Compassion: "Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville"
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- Опубликовано: 18 дек 2012
- Herman Melville (1819-1891), today hailed as one of America's greatest writers, had in his own time a very mixed career. Some of his early sea-stories and sea-adventures were esteemed by the public, but his epic (and to him, most significant) novel, "Moby-Dick," was very badly received. Indeed, after it appeared, Melville became something of a pariah in the literary world. Turning to poetry, he encountered similar neglect. In the last quarter-century of his life, he wrote little and published less. ("Billy Budd," today regarded as one of his finest works, was published posthumously.) Friends feared for his sanity. His wife's family tried not only to get her to leave him but also to have him committed as insane. He wound up working for nineteen years as a customs inspector in New York, and when he died, he seemed destined for obscurity. One might therefore wonder whether his tale about the mysterious Bartleby is, among other things, intended as a profoundly disheartening allegory about the artist's-and his own-relation to our commercial, democratic society. But that, of course, depends on what you think the story says and means.
Watch editors Amy A. Kass, Leon R. Kass, and Diana Schaub converse with guest host Wilfred McClay (University of Tennessee--Chattanooga) about the story. For a discussion guide and more, visit www.whatsoproudlywehail.org/cu....
thanks for talking publicly about such an impressively well constructed book of an unsettling encounter between humans
Amazing! God... Thank you so much.
Thank you for posting this conversation. I am watching this 8 years later in preparation for a class, and I have learned so much from this video. Thank you!
u didn't read it
either?
Incredible! Thanks a lot for sharing your opinions on this amazing story :)
Scriveners, transcribe the "letters" of the ideology of the time. Bartleby is the individual who speaks of the ultimate refusal to be part of the inhuman machine, as he is described. It's a refusal of the ideology, Bartleby represents the destruction of this ideology( hence the pillar of salt reference) by refusal to be complicit
Melville was a brilliant revolutionary. Also in Moby Dick, the first anti slavery novel, according to Toni Morrison!!! I am so excited to learn Melville and benefit from his artistry. Thanks for the discussion
David Graeber in his perspective would have had a great analysis, yes the downside of this commercial society!
Just read the story this morning, glad to find conversation on it to further my insight into it
wow, I love this debate.
I’m so glad I found this. I have a 10-12 page final to write about I!
YT Cliffs Notes
"There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says No! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes." Herman Melville.
Hard Berg (methought), so cold, so vast,
With mortal damps self-overcast;
Exhaling still thy dankish breath-
Adrift dissolving, bound for death;
Though lumpish thou, a lumbering one-
A lumbering lubbard loitering slow,
Impingers rue thee and go down,
Sounding thy precipice below,
Nor stir the slimy slug that sprawls
Along thy dead indifference of walls.
From Melville's poem, "The Berg"
I think what Diana Schaub says at one point is very telling, though I think she misses the point. She says (at around 33:00) that Bartleby and his refusals are "threatening...to human life." The threat isn't Bartleby, of course. If the lawyer wanted to he could have thrown him out at the first "I would prefer not to" and just go ahead and hire someone else. No sweat. The threat for the lawyer, and for each of us, is that we are faced with having empathy for others....and may not always be able to help. What do we do when we feel powerless to help? And are we powerless because we don't have certain skills (i.e. not being a doctor when someone needs medical assistance)? Or is Melville asking us to look at our own basic humanity? How well can we stand humanely and lovingly with someone who is suffering, someone who is failing? Can we stand with someone even if we feel threatened that we will participate in the failing? What does it really mean to love someone? I don't think Melville answers the question in the story. It's sort of like a Buddhist koan. But I think it's a powerful question. I know for me I try very hard not to "blame the victim," in this case Bartleby. The darkness isn't in him. He's only a mirror to what we're afraid to look at in ourselves.
Title does not dictate behavior
32:30
How awful to be a literary critic and have to defend every instance of perception of some aspect of a book, to the death, and attack those of anyone else. "None of us is wrong" ever got anybody a teaching position.
Year old comment, but I fully agree. Critics tend to intellectualize what are mostly imaginative expressions by fictive writers such as Melville. They do this for the sake of "coherency", which usually amounts to what is merely conventional and agreed upon. I personally threw out a book of critical essays on Melville because they were so bitterly pedantic and far too conceptual for my tastes. One of the writers got published for being able to fit Melville into a set of Freudian psychoanalytical concepts.
Critics of critics typically lack the critical capacities to critique clearly the critics they so cruelly critique. Hence why they never respond substantially to any critique a critic makes and instead relies on attacking the character of someone willing to be a critic.