Poe Notes

The Adventure of Hans Pfaall

A strange balloon arrives at Rotterdam -- with a note from recently disappeared Hans Pfaall. Hans relates the construction of a balloon. He intends to go to the moon to escape his creditors. An explosion leaves him hanging beneath the balloon.

It's sci-fi, and some of the phrases are astonishingly familiar from various pop efforts, but it's got a lot of faux-technical detail, and qreminds one in some ways of magical realism, despite the extreme difference in tone from Garcia Marquez or Rulfo or Kafka. He does not appear to have checked the details in any depth, since much of his folderol could have been corrected by an astronomer of the time. He goes through a big highly imaginative spiel about fixing the pressure problem that's bursting his ears by bleeding himself, so he has less blood pushing out. The feathers, further from the ground, plummet rather than float.

Heavy reliance on figures to give a sense of precision.

I suppose at this time, his prior examples would have been narratives of exploration, Robinson Crusoe, and the like. His patient description of Pfaall's fanciful trials and his aping of a diary at one point.

Also perhaps some glance back at Washington Irving or somesuch -- he finishes by making it apparent it's presumably all a fib, and makes a big footnote about similar stories that probably puts the author in the same light as his focalizer-narrator.