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Circumscription of Space and the Form of Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Robert L. Carringer
Robert L. Carringer*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Abstract

Circumscription of space is a fundamental and necessary feature of Poe's fictional universe of negative possibility. That his characters are almost always narrowly circumscribed suggests their severely limited prospects and interests. Diminished space also represents withdrawal into self, and Poe's centers of diminished space often contain symbols of that destructive core of the inner self which continually threatens the moral and rational being of the Poe protagonist. In undertaking The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe was committing himself uncharacteristically not only to the representation of movement in space but also to an objective mode of development, outward and ongoing testing and discovery of self in the infinite possibilities of space. The curious form of Arthur Gordon Pym is the result not so much of careless incompetence (as recent scholarship has suggested) as of a fundamental conflict between psychological inclination and the formal requirements of an unfamiliar genre. But this work is of special interest, since Arthur Gordon Pym is a first effort in an important line of experimentation in American fiction, the transformation of an undistinguished form, the sea narrative, into a vehicle of major literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 3 , May 1974 , pp. 506 - 516
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 515 Esp. Patrick F.Quinn in The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale : Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1957); but also see Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Stein and Day, 1966) and Sidney

Kaplan, Introd. to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960).

Note 2 in page 515 See Joseph V. Ridgely and Iola S. Haverstick, “Chart-less Voyage: The Many Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 8 (1966), 63–80, which is summarized in this paragraph.

Note 3 in page 516 “The Imagination at Play: Edgar Allan Poe,” Kenyon Review, 28 (1966), 202.

Note 4 in page 516 Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923), p. 93.

Note 5 in page 516 “The House of Poe” in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism since 1829, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1966), pp. 255–77.

Note 6 in page 516 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 205–71.

Note 7 in page 516 In a famous review of Hawthorne (1842). See The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: Crowell, 1902), xi, 108–09. Quotations from Poe will be from this edition.

Note 8 in page 516 The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Melville, Poe (New York: Knopf, 1958), pp. 108–09.

Note 9 in page 516 E. Arthur Robinson identified this pun; see “Poe's ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,‘” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 19 (1965), 369–78. “Evil Eye” is Poe's narrator's phrase. The black cat with the offensive eye is named for Pluto, god of the underworld.

Note 10 in page 516 (Boston: Houghton, 1949), p. 93.

Note 11 in page 516 R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in American Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 91.

Note 12 in page 516 For quotations from Pym the chapter number will be cited if the location is not otherwise evident.

Note 13 in page 516 He had mentioned it in two different reviews in the Jan. 1837 Messenger. See Ridgely and Haverstick, p. 64.

Note 14 in page 516 Both the Jane Guy sequence and the Tsalal sequence are characterized by heavy borrowings from written sources. See Ridgely and Haverstick, p. 75, and D. M. McKeithan, “Two Sources of Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Univ. of Texas Studies in English, 13 (1933), 127–37.

Note 15 in page 516 To William E. Burton [1 June 1840], The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (New York: Gordian Press, 1966), i, 130.

Note 16 in page 516 Complete Works, xi, 205.