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What Is the Man of the Crowd? His Preguration Masaomi Kobayashi Who is the man of the crowd? It is the title character a dierence is there between a London populace and that of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1840 story, which centers on an old of the most frequented American city” (155). Poe, who man who moves restlessly through the dimly-lit and spent his boyhood in London as well as Richmond, was densely-populated streets of London. What, then, is this inarguably conscious of his transatlantic readership. is man? e question has remained unanswered, or rather fact can be taken as an eective cue to broaden our hori- it has seldom or never been asked; for he has generally zons of the story with special reference to “Bartleby.” been seen as the type of the flâneur̶the voyeuristic “The Man of the Crowd” has more often than not idler/stroller originally from mid-1830s Paris. Following been drawn into comparison with “Bartleby,” since each Charles Baudelaire, and later Walter Benjamin, this g- narrator fails to read his subject as the product of an ur- ure has been open to broad interpretation in the transat- ban space conditioned by anonymity. Poe’s narrative lantic battle over Poe.1 Signicantly, however, even such subject is a city-dweller who constantly walks through an attempt to draw the story into the vast universe of the crowd, and Melville’s is a job-hunter who reportedly discourse has hardly been successful in unveiling the man worked in Washington, D.C. Both characters become il- of the crowd. It is hence worth reading this anonymous legible when they become part of their urban surround- character from another transatlantic perspective, namely ings. Still, it is possible to restore their personhood by in relation to the title character of Herman Melville’s shifting focus to their personal histories, or more speci- 1853 classic, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall- cally, their past careers. e key is to nd an answer to Street.” the as-yet unasked question, “What̶not who̶is the By the end of the 1840s, New York had eclipsed its man of the crowd?” As we shall see, this quest is itself an commercial rival, Philadelphia, and Bartleby was one of attempt to explore this unnamed character’s potential the many jobseekers magnetized by this emergent me- connection with Bartleby, who plays an essential role in tropolis. Melville’s narrator takes a transoceanic look at addressing oce-worker characters as Bartlebys. the city by likening him to an isolated castaway: “[H]e seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of e Clerks: A Text within the Text wreck in the mid Atlantic” (37-38). In “e Man of the Crowd,” too, the narrator takes such an extensive view of As writer-editor of the anthology, Blue Collar, White the city in order to accentuate its counterpart: “[S]o vast Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work, Richard Ford says, 1 One example is found in European Journal of American “Fiction, indeed, has plenty to tell us about work and its Studies, which once carried an opening essay entitled “From stamp on us” (x). is emphasis on work as an issue of Man of the Crowd to Cybernaut: Edgar Allan Poe’s Transatlan- great import in ction shows why he has been considered tic Journey̶and Back.” With specic emphasis on Poe’s narra- one of the major writers in the subcategory of realism̶ “ tor as the detective-as-physiognomist, the ontological quester, so-called dirty realism. Even as a reader of fiction, he and the flâneur,” the author declares: “I will show how these cannot resist considering what an important character three constants crossed, as it were, the Atlantic, received from Europe renewed impetus in the shape of a postmodern sensibili- does for a livelihood. What would he then think of “e ty, and then returned to the New World, powerfully shaping the Man of the Crowd”? A conceivable reason why he has American detective genre” (Jahshan 1). never anthologized the story, let alone any other one by [ 1 ] (323) 323-331／07九州-論文1.indd 1 18/12/10 10:21 2 (324) Masaomi Kobayashi Poe, is that it makes no mention of what the title charac- iognomic reading of the crowd. Of particular note is that ter is. The reader is uncertain what he makes a living the rst group of passengers whom he describes at length from, as implied at the very outset of the story: “It was is clerks: well said of a certain German book that ‘es lässt sich nicht lesen’̶it does not permit itself to be read” (154). Driven e tribe of clerks was an obvious one and here I by a greater curiosity than ever in his life, the narrator discerned two remarkable divisions. There were transforms himself from a voyeur at a coee shop win- the junior clerks of ash houses̶young gentle- dow into a pursuer of “a decrepit old man, some six- men with tight coats, bright boots, well-oiled ty-ve or seventy years of age” (158). As a consequence hair, and supercilious lips. Setting aside a certain of his overnight chase through the busy nightly streets, dapperness of carriage, which may be termed he arrives at the conclusion that the old man is an illegi- deskism for want of a better word, the manner of ble text̶the very man of the crowd. these persons seemed to me an exact facsimile of One may suspect that this illegibility is in fact the what had been the perfection of bon ton about anonymous narrator’s. For one thing, he can be seen to twelve or eighteen months before. ey wore the have turned into another man of the crowd in the very cast-o graces of the gentry;̶and this, I believe, pursuit of the man who does not permit himself to be involves the best denition of the class. read. For another: “e typical Poe story occurs within The division of the upper clerks of staunch the mind of a poet; and its characters are not indepen- firms, or of the “steady old fellows,” it was not dent personalities, but allegorical gures representing the possible to mistake. ese were known by their warring principles of the poet’s divided nature” (Wilbur coats and pantaloons of black or brown, made to 67). One of such typical stories is “The Man of the sit comfortably, with white cravats and waist- Crowd.” In light of Poe’s well-known stories of the dou- coats, broad solid-looking shoes, and thick hose ble, such as “William Wilson” and “e Fall of the House or gaiters.̶ey had all slightly bald heads, from of Usher,” it is hard to deny that the two main characters which the right ears, long used to pen-holding, had are their mutual mirror images, or even that the narrator an odd habit of standing o on end. I observed is what is called “an unreliable narrator.” Given that he that they always removed or settled their hats has just recovered from an unspecied illness of months, with both hands, and wore watches, with short is he really out in the streets in the first place? If he is gold chains of a substantial and ancient pattern. not, then it is that the whole story may have happened Theirs was the affectation of respectability;̶if only in the coee shop̶in his feverish mind̶just as it indeed there be an affectation so honorable. can be supposed that Bartleby may have been a psycho- (156) logical double for the lawyer-narrator: “The fact that Bartleby has no history, as we learn at the beginning of Apparently, each paragraph conveys an unfavorable view the story and in a later dialogue, suggests that he has of the clerks as those affected or overdressed. In either emerged from the lawyer’s mind. He never leaves the case, the passage as a whole is worthy of remark: it is the lawyer’s offices and he subsists on virtually nothing” most detailed description of workers in the story that (Marcus 366). Approached in this way, the story seems contains references to many dierent others, from pick- far from everyday reality and atypical of stories of work. pockets and gamblers to peddlers and streetwalkers̶ In “e Man of the Crowd,” as we will see later, how- “beside these, pie-men, porters, coal-heavers, sweeps; ever, the similarity between the pursuer and the pursued organ-grinders, monkey-exhibiters and ballad mongers” matters in terms of work. e point that must be stressed (158). e depiction of the tribe of the clerks, no matter here is that Poe provides rather a realistic description of how satirical it is, can then be said to occupy a position those with jobs. e story opens with the narrator sitting of its own as a text within the text̶and herein lies part by the shop window for most of an afternoon. As eve- of the reason why it can be put in perspective with ning approaches, he directs attention from the inside to “Bartleby.” the outside of the room and grows engrossed in his phys- As Nikil Saval puts it in Cubed: A Secret History of the 323-331／07九州-論文1.indd 2 18/12/10 10:21 What Is the Man of the Crowd? His Preguration (325) 3 Workplace, “Clerks were once a rare subject in literature. by, Dan McCall refers to the ever-growing number of eir lives were considered unworthy of comment, their approaches to the story as “the Bartleby Industry.” As workplaces hemmed in and small, their work indescrib- implied by this term, there is no single interpretation of ably dull.

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