Adventures of the Spherical Cow: Collected Essays

The Polar Enigma

 The Polar Enigma of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym

In 1819, an eminent British navigator, Sir John Franklin was selected to lead an expedition "overland from Hudson's Bay to the Arctic Ocean" and "after encountering many hardships, and very frequently at the point of death from hunger and fatigue, he reached home October, 1822."  He made another successful expedition from 1825 to 1827, for which he was knighted by the Queen in 1829.  And in 1845, he set out for his third and last expedition to the arctic regions, from which he never returned.  Some of the party's "shoes, cooking utensils, & c. were found among the Esquimaux, who declared [the Franklin party] had died of starvation."1

In 1837 and 1838, Edgar Allan Poe, American fiction writer, critic, essayist, and poet, whose dark world-view has influenced a number of writers in America, including not only dark fantasy writers, such as Lovecraft and of course Stephen King, but also Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, and Shirley Jackson,2 published The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, a novella of severe hardships at sea which concludes in the antarctic.3 Poe was by no means the only major 19th century American writer to write about antarctic exploration.  In 1835, James Fenimore Cooper published The Monikins: A Tale4 concerning "monkeys…who are called monikins, hail from Antarctica, where there is an extensive monikin civilization."5  In 1896, Mark Twain wrote but did not complete "The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness,"6 which E. F. Bleiler describes as 

a fragment of about forty-five hundred words…originally planned to be an intercalculated story in Following the Equator….  The essential concept of 'The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness is a fancy geography corresponding to the Saragasso Sea of the tropics.  In the Antarctic, Twain postulates, there is a similar area south of the Cape of Good Hope, a circular sea trap about five hundred miles in diameter, with a totally windless area in the center called Everlasting Sunday. … A sailing vessel enters this area and finds the remains of ships going back to the Napoleonic era, all their crews dead of thirst and starvation.7

Neither of these are among their authors' major works.  The Southern Literary Messenger, of which Poe was the editor, the venue of the story's first appearance, summarized Pym as: 

The Details of a Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus on her way to the South Seas--with an Account of the Recapture of the Vessel by the Survivors; their Shipwreck, and the subsequent Horrible Sufferings from Famine; their Deliverance by means of British Schooner Jane Guy; the Brief Cruise of this latter Vessel in the Antarctic Ocean; her Capture and the Massacre of her Crew among a group of Islands in the 84th Parellel of Southern Latitude, together with the incredible Adventures and Discoveries still further South, to which the Distressing Calamity gave rise.8 

Most commentary on the story tends to treat is as supernatural fiction and focuses on the last third, after Arthur Gordon Pym and Dirk Peters have been rescued by Captain Guy of the Jane Guy and the ship has made its way to the antarctic regions.  For example, H. P. Lovecraft describes the story as follows: 

In the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym the voyagers reach first a strange south polar land of murderous savages where nothing is white and where vast rocky ravines have the form of titanic Egyptian letters spelling terrible primal arcana of earth; and thereafter a still more mysterious realm where everything is white, and where shrouded giants and snowy-plumed birds guard a cryptic cataract of mist which empties from immeasurable celestial heights into a torrid milky sea.9

 This essay will also be particularly concerned with this final section, especially with the giant letters inscribed in the landscape, and with the story's final images which pretend to illuminate the enigmatic inscription.  Everett Bleiler claims that "actually, these 'inscriptions' are simply examples of Poe's playfulness, or 'diddling,' as he called it.  They are scrambled versions of Pym and Edgar Allan Poe!"10