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.

Fragments

It's been a disjointed couple of days. I've been simultaneously trying to get a handle on Dred reception history and dabbling into Lacan (or rather Eagleton's interpretation of Lacan) which makes for kind of muddled reading. The Dred stuff is useful just in terms of nuts and bolts research. Of course it gives me things that seem like they should fit in somewhere but where isn't completely obvious. One of the places it's led me is to her memoir of her travels to Europe after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin and before writing Dred, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands in Two Volumes (1854). In it, she devotes a whole chapter about her sojourn at Playford Hall, formerly the residence of the late Thomas Clarkson. The purpose of the chapter does little except give a brief history of Clarkson's early career lifting heavily from Clarkson's own memoirs. In terms of what it might mean for the chapter, at this point, not much save that Stowe's own awareness of the British legacies of transatlantic slavery and the early abolitionist movement. If Stowe herself is haunted by Clarkson's slave ships than the presence of empty hulks of ships makes sense.


A more interesting tidbit courtesy of Audrey Fisch is that shortly after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in England and in response to its immense popularity an anonymous text appeared called Uncle Tom in England or Proof that Black is White. This book appeared in 1852 and according to Fisch was written out alarm that Stowe's original was gaining in popularity amongst the lower classes. I'm trying to decide if it's worth it add this to my already teetering tower of reading.

The Lacan readings are interesting but I need to read more, and read slowly. My brain has never readily absorbed this kind of thing and time hasn't done me any favors. Strangely it's leading me into Althusser's work ideology. Or maybe not strangely since I've been playing fast and loose with the term in Chapter 1. But I think both in terms of the problem of literary representation and positing that something about language changes with the rise in Transatlantic trade both approaches will end up framing my thinking well. If the definition of self transforms in the wake of the Glorious Revolution and with the implementation of race slavery what you have is both the illusion on the part of the British that this vast colonial empire constitutes a whole even if they can only see it in parts, and the misrecognition of that whole for something that it is not, colonists as subjects and not as potential revolutionaries. With regards to the slave the opposite thing happens. Self becomes fragmented into parts and use-value. This makes Equiano's work all the more interesting in that he needs to reconstitute the fragmented self into a whole. A maritime imaginary is perhaps one in which both ideologies and subjectivities are reflected and refracted by oceanic crossings.

A clumsy thought experiment but better to try it out now than a month from now when I'm trying to write coherently. I also don't want to end up doing an awkward psychoanalytic reading of texts like this throughout the whole dissertation.