Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America

By Terence Whalen

Edgar Allan Poe has long been viewed as an artist who was hopelessly out of step with his time. But as Terence Whalen shows, America's most celebrated romantic outcast was in many ways the nation's most representative commercial writer. Whalen explores the antebellum literary environment in which Poe worked, an environment marked by economic conflict, political strife, and widespread foreboding over the rise of a mass audience. The book shows that the publishing industry, far from being a passive backdrop to writing, threatened to dominate all aspects of literary creation. Faced with financial hardship, Poe desperately sought to escape what he called "the magazine prison-house" and "the horrid laws of political economy." By placing Poe firmly in economic context, Whalen unfolds a new account of the relationship between literature and capitalism in an age of momentous social change.

The book combines pathbreaking historical research with innovative literary theory. It includes the first fully-documented account of Poe's response to American slavery and the first exposé of his plot to falsify circulation figures. Whalen also provides a new explanation of Poe's ambivalence toward nationalism and exploration, a detailed inquiry into the conflict between cryptography and common knowledge, and a general theory of Poe's experiments with new literary forms such as the detective story. Finally, Whalen shows how these experiments are directly linked to the dawn of the information age. This book redefines Poe's place in American literature and casts new light on the emergence of a national culture before the Civil War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Sep 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781400823017

Book preview

EDGAR ALLAN POE AND THE MASSES

EDGAR ALLAN POE

AND THE MASSES

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

OF LITERATURE IN

ANTEBELLUM AMERICA

TERENCE WHALEN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright Ó 1999 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Whalen, Terence, 1959–

Edgar Allan Poe and the masses : the political economy of literature in antebellum America /Terence Whalen.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-00199-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849—Contemporary America. 2. Literature—Economic aspects—United States—History— 19th century. 3. Authorship—Economic aspects—United States— History—19th century. 4. Capitalism and literature—United States—History—19th century. 5. Politics and literature— United States—History—19th century. 6. Literature— Publishing—United States—History—19th century. 7. Authors and readers—United States—History—19th century. 8. Popular literature—United States—History and criticism. 9. Mass media— United States—History—19th century. I. Title.

PS2633.W48 1999 818¢.309—dc21 98-43053 CIP

http://pup.princeton.edu

eISBN: 978-1-400-82301-7

R0

For Robin

CONTENTS

PREFACE ix

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xi

PART ONE: CAPITALISM AND LITERATURE 1

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Minor Writing and the Capital Reader 3

CHAPTER TWO

The Horrid Laws of Political Economy 21

CHAPTER THREE

Fables of Circulation: Poe’s Influence on the Messenger 58

CHAPTER FOUR

Poe and the Masses 76

PART TWO: RACE AND REGION 109

CHAPTER FIVE

Average Racism: Poe, Slavery, and the Wages of Literary Nationalism 111

CHAPTER SIX

Subtle Barbarians: The Southern Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe 147

PART THREE: MASS CULTURE 193

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Code for Gold: Poe and Cryptography 195

CHAPTER EIGHT

Culture of Surfaces 225

CHAPTER NINE

The Investigating Angel: Poe, Babbage, and The Power of Words 249

NOTES 275

INDEX 323

PREFACE

EDGAR ALLAN POE and the Masses explores the relationship between literature and capitalism in antebellum America. Broadly concerned with the emergence of a national culture before the Civil War, the book focuses on Poe because he exemplifies, as much as anyone, the predicament of a poor-devil author in an age of social and economic turmoil. Through a series of far-reaching investigations, the book unfolds a new account of the American publishing industry, which had begun to regulate nearly all aspects of literary creation.

Poe was acutely aware of the consequences of the new publishing environment, for like his character Roderick Usher, he possessed an uncanny sensitivity to material powers in the world around him, powers which seemed to foretell the impending triumph of matter over mind. Sometimes Poe described this impending transformation in cosmological terms, but on other occasions he meticulously analyzed the magazine prison-house and the horrid laws of political economy. Contrary to his image as an artist who was out of space, out of time, Poe responded to his economic predicament in a variety of ways, ranging from theoretical pronouncements on literary value to practical ventures in the magazine business. Poe and the Masses accordingly departs from critical lore and instead depicts a writer who was both product and portent of an emerging mass culture.

Making extensive use of primary materials, the individual chapters offer several new contributions to our understanding of Poe and his world: the first fully documented interpretation of Poe’s response to American slavery; the first accurate account of Poe’s performance as a literary entrepreneur; a new explanation of Poe’s ambivalence toward nationalism, exploration, and imperialism; a detailed inquiry into the conflict between secret writing and common knowledge in Jacksonian America; and a general interpretation of the social meaning of Poe’s innovations in literature and criticism. As I suggest in the final chapter, Poe’s inability to escape the horrid laws of political economy ultimately inspired his recurrent dream of a material language that could transport him beyond the bounds of capitalist regulation.

. . . . .

I am grateful to the many people who helped make this book possible. A reading group at Duke University gave me confidence to pursue this project; my thanks to Tito Basu, Joe Cole, Tim Dayton, Craig Hanks, Angela Hubler, Caren Irr, Carolyn Lesjak, Bill Maxwell, and many visitors. I am also grateful to Professors Cathy Davidson, Robert Gleckner, Ric Roderick, and Susan Willis for their advice on the manuscript. I am especially obliged to Professor Louis Budd, whose unwavering support helped me persevere through many trials.

Several institutions provided support for research and writing. I am grateful to the Commonwealth Center at the College of William and Mary for a postdoctoral fellowship. My special thanks to Chandos Brown and Thad Tate for making this possible. In addition, I received invaluable support from the following sources: the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Material from Chapters Two and Eight appeared in American Quarterly as Edgar Allan Poe and the Horrid Laws of Political Economy (September 1992). An early version of Chapter Seven was published in Representations as The Code for Gold: Edgar Allan Poe and Cryptography (spring 1994).

In ways subtle and direct, I have benefitted from the work of many readers. Mary Altomare helped me through the formative stages, for which I am deeply grateful. The following readers provided advice on all or part of the manuscript: Glen Brewster, Brian Higgins, Nancy Isenberg, Howard Kerr, J. Gerald Kennedy, Donald Marshall, Dana Nelson, Louis Renza, J. V. Ridgely, Kirk Savage, Liliane Weissberg, and Sharon Zuber. Robin Grey contributed to the entire project, partly by revising the errata of the manuscript, and partly by enduring the errata of its author. This book is dedicated to her.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

PART ONE

CAPITALISM AND LITERATURE

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

MINOR WRITING AND THE CAPITAL READER

I. THE TRUTH OF SURFACES

ALTHOUGH HE trafficked in arcane and mysterious lore, Poe also liked to shock his readers by celebrating the truth of surfaces, that vast realm of superficial knowledge which is visible out of the corner of one’s eye. Those who gaze intently into the nighttime sky see only the star, but someone who surveys it less inquisitively is conscious of all for which the star is useful to us below—its brilliancy and beauty. ¹ This method is useful for surveying Poe’s own work, for by focusing less intently on a single text, the oblique perspective is in many ways more able to register a multitude of historical forces and to trace their subtle dominion over everyday life. So instead of beginning with a canonical text, I shall take a wayward glance at the working conditions of the 1836 Southern Literary Messenger, where Poe landed his first full-time job in the publishing industry. And instead of concentrating exclusively on the major author himself, this introduction shall also investigate the work of Lucian Minor, a progressive Southern intellectual whose forgotten writings Poe edited and sometimes imitated. Successive chapters of this study explore larger issues in the political economy of literature—ranging from the rise of a capitalist publishing industry, to the role of slavery in literary nationalism, to the creation of new narrative forms such as the detective story. But all of these issues are in some way prefigured by the casual association of Poe and Minor. Brought momentarily together by an intricate web of circumstances, the two writers soon encountered differences that prevented them from sharing a common destiny. These differences are especially significant, for although Poe and Minor were products of the same culture and candidates for the same editorial job at the Messenger, they disagreed markedly about the fate of literature in a developing capitalist economy. The contrast between Poe and Minor reveals much about the rise of a mass culture in antebellum America, and this in turn casts new light on the relation between the production of literature and what has been thought of as production in general.

Such an oblique beginning would perhaps be unnecessary were it not for the vast accumulation of critical and cultural sediment which threatens to distort Poe’s historical situation beyond all hope of recovery. This sediment derives from a variety of sources, ranging from the French appropriations of Poe by Baudelaire, Lacan, and Derrida, to the familiar American portrayals by such mass cultural luminaries as Bella Lugosi, Vincent Price, and Homer Simpson. Given the diversity of these representations, one might easily despair of finding some middle ground between the sublime and the ridiculous, or of even being able to tell with any certainty which is which. Adding to the confusion is the long tradition of literary commentary which, quite paradoxically, uses historical and biographical evidence to demonstrate Poe’s isolation from external social conditions. Commencing with his death in 1849, for example, Poe was variously depicted as an opium-crazed visionary or as the more conventional romantic outcast, both of which were improvements over his earlier image as a drunken beggar. Early in the twentieth century, Vernon Louis Parrington advanced this tradition by portraying Poe as an aesthetecraftsman who was out of step with his time. Frustrated by the apparent anomalies of his subject, Parrington struggled to construct a meaningful historical context but despairingly concluded that the problem of Poe, fascinating as it is, lies quite outside the main current of American thought. Despite many noteworthy exceptions, this trend continues in postwar and contemporary studies, especially those which rely on psychoanalysis to sequester Poe from social and economic pressures. In the Literary History of the United States, for example, F. O. Matthiessen commences the section on Poe with matter-of-fact references to a deep psychological insecurity and overwrought nervous system. In his influential biography, Arthur Hobson Quinn similarly contends that Poe’s emotional life deserves greater attention than quarrels and disputes with persons now forgotten. More recently, Frank Lentricchia invokes Poe to redefine the romantic outcast as someone who resists the discursive formation despite heavy emotional and psychic costs, and in the latest major biography, Kenneth Silverman renews the outcast thesis by emphasizing Poe’s childhood trauma and alleged psychological disintegration. Aptly summarizing the belief in emotional exemption from history, Louis Rubin argues that Poe inhabited a realm that was ‘out of place, out of time’ because he was psychologically unfit for the rigors of the commercial marketplace.² The very persistence of this approach begs a question: if Poe wasn’t in step with his time, then where was he?

As I have suggested, this problem can be clarified by the example of Lucian Minor, a lost writer whose surname conveniently and perhaps fatefully describes his status in American literary history. Although Minor is now remembered only as a footnote to Poe, a greater destiny seemed to await him in 1835. At this time Minor had just commenced a twenty-four-year stint as the commonwealth’s attorney for Louisa County, Virginia, but he was already acting the part of what we would today call a public intellectual. By all indications, Minor had made a conscious decision to sacrifice his private life and professional ambition in order to devote himself to the larger social issues of his day, especially those issues which could be addressed in the pages of the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe, on the other hand, had nothing left to sacrifice. At twenty-six years of age, Poe lived in cramped quarters with relatives in Baltimore, and his vocational prospects had grown exceedingly slim. By 1835, he had dropped out of the University of Virginia, served for two years in the U.S. Army, and trained briefly at West Point before deliberately provoking his own court-martial. Most importantly, he had been spurned—emotionally and financially—by his foster-father, a Richmond tobacco merchant named John Allan. This left Poe to his own meager devices: he was an unknown apprentice writer without family money and without any job offers in the publishing industry. Poe undoubtedly realized the nature of his predicament, and the warnings he received would have clarified his situation even further. One Baltimore literatus, attempting to rescue Poe from his apparent destiny, advised him in no uncertain terms that he must put aside the tragedy he had been composing and begin drudging upon whatever may make money.³ Given the undistinguished record of Poe in 1835, it is no surprise that Thomas Willis White, the proprietor of the Messenger, should have preferred Lucian Minor. In February 1835, White in fact offered Minor $800.00 a year to assume editorial duties for the magazine. To sweeten the deal, he even threw in some secondhand cajolery. Alluding to highly colored panegyrick, White repeated what he had purportedly heard from all quarters: Get Lucian Minor, Get Lucian Minor, he is the man for you.⁴ Minor, of course, was not the man, and later that year White reluctantly offered the job to Poe for ten dollars a week.

It was an offer he couldn’t refuse, but Poe’s acceptance of one opportunity foreclosed other options. In particular, his entrance into what he called the magazine prison-house forever prevented him from becoming the kind of public intellectual epitomized by Lucian Minor. Disturbed by Virginia’s lagging march toward progress, Minor dedicated himself to a variety of reform projects, ranging from public education to African colonization to temperance.⁵ He composed articles on all of these topics for Southern periodicals. As illustrated by his series of Letters from New England, Minor often argued that Virginia should emulate the more liberal social and educational practices of northern states. Although he expended considerable effort on these articles, Minor never thought of his writing as a career; like many intellectuals in antebellum America, he distinguished between his salaried work (commonwealth attorney) and his literary donations to the public good. In many ways, then, Lucian Minor represented the social conscience that Poe could not afford. During what we today call free time, Minor used the Messenger as a vehicle of LIGHT to communicate or commune with an audience of worthy citizen-readers. Setting high standards for both writers and subscribers, Minor argued that contributors to the Messenger should be motivated by the pure wish to diffuse light and to do good, and that the audience should in turn comprise the enlightened, the fair, the exalted in station!⁶ Poe, in contrast, confronted his audience through the medium of capital. In a literary workshop overseen by a profit-driven publisher, he produced texts for a mass of anonymous readers who were distinguished primarily by an act of purchase; their civic virtues, and indeed their virtues as readers, were matters of secondary importance. This initial difference in material conditions had lifelong repercussions: whereas Minor went on to participate in an ever-widening circle of reform movements, Poe’s political agenda was increasingly confined to the point of production itself.⁷

Production, however, does not lend itself to techniques of close reading, and it has therefore devolved upon literary historians to explain the complex relations between culture and political economy. In the case of Poe, unfortunately, this poses some problems, for the very scholars committed to analyzing the social determinants of writing are also the scholars most likely to be repulsed by Poe’s apparent ideology—by his avowed elitism and his habitual denunciation of that mysterious collectivity known as the mob.⁸ Many studies of the literary marketplace accordingly reflect a certain reticence toward Poe. In R. Jackson Wilson’s Figures of Speech: American Writers and the Literary Marketplace, to take one of the better examples, Poe is avoided in favor of Franklin, Irving, William Lloyd Garrison, Emerson, Dickinson and (in the epilogue) Whitman.⁹ Michael Gilmore’s American Romanticism and the Market-place also omits Poe, but to his credit, Gilmore does hold out the possibility for some future consideration. One would expect, he writes, to discover that dependency on the market inspired [Poe] with a similar mixture of accommodation and resistance.¹⁰

Even if applied, however, the market approach would still present difficulties. In its common acceptation, the concept of a market explains very little about the forces and social relations that constitute a mode of production. Nor does it tell us much about the antebellum publishing environment, which comprised cultural traditions, political conflicts, and of course a wide range of properly economic conditions, some of which were similar to those in other capitalist economies, and some of which were specific to the United States. To complicate matters further, specific economic conditions must themselves be interpreted or rendered intelligible through some narrative of historical change, such as the rise of a distinctly capitalist mode of production, or as the territorial expansion that John L. O’Sullivan euphemized as manifest destiny, or as the emergence of a national infrastructure which George Rogers Taylor has dubbed the transportation revolution.¹¹ All of these partial narratives—even the modest story of infrastructural development—shed some light on the political economy of antebellum literature. Improvements in transportation, for example, facilitated the circulation of both objects and information. Obviously, many books and magazines were intended solely for entertainment. But in order for the nation to develop and compete in the world market, the United States also required a swift and reliable system to disseminate information about prices, foreign markets, shipping schedules, labor disputes, trade regulations, patent laws, new manufacturing techniques, and innovations in the prevailing conditions for agricultural and industrial production. As foster son to a tobacco exporter, clerk in the army, and laborer in the publishing industry of virtually every major city of the United States, Poe would have understood the difference between information, which is destined to re-enter the process of production, and literature, which is designed to teach or delight an individual reader. The periodic crises in the American economy accentuated the value of information and information networks, but these crises also signalled the fitful and momentous character of capitalist production in the nineteenth century. As I will show in Chapters Two and Four, the Panic of 1837 gave rise to a period of combined and uneven development in the publishing industry, and this in turn compelled Poe and other commercial writers to confront multiple and conflicting versions of the future—any one of which could be expected to emerge from the crucible of economic depression. In other words, Poe’s writing was regulated not only by the market per se, but also by the instability in the publishing industry, the national investment in a capitalist future, and the rise of information as an economic good, all of which tended to undermine traditional standards of literary value by stressing the growing complicity between capitalism and signification.

Contrary to his image, Poe was an exceedingly perceptive witness to the new conditions of literary production. Writing to raise money for his magazine project, he claims to have foreseen that the country from its very constitution, could not fail of affording in a very few years, a larger proportionate amount of readers than any upon the Earth, and that the whole energetic, busy spirit of the age tended . . . to the Magazine literature—to the curt, the terse, the well-timed, and the readily diffused, in preference to the old forms of the verbose and . . . the inaccessible.¹² Poe also realized that the waning of old forms would expose literature to what he called the horrid laws of political economy.¹³ Since he could not support himself by writing poetry, he had to adapt his talents to the unstable and perhaps unfathomable tastes of a distant mass audience. Some of his most extravagant tales were, by his own admission, composed to supply a particular demand.¹⁴ He used similar commercial phrases to describe the overall condition of American letters. In his critical and editorial writings, he frequently referred to literary commodities, literary enterprises, the general market for literary wares, and to the sale-ableness of literature.¹⁵

But Poe’s starkest application of economic doctrine came at the beginning of his career, at the very moment when he was trying to land the job that Lucian Minor had just refused. In March 1835, Poe published the gruesome tale Berenice in the Southern Literary Messenger. Told by a monomaniac who is obsessed with the teeth of his cousin/fiancée, the tale recounts the apparent death of Berenice and the narrator’s subsequent visit to her grave site in a trance-like fit of bereavement. The shocking truth of his midnight visit is revealed at the end of the story: the narrator has dug up the coffin and extracted the teeth of Berenice, who turns out to have been alive when her grave and her mouth were violated. Not surprisingly, the tale aroused some complaints, so in an April 1835 letter to Thomas White, Poe defended his writing against what he considered to be an overly fastidious editorial policy. Emphasizing the hard facts of literary business, Poe argues that a publisher—and by extension, a writer—must be less concerned with the taste of the reading public than with the circulation of the magazine:

The history of all magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in nature to Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. . . . But whether the articles of which I speak are, or are not in bad taste is little to the point. To be appreciated you must be read. . . . I propose to furnish you every month with a Tale of the nature which I have alluded to. The effect—if any—will be estimated better by the circulation of the Magazine than by any comments upon its contents.¹⁶

Coming from someone who was purportedly unfit for commercial society, this is a startling declaration. It is also startling that the author of Berenice would see fit to lecture a capitalist proprietor about the true nature of capitalism itself. Whether or not Poe was sincere, the passage reveals his willingness to speak a language that Thomas White could understand. Significantly, such a language would have appalled Lucian Minor as much as it enticed White, for it dismisses matters of mere taste and sensibility in order to focus more intently on the bottom line of literary production. Forsaking the opportunity to diffuse light and to do good, Poe adopted a calculating, aggressive stance toward his craft and toward the mass audience whose taste would hence-forth be measured by gross acts of purchase.

Occurring at the commencement of his career, the Berenice incident affords several insights into Poe’s development as a commercial writer. Given the content of the story, one cannot help suspecting that Poe’s reference to the bad taste of Berenice is a grotesque pun. Moreover, Poe claims in the same letter that the tale originated in a bet that I could produce nothing effective on a subject so singular (57). Thus one of Poe’s earliest and most ghastly tales seems to have been motivated less by morbid fancy than by a pun or a bet. Poe’s aesthetic justification for the tale is also worth noting, for he rejects the Messenger’s policy on stylistic simplicity in favor of a more profitable approach consisting of the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful couloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and the mystical.¹⁷ Finally, the Berenice incident comprises one of Poe’s earliest efforts to identify and explain the rational basis of irrational art, a tactic he later repeated in The Philosophy of Composition. In The Philosophy of Composition, however, Poe conspicuously demurs from describing the economic necessity which, in the first place, motivated him to compose a salable text (ER, 15), whereas in the Berenice letter he concentrates on this primal necessity almost to the exclusion of all other considerations. It is not for us to know whether this rational justification actually preceded the composition of Berenice, or whether Poe invented it as a kind of exculpatory afterthought to show the profits of horror. But whatever the precise order of action and justification, it is clear that in Poe’s career as a commercial writer, the first alibi was profit, the first science was political economy.

Poe’s precocious grasp of political economy challenges the widespread assumption that writing begins as a pure or traditional activity that capitalism later reorganizes, however gradually, into a form of commodity production. Poe’s early poetry may have been insulated by a semi-autonomous tradition, but his tales were expressly summoned forth by the new economic order that emerged from the Panic of 1837.¹⁸ During the economic depression that lasted from 1837 to 1843, Poe came to realize that the higher order of poetry is, and always will be, in this country, unsaleable.¹⁹ Responding to the greater demand for prose articles, his literary output in this period shifted dramatically from poems to tales. In crude measurements based on titles and publication dates, Poe’s production of the relatively lucrative tale more than doubled during the depression, whereas his output of unsalable poetry declined by nearly 90 percent. In other words, instead of corrupting old genres, the Panic of 1837 gave birth to new forms of literature that were less encumbered by history and tradition. And because the publishing industry was (to retool a phrase) always already the condition of possibility for his cultural production, the particular style and substance of his fiction cannot be attributed to the mysterious operations of an overwrought nervous system. Far from being the wild offspring of an autonomous or diseased mind, Poe’s tales were in many ways the rational products of social labor, imagined and executed in the workshop of American capitalism.

The true conditions of this workshop were starkly revealed to Poe in the spring of 1836, when he asked Harper & Brothers to publish his tales as a book. Then Poe discovered that every commercial writer—whether genius or hack—wrote not for an undifferentiated public but for three distinct types of virtual readers. First was the Ideal Reader—the reader of taste with whom an author would willingly develop a bond of sympathy. Second was the Feared Reader—the anonymous collective reader Poe designated with such names as the mob, the demagogue-ridden public, the rabble, or simply the masses. Poe acknowledges the existence of these two kinds of readers on numerous occasions, most notably in The Philosophy of Composition, where he describes "the necessity . . . of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste" (ER, 15).

But Poe’s relation to both the Ideal and the Feared Reader was mediated by a third entity who acted as the embodiment of capital itself. The existence of a mediator between author and audience is implied in many of Poe’s descriptions of the literary market, as when he complains of those cliques which, hanging like nightmares upon American literature, manufacture, at the nod of our principal booksellers, a pseudo-public opinion by wholesale.²⁰ While negotiating with Harpers in 1836, however, Poe encountered this mediating entity in its most menacing form—not as a mere literary clique, but as a reader who wielded absolute power over publication. Acting on Poe’s behalf, James Kirke Paulding had approached the Brothers Harper in an attempt to strike a deal; when Poe’s manuscript was rejected, Paulding offered the following explanation:

By the way, you are entirely mistaken in your idea of my influence over these gentlemen in the transactions of their business. They have a Reader, by whose judgment they are guided in their publications, and like all other traders are governed by their anticipations of profit or loss, rather than any intrinsic merit of a work or its author. I have no influence in this respect, and indeed ought to have none. . . .²¹

According to advertisements, Harpers relied upon learned authorities only to guarantee the propriety and morality of new publications.²² Paulding, however, tells a very different story about these hired readers. Whether motivated by bitter experience or avuncular concern, Paulding introduces Poe to the real House of Harper, exposing the calculating and capitalist foundation of its publishing decisions. In so doing, Paulding casually hints at a deep connection between gross economic forces and the creative activity of literary producers. Writers necessarily have some notion of audience which, above and beyond any actual feedback, guides them in the production of texts. Paulding’s letter suggests that the first audience for a literary commodity is neither a sympathetic interpreter nor even an anonymous magazine subscriber, but instead an entirely different kind of critic who can only be called the Capital Reader.

Although Paulding may have had a particular person in mind, the Capital Reader need not be construed as a specific biological or legal entity, but instead as a personification of the peculiar logic that accompanied the new publishing industry. A precedent for such a personification can be found in Marx’s Capital:

As the conscious bearer of this movement [of capital], the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts, and to which it returns. The objective content of the circulation we have been discussing—the valorization of value—is his subjective purpose, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more wealth in the abstract is the sole driving force behind his operations that he functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will.²³

In the letter explaining why Poe’s manuscript was rejected, Paulding offers a similar explanation of the American publishing industry. Like Marx’s living incarnation of capital, the decision-maker at Harper & Brothers is more or less consciously motivated by anticipations of profit or loss, rather than any intrinsic merit of a work or its author. More importantly, Paulding characterizes the publishing firm as a virtual reader, a characterization designed to expose the vaguely sordid intimacy of literary creation and capitalist production. Knowledge of this intimacy would haunt Poe throughout his career. In the 1840 prospectus of The Penn Magazine, for example, Poe felt compelled to deny any part in the general corruption, claiming that his criticism remained independent and that circumstances had not yet taught him to read through the medium of a publisher’s will (ER, 1024). He protests too much and too late, for as shall become clear in the second half of this chapter, the Capital Reader had come to regulate not only the rough movements of the publishing industry, but also the more delicate ventures of the imagination itself.

II. CRISIS OF SURPLUS

On the front page of the February 1836 Messenger, Lucian Minor published an editorial decrying what may have been the most cataclysmic tendency of a capitalist publishing industry, namely the tendency toward literary overproduction. Go to the Library of one of our Colleges, he begins, and you are astonished that human thought or human industry could have produced such an accumulation. Next he turns to the North, where he sees collections swelling beyond forty-thousand volumes. Finally, when his bibliometric gaze extends to Europe, Minor is stunned to discover immense libraries containing upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand volumes. And every day, according to Minor, the burden grows heavier, the crisis of accumulation more acute. From the bookseller’s catalogues to the host of reviews and magazines to the countless newspapers, tracts, pamphlets, and addresses, the literate American is confronted by effusions of ten thousand various forms and merits—craving your attention and bewildering your choice!

The political implications of this were not lost on Minor. He of course advocated a wider diffusion of knowledge among the lower classes, but unlike most reformers Minor worried about the effect of such a policy on an intellectual elite that already seemed saturated with information. In his view, an abundance of reading material could in fact destroy the republican harmony it was meant to encourage, primarily by sundering the public sphere into specialized discursive coteries:

Go forth into society: in one circle, politics—in another, canalling or railroad lore—in a third, some point touching the Campaigns of Bonaparte, the Wars of the League, the American Revolution, or the Conquests of Tamerlane—in a fourth, the beauties of Greek and Roman literature—in a fifth, some topic in Chemistry or Geology—in a sixth, Byron, Campbell, Moore and Wordsworth—in a seventh, the last fifty novels—are discussed by their respective coteries, each, as if that subject alone threw all others into the shade. And if you are not so torpid as to be incapable of excitement by sympathy with others . . . you cannot, for your life, help wishing to be familiar with each theme. You go home; and plunge headlong into a dozen different studies. Your acquisitions are huddled chaotically into your knowledge-box, so that you have a full, distinct idea, of no one subject: you can never get hold of what you want, at the moment when you need it; but must rummage over an immense pile of trumpery, with a bare hope, after all, of finding the useful article you want. You are a shallow smatterer.

Attempting to imagine the full cultural implications of overproduction, Minor here reveals his deepest fears about the precarious and imperiled status of the traditional thinking subject. At some point the quantitative increase in printed material had produced a qualitative transformation in the republic of letters, and because of this transformation, readers could never again hope to plumb the farthest limits of the textual world. The publishing industry, which once served as the emissary of total knowledge, had somehow become its greatest enemy.

Because he had no hope of controlling the publishing industry, Minor devised a plan, based on the scarcity of reading time, for surviving the impending years of literary overproduction. According to Minor’s calculations, no human could hope to read more than sixteen hundred books in a literate lifetime of forty years. Only by disavow[ing] an acquaintance with a fashionable novel or a fashionable science could one triumph over the millions of tomes that litter the world. Minor therefore counseled his readers to have the courage to remain ignorant of those useless subjects which are generally valued.

Poe’s response to the crisis was more complex. He could not deny the sheer material force of literary overproduction, especially insofar as it affected the working conditions of a commercial magazinist. In a review written eight months after Minor’s editorial, Poe in fact offered his own diagnosis of the crisis:

The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge, is one of the greatest evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information, by throwing in the reader’s way piles of lumber, in which he must painfully grope for the scraps of useful matter peradventure interspersed.²⁴

Poe shares Minor’s complaint, but his agenda is more precise. Whereas Minor feared for the intellectual and political coherence of the public sphere, Poe’s only worry is that literary overproduction will impair the acquisition of correct information and other useful matter. In other words, Minor addressed a social problem from the standpoint of a citizen-reformer, but Poe confronts a material problem from the more calculating perspective of a producer. In an 1841 review of Lambert Wilmer, Poe reiterated his anxiety over the practical consequences of literary overproduction. Echoing Minor’s calculations of the limits to knowledge, Poe denounces those editors who review books that they haven’t even read. Such an editor, Poe complains, gives the false impression that "he is in the daily habit of critically reading and deciding upon a flood of publications one tenth of whose title-pages he may possibly have turned over, three fourths of whose contents would be Hebrew to his most desperate efforts at comprehension, and whose entire mass and amount, as might be mathematically demonstrated, would be sufficient to occupy, in the most cursory perusal, the attention of some ten or twenty readers for a month!" (ER, 1008). Ignoring the citizen-reader in favor of the commercial writer, Poe again reveals that he was less concerned with social disintegration than with practical impediments to literary production.

Nevertheless, Poe sometimes attempted to make a virtue of necessity by devising ways to exploit the rising flood of publications. The oblique or wayward glance is in fact perfectly adapted to information-rich environments, for it constitutes an extremely efficient method of skimming useful truths from the surfaces of discourse. In addition, Poe fantasized about a kind of thinker who was still capable of total knowledge, a polymath who was not overwhelmed by literary overproduction but who could actually thrive in a publishing environment saturated by wave after wave of new information. As suggested in Chapter Eight, such fictional polymaths as Morella, Ligeia, and especially Dupin serve as rejoinders to Minor’s thesis about the limits to knowledge, for they all revel in forbidden worlds of promiscuous textuality and endless intellectual delights. Not surprisingly, Poe himself often posed as just such a polymath. At one time or another during his career, he claimed expertise in law, phrenology, landscape gardening, navigation, geology, Hebrew, French, Greek, Latin, cryptography, painting, road-building, natural history, ancient history, aeronautics, political economy, conchology, corkscrews, mathematics, astronomy, Baconian science, religion, music, field sports, and the philosophy of furniture. Poe’s articles on plagiarism imply a similar familiarity with vast accumulations of printed material from all epochs and regions. Since plagiarists tend to plunder recondite, neglected, or forgotten books (ER, 718), only a true polymath could detect and expose the innumerable instances of literary theft. Like the claim to total knowledge, Poe’s crusade against plagiarism suggests that he had developed a new epistemology for coping with literary overproduction, an epistemology that contrasts starkly with Minor’s premonition about the waning of total knowledge. In many ways, the commercial writer who denigrated profundity and who celebrated the truth of surfaces could have wished no greater compliment than to be called a shallow smatterer.

There was, however, a practical side to Poe’s epistemological break with Minor. It is one thing to evaluate texts as being fit or unfit for a reader with certain tastes and aptitudes; it is something else entirely to translate the limitations of an individual reader into restrictions on literary production in general. By maintaining this latter position, Minor had challenged the economic prospects that depended upon an expanding publishing industry and an expanding mass audience. In 1844, Poe therefore reconsidered the predicament of the commercial writer during times of overproduction. Undoubtedly alluding to Minor’s Selection in Reading, Poe claims to have encountered many computations respecting the greatest amount of erudition attainable by an individual in his lifetime. Such computations are anathema to the magazinist because they imply a link between the capacity of an individual reader and the growth potential of the mass literary market. Resisting the implications of Minor’s argument, Poe offers a radically different model of the reading process:

It is true that, in general, we retain, we remember to available purpose, scarcely one-hundredth part of what we read; yet there are minds which not only retain all receipts, but keep them at compound interest for ever. . . . And, even physically considered, knowledge breeds knowledge, as gold gold; for he who reads really much, finds his capacity to read increase in geometrical ratio.²⁵

In this account, the boundary between reading and capitalism is virtually erased. Attempting to elude the economic power of the publishing industry, Poe imagines a different kind of Capital Reader who was not a mere market analyst but rather a polymath blessed with limitless productivity. Significantly, however, this emphasis on productivity compels Poe to reject the traditional humanism of his day. From the standpoint of Poe’s polymath, knowledge does not culminate in virtue, wisdom, or happiness; instead, knowledge reenters an endlessly expanding process of intellectual production that closely parallels the ceaseless augmentation of capitalism itself.²⁶ Responding to both the overproduction of information and the power of the Capital Reader, Poe invents an information-gatherer whose only purpose is to acquire still more information. Poe even goes so far as to project this model of ceaseless augmentation to the heavens. In one of Poe’s angelic dialogues, for example, the veteran angel proclaims: Ah, not in knowledge is happiness, but in the acquisition of knowledge! In for ever knowing, we are for ever blessed; but to know all were the curse of a fiend (PT, 822).

At nearly every turn, then, Poe rejected the model of literary benevolence epitomized by Lucian Minor and instead adopted an aggressive, commercial view of American mass culture. In his 1835 defense of Berenice, Poe surmounted the problem of literary taste by offering an evaluative method based upon magazine sales. And when confronted by the difficulty of total knowledge in an age of literary overproduction, Poe speculated about a mind whose comprehension—and productivity—could expand without limit. As suggested above, such speculations reveal Poe’s longstanding desire to turn capital against itself. The comparison between knowledge and gold obviously exemplifies this strategy, for Poe was attempting to set information against the more obvious forms of capital in the publishing industry—printing machinery, warehouse space, paper, labor, and all additional means of production that could be purchased by publishers but not by poor-devil authors. In addition, Poe tried to transform fame into literary capital, an approach rendered necessary by my having no other capital to begin with than whatever reputation I may have acquired as a literary man.²⁷ When this did not work, he pinned his hopes on breakthroughs in printing technology, which would ostensibly reduce reliance on capital-intensive publishing methods.²⁸ Finally, Poe hoped to circumvent the publishing industry by founding his own magazine, a project that initiated a lifelong quest for a partner possessing ample capital, and, at the same time, so little self-esteem, as to allow me entire control of the editorial conduct.²⁹ In order to attract such an unlikely Capital Reader, Poe not only falsified the circulation statistics of the Southern Literary Messenger, but as demonstrated in Chapter Three, he also engaged in a systematic attempt to refashion himself from a romantic outcast into an editorial entrepreneur.³⁰ Taken together, these efforts signaled the emergence of a new kind of culture, one in which all facets of human communication seemed destined to fall under the gaze of the Capital Reader.

Poe and the Masses focuses on the political economy of literature in Poe’s day, but the rise of the Capital Reader must also have some consequences for what are, in modern times, two of the reigning forms of literary knowledge. These forms of knowledge have been described in various ways, but for present purposes they may be identified as the extensive, historical, or sociological approaches associated with the interpretive practice of mediation; and the intensive, formalist, or deconstructive approaches associated with the interpretive practice of close reading. Mediation usually concerns the relations between literature and other social phenomena, relations which were of course downplayed by the American New Critics. But the practice of mediation was also rendered problematic by the work of Louis Althusser, who argued for the relative autonomy of economic, political, and ideological instances or levels of human practice. In the essay Contradiction and Overdetermination, Althusser disparages attempts to explain political and ideological practices as the expression or mechanistic reflex of an economic essence. Finding problems even with Engels’s claim that cultural forms are determined in the last instance by the economy, Althusser goes on to argue that "the economic dialectic is never active in the pure state. . . . From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes."³¹ Whatever Althusser’s work may finally mean for the study of culture, in practice his theory of relative autonomy has too often been taken as an à priori truth about social reality instead of something to explore in the course of literary and historical research. Moreover, the hasty disavowal of determination, variously understood as mere influence or outright determinism, has led many critics to turn their backs on the material conditions of production. And yet, even a sidelong glance at antebellum America reveals the difficulty of separating literature from the prevailing economic order, and Poe’s explicit acknowledgment of capitalist control further indicates that relative autonomy is not guaranteed from the start, but must instead be achieved and maintained through constant struggle. In fact, Poe would not even exist for us if the Capital Reader had not summoned him to writing as a viable form of social labor. Those who gaze too closely at literature may presume that the last instance of the Capital Reader never comes, but someone who surveys it less intently knows that for Poe and other commercial writers, the last instance must come first.³²

To demonstrate this, I frequently depart from the pure domain of literature and delve into the sprawling materiality of the antebellum publishing industry. Part of my aim is to overturn the abiding presumption that literature is innocent of capitalist determination until proven guilty. Although Poe explicitly described the influence of capitalism over literature, most interpretive approaches fail to account for the uneasy relationship between writers and proprietors; nor do they account for the material conditions that exercised a powerful influence over the making—and therefore the meaning—of even literary texts. The figure of the Capital Reader stands as an admonishment to these approaches because it indicates that the social meaning of Poe’s work is intimately bound up with the political economy of literature. For historicism in general, this implies that the context of a literary work has less to do with time and place per se than with the material conditions that constitute the very occasion of writing and that effectively summon the commercial writer into existence. For reader-response criticism, it suggests that attention to a text’s reception, though in some sense enormously important, is in another sense beside the point because the Capital Reader initiates and controls the interaction between audience and author.³³ For political criticism, the Capital Reader questions any investigation that focuses exclusively on representations of race, class, or gender. These cannot be neglected, but Poe’s political importance should also be sought in his long struggle with the material necessities of literary production. As I argue in Chapter Five, Poe’s insight into these necessities arose not only from his experiences in a capitalist publishing industry, but especially from his perverse capacity to imagine its full implications, that is, to imagine a world where emergent tendencies have become dominant.³⁴

As to the intensive critical approaches mentioned above, it is perhaps unnecessary to point out that there must be some interpretive dissonance between the Capital Reader who determines what texts shall exist and the close reader who determines, almost as an afterthought, what these same texts shall mean. It is likewise unnecessary to emphasize that the intensive approach is today menaced by the same specter that haunted Lucian Minor, namely the specter of cultural overproduction. Close reading has long reigned as the ultimate aim or test of literary study, but in an era of accumulating interpretations, it is only prudent to wonder about their value and durability. In this regard Minor’s complaint assumes a special relevance, raising anew the possibility that an emissary of literary knowledge