The Secret of Arthur Gordon Pym: The Text and the Source

THE SECRET OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM: THE TEXT AND THE SOURCE Richard Kopley* The climax of Edgar Allan Poe's 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym has long mystified and intrigued readers. That "shrouded human figure"1 encountered in the Antarctic by Pym and his friend Dirk Peters has usually been considered divine, but whether male, female, or sexless has remained a matter of contention.2 Furthermore , alternative interpretations have been offered, often conflicting with one another. One reading has been that the figure signifies knowledge; a contrary reading has been that it signifies the limits of knowledge.3 The figure has been seen as a death-conquering Lazarusfigure and as death itself.4 The "shrouded human figure" has further been construed as representative of goodness, perversity, creative impulse , and even the white at the bottom of the page.5 And a few critics have held that the "shrouded human figure" means absolutely nothing at all." While the secret of Arthur Gordon Pym has obviously not remained "beyond all conjecture" (IV, 146), it has managed to elude a single definite solution. Yet such a solution may be discovered if a largely neglected hypothesis is assumed: the mysterious "shrouded human figure" actually has a material identity. Several writers have assumed this hypothesis. Jules Verne presented the figure as a Sphinx-shaped mound which had been magnetized by electrical storms. Charles Romyn Dake rendered it as a white marble statue on the Utopian island of Hili-li. More recently, Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop have envisioned the "shrouded human figure" as none other than the Frankenstein monster himself!7 These possible identities, though provocative, are ultimately implausible ; no evidence from Poe's novel supports their validity. Yet insofar as these fictional identities for the "shrouded human figure" are material, they do lead in the right direction. A handful of critics have written on behalf of a material version of the "shrouded human figure." Establishing the connection between John Cleves Symmes' "holes-at-the-poles" theory, the book Symzonia, and Poe's Pym, J. O. Bailey has proposed that the figure might be the 'Richard Kopley teaches American literature at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He is currently completing a book on Poe's The Narrative ofArthur Gordon Pym. 204Richard Kopley Magellanic clouds which Symmes claimed were the reflections of land across the hole at the South Pole. Developing another of Bailey's points, J. V. Ridgely has argued that the "shrouded human figure" might be a man, one of the "gigantic white ancients" whose origin may have been the Holy Land of the Old Testament. And Helen Lee, even as she maintains that the figure signifies knowledge, has speculated that it might also be "some quite ordinary phenomenon, which then effected rescue."8 Neither the first nor the second of these critical explanations seems compelling, and the third, while potentially true, is so vague that no informed judgment can be made. Still, the tendency of these explanations towards the material does seem sound since they thereby approach a thoroughly natural explanation. Such an explanation would permit the ostensibly other-worldly conclusion to fit in with much of the rest of Pym, wherein a ferocious lion is revealed to be Pym's dog (III, 28-29), and a living corpse turns out to be Pym himself (III, 85-95). That the remarkable events of the conclusion should be expected to be consistent with the other surprising but naturally explainable phenomena of the book is clear from Pym's labeling of these remarkable events as only "apparent miracles" (emphasis added; III, 187). Poe's other writing lends this approach considerable legitimacy; "apparent miracles" were clearly one of Poe's specialties. Madeline Usher's eerie return from the dead is actually an unusual but plausible return from one of her cataleptic fits. And the House of Usher's extraordinary collapse is actually the natural effect of a storm and whirlwind on the "barely-discernible fissure" which ran through the house (III, 273-97). The huge and terrifying "monster" in "The Sphinx" turns out to be a tiny spider viewed too closely (VI, 238-44). And the diabolical "person or persons" who...