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The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, by Edgar Allan Poe (1838) 71K words


Verne wrote the 44th book in his Extraordinary Voyages ("An Antarctic Mystery", aka "The Sphinx of the Ice Realm", 1897) as a sequel and homage to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket". In preparation for reading Verne's book, I first read Poe's work, the only novel the American author wrote.


What is it about?: Young Arthur Gordon Pym stows away aboard a whaling ship called the Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall him, including mutiny, shipwreck and cannibalism. Later, after miraculously surviving, Pym continues his adventures further south, aboard the ship Jane Guy. As they get closer to the South Pole, their ship encounters scheming natives and strange phenomena.


Poe's novel is far from perfect, but it possesses an energy and intensity that kept me glued to my ebook device. In that sense, it reminded me of the best pulp adventure stories from the beginning of the 2oth century. It's a ripping yarn, a real page-turner, with the virtues and flaws of such excessive tales. It has many elements in common with other 19th century adventure stories about sea voyage, but at the same time it's a very personal work, full of Poe's obsessions and terrors.

When published, this novel was not successful, neither critically nor commercially, and Poe himself called it "a very silly book", but at the same time it has influenced and earned the admiration of writers like Herman Melville, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Baudelaire, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft and Jorge Luis Borges.

The novel is composed of two very different parts, with different tones and only linked by the title character's sea voyages and by a certain self-destructive tendency he has that pushes him into terrible situations.

The first half is a more traditional sea adventure, with mutineers, shipwrecks, privations... but this does not give you an idea of how terrifying, dark, extreme, gruesome and claustrophobic the story is. It's a relentless narration, never giving the characters or the reader a respite. Poe really was very different from Verne. Verne's mind is rational and well-ordered, while Poe's mind is twisted, full of dark corners.

The second part, starting at chapter XIV, is such a sudden change of tack that it leaves some readers disconcerted and disgruntled. The pace here is less frantic and oppressive. It now feels like a 19th century sea exploration story. Poe imitates the non-fiction travel narratives of his century, much like Verne will do later in his own novels, describing the islands the ship visits and giving their coordinates. Poe even gives us a long overview of the Antarctic exploration that had been done at the time, which is something that Verne will also do in his stories of polar exploration.

Of course, beyond a certain point, the Antarctic regions were unknown at the time, a large blank area on the maps. And Poe fills it with his fantasy. The so far realistic story of exploration becomes increasingly fantastic.

And then there's the ending. What an ending. Infuriating, a disconcerting cop-out, unsatisfactory... Yes, it's all that, but also, how memorable and intriguing, suggesting so many things and leaving the reader wondering. Verne would write about it "Who shall continue it? Someone braver than me, someone more willing to enter the domain of impossible things." Twenty years after writing that, Verne must have felt brave enough to make the attempt, and the result was "An Antarctic Mystery" (aka "The Sphinx of the Ice Realm"). But that's a different book, to be discussed elsewhere.

Coming back to Poe's novel: it's too gruesome and truculent. It's not well-structured as a novel, feeling like a fix-up of two novellas, very different in tone. Also, it lacks a proper ending. It is deserving of criticism. But at the same time it's so vivid, its imagery so powerful, that it is still read much after its critics are gone and forgotten.


Enjoyment factor: I enjoyed it a lot. A lot of elements in common with Verne's stories, but at the same time so different...