Hospitality and the Thresholds of the Human in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) stands at the center of the vigorous reassessment of Edgar Allan Poe’s politics that has taken shape over the past twenty years. Toni Morrison’s groundbreaking book Playing in the Dark (1992) reanimated scholarly discussion of Pym and focused attention primarily on questions of race and slavery.¹ Work on Poe’s racial politics tends to measure the distance between his representations of race and normative antebellum strains of racism, and to debate the extent to which he supported slavery.² My essay is indebted to and resonates with this rich body of scholarship, but approaches Pym from a different angle. I read the novel as a study of how conceptions of social life can change when the boundaries between human and animal are taken not to be stable or inviolable, but rather volatile and readily crossable.³Pym’s thinking about such boundaries takes the form of an allegorical meditation on hospitality that runs through its stories of shipwreck survivors. Poe’s allegory of hospitality turns its back on the notions of intentionality and self-mastery that ground liberal political thought, and calls for political thinking that is better attuned to the bodily vulnerabilities of living beings.

The “thresholds” of my essay’s title recall Joan Dayan’s important work on Poe’s interest in “the threshold separating humanity from animality.”⁴ In Dayan’s view, Poe’s writing exploits the imperfections of this and other forms of separation or, as she puts it, the “unspeakable slippages between men and women, humans and animals, life and death.”⁵ For Dayan’s Poe the border between humanity and animality is hidden, and the task is to disclose it, to “reveal[ ] the threshold.”⁶ In Animalia Americana, Colleen Glenney Boggs shifts attention from a Poe who reveals a threshold to one who “examines the permeability of that threshold.”⁷ While I very much share Boggs’s sense of the importance of the holes in the border between humanity and animality, I would like to draw attention to Poe’s interest in the logic of hospitality that the word threshold particularly implies. In Poe’s view the human has multiple entries and exits: between human and animal lies not just “the threshold,” but thresholds, some well known and others remaining to be revealed. And as my title suggests, Pym calls for thinking about “the human,” a term I like because it can name concepts of humanity but (unlike “humanity”) can also refer to singular embodied human beings. Perhaps the distinction between humanity and the human is needlessly subtle, but I suggest it to underscore the centrality of fleshly vulnerability to Pym’s conception of humanity. Finally, I note that crossing a human threshold need not destroy humanity. Even if some of Poe’s work is, as Dayan suggests, “about radical dehumanization,” Pym does not accept the stable concept of humanity that notions of dehumanization presuppose.⁸Pym is about retaining and redefining the human: becoming open to the chance that one is not acquainted with every human possibility.

Poe’s writing in Pym and elsewhere blurs, breaks through, and multiplies the boundaries between human beings and other animal species. A dip into the antebellum periodical archive reveals that he was hardly the only writer of his time to wonder about such boundaries.⁹ Attending to Poe’s animals promises not only to show his relevance to contemporary animal studies, but also to give us a more adequately historicized account of his writing. With few exceptions, scholars have understood Poe’s animals anthropocentrically, as figures of strictly human concerns. I suggest both that Poe deserves the attention of animal studies scholars and that attending to Poe’s animals can generate fresh views of his politics.

By using the concept of hospitality to redefine humanity, Pym puts a lot of pressure on a seemingly minor dimension of antebellum social life. “Hospitality” has a lightweight sound to it. Its place in Western political thought is far from secure, and it has not played a...