attempted nothing less than to give a moral to what might have remained an abstract story. 'This history goes forward and goes backward, as occasion calls.' The convertibility between matter and spirit that Poe cast as atoms moving to and fro in the throes of attraction and repulsion, Melville articulated as the inevitable reciprocity between 'Lucy or God,' 'Virtue or Vice,' light and dark, 'wife or sister, saint or fiend!' In Pierre's remarkable dream of Enceladus, the burden of whiteness — parasitical, destructive, and sterile — is embodied in the white amaranthine flower. These flowers multiply, contribute nothing to the agricultural value of the hillside pastures, and force the tenants to beg their 'lady' to abate their rent: 'The small white flower it is our bane!. . The aspiring amaranth, every year it climbs and adds new terraces to its sway! The immortal amaranth, it will not die, but last year's flowers survive to this!'
The dark world, the trope of aggression and excess, Melville reassigns to an overpowering whiteness. After all, if natural philosophers had argued about the cause of human blackness, the pollution of color, the barbaric stain, Melville put inscrutable whiteness, the 'colorless, all-color,' the 'shrouded phantom of the whitened waters' at the heart of the terror and the fascination of Moby-Dick, his -106- other quest romance. In 1837-38 Poe wrote a story that no doubt influenced Melville. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was his own 'narrative' of whiteness, a romantic voyage to the 'white curtain of the South.' If the Southern slave made his perilous journey from bondage to the North — a place that, as Frederick Douglass and other African American autobiographers would find, was no salvation from degradation — Poe takes his reader from the North to a terribly iterated South. Ostensibly a trip to the South Seas, the narrative at times seems to mime and invert the narratives of American slavery. The title page reads as a burlesque of captivity, catastrophe, and incredibility: '. . the massacre of her crew among/ A group of islands in the / EIGHTY-FOURTH PARALLEL OF SOUTHERN LATITUDE; / Together with the incredible adventures and discoveries / STILL FURTHER SOUTH / To which that distressing calamity gave rise.'
In the 'Preface' to his narrative, 'A. G. Pym' places a 'Mr. Poe, lately editor of the Southern Literary Messenger,' quite firmly in the role of Southern gentleman, one of those 'several gentlemen in Richmond, Va., who felt deep interest in all matters relating to the regions I had visited.' Although Pym fears his story will lack 'the appearance of that truth it would really possess,' that only family and friends would 'put faith in [his] veracity,' and that the public would judge his writing 'an impudent and ingenious fiction,' he agrees to a 'ruse' suggested by Mr. Poe. The adventures will be published in the Southern Literary Messenger 'under the garb of fiction.' Yet the public refuses to receive the 'pretended fiction' as a 'fable,' and Pym decides 'to undertake a regular compilation and publication of the adventures in question.'
Poe will later claim Eureka to be his 'Book of Truths' as well as a 'Romance.' Convertibility is essential to both his style and his metaphysics. Fact becomes fancy and fancy fact in the mutual adaptation that remains for his earthbound readers the sure sign of God's perfection. But what is being made convertible in Pym's strange narrative? Pym's narrative is based on other chronicles of polar exploration and travel, most notably Benjamin Morrell's Narrative of Four Voyages (1832). This story, however, is less a romance of voyages to distant seas than a spectacular and violent staging of 'civilization' defining itself through the conquest of savagery. Yet there is -107- no possibility of definition or conquest in this world of shifting appearances. Before Pym and Peters reach the black island of Tsalal (meaning 'to be shaded, dark' in Hebrew and 'to be shade' in its ancient Ethiopian root), the reader has already endured scenes of butchery, drunkenness, treachery, and cannibalism. So, although Pym's story leads us to the islands of the South Seas where we encounter 'barbarians' and 'savages,' when the explorers finally visit the island village, the common racist divisions between 'civilization' and 'barbarism,' good and evil, black and white, are no longer operative.
The 'savages' are described with their 'complexion a jet black, with thick and woolly hair.' The natives dread the complexion of 'the white race' and, most of all, the strange white thing 'lying on the ground,' earlier described by Pym as 'a singular-looking landanimal,' with a 'body. . covered with a straight silky hair, perfectly white.' The complex working out of the narrative depends upon a duplicity or doubling of color. As the explorers journey farther into the interior to that 'country differing essentially from any hitherto visited by civilized men,' any simple splitting of color into black and white — with the metaphysical truths normally attached to such biological facts — becomes more vexed and shifting than any racialist polarity allows.
Color becomes Poe's subject, as in the celebrated description of the water of Tsalal: not black, not white, but 'not colourless: nor was it of any one uniform colour — presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk.' If the justification of slavery depended on the curse of color as sign of inferiority — what Jefferson stressed as the 'real distinction which nature has made' — this story depends upon a crisis of color. Even though the waters manifest an uncommon variability of color, upon closer examination Pym discovers that 'the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue. . these veins did not commingle.'
Without pushing too far the problematic symbolic construction of a totalizing category called race in this romance, I turn to the final entries in Pym's narrative, before his fall into the vacancy of whiteness. Moving quickly southward, Pym, Peters, and the black- teethed Nu-Nu are absorbed by an inexplicable whitening: the warm water -108- has a 'milky hue'; a 'fine white powder, resembling ashes' falls over the canoe; another white animal floats by. In the apocalyptic end, they are in between a 'sullen darkness' and 'milky depths.' Then the darkness spreads except for the 'veil' or 'curtain' of whiteness. Pym's final vision — the mysterious 'shrouded human figure' with a complexion 'of the perfect whiteness of snow' — has been described as God, Lord of Death, or the 'Deity of Eureka,' ushering all things into the final Unity. However we choose to interpret the figure, the ultimate revelation of light becomes deadly, absorbing the previous nuances of shadow or darkness.
In the 'Note' that follows Pym's death and the abrupt end of his story, the unnamed writer refers to 'the most faintly-detailed incidents of the narrative.' Attempting an interpretation of the figures of the chasms on the island of Tsalal, he moves his reader toward 'The region of the south.' The arm of the ''most northwardly' of the figures' is 'outstretched towards the south,' and the displaced Virginian Poe concludes with a litany on white: 'the carcass of the i animal picked up at se. . the shuddering exclamation of the captive Tsalalian upon encountering the white materials in possession of Mr. Pym. . the shriek of the swift-flying, white, and gigantic birds which had issued from the vapoury white curtain of the South. Nothing white was to be found at Tsalal.' And in the region beyond, Poe suggests we can know nothing. Yet, perhaps his Southern readers, especially those Virginians who had followed closely the debates about slavery in the Virginia Legislature in 1831-32, would not be immune to the final effect of this strange commentary on the vicissitudes of white power. The unaccountable and prophetic final sentence of the 'Note' reads: 'I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock.' What G. R. Thompson in Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973) calls a divine and 'perverse vengeance for some unknown offense,' no doubt recalled for some readers the known offense of slavery, and the fears of some Southerners, like Jefferson and Poe, that God's judgment would not be stayed, that the inevitable catastrophe is at hand.
Joan Dayan
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