31 Jan 2013

I Would Prefer Not To



"He does not resist, he does not defend his rights, he takes no steps to avert the worst that can happen to him - more, he provokes it ..."

This happens to be Nietzsche writing of Jesus, but it could well be someone commenting on Bartleby the scrivener. Both figures belong to the same type: that of the enigmatic redeemer who sets himself apart from his fellow man and makes himself untouchable and unknowable. 

Bartleby is one of the most discussed figures in American literature, but I find it hard to believe that he is also one of the best loved. For my part, I hate him. I would prefer not to have to explain this dislike or make any further critical analysis of this monstrous and motionless character, but, for the record ...

I hate Bartleby for much the same reason as Judas came to resent Jesus; the former felt in some sense let down by the latter and recognised the denial and subterfuge inherent in the latter's teaching. And so, despite his feelings of love and loyalty, he betrayed him: with a kiss. Bartleby too is ultimately a fraud and a moral fanatic who leads us not towards new life or greater health and happiness, but to suffering, misery and death.

Thus, like Bartleby's employer (and the narrator of his tale), I can't help feeling a  profound repulsion for the scrivener, who, clearly, is a decadent, suffering from some form of incurable disorder. His very presence is a curse and he sucks the joy out of life, just as he casts a general air of gloom over the office premises he refuses to leave. 

Bartleby's ideal is stasis: he is driven by a will to inertia, or what Freud terms a death drive. Thus he seeks to reduce all tension and avoid all conflict; to return, ultimately, to a state of inorganic objecthood: unthinking, unfeeling, uncaring, uneating, unliving. Surprisingly, Deleuze of all people finds this admirable and amusing. Not only does he think of Melville's book as a comical text, but he describes Bartleby as an anti-hero who, with his five-word formula, manages to suspend all operational logic and indicate the very limits of our world.

Deleuze seems to regard Bartleby as that first perfect nihilist whom Nietzsche spoke of and anticipated. But surely Nietzsche's thought of affirmative destruction and an active negation of the negative, is something very different to Bartleby's passive-aggressive 'negativism beyond all negation' ...? 

Deleuze is not wrong to describe Bartleby as Christ-like - "stricken with a constitutive weakness but also with a strange beauty" - the question is whether we think that's a good thing or not. Is it desirable - or even possible - to collectively imitate Bartleby and live as he lives, die as he dies? He surely provides at best a practice for the individual, but not a politics. Thus Deleuze is mistaken to locate a new model of fraternal alliance and immanent utopia in the story of Bartleby the scrivener. He has been seduced by the latter's suffering and martyrdom, but as Nietzsche points out, we should never confuse pain and showmanship with philosophical profundity.

And so, to conclude, Bartleby is not the physician of culture or the "doctor of a sick America" that Deleuze believes him to be. He's just another pale-faced case of retarded puberty and an apolitical idiot, with an instinctive hatred of reality and a morbid fear of being touched. What we need is someone who can teach us how to live in physical relation to one another; not just curl up and die in a corner, or hang naked on a cross.

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