Allan Poe Man of Crowd

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Best known for his poems and short fiction, Edgar Allan Poe deserves more

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

certain minds, under certain conditions, it [perversity] becomes absolutely irresistible…

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

attention to visible clues:

“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,

“pie-men, porters, coal-heavers, sweeps; organ-grinders, monkey-exhibiters and ballad

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

uninitiated, are decipherable, like a cryptographer’s alphabet of arbitrarily selected symbols.

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

mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-

thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense—of supreme despair”) is

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,

gratefully, that it can’t be done.

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

Allan Poe, Paul Auster, Greg Bear, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Michael Dibdin, E. L.

Doctorow, William Gibson, Félix Guattari, Neal Stephenson.

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The wild effects of the light enchained me to an examination of individual faces;

and… it seemed that, in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that

brief interval of a glance, the history of long years. (Poe 183)1

‘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

sich nicht lesen. (P 188)

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

follow him closely. (P 184-85)

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

status made only possible by the transatlantic journey.

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

his descendents in a long metaphysical tradition, culminating in postmodernism and beyond.

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

postmodern, and finally the cybernaut investigator.

4The flâneur, a creation of early nineteenth-century Paris, is a recurring element in

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

Nineteenth-Century American Literature focussed on Poe’s detective flâneur and on Walter

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

creation of the flâneur, writing:

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

flânerie of the cybernaut.

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

discussions on both sides of the Atlantic. As early as 1927, F. M. Darnall, in an article

entitled “The Americanism of Edgar Allan Poe,” attempted to show that the elements of

Americanism, namely, idealism, romance, and individualism, are outstanding characteristics

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

the mid-nineteenth century. (16)

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

French creation, whereas, to others, he invented symbolist poetics. Studies by Eleonore

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

American writer’s influence on the French symbolists.

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,

according to Rolf J. Goebel, the “personification of geographic dislocation, cultural

transgression, and conceptual reconfiguration” (378). As such, the flâneur, envisioned—and,

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

him with all the amenities of seclusion:

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

midst of the very crowd he had been observing:

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

had already disappeared. (P 184)

12The passage from the interior to the exterior is important to the dialectics of the

detective as flâneur. Benjamin writes, in The Arcades Project:

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

physiognomist of the domestic interior. (9)

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

Baudelaire on Poe’s story:


From behind the window of a café, a convalescent, contemplating the crowd with

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—

now a landscape, now a room. (10)

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

up and exorcized in contemporary American detective fiction and in the treatment of

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

acknowledged by most historians of thought. François Cusset, in French Theory, admirably

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).

As mentioned above in the context of the innovations of postmodernism, JoAnn Cannon

writes that detection is a metaphor of all reading, and that it “dramatizes the operation

performed by the reader of all texts” (46).

18The classical detective’s panoply, enriched with postmodernism’s legacy of open-

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

points are to him relays in a trajectory. (471)

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

understand—and to enjoy—the seemingly meaningless meanderings of the text.

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

more definable rapport:

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

when he is sitting (the galloping bedouin). (472)

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

ramblings in the textual spaces of the city.

22The movement from the classical, ratiocinative tales of Poe and Doyle, to the

“aristocrat/gentlemanly” thriller of manners of Bentley, Christie and Sayers, to the “hard-

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

metamorphosis needs to be more firmly anchored.3

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:

He watched the tourists gaping at the Campanile; he watched dispassionately without

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

of “The Man of the Crowd.”

26The metaphysical/postmodern detective was first clearly identified in Auster’s

1985 New York Trilogy. As Steven E. Alford pointed out, Auster’s characters in

the Trilogy face the constant deferral of knowing themselves, an ontological problem

reflected in the impossibility of solving, satisfactorily, all detective investigations. In true

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 people around me. (1-2)


30The unknown also lurks in DeLillo’s Mao II, where the narrator vividly describes

the fascination found in observing and detecting individual traits in the crowd. The Poesque

and Deleuzian “bedouin” allusions are obvious:

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

of the Crowd,” shielding yet revealing at the same time:

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

exchange rates to TV news, to surveillance cameras placed in strategic places. As a futuristic

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

or from behind his coated windows, of watching others watching crowds:


These were scenes that normally roused him, the great rapacious flow, where the

physical will of the city, the ego fevers, the assertions of industry, commerce and crowds

shape every anecdotal moment. (41)

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

Crowd,” onto the exterior spaces, an invitation he decides to accept:

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

his head […] He was one of them. (176)

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

novel featuring a priest-detective with a degree in divinity-detective, “D.D.,” pauses to reflect

on the metaphysical nature of the crowd and the need to walk and immerse oneself among

them, like the old man in “The Man of the Crowd”:

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,

we rely on the masses around us to delineate ourselves. (11)

35Doctorow describes crowds as “the most spectacular phenomenon in the unnatural

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

reaches of the human text.

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

“grand-daddy” of Stephenson’s Snow Crash (89). The link between cyberpunk and

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” […]

We are here indeed in the realm of theoretical science fiction. (269)

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

including Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), move in a world described by

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

passive window-shopper or consumer” (6), obviously referring to Benjamin’s sad

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

observer and the observed, a “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of

legitimate operators, in every nation” (Gibson 67). Benjamin, in the Arcades, called Poe’s

interior/exterior dichotomy the “dialectic of flânerie”:


[O]n one side, the man who feels himself viewed by all and sundry as a true suspect

and, on the other side, the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man. Presumably, it

is this dialectic that is developed in ‘The Man of the Crowd’” (420).

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

visited is that of a city:

In their movement and bustle, the inhabitants had very little real individuality. Their

images conveyed a blur of color, a flash of indistinct limb or clothing, an instant of


expression like a hastily applied cutout from a photo gallery of faces. The effect was more

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

infected themselves, in tune with the original Poe-Benjamin dialectic of gazing.

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

of bewildering and previously unheard-of variety. Cyberspace, as metropolis, what Mike

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

words: “FATAL ERROR MESSAGE! THIS COMPUTER HAS PERFORMED AN

ILLEGAL OPERATION AND WILL BE SHUT DOWN” (148). Is cyberspace 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

mid-twentieth century across the Atlantic, Poe’s concept of the flâneur-detective-ontological

quester went far beyond Dupin’s initial apprehensions, and came back to occupy

contemporary American fiction, ultimately providing twenty-first-century Homo

Cyberneticus with the tools needed to deal with the bewildering changes ahead.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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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).

4 Within a decade, most of what had been advanced by theoreticians of post-

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

stories-within-stories and the immersive capabilities of these “new technologies.”

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