A Fractal Narrative
Edgar Allan Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. BasicBooks, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers, 1981. (ABN)
Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.
Attridge, Harold W. and others, editors. The HarperCollins Study Bible Fully Revised and Updated New Revised Standard Edition. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. (NRSV)
BBC Earth. Albatross segment.
CECIL, L. MOFFITT. “The Two Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 5, no. 2 (1963): 232–41. Catalogs the loose ends in Poe’s novel. If you read the sequels, this may help you to keep the original straight. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40753758.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. https://resources.saylor.org/wwwresources/archived/site/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ENGL404-Coleridge-The-Rime-of-the-Ancient-Mariner.pdf
Dake, Charles Romyn. A Strange Discovery. Another sequel. https://archive.org/details/cu31924022349355/page/n7/mode/2up
Fox, Everett. The Five Books of Moses: A New Translation with Introduction, Commentary, and Notes. New York: Schocken Books Inc., 1997.
Kopley, Richard. “The Hidden Journey of ‘Arthur Gordon Pym.’” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1982, 29–51. A very good article describing a mirror structure in Pym, and some anagrams Poe uses. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30227494.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/47/the-narrative-of-arthur-gordon-pym/
Verne, Jules. An Antarctic Mystery. Translated by Mrs. Cashel Hoey. A sequel to Poe’s novel. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10339/10339-h/10339-h.htm
WHAT IS A FRACTAL?
Until I decided to write this article, a fractal was just a pretty repeating pattern, like the one above. But, once I thought of writing about fractals, I thought I should look at them more closely to see whether they really fit the situation.
According to the Fractal Foundation, “A fractal is a never-ending pattern that repeats itself at different scales. . . Mathematical fractals are formed by calculating a simple equation thousands of times, feeding the answer back into the start.”
In this article, I will take a few simple story elements and look at how they repeat and change when used by several different writers. Most of these elements are from the Bible or classical sources.
THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
In many of the articles I read about this poem, the commentator wondered what crime the ancient Mariner has committed that deserved such heavy punishment. All he did was to kill a bird—what’s the big deal?
Coleridge himself tells us what the big deal is. In his marginal gloss to the 1817 edition of the poem, at line 80, he says: “the ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the bird of good omen.”
A. Hospitality
Hospitality was a very important concept in the three cultures that flowed into western culture, as we know it. These three were Greece, Rome and Israel. It’s worth noting that in those days when a stranger came to your door, he might very well be a god or an angel.
In ancient Greece, the chief god, Zeus, presided over the rites of hospitality. Homer’s Iliad contains an example of how hospitality was observed. In Book Six, Diomedes (a Greek) and Glaukos (fighting for the Trojans) meet on the battlefield. By convention, each one brags to the other about how great he and his family are. In the course of this conversation, Diomedes and Glaukos discover that their fathers were “guest friends.” They agree not to fight each other. They even exchange gifts.
In fact, the Trojan War started because of a breach of hospitality. Paris, a Trojan prince, was the guest of a Greek King–Menelaus. While Menelaus was away, Paris stole Helen, the wife of Menelaus, and took her back to Troy. This was a horrendous breach of guest friendship.
The Roman poet, Ovid, tells the story of Philemon and Baucis in Book Eight of Metamorphoses. Two gods, Jupiter and Mercury, visited Phrygia. They went to 1000 homes seeking hospitality. Only a very poor elderly couple, Philemon and Baucis, were willing to accommodate them. In revenge, the gods flooded the area; but the house of Philemon and Baucis survived, and was turned into a temple. Philemon and Baucis asked to become priests in the temple, and to die at the same hour. Their wishes were granted. But, instead of dying, they watched each other turn into trees at the appointed time.
In Genesis 18, the Old Testament hero, Abraham, offers hospitality to three men who come to his tent. The men prove to be God himself, and two angels. Later, Yahweh says to Abraham (Everett Fox translation) “The outcry in Sedom and Amora—how great it is!/ And their sin—how exceedingly heavily it weighs!”
Yahweh stayed with Abraham, but the two angels went on to Sodom. Abraham’s nephew, Lot, was sitting at the city gate, and begged the two strangers to come to his house for the night. When the angels were inside, all the men of the town came to Lot’s house and told him “Bring [the strangers] out to us so we may know them.” Both Everett Fox and Robert Alter indicate that the connotation is explicitly sexual. This is surely a breach of hospitality akin to Paris’ kidnapping of Helen. The fact that Lot sat at the city gate waiting for strangers could indicate that this behavior was routine and Lot was trying to save travelers from the ordeal.
The angels told Lot to get his family out of the city because the Lord was about to destroy it. The punishment for Sodom and Gomorrah and “all the cities of the plain” is that they are “overturned” to use Everett Fox’s word. That’s a pretty heavy punishment. Sodom and Gomorrah will come up again later.
Even the story of the Last Supper, in the New Testament, can be interpreted to fit this hospitality pattern, especially in the Gospel of John. Time seems to be out of joint in the King James version of this story, so I will use the NRSV translation to minimize confusion. During the supper, Jesus got up to wash the feet of the disciples. It was customary to wash the feet of the guests before the supper. But this action of Jesus does establish him to be the host.
Then he sat down again and said one of the disciples would betray him. Everyone wanted to know who the culprit was. Jesus said “it is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” Jesus then gave the bread to Judas and Judas left to betray him—another obvious breach of hospitality.
According to the Gospel of Matthew, Judas’ punishment is self-imposed. He hangs himself.
In the Ancient Mariner, the albatross is the guest: the bird is hailed by the sailors at line 65, and given food. It follows the ship “and every day, for food or play, /Came to the mariners’ hollo.” At line 81, the Mariner says he shot the albatross with his cross-bow. This is a breach of guest friendship. It is a mirror image of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus, with the roles of guest and host reversed.
B. More on Sodom and Gomorrah
What happened to Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain? Were they simply reduced to rubble, with the inhabitants killed, as at Pompeii? Or was there a more profound paroxysm of the earth, with the land on which the cities stood disappearing?
Biblical maps do not show Sodom and Gomorrah. It is generally assumed that they were in the region of the Dead Sea. The assumption appears to be logical, because Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt. As such, she would fit into the Dead Sea landscape.
The Bible provides some support for the idea that the land itself disappeared. Genesis 2:10-14 lists four rivers of the Garden of Eden. The rivers Pison (or Pishon) and Gihon are unknown. The Septuagint gives the name Tigris for the third river-Hiddekel. The fourth river is Euphrates. The Tigris and Euphrates exist to this day. What happened to the other two?
The Bible also mentions the gold of Ophir. In 1 Kings 22:48, Jehosaphat built ships to go to Ophir, but they were wrecked at Ezion-Geber at the tip of the Red Sea. The location of Ophir itself is unknown.
A story of land that disappeared also comes down to us from the Greeks. The story of Atlantis is recounted in Plato’s Timaeus. A friend of Socrates heard the story from his grandfather, who heard it from Solon, who heard it from an Egyptian priest.
Atlantis was an island in the Atlantic Ocean, in front of the Straits of Gibraltar . It was larger than Libya and Asia put together. There were other islands and a continent beyond it. After a time of violent earthquakes and floods, Atlantis sank into the sea.
The story reports that a shoal of mud was left behind, making the sea impassable. This shoal might be the Sargasso Sea—a bed of seaweed at a spot where there is no known land. Seaweed does not otherwise occur, except on coasts. The Sargasso Sea is in the Bermuda Triangle—where, according to reports, a number of ships have disappeared.
C. Other Elements from the Bible
The designation “Ancient Mariner” for the narrator of the poem might be based on “the Ancient of days” from Chapter Seven of the Book of Daniel. The Ancient of days is mentioned three times in that chapter. William Blake did a famous painting of the Ancient of Days. It shows an old man measuring with a compass. Seamen take frequent measurements: of the stars, and of ocean currents, which they record in their logs.
Chapter Seven of the book of Daniel narrates an apocalyptic vision. The New Testament Book of Revelation uses some of the same language. Another apocalyptic element in Mariner comes from Isaiah 65:25: “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent’s meal.” At line 67, Coleridge says the albatross (like the lion) “ate the food it ne’er had eat.”
The Mariner’s appearance at weddings is evocative of the wedding parables in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Matthew 22:1-14 tells the story of people who were brought in to a wedding feast from the highways and byways, because the invited guests had refused to come. One of the men brought in was not wearing a wedding garment. The host ordered him to be bound hand and foot and cast into the outer darkness.
But the last verse of the story is enigmatic: “For many are called, but few are chosen.” Who is ‘chosen’?—the many who remain at the feast, or the one who is cast out?
Luke tells a similar story in 14:15-24. But the great feast is not a wedding, and no one is cast out.
Just prior to this passage, in 14:7-11, Jesus advises people not to take the most exalted places at weddings. He says, “For he who exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.” This passage seems to fit the context of Mariner better than either of the other two mentioned. When the Mariner stops him, the wedding guest seems to be headed for the most exalted place at the feast. He says, “I am next of kin” at line 6. But after hearing the Mariner’s tale, “the Wedding-Guest turned from the bridegroom’s door” at line 620-21. He seems to have learned the lesson of Luke 14:11.
I see reason to believe that the Mariner’s penance (line 408) is self-imposed. It might even be a labor of love. Back in Luke 12:35, Jesus related a parable about servants watching for their master to return from a wedding feast. Peter wanted to know if the parable was for the disciples, or for everyone. Jesus replied indirectly with another parable about the servant who gives the other servants the proper amount of food in the master’s absence.
The food of this parable is probably a metaphor for the teaching of Jesus, properly meted out. Blessed is the servant who does this (12:43). This seems to me to be what the Mariner is doing. In lines 586-590 he says “I pass like night from land to land;/ I have strange power of speech;/ That moment that his face I see,/ I know the man that must hear me:/ To him my tale I teach.”
D. One More Idea
There is one more element in Mariner that I think is important. That is the spirit of the south. I’ll let Edgar Allan Poe enlarge on that.
THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM
A. The Spirit of the South
Poe seems to have an interpretation of Mariner which makes the spirit of the south a penguin. In Mariner lines 401-405, “The spirit who bideth by himself/ In the land of mist and snow,/ He loved the bird that loved the man/ Who shot him with his bow.”
In chapter 14 of Pym, Poe speaks of a special friendship between the penguin and the albatross. They nest together in breeding grounds of about three or four acres. A communal square or other parallelogram is laid out by the birds. Then four penguin nests are sited at the corners of smaller squares, with an albatross nest at the center of each square.
This resembles a fractal; it is a repeating pattern although the scale doesn’t vary. The same pattern is recommended by Virgil in his second book of Georgics for planting vines. A diagram of the pattern is here. It’s called a quincunx in Virgil. It seems from these examples to have some connection to fertility.
B. Hospitality
The incident on Tsalal Island, which results in the apparent deaths of all the Jane’s crew except Pym and Peters, is described as a breach of hospitality. At the end of chapter 20 and in 21, Pym describes how the natives feigned friendship and then led their guests into a death trap. We have a connection here to Sodom and Gomorrah.
C. Book of Daniel
There is no Ancient of days in Pym, but there is a reference to the Book of Daniel, as critics have noted. This connection is the cry “Tekeli-li.”
In Chapter 5 of Daniel, Belshazzar, King of Babylon gives a great feast. At the feast, he and his guests drink from vessels looted from the Temple in Jerusalem. As they drink, a man’s hand appears and writes a message on the wall.
Daniel is called to interpret the writing. The words are “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.” According to NRSV notes, ‘mene’ resembles the root ‘mn’ meaning “to number”; ‘tekel’ resembles the root ‘tkl’ meaning “to weigh”; the word ‘peres’ (which has three letters in common with “upharsin”) means “to divide.”
Daniel interprets the writing to mean: “Mene: God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it; Tekel: Thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting; Peres: Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.” You might recall that Everett Fox translates Genesis 18:20 (regarding the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah): “how exceedingly heavily it weighs.” I don’t know any Hebrew, but if that is a literal translation, it resonates with the “weighing” of Belshazzar in Daniel. And, as I related above, Sodom and Gomorrah might have been “divided from the earth”.
D. Wedding Imagery
Kopley believes that the shrouded human figure that appears at the end of Pym is a penguin figurehead, but also a bride. For the latter contention, he cites as evidence that Poe’s mother played the role of a bride in a play named Tekeli-li. I think that’s convincing because a flock of “pallidly white birds emerging from beyond the veil” were continually screaming “Tekeli-li” at the end of the novel.
There are also a couple of Biblical passages that might be at play here. In chapter 23, Pym mentioned two triangular wells, which he sketches as Figure 5. Wells often appear in Biblical stories in connection with weddings (ABN). A case in point is the story of Isaac and Rebecca.
Abraham had sent a matchmaker to find a bride for Isaac. The matchmaker encounters Rebecca at a well, negotiates with her father, and brings her back to Isaac at Gaza. “And Isaac came from the way of the well Lahai-Roi” (24:62). He goes into the field and sees camels coming: the matchmaker and Rebecca with their servants. When Rebecca was told the man coming toward them was Isaac, “she took a vail and covered herself.” Rebecca could be the bride in Pym. And note, this story has two wells. Poe’s Figure 5 is a sketch of two wells.
This is the second appearance of the well of Lahai-Roi in Genesis. In chapter 16, Abraham’s wife, Sarah, gave her maid to Abraham in order to give him a child. Sarah herself was barren at that time. After Hagar (the maid) became pregnant, Sarah was jealous and mistreated her; so Hagar ran away.
An angel found Hagar by a fountain or spring, and told her to go back. Hagar announces that she saw God and lived. Robert Alter translates Genesis 16:13-14 like this: “And she called the name of the LORD who had addressed her “El-Roi” for she said “Did not I go on seeing here after He saw me?” Therefore is the well called Beer-Lahai-Roi.” This is where Isaac meets Rebecca.
I also think the bride in Pym could be the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21:2; “And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” I’ll develop this further in the next section.
E. Did Poe End in the Middle?
The last section of Pym, beginning at chapter 23, is densely coded. Figures 1, 2, 3, and 5 from chapter 23, can all be found on maps.
The Great Rift Valley is a massive depression extending from the Jordan Valley to Mozambique on the east coast of Africa. There is a loop in the Rift Valley in the vicinity of Lake Victoria and other lakes in Africa, which resembles Poe’s Figure 1, rotated 180 degrees.
Pym comes from Nantucket, an island off the coast of Massachusetts. In chapter 1, Pym tells a tale of a drunken adventure he and his friend Augustus had off the coast of Massachusetts. They were rescued from certain death by a ship named Penguin. Pym says “our deliverance seemed to have been brought about by two of those almost inconceivable pieces of good fortune which are attributed by the wise and pious to the special intervention of Providence.”
Verne amplifies the connection between Nantucket and Providence. In the first pages of An Antarctic Mystery, the innkeeper says to the narrator, “And you want to go back to your own country, which is mine, Mr. Jeorling; to return to Connecticut, to Providence, our capital.” This is an egregious error: Providence is the capital of Rhode Island. In chapter 4, Captain Len Guy says he took Mr. Jeorling as a passenger “since you belong to Connecticut, since you have visited Nantucket Island.” It seems clear Verne wants to make a connection between Nantucket and Providence.
On the map above, if you draw a curve around the spiral of Cape Cod; then south around Nantucket; then north again to Providence, RI, you get a curve that resembles Pym’s Figure 2, rotated 180 degrees.
Martha’s Vineyard is within this curve. Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard are enclaves of wealthy oligarchs, including the Obama Family and John Kerry.
Thanks to the Obamas, we know these oligarchs have bunkers in their compounds capable of storing 2500 gallons of propane. Since the New England coast is very windy, you might wonder why they don’t power their estates using wind power. Well, state-of-the-art computer modelling has probably shown that they can do more good by planting some genetically modified pine trees than by using wind power. Possibly, they are concerned about albatrosses being killed by the blades of the windmills.
Figure 3 is a little more obscure. Both Jules Verne and Charles Dake seem to think the key is Dirk Peters. At the end of the novel, Poe says Peters lives in Illinois. Verne locates him in Vandalia, IL; Dake locates him in Bellevue, IL. But I think Poe gives the best clue when he says in chapter 4, “This man was the son of an Indian squaw . . . from the fastnesses of the Black Hills, near the source of the Missouri”. Further, his description of Peters says, “The mouth extended nearly from ear to ear.” Figure 3 looks like a human mouth, rotated 180 degrees.
This map of the Missouri/Mississippi watershed looks like Figure 3, rotated about 120 degrees counterclockwise.
In the note at the end of the novel, Poe tells us that Figures 1-3, and 5 are Ethiopic characters forming a word whose meaning is ‘to be shady’. Figure 4 contains a line of Arabic script, forming an Arabic word, meaning ‘whiteness’; and a line of Greek characters forming an Egyptian word meaning “the region of the south.” Ethiopia, Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula are all situated along the Great Rift.
Figure 5 looks like two teeth; the upper one like an incisor, and the lower one like a bicuspid. The connection with teeth is reinforced by Pym’s use of the word “indentures” four times in describing the previous figure, Figure 4. Do the two teeth correspond to anything on a map?
I think they can be identified through Biblical connections. In chapter 25, as Pym, Peters, and Nu-Nu are traveling south on the Antarctic Ocean, they begin to perceive “agitations of the water” on March 3. On March 6, “a violent agitation of the water occurred very close to the canoe.” Pym says the agitation was associated with the gray vapor on the southern horizon. I think these two phenomena, the agitation and the vapor, allude to the story of “the angel that troubled the waters” in John 5:1-9.
This incident occurred at the sheep market in Jerusalem according to the KJV; other translations call it the Sheep Gate. A pool was there having five porches or porticoes or colonnades (Middle Liddell). The NRSV notes say that at a gate in the wall of Jerusalem, near the Temple, are the remains of a double pool, surrounded by four porticoes, with a fifth between the pools. This sounds very much like a quincunx, and there may be implications of fertility attached to it. John 5:4 refers to an “angel that troubled the waters,” which seems analogous to the curtain of vapor associated with the agitation of the water in Poe.
The Song of Songs 4:2 has a bizarre metaphor for the Bride’s teeth: “Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bears twins, and none is barren among them.” If sheep were washed at the pools near the Sheep Gate, and if the pools were tooth-shaped, this metaphor would make sense. And it would connect Jerusalem with the south polar region of the novel.
The epigram at the very end resembles the passage in Jeremiah 17:13. Poe’s version is “I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock.” Jeremiah says, “they that depart from me shall be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living waters.”
There’s also a connection here with John 8. At the beginning of the chapter, Jesus wrote with his finger on the ground while the scribes and Pharisees were accusing a woman of adultery. In John 4:10, Jesus told a Samaritan woman he could give her living water to drink.
In Revelation 22:1-2, John says “And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.” Revelation 22:17 says, “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” The cataract that Pym is flying toward at the end of the novel could be this river. John’s mention of the bride in connection with the living water brings us back to the New Jerusalem mentioned above—a repeating pattern.
I think Poe ended the novel exactly where he wanted to. He created a mystery, and left it to his readers to unravel it.
F. The White Powder
One other element from the end of Pym is worth mentioning. Beginning on March 6, Pym mentions “A fine white powder, resembling ash—but certainly not such—fell over the canoe and over a large surface of the water, as the flickering died away among the vapor and the commotion subsided in the sea.”
During the journey of the Jane and Halbrane crew survivors in Verne, the narrator reports a similar phenomenon on March 10. “For three or four hours, sparks, accompanied by a sharp noise, shot out of our fingers end, our hair, and our beards. There was an electric snowstorm, with great flakes falling loosely, and the contact produced this strange luminosity.” (Chapter 25) I think this is Verne’s explanation of the ashy substance that falls in Pym 25.
Trying to visualize an electric snowstorm, I remembered the “snow” on analog television. Wikipedia has an article about it. There is a picture of a television screen with this “snow” on it. The article says “some of the white noise is the television receiving microwaves from the cosmic microwave background, an important trace of the Big Bang.”
The Big Bang theory was not proposed until 1927, so Poe and Verne would not have known about it. But they might have believed in a smaller “Bang” caused by the overturning of Sodom and Gomorrah. And they might have had a concept of some electrical phenomena lingering in its aftermath.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Hamlet 1.5.168-9.