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Mass Movements: “The Man of the Crowd” At the beginning of “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) the narrator is in the state of mind against which Poe’s tales are directed. He is subject to that mode of distracted receptivity to “worldly interests” that the ideal short story would absorb into an “hour of perusal” during which “the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control,” a period of “no external or extrinsic inXuences—resulting from weariness or interruption.”1 It is thus Wtting that this narrator is reading, not a novel, which is the immediate target of the critical remarks just cited, but a newspaper: “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 the advertisements, now in observing the promiscuous company in the room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the street.”2 This state of distracted amusement is rapidly converted into one of absorption in the tale. With the lighting of the lamps, the narrator reports, “I gave up, at length, all care of things within the hotel, and became absorbed in contemplation of the scene without” (MC 108). What follows in this passage, as “observations ” proceed from a “generalizing turn” to particular “details” of the types identiWed in the crowd, is the very portrait of Cartesian absorption: were it not for the analogous instance of human beings passing on in the street below, as observed from a window. In this case I do not fail to say that I see the men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax; and yet what do I see from the window beyond hats and cloaks that might cover artiWcial machines, whose motions might be determined by springs? But I judge that there are human beings from these appearances, and thus I comprehend, by the faculty of judgment alone which is in the mind, what I believed I saw with my eyes.3 Like the “I” of this passage from the Metaphysical Meditations, Poe’s narrator takes in a street scene in order to absorb himself in a stabilizing process of self-consciousness. In the passage from Descartes, doubtful sense-perceptions of hats and coats are overcome by the certitude of the thinking or “judging” subject, a subject that secures itself and its objects or representations through a process of reXexivity.4 In the absence of such a process, man threatens to become a specter, a counterfeit man Chapter 1 Distraction in America: Paper, Money, Poe (un homme feint)—in Descartes’s Latin, an automaton—a machine, not in the Cartesian sense of an end-oriented, purposeful mechanism (like the human body), but in the post-Romantic sense of a merely mechanical, inorganic apparatus.5 The process of self-securing reXexivity is already underway when the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” introduces himself in the tale: “Not long ago, about the closing in of an evening in autumn, I sat at the large bow window of the D— Coffee House in London. For some months I had been ill in health, but was now convalescent , and, with returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui” (MC 108). Thus the narrator’s distracted receptivity becomes an occasion for self-recovery, convalescence. And this is precisely the action set in motion as the narrator , like the Cartesian “I,” gazes out the window at the men passing in the street. This process is of course brought to a halt by the appearance of “the man of the crowd.” And yet the narrator also describes this interruption in terms of absorption: the “countenance” of the strange man “at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention” (MC 112). The absorption is now, however, of a different order. For, whereas taking in the crowd followed the Cartesian model of self-securing reXexivity, each “glance” reXecting back to the narrator the “returning strength” of his “peculiar mental state” (MC 108; 111), the man of the crowd refuses to be taken in. What is so absorbing in this Wgure, what makes the narrator “aroused, startled, fascinated,” is a sense of overwhelming narrative possibility: “‘How wild a history,’ I said to myself, ‘is written within that bosom!’” (MC 112). The man of the crowd promises, then, the kind of absorption for which Poe’s stories aim—the absorption of...

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