Content area
Full Text
Poe introduces his story "The Man of the Crowd" with two epigrams in three languages: "Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul" [Such a great misfortune, not to be able to be alone],1 and "It was well said of a certain German book that 'er lasst sich nicht lesen'-it does not permit itself to be read" (Tales 388). The story that follows is a first-person account of the narrator's effort to pursue and apprehend a man whose "idiosyncrasy of expression" (392) has caught the narrator's attention from its place within a crowd of Londoners. In the end, "wearied unto death" (396), the narrator abandons his efforts to interpret the man, declaring him to be among those texts whose secrets hold "the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed" (388).
The concept of a text resistant to interpretation appears in many of Poe's tales via the trope of an unreadable text; unreadable because it is either missing or has disappeared, is of mysterious provenance, or is a cryptogram.2 In the case of "The Man of the Crowd," Poe considers how a text might be incomprehensible because it is in a foreign or non-existent language. What I hope to show is that, for Poe, the foreign text is illustrative of certain interpretive problems inherent in reading and writing. Specifically, intertextuality and interlinguistics characterize the unreadability of the Man of the Crowd insofar as he is compared to a German book. These two phenomena are among the elements that, according to many theorists, open a given text to an external network of referents and meanings and make literature inherently antithetical to monolithic or unilateral interpretations.3 They are also paradigmatic for what de Man might refer to as the final "undecidability" of literature in general.4 By focusing on the particular kind of unintelligibility introduced by the presence of foreign languages and references, I intend to investigate Poe's story as a local instance of literary undecideability. However, I also believe that it offers us an opportunity to understand the problem, not as an abstract, universal formula, but in a historically-determined form. Ultimately, I hope to draw out the richest sense in which, for Poe in America in 1840, every book was, in some sense, foreign.