Who is Poe’s “Man of the Crowd”?

Who is Poe’s “Man of the Crowd”? STEVEN FINK T he critical interest attending Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Man of the Crowd” has come largely in the wake of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay treating the Man of the Crowd and/or the narrator as the type of the flâneur, the desultory observer of the modern capitalist cityscape.1 Since then, it has become one of the more widely discussed and debated stories in the Poe canon. Yet while ambiguities and irresolution are clearly part of its modern appeal, I would argue that the story offers up more answers to its mysteries than have yet been acknowledged. The narrator of the story sits in a London coffeehouse observing, identifying , and classifying the passing crowds, until he is arrested by the sight of an old man and what he describes as “the absolute idiosyncracy [sic] of . . . expression” on his face (Works, 2:511).2 Unable to identify or categorize the old man, the narrator follows him through the streets of London until, after a full twenty-four hours of wandering, he finally abandons the vain attempt to comprehend the stranger. He asserts that the Man of the Crowd is “the type and the genius of deep crime,” but he can penetrate the mystery no further and concludes with the remark with which he began his account, that “‘er lasst sich nicht lesen’—it does not permit itself to be read” (Works, 2:515, 506). Poe scholars have tended to focus on the character of the narrator more than on the old man himself, and in doing so they have analyzed the various ways in which the narrator is limited, inadequate, or unreliable; yet they have tended to accept the narrator’s judgment that the old man and his crime must remain shrouded in mystery. J. Gerald Kennedy, for example, has argued that attention to the old man only obscures the real center of interest in the story, the narrator’s conflicting and irreconcilable modes of perception, and Kennedy concludes that “the man of the crowd retains the ultimate inscrutability of Melville’s white whale, symbolizing (if anything) man’s inability to ascertain, by means of reason, any absolute knowledge of the world beyond the self.”3 Similarly emphasizing the stranger’s inscrutability, Robert H. Byer writes, “Like an apparition in a dream, the old man seems to inhabit a world other than the narrator’s, one that the narrator cannot communicate with in ordinary ways yet that is ‘all-absorbing’ to him.”4 Stephen Rachman’s insightful reading of Poe’s story (which takes as foundational Benjamin’s essay on the flâneur and C  2012 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 44, 2011 17 S T E V E N F I N K “Robert Byer’s equally wonderful Benjaminian reading of the tale”) concludes that “in the end ‘The Man of the Crowd’ leaves the reader with the figure of the old man (who effectively stands for the city itself) as an illegible book.”5 Whether because of the old man’s seemingly innate incomprehensibility or the narrator’s perceptual inadequacy, critics have not merely been incurious about pressing further to identify the Man of the Crowd, but have clung to the notion of his fundamental inscrutability. Richard Kopley would seem to be something of an exception in his recent source study suggesting that Poe’s portrait of the Man of the Crowd draws heavily on the character of “Mr. Gordon” in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Pelham (1828); but even as he makes his case, Kopley concludes that “Poe brilliantly intensified the mystery of Bulwer’s character, forbearing narrative explanations, intimating only the strange, the enigmatic, the diabolical.”6 From the point of view of the story’s narrator, the old man is indeed inscrutable—but then Poe’s fictive narrators are notoriously unreliable. I propose, therefore, that in spite of the narrator’s limitations and his own abandoned attempt to decipher the stranger’s identity, Poe as author provides clues (clues that the narrator observes but is unable to interpret) that should be sufficient for...