“The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfall” (1835)
http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/unphlle.htm
The quote from the anonymously authored song from the 1600s, “Tom O’Bedlam,” sums up the exact happenings of the following story in four succinct lines: With a heart of furious fancies, / Whereof I am commander, / With a burning spear and a horse of air / to the wilderness I wander. This story may sound familiar; a protagonist grows tired of life, pestered by debt, “wishing to live, yet wearied with life,” he runs away in a parallel of suicide much more gratifying for us to read about. Driven by seething, secret hatred for debt collectors and his failing bellows repair business, obviously failing, Hans Pfall builds a hot air balloon and flies it to the moon. This model of escapism has been recreated many times and by many other authors in many other stories.
Reading this story, and many others by Poe, is a measuring exercise in vocabulary size and also an opportunity to greatly expand any sized vocabulary. His words are varied and seemingly carefully chosen to convey a deeper meaning than stories that are written specifically for a general audience or dumbed down for the literary public. The phrase, “All physics in a ferment,” used to describe the descent of the hot air balloon in the beginning of the story as one example. I greatly enjoyed the way that Poe started the story from the end of the journey and then proceeded to fill in the details via a letter and journal entries dropped from the returning balloon by its moon-person operator. Within the journal entries we find mathematical “proof” for the journey and well-crafted-but-obvious-pseudo science. Narrow, providential, and causally unrelated escapes from death and disaster cleverly plague Pfall’s journey, “had not the inconvenience of getting wet, determined me to discharge the ballast my destruction might, and probably would, have been the consequence.” The birth of the kittens was another random occurrence which is used to illustrate Pfall’s grasp of his universe’s physics and their quick dispatch at the end of their usefulness was cleanly crafted and carried out by Poe. The story crashes from reality, to the reading of the letter detailing Pfall’s journey, and back to reality for a speedy conclusion. A conclusion which leaves us with mostly questions, accompanied by no small amount of mystique.
This work begins crossing the gulf of science fiction prominently before many other authors. Jules Verne was inspired by this story (and other Poe stories such as, “The Balloon Hoax”) to write “Around the World in Eighty Days,” and “From the Earth to the Moon.” Jules Verne created similar stories in a way which exhibits precisely the concept of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery. There’s also a confirmation bias on my end to consider. I read this futuristic tale and thought, “gee, this sounds like some other stories I’ve encountered,” and that inspires me to consider that it was the first and all that came after must have followed cautiously in Poe’s footsteps. Poe may have opened the floodgates for science fiction, horror, and the macabre tale but he was much more of a catalyst than a direct ancestor to all stories that were to come after his time. This story opened the doors of the horror genre but shuts them quickly without delving into the yawning depths. Luckily for us, a certain H.P. Lovecraft comes along to discover these doors in Poe’s stories and bound across the threshold.
—–
I wrote this poem about the sea, which is kind of like space, right?
Swells come and go;
crests bloom bottomless,
troughs hide below.
You’re in a boat,
do what people in boats do
when forced to float.
Wave your goodbyes,
to things but leavings,
with intrepid eyes
on unknown moorings
and ubiquitous lives.
thecereallife 