Quoth the Herd, "Never-mensch"

When Nietzsche mentions "herd morality," my mind conjures images of a "superman" breaking free from conformity, smashing metaphors in spandex. But while reading and discussing good ol' Friedrich, I thought of another connection: Poe.*

In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man of the Crowd," the narrator observes an old man walking about in a mass of people; upon following that old man, the narrator discovers that the senior citizen does nothing else: wandering in a crowd, "He crosse[s] and re-crosse[s] the way repeatedly without apparent aim" (par. 16). The old man grows distressed when the crowds thin, "flee[ing]" to areas of higher population with "something even more intense than despair... observed upon [his] countenance" (par. 20). Even if his need to be pressed in the mass of people leads him to less-than-reputable areas of town, he still moves with "a mad energy" to alleviate his distress (par. 20).

According to Nietzsche, "human beings themselves have an unconquerable urge to let themselves be deceived" (772). He seems to exclude the overman from this, at least in the capacity that his exceptional hero has broken free of that conformity, has used its herd morality as a "plaything" (773). But what if his overman relapses? After all, one of Nietzsche's biggest points is that suffering is inevitable. All that tragedy could be too much for a single mind...

The old man's eccentric behavior is attributed by the narrator to an unspeakable tragedy: "perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen'" (par. 20). The translation to that phrase runs along the lines of "Let it not be read," in reference to a German book mentioned in the tale's opening. The narrator there states that men live and die in agony "on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed" (par. 1). One interpretation of the tale and its hints: the old man suffered a horrible, unmentionable tragedy that has devastated his sense of identity (he cannot articulate it or himself in its aftermath) and, as a result, cannot bear to be alone anymore.

If the crowd is the herd, then the old man is seeking that herd mentality, seeking a return to

"That vast assembly of beams and boards to which needy man clings, thereby saving himself on his journey through life" (773). The story's epigram is "Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul," which means "The great misfortune of not being alone." Despite the great horror of being among the crowd, the greater trauma of surviving the inevitable suffering of life.

*As I do not have my Poe anthology, I used the online collection of eapoe.org. It's amazing. You should visit it. (As everyone uses the books, be a nonconformist and use the site; you know you want to.)