Underlands, Oils, and Antarctica: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838)

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ABSTRACT Edgar Allan Poe’s fictions have recently emerged to facilitate critical inquiry into a wide range of ecocritical and environmental concerns. This paper participates in these discussions by tracking the spectre of oil that haunts Robert Macfarlane’s proleptic understanding of Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’ (1841) and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Framing these texts as ‘premonitory oil-dreams’, Macfarlane suggests that they represent ‘Anthropocene works avant la lettre’ presaging the Petrocene’s globally expansive production of environmental and planetary ruin. Yet Macfarlane’s kerogenic interest in reading Poe “for oil depends on a critical method of thinking about the Anthropocene in putatively totalizing, global, or planetary terms, and in ways inimical to the apprehension of histories of extraction located in the South Atlantic and Southern Oceans nestled cocoon-like within Poe’s texts. If ‘memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair’ as Rebecca Solnit suggests, this paper proposes to re-read Poe’s Narrative ‘for the South’ in order to rehabilitate the neglected hinterlands of Southern oceanic worlds, histories, and memories. In this way, it responds to Solnit’s observation that ‘though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past’, and that ‘a memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants … produces that forward-directed energy called hope’.