American Flaneur

The Cosmic Physiognomy of Edgar Allan Poe

James Werner

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415969772
• eBook ISBN: 9781135879846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

American Flaneur investigates the connections between Edgar A. Poe and the nineteenth-century flaneur - or strolling urban observer - suggested in Walter Benjamin's discussion of Baudelaire. This study illustrates the centrality of the flaneur to Poe's literary aims, and uses the flaneur to illuminate Poe's intimate yet ambivalent relationship to his surrounding culture.
While James V. Werner concentrates on Poe's fiction, this book treats many areas of nineteenth-century intellectual and popular culture, including science and pseudo-science, the American magazine marketplace, urban topology, the grotesque, labyrinths, narratives of exploration and discovery, and cosmological treatises. Werner draws on Marxist, reader response and periodical theories while reconstructing Poe through examinations of ephemeral texts of the time.

CHAPTER ONE

The Physiognomy of the Flaneur

One of the most fascinating figures to have appeared, disappeared and subsequently reappeared in the landscape of Western culture has been the flaneur, the strolling urban observer. In the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe, flanerie was considered more than a hobby; it was seen as an appropriate (indeed, perhaps the most appropriate) mode of viewing and negotiating the complexities of the city. With the changes in urban design wrought by industrialism (for instance, its imperative to accommodate vehicular traffic and maximize space efficiency), it was thought that the flaneur’s seemingly aimless ambulations and observations were doomed.

However, flanerie has by no means been relegated to intellectual or cultural obscurity, though it has languished there for extended periods in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With its emphasis on the discontinuities and dislocations of urban life, flanerie has made a significant impact on theories of modernity in general, and in some very specific ways. Flanerie was poetized by Charles Baudelaire in his famous Paris Spleen, thereby making its mark on the French Symbolist movement. The flaneur plays a pivotal role in the work of Marxist theoretician Walter Benjamin, whose writings have been collected in a just-completed four-volume set from Harvard University Press. And as Anke Gleber suggests, a “minor renaissance” (215) of interest in the flaneur has appeared since the 1980s, and more particularly in the 1990s, with the publication of texts such as Dana Brand’s The Spectator in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (1991), John Rignall’s Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator, Keith Tester’s collection of essays, The Flâneur (1994), Gleber’s The Art of Taking a Walk (1999), and most recently, Edmund White’s memoir The Flaneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris (2001). The flaneur has proven remarkably flexible as a theoretical lens on modernity and post-modernity, for artistic and cultural productions as divergent as Francesca Lia Block’s young adult book Weetzie Bat, performance art like “Street Works IV” by Vito Acconci, and Katrina MacPherson’s film-dance Pace.¹

Defining or describing a figure of such versatility is no small challenge. As Keith Tester indicates, “definitions are at best difficult and, at worst, a contradiction of what the flaneur means. In himself, the flaneur is, in fact, a very obscure thing” (7).² Baudelaire, whose Paris Spleen and “Painter of Modern Life” address the practice and methodology of flanerie, describes the flaneurs of nineteenth-century Paris as “independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define” (9). This difficulty has given rise to both the flaneur’s literary richness and a wide range of differing interpretations, many of which will be discussed in this chapter. Which of these is the “true” or original flaneur? Tester has admirably summed up the dilemmas of reading and (re)constructing the flaneur:

There is a certain ambiguity concerning the historical specificity of the figure of the flaneur. On the one hand, there seems to be little doubt that the flaneur is specific to a Parisian time and place. On the other hand, the flaneur is used as a figure to illuminate issues of city life irrespective of time and place…. The greyness of the historical specificity is perhaps as intrinsic to the debate as the problem acknowledged by Baudelaire of defining exactly what the ‘flaneur’ means. (16)

The route one takes in analyzing the flaneur (historically specific or mythic-conceptual) carries important ramifications: “it could lead to flanerie being made so specifically about Paris at a given moment in its history that flanerie becomes of no contemporary relevance at all. Either that, or flanerie becomes so general as to be almost meaningless and most certainly historically rootless if not seemingly somewhat ahistorical” (Tester 17). Further, the historical roots to which Tester refers are themselves the subject of contestation: for example, Walter Benjamin locates the origins of flanerie in nineteenth-century Paris, while Dana Brand finds sources in Renaissance England.

In this study, I shall mediate these two approaches to interpreting the flaneur, examining his significance in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, referenced by both Baudelaire and Benjamin in connection with flanerie. I seek both historic specificity and cultural flexibility in linking the Parisian flaneur to Poe, an American who was writing at the historical moment Benjamin identifies as the age of high flanerie. At the same time, it is essential to emphasize the more distant roots of flanerie, in the ancient “science” of physiognomy that originated with the ancient Greeks and Romans. Furthermore, I want to argue for an expansion of traditional definitions of flanerie, and to suggest that Poe’s readings elucidate not only individual faces, interiors, and cities, but the world and even the universe. To preface these assertions, I shall provide in this first chapter a loosely chronological survey of the flaneur’s various manifestations, and the multiform interpretations suggested by different scholars. In proceeding in this fashion, I do not mean to imply that there is any “pure” or primordial version of the flaneur; such a chronology is simply a useful device for presenting in suitably “panoramic” fashion the flaneur’s sundry historical incarnations. In fact, this chronological tour will serve to reinforce the flaneur’s historical mutability as he has been appropriated by various authors, critics, and historians for divergent purposes. This delineation of the flaneur’s characteristics will set the table for an analysis of Poe’s adoption and transformation of flanerie in ways that have not been acknowledged to date.

Certain features that recur in most, if not all, of the flaneur’s manifestations. One consistent element has been the action of seeing and observing his surroundings. Although it appears to be casual, this act of observing has a particularly analytical dimension; it is not simply “taking air” or “window-shopping.” In most of the earlier versions of the flaneur, this optical engagement with the metropolis involves scrutinizing the faces of passers-by, and identifying their personality characteristics by means of facial features, mannerisms and gestures. This practice of interpreting the countenance predates nineteenth-century Paris by over two thousand years, forming the basis of the “science” of physiognomy, as Elizabeth C.Evans notes:

The study of the relation of the features of a man to his inner character is no modern development; for in Greece and Rome there existed, at least during certain periods of their literary history, a definite interest in the subject…. This interest had gained considerable impetus through the influence of the Peripatetic and Stoic schools of philosophy, and embraced a careful study of the significance of the various aspects of the body. (5)

According to the Pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomica (third century B.C.), “the sources from which physiognomic signs are drawn are: movements and gestures of the body, color, characteristic facial expressions, growth of hair, smoothness of the skin, the voice, the condition of the flesh, the parts of the body, the build of the body as a whole” (8). Evans also points out that in this text, one finds “a clear statement of the basis on which the ‘science’ of physiognomy rests: ‘Dispositions follow bodily characteristics and are not in themselves unaffected by bodily impulses. Conversely, that the body suffers sympathetically with affections of the soul is evident in love, fear, grief, and pleasure’” (7).

This assumption—that there is a correlation between outward appearances and inner characteristics, and that through careful scrutiny of the former one may discern the latter—is at the heart of both physiognomy and flanerie. The principle seems self-evident and fundamental to the way humans negotiate their surroundings and assess the people around them, as is recognized in the following description of early physiognomy by Paulo Mantegazza from the early 20th century:

Long before these words [physiognomy and metoposcopy] had found a place in our dictionaries, and in the history of science, man had looked into the face of his fellow-man to read there joy and pain, hatred and love, and had sought to draw thence conclusions both curious and of daily practical use. There is no untutored people, no rudimentary language which has not incorporated in some proverb the results of these first sports of divination. Humpbacks, squints, sparkling or dull eyes, the varying length of the nose, the varying width of the mouth, all are honored or condemned in popular proverbs. These proverbs are the first germs of the embryonic substance, which later on yield materials for a new science. (Mantegazza 8)

However, as a basis for a “new science,” the principles of physiognomy were problematical to say the least. In its earliest stages, “animal physiognomy” attempted to associate particular species of animals with identifying characteristics, and to draw analogies to human beings sharing the same physical features. In her introduction to Rudolphe Topffer’s “Essay on Physiognomy,” Ellen Wiese notes that

the ‘science’ actually functioned as a conventional code. Says the pseudo-Aristotle: ‘Oxen are slow-moving and lazy. Their muzzles are broad and their eyes large; men with a broad nose and large eyes are likewise slow and lazy.’ Thus a vocabulary for the language of physiognomy was built first of all on a physiognomic response: an animal was identified with a single, typical trait (or by several, provided these would evoke a homogenous image); its physical features were taken to be the material embodiment of this undifferentiated nature, and these, in turn, could be read off like ciphers whenever they appeared in the human face. (xx–xxi)

Wiese’s description implicitly raises questions about the fundamental assumptions of this practice: does an animal have an “undifferentiated” or “homogenous” nature? Can we assume that this nature will be embodied materially in one feature of its appearance? That the occurrence of this same feature in a human countenance will signify a similar characteristic? Or is this simply a projection of human interpretive schema onto nature?³

Even among those nineteenth-century writers concerned with establishing physiognomy as a science per se, there was substantial discomfort regarding its initial stages. Mantegazza freely admits these dubious beginnings: “In these first attempts we always meet the infantine inexperience of ignorance; sympathies and antipathies are there translated into irrefragable dogmas and verdicts without appeal; instinct and sentiment hold the place of observation and calculation. All is seasoned with the magic which is one of the original sins of the human family” (8). The same regret is evident in Mantegazza’s discussion of another type of physiognomy: so-called “celestial” or “astrological” physiognomy, in which parallels are drawn between configurations of the human face and particular constellations of stars:

And then man, not contented to examine the human face and translate it into proverbs and into physiognomical laws of fortuitous coincidences or suggestions of sympathy and antipathy, goes on to seek in the heavens and among the stars relations between the constellations and our features, and erects this odd edifice of judicial astrology—a veritable white magic applied to the study of the human face. Magic demands a magician; he envelops himself in the mystery of the inconceivable to explain the unintelligible, and magic becomes an industry, a trade which fattens a small number of knaves at the expense of a large number of fools. Such is the true origin, little honorable as it may be, of Physiognomy. (8)

As anxious as Mantegazza is to distance himself from what he acknowledges as the primitive and misguided efforts of his physiognomical forebears, his history of the “science” includes such notable figures as Plato, Aristotle, and later even Darwin, as all having considered, endorsed or practiced physiognomy at some point in their lives. Yet none of these figures is so consistently associated with physiognomy as is Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801). Although physiognomical principles were in circulation since ancient civilizations, it was not until Lavater’s work in the eighteenth century that physiognomy enjoyed its widest currency. Lavater’s essays on physiognomy were astoundingly popular; between its original publication in 1770 and 1810, his Physiognomische Fragmente, or Physiognomical Fragments went through “no fewer than sixteen German, fifteen French, two American, two Russian, one Dutch, and twenty English editions,” according to Ellis Shookman in his essay collection, The Faces of Physiognomy (2). In Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy: A Study in the History of Ideas, John Graham provides the following quote from The Gentlemen’s Magazine in 1801:

In Switzerland, in Germany, in France, even in Britain, all the world became passionate admirers of the Physiognomical Science of Lavater. His books, published in the German language, were multiplied by many editions. In the enthusiasm with which they were studied and admired, they were thought as necessary in every family as even the Bible itself. A servant would, at one time, scarcely be hired till the descriptions and engravings of Lavater had been consulted, in careful comparison with the lines and features of the young man’s or woman’s countenance. (61)

Lavater’s work apparently caused quite a commotion, though a good deal of skepticism was mixed in this public reaction. By mid-century, the fame (or notoriety) of Lavater’s theories was firmly entrenched as historical fact, as indicated by the following description from the Encyclopedia Britannica (1853–60): “Its publication created everywhere a profound sensation. Admiration, contempt, resentment, and fear were cherished towards the author. The discoverer of the new science was everywhere flattered or pilloried; and in many places, where the study of human character from the face became an epidemic, the people went masked through the streets” (qtd. in Graham 61).

The hyperbole of such statements is clear, as Graham points out; equally clear is the fact that Lavater presented physiognomy in a way that was at once more accessible and more controversial than in any of its previous instantiations. Lavater articulates the basic premise of physiognomy in the following passage from Physiognomische Fragmente: “All knowledge we can obtain of man (in his tripartite animal, intellectual, and moral life) must be gained through the medium of our senses…. Man must wander in the darkest ignorance, equally with respect to himself and the objects that surround him, did he not become acquainted with their properties and powers by the aid of their externals” (qtd. in Graham 47). Graham notes that Lavater’s “insistence on a scientific methodology is his ground for dissociating himself from earlier physiognomists, such as Aristotle…since the slightest difference in a line, literally a ‘hair-breadth,’ changes the meaning of a face” (47).

But identifying precise principles and methodologies proved difficult for a process that seemed to incorporate as much of art as it did science. Shookman points out Lavater’s belief that “physiognomy was science, albeit an unmathematical one impaired by imprecision…“(4); he then goes on to demonstrate how this blending of artistic and scientific sensibilities and procedures was a self-conscious one on Lavater’s part: “Indeed, he exclaimed, ‘where is the science where everything can be calculated—nothing left to taste, feeling, and genius?—Woe to science, if such a one were to exist’” (5). Lavater’s aesthetic approach to physiognomy was also marked by what Graham calls “a tendency to be all things to all men” (which, as Shookman suggests, would be called an “interdisciplinary” technique today (5)): “The ‘scientific’ flavor may not have satisfied the increased interest in biology, zoology, anatomy, physiology, and anthropology, but it at least acknowledged these fields and made some pretence at employing their information and methodology” (45). While some members of the scientific establishment scoffed at what they considered a questionable contribution, a number of highly reputable scientists and thinkers would later be in his debt: “scientists like Franz Joseph Gall with his phrenology, Carl Gustav Carus with his craniology, and Alexander von Humboldt with his physical anthropology owed a great deal to Lavater, as did Goethe, too, who openly acknowledged the importance of physiognomy for his own notions of osteology and morphology” (Shookman 5). And in great part due to Lavater’s influence, physiognomy remains a popular pseudo-science today, with commercial books such as Terry Landau’s About Faces (1989), Lailan Young’s The Naked Face (1993), and Rose Rosetree’s The Power of Face Reading (2nd edition, 2001) continuing to entertain physiognomical notions and possibilities.

Whatever its actual scientific merit, physiognomy certainly figures prominently in most interpretations of the practice of flanerie, regardless of the critical disagreement as to the flaneur’s origins. As stated earlier, Walter Benjamin argues for the flaneur’s rise in popularity in Paris of the mid-1830s. Dana Brand, in The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, disagrees, maintaining that

the figure that Benjamin discovered in the feuilletons of the 1830s was not a new form of consciousness that had sprung into being in conjunction with the development of enclosed shopping spaces that facilitated strolling. He was the culmination of a long tradition…. By the early nineteenth century, this process was far more advanced, as well as far more geographically widespread than Benjamin represents. The manners and strategies Benjamin associates with the flaneur may be found throughout the literature of Europe long before the late 1830s…. [T]he flaneur is as English a phenomenon as he is a French one, and it was primarily from England that he was imported to America. (13)

Brand finds the roots of the flaneur “in the culture of spectacle that developed in London during its first period of extraordinary growth, in the sixteenth century” (14). He notes the coalescence of economic and political trends that helped to fashion London into a metropolis with the seeds of an “English consumer society” and an emphasis on spectacle. At the same time, various literary genres became popular whose purpose was to represent the city of London. The first were the “survey” or “urban panorama” books, which shared “an encyclopedic intention, a bourgeois urbanism that celebrates the city’s magnificence and vitality, and a tendency to divide the city into separate spaces so as to give the reader the sense of looking at a coherent map or model of the metropolis” (17). These rather static representations of the city were answered by another genre: the “coney-catching” books, designed to describe and classify “the various forms of deception and fraud that could be encountered in London,” functioning both as cautionary tales and (more

importantly) as entertainment for “wealthy young men residing in the metropolis before the assumption of adult responsibilities (18–19). While these texts deal with seamier and more random experiences than those addressed by the survey books, both genres offer a system of classification that “makes sense” of the city through observation of its inhabitants and environments.

Another genre popular in seventeenth-century England was the Theophrastian character book, in which Brand finds “the origins of the flaneur’s conception of the urban crowd, if not the origins of the flaneur himself” (21). One of the followers of both Plato and Aristotle, and a member of the Peripatetic school of philosophy, Theophrastus wrote his Characters (third century B.C.) as an attempt to categorize the various types and character traits of the human personality. He proceeded by positing first a definition of a moral quality, and then listing the actions in a human being that would ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• NOTES
• WORKS CITED