P/p … Tekelili: Pym Decoded

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

P/P . . . T E K E L I L I : P Y M D E C O D E D H ERBERT F . SM ITH University of Victoria IV iodern readers of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym seem to have evolved into two distinct and contradictory classes. In the first category are what we might call the “hoaxers,” who take Poe at his word about his “ silly book” and solve all the cruxes of the text on the basis of a perceived intent to hoax the public with a potboiler adventure fiction. The hoaxers assume that Pym is a deliberate parody of fiction in violation of Poe’s well-known critical opinions concerning the tale and its effect; for them it is a longer example of the genre of “A Predicament.” In the second category we have the “Freudian Fryers,” who accept a parodic element in the narrative, but who see it as a superficial overlay, rather like the borrowings from “Mellonta Tauta” in Eureka. They prefer to emphasize the evidence for Poe’s selfconscious symbolizing of the text — the shift of dates to achieve a ninemonth voyage and the like — thereby emphasizing the archetypal structure of the narrative.1 As a result, criticism of Pym is deadlocked and unproduc­ tive, rather like the squabble between the “squatters” and the “dandies” among Mark Twain critics. One side has all the biographical evidence in place, but is forced to the conclusion that Pym is pretty poor stuff; the other side struggles with the uneven and crude suggestions from the text to prop up the implications that Pym is a masterpiece. This paper proposes an approach to the work from a more modern per­ spective, a reading of Pym in something of the manner of Roland Barthes’s decoding of Balzac’s “ Sarrasine,” S/Z. I say “something of the manner” advisedly, because Barthes’s technique in S/Z was itself a parodic example of exegetical overkill. The Tel Quel edition is 278 pages long, of which 31 constitute a reproduction of the text of “Sarrasine.” 2 To keep those propor­ tions with Pym would require, according to my hand calculator, no less than 1,354 pages of the size of The Collected Works (Boston: Twayne, 1981). Barthes’s technique in S/Z may be adapted to a longer work like Pym in other ways, however. Where “ Sarrasine” was, for Barthes, “passing” as a “straight,” realistic, heterosexual fiction that needed exegetical undressing, E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C anada, x iv , i , March 1988 Pym is a problematic direct contradiction to the laws of verisimilitude and Poe’s own strictures on the art of fiction. Therefore, I propose to use Barthes’s division of the techniques of fiction cited in his textual “lexias” as semiotic “ tumblers” to the lock of Pym, or, perhaps a better analogy, code­ bodies of unequal weight to be juggled simultaneously as we proceed through the narrative. There are two ways to perform this act of explicatio upon the text: one is to write five exegeses in parallel columns according to the five codes; the other is to presume equal reference to all five codes and move randomly through them. This paper will attempt variations on both. For Barthes, the process of fiction consists of manipulation of five semiotic codes. The proairetic code includes all the action of the narration and is approximately equivalent to the less fancy notion known as plot. The her­ meneutic code is the puzzle of the text that continues the reader’s interest — approximately equivalent to the notion of suspense. The cultural code con­ sists of the narrative’s use of the reader’s expectations concerning the rela­ tionship between cause and effect as they appear in the narrative — their etiology. The connotative code is the contribution to the narration of the structure of the work — its division into parts, breaks in chronology, place, perspective, point of view. Finally, the symbolic code is the code of the text itself insofar as it is a recursive generation of its own content. Now, although Barthes does not say so, it is obvious that these cryptanalytic categories...