Essay One Rewrite

Resurrections of Chase

            The speed of the chase is often what pulls us to the edge of our seat, but winding walks of diminishing speed can be just as intriguing. To illustrate pace in such a way that the reader can actually feel the change is a difficult task. In “The Man of the Crowd,” Edgar Allan Poe uses quickening and dizzying descriptions of thoroughfares to emulate the narrator’s emotions, producing pace felt by the reader. Poe creates these emotive passages through a masterful manipulation of language and syntax, forcing the narrator’s voice to be read as stream of consciousness. Through this manipulation of language and stream of consciousness the reader is interpolated in the psyche of the narrator, thus empathizing with his suspicions and anxieties. Throughout the tale the narrator’s descriptions alternate between focusing on what is being seen and what is being done, so that during short periods in which pace is at a lull the reader is engaged in finite details and can recover from the more dizzying portions of narrative.

            In the beginning of the story the narrator is convalescing in a hotel in London and has been lounging in the parlor seated near the window. He remarks on the scene unfolding in, “One of the principle thoroughfares of the city, and had been very much crowded during the whole day. But, as the darkness came on, the throng momently increased; and, by the time the lamps were well lighted, two dense and continuous tides of population were rushing past the door”(102). In this passage Poe uses the increasing speed of the crowd in front of the hotel to illustrate the narrators growing interest in the scene. As the, “throng momently increased,” the narrator is finished with the newspaper, beginning to look around, and by the time the lamps are lit he is, “filled… with a delicious novelty of emotion,” and cannot turn away from the window (102). We empathize the narrator’s interest because the syntax emulates tension and creates rhythm. The first sentence is smooth, a single comma creating a soft pause right in the middle. The second sentence is broken up by several commas and a semicolon, each strategically placed, so that the short pauses between segments create a slow and steady rhythm like the beating of a heart. In this passage Poe illustrates the bustling pedestrian traffic by breaking from conventional syntax using a run-on sentence. It is common in 19^th century literature to see a heavy use of commas to separate sentence fragments creating what we refer to today as a run-on; however, Poe’s use of commas urge the reader to continue. The short and sudden pauses of the commas emulate the bustling traffic. Because there is no period we as readers are not signaled to stop, instead we accept short pauses illustrating pedestrians pausing abruptly as other pedestrians present obstacles to the scene. The semicolon also represents the moment at which the narrator’s interest in the scene is alight with the same energy as the traffic flowing outside the hotel.

            The speed of the chase is not always quick, but Poe continues to use syntax and language with dizzying effect. Upon entering a street, “densely filled with people,” but, “not quite as thronged,” the stranger, “walked more slowly and with less object than before – more hesitatingly... he crossed and re-crossed the way repeatedly without apparent aim; and the press was still so thick, that, at every such movement, I was obliged to follow him closely”(106). Though the speed of the chase has slowed the narrator is forced to follow closely so as not to lose the stranger. However, following closer arises a sense of urgency in not getting caught. Poe creates urgency, again utilizing commas to create a run-on sentence, illustrating the narrator’s engagement in the chase and compelling the reader to feel tension, producing anxiety without the narrator outright claiming its presence. Shortly thereafter, their wandering brings them, “to a large and busy bazaar, with localities of which the stranger appeared well acquainted, and where his original demeanor again became apparent, as he forced his way to and fro, without aim, among the host of buyers and sellers”(107). Again the actual pace is slow, but urgency is maintained through syntax and the actions of the stranger, which force the narrator’s and thereby the readers’ attentions. Not before long the stranger, “hurried into the street, looked anxiously around him for an instant, and then ran with incredible swiftness through many crooked and people-less lanes, until we emerged once more upon the great thoroughfare whence we had started”(107). In these passages, Poe not only uses syntax to create rhythm, but his careful use of language is also important in interpreting the story. Instead of “to and fro” he could have written back and forth, side to side, or hither and thither, but “to and fro” has a bouncing quality to it. This coupled with syntax are what make it possible for the reader to feel the chase as though they were alongside the narrator.

             The interpolation of the reader into the story through Poe’s manipulation of conventional syntax and language, creating stream of consciousness, occurred nearly a century before it was seen in literature, therefore Poe is a pre-modernist author. According to Encyclopedia Britannica the first known use of internal monologue to influence stream of consciousness is Les Lauriers sont coupés by Édouard Dujardin (1888), forty-eight years after the original publication of “The Man of the Crowd,” and, “from which James Joyce derived the stream-of-consciousness technique he used in Ulysses”. In Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities he explains modernity in terms of print capitalism and the simultaneity nations moving calendrically through time. This sense of modernity being influenced by print is reflected in the chronology of stream of consciousness as a literary technique. Ulysses was first published as a serial from 1918-1920, after which the stream of consciousness technique was adopted by other United Kingdom authors like Virginia Woolf and through mass production made its way back to the States utilized by authors like William Faulkner. If we presuppose that Édouard Dujardin was a fan of Poe, than the chronological evolution of stream of consciousness technique also reflects how nations have become more imagined by print media with, “finite, if elastic, boundaries” (Anderson 7). Mass production and distribution has opened reading up to the world so an author in United States can be an influence to an author in France before anyone else in United States is familiar with his or her work, and that French author’s work can then be a larger influence to Britain before making its way back to the states. Poe’s stream of consciousness interpolating the reader also reflects Anderson’s claim that a nation is created by the sharing of national consciousness (45). In this sense Poe’s extraordinary manipulation of language and syntax forcing the reader to empathize with the narrator, join the reader and narrator together, sharing in the experience of the chase through London as a nation.

Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict; Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 2006

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Man of the Crowd. Tales of Mystery and Imagination. J.M. Dent & Sons, London. 1912.

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