Poe’s Sense of Time

Cindy Weinstein begins her incandescent rethinking of the matter of time in American literature by way of, as she puts it, “a rather bizarre reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” (1838) situated early in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (1904): the moment when Prince Amerigo, pondering Mrs. Fanny Assingham’s inscrutable intentions in matching him with Maggie Verver, finds his mind curiously turning to “‘the story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym’” that he remembers reading as a child [1]. That Weinstein does so prepares readers for the fact that, while only her second chapter will focus explicitly on Poe, his sense of time—and most particularly, his narrative work in Pym—is foundational to the story she wants to tell about US literature. Poe, she argues, lengthily delineates time-keeping and at the same time plays with all manner of linguistic temporal markers in his novel, precisely to disorient our grip on time and disrupt the stability of such categories as past or present. And the term Weinstein gives to the narrative structure of temporal disambiguation in novels that paradoxically and self-consciously foreground, down to the sentence level, their obsession with time—“tempo(e)rality”—cements Poe’s place at the center of this temporal turn and literary tradition. Indeed, all the novels analyzed here—Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (1799), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar (1868), Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003)—either anticipate the linguistic and stylistic narration of time in Pym or “make greater (or a different kind of) sense” when put in direct relation to it [4]. But her early and emphatic attention to Poe’s text also reflects Weinstein’s interest in what its ever-shifting chronology captures about the temporal registers and anxieties of its specific cultural moment. For, she suggests, “as much as Pym, and the other novels that I discuss, upends the logic of chronology through its temporal shenanigans, the fact is that the novel is also inextricably enmeshed in the time of its composition” [6].

Where Weinstein’s analysis in chapter 2, “When is Now? Poe’s Pym,” thus attends to how “the [novel’s] representation of time is inextricably bound up with the antebellum debate about race, and more specifically to the question of whether or not blackness symbolizes a regression in time that whiteness is destined to overcome” [41], her preceding chapter on Edgar Huntly neatly tracks how the narrative’s “temporal rhythms” [19] resonate alongside and against debates regarding the timing of action (or inaction) that raged between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists at precisely the historical moment—1787—in which Brocken Brown situates his sleepwalking protagonist. In turn, her chapter on The Gates Ajar movingly explores the ways in which Phelps’s “temporal disorderliness” [74] both archives the Civil War’s trauma and mass death and seeks the narrative tense that will restore lost loved ones to the present, even as her chapter on Dreiser unravels how his contorted sense of grammar and avoidance of verbs reflects not just a modernist sensibility but “the temporal chaos” of modern life [105] identified by Georg Simmel and others at the turn of the century. And Weinstein’s final chapter on The Known World performs a dazzling close reading of the novel that casts in sharp relief Jones’s search for the proper tense in which to tell the temporally vertiginous story of American slavery.

As Weinstein herself rightly points out, time has, of late, preoccupied much scholarship on American literature. Dana Luciano’s Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America [New York: New York Univ. Press, 2007] argues that “the grieving body as an instrument of affective time-keeping” reinforced and unsettled linear modes of national time [5]. Lloyd Pratt’s Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2010] recovers...