Deontologising the Nonhuman: Arthur Gordon Pym, Contemporary Literature, and the Limits of the Human

Abstract

This chapter argues that the notion of “the nonhuman” is simultaneously too monolithic and too vague to be of much use for literary studies, and that a focus on the tensions and antagonisms between different human and nonhuman agencies is a more promising strategy for moving beyond all too human categories. The chapter follows a double trajectory. One is theoretical, and situates the new materialism and object-oriented ontology (two of the key theoretical paradigms in the so-called nonhuman turn) in relation to the work of Theodor Adorno and to deconstructionist thought, in order to find in these traditions a critique of the hypostatization of “the nonhuman.” A second strand focuses on Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and on two contemporary novels that remix Poe’s novel: Yann Martel’s bestseller Life of Pi and Mat Johnson’s Pym. In this constellation of Antarctic texts, “the nonhuman” proves to be an elusive category, and intimations of a more-than-human world are communicated precisely through the failures of these novels to capture the nonhuman reality of the Antarctic. These nonhuman intimations, the chapter concludes, are as close as literature can approximate nonhuman agencies.