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The Narrative of Arthur Gordon is not the original macabre tale of the high seas. There are clear antecedents of Pym to be found in the oral legend of the Flying Dutchman and there were perhaps published predecessors to it that Edgar Allan Poe read. Likewise, it is difficult to argue that Alan Moore's “comic book-within-a-comic book” Tales of the Black Freighter, a subplot of his graphic novel Watchmen, is the generic climax of such tales. Yet it does seem that the following argument can be made: Pym is part of the original set of coordinates that launches the pirate romance laced with horror elements off the dock. Freighter is one of the last instances of such a project sailing high upon the waves before entering the post-modern self-parodying shallows of Disney's PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN film series. There is nothing definitive in regards to sequential order in this sub-genre in these contexts. In a 2009 interview, Harold Bloom said of another Romantic sub-genre: AVC: When you called [Blood Meridian] “the ultimate Western”, did you mean merely the paramount example of the genre, or its final expression? HB: No, I meant the final one. It culminates all the aesthetic potential that Western fiction can have. I don’t think that anyone can hope to improve on it, that it essentially closes out the tradition. (Pierce) Such is my argument with Moore's Tales of the Black Freighter. There will be more pirate fictions in the future, as with horror stories, and the twain might intersect again outside of a Disney film even. But such fiction will not be able to surpass what Moore and illustrator David Gibbons did in their novel. <https://www.patreon.com/posts/from-grampus-to-22458348> -- Best regards, Andrew Stewart _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
