55 (p. 391) My nerves were very much affected.... I now ventured to inquire the cause of the disturbance: This paragraph, in which intrusive noise frightens the assembled company, who are, excepting the narrator, all posing or masking, recalls the kindred effect of the clock’s appalling striking in “The Masque of the Red Death.”
56 (p. 393) “I am happy to acknowledge as belonging of right to the celebrated Fether”: Finally, the title is explained, and the peculiar name spellings only point up the off-centeredness pervading the tale, which the narrator doesn’t comprehend. In some respects, his deadpan stance resembles that of Huckleberry Finn.
57 (p. 393) pandemonium in petto: That is, chaos in secrecy (in petto is Italian for “in the breast”). The lunatics give way to their deranged emotions within the walls of the remote asylum, where nobody is likely to discover them. Pandemonium, in English poet John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost (1667), is the palace of Satan in Hell, a natural locale for uproar and confusion. Pandemonium does indeed ensue, once the real keepers break in upon the mad revelers.
58 (p. 396) “Yankee Doodle,” which they performed, if not exactly in tune, at least with an energy superhuman, during the whole of the uproar: Frenchmen playing “Yankee Doodle,” once America’s most widely popular national song, may signal another example of the craziness occurring before the unwitting narrator.
59 (p.399) “Old Charley Goodfellow”: This is another example of Poe’s wordplay: Charley is anything but good; as a colloquialism, fellow defines a person as a lowlife.
60 (p. 404) crack novels ... Ainsworth: “Crack novels” are excellent, superior novels; Poe uses the phrase ironically, as the subsequent remarks and names demonstrate. Catherine Gore was the English author of Cecil (1841), a fashionable novel that she was accused of pilfering from vathek (see note 43 of Tales). Three popular English novelists in Poe’s day (and well beyond) were Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), Charles Dickens (1812-1870), and William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882). Turnapenny is Poe’s comic name for one who writes principally for money.
61 (p. 413) In looking around me for some subject ... resembling those of John Randolph: Poe invented most of the names or situations mentioned in this paragraph—for example, M. Ernest Valdemar, “Bibliotheca Forensica,” and Issachar Marx. Wallenstein ( 1798-1799) is a play by German author J. C. F. von Schiller. Gargantua (1532) is a book of legends about a giant by French author François Rabelais. John Randolph (1773-1833) was a gaunt Virginia politician from Roanoke.
62 (p. 423) But the chief peculiarity of this horrible thing was the representation of a Death’s Head, ... as if it had been there carefully designed by an artist: This insect resembles the imaginary beetle in “The Gold-Bug.”
63 (p. 424) one of the ordinary synopses of Natural History: A Synopsis of Natural History, by Thomas Wyatt (based on a work by Céron Lemonnier), was published in Philadelphia in 1839; some thought that Poe himself had written the work. The description of the insect that follows unmistakably comes from Wyatt’s book.
64 (p. 426) The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge: We never learn the precise nature for Montresor’s animosity, although if he is a devout Roman Catholic and Fortunato is a Mason, there would be sufficient ground for his feelings. The Free and Accepted Masons, known as Freemasons or Masons, is a secret fraternal society that originated in fourteenth-century England. During the later eighteenth century, when the type of cloak known as a roquelaure came into fashion, animosities developed between the Roman Catholic Church and the Masons. Fortunato is Italian for “fortunate” or “fated.” Each or both may apply here, given the outcome of the story.
65 (p. 427) “Luchesi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry”: Interestingly, Amontillado is a variety of sherry. Perhaps Montresor implies that Luchesi cannot distinguish Amontillado from lower-grade sherry. Just as interesting, the name Luchesi may sound in English as “look hazy,” thus characterizing Fortunato’s perceptions. For that matter, despite his seeming thinking to the contrary, Montresor likewise has misperceptions. That is, later in the story, when he has nearly completed the walling up of Fortunato, he appears to be almost on the verge of admitting that the task sickens him; second, his later boast that for fifty years nobody has discovered his crime may be no genuine boast after all, but rather a confession that this long-past episode has attained a fixity in his life—that is, that it bothers his conscience.
66 (p. 429) He laughed and threw the bottle upward with a gesticulation I did not understand. I looked at him in surprise. He repeated the movement—a grotesque one: Here and in the following short sentences are allusions to the fraternal brotherhood of Masons, whose rituals and symbols have typically been surrounded with mystery. Neither Fortunato’s nor Montresor’s actions are of genuine Masonic origins. If a Roman Catholic-Masonic opposition is a primary motif in this tale, then Montresor’s method of executing Fortunato represents a devout Roman Catholic’s ironic meting out of justice to a heretic. Such an attitude would make the “love of God” interchanges toward the end of this tale highly ironic—because Montresor felt that he was acting for the love of God, and that his ridding the world of a heretic demonstrated such love.
67 (p. 430) “He is an ignoramus,” interrupted my friend, as he stepped unsteadily forward, while I followed immediately at his heels: Montresor’s phrasing recalls the design on his crest of arms—a foot crushing a serpent whose fangs are embedded in the heel; in this case, ironically, he is the serpent at the heels of his enemy, and the attention he devotes to detailing his story of these long-past events represents his being emotionally “crushed” by such “heels,” in these circumstances the emotional effects occasioned by his subsequent murder of Fortunato, such that he cannot forget them.
68 (p. 432) In pace requiescat!: “May he rest in peace!” (Latin). We are left thus with a final irony; for whom does Montresor invoke peaceful rest: Fortunato (whose remains have rested in peace for fifty years) or Montresor, whose guilt has dogged him for that same number of years? The open-endedness of this tale makes it a forerunner to much that subsequently has been called “modernist” or “postmodernist” literature.
69 (p. 433) He would have preferred Rabelais’ “Gargantua” to the “Zadig” of Voltaire; and, upon the whole, practical jokes suited his taste far better than verbal ones: Gargantua (1534), by the French humorist François Rabelais, is a satirical narrative about a giant, peace-loving prince; Zadig (1748), by French satirist Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), is a witty but nevertheless savage satire. The point made in this paragraph is that the king is coarse and bawdy (as Rabelais’s writings often were thought to be), and that anything refined was unlikely to suit him. Thus, in this tale, Hop-Frog’s gruesome “joke” partakes of flagrancy, albeit it is “practical” from his point of view—after all, the king “loved his practical jokes,” and the dwarf takes him at his word. Hop-Frog’s jester’s costume suggests that of the hapless Fortunato in “The Cask of Amontillado,” but his final method of treating his antagonists reminds us more of Montresor, the protagonist in that same tale. Hop-Frog may be the court “fool,” but such figures were often thought to be endowed with more genuine perception than their masters.
70 (p.436) “we stand in need of characters”: That the king and his ministers need “characters,” or, as a dictionary would cite as one definition, “moral excellence and firmness,” is obvious. Hop-Frog’s ultimate joke indeed casts them as the very sorts of beings they are, as manifested in the descriptions of them and in the blurring of seriousness and joking.
71 (p. 436) “Endeavoring!” cried the tyrant.... “Drink, I say!” shouted the monster, “or by the fiends—”: The king’s being a “tyrant” and a “monster,” who invokes “the fiends” reveals his dehumanized state, and it aligns him with the narrator in “The Black Cat,” whose emotional makeup is similar. In both tales, too, a disdain for the feminine is evident among those destined to come to
bad ends.
72 (p. 438) “the company of masqueraders will take you for real beasts—and of course, they will be as much terrified as astonished”: The masquerade motif will, of course, enhance the understandable confusion over who is human and who animal, but Hop-Frog is sure about the “real beasts” nature of the king and ministers, an understanding borne out in a following paragraph, where the “beast-like,” “hideous” qualities of the eight orangutan masqueraders bear out “their truthfulness to nature.”
73 (p. 441) The cripple hurled his torch at them, clambered leisurely to the ceiling, and disappeared through the sky-light: The climactic scene, in which the “brilliance” of Hop-Frog’s jest concludes, represents the ending of his enduring the garish artificial lights of the king’s “world” in which masquerading is all. The escape of Hop-Frog and Tripetta through the skylight symbolizes their removal to the freedom of their own, natural world.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
1 (p. 445) The Narrative... To Which that Distressing Calamity Gave Rise: Within the title of Poe’s novel we may sense a deft shift from Narrative, which term may be part factual, part imaginative, on through terms like Details and Account, to Incredible Adventures and Gave Rise. This shift signals a gradual movement from everyday realism or credibility to increasingly fantastic experience, which may parallel a dream-nightmare structure, which begins in reality and moves on into nonrationality. The “Preface” and the text of the narrative proper continue the counterpointing of truth versus fiction and appearance versus reality. The ironies in such discrepancies are thus early established, and they continue throughout.
2 (p. 447) detailing events which have had powerful influence in exciting the imaginative faculties: Poe seems here to employ a pattern, also used in “The Purloined Letter,” of placing clues to alternations of realism and fantasy directly before readers, along with suggesting that such alternations may trigger imagination—which stimulation in turn may account for the increasing fantastic qualities in Pym’s adventures.
3 (p. 449) My name is Arthur Gordon Pym.... Edgarton New Bank, as it was formerly called: Pym’s full name has suggested, to many, a similarity to that of Edgar Allan Poe, a suggestion presumably supported by using Edgarton for Edgartown, an actual town on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Some readers have also discerned imp in a transposition of Pym, a suggestion that may carry more significance than some have thought, as imp derives from word roots that mean “graft,” “scion,” or “growth” (see also note 49, below). Pym’s own immaturity may be indicated in the name of his friend Augustus, introduced later in this paragraph. However much young Barnard may act to the contrary at times, his first name hints of neoclassical reason and order, in that it has the same root as “Augustan,” which is often a synonym for “neoclassic” or “classic”; the name thus connotes balance, reason, order—all of which eventually vanish in this book. Once he is gone, the situations in the novel become more and more incredible.
4 (p.450) thinking that the wines and liquors he had drunk had set him entirely beside himself: Intoxication as precursor to fantastic adventure links Pym to “Tales of the Folio Club” and to some of Poe’s later tales. The late October night also creates affinities with works like “Ulalume: A Ballad,” “King Pest,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Gold-Bug,” “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” Like “King Pest” and “Tarr and Fether,” a decided liquor-ish atmosphere pervades Pym.
5 (p. 453) I tumbled headlong and insensible upon the body of my fallen companion: This is the first of a series of incidents in which what seems to be a supernatural visitation is soon revealed to have natural, if unusual, causes. The demonic theme, for example, recurs when the mutineer cook is likened to a demon or other supernatural being; nevertheless, his human, if not humane, identity cannot be ignored. Poe was nothing if not adept in creating such ambiguities, offering apparent supernaturalism to entice readers eager for horrifics, but offering as well a reasonable psychological underpinning for the horrors, to appeal to more sophisticated readers. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold-Bug,” and “The Black Cat” exemplify similar techniques.
6 (p.456) The wound in my neck, although of an ugly appearance, proved of little real consequence, and I soon recovered from its effects: The circumstances of the two youths, especially those affecting Pym, are of sufficient incredibility to test readers’ acumen in distinguishing fiction from fact or reliability from unreliability.
7 (p.457) my own enthusiastic temperament and somewhat gloomy although glowing imagination: In sketching his own manic-depressive state, Pym gives another example of the pervasive themes in the novel.
8 (p. 457) a partial interchange of character: The merging of characteristics makes Pym and Augustus, and subseqeuently Pym and Peters, doubles after the manner of the two William Wilson’s, the Usher twins, Dupin and Minister D__ (in “The Purloined Letter”), and many other characters in the Poe canon.
9 (p. 458) indulging my desire of travel: Pym’s eagerness to “travel” may involve mental-emotional voyaging as well as literal traversing of sea and land. That his travels take him to remote regions represents journeying into increasingly fantastic regions in his mind.
10 (p. 462) “I suppose you can’t tell how long you have been buried”: Beginning here, we find recurrent allusions to or motifs of live burial, a favorite theme with Poe. Premature burials in many of his tales and poems symbolize descents into depths of the self.
11 (p. 462) the expedition of Lewis and Clark to the mouth of the Columbia: Amer ican explorers Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838) led an expedition westward to the Columbia River. Poe might have known various published chronicles of these explorations. These would naturally have provided him knowledge of travel-book methods, as would another account by renowned American writer Washington Irving, Astoria; Or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1836), which Poe reviewed in the Southern Literary Messenger (January 1837); the first two serial installments of Pym also appeared in that magazine. The title of Irving’s book—with Anecdotes, Enterprise, and Beyond—allows for as open-ended a work as Pym turns out to be. Many other travel books in Poe’s day were similarly structured.
12 (p. 463) I was oppressed with a multitude of gloomy feelings: This paragraph and the more extended one that follows contribute to Pym’s dreams or fantasies about death and decay, horror, gloom, and solitude, which intermittently are actualized in some one or another episode. When, over the next few paragraphs, Tiger’s identity is revealed, however, we are treated to a vignette of time-honored “explained supernaturalism,” so to speak, featured in many earlier Gothic novels. Pym’s melancholy outlook anticipates that of another popular boy-hero in American fiction, Huckleberry Finn.
13 (p. 464) I stood, naked and alone, amid the burning sand-plains of Zahara: Scenic effects in this paragraph may be likened to those in “Silence—A Fable” or “The Valley of Unrest.” The barrenness of the Sahara Desert mirrors the bleakness of Pym’s emotions.
14 (p. 466) I should swoon amid the narrow and intricate windings of the lumber: “Lumber” in this context means any stored articles, whether or not they consist of actual wood. Pym’s crawling through this troublesome pathway to find Augustus symbolizes an attempt to reestablish identity, since both youths in this early portion of the novel form a composite self.
15 (p.468) Upon a closer scrutiny, I came across a small slip of what had the feeling of letter paper: Discovery of the note parallels the technique in many older Gothic novels of finding an old manuscript or of distinguishing handwriting on a wall. The information found often acts as a catalyst to additional anxieties or physical dangers for the protagonist(s), or it may relieve their terrors.
16 (p. 474) I felt myself actuated by one of those fits of perverseness which might be supposed to influence a spoiled child: Pym’s perversen
ess aligns him with many other Poe characters, notably, perhaps, the narrator in “The Black Cat,” although these are by no means the only perverse characters in the Poe canon.
17 (p. 475) He had brought with him a light in a dark lantern: A dark lantern has metal walls, with slides that can be opened or closed, depending on the need for light. Here such a lantern also symbolizes Pym’s as yet incomplete knowledge of the situation on the ship. The murderer in “The Tell-Tale Heart” uses a dark lantern to aid in his wicked activities.
18 (p. 480) Dirk Peters... of the tribe of Upsarokas.... I have been thus particular in speaking of Dirk Peters: Many hypotheses have been offered regarding Peters’s significance. His name combines “knife” (a dirk is a long, straight dagger) and “rock” (from the Latin word petra), as well as sex (the dirk suggests an erect penis) and Saint Peter, and he proves to be the savior of Augustus and Arthur in more than one situation. His tribe would actually be Absaroka (a Native American tribe also known as the Crow). In his features and actions he anticipates the title character in “Hop-Frog.” Like much else in Pym, Peters seems at times to change abruptly from gentle to savage. Consistent with such shiftings, Peters also seems to embody supernaturalism. His headpiece, which merges the hair of a type of spaniel with that of a grizzly, emphasizes the uncertainties of domestication and wildness in his makeup.
19 (p. 486) Many years elapsed, however, before I was aware of this fact: A question arises: How did Pym gain this information long after the incident? Peters may have enlightened him, but the indefiniteness is another ambiguity in the novel.
Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 78
