The notorious Gordon Pym is hardly known in American literature classes although he was created by Edgar Allan Poe whose other works are prescribed fare for American students. Not to mention as an aside and probably prejudiced that much of American youth's fascination and over indulgence in drugs is probably sublimely suggested in the works of Poe a renowned drug addict. But the focus of this paper is on the notorious Gordon Pym and perhaps we will only casually comment on his neglect in the American learned arenas of school and television. There is one off the cuff mention of him in the Introduction to my copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne and written in 1870 or thereabouts and first published in the United States in 1946, my copy being a 1972 one.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was Poe's only finished novel and was actually published in 1838. His story laid the basis for much of the ensuing frenzy with whalers and living on the ocean for years at a time. The story is fabulous and the most imaginative ever conceived by Poe. Some of his religion or imposed beliefs included a since dismissed theory probably taken from Greek mythology of the hollow earth.
Theories of the Hollow Earth are that the Earth has a hollow interior and an inhabited one. We have all seen and read stories about journeys to the center of the earth. The theory postulates that since man has never drilled deeper than fiften miles, his knowledge of the Earth extend's only that deep. The theory has now been relagated to that science fiction pulp known as pseudoscience or fraudulent science.
The story and storyline of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is from scholarly accounts Poe's fantasy of adventures he himself would have liked to have undertaken much like Jules Verne's identifying with his most beloved character Captain Nemo.
The name Arthur Gordon Pym is stylistically similar to the sounds of Edgar Allan Poe.
We begin to learn of Gordon Pym as he leaves Edgartown, Massachusetts on Martha's Vineyard. How terribly Poe! The psychological mindset of the novel begins at once, Gordon Pym is escaping himself or his ego. The actual story reads like a travel book of where we went and on what ship. The adventures on board ship may have been censored since they include much of that period's fascination with primitivism or the concept of the Noble Savage unsullied with civilization.
Poe was at his diabolical best in this novel in my opinion. The publishing of the book itself was to be a hoax. All I have to say is this: Was there really an Arthur Gordon Pym? Or was he only Edgar Allan Poe's alter ego? The cataloguing of dates and ships and places becomes almost to impossible to believe that they came out of Poe's frenzied though it was, imagination. And, although the book was the only novel Poe actually finished was claimed by the envious British publishers to have ended unfinished due to the death of Arthur Gordon Pym.
I am thinking that perhaps a resurgence or a group of fanatic Poe's could center on this novel as an escape into the mind of a master.
