American Literature March 1973 [antikvár]

Poe s Sense of an E?idmg PAUL JOHN EAKIN Indiana University ' n The Golden Botvl Prince Amerigo recalls the wonder and the L mystery of the ending of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, "a thing to show, by the way, what imagination Americans could have."^ For all the native power of the final image of Poe's longest tale, however, Henry James himself was unsparing in his criticism of its artistic failure: "the climax fails—fails because it stops short, and stops short for want of connexions. There are no connexions; not only, I mean, in the sense of further statement, but of our own further relation to the elements, which hang in the void: whereby we see the effect lost, the imaginative effort wasted."^ In this pair of observations James displays the characteristic set of responses which the conclusion of Fym invariably elicits: it is at once arresting and arrested, striking but unsatisfactory, somehow incomplete in the rendering.® Even Poe himself, in the person of the "editor" of the tale, would seem to concede the justice of such criticisms in his insistence on the incompleteness of Pym's published narrative. This insistence, however, is deliberately misleading, for the design of the tale is complete and fully executed. The charges that Poe's invention was flagging or diat his intentions were shamelessly opportunistic stem, in fact, from a failure to recognize in this instance the familiar concluding strategies of his major fictions. Taking as a point of reference a passage from the "Marginalia," I want to examine these strategies, showing how they work in the angelic colloquies, the mesmerist pieces, and certain representative tales, with a view toward a deeper understanding of Poe's sense of an ending. In a well-known passage from the "Marginalia" {Graham's American Monthly Magazine, March, 1846) Poe claimed for his ^ Henry James, The Golden Bowl (New York, 1909), p. 22. ' The Altar of the Dead (New York, 1909), pp. xix-xx. ' See, e.g., Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 158.