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A Descent into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe - a short story discussion

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Chris OConnor

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A Descent into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe - a short story discussion

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A Descent into the Maelstrom
by Edgar Allan Poe, 1841
Suggested by Robert Tulip

Read A Descent into the Maelstrom online for free.

Or you can listen to the short story for free on YouTube. It's about 50 minutes long.

And if you're like me, and for your sake I hope you're not, you can read the short story while listening to it read by someone else.

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Robert Tulip

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Re: A Descent into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe - a discussion

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This tale has all the suspense and mystery and imagination for which Poe is so highly renowned, as among the greatest of all American wordsmiths.

There is some irony in the opening quote, with its mention of Providence, a divine quality usually imagined as good, but here seen as a source of sheer terror and awesome might, beheld on the very margin of life.

An excellent analysis of the story at https://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1973108.htm emphasises that the sailor is saved only by releasing himself to his fate, achieving the tranquil detachment of the hanged man, surrendered to the power of the whirlpool in order to achieve a higher vision, suspending time to achieve all the time in the world, in the sublime serenity where poetry and truth are unified in beauty, where escape is possible only through joining in the chaos on its own terms.

This story speaks to an American mythos, especially with the maelstrom likened to the moaning of a vast herd of buffaloes upon an American prairie. The theme, as in Moby Dick, is that a vast and pitiless natural force symbolises the western frontier confronted by the hardy free pioneers. Triumph through acceptance of the power of nature is the paradoxical ecological message.
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DWill

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Re: A Descent into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe - a discussion

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I'll be interested to see how I respond to the story, which I first read long ago. Since I gravitate more to realistic, character-based fiction rather than tales typical of Poe, I have a bias. Poe's sesquepedalianism has bugged me just a little.

I hope I have time to read or reread the other stories as well. I like the method of selection, and I won't even think about whether Chris is putting on with the random number generator bit! :-D
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Re: A Descent into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe - a discussion

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DWill, just leaving aside the spelling mistake on your big word, :blush: your comment prompted me to install my readability stats on Microsoft Word. It is quite tedious as you have to go through the whole grammar check to get the analysis.

The Maelström scores at Grade 9 level, with an average of just 4.2 letters per word. Poe's sentences tend to ramble tho', at average length of 29.9 words. The story has about 7000 words.

And the önly way I can get the .. over the o is by göing tö the link and cöpying it.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Mon May 01, 2017 5:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: A Descent into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe - a discussion

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Oh, right, the word has "quip" in it. Interesting about your readability stats. I did not find the vocab full of 50 cent words, nor the syntax to be intricate. Maybe the character of sailor accounts for the plainer speech, or maybe I'm wrong in my recollection of Poe.

The "ancient mariner" (though only made old by the terror of his experience) becomes after his initial horror fascinated by the terrible beauty of the maelstrom, having no hope of surviving in it anyway. His descriptions remind me of the concept of the sublime that was current with Romantics like Poe, in which nature was awe-full and terrifyingly magnificent, and of course indifferent to measly man.

No way to have a story, though, unless sailor gets himself ejected from the whirlpool, so he shakes off the Circean spell of the vortex and employs his good old Norwegian ingenuity. This is very "American" of him, too.

The mechanics of this mighty ocean vacuum are interesting, and I wonder how Poe worked them out. Although obviously fantastical, he creates plausibility for the general reader. Science may say no.

What a bummer for him that his fishing buddies don't quite believe his tale!
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Re: A Descent into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe - a discussion

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DWill wrote:Oh, right, the word has "quip" in it. Interesting about your readability stats. I did not find the vocab full of 50 cent words, nor the syntax to be intricate. Maybe the character of sailor accounts for the plainer speech, or maybe I'm wrong in my recollection of Poe.
Great quip, must have been one of Shaw’s. A fifty cent word dates from telegraph days when people were charged by the letter. I was in Alice Springs last week and visited the old telegraph station which was opened in 1872, shortening the communication time to the old country from two months to one day.
DWill wrote: The "ancient mariner" (though only made old by the terror of his experience) becomes after his initial horror fascinated by the terrible beauty of the maelstrom, having no hope of surviving in it anyway. His descriptions remind me of the concept of the sublime that was current with Romantics like Poe, in which nature was awe-full and terrifyingly magnificent, and of course indifferent to measly man.
Yes, there is a touch of Coleridge and the albatross in this story. My commentary on the poem of the grey beard loon at post84467.html#p84467 looks at the sublime terror of the ice and fate.
DWill wrote: No way to have a story, though, unless sailor gets himself ejected from the whirlpool, so he shakes off the Circean spell of the vortex and employs his good old Norwegian ingenuity. This is very "American" of him, too.
I like your mention of Circe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circe , who of course was the enchantress who befuddled Ulysses, and the origin of holy moly, at least according to Hermes. It was after leaving the year with Circe that Ulysses arrived at the Charybdis, an event with some similarity to the Maelstrom. Yankee can do know how seems to figure in the ejection, with perhaps a nod to the old Europeans going down with the ship.
DWill wrote:
The mechanics of this mighty ocean vacuum are interesting, and I wonder how Poe worked them out. Although obviously fantastical, he creates plausibility for the general reader. Science may say no.
This inexorable vortex is explained at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlpool
DWill wrote: What a bummer for him that his fishing buddies don't quite believe his tale!
I used this story in my novel The Jug, transposing the events from Norway to a near-future collapse of the Antarctic ice sheets causing a global tsunami and floods. post160277.html#p160277

I meant also to mention, from the commentary I linked above, https://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1973108.htm
incomprehensibility of the scientific explanation of the Maelstrom — that is, the theory of colliding currents . Then there is also a more subtle indication of his agreement. When the narrator first sights the vortex from the summit of Helseggen, he says to the sailor, “This . . . can be nothing else than the great whirlpool of the Maelstrom”. The sailor’s reply is a gentle correction of his companion’s appellation. “ ‘So it is sometimes termed,’ said he. ‘We Norwegians call it the Moskoe-strom, from the island of Moskoe in the midway’”. The name is accepted by the first narrator, for the next time he refers to the vortex, he calls it the Moskoe-strom. But the point lies not merely in the acceptance of a new name; rather it lies in the implications of the name. In rejecting “Maelstrom,” the sailor is rejecting a definition: “the stream that whirls round and grinds” or “the grinding stream.” He is thus rejecting man’s efforts to define — and so to limit and control — chaotic Nature.
This reminds me of Hamlet’s Mill, with its discussion of how the Norse Myth of the cosmic mill ground out gold, then iron, then sand, as it fell off its axis with the precession of the equinox. I like this analysis of Poe's idea about the whirlpool as an uncontrollable force of nature.
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Re: A Descent into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe - a discussion

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I'm not getting into this story. I'm ready for the next.
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Re: A Descent into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe - a discussion

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“Maelstrom” is a term that Poe introduced into English, which has taken on wider meaning, indicating emotional turmoil, inescapable confusion, medical conditions in psychology and destructive personal relationships.

These metaphors are worth bearing in mind in reading Poe’s story, as the narrator escapes from the seemingly inevitable doom of the vast sucking whirlpool into which his brother plunges in sheer mad terror.

The virtue of detachment, the ability to view a situation dispassionately, and to observe surroundings objectively, noticing things that you would not see if you gave in to the feelings of powerless fate, enables escape from the most dire situation.
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Re: A Descent into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe - a discussion

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Robert Tulip wrote:“Maelstrom” is a term that Poe introduced into English, which has taken on wider meaning, indicating emotional turmoil, inescapable confusion, medical conditions in psychology and destructive personal relationships.

These metaphors are worth bearing in mind in reading Poe’s story, as the narrator escapes from the seemingly inevitable doom of the vast sucking whirlpool into which his brother plunges in sheer mad terror.

The virtue of detachment, the ability to view a situation dispassionately, and to observe surroundings objectively, noticing things that you would not see if you gave in to the feelings of powerless fate, enables escape from the most dire situation.
Great point. There's an interesting book you might look that goes right to this subject of who is most likely to survive in emergencies. It's Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales.
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Re: A Descent into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe - a discussion

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The Trump Administration is perceived as a descent into the maelstrom, an inexorable vortex of insanity, a tragic risk of collapse of life and freedom and equality and rights.

I don't agree with those perceptions, but sympathise with people who feel terrorised by the White House and the Trump mentality.
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