SOURCE: “How to Place Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym in Science-Dominated Intellectual History, and How to Extract It Again,” in North Dakota Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 1, Winter, 1983, pp. 31-47.

[In the following excerpt, Limon explores some ways in which Poe's scientific ideas described in his Eureka comment on problems in Pym, but points out that Pym remains firmly rooted in the realm of fiction.]

I.

After a dry spell in the practice of intellectual history, Foucault seems to have brought it back into vogue, though Foucault makes his own intellectual project so different from (say) A. O. Lovejoy's that he may be right to refuse to call it intellectual history at all.¹ Lovejoy, of course, defined the intellectual historian's essential task as the tracking of durable unit-ideas “in very diverse provinces of thought and in different periods.”² Historians after Foucault, however, insist that the same idea in a different intellectual setting is a different idea, just as Pierre Menard's Quixote is not Cervantes'. Lovejoy tells us that “one of the results of the quest of unit-ideas … is, I think, bound to be a livelier sense of the fact that most philosophic systems are original or distinctive rather in their patterns than in their components.”³ But the patterns, we are currently taught, lend meaning to the components. Even so vituperative a critic of Foucault as Larry Laudan grants that Lovejoy's method has a “tendency to blind historians to the changes wrought upon an idea or concept in the course of its evolution.”⁴

Lovejoy would have us look first to philosophy for the “common seed-plot” of unit-ideas;⁵ in English-language criticism it is perhaps Marjorie Hope Nicolson who most persuasively turns our attention not to philosophy but to science as the modern intellectual's seminal endeavor. And the typical Nicolsonian order of demonstration (as Foucault outlines it: “How scientific knowledge is diffused, gives rise to philosophical concepts, and takes form perhaps in literary works”⁶) is, predictably, anathema to Foucault, as positing a neatly continuous historical process. Indeed, Nicolson's views and working assumptions may deserve caricature: the proposal of Newton Demands the Muse would seem to be that Newton came and all was Newtonianism.⁷ Foucault's strictures would be all to the good if they promoted in his readers a hearty skepticism about trickle-down intellectual history.

Yet in the history of ideas after Foucault, an oddity has appeared. One might have thought that if on analysis the boundary between two epochs proved at best semipermeable to ideas, then a similar analysis would reveal the boundary between two unsympathetic disciplines to be as little or even less permeable. Thomas Kuhn and Paul K. Feyerabend have forced acknowledgment that it is at least a problem that Newton's “mass” is not Einstein's “mass,” making the commensurability of their theories involving mass problematic. One might have supposed that a similar enterprise would be to refute Nicolson's claim that Pope's “light” is Newton's. But along comes Michel Serres, writing in the manner of Foucault (ingenious in defining archaeological territories and hostile to chronological sequences), to tell us in effect that Pope's light is precisely Newton's, or, to use his own example, that J. M. W. Turner's fire is Boltzmann's: “The boiler's fire atomizes matter and gives it over to chance, which has always been its master. Boltzmann will soon understand it but Turner, in his own domain, understood it before him.”⁸

One wonders what “to understand” means in this context, and one may be inclined to believe that it must mean something radically different depending on “domain”; making Turner honorary co-discoverer of statistical thermodynamics puts science and art on a level by the transparent device of eliminating whatever is scientific from science. (Science is, minimally, that area of investigation in which practitioners agree to agree or call the disagreement a crisis demanding resolution. This is a fact that Serres indirectly pays homage to in his hopeful dismissal of the pre-Raphaelites;⁹ if they could only be eliminated from art history as conclusively as the ether from science, then art would have a history commensurable with science's.) But the primary observation I am making here is the odd effect of views like Serres's on the practice of intellectual history. It turns out that Nicolson was wrong in the opposite way from Lovejoy. In suggesting that Pope's light was Newton's, she thought it was her problem to show that it was not Milton's. But the problem would have been solved before it arose if she had been instructed how to find in Paradise Lost an implicit Opticks.

Foucault is all against “totalitarian periodization,”¹⁰ but the primary force of his work is to show what analogies can be drawn between practices like economics and linguistics within an epoch like the Classical; Serres, in a similar spirit, uses thermodynamics as a way of delimiting epochs, modern (stochastic) art and science united against his own version of the Classical. But if my research has suggested one thing, it is that the intellectual intercourse between art and science is at least as difficult as between two sciences, say, separated by a paradigm shift. I think, furthermore, that the paradoxes of the relationship are what intellectual history, as applied to literature, ought to be in the business of examining. This is because the position of the litterateur is uniquely contradictory with respect to the intellectual world. The writer is, as a verbal artist, required to keep up his intellectual defenses, which means, at least in the last three centuries, knowing something of science; on the other hand, he is for just that reason of all artists most threatened by science, and therefore most inclined to carve for himself an intellectual space defined by its distinction from that of science, and most inclined therefore to dismiss, criticize, or (especially) falsify it. A writer may be affected by science and pretend he is not (like Poe in one mood), or he may learn less from science than he pretends (like Poe in another): the writer for the historian of ideas must be treated simultaneously as a pseudo-intellectual and crypto-intellectual.

A corollary is the hypothesis that the modern writer must live in several histories at once: he at least must survive in one tradition that is rational and evidently progressive (the scientifico-intellectual tradition) and one that is only occasionally rational and not progressive (the artistic tradition). Thomas Kuhn cannot make sense of the painter who (a) considers Rembrandt to be an unsurpassable artist, and (b) does not want to paint like Rembrandt.¹¹ But artists must have an historical consciousness that is at least double—and may therefore be attracted to a science that helps them to transcend a past that cannot be transcended (in which light, science is risible). Thus Poe: the mocker of the scientific pretension of progress whose culminating work is the scientific (?) essay Eureka. Eureka is a document helpful to the historian of ideas in clearly placing Poe's career in an intellectual setting; it may be read as the first intellectual-historical criticism of, in particular, Poe's greatest work, Arthur Gordon Pym. The fact that it is written at the end of Poe's career, ten years after Pym, and is thus apparently intended to impose an intellectual setting retroactively, in addition helps the intellectual historian to get Pym out of the very history he and Poe have conspired to foist upon it.

I also want to use Poe as an example of a nineteenth-century writer whose intellectual context is (pace Serres), at least insofar as we allow Eureka to define it, the opposite of statistical thermodynamics; it is Naturphilosophie, with its fated evolutions. But I am not simply disputing Serres's (and Thomas Pynchon's) fashionable archaeology. For Poe, given the peculiar relationship of literary and intellectual history, might almost as well be read as a Boltzmann before Boltzmann. It is as possible to find entropy in Arthur Gordon Pym as Naturphilosophie or anything else: a work of fiction, I think, does not embrace one set of ideas exclusively. A final comparison of Pym and Pynchon's V., oddly similar or at least not demonstrably dissimilar in philosophy, despite their authors' explicit philosophical divergences, will help us to free both Poe and Pynchon from the straitjacket of a single archaeology. One can find what science one wants in literature; Nicolson did not sufficiently realize the intellectual ambiguity and openness of a piece of creative literature, and Serres, oddly, seems to realize it even less.

II.

Eureka is a document of late Naturphilosophie, produced at the same time as a translation of Lorenz Oken, the Naturphilosoph who like Poe made all nature the fragmentation of a universal man, and Joseph Stallo's popularization of Oken, Schelling, and Hegel. The work is dedicated to Alexander von Humboldt, and Humboldt, it is true, separates himself from the Naturphilosophen: “To embrace the multiplicity of the phenomena of the Cosmos in unity of thought, in the form of a purely rational series is not, as I conceive, possible in the present state of our empirical knowledge.”¹² But at precisely that point, Poe separates himself from Humboldt: “But however admirable be the succinctness with which he [Humboldt] has treated such particular points of his topic, the mere multiplicity of these points occasions, necessarily, an involution of idea, which precludes all individuality of impression.”¹³

Because of limitations of space, a full proof of the place of Eureka in the nature-philosophic tradition is impossible. A few telling points may be made, however.

1. Much of Eureka starts with the Kantian premises that Naturphilosophen used. The definition of matter in terms of exactly two constitutive forces derives from the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. So does the reduction of impenetrability to repulsion. So does Poe's discovery of the “modus operandi” of gravity—the explanation of the inverse square law (XVI, 211, 212, 214). Poe's attacks on Kant, therefore, ought to be understood as disingenuous.

2. But it is in his spiritualization of the forces of attraction and repulsion that Poe is specifically nature-philosophic rather than Kantian. To Schelling, nature is, famously, spirit slumbering; Hegel makes it the goal of nature to “consume itself like a Phoenix in order to emerge from the externality rejuvenated as spirit.”¹⁴ At the end of Eureka, matter becomes, through the agency of gravity, entirely spiritualized. It is perhaps on Coleridge's authority that Poe sees in the reduction of matter to force the implication that it may be reduced to spirit.¹⁵

3. Since nature is divine spirit in potential, it is all alive. Oken: “There is no dead matter; it is alive through the eternal that is in it. … Everything is God, that is there, and without God there is absolutely nothing.”¹⁶ Poe: “… Bear in mind that all is Life—Life—Life within Life—the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine” (XVI, 315).

4. And since there is life everywhere, there is organization everywhere, the organization of an organism. Stallo says that “every individual organism is the activity of all-comprehending nature embodied in concrete unity … [characterized by] reciprocation between the Whole and its parts.”¹⁷ Stallo's concept of reciprocation comes from Hegel: “Reciprocity presents itself [Hegel writes] as a reciprocal causality of presupposed and self-conditioning Substances. Each is in the relation to the others of being at once an Active and a Passive Substance.”¹⁸ The idea that the parts of an organism are “reciprocally Ends and Means”¹⁹ is familiar to the student of Eureka; Poe calls reciprocity “Divine adaptation” and defines it as those “constructions” in which “we may take at any time a cause for an effect, or the converse.” His example, we may note in anticipation of the polar adventure Pym, is the “reciprocity of adaptation of man and food at the pole” (XVI, 571-72).

Parallels may be multiplied, but a procedural problem is perhaps intruding itself in the mind of the reader. Granted, he may say, that Eureka is Naturphilosophie. Granted even, on faith, that Pym adumbrates the ideas of Eureka. Would that put Pym in modern, science-dominated, intellectual history? For of course Naturphilosophie is not science, nor is it even “philosophy of science” like Kuhn's or Popper's, or science-influenced philosophy like Locke's. It is, rather, an attempt to subdue empirical science with philosophical a prioris. But this objection has merely the effect, I think, of not allowing us to postpone our discussion of the problematic relationship of literature and science to the analysis of the fictional Pym; it shows itself even in Eureka, non-fiction written seemingly with respect for science. That Poe should make his grand gesture of accepting scientific facts and ideas in a work in the spirit, not of science, but of idealist co-optation of science, should not surprise. Poe embraces science and fends it off simultaneously.

Of course, even idealist pre-emption of science had something to do with the current state of actual science. The relevant scientific context is perhaps the nineteenth-century emergence of chemistry, culminating in the work of Faraday: “By 1848 [Trevor H. Levere writes, picking as his watershed the year of the publication of Eureka], Faraday had brought all physical powers except gravity into union with one another, as different polar manifestations of a single original.”²⁰ And Poe is interested in such a union in Eureka, and in the concept of polarity in Pym (his polar novel)—polarity is indeed the concept by which some scientists and idealists hoped to build bridges. Yet gravity, we must note, the exceptional force, is the primary unifying force of Eureka. Poe is, furthermore, moved by the immensity of interstellar space, which as a negative infinity left Hegel cold.²¹ The fact is that Poe, in some respects, is an old-fashioned scientific fellow-traveller, deriving his chief inspirational energy from astronomy and gravity rather than (as with the Naturphilosophen) chemistry and all the forces (electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, etc.) united by Faraday. In his awe before the universal scope, Poe seems more a Jonathan Edwards than a Hegel, and indeed his desire for a science that is eschatological owes more to the Puritanic Scottish Secessionist Thomas Dick (whose scientific eschatology Poe borrowed in “Monos and Una”) than to anything German. In treating the relation of literature and science, one swims in muddy waters: Poe's “scientific” mysticism is not the child of his own century, only. Poe stakes a claim in more than one archaeological territory.

III.

The best place to start, perhaps, in the project of using Eureka to describe the ambiguous place of Pym in the history of ideas is with their uncannily similar introductions: in Eureka Poe's loyalty oscillates between Truth and Beauty in his search for the appropriate genre of his essay; in Pym we are given confusing information as to how much of the manuscript is Pym's “actual description of his voyage of discovery, how much Poe's artistic contribution. Our own paradoxical sense of how much of Poe should be treated as intellectual must begin with Poe's.

And the best place to start on a full “Eurekan” reading of Pym is, perhaps, with a word about their twin developments. In Eureka, Poe begins with a hostility for the masses and for science that gives in to popular mythology—science philosophers even in the nineteenth century, Poe thinks, are influenced by the “vulgar idea” that the world centers on the earth (XVI, 217). But he ends with a respect for the masses—as atoms of the divinity that mass and masses approach—and therefore with a willingness to let his own philosophy be affected by vulgar thought: his peroration poses as a mere transcription of the prophecies that “now and then speak to us [i.e., all of us] with low voices (XVI, 313). We can read back from this progression to Pym. The narrative begins with “My name is Arthur Gordon Pym. My father was a respectable trader in sea-stores at Nantucket, where I was born. My maternal grandfather was an attorney in good practice” (III, 5). “My … my … my”: the story begins with an identity and what it possesses. The story ends, however, with Pym's identity-threatening approach to a giant snowman, as we are given a string of “of's” as if to mock the very idea of property: “And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow” (III, 212).

The reader of Naturphilosophie is apt, then, to see in Pym the basic nature-philosophic development: the subject goes over into the object, to use the Hegelian phrase, into nature, as nature is humanized. Yet how many readers of Pym have thought to provide this parascientific context? Certainly very few, for Naturphilosophie has come and gone, and Arthur Gordon Pym does not, as a work of literature, represent it. Only Eureka can pump Pym full of science philosophy. Eureka alone, for example, allows us to notice that the progression from (individual) Pym to (universal) snowman takes place within a grander universal fluctuation from spirit to matter and back, as the names of the succession of boats imply: the Ariel (spirit), the Penguin (animal), the Grampus (mammal, we are approaching humanity), the Jane Guy (human), the unnamed canoe (which takes Pym, Peters, and Nu-Nu into the unnamable, a long nine-month rebirth after the opening naming of the story). Thus, as in Naturphilosophie, nature falls from spirit, and builds up to humanity to regain spirit. And only Eureka allows us to see in the introductory adventure of Pym—an adumbration on the Ariel of the ultimate spiritualization—a punning nature-philosophic commitment to the dematerializing of the world:

“For God's sake, Augustus,” I screamed, now heartily frightened, “what ails you?—what is the matter?—what are you going to do?” “Matter!” he stammered, in the greatest apparent surprise, letting go the tiller at the same moment, and falling forward into the bottom of the boat—“matter—why, nothing is the—matter—going home—d—d—don’t you see?”

(III, 8)

Eureka turns this into Naturphilosophie thus:

… when, I say, Matter, finally expelling the Ether, shall have returned into absolute Unity,—it will then (to speak paradoxically for the moment) be matter without Attraction and Repulsion—in other words, Matter without Matter—in other words, again, Matter no more.

(XVI, 587)

Do we have, without question, a pun in Pym? The next line of Eureka bolsters the case: “In sinking into Unity, it [the universe] will sink into that Nothingness which, to all Finite Perception, Unity must be.” The word “sinking” is ubiquitous in Pym—sinking into unity may be the very subject of the novel. More wordplay unlocks. The black chief Too-wit's lie—“Mattee non we pa pa si,” which is translated as “there was no need of arms where all were brothers” (III, 201), and which literally seems pidgin for “It matters not when we see one papa”—turns out to be a restatement of Augustus' “Nothing is the—matter—going home—d—d—don’t you see?” Only by looking from Eureka to Pym can we give these nonsense syllables a point.

So Eureka puts Pym in intellectual history by paronomasia. But we may well begin to wonder: suppose Poe had died in 1843, after Pym (1838) and before Eureka (1848)? Would Pym in that case, be material for the history of ideas?

IV.

We do have, it is true, sufficient evidence that Poe was no Lockean empiricist: the detective stories rebel against empiricism. Locke wrote, in words Poe seems to have remembered, that

though unlearned Men well enough understood the words White and Black, etc. and had constant Notions of Ideas signified by these Words; yet there were philosophers found, who had learning and subtlety enough to prove, that Snow was black, i.e., to prove, that White was Black.²²

And Poe, making fun of philosophers in an early work (“Loss of Breath,” II, 154, first written as “A Decided Loss,” 1831), himself mocks one thinker who “maintained that snow was black.” When Poe returns to dark snow seven years later, then, he may conceivably do so as another rebellion against Locke, as an anti-nominalist abuser of words, a further abuse of which is the assertion (made up by Locke) that “Humanity is Animality, or Rationality, or Whiteness”;²³ yet another abuse of which (according to a later philosopher in the line whom Poe energetically despised) is the assertion that gravity moves things (since, in Bentham's theory of linguistic fictions, there are things which move, not things in the power of transporting non-things).²⁴ But Poe, as a post-Kantian in Eureka, makes gravity logically prior to things; and as an idealist in Pym, he makes individual things functions of ideas—humanity is whiteness—not the reverse.

Making Poe an anti-nominalist in Pym may help to explain how words are used in that story (the curiously frequent immaterial use of the word “sinking,” for example, in a story that takes place above a dangerously material ocean). And the tests of any intellectual-historical reading must be how well it illuminates the text in question. Let us go through the most famous cruxes of Pym, seeing what the history of ideas mode of criticism can elucidate. The problem of the unity of the book—Pym is, countless critics have observed, a sharply divided novel—is the best place to start, and let us begin by admitting that insofar as Eureka is eschatological science, more like the use Puritans traditionally made of science than the use idealists made of it,²⁵ the essay helps us to see theology rather than science in the division of Pym. At the precise middle of the novel are metaphors of the Protestant sacraments (Pym and Parker's immersion and Parker's sacrifice and cannibalization for the sake of the others' salvation). The precise division allows us to see the typological structure: Pym out of the hold of the grampus is Jonah out of the whale (a grampus is a relative of the whale), foreshadowing the return of Pym out of the avalanche (when Pym is hit by falling stones, he thinks that “the day of universal dissolution was at hand” [III, 203]).

But if this sort of interpretation of the problem of unity takes Pym out of the parascientific world of Poe's own century, we can replace the Old and New Testaments with the Iliad and the Odyssey to reinsert it. “History,” says Schelling, “is an epic composed in the mind of God. Its two main parts are—first, that which depicts the departure of mankind from its center, and secondly, that which depicts the return. The first is the Iliad, the second, the Odyssey of history.”²⁶ And the challenge of a navigational return to unified ideality is a German cliché: “This space between the ideal of man's soul / And man's achievement who hath ever passed? / An ocean spreads between us and that goal, / Where anchor ne’er was cast!”²⁷ Call this the challenge that sailor Pym meets in nine months, and what his progress signifies is the approach not to the Apocalypse but to the Absolute.

And Pym, we may observe, approaches the Absolute by way of polarities, all of them subexpressions of the basic antithesis of multiplicity and unity that is overcome in Eureka. Most remarkable is the alternation of chaos and order. The “complete chaos” of the hold in which Pym is originally stowed away turns out to have been “purposely arranged” by Augustus to afford maximum concealment (III, 23); later, when Pym is lost, the chaos returns to chaos. Similarly, the blacks group “as if by accident” before their carefully planned ambush (III, 188). What is order from one point of view, i.e., what protects the status quo from an alien threat, is chaos from another.

There are other prominent antitheses to be transcended. First of all, consciousness and unconsciousness: Pym wakes up (beginning one cycle) from a dream at last “in possession of [his senses]” (III, 28). He is no sooner awake than he is confronted, he thinks, by a horrible beast, and his “brain swam” (next page). The beast turns out to be only his dog, and gradually (same page) his “thinking faculties returned.” But he is still without food and drink, existing (two pages later) “in a state bordering on insensibility.” Two more pages: “At length there returned to [him] some portion of presence of mind.” Whether Pym is, finally, more often in or out of his senses must be left to a statistician to decide. It would also require an extensive computation to determine whether he is more frequently willful (expressed often as “erect”) or will-less (or “sinking” or “supine”). At the final moment of the narrative, at least one opposition is clearly overcome—the opposition of black and white (and blacks and whites). The white albatrosses that “darkened” the atmosphere at one point in the voyage (III, 157) foreshadow and pre-illumine the synthesis of the black (and, as I shall show, the individualist) principle and the white (universal) principle in the dark snow.

May we say, then, that Pym, ending as it does at the pole, is polar? That hypothesis would certainly place it in the world of Naturphilosophie.

In physics [Hegel writes] a lot has been said about polarity [his emphasis], and this concept has marked a great advance in the metaphysics of physics, for as a concept it is nothing more nor less than the determination of the necessary relationship between two different terms, which, in so far as the positing of one is also the positing of the other, constitute a unity.²⁸

And further to conceive of the basic polar relationship of multiplicity and unity, of nature and spirit, as a relationship of mirror isomorphs would strengthen the nature-philosophic connection. For that is how Hegel puts the relationship:

The absolute freedom of the Idea is that it does not merely pass over into Life, nor as infinite Knowledge allow the latter to show itself within itself, but that rather, in its own absolute truth, it decides to release from itself, as its own mirror-image, the moment of its own Specificity, and of the first determination or other-being, the Idea Immediate, i.e., Nature.²⁹

Perhaps we can best establish the pertinence of the Hegelian mirror in Pym indirectly: let us begin by noting that despite the boldness of O’Donnell's attempt to find unity in Pym, he does not, I think, succeed in discovering events after the Jane Guy rescue (following the communion) that precisely parallel events before. These are the parallels he proposes: motion to the Jane Guy and away, Pym's confinement in the hold and his confinement in the hills, the escape from treachery to sail towards the equator and the similar escape to sail towards the South Pole, the man overboard on July 5 (summer in the north) and January 10 (summer in the south), and Pym's swooning in the face of his mirror image and Too-wit's.³⁰ But it is, I believe, more accurate and suggestive to consider these paired items to be, not parallels, but mirror isomorphs. They all involve mirror oppositions: toward and away, up and down, north and south, black and white. Let O’Donnell's last example be suggestive: mirror opposition is an important concept in a story in which the whites (who naturally understand mirroring) meet the blacks who have never seen their own reflection.

Who, then, are the blacks of Tsalal?: crux number two. The critical tradition—created most notably by Bonaparte, Levin, and Fiedler—has been to see in them images of Negroes remembered from Poe's Southern past. I doubt they are. Rather, I think they stand for extreme analytic rationality and temporal consciousness, which Poe would not have been likely to associate with the Southern Negroes he remembered. The blacks are a disturbing reprise of Old Testament consciousness that, beginning with Parker's sacrifice, the book has rejected. The king is Tsalemon or Psalemoun: both versions of his name contain “Salem,” short for Jerusalem, where his namesake Solomon, and David (the psalm man, type of Christ), reigned. But in order to return to the nineteenth-century archaeological territory, we must go on to wonder what, in idealistic terms, is implicit in the idea of Old Testament consciousness. The natives are led by an analogue of wise Solomon, and their chief is Too-wit (certainly a pun on the scholar's “to wit,” as well as a punning condemnation of excessive cleverness—the blacks have “Too-wit at their head” [III, 311]). They seem stupid, but they are in fact surprisingly “systematic,” and their work shows a treacherous “degree of order” (III, 194, 195-96); they are completely analytic, seeking to “divide [the whites'] numbers” (III, 188). They are, in short, not at all idealistic, they analyze rather than synthesize, they are and wish to be isolated from the rest of the universe, which is why Poe tells us that they have never seen themselves reflected: they have never seen the world as in any way mirroring themselves. They are locked in time as well as space: Nu-Nu from Klock-klock dies as Pym and Peters sail into eternity.

Thus we arrive at the ending, crux number three: in the religious drama a version of Revelation, the end of time and space. But, reading back from Eureka to Pym, we may place Pym's climax in the scientifico-philosophical drama as well. In nature-philosophic terms alone, we may see in it the subject (Pym) arriving at the object (the snowman is nature and man united), the individualist pole (consciousness, willfulness, blackness) rejected for the pole of unity, as the material world is reduced to an abstract idea: subsumed ultimately by whiteness, we realize we had been functions of the abstraction, analyzed temporarily into the colorful and concrete world.

And, alerted to the possibility of using science to understand the end of Pym, we may also see what happens to Pym and Peters literally. For the phenomenon that ends Arthur Gordon Pym makes its appearance with a decisive clue:

A high range of light gray vapour appeared constantly in the southern horizon, flaring up occasionally in lofty streaks, now darting from east to west, now from west to east, and again presenting a level and uniform summit—in short, having all the wild variations of the Aurora Borealis. The average height of this vapour, as apparent from our station, was about twenty-five degrees.

(III, 238)

Pym is correct in his allusion to the northern lights; Poe is basing his description on Dick's account of the aurora: “It generally appears to rise from a kind of dark cloud or collection of vapours, which runs along from the north to the east and west, and is elevated from 10 to 20 or 30 degrees above the horizon.”³¹ Dick also quotes a description of the aurora australis: darkness comes from light, and light from darkness, at the southern pole also. Yet Dick does not present his description with any sense that it has philosophical interest, let alone that it contradicts a famous axiom. Purer science philosophy intervenes, however, turning the vague philosophy of Pym into the explicit philosophy of Eureka—allowing us, thereby, to see the nature-philosophical justification of the arrival in Pym at the idealist's pole of unity at the same moment as the arrival at the earth's pole.

To be more specific: first empiricist and then idealist science philosophy intervenes. Halfway from Pym (1838) to Eureka (1848) is Mill's Logic (1843): in it Poe read the attack on axioms—or rather on the inconceivability of the falseness of axioms—that he takes up in Eureka. In Eureka, two of the axioms that Poe criticizes are “there cannot be antipodes” and “darkness cannot proceed from light” (XVI, 192). And Harry Levin sees that Poe has attacked them both in Pym.³² Yet Poe gets them both from the Logic, which comes after Pym!³³ Of course Poe disputes with Mill: given their partial agreement, the quarrel can best be explained as a matter of temperament and politics. But the important point is that Poe extracts from the Logic passages that serve to turn Pym into philosophical discourse retroactively from Eureka. Levin, by virtue of his historical inaccuracy, is working on Poe's behalf.

Two years after the publication of the Logic, in 1845, Humboldt's Cosmos began to be published in translation. Humboldt had, it was well known (since he was universally adulated as the paragon of the great intellectual), spent a lifetime pursuing his interest in magnetic storms; in Cosmos he publishes a description of the aurora borealis, and of the aurora australis as well, noting about the latter phenomenon that “dark rays shot upwards from an arch which was directed from east to west.”³⁴ Reading this, Poe must have had some of the same emotion that he had had reading Mill. That is, it must have come to him that Pym could be retroactively philosophized: the magnetic nature of the terminal phenomenon of Pym is what connects the geographer's south pole to the Naturphilosoph's conception of polarity, since the conception is based explicitly on the polarity of the magnet. Humboldt, therefore, must be praised in Eureka even as Mill has to be attacked: the “Eurekan” project, it begins to appear, is to turn the disunified Pym (and perhaps Poe's entire disunified career) into coherent philosophy.

V.

But note that the analysis has taken an odd direction. It had started confidently using Eureka to suggest intellectual-historical solutions to Pym's cruxes: it has ended showing that two events of intellectual history important to the production of Eureka were not available at the time of Pym, so that the “Eurekan” reading of Pym begins to seem either imposed or a part of the Michel Serres school of antichronological gymnastics.

According to the Serres school, however, what we should be finding everywhere in the nineteenth century is not Law and Progress but Entropy; Thomas Pynchon would agree. “In the nineteenth century [Pynchon writes], with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat-engine, about 40 percent efficient.” In our century, Pynchon continues, man is “something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons.”³⁵ All right, let us give in to Pynchon and Serres: if Poe is a man of his century, Pym will show, not nature-philosophic ordering, but thermodynamic disordering. Why not? Pym shows that order from one view is disorder from another.

And Pynchon? V. begins: “Christmas Eve …” (V., 1). “Eve” is a pun: the “Christmas Eve” is, typologically, Mary. “Eve” is, furthermore, symmetrical, with “V” symmetrically flanked. Is “Eev” the mirror of “Vee”?—typology and mirrors already! We proceed: “Christmas Eve, 1955. …” The “55” is mirrored “v”: the book is, otherwise inexplicably, filled with double fives. “Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane …” (the profane and sacred mirroring each other across the “v's”), “… wearing black levis, …” (“levis”: a Jewish priest of the profane: blackness) “happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia”) the virgin returns, bringing Judaism to Christianity, blackness to whiteness). None of this explication is hard to do—the point is that it is easy to do. Given that we are all familiar with Pynchon's entropic vision, we may as well do (imperfectly efficient) work on his behalf, secure in the knowledge that every bit of our critical work is allowable and false: all orders return to chaos. And yet—entropy is, Pynchon informs us, the nineteenth-century metaphor. Perhaps we may believe in the orders we discover?

“You are Godolphin,” someone says to the Antarctic explorer of V. Pym, we remember, had mispronounced “Gordon” as “Goddin” when dissembling before his grandfather (why is he suddenly going by his middle name?); from Eureka, in which we all return to the Godhead, we learn that Pym is an allegory of “Godding”—the process is initiated when Pym pre-typically emerges from the grampus. If V. is anti-Pym, then God ought to return to the dolphin, order to disorder. Godolphin's fantasy of an underground world beneath the pole is Poe's fantasy, and Godolphin's “dream of annihilation,” of an Antarctic “apocalypse” (V., 177, 190), is Poe's dream, yet Pynchon reverses it, makes it a dream of disintegration, hence a dream, not of whiteness, but of color: “A gaudy dream,” he twice calls it (V., 190, 193), a dream of “colors, music, fragrances” (V., 188). So disordering is the universal proclivity? Yet, again, entropy is the metaphor of Poe's century.

Why not, then, perform a series of maneuvers to get entropy back where it belongs? Certainly there is enough criticism to show that Pym is disunified. Why doubt it? Let us now, for symmetry's sake, append a note to the end of V. like Eliot's at the end of The Waste Land: all characters, it will say, unite in some “V” as Eliot united all characters in Tiresias. (Does anyone who has not been informed in advance about Pynchon's preoccupation with entropy know for certain that V. is less organized than The Waste Land?) Thus all the unifying patterns that critics have already uncovered in V. cannot be dismissed as interpretive impositions; Herbert Stencil will be shown by a clever critic to be Herbert Spencer, and Herbert Spencer unironized. An exercise for beginning intellectual historians: noting that Godolphin = Gordon Pym = the God Allan Poe of Eureka, or Herbert Stencil = Herbert Spencer, discuss V. and evolution.

Eureka and Pym, it seems to me, typify the relationship of the modern author's knowledge of science and his fiction. “Eurekan” ideas certainly illuminate Pym (as traces of science are everywhere in modern literature), but Eureka never quite makes possible a scientifico-philosophical reading of the adventure story that is absolutely convincing or trustworthy (as the presence of science in literature must be a phantom presence). Furthermore: to attach Pym too determinedly to Eureka is to attach a live work of fiction (in a living, magical, hence pre-scientific, tradition, that includes C. B. Brown's Edgar Huntly, Moby-Dick, “The Bear,” and Henderson the Rain King) to a tedious essay in a dead tradition. The historian of ideas may feel he has to destroy a fiction to save it—but he never does quite save it when he works too closely with science. Scientific history moves by rejection; literary history does not; Poe's initiation tale and Pynchon's will live when the twenty-first century abolishes the Second Law of Thermodynamics as conclusively as Poe's energetic God. The intellectual historian must be prepared to be paradoxical, taking care to make Pynchon and Poe non-intellectual even as he has made them intellectuals, finding strategies to remove them line-by-line from the intellectual tradition he has placed them in line-by-line; he must, in short, see the dangers of bestowing the prestige of science honorifically, as Michel Serres does in aggravating the mistakes of Nicolsonian history of ideas. It is not that science and literature are two cultures; neither is it (the opposite fallacy) that they are one; rather, all the intellectual historian's fun and interest is owing to the fact that they are neither two nor one.

Notes

1. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), especially Part IV.

2. A. O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1948), p. xii. Lovejoy acknowledges the confusions caused by “shifts … in the meanings of terms,” but does not allow these shifts to obscure “the fundamental identity of an idea” (p. xii).

3. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 3.

4. Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems: Toward a Theory of Scientific Growth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 182.

5. Lovejoy, Essays, p. 8.

6. Foucault, p. 137.

7. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's “Opticks” and the Eighteenth Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946).

8. Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 58.

9. Serres, p. 62.

10. Foucault, p. 148.

11. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 346.

12. Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Survey of the General Physical History of the Universe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1845), p. 21. This edition, volume one of the entire work, is the “pirated edition from Prichard” that Poe used. See Carl F. Shreiber, “Mr. Poe at His Conjurations Again,” The Colophon: A Book Collector's Quarterly (May, 1930, Part II), n. page.

13. Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: George D. Sproul, 1902), XVI, 187. This is the Monticello Edition. All future references to this edition will be inserted parenthetically in the text.

14. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, 3 vols., trans. and ed. M. J. Petry (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1970), III, 212.

15. Compare Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (London: Oxford University Press, 1907), I, 88 with Poe, XVI, 244.

16. Lorenz Oken, Elements of Physiophilosophy, trans. Alfred Tulk (London: The Ray Society, 1847), p. 38.

17. J. B. Stallo, General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature: With an Outline of Some of Its Recent Developments Among the Germans, Embracing the Philosophical Systems of Schelling and Hegel, and Oken's System of Nature (Boston: William Crosby and H. P. Nichols, 1848), p. 15.

18. Quoted in J. N. Findlay, Hegel: A Re-examination (New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 219.

19. As Findlay puts it, p. 255.

20. Trevor H. Levere, Affinity and Matter: Elements of Chemical Philosophy, 1800-1865 (London: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 99.

21. Hegel, I, 258.

22. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), II, 27-28 (III, x, x).

23. Locke, II, 4-5 (III, viii, i).

24. See C. K. Ogden, introd. and ed., Bentham's Theory of Fictions (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1932), p. 110.

25. Not for nothing does Poe enter the penultimate chapter of Perry Miller's Errand Into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 236-37.

26. Quoted in Joseph L. Esposito, Schelling's Idealism and Philosophy of Nature (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1977), p. 156.

27. Schiller, translated and quoted in Stallo, p. 219n.

28. Hegel, I, 210-11.

29. Quoted in Findlay, p. 268.

30. Charles O’Donnell, “From Earth to Ether: Poe's Flight into Space,” PMLA, 77 (1962), 89.

31. Thomas Dick, The Christian Philosopher, or, The Connection of Science and Philosophy with Religion, 10th ed., 2 vols. (New York, 1826; Glasgow: William Collins and Co., 1846), p. 151.

32. Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), p. 130.

33. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), pp. 239, 277.

34. Humboldt, p. 122n.

35. Thomas Pynchon, V., (New York: Bantam Books, 1961), p. 265. All future references to this edition are inserted parenthetically in the text.