American Flaneur: The Cosmic Physiognomy of Edgar Allan Poe (Studies in Major Literaryauthors, 33)

148 Pages·2004·1.21 MB·English

by  James Werner

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