Poe, Movement, and Matter: The Malacological Aesthetics of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

In The Conchologist’s First Book, Edgar Allan Poe refuses to limit the study of the mollusk to a simple taxonomy of shells and, instead, approaches the animal as a complex system of material relations between a body, its shell, and the natural environment in which it makes its home. At the same time that Poe was working on this popular and groundbreaking textbook, he was also developing his System of Testaceous Malachology as a powerful and innovative aesthetic, as well as scientific, practice in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Such an aesthetics—oriented toward oscillating impersonal forces of relation—invokes a materialism that is anything but inert.