SOURCE: “The Arabesque Design of Arthur Gordon Pym,” in Poe's Pym: Critical Explorations, edited by Richard Kopley, Duke University Press, 1992, pp. 188-213.

[In the following essay, Thompson discusses the narrative structure of Pym and concludes that in his treatment of the idea of epistemology in the narrative, Poe anticipates postmodernist aesthetics.]

The devices of aesthetic fantasy may be conventional or otherwise. In the opinion of Jorge Luis Borges, the most ubiquitous devices of fantastic literature are four: the double, the voyage back in time, the contamination of reality by irreality, and the text within the text.

—John Barth, “Tales Within Tales Within Tales” (1981), reprinted in The Friday Book, (1984)

Early in his career, Poe conceived of an interrelated sequence of experiments with generic forms of popular literature. One of the earliest of these framed-tale collections was called “Eleven Tales of the Arabesque” (1833). With the addition of fourteen more tales, Poe was able in 1839 to publish a volume of narratives as Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Critics have (generally though not uniformly) assumed that the latter title indicates a division between comic stories (grotesques) and serious stories (arabesques). But each term has a double meaning, and each definition shares some of the properties of the other. The term grotesque has both a comic and a sinister meaning, and frequently the word is defined as a conjoining of humor and horror into an aesthetic unity. Its history confirms such a sense of the fusion or interpenetration of normally discrete realms. The word comes from Italian, grottesco/ca, indicating “grotto” paintings discovered on the walls of ancient Rome below the modern street level. These grotto paintings showed human heads growing out of tangled vines and other fusions of plant and animal, organic and inorganic. The implication of entanglement, of looping and twisting lines, is especially strong in grotesque design; radically different elements entangle and accommodate one another. In this effect, grotesque shares connotations with arabesque, the root meaning of which is “Arab-like.” But the basic denotation suggests an important difference between grotesque and arabesque: namely, the difference between hopeless entanglement and orderly symmetry (even if of chaos), total indeterminacy and controlled or contained indeterminacy. Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) conforms in general and specific ways to the tradition of the arabesque. Its design evokes both Arabo-Oriental art forms and the European genre or mode named for those forms—the latter closely linked to theories of “romantic irony.”

ARABESQUE TRADITION

The Koran prohibits reproduction in graphic art of natural forms that may be considered to have a soul. This prohibition reinforced in Arabic and Arabic-influenced art the development of highly intricate patterns of geometric designs, of structurally repeated, symmetrically developed lines, loops, and concentric and interpenetrating curvilinear, triangular, and rectilinear structures. An often-repeated version of the rectilinear pattern is the interlineated quincunx, a figure with five points of reference, four outer points forming a square or parallelogram, the fifth point in the center. In the quincuncial designs, often an outer rectilinear frame will be doubled or trebled, and grotesque curvilinear patterns will decorate or inhabit, symmetrically, the four interior corners and envelop the visual middlepoint—as in an “Arabesque” or “Persian” carpet. The basic carpet design components are borders, corner elements, and a central medallion (plus pendants top and bottom)—nearly always in a quincunx design. Although the central field can become so filled (or cluttered) as to obscure the basic structuring shape, the quincuncial (or arch variation) can still be discerned beneath the proliferated ornamentation.

Within the double or infinite implication of the quincunx exists the archetypal arabesque leaf, symbol of the garden, earthly symbol of paradise—or of a glimpse of paradise through the gateway to paradise.¹ The basic symbol is repeated within repeated patterns within repeated borders to suggest infinity. The question of the function and symbolism of borders gets to the heart of East/West oppositions and perceptions. Put simply, the question is: Are borders limiting or limitless?

Michael Craig Hillmann writes that “the traditional division of design elements on Persian carpets into border and field areas is often viewed as the mere framing of the field pattern by border material that in addition serves as a transition to the space beyond the carpet.” He cites the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the analogy between the border of a carpet and a cornice on a building or a frame to a picture, each a corresponding feature which emphasizes limits and controls the implied movements of the interior pattern. But Hillmann suggests that the primary function is almost the reverse: “Such a view fails to take into account differences between border and field areas in terms of motifs and patterning in many Persian carpets and may be the imposition of a Western conception of framing upon a visual art form to which the concept may not always apply” (Persian Carpets, p. 57). In a tradition that dates back at least to thirteenth-century Turkish carpets, the border frames a detail of “the infinite.” The infinite pattern flows on freely without beginning or end. When the border cuts through single motifs of the central field, it implies that the field is to be imagined as endless.

The framed floral and calligraphic patterns of architectural decoration, carpets, and book illustrations, reflecting “traditional Islamic aversion to the representation of animal forms and human figures,” also symbolize “the denaturalization of nature.” Denaturalization in this sense is the attempt to represent the supernatural via abstraction of natural forms into mathematical and geometrical relationships. The arabesque design becomes a representation of the dissolution of matter into a perception of infinity through abstract representation that reveals the mind of God. Into this rarified void the observer also dissolves. Self disappears into the great Void: the “journey's end” is to be found in God's “Infinity”—the voyager is from “snares of self set free” (see Hillmann, Persian Carpets, pp. 59-61).

The concept of framing also predominates in Arabic literature as introduced to the West at the end of the seventeenth century from Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East. This literature includes the many fragments of poetry gathered into collections or shaped into wholes, like the Rubaiyát attributed to Omar Khayyám and the collection of serious and humorous framed-tales known as the book of A Thousand and One Nights. The Arabian Nights became enormously popular in Europe in the Galland translation (1704-12), generating in the eighteenth century a flood of Turkish, Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Tartar tales and a craze for “Oriental” fiction in general. The trend persisted into the nineteenth century; Byron's Turkish Tales and Thomas Moore's Alciphron and Lalla Rookh (favorites of Poe's) became best-sellers. Poe imitates the Arabesque tale in his “Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” “Al Aaraaf,” “Siope” (“Silence”), “Some Words With a Mummy,” “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” and other works.²

It is not just in the usual, general sense of an “Oriental tale” but especially in the sense of elaborately and/or subtly framed design—in which one pattern picks up and transforms another into a new pattern, in which one exterior pattern duplicates and multiplies (directly or inversely) another—that the term arabesque enters Western literary theory from art history. By analogy to a sense of elaborate symmetrical yet open-ended design in carpets, replicated in framed narratives, arabesque as a European literary term early came to indicate (1) deliberate inconsistencies in the handling of narrative frames and of the conditions of interior narrative for a larger ironic and aesthetic design, and (2) intricate interrelationships among many tales within a frame or series of frames which may themselves be contained within a frame. The concept of arabesque design foregrounds design itself, whether or not the patterns symbolize anything beyond themselves. The arabesque became the norm of a “pure” standard of beauty for Immanuel Kant: “abstract design,” structures and patterns with no “inherent meaning” in themselves.

IRONY AND ARABESQUE: ROMANTIC DIALOGICS

In the early German romantic period in particular, Friedrich Schlegel and others appropriated the term arabesque to indicate an intricate geometric or abstract design of narrative into which incongruity in detail and antithesis in character and structure are consciously insinuated. In the arabesque, the relationship between a framing narrative and one or more narrative strands severely strains or calls into question the overt narrative illusion, which may be further undermined through involuted narrative conventions, complex digressions, disruptions or incongruities, and the blurring of levels of narrative reality. The writer of the arabesque calls attention to the narrativity of the text, the fiction of its mimesis, the artifice of its conventions—and then frequently turns all these conventions on their heads, beginning at the end or in the middle, or failing to end the narrative in the expected way. Such arabesque attributes are now conventionally categorized under such labels as “metafiction,” “postmodernist fiction,” “self-reflexive fiction”—modes partaking of “romantic irony.”

“Romantic irony,” writes Raymond Immerwahr, “is most commonly applied nowadays to the drastic violation of illusion by reference within a literary work to its author and the process of its creation, to the transgression of the boundary which separates our level of reality as readers of a book or as audience in a theatre from the reality of the characters in that book or play.”³ But when Schlegel praises literary works that abound in direct violation of illusion, he tends to speak “not of irony but of the arabesque” (Immerwahr, Romantic Irony, p. 83), that is, of a form rather than an abstract idea. Taking as his supreme examples the novels of Sterne, Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste, and (with reservations) the novels of “Jean Paul,” Schlegel “uses the term ‘arabesque’ to denote a form characterized by involutions, complex and seemingly aimless digressions, and wandering back and forth between temporal and spatial settings as well as between levels of narrative reality” (p. 84, emphasis added). Although Immerwahr remarks that romantic irony is a “device” that constitutes “one element of what Schlegel terms the arabesque,” the term “irony” is also understood to mean “all the ways … by which a creative writer calls attention to the paradox and flux inherent in the universe.”⁴ The romantic ironist acknowledges and embraces contradiction, opposition, paradox. Romantic irony privileges the idea of the interplay between and among norms, forms, genres, themes, voices, languages. Moreover, to generate “dialogue” between the “two romanticisms”—the light and the dark, the positive and the negative, and the redoubled binary within each of positive and negative—is in part the function of the arabesque.

The special theory of the arabesque and the Roman developed by Friedrich Schlegel defines a more specific generic category, the arabesque romance, that simultaneously illuminates Pym and positions it relative to analogous modes of contemporary literary discourse. After Kant, such writers as Schiller, Schelling, Novalis, Fichte, Solger, and Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel (in differing ways) wrestled with the idea of an “absolute idealism” wherein all objective “reality” is arbitrated, if not created, by the subjective individual. This view makes of the individual almost a God-in-oneself. And this Godlikeness is especially true of the Artist, a supreme “puppetmaster” or “stage manager” analogized in God the Creator of the World as the Author behind or within the Text. Yet Schlegel was aware, as perhaps no one else in his time, of the dialogical voices of the “selves” constituting the “self” of the text—and thereby aware of the frequently naive assumptions about and conceptions of “truth” and “unity” in a text. A simplistic concept of determinate “unity” in a text, Schlegel recognized, is in danger of denying the “true” voice of the text, namely, its “medley” of (sometimes competing) voices, or its “ensemble” of voices. To say that Poe's Narrative is characterized by a “medley” of voices and intentions is not, in this theoretical perspective, necessarily to voice a negative criticism.

For Schlegel, the lesson (if there is one) of “romanticism” is dual: first, to acknowledge multiplicity and indeterminateness; and, second, in the acknowledgment of multiple claims upon our sense of unity, including those of competing genres, to come to an aesthetic accommodation—that is, a quasi-resolution in the aesthetic, not the empirical, or even logical, realm. The arabesque, according to Schlegel, not so much “reconciles” as “elevates” contradictions and oppositions into a higher unity of consciousness for the artist—in a text that explores and embodies the continuity of various intentionalities. It is no accident (even of tradition) that Schlegel's major critical pronouncement is titled Gespräch über die Poesie: the Dialogue on Poesy (1800). This work comes out of a traditional critical dialogue that grapples with a redefinition of dialectic. Even though it does not duplicate the twentieth-century conception of the dialogic of fiction as articulated by Mikhail Bakhtin, it struggles toward (and comes very close to) that conception.

In his formulation of the dialogical and the monological, Bakhtin echoes the theories of Friedrich Schlegel and Adam Müller, the latter of whom seems to have been the first in the Romantic era to have specifically introduced the terms monological and dialogical as mutually interdependent opposite tendencies of thought and language. Summarizing much of the general overview of language and genre argued by Schlegel in the late 1790s, Müller in 1804 and 1806 emphasizes the concept of “mediation” rather than “synthesis” in the “dialectical” doctrine of “contradiction.” Employing Schlegel's term irony, Müller suggests in his Vorlesungen über deutsche Wissenschaft und Literatur that the dialectical aspect of irony results from the interplay of the “monological” (monologisch) and “dialogical” (dialogisch) and (as in Schlegel) “mediates” without absorbing and annihilating oppositions. This early romantic concept of dialectic as expansive accommodation of dissonances undergoes considerable narrowing (monological constriction) in the hands of Hegel and Marx as the nineteenth century wears on. The original open-ended quality of romantic dialectics was specifically dialogical rather than dialectical. The dialogical was a concept that was itself a reaction to the overly restrictive and thesis-oriented interpretation of Platonic dialectics by the neoclassicists.

Ernst Behler, in a brilliant essay on “The Theory of Irony in German Romanticism,” locates Schlegel in the history of aesthetics and distinguishes between an early romantic concept of Platonic dialectic as open-ended dialogue and Hegel's more closed concept of dialectic as thesis-antithesis-synthesis in which the oppositions of thesis and antithesis “disappear.”⁵ The key to understanding the distinction lies in a close resemblance between Schlegel's general orientation and that of Bakhtin—in Schlegel's antipathy to repressive authority (political or artistic) and his love of the human “freedom” (represented for Schlegel by ancient Greek literature). Freedom at its most exalting is to be found in Art—the Romantic Artist being the freest of all beings. Schlegel speaks of the highest incarnation of the Romantic Artist as “the Poet” in terms of a process of “self-creation” (Selbstschöpfung) and counteracting “self-destruction” (Selbstvernichtung). These movements of the creative self and the critical self alternate or oscillate until “developed to irony.” Irony does not “destroy” creativity but mediates between earnestness and skepticism. The result of “alternation between self-creation and self-destruction” is creative “self-restraint” (Selbstbeschränkung). In this large sense, irony is the beautiful “self-mirroring” or “artistic reflection” of the author, embodied in the text as a whole. Irony has the potential to raise poetic reflection “to higher and higher powers and can multiply, as it were, in an endless array of mirrors.” The works of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Schlegel writes in the Dialogue on Poesy, especially represent this pervasive and permeating irony, “this artistically arranged confusion, this happy symmetry of contradiction, this wonderful eternal exchange of enthusiasm and irony.”

In his romantic dialogics, Schlegel emphasized the evolution of increasingly superior versions or texts of the self in the artistic perception or creation of a succession of contrasts—between the ideal and the real, the serious and the comic, the sinister and the absurd—through which the “transcendental ego” can mock its own convictions and productions from the “height” of an ever yet higher “ideal.” The process is on one level a dialectical transaction, but there is less an “ultimate” synthesis, or reconciliation, than an aesthetic framing, a dialogical incorporation of a multiplicity of voices, perspectives, selves. The Self is a kind of library of books, an “encyclopedia” of voices, a multiple figure of figures in the carpet, a potentially infinite reflective and refractive mirroring of subject and object as one.

Socrates as supreme ironist represents for Schlegel the ideal “mind” of the Romantic Artist, in the sense of a union of apparently antagonistic elements held together by a mind characterized as consummately (divinely) ironic. In the classic Lyceum “aphorism” or “fragment” of 1800, Socratic irony is seen as all-pervading—constituting the persona of the artist as well as the work. “Socratic irony” is the “only entirely involuntary and nevertheless completely conscious dissimulation” (emphasis added). Schlegel writes:

In it, everything must be jest and yet seriousness, artless openness and yet deep dissimulation. … It contains and incites a feeling of the insoluble conflict of the absolute and the relative, of the impossibility and necessity of total communication. It is the freest of all liberties, for it enables us to rise above our own selves. … It is a good sign if the harmonious dullards [i.e., smug, commonplace people] fail to understand this constant self-parody, if over and over again, they believe and disbelieve until they become giddy and consider jest to be seriousness, and seriousness to be jest.⁶

In works produced by such a mind, we find embodied a certain continuing reversibility, so that those whom Schlegel contemns as self-satisfied bourgeois readers—addicted to conventional notions of transparent language and linear narrative and familiar plots, of verisimilitude based on a naive notion of mimesis—do not know how to read the romantic text. It is an elitist aesthetics aimed at those who can see the “secret” irony of composition. As Raymond Immerwahr succinctly puts it, for Schlegel, both irony and the arabesque are frequently “centered in the generally playful treatment of artistic form,” which emerges most obviously as “discussion within the work of the form or medium along with the actual object of portrayal” or as the “portraying of this form or medium instead of the object.”⁷ This self-reflexivity is designed to frustrate the preconditioned genre expectations of “linear” narrative held by the “bourgeois reader.”

ROMAN AND ROMANCE

Schlegel's terms for the “new literature” are Roman and romanisch. In English, Roman is almost always translated as “the novel” despite the fact that its obvious linguistic affinities are with the romance (cf. French usage). In a once famous statement, Schlegel declared: “Ein Roman ist ein romantisches Buch.”⁸ The standard English translation of Schlegel's dictum is “The novel is a romantic book.” A more accurate translation, closer to the spirit of the utterance, would be “The romance is a romantic book,” highlighting the tautological potential. But the new romance is, for Schlegel, a more highly charged concept than indicated by the old term romance, which had been used for centuries to designate such works as the Song of Roland or Le Morte D’Arthur. The modern romance is a mixture of the new and the old, sometimes designated the new nouvelle or Novelle or novel. The modern romance belongs in a special way to romanticism. Schlegel is situating it philosophically, culturally, and historically.⁹

In his Notebooks of 1797-98, as well as in the opening section of the Dialogue on Poesie, Schlegel sees the origin of Roman or Arabeske in the “mixed forms” of the late middle ages, “compendia” that for him are “encyclopedias” of the “thinking life” of an individual, in particular of an artistic genius in the midst of an aesthetic and philosophical quest.¹⁰ He adds that the realistic depiction of the “inner life” of the “individual” will obviously have to include false starts and digressions, for that is a true picture of the workings of the mental life as an actual living process. The “self-consciousness” of the artist depicting his self-consciousness will be characterized, even in fictive narrative, by an ever-recurrent digressiveness on the part of the author, especially as he speaks directly to the reader about the process of the narrative (as in Tristram Shandy). The Roman—this alternative but not quite synonymic word for “arabesque”—is characterized not only by tensions among narrative frames but also by illusion-breaking addresses to the reader and by other self-conscious encodings of the artistic process into the narrative of mental process. Thus the new conception of the romance is of a self-reflexive, intellectual-intuitive quest, focused on the interweaving processes of living and writing. The romantic book is a book with a “thesis” as its central “character,” and that thesis represents the central coherence of the mental processes of the “author” writing the book. In this way, all the characters become the character, and the author his book.

The dynamic “unity” realized by foregrounding the mind of the author is, as Schlegel recognizes, no simple thing and is itself an illusion—or a useful fiction. He writes of an absolute “chaos” of character wrought into a primal unity that is “a formed, artistic Chaos”: “ein gebildetes künstliches Chaos.” It is this framed indeterminacy or “formed chaos” representing a central informing mind that is the book. The central character and process of a romance/novel is the dialectical/dialogical relationship of the putative author and assumed reader, so that Roman becomes a complex and multilayered “Socratic dialogue” between these two “characters” who comprise the single doppelgänger that is the dynamic of the book as living artifact.

In contemporary terms, the book itself is the central and original character formed self-reflexively out of the author-reader dialectic in which the author imagines his reader into existence in order to define or redefine his own existence in the text. A text is self-reflexive in this sense of the congruence of multiple selves or multiple voices in dialogue. The dialectic of author-reader over the text gives way to a dialogic form of the novel similar to that later proposed by Bakhtin. Schlegel exhibits an unreconciled desire for reconciliation into unity, even if the only “unity” possible involves the incorporation of chaos or indeterminacy in the artist's consciousness as represented by the artistically framed text. It is gebildetes (imagined, developed) and künstliches (artistic, formed, framed).

A quality of Roman especially pertinent to Poe's Narrative is Schlegel's idea of the “elliptical” structure of the modern romance. In an essay on Wilhelm Meister in 1798, Schlegel observes that the Roman has a “progressiveness” that is “organic” rather than “linear” in terms of conventional plot lines. Each book of the Roman “takes up what is achieved in a previous book and also contains the germ of the next book,” as Eric A. Blackall paraphrases it, so that the “magic” of the whole volume is a constant “hovering between forwards and backwards” over some kind of Mittelpunkt and succeeds only from its organic wholeness, not from its individual parts.¹¹

Considered as a formal term, Mittelpunkt suggests two things: (1) the midpoint in a linear line and (2) the center of a concentric field. Here the term applies in both senses; as well as involving a symmetrical narrative line (freed from mere chronology), the middle point also recalls a series of Chinese boxes. Like a labyrinth, the structure framing the Mittelpunkt may give a first impression of confusion and chaos, but it is in fact formed, shaped. (This does not mean that it necessarily reflects any metaphysical reality.) A labyrinth is a chaotic puzzle that (as in Poe or Borges) is yet artificed, designed, framed—in some way or another—as in the center frame of a series of frames, or the middle point of an interlocking quincunx design in an arabesque carpet. In this elliptical way, the text equilibrates around a center or more than one center.

Schlegel's Roman, Eric Blackall insists, is not a specific genre like the novel but a romantic mode: a “romantic book,” an “encyclopedia,” a “compendium” of all genres in one, made coherent by Witz. The term Witz (loosely, “wit”) means many things, but principally it is the faculty of imagination and intellect that perceives similarities and makes connections among hidden likenesses in seemingly disconnected or unconnected things. It is another form of irony, most often combined with dry humor and parody (including self-parody). Die Arabeske is an expression of Witz, that power of the living author's “mind” to perceive discrepancies and to hold all contradictions within a coherent whole or frame, the “essence” of which is aesthetic design. Herein is a “secret irony” of narrative, or in contemporary terms, a fundamental “textuality.”¹²

THE ARABESQUE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM

The generic term arabesque describes Poe's most puzzling extended work of fiction, significantly titled The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which is neither exactly a novel nor a conventional romance. More than just a journey to the South Pole, Pym's adventures symbolically suggest a journey within the self and back in time, a quest for origins and ends. But the narrative breaks off; the revelation of an ultimate secret is withheld. The “apocalyptic” conclusion of the main narrative veils rather than unveils.

The concept of the arabesque as a literary form or genre answers many of the usual questions about the “unity” of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. For one thing, in a large-writ Travel-Adventure to the End of the World in quest of the Ultimate Discovery, the omission of the end of the quest does not have to be seen as merely a hastily or badly contrived conclusion. The truncation of the genre of the travel-adventure narrative could be seen as deliberate foregrounding of a major genre deformation. In Pym, the narrative quest becomes less for conventional dénouement or any ultimate “truth” (and less and less for “verisimilitude”) than for the astounding as a kind of permanent penultimate apocalypse. The narrative to the end of the world is deliberately regressive and indeterminate: Pym seems to die at the end of his (interior) narrative as he plunges toward a gigantic white figure rising out of the Antarctic but comes back to finish his memoirs, left unfinished by “Poe”; but Pym then “really” dies, leaving them unfinished, to be (partially) finished (and therefore unfinished) by the “editor/publisher.”

This editor/publisher makes tantalizing suggestions regarding an astounding revelation buried in “indentures” in rock walls and in letter-shaped chasms that seem created by some unseen hand—but no final revelation is offered. More than mere hoax, these framing conjectures evoke themes of infinite regression paralleling the act of writing a narrative to a series of infinitely regressive “adventures.” The “Truth,” in the (fictive) reality purportedly mimed in the text, is elusive. Or, to put it in a way that reflects the spirit of both romantic aesthetics and contemporary theory, the “Truth” of the narrative is dependent on the interrelation of foregrounded narrativity and the fiction of reality, on the dialectic of object and subject—or on the dialogic of many subjects and planes.

One of the unifying motifs of what seems to be a loose, overly episodic, fragmented narrative is the experience of the inner mind. In its fragmentation and suggestion of the deep interior movement of thought processes, the narrative exhibits distinctive features of Friedrich Schlegel's definition of the “arabesque romance,” including the feature of multileveled quest: instinctive, unconscious, intellectual, or philosophical. The infinite regression that opens up in Pym when the mind contemplates the mind is reminiscent of other romantic works that partake of the self-reflective character of arabesque romance, such as Ludwig Tieck's drama Die verkehrte Welt (1799), literally “The reverse world” (or The world turned topsy-turvy or inside out). In this work, characters in a play contemplate themselves as characters in a play contemplating themselves as characters in a play, so that (in Tieck's phrase) the mind “spins into the inwardness.” Poe's controversial narrative of a series of stuttering journeys to the end of the world is also a narrative of the possibly infinite journey into “the inwardness.” Pym's journey inward also includes the idea of multiple texts in Schlegel's sense of multiple texts of the self, although the journey, as in Tieck, may be a good deal less self-affirming than in Schlegel.

The imagery of Pym's narrative suggests that Pym travels regressively, as though in a dream within a dream, from the complex world of social institutions toward a world that is increasingly “simple.” But the basic affirmative connotation of romantic “simplicity” is reversed. The seeming multiform and multicolored world becomes simplistically elemented into black and white and the mixture of the two as gray. At the same time, the steady increase of whiteness to all things suggests an original, primeval unity that is both oneiric and mythic. Whatever the implications of the ambiguous “allegory” of black versus white may suggest about racial tensions in an accursed America,¹³ Pym's incomplete recovery of mythic history suggests that there is a fundamental opposition of black and white in the primal schism that was the Creation, when God spoke the light from the dark.

Whether this division is negative or affirmative is neither asked nor answered explicitly in the text, although Poe's critics have variously addressed the issue. When Pym sails nine months later into warm and milky waters at the end of the world, does he journey an amniotic sea toward reabsorption in the womb of the great mother earth? Does he journey toward burial in eternal unbeing? Does the rising up of a gigantic human figure in a “shroud” of perfect whiteness at the “end” signify a beatific vision, at the moment of symbolic and transfiguring death—what one critic calls the negative, blank white light of revelation and another a manifestation of Christ? Or is it a vision of pale void reflecting or inscribed with the vague figure of the observer-perceiver?¹⁴ In the main narrative, these seemingly opposed possibilities, and others, are balanced one against another. Just as the final revelation at the end of the world and the end of the main narrative is about to be given, the narrative abruptly breaks off, without conventional closure.

In this frustration of carefully planted genre expectations, Poe's Narrative conforms to the European definition of the arabesque: it uses genre conventions and conventional narrative to go against the grain of narrative convention. Furthermore, in its incorporation of satiric and ironic elements, especially those that seem to be calculated contradictions or absurdities, into the seemingly serious quest narrative (itself contained within a simultaneously serious and joking metafictional frame), Poe's Narrative suggests not so much a “Menippean satire,” as some have argued, but an encompassing “romantic irony” central to Schlegel's sense of the romantic arabesque.¹⁵ For while the text Pym and the journey of Pym ineluctably suggest a religious or metaphysical allegory which we are invited to read and challenged to decipher, at the same time such meanings are repeatedly withdrawn (or forever “deferred”) and even mocked.

AESTHETIC FRAMING AND THE METALITERARY

The Narrative is ironically framed by complexly self-referential commentary about the text and its authors that simultaneously calls into question the authority of the text and earnestly suggests that it is redolent with meanings. In addition to the ironic metafictional joking in its frames, from the perspective of conventional narrative, the text breaks all contracts with the reader; in particular, it defeats reader expectations of linear plot development and conventional resolution. The narrative hovers elliptically back and forth between apparent beginnings and endings, increasingly edging toward questioning the very assumptions behind one's belief in fixed beginnings and endings. Perhaps the ultimate revelation is the romantic-ironic perception of the fictiveness of all things. In the editorial “Note” appended at the end ([Collected Writing of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Burton R. Pollin, 1985-, hereafter P] 1:207-8), we are told that the last chapters are missing and that “Mr. Poe” has declined the task of filling the “vacuum” because he is disturbed by the “general inaccuracy of the details” and holds a “disbelief in the entire truth of the latter portions of the narration.” The words “entire” and “portions” stand in obvious conflict here, ironically undercutting each other. But exactly what the phrase “latter portions” signifies is not clear. Conventionally, in a narrative, the “latter” holds a privileged position over the “former” because what is latter normally clarifies what has gone before and thus is more authoritative. Poe does not necessarily remove that privilege, but he certainly inverts those conventional reasons for privileging latter over former.¹⁶

The concluding editorial frame refers to the opening editorial frame but emphasizes its distinctness from it. The “editor” observes that Pym had described the figures of the chasms on Tsalal “without comment” and had spoken of certain “indentures” found at the extremity of one of the chasms as “having but a fanciful resemblance to alphabetical characters.” Although “Mr. Pym” is obviously in “earnest” in his opinion, the editor thinks that there are certain “facts” about the configuration of the chasms and indentures that “beyond doubt, escaped the attention of Mr. Poe” (P 1:207). The editor then makes a number of teasingly enigmatic suggestions about the resemblance of the shapes of the chasms and the inscriptions on the walls to Ethiopian, Arabic, Egyptian script with Hebraic meanings; and the reader is asked to entertain the possibility that they have been written in the earth by some gigantic hand. The linked chasms suggest to this editor an ancient word for shadow or darkness and, the indentures suggest, simultaneously, ancient words for whiteness—and for the “south.” The reader is now invited to regard this speculation in terms of some of the “most faintly-detailed incidents of the narrative,” though “in no visible manner is this chain of connexion complete” (P 1:207-8). The editor suggests that the contrast between the black island of the chasms and the steady increase of whiteness, linked with the cry (“Tekeli-li!”) of the sea birds flying overhead and the ejaculations of the natives, be conjoined with some “philological scrutiny” of the name “Tsalal” itself. In the final paragraph, the final words are given as a “quotation” without transition: “‘I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock’” (P 1:208). The reader is implicitly invited to piece together the meaning of this echo from Genesis, Isaiah, Job, and Deuteronomy (along with other biblical echoes throughout the narrative) and the words “Tekeli-li,” “Tsalal,” and “Tsalemoun.”

Other clues to the metaliterary nature of Pym are found in Pym's recurrence to the “narrative” he is telling; in his reading of other narratives of exploration; in the contrived junctures of the narrative episodes; in the multiplication of messages, letters, texts; in the obsession with words, inscriptions, and encryptions in the text; in the imagery of graven letters; and even in the imagery of blackness and whiteness. Whatever else it is, Pym's journey is overtly metafictional.¹⁷ That is, Pym may be read in part as a narrative about the process of artistic creation (of a text, of a self) that increasingly marginalizes reference to the objective world: a subjective fiction about fictionality. (Schlegel would say that such subjectivity thereby becomes objective, for the creation of fiction is part of the definition of the self.) The tyranny of the Word takes its form not only in utterance or “indentures,” but also in the black and white that constitute pages of text, like the physical form of the book The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym itself. The progress through the text of Pym, and through the narrating of Pym's adventures, is a recurrent journey to the white margin at the end of the page. The margin at the bottom of the last page is the not-quite-final silence, a resonant silence, a palpably present absence, suggesting that the text is incomplete, always requiring completion.¹⁸

THE QUINCUNCIAL DESIGN

In addition to the “episodes” in which both Pym and the frame editor attempt to decipher the suggestive but vague inscriptions of rock and chasm, there are at least three major symbolic scenes or incidents (I would call them icons) that exemplify the interpretative problems presented by efforts to stabilize “meaning” in a romantic arabesque such as Poe creates. These are Pym's partial reading, in the dark hold of the Grampus, of Augustus' note in the third chapter; his analogous efforts to “read” and “describe” the black and white rookery of albatross and penguin in chapter 14; and the facing mirrors aboard the Jane Guy in chapter 18. Space permits consideration here of only one: the quincunx structure of the Christmas Harbor rookery. It is also an icon of the Narrative as a whole.¹⁹

In chapter 14, Pym “reads” a natural “text” (the rookery of penguin and albatross on Desolation Island) seemingly without full comprehension, foreshadowing the natural/preternatural/supernatural texts in the rocks at Tsalal. Pym describes the pattern of the rookery formed by two separate species of birds that are “actuated apparently by one mind, to trace out, with mathematical accuracy, either a square or other parallelogram” (P 1:152). At first he says that the nest of each albatross is “placed in the centre of a little square formed by the nests of four penguins” (emphasis added). Then he comments that “one side of the place thus marked out runs parallel with the water's edge” and is “left open.” The two species of black and white birds have (more or less) “defined the limits of the rookery” by creating a wall of stone and rubbish “on the three inland sides”; and “just within this wall a perfectly level and smooth walk is formed” as a “general promenade.” Thus we have a doubly framed “arabesque” design of repeated quincunxes within a quincunx with an open-ended border or margin on one side. The question is: What is the “text” of the “page”? Or what is the “figure in the carpet”?

With Pym, we look at the rookery design a second time. The text tells us that the birds partition the whole area “into small squares exactly equal in size,” formed by narrow paths “crossing each other at right angles throughout the entire extent of the rookery. At each intersection of these paths the nest of an albatross is constructed, and a penguin's nest in the centre of each square—thus every penguin is surrounded by four albatrosses” (P 1:152; emphasis added). In other words, the pattern is described in terms that seem the “reverse” of Pym's first description—though actually the pattern is the “same.” The effect anticipates and parallels that of the double “reversing” mirrors of chapter 18, which leave the imaged pattern the same while reversing it, and parallels in another way the two sides of a letter, each of which can communicate information even when (and because) there is nothing to read on one side. The rookery symbolically mirrors the same epistemological problem as the writing and reading of Augustus' message in total darkness. Here, in the rookery, the difference lies in what is taken as the center and what is decentered, and the center of the design of the open-ended rookery as a whole cannot be determined.

Pym's second description is accurate for a perspective that focuses on the penguin as the center object, but it is not entirely accurate as a description of the dual pattern of the whole, for “each albatross” is also surrounded “by a like number of penguins” (P 1:152). The mirror-like quality of Pym's syntax—“every penguin is surrounded by four albatrosses, and each albatross by a like number of penguins”—suggests that Pym is in the presence of some revelation, the significance of which he does not understand. The question of whether penguins are surrounded by albatrosses or albatrosses surrounded by penguins in a framed but indeterminate rookery of nests within nests of alternating types is, on one level, moot. Both observations are equally correct and equally false, much like the question Melville raises about the two kinds of coral at Mardi (Mardi, bk. 1, chap. 82). What is clear is that there is a pattern, but this natural pattern, contrary to optative romantic reasoning, has “no inherent meaning,” being an arabesque. Any “meaning” or interpretation of center and margin is imposed by the perceiving Self. Moreover, the absurdity of setting the reader to meditate (scholastically) whether penguins surround albatrosses or albatrosses penguins is a consummate romantic-ironic joke, simultaneously serious and silly.

The foursquare pattern, with the addition of either albatross or penguin at the center, along with the whole field of such abstract design, forms the ancient quincunx as a figure-five of one-within-four. In his description, which closely follows the lines of his travel-book sources (see P 1:295-98), was Poe invoking the tradition of the quincunx? The matter is not something that can be determined with any certainty—although the symbolism of the quincunx was well known in Poe's time. For example, in some of Sir Thomas Browne's writings, the quincunx is the master trope, and Poe himself twice quotes from chapter 5 of Thomas Browne's Urn-Burial (once as the epigraph to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” [(Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Olive Mabbott, 1969-78, hereafter M) 2:527] and once in his review of The Quacks of Helicon [(The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, 1902, hereafter H) 10:189], both 1841). Bracketed with Urn-Burial and bearing an inverse parallel relationship with it—the one text on death and dissolution, the other on life and immorality, in a Janus-faced (mirror variant) relation—is Browne's The Garden of Cyrus (published with Hydriotaphia, or Urn-Burial in 1658). The Garden of Cyrus is a meditation on the global symbolism of the underlying design of the ancient “arabesque” garden; for, in addition to being the basic design of arabesque carpets, the quincunx was common in ancient agriculture as a basic unit of infinite reduplication in a field. There are striking resonances in Pym with the natural, the supernatural, and the epistemological significations of the quincunx as set forth by Browne in this work.²⁰

In a discussion of the symbology of the “Quincunciall Lozenge, or Net-Work Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered,” Browne attributes a providential and mystical signification to the ever-varying but constantly manifest pattern of the squared figure-five. (Compare the word “quintessence,” the fifth essence: the pure, highly concentrated essence of something, the purest or most typical; in ancient and medieval philosophy, the fifth and highest essence after the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, thought to be the substance of the heavenly bodies and latent in all things.) Arabesque agriculture traditionally required the planting of trees in this pattern. The Persian king Cyrus the Great—who “delivered” Babylon from Belshazzar and Nabonidus (implicated in the biblical-historical-mythic mists of Pym)—was, as was Cyrus the Younger, famous for systematic cultivation of the desert.²¹

The agricultural arabesque becomes for Browne, two thousand years later, an archetype for the five stars lowest in the horizon, the five senses, the five wounds of Christ, and so on. He makes of the quincunx network a global and cosmic symbol of universal significance, of meaning and order, citing for example the underlying form of crosses and crucifixes, both angular and rounded, and the Egyptian symbol of “Orus, the Hieroglyphick of the world,” who wears a “Net-work covering, from the shoulder to the foot” (p. 87). Taking the V shape as fundamental, Browne particularizes the diamond (or lozenge) shape … and the X (or decussation) shape as doublings of the V, which is, in addition to a geometrical shape, both a letter and a number. He notes the various V shapes of the relation of internal organs, of the neurological avenues of vision and the supposed angles of rays of light entering the eyes and brain, and the V shape of the hand made by thumb and fingers—so that the fundamental pattern is an icon of the organization of the world (object) and of our means of knowing the world (subject) as a network of such shapes (interaction of object and subject). But it is more; it is the basic component of the mythic significance of Logos and religious aspiration, forming not only the basis for the cross of Christ but also (doubtless, he says) the design of the Garden of Eden (pp. 59-64, 104-7) and the cabalistic “name” or “letter” for God himself (pp. 109-10). In addition to sheer repetition of the pattern, the quincunx design in a network also lends itself to incorporating smaller versions within larger versions of itself, as it were endlessly concentralizing itself by framing itself. The multiplication of patterns gives rise to a plentitude of seemingly endless signification that ends in emptying design of meaning—while framing that process meaningfully.

Whether Poe read Browne's quincunxiamania this way or not must remain speculative, but the implication is not uncommon in the nineteenth century. The fifth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1815-17) defines the “Quincunx Order, in Gardening” in a way that suggests its doubleness of meaning and meaninglessness: “a plantation of trees, disposed originally in a square, consisting of five trees, one at each corner, and a fifth in the middle; which disposition, repeated again and again, forms a regular grove … or wilderness” (emphasis added). Is it orderly, or is it a wilderness?

A further association of the quincunx with the problem of determinacy and indeterminacy in the romantic arabesque yields some rather startling possibilities for the partially withheld or faintly intimated patterning of Pym. The fifth edition of the Britannica further defines the quincunx as a word that “in Roman antiquity, denotes any thing that consists of five-twelfths of another; but particularly of the as.” The as was a general symbol of something entire or whole, an integer (cf. “ace”), and in particular a weight of twelve ounces, “being the same as libra, or the Roman pound.” “AS was also the name of a Roman coin,” continues the Britannica, and the decussation X was the symbol for ten asses. But the as was of four “different weights and different matter in different periods of the commonwealth.” Its quantity was so frequently redefined over the centuries (being reduced after the first Punic War to two ounces, and then by half, and half again down to half an ounce) that its signification became indeterminate, and eventually the Roman coin signifying the as (and its quincuncial subtext) came, after the time of the emperors, to carry the symbol of “a Janus with two faces” on one side and “on the reverse the rostrum or prow of a ship.”

The suggestive quality of the as in terms of Pym, a coin linked with the quincunx, involves indeterminacy of meaning and the etymological origin of the word “symbolize” from a token or coin. The image of “a Janus with two faces” appearing on one side of the as parallels Browne's famous paired “books” on death and life that, like shadow and light, “mirror” each other. The doubleness suggested by the as is evident in Pym in such elements as the emblem of a ship's prow and the rookery in a quincunx pattern near a harbor named “Christmas” on an island named “Desolation,” attained after a long sea voyage, in a narrative about dualities of meaning and life and death—a narrative suggesting illusion and hallucinatory regress as much as a journey of Discovery. The pattern of oppositions and doublings of meaning, within a multiplicity of meanings in the full text of Pym, is heavily implicated in the scene of the black and white rookery.

The congruence of this network of symbols is too fortuitous not to pursue a little further. One of the standard methods of navigation in Poe's time involved the quincunx. Under the heading “Geography,” the fifth edition of the Britannica notes that using curved lines of latitude and longitude, one seeking a “location” on the “globe” of the earth can “estimate” the spot between “what two parallels of latitude and longitude the place lies, and consequently by what four lines it is bounded, to find the place by trial, by considering the proportional distance of it from each line” (Navigational “Problem II”). The “proportional distance” (a kind of abstract, intellectualized dead reckoning) results in no less than … [an] of “estimation” for the patterned lines enabling circumnavigation of the earth …

The point of reference, the center of a quincunx, provides the sight line for the course of the ship, as it tacks back and forth through a network of repetitions of this image. The nearly infinite multiplication of this pattern enables the charting of the journey to the end of the world, for it represents order. It also represents in the multiplied duplication of itself both wilderness and oversignification. The global network of such parallelograms (Orus), through which, and by means of which, we chart our course, is, like the rookery of penguin and albatross and albatross and penguin, an arabesque design.

X MARKS THE SPOT

Indeed, the general configuration of the four voyages in Pym approximates the pattern of the rookery and the quincunx of the navigation parallelogram. Consider the configuration of the double journeys of the Grampus from Nantucket in the west and of the Jane Guy from Liverpool in the east—to the middlepoint at the island rocks on the equator (in the 30th meridian of western longitude, between the continental promontories of South America and Africa)—thence east to the Kerguélen Islands (at the 70th meridian of eastern longitude), and then west to the Falkland Plateau in search of the disappearing Auroras (in the 50th meridian of western longitude)—and thence ever southward into the Filchner Ice Shelf in the Weddell Sea. The key points on this course describe a long, lazy, four-pointed parallelogram, or a not quite completed Arab X, or a more curved Greek χ.

Browne, in fact, remarks in chapter 1 of the Cyrus on the everimplied X of the quincunx, calling it the “Emphaticall decussation, or fundamental figure” (p. 60) of the doubled V. He weaves together in an intricate pattern images of darkness and light, vision, doubleness, and symmetrical replication, focusing especially on the variations of X and V as quincuncial. In chapter 4, he comments on the “sacred” meaning of the figure, a figure which corresponds to the Egyptian X that signifies one of the ten sacred animals, the stork, whose “open Bill and stradling Legges” were “imitated by that character” (p. 106). This observation follows a discussion of how “darknesse and light hold interchangeable dominions,” and how “light that makes things seen, makes some things invisible” (like the noble creation of the stars), which leads him to ruminate on “sight” and the double V-shaped refraction of “rays,” one V without, the other within, thus forming an X, as a doubled or self-reflecting V. Vision and doubleness, of course, are the common motifs of all three of the icons of indeterminacy in Pym mentioned here: the writing/reading of the letter in the dark, the discerning of the “pattern” of the black and white rookery, and the two facing mirrors and their variants.

The X pattern that Browne conjoins with black and white, dark and light, is highly suggestive regarding the latent, “faintly-detailed” patterning of Pym, so vividly represented by the iconography of the rookery, which anticipates (actually adumbrates) the shadow meanings of black and white in the hieroglyphic rock writings at the end of the Narrative. The “greatest mystery of Religion,” Browne writes, “is expressed by adumbration … Life it self is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living … The Sunne it self is but the dark simulachrum, and light but the shadow of God” (pp. 104-5). The upper and lower shapes of the letter X he calls “ascending and descending Pyramids, mystically apprehended” (p. 106), and he cites Plato's use of the Greek X, turned in a circle, to represent the “double aspect” of the “soul of man.” Browne observes that, in Justin Martyr's reading of Plato's reading of X for T or a cross, “this figure hath had the honour to characterize and notifie our blessed Saviour” (p. 107), and he concludes with a comment on the “other mysteries not thoroughly understood in the sacred letter X,” thus leaving the significance of the whole with a resonant undercurrent of indeterminacy.

In this context, it is important to note the placement of the center in the journey pattern of Pym—that is, the fifth point, or Mittelpunkt, of a quincunx cross that has degenerated along one axis. The text gives a series of fairly precise longitude and latitude readings, inviting the curious reader to plot out the courses of the ships. If the reader will, in fact, take the trouble to plot these courses according to the arbitrary grids of navigational parallelograms, it will be discovered that the exact Mittelpunkt of latitude and longitude of the whole journey is at the twin jutting rocks called St. Peter and St. Paul in the mid-Atlantic, halfway in the long journey to Christmas harbor rookery and the end of the world. The configuration is another “faintly-detailed” suggestion of overall signification—like the Figure 4 drawing of chapter 23, suggestive, like so much else in the Narrative, of a meaning just out of reach, of some Messiah come to deliver the afflicted, stretching out a hand or pointing the way, but disappearing in the act.

GEOMETRY OF VOID: SYMMETRY AND “MEANING”

The arabesque patterning of Poe's Narrative suggests a “postmodernist” question regarding the reading of the text. What emerges from contemporary critical attention to the narrative is the recurrent perception that there is a coherent, stable, and symmetrical structure of repeating elements. This framing or structuring pattern, however, has no “inherent meaning” in itself. It generates an evocative ambiguity, in which oversignification leads to undersignification and purposeful textual collapse.

Like Schlegel's conception of Roman, like the quincunx which Poe makes its symbol, the Narrative is structurally symmetrical around a Mittelpunkt. Harry Levin notes the “almost symmetrical” pattern of the framing preface and endnote enfolding Pym's narrative, within which are the framing episodes of the small boat Ariel at the beginning and of the canoe at the end, within which are framed the voyages of the larger vessels Grampus and Jane Guy, the transition from the one ship to the other occurring in the middle of the narrative.²² Indeed, the two halves of the Narrative stand in a mirror relation to each other. Harold Beaver writes that the two halves of the book structurally replicate each other with “perfect symmetry”; they are “split down a central spine which (geographically) proves to be the equator and (fictionally) Pym's rescue by the Jane Guy.”²³ In chapter 13, the middle chapter of twenty-five total chapters, the intervention of the Jane Guy occurs at the end, which is the arithmetical middle of the narrative. The initial treachery and mutiny on the Grampus is mirrored by the treachery and revolt on Tsalal. The murderous Black Cook on the Grampus is paralleled by the unscrupulous black chief Too-wit on the Jane Guy. Pym's confinement in the hold of the Grampus is transmuted into his confinement underground in the hills of Tsalal. The opening incident of the small boat Ariel is paralleled by the closing journey of the small canoe. And, of course, the overt editorial frames enclose the whole.²⁴

John P. Hussey takes the symmetry even further. Noting that Pym's journeys take precisely nine months, from the end of spring to the beginning of spring in the succeeding year, he identifies nine episodes to the whole narrative—and finds a central sequence of twenty-seven pages bracketed on either side by four episodes of development precisely equal to one another in the design.²⁵ From the Mittelpunkt outward toward both the beginning and end simultaneously, we find a double pattern of four around either side of a fifth central point. Recognition of affinities of the romantic arabesque (with its use of patterns of no “inherent” meanings in themselves) with postmodernism suggests a question about the symmetries of Pym. The question is not whether these are patterns but whether they are meaningful and necessary, or arbitrary and gratuitous. My contention is that they are, simultaneously, both. Our inability to determine the matter either way underlies the postmodernist affinities of Pym.

Once regarded as an unfinished or hastily and awkwardly finished mistake, the arabesque romance of Arthur Gordon Pym exemplifies Poe's method of resonant indeterminateness. The foregrounding of epistemology in contemporary readings of Pym leads to an important observation: the basis of what we may call Poe's philosophical romanticism is not epistemology as conventionally understood; rather it is the question of epistemology—the question behind the question. In this questioning of the very foundations of Western metaphysics and modes of observation, the Narrative looks forward more (insofar as a distinction is valid) to postmodernist than modernist aesthetics.

The indeterminacy of meaning in Poe's arabesque fictions parallels Poe's themes of the paradox of human existence. The vision not so much of void as of the possibility of void haunts Poe's characters (even more so than Ishmael in Moby-Dick). The rhetoric of his philosophical essay on the universe, Eureka, is largely an elaborate conceit on the word nothing, treated both seriously and playfully within a multiplicity of meaning, a plenitude of oversignification finally signifying nothing. As I have elsewhere pointed out, at one juncture in Eureka the birth-death-resurrection cycle of the universe is analogized to an “imperfect plot” in a “romance.”²⁶ Poe's analogy confirms again, I would say, the Schlegelian conception of Roman as an imperfect emulation (whether from within or without) of God's imperfect text titled World or Universe. Nevertheless, Poe suggests, the universe (whether or not it exists apart from us) may yet have an aesthetic design. But of what kind? Poe proposes a system of expanding and collapsing cycles of nothingness.²⁷

For Schlegel and Poe, the very recognition of the possibility of nothing leads to a recognition of the importance of the “as if” as a necessary qualification to every statement, thus suggesting the refracted and metaphoric quality of all perception: one thing in terms of another rather than absolutes. The arabesque in Schlegel's theory and in Poe's practice is an attempt at an aesthetic resolution (by means of framing romantic irony) of such philosophical-epistemological matters as faith and doubt, affirmation and denial, and of intellectual confusion. This “resolution” is attempted by embodiment of the conflict in an artistic text: by framing chaos (Schlegel's “gebildetes künstliches Chaos”). The recognition that, rather than conventional absolutist pronouncements, the “as if” really constitutes reality is in itself the first step toward higher consciousness for Schlegel and Poe. The second step is to embody that suspected nothingness (or the apprehension of infinitely regressive dislocatedness) in something like a being or like a world. For the limited, earthly artist, this embodiment, of course, would be a fictive text, that text being itself a world or a being. The liberating paradox (to speak in Schlegelian terms) is the recognition of the fictiveness of the constructs. John Barth in “Tales Within Tales Within Tales” observes that the cabalists (“whom writers as different as I. B. Singer and Jorge Luis Borges have found to be a rich source of literary metaphor”) urge that “reality, our reality, is God's text, his significant fiction.” He adds, “Arthur Schopenhauer … declares that our reality, whether or not it’s God's fiction, is our representation, as it were our fiction: that relations, categories, concepts such as differentiation, time and space, being and not-being—all are ours, not seamless nature's.²⁸

It is significant that Barth recurs to a philosopher of the Romantic period to gloss the concept of the dissolution of subject and object in an as-if game. The romantic God-Artist is the architect of the abyss, the geometer of designs of no inherent meaning. “How can Nothing have a structure?” is a crucial Schlegelian question. The ironic perception of the structures of nothingness that constitute our cosmos and our selves constitutes our sanity as we structure the formless and empty void. For Poe, the origin of the universe lies in nothingness, its present material state is but a variation of that nothingness, and its final end is a reconstitution of the original nothingness. This void can have shape only if it is consciously and continuously regenerated as a structure, conceived as a Kantian aesthetic design—that is, what Kant and Schlegel, in different ways, defined as the “arabesque.”

Here then is the insistent structuring impulse of the romantic in the arabesque. Even so, infinite regression opens up. The abyss yawns. Knowing that the world has order, coherence, and meaning only by means of the imposition of these human constructs, the self-conscious romantic artist yet continues to generate the text, even though he knows, or suspects, that the text will collapse. In Poe's writings, the deceptive perversity of the universe (if we can posit the “as-if” personification) and of the mind is transcended by the romantic-ironic imagination of the Artist of the Arabesque. It is the romantic artist who achieves—through the simultaneous detachment and involvement embodied in the new aesthetic, through the creation of the new artwork of the Roman, through the highly conscious but deeply felt act of writing the “as if”—a liberating vision of the paradoxical order of indeterminacy: “ein gebildetes künstliches Chaos.” The act of writing becomes the supremely ironic weaving of a tapestry signifying the paradoxical journey through Cosmos/Chaos. The journey's “end” is to be found in “the inwardness,” in God/Self as infinity, paradoxically from “snares of self” set “free.” The merely mortal Israfel becomes the God-Artist writing and rewriting the always dissolving text of the world/self. Read as an arabesque of romantic irony, Poe's 1838 Narrative becomes a comprehensible and significant text, exemplifying an important romantic vision of world and aesthetic form that shares a number of features with postmodernism. Read without this reference to a particular tradition and genre (or mode) of the arabesque, I would say with Poe that the Narrative is “a very silly book,” hardly worth all the attention it has received from contemporary academic critics.

Notes

1. The basic formal definition of the “arabesque” is “a bifurcated shape extending out from a curving stem.” Ernst Kühnel writes: “The arabesque was born from the idea of a leafy stem, but just as branches turn into unreal waves and spirals, so do leaves furcate and split into forms that do not occur in nature” (The Arabesque: Meaning and Transformation of an Ornament, trans. Richard Ettinghausen [Graz, Austria: Verlag für Sammler, 1977], p. 5); see also Michael Craig Hillmann, Persian Carpets (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), p. 21.

2. Two articles emphasize the Oriental context of Poe's use of the arabesque: L. Moffit Cecil, “Poe's Arabesque,” Comparative Literature, 18 (1966), 55-70; and Patricia C. Smith, “Poe's Arabesque,” Poe Studies, 7 (1974), 42-45. See notes to chapter 1 of Romantic Arabesque.

3. Raymond Immerwahr, “The Practice of Irony in Early German Romanticism,” in Romantic Irony, ed. Frederick Garber (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1988), pp. 82-96 (quotation, p. 82).

4. Ibid., p. 84. See chapter 2 of Romantic Arabesque for discussion of Lawrence Buell's skepticism regarding the idea of an American romantic irony in this sense.

5. Ernst Behler, “The Theory of Irony in German Romanticism,” in Romantic Irony, ed. Garber, pp. 43-81.

6. Translations may be found in German Romantic Criticism, ed. A. Leslie Willson (New York: Continuum, 1982), cited hereafter as GRC, and Friedrich Schlegel's “Lucinde” and the “Fragments”, trans. Peter Firchau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1971).

7. Raymond Immerwahr, “Romantic Irony and the Romantic Arabesque Prior to Romanticism,” German Quarterly, 42 (1969), 665-85; see pp. 678, 683.

8. Friedrich Schlegel, “Brief über den Roman,” section 3 of the Gespräch; see translation in GRC, p. 108.

9. The permutations he takes modern fiction through are valuable in themselves in suggesting the struggle of Schlegel and other German Romantics to describe a concept for which they had no satisfactory new term, only a range of old terms that overlapped one another. See discussion in chapter 3 of Romantic Arabesque.

10. Literary Notebooks, 1797-1801, ed. Hans Eichner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), nos. 69, 103.

11. Eric A. Blackall, The Novels of the German Romantics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 29-31.

12. For a discussion of Schlegel as a romantic critic adumbrating later twentieth-century criticism (but remaining quintessentially romantic), see chapter 3 of Romantic Arabesque. Among the chief differences is that Schlegel is deeply committed to an “expressive poetics”: the author is the ultimate subject, and the text is an expression of the author's mind; the subject does not “disappear” into the space created by the “game of writing.” Rather than the text orientation of Foucault or Derrida, Schlegel's concept of the artist is more akin to Bakhtin's reconstitution of the “self” (or even like that of the pre-deconstructionist phenomenological structuralists of the “Geneva School”). Another major difference is that Schlegel's theory of genre, incompletely worked out as it is, has at its center a concept of a hierarchy of genres, with the arabesque being at the top—a theory that no poststructuralist would find congenial. But Bakhtin would. The arabesque is the ordered artistic frame that in some way “contains” all indeterminants and contradictories and thereby achieves a “transcendental” unity. It is the most comprehensive strategy of containment, even though its “order” is not necessarily coterminous with any “reality” outside of itself, except insofar as the arabesque mimes chaos and order both.

13. See Sidney Kaplan's insightful introduction to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960). At the Nantucket conference, Professor John Carlos Rowe reasserted Poe's authorship of a Southern Literary Messenger review of two proslavery books, despite evidence to the contrary, but Rowe presented no new evidence that the review is Poe's (see “Poe, Antebellum Slavery, and Modern Criticism” in this volume).

14. See especially Edward Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957); Richard Kopley, “The Secret of Arthur Gordon Pym: The Text and the Source,” Studies in American Fiction, 8 (1980), 203-18, and “The Hidden Journey of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Studies in the American Renaissance 1982, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), pp. 29-51, and “The ‘Very Profound Under-current’ of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Studies in the American Renaissance 1987, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987), pp. 143-75; and John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). See also the bibliography of Frederick S. Frank, “Polarized Gothic: An Annotated Bibliography of Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Bulletin of Bibliography, 38 (1981), 117-27; the bibliographical survey by Douglas Robinson, “Reading Poe's Novel: A Speculative Review of Pym Criticism, 1950-1980,” Poe Studies, 15 (1982), 47-54; and that by David Ketterer, “Tracing Shadows: Pym Criticism, 1980-1990,” printed in the present volume.

15. See especially Evelyn J. Hinz, “‘Tekeli-li’: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as Satire,” Genre 3 (1970), 379-99; and J. V. Ridgely, “Tragical-Mythical-Satirical-Hoaxical: Problems of Genre in Pym,” American Transcendental Quarterly, no. 24, pt. 1 (1974), 4-9.

16. In fact, Pym's “latter” portions may begin when Pym and Augustus first drunkenly sail into a nightmare storm and return without apparent ill effects—despite the fact that Pym has been pinned to the hull of a ship by a bolt through his neck and has been submerged for well over five minutes. Does he “die” in this opening incident, and is the rest of the Narrative the narrative of his “letting go”? Or do the “latter” portions begin after Pym climbs into his coffinlike box in the dark hold of the Grampus and begins his “perturbed sleep”? Or does the suspect portion begin at any of several other points of sleep, sleep-waking, half-waking, or life-threatening dangers and burials and seeming deaths throughout the narrative? Generally speaking, questions raised in former portions of a narrative are usually answered in latter portions. Here no questions are resolved. Instead, we are moved irrevocably away from any possibility of resolving them. Throughout the increasingly dreamlike narrative, one ironic reversal succeeds another until all conventional perceptions are inverted, and the narrative acquires the feel and movement of dream. The dream motif merges with explicitly Oriental (“Arabic”) materials in descriptions of the limitless deserts in Pym's nightmare vision in his coffinlike box. Such arabesque nightmares occur in other of Poe's works. See chapter 2 of Romantic Arabesque for further discussion.

17. Perhaps the best recent treatment of this aspect of the narrative is John Carlos Rowe's in Through the Custom-House: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Modern Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 91-110.

18. See especially Jean Ricardou, “Le caractère singulier de cette eau,” Critique, n.s. 14 (1967), 718-33; or the English translation, “The Singular Character of the Water,” trans. Frank Towne, Poe Studies, 9 (1976), 1-6.

19. See chapter 4 of Romantic Arabesque for discussion of the others and the symmetry of their placement.

20. References are to Sir Thomas Browne, “Urne Buriall” and “The Garden of Cyrus,” ed. John Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958); note frontispiece, p. 56.

21. See chapters 1 and 2 of Romantic Arabesque for further discussion.

22. The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New York: Knopf, 1958), p. 114; cf. Charles F. O’Donnell, “From Earth to Ether: Poe's Flight into Space,” PMLA 77 (1962), 85-91; see also Richard A. Levine, “The Downward Journey of Purgation: Notes on an Imagistic Leitmotif in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Poe Newsletter 2 (1969), 29-31; and Richard Kopley, “Poe's Pym-esque ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,’” in Poe and His Times: The Artist and His Milieu, ed. Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV (Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1990), pp. 167-77.

23. Harold Beaver, introduction to Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 29.

24. Originally, the chapters were probably numbered 1 to 24, but with Poe's late insertion of a chapter, the Harpers in the 1838 edition and Griswold in the 1856 (“second”) edition (The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 4, Arthur Gordon Pym, & c. [New York: Redfield]) numbered two contiguous chapters as chapter 23. So there are in fact twenty-five chapters plus an opening and closing frame, making chapter 13 the arithmetic center. Many commentators have observed that a “new” narrative seems to begin after the rescue and boarding of the Jane Guy and the journey farther south.

25. John P. Hussey, “‘Mr. Pym’ and ‘Mr. Poe’: The Two Narrators of ‘Arthur Gordon Pym,’” South Atlantic Bulletin, 39 (1974), 29. Sequentially, by pages (in the A. H. Quinn and E. H. O’Neill Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe [New York: Knopf, 1970]): [1[frac12], 3[frac12], 29, 16, {27}, 16, 29, 3[frac12], 1[frac12]].

26. “Nothingness” in Eureka is discussed in the last chapter of my Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973).

27. Ketterer criticizes my attribution of wordplay on “nothingness” in Poe's sentence in Eureka: “A perfect consistency can be nothing but the absolute truth.” He truncates a quotation from Poe's Fiction (p. 191), in effect reversing his charge that I put words in Poe's mouth. What he leaves out is my point that the “perfect consistency of the design of the universe which Poe sets up in Eureka is its cycle of nothing: the absolute truth.” See Ketterer, “Protective Irony and ‘The Full Design’ of Eureka,” in Poe as Literary Cosmologer: Studies in “Eureka”, ed. Richard P. Benton (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1975), pp. 49, 55. In basic agreement with the argument that Eureka is an arabesque on the extended conceit of nothingness is Harriet R. Holman; see her “Hog, Bacon, Ram, and Other ‘Savans’ in Eureka: Notes Toward Decoding Poe's Encyclopedic Satire,” Poe Newsletter 2 (1969), 49-55; and “Splitting Poe's ‘Epicurean Atoms’: Further Speculation on the Literary Satire of Eureka,” Poe Studies, 5 (1972), 33-37.

28. John Barth, The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1984), p. 221.

The following essay is a version of the text from which was derived the keynote address (“Arthur Gordon Pym: An American Arabesque”) given at the 1988 conference “Arthur Gordon Pym and Contemporary Criticism.” At the conference, Professor John T. Irwin simultaneously gave a paper on the quincunx network of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym from a somewhat different perspective, an unexpected critical fortuity. The present text, which emphasizes the quincunx symbolism in “Arab” and European traditions and its pervasiveness in Pym, is a severe reduction of a monograph, titled Romantic Arabesque, Contemporary Theory, and Postmodernism, which appears in vol. 35, nos. 3 and 4 of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance (1989), printed here with the permission of the editors of ESQ and Washington State University Press. The present version omits large portions of the argument and most of the citations. Readers interested in pursuing the concept of the arabesque are referred especially to chapters 1 and 3 and the notes of the ESQ text; references to and quotations from Friedrich Schlegel and others will be found there in full, along with a critical and bibliographical overview of criticism on Poe's text. Further discussion of the icons of indeterminacy mentioned in the second half of the present essay will be found in chapter 4 of the ESQ text.