Objectless curiosity: Frankenstein, The Station Agent, and other strange narratives.(Critical essay)

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

Dorothy Parker

Early in Poe's first Dupin story, "Murders in the Rue Morgue," the narrator observes two distinct yet obliquely similar kinds of attention: that of Dupin, and that of a crowd gathered to gaze at the crime scene:

 
   We proceeded at once to the Rue Morgue. This is one of those 
   miserable thoroughfares which intervene between the Rue Richelieu 
   and the Rue St. Roch. It was late in the afternoon when we reached 
   it; as this quarter is at a great distance from that in which we 
   resided. The house was readily found; for there were still many 
   persons gazing up at the closed shutters, with an objectless 
   curiosity, from the opposite side of the way. It was an ordinary 
   Parisian house, with a gateway, on one side of which was a glazed 
   watch-box ... Before going in we walked up the street, turned down 
   an alley, and then, again turning, passed in the rear of the 
   building--Dupin, meanwhile, examining the whole neighborhood, as 
   well as the house, with a minuteness of attention for which I could 
   see no possible object. (13, emphasis added) 

The narrator clearly perceives the "objectless curiosity" of the crowd as different from Dupin's "minuteness of attention," though the manner in which Dupin's attentiveness appears to lack an object links the two and invites consideration of what, if anything, does distinguish the crowd's "objectless curiosity" from the detective's examination. As such, the passage may function as a starting point for investigating the differences between modes of curiosity represented in, and provoked by, narrative fiction. In particular, I hope to trace out, or track down, a routinely denigrated form of curiosity, here designated as "objectless," elsewhere as "idle," "mere," or "just." I intend to explore the possibility of understanding "objectless curiosity" as a mode of apprehending otherness, one that may sidestep dynamics of identification and permit an interestingly non-appropriative relationship to the phenomenal world. (1)

First, in the context of the story, it is clear that Dupin's minute scrutiny does have an "object," in the sense of a point or goal. He is reading clues and possibilities, attempting to solve the mystery. The narrator's failure to see the point of looking at the whole neighborhood is, as his diction suggests, attributable to his own obtuseness ("I could see no possible object"). Dupin's examination is oriented toward a future moment at which the past, which appears in the present enigmatic, will have been deciphered and fully explained. His act of looking is thus accompanied by an expectation of closure--as Dupin later puts it, "my expectation of reading the entire riddle" (15).

By contrast, the crowd's presence appears to be motivated simply by the pleasure it generates in the present--not so much in the present as instantaneous "now"--you arrive and are satisfied--but rather in the prolongation or sustaining of the present pleasure of gazing. Thus, the crowd resists dispersal: Poe writes, "there were still many persons gazing up." Of course, one does not want to discount out of hand, or rather out of class bias, the possibility that these unnamed persons are also attempting to solve the mystery. Yet if we take seriously the narrator's implication that the crowd's curiosity is "objectless" in the sense of lacking an end goal, their gaze would signal a more passive, less rational, or less rationalized attraction to the rupture of the ordinary that has here taken place. The fact that the crowd remains stationary (while Dupin moves around) may suggest a mode of attention that differs from the active, essentially teleological investigation that progresses, through space and time, toward comprehension. Instead, the crowd's curiosity seems to rest with what is, in a sense, ahistorical in the present: what is out of sync, aberrant, disruptive, unexpected or inexplicable; the aspect of the present that is new and different by virtue of not being "same old, same old." (2)