"Bartleby, the Scrivener" can be used to Teach Deconstruction in the Introduction to fiction classroom. John sutter: the text is so elusive, perhaps it is meant to be just that. He says deconstruction is a way of elucidating what / who Bartleby is.
"Bartleby, the Scrivener" can be used to Teach Deconstruction in the Introduction to fiction classroom. John sutter: the text is so elusive, perhaps it is meant to be just that. He says deconstruction is a way of elucidating what / who Bartleby is.
"Bartleby, the Scrivener" can be used to Teach Deconstruction in the Introduction to fiction classroom. John sutter: the text is so elusive, perhaps it is meant to be just that. He says deconstruction is a way of elucidating what / who Bartleby is.
to Teach Deconstruction in the Introduction to Fiction Classroom Todd Giles Todd is a Ph D student in American literature at the University of Kansas as well as the Associate Editor of the William Carlos Williams Review. Note: Paragraphs nine and twelve first appeared in slightly altered form in The Explica- tor (Fall 2006) in Todds article Non-critical Eye for the Indeterminate Guy: Not Another Reading of Bartleby, the Scrivener. One of my main goals as a new teacher of Introduction of Fiction courses at the University of Kansas is to familiarize my students with a range of critical approaches to help them enrich their reading, writing, and thinking skills. As such, I spend the first few weeks of the semester discussing literary terminologyplot, characterization, dialogue, etc. and then move on to discussions of feminism, new historicism, deconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. For example, in conjunction with The Fall of the House of Usher I like to introduce classes to psychoanalytic criticism; with The Yellow Wallpaper, femi- nism; and with Bartleby, the Scrivener, deconstruction. While the classes are not based on literary theory per se, I do try to make sure our discus- sions throughout the semester return to the critical terminology as a way of making connections between the literature itself and the larger soci- etal issues that not only went into the making the of the texts, but also those connections we can make in our everyday lives using the literature as a springboard. Although our initial class discussions of Bartleby, the Scrivener begin by addressing a diverse array of readings ranging from the histori- cal, biographical, psychoanalytical, metaphorical, Marxist, and Christian, I point out, when we begin talking about deconstruction, that these read- ings, while attempting to elucidate, often go counter to what/who Bartleby is, attesting to the difficulty of finding a language which actually does the story justice. If the text is so elusive, perhaps it is meant to be just that; it folds back on itself like the folding green screen behind which Bartleby resides, and as readers, we must remain on the surface of the page, at the 129 threshold, like Bartleby at his window. When using Bartleby to address issues of deconstruction, I focus on binary opposites, indeterminate lan- guage and spaces, the ungraspable, silence and secrets, the pharmakon, and Derridas postal metaphor. Introduction to Deconstruction We begin by discussing the biased and arbitrary nature of language and how it alters the way we perceive the world. Language is constantly in flux, unstable. To help students grasp this point, I ask them to think about new words that have recently entered our vocabulary and old words which have been altered to take on new meanings: words like google (as a verb), word (simultaneously a greeting, a question, and an exclamation), bling (money, gold, flashiness), internet, mouse, back (a womans posteriorbaby got back!), and ipod. Deconstruction celebrates the free play of language, pointing out that texts are always in a perpetual state of change; language is not precise, but is rather an untanglable web of possibilities. As with the other forms of criticism I introduce in the classroom, I try to make it clear that these concepts are not merely templates one lays over a text to help shed light on it but are instead viable social and political modes of being. As such, I prompt them to question the presence of any seemingly objective struc- ture or content in the texts they read and to look beyond surface-level meanings. Binary Opposites Turning now to Bartleby, we discuss binary opposites in general and how Western religion, philosophy, science, and literature are based on either/or systems which privilege one pole at the cost of subordinat- ing the other: us/them, alive/dead, white/black, Christian/Muslim, man/ woman, heterosexual/homosexual, etc. The students have, with binary opposites, something they can solidly grasp hold of . . . at least tempo- rarily. Writing these and other binaries on the board with the students help, I then turn to some of the binaries in Bartleby itself: love/hate, anger/compassion, alive/dead, solid/spectral, inside/outside, Turkey/ Nippers, acceptance/resistance. I then point out how this divided space (/) is really not an unbridgeable demarcation, but is rather a zone of undecidability, a space open to free-play and crossings, a gray zone, not a 130 black and white one. Mentioning Derridas use of the zombie here is helpful. What is a zombie not, while at the same time also not? A zombie is not alive but also at the same time not dead. Alive and dead. Zombies disrupt the logic of oppositions, allowing slippage and play, giving the students something to talk about as I walk around the room in a clump- footed, Karloffian state of zombiac horror. Linguistic Indeterminacy The indeterminacy of language is a good place to enter into the text itself (pointing out of course the phallocentric implications of enter- ing a text) by engaging in a close reading of the first few pages of the story. From the opening lines the lawyers speech retrospectively shows vestiges of the infection to come that is Bartleby. He is unable to make an affirmative statement through the use of words such as rather, would seem, somewhat singular, might have been, and if I pleased, I could relate. Note how these wordsall appearing in the first paragraph operate in the realm of undecidability; the lawyer is unable to solidify his own thoughts and language. According to Deleuze, Bartleby sends lan- guage itself into flight . . . open[ing] up a zone of indetermination or indiscernibility in which neither words nor characters can be distinguished (76). Likewise, the lawyer and his other assistants remain nameless: his employees go by nicknames, while the lawyer himself refrains from pro- viding his own name. Even when Bartleby appears in the office thresh- old, the narrator is unable to offer a clear description of him: he exhibits pallid neatness, pitiable respectability, and incurable forlornness. Time too, as narrated by the lawyer, remains uncertain: Some days now passed, for such a period, It was the third day, I think. Indeterminate Spaces From the indeterminacy of language we turn to the indeterminacy of spaces. As a class we try to describe the physical setting of the lawyers office. Doing so, we see that the spaces around which the narrative revolves are of indeterminate potentialitiesspaces penetrated by the outside, haunted by specters, silences, preferences, and secret touches. Spaces which incite the unnamable, undecidable speech, atemporal pas- sage, the unclassifiable, unwritable, and shifting relationships that waver from disdain to compassion. The office space, like the men who inhabit 131 it, remains nameless. It is composed of Duchampesque undecidablesa window with an unobstructed view of a wall, ground glass folding-doors, a folding green screen that provides privacy and openness simultaneously, and a penetrating sky-light running the height of the building. A window that does not look out; glass doors through which sight is rendered void by opacity; a folding, movable green screenthe color a folding in of the natural outsidewhich eliminates sight but not sound: a kind of failed partitioning; and a penetrating phallic shaft of light (also a folding in of the outside). Bartlebys workspace is situated in such a way that enables him to remain perpetually in the corneran indeterminate space where two planes meet but neither exists solely alone. The lawyers office is the perfect space for the likes of Bartlebyone that oscillates between inside and outside, sight and blindness, separate and conjoined. Bartleby further disrupts this architectural space by sleeping in the threshold and sitting on the banister of the landing, both movements which call into question what it means to find a space of ones own, as opposed to a freewheeling mobility and suspensionsomething other than a sadistic movement and appropriation, something other than ownership. The wall, the blank page, potential, the unwritten. We know this of two of the three walls surrounding the lawyers officeone is white and one is black with age. The wall outside of Bartlebys window has no view at allit is colorless, unformed, undescribed, uniscribed, open. It is nei- ther a blank white page attesting to the violence of writing, nor does it attest to the appropriation of reading. It is neither impatiently awaiting color nor erasure, inscription nor translation. It is a nonreflective surface in which Bartleby can find himself in losing himself. Not a loss of subli- mation or shedding, but of being beside oneself. The wall, Bartlebys wall, just is. It is potential, like Bartlebysomething not to be realized. It is pure presence. The blank page would require movement towards; the already written page, contemplation. Neither option inviting dead-wall reveries. Bartleby is not closed in by language. He is an unreadable text without beginning or end. As Deleuze says in Bartleby; or, The For- mula, Being as being, and nothing more (71). The Ungraspable The lawyer himself seems to want to approach this condition, this state of statelessness, this present moment perpetually vibrating in its arrest in which Bartleby is not standing at the precipice, but rather, hov- 132 ers over the void like Wiley Coyote suspended in mid-air, able, nearly, to step back to cliff-side. The lawyer sees the importance of this vantage point but is only able to take cautious steps towards the edge, steps that at the same time simultaneously retract themselves as they are taken. No sooner does he reach out to touch Bartleby, both physically and through the promise of compassion to come, than Bartlebyat least in the lawyers eyesretracts even further. He leaves an ungraspable, nearly impercep- tible, phantasmagoric trace that plays heavily on the lawyer who is won- derfully touched and disconcerted by Bartleby. At one point he even ad- dresses Bartleby indirectly through the narrative (the outside): I never feel so private as when I know you are here. At last I see it, I feel it; I penetrate to the predestined purpose of my life. I am content (35). These are not the musings, as some would have us believe, of an insensi- tive money-grubbing elitist. Rather, they are the ungraspable longings of an unrequited desire to touch the untouchable. I like to ask the students if this is a potentially homoerotic relationship and if the potential of such a relationship places it in the realm of the undecidable. It is relation- ship not yet realized, but is potential. How, then, does the space relate to or affect this potential? Silence and Secrets Bartlebys silence establishes distance, while at the same time inviting the desire for proximity. A silence that at once pushes away and calls hitherattraction unto negligence. This is exasperated at the moment of silences reiterationwhen Bartleby speaks, his silence calls attention to itself. In other words, it is at this moment that language calls attention to itself by highlighting its absence, and it is at that moment that others want to turn to language to describe the silence, as if silence were a re- moval of language and not language a supplement to silence. The Pharmakon Bartleby appears throughout the story as the consummate specter. He is a noiseless, strange, sliding, haughty apparition who appears and disappears from behind his partition, often standing hours-on-end in dead- wall reveries. He haunts the lawyers space, refusing to leave on even for the slightest errand (ironically the lawyer asks Bartleby to go to the post office), and often violently confuses clients through his apparent 133 unaccountability. It is as if he retains some silent secret by refusing to exteriorize himself through his nonsadistic movements: worklessness, anonymity, and his refusal to vacate the premises. His courteous refusal to exteriorize himself strangely affects those around him. Initially the lawyer sees Bartlebys sedateness as a remedy to even-out the opposing tempers of his other employees. However, Bartlebys medicinal charac- teristics change soon enough in the eyes of the lawyer, situating him in the realm of the pharmakon: that of poison and remedy. To the lawyer he becomes a weighty millstone, causing those in the office to become infected with Bartlebys language. Although the lawyer now sees Bartleby as a poison, he cannot help but feel that he, Bartleby, is still somehow the victim of an incurable diseasesomething apparently operating from the outside of Bartleby, leaving him no possible recourse. What is impor- tant here is that Bartleby is not bouncing back and forth between two disparate poles; rather, as pharmakon, he exhibits slippage and play within them. He is at once poison and remedy. By touching the men in the office, Bartleby opens up an unlimited field of dismantling social forces tempers, moods, words, actions, inactions. He does not implicitly invite them per se, but societal preconceptions incite them. He is rooted in his very unrootedness, while at the same time seeming to send out rhyzomatic shoots that touch, usually in an adverse manner, those around him. He is the touch of the outside. The Postal Metaphor Melvilles story also lends itself very well to a discussion of Jacques Derridas postal metaphor. In The Post Card, Derrida argues that letters will either arrive at their intended destination, will arrive somewhere else (perhaps the dead letter office), or will never arrive (get lost). No letter can be guaranteed a smooth passage from signatory to addressee; thus every arrival is somewhat accidental; all letters have the potential for non- arrival. This is the same with speech and writing; when we speak we assume our words will be received according to our intentions and believe that every word and text has an intended destination. Every utter- ance has to arrive somewhere but not necessarily at its intended destina- tion; every text is destined to go places that exceed the intentions of the sender. This applies to letters, books, speech, etc. Every word, every let- ter, every truth is open to the possibility of being misunderstood or received by someone not intended. Thus, truth is relative; it is contextual 134 and therefore always open to misattribution and misdirection. The post- card, then, is occasionalit is written at a certain time and place by a certain person who intends to say something personal to someone else. In order to reach the addressee it must be possible for it to be read by others as well as the addressee. Although every postcard seems to consti- tute a personal transmission, it is always openboth literally by its very design, and by possible interceptors. Bartleby, like the rumor of the dead letter office, is that which never arrives in any form of quantifiable totality. Seeing Bartleby as a dead let- ter as the narrator erroneously does, presupposed an origin and destina- tion which are never reached. Bartleby, on the contrary, is without origi- nation and trajectory; he is a sequel in waiting, already stamped, perpetu- ally in a state yet to come. He is instantaneous, unarrivalable. The narrators inclusion of the sequelmere hearsay subject to disbelief as the narrator rightly points out himselfis a failed attempt, like most critical analyses of the story, to summarize, or at the very least, to rationalize Bartleby. What we are left with is the remnant that persists after (in)completion. A sequel that remains always already unable to be written, read, and relayedan effect of indeterminacy itself, that which forbids naming. Melville, in writing this story, creates something which undoes itself with every reading, unwrites itself as it is written, erases itself through inscrip- tion. More simply put, Bartleby does not operate as a closed rhetorical model, it/he calls into question the nature of writing and existence, exposing us to something beyond which operates in the realm of the undecidable. Bartleby, The Scrivener, itself a supplementary text to the already uncertain sequel of the dead letter office, must remain infinitely open-ended. I find that pairing deconstruction with Bartleby, the Scrivener works very well in that the somewhat nebulous concepts and difficult terminol- ogy of deconstruction are made more tangible when discussed in light of a text that itself engages in issues of indeterminacy. Introducing students to literary criticism in the Introduction to Fiction classroom not only keeps us from having to read the same tired old essays on male domina- tion in the late 1800s as seen in The Yellow Wallpaperhowever im- portant an issue that certainly isby fostering a more complex and criti- cal examination of the texts at hand, while at the same time adding to the level of complexity of classroom discussions. 135 Works Cited Deleuze, Gilles. Bartleby; or, The Formula. Essays Critical and Clinical. Minnesota:University of Minnesota, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Melville, Herman. Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 9. Chicago: Northwestern UP, 1979.
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