The Continuing Puzzle of Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym and a Way Forward

While it has remained consisting popular with the reading public, Poe's 1838 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym has proven a problematic text for critics and scholars from Poe's day to our own. Many have noted that it is full of narrative and stylistic problems, confounds expectations at every turn, and resists classification. The text confuses readers by introducing different kinds of writing, for example, verisimilar historical and scientific reportage, adventure romance, and Christian allegory. Many readers have concluded that the work is a satire or parody of literary forms or social praxis. In addition to its apparent disunity, the text has numerous aberrations, errors, lapses into tastelessness, and these have led many to question the seriousness with which Poe himself took the work. The critical response toPym has mirrored the heterogenous composition of the text itself. Most critics have agreed that it is not a tightly unified work, but that is where agreement ends. Critics who have not dismissed the book as hackwork have often floundered trying to bring together its disparate elements into a coherent reading. Most interpretations tend to apply a particular critical model--psychoanalytic, historicist, mythic, deconstructionist, etc.--to particular elements or sections of Pym, with more or less success. As a result, distinct genealogical lines of criticism have emerged, with each line rarely referring to the others. One comes away from such readings with the sense that the attempt at mastery falls short; that only a fragment of the text's meaning has been grasped, only one side of Pym revealed. This study attempts to address the problem of Pym criticism, and to point the way toward a total interpretation, first by challenging the value of unity as an imperative of aesthetic value, which has been the most common ground for dismissal of Pym, and second, by expanding Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic model as a means of coping with the multivalence and multiple dimensions within the text. The critics--the best of them--are not "seeing things" the Freudians, myth critics, historians, deconstructionists, and so forth, are finding real ore. The text evokes disparate discursive formations, different ways of looking at the world, including those from different fields, which come into dialogue at the site of the text, so to speak. Like Melville, Swift, and Rabelais, Poe indulges in an enormous range of play, not to create anaesthetically refined product or a seamless whole, but to absorb and reflect the immense heterogeneity in his world--itself reflected in the disorganized sprawl and diversity of the printed word in that period. In order to cope with the enormous range of play in which Poe indulges, the critic needs to be free to examine these collisions without the imperative to reconcile contradictions and resolve incongruities.