familiarity breeds Sloth

[cathy ramirez]

An important interpretative key to a reading of
"Bartleby the Scrivener" is Robert Burton's Anatomy of
Melancholy. Melville was fascinated by Burton's
brooding examination of the dark recesses of the human
heart, as the continual references to Burton in
Melville's fiction and his correspondence evinces.1 As
anyone who has plowed through Burton's gargantuan book
knows, the Anatomy presents melancholy in its myriad
positive and negative forms, both as a disease
(whether of body or mind) and as a prominent
ingredient of the creative temperament: "Melancholy
advanceth men's conceits more than any humour
whatsoever."2 Persistently in the works written just
prior to "Bartleby," Melville articulates a Burtonian
attitude towards melancholy, a distress of the soul
that is also indispensable as a catalyst of the
artistic imagination: in Mardi, where Babbalanja
praises the author Lombardo ["He knows himself, and
all that's in him, who knows adversity. To scale great
heights, we must come out of lowermost depths,"
(594)]; in Pierre, where the protagonist fluctuates
between rhapsodic enthusiasm and despair; and in
"Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1850), which praises the
"mystical blackness" (PT 243) of Hawthorne's work as
its most profound dimension, favorably comparing this
to Shakespeare's tragic vision. In this light, it is
certainly significant that in the
opening paragraph of his first published
work,"Fragments from a Writing Desk" (1839), Melville
alludes to Burton; and it could be argued that
throughout his literary career Melville, like the
"Dear M" addressed at the outset of "Fragments," sat
in "the identical seat in which old Burton composed
his anatomy of Melancholy" (191).

Although Burton is never mentioned in the text of
"Bartleby," there are ample reasons to agree with
Nathalia Wright that this story represents Melville's
"most concentrated study of melancholy...which...owes
most to Burton's work, both in theme and form."3

http://www.ku.edu/~zeke/bartleby/bulger.html

The last of Melville's novels of his major
fiction-writing period, The Confidence-Man (1857), is
the last work of his which seems to reflect his
reading of The Anatomy of Melancholy. The varieties of
duplicity represented by the Confidence-Man in his
various guises correspond to those enumerated by
Burton in "Democritus Junior to his Reader." Indeed,
Melville's conception of his central character in this
novel as a multiple one may have been partly inspired
by a passage in the same part of Burton's work
describing man's ability to play several parts at
once.18 The Confidence-Man may also be classified in
form as an anatomy. It presents a comprehensive view
of human experience in
terms of professional practitioners and dupes of
fraud.

Certainly Burton was in Melville's consciousness
during the time he was composing The
Confidence-Man.

http://www.ku.edu/~zeke/bartleby/wright.html

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