Endnotes
Poems
1 (p. 8) Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? l... The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?: In classical mythology, Diana, called Artemis by the Romans, is the goddess of the forest, childbirth, and the moon; hamadryads, or dryads, are nymphs associated with trees, and naiads are nymphs associated with rivers and streams. Elfin means elflike or charming (in contexts of magic). Tamarind trees, native to the Orient, have brightly colored, delightfully fragrant flowers and seedpods that are used as a spice. Poe’s mythological beings are adapted from Studies of Nature (1796), Henry Hunter’s English translation of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Ètudes de la Nature. Along with the trite metaphors and allusions, this borrowing is a giveaway to Poe’s casting his “poet” as pathetic. Poe’s use of Saint-Pierre’s book was recorded by Palmer C. Holt in “Notes on Poe’s ‘To Science,’ ‘To Helen,’ and ‘Ulalume’,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 63 (1959): p. 568. This poem is also an early treatment of male-female oppositions, which will frequently recur in Poe’s creative writings.
2 (p. 11) the angel Israfel: Israfel, or Israfil, is described in the Koran as the angel of music, possessing a beautiful voice; thus he provides a perfect type for Poe’s idea of poets as singers. Poe’s knowledge of Israfel derives from George Sale’s information in his translation of the Koran (1734).
3 (p. 13) Helen, thy beauty is to me /... Are Holy Land!: According to classical legend, Helen of Troy was the most beautiful woman in the world. Nicéan defies precise definition, although it may allude to various conflicts in ancient classical or Christian lore. Naiad here means simply “graceful” or “beautiful.” Psyche was a beautiful woman of classical mythology whose lamp illuminated for her the features of her lover, Cupid, while he slept; Psyche may also mean “soul,” and in combination these associations characterize her as an illuminator—that is, a nurturer, mind-healer, or imaginative inspirer. She ultimately married her lover and was brought to heaven, and thus she is typically represented with wings.
4 (p. 24) Lenore: Lenore derives from the same word root as Helen (see note 3, above). Both carry implications of great beauty and dazzling light, and in both of Poe’s poems the combination may serve intentionally to blur physical and ideal attractiveness.
5 (p. 25) Perched upon a bust of Pallas: Pallas Athena is the Greek goddess of intellectual wisdom. The marble bust here may be pallid—that is, white or pale. The bird’s choice of this perch is symbolic: Rationality will give way to irrationality.
6 (p. 28) It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, /... In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir—: Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782-1871) was a French composer, chiefly of operas. Robert Weir (1803—1889) was an American painter of the Hudson River School, noted for romantic and inspirational landscapes; ghouls here seem to be portrayed more kindly than usual.
7 (p.28) Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul: Cypress trees are emblematic of death and mourning (see “Morella” for a similar theme). Psyche, the classical representation of the soul (see note 3, above), refers here more precisely to intuition, which cautions the speaker against proceeding; ignoring her counsel brings about his emotional tragedy.
8 (p.28) Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek /In the realms of the boreal pole: Yaanek defies precise definition because Poe’s context blurs Arctic and Antarctic implications. Poe may be alluding here to Mount Erebus, the only active volcano in Antarctica.
9 (p. 29) And has come past the stars of the Lion: This is a reference to the astrological sign of Leo. Intersections of Venus with Leo reputedly encourage lust and are unfavorable to love and marriage; thus this line reinforces Psyche’s counsel to the speaker in the next stanza.
Tales
1 (p. 45) Pestis eram vivus—moriens tua mors ero.—Martin Luther: The Latin quotation, from German religious reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546), translates as, “Living I have been your plague—dying I shall be your death.” This idea dovetails with that of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls from one kind of body to another, whether from one human to another or between humans and animals or vice versa. Poe repeats this theme in several of his works.
2 (p. 46) out-Heroded Herod: This is a paraphrase of a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (act 3, scene 2). The expression means to be more extreme than Herod, the biblical king of Judea, who ordered the slaughter of male infants in hope of eradicating the Christ-child. Poe uses the phrase again in “The Masque of the Red Death” and “William Wilson.”
3 (p. 53) Quand un bon vin meuble mon estomac /... Presenter du tabac: The French translates as: “When a fine wine fills my stomach / I am more learned than Balzac—/ Smarter than Pibrac; / My single arm attacking / The nation of the Cossacks, / Would achieve a sack; / I would cross Charon’s lake / Sleeping in his craft; / Would take pride in going to Aeacus, / Without my heart beating tick-tack, / To offer him snuff.” In Greek mythology, Charon is a ferryman of souls to the underworld, and Aeacus is a judge in the underworld.
4 (p. 70) After many years spent in foreign travel, ... the vessel consequently crank: Places cited in these two paragraphs include Batavia, a city on the northwestern coast of Java, and the Lachadive, or Laccadive, Islands, which lie west of India. Coir, a fiber from coconut husks, is used to make ropes and mats. Jaggeree, or jaggery, is sugar made from coconuts or palm sap; ghee is clarified butter, which is used especially in Indian cooking. Crank here denotes instability; that is, the ship is in danger of upsetting.
5 (p. 78) we are whirling dizzily, in ... a gigantic amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls is lost in the darkness and the distance: The ship’s sensational descent alludes to a theory popular in Poe’s day—that there were “holes at the poles” through which one could penetrate to the center of the earth.
6 (p. 101) My books, at this epoch, ... many weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation: The titles in this paragraph refer to early treatises on religious philosophy. The Latin phrase, from De Carne Christi (On the Flesh of Christ), by the early-second-century Christian writer Tertullian, translates as, “The Son of God has died, it is to be believed because it is incredible, and was buried; he is risen, certainly, because it is impossible.”
7 (p. 107) It is unnecessary ... from the marked and agitated manner in which Morella mentioned them: The ideas concerning human will and identity expressed in this paragraph involve ancient Greek (Pythagoras) and eighteenth-century German (Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich von Schelling) philosophic thought. John Locke, a seventeenth-century English philosopher, also took great interest in issues of identity. Poe’s narrator is fascinated with the idea that identity, or will, may continue after death of the physical body.
8 (p. 120) “‘His Grace the Arch Duke Pest-Iferous... the Arch Duchess Ana-Pest.”’: The names are comic references to the pest, or plague, although the final name may be a pun on the poetic term anapest (a metrical foot that comprises two unstressed syllables and one stressed syllable).
9 (p. 126) the well of Democritus: No such quotation appears in the writings of Democritus, the early Greek philosopher-scientist (born c.460 B.C.), but Poe repeats the phrase several times in his writings.
10 (p. 142) “set of articles, in the way of model or study”: The articles named in the following text appeared, with one exception, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine between 1821 and 1837. Confessions of an English Opium Eater, by Thomas De Quincey, originally appeared serially in London Magazine in September and October 1821; expanded, it appeared in book form the following year.
11 (p. 147) “you can tell him from Lucan ... a phrase which Silius Italicus ... applies to thoughts pompous and inflated”: Neither of the two foreign phrases comes from the author designated. The passage supposedly from Lucan (a first-century Roman poet) actually comes from another classical writer, Greek satirist and rhetorician Lucian (c.115-200 A.D.); Poe may have been careless or he may have deliberately confused the names to test his readers—or a compositor’s error may have caused the substitution. The “Silius Italicus” passage actually comes from a Latin translation of Longinus (a first-century Greek critic), which Poe knew and had correctly cited in an earlier version of this story.
12 (p. 159) Son cœur est un luth suspendu; l Sitôt qu‘on le touche il résonne.—De Béranger: The motto is an inexact rendering of a written remark by French poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780-1857). It maybe translated: “His heart is a suspended lute; / When touched it reverberates.” A lute is a heart-shaped, stringed instrument. Poe may also allude to a device popular in his era, an aeolian harp, a stringed instrument placed in open windows, where the wind’s pressure created “music” of an involuntary type. An aeolian harp fittingly symbolizes instabilities in Roderick Usher and the narrator.
13 (pp. 167—168) In the greenest of our valleys, /... And laugh—but smile no more: This poem first appeared in the Baltimore American Museum (April 1839). Its placement at roughly midpoint in the tale and its lyrical intensity make it a deft epitome of Roderick’s physical-emotional collapse, which in turn is mirrored in the responses of the narrator.
14 (p. 168) the sentience of all vegetable things: Sentience in this context refers to the endowment of vegetable matter with mental-emotional responsiveness. Specifically, the stunted, decayed growth evident in the “singularly dreary tract of country” traveled by the narrator as well as the fungi that overspreads the mansion (which closely resembles Usher’s hair) symbolize the physical appearances and, more significant, the decayed emotional makeup of the major characters.
15 (p. 169) such works as the “Ververt et Chartreuse” ... the Vigiliœ Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiœ Maguntinœ: Most of these books treat variously sacred or profane subjects (several of which again concern animal-vegetable bondings or nature-worship, in which Pan and satyrs may figure), sometimes with comic implications (as in the mock epic Ver- Vert [1734], by French satirical writer Jean-Baptiste Louis Gresset), unstable male-female relationships, or mysticism or magic. The Directorium Inquisitorium (1376), by Spanish theologian Nicolás Eymeric, was used for examining heretics; its inclusion in this list may suggest that Roderick was himself a heretic, or that he wished to know what constituted a heretic. The Vigiliae was used as a mass for the dead at the Second Church in Mainz, Germany (1500), and was also invoked to keep vampires at bay. As such it may gloss the role of Madeline Usher, who could be a vampire—used by Poe, to be sure, for symbolic purpose in the tale. Thus Roderick may not wish to place her in the remote family graveyard because he may fear what the doctor may find, should he exhume her body to be used for medical purposes.
16 (p.202) “Chantilly, Orion, Dr. Nichols, Epicurus, Stereotomy, the street stones, the fruiterer”: This exemplifies Dupin’s quick-witted train of thought, which takes intuitive leaps from seventeenth-century astronomy (the constellation Orion), to the Greek philosopher Epicurus’ theory of atoms, to stonecutting (stereotomy) and street-paving, to the collision of the narrator with the fruit seller. Dupin explains himself in subsequent paragraphs.
17 (p. 248) Mr. Coleridge would have called mystical, Mr. Kant pantheistical, Mr. Carlyle twistical, and Mr. Emerson hyperquizzitistical ... I vowed to serve him as St. Patrick... served the toad: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was an English Romantic poet and philosophical prose writer; Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), a German philosopher; Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), a Scottish essayist and historian; and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), an American lecturer, essayist, and poet. Poe generally portrays them as writers whose meanings were obscure, a thought borne out by his own invented comic word “hyperquizzitistical.” No specific source for the allusion to Saint Patrick (a fifth-century Irish apostle reputed to have freed Ireland of snakes) has been found, although Poe used it in another bit of writing, “Fifty Suggestions” (1849).
18 (p. 255) play unto its riddle the Œdipus: In Greek mythology, the Sphinx, a horrifying monster, ate all passersby who could not solve its riddle, “What animal goes on four feet in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?” Oedipus correctly answered that a human crawls on hands and knees as a child, walks upright in adulthood, and uses a cane in old age.
19 (p. 261) The Masque of the Red Death: A masque is a brief but elaborate play originally intended for performance at a royal court (especially popular in Great Britain from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries). Masques incorporated music, dance, poetic drama, and ornate costumes, and often had origins in myth or allegory. Poe’s tale includes all of these elements. Double-masqueing is used for the overall tale and for the stylized action of Prospero and the masquer in the conclusion.
20 (p. 261) The “Red Death”: The twice-repeated “Red Death” may indicate that the term has special significance for Prospero and his followers: They alone give a negative name to what may be one of life’s most firm realities—that is, blood. Blood’s association with life and death, and those in turn with change and time, is what this group wish to evade.
21 (p. 262) But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held ... bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all: Varied interpretations of the “meaning” of the seven chambers are possible, the most likely being that they represent the seven stages of human life from birth to death. The primary blackness in the seventh chamber most probably symbolizes death; the accompanying red illumination, with its obvious tie to blood, may likewise represent sexuality as the originator of life, but also, in colloquial parlance, hint of “dying” or sexual climax.
22 (p. 265) It was in the blue room where stood the prince, with a group of pale courtiers by his side: Significantly, Prospero is in the blue room (suggesting that his notion is naive youth’s feeling of invincibility) when he initiates the action that will bring about the climax of the tale. Blue here suggests a pleasant dawn—in this context, of life. A common interpretation of the color scheme in the tale is that it symbolizes a progression from birth or youth on to death. The scarlet chamber’s color symbolizes blood and perhaps sex, which leads to new blood (life). The black chamber symbolizes death.
23 (p. 266) And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all: Fittingly, the end—of the fantasy cherished by Prospero and his followers, and of all life—occurs in the black and red chamber, where the color scheme and the clock (decor) represent the inevitability of life’s processes.
24 (p. 267) Impia tortorum longas hic turba furores /... [Quatrain composed for the gates of a market to be erected upon the site of the Jacobin Club House at Paris]: No gates or inscription were used for this market. The Latin translates as, “Here the wicked troop of torturers / Insatiable, maintained their long-enduring lusts for innocent blood. / Now, the fatherland saved and the dungeon of death destroyed, / Life and safety abound where death once ruled.”
25 (p. 280) It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies: This is a reference to the Peninsular War (1808-1814), fought when Spain, with the help of the English, rebelled against French domination under Napoleon I; during the war, General Antoine Chevalier Louis Colbert, comte de Lasalle, and his troops penetrated Toledo.
26 (p. 301) executing a series of curvets and caracols: Curvet and caracole are terms from horsemanship for complicated steps and turns. Perhaps Legrand’s type of erratic dance here alludes to tarantism (see the epigraph to this tale and the footnote on p. 286).
27 (p.309) “Well, a kid then”... “Captain Kidd”: The “kid-Kidd” pun is typical of Poe’s wordplay. Captain William Kidd (1645?-1701 ) was a Scottish sea captain who migrated to New York, eventually turned pirate, and was captured and hanged. Legends of his immense buried treasure continue to resurface.
28 (p. 310) “53‡‡†305)) ... 188; ‡?;” [coded message]: The message in the cipher, or cryptograph, which is somewhat inaccurate, is provided subsequently in the text.
29 (p. 320) superstition, ... which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise.... I mention the matter at all for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be remembered: The narrator may be recalling the superstition about black cats and the supernatural because he has recognized credibility in the belief. Thus Poe creates another irony among the many in his creative writings.
30 (pp. 320-321) The fury of a demon instantly possessed me.... a more than fiendish malevolence.... I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity: The “demon-fiendish-damnable” context maintains the aura of supernaturalism hovering about this tale, as do the narrator’s ensuing thoughts about perversity.
31 (p. 325) Goaded by the interference into a rage more than demoniacal: The narrator’s rage, like that mentioned earlier, once more aligns him with supernaturalism and damnation.
32 (p. 325) I determined to wall it up in the cellar, as the monks of the Middle Ages are recorded to have walled up their victims: This allusion to monks in the Middle Ages recalls the immensely popular theme of live burial in Gothic fiction. Poe’s repeated use of live burial, however, may also relate to the very real paranoia of being buried alive at a time when embalming was not so widespread as it is now. Newspaper features concerning fear of premature burial appeared in the United States as late as the 1920s. Poe often uses live burials to symbolize mental disintegration in his characters, although he could also take a playful attitude toward this aspect of popular culture—for example, in “The Premature Burial.”
33 (p. 327) But may God shield and deliver me from ... the demons that exult in the damnation: The word choices in this paragraph—“inhuman,” “hell,” “damned,” “demons,” “damnation”—echo those mentioned previously (see note 30, above). Thus they reinforce the fact that the narrator’s repetitions are verbal registers of his warped psyche, just as do his rapping on the wall and its outcome.
34 (p. 330) The box in question ... could possibly contain nothing in the world but a copy of Leonardo’s “Last Supper”; and a copy of this very “Last Supper,” done by Rubini the younger, at Florence: The box is, of course, coffin-shaped, although one so shaped might be used to transport valuable paintings. The Last Supper is the renowned, frequently copied painting by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). The original was painted on a wall in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan. Rubini cannot be precisely identified; several Italian painters bore that name.
35 (p. 330) I resolved to quiz him well, now and hereafter: Quiz means “to question closely,” but also, especially in Poe’s era, “to tease.” The narrator, like many of Poe’s others, “sees” incorrectly the events transpiring before him. Comparable are the narrators in “The Assignation,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” and “The Sphinx”; likewise the speakers in “The Raven” and “Ulalume: A Ballad.”
36 (p. 341) the habitual use of morphine: Morphine may help to account for the mysterious circumstances that follow.
37 (p. 349) There are certain themes ... which are too entirely horrible ... we should regard them with simple abhorrence: In this passage, the quoted phrase “pleasurable pain” has no definite source, but an approximate wording, “pleasing pain,” may come from English poet Edmund Spenser’s long poem The Faerie Queen (1590). Poe goes on to describe several “horrible themes”: Napoleon lost more than 20,000 men while crossing the half-frozen Berezina River during his retreat from Russia in November 1812; the Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755, killed more than 30,000; the London plague of 1655 killed 80,000; the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, beginning August 24, 1572, resulted in the deaths of 100,000 French Huguenots (Protestants); the Black Hole of Calcutta was an Indian site where 100 English prisoners were suffocated in a tiny prison.
38 (p. 352) The Chirurgical Journal of Leipsic: No Chirurgical Journal from Leipsic (a city in Germany) has been found. This citation may be one of Poe’s hoaxes, especially since it is part of a comic tale.
39 (p. 353) well-known and very extraordinary case ... a very profound sensation wherever it was made the subject of converse: Poe’s source was “The Buried Alive,” a terror tale in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (October 1821), a piece also cited in “How to Write a Blackwood Article.” Poe perhaps jokes at the expense of Blackwood’s tales of sensation, and at his own expense, too, because in his earlier tale Mr. Blackwood had counseled his listener to write tales about the sensations, listing several in which the central interest would indeed have been “a very profound sensation.”
40 (p. 353) the numerous corps of body-snatchers with which London abounds: The reference is to the old practice of robbing graves for corpses to sell for medical dissections. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick Usher was reluctant to bury his sister in their isolated graveyard, fearing that she would be exhumed. English novelist Charles Dickens features a professional “resurrection man,” Jerry Cruncher, in A Tale of Two Cities (1859); Jerry sickens of his work, however, and turns to other occupations. Possibilities of premature burial were far more likely in Poe’s day than our own, and this lengthy paragraph bears out the intensity of such concerns.
41 (p. 355) Conqueror Worm: This phrase also occurs in “Ligeia” and in a poem used in that tale, which was published separately as “The Conqueror Worm” in Graham’s Magazine (January 1843). Worms are mentioned in a more pleasant context in “The Sleeper.”
42 (p. 361 ) “Buchan” I burned. I read no “Night Thoughts”—no fustian about church-yards —no bugaboo tales—such as this: Scottish physician William Buchan published Domestic Medicine; or The Family Physician (1769), which continued long acclaimed. “Night Thoughts” refers to British poet Edward Young’s The Complaint; or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742), which stands as an important “Graveyard School” poem—that is, a poem about death and pertinent customs. Bugaboo tales are stories about imaginary fears—for example, those regarding premature burial.
43 (p. 361) There are moments when ... they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish: Poe adapted this paragraph from Horace Binney Wallace’s novel Stanley (1838), although he also knew firsthand William Beckford’s Oriental-Gothic novel Vathek (1786), in which Carathis, Vathek’s mother, is a witch who ultimately explores and is retained in the caverns of Eblis, ruler of the underworld. Afrasiab is the legendary evil king of Turan (western Turkistan), who betrayed Rustum, the Persian hero, to a horrible death rife with swords and spears; Rustum managed, however, to kill his enemy with an arrow. Oxus is the ancient name of the Amu Dar‘ya, a long river in central Asia.
44 (p. 371) “Rochefoucault, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli, and to Campanella”: François de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) is a French author remembered for his Reflections (1665, 1678), a collection of moral epigrams. La Bougive is not identified, though some have argued that Poe really meant Jean de la Bruyère (1645-1696), whose detachment resembles Dupin’s. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) is renowned for outlining methods by which a prince may acquire power (The Prince, 1513). Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) is an Italian intellectual whose work Poe probably knew by way of citations and quotations in works of other writers; Campanella had the same ability as Dupin to perceive the thoughts and consequent actions of others.
45 (p. 373) “he is merely guilty of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all poets are fools”: The Latin translates as “the undistributed middle.” The meaning here is that all poets are not fools. Here, more explicitly than elsewhere, perhaps, Poe emphasizes balance between rational intellectuality, represented by the mathematician, and imagination, represented by the poet. Dupin’s abilities in unraveling crime mysteries reveal that he embodies such balance. If he and the Minister D__ are brothers, maybe even twins, he can understandably comprehend his opponent’s thoughts and actions. Among those who cannot fathom in this way are the Prefect, Dupin’s companion-narrator, Roderick Usher, William Wilson the narrator, and the protagonists in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Assignation,” “Berenice,” “Morella,” “Ligeia,” and “The Sphinx.”
46 (p. 374) “x2 + px was absolutely and unconditionally equal to q ... he will endeavor to knock you down”: This is a nonsensical mathematical formula, and the response of an informed mathematician may also serve as humor, insinuated here by Dupin—and behind his remark lurks the joker in Poe.
47 (p.377) “In this rack, which had three or four compartments, were five or six visiting cards and a solitary letter”: The letter consists of a four-page sheet containing the text on page 1 and the address on page 4. These could be turned inside out and redirected, a fact that Dupin soon discovers to be the case. When Dupin sees the Minister’s personal seal and the apparent indifference of the Minister’s handling of the letter, he realizes how his customarily neat, orderly opponent had disguised the document, which the police never thought to examine.
48 (p.379) “’Un dessein si funeste, l ... They are to be found in Crébillon’s ‘Atrée’”: “ ‘A plot so deadly, / if unworthy of Atreus, is worthy of Thyestes”’ (French); the quotation is from Atrée et Thyeste (1707), a tragic play by French dramatist Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon. Thyestes has seduced Atreus’ wife and plans to murder him. Knowing of this scheme, Atreus murders Thyestes’ sons and serves them to him at a banquet, after which Thyestes invokes a curse on the house of Atreus. Dupin’s implication is that the Minister D__ had not planned as carefully as he should have.
49 (p. 381) When he had gone ... and excited in my bosom a feeling of mingled respect, interest, and admiration: In this and the preceding paragraph are additional resemblances to “The Fall of the House of Usher”: In that story the narrator, like this one, sees a person depart the mansion, not to be seen again. The “ushered me” phrase is identical with one in the earlier tale (where it seems to be a pun), and the presence of an “excessively ... pale woman” dressed in mourning attire may recall Madeline Usher and the funereal aspect of Roderick’s chamber. The lady’s departure shortly afterward is also reminiscent of Madeline’s passage through Roderick’s chamber.
50 (p. 384) “You are young yet, my friend.... Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see”: These comments are ironic. The narrator does learn for himself what is going on within the mansion, although his unwitting perceptions are like those of many other Poe protagonists. Maillard’s counsel about hearing and seeing, notably the latter, make him near literary kin to Dupin (in “The Purloined Letter”), who sees through what mystifies others, and who is thought mad by some, according to his companion.
51 (p. 386) Upon the whole ... all sorts of conventional customs: This sentence is similar to one in “The Masque of the Red Death,” as are some other features in the tale. Poe may have intended “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” to function, in part, as a parodying of “The Masque of the Red Death,” as it is of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Purloined Letter.” Such comic purpose also gives this late tale affinities with “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” because both suggest that Poe is having fun at the expense of his own methods and themes.
52 (p. 389) “then there was Bouffon Le Grand ... Cicero ... Demosthenes ... and Lord Brougham’s from the mouth to the chin”: Bouffon Le Grand literally means “The Great Clown” in French; some Poe specialists think that Poe may also allude to Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788), a renowned French scientist who published a 44-volume work on natural history. Cicero refers to Marcus Tullius Cicero (106—43 B.C.), the renowned Roman orator and statesman. Demosthenes (384?—322 B.C.) was an impressive Greek public speaker who practiced speaking with pebbles in his mouth, standing near the sea, to develop his oratorical talents. Henry Peter Brougham (1778-1868) was an English politician and writer who was a founder of the Edinburgh Review, an influential nineteenth-century periodical. The combination of clown attributes with those of grave thinkers and orators carries along the theme of deception and grotesquerie that has already been established.
53 (p.390) “Madame Joyeuse was a more sensible person, as you know”: Joyeuse is French for “joyful”; that she is joyful and high-spirited becomes evident in her imitation of a crowing cock. Madame Joyeuse may derive from an episode of similar comic cock-crowing imitation in Charles O‘Malley (1841), by Irish novelist Charles Lever, which Poe reviewed in Graham’s Magazine (March 1842). As in some of his earliest tales, Poe here insinuates a jibe at a popular author.
54 (p. 390) “but there was really much sound sense, after all, in the opinion of Eugénie Salsafette”: This last name comes from salsify, or oyster plant, an edible root vegetable. Given the dinner-table context, it may hint of human identity blurring with that of food, thus enhancing the aura of craziness central to the story. A link with “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in which Roderick is preoccupied with interconnections between animal and vegetable life, is also possible, as is a backward glance at the food-drink motifs permeating most of the “Tales of the Folio Club.”
55 (p. 391) My nerves were very much affected.... I now ventured to inquire the cause of the disturbance: This paragraph, in which intrusive noise frightens the assembled company, who are, excepting the narrator, all posing or masking, recalls the kindred effect of the clock’s appalling striking in “The Masque of the Red Death.”
56 (p. 393) “I am happy to acknowledge as belonging of right to the celebrated Fether”: Finally, the title is explained, and the peculiar name spellings only point up the off-centeredness pervading the tale, which the narrator doesn’t comprehend. In some respects, his deadpan stance resembles that of Huckleberry Finn.
57 (p. 393) pandemonium in petto: That is, chaos in secrecy (in petto is Italian for “in the breast”). The lunatics give way to their deranged emotions within the walls of the remote asylum, where nobody is likely to discover them. Pandemonium, in English poet John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost (1667), is the palace of Satan in Hell, a natural locale for uproar and confusion. Pandemonium does indeed ensue, once the real keepers break in upon the mad revelers.
58 (p. 396) “Yankee Doodle,” which they performed, if not exactly in tune, at least with an energy superhuman, during the whole of the uproar: Frenchmen playing “Yankee Doodle,” once America’s most widely popular national song, may signal another example of the craziness occurring before the unwitting narrator.
59 (p.399) “Old Charley Goodfellow”: This is another example of Poe’s wordplay: Charley is anything but good; as a colloquialism, fellow defines a person as a lowlife.
60 (p. 404) crack novels ... Ainsworth: “Crack novels” are excellent, superior novels; Poe uses the phrase ironically, as the subsequent remarks and names demonstrate. Catherine Gore was the English author of Cecil (1841), a fashionable novel that she was accused of pilfering from vathek (see note 43 of Tales). Three popular English novelists in Poe’s day (and well beyond) were Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), Charles Dickens (1812-1870), and William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882). Turnapenny is Poe’s comic name for one who writes principally for money.
61 (p. 413) In looking around me for some subject ... resembling those of John Randolph: Poe invented most of the names or situations mentioned in this paragraph—for example, M. Ernest Valdemar, “Bibliotheca Forensica,” and Issachar Marx. Wallenstein ( 1798-1799) is a play by German author J. C. F. von Schiller. Gargantua (1532) is a book of legends about a giant by French author François Rabelais. John Randolph (1773-1833) was a gaunt Virginia politician from Roanoke.
62 (p. 423) But the chief peculiarity of this horrible thing was the representation of a Death’s Head, ... as if it had been there carefully designed by an artist: This insect resembles the imaginary beetle in “The Gold-Bug.”
63 (p. 424) one of the ordinary synopses of Natural History: A Synopsis of Natural History, by Thomas Wyatt (based on a work by Céron Lemonnier), was published in Philadelphia in 1839; some thought that Poe himself had written the work. The description of the insect that follows unmistakably comes from Wyatt’s book.
64 (p. 426) The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge: We never learn the precise nature for Montresor’s animosity, although if he is a devout Roman Catholic and Fortunato is a Mason, there would be sufficient ground for his feelings. The Free and Accepted Masons, known as Freemasons or Masons, is a secret fraternal society that originated in fourteenth-century England. During the later eighteenth century, when the type of cloak known as a roquelaure came into fashion, animosities developed between the Roman Catholic Church and the Masons. Fortunato is Italian for “fortunate” or “fated.” Each or both may apply here, given the outcome of the story.
65 (p. 427) “Luchesi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry”: Interestingly, Amontillado is a variety of sherry. Perhaps Montresor implies that Luchesi cannot distinguish Amontillado from lower-grade sherry. Just as interesting, the name Luchesi may sound in English as “look hazy,” thus characterizing Fortunato’s perceptions. For that matter, despite his seeming thinking to the contrary, Montresor likewise has misperceptions. That is, later in the story, when he has nearly completed the walling up of Fortunato, he appears to be almost on the verge of admitting that the task sickens him; second, his later boast that for fifty years nobody has discovered his crime may be no genuine boast after all, but rather a confession that this long-past episode has attained a fixity in his life—that is, that it bothers his conscience.
66 (p. 429) He laughed and threw the bottle upward with a gesticulation I did not understand. I looked at him in surprise. He repeated the movement—a grotesque one: Here and in the following short sentences are allusions to the fraternal brotherhood of Masons, whose rituals and symbols have typically been surrounded with mystery. Neither Fortunato’s nor Montresor’s actions are of genuine Masonic origins. If a Roman Catholic-Masonic opposition is a primary motif in this tale, then Montresor’s method of executing Fortunato represents a devout Roman Catholic’s ironic meting out of justice to a heretic. Such an attitude would make the “love of God” interchanges toward the end of this tale highly ironic—because Montresor felt that he was acting for the love of God, and that his ridding the world of a heretic demonstrated such love.
67 (p. 430) “He is an ignoramus,” interrupted my friend, as he stepped unsteadily forward, while I followed immediately at his heels: Montresor’s phrasing recalls the design on his crest of arms—a foot crushing a serpent whose fangs are embedded in the heel; in this case, ironically, he is the serpent at the heels of his enemy, and the attention he devotes to detailing his story of these long-past events represents his being emotionally “crushed” by such “heels,” in these circumstances the emotional effects occasioned by his subsequent murder of Fortunato, such that he cannot forget them.
68 (p. 432) In pace requiescat!: “May he rest in peace!” (Latin). We are left thus with a final irony; for whom does Montresor invoke peaceful rest: Fortunato (whose remains have rested in peace for fifty years) or Montresor, whose guilt has dogged him for that same number of years? The open-endedness of this tale makes it a forerunner to much that subsequently has been called “modernist” or “postmodernist” literature.
69 (p. 433) He would have preferred Rabelais’ “Gargantua” to the “Zadig” of Voltaire; and, upon the whole, practical jokes suited his taste far better than verbal ones: Gargantua (1534), by the French humorist François Rabelais, is a satirical narrative about a giant, peace-loving prince; Zadig (1748), by French satirist Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), is a witty but nevertheless savage satire. The point made in this paragraph is that the king is coarse and bawdy (as Rabelais’s writings often were thought to be), and that anything refined was unlikely to suit him. Thus, in this tale, Hop-Frog’s gruesome “joke” partakes of flagrancy, albeit it is “practical” from his point of view—after all, the king “loved his practical jokes,” and the dwarf takes him at his word. Hop-Frog’s jester’s costume suggests that of the hapless Fortunato in “The Cask of Amontillado,” but his final method of treating his antagonists reminds us more of Montresor, the protagonist in that same tale. Hop-Frog may be the court “fool,” but such figures were often thought to be endowed with more genuine perception than their masters.
70 (p.436) “we stand in need of characters”: That the king and his ministers need “characters,” or, as a dictionary would cite as one definition, “moral excellence and firmness,” is obvious. Hop-Frog’s ultimate joke indeed casts them as the very sorts of beings they are, as manifested in the descriptions of them and in the blurring of seriousness and joking.
71 (p. 436) “Endeavoring!” cried the tyrant.... “Drink, I say!” shouted the monster, “or by the fiends—”: The king’s being a “tyrant” and a “monster,” who invokes “the fiends” reveals his dehumanized state, and it aligns him with the narrator in “The Black Cat,” whose emotional makeup is similar. In both tales, too, a disdain for the feminine is evident among those destined to come to bad ends.
72 (p. 438) “the company of masqueraders will take you for real beasts—and of course, they will be as much terrified as astonished”: The masquerade motif will, of course, enhance the understandable confusion over who is human and who animal, but Hop-Frog is sure about the “real beasts” nature of the king and ministers, an understanding borne out in a following paragraph, where the “beast-like,” “hideous” qualities of the eight orangutan masqueraders bear out “their truthfulness to nature.”
73 (p. 441) The cripple hurled his torch at them, clambered leisurely to the ceiling, and disappeared through the sky-light: The climactic scene, in which the “brilliance” of Hop-Frog’s jest concludes, represents the ending of his enduring the garish artificial lights of the king’s “world” in which masquerading is all. The escape of Hop-Frog and Tripetta through the skylight symbolizes their removal to the freedom of their own, natural world.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
1 (p. 445) The Narrative... To Which that Distressing Calamity Gave Rise: Within the title of Poe’s novel we may sense a deft shift from Narrative, which term may be part factual, part imaginative, on through terms like Details and Account, to Incredible Adventures and Gave Rise. This shift signals a gradual movement from everyday realism or credibility to increasingly fantastic experience, which may parallel a dream-nightmare structure, which begins in reality and moves on into nonrationality. The “Preface” and the text of the narrative proper continue the counterpointing of truth versus fiction and appearance versus reality. The ironies in such discrepancies are thus early established, and they continue throughout.
2 (p. 447) detailing events which have had powerful influence in exciting the imaginative faculties: Poe seems here to employ a pattern, also used in “The Purloined Letter,” of placing clues to alternations of realism and fantasy directly before readers, along with suggesting that such alternations may trigger imagination—which stimulation in turn may account for the increasing fantastic qualities in Pym’s adventures.
3 (p. 449) My name is Arthur Gordon Pym.... Edgarton New Bank, as it was formerly called: Pym’s full name has suggested, to many, a similarity to that of Edgar Allan Poe, a suggestion presumably supported by using Edgarton for Edgartown, an actual town on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Some readers have also discerned imp in a transposition of Pym, a suggestion that may carry more significance than some have thought, as imp derives from word roots that mean “graft,” “scion,” or “growth” (see also note 49, below). Pym’s own immaturity may be indicated in the name of his friend Augustus, introduced later in this paragraph. However much young Barnard may act to the contrary at times, his first name hints of neoclassical reason and order, in that it has the same root as “Augustan,” which is often a synonym for “neoclassic” or “classic”; the name thus connotes balance, reason, order—all of which eventually vanish in this book. Once he is gone, the situations in the novel become more and more incredible.
4 (p.450) thinking that the wines and liquors he had drunk had set him entirely beside himself: Intoxication as precursor to fantastic adventure links Pym to “Tales of the Folio Club” and to some of Poe’s later tales. The late October night also creates affinities with works like “Ulalume: A Ballad,” “King Pest,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Gold-Bug,” “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” Like “King Pest” and “Tarr and Fether,” a decided liquor-ish atmosphere pervades Pym.
5 (p. 453) I tumbled headlong and insensible upon the body of my fallen companion: This is the first of a series of incidents in which what seems to be a supernatural visitation is soon revealed to have natural, if unusual, causes. The demonic theme, for example, recurs when the mutineer cook is likened to a demon or other supernatural being; nevertheless, his human, if not humane, identity cannot be ignored. Poe was nothing if not adept in creating such ambiguities, offering apparent supernaturalism to entice readers eager for horrifics, but offering as well a reasonable psychological underpinning for the horrors, to appeal to more sophisticated readers. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold-Bug,” and “The Black Cat” exemplify similar techniques.
6 (p.456) The wound in my neck, although of an ugly appearance, proved of little real consequence, and I soon recovered from its effects: The circumstances of the two youths, especially those affecting Pym, are of sufficient incredibility to test readers’ acumen in distinguishing fiction from fact or reliability from unreliability.
7 (p.457) my own enthusiastic temperament and somewhat gloomy although glowing imagination: In sketching his own manic-depressive state, Pym gives another example of the pervasive themes in the novel.
8 (p. 457) a partial interchange of character: The merging of characteristics makes Pym and Augustus, and subseqeuently Pym and Peters, doubles after the manner of the two William Wilson’s, the Usher twins, Dupin and Minister D__ (in “The Purloined Letter”), and many other characters in the Poe canon.
9 (p. 458) indulging my desire of travel: Pym’s eagerness to “travel” may involve mental-emotional voyaging as well as literal traversing of sea and land. That his travels take him to remote regions represents journeying into increasingly fantastic regions in his mind.
10 (p. 462) “I suppose you can’t tell how long you have been buried”: Beginning here, we find recurrent allusions to or motifs of live burial, a favorite theme with Poe. Premature burials in many of his tales and poems symbolize descents into depths of the self.
11 (p. 462) the expedition of Lewis and Clark to the mouth of the Columbia: Amer ican explorers Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838) led an expedition westward to the Columbia River. Poe might have known various published chronicles of these explorations. These would naturally have provided him knowledge of travel-book methods, as would another account by renowned American writer Washington Irving, Astoria; Or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1836), which Poe reviewed in the Southern Literary Messenger (January 1837); the first two serial installments of Pym also appeared in that magazine. The title of Irving’s book—with Anecdotes, Enterprise, and Beyond—allows for as open-ended a work as Pym turns out to be. Many other travel books in Poe’s day were similarly structured.
12 (p. 463) I was oppressed with a multitude of gloomy feelings: This paragraph and the more extended one that follows contribute to Pym’s dreams or fantasies about death and decay, horror, gloom, and solitude, which intermittently are actualized in some one or another episode. When, over the next few paragraphs, Tiger’s identity is revealed, however, we are treated to a vignette of time-honored “explained supernaturalism,” so to speak, featured in many earlier Gothic novels. Pym’s melancholy outlook anticipates that of another popular boy-hero in American fiction, Huckleberry Finn.
13 (p. 464) I stood, naked and alone, amid the burning sand-plains of Zahara: Scenic effects in this paragraph may be likened to those in “Silence—A Fable” or “The Valley of Unrest.” The barrenness of the Sahara Desert mirrors the bleakness of Pym’s emotions.
14 (p. 466) I should swoon amid the narrow and intricate windings of the lumber: “Lumber” in this context means any stored articles, whether or not they consist of actual wood. Pym’s crawling through this troublesome pathway to find Augustus symbolizes an attempt to reestablish identity, since both youths in this early portion of the novel form a composite self.
15 (p.468) Upon a closer scrutiny, I came across a small slip of what had the feeling of letter paper: Discovery of the note parallels the technique in many older Gothic novels of finding an old manuscript or of distinguishing handwriting on a wall. The information found often acts as a catalyst to additional anxieties or physical dangers for the protagonist(s), or it may relieve their terrors.
16 (p. 474) I felt myself actuated by one of those fits of perverseness which might be supposed to influence a spoiled child: Pym’s perverseness aligns him with many other Poe characters, notably, perhaps, the narrator in “The Black Cat,” although these are by no means the only perverse characters in the Poe canon.
17 (p. 475) He had brought with him a light in a dark lantern: A dark lantern has metal walls, with slides that can be opened or closed, depending on the need for light. Here such a lantern also symbolizes Pym’s as yet incomplete knowledge of the situation on the ship. The murderer in “The Tell-Tale Heart” uses a dark lantern to aid in his wicked activities.
18 (p. 480) Dirk Peters... of the tribe of Upsarokas.... I have been thus particular in speaking of Dirk Peters: Many hypotheses have been offered regarding Peters’s significance. His name combines “knife” (a dirk is a long, straight dagger) and “rock” (from the Latin word petra), as well as sex (the dirk suggests an erect penis) and Saint Peter, and he proves to be the savior of Augustus and Arthur in more than one situation. His tribe would actually be Absaroka (a Native American tribe also known as the Crow). In his features and actions he anticipates the title character in “Hop-Frog.” Like much else in Pym, Peters seems at times to change abruptly from gentle to savage. Consistent with such shiftings, Peters also seems to embody supernaturalism. His headpiece, which merges the hair of a type of spaniel with that of a grizzly, emphasizes the uncertainties of domestication and wildness in his makeup.
19 (p. 486) Many years elapsed, however, before I was aware of this fact: A question arises: How did Pym gain this information long after the incident? Peters may have enlightened him, but the indefiniteness is another ambiguity in the novel.
20 (pp. 489—491 ) A proper stowage cannot be accomplished in a careless manner.... I found myself comfortably situated for the present: The lengthy attention given to stowage as chapter VI opens may be in part Poe’s attempt to create an air of realism after the sensationalism that precedes the passage. Since the description incorporates inaccuracies—for example, that casks are screwed so firmly that they lose their ordinary shape—Poe may have been insinuating a joke into apparent factuality.
21 (p. 494) Simms ... Augustus and myself: These names may connect to actual persons Poe knew or knew about—for example, William Gilmore Simms (1806—1870), a Southern author; Horace Greeley (1811-1872), a well-known New York newspaperman; and Richard Parker, a notorious eighteenth-century mutineer. About others one may only conjecture. Interestingly, the cook’s name, Seymour (“see more”), may again impart a hint of supernaturalism to his demonic character.
22 (p. 501) The streak across the eye was not forgotten, and presented a most shocking appearance: Since Pym earlier had felt as if he were buried alive, his return as a simulated corpse deftly maintains motifs of deception, apparent supernaturalism, and death—all of which will resurface. Pym’s gruesome masquerading is reworked in “ ‘Thou Art the Man.”’
23 (p. 516) any of the thousand chances which afterward befell me in nine long years: The “nine long years” may bring the time from 1827, when Pym’s adventures commenced, to 1836, just before publication of the two installments of Pym in the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe as author may be creating his own kind of deception, or he may simply have had an attention lapse when he composed the “Note” that concludes the book.
24 (p. 516) The vessel in sight was a large hermaphrodite brig, of a Dutch build, and painted black, with a tawdry gilt figure-head: Hermaphrodite brig is an actual nautical term for a two-masted vessel with a square-rigged foremast and fore and-aft-rigged mainmast. However, hermaphrodite also refers to plants or ani mals with both male and female reproductive organs, and such dualism may fit well with Pym’s own psycho-physical constitution. Male though he is, he rep eatedly gives way to an emotionalism ordinarily considered a feminine trait in Poe’s era. What seems to be his maturing or adventuring in fantasy to a point where he can merge with a female force, depicted at the conclusion of the novel, may also be anticipated in this term. Thus Pym takes rank with such works as Poe’s tales about women, most notably “The Fall of the House of Usher”—where the narrator’s entering the house that looks like a head and confronting the Usher twins may symbolize facets of masculinity and femininity in his self—or the poems “To Helen,” “The Raven,” and “Ulalume,” which highlight similar combinations.
25 (p. 523) the good effect of the shower-bath in a case where the patient was suffering from mania a potu: Mania a potu is a Latin phrase referring to madness resulting from overindulging in alcohol. Pym’s analogy maintains the liquor-ish aura of the novel. We might ask at this point: Is this novel a drunkard’s fabrication? The visions that affect the sailors suggest such possibilities, although they may also signal that Pym is journeying further into the interior of his self. Perhaps the repeated murders that kill the physical bodies of many characters deepen this context.
26 (p. 531) a carboy containing nearly three gallons of excellent Cape Madeira wine ... a small tortoise of the Gallipago breed: A carboy is a special container for holding liquids that is cushioned within another container. The Galapagos giant tortoise derives its name from its habitat on the Galapagos Islands, west of Ecuador. The ensuing description of the tortoises serves as another example of Poe’s returning his situations and characters to mundane, calm levels once a sensational vignette has concluded. Additional sensational events follow hard upon this passage.
27 (p. 535) Augustus’ wounded arm began to evince symptoms of mortification: That is, gangrene, or necrosis, was setting in, a condition in which the local soft tissue around a wound dies and decays. Significantly, Augustus’ death from this condition occurs at midpoint in the novel. Reason and order, represented by his first name (see note 3), yield thereafter to ever-increasing fantasy.
28 (p. 540) She proved to be the Jane Guy, of Liverpool, Captain Guy, bound on a sealing and trading voyage to the South Seas and Pacific: This ship is also hermaphroditic (see note 24), in that it has a female and a male name. Guy may also imply making fun of someone or mocking a person; oncoming events strengthen such a context.
29 (p. 545) Navigators have agreed in calling an assemblage of such encampments a rookery: Although rookery may refer to a nesting area for birds, it may also mean a dilapidated tenement. As a verb, rook means “to cheat or defraud,” and so Poe again plants clues to deceit and deception, which course through the novel. Upon leaving the rookery, Pym symbolically begins to shed his adolescence.
30 (p. 548) Chapter XV: Most of the details in this chapter derive from Benjamin Morrell’s A Narrative of Four Voyages (1832), just one of the several travel-exploration publications that Poe pilfered for use in Pym (see note 11, above).
31 (p. 552) Chapter XVI: This chapter is largely derivative from Jeremiah N. Reynolds’s Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and South Seas (1836), which Poe favorably reviewed in the Southern Literary Messenger (January 1837). Henceforth, Antarctic exploration rather than mercantile enterprise becomes the mainstay in travel literature. These explorations were hot-topic current events, so Poe attempted to capitalize on such best-seller material.
32 (p. 557) Chapter XVII: Much in this chapter derives from Morrell’s Narrative (see note 30, above). Again we encounter a section of the novel in which the fairly realistic details serve as dramatic relief for high-pitched sensationalism that follows. The chapter’s closing sentence, hinting of a contribution to science, only reinforces the air of realism.
33 (p. 563) we could distinguish the word Anamoo-moo! and Lama-Lama!: Although several conjectures about “meanings” in the islanders’ language are on record, the words may be only Poe’s invention, perhaps calculated to test readers’ acumen. This strange language is perhaps natural to people Pym first refers to as “strangers,” then, for the most part, “savages,” using “natives” seldom. On possible implications in the Tsalalians’ language, the most sensible critique is J. V. Ridgely’s “The Continuing Puzzle of Arthur Gordon Pym: Some Notes and Queries,” Poe Newsletter 3:1 (June 1970), pp. 5-6. That there may have been implications of darkness and shadiness (in the sense of deception) in Tsalemon-Psalemoun (the king’s name) and Tsalal, in chapter XXV (see p. 603), which may derive from Hebrew or African roots, as well as suggesting the name “Solomon,” is remarked by Burton R. Pollin, ed., in Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. 1: The Imaginary Voyages, pp. 351—352 (see “For Further Reading”). If any implication of Solomon, the king of ancient Israel reputed for great wisdom, was Poe’s intent, it may join other ironies in the book: Solomon’s wisdom in deciding the matter of a child and the two women who claimed it produced momentarily startling conditions, akin to many in Poe’s novel.
34 (p. 565) We also saw some biche de mer in the hands of one of the savages, who was greedily devouring it in its natural state: The ocean-dweller known as bêche de mer (from the Portuguese bicho do mar, meaning “sea worm”) also goes by the names sea slug, sea cucumber, and trepang. Poe’s preference for the less common term (which implies an animal) suggests that the islanders are more carnivorous than vegetarian. These organisms are ordinarily found in Australia and Oriental regions. That such life flourishes in this locale suggests how far behind Pym’s travels and adventures have left the civilized, the expected, and the rational. What follows only reinforces such transfers into a strange world—of physical and mental geography. Just so, Pym’s symbolic journey into the self may be considered a movement from flesh to spirituality, thereby suggesting why Nu-Nu dies before the merger occurs.
35 (p. 567) The phenomena of this water formed the first definite link in that vast chain of apparent miracles with which I was destined to be at length encircled: This strange water may be inspired by certain American springs credited with medicinal qualities, of which Poe was aware. It also reinforces Pym’s departure from an everyday world to move deeper into one of nonrationality. His comment that concludes chapter XVIII, regarding the “apparent miracles with which I was destined to be at length encircled,” carries along the appearance-reality experiences that indeed ever more firmly surround him. Pym again refers to appearance in the islanders’ actions as chapter XIX opens. The circle analogy relates to those whirlpools, spirals, and other means of literally and symbolically dizzying a character, which are among Poe’s favorite motifs for psychological disorder.
36 (p. 578) They accordingly turned, and were scrambling back ... the day of universal dissolution was at hand: The situation that permits Pym and his companions to remain safe while the others are buried alive is paradoxical, to understate. Whether this delivery from death is an example of Poe’s carelessness or his calculated creation of incredibility to test readers cannot be determined.
37 (p. 579) As soon as I could collect my scattered senses, I found myself nearly suffocated.... The blackness of darkness which envelops the victim ... never to be conceived: Another incredibility or irony occurs here; does Pym mean that Peters’s head is actually near his own, or does he simply suggest that positioning as an expression of his overwhelming confusion, which would be plausible, given his “scattered senses”? The “blackness of darkness” is biblical (Jude 13, King James Version), and in context it merges physical and psychological upset linked with Poe’s ever-popular theme of premature burial. Jude also mentions sea voyaging, which would likewise be relevant here.
38 (p. 580) With sorrowful hearts, therefore, we left the corpse to its fate, and again made our way to the bend: That Wilson Allen dies in this avalanche may be symbolic, given that not long after Pym appeared Poe’s renowned tales of the importance of will, “Ligeia” and “William Wilson” in particular, were also published. Some readers think that this character’s surname was a variant spelling of Allan, and that Poe was being autobiographical in “burying” his late foster father, John Allan. At this point in the novel, the disappearance of will may point strongly toward the accelerating onset of fantasy.
39 (p. 585) the cordage, sails, and every thing movable on deck demolished as if by magic: The taking and destruction of the Jane Guy, called now only the Jane, harks back to the theme of vicious pursuit of a hapless female, usually with sexual expectations on the villain’s part. As is also usually the outcome in such episodes in earlier Gothics, the “taken” female dies, and so here the ship is destroyed by the marauders’ actions. It may be significant that males destroy the female at this point, which ploy seems to reverse in the final chapter. Here, too, and in following paragraphs, the notion of magic is introduced; such magic continues to the end of the novel.
40 (p. 587) First of all there came a smart shock (which we felt as distinctly where we were as if we had been slightly galvanized), but unattended with any visible signs of an explosion: Poe uses galvanized in the sense of being shocked with a battery’s electric charge. This is one more example of Poe’s incorporating timely technology into his fiction: The Galvanic battery, an electric battery invented by Italian physicist Luigi Galvani (1737-1798), had gained attention in popular culture by the 1830s. Thus we find another bit of realism amid the increasingly weird occurrences within the novel.
41 (p. 589) Chapter XXIII: The first edition of Pym contains two chapters numbered XXIII, which stand uncorrected in Griswold’s edition of Poe’s works (1856). I have changed the chapter numerals to proceed chronologically, and so I number the second “chapter XXIII” as XXIV and the last chapter XXV.
42 (p. 597) a dusky, fiendish, and filmy figure stood immediately beneath me.... At length, seeing me totter, he hastened to ascend to my rescue, and arrived just in time for my preservation: In this incident, Pym initially supposes that a supernatural figure threatens him, only to regain clear consciousness and realize how faulty his vision was, and that Peters has rescued him; it parallels Pym’s supposing that Tiger is some horrendous antagonist, but soon learning the actuality of the situation.
43 (pp. 597—598) The place was one of singular wildness ... immense scorpions were seen, and various reptiles not elsewhere to be found in the high latitudes: The desolation here compares with that in “The Valley of Unrest,” “Silence—A Fable,” and the opening of “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
44 (p. 601) The ribs were of a tough osier, well adapted to the purpose for which it was used: Osier is a pliable willow twig used in basket and furniture making. This substance may have been mentioned with irony because its frail quality is but one more frailty in the canoe and the characters themselves, they having sustained considerable physical and emotional batterings.
45 (p. 602) in short, having all the wild variations of the Aurora Borealis: The aurora borealis is a luminous nighttime phenomenon that occurs in the atmosphere of Earth’s northern hemisphere; in the southern hemisphere, where Pym is, such a phenomenon is termed the aurora australis. Pym’s allusion to its vaporous appearance accelerates his own symbolic journey into visually obscure and emotionally uncertain regions.
46 (p. 603) they were governed by a common king, named Tsalemon or Psalemoun, who resided in one of the smallest of the islands: Various speculations about the meaning of these names have been offered; but, as with other strange language employed, they may represent Poe’s comic intent, or they may be additional signposts that imply a defiance of establishing absolute, exclusive meaning by those within the novel and by readers. See note 33, above, for elaboration on possibilities in Nu-Nu’s words. If Nu-Nu’s name means “to deny”—as Sydney Kaplan submits in her edition, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, New York: Hill and Wang, 1960, p. xviii—then his death just before the mysterious white figure looms fittingly concludes one variety of symbolism in the novel. The Tsalalians have destroyed the Jane, as the explorers’ ship is termed in that episode, signifying that the savages had killed a representative of the female principle (see note 39, above). Such destruction links these characters with other imbalancing males in the Poe canon—for example, Roderick Usher and the narrators in “Berenice,” “Morella,” Ligeia,” and “The Black Cat” (and perhaps also the king in ”Hop-Frog”). Naturally, then, such a character could not merge with femininity, as may be symbolized in the shrouded figure as Pym’s narrative closes.
47 (p.603) The commencement of the words Tsalemon and Tsalal was given with a prolonged hissing sound ... which was precisely the same with the note of the black bittern we had eaten up on the summit of the hill: Although hissing may be more commonplace in snakes, frightened or angry ducks, geese, and swans also make hissing sounds. These may register another linkage of human and animal or otherwise nonhuman, as we have seen in connection with the demonic cook or the characterization of Peters. They may also hint of the futility to fix meanings as regards the novel, particularly in its later chapters.
48 (pp. 603—604) I felt a numbness of body and mind—a dreaminess of sensation—but this was all: Pym yields even more to dreaminess—that is, journeying into the depths of the self—than his previous voyagings have effected. He is about to move beyond adolescent immaturity and to gain character by merging with the female principle in life, which will result in his gaining balance or integration within the self. His feelings are plausible in such a growth pattern in maturing. Poe’s presentations of masculine-feminine balancings may be seen as forerunners of twentieth-century medical viewpoints that argue that an individual may not be so exclusively masculine or feminine as many traditional distinctions would dictate.
49 (p. 605) And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow: As Camille Paglia has argued, Pym and Peters seem to be merging with a female principle or nature mother, and Pym’s voyaging is actually ”a journey to the heart of creation” (see Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 579-580, 590-591). Whether the contrast of the giant shrouded figure’s whiteness with that of the dead Nu-Nu’s blackness has anything to do with racial paranoias to which, some have contended, Poe subscribed is eminently debatable. Nu-Nu is representative of harmful deceit and savagery, which qualities may well be aligned with the color black, having no racial stigma but rather based on age-old beliefs that black symbolizes death, which for many (for example, the masqueraders in ”The Masque of the Red Death”) is inevitably associated with dissolution and destruction. White, on the other hand, has equally long associations with radiance, which in the Poe canon (and in his awareness that names like Helen derive from root meanings of dazzling light, indeed lightning) is typically a positive, harmonizing factor in life. According to legend, Helen of Troy was the most beautiful woman in the world. Poe is quick to transpose the concept of beauty to ideal planes rather than to confine it solely to physical features, and that treatment seems to be consonant with the conclusion of his novel. Edward H. Davidson, in Poe: A Critical Study, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957, chapter 6, argues along similar lines, contending that Pym matures out of ignorance to an awareness of unity.
Of course, we must not ignore Poe’s use of the timely “holes at the poles” notion that entrances to the center of the earth were to be discovered at the North and South Poles, a topic that was often ridiculed by skeptics.
Peters may serve as a double for Pym in terms of his own racial mix implying outreach and even more so in the juncture of humaneness and volatility in his being. He has certainly mellowed in demeanor before the novel concludes. Peters’s traits (physical and emotional) may in tandem benefit Pym, who seems to need bringing out.
Finally, we should not overlook that Pym’s voyaging concludes on the traditional first day of spring, and that instead of a negative conclusion to the novel, in which certain death is oncoming soon for the canoers, a symbolic rebirth, with ample growth in the future, are in store for Pym and Peters. Such futurity would be consistent with Pym as “imp,” because the origins of that word relate to grafting and growth. The symbolic spring-rejuvenation theme anticipates that in the closing pages of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), another famous and open-ended American literary work. That we learn in the “Note” of Pym’s death is not inconsistent with the ending of the narrative. Given the average life span for a man during the 1820s and 1830s, the time during which the events in the novel presumably take place, a sudden death for Pym at an early age would be altogether credible, no matter that Poe may have attached irony to that circumstance.
50 (p. 605) This, however, may prove not to be the case, and the papers, if ultimately found, will be given to the public: The overall content of the “Note” suggests that Poe the joker is at work, but also that truth may come to us clothed as jest. Once more, truth-reality issues are raised, along with evasions of whether or not supposed missing portions of the novel will ever be recovered. The comment on lost pages recalls escape clauses in many other literary works, wherein an author uses an unavailable or destroyed manuscript to keep readers guessing—and as such to compound the mystery element in the work itself. The drift in the “Note” is one from near-jocularity to apparently serious and almost cosmic levels. In this manner Poe conveys his “learning” to the public, even to paraphrasing the Bible (Job and Jeremiah), as if to seal his “scientific” subject matter with divine authority.