Edgar Allan Poe and the Author-Fiction: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

At the end of his studies on the history of copyright in Britain in Authors and Owners (1993), Mark Rose discusses the persistence of the eighteenth-century idea of authorship in the present. According to him, our current understanding of artistic creation fundamentally stays in line with the Romantic representation of the author as “a specially gifted person able to produce from the depths of personal experience an organically unified work of art” (132). It is so even though the term “author” now applies to the producers of movies, “photographs, sculptures, sound recordings, and choreographic works,” as well as to those of typical literary works (132). Rose describes this persistence as “the enclosure of new territories” by the Romantic author, quoting Peter Jaszi’s words that having a copyright means having “a general dominion over the imaginative territory of a particular literary or artistic production” (133). In other words, the conception of the exclusively originary, possessory, and regulatory author could last because we have continuously incorporated new artists since the eighteenth century into the boundary of that conception.

This “enclosure of new artists,” which conspicuously defies the Barthesian death of the author, is especially well demonstrated in Poe scholarship. Though now considered one of the nation’s most quoted, parodied, and admired writers of all time, from a scholarly perspective Edgar Allan Poe was a “new artist” for quite a while. As is well known, Poe was not a widely popular or critically acclaimed literary figure in America during his lifetime.¹ It was French poet Charles Baudelaire who for the first time assessed him as an artistic genius. Baudelaire played a major role in introducing Poe to nineteenth-century Europe by writing essays about him in the 1850s and translating his works from the late 1840s through the 1860s. What is noteworthy is that Baudelaire’s discovery of Poe went hand in hand with his characterization of Poe as an exemplary eighteenth-century artist who is “an isolated and brilliant victim of his artistic temperament, neo-European and aristocratic, essentially opposed to his bourgeois American milieu of ‘money-making’ journalism and democratic mediocrity” (Allen 11). Through this characterization, Poe was rescued from the unknown and “newly” included in a constellation of exceedingly talented artists that shines above the mundane people.

It was not until the 1920s that the literary Poe became familiar to his fellow countrymen when newly emerging literary historians in American universities embarked on establishing the American literary tradition (Allen 11). In the process, they turned their attention to Poe in Europe and tried to transplant him in the American artistic soil by underscoring Poe’s careerlong involvement with nineteenth-century American journalism as an editor, commentator, and contributor.² Yet it would take some more time for Poe to be fully accepted as an American writer because of the lingering scholarly reluctance to canonize his “too gothic” writings.³ Around 1980 critics began to question the legitimacy of that reluctance and Americanize his Romantic authorial traits. Poe’s formerly awkward, otherized position as America’s “dejected cousin” (Tate 40) came to indicate his self-definition as an author who, despite his unavoidable catering to newly rising mass literary markets of the nineteenth century, clung to eighteenth-century sole textual ownership, never feeling comfortable with—rather, quite hostile to—the audience’s increasing influence upon literary production. In this way, Poe, after being rediscovered as a “new” American writer, was re-contained within individualistic, autarchic authorship.⁴

Poe acquires a secure place within American literary tradition under the ever-embracing effect of eighteenth-century sovereign authorship upon our conception of artists. Critics’ formation of his place, however, significantly betrays an inherent problem of that effect. Their almost unanimous portrait of Poe as one who relentlessly goes after authority is in fact a result of their collective effort to “give this intelligible being a realistic status, by discerning, in the individual, the milieu in which writing originates,” so as to make him or her function as “the principle of a certain unity of writing” (Foucault 150, 151...