ABSTRACT
In his essay “The Flaneur,” Walter Benjamin agrees with Paul Valéry’s assessment that Poe was “the first to attempt the scientific story, a modern cosmogony, [and] the description of pathological phenomena,” and posits a unifying methodology behind these divergent strands of Poe’s work:
These genres he regarded as exact products of a method for which he claimed universal validity. In this very point Baudelaire sided with him, and in Poe’s spirit he wrote: The time is not distant when it will be understood that a literature which refuses to make its way in brotherly concord with science and philosophy is a murderous and suicidal literature.’ The detective story, the most momentous among Poe’s technical achievements, was part of a literature that satisfied Baudelaire’s postulate. (43)
Benjamin’s suggestion that Poe employed a “method for which he claimed universal validity” helps to illuminate his references to Poe as a physiognomist of the interior and of the crowd. The principles of flanerie connect Poe’s Eureka with his detective tales, horror stories and “tales of sensation.” In this chapter I will discuss Poe’s strategies and maneuvers as a physiognomist of faces and interiors. The next chapter will expand the analysis to include not only Poe’s physiognomic exploration of faces in the urban crowd, but also his application of flanerie in imaginative and innovative ways to landscapes both urban and natural. If in Eureka Poe argues for the application of flanerie to science, in his fiction he dramatizes both the potential revelations and the limitations (even the dangers) of such a perspective.
