Lester Traipse, Bartleby the Scrivener & The "woraciousness" of the Sharks

[Fiona Shnapple]

In one of his essays, probably the one on Sloth, P hauls out
Melville's most cryptic tale, "Bartelby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall
Street" and connects the tale with the place of authors in our world,
a world that made Bartleby a human copy machine way back when John
Jacob Astor, the employer of the lawyer-narrator of the tale, had more
money than Gabrial Ice and Bill Gates combined.

The tale, as I said, is quite cryptic and has been read from a hundred
 angles and approaches, most of them quite convincing. Bertleby can be
rad as a passive resister, a desciple of HD Thoreau or a parody of
Thoreau, as the spirit of the times, of the lawyer, as a double, a
Christ figure and so on. Again, the critical schools have done wonders
with this brilliant story, arguably Melville's finest. And, the
imagery, of food, its symbolic purpose, its religious connotations and
so on...have been discussed. And, how the food in this story is
functions has been connected with how food functions in all other
works by the brilliant author from Manhattan.

In BE, as I noted in a prior post, food is quite important and food
fights, debates, arguments, religious practices secularized...made
into take out and order in menus...delivered by magical Flying
Dutchman ....and all this eating must must, by nature, be made waste
and flushed into the underworld and out into the landfills and toxic
environments that encircle the City.

In M-D, Melville's most famous Romance, his protagonist, at least of
the comic cosmopolitan part,  one Ishmael, asks, "Who ain't a slave"
 and, "Who ain't a cannibal?"

Who ain't?

Of course, John Jacob Astor doesn't eat Bartleby. Not quite. Bartleby
prefers not to eat and dies, in prison. Despite the lawyer's good
Christian fight, he can not save his Bartleby, his Ah Humanity!  Of
course, by this time Bart has be dehumanized by his employer and by
his employer's employer. Not that JJA would ever know. And it's not on
JJA exactly that Melville hangs his theme: Charity. He hangs it on the
lawyer, who, despite his clever argument, in his defense, convicts
himself of murder by Christian Logic.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l