STUDIES IN MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS edited by William E.Cain Wellesley College A ROUTLEDGE SERIES STUDIES IN MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS WILLIAM E.CAIN, General Editor DELICATE PURSUIT Discretion in Henry James and Edith Wharton Jessica Levine GERTRUDE STEIN AND WALLACE STEVENS The Performance of Modern Consciousness Sara J.Ford LOST CITY Fitzgerald’s New York Lauraleigh O’Meara SOCIAL DREAMING Dickens and the Fairy Tale Elaine Ostry PATRIARCHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS Sexual Politics in Selected Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy Joanna Devereux A NEW MATRIX FOR MODERNISM A Study of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham Nelljean McConeghey Rice WHO READS ULYSSES? The Rhetoric of the Joyce Wars and the Common Reader Julie Sloan Brannon NAKED LIBERTY AND THE WORLD OF DESIRE Elements of Anarchism in the Work of D.H.Lawrence Simon Casey THE MACHINE THAT SINGS Modernism, Hart Crane, and the Culture of the Body Gordon Tapper T.S. ELIOT’S CIVILIZED SAVAGE Religious Eroticism and Poetics Laurie J.MacDiarmid THE CARVER CHRONOTOPE Inside the Life-World of Raymond Carver’s Fiction G.P.Lainsbury THIS COMPOSITE VOICE The Role of W.B.Yeats in James Merrill’s Poetry Mark Bauer iii PROGRESS AND IDENTITY IN THE PLAYS OF W.B.YEATS Barbara A.Seuss CONRAD’S NARRATIVES OF DIFFERENCE Not Exactly Tales for Boys Elizabeth Schneider GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND VICTORIAN CATHOLICISM Jill Muller THE ARTISTRY AND TRADITION OF TENNYSON’S BATTLE POETRY J.Timothy Lovelace JAMES JOYCE AND THE PERVERSE IDEAL David Cotter IN THE SHADOWS OF DIVINE PERFECTION Derek Walcott’s Omeros Lance Callahan ELIZABETH STODDARD AND THE BOUNDARIES OF VICTORIAN CULTURE Lynn Mahoney GEORGE ORWELL, DOUBLENESS, AND THE VALUE OF DECENCY Anthony Stewart AMERICAN FLANEUR The Cosmic Physiognomy of Edgar Allan Poe James V.Werner ROUTLEDGE New York & London Published in 2004 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE Copyright © 2004 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go towww.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Werner, James V., 1962– American flaneur: the cosmic physiognomy of Edgar Allan Poe/ by James V.Werner. p. cm.—(Studies in major literary authors; v. 33) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-415-96977-8 (Print Edition) (Hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849—Fictional works. 2. Detective and mystery stories, American—History and criticism. 3. Fantasy fiction, American—History and criticism. 4. Horror tales, American—History and criticism. 5. City and town life in literature. 6. Point-of-view (Literature) 7. Flaneurs in literature. I. Title. II. Series. 813′.3—dc22 2003018836 Printed on acid-free, 250 year-life paper Manufactured in the United States of America ISBN 0-203-49282-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-58029-X (Adobe eReader Format) For Janine and Jason Contents Preface viii Chapter One The Physiognomy of the Flaneur 1 Chapter Two Neither In nor Out of the Market 21 Chapter Three The Sacred Fury of the Cosmic Flaneur 46 Chapter Four Physiognomic Revelation 73 Chapter Five Reading the Perfect Plot 98 Notes 119 Works Cited 129 Index 133 Preface In “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” theorist Walter Benjamin refers to Edgar Allan Poe as a “physiognomist,” of both the private interior and the public urban crowd, within a discussion of the flaneur —the strolling observer of the nineteenth-century city. Benjamin alludes in his essay to Charles Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life,” which also links Poe to the flaneur. A full examination of what these two seminal writers and thinkers meant by connecting Poe with the flaneur has not been attempted to date, and is the aim of the present study. In the first chapter, the flaneur’s various historical manifestations and the most notable literary and theoretical interpretations of flanerie are considered, from Parisian pamphlets in the first decade of the nineteenth century, to the writings of Baudelaire and Benjamin, to theoretical works at the turn of the millennium. Many scholars of the flaneur have suggested that his approach to urbanity was nostalgic and utopian, and that his spectatorial perspective had limited usefulness in the face of encroaching capitalism. Benjamin himself, who devoted more attention to the flaneur than any other literary theorist, stresses the inevitability of his demise. Dana Brand, in The Spectator in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, suggests that the flaneur was most significant for Poe as a precursor to his detective Dupin, a modern observer more capable of negotiating the city’s increasingly congested, complex and violent nature. This study asserts that the flaneur exerted a greater influence on Benjamin than even he himself recognized; furthermore, the flaneur registered a profound impact on Poe that may be discerned not only in tales like “The Man of the Crowd” and the Dupin stories, but throughout much of his fiction, as well as Eureka (his cosmogony and “prose-poem”). In fact, the flaneur’s approach is as central for Poe’s fictional and philosophical aims as it was for Baudelaire and Benjamin, though in markedly different ways. Like Benjamin’s flaneur, Poe was a liminal participant, “neither in nor out” of his magazine marketplace, crafting literary commodities even as he satirized fugitive genres. Like Baudelaire’s “painter of the passing moment,” Poe found within such ephemeral forms—including literary flanerie—opportunities to apprehend eternal truths. Flanerie’s uneasy blend of intimacy and ambivalence characterizes Poe’s relationship to many of the burgeoning intellectual and economic enterprises of his time. This study joins other recent scholarly works in arguing that Poe was not (as he has too often been cast) a cultural anomaly, out of step with his time and place, but was thoroughly grounded in a specific historical and cultural moment, and a particular literary tradition. As always, though, Poe offers resistance—and brings innovation—to these contexts, thereby transforming them. Poe was first and foremost a magazinist, and the magazine is a medium that encourages the flaneur’s desultory intellectual browsing. Therefore, even aside from his familiarity with the tradition of the literary flaneur (which Brand and others have firmly established), Poe’s connection to flanerie is perforce a close one. My second chapter focuses initially on the urban culture of display Benjamin examines in “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” and utilizes Marxist theories of commodification to investigate how the ix nineteenth-century periodical figured in American urban culture. After considering the magazine as a physical artifact, I discuss literary commodification in terms of genre, especially the genre of literary flanerie itself. By the 1840s, Poe’s most productive period, the typical productions of the literary flaneur—his panoramic cityscapes and comforting physiologies of character “types”—had become transparent conventions of a fantasy with little credibility. Poe’s comic grotesques reveal his aversion to the production of literary commodities, including the magazinist-flaneur’s, even as he generated them for his own survival. But Poe also demonstrates how the flaneur’s methods provided an observational perspective for reading and understanding not only the individual face, but the private interior, the city, the world, even the cosmos. Poe’s unique application of flanerie therefore represents a central element in his bid for participation in American science during its formative stages. At a time when the parameters of scientific knowledge and activity were being discussed (particularly in general interest magazines), Poe argued for a science that was instinctive, holistic, and aesthetic as well as analytical—a science based on the principles of flanerie. Chapter Three focuses on Poe’s attempt to displace the “professional scientist” with the intuitive artist, the brilliantly casual observer of external appearances—the cosmic flaneur. Poe’s scientific contributions are viewed within the context of an ongoing discussion about science and its methodologies in the North American Review and other general interest periodicals of the time. Poe’s Eureka and his “science fiction” are then analyzed, revealing Poe’s application of the flaneur’s random and indirect observation, his emphasis on the superficiality of truth, his manipulation of inductive and deductive processes, and his aesthetic sensibility, to enact a reading of the cosmic physiognomy. If in Eureka Poe brings flanerie to science, in his fiction he dramatizes not only flanerie’s potential revelations in urban as well as natural settings, but also its limitations and even dangers. In my fourth and fifth chapters, I examine how Poe’s narrators perform a physiognomy of faces, interiors, cities, landscapes and seascapes, employing the flaneur’s “sidelong glance” visually and intellectually, and capitalizing on the flaneur’s sense of the flexible and reciprocal (rather than fixed and oppositional) relation of “inside” to “outside.” Poe’s narrators struggle to find an equipoise between detached observation and sensory immersion in their environments. Their oblique thinking and groping experiential logic allows them to glimpse the beauty—and the horror—of metaphysical insight in brief, incomplete and possibly fatal readings of urban labyrinths, and natural topographic figures like vortices and crevices. While Poe projects flanerie onto a cosmic scale, stressing the dialectical nature of the inner/outer binary and the porosity of personal, natural and architectural interiors, it becomes clear that the generic flaneur’s promise of an easy and absolute legibility is indeed a fraud. The fault (if it be such) lies not in the flaneur’s perspective, but in the nature of the world-text itself, a book that “does not permit itself to be read” (as Poe writes in “The Man of the Crowd”). Humanity exists within the recesses of the world’s physiognomic text, and any interpretation is therefore doomed to be incomplete. Yet the most perceptive reading is offered by the observant artist who, like the flaneur, can draw on both aspects of Dupin’s “bi-part soul,” the analytic and the aesthetic, discerning and delineating the tantalizing revelations and persistent mystery of the cosmos. Poe’s flanerie is not the breezy urban fantasy that Benjamin dismissed as being naive and “of perfect bonhomie,” but an observational technique that yields profoundly unsettling peripheral glimpses of the world’s metaphysical underpinnings. My thanks go out to a number of people who helped bring this book into existence. I owe a great debt to Professors Joan Richardson, William Kelly and David Reynolds at The City University of New York Graduate School and University Center, for their wisdom and guidance in shaping this work as a dissertation. Much of the material in Chapter Three appeared originally in the form of two articles: “Ground-Moles and Cosmic Flaneurs: Poe, Humboldt and 19th-Century Science” in The Edgar Allan Poe Review (Spring 2002), and “Bringing Down Holy Science: The North American Review and Jacksonian Scientific Inquiry” in