Text: David M. La Guardia, “Poe, Pym and Initiation,” New Approaches on Poe, 1970, pp. 82-84

[page 82:]

Common to several nineteenth-century American literary figures are elaborate metaphors of gestation, birth, innocence, initiation, adolescence, and maturity.(1) Because of Arthur Gordon Pym's early inception, he becomes the archetype of initiates in American Literature.(2) His only significant precursor is Rip Van Winkle, who also leaves his community to make a symbolic journey involving a long period of sleep. Like Pym, Rip must pass rigorous tests of initiation into a new, highly spiritual society, which can never again fully unite with that left behind by the emerging ego. Unlike Pym, Rip returns to his community in the form of a dislocated artist.

Pym never reaches that state of ultimate maturity and wisdom experienced by other famous initiates. He exists in a series of increasingly perceptive selves, each buoyed by the experience that has capsized the former, each moving toward a better. Rip returns to his society an aged, bearded man. At once nostalgic and philosophical, he symbolizes the wisdom of the ages. Coleridge's Mariner, perhaps the ultimate of initiates and certainly the one Poe had most in mind in his conception of Arthur Gordon Pym, returns to his society in an actual and existential degree described simply as “ancient.” Like Rip, only in greater depth, he has wisdom embodied in his “long grey beard and glittering eye.” Through the mariner, Coleridge preaches the anguish of love. Through Rip, Irving apotheosizes the past. But if, through Pym, Poe posits any truth, it remains concealed in the form or formlessness of the narrative itself. Pym does not grow old. He begins his journey in adolescence and disappears in the same state. The closest Poe comes to offering any solutions for Pym is to note that the ‘few remaining chapters’ of the narrative, which may have offered some revelations, “have been irrecoverably lost,”(3) that is, deliberately lost. That Poe did not realize the abortive state in which he left his novel on the realistic level is inconceivable. His skill in tying together irretrievably loose ends is illustrated in the tales of ratiocination. He could have attached some conclusion to the narrative which would have satisfied the outrage of those who seek logic and order in their reading material. That he did not force an in-depth reading so that what seems to be middle can be understood as end.

Important to all initiate journeys is the presence of a conscious, totally responsive future ego, or self, which not only receives experience, but records it for telling. Insofar as he journalizes his voyage, Pym becomes one of many artist-initiates, who, like the mariner, impulsively shares the agony of his ghostly tale with others, who, if equally sensitive, are “sadder and wiser” for the experience. Herein lies the core of art.

Concern with Pym as initiate then must be concern with Pym as emerging consciousness. This emergence is embodied in the experiencing self presented in the journal entries. The outrageous incidents of the narrative are not at all as crucial as the manner in which Pym responds to them and matures by them, just as the unrealistic events in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” are of secondary importance on the realistic level — though of primary importance on the symbolic level — to the responses of the heart and mind, the perceiving self of the mariner. That few have questioned this realism-symbolism distinction in the “Ancient Mariner” must be attributed to Coleridge's masterful integration of symbols and images. Poe's work is not so masterfully contrived and deserves the critical severity has so widely received. Yet, insofar as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is, as Edward H. Davidson states, “Poe's masterwork in the evolving consciousness of a fully developed man,”(4) it is one of the earliest fictional works in American Romanticism based on a psychological investigation of the ego, and it anticipates those greater psychological. studies of Ahab, Bartleby, and Dimmesdale. The novel is not only a pivotal work in the mainstream of the American romantic movement, but it is also the essential, though artistically not the best, link in the chain of all Poe's work.

When he embarks on his journey, Pym is so naive that he is unable to understand where he is going or why he wants to go. Simply expressed, he seeks adventure. [page 83:] His vivid imagination has been set gyrating by the phantasy sea-tales of his friend Augustus. For many months he has lived, on land, in an imaginative sea-world, until “by degrees, I felt the greatest desire to go to sea.”(5) He owns a sail-boat called the Ariel in which he has defied death on numerous occasions. On the Ariel, he recalls, “we were in the habit of going on some of the maddest freaks in the world; and, when I now think of them, it appears to me a thousand wonders that I am alive today.”(6) Thus early in the narrative and in his life Pym demonstrates a propensity for destruction which becomes one of the principal motifs of the book. He will experience several ritualistic deaths during his adventures, until, like the mariner, he will become the embodiment of “Life-in-Death,” the extreme condition of the initiate before being received into a higher level of existence.

Pym's mad excursions or “freaks” on the Ariel are important in another way. Several critics refer to Pym's utter impotence in the narrative. Marie Bonaparte speaks of his innumerable “impotence-nightmares” which become actualized in his inability to produce significant effects by means of positive action at crucial points in his adventures.(7) Patrick Quinn says that Pym is the character “to whom things happen;” that he is “acted upon” and that, for the most part, he “is simply the narrator, the victim, the masochist — and so the more clearly recognizable as Poe himself.”(8) Closer scrutiny reveals that Pym becomes symbolically paralyzed as he hovers between the real and imaginary worlds, the dichotomies of each freezing his will and his physical-mechanical actions; nevertheless, he acts, as Hamlet acts, though Hamlet too presents an illusion of inaction, in vital and specific ways throughout the voyage. Through conscious acts of the will, the initiate must earn salvation, or whatever lesser reward will be his. The Ancient Mariner looks to the slimy, crawly creatures of the sea and performs an act of love: he “blessed them unaware” — unaware in the relative sense of acting spontaneously, not in the sense of irresponsible action. Pym, too, deserves more credit for responsible existential action than some critics allow. He is no Prufrock. If death is Pym's “overwhelming question,” his arrogant confrontation of it on numerous occasions aboard the Ariel, and toward later, his more reticent, more humanly sensitive magnetism it on the Grampus and the Jane Guy and on the island of Tsalal, illustrate a character who is vibrant, somewhat immature, but not impotent.

The movement from innocence to experience for every sensitive human being involves an inability of the rational faculties to supply answers to those critical pain areas of such existence a realization. where answers The are so much in demand. The initiate suffers the great challenge to the artist who wishes to capture the initiate in his state of painful emergency rests in the manner by which the initiate is left to live with his continuing process of initiation. Once the process begins, it can never stop. The Ancient Mariner is constrained to communicate the suffering anguish of his realization in an endless repetition in order to be hour;” free hence of that the “woeful stigmatism agony” which returns to his branded heart at an uncertain of the experiencing soul. What makes Rip Van Winkle less his significant as initiate is that he bears no such stigmatism. His return to community in such a cordial, unsuffering way contradicts what the initiate should be and do. The process for him stopped. He is not experiencing, but experienced. The past tense of the verb is, in this sense, existential death.

Pym's heightened state of confusion throughout his journey is Poe's device for continuing the process of Pym's initiation. Nothing is as it seems to be or as one would logically expect it to be in Pym's world. He repeatedly confronts the difference between appearance and reality. The reversals and counter-reversals becomes in the narrative are staggering in their number and in their effect. Reality illusion; illusion becomes reality. As innocent, Pym begins his voyage in a and condition of mental paradox: he has, simultaneously, a quite vivid imagination a very rational, pragmatic mind. In the early stages, his ratiocinating self which has precedence, on the conscious level of his existence, over his imaginative self, acts on the subconscious level. This explains Pym's elaborate dreams and semi-dreams in the first half of the novel. The ratiocinative part of him perceives a consistent, hierarchical universe. The movement of the narrative embodies the gradual juxtaposition of the imaginative self of Pym from the subconscious to the conscious. For Poe, the essential Pym is the imaginative Pym. All the symbols and events of the narrative combine in a state of near total emergence of the subconscious Pym as that state is imaged in his acceptance into the arms of the white mother-god at the end.

Poe does not feel that there is any need to bring Pym back from behind his [page 84:] white cloud. Pym has progressed, imaginatively, as far as he can progress and still be understood by the most perceptive reader. Bringing him back to a ratiocinating society would destroy the artistic thrust of the narrative. Pym no longer needs to have explanations and solutions in the way that the world which he has left needs them. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge contrived a situation in which his initiate returns to society but remains outside it. Thus the real world and the symbolically bizarre world are webbed neatly together in artistic harmony. The poem is complete in every sense. Poe preferred not to accept the challenge of bringing Pym back and somehow making him fit into a society to which he could never again belong. In terms of what Poe was trying to do, the seemingly unsatisfactory end to Pym's journey is its greatest culmination. His final birth is into that world to which Poe invites all the readers of the narrative who become, in turn, like Dirk Peters, Pym's fellow-initiates. But for the real world, this other world is one of madness which cannot be portrayed in terms of sanity. It is Poe's famous “Dream-Land,” which he reaches ‘by a route obscure and lonely, / Haunted by ill angels only, / ——— / Out of SPACE — out of TIME.”(9) “The dreamer who starts to put his dreams into words is not a dreamer any more. ‘He is only an awakened man,”(10) remarks Georges Poulet in his chapter on Poe in The Metamorphosis of the Circle. Poe chooses not to put the dream world of Pym into words.

Pym, then, becomes one of many Poe initiates who move from a world of syllogistic precision to one of imagination and illusion. They exist or are destroyed in a world in which pat solutions are meaningless. He defies his readers to find the answers that are not there. In Pym he intentionally exasperates those who seek answers by conveniently losing the chapters which could tell all. Early in the novel, he anticipates the insanity of the narration and of its ending: “[This is] ... a narrative, let me here say, which, in its latter portions, will be found to include incidents of a nature so entirely out of the range of human experience, and for this reason so far beyond the limits of human credulity, that I proceed in utter hopelessness of obtaining credence for all that I shall tell, yet confidently trusting in time and progressing science to verify some of the most important and most improbable of my statements.”(11) Poe not only achieves a semblance of veracity by the mere mentioning of his awareness of the bizarre nature of the tale, but, at the same time, he also postulates a setting and tone into which he can comfortably introduce and freely manipulate the emerging consciousness of his protagonist.

John Carroll University

[page 84, continued:]

[[Notes]]

1 Harry Levin notes that “the characteristic point of view in American fiction may well be that of a boy, an adolescent initiated to manhood by the impact of his adventures. ...” (Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, 1958], p. 90.)

2 Edward H. Davidson calls Pym a “curiously ‘American hero,’ uprooted, without a past, and yet determined to know himself.” (Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study, [1957], p. 165.)

3 Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Edward H. Davidson, (1956), p. 405.

4 Davidson, p. 166.

5 Pym, p. 249.

6 Ibid.

7 Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, (1949), p. 304.

8 Patrick F. Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe, (1957), p. 200.

9 Edgar Allan Poe, “Dream-Land,” Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, II. 1, 2, and 8, p. 751.

10 Georges Poulet, The Metamorphosis of the Circle, (1966), p. 184.

11 Pym, p. 185