So, like most everyone else it seems, i too was bothered by these god awful tangents that Pym indulges in every few pages. In the beginning of the novel i found these tangents to be informative (albeit tedious to read). They helped the reader to get oriented around this fictional boat and even legitimized cracking a tortoise open for fluids. However, towards the end of the novel, his tangents are unbearable. It seems strange to me that for someone who has such an interesting story to tell it would be necessary to trouble the reader with other individuals' adventures (i.e. Cook et al. making their way around the arctic). Towards the end i found myself looking forward to his diary entries which i could always count on to be brief and to the point... especially if someone he was close to died... then you know for sure that it will be summed up in a maximum of six sentences.
Pym's tendancy to talk endlessly about unnecessary details makes me think a couple of things may be going on. There seems to be a changing of voice between the two styles of writing throughout the book. It could be that these awful and inpersonal lists of trivia could be where Poe as a writer of Pym's story is coming through. As Pym mentioned in the introduction, Poe co-authored his narrative, so maybe Poe (as the actual author, not the fictional co-author) is exagerating the tedium of these parts as a means to juxtapose Pym's (the fictional author) own writing style.
The other possibility, which is only a suposition on my part, is that these long meandering parts are just a mean to fill pages. Who knows, maybe Poe was getting paid by the page and just wanted to fluff the novel out. The writing throughout just reminded me of freshman year when we all discovered ways to take a six page paper and stretch it out to ten pages. Maybe someone should tell Poe that it is far better to adjust font and margin sizes to increase page number than it is to go on a three page discussion on the anatomy of a tortoise. But hey, who hasn't made that mistake before.
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I totally agree with you about the tangents, Sarah! It seemed as if they increased in frequency as they decreased in relationship to the actual story. I found that most of what I found boring was the "scientific" explanations of the conditions in the arctic. It seems to me that the reason I found these much more boring was that it was information that seemed to be common knowledge. The description of the Antarctic means little to us because we've heard about it in school and it is just as familiar to us as the rest of the world. However, Kelly brought up a good point today that at the time this was written, they didn't know about the arctic. So maybe what is mundane to us was an exciting new theory on the ways of the world to Poe's readers. That being said, I still don't think that a generation gap is an excuse for how disjointed the book is. It may be literary genius, but I don't feel like reading it again.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I like what you said about the juxtaposition. It takes our focus out of the story itself and brings it to a broader view of the novel. We can see something Poe was attempting, even if it didn't go over very well.