Bartleby

[public domain]

It's difficult to read Bartleby or any Melville tale
and not get the feeling that there is something very
dark about our state of affairs. Maybe that Calvinism
he inherited from his mother? Maybe that's why I can
smile more when I read Pynchon or even Hawthorne. I
attribute, in part anyway, to the genial good humor
and subversive irony of these two Americans.  Very
American, even if British TV and English film fill the
stage with canned laughter. 

In fact, while critics may never tire of comparing
Melville's white/black themes and motifs with
Pynchon's, it is actually Hawthorne who is more like
Pynchon in this regard. 
That blackness that Melville discovers in Hawthorne, a
blackness "ten times black", is not quite there under
the surface. Melville, a deep diver, discovers it, I
submit, in his own "strong reading" of Hawthorne
(Bloom). For Melville the blackness is much more than
a mastery of language and irony-genius. It is an
aesthetic stance positioned at one end of the pole
where Poe and Pynchon only travel to fantastically or
in nightmares. And yet, at the other end of the pole
for Melville there is a humor that balances the dark
spirit and provides a spiritual solace to a few who
wonder in his prairies of desperate immensity and at
the margins.  The blackness is quite paranoid, a
conspiracy.  Moreover, as in Pynchon, repressed and
returning. All Melville's great tragic/comic
characters, including Bartleby, are victims of their
own instincts. Bartleby, like Slothrop or Dixon, is
caught in a double bind. On the one hand, instinctual
drives, be they subversive (i.e., when Slothrop hears
American voices for the first time as a "non-America)
or secretly integrative (i.e., when Ishmael wakes in
the marriage bed with his arms around his brother), be
they intellectual or philosophical (i.e., Ishmael atop
the masthead falling out of Emerson's rainbow) or be
they affective (i.e., Slothrop falling into the bowl),
they act automatically and indifferently. In the bowl,
Slothrop's mind is cluttered with paranoid thoughts
(blackness hovering inside and outside of him, even as
he has become black), but he must retrieve the harp,
it's an instinctual or  cybernetic drive. It's quite
mechanical, like Bartleby's doings and preferring not
to.  Of course Pynchon won't allow these mechanical
instincts to make his more interesting chacters only
puppets on strings or angels.  No, the harp will be
found poetically, magically, serendipitously, as the
penis that is truly his own, as the penis of Orpheus
is found and lost and found again and again. 


As with Pynchon, it's not unreasonable to talk about
what forged this black conspiracy in the mind if not
the soul of the poet. For Pynchon, it was his mother's
religion. And so too for Melville, whose mother was a
Calvinist. That's too simple and too Freudian I guess,
but both men pull, as with the force of God's own
gravity, away from their mother's religion and yet
remain forever intrigued by what Melville described as
the "mysteries of iniquity." 

PD & B


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