SOURCE: “Pym Pourri: Decomposing the Textual Body,” in Poe's Pym: Critical Explorations, edited by Richard Kopley, Duke University Press, 1992, pp. 167-74.

In the following essay, Kennedy examines Poe's handling of putrefaction in The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, suggesting that the use of this taboo subject “afforded him the perfect trope for his own revolting and revolutionary project.”

We cannot be sure whether Poe or some nameless functionary at Harper and Brothers constructed the elaborate subtitle for The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket which summarizes the novel's sensational elements. But the sixteen-line inventory—which promises “mutiny,” “atrocious butchery,” “shipwreck,” “horrible sufferings,” “famine,” “capture,” and “massacre,” as well as “incredible adventures and discoveries”—must have amused the author, who well understood the exchange value of sensation (P 1:53). In “How to Write a Blackwood Article” (published a scant four months after the novel's appearance), Poe's fictional magazine editor...