Abstract
A book dedicated to the metacognitive mystery tale could not exist without a detailed analysis of one of the most (if not the most) important stories in the history of the genre. Based on Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” this chapter seeks to establish a chronotope of the metacognitive mystery tale by examining the urban environment in which such narratives take place. I especially focus on the figure of the flâneur described by Baudelaire and Benjamin, moving from Paris to London and New York, before addressing, in the next chapters, two paragons of postmodern literature, allegedly one of its initiators and one of its closing figures: Borges and Auster.
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- 1.
This idea reminds one of a distinction made by Paul Valéry between poetry and prose, the former being associated with dancing while the latter is linked to the art of walking. For Valéry , to write prose and to walk are utilitarian activities: “Walking, like prose, has a definite aim. It is an act directed at something we wish to reach” (1977, 154). Poetry, on the other hand, is a dance made of a similar “system of actions; but of actions whose end is in themselves. It goes nowhere” (1977, 154). In this perspective, de Certeau ’s phrase—and the flâneur’s aimless strolls in more general terms—thus appears as a sort of via media between walking and dancing; it highlights the beauty of walking for its own sake while also pointing at the very message that these walks may produce.
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The narrator in fact implies that the old man would have been a perfect model for the different representations of the devil made by Moritz Retzsch, the illustrator of Goethe’s Faust. For a detailed examination of the relationship between Retzsch and Poe, see Hayes ’s inspiring article which, among many other things, points at their shared attraction for dark images and the pictorial quality of many of Poe’s stories (Hayes 2010, 34). In “The Man of the Crowd,” the sharp contrast between the gaslights and the ominous darkness of the mob increases the tension of the scene while also preparing the vision of a hypothetical weapon in the old man’s pocket.
- 3.
It must be noted, however, as argued in the previous chapter, that Dupin himself cannot really be considered a professional sleuth, still sharing some of the epistemological doubts of the urban stroller.
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Dechêne, A. (2018). Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”. In: Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94469-2_4
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