Cowart, "Intersecting Worlds"

[Dave Monroe]

... seeing as Michael mentioned it, and, seeing as I'd already done the
typing, from David Cowart, Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (Urbana:
U of Illinois P, 1980), Chapter 5, "Intersecting Worlds: Language and
Literature in Pynchon," pp. 96-133.  We enter mid-paragraph ...

Given Pynchon's fascination with the South Pole and accounts of it, one
might expect to find traces in his fiction of Edgar Allan Poe's novella
of Antarctic adventure, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of
Nantucket.  Poe's tale describes an imaginary voyage of exploration
which culminates in the arrival of the eponymous hero at a great
chasm--presumably the South Pole.  According to Edward Davidson
["Introduction," Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1956), p. xxi], Poe was influenced by John Cleve Symmes (better
known as a jurist than as a theoretical geographer) that there were
"holes at the poles"--leading to vast hollow regions peopled by an
ancient race.  One thinks again of the Florentine chapter of V., in
which Sidney Stencil allegedly comes to the
conclusion, based on what he has been able to learn about Hugh Godolphin
and his polar experiences, that "a barbaric and unknown race ... are
even now blasting the Antarctic ice with dynamite, preparing to enter a
subterranean network of natural tunnels" ([V.,] p. 197).
    Gravity's Rainbow also contains indirect references to Pym.  The
narrator's hatred of whiteness in Pynchon's novel reminds one of the
violent feelings toward the color white evinced by the black
savages--even their teeth are black--who populate Poe's Antarctic.  So
vehemently do they abhor whiteness that they murder the band of sailors
with whom Pym travels.  The enigma of their strange antipathy deepens at
the end of the tale, for the protagonist, escaping from them, is carried
by a swift current inexorably south, through a shower of white flakes
which are neither ash nor snow.  Everything is silent and white.  Like
Gottfried in the 00000 rocket, Pym voyages into mystery.  The "Other
Kingdom" to which Gottfried tends, as we shall see, at his death and at
every coupling with Blicero,  sounds unmistakably polar: "He approached
the gates inside, expressionless beasts frozen white" ([GR,] p. 722).
Pym's story, which Poe pretends he has been constrained to publish in
fragmentary form, breaks off as his small boat approaches the pole.
Like "the last image" on the Gravity's rainbow movie screen, which "may
have been a human figure" ([GR,] p. 760), the last image in Pym is an
enigmatic human shape: "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."

... all from Cowart, pp. 100-1.  While I'm at it, note also the
similarity of that last image in Poe's Narrative to the final sighting
of the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  THOAGPON (!) is well
worth a read, by the way, very creepy, and note also the strange writing
therein ...