The Climate ‘Unspeakable’: Representing Eco-Horror in Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Abstract

Contemporary ecocriticism and the American Gothic tradition share an investment in the psychic repression of terrors lurking just beyond the articulable. Amitav Ghosh's assertion that the history of fossil fuels is ‘a matter of embarrassment verging on the unspeakable’ and Timothy Morton's conception of ecocatastrophe as ‘an uncanny entity that we cannot grasp’ both, for instance, invoke the Gothic's most infamous conventions—the unrepresentable, the dark, shrouded, and looming—within the framework of contemporary environmental discourse. However, the nature of the Gothic reminds us that repression and disavowal tend only to strengthen the buried object, not to extinguish it. Turning to this centuries-old tradition for epistemological direction, might contemporary literary critics solve climate change's ‘crisis of representation’ by refusing to privilege direct representation altogether? This paper traces the fusion of ecocritical and Gothic discourse to the early nineteenth century, taking as its primary object Poe's only published novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). I argue that Poe deploys Gothic conventions throughout the novel to obliquely represent ‘Unspeakable’ environmental anxieties emerging around extractivism, plantation agriculture, overconsumption, global trade networks, and ecological apocalypse. After illuminating the explicitly ecological dimensions of Poe's Gothic fiction, I demonstrate how conventional Gothic tropes—including metaphor, latency, secrecy, containment, darkness, decay, and ‘the Unspeakable’ in its broadest sense—can inform contemporary literary-critical approaches to climate change, which (according to Ghosh, Morton, and contemporaries) often assume that the narrative latency of ecocatastrophe inherently precludes our recognition of environmental crisis. In Poe's Gothic fiction, however, ‘Unspeakable’ horrors and latent anxieties are eventually made even more blatantly manifest than they would be if they were represented mimetically.