Pym: A Novel

"Poe only wrote one novel— The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym— and even that breaks off suddenly, with no proper ending. Pym: A Novel is a comic satire that uses Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket to engage the blinding and destructive effects of whiteness in American culture. Pym starts out as an adventure at sea, with shipwrecks and mutinies and cannibalism. Eventually, Pym arrives at an island called Tsalal, where the inhabitants are entirely black – even their teeth are black – and are terrified of whiteness. The black-skinned figures attack the crew, and Pym and his racially-mixed companion Dirk Peters hide out in enormous Hebrew hieroglyphs cut a hundred feet into the ground. Once they escape, they sail toward the South Pole. The water turns warm, and then hot; ash falls from the sky; and then, as a huge white figure emerges from the ocean mist, the novel ends. It’s a crazy book, but influential. Toni Morrison recommends it as a way to illuminate the structural heart of American racism. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Mat Johnson, a Black graphic novelist and critic, rewrites Poe’s story today. Now the main character is a Black professor of literature who pursues the story of Pym to Antarctica, where he finds a tribe of savage white creatures, a biosphere built by a character modeled on the painter Thomas Kincaid, and storerooms full of Little Debbie snack cakes. Johnson’s satire takes on many of the absurdities in American attitudes toward race, but it’s also an extremely smart reading of Arthur Gordon Pym , which Johnson quotes from and parodies at length. In Johnson’s hands, Poe’s racism becomes a resource for understanding how America’s caste system developed – in particular, how it relied on an unmarked invisibility around whiteness that locked in forms of domination and control. Johnson is also alive to the instability of Poe’s racism, as ambivalent figures like Peters turn out to be stronger, smarter and more poised than the ostensible hero. Opening up the perversity of racial ideologies is an essential part of destroying their social power, and Johnson’s satire does that in provocative, often hilarious ways. Elements of his plots, bits of his poetry, characters borrowed from his works continue to show up in weirdly diverse places – Lovecraft Country is an interesting example, because it reworks Lovecraft, and by implication Poe, partly to wrestle with the racism of the original works. At other times, Poe becomes an icon for the kind of intensity the filmmakers or writers want to achieve – again, in works as different as Picnic at Hanging Rock or The Lost Boys, or Truffaut’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 , where the central character chooses to save and memorize Poe’s Tales of Mystery & Imagination rather than burn it. Just so. In large part, that’s because we now live in a world where Poe’s aesthetics of intensity have carried the day. I’m still astonished to see the range of people who have a vital relation to Poe – often people you’d never suspect of reading 19th century literature. Unlike Hawthorne, say, Poe doesn’t rely on English professors for his continued success."