In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reading, Begging, Paul de Man Jan Mieszkowski The opening sentence of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘The Man of the Crowd’’ cryptically informs us: ‘‘It was well said of a certain German book that ‘es lässt sich nicht lesen’—it does not permit itself to be read,’’ a pronouncement that returns in the final sentence of the story when the narrator concludes his comments on the ‘‘worst heart’’ in the world with: ‘‘Es lässt sich nicht lesen.’’1 The reading pursued in the tale framed by these two lines certainly has its share of difficulties. The narrator sits in a London coffeehouse, contemplating the crowd on the street. At first able to classify the people he sees, subsuming each one under a type (clerk, gambler, beggar), he is eventually confronted with a unique countenance that ‘‘at once arrested and absorbed [his] whole attention on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression’’ (183). Almost immediately, he recasts this singular appearance as the external manifestation of an internal text: ‘‘‘How wild a history,’ I said to myself, ‘is written within that bosom!’’’ (184). In an effort to read the physiognomy of this enigmatic man and the soul that lies within, the narrator gets up and follows his prey on a walk through the night and into the next morning. Perseverance, however, is not rewarded . No incident that might somehow clarify the inclinations or intentions of this extraordinary personage ever takes place, and ultimately, the project has to be abandoned. It is from the standpoint of this explanatory29 30 Jan Mieszkowski event-that-wasn’t that ‘‘The Man of the Crowd’’ begins with the narrator ’s declaration that there are ‘‘secrets which do not permit themselves to be told,’’ ‘‘mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed’’ (179; emphasis in the original). As the narrator and his object of inquiry travel in tandem through the crowded streets of London, it gradually dawns on us that either one of them may rightly lay claim to the title ‘‘man of the crowd.’’ In trying (and failing) to read the stranger, the narrator has to come to terms with what it means to read, or not to be able to read, his own bosom. In a story that begins and ends with a reflexive construction about a book that does not permit itself to be read, the possibility that the Other may turn out to be oneself neither confirms nor denies the authority of self-consciousness as much as it forces us to ask whether the inability to read—either one’s own bosom or the countenance of a stranger on the street—is itself legible. In other words, does this allegory of unreadability permit itself to be read, and if so, in what respect, if any, is something genuinely unreadable in play? The problem is already evident in the first sentence of the story, in which the citation of a remark in German—‘‘es lässt sich nicht lesen’’—is followed by a dash that evidently introduces a translation of the preceding words: ‘‘It does not permit itself to be read.’’ Superficially, the construction inspires confidence, providing us with an English version of the original so that we can understand the sentence about a book that will not permit itself to be read even if we are not acquainted with the German language and the nuances of the reflexive sich lassen. But is it clear what it means to say that Poe’s own sentence does or does not permit itself to be read? If one cannot in some minimal sense decode the German, then one does not actually read the first part of the sentence; rather, one glosses the proposition as an undecipherable clause, the meaning of which may never be clarified. At the same time, this obscurity does not constitute an insurmountable obstacle. Just as one need not know precisely which ‘‘certain German book’’ Poe is referring to in order to proceed to the second paragraph and beyond—again, we do not learn the identity of this book until the story’s last sentence—so one does not need to be able to decipher every word or phrase to make headway with the tale. If absolute lucidity were the standard for progress, then many readers would presumably never make it past the epigraph in French from La Bruyère (for which no translation is provided). In this respect, we could say that the...

Share