Scott with Tom Cringle’s Log (1833) or Joseph C. Hart with Miriam Coffin, or The Whale-Fisherman (1834). He would surely have been encouraged by his own earlier success with a sea tale, “MS. Found in a Bottle.” (Notably, chapter 10 of Pym, the death ship chapter, relies on the “Flying Dutchman” motif of “MS.”) Working in the genre of the sea novel, Poe clearly emphasized its sensational elements. He understood that the expectations of his potential readership had been shaped by tales of the extraordinary that appeared in monthly magazines and accounts of the extraordinary that were regularly published in the penny press. Defending his tale “Berenice” to publisher White in April 1835, Poe defended the sensational in literature, stating that literary success in the magazines was owing to “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” (He disagreed with Harper on the “mystical.”) Poe summed up his position by explaining to White, “To be appreciated you must be read, and these things [stories with sensational elements] are invariably sought after with avidity.” From popular gothic tales, Poe extrapolated a gothic sea novel—a series of tales, involving a character repeatedly on the brink of either death or discovery.

The language of Pym’s subtitle cries out the sensations of the book: “MUTINY,” “BUTCHERY,” “SHIPWRECK,” “SUFFERINGS,” “CAPTURE,” “MASSACRE.” Over and over, Pym is about to die; indeed, in one episode he appears as a dead man. Poe was drawing on the same fascination with death that he drew on in so many other works, including “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Premature Burial” (1844), and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845). He was appealing to readers’ desire for pleasurable fear, and perhaps, too, to their longing for annihilation—at least vicarious annihilation—to what he later termed “the Imp of the Perverse.” Furthermore, the “CAPTURE” and “MASSACRE” of Pym’s shipmates would probably have had a particular interest for a large audience—the devious, deadly natives would have suggested to readers not only the fierce natives in other sea narratives but also, very likely, fearsome renderings of southern slaves. Poe invited an association such as this in Pym’s voyage south by stating that “a singular ledge of rock” in a South Sea island looked like “corded bales of cotton” (chapter 17). Poe’s characterization of the Tsalalian natives as a primitive people of great deceit and murderousness would probably have resonated with southern fears of slave insurrection—and perhaps with similar northern fears, as well. (Harry Levin, Leslie Fiedler, Sidney Kaplan, and numerous subsequent scholars have discussed the importance of race in Pym; J. Gerald Kennedy has recently posited that the rescuing “half-breed,” Dirk Peters, may suggest an ameliorative view.) Finally, Poe’s reference in his subtitle to “ADVENTURES AND DISCOVERIES STILL FARTHER SOUTH” would have engaged a public intrigued by nautical exploration. The belief that there were holes at the poles—with water rushing north to south according to Captain John Cleves Symmes Jr., and south to north according to his disciple Jeremiah N. Reynolds—and the effort of Reynolds to secure an exploring expedition to advance human knowledge of the southern waters—were very much in the news. The mystery of the southern regions was a great one in Poe’s day, and could be taken as an emblem of all mysteries that perplexed and challenged.

Poe intensified the sensations of Pym by rendering them with what he termed in his September 1836 review of Robert Montgomery Bird’s novel Sheppard Lee “the infinity of arts which give verisimilitude to a narration.” Poe relied upon a variety of sea documents—not only works of fiction, but also mariners’ chronicles, the writings of Jeremiah N. Reynolds, and, in particular, A Narrative of Four Voyages (1832), supposedly written by Benjamin Morrell but actually ghostwritten by Samuel Woodworth. The specific details that Poe provided may have occasionally slowed readers, but they also probably yielded a sharper contrast for the sensations of the novel. Clearly, the believability of the work—or the seeming good-faith effort to make the work minimally believable—could increase its readership. Strengthening the verisimilitude of the novel was Pym’s earnest appeal to “progressing science.” Although Poe had critiqued science as an enemy of the imagination in “Sonnet—To Science,” he came to hold a more positive view in subsequent years, seeing science as an effort that could satisfy the imagination; his ultimate meditation on that subject was his prose poem on the nature of the universe, Eureka (1848). Pym’s trust in science and the findings of the Exploring Expedition (1838-1842) might have held out to readers the possibility—perhaps only the apparent possibility—of empirical bases for Poe’s improbabilities and impossibilities.

However, whereas Pym claims in the preface to the novel that the public recognized as factual the seemingly fictional narrative in the Messenger (roughly, the first three and a half chapters of the book), readers were not typically so credulous. It is true that in reading Pym Oliver Wendell Holmes’s brother John was “completely deceived by the minute accuracy of some of the details.” And, as Joan Tyler Mead has shown (in Kopley, Poe’s Pym), John Murphy did include portions of Pym’s “stowage” section in a guidebook, Nautical Routine and Stowage (1849), identifying his source only as “Am. Pub.” (If he recognized Pym as fiction, he still had sufficient regard for one of its digressions to include it in his work of nonfiction.) Yet an angry William Burton (editor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine) called the novel “an impudent attempt at humbugging the public,” and a British critic concurred, terming it “an impudent attempt at imposing on the credulity of the ignorant.” An 1850 reader wrote in his copy of Pym, addressing any future reader, “I Don’t believe A damned word of this yarn do you Sir” (University of Texas, Austin, copy). And while this reader must have believed in Pym, for he wrote beneath Pym’s name in the title, “you are a Liar,” another contemporary reader disbelieved in Pym, declaring at the novel’s close, “It is my firm opinion that the whole of the preceding narrative is a base fabrication, & that such a man as Pym never existed[;] if any one should read this book[,] I think them void of common sense if they believe it” (UCLA copy).

Yet some could willingly disbelieve and still enjoy the story. An American critic asserted, “. . . this is a very clever extravaganza . . .”; a British critic exclaimed with amusement, “Arthur Pym is the American Robinson Crusoe, a man all over wonders, who sees nothing but wonders, vanquishes nothing but wonders, would, indeed, evidently, scorn to have anything to do but with wonders.