Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym
the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym ( The Narration off Arthur Gordon Pym off Nantucket ) is the title of the single novel completed by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1838 with the the United States and in England. Charles Baudelaire gives of it a first French translation in 1858.
Presented by its editors like the account of an authentic voyage of discovered to the unexplored borders of the Antarctic Ocean, the work was éreinté by Anglo-American criticism at the time of its publication and almost disavowed later by its author. Baudelaire itself will initially express reservations vis-a-vis this exuberant novel of adventures, not stripped of improbabilities and of constructional defects, which thereafter will impress deeply readers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Jules Verne, Howard Philips Lovecraft or Gaston Bachelard.
The enigmatic odyssey of Arthur G. Pym, the mystery which planes around its disappearance with broad of the south pole, as well as the nature of the “buckled silhouette” which closes the account in addition gave place to the most various interpretations and most contradictory.
Titrate and subtitles novel
D' Arthur Gordon Pym
De Nantucket
containing the details of a révolte
and of a dreadful massacre
aboard American brig the Grampus ,
doing lot of mileage towards the South Seas,
in June 1827;
more, history of the resumption of the navire
by the survivors:
their horrible shipwreck and their souffrances
in consequence of the famine;
their delivery by the English goélette the Jane Guy ;
short exploration of this navire
in the Antarctic Ocean;
catch of the goélette and massacres équipage
in a group of islands
au four-twenty-fourth parallèle
of latitude sud
jointly, incredible the aventures
and découvertes
dans the extreme sud
whose this deplorable disaster was the origine.
Summary
In the foreword with the account of its adventures, Arthur Gordon Pym reports that, returned recently in the United States after having lived a series of more extraordinary adventures the ones than the others, it met a gentleman of Richmond, Edgar A. Poe, which committed it to reveal with the public the strange events with which it was associated. Putting side its reserves initial, Pym explains why it decided to take an action pursuant favorable to this proposal.
On board Ariel
Arthur Gordon Pym was born on the island of Nantucket, famous for its fishing port to the whale. His/her best friend, Auguste Barnard, is besides the son of a captain of Baleinier S. It is with the latter that one night the young man organizes one equipped which misses turning to the drama: two young people, passably alcoholized, decide at the instigation of Auguste to benefit from the breeze which rises to take the sea on the Canot of Pym, Ariel . But the breeze proves to actually be a beginning of storm: embanked by intoxication, Auguste collapses in the boat, kind Pym, whose competences as regards navigation are more summary, to seize bar. Besides he has hardly time to operate before their boat is not run by inadvertency by a whaler who returns in Nantucket and which did not see them. Collected by the crew of the whaler, two young people are brought back to ground, where they take care well not to tell this escapade with their parents.
On board the Grampus
This history did not disgust Pym of the maritime adventures, quite to the contrary: the imagination overheated by this memory, and the anecdotes on the life of sailor whom Auguste tells him, Pym is let convince to follow this last on board the Grampus , a whaler whose his father has just been appointed captain and who is on the point of leaving to go in the South Seas to drive out the whales. The family of Pym refusing to let Arthur join forwarding, it decides, in.liaison.with Auguste, to embark clandestinely on board the Grampus , which must put at the veil at June 1827.
Thus Pym, disguised as a sailor, goes on the ship, after a meeting with his/her grandfather gave him some cold sweats (it in extremis succeeds in persuading the old man - that it insults in the passing - which it confused his grandson with another), where his/her friend arranged to him a hiding-place in the hold of back: it is agreed that Pym will remain hidden there a few days while waiting for that the whaler gained the open sea, and will show itself only when it is too late to make half-turn.
But the days pass. Pym, which is gained by a species of comatose numbness, which had seems it with the vitiated atmosphere of the hold, does not realize from there that when its provisions come to a end. It tries, in vain, to regain the bridge of the ship, and it is ready to succumb to despair when arrives at its Tigre help, its faithful dog, that Auguste had embarked on the ship without him to make share of it. But the faithful companion of Pym is carrying a bad news: a letter fixed on the back of the animal, and written with blood, warns the young man: remain hidden , it is written there, your life depends on it.
Some time later, Auguste, who joined finally his companion, explains to him the direction of this message sybillin that it forwarded to him, as well as the reason of his delay to come to deliver his comrade: a mutiny burst on the whaler. Part of the crew was massacred by the mutineers, while an other (among which it is necessary to count the father of Auguste), was embarked on one of the lifeboats of the whaler, and was given up with his fate. Auguste must have the safe life with the one of the mutineers, Dirk Peters, which was caught of friendship for him, and which starts to regret having taken share with this mutiny.
It is in company of the latter that Pym and Auguste erect scaffolding a recovery plan of the ship: with the favor of a storm, Pym, whose mutineers do not know the existence, will cover clothing of a sailor which has just died and will be made pass for a phantom. Benefitting from the distress which will not fail to be followed some, Peters and Auguste, helped of Tiger, are extremely made reduce to mercy the rebellious sailors. The plan proceeds as envisaged, and soon the three men are Masters of the ship: the mutineers were killed, or thrown over edge, except for one only, Richard Parker, leave in life in order to lend strong hand to them.
Indeed, the ship threatens to sink.
Shipwreck and drift
The last survivors of the Grampus manage to avoid the worst by cutting down the masts with blows of axe, which avoids with the ship capsizing. But the cargo, badly fastened in the holds, is detached: the ship gives band then in a worrying way, plunging half of the bridge under water and flooding the cabins.The days pass, and the four men, after having in vain tried to recover provisions in the cabins, are ready to give up themselves with despair, when a sail appears at the horizon. The delivery, finally? Mow! The ship, a brig Dutch, has nothing any more as a crew but corpses in the process of putrefaction and drift on the ocean randomly of the winds.
Hunger becoming increasingly pressing, Parker with the idea, disaster, to draw with the short straw in order to indicate that of the four shipwrecked men who will be sacrificed to nourish the three others: Pym, initially scandalized by this proposal, is constrained to be subjected to it. Irony of fate, it is Parker which draws the shortest match…
Auguste succumbs in his turn, patient, wounded and exhausted by the deprivations: its corpse, which starts to break up just after its demise is thrown to the sharks which for some time accompany the ship, which leans more and more on the side. Soon, it capsizes completely, kind Pym and Peters to be taken refuge on the hull. The situation of the two men seems once more without hope, when they see a ship which moves towards them.
On board the Jane Guy
The two shipwrecked men are collected on the Goélette Jane Guy , started from Liverpool to drive out the marine Veau and to devote themselves to various commercial transactions in the South Seas. Pym then realizes of the long drift which was theirs since the Grampus was delivered to the whims marine currents: they deviated of twenty-five degrees of north in the south.Pym brings back then various information on the islands located at broad of the Cape of Good Hope: its attention is particularly drawn by the singular social organization of the Pingouin S, and in particular by the rigorous geometry with which they lay out their nests, as by the way in which they divide their territory with the albatross. Fascinated by this voyage of exploration, Pym convinces the captain of the Jane Guy to be more pushed towards the south, towards these antarctic regions which are still terrae incognitae. After all, time is lenient, it is possible to push more before did not do it the forwarding of James Cook. Who knows? Perhaps will they manage to bore the secrecy of the nature of the terrestrial Pôle?
The voyage of exploration quickly seems to have to be abandoned: one sees in direction of the pole only a enormous Banquise and apparently without limits. But the explorers find a passage, and, having circumvented it, have the surprise to see to open in front of their eyes a completely free sea of ice. The temperature of water increases gradually. Among the animals which they meet on their road, they have the surprise to discover a specimen of an unknown species of the Naturaliste S: an animal with teeth and red claws, tail of rat and nigger head with ears of dog, whose body is entirely covered with white hairs.
But soon, another event monopolizes all their attention: the watchtower announced the presence of an island, from which it proves that she is inhabited.
On the island of Tsalal
It is on board four pinnaces that a hundred autochtones to the black skin approach the ship. Invited to visit it, they are astonished by what they discover there: the mirrors, in particular, cause the terror of their chief. The objects of white color also seem to cause them the sharpest loathing.Pym belongs to the group of travellers invited in return to visit Tsalal , the island of the autochtones, with the invitation of their chief, who answers in the name of Too-Wit . With the first rank of curiosities which he discovers on this island, strange properties of water: in the brooks runs a water crimson, which has a consistency close to that of gum arabic, made up of distinct veins which one can temporarily disjoin the one of the others using a knife.
The village where the travellers are led, who bears the name of Klock-Klock , reveals a state of civilization of most rudimentary: the majority of the men and the women go naked, they have others weapons only lances and bludgeons, live in summary huts, and nourish raw meat. They seem nevertheless hospital, and Too-Wit even proposes to indicate to them where they will be able to find in abundance of the hind of sea.
But this proposal hid a trap: letting itself lead without mistrust in a throat escarpée between two hills, the men of the Jane Guy are crushed and buried by an avalanche of rocks artificially caused by the savages. Pym, that its curiosity pushed to deviate from the group with Peters to go to examine a crack in the rock of the hill, is saved by the crumbling with his/her companion.
The two men then realize that they engaged in a complicated network of underground corridors. They manage to rise to a natural platform, at the edge of a ravine, from where they are pilot massacre of the remained sailors on board the Jane Guy by the savages of Tsalal , of which several hundreds perish in the explosion of the ship that they have by caused inadvertency. The others, terrorized, flee by howling with full lungs the cry of Tekeli-Li .
Pym and Peters, after explored meanders of this underground grid to geometry complicated (meanders that Pym reproduces in its account by means of diagrams), manage to join the beach where, continued by the savages which located them, they succeed in stealing a boat, carrying like hostage one their prosecutors.
Final drift
To return on their traces is interdict with the two men: the winter advances, and to return towards north would mean to run up against an ice barrier insuperable than that which they had to circumvent to go it. It do not have any more but to be let carry by the current which involves them towards the south. Water, as they advance, becomes increasingly hot and starts to take a milky color. The health of their Naked-Naked prisoner, , seems to be degraded as they progress towards the hot and white areas which mark the accesses of the pole. With the questions which are asked to him as for the reasons for which its people showed themselves also cruel to the visitors come from north, it is satisfied for any answer to indicate for submission to Pym and of Peters its teeth: they are black.
Pym and Peters become increasingly apathetic, without precise reason. Their boat takes speed. The temperature of water is done extreme. A brittle substance that they do not manage to identify pours continuously on them. In the south, a vapor barrier veils the horizon. It emerges from there from gigantic white birds which push the cry already heard in the mouth of the savages of Tsalal : Tekeli-Li . Naked-naked continues to weaken and ends up dying.
The sky is dark, but a luminosity blanchâtre deaf depths of the ocean. The vapor barrier seems to be a gigantic cataract, towards which the boat precipitates. At the time when it penetrates there, the vapor curtain tears and a gigantic buckled silhouette, whose skin is as white as snow, is drawn up in front of them…
Mysterious conjectures
Thus finishes the relation made by Arthur Gordon Pym of its tour. The editor explains in a postface that the death of Pym, occurred in well-known circumstances of the public, prevented it from delivering the final chapters of its history. Perhaps Peters, income in the United States at the same time as Pym, will be able it to give its conclusion to this account, but it is at present untraceable.At all events, this editor wishes to draw the attention of the readers to some facts which seem to have escaped with the sagacity of Edgar A. Poe, which is the first to have taken knowledge of the account of Arthur Gordon Pym: the sketches carried out by Pym to describe the interlacing of the underground grid of the island of Tsalal resemble alphabetical and hieroglyphic characters curiously, for certain Arabic, other Egyptians, the Ethiopian last. They evoke words which have relationship with blackness or whiteness. As for the cry of Tekeli-Li , the analysis of its various occurrences in the testimony of Pym seems to indicate a mysterious bond with the white color.
Following this note of the editor, an unknown hand wrote these words, on which the novel is closed: I engraved that in the rock, and my revenge is written in dust on the rock.
Circumstances of publication
Situation of the American edition in the years 1830
At the time where Edgar Poe writes its work, the American edition is in a quite particular situation: between 1825 and 1850 indeed, the United States live a true golden age of the periodicals, which pass from less than one hundred to more than six hundred titles. From where the parallel development of the shorts stories , which are published in these magazines. The situation of the novelists is on the other hand much less enviable.The American public is however fond of delicacies novels, but the editors prefer to publish works with success of the English authors, such as those of Walter Scott, for example, and that for quite precise financial reasons: there does not exist international agreement between England and the United States on the Copyright. Also the pirate editions multiply, and the editors do not have to spend one hundred to publish an English work with success, whereas they should pay the manuscript of the American authors. The New Yorkean editor Harper will be able to thus affirm in 1843: “the publication of the American books is the negligible part of our business. ”
Sometimes the difficulties which meet the American writers to make publish their works in volumes push them to agree to advance as guaranteed money sums not always negligible: thus Nathaniel Hawthorne is constrained, in 1837, to pay the sum of 250 dollars to make publish its Contes twice told . Another solution was for the American authors to be made publish initially in England.
Edgar Poe has also these problems, him which fails to make publish the first volume of tales in 1836, at Harper, which justifies its refusal in these terms: We have three reasons to decline the edition of your work. First is that most of these texts already appeared in periodicals. The second, which they are tales and independent pieces; our long experience taught us that there are two serious obstacles with the success of a book. The readers of this country have a marked preference for the works (especially if they are works of imagination) in which a single and coherent intrigue occupies all volume or volumes if it is necessary; and we always noted that the reproduction of texts of magazines, known as such, is the least profitable of the literary products. The third objection is also important. texts would not be included/understood and tasted only by one small circle and not by the mass of the readers It is extremely important for an author who its first volume is popular
Situation of Edgar Allan Poe in 1837
Edgar Poe at that time is not however any more one unknown: it is since 1835 the editor association of the Southern Literary Messenger of Richmond. This review had as an ambition to become, according to the word of its owner, Thomas White, “the emanation of the Southerner spirit” and to be during and the adversary of the New Yorkean reviews which held the top of the intellectual paving stone. Thanks to Poe, the review is indeed quickly known beyond the borders of the South, in particular by criticisms without kindness, often wild, which are made there works published by the intelligentsia of New York.
Poe scrambles with the owner of the Messenger in January 1837, undoubtedly because it did not have to operate all the latitude which it would have wished, or because it estimated that its collaboration was not remunerated by its right value. It leaves Richmond for New York then, where it hopes to be able to place its writings.
But, in this same year 1837, the economic crisis bursts: many periodicals cease appearing. Who more is, Poe was made enemies with his articles of the Messenger . Only an obscure theological review, the New York Review , accepts its services, but it ceases appearing before even as Poe has time to collaborate in it.
The attempt to be established in New York is thus balanced by a failure: at the summer 1838, Poe leaves the city with its family to go to Philadelphia. It nevertheless succeeded in placing the manuscript of the Aventures of Arthur Gordon Pym at Harper.
A novel for the general public
It should be said that Poe made profitable the councils given by Harper in his letter of 1836: the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym constitutes an attempt at answer to the three justifications of the editor to justify his refusal to publish the tales of the écrivain.Thus, the objection according to which the preliminary publication in magazine would be harmful with the success of the work, Poe answers by an essentially new text: two parts only of the Aventures of Arthur Gordon Pym (which correspond to the chapters I to IV of the novel) appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger (in the deliveries of January and February 1837), which can constitute besides a kind of setting in mouth for the future reader of volume, intrigued by the first steps of a history it does not know which ways it will borrow.
Concerning the second objection, namely the fact that the manuscript of Poe did not present “a single and coherent intrigue occupies all volume or volumes if it is necessary”, the writer answers by an account dealt with by single narrator who tells only one history (if one excludes the first chapter): a maritime tour rich in bounces.
As for the third requirement (to choose a popular subject), Edgar Poe was subjected there by choosing a kind of accounts, the Roman of adventures, which is likely to like the general public (the novels of Fenimore Cooper meet a big hit then), and a set of themes, the voyage of exploration towards the south pole, which interests a big part of the public opinion.
In 1836 indeed, the navigator Jeremiah Reynolds had proposed with the American Congrès to organize a forwarding towards the south pole (in France, the navigator Dumont d' Urville also prepared its voyage), with for notable objective checking the veracity then or not theory in vogue: the theory of the Ground digs, such as it had been exposed in 1826 by the captain John Cleves Symmes. According to this last, the ground at its ends would be pierced with two holes corresponding to the poles. The barriers of ice which one meets with the accesses them poles were to grow blurred then to disappear as one approached these holes, heated by interior fire from the sphere.
Thus in June 1837, the Harper firm agrees to publish the manuscript that Poe forwarded to him. The novel however appears only one year later, in August 1838 in the United States, then a few months later in England, in the editors Wiley and Putnam. The name of Edgar Poe does not appear on the cover of the work, and it is not mentioned nowhere that he is the author.
Mystification
Indeed, in.liaison.with its editor, Poe undertook to make pass its novel for an authentic relation of voyage, and Arthur G. Pym for an individual having really existed, who precisely returns from the regions that proposes to explore forwarding that J. Reynolds is setting up.The difficulty, for the author and his American editor, consisted in convincing a public which had been able to read the first chapters of this history in the Messenger , where they had appeared under the signature of Poe, that those actually had been dictated by Pym itself: it with that Edgar Poe gets busy in the foreword of the novel, is written seems it at the last time (it is gone back to June 1838). The narrator of this foreword (Arthur G.Pym) there declares that it is because it estimated that nobody could believe in the veracity of his history that the editor association of the Messenger (namely Edgar Poe) had persuaded it to let it bring back his account, by publishing it under his name and by making it pass for a work of imagination. But, explains Pym, of many readers would then have written with the Messenger by explaining that they were not laid out to believe that this history was only one fiction. Convinced and reassured by these reactions, Pym would then have decided to bring back in its entirety the account of its adventures.
As astonishing as that can appear with the reading of the novel, this trickery has seems it functioned some time: several English and American critics gave an account of the novel as if it had been about an authentic relation of voyage. It should be said that, concerning England, the editors of the book of Poe had removed the last paragraph of the novel, considered to be definitely too incredible (it is about that which tells the final meeting with the white silhouette), and that they added a note of their vintage at the end of the foreword, warning the readers of the incompletion of the account due to died of M.Pym on which they could not “have particular information. ”
Mystification however does not manage to make the success of the work.
The public and critical reception
The trickery of Poe and its editors nevertheless would have made it possible the Aventures of Arthur Gordon Pym to obtain a success of curiosity in Great Britain. But the reception, in the United States, is icy: the majority of criticisms denounce the improbabilities of the account, like its kindness in the horror, and it is sometimes compared, with its disadvantage, Robinson Crusoé or the Gulliver's Travels. The judgment of the critic Alfred Russel Wallace summarizes rather well the impressions of American literary criticism opposite the work: The part on the Antarctic wastes completely this book, the thing being completely impossible, with its vegetation, its climate soft, its fruits, its fauna so close to the south pole. These are the nonsenses which disgusted me EC history.The disinterest of American criticism for this novel will be persistent: regarded as a work of order, abortive, not very representative of the art of Poe, it will hardly be republished, including until in first half of the 20th century. One hardly finds it whereas in the editions of complete works of Edgar A. Poe.
As for Edgar Poe itself, it hardly referred to this novel thereafter. At most it in a letter evokes it where it describes it as “very stupid book. ” Disgusted seems romantic form, it gives up another novel in preparation then ( the Newspaper of Julius Rodman ), to concentrate, in the narrative field, on the short forms.
French translation of Charles Baudelaire
the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym is the third volume of the translations of works of Edgar Poe which Charles Baudelaire undertakes. This translation is outlined in 1852, but the project of an integral translation is mentioned in the correspondence of Baudelaire only in May 1856. This one appears in the Universal Monitor as from February 1857, before being published in volume the following year by the editor Michel Levy.
The translation is as a whole relatively faithful to the original. One will note however the addition of titles in the chapters, whereas editions English and American do not comprise any, and the fact that translated Baudelaire, in the last sentence of the account of Pym, “ the hoots the skin off off the figure ”, by: “the color of the skin of the man ”. This translation-interpretation will be disputed thereafter, especially after the publication of the psychoanalytical study of Marie Bonaparte on Edgar Poe, in which the enigmatic silhouette which is drawn up in front of Pym is comparable with the figure of the mother.
It would seem that between 1852 and 1858, Baudelaire somewhat modified its judgment on this work: initially, he did not appreciate obviously that moderately this book that he had described as “purely human novel” in his note of introduction to the Extraordinary Histoires (“Edgar Poe, its life and its works”). On the other hand, the tone is extremely different in 1858, when he writes with Holy-Beuve to ask him to make “an excursion in the depths of Edgar Poe” by reading Arthur Gordon Pym . The previous year, he had written to the Minister of state to recommend this “admirable novel to him”.
The divergent opinion as for this evolution of the appreciation of the novel. According to the specialist in Baudelaire Jacques Crépet, the praises of 1857-1858 are not to take literally: Baudelaire, whose independent source of incomes came from its translations, sought before very drawing the attention to that which it had just finished and of which it hoped that it would meet same success as the extraordinary Histoires and the Nouvelles extraordinary stories . The American specialist in Poe Patrick Quinn estimates on the other hand that it is the judgment of 1852 which must be taken with precautions. According to him, on this date, it is very vraisembable that Baudelaire had not read the novel yet and that it based its judgment on an American article published in 1850 and from which he had drawn a big part of the contents of his article. The critic American adds that if Jacques Crépet refuses to admit that Baudelaire held this novel for “admirable”, it is because itself does not appreciate this book, and that he would refuse to admit that the judgment of Baudelaire could be different from his.
At all events, the third volume of works of Edgar A. Poe translated by Baudelaire was not to meet same immediate success as the two precedents.
Elements of analysis
Sources
To write what he wanted to present like the account of an authentic exploration, Poe used a certain number of accounts of voyages among all those which pullulated at the time. One will quote in particular the proposal for an exploration of the south pole presented on April 3rd 1836 by Jeremiah Reynolds, An Address one the Subject off has Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas , republished the following year with a critical introduction of Poe, which will be used for the writer to write the passages relating to the exploration of the South Seas by Arthur Pym; the newspaper of voyage of the captain James Cook ( has Voyage to the Pacific , London, 1784), or off has Narrative Furnace Voyages published at Harper by Benjamin Morrell, whose Poe recopied several passages, in particular those which relate to descriptions of manners of the penguins and those relating to the fishing of the hind of sea, works which perhaps also gave him the idea of the title-summary that it gave to his novel.Another important source of Arthur Gordon Pym is consisted two works in which the theories of John C. Symmes are exposed on the hollow ground: a novel of adventures entitled Symzonia and published in 1820 by certain Adam Seaborne, pseudonym behind which probably Symmes itself hides, and off works it of a “citizen of the United States” entitled Symmes Theory the Concentric Spheres , published in 1826. These works had already been used for Poe when he wrote, in 1831, the Manuscript found in a bottle where, already, it was a question of an odyssey towards the great south and of a giant cataract, heralding the pit which is in the place of the pole.
Edgar Poe also took as a starting point a novel of adventures, which also claimed to be the account of an authentic voyage, and which for this reason had met one big hit: Sir Edward Seaward' S Narrative off His Shipwreck , published by Jane To carry to London in 1831. It re-uses a certain number of the adventures of this work (the clandestine loading, enfermement in the cabin, the role of the dog, etc) One will quote finally probable reminiscences, in Arthur Gordon Pym , of The Rhyme off the Ancient Mariner , the long poem of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Errors and inconsistencies in the account
“All the work of Poe, writing Patrick Quinn, is wasted by inadvertencies so obvious that even the reader less informed will perceive them. ” the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym does not derogate from this rule, far from there, and it is noted that several inconsistencies enamel the account.Thus, when Auguste comes to release Pym in the hold of the Grampus , it is very close turning back before to have found his friend, that it believes dead. But, explains Pym, Several years were passed however before I was informed of the fact. A natural shame and a remorse of its weakness and its indecision prevented Auguste from immediately acknowledging me what a major intimacy and without reserve enabled him later to reveal me. However, thus to have shortly after let clearly hear that his/her friend would survive still at least “several years” this adventure, Pym brings back the death of Auguste, which finally will have succumbed to this odyssey, about one month after having released his/her companion.
In the same way, the destiny of Tiger, the dog of Pym, is left outstanding: this animal, whose Pym explained why it carried to him “an affection of much burning than the common affection” disappears from the account, without explanations, after having helped Pym and its companions to be seized the Grampus , as if the author had forgotten this actor on the way that it had introduced into his novel.
One also notices an inconsistency in the dating of the episodes of the account, moreover raised by Baudelaire.
Overall, the structure of the novel misses unit: the first two parts (the mini-odyssey on board the Ariel and the tour of the Grampus ) have a tonality very different from the last part, so much so that several exégètes supposed that they were three tales distinct arbitrarily connected by the presence from the same narrator. Who more is, inside these parts, descriptions on the manner of fastening a cargo well, on the lexicon of sea transport, or on the history of navigation towards the pole, feel the filling, or in any case are integrated in a surface way into the account.
The conclusion leaves as for it the impression that Poe had not really planned the course of its account. Patrick Quinn notes on this subject: Thus, after having attracted the reader to the edge of a great mystery by a whole series of black promises, Poe realizes that it has neither mystery nor secrecy to reveal - or at least, anything which agrees with the indices which carried out to it. thus it finishes the history abruptly and to make pass the thing, it adds a note in conclusion, in which the interruption of the account is allotted to the untimely death of Pym.
Lastly, the fundamental inconsistency of the novel lies in the fact of having chosen to make tell with the first anybody, by a supposed narrator in being returned, a tour which could only be without return.
A structure of repetition
It is known that Poe, taking again the distinction which Coleridge between fancy and imagination had established, estimated that a true work of art cannot be satisfied simple fitting of the adventures (which raises of the fancy ), but that this one must be put at the service of “the ideal” (the feeling of the presence, behind the letter of the account of something of inexpressible), task which concerns as for it the imagination , and whose result on the formal level must be a coherent intrigue. Indeed, observes Poe, “the greatest complexity of the adventures will not have an intrigue for result, intrigue whose suitable definition is a thing of which one cannot move the least part without destroying the whole . ” It is perhaps because of this esthetic design that the fitting of the adventures of the Aventures of Arthur Gordon Pym seems incompletely controlled, but that to these defects a structure is opposed which appears contrary to be rigorously worked.One of the characteristics of the novel of Poe resides indeed in the fact that its apparent absence of linear unit hiding place another unit, less visible: to each element of the one of the parts of the account another element in another part of the account corresponds, which echoes first all while amplifying it.
Thus, for example, the mutiny of the second of the Grampus was preceded by the disobedience of the second of the Pingouin (the ship which runs the boat of Pym in the first chapter.)
The episode during which Pym is locked up in the hold of Grampus announces as for him the burial in the mountain of Tsalal, and in both cases at Pym the terror of “the premature burial re-appears”: I in vain tried to reason on the probable cause which thus walled me in my tomb I were given up without resistance to the blackest imaginations, among which drew up myself mainly, crushing and terrible, death by thirst, death by the hunger and the premature burial. (chapter II, “the hiding-place”) I believe firmly that none the accidents of which can be sown the human existence is more specific to create the paroxysm of the physical pain and morals only one case like ours: - To be buried alive! (chapter XXI, “artificial Cataclysm”)
One will quote also the black cook, wildest of all the mutineers (“a perfect demon”, explains Pym) who precedes the brutality of the natives of the island of Tsalal (“the race most positively diabolic which ever lived the face of the earth”), the strange white animal met at the beginning of the third part and that one finds at the end of the novel, the two dressings-up of Pym as a sailor, the reason of alcohol and the intoxication which totals three recoveries, etc
According to Jacques Cabau, this “structure of repetition” obeys a double logic: it makes each episode the prefiguration of the following episode, marking each time a progression in the horror: “of the shipwreck to the anthropophagy, the underground burial to engloutissement underwater. ” Of other, this progression is also an esthetic progression, which marks the gradual passage of real towards the fantastic one, since “the banality of the real life” up to the “level of the dream and of its obsessing illusions”, which makes it possible Poe to facilitate the voluntary suspension of the incredulity ( willing suspension off disbelief ) of its reader, who without this preparation could not seize this “illusion of the life of the dream” to which it is proposed to him to adhere.
For this reason Patrick Quinn, while putting forward the imperfections of the account, however notes that, “far from being an incoherent accumulation of horrors, the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym is built with rigor and skilfully carried out. ”
Peaks and rock bottoms
The structure of the work is indeed built on the model of the movement of the sea, with its peaks and its hollows: “to each peak the new conflict resorts in violence”, before the tension does not fall down to go up once again with more intensity but the preceding one. This tension, which also appears in the alternation of hope and despair which rate/rhythm the account, is particularly manifest at the time of the episode of the “mysterious Brig” (the Dutch ship filled with corpses), during which the shipwrecked men believed to be close to the delivery before seeing their disappointed hopes. This episode is significantly introduced by Pym in these terms: large episode a “initially of extreme joy and then of extreme horror. ” These examples of alternations of hope and despair could be multiplied.
To this formal recurrence is added some another, set of themes: “each episode contains a revolt and an inversion of the authority. ” the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym indeed constantly puts concerned this set of themes of insubordination and the revolt: insubordination is initially that of Pym which takes the sea against the will of its family (which with the current of sound is not equipped on board the Ariel , and which is opposed to its loading on the Grampus .) This insubordination is also that of the sailors who, one saw it, revolt against the authority of their captain, on board the Pingouin then on board the Grampus (double revolt on the latter ship, since it is one second mutiny which makes of Pym, Auguste and Peters the Masters of the wreck).
Another fundamental set of themes of the novel, which also marries the same movement of alternation: non-coincidence enters appearance and reality, the duplicity of reality. In the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym , the beings and the things are never really what they appeared to be first of all: Auguste seemed to have all his reason when he had proposed in Pym a night exit at sea on board the Ariel , whereas it appears later that it was actually “brutally drunk”; what seemed to be a sailor who by far encouraged them “to take patience joyeusement greeting head smiling constantly, as to deploy a line of very white teeth” proves to actually be, as Pym of realizes when the ship on the forecastle which is held the silhouette approaches the wreck of the Grampus , a dreadful corpse of which the “eyes did not exist any more, and all the flesh of the mouth corroded left the teeth entirely to naked”; the savages of the island of Tsalal seemed accessible, whereas it appears that it was only about one trick to deaden the mistrust of the travellers, etc Parfois, however, this duplicity of reality turns to the advantage of the protagonists: when the wreck of Grampus ends up capsizing, Pym notes that this accident “had finally turned to profit rather than to damage”, because it reveals the presence to them on the hull of the boat of edible shells which will enable them not to die of hunger.
This duplicity, Pym itself of it is not free. Thus to the beginning of the account he manages to hide with his hosts his night forwarding on board the Ariel with Auguste: “the schoolboys are able to achieve miracles in fact of fraud”, comments on it. But these are the disguises which attest best its capacities to dissimulate reality behind a misleading appearance: appearance of a drunk sailor, to mislead his grandfather, appearance of a phantom to mislead the mutineers of the Grampus . Patrick Quinn concludes on this subject while pointing out that: Arthur Gordon Pym , on the one hand so strongly marked by conflicts of an obvious kind - conflicts of man with men, conflict between the man and nature - is also the theater of a conflict between reality and appearance. Pym is involved in a life where nothing is stable, nothing is never really known .
“It text-key of the work of Poe”
One finds expressed in addition in Arthur Gordon Pym , according to Patrick Quinn, directly or indirectly, “all the broad topics of Poe.” One will mention as example the set of themes of “the premature burial”, present in the novel like in several news.It will be also noted that Pym is reached of this poesque evil famous : “the demon of perversity” ( the imp off the perverse ), this strange impulse which pushes us to act “by the reason that should not us ”, this “overpowering tendency to make the evil for the love of the evil”.
“Perversity”, in the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym , is what pushes Pym to wish the adventure, not for its approvals, but for its dangers: All my visions were of shipwreck and famine, died or captivity among the cruel tribes, of an existence of pains and tears, trailed on some rock grisâtre and afflicted, in an inaccessible and unknown ocean. Such daydreams, such desires are extremely common, one affirmed it to me since, among the very many class of the men melancholic persons… It is this same demon of the perversity which pushes Pym with drinking of a feature the liquor bottle in the hold of the Grampus , when it realizes that it does not have anything any more to eat. Lastly, when it descends a cliff after being extracted the mountainous labyrinth from the island from Tsalal, Pym tries out the feeling directly described by the narrator of the “Demon of perversity” in connection with the call of the pit: it is seized, explains it, “of an immense desire to fall, - a desire, a tenderness for the abyss! a passion absolutely immaîtrisable! ”
Appears finally, in Arthur Gordon Pym as in several news of Poe, the topic of the Doppelgänger, the unfolding of the hero: Pym is indeed a hero curiously passive, “at whom them things arrives. His/her companions act: he is subjected to the action. ” If it is not twice in the course of the account (it is him which with the idea to disguise itself in phantom and it is him which pushes the captain of the Jane Guy to prolong his forwarding towards the south), Pym is hardly other thing but the witness of the events which occur and which it undergoes. In that, it would be during characters who accompany the heroes by Poe, that which, for example, reports the actions of the Dupin detective in “the Double assassination in the street Morgue. ” If the character of Pym preserves despite everything more presence than the assistant of Dupin it is, according to Quinn, because “Poe managed here to present with a total success a true double hero”, in particular because, replacing in the second Auguste part by Peters as a companion of Pym, Poe managed to find a balance in “dividing the active role between two characters”: neither Auguste nor Peters remain present long enough in the account to polarize on them our attention at the expense of Pym.
It is presence in this novel of these sets of themes, which will be recurring in the later tales, which explains the fact that Patrick Quinn proposes to see in Arthur Gordon Pym it text-key of the work of Poe, that from which the reading alone makes it possible to learn “how it is advisable to read Poe. ”
Exegetic assumptions
From its enigmatic (not) conclusion, the novel of Edgar Poe could not miss giving place with various attempts at interpretation aiming at boring the direction which it is advisable to give to work, and particularly with its last part. Because of the particular history of the reception of the work of Poe, which for a long time profited from a more important consideration in France than in the United States, the first great interpretative theories were written in French language.
An Odyssey of the inceste (Marie Bonaparte)
In its study published in 1933 and intended for “project the light of the psychoanalysis on the life and the work of a great writer with pathological tendencies” (namely Edgar Poe), Marie Bonaparte devoted a long chapter to the Aventures of Arthur Gordon Pym . This novel belongs according to it to the “cycle of the mother”, and more precisely to the “cycle of the mother-landscape. ”As a maritime novel, the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym would be indeed according to it Petri of maternal symbolism, under the terms of unconscious association but universal between the sea and the mother , symbolism to which the Sado-masochiste impotent Nécrophile driven back and which would have been Edgar Poe (it is the diagnosis which it reaches at the end of her study) gave the print of its particular sensitivity. It is thus primarily “because of the great importance of this account, as a revelation of the major psychology of Edgar Poe”, that Marie Bonaparte undertakes to make the analysis of it, rather than for its esthetic qualities, than she judges lower than those of her tales.
The study of the Aventures of Arthur Gordon Pym by Marie Bonaparte is appeared as a long summary with accompanying notes of the various adventures of the novel, during which, after having indicated a certain number of bringings together real or supposed between the biography of Poe and the first pages of the account of Pym, it develops the central thesis of her interpretation of the novel: “impassioned, unrestrained, always disappointed and always renewed research, of the lost mother who fills up this account, as it was to fill the life of Poe. ” Thus the Grampus , in the hold of which Pym is locked up, would be a notation symbolic of the mother, and the reclusion of Pym a “phantasm of the return in the maternal body. ” As for the successive rebellions whose ship is the theater, they would be conflicts œdipiens: the brothers revolt against the father in order to appease their incestueux desires for the mother.
The third part of the account, on the island of Tsalal , would be the amplified repetition of the same set of themes: the very whole island would be a notation symbolic of the body of the mother, and strange water, veined , of red color , would be blood, the blood of the mother. As for the black color, which is “the emblem of this island”, it would indicate that “the maternal body appears there this time conceived like of the inside , as could see it the fetus, if it opened the eyes and could look at”. The burial of Pym and Peters in the entrails of the island would be matérialisation of the same phantasm as that which was expressed in the reclusion of Pym in the hold of Grampus, but “on a scale much vaster”. As for the diagrams drawn by Pym, they should not be only included/understood like alphabetical characters: they also point out “the curves of the intestines”: thus, “the such child who is unaware of the vagina and the uterus, but knows the digestive functions naturally represents readily the birth having to take place by the anus”, Poe would symbolically have given body to “his more primitive desires. ”
The exit out of the underground labyrinth is from this comparable point of view with a childbirth, while the milky whiteness of the sea on which sail then the survivors would be obviously to put in connection with the mother's milk, and that the apathy which gains Pym and Peters would point out “the numbness, the happy abandonment and without thought of the infant on the maternal center which it comes from téter. ” The black men of Tsalal would have had as a function to punish the white men, whose whiteness of the teeth seemed to state “that they were mackled of milk implying a relationship with the mother”, under the terms of this taboo which weighs on the mother, and the prohibited desires that the men test for it. It is the force of this taboo which causes the death of Naked-Naked, the savage taken as an hostage by Pym and Peters, while for these two last the veiled silhouette, actually the mother, “in an imposing phantasm of desire, reopens, with its two sons, its sides white of milk. ”
Since Pym succeeded in turning over in the bosom of the mother, its account is regarded by Marie Bonaparte as completed: “That Edgar Poe could indeed have added after the supreme appearance of the mother? which mysteries concerning the mother could thus have been revealed? The account finishes legitimately on the question mark relative to these unsoundable mysteries and on the dazzled vision of the mother in her symbolic system whiteness. ”
The last words of the novel, nevertheless, are heavy of threat: I engraved that in the mountain and my revenge is registered in dust on the rock , wrote an anonymous hand. To which thus belongs this hand? “We will say: father”, answers Marie Bonaparte. It is him indeed which posed, préhistoriquement, the taboos of the island of Tsalal. it is its defense which stops the black wire , the bad son, in front of the whiteness of the mother. It is its defense which, biographiquement, stopped Poe in front of the woman, all its life.
“One of the large books of the human heart” (Gaston Bachelard)
Marie Bonaparte concluded her study by evoking “the song with two ranges which is the account of Arthur Gordon Pym ”, with which the manifest content would cover a latent content that the analysis was supposed to have put at the day. It is also a double grid of reading which Gaston Bachelard in his study published in 1944 builds to be used as introduction to the Aventures of Arthur Gordon Pym .Indeed, observes Bachelard, Edgar Poe is one of the rare writers “to have known to reconcile in its works two contrary qualities: the art of strange and the art of the deduction”, and for this reason the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym would have according to him, not only to be read, but also “slandered and rêv”. It is by being essential this discipline which the reader can realize that the first episode of the account, the escapade on board the Ariel brings into play “the powers of the nightmare ”, and that it can start to be exerted, “on this example still very diagrammatic”, with the double reading which Bachelard proposes: A reading must follow the line of the facts; another must follow the line of the daydreams. One will synchronically unroll the two readings by putting in front of each imaginary adventure the following systematic question: “under which pushes of imagination the events were they imagined? ” With a little exercise one will detect singular daydreams, nightmares and hallucinations which will reveal psychological great depths. Then the Aventure which tends to discover the world discovers at the same time the human intimacy. It is in this oneiric sympathy with the text which the reader must grant the greattest importance to the episodes which belong to the world of the dreams rather than in the world of the facts: thus for example of the episode in the hold of the Grampus , which is a long nightmare of enfermement. The social drama which is played in same time on the bridge of the ship (the mutiny), on the other hand, is a rationalization which does not concern the double reading suggested by Bachelard. “Astonishing inversion: it seems that for the vision of Poe, the man in the company is less complicated that the man in nature. ” It is that with the difference in our literature, “almost entirely absorptive by the social dramas ”, the novel of Poe is a work which treats “ natural drama , drama of the man opposite the world. ” The drama of Arthur Gordon Pym is the drama of the solitary adventurer, it is a drama of loneliness, where “the man must unceasingly fight against a whole universe. ”
This part of the account would in addition contain “the germs of the preferred nightmares of a large dreamer”: the mysterious brig, for example, which recalls in a form to the fantastic character attenuated “the boat of died” of the Manuscrit found in a bottle ; or the terror of the mutineers when they see appearing Pym disguised while returning, which brings into play the loneliness of “the man returned at the nightmares of his intimate night in the time even where he saw the actions of the day”, would provide the key of many extraordinary Récits .
As for the last part of the account, it would have according to Bachelard to be approached “with a major oneiric sympathy to include/understand all resonances of them. ” The new continent that the explorers approach, placed under the sign of the strange white animal that they discover at the time to approach there and that one will find at the end of the account, would be placed under the sign of “the misleading nature”: the decoration of the island of Tsalal “dynamically is indeed disturbed”, with its sticky water and its fuller's earth and black. It is here the outside world as a whole which would take part then “in this synthesis of the dream and the thought. The dreamer and the universe together work with the same work. ”
In this study, Gaston Bachelard includes a certain number of elements put forward by Marie Bonaparte and gives the same attention to the psychology depths, with the “hidden psychological mysteries” of Edgar Poe. But it does not take again the médico-psychological conclusions of the disciple of Freud, not more than it does not establish explicit relations between the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym and the biography of Poe. It is satisfied to note that “the last pages remain a mystery; they preserve a secrecy”, whose strange fascination that they exert on their reader is due to their oneiric depth, before concluding by evoking nature from the latent content hidden under this appearance from novel from adventures: By reading the Adventures , one believed to distract oneself and one realizes that the poet transmits the germ of dreams without end. It was also believed that one was going to see a universe, but it is the heart of the man, the obscure heart with its sufferings, which is the center of all. the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym are one of the large books of the human heart.
“A voyage at the end of the page” (Jean Ricardou)
The writer and theorist of the literature Jean Ricardou publish in 1967 under the title of Problèmes of the new novel a collection of articles previously published in various reviews in first half of the years 1960. The final chapter of its study, heading “the singular character of this water”, is devoted to “the critical interpretation” of the literature, and uses like “privileged example” of the theories of Ricardou on the subject the last part of the Aventures of Arthur Gordon Pym .This interpretation, affirms Ricardou, “is cursed”, condemned to sail between two contradictory shelves, two temptations: that to give up themselves with the giddiness of interpretation and to pour, by refinement “in sometimes abusive subtleties”; or that which consists in “fixing an often premature direction”, fault of having taken into account the whole of the elements of the text. Between the two, Jean Ricardou chooses his camp: These two temptations, however, are hardly equivalent: by excess, interpretation exalte the fundamental idea that all means; by defect, she condemns a share of the text to insignificance. It is thus initially on what she forgets, more than on what she declares, that one will judge an interpretation.
It is from this point of view which it reconsiders the strange nature of water that Pym and its companions discover on the island of Tsalal and the analysis that made by Marie Bonaparte (“interpretation Bonapartist”), and continued of it by Gaston Bachelard, analyzes qualified “exegetic bluff . ” Indeed, Marie Bonaparte as Gaston Bachelard retained this water only some of his attributes (the color and the fact that it is veined) at the expense of the others, which are retracted (“not liquidity safe cascades about it, dissolution of gum arabic on the not very significant declivities, variable color. ”)
Who more is, one and the other would apply to the text of Poe the same ideology of the literature: the latter “would have as a load to express an antecedent ” (the unconscious one or the dream would preexist to the text and would be transposed in this last.) Ricardou rejects this idea, estimating that on the contrary interpretation, even with the risk to be “then taken in an tireless circularity”, must confine with the text itself and “its fundamental opacity” which does not return to any “consistent figure of the inset plate. ” Also he interprets the strange water which runs on Tsalal , starting from the various characteristics which lends to him Edgar Poe (and either from some-a of them, like it reproaches Marie Bonaparte and Gaston Bachelard to do it), as being “a perfect metaphor of a written text. ” It is thus for example which the character of not-limpidity of this water, except when it runs in cascade, would symbolize the opacity of the text, whose prose appears limpid only when “the text ravels very quickly, i.e. if the reading is too fast. ”
Spinning this metaphor, Ricardou, after having pointed out that the island of Tsalal , whose entrails have hieroglyphic forms, is “the place even writings”, affirms that the white travellers are the “metaphorical substitutes of paper”, while the black inhabitants of Tsalal “represent the instruments of the writing. ” The murder of the sailors of the Jane-Guy should thus be interpreted like component the installation “of scriptural news sinuosities”: while making crumble the black mountain (ink) on the white men (paper), the savages transform the physical configuration of the island, and would trace without their knowledge of new signs, whose text is given in conclusion of the novel: I engraved that in the mountain, and my revenge is written in the dust on the rock , formula which is only one “dramatization of the antagonism ink-sheet” and whose real significance would be: “I wrote that on the page, and ink buried paper. ”
From this point of view, the final drift of Pym and Peters towards polar whiteness must of course be seen like a voyage at the end of the page, “the ultimate installation of the “vacuum paper which whiteness defends”. ” In this direction, not only the account is not unfinished, like had seen it well Marie Bonaparte, but one can go until affirming that “no text better than the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym is not completed, since its fiction indicates the end of any text. ” In the same way, no one another text, whose interpretation reveals that its deep sense returns only to itself and its physical configuration, more does not deserve to be seen applying this famous formula of Mallarmé by which Jean Ricardou concludes his study and at the same time his Problèmes from the new novel : “The language reflecting itself. ”
University interpretations
Interpretations previously described were abundantly commented on, and variously appreciated, by the specialists in the work of Poe. In its capacity as study founder, the work of Marie Bonaparte, “single in what it is less easy to refute the whole of volume than the details which compose it” remainder a required passage of any interpretation of work, even if it to him is reproached an outrageous will to want to find in each episode of the novel the confirmation of the diagnosis established on the case of Edgar Poe. The most serious criticism which was made against this study it was by Claude Richard, who called in question the base even of the analysis of starting there from a criticism of the sources which were used for the établir.Indeed, note Claude Richard, Marie Bonaparte “almost exclusively bases her study on the work of Hervey Allen, Israfel: The Life and Times off Edgar Allan Poe , appeared in 1926. ” But, observes Richard, this biography, in the beginning conceived like a novel, makes the good share with the “sensational document” and the doubtful anecdotes. Starting from this “biographical novel”, the disciple of Freud would deliberately choose to preserve only the elements which can be used for its thesis, accommodating “all the scandalous rumors” and drawing aside contrary testimonys, when well even they are worthier of faith. Thus, according to Claude Richard, “all the biographical introduction the study of Marie Bonaparte reveals this handling of already deformed facts”, from which a diagnosis is established whose interpretation of works of Poe is supposed to show the relevance, interpretation which finds in its turn its justification in the biographical study that it was to justify, in a process of demonstration which rotates in round. Methodological sophism once bored up to date, the psychoanalytical interpretation developed by Marie Bonaparte would reveal all her arbitrary character: At this price all the undergrounds of the Romance Gothics are reproduced the mother of their authors, all the voyages on sea are explorations of the maternal body, all metaphysics of subjective sublimations. If the comments of Gaston Bachelard did not give place to the same critical analyzes, those of Jean Ricardou on the other hand caused reactions enough sharp. If Claude Richard sees in the analysis developed in “the singular character of this water” a “penetrating comment” of the text of Poe, Roger Asselineau on the other hand carries out in some sentences “poverty afflicting” with the conclusions of Ricardou, developed according to him in a “very pretentious style, stuffed inversions as made the poets of them two centuries ago. ”
More measured in the tone, Patrick Quinn, after having not without humor pointed out that the prose of Jean Ricardou is not free from this opacity which it in general lends to the literary text, and noted the stimulating character of this “creative reading” ( creative reading ), notes that the step of Jean Ricardou has it as this character of “bluff exegetic” as that which it was reproached Marie Bonaparte for delivering itself: to select the elements of the text which will be used to support its thesis and to exclude some from others. Thesis which, according to Quinn, would have preexisted to the analysis, the latter being used only as development to then defend an ideology of the literature very to the mode, ideology according to which any literary work referred only to itself and with its own creation.
The specialists in the work of Poe have in addition in their turn proposed their interpretations of mysterious final of this account. These university criticisms mainly stuck to contextualiser the novel, putting it in relation to the political convictions and metaphysics of Edgar Poe.
Damnation of the black people
The last part of the novel is partly founded on a radical chromatic dichotomy: to the blackness of Tsalal and its inhabitants is opposed the final whiteness in which Pym and Peters are based. It was seen how Marie Bonaparte and, from very the other point of view, Jean Ricardou, had explained this opposition. American literary criticism is also leaning on this question of the opposition of the black and the white, explained in the light of the political convictions of Edgar Poe. This interpretation was proposed in 1958 by Harry Levine in The Power off blackness before being begun again and developed by Sidney Kaplan in an introduction of 1960 to The narration off Arthur Gordon Pym .
Levine, after having recalled that the voyage of Pym is a constant drift towards the south, points out that the direction printed with its way takes a very particular direction when one puts it in relation to the convictions “Southerners” of Edgar Poe. Moreover isn't the first image which comes to mind from Pym when he discovers the island of Tsalal a reminiscence of the agricultural south of the United States? And reactions of its black inhabitants, who to mark their astonishment and their pleasure “claqu of the hands, frapp the thighs and the chest and pouss of the bursts of laughter dazing” don't point out the behaviors outrageous and comiquement grotesque of the “negros” of the '' minstrels shows ''? It is neither the first besides nor the last time that Poe puts in scene stereotypes of this kind: one also finds of it in gold Scarab3ee or in the Newspaper of Julius Rodman , without speaking about the figures simiesque of the Double assassination in the street Morgue and of Hop Frog .
But these blacks of Tsalal hide behind this puerile simplicity of the intentions as dark as the color of their skin, showing by there their relationship of nature with the black cook, wildest of all the mutineers of the Grampus , this “perfect demon” which massacred with the axe the sailors remained faithful to the Barnard captain. After the inhabitants of Tsalal finally revealed their true nature, Pym will affirm that they belong to “the race most positively diabolic which ever lived the face of the earth. ” According to Sidney Kaplan, these men, who live in good intelligence with gigantic snakes, would be indeed the people of the prince of darkness, Tsalal would appear the Enfer, and its strange water crimson the Styx. The novel of Poe would transpose thus, behind the stereotype of the jovial and childish negro, the nightmare of the slave South: fear in front of the brutality supposed of the Blacks, evoked on the mode of the biblical allegory.
Indeed, the language of the inhabitants of Tsalal would actually be of the Hebrew . Thus, for example, Klock Klock would mean “black being”, Too-Wit , “being salts”, while sonorities of the name of the king of the inhabited islands by the blacks, the Tsalemon , evoke more or less the name of Solomon. He is not pain-killer, notices Sidney Kaplan, to have made be expressed blacks comparable with the slaves whom one could at the time see in Virginia, in the language of the Genèse. From this point of view, the cry of Tekeli-Li , it was to be put in connection with the Mane Tecel Phares of the Livre of Daniel, curse behind which it would be necessary to see another biblical curse here: that which condemns the wire of Cham to slavery. The wire of Cham which are the ancestors of the black people according to the Bible, and whose Genesis says that they went to settle in the most southern areas of the Earth. And it is because it would not have found this judgment rather explicit that Poe would have forged one of its vintage of them to put it in conclusion of its book: “ I engraved that in the mountain, and my revenge is written in dust on the rock . ”
These speculations on the direction to be given to this biblical tonality in the last part of the novel are to be replaced in the political context and social in which the Aventures of Arthur Gordon Pym were written. The institution of slavery, “the base of all our institutions” (Edgar Poe), was disputed more and more with State-Plain, by means as various as the revolt of Nat Turner (1831), the creation of an American company against the Slavery or by the publication of the work of Theodore Weld the Bible against slavery . To counter this movement, the writer and friend of Poe James Kirke Paulding had harnessed themselves with the drafting of a plea in favor of slavery, Slavery in the United States , which appears in 1836. It is same Paulding which, in 1836 also, advises in Edgar Poe to write a novel. This last writing an enthusiastic report of the test of Paulding, report in which he concludes his defense from the institution of slavery by these words: “It is the will of God that it is thus. ”
Hermann Melville wrote some share that the great geniuses belong to their time. Was Edgar Poe a man of its time? Not, Baudelaire answered, for which the author of the extraordinary Histoires was in America “a singularly solitary brain. ” Yes, Levine and Kaplan answer: the author of the Aventures of Arthur Gordon Pym belongs well to the “American nightmare”.
The key Eureka
This attempt at elucidation of the last part of the novel by the political convictions of Edgar Poe is not exclusive other assumptions of interpretation, whose principal one the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym with Eureka (1848) consisted in connecting, the great test cosmologico-metaphysics of Poe. “When two works end to end are put, explains Roger Asselineau, one discovers the direction which underlies the first. ”In this test, that its author qualifies “ prose poem ”, Edgar Poe postulates that at the origin of the universe the Divinity ( godhead ), which is pure spirit, created a single matter particle, which, by the divine will, was divided into atoms projected in all the directions of space. Each one of these atoms would aspire to turn over to the original unit (this aspiration being expressed by the law of the universal gravitation), aspiration thwarted by, on the one hand by the “force of originally printed expansion” to the atoms to diffuse itself in the universe, but which goes becoming exhausted; and in addition by the electricity, considered as being a repelling power, which prevents the various atoms from immediately incorporating the ones with the others. “The physical world is thus primarily energy” comments on Roger Asselineau, permanent tension between centrifugal forces and centripetal forces, between gravity and electricity, the attraction which emanates from the body and the repulsion which comes from the heart. The man is at the junction point of the heart and the body. Arthur Pym would be taken between these two contradictory forces, between that which emanates from the heart, and which pushes it to preserve its individual existence and its identity, and that which emanates from the body, which would push it to be let go to join the original unit of the matter. The decoration in which it is thrown métaphoriserait by its blackness darkness of cosmos, while final whiteness, “the “omni-color”, as Poe once called it more, which is the synthesis, the reconciliation of all the colors symbolizes the return to the unit. ” The absence of fear tested by Pym at the end of the account would mean that “the forces of repulsion ceased operating. Pym is given up entire with the attraction force, does not aspire any more that with the return to the unit first, and any terror disappears. ” Indeed, this return to the unit is not other than fusion with the Divinity: what Poe would have liked to express in its novel of 1838 would not be other than this intuition that he will manage ten years later to formalize in his poético-philosophical test, which constitutes the result of its intellectual and spiritual search. All creatures are also more or less conscious intelligences; conscious, initially, of their own identity; conscious, then, by weak flashes, of their identity with the divine Being of which we speak, of their identity with God. Of these two species of consciences, supposes that the first weakens gradually, and that the second is strengthened Imagine that the direction of the individual identity drowns little by little in the general conscience, that the Man, for example, ceasing, by unperceivable gradations, to feel Homme, reaches with long this triumphing and imposing time when he will recognize in his own existence that of Jéhovah. At the same time, remember that all is Vie, that all is the Life, the Life in the Life, the small one in largest, and all in the Spirit of God.
The literary posterity: a durable fascination
This singular novel did not cease, since its publication, fascinating the writers who followed it. One says thus that Arthur Rimbaud drew there a share of the inspiration of its famous poem the drunk Boat .The influence of the Aventures of Arthur Gordon Pym on Pierre Mac Orlan is less prone to guarantee, since it refers to “more mysterious books” in several of his works: one will quote the news entitled “the great south”, which is directly inspired by it, but also his deliver-testimony on the First World War, dead Poisson (1917), or the novel international Venus (1923). In these two cases, which especially retained Mac Orlan, it is the final and inexorable drift of Pym towards the pit, which it puts in relation to the current of the History, which carts the beings and the things towards an inescapable catastrophe.
For its part, Jorge Luis Borges estimated that, of all works in prose of Poe, the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym was led, and he entrusted at the end of his life that, if he were to choose only one work of Poe, it would be that one, whose last pages are according to him “admirable”. What struck especially Borges, it is this “very strange idea which emanates from it: that to design, feel the white like a horrible color. ”
Howard Philips Lovecraft, as for him, makes several winks supported on the novel of Poe in a news of 1931, the hallucinated Mountains ( At the Mountains off Madness ), whose action is in the Antarctic: in particular, the cry of terror on which the account of the narrator of the hallucinated Montagnes finishes is the famous Tekeli-Li savages of the island of Tsalal in the account of Pym.
the Sphinx of the ices
“Which will never take again unfinished account of Pym? , wondered Jules Verne in 1864. More daring than me and bolder to advance in the field of the impossible things”, he concluded. It is however well the same Jules Verne who, about thirty years later, undertakes rising the veil which had recovered for sixty years the mysterious silhouette met by Arthur Gordon Pym.
In the Sphinx of the ices (1897), whose action begins in 1839, that is to say a few months only after the publication of the Aventures of Arthur Gordon Pym , the narrator, Jeorling, learns with stupor that this account, that it had held for a work of invention, is actually authentic: indeed, the proper brother of the captain of the Jane Guy assure him that the ship left Liverpool indeed disappeared with its crew eleven years earlier. The captain Len Guy is thus, since all this time, in the search of his brother, and it is with as money the account of Edgar Poe that the heroes of Jules Verne launch out on their traces.
They will end up finding part of the crew of the Jane Guy , which, in company of its captain, miraculeusement survived the attack of the savages of Tsalal. They will also bore the mystery, and of the account of Pym, and the nature of the buckled silhouette which it met. Actually, it was not Arthur Gordon Pym which had told this adventure with Edgar Poe, but Dirk Peters: this last had fallen to the sea whereas the dugout carried on its inexorable road towards the pole, and of the reverse currents had ended up bringing back it towards civilization. As for the gigantic buckled silhouette that entraperçue Peters had, it proves to actually be a mountain whose form evokes that of a sphinx, and who with the astonishing property to be a mountain-magnet. And it is along this mountain which the corpse of Arthur Gordon Pym puts back, that the rifle which it carried in shoulder-belt projected and maintained all these years against its side.
The Sphinx of the ices , “which pushes the literary anthropophagy until summarizing the work of Edgar Poe in its fifth chapter”, was severely criticized by Jean Ricardou, who wrote that it had been necessary a whole novel Jules Verne to show that it had not included/understood the significance of the Aventures of Arthur Gordon Pym . Roger Asselineau, as for him, considers it regrettable that the explanation given is “a little too ground-with-ground” and it estimates that the spirit of the novel is betrayed. In any event, the Sphinx of the ices seems “a novel of disappointment”, where with each stage of its voyage “Jeorling discovers only afflicted, devastated or sterile grounds, where Pym had described strange phenomena and luxuriant vegetations”. Who more is, where the novel of Poe multiplied the enigmas, that of Jules Verne multiplies the rational explanations.
Pierre-Emmanuel Roller, commenting on the series of demystifications of the account of Poe to which Jules Verne delivers itself, concludes however which the convergence of the texts is more important than their divergences: the Adventures and the Sphinx , Romance faced twins from one end to another of the XIXe century, represent the face double and indissociable Romantisme; after the romanticism of the dream and metaphysical going beyond, romanticism of the system and conquest. Both are completed and gather in this dream of mystical fusion which the initial myth of the white landscape promised.
Moby Dick (?)
There does not exist any certainty as for the fact that the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym would have constituted one of the sources of inspiration of Hermann Melville to write Moby Dick (1861). One does not have even any proof owing to the fact that it read the novel of Poe. Nevertheless, a certain number of elements led university criticism to see family ties between two works.
Thus one could propose the proximity of the Incipit of these two novels, or the vision “of the immense phantom white, which resembled a hill in space” that imagines Ishmaël at the beginning of Moby Dick , and which seems to echo the final vision of Arthur Pym. Ishmaël which, like Arthur Pym, seems to be thorough to embark by the demon of perversity: where the desire of Pym is excited by the prospect “for shipwreck and famine; of dead or captivity among cruel tribes in an inaccessible or unknown ocean”, the spirit of Ishmaël is tormented by “a terrible itching of distances and remote things. adore to sail on the prohibited seas and to accost the cruel shores. ” Both embark since Nantucket, and will have as an accomplice, the first a mongrel with the wild aspect, the second a repented cannibal whose appearance causes with the first access the terror of his/her companion.
More basically, the elements of proposed convergence concern, on the one hand the architecture of the two novels, on the other hand the search of its protagonistes.
Melville thus integrated in Moby Dick , like had made Poe in Arthur Gordon Pym , of many encyclopedic digressions, by the way in particular of the whales and the conditions of existence of its hunters. But, unlike the effect which it produces in the novel of Poe, this mass of material details does not give in Moby Dick the impression to have been artificially plated on the account: Melville, at the same time as it would have learned at Poe this technique from literary construction, would have been informed by inaboutissement of its application in work of its precursor?
A fundamental topic of the Aventures of Arthur Gordon Pym seems absent from Moby Dick : that of the revolt against the authority. Or rather, “the reason of the revolt and the defeat of the authority is not present in the same form in Moby Dick . ” There is no revolt against Achab, the captain of the Pequod , as there was against the Barnard captain of the Grampus . The men of the captain to the ivory leg are subjected too much to its authoritative charisma to think of rebelling against him. But isn't itself the rebel par excellence? Do not carry it the revolt until in its name even: Achab? Who more is, the captain of the Pequod is that for which the appearance of the things is only the mask of a very different reality: “it is deeply convinced that the things are not what they appear, which the White whale in particular is not the rough one plugs and dumb woman that Starbuck believes, but the agent conscious of some impenetrable force which it is necessary to face and uncover. ” By what it joined one of the major sets of themes of the novel of Poe: the duplicity of the réel.
Lastly, of course, there is, common to both novels, the reason for the white: “the ultimate term the search is whiteness”, in a case as in the other: to the landscape uniformly white of the last pages of Gordon Pym corresponds chapter XLII of Moby Dick , in which, like had made Poe before, “Melville speaks about the white like terrible thing. ” To suppose that Melville was unaware of the pages written by Edgar Poe on this subject is impossible, concludes Borges.
It is for all these reasons which Patrick Quinn concludes that “if Melville did not grant a long and serious reflection to the essential tendency of Arthur Gordon Pym , then the resemblances which exist between this book and Moby Dick must then seem one of the most extraordinary accidents of the literature. ”
Sources and references
See also:
-
cryptology in '' gold Scarab3ee '' where the process is found, as well as the use of the term hieroglyphical , used by the writer in the note in the form of epilog which closes again the account and diverted the readers like the commentators of Poe.
Editions of the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym quoted in this article
(All the French translations are of Charles Baudelaire)- Roger Asselineau (ED.), Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym / The Narrative off Arthur Gordon Pym , Aubier Montaigne, Paris, 1973
- Gaston Bachelard (intro.), Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym , Stock, Paris, 1944. (The study of Bachelard is included in the posthumous collection the Right to dream , PUF, Paris, 1970.)
- Harold Beaver (ED.), The Narration off Arthur Gordon Pym off Nantucket , Penguin classics, 1986.
- Jacques Cabau (ED.), Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym , Gallimard, traditional Folio, Paris, 1975.
- Y.G. Dantec (ED.), Edgar Poe, Works in prose , Gallimard, Library of the Pleiad, Paris, 1951.
- Sidney Kaplan (intro.), The narration off Arthur Gordon Pym , American Century Series, Hill and Wang, New York, 1960.
- Claude Richard (ED.), Edgar Allan Poe, Tales, Tests, Poems , Robert Laffont, Books, Paris, 1989.
Critical articles and works
- Marie Bonaparte, Edgar Poe, its life, its work: analytical study , 3 vol., PUF, Paris, 1958 (1 ED. 1933)
- Daniel Hoffman, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe , Louisiana University Near, Baton-Rouge, 1972.
- Eveline Pinto, Edgar Poe and Art to invent , Klincksieck, Paris, 2003.
- Patrick Quinn, “the imaginary voyage of Poe”, in Configuration criticizes of Edgar Allan Poe , the Review of the modern letters, 1969 (transl. Yvette Camée). This article is actually a chapter of a work published by Patrick Quinn in 1957: The French face off Poe , Southern Illinois University Near.
- Jean Ricardou, Problems of the new novel , Threshold, Paris, 1967.
- Georges Walter, Investigation into Edgar Allan Poe, American poet , Flammarion, Paris, 1991.
Sources Internet
- Patrick Quinn, '' Arthur Gordon Pym '': " With journey through the end off the page" ? , text of the critical report of the analysis of the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym by Jean Ricardou, published in Poe Newsletter, vol. I, No April 1st, th and th 1968. consulté in February 2007
- Jean Ricardou, “The Singular Character off the Toilets”, English translation (of Frank Towne) of the article of Jean Ricardou on Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym appeared in Poe Studies, vol. VIII, No June 1st, th and th 1976.
- J.V. Ridgely, “The Continuing Puzzle off '' Arthur Gordon Pym '', Sum Notes and Queries”, Poe Newsletter, vol. III, No June 1st, th and th 1970 consulté in February 2007
- Claudia Kay Silverman, '' The stange Say/appearence off Arthur G. Pym '' (University of Virginia, 1998), a study of the novel of Edgar Poe consulté in February 2007
- Jules Verne, '' Edgard Poe and its works '' (1864) on the site “Zvi Har' El' S Jules Verne Collection” (chapter IV is devoted to the Aventures of Arthur Gordon Pym ) consulté in February 2007
- Audiolivre Lecture supplements in MP3 - Creative Commons
Other quoted works
- Jorge Borges, Conférences , Gallimard, Folio Tests, Paris, 1985.
- Jorge Luis Borges, Ultimes dialogs with Osvaldo Ferrari , Agora, Press-Pocket, Paris, 1988.
- Howard Philips Lovecraft, the hallucinated Mountains , I Shine have Lu, Paris, 2002.
- Pierre Mac Orlan, the Poisson died, in complete Works (ED. Gilbert Sigaux), the Circle of the Bibliophile, Geneva, 1970.
- Pierre Mac Orlan, international Venus , Gallimard, Paris, 1926.
- Hermann Melville, Moby Dick , Phébus, Paris, 2005 (transl. Armel Guerne)
- Edgar Allan Poe, extraordinary Stories , Bookstore Joseph Gibert, Chiefs of Literary works, Paris, s.d. (transl. Charles Baudelaire)
- Jules Verne, the Sphinx of the ices , the Book of pocket, Hatchet, Paris, 1970.
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