Julie Lybarger
3/22/2011
Eng 441-Studies in an Author/Poe
Final Paper
In both Edgar Allan Poe’s book, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and Yann Martel’s book, Life of Pi, the narrators, as writers, create fiction out of facts. While Poe’s, narrator, Pym, blurs fact and fiction with an eye to artistic aesthetics and authenticity, Martel’s narrator, Pi, invokes an emotional appeal to that blurring of fact and fiction for the “better story”, regardless of its veracity(63). Analyzing Poe’s book in light of Martel’s adaptation (one that gives the reader two distinct stories to choose from), reveals that Martel clarifies the necessity for a writer’s artistic license by revealing how stories have the ability to sustain humans with life-giving power. This concept has been expressed by other writers as well, including Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko, in her book Ceremony. She puts it this way: “I will tell you something about stories;/[he said]/They aren’t just entertainment./Don’t be fooled./They are all we have, you see,/all we have to fight off/illness and death” (Silko 2). Non-Western perspectives of storytelling often grant stories an element of sacredness. In order to see how Martel’s book illustrates this non-Western perspective and clarifies our understanding of Pym as a book about the life-giving power of stories, it is necessary to assume that Pi’s second story about the cook is the factual story, as it will be made clear later on.
Pi’s first story, without a doubt, is the more powerful one. He fills the vast majority of the text describing the life-sustaining qualities of nature (including the ocean) in the preservation of his life. The descriptions maintain an uncanny resemblance to that of a fetus within its mother’s womb, where the rope tied to the lifeboat becomes the umbilical cord, the raft itself containing Pi becomes the fetus, the ocean becomes the bag of waters and the lifeboat that the rope is affixed to combined with the tiger symbolizes mother nature. Pi describes in detail his efforts to save himself from the dangerous Bengal tiger that has been capsized with him. He builds a raft and in a moment of fear, “hitched the long rope to the raft [so that] lifeboat and raft were now tethered” (153), and launches himself onto it, just as night overcomes him (155). His description resembles that of a fetus attached to the womb of its mother when he concludes chapter 53 with these words: “Night crept up. My surroundings disappeared into pitch-black darkness. Only the regular tugging of the rope at the raft told me that I was still attached to the lifeboat. The sea, inches beneath me yet too far for my eyes, buffeted the raft. Fingers of water reached up furtively through the cracks and wet my bottom” (Martel 156). The imagery here conveys a picture of a helpless human surrounded by the immensity of the ocean, “soaked to the bones” (156), curled up on a small raft. Pi’s regression continues with his constant exposure to sun and water. He says that, “My clothes disintegrated, victims of the sun and the salt. First they became gauze-thin. Then they tore until only the seams were left. Lastly, the seams broke. For months I lived stark naked…” (192). Pi survives 227 days at sea (that is, about as old as a baby would be if he was born one month premature); most of that time he is naked, wet, and exposed, and yet, the sea sustains his life like an expectant mother. The illustrator of the cover of Martel’s book, Andy Bridge, captures this fetal imagery well, showing Pi as a black, unidentifiable human figure tightly curled in a fetal position, although there is no raft at the moment that the illustrator captures. Pi’s slow regression into an almost fetus-like state, naked, floating helplessly in the ocean is congruent with the larger image of him being reliant upon nature to sustain him.
Another place where this nurturing imagery is even more vivid is when Pi discovers the lifesaving use of the solar stills. He attaches all of these “stills together, tying one end of the flotilla to the lifeboat and the other to the raft, which meant that not only would I not lose any stills should one of my knots become loose, but also that I had, in effect, a second emergency rope to keep me tethered to the lifeboat” (173). Like an umbilical cord, Pi strings out the life-giving stills from boat to raft. When his water supplies run low, he further emphasizes this nurturing imagery when he checks the stills for water: “’My sweet sea cow!’ I exclaimed to the solar still. ‘You’ve produced, and how! What a delicious milk” (187). The production of fresh, life-giving water from natural saltwater by the stills adds nutrient-giving to Mother Nature and the larger image of Pi as a fetus in her womb.
If we look at the nurturing imagery Pi uses throughout the narrative, we can see why his other story–the “dry, yeastless factuality” at the end of the book–upholds the necessity for telling “better story” (63). In order for Pi to survive the real events with the murderous, cannibalistic cook, it is absolutely vital that he maintains a religious-like faith in the fiction he has created about nature as the source of his survival. Pi alludes to this when he tells of coming to understand that the tiger (a representation of Mother Nature, like the ocean) must be a part of his survival. He makes his confession of faith in nature very clear when he says, “It was Richard Parker who calmed me down. It is the irony of this story that the one who scared me witless to start with was the very same who brought me peace, purpose, I dare say even wholeness“ (162); and again a few pages later: “It’s the plain truth: without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today to tell you my story” (164). Describing himself in terms of the tiger, as the Japanese later assess he has done (311), allows him to separate himself from the regressive self he had to assume in order to overcome extreme circumstances. The link between Pi’s fiction about the tiger and his survival becomes inseparable. The blurring of fact and fiction, that Pi was afloat with wild animals, not people, is life-giving to the narrator. The “better story” is better because it keeps the story-teller alive.
If we understand Life of Pi as an adaptation of Poe’s book, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, then we might expect to find some kind of connection to the life-sustaining abilities of fiction in Poe’s imagery as well. In fact, others have claimed to have found this very thing in some of Poe’s other short stories. For example, in explaining Poe’s story, “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” Jerome D. Deruccio pens an essay entitled “Fact, Fiction, Fatality: “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” in which he describes the nature of Poe’s philosophy on fiction in that story as “a self-generating process, an imaginative enterprise that pursues its own logic and creates the conditions for its own preservation and continuity. By means of this process, author, text, and textuality itself perpetuate themselves” (Deruccio 368). This is highly congruent with what Martel expresses in Pi’s maternal/fetal relationship with nature as a metaphor for the blurring of fact and fiction. It seems even more likely in a long book, that Poe’s text might concern itself with the preservation and continuity of the author and his text. Just as in Life of Pi, a first-person survival narrative written by an author already concerned with this topic begs to explore the capacity for a story to “self-generate.” Poe does not let the critical reader’s expectation down.
In Pym’s second and long adventure in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, he stows away in the pitch black hold of a cargo ship, awaiting the right moment to reveal his presence to Captain Barnard. His wait takes much longer than he anticipates and eventually Augustus sends Pym’s dog, Tiger, down to Pym with a message written on the back of a letter to him. Pym feels the note affixed to Tiger, but he cannot, at first, read it due to the intense darkness in the hold. It is important to note here that Pym has had no water or food for a long time, nor any communication with Augustus, and he succumbs to “the most gloomy imaginings, in which the dreadful deaths of thirst, famine, suffocation, and premature interment, crowded upon [him] as the prominent disasters to be encountered” (Poe 32). In other words, the narrator’s health and morale are flagging, and it is at this point that he discovers the paper on Tiger’s neck. Without even being able to see the words on the page, he knows that Augustus has sent him a message, but in such intense darkness, without the ability to read the text, the unreadable note seems more likely to cause him emotional upset, “by disquieting to no purpose [his] already enfeebled and agitated mind” (Poe 36). The text on the paper only becomes valuable when he is able to narrate the words it contains; that is, the story it contains remains an element of his imprisonment in the hold until he manages to light the paper up temporarily by means of rubbing it with phosphorous. Until he is able to tell us that the last few words on the page are, “’blood—your life depends upon lying close’” (Poe 39), Pym’s planned response to his “premature interment” (making as much noise as possible to have his location discovered) is also bound to bring him a much worse fate. As he will later discover to us, the murderous crew has committed mutiny and seized control of the ship during the trip. The enlightenment of Augustus’ story, even just the small fragment of it Pym can read, becomes life-saving to Pym. Just as in Life of Pi, the story preserves the story-teller’s life. If we assume that Poe does not make a mistake in later having Augustus recount that he wrote his message to Pym on “the back of a letter” (56), Pym’s preservation becomes an even more powerful example of this; Pym claims to have searched both sides of the page and only discovered writing on the second side (37). Thus, the message on the note is a true fiction; it is not real.
Pym revisits this concept of fiction again later in the book when he and Augustus join with the mutiny’s opponent, Peters, in a plan to overthrow the mutineers. By luck, one of the crew, Rogers, has died a horrible death that Pym suspects was due to poisoning; his body becomes bloated and turns a ghastly shade of white with red spots on his face shortly after death (Poe 77). Pym disguises himself in the fictitious appearance of the bloated corpse, and the men charge the mutineers cabin, with Pym’s startling appearance as the main affectation upon which they hope to overthrow the mutineers. They are successful because, as Pym puts it, “in the minds of the mutineers there was not even the shadow of a basis upon which to rest a doubt that the apparition of Rogers was indeed a revivification of his disgusting corpse…” (Poe 83). The basis for their life-saving siege is the highly successful fiction that Rogers is avenging his death upon the mutineers for being poisoned. In fact, the fiction is so convincing that the captains mate drops dead from fright, and four of the seven remaining “sat…the most pitiable objects of horror and utter despair” (Poe 84). Had Pym’s disguise not been so effective, we might expect that the discovery of his presence on the ship would have lead to great disaster for the narrator, but, by means of the fiction, they overtake the ship and the narrative continues. In this case, as in the letter, fiction perpetuates the narrator’s life.
The partial sinking of the ship later on provides another setting for the rejuvenating effects of fiction to take place. Once again, Pym links the concept with his survival and morale. The drifters are afloat on the rolled side of the cargo ship, and their first attempts to descend into the steward’s cabin to retrieve sustenance fail, and they are in great despair and desperately hungry. It is at this moment that the most remarkable appearance of a ship sailing towards them occurs, and produces such overwhelming joy in them all that they “poured out [their] whole souls in shouts and thanksgiving to God for the complete, unexpected, and glorious deliverance that was so palpably at hand” (Poe 101). What is so remarkable about this incident is, that all the while that the ship is approaching they remain joyous and are filled with hope of rescue that had seemed completely lost only just moments before in the previous chapter. That is, while they believe in the fiction that the ship is coming for them, that belief sustains them. It is only after their sense of smell and sight discover that the ship is full of dead people–when the fiction is replaced by tangible fact–that they can no longer realize a rescue is at hand. It is only after the ship has passed them by that it occurs to Pym that they “might possibly have found means of boarding her, had not [their] sudden disappointment, and the appalling nature of the discovery which accompanied it, laid entirely prostrate every active faculty of mind and body” (Poe 103). In this case, fact renders them helpless to take advantage of the fiction; so in a sense, Poe has shown by an inversion of circumstances, the life-sustaining possibilities of fiction. Nevertheless, even the short elevation of their spirits caused by the belief that their rescue is near seems to lift them from their slump, for the narrative continues and they survive their shipwreck. Just as in Life of Pi, when Pi has to produce “dry, yeastless factuality” for the Japanese (Martel 63), Poe shows that fiction has the power to rejuvenate the writer even when placed side-by-side with the horrible facts.
Looking at Poe’s book in light of Martel’s more obvious interpretation of stories as life-preserving in Life of Pi, we can see that the two authors write this philosophy into their texts. For Martel, this philosophy of preservation of his narrator occurs through the creation of one long, sustained fiction and eventually becomes explicit near the end when he faces the Japanese and must explain the factual story to them. For Poe, this philosophy is implicit in his texts as his story bounces from one part of the sea to another. Poe never gives the reader a moment of clarification like Martel does, but leaves it up to the critical analysis of his reader to make the discovery. Even the note at the end of Poe’s book only seems to add more clues to the puzzle, and is not a definitive narration of the real facts such as Martel offers. Life of Pi becomes an eloquent vehicle through which we can more clearly see how one of Poe’s lesser known philosophies of fiction is implicitly imbedded in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym such as Jerome D. Deruccio says exists in Poe’s other works. Poe’s book carries the message in Pym’s many brushes with death that fiction provides the author with a means to perpetuation. Without fiction, a writer has no means to save himself from premature interment.
Works Cited
Denuccio, Jerome D. "Fact, Fiction, Fatality: Poe's 'The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade'."Studies in Short Fiction 27.3 (1990): 365-370. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 20 Mar. 2011.
Martel, Yann. The Life of Pi. Orlando: Harcourt, 2001. Print.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. 1838. Ed. Richard Kopley. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Print.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1977.
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