Poe’s Aesthetics of Temporality
Time is an essential component in the narrative of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Augustus’s watch stops and his father’s chronometer disappears. The passage of days, hours, and minutes occupies much narrative space and anxious speculation. The narrative assumes the form of a log with months and dates demarcated. But time’s presence runs even deeper. Adverbs designating the passage of time, for example after and at length, are a constitutive feature of Pym’s narrative fabric, as are adjectives that convey an experience of time, such as immediate and still. As much as Pym’s is a journey in space, his is also a journey in and through time. In an analysis of how anthropological discourse deploys the markers of time, such as tenses and adverbs, to produce the subjects of its study as colonized others separate in time, Johannes Fabian provides a valuable template for understanding Pym, which contains pages of material plagiarized from antebellum exploration narratives. By reading key anthropological texts, Fabian foregrounds the central but unstudied role time plays in the imperial/epistemological conquest of space and argues that “time [was required] to accommodate the schemes of a one-way history: progress, development, modernity (and their negative mirror images: stagnation, underdevelopment, tradition)”: “In short, geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics.”1 Another way of putting this is to say that “chronopolitics” posits a static temporality—the past or then—against which progress—the present or now—measures itself. There must be a zero degree, an origin, in order for the story of progress to tell itself.
On the one hand, Pym tells the story of the Tsalalian culture far removed in space and stuck in an originary moment of time that, upon contact with the modern (white) world, must be destroyed because of its savage and primitive (black) nature. On the other hand, the temporal complexities of Poe’s narrative constantly undermine the “one-way history” that is essential to the imperial project. Pym’s chronopolitics, then, are not as ideologically straightforward and consistent as Fabian’s analysis might lead us to believe, and there are two reasons why: because the “now” of Pym is constantly shifting and because Pym, for all of its borrowings from travel narratives, is a fiction and a self-conscious work of art that aims to amuse, baffle, and frighten the reader. Inasmuch as there is a chronopolitics at work in Pym, there is also what I shall call an aesthetics of temporality. The two are in tension and pull the text in quite different directions, with the chronopolitics offering a stable sense of past and present in order to make an argument about the necessity of racial hierarchy and domination and the aesthetics subverting that stability in order to have the desired effect on the reader.
What follows is a close reading of Pym that combines narrative theory, history of science, and Poe’s racial politics. With Fabian’s analysis in mind, I begin by identifying the uses to which time in Pym is put and then read those uses in a dialectic relation with “wider” contexts. First, my analysis foregrounds and theorizes Pym’s colliding tenses through the vocabulary provided by Gerard Genette, specifically the temporal “anachronies” of prolepsis and analepsis.2 The temporal chaos of the narrative—its shifting dates, unknowable o’clocks, and warping sentences—is both caused by and reflected in the text, which fails to keep track of its time-keeping devices, in particular the run-down watch and the lost chronometer.3 The missing chronometer leads to my reading’s second framework, which is the history of science, particularly John Harrison’s 1735 discovery of the chronometer and the measurement of longitude. Longitude, which is the conversion of time into space, gave explorers a sure sense of where they were and consequently made exploration safer and more profitable. Calculating longitude, however, depends upon keeping track of time, which is a dicey proposition in Pym. The third step in my reading is an examination of Poe’s perturbations of time in relation to his representations of race. I argue that Pym’s quick descent into a temporal freefall works against Poe’s notion of time as a reliable demarcation of the differences between civilization and savagery, present and past, white and black. The text attempts to recover, but not wholly successfully, its sense of now by locating its then in the alleged clarity of racial difference (the “perfectly white wool of the Arctic bear” and “the jet black complexions” of the Tsalalians) with which Pym concludes.4
“The Sentence Had Passed”
Critics have observed that Pym is a strange tale for Poe to have written because of its length. Unlike “The Black Cat,” for example, thirty minutes (Poe’s ideal duration for achieving the greatest effect on his reader) is not enough time, even for the speediest reader, to get through Pym, which means that Poe’s own text goes against his statement that a reader can sustain a high degree of excitement within “the limit of a single sitting.” Perhaps Poe was right about the limitations of the reader (and himself as a writer of lengthy works), and this is why antebellum reviewers complained about the “tough stories in this book [being] told in a loose and slip-shod style” or criticized “the faulty construction and poorness of style.”5 Poe was encouraged by friends at Harper and Brothers to write something longer than usual in order to attract new readers and make some much-needed money, but he succeeded in neither. He did not want to write such a long story and he inflicted his own sense of artistic integrity, compromised by economic necessity, upon his reader. Even readers who acknowledged its accomplished style were more interested in contesting the preface’s claims that “the public were not at all disposed to receive it as fable” (56) and establishing what was and was not true.
Because the preface purposefully confuses the two (Poe poses as Pym’s editor, urging Pym to publish his narrative as true, and Pym decides to publish it in the “Southern Messenger under the garb of fiction” [56]), readers of Pym, then and now, have tried to separate the ridiculous from the possible. Burton R. Pollin’s magisterial edition meticulously examines Poe’s claims. For example, when Pym and Augustus take a joyride on the Ariel, and Pym states, “we should be out of sight of land before daybreak” (60), Pollin remarks, “In terms of time, distance, and rates of speed, more realistically interpreted than Poe perhaps intended, a boat of this size, running off the wind in this weather, at a probable five knots, in about three hours would hit Monomy Point at the southeast corner of Cape Cod, where he would still see the land” (220). Regarding such inconsistencies, antebellum reviewers responded as if personally attacked (and the preface certainly gave them reason) and lambasted the text’s “gross improbabilities and preternatural adventures.” Poe was also attacked for his “evident ignorance in all nautical matters,” including his description of the stowage on the Grampus: “No Yankee captain of a whaler ever packed his oil casks in such a careless manner.”6
But what does that mean? We could follow this approach and quote the preface where Pym informs us that he “kept no journal during a great portion of the time in which he was absent” (55) and therefore he could not possibly know the lines of latitude and longitude until his return, then making them up. But he made the whole thing up, which leads us to conclude, in the words of the New York Review, “the work is all a fiction”—which Poe has already told us.7 A more fruitful approach concedes the fictionality of Pym and considers how Poe utilizes the markers of time in his fiction (markers that usually help to produce the illusion of reality in that fiction) to create in the reader’s mind a profoundly disorienting experience of narrative time. Poe-time runs according to a logic that invokes the conventional passage of time and undercuts the reader’s ability to follow its passage. The instability of time establishes Poe as its arbiter and the reader as the amused/bemused/confused victim of his temporal shenanigans. Now is when I, Poe, say it is.
The dissolution of time, or conventional measurements of time, is literalized in the early section of Pym when Augustus gives the narrator a watch, which soon stops working. Despite informing us that “the watch … was run down, and there were, consequently, no means of determining how long I had slept” (70–71), the narrator, nevertheless, writes “for the last fourteen or fifteen hours I had no water—nor had I slept during that time” (78). Although the narrator has confessed that there is simply no way he or the reader can know this, the narrative overloads itself with phrases, such as “in about an hour” (70) or “for some minutes” (76), that say just the opposite. Interspersed among these denominations of time, other temporal markers appear, such as “quickly” (89) and “momentary” (81). And if a sentence does not insist on noting through hours or adverbs the passage of time, words such as “next” (77), “before” (78), “at last” (78), “then” (76), “presently” (77) and “now” (77) register the narrative’s hold on sequence.
But to put Pym into a sequence, on the order of Genette’s example in Narrative Discourse, is to get lost amidst the false distinctions of hours and minutes, between then and now, finding oneself searching for a present moment against which to measure the narrator’s retrospective and anticipatory or, to use Genette’s terms, analeptic and proleptic statements. Such terms are useful for thinking about the preface, which appears first in the story but is written at some point, unknown, but certainly after the first two installments of the narrative have appeared under Poe’s name in the Southern Literary Messenger. The preface fulfills the requirements of analepsis in that it recounts a set of events in the past leading up to the present in which Pym is writing. Yet it is also an example of prolepsis in that its final paragraph is a series of sentences containing the words, “it will be seen at once,” “it will be also be understood,” and “it will be unnecessary to point out” (56)—anticipatory phrases that are the hallmark of prolepsis. According to Genette, one begins to understand how a text works by mapping these kinds of temporal relations between narrative and story.
I use the word map because throughout Narrative Discourse Genette relies on spatial metaphors to describe the temporal operations of narrative. He speaks of “narrative information that has its degrees” (162), and describes “the Proustian scene as a ‘magnetic pole’” (111). In the chapter “Order,” he writes, “pinpointing and measuring these narrative anachronies … implicitly assume the existence of a kind of zero degree that would be a condition of perfect temporal correspondence between narrative and story” (35–36). In the chapter “Mood,” Genette characterizes narrative as “keep[ing] a greater or lesser distance from what it tells” (163) and reminds us that this “common and convenient spatial metaphor … is not to be taken literally” (162). However, he continues to use the metaphor of the “degree zero” as he strives to locate “a reference point for a rigorous comparison of real durations” (86, 87). In defining narrative speed, he writes, “we mean the relationship between a temporal dimension and a spatial dimension (so many meters per second, so many seconds per meter)” (87). The zero degree is thus necessary to structure the oppositions between before and after, then and now, Pym and Poe.
There is a longitudinal rhetoric and logic to Genette’s assumption of “the existence of a kind of zero degree.” His search for a way to measure “real durations” is, bizarre as the analogy might seem, narrative theory’s equivalent of the scientific desire for a chronometer. Historian of science Dava Sobel tells the story of John Harrison, the English clockmaker who invented a chronometer that could keep track of time at sea. This invention was so important to English imperial ambitions that the British Parliament passed “The Longitude Act of 1714,” which would reward millions of dollars in today’s valuation to the person who invented a clock that could determine longitude. The difficulty lay in constructing an instrument that would be immune to the climate changes, alterations in atmospheric pressure, and a ship’s vacillations. What was needed was a chronometer that would not only mark the passage of time aboard ship but also maintain the time of the ship’s point of origination. For every hour that the ship has traveled from the home port, that ship has traveled fifteen degrees of longitude. Without knowing home port time, ships did not know where they were, which often had terrible consequences. Sobel describes one “miserable history [that] relates quintessential horror stories of death by scurvy and thirst, of ghosts in the rigging … of drowned corpses fouling the beaches.”8
Without knowing their longitude, which is only possible with a chronometer, a shipwreck like this, with all its gothic terrors, awaits Pym and company. Indeed, Sobel’s story sounds an awful lot like chapter 10 of Pym, in which the narrator describes “twenty-five or thirty human bodies … scattered about between the counter and the galley, in the last and most loathsome state of putrefaction” (124). The potential for gothic effect is heightened by the absence of a chronometer (Sobel would not put it quite this way, but Poe might), and Poe is certainly aware of the fact and importance of chronometers (a chronometer appears in “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall”). Harrison had built a functioning chronometer as early as 1770, which means that the navigators aboard the Grampus would have had access to one. Third, and most importantly, Poe tells us in chapter 4 that Augustus’s father had a chronometer: “the first mate, eyeing [Augustus’s father] with an expression of fiendish derision, and deliberately searching his pockets, from which he presently drew forth a large wallet and a chronometer” (85). The chronometer is one of two timepieces aboard the ship, the other being the watch that Augustus puts in Pym’s hiding place and which frequently runs down. It is the chronometer, however, that is the important instrument for measuring time, and it mysteriously disappears from the narrative. What the mate has done with the chronometer is never explained, but his fate is: in reaction to Pym’s disguise as Rogers’s corpse, the mate “fell back, stone dead” (112). Was the chronometer with him when he fell stone dead? Did it break? If not, where did it go?
The chronometer momentarily appears in Pym only to vanish, and with it the degree zero, the Greenwich meridian against which time can be told and against which the narrative can support its sense of now, its hold on the past, and its grip on the future. Pym admits as much in his account of falling asleep, passing out, and realizing that his watch has run down. Yet these confessions of temporal uncertainty keep company or compete with attestations of temporal certitude. The reader shuttles between these positions, struggling to keep track of what has happened and when, even though to figure that out, which the narrative demands we at least try to do, is pointless according to the narrator’s admissions that he has no idea what time it is. This is a source of humor in a footnote to chapter 18 that follows the words “this morning” (166). The narrator writes, “the terms morning and evening, which I have made use of to avoid confusion in my narrative, as far as possible, must not, of course, be taken in their ordinary sense. For a long time past we had no night at all, the daylight being continual. The dates throughout are according to nautical time, and the bearings must be understood as per compass” (167). With this, a wedge is driven between the dates on the page and their signification. We think we know what “morning” means, but perhaps not. Morning does not necessarily signify the sun rising, or having risen, because it has never set.
Lest we think that calendrical dates are real, the footnote continues: “I would also remark, in this place, that I cannot, in the first portion of what is here written, pretend to strict accuracy in respect to dates, or latitudes and longitudes, having kept no regular journal until after the period of which this first portion treats” (167). We have seen this language of “the first portion” before, and that is in the preface, where Pym talks about Poe “draw[ing] up, in his own words, a narrative of the earlier portion of my adventures, from facts afforded by myself” (56). The question arises, to what “first portion” does this footnote refer? Indeed, this footnote is a miniaturized version of what repeatedly happens in Pym, as the reader, under the direction of a narrator who constantly uses temporal markers that promise sequence but do not deliver, struggles less to keep track of what happened than when it happened. In the first chapter of Pym, which the narrator “relate[s] … by way of introduction to a longer and more momentous narrative” (57), Augustus drinks too much and passes out. Pym temporarily manages until he too passes out, only to wake up and find himself and Augustus rescued. The narrative then shifts to an explanation of what happened during the time of lapsed consciousness. Although the narrator retrospectively presents this account, he has received it from someone else (perhaps Augustus, but it is not clear) who retrospectively narrates the rescue. We are taken into a past about which Pym could not have known, and he states, “the mystery of our being in existence was now soon explained” (61).
When is this now? It is not the now of the narrator’s present, with which he concludes the opening paragraph of chapter 1: “when I now think of [my adventures], it appears to me a thousand wonders that I am alive to-day” (57). Rather it is the now of a narrative that is embedded within a narrative that is embedded within a narrative. To clarify: the first now is Pym’s present, as he recalls his adventures. When he speaks of this now, he speaks in the present tense: “when I now think of them, it appears to me …” (57). The second now is in the past as Pym narrates the troubles aboard the Ariel: “I now boomed along before the wind, shipping heavy seas occasionally” (60). This is in the past tense. The third now is Pym coming out of his swoon and listening to the account. He writes that he “was told” (61) of what happened during the time he had passed out, and the fact that he and Augustus are alive “was now soon explained” (61). Even this now is not quite now, however, because the word soon implies a later. As if this were not complicated enough, embedded within this now soon is another: “In the meantime, Henderson [the person leading the rescue] had again put off from the ship, although the wind was now blowing almost a hurricane” (62). The past tense is no longer a simple past, but rather the pluperfect: “he had not been gone many minutes” (62–63).
The levels of retrospective narrative accrete so intensely that the analepses produce what Genette calls “narrative interference” (50). The narrative’s time frames become almost impossible to separate, leading to “redundancy or collision” (50), as phrases such as the following demonstrate: “as I said before” (60), “which it will be remembered” (61), or “the period of time just mentioned” (63). The narrative is strewn with evidence of colliding temporalities: “I have already spoken” (99), “many years elapsed before I was aware of this fact” (94), and my favorite, “shortly afterward we could perceive a sensible diminution in the force of the wind, when, now for the first time since the latter part of the evening before, Augustus spoke” (117).
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Of Nantucket. Comprising the Details of a Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery. On board the American Brig Grampus, on her way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827. With an account of the recapture of the vessel by the survivers; their shipwreck and subsequent horrible sufferings from Famine; their deliverance by means of the 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 Eighty-Fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude; Together with the Incredible Adventures and Discoveries Still Farther South to which that Distressing Calamity Gave Rise.
Poe is very interested in length, whether the length of a poem, the length of time one can breathe while buried alive, or the length of time a reader’s attention can be sustained. At length is one of Poe’s favorite phrases and topics. Interestingly, the term is temporal (how long does something take to happen) and spatial (how long is that sentence). Indeed, length is a topic to which the narrative often gravitates. This is the case because length is both a condition of writing imposed upon Poe by Harper and Brothers and it is a condition that he can impose upon his reader. If nothing else, he controls how long Pym lasts. Therefore, length is not only a theme of the story (how long can Pym survive without water? How long before the match goes out?) but a formal concern as well. If the experience of time varies from individual to individual, and if time must nevertheless be subjected to standardized representation, Poe produces an ironic version of time’s zero degree, one that refuses to stay in place. Poe’s time is simultaneously relativistic, because it is subject to individual experience, and arbitrary, because it is subject to individual whim—Poe’s whim.
Perhaps most whimsical is the length of the full title.9 Its lengthiness is a parody of lengthy titles and was something upon which reviewers remarked: “what say you, reader to that for a title page?”10 What lengthens the work is not only the series of events narrated and passages from other accounts of exploration Poe copies but also the unnecessary and repetitive words that do little except lengthen the sentences. Thus, Poe writes about “two or three violent quarrels” (88), “twenty-five or thirty human bodies” (124), “twelve or fifteen miles” (131). But there are other signs of lengthening. In one paragraph alone, “at length” appears twice, in addition to “afterward,” “shortly afterward,” “now,” “we lost no time,” and “after a short delay” (118–19). Adverbs, especially those designating time and speed, appear throughout, especially “repeatedly” (95), “frequently” (93), and “immediately” (96). In one especially self-conscious moment, Pym confesses, “in far less time than I have taken to tell it, we found ourselves masters of the brig” (113). When he describes the scene of the survivors drawing straws to see who will be cannibalized, Pym writes, “let me run over this portion of my narrative with as much haste as the nature of the events to be spoken of will permit” (134). In disclosing how long it took to consume Parker’s body, Pym writes, “we devoured the rest of the body piecemeal, during the four ever memorable days of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth of the month” (135).
Time (and Pym) are getting stretched out here to make the reader squirm and to increase the length of the story. It is as if there is some ideal word count that will make Pym a novel, and Poe keeps grasping for it, and there is always the sense that more is needed. Pym explains, “I am at a loss to give a distinct idea of the nature of this liquid, and cannot do so without many words” (171), and he prefaces his description of the Jane Guy being surrounded by Too-wit and “the black-skin warriors” (187) with this familiar phrase: “in less time than I have taken to tell it” (186). At length elongates the chapters and is part of an overall pattern of language that warps the reader’s experience of time: time stands still, slows down, moves fast.11
I want to focus on one particular phrase from this parodically loquacious title: June 1827. This would be ten years before the first two installments of Pym appeared in the January and February 1837 issues of the Southern Literary Messenger and eleven years prior to Harper and Brothers’ publication of the full text in 1838 in which the preface first appeared. How do these dates match up with the following claims in the preface? First, Pym informs us that the note is written “upon my return to the United States a few months ago” (55). Second, he tells us that he was urged to begin the writing process “at once” (55). Third, the preface is dated July 1838. Thus, the words “a few months ago” indicate that he returned to the U.S. around April 1838, which is impossible because the first two installments were published in 1837. What if we allow that “a few months ago” refers to the three months before January 1837, which means that he returned to the U.S. around October 1836? Thus, his journey took nine years. It is worth recalling that the journal entries in chapter 25 conclude on March 22, 1828, with the famous image of the “shrouded human figure” (206). The narrative ends with an additional note that asserts the “late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym” (207) and the admission of “the loss of two or three final chapters (for there were but two or three)” (207). If the journey took nine years, which is confirmed in chapter 10, and the account of it that we read covers less than two years, it is difficult to imagine the additional seven years could be covered in two or three chapters. Difficult, but not impossible.
What is impossible to know is what time frame Pym is referring to when he includes phrases such as “we two have since very frequently talked the matter over” (64) or “since my return home” (158) or “I have since frequently examined my conduct” (66). Since returning home, Pym has done many things, including dying. Thus, when he reflects upon his adventures aboard the Ariel, he remarks, “when I now think of them, it appears to me a thousand wonders that I am alive to-day” (57). According to the concluding note of the narrative, however, he is not alive today. Or rather, he was alive on the day he was writing it, but now he is dead. When does this sentence stop making sense? When does that now stop being present and become past? Indeed, two crucial dates are missing from a text that is full of them: the date of Pym’s return and the date of his death. But there is even more to say about this ambiguity. When Pym says “we two have since very frequently talked the matter over” (64), he is referring to himself and Augustus, who, according to the narrative, dies on July 31, 1826. Since when?
Like the words now and present, since implies a temporal present against which the reader can separate past from present, but the narrative keeps changing when that present is. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, since, as an adverb, refers to “some or any time, between then and now; subsequently, later.” In Pym, since is accompanied by a verb in the perfect tense whose action takes place in the past and its effects continue into the present. What happens to those effects when the persons referred to as experiencing those effects into the present die? What happens when the present keeps changing?
The answer to this question is that there is no stable point against which since makes sense. There is no home port, no ground zero. What there is is a wholly individualized experience of time in which the present is perpetually relative. Put another way, the individualized experience, which is one of perpetual relativity, becomes the ground zero for telling time. The zero degree—both the Greenwich meridian and the present tense of Poe’s story—have been arbitrarily designated. And if anyone is to do the designating, it will be Poe. When is now is when Poe says it is. Poe asserts his power by creating a standard of time that is in a state of constant deviation. If we return to Pym—both the text and the time line of its production—we can see how this works.
A funny thing happens when the first two installments from the Southern Literary Messenger are published by Harper and Brothers in 1838.12 They are identical except in three places. Installment number 1 recounts the Ariel episode and the concluding paragraph of part 1 reads, “during the three or four months immediately succeeding the period of the Ariel’s disaster” (SLM 17). The paragraph in the 1838 edition, however, begins with: “about eighteen months after the period of the Ariel’s disaster” (65). A difference of fourteen or fifteen months. Also the length of the installments differs from the length of the chapters. Installment number 1 includes Pym and Augustus’s “scheme of deception,” which enables them to get on the Grampus against the wishes of Pym’s grandfather. The installment concludes, “vessels enough would be met with by which a letter might be sent home explaining the adventure to my parents” (SLM 17). In the Harper and Brothers edition the conclusion to installment 1 is the final sentence of the third paragraph in chapter 2.13
There is no evidence to suggest that these differences from magazine to book are typesetter errors, and common sense indicates “three or four months” and “eighteen months” look so dissimilar it is impossible to imagine a typesetter confusing them. Poe’s correspondence with Harper and Brothers suggests nothing about these alterations. A similar change appears if we look at the February 1837 installment in relation to the 1838 edition. Installment number 2 begins, “The middle of April at length arrived, and every thing had been matured” (SLM 109). In the Harper publication, the paragraph reads, “The middle of June at length arrived, and everything had been matured” (67). A difference of about two months. When Pym explains in the 1837 version that “the brig put to sea, as I had supposed, in about an hour after he had left the watch [which was on the twentieth of April]” (SLM 115), he maintains the consistency of the change by stating in the 1838 edition that the brig put to sea “on the twentieth of June” (84).
But consistency is not quite the right word. On the one hand, in changing April to June, Poe also changes April 20th to June 20th, but, on the other hand, why bother changing April to June? Similarly, why the change from “three or four months” to “about eighteen months?” The changes change nothing. It is completely unimportant whether they wait three months, four months, or eighteen months. It is also utterly irrelevant whether the brig leaves in April or June, the 15th or 20th. One could say the same about Pym’s statement that “when I had in some degree satisfied my thirst, Augustus produced from his pocket three or four boiled potatoes” (83). Three or four? What does it matter? Or Pym’s description of his dog’s behavior: “I first observed an alteration in his conduct while rubbing in the phosphorous on the paper in my last attempt. … Soon afterward, it will be remembered, I threw myself on the mattress, and fell into a species of lethargy. Presently I became aware of a singular hissing sound. … Presently I relapsed into my stupor from which I was again awakened in a similar manner. This was repeated three or four times” (81). Three or four, presently or afterward, first or again. It is the language of sequence that not only calls attention to its absolute meaninglessness but actually makes the sequence meaningless. All these words do is make the story longer and stop the reader in her tracks as she wonders about the significance of these numerical possibilities.14
As assertions of Poe’s power, however, they signify a great deal. In a story about extreme states of powerlessness, Poe preserves himself. The details of Poe’s composition of Pym provide a counternarrative to the story of decomposition that he tells in Pym. What is so fascinating about Poe’s assumption of authority in Pym is that the form it takes is an emptying out or decomposing of some of the fundamental assumptions the reader makes about narrative, especially tense. Roland Barthes observes that “when the novelist relates that the Marchioness went out at five o’clock,” such past tense (or preterite) statements “have the stability and outline of an algebra … which [makes] reality neither mysterious nor absurd; it is clear, almost familiar, repeatedly gathered up and contained in the hand of a creator; it is subjected to the ingenious pressure of his freedom.” Poe’s math is profoundly mysterious, often absurd. Poe’s expressions of ingenuity and freedom are found in the blurring of temporal outlines and the reader’s resulting perplexity. Poe’s hands are not unlike those of a magician, but of a different sort than Barthes imagines. Poe is uninterested in the “reassuring effect” that accompanies a narrative told in the past which “escapes the terror of an expression without laws.”15 He is continually bringing the reader back to an experience of “reading zero degree.” Reading and stopping time. Reading and going nowhere. Indeed, even the most careful reader has difficulty figuring out where things have gone when Poe’s hands are opened and nothing is there.
Writing Zero Degree: Latitude and Race
Thus far, my analysis of Pym has focused on the text’s refusal to keep its temporal markers consistent, propelling the reader into a zone of confusion, where “now” keeps changing. The text’s zero degree—its narrative Greenwich meridian—does not stay put as Poe decides when now is and now may change, depending upon the quantity of liquor consumed, the degree of fatigue, or the rotation of the earth. That is not to say Poe does not “assume the existence of a kind of zero degree” (36), to return to Genette. And that “kind” is the zero degree of latitude or the equator.
Unlike longitude, whose calculation is embedded in the complexities of time, latitude is a spatial construction that is comparatively easy to compute. This scientific principle applies to the narrative of Pym as well, where Pym’s experience of space is more easily narrated than his sense of time. When writing of his stowage aboard the Grampus, Pym writes: “in this space I found myself comfortably situated for the present” (99), despite being sandwiched “between the oil-casks and the upper deck” (99). Though trapped in space, he is relatively comfortable. One cannot say the same of Pym’s experience of being trapped in time. Why?
The answer is that, in Pym, the experience of space is made coherent by the putative clarity of racial categories. Images of black and white pervade the chapters with Captain Guy, the Liverpool merchant/explorer who, while sailing southward, “has purchased five hundred seal-skins and some ivory” (156). In their travels, they see “a gigantic creature of the race of the Arctic bear [whose] wool was perfectly white” (165). They encounter a group of savages, whose “complexion [was] a jet black. … They were clothed in skins of an unknown black animal …. [and] the bottoms of the canoes were full of black stones” (168). Finally, “nothing worth mentioning occurred during the next twenty-four hours, except that, in examining the ground to the eastward of the third chasm, we found two triangular holes of great depth, and also with black granite sides” (196). Race in Pym enables a degree of precision—“the exact situation of this islet” (165–66)—an exact zero degree that eludes temporal assignations.
Thus, while Pym delights in unraveling what the reader might have thought were the stable categories of past, present, and future, certain “laws of nature” remain operational (even if only to show that those laws are being broken) and necessary, the most significant being the racial distinctions between black and white. That Poe, the “average racist,” to use Terence Whalen’s designation, believes these laws help ensure the survival and prosperity of whites is clear; that their representation in his texts is more complex and self-aware is also true. Maurice S. Lee states the conundrum this way: “the problem is that such acute self-consciousness fails to raise Poe’s moral conscience.”16 Where is here is far less problematic for Poe than when is now. Racial certainty organizes the here, and not the now, which is to say that the lines of latitude in Pym are anchored by racial taxonomies, whereas the coordinates of longitude are subject to the relativity of time.
The first line of latitude to appear—35/30—is interpretively rich. Pym writes, in chapter 4, after the mutineers cut adrift: “This event happened, however, in latitude 35 degrees 30 minutes north, longitude 61 degree twenty minutes west, and consequently at no very great distance from the Bermuda Islands” (88). Poe does not use the Mason-Dixon Line’s 36 degrees latitude (but retains its thirty minutes) or the actual latitudinal designation of the Bermuda Islands, which is 32 degrees twenty minutes. No, he chooses 35. This numerical alteration could indicate a questioning of the latitudinal (and racist) logic inherent in the 1820 Missouri Compromise, similar to his skepticism about arbitrary longitudinal designations. This is not, however, the case. Poe might be willing to fictionalize the Mason-Dixon Line and change its latitude from 36 to 35, but he is not willing to dispute the underlying fictions of the Missouri Compromise that separated blacks and whites into slaves and free persons on the basis of a made-up line of latitude and an alleged sense of white superiority.
Racial hierarchy and the power of whiteness, though threatened in Pym, are nevertheless the zero degree against which the chaos of Tsalal can be measured: 35/30 provides Pym and Augustus with a kind of Mason-Dixon Line, an entrance into a dreamscape of the South, where “a singular ledge of rock … bear[s] a strong resemblance to corded bales of cotton” (165), where white men are threatened by wild black men. Although Pym will be buried alive here, there is an explanation for his experiences, and this gives the text a much surer sense of the causes and effects of Pym’s vulnerabilities. That is, as Pym enters a Benito Cereno–like world in which nothing is what it seems—“the islanders for whom we entertained such inordinate feelings of esteem, were among the most barbarous, subtle, and blood-thirsty wretches that ever contaminated the face of the globe” (180)—the reason for the gap between seeing and understanding is straightforward. It is race.
Race appears early on in Pym through the hybrid figure of Peters and the black cook, but it assumes center stage in the text’s second half, about which Whalen observes: “a break in the style and purpose of the narrative coincides with Pym’s rescue by the British Schooner Jane Guy.”17 It also coincides with their crossing the Equator—latitude zero—which Pym describes in chapter 12: “At noon the sun appeared to be nearly vertical, and we had no doubt that we had been driven down by the long succession of northward and northwesterly winds into the near vicinity of the equator” (140). In addition to a “break in the style and purpose,” there is also a break from north to south, from white to black, and from longitude to latitude. This break happens at the center of the text (the narrative’s equator, as it were) and provides Pym with its zero degree—race. The latitudinal certainty of the equator (35/30 is one degree off) gives Pym’s narrative the stable point of reference that Poe’s temporal aesthetics have been working so hard (and successfully) to unmoor.
I do not mean to imply that Poe’s narrative experimentation ends with the crossing of the equator. Later chapters contain phrases such as “which I mentioned before” (188) or “during the six or seven days immediately following” (191). Yet, as formally chaotic as those final chapters may be, the chaos is a product of what Poe imagines to be the natural and necessary differences between black and white. The undoing of these differences represents a comforting, familiar chaos. White men are buried alive. Hieroglyphs need deciphering. Whatever chaos there is can be explained in terms of black and white. Unlike narrative time, which flows along the unstable axis of longitude, racial difference and its “laws of nature” operate according to the axis of the equator. In other words, those laws regarding the naturalness of racial difference, arbitrary and relativistic as we know them to be, provide the text with a zero degree, even as those laws get broken.
Latitude is therefore aligned with space, and space is aligned with a certitude about race, which ironically leads Poe into a kind of comfort zone where the relativity of time is replaced by the reliability of racial terror. For example, Nu-Nu, Pym’s island captive, is “violently affected with convulsions” upon seeing a “white handkerchief” (204) and Pym, upon seeing “a large black bird of the bittern species” is “so much startled that [he] could do nothing” (188). Both are made prostrate by the other’s presence. Based on these similar responses, one could say that Poe collapses racial difference (white and black react the same to the terrifying presence of one another) to demonstrate a progressive perspective about the similarities between races or one could say that the collapse of racial difference engenders such horror (white and black are terrified by the presence of one another) to argue a racist position about the incontrovertible oppositionality between the races. Fright can be counted on because of essential differences between black and white that ought to be preserved. When they are not, there is terror, and there is nothing relative about this.
Poe’s racial politics have received extensive analysis, though as Jared Gardner observes: “[the] resurgence of interest of late in Poe’s thoughts on slavery [is] somewhat curious in that Poe’s opinions on the subject have long been quite visible: he supported slavery both as a southerner and as an individual.” The first approach to the question of Poe and race is perhaps best represented by John Carlos Rowe, who argues that Poe’s racism is evident in both content and form. The second takes Poe’s racism as its departure point and reads the text against the grain. Dana D. Nelson contends, “while on one level Pym is a racist text, on another the text provides a reading that counters racist colonial ideology, and the racialist, scientific knowledge structure.” Teresa Goddu similarly reads Pym as “deploy[ing] and reinforc[ing] social stereotypes,” while nevertheless “reveal[ing] race to be a social invention.” On this view, Poe’s racism is somewhat less baleful because the text “point[s] out that [racial fantasy] is merely a representation.” At least he knows he is a racist.18
That Pym “transgresses” the color line “instead of policing it,” according to Goddu, has been taken as a sign that his representations of race run counter to his personal politics (87); that is, his inability to police the line makes him someone who does not fully believe in it or someone who understands its arbitrariness. But just because Poe via Pym might voice a constructivist’s view of race does not mean that he thinks the line is bogus (because arbitrary) or that it should be crossed. That the line is transgressed is certainly true. The hybrid Peters both rescues Pym and has the “merriment … of a demon” (87). Whiteness, like the “white ashy shower” and the “white birds” (205) at Pym’s end can terrify as much as blackness. These representations, however, need not be unconscious admissions of ideological complexity (and therefore a resistant racism), but might simply be Poe’s observation that white and black are sometimes proximate. “Whiteness,” Pym writes, “is no longer transparent” (204). Nevertheless, the desirability of pure whiteness remains, either in its negative articulation (“living inhumation” is “the blackness of darkness” [182]) or its positive (the Arctic bear’s wool “was perfectly white” [165]). White’s perfection becomes marred as liquid whiteness comes to possess “a milky consistency and hue” and “a fine white resemble[s] ashes” (204). Crossing the zero degree of the equator is entering a state (of mind, of place, of color) with its own experience of disorientation, but, unlike the unending relativity of the temporal variety, this confusion is binary, locatable, and color-coded. Poe’s works, as Toni Morrison observes, are constituted by an “Africanist” presence that is a “haunting … that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing.”19 Following Morrison’s claim, Gardner argues that Poe requires this haunting because “racial difference [is] the condition—the ground—for an American writing” (141). The ground zero we might say.
Rather than trying to save Poe from his politics (or repudiate him because of them), I have been proposing an approach that allows us to see how Pym’s “chronopolitics” are embedded in an authorial and national will to power that pulls the text in antipodal directions. One subtends a logic of slavery by representing the conquering of space and (black) people who inhabit it as the result of a natural superiority grounded in race. The other undercuts that logic by dismantling the temporal pillar upon which that understanding of space rests. Poe’s aesthetics of temporality, in other words, replicates and enforces the arbitrary assertion of power, but at the same time problematizes it. Ironically, Poe’s “narrative interferences” interfere with the racist logic of Pym’s final episodes. Poe tries to retrieve and deploy the category of time as an instrument of conquest and hierarchy in his account of Nu-Nu’s brutality. The episodes with the Tsalalians, described as “savages” (196), capture the temporal certainty that, according to Fabian, is essential to imperialism.20 Indeed, there is one especially powerful moment when Pym finds its narrative zero degree and the disorientation of relativity has been temporarily suspended. In what is perhaps Pym’s shortest sentence, Nu-nu’s teeth are described: “These were black” (205). There is no need for more length. Racial clarity has replaced temporal uncertainty. The vicissitudes of “now” are anchored in space, made coherent by racial categories. Poe’s experiment with narrative temporality has at last, or at length, come to an end.
Until we read the note with which the story concludes—yet again. This note informs us that Pym has died, creating a gap in the narrative “of two or three final chapters (for there were but two or three)” (207). The chaos and crisis are back. Unlike the figure of “the perfect whiteness of the snow” (206)—the perfection of racial purity—the numbers are relative. Is it two or three? That question gets asked not once but twice. The South would go to war for this figure of whiteness, and Poe would undoubtedly have supported it. The perfection or racial purity of that figure of white holds things in check for just a moment, disclosing Poe’s historical and geographical past as an antebellum Southerner, but then his conviction of temporal disturbance and relativity asserts itself, revealing his future canonization as an American (post)modernist before his time. Two or three; his “now” is both.
Notes
I would like to thank the editors at Poe Studies, where a longer version of this essay first appeared, for their generosity. Special thanks go to Geoffrey Sanborn and Scott Peeples for their terrifically helpful readings.
1. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 144.
2. Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin, foreword by Jonathan Culler (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 40.
3. Pollin notes that Augustus’s father’s “chronometer” is more likely a pocket watch because a chronometer with its “balance wheel, escapement, and gear train” (243) would not fit in a pocket. This is, however, another case where Pym as fiction runs counter to Pym as fact. It is a fact that a chronometer does not fit into one’s pocket; however, Poe uses the word chronometer in order to establish the importance of tracking latitude and longitude on board the Grampus, and the subsequent importance of losing that device. Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1: The Imaginary Voyages, ed. Burton R. Pollin (New York: Gordian, 1981), 243, note 4.3B. Scott Peeples’s analysis of Pym correctly notes, “Regardless of Poe’s intentions, however, to read such an error-laden text—assuming one notices the errors—is to be constantly reminded of its fictional nature, no matter how much nautical (and botanical and zoological) detail Poe includes to convince us that the story is ‘real.’” Peeples, Edgar Allan Poe Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1998), 61. Similarly, J. Gerald Kennedy maintains, “even the simplest declarative sentence … refers not to a pure, immanent fact but to what the speaker or writer wishes his audience to construe as a fact,” which leads him to conclude that “any textual distinction between truth and fiction must remain intractably problematic. J. Gerald Kennedy, Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 150–51.
4. Pollin, Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, 165, 168. All further quotations from Pym will be from this edition, incorporated parenthetically into the text. My reading of Poe’s relation to language is influenced by Sam Worley’s work on Pym as a critical reflection of pro-slavery discourse, which upholds “the vision of a social hierarchy that manifested itself in varying degrees of linguistic authority.” Worley, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the Ideology of Slavery,” ESQ 40, no. 3 (1994): 222. Whereas Worley uses Poe’s self-conscious suspicion about language’s transparency to argue for Poe’s covert critique of the pro-slavery position, I maintain that his assertions of “linguistic authority” actually and ironically get in the way of the text’s racist vision.
5. Epigraph from Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1: Tales and Sketches, 1831–1842, ed. T. O. Mabbott (Cambridge: Belknap, 1969, 1978), 684. Quotations taken from Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 15; I. M. Walker, ed., Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 93, 96.
6. Walker, Edgar Allan Poe, 91, quoted in J. Don Vann, “Three More Contemporary Reviews of Pym,” Poe Studies 9, no. 2 (June 1976): 43; Walker, Edgar Allan Poe, 97.
7. Walker, Edgar Allan Poe, 98.
8. Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Penguin, 1995), 14.
9. Here is another case where Poe calls attention to the fictional status of his text, even as he invokes the verisimilitude of the travel narrative. It is one thing—and acceptable—for Benjamin Morrell to have a title page that exceeds the length of some paragraphs; it is another thing altogether (which I am calling parodic) for Poe to have this kind of title page. Morrell’s title, upon which Poe based his, is A Narrative of Four Voyages, to the South Sea, North and South Pacific Ocean, Chinese Sea, Ethiopic and Southern Atlantic Ocean, Indian and Antarctic Ocean. From the Year 1822 to 1831. Comprising Critical Surveys of Coasts and Islands, with Sailing Directions. And an Account of Some New and Valuable Discoveries, Including the Massacre Islands, where Thirteen of the Author’s Crew were Massacred and Eaten by Cannibals. To which is Prefixed a Brief Sketch of the Author’s Early Life.
10. Walker, Edgar Allan Poe, 94.
11. Of course, plagiarizing from other texts is another fundamental way in which Poe lengthens Pym. For an excellent account of Poe’s “defense of plagiarism” (213) as authorial mastery, see Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting: 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), especially 204–17. My reading of Pym’s self-conscious lengthening develops Richard Kopley’s claim that Pym is “striking [in] its economy.” Kopley, “The ‘Very Profound Under-Current’ of Arthur Gordon Pym,” in Joel Meyerson, ed., Studies in the American Renaissance 1987 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1987), 157. Its economy is indeed striking by virtue of its relentless profusion of sameness in the guise of difference. Rather than interpreting the novel as “dense with language conveying multiple meanings” (157), which has been the quite fruitful allegorical approach taken by Kopley and others, I read Pym as creating the illusion of a text “dense with language” conveying multiple meanings; in other words, it is just dense with words.
12. The citations from the Southern Literary Messenger installments are taken from the “Making of America” Web site. http://www.hti.umich.edu. Page references will be provided parenthetically within the text. Also see Pollin, Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, 211–14. Pollin bases his edition on the 1838 Harper and Brothers text, but he provides a list of Southern Literary Messenger variants as well as a discussion of changes, throughout the “Notes and Comments” section, reflected in the Harper version.
13. Here I am going over points made in Pollin’s edition, but with the goal of demonstrating how Poe’s authorial mastery of time in the context of the material production of Pym is replicated in the narrative technique of Pym. Pollin remarks upon “this gross discrepancy of narrative time” (Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, 216), which I read in the context of Poe’s desire to assert his authorial power.
14. Louis Renza makes a similar point: “as allegories of their process of misreading, his tales never quite exist.” Louis A. Renza, “Poe’s Secret Autobiography,” in Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease, eds., The American Renaissance Reconsidered (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 70. There is an impressive body of criticism on Pym that takes a deconstructive approach, for example, John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980); and John Carlos Rowe, Through the Custom House: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Modern Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Richard Kopley takes a different approach to Poe’s use of allegory, and offers two readings in essays from the 1980s that do not take the deconstructive approach (Poe’s allegory is an allegory of reading), but rather see Poe’s allegory as having a psychological referent as well as a biblical one. For the more psychologically inflected reading (Pym as an allegory of the deaths of Poe’s brother and mother), see “The Hidden Journey of Arthur Gordon Pym,” in Joel Myerson, ed., Studies of the American Renaissance 1982 (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 29–51. Pym as biblical allegory can be found in Kopley, “The ‘Very Profound Under-Current’ of Arthur Gordon Pym”: “Even as the Tsalal landslide … allegorically represents the destruction of Jerusalem as prophesied in Isaiah, so, too, does Pym’s imaging the ‘human figure’ in the Tsalal chasm … allegorically represent John of Patmos’ first seeing Christ in Revelation” (156).
15. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 31, 32.
16. Maurice S. Lee, Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 46. For an excellent overview (and critique) of how literary critics have discussed, ignored, and/or simplified the question of Poe and race, see Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), chapter 5, “Average Racism: Poe, Slavery, and the Wages of Literary Nationalism” (111–46). My reading of Pym has been guided by Whalen’s historically rigorous and deeply sensible approach: “the case of Poe demonstrates the importance of race in determining what literature is—the form and meaning of its sentences, the form and meaning of its silences” (146).
17. Whalen, Poe and the Masses, 160.
18. Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 129; John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 70, and “Poe, Antebellum Slavery, and Modern Criticism,” in Richard Kopley, ed., Poe’s “Pym”: Critical Explorations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 117; Dana D. Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature, 1638–1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 29; Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 86. Further references to Gardner and Goddu will be given parenthetically within the text.
19. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993), 33; Gardner, Master Plots, 141.
20. The temporal remoteness and fixity (and decimation) of the black Tsalalians would seem to be predicted in Poe’s 1837 New York Review notice of John L. Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea and the Holy Land, where Poe writes about Egypt, “it, however, was distinctly foretold that this country of kings should no longer have one of its own—that it should be laid waste by the hand of strangers—that it should be a base kingdom, the basest of the base—that it should never again exalt itself among the nations—that it should be a desolation surrounded by desolation. Two thousand years have now afforded their testimony to the infallibility of the Divine word, and the evidence is still accumulative. ‘Its past and present degeneracy bears not a more remote resemblance to the former greatness and pride of its power, than the frailty of its mud-walled fabrics now bears to the stability of its imperishable pyramids’” (Thompson, Edgar Allan Poe, 926).