Pym’s Games

This essay argues that the critical focus on gaming and computation that often crops up in studies of such Poe texts as “The Purloined Letter” and “The Gold-Bug” should also extend to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Pym draws on the rhetoric of gaming and computation in a manner less straightforward than in Poe’s mystery tales. By conflating racial ambiguity with the question of the computability of certain games, Poe uses Pym to tread the philosophical line between the determinist model of a clockwork universe and the vision of a world overflowing with the continuous foment of new creation. I propose that attending to this philosophical issue allows Poe to experiment with a type of fiction that plays in the gap between the closure of the novel and the potentially infinite iterability of gaming. While Pym retains the formal (and physical) completeness typical of the novel, it also employs the character of Dirk Peters as a lacuna that keeps the novel’s promise of self-contained meaning from being fully realized.