The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Arthur Gordon Pym's Report , first edition (1838)

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket ( The story of Arthur Gordon Pym from Nantucket ) is the only novel by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe . It was first published in 1838. The narrator describes the life of Arthur Gordon Pym from the island of Nantucket off the northeast coast of the USA . From a young age, Pym sought out adventures at sea that changed his approach to life over the years. The nature of the adventures are partly realistic ( shipwreck and mutiny ), partly fantastic (hot currents and rapids in the ocean of the south). The novel is Poe's longest prose work and is considered one of his most enigmatic works.

The novel has been translated into German several times, although the rather long title was mostly subject to changes. The first known translation with the title Strange Sea Adventure Arthur Gordon Pym’s comes from Adolf von Winterfeld from the year 1883. Other well-known translations are from Hedda Moeller and Hedwig Lachmann : Die Abenteuer Gordon Pyms (1901), Gisela Etzel : The memorable experiences of Arthur Gordon Pym (1918). One of the best-known German translations is by Arno Schmidt , who published it in 1966 under the title Circumstances of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket . The most recent (commented) translation was published in 2008 by Hans Schmid under the title The Story of Arthur Gordon Pym from Nantucket

content

Pyms boat is destroyed, issue Downey & co. , 1898

The novel is divided into 25 chapters and a foreword and an afterword.

Preface

In the foreword, the first-person narrator Pym explains to the reader that, returning from a trip to the South Seas, he told some gentlemen, including EA Poe, about his experiences on this trip and was asked to make this report available to the general public do. He was reluctant to begin with, as the events on this trip were sometimes so incredible that one could take him for a dream. In addition, he did not keep a diary, which would lead to some inaccuracies. At first, he was therefore unable to comply with this request. Then Mr. Poe offered to write this report with his, Pyms, consent and to publish it in the monthly magazine Southern Literary Messenger, of which he was the editor, stating his, Poes, name and thus marked it as pure poetry. He, Pym, agreed to this proposal and later took up pen himself, so that the majority of the report ultimately came from him, Pym.

Part 1 (Chapter 1)

Even as teenagers, Pym and his friend Augustus Barnard did the best pranks on Pym's sailboat. One of them is a night drive without provisions and equipment when the storm is approaching, in which Augustus turns out to be drunk, while Pym is sober, clear and terrifying. In the dark they are finally run over by a whaler , discovered and then rescued.

Part 2 (Chapters 2-4)

A few years later Pym hides in the belly of the whaler "Grampus", whom Augustus' father is supposed to lead as captain and who is to accompany Augustus. In the darkness below deck, between the evaporating oil drums and without enough water and food, Pym almost goes insane. After a few unsuccessful attempts at liberation, Pym gives up, but Augustus frees him from the dark after 11 days: He couldn't do it earlier because a mutiny also imprisoned him and almost cost him his life.

Part 3 (Chapters 5-9)

The reconquest of the ship by Augustus, Pym and their new friend, Dirk Peters, a former mutineer, succeeds. The mutineers are surprised that Pym disguises himself as the ghost of a mutineer who was murdered by his comrades. Parallel to the struggle of the people, the next struggle of the forces of nature rages, a storm that turns the ship into a drifting wreck .

Part 4 (Chapters 9-13)

Illustration of the death of Augustus by Albert Edward Sterner, 1895

Pym, Augustus and Peters, as well as another surviving mutineer named Richard Parker, wait about three weeks on the flooded wreck, which only floats thanks to the empty drainage barrels in the hold. With varying degrees of success, they repeatedly try to dive for provisions in the hold of the ship. Hunger and thirst torment the four so much that they draw among themselves who should serve as food for the others. The mutineer who first came up with this idea is fateful. Augustus dies as a result of a wound infection . Pym and Peters are finally rescued by a sailor from their wreck, which is floating up the keel.

Note : This episode actually took place in 1884, long after Poe's novel, and led to one of the most famous legal cases of the 19th century ( R v Dudley and Stephens ). The name of the murdered man was - as in Poe's work (!) - Richard Parker.

Part 5 (Chapters 14-24)

Illustration of the End of History by AD McCormick, 1898

The sailor who saved them, the "Jane Guy", trades in the South Seas and hunts seals. The captain also hopes for wealth by finding islands that are insecurely located. In search of them, he penetrates large ice fields and further south than any sailor before him. They break through the ice fields and come back to warmer regions, carried by a current to the South Pole. You come across a group of islands with black natives who do not know the color white or only know it as a harbinger of bad luck or death. The “savages” seem to be accommodating to the Europeans, although a remnant of Pym's distrust, who impatiently wants to follow the current south, cannot be dispelled. Surprised they observe z. B. that the water here consists of veins of different colors that do not mix with each other. The savages lure the Europeans into a trap by collapsing a ravine and then conquering the schooner. Only Peters and Pym are able to free themselves from the burial and after a few days flee the island in a canoe.

Part 6 (Chapter 25)

Peters and Pym, who kidnapped one of the savages, flee into the open sea by canoe. The current leads them further south, the sea heats up increasingly, white birds fly around, it rains white ash, the sea turns milky white and boils, the water glows, whirlpools form ... The native dies of horror. They seem to be approaching a silent rapids, figures appear, “monstrous and pale white birds” fly around, and in the cataract, Peters and Pym see a veiled, enormous, superhuman figure falling, not a “man-made”, with a skin of “flawlessness White of the Snow ”.

epilogue

Mr. Poe informs: Mr. Pym died suddenly and he does not want to reconstruct the remaining 2 or 3 chapters without him. Mr. Poe then turns to the precisely described and drawn crevices on the island and their indentations, the shapes of which he recognizes as similar to the Ethiopian and Egyptian words for the dark and the light.

Narrative

For Poe, this long story of over 200 printed pages was published in 1837, more than ten years before Poe's death. Even if the work itself speaks of its incompleteness in the afterword (two or three final chapters are allegedly missing), it is actually closed in terms of content due to the mysterious appearance that cannot be increased at the end and formally due to the afterword and its explanations, i.e. finished - all interpretive approaches can be therefore rely on the given without having to argue with “gaps”.

The novel begins and ends with a confusion about authorship, in which Poe becomes a character in his own narrative: In the “Introductory Comment” he looks at himself with Pym's eyes as a writing “Poe”, in the follow-up (presumably) with the eyes "Poes" on the now deceased Pym and his experiences. This frame construction and the identical syllable rhythm of the full names Pyms and Poes therefore suggest a somewhat “autobiographical” interpretation.

The plot runs like a number revue, rushing from an emergency to a temporary relaxation into a new danger. With the piling up of the catastrophes, Peters and Pym are on the verge of madness after the wreck of the Grampus capsized - and yet the following dangers are "just as great, if not greater". It is not the daily data that structure the life of Pyms and his friends, but the type of disaster. Nothing is so horrific that it cannot be surpassed by the following events, and in this climax of human exposure, the last possible increase is the encounter of the creatures with their ultimate appearance - presumably the Creator himself.

Several excursions provide additional information about stowing on sailing ships, about turning in a storm, about albatrosses and penguins, about the approach of sailing ships to the South Pole, about life and the preparation of a certain type of mussel. This slows down the progress, but the narrative is given the appearance of a “factual report”, which the first-person narrator already values ​​in the introduction despite his “strange” experiences.

Part of the story was first in January 1837 in the journal Southern Literary Messenger published

History of origin

A friend of Poes, James Kirk Paulding (1778-1860), had tried in vain to get the stories from the Folio Club to publishers. In the letter of March 17, 1836, in which he told Poe about it, he recommended that he try a more extensive format, “a story in two volumes, because that is the magic formula!” Poe, who as always in Was short of money, was motivated by this; in the choice of substances his success with MS is likely . Found in a Bottle would have been decisive - Poe had experienced the demonia of the sea himself, it appealed to him and he felt literarily equal to it. Nevertheless, the chosen format overwhelmed the short story author, which is why, in order to achieve the desired volume, he added nautical, geographical and biological digressions and thus anticipated the much-vaunted structure used by his contemporary Herman Melville in Moby Dick . One of the most important sources for the novel is likely to have been the memoranda of Jeremiah N. Reynolds (1799-1858), who campaigned for the exploration of the South Seas on a political level. Poe has reviewed them several times and copied passages from them. After this Reynolds, Poe kept calling shortly before his death.

Historical and regional references

The whaling was in the County Nantucket in the US state of Massachusetts in the 17th and 18th centuries an important economic factor.

Interpretations

The report of Arthur Gordon Pym was received very different and there is still no generally accepted interpretation. For Peeples the novel is at the same time a pseudo-non-fictional story of discovery, an adventure saga, an educational novel, a joke, a heavily plagiarized travel description and an allegorical landscape of the soul. Poe's work is one of the most elusive, most significant texts in American literature.

Poe biographer Hutchisson writes that the plot both rises to new heights of fictional ingenuity and falls to new depths of silliness and absurdity. One reason for the confusion of readers are the many improbabilities and inconsistencies in the course of the novel. However, one could explain individual fantastic elements as reactions of the author to the adventure literature and theories of his time, e.g. B. on Symme's model of the hollow earth, which says that one can get through openings at the poles to a warm area in the interior of the earth. In contrast, other parts of the story seem carefully crafted and structured. A central design feature is the increasing repetition of the doom and rescue motifs, and the center of the novel coincides with the reaching of the equator, as the novelist Barth noted.

For Hoffman's analysis, Pyms used a targeted search for the south country, compared to Poe's other sea stories such as MS. Found in a Bottle , a great allegorical meaning. Meyers even suspects that the trip is about establishing a national American identity as well as discovering a personal identity.

Autobiographical allegory

The autobiographical interpretation begins with the name Arthur Gordon Pyms, which is similar to that of Edgar Allan Poes. The decisive turning point in the life of both the young protagonist and the author is the separation from the family and the start of adventure. The odyssey to the end of the world begins symbolically in search of the mysterious fantasy land in the white region of the south in Edgartown , Massachusetts . Interpreted in this way, Pym drifts away from his previous mainland life and searches for the deep structures of his person in the dark ship belly of the whaler Grampus and in the stormy ocean: his id, his ego and his superego. The author replaces the middle part of his name, "Allan" with "Gordon", i. H. Poe's connection to his foster parents is exchanged for a reference to George Gordon Byron, whom the writer admires . In keeping with this, Pym hides his travel plans from the family and stages a game of hide and seek. The scene in which he does not want to be recognized by his grandfather on the way to the ship, while at the same time wishing to inherit him, shows, according to Kennedy, the author's wish to free himself from his foster father, John Allan, whom he despises. The data in the travel diary are just as important for this interpretation. Pym arrives on Tsalal Island on January 19th - Poe's birthday . Various literary scholars, including Burton R. Pollin and Richard Wilbur, point out that the author's childhood friend Ebenezer Burling and his brother William Henry Leonard Poe, the sailor aboard the USS Macedonian , the day of the death of which coincides with August's, were the models for August Barnard could be. Another connection is in the ship's name. Both Pym's sailboat and that of Byron's admirer Percy Bysshe Shelley are called "Ariel". In addition, Poe's mother, Eliza, played a theater character of that name.

Obviously, biographical references are recognizable in the drug issue, the labyrinthine systems and dark grave-like prisons that cause hallucinations and states of fear. For example, Poe illustrates the different effects of alcohol from his experience. The first episode shows that intoxicated people sometimes seem very sober and then suddenly act uncontrollably. Such descriptions correspond with the many contradictions between chaos and order presented in the travelogue. In addition, nature appears inconsistent. Water, for example, is described as either colorful or unnaturally clear at the end of the novel. In the end, the sun shines sickly yellow, but does not emit any clear light and is then apparently extinguished.

Other parallels to the Poe biography have also been explored. So Rosenheim believes that the use of hieroglyphics in the novel reflects Poe's interest in cryptography . The pictograms are probably inspired by The Kentuckian in New-York (1834) by William Alexander Caruthers , where a similar font is the work of a black slave.

Existential journey

Some interpreters focus on the protagonist's search for the meaning of life and see the novel as the forerunner of Herman Melville's Moby Dick , whose main character, Captain Ahab, does not achieve his goal of hunted down the white whale. The fact that Pym's report ends with the boat falling into a crack in the cataract and the sudden appearance of a huge figure with the flawless white skin color of the snow is interpreted by Peeples as the symbolic conclusion of a spiritual, spiritual journey. In keeping with this, the question of whether there is a land behind the cataract remains open in the novel. Rather, the focus of interest is on the cruel travel experiences of the protagonist, which are associated with puzzling symbolism: the encounter with the ghost ship and the strange shapes of the gaps and the hieroglyphs "being white" and "the region of the south" on the island of the black Savages who are afraid of white animals.

A central problem of interpretation is the function of the complexly constructed and yet incomplete framework plot. In the “preliminary remarks”, Pym is initially reluctant to tell his experiences in writing: He fears that the public will see his story as an invention and not as a factual report. But Pym finally allows Mr. EA Poe to write the first part of his adventure instead of himself and even to publish it as an "invented [...] story" under Poe's name. The fact that the author so clearly thematizes the veiled “truth” of the apparently surreal events is an indication of the extra-factual, subjective truth of this experience. In the disasters, the survivors of the shipwreck, Pym and Peters, change, who gradually matures into an alter ego Pyms. The experience report thus describes an inner journey of discovery, the painful insight into the way the world works, and becomes a story of the development of the worldview of his heroes, which is well documented in the text:

The journey to the boundaries of the known world broadened the horizons of the youngster, who was naive at the beginning of the action, and changed his behavior: the prisoner in the ship's belly became the driving force of the search trip, and that distinguishes him from his companions: “We discovered nothing that was us would have been familiar. ”And despite the canoe shooting towards the cataract, Peters and Pym remain attentive until the report is broken off. Poe joins the downfall of his hero with the fascinating increase in knowledge: Only the risk, the heroes learn something about the nature of the world - precisely the moment in which they are entangled, and differs only in that they are devoured. The turning point in the development, the beginning of the catharsis , can be pinpointed: The main characters Pym and Peters have had the weeks on the capsized Grampus behind them - although the following dangers are "just as great, if not greater", but they are caused by the Both overcome differently than before or differently than others: “The difference lay in our mental state”, in the unexcited attention, in the more “ stoic way of thinking ” towards the catastrophes: This is how Peters quickly stimulates the successful search after being buried on the island after finding a way out and thanks to his resourcefulness and determination, you can also descend on the steep face. The world is out of joint and sometimes the islands are reliably where they should be, then again they have disappeared - the people cannot find a safe haven, but instead of complaining they try to "determine the extent of [their] misfortune more precisely": attentive, stoic, non-resigned. In the strong current towards the South Pole cataract, Pym feels "a physical and mental dullness - a tendency to dream - but that was all!", But remains the distant observer. Peters becomes "very taciturn" and "apathetic" ( Greek for: ' without affect ' or philosophically: ' stoic ') - but the savage in the canoe dies of horror. The story examines the possibility of a life decision in an orientation triangle of optimism, fatalism and an active equanimity in the unpredictable vicissitudes of life. The novel is therefore the report of a catharsis, a self-experience in which confidence and optimism under the influence of the catastrophes are transformed into a stoic, bleak curiosity. In the report by A. Gordon Pym , Poe describes the origin of his unchristian worldview of the struggle for survival.

This text-related interpretation is supplemented by some interpreters because of the end of the novel, which the author probably left open to allow for speculation. Hoffman suspects that Pym died in the cataract and that his story is somehow being told posthumously. Alternatively, the protagonist could have died while writing in the place of his report when he should have died in his fictional travel story. Accordingly, his last knowledge would be that of death: "an abyss was already opening to receive us". Like other characters in Poe's work, Pym seems to have willingly submitted to whatever fate it turns out to be.

Literary aftermath

• Jules Verne created a continuation of Poe's story in 1897 with his story Die Eissphinx .
• There is a sequel by Charles Romyn Dake under the title A Strange Discovery (1899).
• The story also had an impact on HP Lovecraft ; He led them into the Mountains of Madness (English. At the Mountains of Madness ) in some ways continues.
• Most recently, Yann Martel took up numerous motifs from the novel in his story Shipwreck with Tiger .

German translations (selection)

• 1883: Adolf von Winterfeld (translator): Arthur Gordon Pym's strange sea adventures. Entertainment library for travel and home, Jena.
• 1901: Hedda Moeller and Hedwig Lachmann (translators): The adventures of Gordon Pyms. JCC Bruns, Minden.
• 1908: Bodo Wildberg (translator); Rudolf Presber (ed.): The memorable experiences of Artur Gordon Pym. The books of the German House, Berlin.
• 1918: Gisela Etzel (translator): The memorable experiences of Arthur Gordon Pym. Propylaen Verlag, Munich.
• 1922: Alfred Wolfenstein (translator); Franz Blei (ed.): Arthur Gordon Pyms adventurous experiences. Rösl & Cie., Munich.
• 1922: Maria Lazar (translator): The story of Arthur Gordon Pym from Nantucket. Drei Masken Verlag, Munich.
• 1930: Carl Ehrenstein , Thomas Schramek (translator): The memorable experiences of Gordon Pym. German Book Community, Berlin
• 1966: Arno Schmidt (translator); Kuno Schuhmann , Hans Dieter Müller (ed.): Complicated report by Arthur Gordon Pym from Nantucket. Walter Verlag, Freiburg i. Br.
• 1989: Ruprecht Willnow (translator); Günter Gensch (Ed.): The report of A. Gordon Pym. Insel-Verlag, Leipzig, ISBN 3735101151 .
• 2008: Hans Schmid (translator); Michael Farin (Ed.): The Story of Arthur Gordon Pym from Nantucket. marebuchverlag, Hamburg, ISBN 978-3-86648-092-6 .

Opera

On February 18, 2016, the premiere of the opera "Pym" by the German composer and conductor Johannes Kalitzke took place in the Heidelberg Theater . The score for the commission came from the Austrian choreographer Johann Kresnik .

Audio books

• Arthur Gordon Pym. Read by: Lars Rudolph , publisher: der sprachraum, ISBN 3-936301-02-6
• Cumbersome report from Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. (Translation by Arno Schmidt ) read by Christian Brückner , unabridged edition, Argon, Berlin 2008. ISBN 978-3-935125-88-8 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Scott Peeples: Edgar Allan Poe Revisited . New York 1998.
2. ↑ James M. Hutchisson: Poe . Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
3. ^ Daniel Standish: Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth's Surface . Cambridge, MA. 2006.
4. ^ John Barth: Still Farther South: Some Notes on Poe's Pym . Poe's Pym: Critical Explorations , Richard Kopley, editor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992, p. 228.
5. ^ Daniel Hoffman: Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972.
6. ↑ Jeffrey Meyers: Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy . New York: Cooper Square Press, 1991.
7. ↑ s. Hoffman.
8. ^ William Bittner: Poe: A Biography . Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962.
9. ^ Dawn B. Sova: Edgar Allan Poe: A to Z. New York: Checkmark Books, 2001.
10. ↑ J. Gerald Kennedy: Trust No Man: Poe, Douglass, and the Culture of Slavery , Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race , J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg, editors. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
11. ↑ Kenneth Silverman: Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance . New York 1991, p. 135.
12. ↑ ^{a b} s. Peeples, p. 58.
13. ↑ s. Silverman, p. 37.
14. ↑ s. Silverman, p. 474.
15. ↑ s. Bittner, 1962.
16. ↑ Joseph Wood Krutch: Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926, pp. 69-70.
17. ↑ s. Krutch, p. 70.
18. ^ Shawn James Rosenheim: The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet . Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, pp. 21-22.
19. ↑ s. Silverman.
20. ↑ Pattrick F. Quinn: Poe's Imaginary Voyage , Hudson Review, IV (Winter 1952), p. 585.
21. ^ Peeples, p. 68.
22. ↑ s. Hutchisson, p. 75
23. ↑ s. Hoffman, p. 271.
24. ^ John T. Irwin: The Mystery to a Solution . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 173.
25. ↑ s. Sova, p. 162.
26. ↑ Information on the opera “Pym” on theaterheidelberg.de
27. ↑ further information on die-stadtredaktion.de
28. ↑ criticism on die-deutsche-buehne.de

Web links

Wikisource: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym  - Sources and full texts (English)

• Online text of the novel , University of Virginia (English)
• Online text of the novel (PDF; 658 kB) , translated by Hedda Eulenberg , Haus Freiheit
• Essay on the story of the novel , heise.de