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

Abstract

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.