Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004
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Dream Journey: An Approach to Pym
by
Wesley College, USA
“To write a dream which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its strange transformations, which are all taken as a matter of course; its eccentricities and aimlessness – with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole. Up to this old age of the world, no such thing has ever been written.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne (c. 1842)
Although Nathaniel Hawthorne had composed and published a strange tale that blends the waking and dreaming psyches of the narrator (“The Haunted Mind,” 1835) and although many of this other narratives deeply explore psychology and the supernatural, he never fully realized his concept of “writing a dream,” and apparently, as of 1842, he had either not read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838; hereafter Pym) or he had misunderstood what I believe is the overall thrust of Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel. When one reads Pym believing that Poe was, indeed, attempting to write a dream, the book is even more powerful and disturbing. Let us examine this odd little novel and look closely at some of the possibilities, effects, and implications.
Like Percy Bysshe Shelley’s, Arthur Gordon Pym’s boat is named Ariel – a reference to the blithe spirit who serves Prospero in The Tempest. In Pym, the Ariel and other vessels are the means by which the main character voyages into the unknown and, though there are stretches of meticulous verisimilitude, also into the supernatural. Moreover, rather than a novel, Pym seems to be an episodic nightmare, tenuously knitted together by narrative devices and occasionally lacking logical credibility, even in fictional terms. Sometimes the story has gaping holes in it. At times, the situations and characters become so nightmarish and outlandish as to be very nearly ridiculous, especially in the Tsalal episode.1
In fact, one notices a definite progression from rational, controlled storytelling, in the style of escapist adventure-realism, to a rapid, almost blurred recounting of incredible events, ending with an unworldly vision and confusion as to the ultimate meaning of all that has happened. This pattern of movement corresponds to a familiar psychological progression: the imagination while falling asleep, the ever-growing involvement in a more and more fantastic dream, the sometimes traumatic moment of waking, and the awakened rational mind attempting to understand the dream and deal with the disturbing emotions brought about by it. The “irrecoverably lost” concluding chapters of Pym, referred to in the epilogue, could correspond with the missing end of a dream or some missing clues as to its meaning. Dreams are characteristically and notoriously incomplete.
In Poe’s novel, the change from the first stage (the imagination on the verge of sleep) to the second (the immersion into the dream) is more emotional/psychological than stylistic – a gradual, almost imperceptible progression – and the preface’s explanation for any change from beginning chapters to later ones, a claim that the first part was co-authored by Poe and that, at some undesignated point, Pym took over alone, seems subterfuge, or perhaps a satire on those works of fiction whose authors go out of their way to “prove” the authenticity of their stories, a practice once necessary to placate the Puritans. Maybe the somewhat strange opening and closing statements, the first by “Pym” and the last by some anonymous “editor” are attempts to ground an essentially fantastic story in reality. More likely they represent Poe’s playful use of his own “Imp of the Perverse” in the charade of creating “respectable” fiction. One can almost see the wizard giggling behind the fastidious, but nonetheless shaky, curtain.
It is also possible that Poe is giving us a clue as to what I contend is his overall purpose, identifying himself as the rational being who organizes the beginning and – in the thin guise of the “editor” – discusses the end of an amazing dream voyage, as well as pointing to Pym as the alter ego who experiences the dream. This conjecture would also account for the “death” of Pym. The dreamer is buried below the surface in the waking state. Which theory is true? This ambiguity of purpose and such a lack of the credibility and concision for which Poe is justly revered have caused many critics and casual readers to dismiss the book as an aberration not up to Poe’s usual standards, and according to Sidney Kaplan, Poe himself once said that the ultimate effect of a “common novel” need not be as precisely formed and delivered as that of a short story (xii), although it would be difficult to think of Pym as a “common novel.” Moreover, in this uniquely rambling, barely controlled narrative, one can see a possible attempt to portray the subconscious, and viewed in such a light, the experiment is quite successful. The tensions between reality and the dream state are multiplied and intensified by the inherent tensions between the real and any attempt to show it in writing, the total effect being further heightened by Poe’s particular, peculiar sensibilities. Joseph Wood Krutch refers to Pym as “Poe’s first story” and remarks on its unusual, even eerie, quality of strangeness, pointing out especially that the water upon which Pym sails is sometimes “unnaturally clear,” allowing “the eye to travel many fathoms into its depths” (70).
In his Marginalia, Poe says, “There is . . . a class of fancies, of exquisite delicacy, which . . . arise in the soul . . . at those mere points of time where the confines of the waking world blend with those of the world of dreams. . . . Now, so entire is my faith in the power of words, that at times I have believed it possible to embody even the evanescence of fancies such as I have attempted to describe” (emphasis original; 92-93).
With his use of ambiguity and unreliable narration in Pym, suppose Poe wanted not only to “embody” such “evanescence” but also to create a trancelike dream state in the reader. The reader’s mind would be swimming in possibilities and grasping for metaphorical connections. Arguably, Poe achieves this atmosphere rather well. One could even compare Pym to a surreal painting, a picture of a dream in the style of, say, Hieronymous Bosch or Salvadore Dali.
However, Poe’s single, infamous remark about his novel should be mentioned, at least in passing. In a June 1, 1840 letter of rapprochement to William E. Burton, a magazine owner who had fired him as an editor on May 30, Poe said, “You once wrote in your magazine a sharp critique upon a book of mine - a very silly book - Pym. Had I written a similar criticism upon a book of yours, you feel that you would have been my enemy for life, and you therefore imagine in my bosom a latent hostility towards yourself” (eapoe.org). Poe wanted to assure Burton that no such hostility existed, and reconciliation was quickly achieved between the two. In fact, when Burton sold the Gentlemen’s Magazine a short while later, Poe was back on staff, and Burton asked the new owners “to take care of my young editor [Poe]” (qtd. in Bancroft). Thus, Poe’s seeming disregard for his book, in context, was a sort of peace offering. Pym had not been commercially successful, and Poe apparently wanted to reassure the man who had just fired him that their editorial judgment was on the same wavelength.
Moreover,
Poe’s comment could and should be disregarded if one is to follow perhaps the
most well-known edict in the history of criticism, D. H. Lawrence’s sage
advice: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the
critic is to
save the tale from the artist who created it” (31).
Indeed, some critics have already made special mention of the dreamlike qualities of Pym, saying its depth “resembles the latent content of the dream” (Marie Bonaparte); its hero is “as purely passive as the I in dreams” (W. H. Auden); and its symbols “retain the clouded complexity of dream images” (Patrick Quinn).2 However, to my knowledge, no one has followed such an observation by theorizing that perhaps Poe wanted Pym – as much as possible – to be a dream, much more a feeling than a puzzle. As a careful writer who cherished bringing about, in each work, a single unifying effect, Poe would not abandon this credo capriciously or pointlessly. Pym, though hard to follow, does ultimately have the strong overall effect of a dream.
Implicitly, I believe Poe was telling us that realistic fiction is not the best means of obtaining deep, important self-knowledge or exciting, memorable aesthetic pleasure. As Edward Albee has pointed out, the really absurd theatre is the realistic theatre, and Poe was apparently trying to create a theatre of the mind. Such art must be demanding. Frontiers must be found and explored, and the most rewarding ones can be found within ourselves. Of course, they can also be the most dangerous ones. Poe must have realized that fiction, whether set in James Fenimore Cooper’s romantic wilderness or on Pym’s quixotic ocean, only happens in the mind of the reader. In bringing us closer to the depths of his own mind, Poe offers us a mirror with which to examine our own. The mirror in Pym is distorted but true to life: our minds, like that of Pym, are constantly being bent and shaped by experience, restrictions, growth, and dreams.
In presenting this dream, Poe uses ephemeral clarity and stark, surreal imagery that can combine to confuse if not upset the rational mind of the reader and perhaps interfere with an appreciation of the work. While it could be that Poe wanted to confound the rational mind in the process of showing that maybe the most important truths are ultimately unknowable – more spiritual and emotional than intellectual – this quality of uncertainty is an aesthetic problem and presents an interesting paradox: how much like a dream can one make a story before the narrative breaks down into subjective, amorphous confusion? What Poe is apparently trying to do, to present a nearly journalistic but still effective picture of the subconscious mind, is so difficult and fraught with pitfalls as to be almost impossible. (Consider the painfully self-conscious mumbo-jumbo throughout psychologist R. D. Laing’s Bird of Paradise, for example.) However, one must admire Poe for his creative tightrope walking, a special kind of writerly heroism – as sharply illuminated in a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (“Constantly risking absurdity / and death / whenever he performs / above the heads / of his audience . . .). Poe’s attempts to communicate with himself and his readers on a new, much deeper level, combined with the ongoing battles with his inner demons, may have contributed to his early death, just as Pym’s quest for the unknowable, for the final wisdom, seems to have been at least a factor in his own death, and is presented as a major concern during the last part of Pym’s life. In the case of Poe, Krutch notes how much the writer had lost touch with reality near the end of his life, how certain “delusions” had once inspired him to embody them “in gorgeous dreams, but now the line between the fantasy and actuality . . . had completely disappeared . . .” (184).
The “inner world,” says Laing in his valuable, comprehendible book The Politics of Experience, “is our experiencing our bodies, other people, the animate and inanimate world: imagination, dreams, fantasy, and beyond that to ever further reaches of experience” (6). Pym’s voyages, like many of Poe’s, seem to be into inner space more than into a new world. The facts that the names Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Gordon Pym are similar (the trochaic meter being mirrored) and that the young Arthur’s support is via his father in “Edgarton” work together to create a specific effect, a connection between Pym and Poe, most likely noticed by the reader, either consciously or subconsciously. “This is uncharted art,” Poe seems to be saying, “but here are some landmarks; here is a general direction. Now leave your outdated expectations ashore and join me on the journey.”
The story seems to begin innocently enough, with Pym and Augustus Barnard, a schoolmate, getting inebriated, having an exciting adventure aboard the Ariel, dramatically being rescued at sea, and showing up, (incredibly) nearly unruffled, for breakfast at the Barnard home, right back where they started. This episode begins the stretching of the imagination, which is to be ripped and torn later on, but the little adventure is organic, i.e., within contextual logic. After all, the narrator is here a schoolboy, and as he says, “Schoolboys . . . can accomplish wonders in the way of deception . . .” (14). Well, at least they think they can. The reader can understand all this: the narrator is exaggerating the wildness of his youth, not an unheard-of practice.
However, as Pym gets older and more experienced, the story line and descriptions get even more incredible, not less. For example, in chapter 18 Pym goes into meticulous detail about the liquid in the streams on the island of Tsalal:
Although it flowed with rapidity in all declivities where common water would do so, yet never, except when falling in a cascade, had it the customary appearance of limpidity. It was, nevertheless, in point of fact, as perfectly limpid as any limestone water in existence, the difference being only in appearance. At first sight, and especially in cases where little declivity was found, it bore resemblance, as regards consistency, to a thick infusion of gum Arabic in common water. But this was only the least remarkable of its extraordinary qualities. It was not colorless, nor was it of any one uniform color – presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk. . . . Upon collecting a basinful, and allowing it to settle thoroughly, we perceived that the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue . . . (151).
Every laboriously detailed description and each new situation stretch the reader’s imagination more and more. With the narrator himself, readers become more and more disoriented, further and further away from the familiar, farther from home, farther from Edgarton, but deeper inside the “mind” of the novel, and by extension deeper within their own psyches, if Poe’s magic is working, if he is successfully weaving his spell. In Psychological Reflections, C. G. Jung writes:
The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens into that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was a conscious ego. . . . This ego-consciousness consists purely of restrictions. . . . All consciousness divides; but in dreams we pass into that deeper and more universal, truer and more eternal man who still stands in the dusk of original night, in which he himself was still the whole and the whole was in him, in blind, undifferentiated, pure nature, free from the shackles of the ego. From these all-uniting depths rises the dream, however childish, grotesque or immoral (39).
It is this “whole” person within us that Poe is seemingly aiming at, and his frequent use of the grotesque, especially near the end of the novel, adds strongly to the overall dreamlike effect, as does his obvious, though occasionally mysterious, use of symbolism.
Could it be, for example, that the giant, white, shrouded figure at the South Pole represents the soul? Maybe Pym voyages through various hells to find that the only knowledge worth knowing in a deep sense is total self-knowledge and that this wisdom and knowing are subconscious, spiritual, and eternal, more a feeling than a fact in the cognitive sense. When Pym’s Newfoundland dog Tiger leads him out of his early “entombment” (in chapter 2) maybe the dog symbolizes sensuality and unbridled nature leading man out of his tightly constrained self-consciousness, his burial within his own restrictions and those imposed by society – a view that Lawrencian and Freudian scholars could embrace. Where does Tiger come from, though? The details are missing until much later (chapter 5) and then are only barely believable. Perhaps the dreamer invents the dog because the animal is needed in that particular predicament. We have all invented characters in our dreams on the spur of the moment to save us from doom. (There are theories that heaven is a construct of the ego to save the self from dissolution in death.) The sudden, unexplained appearance of the dog may cause us to begin to question the reliability of the narration. Perhaps we can barely hear the turn of the subconscious doorknob, an almost silent harbinger of the still stranger journey to come.
Jung often discusses in his writings the importance of symbolism in dreams, as does Freud, of course, and Jung gives credit to his former teacher: “It is Freud’s great achievement to have put dream-interpretation on the right track. . . . [Dreams] have not just one meaning, but many meanings” (Dreams 70). Very early in his career, in 1912, Jung had addressed the common lay resistance to dream interpretation:
This ancient idea of dream symbolism has aroused not only criticism, but the strongest opposition. That dreams should have a meaning, and should therefore be capable of interpretation, is certainly neither a strange nor an extraordinary idea. It has been known to mankind for thousands of years; indeed it has become something of a truism (Basic Writings 12).
Lately the scientific community seems to be reaffirming the importance of the meaning of dreams. In a November 1999 essay presented to the British Psycho-analytical Society, neurologist Mark Solms sums up years of research into the issue as follows: “Freud’s major inferences from psychological evidence regarding both the causes and the function of dreaming are at least compatible with, and even indirectly supported by, current neuroscientific knowledge” (psychoanalysis.org). Thus, dreams are not merely physiological “accidents” caused by the positioning and repositioning of the brain stem during sleep. As Freud and Jung had postulated, they are mechanisms by which the mind sends symbolic, encoded messages to the dreamer.
Poe was well acquainted with symbolism and apparently comfortable with utilizing the powerful effects that could be achieved by tapping the unconscious mind, but writing a novel in the form of a dream had never been attempted before and Pym is not completely unblemished. At times, in fact, the apparent lack of control so necessary to the dream effect is close to comical. For instance, the dire circumstances at the end of chapter 8 are not fatal because, as Pym says to begin the next chapter, “Luckily, just before night, all four of us had lashed ourselves firmly to the fragments of the windlass. . . .” Often, though, when people awake at a precipitous moment, they will go back to sleep and re-enter the dream with a thought sequence that explains, in retrospect, why they are still alive, and the sequence re-orients the dreamer into the dream. As Freud writes, “In a certain sense all dreams are dreams of convenience: they serve the purpose of continuing sleep instead of waking up. The dream is the guardian of sleep, not its disturber” (emphasis original; 180).
Poe understood the human mind very well, probably instinctively, but the effect of the dream is very difficult to accomplish as subtly and artistically as Poe apparently tried to do with Pym. Writing as Pym in the introduction, Poe himself points to the rough edges of the work: “however roughly . . . my book should be got up, its very uncouthness, if there were any, would give it all the better chance of being perceived as truth” (2). “Usually a dream,” according to Jung, “is a strange and disconcerting product distinguished by many ‘bad qualities,’ such as lack of logic, questionable morality, uncouth form, and apparent absurdity or nonsense. People are therefore only too glad to dismiss it as stupid, meaningless, and worthless” (Dreams 68-69).
Considering the inherent tactical problems between Poe and his goal of “writing a dream,” I believe his achievement is a great and exciting one: the creation of a profoundly meaningful and psychoactive reading experience within an essentially Gothic-style story, even though at the time of publication and for years thereafter, he endured critical abuse for it. I do not believe that even now Pym is understood and appreciated as well as it could and should be. To reiterate, though, the message is not so much one that can be understood, per se, as it is one that is organic and intrinsic. If Poe’s desired effect is achieved, the message is only partially communicated in a fully rational sense. Art is a quest and the appreciation of art is also a quest. Dreams are among the most vital searches. If Pym makes us feel that we are dreaming, then Poe’s art will have reinforced the importance of dreams as quests for knowledge and the importance of art to the human mind.
As
Paul Brians
reminds us,
One
of Freud's more important discoveries is that emotions buried in the unconscious
surface in disguised form during dreaming, and that the remembered fragments of
dreams can help uncover the buried feelings. Whether the mechanism is exactly as
Freud describes it, many people have derived insights into themselves from
studying their dreams, and most modern people consider dreams emotionally
significant, unlike our ancestors who often saw them either as divine portents
or as the bizarre side-effects of indigestion. Freud argues that dreams are
wish-fulfillments, and will ultimately argue that those wishes are the result of
repressed or frustrated sexual desires. The anxiety surrounding these desires
turns some dreams into nightmares. (wsu.edu)
The recurrence of the entombment motif; the strange wanderings within the black passageways engraved with cryptic, archaic phrases and figures; the black island of Tsalal itself – all point to the dark, foreboding restrictions of Poe’s own past and present at the time he was writing the book and attempting to establish his reputation as a writer. Pym’s careful listing of dates, latitudes, longitudes, and historical data point up the rigid aspects of life at sea, a lifestyle he has fantasized as being carefree prior to his actual experience of it. They represent the bonds he must break to reach freedom and self-knowledge. Such accurate-sounding data is not foreign to the world of dreams, of course. Businessmen must see the figures on spreadsheets quite clearly at times while asleep. Architects probably envisage entire structures on blueprints in their dreaming minds, and both Jung and Freud were emphatic in their belief that dreams could and should be connected to one’s waking life. The seminal book on the subject of dreams and their useful, sometimes quotidian, meanings is, of course, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.
A classic, in-depth, Freudian analysis of Pym would most likely be instructive and compelling, especially considering the psychological aspects of Poe’s other works and the known facts regarding his private life. Though some have classed Pym as purely escapist literature, Freudian scholars would quickly point out that nothing is ever “purely escapist.” There are reasons and destinations for both the author’s and the readers’ escapes, and there are meanings for every dream. One could even argue that Poe produced in his fiction a series of dreams, some of them nightmares, many of which relate to achieving power over death, and that in Pym, although the protagonist and Poe himself are both missing in the anonymous final note, their spirits live on in the novel itself. Literature is one of the safest places for one’s soul and one of the surest routes to immortality.
Unfortunately for Poe, by the end of his life he was no longer capable of caring for himself, much less producing literature, and Eureka, his final book, seems more the ramblings of a madman than it does the conclusive, poetic statement on philosophy that he apparently intended it to be. Krutch refers to it as “the product of a mind which has been completely mastered by the fancies which it had once been able to control and use . . .” (182). According to Krutch, the Poe in Eureka is “engaged in a battle against reality which he conducts by running away, but in the end reality always wins by demanding the complete surrender of the mind as the price of escape” (186). It is important to reiterate here that dreams, whether encased in fiction or not, are not escapes but potentially important explorations. As Freud says in The Interpretation of Dreams, “every dream turns out to be a meaningful psychical formation which can be given an identifiable place . . . in our waking life” (7).
In Pym and through Pym the character, I believe that Poe tried to break free from everyday restrictions, including facts, figures, and certitudes, in order to fashion a wildly new fictional structure that includes an imaginary voyage to the depths of human consciousness, a dangerous trip to the edge of reality and beyond it, down, down to the truth itself. And if we allow ourselves, we go with him. His art is as visionary and elusive as a dream, but carefully formed; his vision is filmy, misty, and frightening but well wrought, long-lasting, and significant. Poe’s only novel deserves much more praise than it has received so far; it is another monument to one of America’s most unusual, most courageous, and most innovative artists.
– Jack Turner, Wesley College
Notes
1 Could it be that Poe named the island of Tsalal by reversing the word last and adding a stuttering effect: lalast? The settlement there is the last outpost Pym encounters before plunging completely into the unknown, and the looks of the setting have the stark strangeness of photographic negatives – a reversal of normality.
2 These critics are quoted by Sidney Kaplan in his introduction to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (New York: Hill & Wang, 1960), p. x.
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