Bartleby

[David Morris]

Thanks for a very nice post, Mr/Ms domain.

>From: public domain <publicdomainboquita at yahoo.com>
>
>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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