NPPF: Canto Three: Poe's Pym

[Jasper Fidget]

ln 707: "Against the dark, a tall white fountain played." 

Poe's _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_ (1837) is his only novel and,
according to Borges, his greatest work.  It concerns in part a voyage to the
South Pole, the discovery of a strange land where the rocks of a chasm are
the shapes of words hinting at arcane mysteries (patterns of nature leading
to higher truths), and ending at another, solely white land where a giant
white cataract falls from the sky and pours into a milky sea.  This fountain
from the sky offers only a dead ending instead of the revelation and
salvation hoped for by the crew: Pym's journal ends as the ship enters the
cataract and they meet "a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its
proportions than any dweller among men"; but also symbolizes creative
imagination and the source of all art, especially the white paper of
literary art.

Pym's journal is followed by a "Note", which forms a brief commentary on the
text, and reveals the entire thing to be a hoax: according to the editor of
the "Note", the words engraved in the chasm of the strange land "constitute
an Ethiopian verbal root--the root ... 'To be shady'" (Poe, 244).  Shady
indeed, for as Daniel Wells comments, "when we assemble a map of the entire
chasm from Pym's own diagrams, the secret of [the island] reveals itself" to
be Poe's own name (in mirror form naturally).  "This communication is
between Poe and his special readership," writes Wells, "who must connect the
figures in written script before the meaning emerges. One must glimpse the
total picture from a perspective outside and above the action, something
which the characters within the Narrative and its 'Editor' fail to do. When
the connection is made, and it glares at us in its stark simplicity, the
aesthetic distance between author and work disappears; Poe signs his name,
as it were, to his island, and the fiction of the separate existences of Pym
and Peters (and the 'Editor') collapses like the landscape itself in the
previous episode."  (Wells, "Engraved Within the Hills", _Poe Studies_, vol
X, no. 1, 1977).

http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/poe/works/a_g_pym/toc.html 
http://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1977102.htm

Jasper