Allan Poe Man of Crowd
Allan Poe Man of Crowd
Allan Poe Man of Crowd
credit than any other writer for the transformation of the short story from
anecdote to art. He virtually created the detective story and perfected the
psychological thriller. He also produced some of the most influential literary
criticism of his time–important theoretical statements on poetry and the short
story–and has had a worldwide influence on literature. Poe did not find it
sufficient that he essay his theory of perversity in one story only. Perhaps his
most lucid portrayal of perversity resides in his masterfully told tale “The Black
Cat.
That work’s narrator owns a black cat named Pluto, which he dearly loves.
However, the cat’s owner takes to drinking, and one day, in a tantrum, he is
seized by perverse impulses beyond his control. He captures the unfortunate
creature, and with his pen knife, removes one of its eyes. This is but the
beginning of the narrator’s sorrows. He recognizes that it was this
unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself–to offer violence to own nature–
to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only–that urged me to continue and finally to
consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute.
One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the
limb of a tree;–hung it with tears streaming from my eyes, and with the
bitterest remorse at my heart;–hung it because I knew it had loved me, and
because I felt it had given me no offence;–hung it because I knew that in
doing so I was committing a sin–a deadly sin that would jeopardize my
immortal soul as to place it–if such a thing were possible–even beyond the
reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God. (Poe,
“The Black Cat” 225)
Again, Poe employs language which can send a traditional moralist howling
about the wages of sin. But catch the subjunctive, “if such a thing were
possible. ” Poe makes it clear, even in this extreme set of circumstances, that
he does not believe it possible to be beyond the reach of God. In Eureka we
saw why. In that work, Poe portrayed God as manifest in the works of his own
creation. We saw him further declare that all things of the universe contain
“the germ of their inevitable annihilation. ” Speaking through his narrators,”
Poe illustrates perversity as the “germ” of annihilation as it resides in the
human psyche.
But, for now, let us return to the story and witness perversity wreak its havoc.
The night of the day he hanged Pluto, a fire swept through the narrator’s
house. He, his wife, and the servant escaped, but the conflagration completely
destroyed the house; yet one wall had not fallen in. Upon visiting the ruin, the
narrator witnessed in the standing wall, “as if graven in bas relief upon the
white surface, the figure of a gigantic cat… There was a rope about the
animal’s neck. ” (Poe 66) The image of the cat detailed in what had been a
freshly plastered wall profoundly affected the fancies of the narrator.
As if to atone for his actions, the narrator begins a search to adopt a similar
cat, which he finally locates “in a den of more than infamy… reposing on the
head of one of the immense hogsheads of Gin, or of Rum. ” (66) The new cat
is completely black except for an indefinite white splotch on its chest. It follows
him home. At first he likes the cat, for it is quite affectionate. But his attitude
changes; tension builds anew. The tension grows to hatred, caused in part by
the narrator’s discovery that, like Pluto, the new cat has been deprived of an
eye.
The narrator, only because of his terrors about his first cat, restrains himself
from doing the new cat harm. But to his horror, the white patch of fur on his
new cat’s chest gradually assumes the shape of the gallows. The narrator
begins to fancy the cat as the tormentor of his heart, its hot breath in his face.
Perversely, the narrator succumbs entirely to evil thoughts, “hatred of all
things and of all mankind. ” (Poe 68) Finally, one day as the narrator and his
wife descend the steps into their cellar, the cat causes the narrator to lose his
footing.
In turn, the narrator flies into a rage and tries to axe the cat. The wife, trying to
save the life of the cat, catches hold of the axe. Then entirely out of his mind,
the narrator plants the axe in her skull. To avoid detection in his crime, he
bricks his wife into a cellar wall. But the luckless narrator accidentally bricks
the cat into the wall as well. After searching for the dreaded cat, the narrator
concludes that the beast has “in terror, fled the premises forever. ” However,
the fourth day, the police arrive to thoroughly examine the house. They leave
no “nook or corner unexplored. Poe 60) Even upon their third or fourth visit to
the cellar, the narrator remains sublimely calm. Finally satisfied, and preparing
to quit the search, the police are interrupted in their ascension of the stairs by
the triumphant voice of the narrator. “Gentleman,” I said at last… , I delight to
have allayed your suspicions. I wish you all health, and a little more courtesy.
Bye the bye, gentleman, this–this is a very well constructed house. ” [In the
rabid desire to say something easily, I scarcely knew what I uttered at all. ]–“I
may say an excellently constructed house. The walls–are you going,
gentlemen? these walls are solidly put together;” and here, through the mere
phrenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily, with a cane which I held in my hand,
upon that very portion of the brick-work behind which stood the corpse of the
wife of my bosom. No sooner had the reverberations of the striking of the cane
died away, than there issued forth the howl, “a wailing shriek, half of horror
and half of triumph… , such as might have arisen… from the throats of the
damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation. ” The
cat had completed its conquest, revealing the location of the corpse and
consigning the wretch to the gallows.
The final horror of the narrator, his crowning act of perversity, is reminiscent of the
crazed killer of the old man in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” who had succeeded in hiding his
atrocity, only to betray himself in direst effect, again to the police. Later, we shall see a
similar psychological imolation performed by the narrator on himself in “The Imp of the
Perverse. ” “The Black Cat” illustrates many manifestations and vehicles which the perverse
can assume. First the narrator succumbs to alcohol; then the narrators spirit of perversity,
given a foothold in his psyche, causes the eventual decline in his temperament.
As the story progresses, the narrator reaches the point which Poe describes: “With
radical… primitive…. ” Alas, the hapless narrator cannot help himself. As mentioned
previously, a traditional moralist will always be tempted to overlay his own principles on
Poe’s tales, in this story, expostulating the evils of drink, perhaps. And understandably, when
such tenets reside at the core of one’s belief structure, the temptation to perform moral
judgment can be preemptory; yet Poe’s system of mind deserves our efforts to comprehend
his system.
Certainly Poe recognized the lure of alcohol; yet he chose to examine the primitive
cause for the urge, rather than submit to the prescriptions of the moralists of his time. So let
us, too, seek to discern Poe’s intentions. And what of this flailing narrator who possesses
seemingly so little command of his life? He knows that he has violated his own vitality by
removing Pluto’s eye, and by later hanging the cat in the tree. He displays regret for his
actions, a conscience. But what can his conscience constitute in Poe’s system of morality?
And for that matter, what is morality when one leaves God’s intention for man out of the
picture?
IMP
EDGAR ALLAN
POE AND AND THE
RISE OF THE
MODERN CITY
"The Man of the Crowd" was arguably Edgar Allan Poe's
first detective story. It's also one of his strangest.
First published in December 1840, Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd” encapsulates
the mystery and fear that attended the rapid development of cities and the influx of
“strangers.” Though set in London, where Poe had lived as a child and whose density and
growth exceeded those of American cities in 1840, the tale reflects the future shock of mid-
nineteenth-century urban experience generally. For the first third of the story, the narrator,
recuperating from an unnamed illness, sits alone at the “large bow-window” of a coffee
house, watching the parade of pedestrians at the workday’s end. A shrewd taxonomist of
urban types, he identifies the professions and social stations of passersby. The first group
includes “noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen, stock-jobbers . . . men of leisure and
men actively engaged in affairs of their own.” He proceeds down the social ladder, calling
“The tribe of clerks was an obvious one and here I discerned two remarkable
divisions. There were the junior clerks of flash houses [pubs that engaged in various illicit
activities]— young gentlemen with tight coats, bright boots, well-oiled hair, and supercilious
lips. Setting aside a certain dapperness of carriage, which may be termed deskism for want of
a better word, the manner of these persons seemed to me an exact facsimile of what had been
the perfection of bon ton about twelve or eighteen months before. They wore the cast-off
graces of the gentry;—and this, I believe, involves the best definition of the class.” (T 1:508)
The “upper clerks” are similarly identifiable from appearance, as are “gamblers,”
“Jew peddlars,” “sturdy professional street beggars,” “feeble and ghastly invalids,” “modest
young girls,” “women of the town,” “drunkards innumerable and indescribable,” and, finally,
mongers, those who vended with those who sang; ragged artizans and exhausted laborers of
every description, and still all full of a noisy and inordinate vivacity which jarred
discordantly upon the ear, and gave an aching sensation to the eye” (T 1:509–10). This
extraordinary inventory suggests that the city and its inhabitants, however mysterious to the
But the narrator eventually spies an enigmatic old man, and feeling “singularly
aroused, startled, fascinated,” he pursues this “man of the crowd” over the course of an entire
night. The list of emotions and dispositions the man suggests to the narrator (“ideas of vast
so varied, even contradictory, that we might see the man as embodying the crowd, somehow
reflecting its very diversity, and for that reason escaping the narrator’s classification. Indeed,
the defining feature of the man’s movements throughout the night is his effort to
remain within a crowd, as if he could exist nowhere else. Literally, the man of the crowd
might simply be trying to avoid a solitary encounter with the narrator— another “man of the
crowd”—if he realizes he is being followed, but even that precautionary maneuver suggests
that the densely populated city is the water he swims in, that he is perfectly acculturated to his
environment. In fact, he becomes less at ease whenever the crowd thins. Entering a street “not
quite so much thronged as the main one he had quitted,” he “walked more slowly and with
less object than before—more hesitatingly. He crossed and re-crossed the way repeatedly
without apparent aim” (T 1:512). When a bazaar closes for the night and he jostles a
shopkeeper closing his shutter, he shudders (Poe can’t resist the pun), perhaps in fear of
having nowhere to go. But then “he hurried into the street, looked anxiously around him for
an instant, and then ran with incredible swiftness” before melting into a crowded
thoroughfare. If the man is agitated when not in the crowd, he evinces no joy or contentment
upon reuniting with the urban throng; he never smiles, and he speaks to no one.
London, the city that Philadelphia and New York in the 1840s may soon become,
never sleeps, but the all-nighter it offers “the crowd” isn’t much fun. The pursuit of a crowd
through the small hours leads the man, and his pursuer, to the slums, described in terms
similar to those of the Philadelphia Sanitary Commission quoted earlier. Here “every thing
wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime. By
the dim light of an accidental lamp, tall, antique, worm-eaten, wooden tenements were seen
tottering to their fall” (T 1:514). As night turns to day, the narrator can interpret the man only
as “the type and genius of deep crime,” although, aside from his possession of a dagger, he
exhibits no criminal behavior. His unreadability, ultimately the unreadability of the urban
crowd itself, is what terrifies the narrator, who opens the tale with the epigraph “Ce grand
Malheur, de ne pouvoir etre seul” and ends it speculating that “it is but one of the great
mercies of God that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen.’” The French and German, at least, are
translatable—“The great evil, not to be able to be alone,” and “it does not permit itself to be
read”—but, to the narrator, the untranslatable man of the crowd is not only a mystery but also
a horror. Poe seems to have recognized that there was something about the modern city that
could not be explicated. Treasure maps could be decoded and cryptographs could be solved,
but this coded text remained unreadable. In what could reasonably be called Poe’s first
detective story, then, the detective fails: if he’s looking for a crime, he doesn’t find one, and
if he is trying to decode the appearance of the man of the crowd, he concludes by admitting,
From Man of the Crowd to Cybernaut: Edgar Allan Poe’s Transatlantic Journey
—and Back.
Paul Jahshan
https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.2293
Index | Text | Bibliography | Notes | References | About the author
INDEX TERMS
Keywords:
Postmodernism, Don DeLillo, Thomas
Pynchon, Crowd, detective, flâneur, cybernaut, contemporary fiction, nomad, city, Edgar
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and… it seemed that, in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that
‘This old man,’ I said at length, ‘is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses
to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more
of him, nor of his deeds…and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that es lässt
Here a change in his demeanor became evident. He walked more slowly and with less
object than before—more hesitatingly. He crossed and re-crossed the way repeatedly without
apparent aim; and the press was still so thick, that, at every such movement, I was obliged to
1The three short passages above convey three characteristics in Edgar Allan Poe’s
fiction which have proved to be crucial elements in detective fiction from 1840, the date of
publication of “The Man of the Crowd,” until the present day, namely, the detective-as-
physiognomist, the ontological quester, and the flâneur. I will show how these three constants
crossed, as it were, the Atlantic, received from Europe renewed impetus in the shape of a
postmodern sensibility, and then returned to the New World, powerfully shaping the
American detective genre. There, modern and contemporary fiction, most notably that of
Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, and E. L. Doctorow, on the one hand, and
cyberpunk, on the other hand, picked up where Poe had left, added to it, and reached a
culmination in the eventual decentering of Dupin’s original position and the reclaiming of the
flâneur as a new discursive strategy in detective fiction. The new, third-millennium detective
has been endowed with Poesque visitations similar to those encountered, more than a century
and a half earlier, by the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd,” but later acquired a unique
2It is a well-known fact that Poe created the detective story, and critics have been
quick to associate the detective with the flâneur in Poe’s fiction. Gerald Kennedy, in 1975,
described “The Man of the Crowd” as having “long been one of Poe’s most perplexing tales,”
where the protagonist, instead of fleeing his double, like in “William Wilson,” in fact pursues
him. To Kennedy “The Man of the Crowd” marks the beginning of Poe’s “ratiocinative
cycle,” and the humorous “The Oblong Box,” in 1844, marks its end. Kennedy, however, is
just as dismissive about the end as he is about the beginning, and advises his readers to stay
away from both, focussing instead on the more mature Dupin stories in between.
Interestingly, Kennedy’s problem with “The Man of the Crowd” is the narrator’s inability to
understand the rules of investigation later used by Dupin, and his self-delusion.
3But it is precisely this consciously accepted failure by the story’s narrator that has
fueled renewed contemporary interest in Poe’s investigative philosophy and firmly anchored
The ontological problem raised by Poe in “The Man of the Crowd,” his acknowledgment that
it “will be vain to follow,” that no more can be learned from the stranger stalking the streets
in search of an identity amidst the crowd, was to develop later into the metaphysical, the
Poe’s tales, especially those termed “ratiocinative,” and a major focus of interest since
Charles Baudelaire, and later Walter Benjamin, popularized the study of this unique product
of the densely populated urban space. Dana Brand’s The Spectator and the City in
Benjamin, and Keith Tester called the flâneur “a very obscure thing” (qtd in Werner 5).
James Werner took up Benjamin’s view in ascribing the rise of the detective to precisely the
The triumph of societal forces was putting the flâneur to use as detective [… ]The rise
of the detective reflects society’s uneasiness about the flâneur and its pressure to mitigate his
elusiveness. (6)
5Werner firmly links the flâneur with the detective in Poe’s tales, putting flânerie at
the “very heart” of his ratiocinative techniques, and calling “The Man of the Crowd” one of
the “most successful instances of flânerie in Poe” (10). Contrary to what Kennedy and Brand
believed, the narrator in “The Man of the Crowd” and Dupin are, to Werner, one, and the
detective is best seen in Poe as he is engaged in the act of flânerie. Werner is also astute
enough to maintain that the detective and flâneur in Poe make up for the uncanny ability to be
“in the scene yet removed from it” (11), a crucial dichotomy as regards the investigative
6The Poesque detective, ontological quester, and flâneur, have had to go through a
transatlantic “pilgrimage” in order to acquire the much-needed elements which have made
contemporary American detective fiction what it is today. Indeed, much ink (and now
countless digital bytes) has been spilled over the question of Poe’s influence on European
literature and vice-versa. The pull to own Poe has been strong enough to warrant heated
entitled “The Americanism of Edgar Allan Poe,” attempted to show that the elements of
of Poe, despite opinion otherwise. In addition, Poe’s imagery, to Darnall, is deeply rooted in
American history, and harks back to the time of the Puritan Fathers. Conversely, John
Matthew, in 1936, claimed that Poe was not only an influence on French literature, but was
also deeply indebted to it to begin with. Marcel Françon, in 1945, explained Baudelaire’s
“déjà vu” feeling upon encountering Poe by claiming that Poe was initially influenced by
French/European writers like Coleridge, Schelling, Novalis, Mme de Staël, and Balzac. More
recently, Robert Shulman, in “The Artist in the Slammer,” placed Poe with Hawthorne and
Melville in the group of writers who saw America as a prison and looked across the Atlantic
for fulfillment and recognition. Monika M. Elbert, in the opposite camp, was even more vocal
when she said, in the context of “The Man of the Crowd,” that:
There has been a French plot to purloin our American Poe. It is time to bring Poe back
to American soil, to place him in the context of his time, as a representative American man of
7The transatlantic battle to win Poe was, of course, initiated by translations of his
tales into French as early as 1845, with Baudelaire subsequently trying to contact Poe’s first
“secret translator,” Amédée Pichot, for his original sources (Bandy). Such was the interest in
Poe in France that Edith Philips, in 1927, went into the minute tracing of the use of French
words and expressions in the American writer’s tales, and Claire-Eliane Engel, in 1932,
reported on the voluminous state of academic research on Poe in France.2 A decade later,
Dudley R. Hutcherson summed up the heated discussion surrounding Poe’s reputation in
England and America a year after the writer’s death until 1909, delineating the works of
Poe’s moral detractors and defenders. Joseph N. Riddel presented the ambivalence still
existing about Poe and French literature, where, to some, the American writer is a pure
Zimmermann on Poe and Mallarmé, by Reino Virtanen on Poe and Valéry, and by James
Lawler on Poe and the symbolists, are examples of the numerous research done on the
8Of course, Poe’s reputation as the first detective story writer and his influence across
the Atlantic are not restricted to France. Charles Dickens, R. L. Stevenson, Wilkie Collins,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, E. C. Bentley, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie,
and others testify to the popularity of the genre. Robert Ashley, in 1951, traced Poe’s
influence on the British detective story, citing Collins as the link between Poe and Doyle. As
with the French connection above, Poe’s legacy to the British Isles has been adequately
documented.
9If Collins was the link between Poe and the English detective scene, it is
undoubtedly Benjamin who united, with his studies of the flâneur in the Parisian arcades,
Poe’s theme of the crowd with that of the detective and paved the way for the fusion of the
two into an existential questioning that would eventually lead to the postmodern detective.
The flâneur, with Benjamin, is not only the dandy who slides among the city crowds,
observing their features and trying to get at the bottom of their hidden motives; he is also,
by the same token, re-created—by Benjamin, is an observer and an actor in the drama facing
humanity at the dawn of the twentieth century, a drama which, as I will show, shows no sign
of abating even as this humanity is being ushered into yet another era, that of digital
information.
10The narrator-observer in Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” sitting behind the window
of a café and recuperating after some illness, was safely situated in an interior which provided
With a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap, I had been amusing myself for
the greater part of the afternoon, now in poring over advertisements, now in observing the
promiscuous company in the room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the
street. (P 179)
11When the narrator first sees the old man and tries, in vain, to decipher his secret, he
has to leave the interior, his position behind the window-as-screen and go outside, in the
Hurriedly putting on an overcoat, and seizing my hat and cane, I made my way into
the street, and pushed through the crowd in the direction which I had seen him take; for he
12The passage from the interior to the exterior is important to the dialectics of the
The interior is not just the universe but also the étui of the private individual. To dwell
means to leave traces. In the interior, these are accentuated […] Enter the detective story,
which pursues these traces. Poe […] in his detective fiction, shows himself to be the first
13Yet, it is when the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” leaves and moves from the
interior to the exterior that he gradually loses his composure and ultimately plunges into the
unknowability of the crowd, of the exterior, of the unfathomable. Benjamin writes, quoting
delight […] Finally, he rushes into the crowd in search of an unknown person whose face,
glimpsed momentarily, fascinated him. Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion.
(442)
14Poe’s foray into what will be, more than a century later, the common grounds of
postmodernism, will not be repeated, and Dupin is seen to be much more at ease in interiors
than in exteriors. As Peter Schmiedgen remarked, the city is “one of the loci of both hope and
fear within modernity,” and the café, to Benjamin, is the “partial crystallization out of the
ever changing crowd” (47, 50). To the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd,” the exterior was
just a screen to be gazed at, leisurely and safely, a spectacle which could be shut off at will.
The tension between a detection of the interior as detective and a more real exchange in the
exterior as flâneur is probably the central theme of the story. Benjamin states:
It is the gaze of the flâneur, whose way of life still conceals behind a mitigating
nimbus the coming desolation of the big-city dweller […] He [the flâneur] seeks refuge in the
crowd. Early contributions to a physiognomics of the crowd are found in Engels and Poe. The
crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria—
15Benjamin credited Poe with creating “a character who wanders the streets of capital
cities [calling] him the Man of the Crowd” (96). The cityscape is an ambivalent space which
both lures and repels, and it is precisely this space, so daunting to Poe in 1840, which is taken
cyberspace.
16The advent of postmodernism will not only take up where Poe left in awe, but will
also alter classical detective fiction forever, and what is known as the “Ellery Queen
yardstick” for detective fiction, that is, a detective who detects, who is the story’s protagonist,
and who triumphs over the criminal (Ashley 48), will be severely challenged. That this
change took place initially in France before leaving a trail in the rest of the world has been
set out to trace the influence of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and many others on the
intellectual life of the United States. The influence is so pervasive that Cusset himself is
puzzled by the extent of what he sees as an “invasion” (21). What this epochal moment
effected has been the subject of countless studies; briefly put, one can mention the
decentering of authorial voice, the undecidability of meaning, the deferred role of the critic, a
re-evaluation of more than 2,000 years of western philosophy and the premium place it
accorded to an ultimate Signified or Truth, and the realization that all interpretive practice, at
all levels, is a kind of writing, and this writing itself a fictional construct.
17Indeed, William V. Spanos pointed out that if Poe and Doyle were presenting a
comforting view of the universe, postmodern writers like Pynchon were experimenting with
the anti-detective fiction, the antithesis of the positivistic universe with its totalitarian
implications, and thus did their best to subvert the classical notions of plot. What became
known as the “metaphysical” detective novel was the opposite of the classical ratiocinative
tales started by Poe’s Dupin and taken over by Doyle, and the new genre was characterized
by its overt attempts at defeating the previously established “syllogistic order” (Cannon 46).
writes that detection is a metaphor of all reading, and that it “dramatizes the operation
endedness and reader empowerment, was also ready to embrace the newer version of the
flâneur, the Deleuzian nomad moving in the smooth and rhizomatic spaces of the new urban
landscape. In Mille Plateaux, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe the contemporary
nomad:
The nomad has a territory, he follows habitual paths, he goes from one point to
another, he does not ignore points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points)…The
water point is there only to be left, and any point is a relay and exists only as relay […] the
nomad goes from one point to another only as consequence and necessity: in principle the
19Like Poe’s old man in “The Man of the Crowd,” described as moving from one
point in the crowd to another, the nomad-detective-flâneur is content to peregrinate from one
event to another, leading behind him the reader, just as the old man did with the bemused and
then irritated narrator. The difference is that the reader-turned-detective has learned to
20What is also interesting is that the dichotomy between the interior and the exterior,
so acutely felt by Poe in “The Man of the Crowd,” is placed by Deleuze and Guattari in a
The nomad distributes himself in smooth space; he occupies, he lives, he holds this
space, and it becomes his territorial principle. It is thus wrong to define the nomad by
movement […] Of course the nomad moves, but he is sitting, he is never as much moving as
21The narrator behind the café’s window had to move out to pursue his investigation,
but the reader moves with the narrative without moving, just as the cybernaut, in front of the
computer screen, can travel the whole world of data without leaving his/her seat. Reading
becomes nomadic and it is not enough anymore to discover, along with the writer-narrator-
detective, multiple and open-ended meanings, but also to produce them (Briggs), and the
reader becomes engaged in a Barthesian writerliness mirrored by the detective’s own
22The movement from the classical, ratiocinative tales of Poe and Doyle, to the
boiled,” realistic novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, has been vividly
painted, among others, by George Grella, Michael Holquist, and Carl D. Malmgren, and
although a lot has been written on contemporary mystery writers like Pynchon, Auster,
DeLillo, and Doctorow, the link to Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” and to the transatlantic
23Kenneth Kupsch has found Poe overtones in Pynchon’s 1961 novel V., and wrote
that the “V” puzzle is answered in a way which opens up instead of closing the book, and that
readers must be willing to do the legwork, like Stencil, the detective in the novel. More
recently, Daniel Punday explored the Pynchon-Deleuze connection in a similar context. In the
novel, a spy is carrying with him a secret which later becomes the rallying point of different
characters whose stories meet. Pynchon’s flâneur in the crowd is reminiscent of that in Poe’s
story:
effort, curiously without commitment […] those four fat schoolmistresses whinnying softly to
one another by the south portals of the Duomo, that fop in tweeds and clipped mustaches who
came hastening by in fumes of lavender toward God knew what assignation; had they any
notion of what inner magnitudes such control must draw on? (V. 184)
24Four years later, with The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon went deeper into the
interaction between the crowd, the voyeuristic gaze, and the city. As Oedipa Maas tries to
find the post-horn symbol, she goes through the realization that the city is offering itself to
her gaze:
Oedipa played the voyeur and listener. Among her other encounters were a facially-
deformed welder, who cherished his ugliness; a child roaming the night who missed the death
before birth as certain outcasts do the dear lulling blankness of the community; a Negro
woman with an intricately-marbled scar along the baby-fat of one cheek. (Lot 49 85)
25Oedipa’s wanderings in the city leave her at the mercy of an unknown crowd she
thought did not exist, and the realization is enough to transform her as deeply as the narrator
Poesque vein, Auster’s detectives are confronted with the “es lässt sich nicht lesen” (“it does
not let itself be read”) of “The Man of the Crowd.” To William G. Little, the “interminable
wandering,” “re-tracing,” and “perpetual crossing” done by the protagonists of City of Glass,
the first story in the Trilogy, “lead to no final illumination, no climactic discovery” (133-34).
27Not all critics, however, have seen the Poe influence in that way, preferring to see
Dupin as the only embodiment of the detective. John Zilcosky, for example, sees Auster as
simply overturning the classical rules of detective fiction set out by Dupin and disregards the
flâneur-quester side. Yet, New York, to Auster’s detective, Quinn, is a Benjaminesque and
Deleuzian labyrinth:
The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it
kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long […] By
wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was.
(Trilogy 4)
28Quinn’s double is a character taken from Poe, William Wilson, his pseudonym for
writing detective stories, and the mind-boggling shuffling and interchanging taking place in
the Trilogy between real author (Auster), narrator (Quinn), writer (William Wilson), and
persona (Auster, twice), answers what Quinn already knows when he says: “In effect, the
writer and the detective are interchangeable” (Trilogy 9). Quinn is a true nomad writer and
reader, moving from one story to another: “What interested him about the stories he wrote
was not their relation to the world but their relation to other stories” (8). In a passage almost
identical to Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” Quinn searches the crowd in a train station for
Peter Stillman, the old man supposedly come back to New York to kill his son, also named
Peter Stillman:
Soon the people were surging around him […] Quinn watched them all, anchored to
his spot, as if his whole being had been exiled to his eyes […] he rapidly shifted his
expectations with each new face, as if the accumulation of old men was heralding the
imminent arrival of Stillman himself. For one brief instant Quinn thought, “So this is what
detective work is like.” But other than that he thought nothing. (Trilogy 66)
29Almost ten years later, Auster’s Oracle Night evinced this same preoccupation. The
narrator, a writer who writes about writers is, like the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd,”
recovering from a long illness and, as the story starts, is out among the crowds:
I had lived in New York all my life, but I didn’t understand the streets and crowds
anymore, and every time I went out on one of my little excursions, I felt like a man who had
lost his way in a foreign city […] I drifted along like a spectator in someone else’s dream,
watching the world as it chugged through its paces and marveling at how I had once been like
the fascination found in observing and detecting individual traits in the crowd. The Poesque
There are still more couples coming out of the runway and folding into the crowd,
although “crowd” is not the right word…there are curiosity seekers scattered about, ordinary
slouchers and loiterers, others deeper in the mystery, dark-eyed and separate, secretly alert,
people who seem to be wearing everything they own, layered and mounded in garments with
missing parts, city nomads more strange […] than herdsmen in the Sahel. (4)
31The reporter’s lens serves, in Mao II, the same function as the window in “The Man
Crowds […] People trudging along wide streets, pushing carts or riding bikes, crowd
after crowd in the long lens of the camera so they seem even closer together than they really
are, totally jampacked…Totally calm in the long lens, crowd on top of crowd. (70)
32DeLillo goes a step further in Cosmopolis and has his protagonist, the “multi-
billionaire” Eric Packer, move around Manhattan in an armored car, where he conducts actual
meetings, listens to reports from his counselors, and even has a medical checkup. As Packer
begins his day, he is connected to a bevy of data-displaying units, ranging from the stock
nomad, Packer is moving around the city without moving, his mobile office going wherever
he is. Yet Packer’s isolation, like that of his staff, will in the course of the novel lead him to
reconsider his priorities, until the final confrontation which will take place in “real life.” In
the meantime, Packer is mesmerized by the power he has, from the cameras placed in his car
physical will of the city, the ego fevers, the assertions of industry, commerce and crowds
33The world as seen from behind the screen is a source of pleasure and power but, as
DeLillo shows at the end, also provides a false sense of security. As the plot unfolds,
however, Packer intermittently crosses from his interior to the exterior and mingles with
others, albeit sporadically. Near the end of the novel, Packer comes across a film shooting
taking place in the middle of the street with “three hundred naked people sprawled in the
street” (Cosmopolis 172). It is clear that Packer’s initial shock at seeing so much exposed
flesh is due to a violation of the machine-like nature of the interior, the false safety of the
window/screen/monitor, and an invitation to step out, like the narrator of “The Man of the
It tore his mind apart, trying to see them here and real, independent of the image on a
screen in Oslo or Caracas […] He wanted to set himself in the middle of the intersection,
among the old with their raised veins and body blotches and next to the dwarf with a bump on
34It is this Benjaminesque mapping of life over the Poesque city streets that also
informs Doctorow’s City of God. The streets are not empty, however, and the narrator, in this
on the metaphysical nature of the crowd and the need to walk and immerse oneself among
But I can stop on any corner at the intersection of two busy streets, and before me are
thousands of lives headed in all four directions, uptown downtown east and west, on foot, on
bikes, on in-line skates, in buses, strollers, cars, trucks, with the subway rumble underneath
my feet […] For all the wariness or indifference with which we negotiate our public spaces,
world” because he felt, like DeLillo above, and like Poe a century and a half earlier, that the
big city, a construct of stone, steel, and glass, is set, maybe indefinitely, to compete with the
flesh. What cannot let itself be read, as in Poe’s phrase, is the crowd’s ultimate fleshiness, the
undecidability and unknowingness of the human mind. Mapped onto the city-scape, the
detective/reader has to leave the prison of the interior and stalk, flâneur-like, the uncertain
36It will come as no surprise, then, that with the advent of the “new technologies” and
their attending concepts of simulation and virtual reality, the dichotomy between the interior
and the exterior, so prevalent in Poe, Benjamin, and the postmodern detective, becomes more
acutely felt. As Lawrence Frank said in the context of Poe’s detective tales, the appearance of
new genres takes place when historical circumstances need it. Likewise, the appearance of
the cyber-detective-flâneur has followed the development of the “new technologies,” and its
best representation has been cyberpunk. Steffen Hantke wrote that Poe’s “close association
with the beginnings of science fiction alone secures him a place in the genealogy of
steampunk” (247), and Paul C. Grimstad not only reiterated Poe’s position as the inventor of
the analytical detective story, but also as the writer who laid the groundwork for cyberpunk
writers like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, also tracing Gibson’s debt to
Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Others, like Randy Schroeder, have dubbed Pynchon the
postmodernism, particularly the French flavor of it, has been set by Cusset:
The science fiction genre itself has made way to French theory […] With the pioneer
of the genre, William Gibson—who invented in 1982 the term “cyberspace”—they are many
famous novelists who associate themselves with French authors. Often quoting Deleuze or
Baudrillard in their interviews, they are read by their critics, or by their learned fans, through
the prism of the simulacrum or, as metaphor of the Net, of the “body without organs” […]
37Gibson’s landmark novel, Neuromancer, set the tone in 1984 for the new genre of
cyberpunk and its close cousin, steampunk. Gibson’s characters, in what will be a trilogy
Jason Haslam as having a “retro-future feel,” where “space-age computer technology co-
exists with grime, filth, and […] an all-encompassing urban decay, characterized by Gibson
as ‘The Sprawl’” (Haslam 93). The futuristic city is crowded, on one level, with people and,
on another level, with the exchange of data making up the daily business of mega-companies,
a traffic of flesh and information. The city crowds, as in Poe’s story, are made of shoppers
who stroll in search of goods to buy: “Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like
windblown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification”
(Gibson 60).
38As Werner remarked, the danger for the flâneur is “of being reduced to the status of
observation, in the Arcades Project, that the flâneur’s “final ambit is the department store”
(448). Yet, when Case, Gibson’s protagonist, “jacks in” to his holodeck and plunges into
cyberspace, he is stepping into a space which is neither the interior nor the exterior of
everyday reality. His trip transports him into a virtual space which combines both the
legitimate operators, in every nation” (Gibson 67). Benjamin, in the Arcades, called Poe’s
and, on the other side, the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man. Presumably, it
39Stephenson takes the simulatory nature of the crowd a step further in Snow Crash,
where he envisions cyberspace as a huge virtual construct called the “Street.” As Hiro, the
protagonist, puts on his VR goggles, he feels at home in the construct and leisurely walks the
heavily crowded but simulated urban spaces. As on the streets of London in Poe’s “The Man
of the Crowd,” the “Street” in Snow Crash is also the rallying place of the stranger, the
character who observes, but here as if twice removed from what is being observed, shielded
twice, first by the interiority of his location in real space, second by his mingling in the
virtual crowd:
[H]e can see all of the people in the front row of the crowd with perfect clarity […]
persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap public terminals, and who are
rendered in jerky, grainy black and white. A lot of these are run-of-the-mill psycho fans […]
they can’t even get close in Reality, so they goggle into the Metaverse to stalk their prey. (38)
40The detective-as-stalker is also one of the main themes in Greg Bear’s 1990 Queen
of Angels, where LAPD police officer and detective, Mary Choy, is stalking the elusive
psychopath killer Emanuel Goldsmith. In the course of her investigation, she has to go to the
island of Hispaniola and is involved in another case. In the meantime, Goldsmith is found and
two researchers enter his brain, inside what they call the “Country of the Mind,” in a
simulation to trace the source of Goldsmith’s evil inclinations. Expectedly, the landscape
In their movement and bustle, the inhabitants had very little real individuality. Their
than impressionistic; Martin and Carol truly felt themselves alone in this crowd. (357)
41The researchers, simulated detectives of the mind, are once again facing the
unknown and, as the story unfolds, fail to “read” the killer’s mind. In fact, they end up being
42It is, indeed, with cyberspace that the full potential of Poe’s “The Man of the
Crowd” was to be unleashed:after having traveled across the Atlantic and back, the new
cyber-detective, in the guise of the cybernaut, can stalk the vast digital reaches as a true
Deleuzian nomad. From behind a screen, the cyber-flâneur lurks among the other visible yet
invisible cybernauts, safely ensconced behind an anonymity of person, class, position, and
gender.4 As soon as the cybernaut logs in, he/she is instantly transported to a twilight region
which is neither the interior nor the exterior, a region which, as in Poe’s “The Man of the
Crowd,” is teeming with different people, nay, with different cultures, tongues, and traditions
Featherstone called a “data city” (911), vastly outnumbers any city on earth in diversity and
range of experience, and cyber-flâneurs can choose to invisibly stalk—if they have the
technological know-how—the digital polis or, on the contrary, to engage in the exchange of
data or consumer goods. If what brought the original flâneur to his end was, according to
Benjamin, Parisian motor traffic and if, as Susan Buck-Morss aptly said, today’s would-be
flâneurs, “like tigers or pre-industrial tribes,” are indeed “cordoned off on reservations,
preserved within the artificially created environments of pedestrian streets, parks, and
underground passageways” (102), could virtual reality be the flâneur’s ultimate revenge?
43Yet is it really the case? Michael Dibdin, in his detective novel Blood Rain, has his
protagonist’s daughter discover, upon setting up a network for the special police, a “virtual
draught,” a “flaw in cyberspace, a seepage of information from the system,” felt “almost
physically,” like a “malaise” (42). Later on, just before she is killed, her laptop displays the
culmination of The Man of the Crowd’s transatlantic voyage and back, or is it still the same
angst experienced by Poe which really comes from the inside and masquerades as otherwise?
Is this virtual city the locus, once again, of that ever-present and also ever-increasing danger
of turning human flesh into what is worse that machines, into data bits?
44Poe’s legacy, particularly that of “The Man of the Crowd,” is as strong and as
relevant as ever. As the creator of the detective story, Poe was courageous enough to peer
into the theoretical abyss which would be soon slowly building up after the demise of
positivism at the end of the nineteenth century. Fortified by those other daring minds of the
quester went far beyond Dupin’s initial apprehensions, and came back to occupy
Cyberneticus with the tools needed to deal with the bewildering changes ahead.
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NOTES
1 All references to Poe will be indicated by “P” followed by the page number.
2 Works in French have been translated by me.
3 Edgar Lawrence Doctorow’s father, a fervent admirer of Poe, named his son after
him (Schama).
structuralism like Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, Baudrillard, and others, was being uncannily
translated onto the silicon chip and later, given the unprecedented development in computer
power, onto the Internet. One of the first experiments involving the digital reader-as-detective
was interactive fiction (IF), also known as text-based adventures. Willie Crowther’s
pioneering game, simply called “Adventure,” was soon followed by more sophisticated IF
games, many of them, interestingly, of the detective type, like Infocom’s “Deadline,”
(subtitled “A locked door. A dead man. And 12 hours to solve the murder”) (1981) “The
Witness,” (1983) “Suspect,” (1984) “Moonmist,” (1986) and “Sherlock: The Riddle of the
Crown Jewels,” (1988) all complete with manuals, blueprints, transcripts, and other familiar
detective paraphernalia. IF kept the classical ingredients of the detective story, but added the
player as detective with unparalleled freedom of choice and action. For more on this
interaction and the empowerment of the reader/player becoming a digital flâneur, see
Anthony J. Niesz and Norman N. Holland, as well as their parallels between Pynchon’s