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Narratives in Perambulation: Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’ and Metsakes’ ‘Aυτόχειρ’*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Georgia Gotsi
Georgia Gotsi*
Affiliation:
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Kings College London
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Extract

An author Edgar Allan Poe was initially introduced to the Greek public of the late nineteenth century by Roi’des, and soon became well-known through a series of translations in the contemporary press. ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840) appeared in a somewhat adapted translation in the journal Eστíα of 1890. Five years later, Michael Metsakes, who was familiar with Poe’s tales, published in the newspaper a short story which, despite its affinities to ‘The Man of the Crowd’, preserves a remarkable individuality. What rather brings these two texts together, otherwise products of two quite different cultures, is the awareness shared by their authors of the rise of a new era. Writing just before the Civil War, Poe experiences the tensions connected with the upsurge of Jacksonian democracy. The period witnessed an unprecedented increase in urban population following the transformation of the United States from an agricultural country into a commercial and industrial one. The American dream of freedom and justice had to come to terms with the fear of the mob, economic inequality, and man’s dependence on the machine. Sensitive to the new cultural situation which was beginning to emerge in his country, Poe deplores America’s increasing industrialisation and is preoccupied with the disintegration of personality it generates. Poe’s awareness of the new age is apparent in ‘The Man of the Crowd’, a text noticed by both Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin for its anticipation of modernity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 20 , 1996 , pp. 35 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1996

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References

1. For this characterisation by Palamas see 23.6.1918.

2. Edgar Poe, trans. Prassas, K.I., 2 45 (1890) 297–301 Google Scholar. For a bibliography of Poe translations in Greece see Katsimbales, G.K., (Athens, 2nd edition 1959)Google Scholar.

3. See for instance Metsakes’ reference to Poe in in Michael Metsakes, Peranthes, M. (Athens 1956) 332–347 Google Scholar (p.343). Filyras, Romos, 8.10.1920 Google Scholar also mentions that Metsakes had translated Poe’s The Gold-bug.

4. See Bakounakes, Nikos, 1828-1869 (Athens, 2nd edition 1995)Google Scholar.

5. See, for instance, the studies by Irwin, John T., American Hieroglyphics (New Haven-London 1980)Google Scholar and Williams, Michael J.S., A World of Words. Language and Displacement in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Durham-London 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar as well as the discussions of Lacan, Derrida, and Johnson, Barbara on ‘The Purloined Letter’ in Muller, John P. and Richardson, William J., eds., The Purloined Poe. Lacan, Derrida & Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore-London 1988)Google Scholar. Cf. also Rignall’s, John reading of ‘The Man of the Crowd’ in Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator (London-New York 1988) 9–19 Google Scholar.

6. For an overview of Metsakes’ fiction see, Gotsi, Georgia, in in Vol. 6 (Athens 1996)Google Scholar.

7. See Walkowitz, Judith R., City of Dreadful Delight. Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London 1992) 16 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. See among others Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth Century American Literature (Cambridge 1991) 41-63 and Byer, Robert H., ‘Mysteries of the city: A Reading of Poe’s’ ‘The Man of the Crowd’ ’ in Ideology and Classic American Literature, eds. Bercovitch, Sacvan and Jehlen, Myra (Cambridge 1986) 221–246 Google Scholar (p.222). Nevertheless, the dominant representations of public urban landscape were reworked later on in the century. Cf.Walkowitz, , City of Dreadful Delight, 38 Google Scholar, who notices how an epistemological crisis in the 1880s led authors such as George Gissing, R.L. Stevenson, and Henry James to ‘produce meditations on London that emphasised fragmentation and introspection’.

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10. Cf.Mackridge, Peter, ‘The Textualization of Place in Greek Fiction 1883-1903’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 2 2 (1992) 148-68 (p. 149)Google Scholar. In the association with travel literature is highlighted by the general title under which the text appeared: In this same series in of January 1895, Metsakes published ten more texts. However, in Metsakes’ manuscripts, two of these texts, are found under the altered general title: See Drakopoulou, Despina, 1 (1989) 96-105 (pp.97–8)Google Scholar.

11. For instance, in (July-August 1894) holds the columns where he recounts his impressions of Athenian life. Another example of short survey texts on urban life is the series of by Palamas, first published in of 1882, by Gerasimos Vokos, published in of 1895 and by Roi’des, first published in of 1896. See now Kostes Palamas, Synadinos, D.P. and Kassines, K.G., 1 (Athens 1990)Google Scholar and Roi’des, Emmanouel, Alkes Aggelou, 5 (Athens 1978)Google Scholar.

12. All quotations and references to ‘The Man of the Crowd’ are to: Poe, Edgar Allan, Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Mabbot, T.O., 3 vols. See vol. 2, Tales and Sketches 1831-42 (Cambridge, Mass.-London 1978) 505-18 (p.507)Google Scholar.

13. Poe, , ‘The Man of the Crowd’, 507 Google Scholar.

14. Byer, , ‘Mysteries of the city’, 236 Google Scholar.

15. Poe, , ‘The Man of the Crowd’, 507, 511 Google Scholar.

16. Benjamin, Walter, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London 1973) 49 Google Scholar.

17. Quotations and references to are to: Metsakes, Michael, (Athens 1988) 271 Google Scholar.

18. Poe, , ‘The Man of the Crowd’, 511 Google Scholar.

19. Metsakes, , 270.

20. Maronites, D.N., , (Athens 1992) 170-82 (p. 177)Google Scholar.

21. See Grunes, Dennis, ‘Fraternal Hopes Dashed: Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”‘, College Language Association Journal 25 3 (1982) 348-58 (p.351)Google Scholar; Kennedy, J. Gerald, Poe, Death and the Life of Writing (New Haven-London 1987) 118 Google Scholar; Elbert, Monika M., ‘“The Man of the Crowd” and the Man Outside the Crowd: Poe’s Narrator and the Democratic Reader’, Modern Language Studies 21 4 (1991) 16-30 (pp.19–21)Google Scholar.

22. Poe, , ‘The Man of the Crowd’, 515 Google Scholar.

23. Metsakes, , 270.

24. Byer, , ‘Mysteries of the city’, 238 Google Scholar.

25. A look at the actual map of Patras shows that, in his journeys, the narrator covers the whole of the city proper.

26. Metsakes, , 278.

27. Metsakes, , 266, 269.

28. Byer, , ‘Mysteries of the city’, 234 Google Scholar.

29. Poe, , ‘The Man of the Crowd’, 513–4 Google Scholar.

30. Metsakes, , 229.

31. The impressionistic technique of the narrative draws attention to the issue of the means of arriving at knowledge by suggesting the dominance of viewpoint over material reality. In this context both texts foreground the preoccupation of literary impressionists at the beginnings of the twentieth century with the importance of the perceiving consciousness and the phenomenological relation of subject to object.

32. Metsakes’ as a whole also challenges the possibility of a totalistic perception of the city.

33. Byer, , ‘Mysteries of the city’, 235 Google Scholar.

34. Barthes, Roland, S/Z (Paris 1970) 168 Google Scholar.

35. Though it is not the issue of this article, it should be noted that the meandering of the phrase combined with the arrangement of the narrative on modulations of a key theme create a musical prose according to the contemporary precepts of the Symbolists. In the organisation of the narrative on a musical pattern is poignant — as Maronites, , 178, was the first to notice — while musicality, both as a structural element and thematic motif imbues many of the in all cases it exemplifies Metsakes’ wish to write a See Metsakes, , 233-8 (236).

36. The tragic equation of human life in its variety with a physical phenomenon is also the subject of . In both texts, as actuality disintegrates into a set of repeated movements and fragmented discussions, human life loses its momentum and becomes meaningless.

37. Metsakes, , 281, 279.

38. Metsakes, , 277, 280. Although the narrator does not comment on the main economic activity of the city, the description of the deserted and silent docklands with the scales for the weighing of the raisins and the packing cases for their transportation hints at its strongly commercialised character.

39. Benjamin, , Charles Baudelaire, 53, 55 Google Scholar.

40. Poe, , ‘The Man of the Crowd’, 513. Cf.Metsakes, , , 274-5, 279 Google Scholar.

41. For the reciprocity in the figures of the ‘flâneur’ and the prostitute see Nord, Deborah Epstein, ‘The City as Theater: From Georgian to Early Victorian London’, Victorian Studies 31 2 (1988) 159–88 Google Scholar, quoted by Walkowitz, , City of Dreadful Delight, 253 Google Scholar. Cf.Buck-Morss, Susan, ‘The Flaneur, the Sandwichman, and the Whore’, New German Critique 23 39(1986) 99–142 Google Scholar.

42. Metsakes, , 285.

43. Metsakes, , 270.

44. Metsakes, , 270, 272.

45. Here, I am referring to the internal connections of the narrative with other literary texts. Criticism has also pointed out a series of intertextual links between Poe’s tale and texts by Dickens and Hoffman. See for instance, Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’, 505 and Vitt-Maucher, Gisela, ‘E.T. Hoffmanns Hitter Gluck und E.A. Poes The Man of the Crowd: Eine Gegenüberstellung’, The German Quarterly 43/1 (1970) 35–46 Google Scholar.

46. It is characteristic that when the Greek translator removed all these intertextual allusions, probably because of their obscurity, he rendered the text less perplexing and therefore less suggestive.

47. For biographical information on Leónidas Kanellopoulos see 1903 (1902) 91 and on Chrestakes Palamas, ed. Drandakes, Pavios, 19, 2nd. edition (Athens n.d.)Google Scholar.