“Poetics of the Potent”: Yann Martel's Life of Pi, Edgar Allan Poe's <i>The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket</i>, and Modes of Transcreation

DEPENDING ON TIME AND CULTURE, concepts of authorship have varied greatly, affecting our notions of how a writer should engage both with what we call “reality” and with literary products of the past. As far as the former is concerned, an “authentic” account based on actual observation or at least producing “un effet de réel ” (Barthes 1968, 88; emphasis in the original) might be just as welcome as an imaginary tale full of fantastic elements. With regard to the latter, stances taken range from the appreciation of texts that are close copies of well-known precursors, thus embracing the principle of imitatio , to the reverence of artworks that seem unique and original. Often, relations between these aspects are highly complex and hard to disentangle. Thus landscape descriptions in allegedly truthful reports may include elements that can only be explained by preconceived notions of ideal places and a strong literary tradition. Conversely, it is not uncommon for authors of prose fiction to rely on actual travel reports. In “The Journal of Julius Rodman: Being an Account of the First Passage Across the Rocky Mountains of North America Ever Achieved by Civilized Man” (1840) Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) made use of a number of such sources, among them the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who recorded their overland expedition of 1804–06 to the Pacific Northwest (1814), and Alexander Mackenzie's Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Laurence, Through the Continent of North America, To the Frozen and Pacific Oceans: In the Years 1789 and 1793 … (1801). Poe's extensive borrowings did not stop at firsthand accounts of real travels but included texts like Washington Irving's Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1836) that in their turn hark back to the original accounts—here the journals of Lewis and Clark—and thus complicate matters further. Speaking of “verbal collage” and specifying instances of “verbatim copying, close or loose paraphrase, and even deliberate contradiction or citation by opposition” (Poe 1981, 512–14), Poe's latter-day editor Burton R. Pollin ultimately accuses the American author of “unoriginality” and “plagiarism,” as Liliane Weissberg (1987, 420) convincingly argues in her analysis of Pollin's editorial procedure.

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