Either we reduce our personalities to caricature and numb ourselves through substance abuse (the clerks Turkey and Nippers) or we deceive ourselves through a pattern of benign neglect disrupted by fits of compassion (the Manhattan lawyer). I also marvel at the literary landscape which flows past the windows of this tale, for Bartleby, though it speeds non-stop from the village of Dickens to Kafka Terminal, yet gives us a glimpse of the cities of Dostoevsky and Zola, their chimneys darkening sunset in the hills beyond.īut the truth which haunts me is how precisely Melville delineates how we all survive-or do not survive-our workaday worlds. I think of Melville the prophet, warning of the starkness of the coming metropolis and the small brutalities of cubicle capitalism. I think of Melville the innovative writer, his popularity-and income-waning as his daring increased, contemplating the act of writing considered in itself as a bleak task performed for money. I think of Melville the sailor, accustomed to wide sea vistas and many sea duties, recoiling at the confined, reduced lives of New York City office workers. What a pleasure it is to return to a work of genius and find it inexhaustible! What a host of insights, what a web of subtleties, are contained within this short account of the breakdown of one man in a five man office!
0 kommentar(er)
