When Is Now?: Poe’s Aesthetics of Temporality

When Is Now? Poe’s Aesthetics of Temporality CINDY WEINSTEIN In about an hour after he had gone I distinctly felt the brig in motion, and congratulated myself upon having at length fairly commenced a voyage. —Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) Time and temporal relations must almost always be ascertained in a context that is wider, and on a level that is higher than the one in which uses of Time can first be identified. —Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (1983) T ime is an essential component in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Augustus’s watch runs down and his father’s chronometer goes missing. The passage of days, hours, and minutes occupies a great deal of narrative space and anxious speculation. The narrative even assumes the form of a log with its explicit demarcation of months and dates. But time’s presence runs deeper than even these instances suggest, as my epigraph from Pym intimates and as this essay will show.1 Adverbs designating the passage of time, such as “after” and “at length,” are a constitutive feature of Pym’s narrative fabric, as are adjectives that convey an experience of time, such as “immediate” and “still.” As much as Pym’s is a journey in space, it is a journey in and through time. And lest we forget, it is also a fictional voyage of exploration written in time by Arthur Gordon Pym/Edgar Allan Poe and read in the time of the 1830s. In an analysis of how the discipline of anthropology strategically deploys the markers of time, such as tenses and adverbs, to produce the subjects of its study as colonized others separate in time, Johannes Fabian provides a valuable template for understanding Poe’s Pym—which, as we know, contains a substantial amount of material plagiarized from exploratory and ethnographic texts of the antebellum period. Through close readings of key anthropological texts, Fabian foregrounds the central, but theoretically unstudied, role time has played in the imperial/epistemological conquest of space and argues that “time [has been required] to accommodate the schemes of a one-way history: C
2008 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 41, 2008 81 C I N D Y W E I N S T E I N progress, development, modernity (and their negative mirror images: stagnation , underdevelopment, tradition)”: “In short, geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics.”2 Another way of putting this is to say that chronopolitics posits a static temporality—the past or then—against which progress—the present or now—measures itself. There has to be a zero degree, an origin, in order for the story of progress to tell itself. On the one hand, Pym does tell the story of the Tsalalian culture far removed in space and stuck in an originary and unchanging moment of time that, upon contact with the modern (white) world, must be destroyed because of its savage and primitive (black) nature. On the other, the temporal complexities of Poe’s narrative constantly undermine the “one-way history” that is essential to the imperial project. Pym’s chronopolitics, in other words, are not as ideologically straightforward and consistent as Fabian’s analysis might lead us to believe, for two reasons: because the “now” of Pym is constantly shifting; and because Pym, for all its borrowings from travel narratives, is a selfconscious work of fiction that aims to amuse, baffle, and frighten the reader. Thus, inasmuch as there is a chronopolitics at work in Pym, there is also what I shall call an “aesthetics of temporality.” The two are in tension and pull the text in quite different directions—the chronopolitics offering a stable sense of past and present in order to argue for the necessity of racial hierarchy and domination, and the aesthetics of temporality subverting that stability in order to achieve the desired effect on the reader. The primary conflict in Pym is between form and content: Poe’s aesthetic power has the alarming effect of obstructing his ideological perspective. What follows, then, is a close reading of Pym that takes the rather unorthodox, but I believe...