Mat Johnson - Pym

“Enough!” I managed the energy to snatch it back from him, replacing the contents and hugging my collection as if the remains were still living.

“Why do you have a dead man among your luggage?” Arthur Gordon Pym asked me, the judgment and disdain as palpable as the wind that blew against our refuge’s walls. “What is this, one of your victims?”

“No,” I replied, pointing. “It’s one of yours. It’s Dirk Peters.”

Pym dropped what was in his hands, pulled away from it for a second before looking into the rest of the sack. And then he looked back at me, smiled broadly, and gave a laugh of madness. Picking up the skull, he held it out to me.

“Alas, poor Dirk! I knew him, Christopher: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!” The sight of this white guy holding the sacred remains of my black brother pissed me off more than any of the events before. I grabbed the skull back out of Pym’s hands with the one-word curse, “Blasphemy!”

“Well, if this is who you say, which I believe not, then who are you to throw such a stone?”

“The weirdo’s right, dog. What you’re doing with it?” the former bus driver asked me.

“I’m taking it to Tsalal. For a proper burial,” I said, holding the bag to me.

“I’m saying, if you ever do find Tsalal, this big black island, why the hell would you bury his bones there? Isn’t that, like, the last thing this dude and this Mathis lady would have wanted?”

“It’s not about what they would have wanted. It’s about what’s right,” I told him. Consumed by cold and overwhelming hunger, I barely bothered to offer that explanation. Why struggle to fight such silliness?

We sat in silence for hours awaiting death, the three of us. Then, after a while, Arthur Pym said:

“Do either of you count straw or twigs among your many wondrous possessions? For I believe that to find sustenance we may have to look amongst our own circle.” Despite myself I looked and saw a pool of spittle spill out the side of the Caucasian’s mouth in anticipation. Although Garth was the one currently being stared at, the big man paid Pym no mind. Instead, as Arthur Pym argued to no one the merits of his culinary suggestions, Garth put back on his gloves, goggles, and hat, and left the tent.

“I am just going outside and may be some time” was his sole remark, and like Lawrence Oates before him he was gone. I was too far gone to try to stop his sacrifice.

“So, are you going to try to eat me now,” I asked Pym, but he shrugged this off.

“Let us acknowledge this: yours is a rather odorous breed, and you, sir, are a particular pungent example of this. I fear even my starving appetite could not overcome that truth.”

“My people don’t stink. And I wouldn’t stink if those Tekelians you love so much had let me take a bath.” At the mention of criticism of his beloved snow monkeys, Pym’s head shook side to side as if he’d bitten something nasty.

“This end is a judgment, I fear. For your theft of yourself,” Pym returned, looking toward the tent door Garth had just walked out of, perhaps considering if he should go and chase after his meal.

“What are you talking about? Steal myself? You basically admitted that they scammed us into that deal, that they were watching us all along.”

Again, the head shake. Pym wouldn’t hear anything negative about the race from the caves. That is it, that’s the trick, I realized as my brain began to go numb. Drifting off, staring across at the two-hundred-year-old man just to make sure that the needs of his stomach didn’t overpower the needs of his nose, I saw it all become clear to me. That is how they stay so white: by refusing to accept blemish or history. Whiteness isn’t about being something, it is about being no thing, nothing, an erasure. Covering over the truth with layers of blank reality just as the snowstorm was now covering our tent, whipping away all traces of our existence from this pristine landscape.

And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.

— The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

IT can be argued then that the greatness of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket lies more in the ongoing reaction to its cliffhanger ending, this flaunting and confounding literary challenge, than to the work itself. The backflips of those who seek to prove that the book is actually a finished work in itself are matched perfectly by the somersaults of others who say the work is an unfinished equation to be answered. Jules Verne, eager to solve the riddle laid out by his American hero, wrote a sequel called An Antarctic Mystery , or The Sphinx of the Ice Fields . *Verne sought to place Pym firmly within the world of the rational, regardless of Poe’s own lack of concern for this regard. The mystery referenced in Verne’s title is solved when his protagonist’s exhaustive research into Pym’s final scene comes up with an answer to explain everything: magnets. Ever fond of science (or even pseudoscience) over mysticism, Verne came up with this rational explanation, that the white figure was a big Sphinx-shaped magnet that had pulled Pym to his death. H. P. Lovecraft took up the challenge in At the Mountains of Madness . In Lovecraft’s version, Poe’s white figure was revealed to be a penguin. A massive, albino penguin, of a breed that was left there by the alien Old Ones, who had also left behind an incomprehensibly hideous tentacled monster. This creature was slimy and, true to Poe’s symbology if not to the setting, completely black.

Pym’s literary critics, the ones stuck with working over the existing text rather than imagining their way out of it, have struggled valiantly, but with disappointing results. As examples of the many schools of thought on that infamous final paragraph, I offer the following:

A. The ending of Pym is simply a taunt for a possible sequel, a crass attempt to turn this novel into one of several, thereby solving Poe’s considerable financial burdens during this period. This technique also harkens to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe , from which Poe borrowed liberally throughout. People forget that, after Crusoe escaped from the island, he and Friday went on to further adventure for another chapter in the wild hills of Italy, chased by ferocious wolves and the like. People forget that part because they want to — it’s anticlimactic, pointless, and silly. Arguing against this theory is the fact that Poe says in the afterword to Pym that there are only two or three chapters missing. Why merely three if an additional volume was the aim?

B. If it is separated from the expectations that a novel has an arc, a direction, and that even the picaresque variety must undergo some final statement, then the ending of Pym fits quite well within the rest of the work. It starts with action, explores the scene, and then ends unresolved, with the reader wanting only to read on. The final chapter feels like every other chapter in the book, and Poe himself once declared that he was first a “magazinist,” an assertion that fits his refusal, or inability, to end this story. Instead of an apposite and structurally determined ending, his finale seems merely to mark the moment when he surrendered to exhaustion and wrote no more. While this may be an attractive explanation, it should be remembered that Poe was a master storyteller, albeit of short-form fiction. Surely, though, a master of the micro could not blunder so largely on the macro level as to have a novel that simply doesn’t end. Right?