Bartleby the Scrivener

            On Tuesday after midnight I did a search for bedbugs and found none. If the current pattern holds one will turn up tonight but hopefully not. 

            I translated the ninth verse of "Arthur, où t'as mis le corps" (Arthur, Where'd You Put The Corpse?) by Boris Vian: “We called upon a diviner / who read with his fingers / and even his hearing / but we still couldn't find him / until one fine evening / we brought a spirit guide in.” 

            I worked out the chords for the first verse and chorus of “Cuti–réaction” (Skin Prick Reaction) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            It was six degrees this morning and the heat has yet to be turned on. I had the oven on again for the first part of song practice. 

            I weighed 89.6 kilos before breakfast but I was wearing my cargo pants and a long sleeved shirt so it would probably be 89 kilos in my tank top and sweatpants. 

            I had time to eat most of a bowl of grapes and take a few sips from my coffee before leaving for US lit class. 

            I wore a scarf for the first time since early spring but I could have used two. I had my fall gloves on but I would have been comfortable in the winter ones. There was a police roadblock on Brock and I had to go west onto a side street and then north and east again until I was back on Brock. 

            Before the lecture I managed to read another couple of pages of “Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville but was still not much more than a third of the way through. 

            The lecture hall was chilly but Professor Morgenstern was wearing a sleeveless top. I asked her if she was cold and she said that she gets warmed up by lecturing but if she wasn't talking she'd put her sweater on. 

            We are at the mid point.

            She encourages us to come to her office hours on zoom. 

            She has the format for the final exam but no date. It will be in person and two hours. It is a simple format with two parts: identifications of authors, titles, original dates of publication, occasionally a character identification, identification of a fairly short quote and answer a question about it. Part 2: extended writing on a few passages. The second part is not an essay. Essay skills are not exam skills. It is more close text analysis of passages, closely related to the first assignment. Demonstrate general knowledge of the texts and connections to other texts. If dates are a little off it is okay. People are more likely to get the century wrong. For Frederick Douglas a ballpark is required for his first publication date. Next week she'll post our assignment for the second essay. 

            On Harriet Jacobs's story. 

            Categories: True womanhood, cult of domesticity, idealization of domesticity by white people. She needs to negotiate her subjectivity with that. Consent in the category of speech acts. Verbal and sexual consent and contracts are close. The formal sense of a contract. What kind of agent one needs to be to be a valid party to a contract. Who exchanges what is exchanged? In the background, gender, race, class, forms of nationality, belonging or exclusion. 

            “While slavery’s defenders asserted that the enslaved were happy, they also were determined not to let these happy slaves say a public word, whether in a courtroom, ballot box, or novel. The official line on slavery declared that slaves had no subjectivity to speak of, yet there was tremendous anxiety that there be no public arena where such a subjectivity might somehow speak. This central contradiction helps reveal the fictions underlying legal constructions of slavery.”-Christina Accomando

            A slave is one who can't publicly consent or sign a contract because they are not individuals. Property cannot own property. 

            Resistance links today's two texts. Jacobs as a slave and Bartleby as a copyist, a human xerox. From the perspective of the boss. Extra contractual relations. What exceeds a contract? Intimacy and friendship. Melancholy is more about Melville. Melancholy as opposed to a not unpleasant sadness. How he works double negatives. 

            The publication of Jacobs. Amy Post, a Quaker and abolitionist encouraged her to write. She argued it would be useful for the cause. Post wrote the appendix. Jacobs's employer who purchased and freed her suggested she dictate it to a writer. Harriet Beecher Stowe said I'll include her story in my own text but Jacobs said she'd do it herself. But she also had to write while a servant . It was published in 1858 then after a while disappeared and was republished in 1973. There was a dispute about authorship because she'd used a pseudonym. Scholar Jean Yellin confirmed Jacobs wrote it. The first scholarly edition was published in 1987 and has been widely taught since then. 

            Passage from the preface: “I am well aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for presenting these pages to the public; for the experiences of this intelligent and much-injured woman belong to a class which some call delicate subjects and other indelicate. This peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I will willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil withdrawn. I do this for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering wrongs so foul, that our ears are too delicate to listen to them.”-Lydia Maria Child 

            Douglas said they need white people to verify but it undercuts authenticity. Useful because it gives a good sense of her contemporary readers. Child is foregrounding “indecorum”, “delicacy”, “veiling”. “Extraordinary injury and suffering” are words in two registers. It is clever to say “for the sake of my sisters in bondage” because it is a gesture of kinship. Our ears are too delicate to listen. White women who want delicacy obscure the grammatical position of slave women. The kind of work Jacob needs to do to count as an authority. She needs authorization but she needs to address her reader and appeal on a sentimental level. This relates to genre. 

            Jacob's text is not exactly a slave narrative. It draws from domestic fiction, domestic novels, sentimental fiction, seduction narratives and a touch of the Gothic. These genres are drawn upon and used even though true and a slave narrative. It is not fiction but she's going to use codes of fiction.

            “Jacobs’s class affiliation, and the fact that she was subjected to relatively minor forms of abuse as a slave, enable her to locate a point of identification both with her readers and with the protagonists of sentimental fiction. Like them, she aspired to chastity and piety as consummate feminine virtues and hoped that marriage and family would be her earthly reward . . . By pointing up the similarities between her own story and those plots with which her readers would have been familiar, Jacobs could thus expect her readers to identify with her suffering. Moreover, this technique would enable them to appreciate the ways in which slavery converts into liabilities the very qualities of virtue and beauty that women were taught to cultivate.”-Valerie Smith 

            Who is reading Jacobs? She situates her narrative in relation to other texts her readers would know in sentimental fiction. There is a strong sense of Jacobs using fiction as a way to get readers to identify. 

            I said the fact that she had a loving family helps people identify. 

            Douglas's narrative is seen as making highly crafted aesthetic choices. Linda repeatedly addresses the reader so they are implicated and folded into the narrative. Douglas makes himself heroic which obscures certain traits. For a man it is more moving to make oneself self a hero but for a woman there are different expectations. 

            The professor shows an image of the sphere of a white woman in the sentiment of domesticity. What are we not seeing in the image?

            In chapter one she conveys intimacies between slavery and her own power. Not the opposite of intimacy but entangled. Affection is no substitute for legal protection. Her grandmother breastfed both her owner's child and hers but had to ween her own so there would be more food for her owner's child . The mistress's daughter and the slave's daughter are symbolically sisters. 

            A picture of a young woman holding a child who is her owner is a disturbing image. 

            Questions of agency. The chapter “A Perilous Passage In A Slave Girl's Life” works a bond of identification. The passage addressing the reader also draws on sentimental fiction. Language of the virtue of femininity appealing to the reader her relationship to those codes. The demonic seducer juxtaposed and figured as the seducer from a novel. She suggests power is tied with letter writing in the seduction. 

            In excerpts from chapter 10 we hear Jacobs speak in different registers. I became desperate, plunged into the abyss. Felt forsaken by god. That's one register. I knew what I did and did it with deliberate calculation. It is nice to have a lover with no control over you. A slave woman should not judged by normal moral standards. Moving in and out of conventions of sentimental fiction and thoughtful philosophy. 

            The guy next to me was watching basketball game on his laptop. 

            Codes of sentimental fiction. Purity is not restricted to fiction. Codes are not meaningless. She still feels judged. Something akin to freedom. I didn't get to be with the man I chose who was the free black man. She chose to give herself to an affectionate white man. She strategically crafts a space so she is not property. Think about this in the loophole of retreat chapter. She is confined for seven years but that space is outside of enslavement somewhat. She exercises power from that space. She spies on Flint and sends letters. She sends Flint on a chase with letters. 

            Free papers. Being sold for freedom. Philosophical point. She knows she can be purchased and freed or not freed. My freedom can't be a commodity. The most quoted is the end. She is rewriting domestic fiction and how she can't be the heroine in a novel. 

            “Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way with marriage.”-Harriet Jacobs (1861) 

            Compared to JaneEyre. 

            “Reader, I married him.”-Charlotte Bronte (1847) 

            We took a break. On the way back from the washroom the guy who was watching the basketball game told me I look like Professor Lambeau in “Good Will Hunting.” 

            Melville wrote to Hawthorne: “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned—it will not pay. Yet altogether write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.” Melville had a rough time as a writer. Melville and Hawthorne were pals. 

            Of sentimental fiction he tried to write one called Pierre. It was popular in his lifetime but he couldn't inhabit those conventions successfully. 

            Poems about mental anguish and suffering in that era can be related to Bartleby as opposed to triumphs of self we've seen. He doesn't want to write conventional fiction. The other way is sentimental novels. 

            Compare this to Dickinson Poem 341 about anguish. 

 After great pain, a formal feeling comes— 

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs— 

The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore, 

And Yesterday, or Centuries before? 

The Feet, mechanical, go round— 

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought— 

A Wooden way Regardless grown, 

A Quartz contentment, like a stone— 

This is the Hour of Lead— 

Remembered, if outlived, 

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow— 

First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go-- 

            Think of Bartleby. Commenting on literary form writing poetry after pain the measurement by feet mechanical go round. 

            A workplace story. In an earlier era an employer would have an apprentice not an employee. An apprentice would have been part of an hierarchical family. An apprentice would live in the household sharing domestic space. Different from contractual workplace. 

           The context for Bartleby is transition to industrial society. Bartleby functions like a machine until he stops which could also be about a machine. Thoreauvian machine of government. He calls people to be friction to resist mechanics. 

            Bartleby is an enigma for his boss. He generates the story. Is he allegory, realistic person in distress, or both. Gesture of first person biography he can't write. Bartleby is resistance but also absence confronting the inability to adequately represent fullness. Absence is missing. 

           The lawyer says a safe man is no risk. No interest in representation. If we read of self Melville stages an encounter with the other. The lawyer encounters Bartleby as other and so has an encounter with the limits of his own subjectivity. 

           The advent of Bartleby. Advent is the arrival of a great significant figure, particularly in Christianity. Emerson says if I encounter a new person that is a great event. 

           There is a farcical dimension of the story but not merely. Getting at the tonal complexity it is funny and tragic. Bartleby appears. The lawyer reads Bartleby and misreads him. Maybe he didn't answer the ad. Maybe he just mysteriously appeared on the threshold. Bartleby is always on the threshold. Is he living or dead? Is he man or machine? He devours documents. A screen for Bartleby so out of sight but not earshot. Bartleby is useful and not supposed to be an encounter with the other.

           Bartleby's “I prefer not to” response reveals the lawyer's posture. The boss calls with head down and holds papers, expecting the least loss of time but gets resistance. He is surprised and stunned, not knowing what do. There is no anger in his manner if there had been, if human I would have fired him. The lawyer continues to miss Bartleby as an event outside. Bartleby becomes a crisis. 

           The lawyer is forced to asks the question of himself, what one does. The lawyer expects a contractual relationship but the story pushes beyond contract as the sufficient relation between parties. Is Bartleby or the lawyer responsible? When is someone responsible? Is Bartleby rendering a Thoreauvian figure of civil resistance? I would prefer not to. How it sounds, what it means, what it does. 

            I said Bartleby is the only one called by his real name. The other employees have pet names but Bartleby is not a pet. Bartleby is the only one in the story with a real name. 

            Resistant characters with double B names are common in Melville. Bartleby is weird and fascinating because he goes back and forth between classic character and other. “I would prefer not to” is polite and civilly disobedient. “I would prefer not to” versus “I celebrate myself.” Preference is subjective and nothingness is a negative but also positive registration of subjecthood. His utterance has odd agency. Is he passive or agential? Bartleby's word infects everyone and becomes comical. Everyone crowds him. What does it mean to be possessed by words? Magical performative. 

            What happens to the lawyer? He becomes less manly. Bartleby unmans him and he becomes more melancholy. 

            On Sunday morning Bartleby is there, living in the office. The dent of Bartleby's body on the couch. He makes him sad. The lawyer leaves but Bartleby does not follow. He haunts the office. “Nothing to me” but Bartleby moves the lawyer because he is nothing. Back to the declaration of independence, what is kinship? A new law firm moves in but Bartleby is still there. You are responsible for him. 

            In the end the lawyer has a last encounter with Bartleby. Bartleby dies in debtor's prison. Bartleby says I know you. Bartleby stares at a wall so it is not different from the office. I want nothing to say to you. Want as in lack. Talk of supplement at the end. He asks but is it answered? He used to work in a dead letter office. If not an answer what does it do? He is a dead letter himself. 

            I told the professor Melville's story is very Dickensian. She said it is but one would have to find out who wrote first. I see on looking it up that Melville was very influenced by Dickens. In this story he probably drew inspiration from The Pickwick Papers. 

            I suggested that Bartleby represents democracy. Efficient but out of place in the hierarchical United States business world. 

            I rode to Yonge and Bloor. On the way home, because of construction on Queen I took Richmond to Portland before coming back up to Queen. 

            I weighed 88.1 kilos before lunch. 

            I weighed 89.2 kilos at 18:00. 

            I had a potato with gravy and roast beef while watching an episode of Gomer Pyle.

            In this story Gomer is in a night club watching a singing, banjo playing performer named Jerry Ball. Gomer is the only one applauding. Jerry tries to engage the audience in a singalong but no one responds. In between shows Gomer talks with Jerry and learns that he's being fired. Jerry used to be part of a duo that split up and since then he has not been successful. Gomer stays for the second show and when Jerry tries to engage the audience again in a singalong Gomer gets up and walks around, coaxing people to sing. The result is that the whole audience gets into singing along. The owner of the club is impressed and offers to keep Jerry on as long as Gomer works the floor. Gomer has guard duty the next night but a fellow Marine is willing to switch with him if Sergeant Carter allows it. Gomer tells him he's helping out a troubled friend and so Carter gives in. But that night Carter walks into the club and sees Gomer singing with Jerry. Carter is angry because it's not the kind of trouble he had in mind. He punishes Gomer and tells him if he catches him singing in a club again he'll call the MPs for disobeying orders. He says Jerry has to learn to survive on his own. That night Gomer stays on the sidelines and hides when Jerry asks him to rouse the audience. Suddenly Jerry is forced to try to motivate the audience on his own and he is a big success. 

            Jerry was played by Jerry Van Dyke, who of course went on to become a star on the sitcom Coach. 

            It took me until almost 23:00 to finish editing my lecture notes.