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.

Revision and the Illusion of Completeness

Discussing chapter revisions is simultaneously excruciating and liberating. You are purged of delusions of completeness, disabused of any sense of your own brilliance, and finally reassured that you're "almost there." You are also, at least for a little while, free from that dark isolated cave so necessary to writing, and in talking about your work more aware of how things are coming together beyond the immediate chapter. And having done the hardest work of wrestling with concepts in the first draft, you are now allowed to pay more attention to nuance, argument, etcetera.

So instead of moving on whole-hog to pirates, I'm going to start with the revising process with small excursions into pirate territory for variety. In terms of revising, The next few weeks I'm going to concentrate on some key questions brought up at the workshop.

• Principles of Selection
• The Historical Phenomenon of the Maritime Imaginary
• The Relationship Between Insurrection And Revolution
• The resonance of Haiti and American Revolution within the Context of the 1850s

The narrative isn't as clear as it initially seemed. The progression from swamp to sea of course makes mores sense at the end of the chapter than at the beginning which, naturally, that the chapter essentially as to be rewritten backwards. Having teased out the close readings of the texts I now need to go back and do what I set out to do in the first place and make the controlling elements the progression from swamp to sea rather than letting my close readings guide the chapter. I think I'm going to spend the next couple of days concentrating on the introduction and then go back to the swamp. Sigh.

On the pirate front, this weekend I'm headed, finally, to the Field Museum of Natural History's exhibit of the Whydah.

From National Geographic:

The Whydah's story begins in London in 1715 when the hundred-foot [31-meter] three-master was launched as a slave ship under the command of Lawrence Prince. Named for the West African port of Ouidah (pronounced WIH-dah) in what is today Benin, the 300-ton [272-metric-ton] vessel was destined for the infamous "triangular trade" connecting England, Africa, and the West Indies. Carrying cloth, liquor, hand tools, and small arms from England, the Whydah's crew would buy and barter for up to 700 slaves in West Africa, then set out with them on three to four weeks of hellish transport to the Caribbean. Once there, the slaves were traded for gold, silver, sugar, indigo, and cinchona, the last being a source of quinine, all of which went back to England.

The Whydah was fast—she was capable of 13 knots—but in February of 1717, on only her second voyage, she was chased down by two pirate vessels, theSultana and Mary Anne, near the Bahamas. Led by Samuel "Black Sam"

Bellamy, a raven-haired former English sailor thought to be in his late 20s, the pirates quickly overpowered the Whydah's crew. Bellamy claimed her as his flagship, seized a dozen men from Prince, then let the vanquished captain and his remaining crew take the Sultana.

By early April the pirates were headed north along the east coast, robbing vessels as they went. Their destination was Richmond Island, off the coast of Maine, butthey diverted to Cape Cod, where legend says Bellamy wanted to visit his mistress, Maria Hallett, in the town of Eastham near the cape's tip. Others blame the course change on several casks of Madeira wine seized off Nantucket. Whatever the reason, on April 26, 1717, the freebooter navy sailed square into a howling nor'easter.

According to eyewitness accounts, gusts topped 70 miles [113 kilometers] an hour and the seas rose to 30 feet [9 meters]. Bellamy signaled his fleet to deeper water, but it was too late for the treasure-laden Whydah.Trapped in the surf zone within sight of the beach, the boat slammed stern first into a sandbar and began to break apart. When a giant wave rolled her, her cannon fell from their mounts, smashing through overturned decks along with cannonballs and barrels of iron and nails. Finally, as the ship's back broke, she split into bow and stern, and her contents spilled across the ocean floor.

A slave ship turned pirate ship and wrecked off the coast of New England! Perfect!

Looking Ahead

I promised myself I wouldn't start writing until August but I'm thinking about revising that since I'm feeling antsy about all the stuff I have swirling around in my head. I'm probably going to spend another week reading and taking notes and then start outlining and generating some close readings of the texts I've read. I also need to organize my notes and figure out what I have the jettison and what needs more research. I think sticking to looking at Dred as my main text is still the right way to go but I also really need to figure out a better way to incorporate Douglass and Delany into that analysis. Here is a loose sense of how I'm going to organize the chapter.

The 1850s
I'm going to need to narrate the history following the Compromise of 1850 i.e. John Brown and bleeding Kansas, the abolitionist debates over black assimilation versus emigration, and pro-slaver supporters arguments in favor of the annexation of Cuba. More than that I need to the way these debates are echoes and continuations of the earlier abolitionist debates in Great Britain. Specifically, how desire for access to the Caribbean sugar market and fear of a black Cuba reenact issues surrounding the rise of the sugar plantation, the expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and eventually the Haitian revolution. In the case of abolitionist debates over emigration, I need to tease out how emigration acts as a reversal of the trauma of the Middle Passage, the desire for return not merely about being a homecoming and the establishment of a black republic, but also a desire for a founding narrative, in which equality with white Americans established through an origin story similar say to the founding of Plymouth Rock.

Stowe
The journey she takes from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Dred is an interesting one involving both the influence of Douglass, critiques from Delany and others regarding the representation of slaves, and her trip to England prior to writing Dred. This last one is a bit flimsy but I think Clarkson and the British fight is on her mind during the gestational period of this novel. The character of Dred and the setting of the swamp allow her to negotiate both the present and the past in presenting abolition as the outcome of a longer history.

Revolution, Insurrection, Mutiny and the Slave Ship
The slave ship is a fraught image in this moment. On the one hand the Transatlantic slave trade has technically been abolished. But as Blake shows us, and as the Amistad, Tryal, and Creole cases also demonstrate, the slave ship won't go away. The slave ship mutinies and the slave insurrections provide rhetorical moments for abolitionists to invoke both the Haitian and American revolutions.

The Literary Representation of the Slave
Not sure where this is leading exactly but it seems to me that some of the problems I introduced in the first chapter on Grainger and Equiano become even more fraught, especially in the wake of the Compromise of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision. Douglass and Delany in particular use these texts about insurrection as a way of making opposite points in a way. Douglass ties Madison Washington to the history of the American Revolution as a way of creating an American identity for his character. Delany's Blake is more of a Moses figure leading people away from the States to some never-seen promised land. Stowe is a bit trickier. While Dred at once seem to be merely a representation of other insurrectionists from history she seems less concerned with creating an accurate black revolutionary figure than she is in using him to discuss abolitionists need to recognize themselves as fellow insurrectionists as well as highlighting the role of pro-slavery violence in creating these insurrectionist figures.

The Maritime Imaginary
Hopefully by the time I work these other things out, I'll have a clearer sense of how they play into the role of the maritime in abolitionist texts. For the moment though I'm stuck on this quote from "The Heroic Slave" (1853)

During all the storm, Madison stood firmly at the helm,— his keen eye fixed upon the binnacle. He was not indifferent to the dreadful hurricane; yet he met it with the equanimity of an old sailor. He was silent but not agitated. The first words he uttered after the storm had slightly subsided, were characteristic of the man. 'Mr. Mate, you cannot write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The ocean, if not the land, is free.'(Douglass 237)

A vexed statement if there ever was one. On the one hand he's correct. The opportunity for mutiny while at sea demonstrates the illusion of authority aboard a ship. On the other hand it seems to me that the kind of freedom attained through mutiny epitomizes the problem of negative freedom, a freedom from tyranny but not necessarily enfranchisement.