DONALD B. STAUFFER, ‘The Two Styles of Poe’s Ms. Found in a Bottle’, Style vol. 2 (1967), pp. 107–20
BURTON R. POLLIN, ‘Poe’s Use of Material from Bernardin De Saint-Pierre’s Etudes’, Romance Notes vol. 12 (1971), pp. 331–8
THE UNPARALLELED ADVENTURE OF ONE HANS PFAALL
First Published
Southern Literary Messenger (June 1835)
Reprinted
New York Transcript (2–5 September 1835), as ‘Lunar Discoveries, Extraordinary Aerial Voyage by Baron Hans Phaall’
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Vol. 2
Translated
Alphonse Borghers, ‘L’Aéronaute hollandais’,* Revue brittanique 1843).
(September 1852).
Baudelaire, ‘Aventure sans pareille d’un certain Hans Pfaall’, Le Pays
(March–April 1855).
The ‘Unparalleled Adventure’ is that of a bankrupt bellows-mender on his dream flight to escape from debt and to mangle his creditors. But the fantasy is also a private confessional. This April Fool’s Day ascent is self-consciously Poe’s own alcoholic send-up: of a Grub Street hack, carried off by his own hot air – in a balloon made of foolscap in the shape of a fool’s cap – floating effortlessly into remote and rarified regions of speculation far removed from the clutches of his creditors.
There are two modes of discussion, he maintained, ascent and descent. We can recognize the distinction as, in some measure, respectively corresponding with the manic and the depressive phases of his imagination. Predominantly, the phase is depressive; and then the mode is descendent, a downward movement, a dying fall. Yet there are occasions when the trend veers upward…*
But here the very name of this dreamer who rises upward has a dying ‘fall’: its phallic sound suggesting both erection and detumescence.
Lucian wrote his True History to parody tall tales by contemporary travellers (now lost) like Ctesias, Iambulus, Antonius Diogenes; Poe would write his as a burlesque on the vogue for romantic escapades to the moon. What opens as a satirical ‘grotesque’, then, grows into an imaginative ‘arabesque’.† Yet the hoax, inverted as the foolscap balloon with its rim of tinkling bells, cuts all ways: at the expense of the toy-town Dutch; at the expense of Sir John Herschel’s algebraic equations; at the expense of George Tucker, professor at his own University (and immediate target); at the expense of all lunar exploits devoid of ‘verisimilitude’ – that ‘effort at plausibility in the details of the voyage itself’. If you accept Hans Pfaall’s adventures, you are fooled. If you reject them, you must be as thick as those pipe-puffing burghers who decry
the whole business as nothing better than a hoax. But hoax, with these sort of people, is, I believe, a general term for all matters above their comprehension.
Invert ‘Phaal’, that other variant of his name! What sound do you hear but ‘laugh’?
For Poe had been a keen astronomer since earliest youth. When John Allan, his step-father, in 1825 bought a house with a two-storey portico extending along one side, the sixteen-year-old Edgar had set up his telescope on the upstairs porch to study the stars and beckoning mystery of the moon. According to John H. B. Latrobe (one of the judges of the Saturday Visiter prize), Poe in October 1833 was already bursting with lunar schemes :
I was seated at my desk on the Monday following the publication of the tale, when a gentleman entered and introduced himself as the writer, saying that he came to thank me as one of the committee, for the award in his favor. Of this interview, the only one I ever had with Mr Poe, my recollection is very distinct, indeed, – He was if anything, below the middle size, and yet could not be described as a small man. His figure was remarkably good, and he carried himself erect and well, as one who had been trained to it. He was dressed in black, and his frock coat was buttoned to the throat, where it met the black stock, then almost universally worn. Not a particle of white was visible. Coat, hat, boots, and gloves had evidently seen their best days, but so far as mending and brushing go, everything had been done apparently, to make them presentable. On most men his clothes would have looked shabby and seedy, but there was something about this man that prevented one from criticizing his garments, and the details I have mentioned were only recalled afterwards. The impression made, however, was that the award in Mr Poe’s favor was not inopportune. Gentleman was written all over him. His manner was easy and quiet, and although he came to return thanks for what he regarded as deserving them, there was nothing obsequious in what he said or did. His features I am unable to describe in detail. His forehead was high, and remarkable for the great development at the temple. This was the characteristic of his head, which you noticed at once, and which I have never forgotten. The expression of his face was grave, almost sad, except when he became engaged in conversation, when it became animated and changeable. His voice I remember was very pleasing in its tone and well modulated, almost rhythmical, and his words were well chosen and unhesitating…. I asked him whether he was then occupied with any literary labor. He replied that he was then engaged on a voyage to the moon, and at once went into a somewhat learned disquisition upon the laws of gravity, the height of the earth’s atmosphere, and capacities of balloons, warming in his speech as he proceeded. Presently, speaking in the first person, he began the voyage, after describing the preliminary arrangements, as you will find them set forth in one of his tales, called ‘The Adventures of Hans Phaall’, and leaving the earth, and becoming more and more animated, he described his sensation as he ascended higher and higher, until, at last, he reached the point in space where the moon’s attraction overcame that of the earth, when there was a sudden bouleversement of the car and great confusion among its tenants. By this time the speaker had become so excited, spoke so rapidly, gesticulating much, that when the turn upside-down took place, and he clapped his hands and stamped with his foot by way of emphasis, I was carried along with him, a companion of his äerial journey… When he had finished his description he apologized for his excitability, which he laughed at himself. The conversation then turned upon other subjects, and soon afterward he took his leave.
Latrobe’s account of this interview was given in an address at the Poe Memorial gathering in Baltimore, 17 November 1875. By then he was an elderly, rather unreliable witness.* According to Poe, his inspiration derived from the American edition of Sir John Herschel’s A Treatise on Astronomy (1834):
I had been much interested in what is there said respecting the possibility of future lunar investigations. The theme excited my fancy, and I longed to give free rein to it in depicting my day-dreams about the scenery of the moon – in short, I longed to write a story embodying these dreams.†
But the day-dreams, the gestation of ‘Hans Pfaall’, may well have begun before 1833. The actual writing, especially ‘the application of scientific principles’, seems to date to the years 1834–5. It was then, he claims, he gave up a journalistic hoax (with reports from a new super-telescope) and reluctantly ‘fell back upon a style half plausible, half bantering… resolved to give what interest I could to an actual pas-page from the earth to the moon, describing the lunar scenery as if surveyed and personally examined by the narrator’.
This might just be true. But what Poe is obviously claiming is another ‘first’. He could not bear being pipped to the post! And what should appear, three weeks after the publication of ‘Hans Pfaall’ in the Southern Literary Messenger, but the first of a series of articles – ‘Discoveries in the Moon’ – the hoax of the century – in the New York Sun? Supposedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Courant and Edinburgh Journal of Science, they relayed discoveries ‘Lately Made’ by Sir John Herschel’s new telescope ‘at the Cape of Good Hope’. With a magnifying power of 42,000, it could spot objects on the moon a mere eighteen inches in diameter. On 25 August 1835, banner headlines announced Herschel’s discovery of life on the moon. Reddish flora had been sighted, ‘precisely similar to the Papaver Rhoeas or rose-poppy of our sublunary cornfields’. H
uge claret-coloured gems were seen; then bison-like creatures with adjustable eye-flaps. On 28 August came the climax: the revelation of furry winged men resembling bats! That issue sold 19,360 copies. The series ended on 31 August when Herschel’s lunar observations were cut short by fire. The sun’s rays, striking the great lens, had ignited his observatory.
How could Poe, that arch-hoaxer, sit quietly by? Excitedly he wrote to John P. Kennedy:
Have you seen the ‘Discoveries in the Moon’? Do you not think it altogether suggested by Hans Phaal? It is very singular, – but when I first purposed writing a Tale concerning the Moon, the idea of Telescopic discoveries suggested itself to me – but I afterwards abandoned it. I had however spoken of it freely, & from many little incidents & apparently trivial remarks in those Discoveries I am convinced that the idea was stolen from myself.
Richmond: 11 September 1835
In public, however, he did not press the charge, giving Richard Adams Locke the credit of perpetrating a whimsical coup: ‘decidedly the greatest hit in the way of sensation – of merely popular sensation – ever made by any similar fiction either in America or in Europe’. But again and again, in exasperation, he returned to the theme. By 1846 it even becomes the excuse for leaving his own ‘Unparalleled Adventure’ up in the air:
Having read the Moon story to an end and found it anticipative of all the main points of my ‘Hans Phaall’, I suffered the latter to remain unfinished. The chief design in carrying my hero to the moon was to afford him an opportunity of describing the lunar scenery, but I found that he could add very little to the minute and authentic account of Sir John Herschel. The first part of ‘Hans Phaall’, occupying about eighteen pages of ‘The Messenger’, embraced merely a journal of the passage between the two orbs and a few words of general observation on the most obvious features of the satellite; the second part will most probably never appear. I did not think it advisable even to bring my voyager back to his parent earth. He remains where I left him, and is still, I believe, ‘the man in the moon’.
Yet Poe was too hard on his ‘jeu d’esprit’. After the flood of recent words from Houston and Apollo spacecraft, who would not prefer another Hans Pfaall, astronaut, to his American successors? Though occasionally there have been echoes of that intense, imagined tone. Major Alfred M. Worden of Apollo 15, for one, in lunar orbit:
My impression of living inside that vehicle, particularly the days when I was in there by myself, was one of floating free. I guess it would be almost like riding in a free air balloon, floating over the countryside. There’s nothing pushing you. There is no noise, no sound… You have no sensation of motion unless you look down and see the lunar landscape sweeping below you. At times, I thought of myself as a bird seemingly detached from all that is below.
The only time you’re really aware of the fact that you’re orbiting the moon is when you’re on the front side and can see the surface. When you cross the ninth terminator, the sunset terminator – the point which divides light from darkness – and you get past it, you lose the reflective light from the earth, and it’s just as black as you can imagine. In fact, you can’t see anything.
The only way you know the moon is there is that its horizon cuts off the full view of the stars. So you can see a distinct difference. You can see the star field, and then you see the circular cut-out of the star field, which is the lunar horizon. And there is nothing but blackness below there. You sort of lose the sense of reality of being in lunar orbit when the moon is dark like that. You could be anywhere.
As you get close to the terminator you begin to see a few of the peaks lighted in front of you, and everything else is black. As you get closer and closer to it, you begin to see just a little more light, and a little more light, and then suddenly – bang! – everything is lit.
But then Major Worden did not fully share Colonel David R. Scott’s or Colonel James B. Irwin’s experience. Though circling the moon, he was no nearer those lunar Apennines than Edgar Allan Poe.
1. (p. 12) of One Hans Phaall: With an echo of ‘fall’ and ‘phallus’ and ‘fail’. For the sound, above all, seems to matter. The spelling underwent at least four metamorphoses: ‘Phaal’, ‘Pfaal’, ‘Pfaall’, and ‘Phaall’.
Marie Bonaparte pointed to the German root phahl, meaning ‘stake’; Edmund Reiss, to the Latin follis, meaning ‘bellows’ (for a bellows-mender), late Latin ‘windbag’, French fou, English fool (for this foolscap balloon).
But a touch of sexual clowning seems also to have been intended. In ‘A Tale of Jerusalem’, for example, the puerile but quite legitimate name for the high priest, Abel-Shittim (Saturday Courier, 1832), on republication became Abel-Phittim (1836). So too in ‘Lionizing’ (1835) the Shandean joke on noses and inflated reputations, with its phallic innuendo, was later revised or deleted (1840). A kind of bashful obscenity is a hallmark of Poe’s earliest style.
2. (p. 12) ‘With a heart of furious fancies…’: (Wit and Drollery, 1661). The epigraph derived most probably from Isaac D’Israeli’s chapter on ‘Tom o’ Bedlams’ in Curiosities of Literature (1832). The complete stanza, properly set, reads:
With a heart of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander:
With a burning spear,
And a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander;
With a knight of ghosts and shadows,
I summoned am to Tourney :
Ten leagues beyond
The wide world’s end;
Methinks it is no journey!
The stanza haunted Poe. He recalled it, fourteen years later, at the time of the California gold rush :
And, as his strength
Failed him at length
He met a pilgrim shadow –
‘Shadow,’ said he,
‘Where can it be –
This land of Eldorado?’
‘Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,’
The shade replied, –
‘If you seek for Eldorado!’
Eldorado (1849)
Insolvency and lunar escapades went hand in hand. But what once he had inflated with a zany bric-a-brac of prose burlesque was now reduced to the barest parable of the romantic dreamer on the shadow-line of death.
3. (p. 13) not even the burgomaster Mynheer Superbus Von Underduk: Awaiting this lunar Rip Van Winkle on his return. The Knickerbocker-type humour is heavily indebted to Washington Irving.
4. (p. 13) sheep-bells… to the tune of Betty Martin: No tune, but the English proverb: ‘That’s all my eye, and Betty Martin!’ Viz humbug, nonsense.
5. (p. 14) vrow Grettel Pfaall: Dutch, vrouw, German Frau: a Grettel for the absentee Hans.
6. (p.14) He could not have been more than two feet in height: This lunar Lilliputian has some lunatic link with the Dutch farce of ‘long speeches, and radicalism’ – and thus with Jacksonian Democracy in that ‘incomprehensible connection between each particular individual in the moon, with some particular individual on the earth…’ (p. 351, note 36).
See H. Allen Greer, ‘Poe’s “Hans Pfaall” and the Political Scene’, Emerson Society Quarterly vol. 60 (1970), pp. 67–73.
7. (p. 14) His feet, of course, could not be seen at all: Though Pfaall’s alter ego, or lunar double, was originally endowed with a diabolic tail. The 1835 text continued: ‘although a horny substance of suspicious nature was occasionally protruded through a rent in the bottom of the car, or, to speak more properly, in the top of the hat’.
8. (p. 17) written either by Professor Encke of Berlin, or by a Frenchman: Johann Franz Encke, renowned for measurements, based on the transits of Venus, of the earth’s distance from the sun. Encke’s Comet (p. 28), though discovered by J. L. Pons of Marseilles in 1818, was named after the German astronomer who calculated its orbit and accurately predicted the date of its return.
There were two noted astronomers called ‘Encke’ at t
he time and a third ‘of somewhat similar name’, L. Hencke.
9. (p. 18) a cousin from Nantz : A non-existent town, whose very spelling seems deliberately non-Dutch.
10. (p. 18) all the force, the reality…of instinct or intuition: The 1835 text continued:
In other words, I believed, and still do believe, that truth is frequently, of its own essence, superficial, and that, in many cases, the depth lies more in the abysses where we seek her, than in the actual situations wherein she may be found. Nature herself seemed to afford me corroboration of these ideas. In the contemplation of the heavenly bodies it struck me very forcibly that I could not distinguish a star with nearly as much precision, when I gazed upon it with earnest, direct, and undeviating attention, as when I suffered my eye only to glance in its vicinity alone. I was not, of course, at that time aware that this apparent paradox was occasioned by the centre of the visual area being less susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the exterior portions of the retina. This knowledge, and some of another kind, came afterwards in the course of an eventful period of five years, during which I have dropped the prejudices of my former humble situation in life, and forgotten the bellows-mender in far different occupations. But at the epoch of which I speak, the analogy which the casual observation of a star offered to the conclusions I had already drawn, struck me with the force of positive confirmation, and I then finally made up my mind to the course which I afterwards pursued.
The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin Classics) Page 40