MS. Found in a bottle

Early illustration by Hermann Wögel on MS. Found in a bottle

MS. Found in a Bottle (. German title u a .: The manuscript in the bottle , the bottle or manuscript found in bottle ) is Edgar Allan Poe's second short story and could make money with it first: 1833 won Poe with her first prize in a writing competition the Baltimore Saturday Visiter newspaper . Together with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and A Descent into the Maelström , it is part of Poe's seafaring stories in the tradition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Old Sailor

content

The nameless first-person narrator starts with one of the extensive prefaces typical of Poe: “I know little to say about my homeland and my family. Bad experiences and the length of the years have driven me out of one and alienated me from the other. Inherited wealth gave me an unusual education, and my thoughtful disposition enabled me to methodically organize the treasures of knowledge that I had acquired through my studies from my youth. ”But he justified the following page-long excursion by saying, that the unbelievable story that he has to tell "does not appear so much as the babbling of a raw imagination, but rather as the positive experience of a person to whom fantastic daydreams have always meant nothing but insubstantial chatter and trivialities." He describes the departure to a sea voyage in the year 18 .. which is to take him on a sailboat of about 400 tons from Batavia on the island of Java to the Sunda archipelago . On the way the ship finds itself first in a calm, then in a terrible storm; the first wave breaks over the ship with the suddenness of a tsunami, destroying masts and rigging. Only a Swede and the narrator survive. The wreck is constantly being driven further south until it ends up in the southern polar night, where it collides with a huge ship of around 4,000 tons, onto which the narrator is thrown. He hides from the crew in the belly of the ship, but then discovers that the ancient and frail sailors neither notice nor want to notice him. He can move around safely among them, can also get himself writing materials and thus continue the manuscript that he wants to put down in a bottle . Ever higher icebergs appear, the ship has set all sails despite the storm and is so fast that it sometimes rises above the water into the air. So it approaches an abyss, which the narrator compares to an amphitheater, and shoots down into it: “The circles become narrower and narrower - we dive madly into the vortex's embrace - and go under the howls, roars and thunders of storm and sea a shudder through the ship - and, oh God! - it sinks. "

interpretation

Measured against his biography, Poe's preface is both true and untrue; for in fact he was treated badly by the family he grew up in and has become estranged from them and his home town of Richmond . But he didn't inherit a cent. His family background, however, may have been expressed by his older brother, William Henry Leonard , who died two years earlier , whom he admired for his sea voyages and who had also written poems and stories. Even though many of Poe's other stories are “seaman's stories” in the broadest sense, he only draws his description of the sea in parts from authentic experience: “Except for a few passages indicating some knowledge of seamanship, the sea in Poe's work is a poetic construct conjured largely from literary and imaginative sources. "

Two of the most popular literary materials of his childhood also have parallels to the plot: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Samuel Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner .

The Flying Dutchman by Albert Pinkham Ryder , Smithsonian American Art Museum , Washington, DC

The story reflects on the one hand the legend of the Flying Dutchman , on the other hand that of John Cleves Symmes junior. A theory of the hollow earth : The earth is hollow and has openings at the north and south poles, into which the ocean flows like a vortex. Both motifs are composed by Poe to form a symphony of fear. In the short gossip, Poe also indirectly refers to the theory of the hollow earth: “It was not until many years later that I became acquainted with Mercator's maps , on which the ocean plunges into the northern polar gulf in four mouths and is swallowed up by the bowels of the earth . The pole itself is represented by a black rock that towers at an enormous height. "

The form in which Poe got to know the legend of the Flying Dutchman is unknown, possibly through a translation of Wilhelm Hauff's ghost ship . Anyone looking for symbols will not be able to avoid the two ships and their bulbous femininity, in which the first-person narrator seeks security: when his mother died, Poe was literally thrown from the physical to the foster mother, only in the world of the latter to slide into the catastrophe of final orphan. This explains his justification for his hiding place: "I was not willing to entrust myself to beings who, as a fleeting impression showed, carried so many strange, doubtful and frightening things about them." How the message in a bottle should have escaped a vortex that devoured an entire ship, Poe does not explain.

Jutta Ernst saw the story less as a fictional travel story than in the haunting portrayal of "loss of orientation and chaotic spatial experience" in the space of transformation and confusion, in which the narrator has conceptual difficulties in formulating what has been captured, "rather the description of a spiritual journey of discovery, " the positive experience of a mind " (..), as the narrator put it at the beginning." This development is most strongly expressed in Poe's novel The Report of Arthur Gordon Pym , published four years later .

Like John Keats, Poe himself had absolute confidence in the human imagination and the potential of language, but was also aware that this would possibly overwhelm his readership. Therefore, he chose to encrypt the message in a bottle and introduce the anonymous narrator in order to provide a framework for capturing the story: “Moving beyond all fixed codes, in search for the origins of language itself, it involved the discovery of something that might not, in the last analysis, be capable of being shared. "

For the extremely imaginative descriptions of the unnamed narrator, May found a more radical interpretation by referring to the original cargo of the merchant ship (including opium and palm sugar ) on which the ship, according to his own admission, lived after the shipwreck: “For five entire days and nights - during which our only subsistence was a small quantity of jaggeree, procured with great difficulty from the forecastle (...) " From this May concluded: " we perhaps have the immediate answer as to why the narrator's perception and his description of his experience change radically after the consuming small quantities of such a diet. "

reception

The editors who first published The Manuscript in the Bottle called it in superlatives "eminently distinguished by a wild, vigorous and poetical imagination, a rich style, a fertile invention, and varied and curious learning ."

Fellow writer Joseph Conrad , whose story Herz der Finsternis also used the journey to unknown zones as a symbol of self-discovery, later viewed the short story as something “as fine as anything of that kind can be-so authentic in detail that it might have been told by a sailor of sombre and poetical genius in the invention of the fantastic. " The Poe specialist Scott Peeples summed up the importance of the narrative in the fact that it significantly initiated Poe's writing career.

The story certainly had an influence on Herman Melville and contains similarities to his novel Moby-Dick : “ Two well-known works of American fiction fit the following description. Composed in the 19th century each is an account of an observant, first-person narrator who, prompted by a nervous restlessness, went to sea only to find himself aboard an ill-fated ship. The ship, manned by a strange crew and under the command of a strange, awesome captain, is destroyed in an improbable catastrophe; and were it not for the fortuitous recovery of a floating vessel and its freight, the narrative of the disastrous voyage would never have reached the public. The two works are, of course, Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) and Poe's "MS. Found in a Bottle "(1833), and the correspondences are in some respects so close as to suggest a causal rather than a coincidental relationship between the two tales." Others saw in particular the fatalistic, everything else ignoring description of the respective captains and the merciless sea a special parallel: “If I was already trembling at the wind that has accompanied us so far, must I not die in horror in this chaos of storm and sea, in contrast to which terms like whirlwind and Samum are meaningless? In the immediate vicinity of the ship all is night and unfathomably black water; but at a distance of about a mile, on both sides of the ship, one sees indistinctly and at intervals enormous ice walls protruding into the bleak sky, like walls that enclose space. "

James Thurber published MS Found in a book in 1950 , with which he already made a clear loan in the title. The story was ostensibly about a first edition of Stephen Crane's The Open Boat that Thurber allegedly got from a friend who in turn bought it for a quarter from an antiquarian bookstore in Columbus . In the nested encryption, Thurber declared it to be authentic, since it contained a still sealed letter that CN Bean had sent to Mr. Remo, in which he described a discussion with Crane in Havana in 1898. Both the interlacing of the plot introduction and the multiple references to the lake theme lead back to Poe.

Other literary scholars saw Poe's influence even in Carlos Fuentes , who in part 2 of Terra Nostra used the symbol of a three-fold "encrypted" message in a bottle to construct his narrative method.

The Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers , who admired Poe very much, created an illustrative object installation in 1974, among other things : a simple wine bottle, usually used for white Bordeaux . In the first third below the bottle neck, the words "The Manuscript" and the year "1833" were printed in bright black letters. Art historians nonetheless saw a tautology in the work , as both the original content (wine) and the presumed new content (the manuscript) were missing.

Publication history

Baltimore Saturday Visiter, October 19, 1833

The Gift , Carey and Hart, Philadelphia, 1836

Southern Literary Messenger , the MS. Found in a Bottle and Politian by Edgar Allan Poe, 1835

In the June 15, 1833 issue of the Baltimore Saturday Visiter , its publishers Charles F. Cloud and William L. Pouder announced prices of $ 50 for the best story and $ 25 for the best poem, which must not exceed a hundred lines. Contributions should be submitted by October 1, 1833. Poe handed MS. Found in a Bottle along with five other works. The jurors, John Pendleton Kennedy , Dr. James Henry Miller and John HB Latrobe, met at the latter's house on October 7th, and named Poe's short story the winner. The award was announced in the October 12th issue and the narrative appeared in the October 19th issue with the following note: “The following is the Tale to which the Premium of Fifty Dollars has been awarded by the Committee. It will be found highly graphic in its style of composition. "

Poe's contribution to poetry, The Coliseum , appeared a few days later but did not win a prize. With John W. Hewitt, the winner of this section turned out to be none other than one of the Visiter editors , who had submitted his work under the pseudonym Henry Wilton . Poe was indignant and implied that the competition had been manipulated. Hewitt himself claimed in 1885 that he and Poe had a scuffle in the streets over it, but that argument has never really been verified. Poe believed that his own poem was the real winner, a guess that Kennedy and, above all, Latrobe later confirmed.

Kennedy was particularly helpful in starting Poe's career, giving him a post-competition job at the Visiter . He also helped the writer to reprint the story three years later in an annual gift book: The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present (1836). In addition, the story appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in December 1835 when Poe became editor there. Kennedy also encouraged Poe to reissue the other short stories that were submitted to the competition together with the winning title in one edition and contacted the publisher Carey & Lea at his own risk. The collection was to appear under the title Tales of the Folio Club , and Saturday Visiter beat the drum to find subscribers for one dollar each who could buy the work in October 1833. A week after the announcement, however, it was announced that the author would have his works printed in a different location. The collection was also offered to publishers Harper and Brothers. However, these declined with the reference that their readers would prefer longer stories and short stories . This rejection indirectly stimulated Poe to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket , another seaman's story, and his only novel .

After its first appearance, The Manuscript in the Bottle Ready was illegally printed in violation of copyright law on October 26, 1833 at the People's Advocate in Newburyport , Massachusetts .

German translations (selection)

• 1901: Hedda Moeller and Hedwig Lachmann : The message in a bottle. JCC Bruns, Minden.
• 1909: Bodo Wildberg : The handwriting in the bottle. Book publisher for the German House, Berlin.
• 1911: Gisela Etzel : The manuscript in the bottle. Propylaen, Munich.
• 1922: M. Bretschneider : The manuscript in the bottle. Rösl & Cie., Munich.
• 1925: Stefan Hofer: The manuscript in the bottle. Interterritorial publishing house “Renaissance”, Vienna
• 1945: Marlies Wettstein : The message in a bottle. Artemis, Zurich.
• 1947: Wolf Durian : The manuscript in the bottle. Ullstein, Vienna.
• 1953: Richard Mummendey : The document in the bottle. Hundt, Hattingen.
• 1960: Christel and Helmut Wiemken : A message in a bottle. Schünemann, Bremen.
• 1966: Arno Schmidt : Manuscript find in a bottle. Walter, Freiburg i. Br.
• 1989: Erika Engelmann : A manuscript in a bottle. Reclams Universal Library, Stuttgart.
• 1989: Erika Gröger : The message in a bottle. Insel, Leipzig.
• 2017: Andreas Nohl : Manuscript found in bottle. dtv, Munich.

literature

• Herwig Friedl: Edgar Allan Poe: “MS. Found in a Bottle " . In: Klaus Lubbers (ed.): The English and American short story . Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt 1990, ISBN 3-534-05386-9 , pp. 40–51.
• David Halliburton: Edgar Allan Poe. A Phenomeological View. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1973, ISBN 0-691-06237-4 .
• Stephen K. Hoffmann: Sailing in the Self: Jung Poe, and “MS. Found in a Bottle ". In: Tennessee Studies in Literature. 26, 1981, pp. 66-74.
• David Ketterer: The Rationale of Deception in Poe. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 1979, ISBN 0-8071-0561-9 .
• Charles E. May: Edgar Allan Poe. A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne, Boston 1991, ISBN 0-8057-8337-7 .
• Walter Sheat: Poe's Fiction: The Hypnotic Magic of the Senses. In: The Midwest Quarterly. 47, No. 3, 2006, pp. 276-290.
• Dawn B. Sova: Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe . Facts on File, New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-8160-6408-3 , pp. 118-120.

Web links

Wikisource: The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe / Volume 1 / MS. found in a Bottle  - Sources and full texts (English)

• MS. Found in a Bottle at Zeno.org ., Another German translation.
• Original text
• The manuscript in the bottle as an audio book on Librivox.org

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Richard Gravil / Molly Lefebure (ed.): The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland. Humanities-Ebooks, Penrith 2007, p. 242.
2. ↑ On the technology: Margaret Alterton: Origins of Poe's Critical Theory. Severus Verlag, Hamburg 2011. ND of the English edition from 1925, p. 22.
3. ↑ On the continuous use of the motif: Eberhard Schmitt: India Driver 2. Seamen and Life on Board in the First Colonial Age (15th to 18th Century) Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2008, p. 190.
4. ↑ Edgar Allan Poe: The murder in the Rue Morgue and other stories. Buch und Zeit Verlagsgesellschaft, Cologne undated , ISBN 3-8166-0090-5 , p. 69.
5. ↑ Edgar Allan Poe: The murder in the Rue Morgue and other stories. Buch und Zeit Verlagsgesellschaft, Cologne undated , ISBN 3-8166-0090-5 , p. 80.
6. ↑ Deborah Schultz: Marcel Broodthaers : Strategy and Dialogue. Peter Lang Verlag, Oxford a. a. 2007, p. 215.
7. ↑ Patricia Ann Carlson (Ed.): Literature and Lore of the Sea. Rodopi / Humanities Press, Amsterdam / Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1986, p. 177.
8. ↑ See Brett Zimmerman: Edgar Allan Poe: Rhetoric And Style. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal 2005, p. 259.
9. ↑ ^{a b} James M. Hutchisson: Poe. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2005, p. 39.
10. ↑ Stuart Levine, Susan F. Levine (eds.) The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition. University of Illinois Press, Urbana 1990, p. 622.
11. ↑ Hans Richard Brittnacher: Monster in the pack ice. In: Achim Geisenhanslüke, Georg Mein (Hrsg.): Monstrous orders: On the typology and aesthetics of the abnormal. transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2009, pp. 103–124, here: p. 117.
12. ^ Edgar Allan Poe: Thirty-Two Stories. Edited and commented by Stuart Levine et al. Susan F. Levine, Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis 2000, p. 16.
13. ^ Edgar Allan Poe: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and Related Tales. Edited and introduced by J. Gerald Kennedy, Oxford University Press, Oxford S. XVI.
14. ↑ Edgar Allan Poe: The murder in the Rue Morgue and other stories. Buch und Zeit Verlagsgesellschaft, Cologne undated , ISBN 3-8166-0090-5 , p. 80.
15. ↑ Edgar Allan Poe: The murder in the Rue Morgue and other stories. Buch und Zeit Verlagsgesellschaft, Cologne undated , ISBN 3-8166-0090-5 , p. 75.
16. ↑ Jutta Ernst: Edgar Allan Poe and the poetics of the arabesque. (= Saarbrücken Contributions to Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, 3; Zugl .: Saarbrücken, Univ., Diss., 1994) Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1996, ISBN 3-8260-1244-5 , p. 98.
17. ↑ Seymour Betsky : Doodling America: Poe's "Ms. Found in a bottle “ In: Robert Druce, Seymour Betsky (Ed.): A Center of Excellence: Essays Presented to Seymour Betsky. Rodopi, Amsterdam 1987, p. 15.
18. ↑ Original text , p. 115.
19. ^ Charles E. May: Edgar Allan Poe. A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne, Boston 1991, p. 24.
20. ↑ ^{a b c} Dawn B. Sova: Edgar Allan Poe: A to Z. Checkmark Books, New York City 2001, ISBN 0-8160-4161-X , p. 162.
21. ^ Scott Peeples: Edgar Allan Poe Revisited . Twayne Publishers, New York 1998, ISBN 0-8057-4572-6 , p. 46.
22. ↑ Jack Scherting: "The Bottle and the Coffin: Further Speculation on Poe and Moby-Dick ." In: Poe Newsletter, vol. I, no.2, October 1968, p. 22.
23. ↑ See the parallels made clear by Katrin Schmidt: Melville's Moby-Dick as an ancient Egyptian soul journey. Norderstedt 2010, p. 38.
24. ↑ See Burton R. Pollin : Poe's Seductive Influence On Great Writers. IUniverse, Inc., New York 2004, p. 3.
25. ^ Harold Kaplan : Democratic Humanism and American Literature. Transaction Books, New Brunswick (NJ); (ND of the 1972 edition) 2nd edition. London 2009, p. 117.
26. ^ Edgar Allan Poe's works. Complete edition of the poems and stories, Volume 5: Fantastic journeys . Published by Theodor Etzel , Propylaen-Verlag, Berlin 1922, p. 24.
27. ^ Bermudian , August 1950, Letter from the States .
28. ^ Burton R. Pollin: Poe's Seductive Influence On Great Writers. iUniverse, New York 2004, p. 135.
29. ↑ Terra Nostra. (1975) - Terra nostra . German by Maria Bamberg. Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-423-10043-5 .
30. ↑ Lois Vines: Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities. University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 1999, pp. 236f.
31. ↑ Marcel Marcel Broodthaers: Le manuscrit trouvé dans une bouteille. Edition René Block, Berlin 1974 (120 numbered and signed copies).
32. ↑ Deborah Schultz: Marcel Broodthaers: Strategy and Dialogue. Peter Lang Verlag, Oxford a. a. 2007, p. 214 ff.
33. ↑ Dwight Thomas, & David K. Jackson: The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849 . GK Hall & Co., Boston 1987, ISBN 0-8161-8734-7 , p. 130.
34. ↑ Dwight Thomas, & David K. Jackson: The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849 . GK Hall & Co., Boston 1987, p. 133.
35. ↑ On the extremely positive reception by supraregional contemporary literary criticism, cf. Ian Malcolm Walker (Ed.): Edgar Allan Poe. The Critical Heritage. Routledge, London 1987, pp. 84f.
36. ↑ Harry Lee Poe: Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to His Tell-Tale Stories . Metro Books, New York 2008, ISBN 978-1-4351-0469-3 , p. 55.
37. ↑ Jeffrey Meyers: Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy . Cooper Square Press, New York 1992, ISBN 0-8154-1038-7 , p. 65.
38. ↑ Arthur Hobson Quinn, Shawn Rosenheim: Edgar Allan Poe. A Critical Biography. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore / London 1998, p. 203.
39. ↑ Dwight Thomas & David K. Jackson: The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849 . GK Hall & Co., Boston 1987, p. 135.
40. ^ Richard P. Benton: "The Tales: 1831-1835", A Companion to Poe Studies. Edited by Eric W. Carlson, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT. 1996, ISBN 0-313-26506-2 , p. 111.
41. ↑ Kenneth Silverman : Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance . Harper Perennial, New York City 1991, ISBN 0-06-092331-8 , p. 93.
42. ↑ Kenneth Silverman: Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance . Harper Perennial, New York City 1991, ISBN 0-06-092331-8 , pp. 92f.
43. ↑ Scott Peeples. Edgar Allan Poe Revisited . Twayne Publishers, New York 1998, p. 56.
44. ↑ Cf. Edgar Allan Poe: Tales and sketches Edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott with the help of Eleanor D. Kewer and Maureen C. Mabbott, Vol. 1. (1831–1842), University of Illinois Press, Urbana et al. a. 2000, p. 131.