Toni Morrison writes in Beloved (1987): "Definitions belong to the definers — not the defined." The black fugitive turned hero or heroine found not only that there had to be limits to invention — imagination had to be accountable to a reality often invented by someone else — but also that these facts could then be embellished or made to serve the often demeaning romantic fantasies about the "African character." So, terms like romance and history (like liberty and bondage) underwent some strange but instructive metamorphoses. In the history of the United States, where a slave, a piece of property, could become an object of "love," linguistic distinctions were undone, humanitarian definitions derailed and dismantled. -105-
The oft-repeated "power of blackness" thus could be argued to be absolutely necessary to the continued construction of whiteness. As Frantz Fanon argued in Black Skin, White Masks (1952, tr. 1967): "The black soul is a white man's artifact." Who holds the claims on the business of racial identity? Melville knew that the claims of color are nothing more than a sometime masquerade, depending on who wields power when. The Confidence-Man (1857) remains the most astonishing narrative of convertibility. But as early as Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), Melville attempted to "gospelize the world anew" by reveling in a wild blurring of opposites, what Poe had called "Infernal Twoness." Reviewers were quick to condemn Pierre when it appeared, recognizing how dangerous were the excesses of his language (not only his subject) to morals and to the very myths of purity and domestic love on which Americans of "good taste and good sense" depended.
Like Poe in Eureka, Melville dealt with impossible inversions, unspeakable mergings. But Melville humanized or gave flesh to Poe's Newtonian mechanics and cosmic attractions. He attempted nothing less than to give a moral to what might have remained an abstract story. "This history goes forward and goes backward, as occasion calls." The convertibility between matter and spirit that Poe cast as atoms moving to and fro in the throes of attraction and repulsion, Melville articulated as the inevitable reciprocity between "Lucy or God," "Virtue or Vice," light and dark, "wife or sister, saint or fiend!" In Pierre's remarkable dream of Enceladus, the burden of whiteness — parasitical, destructive, and sterile — is embodied in the white amaranthine flower. These flowers multiply, contribute nothing to the agricultural value of the hillside pastures, and force the tenants to beg their "lady" to abate their rent: "The small white flower it is our bane!. . The aspiring amaranth, every year it climbs and adds new terraces to its sway! The immortal amaranth, it will not die, but last year's flowers survive to this!"
The dark world, the trope of aggression and excess, Melville reassigns to an overpowering whiteness. After all, if natural philosophers had argued about the cause of human blackness, the pollution of color, the barbaric stain, Melville put inscrutable whiteness, the "colorless, all-color," the "shrouded phantom of the whitened waters" at the heart of the terror and the fascination of Moby-Dick, his -106- other quest romance. In 1837-38 Poe wrote a story that no doubt influenced Melville. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was his own "narrative" of whiteness, a romantic voyage to the "white curtain of the South." If the Southern slave made his perilous journey from bondage to the North — a place that, as Frederick Douglass and other African American autobiographers would find, was no salvation from degradation — Poe takes his reader from the North to a terribly iterated South. Ostensibly a trip to the South Seas, the narrative at times seems to mime and invert the narratives of American slavery. The title page reads as a burlesque of captivity, catastrophe, and incredibility: ". . the massacre of her crew among/ A group of islands in the / EIGHTY-FOURTH PARALLEL OF SOUTHERN LATITUDE; / Together with the incredible adventures and discoveries / STILL FURTHER SOUTH / To which that distressing calamity gave rise."
In the "Preface" to his narrative, "A. G. Pym" places a "Mr. Poe, lately editor of the Southern Literary Messenger," quite firmly in the role of Southern gentleman, one of those "several gentlemen in Richmond, Va., who felt deep interest in all matters relating to the regions I had visited." Although Pym fears his story will lack "the appearance of that truth it would really possess," that only family and friends would "put faith in [his] veracity," and that the public would judge his writing "an impudent and ingenious fiction," he agrees to a "ruse" suggested by Mr. Poe. The adventures will be published in the Southern Literary Messenger "under the garb of fiction." Yet the public refuses to receive the "pretended fiction" as a "fable," and Pym decides "to undertake a regular compilation and publication of the adventures in question."
Poe will later claim Eureka to be his "Book of Truths" as well as a "Romance." Convertibility is essential to both his style and his metaphysics. Fact becomes fancy and fancy fact in the mutual adaptation that remains for his earthbound readers the sure sign of God's perfection. But what is being made convertible in Pym's strange narrative? Pym's narrative is based on other chronicles of polar exploration and travel, most notably Benjamin Morrell's Narrative of Four Voyages (1832). This story, however, is less a romance of voyages to distant seas than a spectacular and violent staging of "civilization" defining itself through the conquest of savagery. Yet there is -107- no possibility of definition or conquest in this world of shifting appearances. Before Pym and Peters reach the black island of Tsalal (meaning "to be shaded, dark" in Hebrew and "to be shade" in its ancient Ethiopian root), the reader has already endured scenes of butchery, drunkenness, treachery, and cannibalism. So, although Pym's story leads us to the islands of the South Seas where we encounter "barbarians" and "savages," when the explorers finally visit the island village, the common racist divisions between "civilization" and "barbarism," good and evil, black and white, are no longer operative.
The "savages" are described with their "complexion a jet black, with thick and woolly hair." The natives dread the complexion of "the white race" and, most of all, the strange white thing "lying on the ground," earlier described by Pym as "a singular-looking landanimal," with a "body. . covered with a straight silky hair, perfectly white." The complex working out of the narrative depends upon a duplicity or doubling of color. As the explorers journey farther into the interior to that "country differing essentially from any hitherto visited by civilized men," any simple splitting of color into black and white — with the metaphysical truths normally attached to such biological facts — becomes more vexed and shifting than any racialist polarity allows.