Confinement and Jouissance in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”

2021 ◽  
pp. 59-73
Author(s):  
Alma Krilic
Keyword(s):  
Wall Street ◽  
Bartleby The Scrivener

scholarly journals Bartleby’s Consensual Dysphoria

2019 ◽  
pp. 191-220
Author(s):  
Robin West
Keyword(s):  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Political Condition ◽  
Fellow Traveler ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Bartleby The Scrivener ◽  
Seminal Article

In this essay I seek to understand why many of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protestors embraced Bartleby, the dysfunctional scrivener of Melville’s Story of Wall Street, as a fellow traveler in their movement. I first situate Bartleby the Scrivener in the context of classical legal thought, expanding on some claims put forward in a seminal article on Bartleby by Brook Thomas in the 1980s. I then argue that Melville’s scrivener suffered from a psychic and political condition I call “consensual dysphoria.” Bartleby suffered from consensual dysphoria in extremis. The OWSers recognized this—thus their otherwise inexplicable empathic bond with him. Consensual dysphoria, as depicted by Melville and as suffered by Bartleby, I will urge, is a part of the debilitating legacy of classical legal thought that persists today, and in an even more developed and exaggerated form.

Necrophilology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacques Lezra
Keyword(s):  
Not Given ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
The Core ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Human Labor ◽  
Bartleby The Scrivener ◽  
Theory Of Value

This chapter turns to the problem of equivalence posed in Marx's theory of value. It focuses on the ontological contingency at the core of the concept of general equivalence: that because any object, produced by human labor or naturally occurring, may reveal itself over the course of time to be value-carrying, and thus to work like and as a commodity, any object at hand may step, according to laws not given in the object and not given necessarily, into the role of commodity, and thence into the sovereign role of general equivalent. Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” written from the center of what would become global capital, Wall Street; and Jorge Luis Borges's translation, “Bartleby, el escribiente,” helps to show how this contingent determination shifts the question of abstraction on which Marx's analysis of equivalence turns toward the figure and dynamics of translation.

Charity as Purchase

2014 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy D. Goldfarb
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Civic Responsibility ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Bartleby The Scrivener ◽  
Sense Of Obligation ◽  
The Needy ◽  
Individual Human

Nancy D. Goldfarb, “Charity as Purchase: Buying Self-Approval in Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’” (pp. 233–261) This essay examines Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) in light of recent scholarship in philanthropic studies. Through the lawyer-narrator, Melville’s story discreetly challenges the representation of charity as a viable means of redistributing wealth and restoring balance to an unequal social structure. The narrator masterfully employs the rhetoric of charity to negotiate his role in Bartleby’s tragic outcome, generating a self-promoting narrative that deflects potential criticism. His charitable acts toward Bartleby do not fulfill Kenneth Boulding’s criterion for philanthropy as a “one-way transfer”; rather, they constitute an exchange. In return for his financial gifts, the lawyer assuages his guilt and cheaply purchases “a delicious self-approval.” The story demonstrates the extent to which the profit-oriented culture represented by Wall Street is antithetical to a sense of obligation for others. By neglecting his civic responsibility and excessively valuing money, the narrator finds himself incapable of a spiritual connection with Bartleby and, despairing of his ability to assist his employee, instead offers him charity. Once the lawyer begins to perceive Bartleby as useful, the potential of charity to express human fellowship transforms into a means to profit. “Bartleby” demonstrates how in late capitalism the needy cease to be seen as individual human beings and subjects of their own lives. Rather, they are seen as an occasion for a purchase, an opportunity to achieve one’s objectives by means of what are now tax-deductible donations.

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