Poe's Sea Of Darkness

I’m working up a rather loose idea for this chapter that resituates Poe as maritime writer taking The Narrative of the Life of Arthur Gordon Pym, "The Gold Bug", and "Descent Into the Maelstrom" as a sort of maritime gothic trilogy within his repertoire. I’m currently in search of an argument to support this reading. I tend to get mulish about my arguments, or more precisely, about the necessity of having an argument. It’s one part laziness, one part vanity on my part. Aren’t my readings clever? Do I really have to make a claim to support them? At the heart of this is a guilty yet steadfast conviction that I really shouldn’t have to work hard and people should just give me jobs and money regardless. A rather dangerous attitude have in the current academic climate, n’est-ce que pas?

But to return to the matter at hand, Poe’s approach to the sea is difficult in part because all of my conclusions feel obvious and thin. The trio of tales all jive with Poe’s anti-romantic gothic approach literature. The primary question I’m grappling with is, why does it matter that they’re sea tales? Poe’s preoccupation with Jeremiah Reynolds’ South Sea Expedition and his use of the Globe mutiny have been pretty well covered. Ditto for Poe’s ambiguous position on slavery. Trying to locate myself in the criticism is proving more difficult than first imagined.

Both Pym and "The Gold Bug" present some interesting moments to talk about piracy and slavery. Pym, whose romantic notions of seafaring are dashed when he is first entombed within the ship for days before emerging in the midst of a violent mutiny, experiences an approximation of the Middle Passage wherein boarding the ship means the end of freedom instead of the beginning. Pym's fear of the mutineers seems centered primarily on the black cook one of the ringleaders. That fear becomes transmuted from fear of entrapment to fear of being taken unwilling along on a pirate expedition as the mutineers gradually turn their interests towards lawlessness. Poe uses piracy to critique Pym's imperfect understanding of freedom and his hyper-romantic notions of adventure. His love of adventure and defiance of his father's wishes compared with his horror at the mutineers anticipation of a pleasure cruise for profit in the Pacific islands smacks of a certain hypocrisy.

"The Gold Bug" is a bit more complicated. It's not properly a sea tale but it does use the hunt for Kidd's pirate treasure. There's an air of menace that hangs over the first part of the story, while Legrand's motives are hidden and his actions erratic. Once the treasure is discovered and he explains how he cracked Kidd's code the second half of the book reassures us that possibility for madness and murder was never really there. Except for the ending when the narrator asks about the skeletons found alongside the treasure. Legrand's reply knocks us back to moment of Legrand's rage at Jupiter's blundering.

"That is a question I am no more able to answer than yourself. There seems, however, only one plausible way of accounting for them--and yet it is dreadful to believe in such atrocity as my suggestion would imply. It is clear that Kidd-- if Kidd indeed secreted this treasure, which I doubt not--it is clear that he must have had assistance in the labor. But, the worst of this labor concluded, he may have thought it expedient to remove all participants in his secret. Perhaps a couple of blows with a mattock were sufficient, while his coadjutors were busy in the pit; perhaps it required a dozen-- who shall tell?" (Poe 596)

This classic Poe, deconstructing the method to the madness without letting us forget the madness part of the equation. Logic and rationality are not proof against madness, desire and chaos. Pirates and piracy are false symbols of romantic freedom and native intelligence.

Red Rover, Red Rover, Let Scipio Come Over

I'm finally working on Chapter 2 of the diss tentatively titled "Deconstructing the American Romantic Pirate." This is always the best part of the process: reading, flagging, taking note of every little thing that might be of interest. I finished going through Cooper's The Red Rover this morning which was a good way to start the process. I've always found reading Cooper to be something of a pain (overwrite much JFC?). And turgid prose plus a lot of impenetrable sailing jargon equals me wishing I'd gone ahead with the Melville chapter instead of this one. But I'm actually excited about this chapter, because this is the "rollicking adventure" chapter.

The Red Rover is a great book for me because it's a historical novel written in 1824 that takes place in Newport, RI in 1756. The character of the Red Rover is a pirate who sails in a ship called the Dolphin which travels under several guises. At the novel's opening it is lying in the harbor as a (drumroll please)...slave ship! Cooper plays with this comparison between the dubious character of the slave ship and the feared yet largely mysterious character of the pirate ship at several times during the novel. Slaving is by turns referred to as honest and shameful. Piracy is roundly condemned yet sympathizers are found at every turn. And of course there is the question on how free all sailors are , black or white, at sea.

Scipio Africanus is one of the first sailors we meet. He's not exactly a slave, but he's also clearly not free. He refers to his companion Richard "Dick" Pip as a "Master" and Cooper, through Pip, makes reference to his "degraded" and "ignorant" state. Yet, as the novel progresses, we gradually become acquainted with Scipio's sailing expertise. Throughout the novel he remains something of a mystery. Cooper plays with both the practice of naming slaves after Classical figures and assumptions concerning black intellect by repeatedly setting Scipio up to be object of derision only to have him reveal himself to be more canny than those around him realize.

My tentative plan for this chapter is to analyzee Cooper's treatment of piracy in this book alongside Poe's in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. What I'm thinking right now is that looking books that use sea tales to arrive at different conclusions regarding the lessons of the Revolution will be a good way to shore up my arguments regarding using sea fiction as political critique. But it's always risky to go into a chapter with too narrow an agenda. And there is so much in The Rover Rover to explore that I don't want to overlook anything.