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.

Lost, Dred, and the Enlightenment

I started watching Lost over the weekend to see what all the fuss is about (and to fill the gaping void left by The Wire). I can already tell that "pretty" factor is going to get to me (perfectly groomed brows and smooth armpits after being stranded for 6 days), but nitpicking aside, so far so good. I think if it was merely a survival show, I'd be bored to tears. I overdosed on books like Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain in my preteen years, not to mention Robinson Crusoe in grad school. Books like that tend to have a limited appeal for me, even when fascinating and well-written. Camping lost its appeal for me when I was about ten years old and really not okay with the lack of indoor plumbing. It was always difficult for me to get lost in the adventure aspect when I was vividly imagining the discomforts of roughing it. But Lost gets right into the supernatural even before we know the names of the survivors. Surviving in the wilderness is only the first step.

Both Lost and some of the reading I've been doing over the last few days have got me thinking of The Great Dismal Swamp as also Stowe's way of discussing Locke, Rousseau, and Paine in conjunction with abolition and insurrection. According Levine, one of Stowe's sources for was a book called The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855) by William Cooper Nell.

In a chapter on 'The Virginia Maroons,' Nell writes, 'The Great Dismal Swamp, which likes near the Eastern shore or Virginia, and, commencing near Norfolk, stretches quite into North Carolina, contains a large colony of negroes, who originally obtained their freedom by the grace of God and their own determined energy, instead of the consent of their owners, or by the help of the Colonizatoin Society.' (Levine 161)

It's interesting to think of Stowe of setting up the Maroon community as an experiment in black self governance and revolution. The Virginia Maroon colony (we'll call it that for the time being) is a fairly old one. A 1939 article in The Journal of Negro History by Herbert Aptheker states that as early as 1672 there are reports of insurrectionist activity in the area surrounding The Great Dismal Swamp. This presents the possibility of looking at the history of the Great Dismal Swamp as presenting a mirror for the history of America's evolution from colony to republic. Granted Stowe presents Dred's colony as a brief and ultimately failed attempt at black revolution. Yet the history suggests otherwise. The community is a fairly durable one until approximately 1862.

Although Dred's little community seems to represent a temporary experiment of escaped slaves creating community even to the point of establishing trade with local sympathetic whites, it also represents maroon communities throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. Moreover, these maroon communities enact an ethos of man in his natural state forming communities, and yet fail to achieve that crucial step of creating government. Why?

Part of the answer might be in that there is something unworkable about Enlightenment approaches to civil government for Stowe particularly Locke's ideas on rationality and property in the abolitionist context. Under the Lockian model the slaves escaping to the swamp returns them to a state of nature. The next step should be to come together in social contract to form a civil government. But that doesn't happen. In a way Dred is potentially the fanatical despot who lures slaves away only to sway them to his cause and revolt. If Stowe is doing what Levine suggests and tying Vesey, Turner, and the like to the American Revolution she's also presenting their failures, or rather the limits of that model in the context of American slavery.

There's room for a bit about Haiti in here, particularly in regards to the "perpetual state of revolt" bit but I'm not quite there yet.

This probably goes without saying but I'm setting aside the whole Lacanian approach to the Maritime Imaginary in favor of re-reading some key Enlightenment texts. I'll probably end up bringing some of it back in but for the moment I think this is more productive.

The More One Reads...

I've been reading Maurice S. Lee's Slavery, Philosophy, & American Literature, 1830-1860 in addition to my explorations into Lacan and Althusser. In the introduction he offers this assessment of the latest work in the American Renaissance:

Just as the American Renaissance proved amenable to political interpretation, more recently canonized traditions appear increasingly open to philosophical inquiry. Such inquiry need not entail deconstruction, neo-Marxism, or psycholinguistics, which have for decades been projected back on nineteenth-century texts. The more historically minded can turn to ideas available at the time to invoke, for instance, Hobbes before Foucault and Schelling instead of Lacan, and to view language not through Derrida but through someone like Thomas Reid. In this way, the literature of slavery can be read within the philosophical history not to attenuate theory or cultural studies but rather to advance them through an effort of synthesis that does not exclude philosophy from the domain of politics and culture. (Lee 9)

Oy. Just when I think I'm on the right track, I come across something like this and it sends me back to the drawing board. Lee's book is something I probably should have read before writing my dissertation proposal since he gets at a bunch of different things I'm interested in exploring, namely that literature of this period is invested in vexed philosophical questions regarding the position of slaves in the post-revolutionary moment. Lee does talk about some Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Kant but he's also looking the contemporary German philosophers like Schelling, people I don't even have a passing acquaintance with. I guess I'm not sure which is the most logical place from which to draw my definition of the Imaginary. Should it be from Lacan's concept of The Imaginary or should I drawing from contemporary concepts of the imaginary? Concentrate on Emerson, Kant, and the like? A little of both perhaps...use the Lacanian concept and look how the philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries enacts it? 

Reading Lee's book is both great and panic-inducing because he hits several of my pet points and does it really well. His chapter on Melville even as a section called "The Almost-Ship of State." "No political philosopher of the antebellum period was more provocative then Herman Melville" (134).  This is where I begin my thinking and where the dissertation ends. Of course to get there I have to get through Dred, so I better set Melville aside for now.

In his chapter on Stowe he discusses how Stowe's training in metaphysics manifests in her writing and how the violence of the abolition debates in the 1850s challenged her sentimental theory.  Dred, in depicting not just the plotting of a slave insurrection but partisan violence between whites, challenges her own theories on sentiment and enlightenment in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Violence is seen as inevitable given the limits of moral sympathy and also, in some ways, desirable. This is mostly in line with Levine's analysis but with more emphasis on the way in which Stowe and her contemporaries used literature to explore and critique Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). 

I haven't really thought of Dred as engaging with Enlightenment philosophy in the same way that Billy Budd does. My conception of this chapter has been primarily in terms of abolitionist debates of the 1850s and in the way that representations (or non-representations) of slave insurrections and their actors echo historical anxieties regarding insurrection. In terms of the limits of reason and sympathy I've mainly seen Stowe as in denial about it. But I think Lee's offering a way to engage Dred with something beyond the debates and the echoes of Haiti, etcetera. In terms of my own argument, or what I hope my argument is shaping up to be, the way that Dred both looks at the present and the future in terms of the debate, it also looks at the past, hence the coastal nature of the title character and his tendency to meditate in the hulks of ships. I think given both Stowe's trip to Europe and this concept of her own grappling with Smith I might have something else upon which to build on my concept of the Maritime Imaginary. 

Of course that means I'll have to re-read Adam Smith. Oy squared.