Sovereign Authority and the Democratic Subject in Poe

Sovereign Authority and the Democratic Subject in Poe RICK RODRIGUEZ E dgar Allan Poe’s work records in mock horror what he perceives as the passing of old-style Republicanism and the emergence of popular democracy in Jacksonian America. The fear that the federal state would be “a government of people, not states,” loomed in the imagination of an elite to which Poe aspired, as the buffer zones the wealthy and powerful had erected to distance themselves from the encroaching masses seemed to be eroding.1 For instance, “Four Beasts in One—The Homo-Cameleopard,” his satire of Jacksonian democracy set in “the flourishing times of the Roman Empire” (PT, 181),2 depicts a decadent society addicted to bread and circus. The emperor, a parody of Jackson, turns into a sideshow monstrosity, the titular four beasts in one, fleeing a screeching mob and taking refuge in the Coliseum, where a spectacle is staged in his honor.3 For Poe, popular democracy is the constitutive obverse of absolute power, a perverted form of sovereignty made possible by the constitution of the masses through the leveling of social hierarchies and the fusing of disparate affects in spectacles and other forms of mass communication, the product of which he reflects back to his audience in the satirical figure of the bestial Jackson.4 The image of the sovereign taking refuge from the mob that authorizes its power by entering a spectacle of mass entertainment fuses sovereign authority and the people in a loop of enjoyment, like a dog—or better yet, a homo-cameleopard—chasing its own tail. Poe’s point is clear: so long as the State and the source of its authority are indistinguishable, there is no way to check the excesses of sovereign power, or what amounts to the same thing, the tyranny of the One (democracy’s numerical majority consolidated in the State) over the few. Inverting the traditional criticism of abusive state power, Poe depicts the sovereign as devoid of authority, subject to the whims of a multitude hungry for the next spectacle. That is why there is nowhere for Jackson to run but into the precarious safety of the Coliseum, where the wild adulation of the masses just as easily can turn against him.5 We might dismiss Poe’s satire of populist democracy as the fantasy of an aspiring elite bemoaning the breakdown of social hierarchies and traditional values, but in doing so we overlook a serious opposition to the inclusion of life in democratic C  2012 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 44, 2011 39 R I C K R O D R I G U E Z order. Dependent on the consent of the governed, democratic governments seek the regulation of citizens through their own participation in civic life. The more passionate citizens become about the sociopolitical issues of the day, the stronger their attachment to sovereignty will be. Sovereignty is cold and abstract; it requires the heat of the citizenry to animate it, and this is the process that Poe sets out to dramatize in his work.6 “Four Beasts in One” is not an anomaly in Poe’s canon but rather a representation of a consistent preoccupation with the processes by which life is made subject to politics. Not simply reflecting disgust with the mob, the story’s carnivalesque excess shows democracy as a hypertrophied politics saturated with bodies and passion. The monstrosity resulting from the amalgamation of the sovereign and the people is Poe’s comment on democracy’s constitutive tendency to concentrate sovereign power through a process that promises to enfranchise those “left out of doors” in the wake of the Federalist postrevolutionary settlement. While some argued that the enlargement of the democratic franchise would preclude dangerous concentrations of power, others worried that broader inclusion would not translate into competing democratic pluralities but lead to concentrations of sovereign authority.7 Concern over the centralization of sovereign authority intensified in the works of John C. Calhoun, Thomas Dew, and Alexis de Tocqueville, whose views converged on the potential marginalization of minority positions in an expanding democracy . These thinkers identified in the expansion of...