Bartleby & Bergson

[Fiona Shnapple]

BY the time of "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street"
(1853), acedia had lost the last of its religious reverberations and
was now an offense against the economy. Right in the heart of
robber-baron capitalism, the title character develops what proves to
be terminal acedia. It is like one of those western tales where the
desperado keeps making choices that only herd him closer to the one
disagreeable finale. Bartleby just sits there in an office on Wall
Street repeating, "I would prefer not to." While his options go
rapidly narrowing, his employer, a man of affairs and substance, is
actually brought to question the assumptions of his own life by this
miserable scrivener -- this writer! -- who, though among the lowest of
the low in the bilges of capitalism, nevertheless refuses to go on
interacting anymore with the daily order, thus bringing up the
interesting question: who is more guilty of Sloth, a person who
collaborates with the root of all evil, accepting things-as-they-are
in return for a paycheck and a hassle-free life, or one who does
nothing, finally, but persist in sorrow? "Bartleby" is the first great
epic of modern Sloth, presently to be followed by work from the likes
of Kafka, Hemingway, Proust, Sartre, Musil and others -- take your own
favorite list of writers after Melville and you're bound sooner or
later to run into a character bearing a sorrow recognizable as
peculiarly of our own time.

Should we put Pynchon on that list?

June 6, 1993

The Deadly Sins/Sloth; Nearer, My Couch, to Thee

By THOMAS PYNCHON

His doctoral thesis was on Time and Free Will: An Essay on the
Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889). Here Bergson distinguished
between time as we actually experience it, lived time – which he
called ‘real duration’ (durée réelle) – and the mechanistic time of
science. This, he argued, is based on a misperception: it consists of
superimposing spatial concepts onto time, which then becomes a
distorted version of the real thing. So time is perceived via a
succession of separate, discrete, spatial constructs – just like
seeing a film. We think we’re seeing a continuous flow of movement,
but in reality what we’re seeing is a succession of fixed frames or
stills. To claim that one can measure real duration by counting
separate spatial constructs is an illusion: “We give a mechanical
explanation of a fact and then substitute the explanation for the fact
itself”, he wrote.

His next major work, Matter and Memory (1896), was an essay on the
relation between mind and body. In his preface, Bergson affirms the
reality of mind and the reality of matter and tries to determine the
relation of the one to the other by the study of memory, which he saw
as the intersection or convergence of mind and matter. He regarded the
brain as an organ of choice, with a practical role. Its main function
is to filter mental images, allowing through to consciousness those
impressions, thoughts or ideas that are of practical biological value.
(Time and Free Will, p.181)

He spent five years researching all the psychological, medical and
other literature then available on memory. He focussed in particular
on the condition known as aphasia – loss of the ability to use
language. The aphasiac understands what people are saying, knows what
he or she wants to say, suffers no paralysis of the speech organs, and
yet is unable to speak. This, Bergson argued, shows that it is not
memory as such that is lost, but the bodily mechanism that is needed
to express it. From this observation he concluded that memory, and so
mind, makes use of the physical brain to carry out its own purposes.

http://philosophynow.org/issues/48/Henri_Bergson_and_the_Perception_of_Time
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l