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 Epilogue Afterlives of Ariel’s Ecology In the opening chapter of Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (), Poe’s protagonist, Pym, is swept from the brig Ariel when it is run down by the whaler Penguin. Pinned to the keel of the Penguin, Pym rides the Atlantic, facing downward to the sea’s depths and drowning. Pym’s opening sequencing of storms, shipwreck, and the delivery of the Anglo-European Pym to the sea by the agency of an Ariel, this time a ship rather than a spirit, recalls Shakespeare’s play, which is one of Pym’s several literary precedents. Like the other literary precedents circulating in Pym (Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), The Tempest is referenced in order to be mutated. Instead of the structures of subjection and social and political order that emerge from these precedents, Poe casts Pym in an erratic trajectory that dissolves autobiography (evident in Pym’s lack of a sense of either history or guilt), sedimented social organizations (evident in Pym’s cannibalization of a shipboard companion), and known cartographies (evident in the work’s concluding drive off the edges of any known mapping of space or terrain). In the work’s penultimate sequence, when Pym, along with the half-Crow, half-Canadian Dirk Peters, finds himself stranded on the tropico-polar island Tsalal, he declares, “We alone had escaped from the tempest of that overwhelming destruction. We were the only living white men upon the island.”1 This declaration of whiteness is so deeply shot through with irony as to announce precisely its inverse. Most obviously, Peters is not white. More pressingly, Pym himself has been increasingly coded as savage in the several chapters preceding this declaration. Pym’s erratic trajectory involves him in a process of creolization that began in the opening sequence when the Penguin’s wayward bolt passed into his neck and out just below his ear, impaling him on the ship’s bottom. Pym’s declaration indicates that this “tempest,” which by this point references subaltern resistance as well as elemental and ecological processes, has become a planetary phenomenon.   EPILOGUE If Pym hoped to find a new personal or political configuration in his zigzagging trajectory across the Atlantic, down from the tip of South American where the Atlantic joins the Pacific, and then beyond all known territories, he instead discovers that there is no escape from colonialization and ensuing processes of creolization. That Pym recasts The Tempest as a colonial contest unfolding on a planetary scale indicates the expanding geopolitical frame on which tropical unrest and agency were conceived by the midcentury moment in which Poe wrote. What’s more, Pym’s attention to planetary creolization indicates how the themes I have followed in this book verge toward and then veer away from the canonical archive of American literature in which Pym has been included since the publication of Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel ().2 In verging on this canonical archive, I do not mean to infuse the archive and the questions I have pursued into the American canon so as to expand it with new readings in minor keys. Rather, I mean this verging as the occasion for a line of interrogation that reclaims Poe’s Pym as a minoritarian work, by which I mean a work and genealogy that develops within a majority tradition and that offers a port through which character or critic might move to produce alternate forms of personhood and sociality. As Deleuze and Guattari propose, minority languages and literatures might be understood as “that which a minority constructs within a major language” and that effects the “deterritorialization of languages, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy , and the collective assemblage of enunciation.”3 By their account, minor literatures forge “the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literatures.”4 If this definition of the minoritarian suggests that the minoritarian depends on a majoritarian language and literature from which it emerges and that it cannibalizes and revolutionizes, the reading of Pym I offer here indicates that minoritarian works, far from being in opposition to and thus dependent on the crushing presence of canonical traditions, decompose canonical traditions from within, in their place producing a new field, by which I mean a new organization of space, self, and sociality that has the power to pass the majoritarian...

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