The Detective Gaze: Edgar A. Poe, theFlaneur, and the Physiognomy of Crime

fames V. Werner

Amor\g the many achievements in the short and difficult life of EdgarA. Poe was the creation of the detective tale as a popular literary genre.The extraordinary feats of ratiocination performed by C. Auguste Dupinin "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," and "TheMystery of Marie Roget" have entertained countless young readers in thepast 150 years, and attracted enormous critical attention. Some of thatattention, most notably Dana Brand's The Spectator and the City in Nine-teenth-Century American Literature, has focused on the relationship be-tv^een Poe's detective and the flaneur, the solitary strolling metropolitanobserver theorized by Walter Benjamin in "Paris: Capital of the Nine-teenth Century," in his essay "The Flaneur," and in its revised version"On some motifs in Baudelaire." Within the context of these discussions,Benjamin points briefly to Poe's connection to the flaneur who, Benjaminargues, enjoyed his heyday in Paris during the 1830s, just when Poe waslaunching his literary career.'Benjamin's references, typically aphoristic,deserve to be more fully unpacked; and Brand's analysis of this connec-tion, while extremely useful, tends to downplay the significance of theflaneur for Poe. In fact, the flaneur represents a pivotal influence on Poe'sphilosophical perspective and fictional aims and strategies overall, per-haps nowhere more evidently than in his detective tales.

Walter Benjamin, the Flaneur, and the Detective

There is considerable disagreement among scholars as to the natureand origins of the flaneur. As Keith Tester indicates, "definitions are atbest difficult and, at worst, a contradiction of what the flaneur means. Inhimself, the flaneur is, in fact, a very obscure thing"(7). Yet certainfeatures recur in most if not all delineations of this figure. The ancient"pseudo-science" of physiognomy, of reading a person's facial featuresand external characteristics for evidence of inner qualities, plays a centralrole in flanerie.^ Another critical element is the flaneur's apparently

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detached, aimless, and desultory (but in reality, highly present andfocused) observation. The flaneur's methodology is intuitive; he baseshis conclusions solely on observation and inference. According to an1806 French pamphlet titled Le Flaneur au Salon, he was an outsiderwithin the metropolis, walking "through the streets at random and alone... suspended from social obligation, disengaged, disinterested, dispas-sionate"; his leisurely manner and his ties to aristocratic privilege makehim appear to be a "loafer" or "lazybones" (qtd. in Ferguson 26,24). Theflaneur must preserve this liminal perspective to interpret the city. Hemust be immersed in the crowd, and yet must remain aloof from it; partof the marketplace, he must still keep his distance from it and itscommodities.

For a while, Benjamin argues, the flaneur remained "still on thethreshold, of the city as of the bourgeois class. Neither has engulfed him;in neither is he at home" ("Paris" 156). However, for Benjamin, theflaneur was constantly in danger of being reduced to the status of passivewindow-shopper or consumer, a transformation that, as PriscillaParkhurst Ferguson suggests, "effectively ends the flaneur's connectionwith creativity"(35). Also, the flaneur quickly became a literary figure,generating "a panorama literature" of "physiologies" which "investi-gated types that might be encountered by a person taking a look at themarketplace" ("Flaneur" 36). Ultimately, then, the flaneur became gain-fully employed, and his written observations became comnrodities withinthe market. For Rob Shields, the "ambiguous process of consumptionand self-implication" inherent in flanerie poses a fundamental question:"How to gain knowledge yet remain unchanged; how to witness, yetremain unmoved?" (75-76).

The triumph of societal forces, Benjamin argues, was putting theflaneur to use as a detective. As the "physiologies" waned in popularity,perhaps reflecting doubts as to the flaneur's ability to give order to themetropolis and its masses, "the flaneur is . . . turned into an unwillingdetective" ("Paris" 40). Benjamin argues that the flaneur's newfoundemployment "does him a lot of good socially, for it accredits his idleness"(40), but it also clearly signals the demise of the flaneur in his "pure" state.The now productive flaneur-turned-detective was assimilated into theutilitarian society that he had formerly resisted. If Baudelaire's flaneurwas "a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito" (9-10), the riseof the detective reflects society's uneasiness about the flaneur and itspressures to mitigate his elusiveness: "the detective story came intobeing when this most decisive of all conquests of a person's incognito hadbeen accomplished. Since then the end of efforts to capture a man in hisspeech and actions has not been in sight" ("Paris" 48).

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Such attempts to "conquer the incognito" reflect the continuing ten-sion between public and private in the social contract. For Benjamin, thefragmentation of the worker's psyche is mirrored Ln the spatial splitbetween "public" places of business and "private" interiors that becomeshrines to the art of collection.

For tbe private person, living space becomes, for the first time,antithetical to the place of work. The former is constituted by theinterior; the office is its complement. The private person who squareshis accounts with reality in his office demands that the interior bemaintained in his illusions From this spring the phantasmagoriasof the interior. For the private individual the private environmentrepresents the universe. In it he gathers remote places and the past. Hisdrawing room is a box in the world theater. ("Paris" 154)

Paradoxically, the bifurcation of public and private, of "inner" and"outer" space that Benjamin illustrates, tends to invert itself. In adorninghis private interior with his collection, the bourgeois collector establishesa trail by which he may be traced, by none other than the public sphere'slatest recruit: the flaneur-turned-detective, who now performs a "physi-ognomy of the interior." The specific reasons for bourgeois culture'speculiar "adoption" of the flaneur, the particular ways in which theflaneur was commodified, and the implications of his relationship tonineteenth-century culture are intriguing matters to be explored in afuture article. The focus of the study at hand is Poe's innovative use offlanerie at the very heart of his detection tales.

The Case of Poe: Flanerie or Detection?

It is as "physiognomist of the interior" that Benjamin discusses Poe asa progenitor of the detective tale:

The interior is not only the universe but also the etui of the privateperson. To live means to leave traces. In the interior these areemphasized. An abundance of covers and protectors, [of] liners andcases [,] is devised, on which the traces of objects of everyday use areimprinted. The traces of the occupant also leave their impression onthe interior. The detective story that follows these traces comes intobeing. His "philosophy of furniture," along with his detective novellas,shows Poe to be the first physiognomist of the interior. (155-56)

Benjamin mentions Poe again in "One Way Street," suggesting theappropriateness, even the inevitability of murder "in a certain type ofdetective novel at the dynamic center of which stands the horror ofapartments"(64). "That this kind of detective novel begins with Poe—ata time when such accommodations hardly yet existed—is no counterargument," Benjamin argues. "For without exception the great writersperform their combinations in a world that comes after them" (64).

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Poe's connection to the detective is readily apparent, of course, in histales about C. Auguste Dupin: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "ThePurloined Letter," and "The Mystery of Marie Roget." Poe's connectionto the flaneur is perhaps less obvious but equally important, and morepervasive than has been acknowledged to date. Having lived in variousmetropolitan centers on the Eastern seaboard (Richmond, Baltimore,Philadelphia, New York), Poe was certainly sensitive to the practice offlanerie. Hans Bergmann's God in the Street clearly illustrates the extentto which literary flanerie was practiced in ante-bellum American peri-odicals, and Dana Brand has illustrated how Poe was thoroughly famil-iar with the conventional literary flaneur. Catherine Quoyeser notes thatPoe's "Doings of Gotham" series emulated the work of Nathaniel ParkerWillis, whom she views as a prime example of the nineteenth-centuryAmerican literary "salaried flaneur" (158). And Poe's interest in phrenol-ogy and autography suggests his fascination with physiognomical ob-servation and interpretation. But Poe applied the principles of flanerie inways far more interesting and subtle, employing its methods even as hesubverted its fantasies of control, capitalizing on its inversions of publicand private space, of "inner" and "outer."

Probably the most famous instance of flanerie in Poe's works may befound in his story "The Man of the Crowd," which Benjamin calls Poe'searly contribution to a "physiognomies of the crowd" ("Paris" 156). Thetale's narrator relates how as a "convalescent" he sat in a Londoncoffeehouse, observing the crowds passing by his window on the busystreet. He begins to regard "with minute interest the innumerablevarieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance"(389). He distinguishes between people of different classes by means oftheir physiognomy. The "tribe of clerks" is "obvious" because of their"tight coats, bright boots, well-oiled hair, and supercilious lips," their"dapperness of carriage," and the "cast-off graces of the gen try" (389-90).The "upper clerks" are especially notable in that they uniformly have"slightly bald heads, from which the right ears, long used to pen-holding,[have] an odd habit of standing off on end" (390). The "swell pickpock-ets" are recognizable from their "voluminous wristband" and their "airof excessive frankness." The gamblers are "distinguished by a certainsodden swarthiness of complexion, a filmy dimness of eye, and pallorand compression of lip," not to mention a "guarded lowness of tone inconversation, and a more than ordinary extension of the thumb at rightangles with the fingers" (390).

As Poe's narrator proceeds with his detection and classification of thecrowd, however, he is confronted by a face that baffles his method byvirtue of "the absolute idiosyncracy of its expression": he can muster no

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more than "confused" and "paradoxical" ideas of "vast mental power, ofcaution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense—ofsupreme despair" (392). He follows this mysterious stranger, who com-pulsively immerses himself in the crowd, but ultimately abandons hisscrutiny, saying, "This old man is the type and the genius of deep crime.He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain tofollow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds. The worst heartof the world is a grosser book than the 'Hortulus Animae,' and perhapsit is but one of the great mercies of God that 'er lasst sich nicht lesen'" ("itdoes not permit itself to be read") (396).

Dana Brand, one of the few scholars to have addressed Poe's cormec-tion to the flaneur in detail, offers a rich discussion of this topic in TheSpectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. However,I find Brand's analysis of the relation between the flaneur and thedetective in Poe somewhat confusing, and overly dismissive of theflaneur's importance for Poe. Brand argues early on that the presence ofthe illegible face of the wanderer in "The Man of the Crowd" representsPoe's "critique of the interpretive strategies of the flaneur"(89), that"ultimately, 'The Man of the Crowd' suggests that the urban crowdcarmot be reduced to comfortable transparency" (88). For Brand, Poe'stale "implies that an urban observer is needed who can read and in somesense master what the flaneur cannot" (89). Brand maintains that in Poe'sdetective Dupin, the author created that "urban interpreter... who couldprovide a more credible and complex assurance of urban legibility thancould be fouhd in the literature of the flaneur" (90).

The implication here is that the detective represents a figure distinctlydifferent from the flaneur, and is therefore more capable to observe andinterpret modern urban phenomena. Brand's emphasis on the differ-ences between the two types and his assessment of the flaneur's effective-ness are misleading, though. In the end, after forging an argument todistinguish the detective from the flaneur. Brand ultimately suggeststhat Dupin "shares . . . many of the objectives and functions of hispredecessor" (102); he argues that "in spite of their differences, thedetective is not a contradiction of the flaneur so much as a dialecticaladaptation of him," an adaptation better suited to "the changing intellec-tual and aesthetic expectations of his audience" (105). Though somewhatcontradictory, the case Brand makes for the affinities between the flaneurand the detective seems much more compelling. In Poe's formulation theflaneur and detective are closely aligned in characteristics and method-ology. The narrator in "The Man of the Crowd" and Dupin are of one

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spirit, and in Poe's detective tales one finds some of his most successfulinstances of flanerie.

For example, the flaneur/detective, whom Poe refers to as the "ana-lyst" in "Rue Morgue," pays minute attention to details regarding facialfeatures, expressions, and body language. Poe's Dupin also shares theflaneur's association with wealth and aristocracy: "This young gentle-man was of an excellent—indeed of an illustrious family, but, by a varietyof untoward events, had been reduced to such poverty that the energy ofhis character succumbed beneath it, and he ceased to bestir himself in theworld, or to care for the retrieval of his fortunes" (400). This associationallows Dupin time and resources to observe the city and its inhabitantsat his leisure, despite the fact that his is an aristocracy in decline; hisindolence as regards "productive" and "socially valuable" labor is alsoevident. Dupin also exhibits the flaneur's traditional isolation and de-tachment from society, though he consents to the narrator's unobtrusiveaccompaniment:

I was permitted to be at the expense of renting, and furnishing in astyle which suited the rather fantastic gloom of our common temper,a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted throughsuperstitions into which we did not inquire, and tottering to its fall ina retired and desolate portion of the Faubourg St. Germain. . . . Ourseclusion was perfect. We admitted no visitors.... We existed withinourselves alone. (400-01)

Dupin and the narrator also engage in the flaneur's traditional behaviorof sauntering, after the "advent of true Darkness," when they "salliedforth into the streets, arm in arm, continuing the topics of the day, orroaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights andshadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement whichquiet observation can afford" (401). Indeed, that observation, Dupinadmits, "has become with me, of late, a species of necessity" (403), and heboasts to the narrator of his flaneuristic skills, saying that "most men, inrespect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms" (402).

Dupin's flanerie also dramatizes the importance of intuition, one ofthe main ideas Poe would later raise in his speculative cosmogony.Eureka: A Prose Poem. Dupin claims that while his technique of observa-tion may seem to be more intuitive than "scientific," it is in fact moremethodical (and on a higher plane) than the "mere method" of the police.The analyst exhibits "in his solutions of each a degree of acumen whichappears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural. His results, broughtabout by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the wholeair of intuition" (397). Dupin's dialectic of close analytical scrutiny anddisengaged, casual theorization is developed at greater length in Eureka,where Poe asserts that the "intuition" of "theorists" like Kepler is actually

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"the conviction arising from those inductions or deductions of which theprocesses are so shadozvy as to escape our consciousness, elude our reason, or defyour capacity of expression" (1276). In his detective tales, Poe seems unwill-ing to argue (as he later would in Eureka) for the scientific validity of such"guesses" outright. Dupin concedes, "I will not pursue these guesses—for I have no right to call them more—since the shades of reflection uponwhich they are based are scarcely of sufficient depth to be appreciable bymy own intellect, and since I could not pretend to make them intelligibleto the understanding of another. We will call them guesses then, andspeak of them as such" (425). But clearly such guesses are crucial to solvethe mystery in the detective tales, just as in Eureka they identify the"cloud" behind which must lie the answer to questions about the uni-verse (1293-94).

Reading the Criminal Interior

Perhaps most intriguing are the ways in which the methods of Poe'sdetective reveal and play on the flaneur's liminality, his ability to remain"in" the scene yet "removed" from it, "neither in nor out," as Poe phrasedit in his sub-title for an early tale called "Loss of Breath." One way thisability is manifested is in Dupin's capacity for "reading" the hiddenthoughts of other characters. To do so, he must be fully present, alive tosensory stimuli. In fact, he must be more than "in" the moment; he mustidentify and empathize completely with his opponent, to get "inside" hismind. "The analyst," we are told, "throws himself into the spirit of hisopponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus,at a glance, the sole methods (sometimes indeed absurdly simple ones)by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation" (398).This may be accomplished in a simple fashion, according to Dupin in"The Purloined Letter," by approximating the opponent's face to read histhoughts, as one schoolboy did particularly well in the game of "even andodd":

This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds inhis hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether thatnumber is even or odd. . . . The boy to whom I allude won all themarbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing;and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astutenessof his opponents [UJpon inquiring of the boy by what means heeffected the thorough identification in which his success consisted, Ireceived answer as follows: 'When I wish to find out how wise, or howstupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are histhoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, asaccurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, andthen wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart,as if to match or correspond with the expression' (689-90)

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However, Dupin achieves his masterly reading of individuals notsimply by seeing "deeper into" their hidden souls, but by moving at will"into" their psyches and "out" to get a distanced perspective on them. In"Rue Morgue," Dupin illustrates how the analyst employs the flaneur'sdetached physiognomic scrutiny to become "proficient" at the game ofwhist. That proficiency includes "a comprehension of all the sourceswhence legitimate advantage may be derived," which are "not onlymanifold but multiform, and lie frequently among the recesses of thoughtaltogether inaccessible to the ordinary understanding" (398). The analystmust consider but also transcend the "limits of mere rule," making "ahost of observations and inferences" and "deductions from things exter-nal to the game" (398):

He examines the countenance of his partner, comparing it carefullywith that of each of his opponents. He considers the mode of assortingthe cards in each hand; often counting trump by trump, and honor byhonor, through the glances bestowed by their Jiolders upon each. Henotes every variation of face as the play progresses, gathering a fundof thought from the differences in tlie expression of certainty, ofsurprise, of triumph, or of chagrin. From the manner of gathering upa trick he judges whether the person taking it can make another in thesuit. He recognises what is played through feint, by the air with whichit is thrown upon the table. A casual or inadvertent word; the accidentaldropping or turning of a card, with the accompanying anxiety orcarelessness in regard to its concealment; the counting of the tricks,with the order of their arrangement; embarrassment, hesitation,eagerness or trepidation—all afford, to his apparently intuitiveperception, indications of the true state of affairs. (398-99)

The analyst's success in reading his opponents' physiognomy and be-havior for their "hidden" thoughts is revealed—and mirrored—in hiscomplete knowledge of their cards, "as if the rest of the party had turnedoutward the faces" of those cards (399).

In both cases, the flaneur employs a method that incorporates closephysiognomic scrutiny with an ability to detach himself from the gameitself. He must, as Benjamin notes, remain "on the threshold," existing"neither in nor out" of the situation at hand. The consideration ofphysiognomic details that are ostensibly "external" to the game enablesthe analyst to rise "above," to see "past" the mere "rules" and proscribed"method" of play. The knowledge of an opponent's behavior representsan advantage that can be gained without any extraordinary understand-ing of the ganae's more intricate strategies, if there are any. Indeed, tofocus too much on the play itself is to neglect this "external" information,and to obscure the "necessary knowledge . . . of what to observe" (398).Dupin's claim that such advantages are only found in "recesses" ofthought "altogether inaccessible to the ordinary understanding" is some-what misleading, as this data is emphatically available on the "surface"

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of the situation. But to one too thoroughly engaged in the complexity ofplay and unable to distance himself, the most obviously superficialreality becomes a "hidden recess." The most effective route to perceivea person's "inner" secrets is not a direct or linear trajectory "inward," butan oscillating zig-zag, an in-and-out movement that tends to problematizethe traditional opposition of "inner" to "outer."

The detective must consider this flexible relation between interiorityand exteriority when reading the physiognomy of a room's interior tosolve a crime. Both of Poe's most famous Dupin mysteries, "The Murdersin the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter," are based upon appar-ent violations of fundamental principles of the interior. As John T. Irwinhas pointed out in The Mystery to a Solution, "The Murders in the RueMorgue" is a "locked-room" mystery: a substantial part of the mysteryis how the murderers gain ingress and egress from the seemingly lockedapartment. "The Purloined Letter," on the other hand, is a "hidden-object" mystery; here the detective/flaneur must "read" an interior inorder to locate the document that the Minister has stolen:

A locked-room mystery asks how a solid body got out of (or into) aninternally sealed space without violating the space's appearance ofclosure, while a hidden-object mystery asks how a solid object remainspresent within a finite physical space without, as it were, making anappearance. In one case we are certain that what we seek is not insidea given space, in the other that what we seek cannot possibly beoutside it. (181)

Conventions such as "locked-room" or "hidden-object" mysteries sug-gest that the genre inherently questions concepts of "interiority" and"exteriority." Poe's tales are prototypical in this regard. The orangutan in"Rue Morgue" escapes from the "locked" interior of the sailor's closet,proceeds out onto the urban street, obtains access into another "locked"interior, that of the apartment in the Rue Morgue, only to escape again.In "The Purloined Letter," the Minister's apartment, though locked, iseasily permeated by the Prefect's agents; ostensibly open in this way, itnevertheless conserves its secret "enclosed" within its walls. The artifi-cial boundaries created through interiors are defied throughout Poe'sdetective tales, reinforcing the ambiguous and problematic relationshipbetween "inner" and "outer" upon which Benjamin's flaneur wouldcapitalize, turning the street into an interior, as much at home in thatstreet as he would be in his study. And Dupin defies these boundaries inthe same way he gains access to other characters' "inner minds"; asShawn James Roservheim points out in The Cryptographic Imagination:Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet, "Dupin's ability to enter andleave [these] space[s], like his ability to identify the murderer from the

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evidence at the crime scene, is an attenuated form of his ability to readminds"(67).

The flaneur's ability to abstract himself from the deceptive complexityof his immediate surroundings also applies to these interiors. In bothstories, while considerable attention is paid to the actual interiors inquestion and their peculiar details (i.e., the grisly crime scene in "RueMorgue" and the microscopic examination of the Prefect in "PurloinedLetter"), Poe devotes much more care to the articulation of Dupin'smethod of reading these interiors "at one remove" (Ferguson 28), andhow it surpasses the plodding method of the Prefect and the Parisianpolice. The initial analysis of the crime scene by the police in "RueMorgue" lacks the flaneur's simultaneous engagement and detachment,according to Dupin:

The Parisian police, so much extolled for acumen, are cunning, but nomore. There is no method in their proceedings, beyond the method ofthe moment. . . . The results attained by them are brought about bysimple diligence and activity. When these qualities are unavailing,their schemes fail. . . . [TJhere is such a thing as being too profound.Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more importantknowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial. (411-12)

The police have made the error of "getting too close," of losing them-selves in the complexity of the "game," as Dupin points out in thefollowing passage:

The wild disorder of the room; the corpse thrust, with the headdownward, up the chimney; the frightful mutilation of the body of theold lady; these considerations, with those just mentioned, and otherswhich I need nol mention, have sufficed to paralyze the powers, byputting completely at fault the boasted acumen, of the governmentagents. They have fallen into the gross but common error ofconfounding the unusual with the abstruse. (414)

The Prefect, Dupin maintains, "perpetually errs by being too deep or tooshallow, for the matter in hand" (689). When viewing an object ofcomplexity, to hold it too close to the eye is to become bedazzled,immersed, and literally "a-mazed" in its labyrinths. The Prefect thusrepresents a prefiguration of the inductive "ground-moles" Poe lam-poons in Eureka, full of painstaking yet short-sighted and ultimatelyineffective method; Dupin is the truly analytical "theorist," withoutspecialized training, but endowed with naturally superior vision andreason (1264-70). It is necessary to pay attention to details, but it is alsoimportant to gain a detached distance, so as to identify which details arecrucial, and which are simply contributing to the confusing complexityof the situation.'

If, as Dupin points out, truth is not always fovind "in a well," but isfrequently discovered on the "surface" of a situation, then the ability only

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to plumb the "profoimd" and "deep" detail of an event's intricate"recesses" amounts to blindness, no matter how adept the viev^er is atthis type of scrutiny. The detective must detach himself and become a"meta-reader" of not only the "game" but the psychology of its players.If not, he will (like the Prefect) commit fatal errors of assumption, asDupin suggests:

Do you not see he has taken it for granted that alt men proceed toconceal a letter,—not exactly in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg—but, at least, in some out-of-the-way hole or comer suggested by thesame tenor of thought which would urge a man to secrete a letter in agimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg? And do you not see also, that suchrecherches nooks for concealment are adapted only for ordinaryoccasions, and would be adopted only by ordinary intellects; for in allcases of concealment, a disposal of the article concealed—a disposal ofit in this recherche manner—is, in the very first instance, presumableand presumed; and thus its discovery depends, not at al! upon theacumen, but altogether upon the mere care, patience, and determinationof the seekers (690-91)

Dupin, on the other hand, recognizes tha t the Minister, as "both poet andmathematician," would be sufficiently "analytic" to anticipate the Prefect'shighly thorough, microscopic, yet essentially simplistic and misguidedprocedures. TTie Minister would perceive that "the most intricate andremote recess of his hotel would be as open as his commonest closets tothe eyes, to the probes, to the gimlets, and to the microscopes of thePrefect," which in turn would "imperatively" cause the Minister "todespise all the ordinary nooks of concealment" (693-94).

Physiognomies of Landscape and Language

Adopting the detective/flaneur's perspective thus involves a curiousinversion (or, to use one of Poe's favorite words, a "bouleversement")regarding traditional concepts of "irmer" and "outer." If the "recess" ofan event or an interior, with its devious complexities, becomes the focusof methodical and diligent scrutiny, its conventionally "hidden" objectswill eventually be plain to see, but the surface becomes obscure. Thus,"deep" complexity becomes simple and "ordinary," and "simplicity" orsuperficiality becomes the more sophisticated and complex strategy. Allthat is concealed on the "inside" of the mystery is revealed, whereas allthat is practically advertised on its "external" surface, though readilyvisible, becomes unseeable. This is why, Dupin tells the Prefect, "it is thevery simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault. . . . Perhaps themystery is a little too plain.... A little too self-evident" (681). Appropri-ately enough, Dupin explains the matter to the narrator first in terms ofthe urban street, home of the flaneur, and then of the map, which projects

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the intricacies of the street onto a global and even cosmic scale, thoughthis time with words rather than topography:

[H]a ve you ever noticed which of the street signs, over the shop-doors,are the most attractive of attention? . . . . There is a game of puzzles ... which is played upon a map. One party playing requires another tofind a given word—the name of a town, river, state, or empire—anyword, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. Anovice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents bygiving them the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selectssuch words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart tothe other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of thestreet, escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious; andhere the physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moralinapprehension by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed thoseconsiderations which are too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident.(694)

Language and letters, designed to identify, locate and thereby controlthe physical terrain, become invisible when they are magnified or made"excessively obvious" to heighten their "readability." In effect, what wasintended to be a verbal label "outside" of the topography becomes partof the landscape itself, and contributes to its complexity rather thanclarifying it. The problematic nature of language, its deceptive promiseof analytic distance from what it describes, is an important issue for thedetective/flaneur. He reads ephemeral periodicals and listens analyti-cally to accounts of eye-witnesses, as part of an already complex physi-ognomic landscape. For Poe, all external reality constitutes a "surface"that is to be read, by means of its phrenological "bumps," its topography:"it is by these deviations from the plane of the ordinary, that reason feelsits way, if at all, in the search for the true" (414). Language is part of thattopography; in two of the detective tales ("Rue Morgue" and "MarieRoget"), Dupin arrives at a clearer understanding of the situation by"removing" himself from the crime scene and focusing on newspaperaccounts of the crime. Such accounts do not guarantee genuine detach-ment, though. Certainly, by "reading" the crime through the mediationof the news media, Dupin distances himself from the immediacy of thecrime's overwhelmingly violent, complex, and sensational reality. Hereiterates the importance of such abstraction implicitly in "The PurloinedLetter": "If it is any point requiring reflection," he observes, "we shallexamine it to better purpose in the dark" (680). But in dealing with suchtopics, periodicals at this time often heightened their sensationalism; asDavid Reynolds illustrates in Beneath the American Renaissance, "theantebellum public was fed an increasingly spicy diet of horror, gore, andperversity" in the ephemeral press (171). Such accounts must thereforebe read at yet another level of remove, as a flaneur would; they provide

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fragments only the flaneur can piece together, as he reads them at a meta-level.

Dupin brings such superior observational skills to bear on the interiorof the Minister's apartment, searching not its "recesses" or "recherchesnooks for concealment" but its "surface." It is intriguing to note furtherthat he must present a deceptive and urureadable "surface" of his ownface: "I prepared myself with a pair of green spectacles, and called onefine morning... at the Ministerial hotel.... I complained of my weak eyes,and lamented the necessity of the spectacles, under cover of which Icautiously and thoroughly surveyed the apartment, while seeminglyintent only upon the conversation of my host . . . " (695). The readerimagines Dupin must keep his face turned towards the Minister evenwhile scarining the interior, thus completing the union between theflaneur's oblique glance and the attentive gaze of the detective:''

[W]hile I maintained a most animated discussion with the Minister, ona topic which I knew had never failed to interest and excite him, I keptmy attention really riveted upon the letter. In this examination, Icommitted to memory its external appearance and arrangement in therack; and also fell, at length, upon a discovery which set at restwhatever trivial doubt I might have entertained. In scrutinizing theedges of the paper, I observed them to be more chafed than seemednecessary. They presented the broken appearance which is manifestedwhen a stiff paper, having been once folded and pressed with a folder,is refolded in a reversed direction, in the same creases or edges whichhad formed the original fold. This discovery was sufficient. It wasclear to me that the letter had been turned, as glove, inside out, re-directed, and re-sealed (696)

The symbolic value and problematic nature of the purloined letteritself has been the subject of considerable recent scholarly attention. In hisseminar on the story, Jacques Lacan argues that the letter represents anempty signifier, important not for its contents, but for its function withinthe story as the (un)observed object of Oedipal triangulations of charac-ters. Irwin argues in The Mystery to a Solution that the purloined letterillustrates

that the most accurate physical representation of the link betweenbody and mind is the reversal or interchangeability of dimensionaloppositions considered as the sign of the metaphysical's transcendenceof thebodily. The tumingofthepurloined letter insideoutsymbolicallydepicts the relationship between the physicality of writing and themetaphysicality of thought as a continuous container/containedoscillation. (126)

This symbolism functions on a more literal level as well, to questions ofinteriority and exteriority rather than to thought and writing, to philo-sophical ends rather than psychoanalytic ones. The letter itself, its insideturned out, becomes Poe's final reminder of the flexible nature of

18 ATQ

seemingly fixed relations between inner and outer, precisely the kind ofinversion between surface and depth Dupin points to in his analogy ofthe map, or the city street. Irwin describes this convertibility nicely in thefollowing passage: •

The letter is concealed in plain sight on the surface, on the outside ofthis inside (the house), a concealment accomplished by, and symbolizedin, the turning of the letter itself inside out. Thus everted, its outside—the part of the letter whose appearance is known to the prefect andDupin from the queen's description, the part that usually serves toconceal, to envelop, the letter's contents—now becomes the content tobe concealed from the eyes of the police; while the inside—the realitythat gives this letter its special significance, the part of it that is notknown to the prefect and Dupin—becomes a new outside that givesthe letter a different appearance. (181-82)̂

The flaneur, who can move mentally within and without his observedsubject, is uniquely (perhaps solely) qualified to perceive such physicalfluidity.

Numerous scholars have pointed out that-Dupin achieves his impos-sible mastery of crime without discovering or disclosing its deeper roots,settling in the end for a detached position "outside" these interiors,removed from the events occurring within them. As Thomas Joswicksuggests, this represents an important limitation of Dupin's "mastery":

[B]y translating brutal events into a discursive order, Dupin canremain unperturbed by what most unsettles the narrator and readers:the horrifyingviolenceof an'Ourang-Ou tang'thatuncannily resemblesthe violence of human mastery. With a 'mood of mind' detachedbecause triumphant over senseless events, Dupin returns to thesanctuary of his own thought once the horror is explained. The worldof sensational shocks and murderous impulses is left for the reader towonder and tremble at. (241)

And, as Rosenheim suggests, this "translation" of events into a "discur-sive order" involves a reductionism that may be the price for Dupin'sultimate disengagement: "Objects and events in the world must bedeprived of their polyvalent materiality, since the semiotic schema, asconceived by Poe, requires the replacement of contingency and indeter-minacy with the detective's single, verifiable meaning. Just as in theorya deciphered code ought to be completely intelligible, so Dupin believesin a corresponding transparency of events in the world . . ." (25).

But if Dupin's mastery represents a comforting fantasy of control,what remains in opposition to that fantasy are (disturbing messagesregarding the stability of architectural and conceptual boundaries. Thepersistence of such an unsettling porosity undercuts whatever comfortDupin's ratiocination provides, by subverting the most basic reductionat the heart of the detective tale, perhaps even all human experience: the

The Detective Gaze 19

division of inner and outer. The fluidity of that division is at the heart ofboth the flaneur's approach to urban landscapes and the detective'sscrutiny of people and crime scenes. Its ambiguity in Poe's detectivetales, along with Dupin's striking affinities with the flaneur, points to theintimate connection between the flaneur and the detective, and thecentral importance of the former in Poe's creation of the latter. Despitethe scholarly rumors of his demise, in Poe's detective tales the flaneur(like so many of Poe's own fictional characters) has refused to stayburied.

The City University of New YorkNew York, New York

NOTES'The male possessive is used here because, with few exceptions, the flaneur has beendescribed as an explicitly male figure; however, scholars such as Deborah Parsons and JanetWolff have pointed to the problems women face[d] in attempting to "stroll" urban streetsas leisurely observers. Cf. Deborah Parsons' Streetzvalking the Metropolis: Women, the City,and Modernity, and Janet Wolff, "The Invisible Flaneuse: Women and the Literature ofModernity," and "The Artist and the Flaneur: Rodin, Rilke, and Gwen John in Paris" in TheFlaneur, ed. Keith Tester, 111-37.

^Noone is so consistently associated with physiognomy as Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801), whose essays on physiognomy were astoundingly popular; between its originalpublication in 1770 and 1810, his Physiognomische Frngmcntc, or Physiognomical Fragments,went through "no fewer than sixteen German, fifteen French, two American, two Russian,one Dutch, and twenty English editions" (Shookman 2). John Graham notes a passage fromThe Gentlemen's Magazine of 1801 on Lavater's principles: "In the enthusiasm with whichthey were studied and admired, they were thought as necessary in every family as even theBible itself. A servant would, at one time, scarcely be hired till the descriptions andengravingsofLavaterhadbeenconsulted.incarefulcomparison with the lines and featuresof the young man's or woman's countenance"(61).

•"This inability to "pull back" from one's interior becomes a major element in scenes fromPoe's "tales of sensation," such as "The Pit and the Pendulum" and The Narrative of ArthurGordon Pym, wherein narrators are forced to "grope" their way blindly through dark andcomplex (or apparently complex) interiors.

••This passage also brings to mind Christopher Benfey's discussion of the "twin fantasies ofutter exposure and complete secrecy" in Poe's work, which are united in the incompletereading of the flaneur's gaze. Benfey implies a causal relation between the two, particularlyin "The Tell-Tale Heart," in which the narrator, "for all his secrecy ... claims to have accessto the mind of the old man. His very privacy, his enclosedness, seems to allow him to seeinto the minds of other people" (33).

•Mrwin also addresses this convertibility in American Hieroglyphics, in reference to thenarrator's ruminations in "Morella" on the fluidity of identity:

The paradox here involves the way in which a mutually constitutiveopposition simultaneously depends upon and dissolves the notion ofa limit, whether that limit be internal or external. Like a Mobius stripin which a two-sided surface is turned into a one-sided surface but isstill experienced as if it had twosides, a mutually constitutive oppositioninvolves the same bewildering interpenetration of one and two. (122)

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If we substitute "inner and outer" for "one and two," we can perceive the same disorienting"effect."

Works CitedBaudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. London: Phaedon, 1964.

Benfey, Christopher. "Poe and the Unreadable: 'The Black Cat' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart.'"Nezu Essays on Poe's Major Tales. Ed. Silverman, Kenneth. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Flaneur." Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the EraofHigh Capitalism.London: Verso, 1983.

—. "One Way Street." Demetz, 61-97.

—. "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire." Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. HannahArendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

—. "Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century." Demetz, 146-63.

Bergmann, Hans. Cod in the Street: Nezu York Writing from the Penny Press to Melville.Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1995.

Brand, Dana. The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Cam-bridge, New York: Cambridge UP, 1991.Demetz, Peter, ed. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. By WalterBenjamin. New York: Schocken Books, 1978.

Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. "The flaneur on and off the streets of Paris." Tester, 22-43.Graham, John. Lnvater's Essays on Physiognomy: A Study in the History of Ideas. Bern, LasVegas: Lang, 1979.

Irwin, John. American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the AmericanRt'iinissniici,'. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.—. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore andLondon: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.Johnson, Barbara. "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida." The Purloined Poe: Lacan,Dcrrida & Psychoanalytic Reading. Eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson. Baltimoreand London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.Joswick, Thomas. "Moods of Mind: The Tales of Detection, Crime, and Punishment." ACompanion to Poe Studies. Ed. Eric W. Carlson. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood P,1996.

La vater, Johan Caspar. Essays on Physiognomy: For the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Loveof Mankiwd. London: C. Whittingham for H.D. Symonds, 1804.Parsons, Deborah. Streetwalking the Metropolis: Wotnen, the City, and Modernity. Oxford:Oxford UP, 2000.Poe, Edgar Allan. Essays and Revieivs. Library of America, 1984.—. Poetry and Tales. Library of America, 1984.

Quoyeser, Catherine Jean. "'Fugitives'and'standards': Journalism and theCommodifica tionof Literature in Antebellum America." Diss. Stanford University, 1990.Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Ageof Emerson and Melville. Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1988.Rosenheim, Shawn James. The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writingfrom Edgar Poe to theInternet. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.

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Rosenheim, Shawn and Stephen Rachman,eds. The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe.Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.Shields, Rob. "Fancy footwork: Walter Benjamin's notes on flanerie." Tester, 61-81.Shookman, Ellis, ed. The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar

Lavater. Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1993.Tester, Keith. The Flaneur. London, New York: Routledge, 1994.Wolff, Janet. "The Invisible Flaneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity." TheProblems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin. Ed. Andrew Benjamin. London: Routledge,1989: 141-56.—. "The Artist and the Elaneur: Rodin, Rilke, and Gwen John in Paris." Tester, 111-37.