ENGL 510: The City in the 19th Century

First paragraph, introduces us to secrets, to conscious rather than repressed acts that become “a burden so heavy in horror” that regardless of the possibility for absolution, forgiveness, or relief, cannot be divulged. Why? Because of shame (as self-same repulsion) and utter social repulsion it seems, since guilt or fear of an afterlife would compel someone with a conscience or with faith to tell and confess the un-nameable secret. “Thrown down only into the grave” sounds violent as an utter act of repulsion that which cannot be accepted even if it is done so only through denial (1). This denial, obstruction, or restriction opens Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”.  As a text that refuses to be read, it will take us, the reader, on a journey as both the follower and followed, leaving us all (follower, followed, and reader) as a stranger and wanderer that circuited a Penrose spiral to end where we began. But rather than a circular narrative, we are dropped at the gap of and ending that began with what first seemed to be an intelligible, and cohesive narrative. Through our willing and driven journey of reading, Poe has disrupted our expectations of coherence, moved rather as by compulsion.

The first paragraph enjambs into the next as we shift to what requires familiarity-for the narrator, and by implication for the reader. You know, that coffee house with the “large bow-window” the D-Coffee-House in London. Indeed, the contrasts that follow pain / pleasure, illness / good health, ennui / excitement resonate with our sensory, corporeal and psychic experiences. Yet, there is surely also a distancing. Intertextually, I associate ennui with Baudelaire and Le Fleurs du Mal (1857). Uncanny? Purposefully referenced somehow in the psyche of those who read certain genres? Eroticism? “With a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap, I had been amusing myself” subliminally playing to (with) the oral and phallic ears of our psyche concerned with the needs and desires of the body? But who has the privilege to just sit and watch, and to remain focused with one’s own pleasure and enjoyment? Definitely not a laborer. But that observation does not seem as central as the next, and that is, that we are not allowed to stay fixated on the Id. And so the narrator shifts from his personal narrative of ill health, pleasure, pain, and enjoyment to intellectualism.

Abstraction, to move away from pain and pleasure to the scientist categorizing and hierarchizing society seems familiar and the right course of action and thought. The masses of people, described within categories (even tribes), is told in a coherent and almost linear way. We move from the upper echelons of society to its most dispossessed. Distinctions continue. Types are differentiated. Dandies and military men. Women of all classes whose distinction is beauty contrasted against ladies of leisure trying to hold on to their looks, all of them too closely associated to prostitutes, except for the modest young girls. These seem more like victims, tearful when they should be indignant of their use and abuse.

And so “with a brow to the glass” the scientist / anthropologist continues. And when the narrator takes us, makes us follow him and the stranger, it is rationalized as such. He is driven by history but also by his inability to fully read or place the old man. Thus, he is driven by the appearance of a seemingly new sign. But instead of driven or compelled, or impelled (by the sign itself), the narrator wants us to believe as he seemingly does that he has made a choice, a “resolve” to follow this discovery and to thus know the meaning of this “other”. But the other can never be fully known, integrated, absorbed, disclosed, possessed, or resolved. This other might as well be “death” for as close as we come to it, it will always remain an unknown for to know it means our dying. And yet, is an individual consciousness truly individual or truly ours or just mine?

Gosh, I enjoyed this story. Yes, it tickled me and made me utter a few “Ah’s” and “Oh’s”. Afterall, the seeker remains estranged to the stranger, and yet, this stranger does not give up because in essence, as long as he is among the crowds, searching for the crowd, he is not alone but among all others.

But what about us, the reader? At the end, I understood that the city was a text itself, and that it had just played (with) me and my desire for the familiar and to make coherence. Having said that, I was pleased to then read Michel de Certeau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life” since it fit perfectly with Poe’s short story.