SOURCE: “Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym and the Narrative Techniques of Antarctic Gothic,” in CEA Critic, Vol. 53, No. 3, Spring/Summer, 1991, pp. 30-38.

Edgar Allan Poe is best known for his depictions of extreme states of consciousness. It is easy to forget that he was a successful exploiter of contemporary cultural attitudes and popular literary conventions. Whether we think of the nineteenth-century interest in phrenology, occultism, orientalism, hoaxes, and mesmerism, or the nineteenth-century popularity of lyric poetry and Gothic fiction, Poe is always among the first to capitalize on topical issues and literary trends.

Early in his career, Poe was drawn to the sea narrative; in part, the sea seems to have represented for Poe a metaphorical expression of the individual consciousness cast adrift in a potentially hostile universe. “MS. Found in a Bottle,” Poe's first published story, won the fiction prize of the Baltimore Saturday Visiter in 1833. Poe's technique is to conflate the conventions of sea narratives with those of Gothic fiction. Poe recognized the congruity of the devices of plot underlying each genre: Both make use of the journey from innocence to experience, the isolation of the self in a threatening environment, the dramatic rendering of nature as hostile and superhuman, the voyage as a personal test resulting in self-discovery, and the location of the ego in an alien and “other” human community.

In “MS.,” Poe exaggerates and intensifies the effects of sea narrative conventions—apparent in Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast (1840)—through the use of their Gothic counterparts. The voyage is from natural innocence to unnatural experience, through not the mortal hardships of adventure but the immortal horrors of nightmare. The theme of isolation becomes the theme of imprisonment, while the journey into the physical unknown is transformed into a plumbing of the metaphysical terra incognita of the psyche. The conventional complication of a hurricane, for example, becomes a supernatural visitation that fixes itself upon the narrator's ship, envelops it in darkness, and not only isolates the narrator by drowning his ship's crew but also hurls him into the rigging of a gigantic “ghost” ship piloted by ancient men employing obsolete navigational instruments. These men, who speak an alien language and move as if in a trance, cannot see the narrator at all. He perceives that he is imprisoned upon a kind of Flying Dutchman, “doomed,” as he notes, “to hover continually upon the brink of eternity” (124). The gigantic ship (like that in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner) functions as a re-imagined Gothic castle, a notion reinforced by the form of the story itself—since the story is, in the best Gothic tradition, a “found” manuscript, all that remains of the self at the conclusion of its extreme encounter with the Unknown. The desire for exotic knowledge, or the desire for knowledge of the exotic present in sea and travel narratives, and the elements of compulsion and pursuit prevalent in Gothic fiction here are seen to be both internal, in the narrator's hunger for secret knowledge, and external, in the form of the current that imprisons the ship and hurls it on a fated course. The impulses of compulsion and pursuit are perfectly matched, internal and external motivations and states, synchronous. When the narrator unfurls a folded sail upon which he has carelessly daubed paint, the word that greets his eyes is “Discovery.” “Are such things the operations of ungoverned chance?” (123)—certainly not.

At this point, Poe charts a course for deeper waters. Not content to blend these genres, Poe hoists from the hold of the popular imagination a new set of images—polar images—that suggest both a new American preoccupation and a new direction for American fiction:

All in the immediate vicinity of the ship, is the blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foamless water; but, about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe. … [T]he ship proves to be in a current— … a tide which, howling and shrieking by the white ice, thunders on to the southward with a velocity like the headlong dashing of a cataract.

(125)

It is to “the southern pole itself,” a shimmering Ultima Thule, that the narrator speeds between the walls of a cosmic landscape. At the pole, some “exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret” offers itself—like that sought by Walton in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—some ultimate knowledge of reality. To possess it, the narrator must descend into the bowels of mystery, following, like Melville's Ishmael, the descending steps of an Antarctic Hotel de Cluny:

… the ice opens suddenly … we are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls is lost in the darkness and the distance. … [W]e are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool—and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and tempest, the ship is quivering—oh God! and—going down!

(125-26)

Poe's imaginative vision of the Antarctic antedates James Fenimore Cooper's in The Sea Lions (1849) and Melville's exploration of whiteness in Moby-Dick (1851). Poe is the first classic American writer to recognize and exploit the Antarctic's symbolic nature. He is clearly drawing upon materials, images, and attitudes current in nineteenth-century American culture—namely, the theory of John Cleves Symmes and the concept of a United States exploring expedition to the southern polar seas and to the South Pole itself. In 1818, Symmes had published a pamphlet entitled The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres, demonstrating that the earth is hollow, habitable, and widely open about the poles. At the poles are open holes; as a ship approached either pole, it would pass through a region of extreme cold and then extreme warm water, at last passing over the rim into the next concentric sphere. At the climax of “MS.,” Poe's narrator whirls “dizzily, in immense concentric circles” (124). Once inside, Symmes claimed, one would discover that the inner world was “inhabited by human beings of various castes and of various grades of civilization, none, however, being much civilized” (Silverberg 18). Although the majority of Americans considered Symmes a crank, a following developed for his theory, and he even became the subject of a pseudonymous utopian satire, Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery,¹ published in 1820 by “Captain Adam Seaborn.”

To understand how Symmes's theory could appeal to nineteenth-century Americans and influence Edgar Allan Poe, we must consider Symmes in a broad cultural context. By the early nineteenth century, science had made many strides, but it was hardly the dominant and authoritative cultural force it is today. Though the period was marked by technological, scientific, and exploratory marvels, this was also an era when science and pseudoscience often shared one bed. Phrenology, mesmerism, and religious enthusiasm were woven into the fabric of American society.

In 1825, Jeremiah N. Reynolds linked Symmes's metaphysical longings to physical necessities and capitalized on the clear realization that both could be made to serve national and personal interests. Reynolds made an ally of Edmund Fanning, a retired Connecticut sealer and author of Voyages Round the World (1833). Fanning and Reynolds tied the search for the South Pole to the need felt by American sealers, whalers, and merchantmen for accurate navigational charts and the establishment of safe harbors. They turned the visionary call for an exploring expedition into an issue of national importance that had its foundation in American economics and addressed three prime motivators of nineteenth-century American politicians—national honor, political self-promotion, and personal greed.

The United States Exploring Expedition sailed from 1838 to 1842. Lt. Charles Wilkes, with six ships, charted whaling and sealing grounds; recorded Atlantic, Pacific, and Antarctic ocean currents; collected tons of specimens; made two forays into Antarctic waters; and sailed the Antarctic coast for more than fifteen hundred miles. The importance of the idea of an Antarctic expedition in the minds of American writers needs to be stressed; Poe shared with Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and James an enthusiasm for the United States Exploring Expedition. As Reynolds proclaimed in his 1836 address to Congress, the polar expedition offered “a theatre peculiarly our own from position and the course of human events” (“South-Sea” 69). The importance of a United States expedition to the Antarctic to the American mind, to a self-conscious and visionary view of American history, and to expanded notions of manifest destiny is clear: The Antarctic is a new American frontier, an analogous and imaginative New World. Poe himself enthusiastically endorsed the expedition in the Southern Literary Messenger, claiming that “the public mind is at length thoroughly alive on the subject” (“South-Sea” 68). His endorsements of Reynolds appeared as he composed The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in 1836-37.

Poe acts as a cultural weather vane and barometer of American attitudes. For nineteenth-century Americans, the Antarctic exerted an appeal on two levels: First, it existed as a real challenge for explorers like Wilkes, one that might provide huge financial rewards for Americans if new seal grounds or other untapped resources were discovered; second, it beckoned to our best writers as an imaginative challenge. For Poe, Cooper, and Melville, in particular, the Antarctic took on the allegorical aura of the last true terra incognita, which had previously been associated with the American West.

In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, these associations become explicit.² The conventions of the sea narrative are mingled with those of Gothic fiction and are directed toward the exploration of the Antarctic. Having before him the palpable idea of the United States Exploring Expedition (though Wilkes's account would not appear until 1845), the inflamed rhetorical pleas of Reynolds, the bizarre theory of Symmes, and literary antecedents in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Poe imagines the Antarctic in the symbolic terms of the Gothic.

Pym begins with an introductory note that reproduces the ambiguities inherent in the Gothic “found” manuscript. The text purports to be based upon real experiences, yet to consist of a fictionalized version of Pym's adventures composed by Poe, with a second part composed by Pym. This self-conscious complication intensifies the ambivalence of the reader. Compelled to sail with the drunken Augustus on the Ariel, Pym finds himself imprisoned on the small craft without the knowledge to sail it. Without a sensible companion to aid him, in the midst of a natural world that threatens to engulf him, he is assaulted by a ship that crushes his craft to splinters. From the very first, we recognize that this cosmos is subject to radical transformation. Pym's fate is to be wrenched from the known into the unknown in the manner of “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Pym's response to this victimization is to lose consciousness and sensation, a response characteristic of a Gothic world not bound by time and space, not rationally defined, but one in which identity itself is ambiguous: Before stowing away on the Grampus, Pym feels that he and Augustus “exchange character” (757), a version of Gothic doubling, and Pym himself denies his own identity when confronted by his grandfather (759).

At this point, Pym has accepted the topsy-turvy world of the Gothic-sea narrative, internalized it, and therefore suffers its full horrors in the hold of the Grampus: He is multiply imprisoned, first, in the iron box; second, in the hold; third, hidden from the crew; and fourth, upon a ship at sea. Totally isolated, Pym experiences a series of astonishing reversals. Time, as represented by the watch, runs down and appears to obey no known laws. In like manner, the food he has been left suddenly putrefies. He finds himself falling into a stupor, insensible again, and plagued by Gothic dreams. He senses the imminent attack of a monster, only to have two reversals of perception—first, it is only a monster in name, his own dog Tiger; second, however, man's best friend goes berserk and actually attacks him as if he were a monster or tiger. And last, he finds a note of warning only to discover it blank at first and then ominously cryptic: “blood—your life depends on lying close” (770).

Pym's is clearly a disordered world, one in which reading the chronicles of the Lewis and Clark expedition will do no good. Pym is released by Augustus into the nightmare of mutiny, one that is conventional in sea narratives as a plot device but that in Pym takes on macabre significance as the body count mounts above twenty, a seaman is poisoned, and Pym disguises himself as the corpse of the dead Rogers (conflating the roles of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster). Caught in a gale, their ship unmasted, a “mere log” (802), they find their prayers to God answered by some weird demon who sends not rescue but a “hermaphrodite brig” piloted by a dead crew. This ship recalls the gigantic ship of “MS.” as well as that in Coleridge, but here the Flying Dutchman evokes the new terrors of diseased life-in-death and cannibalism; Pym and Augustus share a glance of “eager meaning” as a gull drops a seahand's liver at their feet. In fact, Parker, one of the four survivors, makes explicit the suggestion by demanding that they draw lots to determine who will offer himself to the remaining starved three. Poe reveals that most people have a secret nature, a hidden, awful identity, for all except Pym appear delighted with the idea of cannibalism. The human form of Parker, who ironically draws the short straw, is dramatically reduced, transformed into lumps of meat. Augustus, likewise, is quickly transformed into a mess of putrid mush by the hyperactivity of his wound. The human slides into the inhuman before our eyes.

Rescued by the Jane Guy, Pym and his new doppelganger, Dirk Peters, undergo another loss of sensation, a “partial oblivion … brought about by sudden transition” (831). Here, the narrative rushes to climax. They attempt to but cannot fix the location of reported islands. Nature seems deceiving; reality, illusory. Nonetheless, the captain and crew decide to “push on toward the pole” (840), taking the “opportunity of solving the great problem in regard to the Antarctic continent” (847). In Pym, the journey southward is chosen.

At last, we have arrived at the edge of Poe's Antarctic vision and the reason for the incredible accumulation of Gothic paraphernalia. What Poe has been about is the reversal of contemporary expectations: The Antarctic is not desolation, worthless and lifeless. The Gothic mode is perhaps best suited to accomplish this purpose. What is living may be dead, what appears dead may possess a bizarre form of life, and the laws of our normal universe do not hold. The burden of Pym is to prepare the reader to accept the impossible, to acknowledge the possibility of “some exciting knowledge” that is literally beyond comprehension. With Pym, we move beyond the known world, from polar bears and albatross to alien white creatures with red claws. The natives of Tsalal appear utterly foreign, black with black teeth, speaking an alien language, and eagerly devouring “the palpitating entrails of a species of unknown animal” (855). Even the water is characterized by its strange “limpidity” and its rainbow-purple hues: “We were in a country differing essentially from any hitherto visited by civilized men. We saw nothing with which we had been formerly conversant” (851).

In this reversed world, Pym again suffers Gothic isolation and witnesses the destruction of the Jane Guy and her crew by the deceiving natives. Pym and Peters escape in a canoe and head for the South Pole. They pass, as Symmes had predicted, into warmer waters. No theory predicted, however, that the sea would take on a white, luminous radiance; that clouds of white vapor would rise all about them; that a white powdery substance would fall from the sky; and that as they penetrated the white curtain a huge, white, shrouded human figure would rise before them. It appears to be the unknown itself that towers above Pym.

Poe visualizes the Antarctic unknown in the reversal of conventional Gothic black. His landscape offers knowledge of elemental being, an inverted, or rather, extended and intensified Gothic universe. It appears a mythic locus of meaning, one that makes human beings utterly insignificant. It is in its howling coldness that it appears alien and threatening; it is icy white in color, bleached or drained of natural variation; and it seems to hold out the promise of “some exciting knowledge” that is at once personal, social, national, human, or cosmic in scope. Despite the concluding notes of explanation, it remains a region from which there can be no verifiable report, a purely imaginative realm of symbol, supposition, and superstition. It is to Poe that we must credit the discovery of the symbolic meaning of the perfect whiteness of Antarctica to nineteenth-century Americans.

Writing more than ten years after Poe, James Fenimore Cooper in The Sea Lions (1849) propels his characters toward the South Pole in pursuit of mythical seal-grounds and wealth. W. B. Gates has accurately recorded Cooper's dependence on Charles Wilkes's Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition published in 1845, but Cooper owes a debt to Poe as well. What appealed to Cooper, as he states in his preface, was the uniqueness of the setting: “In this book the design has been to portray man on a novel field of action.” But Cooper also had a second purpose beyond the uniqueness of the Antarctic: “to exhibit his dependence on the hand that does not suffer a sparrow to fall unheeded” (8). This spiritual level clearly differs from Poe's, yet Cooper's theme is strikingly similar:

There is a point attained in each and all of our acquisitions, where a mystery that no human mind can scan takes the place of demonstration and conjecture.

(6-7)

The voyage to the Antarctic is for Cooper a journey into the metaphysical uncertainties of the Absolute Unknown, just as it is for Poe a diving into the cosmic labyrinth. The twin Sea Lions are a manifestation of Gothic doubling, and the quest for virgin seal-grounds is the search for a Symzonian Earthly Paradise. In the Antarctic—as in the Gothic—each person confronts oneself and comes face to face with the unresolvable ambiguities of reality, emblemized in Pym by the Tsalal hieroglyphics. The experience for Cooper inspires either awe or annihilation—Captain Gardiner learns a true spirituality while Daggett is destroyed before the gigantic whiteness of the inhuman landscape.

Herman Melville reviewed The Sea Lions for the New York Literary World in 1849: “Few descriptions of the lonely and terrible, I imagine, can surpass the grandeur of many of the scenes here depicted” (370). Like Poe, Cooper, and Wilkes, Melville is attracted to the symbolic significance of Antarctic nature and the extreme isolation of the protagonists—which surface in Moby-Dick as the compulsion of Ahab in his pursuit of the snowy-white hump of Moby Dick:

“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks … If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near.”

(167)

In Moby-Dick, Melville drew upon the tradition of Antarctic Gothic codified by Poe, Cooper, and Wilkes, apparent in the blood-tempering of harpoons, the hieroglyphic or blank-faced whales, the character of Fedallah, and Ahab's near-supernatural manipulation of natural phenomena. Unlike Pym, who can pursue ultimate knowledge in an almost passive manner, and unlike Cooper's Gardiner, who must realign his spiritual self to accept the limits of knowledge, Melville's Ahab actively desires to strike through this white mask to pierce the mysteries of reality. That the mask is white he owes to Poe, Wilkes, and Cooper; they, along with Reynolds, focused his imagination on the Antarctic and its inhuman whiteness, a symbol of the limits to individual perception.

In the 1963 novel V., Thomas Pynchon's Godolphin explores an Antarctic that in many ways combines these nineteenth-century visions. Lost, alone, and pursued by the agents of the mystical Vheissu (another version of a Symzonian Paradise)—which haunts his dreams and which he feels compelled to seek—Godolphin at last confronts the absolute limits of human knowledge in the Antarctic. Digging below its surface, he strikes clear ice, illuminated by a strange light, and sees a rainbow-hued spidermonkey—the color of Tsalal's water in Pym—staring up at him. What he deduces seems extrapolated directly from Poe: “The skin which had wrinkled through my nightmares was all there had ever been. Vheissu itself, a gaudy dream. Of what the Antarctic in this world is closest to: a dream of annihilation” (206). This dream is itself Gothic in inspiration, as is the figure of the human /inhuman “V”—which embodies self-canceling opposites—and the labyrinth of time and space that forms the novel's narrative structure.

Pynchon's vision illuminates Poe's. As Godolphin concludes, “If it were only a hallucination, it was not what I saw or believed I saw that in the end is important. It is what I thought. What truth I came to” (206). What Pynchon reminds us is that the Antarctic exerted a strong attraction for nineteenth-century American writers, and that to apprehend the Antarctic, they, like Poe, used modified Gothic devices to realize the unrealizable. In the end, it is the truth they came to that is important: that the Antarctic functioned as a stimulus to new perceptions, affirming that the exploration of our physical and psychological limits should be actively continued. The Antarctic Gothic allowed—and still allows—our best writers “to hover continually upon the brink of eternity.” The Antarctic, like the Gothic mode itself, is a doorway to the deepest regions of our primitive imagination, a technique and a destination that heighten metaphysical uncertainties and make them immediately available. The Antarctic brings together the eternal mysteries of the human condition, the Absolute Abstractions, in a concrete, assailable form. For an instant, in fiction, the Antarctic takes on the rainbow-white hues of the imagination itself. And this discovery should rightly be attributed to Poe.

Notes

1. On Symmes and the authorship and intention of Symzonia, see J. O. Bailey's Introduction to Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery (1820); Hans-Joachim Lang and Benjamin Lease, 241-52; William Stanton, 8-40; and William H. Goetzmann, 258, 260, 437.

2. Pym scholarship has become a veritable industry. A brief sample of Pym criticism would begin with the special issue of ATQ [American Transcendental Quarterly], “Journey into the Center—Studies in Poe's Pym,” 37 (Winter 1978); Burton Pollin, passim; John Carlos Rowe, 91-110; and John T. Irwin, 1-14.

Works Cited

Bailey, J. O. Introduction. Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery (1820). By Captain Adam Seaborn. Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1965.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Sea Lions. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965.

Gates, W. B. “Cooper's The Sea Lions and Wilkes' Narrative.” PMLA 65 (1950): 1069-75.

Goetzmann, William H. New Lands, New Men: America and the Second Great Age of Discovery. New York: Viking, 1987.

Irwin, John T. “The Quincunial Network in Poe's Pym.” Arlington Quarterly 44. 3 (1988): 1-14.

Lang, Hans-Joachim, and Benjamin Lease. “The Authorship of Symzonia: The Case for Nathaniel Ames.” New England Quarterly 48 (1975): 241-52.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: New American Library, 1980.

———. Review of Cooper's The Sea Lions. New York Literary World 28 Apr. 1849: 370.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Vintage, 1975.

Pollin, Burton. Edgar Allan Poe: The Imaginary Voyages. Boston: Twayne, 1981.

Pynchon, Thomas. V. New York: Modern Library, 1963.

Rowe, John Carlos. Through the Custom-House: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Modern Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.

Silverberg, Robert S. Stormy Voyager: The Story of Charles Wilkes. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1968.

“South-Sea Expedition.” Southern Literary Messenger 3.1 (January 1837): 68-72.

Stanton, William. The Great United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842. Berkeley: U of California P, 1975.