SOURCE: “‘Dust within the Rock’: The Phantasm of Meaning in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 14, No. 2, Summer, 1982, pp. 137-51.

[In the following essay, Rosenzweig examines the narrative structure of Pym and contends that the narrative constitutes a unified whole, but one that attests to the impossibility of obtaining a final explanation.]

In recent interpretations of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, much emphasis has been placed upon the ending of Pym's journey and the giant shrouded figure who appears in the last sentence. While critics may adopt different approaches, most seem unable to resist the lure of ascribing an illuminating meaning to both the figure and the ending. Pym's last vision has been interpreted as the acquirement of knowledge which an epistemological approach suggests, the nothingness of an existential reading, or the final rite of initiation of a mythic approach. The figure has been variously identified as the long lost and desired Mother,¹ “the apotheosis of the creative imagination itself,”² the embodiment of Pym's journey toward the ultimate reality,³ the symbol of the final step in Pym's removal from the “world of reality and reason,”⁴ or “Anthropos … the Primal Man … stand[ing] for the … reunion of the voyager's soul with God or … with the divinity in himself.”⁵

It is not surprising that most critiques of the novel tend to wrest a clarifying meaning from the concluding Tsalal section, particularly from the final lines of Pym's account. In a novel so frustratingly protean in form, the depiction of the polar world in literally black-and-white terms, and the final glimpse of Pym seem not only climactic and even apocalyptic, but, more important, definite.⁶ They seem to offer “meaning” to the interminably shifting sands of both Pym's experiences and the novel's form.

The novel itself encourages this movement toward meaning. As Daniel Hoffman points out,⁷ the work presents an increasingly simplified version of the world—a world which is not only literally black and white, but which becomes increasingly stripped of all peripheral considerations. Only Pym and his alter ego and life-sustaining guide, Peters, remain alive of all the characters who have journeyed southward toward the Pole; and the issues of life and death, with which the novel has dealt from the beginning, finally rest fully on Pym's shoulders. The novel becomes a funnel of sorts, gradually narrowing its focus to a point, paralleling Pym's and Peters's increasingly defined direction southward, until they are irrevocably swept into what seems to be the vortex of the world.

Then, too, there is the natural rush of the reader of any text toward the ending that will reveal meaning.

Yet the problem with this attention to endings in the novel—both the last lines of Pym's narrative and the sense of apocalypse which they create—is that both senses of ending are in part misleading. Neither Pym's life, nor his account of his adventures, nor Poe's novel containing that account ends at that point. There are at least two other endings which are often ignored, the “two or three final chapters”⁸ which are lost at the time of Pym's death and the lengthy note which completes the novel.

This final note at first seems further to reinforce the novel's movement toward meaning. It is written by an anonymous editor who has supplanted the two former shapers of the narrative—Mr. Poe, author in Pym's name of the initial pages of the story, who, no longer believing in the story's truthfulness, has withdrawn his support of it, and Pym himself, now dead, who not only has authored most of the narrative but also an introduction to it apprising the reader of both his and Mr. Poe's relationship to that narrative. Apparently fulfilling the reader's desire for a definitive explanation of that mysterious figure and an account of Pym's subsequent experience, the authoritative editor offers a scholarly explanation of the meaning of the hieroglyphics of Tsalal. His note concludes with a quotation which appears to be biblical in origin in which God himself seems to speak explaining the underlying source of the hieroglyphics: “‘I have graven it within the hills and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock.’” The line seems to resonate with meaning and to have implications not only for understanding the hieroglyphics, Tsalal, and Pym's journey but for man's existence in general.

However, many critics who find a pattern or meaning in the novel dismiss this note as a contrived and anticlimactic mistake. Patrick Quinn writes, “Poe is suddenly brought up short by the realization that he has no mystery to reveal, or nothing in keeping with the clues that led up to it. And so he terminates the story abruptly, and, to smooth matters over, adds a concluding note in which the break in the story is blamed on the untimely death of Pym.”⁹ Joseph Moldenhauer describes Poe's “resort[ing] to the desperate tightrope trick of the concluding note”;¹⁰ Edward Davidson writes of Poe's “adding an appendix in small type in which he essayed to clarify certain conclusions … and clarified nothing”;¹¹ and J. V. Ridgely and Iola Haverstick maintain that the “‘Note’ remains a curious, almost contemptuous, treatment of the credulity of the reader.”¹²

In contrast to such dismissals of the note as a mistake, several recent critiques have used the note to furnish the meaning and unity for which they search. Both Daniel Wells and Maurice Mourier¹³ have found in the hieroglyphic chasms of Tsalal versions of Poe's own name and initials, suggesting that he is the hidden author-god and final source of meaning in this fantastical world. Jean Ricardou, equally literal in his attempt to find a meaning in the hieroglyphics, has devised an almost allegorical reading of the Tsalal section in which the colors of black and white become the ink and page of the text itself.¹⁴

Despite the contrast of these approaches,¹⁵ both insist on evaluating the artistic success of the final note by whether it furnishes the meanings it purports to. While the latter approach is satisfied with the direction of the final editor's clues, convinced they are Poe's, the former finds such clues not precise or meaningful enough. Both also treat the note as an adjunct to the text—merely a commentary on that text's meaning rather than an integral part of it, continuing the text's essential pattern. However, it is my contention that while the note, like the text as a whole, does not supply adequate “meaning” it is the very refusal (rather than inability) of the text to illuminate, and of the endings to end, which is at the heart of the novel's vision. Like the mystified police and narrator of “The Purloined Letter,” we have the answer right before our eyes. It is the reader, not Poe, who should “suddenly [be] brought up short by the realization that [Poe] has no mystery to reveal,” and it is exactly the point that, as Davidson critically notes, nothing is clarified.

The note, coupled with the Tsalal section describing Pym's blind meanderings in the chasms and his discovery of the indecipherable hieroglyphs, does suggest an analogy between Pym's relationship to the world he explores and the reader's relationship to the novel he reads—an analogy dependent upon this frustration of meaning. Like Pym's exploration of the chaotic world and his continually disappointed attempt to gain some manner of control over it, the reader, manipulated by Poe, continually struggles to make some sense of or find some constant in the apparently chaotic sprawl of the text. Yet, in both cases, despite a final promise of revelation, there is no further enlightenment. While the introductory and concluding notes purport to help the reader in his search, their effect is to continue the undercutting of the reader's expectations. Just as Pym's apocalyptic vision seems to prove false (his death occurring later, accidentally), so the apocalyptic meaning provided the reader in the final note only further mystifies. The anonymous editor with his authoritative tone and ostensibly objective scholarly erudition ultimately functions ironically in exactly the opposite manner from his purported aim of clarification. His initial remarks remind the reader of the problematic relationship of both Pym and Mr. Poe to the main text, while his appearance itself, by revealing at the last minute the presence of another mediator intervening between Pym's actual experience and the publication of the narrative describing that experience, further emphasizes the distance that lies between the events themselves and our knowledge of them. Finally, the fact that the editor's insights prove hollow calls into question authority in general and the search for definitive answers.

On these grounds a case can be made for a unified vision of the novel, uniting not only the earlier half of the novel with the Tsalal section, but the whole of Pym's narrative with the editorial notes and demonstrating that the apparently formless form of the novel is integral to its vision. That vision is essentially concerned with meaning and ends, “meaning” being the thematic component of which “ends” are the formal. That is, as Frank Kermode suggests in his Sense of an Ending,¹⁶ our expectations and use of endings, both actual (apocalypse and death) and literary, by their very nature ascribe meaning to an event or text by giving it form. Pym reflects the inability of meaning, on every level, to assert or declare itself, and of any end to complete itself despite man's constant search—whether he be adventurer or reader—for enduring meaning.¹⁷ Since a direct thematic assertion of this vision, by its very nature, is alien to that vision, this theme is articulated almost completely in terms of form—by the continual creation of expectations (for expectations always implicitly include potential fulfillment in ending or meaning) and then the retraction or undercutting of those expectations.¹⁸

Such a vision is then very different, both in the means by which it is effected and in its import, from the muddled and unintegrated vision which disparaging critics tend to attribute to the novel. Rather than inadvertently conveying a sense of chaos to the frustrated reader due to Poe's failure to establish any consistent pattern, Pym actively conveys to the reader through a tightly patterned aesthetic of assertion, repeatedly denied, man's frustration with the failure of meaning to emerge. Nor should the refusal of meaning to declare itself be too simply identified with earlier analyses of the story which discriminate between a manifest content without consistent meaning and a latent or transcendent content, necessarily vague and covert in meaning because of its unconscious or mystical subject matter. In this vein, Gaston Bachelard, basing his analysis of the novel on unconscious archetypes, notes the fact that the “final pages retain their secret” as all dreams characteristically do,¹⁹ and Richard Wilbur argues that the dreamlike quality of the work reflects an underlying gnostic outlook.²⁰ Such analyses still attempt to demonstrate a meaning, albeit one that is obscure and finally ineffable, not the deliberate withholding of “meaning” altogether.

The fluctuation of expectations which lies at the heart of the novel's pattern and meaning is reflected in several ways. The boundaries between tragic and comic perspective are undercut throughout by the bathetic descent into farce of potentially tragic climaxes and then the sudden emergence of horror out of such farce. The contrasting movements of Pym's journey—either Pym's positive development, his maturation or rebirth, his confrontation with essentials and his discovery of “the truth,” or conversely, a deterioration and disintegration reflected in Pym's growing detachment from civilization and his movement into a world not only of isolation but of delusion and unreality—are in fact simultaneous movements, each undercutting the other. The static effect of no real movement despite the excessive motion of these fluctuations accounts for original estimates of the work as much ado about nothing.

This simultaneous movement both toward and away from clarifying ends is reflected within the plot most clearly in the contrast between Pym's continual escape from the imminence of his own end and his self-destructive perversity (e.g., his desire to fall while climbing the walls of the chasms of Tsalal, and his insistence on continuing southward despite the captain's sensible desire to turn back). The fluctuations are related as well to what several critics have suggested is the novel's central theme: deception.²¹ Pym is both deceiver—creating disguises, false stories and ruses, and various concealments for himself—and, to a much greater degree, the deceived. Not only is he intentionally deceived by others, but he is continually deceived by the “very construction of the world itself.”²² The external world continually shifts in its relationship to Pym, seeming to offer him security and salvation one moment, imprisonment and death the next, and then apparent salvation again. For instance, the double security of the ship's hold and Pym's compartment within it, stocked with food and drink, becomes suddenly a potential coffin and that very coffin then is revealed as the means of his salvation from the mutiny and death occurring on deck. Later, on the island of Tsalal, the near-disastrous entombment of Pym and Peters becomes their salvation when it serves to separate them from the mass entombment of the rest of the crew. In the hold of the Grampus a pet dog appears successively as seeming monster, rescuer, and finally hostile antagonist, only to disappear as mysteriously as he appeared; while Peters, “the most ferocious-looking [of] men” (p. 51), proves Pym's most faithful friend and savior. Further examples of these seemingly endless fluctuations have been detailed elsewhere.²³ Here I wish only to establish the pronounced pattern of fluctuation between assertion and denial.

In these fluctuations of the fickle world the reader's experience with the text parallels Pym's. As Evelyn Hinz writes, Poe is “always occasionally defeating the expectations of the reader and Pym”²⁴—her “always occasionally” rightfully suggesting the necessity of refusing to make even of deception a predictable pattern. Much of the violation of reader expectation in a first reading of the novel is caused by the first-person narration which forces the reader to share in many of the deceptions to which Pym falls victim—a limitation of perspective which is further exacerbated by the manner in which Pym “always occasionally” omits important information which could give the reader better preparation for the changes to come. Moreover, there are places in which the reader alone feels suddenly out of step, in part because of the discrepancy between his reaction to a situation and Pym's. For instance, Pym so fully emphasizes his horror of cannibalism that the manner in which he so quickly becomes a wily partaker in that very act seems strange, but we accept it as testimony to the necessity of the act for his survival, only to find that shortly thereafter Pym is able to secure ham and wine from the hold by means which were equally available at the time of his cannibalistic feast. Yet Pym oddly makes no mention of this horrible irony. In essence, Poe seems to ask the reader to accept Pym's limited and often strange vision in a Kafkaesque manner without any apparent recognition of its idiosyncrasies. Strange reactions to a strange landscape are at times presented as if normal and we are lulled into a partial acceptance of Pym's anticipations, predictions, and actions as we would a guide in a foreign place, until such reactions are “always occasionally” revealed as ludicrously misguided.

The novel thus establishes both in its themes and its structure a pattern of expectations continually frustrated—a pattern which undermines not only the reader's sense of an ending or a particular meaning, but of the very concept of endings and meanings, for while tempting the reader to work toward establishing meaning on several levels, the novel never allows any one reality or continuity to establish itself.

Although the sharp contrast between the black world of Tsalal and the subsequent white polar world may seem to transcend this pattern by suggesting an apocalyptic landscape of absolute and final definition, it only escalates the expectation of ends and meanings without finally offering any more satisfactory resolution. The black world does not depict horrors of a truly different kind than Pym has already met in his earlier travels, and the white world to which it yields refuses to reveal either a decidedly positive or negative nature. While many critics²⁵ consider the black-and-white polarization indicative of a racist perspective on Poe's part, to take Pym's evaluation of the inhabitants of Tsalal as “among the most barbarous, subtle, and blood-thirsty wretches that ever contaminated the face of the globe” (p. 200) at face value or as the author's discrimination on racial grounds, is to miss comparison with the similar treacherous mutiny accomplished earlier by a largely white crew. One might also remember Pym's earlier incongruous indignation at the sharks, those “monsters who … devoured our poor companion” (p. 141), Augustus, following Pym's own consumption of another poor companion! In fact, the Tsalalian's taboo of the color white seems an exaggerated reversal of traditional Caucasian attitudes toward black, and suggests the relativity of the absolute values both cultures ascribe to these colors.

A hint as to the meaningfulness of this polarization of color in the polar world may lie in an apparently insignificant footnote attached to the first lines of the chapter which introduces the Tsalal section. Pym writes, “The terms morning and evening, which I have made use of to avoid confusion in my narrative, as far as possible, must not, of course, be taken in their ordinary sense. For a long time past we had had no night at all, the daylight being continual” (p. 179). Something so basic to man's sense of reality as the cycles of day and night is here revealed as relative, a mere fiction of artistic license for much of the narrative. How seriously, then, are we to take Pym's similar light-and-dark divisions of landscapes and races? Mere figments of the mind, too?

A close reading of the last paragraph of Pym's narrative reveals the manner in which the fluctuating rhythms of Poe's style continue until the end, frustrating the attribution of clear meaning either to “whiteness” or to the ending, while at the same time escalating the contrasting sense of a rush toward resolution. The first sentence continues the opposition between black and white: “The darkness had materially increased, relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain before us” (p. 243). But the white, which at first relieves the suffocating sense of darkness, in the end becomes a curtain of obscurity, too. The next sentence increases the negative sense of white (“pallid”): “Many gigantic and pallidly white birds flew continuously now from beyond the veil, and their scream was the eternal Tekeli-li! as they retreated from our vision.” The flight of the birds continues the contradictory motion; they emerge from the obscuring white mists only to immediately retreat from sight. If there is to be a “vision” in these last moments, it will be the absence of any clear vision.

The concluding sentences of the paragraph reflect the continuation of the contradictory motions of assertion and retraction in the syntax of alternating “buts” and “ands” introducing the major clauses:

Hereupon Nu-Nu stirred in the bottom of the boat; but upon touching him, we found his spirit departed. And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.

(p. 243)

In the first sentence Nu-Nu seems to revive, but dies. A final contrast is created between cataract and chasm on the one hand, threatening destruction, and the shrouded human figure, who, barring the way, seems a savior. Yet the positive connotations of “embraces” and “receive” make the value of the cataract and chasm ambiguous.²⁶ The figure which bars the way is equally ambiguous with its “shrouded” appearance bearing connotations of both ambiguity and death. Moreover, it is both “human” and inhuman (“far larger than any dweller among men”). This imminent interaction between boat and figure seems an exaggerated repetition of Pym's death leap into the equally ambiguous “dusky” arms of Peters (p. 230), who saves him from the death fall in another chasm. In the end, although the figure is contrasted to the cataract and chasm by the interceding “but,” it is hard to see a qualitative difference between them. The syntax of the final sentence also captures contradictory movements. As Daniel Hoffman writes, “This series … of ‘of’ phrases is the perfect syntactical epitome of the action, an endlessly regressive series of phrases disappearing into each other until there is nothing left to say or see but Nothing.”²⁷ Each successive prepositional phrase moves us farther from the thing (“the hue”) being described in a direction of continually retreating meaning; yet, Hoffman does not note the simultaneous opposing movement. The nouns escalate toward the final and definite perfectly white snow, each successive noun enlarging the scope of our vision. Nor should any so clear a meaning as “Nothing” be ascribed to the ending. As I have tried to show, it is far from clear what this last image bodes. Is it Nothing? Or Everything?

To appreciate the manner in which the final note not only continues this pattern of expectation and denial but broadens its levels of application, it is helpful to yoke it with its companion note at the beginning of the novel and with the “hoax” this frame perpetrates. G. R. Thompson, writing of Poe's hoaxing tendencies in general, provides a helpful discrimination which is not often made in connection with Poe:

A hoax is usually thought of as an attempt to deceive others about the truth or reality of an event. But a literary hoax attempts to persuade the reader not merely of the reality of false events but of the reality of false literary intentions of circumstances—that … one is writing a serious Gothic story when one is not. The laugh of the hoaxer is rather private, intended at best for a limited coterie … who can discriminate with more subtlety the complexities of art and life. At the extreme, the hoax can limit the circle of understanding readers to an audience of one. In such a case it can be seen as a kind of supreme irony in which the writer mocks even perceptive eirons like himself, and even, therefore, himself.²⁸

The assumption, therefore, that Poe was primarily interested in fooling the public into believing in the actuality of Pym's existence and adventures, ignores the possibility of a deeper level of hoaxing in which the reader's detection of this initial hoax is not only anticipated but encouraged as part of a self-referential satire.²⁹

This double level of hoaxing can be uncovered initially in the introductory note. Under the guise of Pym's reassuring the reader of the authenticity of his narrative, Poe ironically calls that authenticity into question by his continual emphasis on appearances and hoaxes. This emphasis can be noted merely by glancing at the introduction, for Poe has italicized the words “appearance,” “under the garb of fiction,” “ruse,” and “exposé.” Epitomizing the manner in which Poe effects his double-edged hoax, Pym writes, “I feared I should not be able to write, from mere memory, a statement so minute and connected as to have the appearance of that truth it would really possess, barring only the natural and unavoidable exaggeration to which all of us are prone when detailing events which have had powerful influence in exciting the imaginative faculties” (p. 1). Poe subtly supplies the grounds by which Pym undermines his own reassurances. The account is true despite the limitations of memory—a faculty which Pym calls into question by his qualification of it as “mere”—and it is a limitation which Poe does not wish us to forget, for he has Pym repeat the fact that the entire story is recorded from “mere memory” several times in the body of the narrative. Moreover, whatever trust the reader may still have should be fully undermined by the thrust of the second half of the sentence which reveals Pym's tendency to exaggerate imaginatively and distort events.³⁰ Further on, Pym's account of the “shrewdness and common-sense of the public” (p. 2) which sees through Mr. Poe's initial hoax of publishing “fact” as fiction, becomes an ironic testimony to the inability of that public to discriminate between the two, since “fact” is indeed fiction twice over—initially, as the introduction details, because Mr. Poe has counterfeited Pym's style in order to tell Pym's “authentic” story, and secondly and covertly, because Pym's very existence is a fiction. A final attempt to demonstrate the clear difference between the counterfeit and the real—Mr. Poe's style and Pym's—is also undermined. Pym ends his introduction: “It will be unnecessary to point out where his portion ends and my own commences; the difference in point of style will be readily perceived” (p. 3). Yet there is no clear contrast in style at the break in the midst of chapter 4 where Poe's initial two installments of the novel in the Southern Literary Messenger ended. In general, the introductory note is a marvelously apt piece of rumination for a man who has so thoroughly been taught the fickle nature of both appearance and reality as Pym.

The final note's pattern of frustrating expectation is thus prepared for both in the introduction, which initiates it in the reader toward the text, and in the body of the novel, which applies this frustration of expectations to Pym's attitude toward his world. It does this not only by continuing the stylistic rhythms of assertion and denial, but, as I have mentioned, by undercutting the various senses of ending we have been led to expect. Neither Pym's life, the account of his adventures, nor the novel containing that account truly ends with the abrupt apocalyptic ending of the main narrative. In essence, while ostensibly attempting to resolve ambiguities and interrupted endings, the concluding note subtly undermines the sense of climax of that final section while at the same time refusing to deny that climax completely. Elevated to a grander level, we are essentially left as before in the novel, in a state where apparently nothing can be decided—not even the fact that nothing can be decided.

The note, which any first reader inevitably turns to with hope of some elucidation of the mysteries, begins by reinforcing our sense of climax, for it immediately reintroduces the sense of sudden ends—“the late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym” (p. 243)—but this sense of catastrophe is undermined immediately in several ways. For one thing we realize that this sudden death is not at all clearly related to the scene in which we have been immersed moments earlier since Pym has returned from that imminent death to write his memoirs. Yet what is “the accident” that took Pym's life of which we are supposed to have heard (and of course have not)? Is it related to his adventures? Or, more likely, as every other death in the novel, is it truly an accident? The note's “attempt” to clarify provides only further mystification. While we are thus refused any sense of the catastrophic, Poe also denies us—partially, that is—grounds for belief that Pym and Peters achieved any vision of heavenly enlightenment either, if we are to judge by the mundane picture we are given of Peters who, still alive, is “a resident of Illinois”! (p. 243)—hardly the expected description of this heroic half-breed who has weathered the adventures of such an expedition.

Moreover, the “apocalyptic” encounter is not necessarily the climax of Pym's trip anyway; there is a third ending to the novel which we will never see, the “two or three final chapters” which “have been irrecoverably lost.” But the “irrecoverability” of the manuscript and our inability ever to know what subsequently happened to Pym are immediately undercut as well: “This, however, may prove not to be the case, and the papers, if ultimately found, will be given to the public” (p. 243). The editor of this final note offers us several other similar hopes for resolving the mystery and obtaining an ending. Mr. Poe is offered as a possible source of information and then withdrawn because he disbelieves “in the entire truth of the latter portions of the narrative” (p. 243)—those very portions which he did not attempt to counterfeit, and which are, therefore, the “more real” ones. Peters is then mentioned as a possible source, but after being pronounced still alive and apparently located (“a resident of Illinois”) we are first told that he cannot be met with at present and then find that it is not a matter of a delayed reception but that he has somehow disappeared! (“He may hereafter be found, and will, no doubt[!], afford material for a conclusion of Mr. Pym's account” [p. 243, my emphasis]). By this time it should be clear that Poe is pulling the reader's leg, and he is attempting not really so much a hoax as artful dodging. One further source is offered: another polar expedition by which Pym's narrative may “shortly be verified”—and again that hope is undercut, “or contradicted” (p. 243).

Yet the note does seem finally to offer meaning. Evidence supports Peter's conjecture that the labyrinthine chasms and the indentures on one of the chasm's walls are “art” even while they are nature as Pym insists—a congruence which suggests the world is a text upon which someone, a god no doubt and perhaps the white, shrouded giant, has written a message. Or so the anonymous editor would have it. While the introduction of this neutral third party as the vehicle by which the climactic meaning is deciphered would seem to enhance the credibility of this discovery, the editor is in fact a means by which the apparent meaning of the hieroglyphics is rendered questionable. He is hardly either neutral or objective. While he remains unnamed and shrouded in anonymity like the giant human figure immediately preceding him, his note has one continual thrust—a search for meaning. No matter what obstacles present themselves—the death of Pym, the destruction of the final chapters, the disbelief of Poe, the disappearance of Peters—he refuses to believe that the truth will not out. And so out it does—not through any further discovery concerning what Pym has seen—rather by the apparent discovery, imposition perhaps, of meaning by the editor himself, possibly making himself that very god in which he himself wishes to believe. Indeed, any reader familiar with Poe's general treatment of rationalists should view the editor's approach to the problem with suspicion.

Mr. Poe gives us a viable counterpoint to Pym's and the editor's search for meaning. Rather than searching for some extrinsic, meaningful correspondence for experience, Mr. Poe seems all too ready to see everything as a fiction, whether it be the first chapters he seems to believe true but wishes to re-create as a counterfeit, publishing them “under the garb of fiction” (p. 2), or the last chapters in which he fully disbelieves. Indeed, the editor suggests a veiled animosity toward him by initially referring to Mr. Poe as “the gentleman whose name is mentioned in the preface, and who … might be supposed able to fill the vacuum” (p. 243), only later calling him by name when he contrasts “Mr. Poe['s]” oversight in finding meaning and correspondence in Pym's adventures to his own insights. Poe here seems to be having fun at his own expense, but, of course ultimately at the expense of his gulled, or partially gulled, audience.

And what of the message itself which the editor's erudition reveals? As with Poe's deployment of the mind's rational faculty in many of his horror stories, the editor's logic leads to impressive answers which are finally no answers at all. Although his scholarship seems to be accurate (Sidney Kaplan has corroborated the translations),³¹ it leads only to what we already know—that the island is dark or black and to the south lies whiteness. (Is Poe having further fun with us and double meanings when he has the editor translate the hieroglyphics of the chasms themselves as “to be shady” rather than “to be dark” or “to be in shadow”?) While the editor seems to offer a message from the hand and mouth of God, replete with ancient languages from biblical lands and a final, wrathfully prophetic warning, the convolutions of his style in explicating that meaning suggest that he, like Pym, is still wandering within the chasms, only looking skyward, hopefully. The rhythms of his prose continue to fluctuate between certainty (“so conclusive,” “no reasonable reader should suppose otherwise,” “beyond doubt”), indirect assertion (“it is more than probable,” “it is not impossible that”), and uncertainty and speculation (“the reader … may, or may not, perceive the resemblance,” “The lower range is not so immediately perspicuous. The characters are somewhat broken and disjointed; nevertheless, it cannot be doubted,” “a wide field for speculation and exciting conjecture,” “perhaps,” “no visible manner of complete connection”). The puzzling last sentence before the italicized quotation hints at further mystery, too: “It is not impossible that ‘Tsalal,’ … may be found, upon minute philological scrutiny, to betray either some alliance with the chasms themselves, or some reference to the Ethiopian characters so mysteriously written in their windings” (p. 245); but Kaplan³² seems to have revealed the purport behind it—not an earthshaking ultimate meaning for which some critics still search,³³ but merely the fact that Tsalal is the Hebrew word equivalent to the Ethiopian root word “to be dark,” a further connection which leads us no further.

As for the final, italicized warning: “‘I have graven it within the hills and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock,’” it arises out of nothing; from where has the editor obtained it? Is it the final both hopeful and fearful flight of his imagination? It seems to be derived from the Bible just as the names of the Tsalalians (e.g., King Tsalemon) seem to hint of biblical origins, but it is only a parody of the Bible. Its language, seeming to carry a clear meaning, is finally not poetic but garbled and unclear. What has the speaker (whoever he is) graven in the hills? And why wreak vengeance upon the dust? Rather it should be wreaked upon the rocks to turn them into dust. But here the dust lies within the rock. If this is to be taken literally, it hints at a final paradigm for the novel itself. Like Augustus's message to Pym, trapped in the hold of the Grampus, which, offering a meaning on both sides, only adds further mystery, or like the two mirrors which the perplexed primitive Tsalalian chieftain, Too-wit, finds himself between, confusing his sense of identity, the reader may find himself thinking he holds a solid rock of either reality (a true account) or appearance (a hoax) and finds instead he holds nothing certain—the rock, hollow, hiding within it only the dust of disintegrating meaning. Nothing is certain in the world of the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, not even the certainty that nothing is.

Notes

1. Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe, A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, trans. John Rodker (London: Hogarth, 1949), pp. 290-352.

2. Daniel A. Wells, “Engraved Within the Hills: Further Perspectives on the Ending of Pym,” Poe Studies, 10 (1977), 14.

3. E.g., Joseph J. Moldenhauer, “Imagination and Perversity in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 13 (1971), 267-80.

4. Joseph M. DeFalco, “Metaphor and Meaning in Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Topic, 30 (1976), 67.

5. Richard Wilbur, Introduction, in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Boston: David R. Godine, 1973), p. xxiv.

6. J. V. Ridgely and Iola S. Haverstick in “Chartless Voyage: The Many Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym,” (Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 8 [1966] 79) note the “biblically cadenced prose” of these last lines in the body of the narrative and of the final quotation in the novel.

7. Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Garden City: Doubleday, 1972), pp. 265-70. See also G. R. Thompson, Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1973), p. 183.

8. Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902), III, 243. Subsequent references to this edition will hereafter appear in the body of the text.

9. Patrick Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1957), p. 202.

10. Moldenhauer, p. 279.

11. Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1957), p. 158.

12. Ridgely and Haverstick, p. 79.

13. Maurice Mourier, “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe,” Esprit, 42 (1974), 902-26; Wells, p. 14.

14. Jean Ricardou, “Le Caractère Singulier de Cette Eau,” Critique (1967), trans. Frank Towne, Poe Studies, 9 (1976), 1-6.

15. There are also those recent criticisms, based upon the scholarly evidence of Poe's patchwork construction of the novel, which argue in favor of early estimates of Pym as a fragmented work without a unifying theme or purpose. See L. Moffitt Cecil, “The Two Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 5 (1963), 232-41; Sidney P. Moss, “Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym: or the Failing of Thematic Interpretation,” University Review, 33 (1967), 298-306; Ridgely and Haverstick, pp. 63-80.

16. Frank Kermode, The Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967).

17. See Paul John Eakins, “Poe's Sense of an Ending,” American Literature, 45 (1973), 1-22; and Thompson, pp. 176-95 for two treatments of Pym which recognize the open-endedness of the narrative as intrinsic to its form without trying to resolve it.

18. Patrick Quinn notes this “wave-pattern” effect (p. 196); Daniel Wells speaks of the “involuted” nature of Pym in his article (p. 13); Joseph Moldenhauer mentions the “spiral of action” (p. 278) in his; and David Ketterer details how “Poe's technique depends on defeating expectations” (The Rationale of Deception in Poe [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979], p. 131).

19. Gaston Bachelard, Introduction, in Edgar Poe, Les Aventures d’ Arthur Gordon Pym, trans. Charles Baudelaire (Paris: Stock, 1944).

20. Wilbur, pp. xxiv-xxv.

21. For instance, see Quinn, pp. 169-215; Davidson, pp. 156-80; and Ketterer, pp. 125-41.

22. Davidson, p. 160.

23. For example, see Evelyn J. Hinz, “Tekeli-li: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as Satire,” Genre, 3 (1970), 370-97; Quinn, pp. 169-215; and Ketterer, pp. 125-41.

24. Hinz, p. 380.

25. For example, see Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. (New York: Dell, 1966), pp. 391-400; David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 276-77; Hoffman, pp. 265-70; and Sidney Kaplan, “An Introduction to Pym,” in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960); rpt. in Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Regan (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 155-63.

26. The positive connotations of these words are reinforced if placed in the context of Bonaparte's or Fiedler's Freudian interpretations with their heavy emphasis on the image of the mother.

27. Hoffman, p. 274.

28. G. R. Thompson, Introduction, Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 8-9.

29. In The Rationale of Deception in Poe, David Ketterer has demonstrated the intricate and pervasive manner in which Poe practiced this sort of subtle deception throughout his stories and makes a case for the “structural integrity” of Pym (p. 127) based on such deception. However, Ketterer himself at times falls into the trap of accepting appearances. He writes of the “vision of the apocalypse” with which the novel ends, explaining the abrupt ending of Pym's narrative as Poe's wish not to “spoil a climax” (p. 140).

    J. Gerald Kennedy has detailed the self-referential and literary nature of the introductory note's clear satirical bent. (“The Preface as a Key to the Satire in Pym.” Studies in the Novel, 5 [1973], 191-96.) See also G. R. Thompson's more general treatment of Poe's use of satire and double-edged irony in Poe's Fiction (pp. 176-95). Evelyn Hinz argues for the centrality of satire in the novel's design and its use of literary parody. However, her explanation of Pym solely in terms of genre (Menippean satire) misses the specific thematic ends to which Poe has employed his satire, and the wide-ranging nature of the satire she describes seems out of key with Poe's tendency for carefully defined artistic patterning. Such articles, treating Pym primarily as a satire on popular romance fiction, fail to note the manner in which such specific satirical elements contribute to the more general attack of the novel on all “conventional” perspectives which assign a meaning to reality. Moreover, the fact that the novel is not straight satire, but fluctuates between that mode and straight presentation of realistic elements is part of its general pattern of agnosticism—of not allowing any one reality or mode to establish itself while at the same time not denying any reality absolutely.

30. The manner in which Poe undermines Pym's reliability as narrator and the objectivity of his tale is similar to the manner in which he undercuts the narrator's “ghost” story in “Ligeia” by having him casually mention his frequent use of opium.

31. Kaplan, pp. 145-63.

32. Ibid.

33. E.g., Daniel A. Wells and Maurice Mourier.