10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 g ero g uTTzeiT Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure Introduction If the idea of the embarrassing ‘pleasures of peril’ defines much of the reception of adventure fiction in modernity, then Mat Johnson’s Pym (2011), a satirical rewriting of Edgar Allan Poe’s sole novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), reimagines that peril, and those pleasures, for the contemporary reader� 1 Poe’s Narrative is not only one of the most relevant adventure novels when it comes to the problematic heritage of the genre in terms of race, but Pym, its rewrite - or, as I shall argue below, its re-vision - also reframes the ideological dimensions of both pleasure and peril in the reading process, redeploying the form of the adventure in order to make visible the history of race in the United States� Johnson’s contemporary novel satirises the racialised Manichean world of its classic model, thus evincing the power of adapting the traditions of adventure fiction to reflect and problematise contemporary issues of race in the United States and beyond� Pym extends the possibilities of adventure fiction far beyond regression or escape, proffering a comic critique of the social perils of the pleasurable genre and its history� Establishing coordinates for a comparison of Pym with its predecessor, Poe’s Narrative, enables a discussion of the cultural work that the two novels - viewed as complex examples of adventure fiction - perform in their respective historical constellations� Pym imagines the journey of Chris Jaynes, an Americanist who is refused tenure, to the South Pole, where he - together with a crew of Black family and business partners including his long-time friend Garth, his cousin Booker, and his ex-girlfriend Angela - discovers a still-living Arthur Gordon Pym among the monstrous, gigantic, and excessively white Tekelians, yeti-like beings inspired by the notoriously open end of Poe’s novel� Having set out to capitalise on the region’s clear drinking water, Chris and his crew, following an unspecified apocalyptic event that isolates them from civilisation, 1 Research for this publication was supported by LMUexcellent as part of LMU Munich’s funding as a University of Excellence within the framework of the German Excellence Strategy� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 216 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 are enslaved by the Tekelians but, with the bizarre aid of arch-conservative painter Thomas Karvel, who lives in an Antarctic biodome with his wife, manage to obliterate the Tekelians� In the end, Chris and Garth escape to an island - possibly Poe’s Tsalal - where they appear to be greeted by a “brown” (Johnson 322) man� 2 As this short summary makes clear, Pym takes no satirical prisoners in its “appropriately preposterous” (Vermeulen 70) rewriting of Poe’s novel as it skewers contemporary issues of race, capitalism, political polarisation, and climate catastrophe� Considering its recent publication in 2011, Johnson’s critically acclaimed novel has already been the subject of a number of scholarly articles and book chapters� Pym has been read from approaches ranging from critical race studies to Marxist criticism and ecocriticism, which may be taken as additional evidence of the wide range of issues with which Johnson’s novel engages through the prism of race� Jennifer Wilks reads Pym as a theoretically informed treatment of the history of race in the United States that demonstrates - in the spirit of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1993) - the inextricability of Blackness and Whiteness. Published during Barack Obama’s first term, Pym, Wilks argues, “does not posit a postracial fantasy that enables its characters to escape the complications of race and history so much as it projects a multi-layered, multiracial world in which such complications [of Blackness and Whiteness] might be acknowledged and worked through” (17)� The novel’s satirical strategies are situated in the tradition of African American utopian texts by Kimberly Chabot Davis, who argues that Pym is an anti-utopian text since it “critiques not only the white supremacist utopian rhetoric of the past and present, but also Afrofuturist idealizations and Afrocentric utopias based on a romanticization of a primitive past” (19)� Johnson’s anti-utopian satire ultimately “attempts to dislodge the bedrock - the fictional concept of race itself - that has undergirded American society since its inception” (41)� In explicit contrast to Davis, Julie A� Fiorelli contends that Pym is written “in the spirit of the critical utopia”, which critiques “utopian projects that don’t recognize their own historical contingency” but maintains a “utopian desire” (223)� Building on Fred Moten’s kind of Black optimism, Fiorelli argues further that “Pym presents utopia as a means of working through historical problems” (223)� Issues of race in Pym need to be discussed in terms of political economy, as Tim Christensen maintains� He characterises Pym as a parodic critique of the postmodern consumerism of late capitalism, in which the protagonist, Chris Jaynes, “proceeds from the margins of American market society toward its white heart” (191)� 2 Unless otherwise mentioned, all in-text citations mentioning Johnson refer to Pym� Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 217 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure The most recent interpretations of the novel address it as an example of Anthropocene fiction: Taylor McHolm argues that “the novel creates an allegory of the Anthropocene through an extended metaphor of a Eurocentric pastoral landscape made real in Antarctica” in order to “assess racial formation and settler colonialism” (75)� Pieter Vermeulen, in turn, analyses Pym as “part of a leaky ecology in which genres refract the entanglements of forms of life and life forms” (72) and which he sees as indicative of the difficulty of writing the Anthropocene� While Vermeulen’s point on the entanglement of differing genres is well taken, especially as analyses of Pym frequently focus on the tropes of satire and utopia, the question of genre is one well worth pursuing further� Pym incorporates a variety of genres, among which scholars have pointed out not just Anthropocene fiction and anti-/ utopian satire but also the neoslave narrative, the “macabre revenge plot” of ‘kill-the-white-folks’ narratives (Davis 33), and ‘new weird’ fiction, understood as “a sideways glance at the gothic residues of nineteenth-century literature” (Marshall 631)� It is striking that the tradition of adventure fiction is mentioned in virtually all scholarly work on the novel, yet does not seem to be discussed anywhere in detail� So does the adventure genre hum in the background of the text like the petrol generators in Thomas Karvel’s Antarctic biodome? Poe’s text, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, certainly absorbs much of this noise, standing as it does in the context of nineteenth-century adventure fiction. Indeed, Poe’s short novel might almost be viewed as constituting a genre of its own, as Mat Johnson himself used to point out on his website (PYM Sequels)� Johnson compiled a list of novels “directly inspired” by Poe’s text, describing them through the metaphor of “offspring”: Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Verne’s An Antarctic Mystery (Le Sphinx des glaces, 1897), Charles Romeyn Dake’s A Strange Discovery (1899), and Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936)� 3 While Pym, in terms of genre, is arguably far more kin to Gulliver’s Travels (1726) than to Robinson Crusoe (1719), one of the crucial aspects of Johnson’s rewrite is that it remakes the tradition of adventure fiction that is already reworked to a considerable degree in Poe’s source novel� My thesis is that Pym re-visions racialised subjectivity by rewriting Poe’s novel and, by foregrounding the visual dimension of racialised subjectivity, revises the allegorical meanings of the adventure genre. In what follows, I first relate Fredric Jameson’s notion of allegory to adventure writing in order to explore how the two novels rewrite the adventure tradition moving into the 3 Another successor to Poe’s Narrative is Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001), see Vermeulen 66-71� 218 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 abyss of race in the United States as understood by Patrice Rankine� Finally, I read Pym as a re-vision of Poe’s novel that, as part of what Lena Hill has called the “Picture Book” tradition of African American writing (3), foregrounds the absurdity of the racialisation of the visual� Allegorising Adventure Reading Pym in terms of an “archaeology of adventure” (2), as suggested by Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher, can help us identify in what ways Johnson employs tropes of adventure fiction, but it also highlights how issues of racialised identity and subjectivity can be rearticulated in the genre� In what ways, then, is Pym an example of adventure fiction? If we begin by posing this question in systematic rather than historical terms, we can turn to the minimal definition of adventure as established by the Munich Research Group Philology of Adventure on the basis of Erich Auerbach’s thoughts on the medieval tradition of the genre (123-142). This definition includes “(1) an identifiable hero, (2) a cross-border movement in space, (3) a moment of (dangerous) contingency, and (4) a narrative instance that establishes the context in which that contingency turns out to be a trial or test” (von Koppenfels et al� 4, my translation)� One potential reconstruction of the novel’s action in these terms is the following: (1) marked as an outsider by White society and culture, Chris Jaynes recruits an African American crew, who (2) travel to Antarctica, where (3) they become entangled in a fight for life and death with the fantastic white monsters of the underground city of Tekeli-li, (4) all of which is narrated by Chris himself, who views the trials of his own adventure as part of the longue durée of the “pathology of Whiteness” in US history (Johnson 14)� This brutal abbreviation does not do justice to the complexity of the novel, but it demonstrates that all crucial elements of the generic structure are present in it� The notion of contingency is particularly useful in the interpretation of Pym, as it highlights one of Johnson’s major poetic strategies� The novel obliquely integrates historical elements that do not fit stereotypes, as it discusses, for instance, the African American arctic explorer Matthew Henson (11, 71)� Even the name of the “Creole Mining Company” (114) might be based on historical precedent since a 1907 report on Mineral Resources of the United States mentions a company of that name (United States Bureau of Mines 355)� This strategy of subverting readerly expectations by demonstrating historical contingency is especially pronounced in the ironic partial reversal of the roles of colonisers and colonised in the middle section of the novel, when the crew attempt to turn two Tekelians into profit, are enslaved by the Tekelians as a Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 219 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 result, and end up committing a “genocide” (Johnson 196), thus commenting wryly on the history of White Americans enslaving African Americans and violently displacing Native Americans� It is characteristic of the adventure tradition, particularly in such self-aware texts as Don Quixote (1605), that questions of definition apply not only to the genre but to its heroes who seek to define themselves: von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher call these “veritable adventures of definition, which are an integral part of their [the heroes’] story, and often function as catalysts for other forms of adventure which no longer deal with mere semantics but with life and death” (3, my translation)� Certainly, when the adventure concerns race, it is always already a matter of life and death� In many ways, the tradition of African American satiric fiction - recently in the limelight when Paul Beatty’s The Sellout became the first American novel to win the Booker prize in 2016 - could not be more distant from Eurocentric medieval chivalric adventure� 4 Yet viewing the adventure (avanture) as raw material that allows its own concrete textual gestalt (conjointure) to emerge from it (von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher 2) helps us to examine the interstitial spaces between literatures often thought of as disparate� The intertextuality that connects Johnson’s and Poe’s novels might be viewed in terms of avanture and conjointure and not just in terms of the traditions of the imperialist adventure novel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries� Such an approach entails a formal understanding of adventure that oscillates between what John Frow has described as ‘mode’ and ‘genre’� He distinguishes between “mode in the adjectival sense as a thematic and tonal qualification or ‘colouring’ of genre” and “genre or kind, a more specific organisation of texts with thematic, rhetorical and formal dimensions” (67)� Interestingly, adventure is usually taken as a genre of its own and simultaneously, in such theories as Campbell’s monomyth, as the story of stories, but it is rarely understood as a mode in the adjectival sense, as we can see in the complete absence of the adjective ‘adventurous’ as a genre qualifier. In light of the two novels under discussion here, adventure should be understood both modally and generically, extending from common tropes and structures of the genre to the tones and undertones of the mode� In order to complement the idea of an archaeology of adventure and further complexify the generic dimension of the adventure, I turn to the notion of allegory as redefined by Fredric Jameson in his recent Allegory and Ideology (2019). For Jameson, allegory is not just a fixed genre but also an independent 4 See also Darryl Dickson-Carr’s seminal monograph on African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (2001)� 220 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 rhetorical process and interpretive scheme that can be abstracted from its theological uses; its “four levels essentially exhaust the various terrains on which ideology must perform its work” (xvi)� These levels are the 1) literal or historical, 2) allegorical or mystical, 3) moral, and 4) anagogical meanings of a text� This notion of allegory, Jameson suggests, helps characterise the periods of modernity and postmodernity, when it is contrasted with its earlier, traditional meaning: “modern allegory”, Jameson argues, involves a kinship between processes, unlike the personifications of classical or traditional allegory: it is the interechoing of narratives with one another, in their differentiation and reidentification, rather than the play with fixed substances and entities identified as so many traits or passions, for example, incarnated in individual figures all the way to the caricatural or the stereotypical� […] [I]t is the disappearance of personification that signals the emergence of modernity. (48) In modernity, then, allegory is no longer a contemporary genre, but it remains relevant as a mode in Frow’s sense� Jameson’s insistence on the continuing importance of the traditional four-fold system of meaning also suggests a way to interpret early adventures, often told with a specific allegorical or mystical meaning (the second of the four levels) in mind: “Beginning with Chrétien de Troyes, it is only the initiated who know what an aventure is - and they have notorious difficulties explaining it to the uninitiated” (von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher 3); in other words, they know how to read allegorically� Allegory, according to Jameson, continues in modernity and postmodernity� In modernity, Jameson argues, there is “the need for any adequate modern allegory to include the very problem of representation within its own structure” (14)� Finally, for postmodernism, Jameson makes the “historical claim […] that meaningful narratives today, in late capitalist globalization, tend to find their fulfillment in structures that call for allegorical interpretation” (309). What I suggest calling the ‘allegories of adventure’ extends across the longue durée of the genre and mode of adventure with a particular emphasis on the Jamesonian “interechoing of narratives with one another” and the need for complex interpretation� As we see in the manner that Poe’s Narrative and Johnson’s Pym draw on the genre and mode of adventure, the former includes the problem of the representation of race within its own structure of writing in black and white, while the latter presents postmodern “allegoresis, as a conflict of interpretations that has no particular structural basis” (xix) and ultimately demands its own allegorisation from the reader� Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 221 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 Historicising Adventure While they do so in the differing modes of the Gothic and the satiric, respectively, both Narrative and Pym certainly draw on the adventure tradition in the generic sense� This commonality becomes clear when we turn to Robinson Crusoe (1719) as a prime example of the genre and look to its traces in the two texts� The literature on Poe’s only novel is legion, but I would like to single out one strain of its contemporary reception that viewed it less as a collection of exploration narratives plagiarised by Poe (see Pollin, “Sources”) and more of an example of the structure of Defoe’s seminal novel� 5 The adventurous character of Poe’s text was not lost on his most fervent interpreter, Charles Baudelaire, as indicated by the title of the latter’s translation of the novel in 1857: Les Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym. Indeed, the title page of the first edition of the novel in 1838 overflows with the descriptions of the dangerous events of Pym’s journey in a manner reminiscent of the title page of Robinson Crusoe and arranges these descriptions in a typographical layout shaped like a ship in the water, as John Tresch argues� While various adventure novels were evoked in comparison by contemporary reviewers, the connection between Pym and Crusoe stood out among them (see, e� g�, Thomas and Jackson 254)� A reviewer in the New Monthly declared that “Arthur Pym is the American Robinson Crusoe” (“Review” 429)� While this comment was tongue-in-cheek, the truth of the statement goes beyond what the reviewer intended� For one, it establishes a formal and thematic connection between the two novels� As Burton Pollin has pointed out, Crusoe as a model is evident in “the very first pages of the [Southern Literary Messenger] version of the novel, with its succession of personal and place names, its schooling data, and its promise of dire adventure: the method and even the material, to a degree, of Robinson Crusoe” (“Introduction” 5)� Secondly, Robinson Crusoe and the adventure form were viewed by Poe - while always sceptical of literary nationalism - as crucial for the development of American literature� Poe later, in a letter dated 1 June 1840, dismissed his own attempt in the Crusovian vein as a “very silly book” (Letters 1, 130), and editor Burton Pollin takes the many grammatical mistakes, stylistic infelicities, and errors in continuity to be evidence of Poe’s own low estimation of the novel (“Introduction” 14)� However, this reception of the Narrative does not take away anything from the relevance of this strand of literary history, a strand whose centrality for American literature Poe himself made explicit� 5 For an overview of the critical literature on Poe’s novel, see Peeples 93-108; on Poe and race, see Kennedy and Weissberg� 222 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 Poe had reviewed an edition of Defoe’s novel by Harper and Brothers for the Southern Literary Messenger in January 1836, saying that he had “seldom seen a more beautiful book” (Essays 203) and lauding it as “an honor to the country” (201)� Poe apparently saw Defoe’s archetypal imperial, Protestant, bourgeois novel to be of crucial importance for the United States’ ongoing struggle for cultural independence in the antebellum period� In effect, he establishes a parallel between this cultural process of maturation and the typically gendered reception of adventure novels: “How fondly do we recur, in memory, to those enchanted days of our boyhood when we first learned to grow serious over Robinson Crusoe! ” (ibid�)� The “potent magic of verisimilitude” (202) of the novel makes reading Robinson Crusoe and gaining cultural independence part and parcel of the process of growing up in the American grain� To Poe, then, Robinson Crusoe, as the foremost representative of adventure fiction, is foundational to his vision of American literature. How, then, does Pym take up the link between the Narrative and Robinson Crusoe? It does so in both explicit and implicit ways, through theory and allusion� For one, Pym’s protagonist Chris Jaynes explicitly discusses the intertextuality between Poe and Defoe in his summary of the four major interpretations of the Narrative’s ending� One reading, Chris summarises, is that the ending operates as “a taunt for a possible sequel”, a technique that also harkens to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, from which Poe borrowed liberally throughout� People forget that, after Crusoe escaped from the island, he and Friday went on to further adventure for another chapter in the wild hills of Italy, chased by ferocious wolves and the like� People forget that part because they want to—it’s anticlimactic, pointless, and silly� (Johnson 230) What is more, Johnson remakes what is probably the most famous image from Defoe’s novel, the footprint in the sand� Explicating his theory of Whiteness in Poe and other American authors such as Melville and Hemingway, Chris - in Morrisonian spirit - says: “I like looking for myself in the whitest of pages� I like finding evidence of myself there, after being told my footprints did not exist on that sand” (27). Though discovered long before he makes his first appearance in Crusoe, the footprint is usually thought of as the footprint of the man whom Crusoe will come to call Friday and make his servant� 6 Johnson’s allusion ironises the passage from Defoe since the footprint of a non-white man does exist in the novel but only in the position of a cannibalistic enemy or Christianised servant, not in the position of someone who reads signs such as footprints� The original discovery of the footprint in Crusoe is framed in 6 On race in Robinson Crusoe, see Wheeler 50-68� Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 223 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 terms of spectrality: “It happen’d one Day about Noon going towards my Boat, I was exceedingly surpriz’d with the Print of a Man’s naked Foot on the Shore, which was very plain to be seen in the Sand: I stood […] as if I had seen an Apparition” (Defoe 130)� This spectrality is reframed in Pym as monstrosity through the apparently large size of the footprint, but the analogy also positions the Tekelians as the equivalent of the Indigenous Friday in Crusoe� In one of the many passages in chapters eight and nine that mention footprints, Chris says: “I saw footprints as well� They were like little craters, oblong, in a pattern that suggested the gait of a biped” (Johnson 105)� As one of the foremost visual examples of the index as a semiotic type of sign, the footprint not only connects the crew and the Tekelians, but it is also the trace of Robinson Crusoe in Pym� Beyond the connection to Robinson Crusoe, Poe’s Narrative echoes with other elements and structures of the tradition, which, taken together, can be seen as indicative of a certain development in adventure fiction. Its specific difference lies in what J. Gerald Kennedy identifies as a “philosophical split at the heart of the narrative” between (Christian) providence and (Pagan) fortune: “belief in Providence assumes a coherent plan behind the contingencies of experience, while trust in fortune implies a resignation to the absurd unpredictability of events” (xiii)� Poe’s Narrative can be viewed as torn between a divinely well-ordered world and the blind workings of chance� It would then encapsulate a distinctly transformative moment in the development of the adventure as its characters struggle to overcome chaos in a world potentially forsaken by divine providence� While the circumstances of its composition certainly had an impact on the textual integrity of Narrative, these often curious, sometimes absurd or shocking, inconsistencies are also evidence of a shift in the tectonics of the genre of adventure� Its early stage is marked by a stringent “belief in Providence” in Robinson Crusoe, while, in its late stage, Pym revels in “the absurd unpredictability of events” (Kennedy xiii)� Poe’s Narrative, then, mediates between the early and the late example of this adventurous tradition� Rewriting Adventure In his discussion of Pym, Tim Christensen has drawn attention to Christian Moraru’s definition of “postmodern rewriting”, arguing that “Johnson’s novel-length engagement with Poe’s novel can be broadly understood in terms of [that] practice” (Rewriting 168)� Moraru emphasises that “[t]he rewrite reworks not only a text from the past - a form - but also cultural formations, i� e�, the values underlying that text” (“Postmodern” 460)� As a rewrite in 224 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 the basic sense of a reworking of a text from the past, Pym is nowhere as close to Narrative as in Chris Jaynes’ preface, which closely models Arthur Gordon Pym’s, thus foregrounding the intertextual relationship between the two� 7 Interestingly, the first change Johnson makes to Poe’s text is to replace “adventure” (Poe, Narrative 3) with its plural form “adventures” (Johnson 3)� While this change might be interpreted as a correction of Poe’s slipshod writing, this small detail can be taken as representative of Johnson’s strategy of foregrounding the plurality of the elements of Poe’s text� What is more, it is the earliest generic marker in the text, thus priming the reader for what to expect: adventures� In a departure from Poe’s novel, Johnson has Chris describe his own motivations in contrast to those of the gentlemen he initially speaks to about his adventures (and this is the first addition to Poe’s preface by Johnson): “Yet here our intentions diverge (at crossroads travelers may meet, then move on in different, at times opposing directions)� For sociological and historical purposes they wanted me to tell my story, to enlighten them about my experience” (3)� This emphasis on “diverg[ing] intentions” may be taken as a metafictional allusion to Pym’s divergence from the path of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, moving as they do in “different, at times opposing directions”� Moraru’s second feature of the rewrite - that it reworks “cultural formations” - applies in particular to African American fiction. One methodological point of entrance into African American fiction that engages explicitly with earlier White fiction in the vein of myth and adventure has been suggested by Patrice Rankine in his seminal study Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature (2008)� Rankine applies Joseph Campbell’s monomyth - in which “the hero travels through a frontier and across an abyss to emerge with some unprecedented truth for his society” (16) - to the exploration of black classicism, arguing that “[i]n America, this heroic journey is across the abyss of race” on the model of the mythical katabasis (ibid�)� Journeys such as that described in Ulysses in Black are “an exploration of the hero’s (or America’s) travels through a classical past, into the abyss of race, and to 7 It is difficult to say which version of Poe’s text Johnson used for his own rewriting. On his personal website, Johnson listed the Gutenberg edition of Poe’s novel (digitised from the so-called “Raven Edition” of 1903 in five volumes), but this edition - in contrast to other editions of the novel - begins with an “Introductory Note” rather than a “Preface”, as Johnson also has it in Pym (3)� The 2011 Spiegel & Grau paperback edition of Pym, from which I cite, contains a reprint of chapters 18 to 22 of the 2002 Modern Library edition of Poe’s novel (329-363), which also has a “Preface” (3)� The version I use for comparison is the standard scholarly edition prepared by Burton R� Pollin for Gordian Press, which I cite in its more readily available reprint in Richard Kopley’s 1999 Penguin Classics edition� Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 225 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 a potential triumph, namely our realization of a broader cultural integrity” (ibid�)� If we transpose Rankine’s discussion of the katabasis, the heroic journey into the underworld across the abyss of race, to the tradition of adventure fiction, Chris Jaynes’ idea of going back to Poe to understand the meaning of race and the origin of racism in the United States becomes legible as a textual adventure that deals with the American literary past and political present� The abyss of race shows in Narrative in the doubled chasms at the end of the novel. The final chapter ends with the passage that was identified by Toni Morrison as the foremost early American literary example of “images of impenetrable whiteness” that “appear almost always in conjunction with representations of black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent, or under complete control” and “function as both antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness” (33)� As Pym and Dirk Peters, with the dead Tsalal native Nu-Nu at their feet, approach the sublimely limitless cataract, “a chasm threw itself open to receive us� But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow” (Poe, Narrative 217)� Pym - in one of many often-noted inconsistencies - is supposed to have first returned and then died from this incipient katabasis, but he, in any case, does not return with the Campbellian elixir of the hero� He is also unable to read the literal writing on the wall in the chapter set in the chasms on Tsalal that is explained in the editorial note at the end of the book, both late additions to the text by Poe (Ridgely 29-36)� The figures in the chasms are part of another displaced katabasis in Poe’s novel, one just as crucial for the construction of the absolute opposition of White and Black that is undermined only by Dirk Peters’ ambiguous racialisations: he first appears as being of Indian and African heritage and then suddenly turns “white” (Poe, Narrative 188)� Pym refuses to recognise as writing the writing on the wall in the Tsalal caves, which the editor will later identify as the Ethiopian, Arabic, and Egyptian words for, respectively, “To be shady”, “To be white”, and “The region of the south” (220)� Here it becomes apparent how the Narrative makes an adventure of reading Blackness as a danger - it displaces the perils of race in the US American South and attempts to turn them into a pleasure for its readers� In doing so, it is representative of what Terence Whalen has called the “average racism” of Poe and the antebellum literary marketplace, which “was not a sociological measurement of actual beliefs but rather a strategic construction designed to overcome political dissension in the emerging mass audience” (111-112)� Poe gothicises the adventure formula, which means that he makes use of bodily horror and mental excess in order to turn the adventure novel into a text with an “effect” (Essays 586)� 226 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 Even though Narrative spans the globe, moving as it does from Nantucket to the (imaginary) South Pole, it remains occupied with Pym’s difficulties in reading the visual and, in particular, race� The katabasis in Pym can be located exactly, as Johnson stages the literal entrance into the abyss of race in the Antarctic, displacing elements of Poe’s ending into the major complication of the first sighting of a Tekelian by Chris Jaynes� In one of the many ironic twists of the novel, the crew’s exploratory venture is also a commercial one� They are following Civil Rights activist Booker Jaynes’ idea to drill for Antarctic ice in order to sell it as drinking water, thus reviving not only the nineteenth-century international trade of ice at the beginning of modern cryoculture but also the inextricable entanglement of scientific exploration and colonial exploitation in Poe’s novel. When Chris and Garth start the - masculine-coded - drill, it disappears into a hole, leaving “only air”, “[a] crater the size of a good-size Texas house”, and an “abyss spread[ing] eighty yards from one crumbling side to the other” (Johnson 92). Initially motivated by the need to recuperate his financial investment, Chris, contemplating going down into the abyss, starts imagining himself as the hero of a mythical katabasis: “Even in death I would be redeemed, in life I would be a hero” (94)� At the same time, he distances himself from the “intention of turning this into yet another polar epic of man succumbing to nature” (ibid�)� Going into the abyss is the decisive cross-border movement of the adventure story, as Chris first sights “a figure of massive proportions and the palest hue” (96), the first of the Tekelians, the monstrous mixture of White slave-holders and Indigenous population� Chris’ intended journey to the heart of Blackness is thus preceded by a mock-heroic - and in its middle section also bizarrely Gothic - journey to the heart of Whiteness: “Down into the ground at the end of the world” (129)� Similarly, the novel takes up a plethora of other elements of the adventure tradition beyond allusions to Robinson Crusoe and mythical katabasis� The gay couple of Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter updates a variety of adventure elements: they are introduced as “two water treatment guys from Queens who ran what they called an ‘Afro-Adventure Blog’ on the side” (Johnson 75-76)� Going on adventures in place of their online audience, the two are representative of the commodification of contemporary participatory culture as the adventure novel turns into a video blog� 8 Yet the idea of “Afro-Adventure” as embodied by the two men also queers the traditional homosociality of the adventure novel that makes male bonding central to the plot and yet does not allow for male homosexuality� Of course, this is ironised by Chris, as 8 On commodification and fetishism in the novel, see Christensen 166. Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 227 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 he calls Jeffree “Mister Adventure Man” (128), yet Jeffree also has a point in saying that their audience “love[s] […] [p]olar adventure” and that “[p]eople need a hero” (102)� Furthermore, the action of the novel is also connected to the earlier history of adventure by being referred to as an “odyssey” (81) and by making reference to the “swashbuckling seafaring adventure scenes” (40) in Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, a prime example of the imbrication of the slave narrative with adventure writing and travel literature� The overall structure of the adventure (as sketched above in the application of the minimal definition of adventure) is thus reinforced by contextual references, intertextual allusions, and metafictional motifs. Re-visioning Adventure Visualizing Blackness has been central to the African American literary tradition, as Lena Hill has demonstrated� Complementing Henry Louis Gates’ notion of the Talking Book, Hill codifies African American authors’ practices of countering Western societies’ dominant images of Blackness in the trope of the “Picture Book”: “black writers signify on visual practices in their literature to challenge the visual terms on which African Americans are excluded from full national belonging and artistic appreciation” (3)� She traces this “inscription of vision” (ibid�) in texts that interconnect with cultural practices related to, for instance, painting, the plastic arts, and the museum� Pym engages with the trope of the Picture Book in complex ways, using aspects of it to rewrite Narrative and the adventure genre� Pym thus insistently revises the “assumption […] that ‘blackness’ is a transparently readable sign of racial identity” (Mitchell 162)� As Moraru argues, the postmodern rewrite amounts to, on the one hand, “a notable, formal surplus”, and, on the other, “an ideological, revisionary difference” (Rewriting 7)� It is this “revisionary difference” that is explicitly coded in visual terms in Pym, which makes it an example not just of a re-write but of a re-vision: in rewriting Narrative, Pym revises it but also replaces its vision with a counter-vision� This re-vision plays out particularly in Chris’ racial interpellation� When the Black crew make contact with the Tekelians and find that Arthur Gordon Pym is still alive, the latter “look[s] quickly” over the whole crew and asks Chris: “have you brought these slaves for trading? ” (Johnson 134)� Pym keeps on treating Chris as a White slaveowner, despite Chris’ assertions to the contrary, until Chris refers to himself by the antebellum term for a person who is one-eighth Black by ancestry: “octoroon” (149)� In between, Chris explains: “I am a mulatto in a long line of mulattoes, so visibly lacking in African heritage that I often appear to some uneducated eyes as a random, garden-variety 228 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 white guy� But I’m not� […] I am a black man who looks white” (135)� Pym’s interpellation of Chris as a White slaveholder inverts an earlier instance of racial interpellation in the novel when Dirk Peters, who does not view himself as Black (61-62), meets Edgar Allan Poe: “What he [Poe] says back to me [Peters] is ‘Who is your master? ’” (65), on which Chris comments that “an astute southerner, particularly one as conscious of caste as Mr� Poe, could discern negritude in the palest of those mixed in race” (67-68)� Such racializing interpretations of the visual are not only judged as preposterous through Chris’ narrative but are further undercut by Chris’ self-identification. Christ meets Mahalia Mathis, a woman who looks like a “black American” to Chris but who self-identifies as “Native American” (53). To her, Chris speaks of “my fired alabaster skin” (ibid.), using a colour as description that is, in the remainder of the narrative, only ever associated with the Tekelians’ “alabaster tongue” (123, 127, 290) and “alabaster digit” (287)� “In interracial literature”, as Werner Sollors points out in his seminal book Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, “no single image is totally in or totally out, auto-image or hetero-image” (26)� In the scenes that play off the visual against its racialization, Pym fully undermines the ideological premise of any kind of naturalised connection between the two� Full of allusions to and citations from Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, Solomon Northup, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Henry Louis Gates Jr�, the novel also incorporates the trope of invisibility as most fully developed in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)� For instance, Chris alludes to the grandfather in Ellison’s novel and Chris’ early work is known by his academic successor Mosaic Johnson as “your Ellison theory” (Johnson 18)� However, the re-vision not only applies to the intertextual dimension, as many other elements within the text are informed by the question of vision, but it also extends to the characterizations of the members of the crew, whose individual senses of vision form a crucial part of their textual introductions� Thus Angela, with a “poor” “sense of direction”, “her eyesight worse”, refuses “to get glasses because she was a little vain and was afraid of falling into a downward spiral of myopia” (79)� Filmmaker Carlton Damon Carter describes his relationship with his partner Jeffree by stating: “He’s my muse […] I’m his lens” (77)� Booker Jaynes’ vision, in turn, is marked by a past of state violence against his protesting body: “when Booker Jaynes looked at you, he really looked at you with his whole body: an errant billy club in Little Rock in ’64 had resulted in a loss of rotation in his neck” (72)� Moreover, their visions fail in a metaphorical sense, as well: they all die in the genocidal feast with the Tekelians (302-307)� Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 229 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 Yet no one’s vision is as fraught as that of Thomas Karvel, the thinly disguised parody of the kitsch painter Thomas Kinkade� Hiding from “ARMA- GEDDON” (152) in his biodome, the heat emissions of which destroy the Tekelians’ city of ice, Karvel is the prime example of Whiteness as invisible power� The latter, Chris argues, is “about being no thing, nothing, an erasure”, which covers “over the truth with layers of blank reality” (225)� 9 Arguably mediated also by the figure of the landscape artist Ellison in Poe’s tale “The Domain of Arnheim” (McHolm 76), Karvel’s signature in the sky of his biodome replaces the hieroglyphic writings found in the caves on Tsalal as he inscribes only Whiteness into his paintings and the world he creates: “Karvel’s world seemed a place where black people couldn’t even exist, so thorough was its European romanticization” (Johnson 184)� Karvel himself describes his project in terms of the interlocking of monolithic look and vision: “There is only one look� There is only one vision� Perfection isn’t about change, diversity� It’s about getting closer to that one vision� And there’s still so much, so much to do” (251)� Karvel’s gaze is countered by Chris’, yet even Chris’ vision remains tentative on some level� Chris’ perception at Pym’s ending, in particular, is another excellent example of the uncertainty of visual interpretation as it pervades the whole novel� Whereas in Narrative, it is the scream of the “[m]any gigantic and pallidly white birds […] the eternal Tekeli-li! ” (Poe 217) which leads to Nu-Nu’s death, in Pym, Arthur Gordon Pym dies after seeing something that cannot be clearly identified but is perhaps the appearance of the “brown” man at the end. Beginning with this ambiguity over Pym’s lethal vision, the novel’s ending insists on foregrounding the visual and its tentative interpretation: Looking up to see what vision had mortified him, what there was beyond the tan sand and green palms that seemed so inviting, we could find no explanation. But we did see something, something that finally caught both sets of our eyes. Rising up in our pathway was a man� He was naked except for the cloth that covered his loins� He was of normal proportions, and he was shaking his hand in the air, waving it, and we, relieved, waved ours back at him� Past him, minutes later, we saw that he was joined in welcoming us by others, women, more men, and the offspring both had managed� Whether this was Tsalal or not, however, Garth and I could make no judgments� On the shore all I could discern was a collection of brown people, and this, of course, is a planet on which such are the majority� (Johnson 312-322) The passage is filled with visual imagery made to catch our eyes. In contrast to Poe’s text, the figure of the man is “naked”, (Johnson 322) not “shroud- 9 On the invisible power of Whiteness, see Dyer 3� 230 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 ed”, (Poe, Narrative 217) and “of normal proportions” (Johnson 322) rather than “very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men” (Poe, Narrative 217). Rather than being directly classified in terms of his skin colour - “And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow” is, of course, the ending of the final chapter of Poe’s text (217) - the man gestures and is only later implicitly described as being among “a collection of brown people”� To a certain extent, Chris is aware of the limits of his inferences, as he and Garth “could make no judgements” (Johnson 322)� Yet, as Davis has pointed out, he is drawing an inference with regard to the gesture of the man (39), moving as he does from “he was shaking his hand in the air” to “waving it” (Johnson 322)� The movement from a potentially threatening gesture to a welcoming one marks this as an act of interpretation by Chris of whose implications he is not fully aware� This is even more so since this final scene partially repeats the scene of first contact with the Tekelians, in which Chris, out of necessity, relies on universalist assumptions: “Drop whatever’s in your hands, and hold them out to show that they’re empty”, he says to his fellow crew members, and thinks: “That’s what waving and shaking hands are all about: showing we have no weapons to attack with” (Johnson 125-126). The final scene thus not only rewrites Poe’s text but also rewrites the earlier scene within Pym, opening up the ending to even more ambiguity� Whether the island (and the planet) can be a utopia or will remain an anti-utopia is still open for discussion, but, in any case, Johnson’s text, as a rewrite, re-visions Poe’s adventure novel by foregrounding the difficulty of interpreting the visual, thereby thoroughly undermining the racial fixations of its source text� Conclusion Pym’s renegotiation of the racialised world of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is a re-vision of Poe’s novel. In the satirical flurry of Johnson’s Antarctic novel, the adventure tradition stands out� Pym’s adventure demonstrates the historical contingency of acts of (mis)recognition while at the same time constructing a literary archaeology of race in the United States� By illustrating the follies of the all-too-powerful fiction of race, Pym is more than alert to the complexity of the visibilities and invisibilities structuring subjectivity� The “Author’s Note” added only to the paperback edition of Pym harks back to Poe’s original note and connects the body of the text of Pym closely to the other paratexts included: excerpts from Poe’s novel (chapters 18-22) and the discussion questions for a book club� These paratexts amplify the open ending of the novel itself� While the insertion of book club questions at the Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 231 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 end of a volume is common, its combination with the excerpts from Narrative enables a comparison with the source text: a discussion of the meaning of the novel becomes the end of the book� In other words, the book demands the allegorisation of the adventure it presents, inviting the reader to reflect on its perils and its pleasures� The novel thus insists - in a textually unusual way - on its contextualisation and discussion, redeploying Poe’s notoriously open ending to the allegoresis that Jameson sees as typical of the postmodern period� By re-allegorising the Black-or-White dualism at the heart of Poe’s Narrative, Pym not only satirically reshapes the literary history of race but also re-visions how adventures of the past might be retold today� Works Cited Auerbach, Erich� Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. 50 th Anniversary ed� Princeton, NJ : Princeton UP , 2003� Christensen, Tim� “Little Debbie, or the Logic of Late Capitalism: Consumerism, Whiteness, and Addiction in Mat Johnson’s Pym�” College Literature, vol� 44, no� 2, 2017, pp� 166-99� doi: 10�1353/ lit�2017�0009� Accessed 15 Nov� 2020� Davis, Kimberly Chabot� “The Follies of Racial Tribalism: Mat Johnson and Anti-Utopian Satire�” Contemporary Literature, vol� 58, no� 1, 2017, pp� 18-52� Defoe, Daniel� Robinson Crusoe, edited by Thomas Keymer and James William Kelly� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2007� Dickson-Carr, Darryl� African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel� Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2001� Dyer, Richard� White: Essays on Race and Culture� London: Routledge, 1997� Fiorelli, Julie A� “Against ‘A Place Without History’: Contemporary Racism and Utopian Dynamism in Mat Johnson’s Pym�” Race and Utopian Desire in American Literature and Society, edited by Patricia Ventura and Edward K� Chan� Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp� 221-240� Frow, John� Genre� London: Routledge, 2006� Hill, Lena� Visualizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary Tradition� Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2014� Jameson, Fredric� Allegory and Ideology� London: Verso, 2019� Johnson, Mat� “ PYM Sequels�” Web Archive, 2011, http: / / www�web�archive�org/ web/ 20110309011928 / www�matjohnson�info/ sequels� Accessed 15 Nov� 2020� Johnson, Mat� Pym: A Novel� New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011� Kennedy, J� Gerald, and Liliane Weissberg, eds� Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2001� Kennedy, J� Gerald� “Introduction�” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and Related Tales, by Edgar Allan Poe, 1994, edited by J� Gerald Kennedy� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2008, pp� vii-xx� 232 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 Marshall, Kate� “The Old Weird�” Modernism / Modernity, vol� 23, no� 3, 2016, pp� 631-649, doi: 10�1353/ mod�2016�0055� Accessed 15 Nov� 2020� McHolm, Taylor� “Mat Johnson’s Pym and Reflecting Whiteness in the Anthropocene.” Literary Geographies, vol� 5, no� 1, 2019, pp� 72-89, literarygeographies�net/ index�php/ LitGeogs/ article/ view/ 140 / pdf� Accessed 15 Nov� 2020� Mitchell, W� J� T� Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994� Moraru, Christian� “Postmodern Rewrites�” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, et al� London: Routledge, 2008, pp� 460-461� ---� Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning� Albany: State U of New York P, 2001� Morrison, Toni� Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination� New York: Vintage, 1993� Peeples, Scott� The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe� Rochester, NY : Camden House, 2004� Poe, Edgar Allan� Essays and Reviews, edited by Gary Richard Thompson� New York: The Library of America, 1984� ---� The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by John Ward Ostrom� 3 vols� Cambridge, MA : Harvard UP , 1948� ---� The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, edited by Richard Kopley� New York: Penguin, 1999� ---� The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, introduction by Jeffrey Meyers, notes by Stephen Rachman� New York: Modern Library, 2002� Pollin, Burton Ralph� “Introduction�” The Imaginary Voyages: Reissued with Minor Revisions and Corrections� 1981, edited by Burton Ralph Pollin� New York: Gordian, 1994, pp� 4-16� ---� “Sources�” The Imaginary Voyages: Reissued with Minor Revisions and Corrections� 1981, edited by Burton Ralph Pollin� New York: Gordian, 1994, pp� 17-28� Rankine, Patrice D� Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature� Madison, WI : U of Wisconsin P, 2008� “Review of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket�” The New Monthly Magazine, vol� 54, no� 3, 1838, pp� 428-429� Ridgely, Joseph V� “The Growth of the Text�” The Imaginary Voyages: Reissued with Minor Revisions and Corrections� 1981, edited by Burton Ralph Pollin� New York: Gordian, 1994, pp� 29-36� Sollors, Werner� Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature� Oxford: Oxford UP , 1997� Thomas, Dwight, and David K� Jackson� The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe. 1809-1849. 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