[Spiegel and Grau; 2011]

By: Alli Carlisle

Some great artists can break out of their most comfortable form to produce a brilliant work in another—think Debussy’s only quartet—while others just can’t seem to. Edgar Allan Poe was one of the latter. His only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, was a mess, heavily plagiarized and full of inconsistencies that have kept people who have nothing better to do (literary critics) stoking the flames of that great debate: is it really good or really bad?

Mat Johnson reinterprets Poe’s questionably constructed work in Pym, a novel that manages to be all at once a slapstick adventure, a literary mystery and a satirical approach to race, racism and academia. Johnson is not the first to rewrite this story—he’s behind Herman Melville and Jules Verne—but he does it pretty uniquely, blending a strong comic voice with strange, fantastical adventure. Some of these parts work better than others for Johnson, giving us an extremely entertaining but uneven, even occasionally puzzling, novel.

In the opening scene, our narrator, Chris Jaynes, a professor of African American literature, has just been denied tenure at Bard College. The college president took issue with his refusal to serve on the Diversity. Jaynes is instead fixated on Poe:

What I discovered in my studies in Poe’s and other early Americans’ texts was the intellectual source of racial Whiteness. Here, in these pages, was the very fossil record of how this odd and illogical sickness formed. […] I was doing essential work, work affecting domestic policy, foreign policy, the entire social fabric of the most powerful nation in the world.

Jaynes, seeking literary greatness and only briefly deterred by the loss of his job, begins a deeply obsessive quest to Antarctica to find the truth behind the story of Arthur Pym.

Our narrator relentlessly, and insightfully, skewers his crewmates and the way they manifest the racist pathologies that infect American society, as well as his own obsession. Most of the characters are not terribly complex, but they are funny. Jaynes’s best friend Garth has two fixations: Little Debbie snack cakes and Thomas Karvel, a painter of schmaltzy, highly contrived landscapes that represent the U.S. as a WASP-ish utopia (think Bob Ross channeling Pat Robertson). Booker Jaynes, Chris’s cousin and captain of the trip to Antarctica, is a paranoid former-civil rights activist who describes to Chris early on his great disappointment when no one participated in a march he organized in response to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Chris asks what exactly he was marching for, or against, and Booker replies, “‘Negro, we were going to march! Don’t ask me about marching; what kind of ignorant ass question is that? Let me tell you, I marched at Selma, I marched in Mississippi, I marched in Montgomery. I know how to march.’” Booker Jaynes’s dog is named White Folks.

As the crew’s trip to Antarctica progresses, things get really weird. Arthur Pym turns out to be alive, and living in the company of a society of abominable snowmen (there’s a suggestion that these creatures are a kind of über-white people, but the suggestion doesn’t really go anywhere). Armageddon mysteriously occurs, ending all communications to the outside world; the snow creatures enslave the crew when they then can’t pay up a promised load of Little Debbies. Gross and funny and violent things happen, and from here the book spins out into an unwieldy escape story that doesn’t manage to uphold the promise of the smart satire present throughout the early book.

Pym never stops being clever, but it’s hard to say where it goes beyond that. Johnson models his book after Poe’s, and includes enough references to the original so that you know it. He begins with a preface echoing Poe’s; there are character namesakes, similar plot points, echoing language. There is even a dog introduced and then never mentioned after a certain point, just as in Poe’s novel. But Poe’s novel is choppy and strange, and these elements don’t diminish in Johnson’s version of them, and neither do they advance the project of Pym.

In a way, Pym is a fabulous book—the ambition of the literary interpretation and the voice of the narrator are excellent. I wanted less of the overdeveloped absurdist humor that dominates the latter part of the novel, and yet more of Johnson’s smart, funny narration.


 
 
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