The continuous interweaving of chaos with reason, throughout the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, is essentially used by Poe to express a radical skepticism, a question behind the question, if you will; this being most effectively procured through the use of horror, or the evocation of a sense of the grotesque. This sense of incongruity and fluctuation is to be seen as a parallelism of the paradox of human existence; a theme, which however remotely, derives from a Gothic point of view. The element of chaos, and in turn, of horror, is effectively mimicked in Pym's sea voyage through the presence of two main modes of construction -- the first being that of contrast, as seen through irony, and the second being that of distortion, as seen through parody.

The idea of contrast is transcended in Chapter X, where Pym and some sailors, while stranded on their raft, encounter false hope. Pym initially observes that a Dutch trading ship is sailing to their rescue; he quickly makes note of the situation on deck, and remarks of one man that "seemed by his manner to be encouraging us to have patience, nodding to us in a cheerful although rather odd way, and smiling constantly, so as to display a set of the most brilliantly white teeth" (Poe 809). And so it appears that all is well, that fortune has smiled on the ship-wrecked sailors; the dark irony which is at play only surfaces a page and a half later, when Pym is able to get a closer look at the mysterious man. "The eyes were gone, and the whole flesh around the mouth, leaving the teeth utterly naked. This, then, was the smile which had cheered us on to hope" (810)! So the final, grim realization of the rescue ship is here used to mock the living sailors, that they too will degenerate into a loathsome, rotting mass -- insensible to the chaos of the universe, but still affected by it. Therefore, the element of the grotesque is translated into an extreme version of the human condition; it is not merely a part of Gothic decor, but becomes a desperate world-view by which the subjective human mind tries to hide the meaningless ambivalence of the natural world, by clothing it with the complexity of self-awareness. In this way, horror only arises when the natural world cannot be camouflaged.

The theme of distortion is also closely related to that of contrast; however, the former blends reason with chaos, rather than juxtaposing the two extremes. It is to be observed when the breakdown of social convention results in cannibalism, practicality having defeated morality in Chapter XII. And so, Pym speaks of how anyone who "drew the shortest of four splinters . . . was to die for the preservation of the rest" (819). The reference to 'four splinters' and 'preservation' emphasizes parody as the vehicle of distortion, for as Mr. Lee states, the author's "parodic vision creates a mock communion from a scene of cannibalism by interfusing it with allusions to the last supper of Christ" (Kopley 147). More simply stated, what arises out of this wildest of predicaments is a dehumanization of the self that directly exposes the practical amorality of the natural world as being actually alien to our own being, and thus the main source of Poe's refined Gothicism. "The ironic perception of the structures of nothingness that constitute our cosmos . . . constitutes our sanity as we structure the formless and empty void" (Kopley 212). This element of the explained horrible in Poe, is to be also perceived in the tales of effect of Blackwood's Magazine, where the main character would be placed in a terrible situation purposefully, in order to analyze the sensations and thoughts which arise -- evidently the first tremors of psycho-analysis. In that way, the hideous sea perils of the stranded sailors can also be explained; the ludicrous effect destroys sensibility, and so Pym constantly regresses inwards, becoming eventually unaware and indifferent to his surroundings.

By interweaving chaos with remnants of a thought process, Poe's novel of philosophical contradiction eventually ends in intellectual confusion. For the intellect, by wandering from compassion to practicality and then back again, eventually escapes its bonds altogether, becoming alienated. And this sense of alienation is essentially the focal point of Poe's horror school; this being, in truth, a failure of trying to find meaning in chaos, where there is none. Incidentally, the novella ends when Pym and another ship-mate sail off into a 'perfect whiteness' that arises -- this whiteness can be viewed as a return to purity and truth, after the previous barbarities, but is more in keeping with the design if interpreted as a deterioration into complete, mental blankness.

Works Cited

Kopleys Richard. Ed. Poe's Pym: Critical Explorations. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: The Modern Library, 1992.

Slobodan Sucur
Gothic Fiction
November 1995