“Absent subjectivity in Poe’s THE MAN OF THE CROWD”

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe says in the first sentence that “it does not permit itself to be read,” to build a myth in “The Man of the Crowd,” which refuses to be decoded. Compared with the plot, the story is more structurally attractive to readers. Accordingly, much formalistic efforts have been made in examining the narrative strategies of the story, such as “‘ambiguity’, ‘irony’, ‘doubleness,’ and ‘unreliability’” (Cananau 242). As Iulian Cananau observes, “[a] more recent formalist inquiry, inspired by poststructuralism and genre criticism, reads ‘The Man of the Crowd’ not against the socio-cultural context, but against a ‘literary’ one that consists of the broader framework of Gothic fiction and a representative selection of Poe’s other canonical short stories” (242). This inquiry, applied in analyzing the reading process of the reader, can be extended to the “reading process” of the narrator who follows the old man for a long time and yet fails to figure out the old man’s secret, which might lead to the conclusion that Poe, by exhibiting the futility of pursuing meaning, turns the short story into a symbol of empty subjectivity. However, it will be a more enlightening effort when we pay attention to the narrator’s keen interest in following the old man, which structurally shapes the short story into a double-layered pursuit. It exhibits Poe’s textual endeavor to portray the theme of the story: emptiness in subjectivity, one of the heated topics of Lacanian theory, which, in probing the relationship between language and identity, exhibits diversified textual features among different literary works. For example, in the interpretation of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Pyeaam Abbasi argues that Prufrock’s failure to become a “speaking subject” in the symbolic order of language leads to a “neurotic” Prufrock (118). To some extent, Lacanian theory is so deconstructive that the gap between the symbolic order and imaginative order cannot be bridged even for a speaking subject. Accordingly, when we take the narrator as a speaking subject in “The Man of the Crowd,” the short https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2080519