Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [9]
Shortly after this, as luck would have it, the Grampus is destroyed by inclement weather. These things happen. For another near third of the book, the sole survivors—Pym, Augustus, Dirk, and a guy named Richard Parker—cling to the driftwood that the capsized ship has become, steadily starving and dying of dehydration. The first imagined hope for rescue comes in the form of blackness, with a black ship moving toward them across the horizon, a man with “very dark skin” on deck nodding and “smiling constantly so as to display a set of the most brilliantly white teeth.” On arrival, it turns out to be just a decayed, blackened corpse, his smile the result of his lack of lips and his nodding the result of the fact that there is a seagull actively gorging on chunks of the dead man’s head, the bird’s “white plumage spattered all over with blood.”
Before long, the boys are forced to soil their own whiteness with gore as well. To fight starvation they must partake of the ultimate act of savagery: cannibalism. Not surprisingly, Parker, the least fleshed out character and a former participant in the mutiny, is the one who recommends this culinary choice, only to go on to literally draw the short straw. The line, the definitive line that separates civilized man from the primitive, is crossed. This is the sin that kills off Augustus, who poetically dies on the first of August despite his feast of man-meat. With little fanfare, this once central character melts away from the novel as if he never existed.
Why not eat the dog first? you might ask. Well, the dog is missing, having gone AWOL immediately after the mutiny. We know this not because we’re told but because we are not: no fate is given, Tiger’s simply gone, vanished from Poe’s mind without a mention despite his before stated importance. Not that this is simply an act of animal cruelty, because from the moment Augustus dies (a death we are at least informed of), Augustus too receives no mention for the rest of the book, which is only half completed by this point. Serial publication minded, Poe seems to have had little concern for the past or for continuity in this text. The work veers inconsistently from straight prose chapters to a dated journal finale. The only thing that appears to matter to him is the chapter at hand.
Before the doomed Parker can even be properly digested, rescue arrives in the form of the merchant ship the Jane Guy. By this time Pym and Peters, now the best of buddies it seems, discover that they have sunk far into the Southern Hemisphere. And they will be going farther, continuing down as the Jane Guy sails off to the South Seas for trading.
This is where things start to get interesting (really, they haven’t been tremendously until now). Here’s where things start to get surreal, where Poe starts to go off. This is where the darkies really start to bubble to the surface, where the Africanist presence jumps out and does its jig on the page.
I used to complain that the only things the white literary world would accept of Africa’s literary descendants were reflections of the Europeans themselves: works that focused on the effects of white racism, or the ghettos white economic and social disfranchisement of blacks created. I still think that, I have just come to the understanding that I’m no better. I like Poe, I like Melville, I like Hemingway, but what I like the most about the great literature created by the Americans of European descent is the Africanist presence within it. I like looking for myself in the whitest of pages. I like finding evidence of