Pym & have we been shooting in the Dark too Long?

[alice wellintown]

Wednesday, December 29, 2010
http://blog.loa.org/

Mat Johnson’s Pym twists anew a controversial Edgar Allan Poe adventure tale
It looks like another Edgar Allan Poe work is getting an update. Poe’s
only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
(1838), relates the adventures of a young stowaway on a New England
whaling ship as he endures shipwreck, mutiny, and even cannibalism
among the islands of the South Seas. Pym shares his adventures with
another sailor, Dirk Peters, “son of an Indian squaw . . . and a fur
trader.”

Peters himself was one of the most ferocious-looking men I ever
beheld. He was short in stature, not more than four feet eight inches
high, but his limbs were of Herculean mould. His hands, especially,
were so enormously thick and broad as hardly to retain a human shape.
His arms, as well as legs, were bowed in the most singular manner, and
appeared to possess no flexibility whatever. His head was equally
deformed, being of immense size, with an indentation on the crown
(like that on the head of most negroes), and entirely bald.
The novel occasioned charges of racism for passages like the one above
and for Poe’s depiction of a tribe of black islanders who, after being
initially friendly, turn savage and slaughter the crew of Pym’s boat.
In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni
Morrison wrote that “no early American writer is more important to the
concept of American Africanism than Poe.”