The Polar Enigma of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym

In 1819, an eminent British navigator, Sir John Franklin was selected to lead an expedition "overland from Hudson's Bay to the Arctic Ocean" and "after encountering many hardships, and very frequently at the point of death from hunger and fatigue, he reached home October, 1822." He made another successful expedition from 1825 to 1827, for which he was knighted by the Queen in 1829. And in 1845, he set out for his third and last expedition to the arctic regions, from which he never returned. Some of the party's "shoes, cooking utensils, & c. were found among the Esquimaux, who declared [the Franklin party] had died of starvation."1

In 1837 and 1838, Edgar Allan Poe, American fiction writer, critic, essayist, and poet, whose dark world-view has influenced a number of writers in America, including not only dark fantasy writers, such as Lovecraft and of course Stephen King, but also Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, and Shirley Jackson,2 published The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, a novella of severe hardships at sea which concludes in the antarctic.3 Poe was by no means the only major 19th century American writer to write about antarctic exploration. In 1835, James Fenimore Cooper published The Monikins: A Tale4 concerning "monkeys…who are called monikins, hail from Antarctica, where there is an extensive monikin civilization."5 In 1896, Mark Twain wrote but did not complete "The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness,"6 which E. F. Bleiler describes as

a fragment of about forty-five hundred words…originally planned to be an intercalculated story in Following the Equator…. The essential concept of 'The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness is a fancy geography corresponding to the Saragasso Sea of the tropics. In the Antarctic, Twain postulates, there is a similar area south of the Cape of Good Hope, a circular sea trap about five hundred miles in diameter, with a totally windless area in the center called Everlasting Sunday. … A sailing vessel enters this area and finds the remains of ships going back to the Napoleonic era, all their crews dead of thirst and starvation.7

Neither of these are among their authors' major works. The Southern Literary Messenger, of which Poe was the editor, the venue of the story's first appearance, summarized Pym as:

The Details of a Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus on her way to the South Seas--with an Account of the Recapture of the Vessel by the Survivors; their Shipwreck, and the subsequent Horrible Sufferings from Famine; their Deliverance by means of British Schooner Jane Guy; the Brief Cruise of this latter Vessel in the Antarctic Ocean; her Capture and the Massacre of her Crew among a group of Islands in the 84th Parellel of Southern Latitude, together with the incredible Adventures and Discoveries still further South, to which the Distressing Calamity gave rise.8

Most commentary on the story tends to treat is as supernatural fiction and focuses on the last third, after Arthur Gordon Pym and Dirk Peters have been rescued by Captain Guy of the Jane Guy and the ship has made its way to the antarctic regions. For example, H. P. Lovecraft describes the story as follows:

In the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym the voyagers reach first a strange south polar land of murderous savages where nothing is white and where vast rocky ravines have the form of titanic Egyptian letters spelling terrible primal arcana of earth; and thereafter a still more mysterious realm where everything is white, and where shrouded giants and snowy-plumed birds guard a cryptic cataract of mist which empties from immeasurable celestial heights into a torrid milky sea.9

This essay will also be particularly concerned with this final section, especially with the giant letters inscribed in the landscape, and with the story's final images which pretend to illuminate the enigmatic inscription. Everett Bleiler claims that "actually, these 'inscriptions' are simply examples of Poe's playfulness, or 'diddling,' as he called it. They are scrambled versions of Pym and Edgar Allan Poe!"10

Although I had heard that the story of Sir John Franklin had something to do with the origins of Pym, the direct connection between the story of the enigmatic disappearance of the Franklin party and Poe's penning of Pym that one might have hoped for does not exist because Poe published the story before Franklin left on his third expedition. Rather, if there is a connection, it is probably to the earlier Franklin expeditions which Franklin lived to tell about. It is, in fact, possible that Franklin outlived Poe by a year or so, in that Poe died in October, 1849, and the Franklin party is believed to have perished in the winter of 1850 - 51.

Both Sir John Franklin's fate and the ending of Pym are enigmas, though the enigma of Sir John Franklin's disappearance brought many ships out searching for him; those pursuing the enigma of Pym's narrative may stay at home in their cozy chairs. The chasm into which Pym and Peters escape when fleeing from the murderous savages is in the shape of what Peters perceives to be hieroglyphs. A note at the end explains what the characters did note know: the general sense of the hieroglyphs is that the north region is shady, and the south region is white. The note concludes: "Nothing white was to be found at Tsalal, and nothing otherwise in the subsequent voyage to the region below."11 This explains everything and nothing. The presence of the giant white man at the end implies that one of his race was responsible for the inscribed hieroglyphs at Tsalal; but that is also absurd, and again, explains nothing.

The illustrations of these hieroglyphs would be perfectly at home in Kane's narrative, which contains illustrations considerably more cryptic than these. When considered in the context of illustrations that appear in actual exploration narratives, one notes a significant resemblance between Poe's illustrations and maps with letters on them. It is as though Pym at Peters had discovered chasms in the form of ANTARCTICA.

Like finding the letters on a map engraved in the landscape features that they describe, the discovery of the chasm hieroglyphs destablizes the discourse, interfering with the conventional relationship between signs and their meaning. It destablizes this relationship in the manner that riddles often destablize it, for example, the riddle "What is the end of everything?" to which the answer is "G." The majority of riddles that ask portentous questions have innocuous answers. But like the incest enigma in the medieval Greek romance of Apollonius of Tyre, in which giving a correct answer destroys the protagonists life because of the ghastly secret he has uncovered, Poe implied that the answer to his enigma is forbidden knowledge of the kind that drives men mad. Poe's polar enigma, by disturbing the relationship between the facts and the letters with which they are written disturbs the mimetic conventions of the exploration narrative, recasting much objectively observed detail as psychological detail.

The series of events recounted in Pym is not different in kind from the anecdotal accounts of polar explorations. The fragmented structure of the narrative, often regarded as an aesthetic flaw by critics, is wholly in keeping with the literary style of such accounts: for example, chapter XVII of Elisha Kent Kane's narrative of the US Grinnell expedition in search of the Franklin party records strange light effects due to refraction ("there is a black globe floating about 3° north of the sun" (p. 126)), the marvellous food prepared by their French cook Henri, the advantages of a steamer for making headway through the ice, and an account of discovering families of Eskimos in their igloos, grouped round their oilless lamps, "in the attitudes of life" but "with darkened lip and sunken eyeball," frozen to death, as though each anecdote were of more or less equal scientific and emotional importance. Both the Kane and the Poe narratives contain anecdotes of cannibalism as a tactic for starvation; both contain description of features of the landscape as appearing Egyptian; both contain very detailed accounts of the effects of survival. The most striking differencebetween Kane's narrative and Pym is Poe's view of human nature--were Poe's natives found to be in the possession of the shoes or cooking utensils of a party of explorers, it would be clear evidence of treachery; Poe's natives wipe out the expedition for their equipment, stores, and cargo.

The ancient genre of the sea story has not only a mimetic component, but also a mythic one. When Pym relates that "there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its propositions than any dweller among men,"12 his boat might easily have reached the same island as Odysseus, who relates that:

A prodigious man

slept in this cave alone, and took his flock

to graze afield--remote from all companions,

knowing nothing but savage ways, a brute

so huge, he seemed no man at all of those

who eat good wheaten bread; but he seemed rather

a shaggy mountain reared in solitude.13

Because sea stories have a such a long history, sea stories have a highly codified interpretive framework. On the other hand, because throughout the history of sea stories, real people have made real sea voyages, returning with marvellous tales of their adventures at sea and of the strange lands on the other side sea stories insist upon their literal level, despite the conventional meaning of virtually every element of the sea story.

It is Poe's dark world-view that transforms the mythic landscapes of the polar explorations of his day into the stuff of literary myth. Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkel," Pym emphasizes the connection between wilds of nature and wild psychological states. But Poe has chosen a more exotic setting than Irving, and the psychological states he describes are correspondingly wilder--and indeed, as discussed above, are not unlike the psychological states experienced by actual explorers. Poe wrote about the kind of exploration that led to the colonization of America, so the antarctic land his characters find is both "home" and "not home," and is in fact "Unheimlich." Poe, along with other nineteenth century writers such as Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, was re-coding the codified signs of the sea story into an overtly psychological language in which the boundaries of the ship represent the ego, the surface of the water represents social reality as it is consciously perceived, under water represents the unconscious, sea monsters represent monsters from the id, etc. While many of these psychological symbols are implicitly present when we read sea stories in retrospect, the nineteenth century's emergent psychological sensibility elaborated upon previous codes, and Pym represents Poe's contribution to this process.

Pym is composed of a series of escalating disasters narratives, in which the hapless Pym is cast from one disaster into the next, each calamity more wondrously horrific than the last. Certainly, the intended emotional effect of the story is horror. The story builds through a series of horrific emotional peaks to the advent of a great white god. And the mutiny at sea, during which Pym must piece together from the slightest evidence just what has transpired, is a tale of detection. Thus, his narrative is structured by the conventions of response to disaster. To a calamity, a disaster, a catastrophe, an apocalypse a range of responses are possible. The religious response is cast in the terms of moral allegory, deriving its form from the Biblical account of God's destruction of the cities of the plain. There is also the aesthetic response, cast in terms of romantic melodrama in which the event is raised to a level of sublimity, equally composed of horror, wonder, and intense emotional involvement. There is the psychological response, blaming the victims of the misfortune for having the poor judgement to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And there is the rationalist response, subsuming the event in a universal scientific system of causes and effects. Each of these affords the construction of a story specifying the time, place, and nature of a misfortune as well as its magnitude. Clearly, Poe opts for the romantic response to disaster, emphasizing the drama, the sensations, the radical juxtapositions of scale, rather than appealing to a moral system of sins punished, a psychological system of people making the wrong choices for reasons associated with mass psychology, or rationalist explanations like those accounts of disaster in the exploration narratives from which his tale draws its settings, atmosphere, and plot.

Another aspect of science underlying Pym, much less recognizable to today's reader is his use of John Cleaves Symmes' theory of concentric spheres which claimed that "the earth is hollow and open at the poles"14 with another earth-shaped shell inside it; the scientific romance Symzonia [1820] by one "Adam Seaborn," (possibly a pseudonym of Symmes himself, although there is some debate15), is very likely part of the basis of Pym. The notion of warm polar regions surrounded by a ring of ice originated in 1592 with John Davis, discoverer of the Faulkland Islands, and Symmes' elaboration on this idea was widely discussed in the nineteenth century.16 Symzonia contains all manner of odd explanation in favor of Symmes's theories, for example:

I concurred in the opinion published by Capt. Symmes, that seals, whales, and mackerel, come from the internal world through the openings at the poles; and was aware of the fact, that the nearer we approach those openings, the more abundant do we find seals and whales.17

There are hundreds of nineteenth century works of fiction that make some use of Symmes theories, many of them utopian novels and lost race novels. Pym shows little trace of the utopian impulse, but does feature a lost race of black-toothed savages. The general speculation is that after the end of Pym's narrative, he goes through the hole at the South Pole and to earth's hollow interior.

Pym is one of four of Poe's texts that make use of Symmes' theories. In "The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall," in which Pfaall journeys to the moon and back, on his way to the moon, Pfaall sees the Symmes Hole at the North Pole: "Hell itself might have found a fitting image. Even as it was, my hair stood on end, while I gazed afar down within the yawning abysses, letting imagination descend, and stalk about the strange halls, and ruddy gulfs, and red ghastly chasms of hideous and unfathomable fire."18 In a footnote to "Hans Pfaall," Poe explains how his story differs from other moon-voyage stories, a remark which might equally well apply to Pym:

In these brochures the aim is always satirical; the theme being a description of Lunarian customs as compared with ours. in none is there any effort at plausibilityin the details of the voyage itself. The writers seem in each instance, to be utterly uninformed in respect to astronomy. in "Hans Pfaall" the design is original inasmuch as regards an attempt at verisimilitude, in the application of scientific principles (so far as the whimsical nature of the subject would permit) to the actual passage between the earth and the moon.19

Especially in comparison to other scientific romances of polar exploration, Pym demonstrates Poe's meticulous attention to the details of scientific knowledge about the polar regions. In this passage we can also see Poe's reason for neglecting the utopian component of the polar romance: he sacrifices the possibility of comparisons of customs for scientific plausibility.

It is important to note that there are two components to scientific plausibility: meticulous adherence to the details of observed reality, and the shaping of a narrative such that it accords with the theoretical abstractions of science. This is true both of the learning of science and the composition of a scientifically plausible narrative, and is in fact one of the fundamental contradictions of the sciences. As Gaston Bachelard has observed:

Every man who attempts to learn science makes use of not one but two metaphysical systems. Both are natural and cogent, implicit rather than explicit, and tenacious in their persistence. And one contradicts the other … [They are] rationalism and realism.20

It may be that Poe ends his story where he does to avoid proceeding beyond the point where there are actual accounts of the terrain, in order not to have to rely upon pure speculation based on abstract scientific principles. Poe's account of the earth's interior, had he written one, would have required him to make up, from whole cloth, the details of such a place.

The other stories in which Symmes' theory makes an appearance are "Descent into the Maelstrom" and "Ms. Found in a Bottle." In the former, the narrator remarks that, "Kircher and others imagine that the centre of the channel of the Maelstrom is an abyss penetrating the globe." "Descent into the Maelstrom" is one of the key stories in the evolution of science fiction, particularly problem-solving hard sf. Because "Pym" so closely parallels actual scientific discovery of his age, going beyond it into the speculations to which seamen on long voyages were prone,21 it can properly be considered an early specimen of science fiction. Unlike Poe's "Descent Into the Maelstrom," Pym is not so much concerned with how the protagonist solves his problems, as with the enigmas of sublime landscape.22

"Ms. Found in a Bottle" concludes with the ghost ship with the shipwrecked protagonist on board, a ship which some speculate is supposed to be that of Christopher Columbus, disappearing down a hole at the South Pole:

The narrator, on a derelict boat, is run down by a gigantic, ancient vessel, upon which he is hurled by the force of the collision. The boat which is abnormal in certain ways, is manned by ancient men in outmoded garb, and which bears association with old Spain. As the manuscript ends, the ship is about to disappear into a South Polar orifice. The story as a whole is apparently an allegory on geographical discovery. The captain of the ship is sometimes identified with Christopher Columbus, but this seems too specific.23

The story concludes: "The circles rapidly grow small--we 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!"24