wjhat kind of fiction is Bartleby

[Terrance]

In the thematic context, perhaps no modern topic has
been given more consideration than the way in which we are thought
to create our own selves, or to put it another way, the way in which
we are  ourselves finally arbitrary signs to be filled up by whatever
haunts
us at the moment.  If the moderns called language and form into
question, if they
seriously  considered the degree to which all utterance is devoid of
ground, they
also  pursued the ways in which the same thing could be said of our
conceptions of  individual humans. Indeed, one of the great early modern
texts,
"Bartleby, the  Scrivener," has as its main character one of the first
creations to
represent a sort of nothing, a void of a human who is not just absurd in
the end but highly meaningful  precisely because the echoes of his
alienation and meaninglessness in the modern era  are to be found in the
employer, the reader, and anyone else who takes up  space in the world
we presently live in. The companion text to
"Bartleby," I would argue, the one that marks the end of this modern
thematic, is Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, a work in which it
is not the void at the  center of humans that is at issue but rather the
great plenitude. Both works focus on  the same questions - the problem
of identity in the modern world, the question of the reality of our
identity, the related concerns of
alienation and  despair - but "Bartleby" marks these problems in terms
of lack whereas
Lot 49  construes them in terms of the horrifying plenitude of meaning.
Just
as Derrida  was to demonstrate that the supplementary character of
language meant
both  that language never says enough and that it always says too much -
that the  problem was as much a plenitude of meanings as a lack of them
- so too
Pynchon shows that the problem is not that we are confronted by our
own  meaninglessness but rather that we are forced to deal with the fact
that we  have too many meanings, that we are far too rich in our
plenitude to
be  contemplated in any bearable manner. The problem of the supplement -
the fact that it  both lacks meaning and yet has far too many meanings
ever to be
reduced to any  one set of them - is related in turn to Foucault's
concerns about the
way we  constitute our sense of selves in terms of the other. If
"sanity" can
only be  construed through a concept of "madness," if the exploited
other is
always that  in terms of whom we constitute the significance of
ourselves, the
problem once  again has to do with a plenitude of meanings rather than a
lack of
them, for the  other allows our selves to obtain a kind of coherence
that would be
impossible  without him: we displace those features that call into
question our
homogenized  view of self onto the other in order to achieve a coherent
vision that
is a  fiction precisely because it limits the number of meanings that
can be
attached to the  self that we have so constituted. Given the
multiplicity of "meanings"
that obtain  for each of us, we thus tend to consolidate our vision of
self around
those  features that most reflect what we would like to think we are. In
this, we are in  some respects almost innocently making ourselves into
what we would
like to be  even as our self-deception reveals our inability to so make
ourselves.
The  mixed bag of meanings that we inevitably are manifests itself in
our
very  inability to keep our unpalatable traits securely in the corner of
the
other. They  insistently return to us, and just as insistently require
us to move
them back to the  category of the other. This too is a game we see at
the limit of the
modern, in The  Crying of Lot 49; it is the link between linguistic and
human
plenitude that marks  the end to the mindless fascination with lack that
so resolutely
defined  the modern period. 

Emptiness and plenitude in "Bartleby the Scrivener"
  and 'The Crying of Lot 49.' 

 Hans, James S.