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Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is much like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin: both regard race; both are highly influential texts, and both are dreadful reads.
Poe's Narrative is a story of antarctic adventure. It is important in terms of American science fiction and conspiracy thinking, and its infuriating ending inspired what on A03 would be tagged 'fix-it' from no less than Verne and Lovecraft, for the later one of his top three works. Narrative itself is like 'what if Moby Dick was shite?'. This does not make it a good subject for satire. Parody, maybe, but the sort of intimacy of satire is frustrated by the book's perplexity and, frankly, a bad text is a joke enough on its own.
Pym is a satire of Narrative. The book's protagonist is a literature professor fired for being insufficiently tokenizable by the college he works for, who has a sort of Doylist moment where he discovers the text that is the lost half (sorta) of Narrative being the remainder of the story as told by the Black man who was with the titular character. This leads him to go to Antarctica and follow in the footsteps of the tale, along with a crew of caricatures, all of whom, including the protagonist, are in it for fame and lucre.
Things go disastrously wrong due to a shameless diablo ex machina, whereupon the crew isKinkade in a sort of fortress of heterogeneity (which, I'm going to tell you, feels more like a Watchmen satire, but which more accurately vacuums all the sources from which it referenced), which is where the story ends, abruptly like Poe's but much less of a cliffhanger, specifically due to the sense that this is not a weird and impossible land, but sort of life as normal, just not White.
The book is hilarious, and I did laugh out loud. However, the jokes are a strange bedfellow to the story, funny, but often either outside of the context or beside it. The author did not need Narrative to make them funny, or they could have been just as or more funny without this overbearing conceit. I do not feel the need to ask why the author burdened his work in a Narrative satire - the book itself has the answer to the question and it is in Narrative's quiet importance. But I keep thinking about books like Sewer, Gas, & Electric, where the targeted text is more an object, where it serves a narrative function rather than is the narrative.
Because there is a variety of ways that involving the story here detracts from the core storyline. The book makes the informal 'state of play' fallacy. I also think that, in our era of the Karen, the sort of long suffering beatitude and cunning of the Mrs. feels hollow.
"But it's satire," I argue with myself. Yeah, but it's not enough. Yes, the sorts of things that Pym does are long standing traditions in this sort of text in general and in satirical works in specific. But the book could be twice as weird and work four times better. (I cannot help but think about The Sellout in this context.) The attempt to make it part of what it wants to be to connect it to American letters feels like a big drag.
But then we come to the third hand of the review, which is that when the author decides to kick the plot alive, it runs. After all the comedy, and allegory, and comedic allegory, the back fourth of the book is much more of an adventure story, still jokey, but in an action movie sort of way. And it worked for me, still somewhat absurd but as the pace picks up it makes the whole book end strong.
So how do you rate something like this? Five star jokes in a one star satire of a two star book that morphs into a three star ripping yarn with a thoughtful conclusion? I feel like I fall back to my comment about Masters of Atlantis: this is a book that is very funny, but funny in a way that is not for everyone, here more due to the other two books this is.
Poe's Narrative is a story of antarctic adventure. It is important in terms of American science fiction and conspiracy thinking, and its infuriating ending inspired what on A03 would be tagged 'fix-it' from no less than Verne and Lovecraft, for the later one of his top three works. Narrative itself is like 'what if Moby Dick was shite?'. This does not make it a good subject for satire. Parody, maybe, but the sort of intimacy of satire is frustrated by the book's perplexity and, frankly, a bad text is a joke enough on its own.
Pym is a satire of Narrative. The book's protagonist is a literature professor fired for being insufficiently tokenizable by the college he works for, who has a sort of Doylist moment where he discovers the text that is the lost half (sorta) of Narrative being the remainder of the story as told by the Black man who was with the titular character. This leads him to go to Antarctica and follow in the footsteps of the tale, along with a crew of caricatures, all of whom, including the protagonist, are in it for fame and lucre.
Things go disastrously wrong due to a shameless diablo ex machina, whereupon the crew is
Spoiler
meet Pym, who still lives after 200 some years, are enslaved by the local Yeti-esque population, flee, meet ThomasSpoiler
, end up in a further conflagration between the two factions, then (the survivors) flee again, now ending up in another part of Poe's story, an area he derides as a sort of "land of the black people"The book is hilarious, and I did laugh out loud. However, the jokes are a strange bedfellow to the story, funny, but often either outside of the context or beside it. The author did not need Narrative to make them funny, or they could have been just as or more funny without this overbearing conceit. I do not feel the need to ask why the author burdened his work in a Narrative satire - the book itself has the answer to the question and it is in Narrative's quiet importance. But I keep thinking about books like Sewer, Gas, & Electric, where the targeted text is more an object, where it serves a narrative function rather than is the narrative.
Because there is a variety of ways that involving the story here detracts from the core storyline. The book makes the informal 'state of play' fallacy
Spoiler
in ascribing scientific basis for the takkeli"But it's satire," I argue with myself. Yeah, but it's not enough. Yes, the sorts of things that Pym does are long standing traditions in this sort of text in general and in satirical works in specific. But the book could be twice as weird and work four times better. (I cannot help but think about The Sellout in this context.) The attempt to make it part of what it wants to be to connect it to American letters feels like a big drag.
But then we come to the third hand of the review, which is that when the author decides to kick the plot alive, it runs. After all the comedy, and allegory, and comedic allegory, the back fourth of the book is much more of an adventure story, still jokey, but in an action movie sort of way. And it worked for me, still somewhat absurd but as the pace picks up it makes the whole book end strong.
So how do you rate something like this? Five star jokes in a one star satire of a two star book that morphs into a three star ripping yarn with a thoughtful conclusion? I feel like I fall back to my comment about Masters of Atlantis: this is a book that is very funny, but funny in a way that is not for everyone, here more due to the other two books this is.