The Quincuncial Network in Poe's Pym

Abstract

JOHN T. IRWIN The Quincuncial Network in Poe's Pym There is probably no serious reader ofThe Narrative ofA. Gordon Pym who hasn't felt somewhat puzzled by Pym's lengthy description , in Chapter 14, of the nesting habits of the albatrosses and penguins he encounters on Desolation Island. The usual explanation of this passage is that it forms part of a larger description of the flora and fauna peculiar to the island, that Poe has culled the details from narratives of voyages to the region (almost certainly from Benjamin Morrell's A Narrative of Four Voyages), and that its inclusion is meant to give a greater air of authenticity, of convincing local color, to Pym's account. What puzzles the reader, what makes this local-color explanation less than satisfying, is the length and level of detail of the passage. The account of the visit to Desolation Island takes up six pages in the Harrison edition, and three and a half of these are devoted to the nesting habits of the birds. Poe is, of course, essentially an artist of the short form—a writer of short stories, poems, and essays—and economy of means remains his watchword, even in a longer work of fiction like Pym. Any knowledgeable reader of Poe senses that the passage in question is simply too long and too detailed to be just a bit of startling local color meant to make the narrative more authentic. Clearly something else is going on here. Recall that in describing the various species of birds on Desolation Island Pym is particularly struck by the fact that though "the albatross is one of the largest and fiercest of South Sea birds," there exists "between this bird and the penguin the most singular friendship." This Arizona Quarterly Volume 44 Number 3, Autumn 1988 Copyright © 1988 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 004-1610 John T Irwin friendship is manifested by the fact that "their nests are constructed with great uniformity, upon a plan concerted between the two species—that of the albatross being placed in the centre of a little square formed by the nests of four penguins."1 Having chosen a level piece of ground suitable for nesting, "the birds proceed, with one accord , and actuated apparently by one mind, to trace out, with mathematical accuracy, either a square or other parallelogram, as may best suit the nature of the ground, and of just sufficient size to accommodate easily all the birds assembled" (3:155). After smoothing out a pathway six to eight feet wide around the encampment, the birds "partition out the whole area into small squares exactly equal in size. This is done by forming narrow paths, very smooth, and crossing each other at right angles throughout the entire extent of the rookery. At each intersection of these paths the nest of an albatross is constructed, and a penguin's nest in the centre of each square—thus every penguin is surrounded by four albatrosses, and each albatross by a like number of penguins" (3:156). I would suggest that this geometric pattern in the arrangement of the birds' nests is the whole point of the lengthy passage on the two species' mutual nesting habits. We know that Poe was familiar with the works of the seventeenth-century English polymath Sir Thomas Browne (the epigraph to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is taken from Browne's essay Um Burial), and no reader who knows Browne's work well could fail to recognize that the geometric pattern which Pym describes is that of the quincunx, the subject of the essay that is the companion piece to Urn Burial—The Garden ofCyrus. Browne published the two essays together in one volume in 1658, the two pieces joined in a Janus-like relationship in which Um Burial looks toward the past and The Garden ofCyrus toward the future. Commenting on the structural link between the two works, Frank Huntley observes that the essays "form a Platonic dichotomy: two parts opposed yet conjoined, with a rising from the lower or elemental Um Burial (death) to the higher or celestial Garden of C^irus, the 'numerical character' of reality (life...