Poe's Moon Hoax: Too clever for its own good (Part 2)

(Continued from Part One).

Poe's Moon Hoax is not very famous. It failed as a hoax, although it succeeds as a story: mainly as a comedy, although the plot is sufficiently ingenious for an adventure yarn.

Gloriously titled "The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfaall", it's about a Rotterdam man dinged by creditors and burdened with responsibilities, who decides to take care of them both in one grand suicidal adventure. After reading up a bit on speculative astronomy and pneumatics, he constructs a balloon, complete with gunpowder-powered launching system, and rockets himself up thousands of miles into the air. He survives the launch, by the skin of his teeth (or should I say the strings of his pantaloons), but his creditors aren't so lucky. 

The bulk of the rest of the narrative describes Pfaall's attempts to construct a rudimentary atmospheric system, as he gets higher and higher; several experiments which end badly for their animal subjects; and his feelings as the Earth falls further and further away and the Moon grows closer and closer.



SPOILERS

He finally crash lands in the middle of a Moon city, and persuades one of the inhabitants to return (via balloon) to Rotterdam to ask for a pardon for Pfaall, There's a lovely wry ending: 

 The letter, having been published, gave rise to a variety of gossip and opinion.  Some of the over-wise even made themselves ridiculous by decrying 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.  For my part, I cannot conceive upon what data they have founded such an accusation.  Let us see what they say:
Imprimis.  That certain wags in Rotterdam have certain especial antipathies to certain burgomasters and astronomers.
Secondly.  That an odd little dwarf and bottle conjurer, both of whose ears, for some misdemeanor, have been cut off close to his head, has been missing for several days from the neighboring city of Bruges.
Thirdly.  That the newspapers which were stuck all over the little balloon, were newspapers of Holland, and therefore could not have been made in the moon.  They were dirty papers – very dirty – and Gluck, the printer, would take his bible oath to their having been printed in Rotterdam.
Fourthly, That Hans Pfaall himself, the drunken villain, and the three very idle gentlemen styled his creditors, were all seen, no longer than two or three days ago, in a tippling house in the suburbs, having just returned, with money in their pockets, from a trip beyond the sea.
Lastly.  That it is an opinion very generally received, or which ought to be generally received, that the College of Astronomers in the city of Rotterdam, as well as all other colleges in all other parts of the world, – not to mention colleges and astronomers in general, – are, to say the least of the matter, not a whit better, nor greater, nor wiser than they ought to be.

And that's that.

Nobody, of course, believed a word of it. I can't see how he ever thought they would. Let's look at why, point by point.

1. The preposterousness of the story.

OK, so the Sun Moon Hoax seems pretty preposterous to us now. Man-bats? But at the time, it probably wouldn't have seemed that weird. Darwin's revelations had eroded the certainty that man was unique among species, and they also made it seem possible that - given the right environment - a human-like species could evolve adaptations like bat-wings. Locke's narrative also builds the revelations masterfully, from the mundane to the shocking.

Poe, on the other hand, well... Granted, technology was advancing at an enormous speed, with airplanes more-or-less right around the corner, and he does go into reasonably-plausible-sounding technological details - but even so, was the story of a man ballooning to the Moon remotely plausible even then?


And then there's this:

The balloon at first collapsed, then furiously expanded, then whirled round and round with horrible velocity, and finally, reeling and staggering like a drunken man, hurled me with great force over the rim of the car, and left me dangling, at a terrific height, with my head downward, and my face outwards, by a piece of slender cord about three feet in length, which hung accidentally through a crevice near the bottom of the wicker-work, and in which, as I fell, my left foot became most providentially entangled.  It is impossible – utterly impossible – to form any adequate idea of the horror of my situation. 

2. The names - oh God, the names.

The single biggest reason why no one would take this seriously is the names of the Rotterdam burgomeisters, Superbus Von Underduk and Professor Rubadub. There are slight Swiftian overtones - and maybe I`m missing a political allusion of breathtaking subtlety - but the joke here seems to be basically "Foreigners have funny names, hur hur". Shame on you, Edgar.

3. The TONE

This is so obviously tongue-in-cheek even the most unsophisticated rural bumpkin could pick up on it. Even at a time when journalistic discourse was relatively erudite, and many columnists addressed their readers with  dry irony, this doesn't pass muster as a straight report. And the especially attentive reader might have noticed that the balloon's first flight occurs on April Fool's Day.

So, nice try, EAP, but no dice.

He'd go on to publish "The Balloon-Hoax" in the Sun later the same year. This was more successful as a hoax (although my evidence for that comes entirely from his own account, which can hardly be considered objective.)

Citations:
I read the Moon Hoax article on Wikipedia, the Moon Hoax texts on the Museum of Hoaxes, and the two Poe stories "The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfall" and "The Balloon Hoax". Illustration by Fritz Eichenberg.