| Theorist Walter Benjamin refers to Edgar A. Poe as a "physiognomist" of the "crowd" and the "interior" within his discussion of the nineteenth-century flaneur, the strolling urban observer. He also alludes to Charles Baudelaire's treatment of Poe and the flaneur in "The Painter of Modern Life." But both writers treat Poe's relation to the flaneur superficially this study is an attempt to delineate that connection more fully. Most scholars conclude that the flaneur's importance was only temporary, his spectatorship inevitably obliterated by the forces of capitalism. This study maintains that the flaneur's perspective helps to clarify Poe's relation to his magazine publishing milieu, and was in fact as central to his fictional aims as it was for Baudelaire and Benjamin, though in markedly different ways. Like Benjamin's flaneur, Poe was a liminal participant in his magazine marketplace, "neither in nor out," crafting literary commodities even as he satirized fugitive genres. Like Baudelaire's "painter of the passing moment," Poe found within such ephemeral forms---among them literary flanerie---opportunities to apprehend eternal truths. He applied the principles of flanerie in ways ungrasped by both his generic flaneur predecessors and literary acolytes like Benjamin and Baudelaire. At a time when the nature of science and scientific methodology were hotly debated issues, Poe sought in Eureka to displace the "professional scientist" with the intuitive artist, the brilliantly casual observer of external appearances---the cosmic flaneur. In his horror, detective and sensational fiction, he dramatizes the potential revelations of this flanerie, as well as its limitations and even dangers. Poe's narrators negotiate the flaneur's blend of critical detachment and an intoxicating immersion that has both redemptive and destructive potential. In natural as well as urban settings, they perform a physiognomy of faces, interiors, cities, landscapes and seascapes, one that demands oblique thinking and a groping experiential logic, but permits only brief, incomplete and possibly fatal readings of metaphysical truth. Seen in this light, Poe becomes not a cultural anomaly, but grounded in (yet transforming) a historical moment and a literary tradition, reinscribing the mystery of the universe as he attempts to read its physiognomy. |
