The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, written in 1838, is the only complete novel by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaler called the Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall Pym, including shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism, before he is saved by the crew of the Jane Guy. Aboard this vessel, Pym and a sailor named Dirk Peters continue their adventures farther south. Docking on land, they encounter hostile, black-skinned natives before escaping back to the ocean. The novel ends abruptly as Pym and Peters continue toward the South Pole.
Author
The story starts out as a fairly conventional adventure at sea, but it becomes increasingly strange and hard to classify. Poe, who intended to present a realistic story, was inspired by several real-life accounts of sea voyages, and drew heavily from J. N. Reynolds and referenced the Hollow Earth theory. He also drew from his own experiences at sea. Analyses of the novel often focus on possible autobiographical elements as well as its portrayal of race and the symbolism in the final lines of the work.
Difficulty in finding literary success early in his short story-writing career inspired Poe to pursue writing a longer work. A few serialized installments of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket were first published in the Southern Literary Messenger, though never completed. The full novel was published in July 1838 in two volumes. Some critics responded negatively to the work for being too gruesome and for cribbing heavily from other works, while others praised its exciting adventures. Poe himself later called it "a very silly book". The novel later influenced Herman Melville and Jules Verne.
Literary significance and reception[edit]
Contemporary reviews for The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket were generally unfavorable. Fifteen months after its publication, it was reviewed by Lewis Gaylord Clark, a fellow author who carried on a substantial feud with Poe. His review printed in The Knickerbocker[74] said the book was "told in a loose and slip-shod style, seldom chequered by any of the more common graces of composition."[75] Clark went on, "This work is one of much interest, with all its defects, not the least of which is that it is too liberally stuffed with 'horrid circumstances of blood and battle.'"[74]
Many reviewers commented on the excess of violent scenes.[57] In addition to noting the novel's gruesome details, a review in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (possibly William Evans Burton himself) criticized its borrowed descriptions of geography and errors in nautical information. The reviewer considered it a literary hoax and called it an "impudent attempt at humbugging the public"[76] and regretted "Mr. Poe's name in connexion with such a mass of ignorance and effrontery".[77] Poe later wrote to Burton that he agreed with the review, saying it "was essentially correct" and the novel was "a very silly book".[65]
Other reviews condemned the attempt at presenting a true story. A reviewer for the Metropolitan Magazine noted that, though the story was good as fiction, "when palmed upon the public as a true thing, it cannot appear in any other light than that of a bungling business—an impudent attempt at imposing on the credulity of the ignorant."[78] Nevertheless, some readers believed portions of Poe's novel were true, especially in England, and justified the absurdity of the book with an assumption that author Pym was exaggerating the truth.[79] Publisher George Putnam later noted that "whole columns of these new 'discoveries', including the hieroglyphics (sic) found on the rocks, were copied by many of the English country papers as sober historical truth."[65]
In contrast, 20th-century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who admitted Poe as a strong influence,[80] praised the novel as "Poe's greatest work".[81] He later included one of the species invented for the story in his dictionary of fantastical creatures, the Book of Imaginary Beings, in a chapter titled "an animal dreamt by Poe".[82] H. G. Wells noted that "Pym tells what a very intelligent mind could imagine about the south polar region a century ago".[83] Even so, most scholars did not engage in much serious discussion or analysis of the novel until the 1950s, though many in France recognized the work much earlier.[84] In 2013, The Guardian cited The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket as one of the 100 best novels written in English, and noted its influence on later authors such as Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, B. Traven and David Morrell.[85]
The financial and critical failure of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was a turning point in Poe's career.[42] For one, he was driven to literary duties that would make him money, notably his controversial role as editor of The Conchologist's First Book in April 1839.[86] He also wrote a short series called "Literary Small Talk" for a new Baltimore-based magazine called American Museum of Science, Literature and the Arts.[87]
In need of work, Poe accepted a job at the low salary of $10 per week as assistant editor for Burton's Gentleman's Magazine,[88] despite their negative review of his novel. He also returned to his focus on short stories rather than longer works of prose; Poe's next published book after this, his only completed novel, was the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840.[89]
