Edgar Allan Poe's Fear of Texts: "The Man of the Crowd" as Literary Monster

Poe introduces his story "The Man of the Crowd" with two epigrams in three languages: "Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul" [Such a great misfortune, not to be able to be alone],¹ and "It was well said of a certain German book that 'er lasst sich nicht lesen'—it does not permit itself to be read" (Tales 388). The story that follows is a first-person account of the narrator's effort to pursue and apprehend a man whose "idiosyncrasy of expression" (392) has caught the narrator's attention from its place within a crowd of Londoners. In the end, "wearied unto death" (396), the narrator abandons his efforts to interpret the man, declaring him to be among those texts whose secrets hold "the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed" (388).

The concept of a text resistant to interpretation appears in many of Poe's tales via the trope of an unreadable text; unreadable because it is either missing or has disappeared, is of mysterious provenance, or is a cryptogram.² In the case of "The Man of the Crowd," Poe considers how a text might be incomprehensible because it is in a foreign or non-existent language. What I hope to show is that, for Poe, the foreign text is illustrative of certain interpretive problems inherent in reading and writing. Specifically, intertextuality and interlinguistics characterize the unreadability of the Man of the Crowd insofar as he is compared to a German book. These two phenomena are among the elements that, according to many theorists, open a given text to an external network of referents and meanings and make literature inherently antithetical to monolithic or unilateral interpretations.³ They are also paradigmatic for what de Man might refer to as the final "undecidability" of literature in general.⁴ By focusing on the particular kind of unintelligibility introduced by the presence of foreign languages and references, I intend to investigate Poe's story as a local instance of literary undecideability. However, I also believe that it offers us an opportunity to understand the problem, not as an abstract, universal formula, but in a historically-determined form. Ultimately, I hope to draw out the richest sense in which, for Poe in America in 1840, every book was, in some sense, foreign.

I will begin by tracing the ways in which rational analysis and interpretive confidence give way to incomprehension on the part of the story's narrator. This decline into perplexity, I will show, is partly the result of the narrator's own intertextual interpretative apparatus. I will then turn to some of Poe's theoretical essays that directly address the problems of literary closure. Although I believe these texts express a desire for mastery over the meaning of a text, by charging them with theories derived from foreign philosophical traditions, Poe also effectively disrupts the stability of the concepts of literary openness and closure that these essays advance. Next, I will consider how the Man of the Crowd himself represents a text caught in an ambivalent relationship with society. On the one hand, the man depends on the crowd for survival, while on the other hand, he fails to relate socially to the people surrounding him. If the Man of the Crowd can be understood as a text, then his associability is perhaps analogous to certain problems of textual interrelationships. This hypothesis will require a reevaluation of Poe's critical work, particularly his theories regarding novelty, wherein he imagines the possibility of a literature that is radically autonomous from all other texts.

During his lifetime, Poe was a great reader; he was a gifted student of both classical and modern languages (Silverman 23), and in his professional life he wrote a considerable amount of literary criticism, largely dealing with contemporary American fiction (Silverman 165), but also occasionally with foreign works.⁵ It is no surprise, then, that Poe's tale is deeply layered with concerns regarding the possibility of reading, writing, and understanding. As noted, "The Man of the Crowd" opens with a...