Have you ever read "Bartleby, The Scrivener" by Herman Melville? I've read it a few times, and even though it makes me anxious and uncomfortable, I find it really, really interesting. We read it again for my North American Lit class, and as always, the discussion we had was pretty simplistic, one-sided and boring. The professor had decided that Bartleby was a metaphor for Melville, and that since he'd written it after the relative failure of his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, it was a commentary on his refusal to continue "copying" old literary forms, etc. I'm sure there's some validity in that argument, but I definitely don't think that it's the only valid reading and she was really dismissive to other students' attempts to look at the story in different ways. Plus she has this really weird way of talking about authors in an over familiar way. "Poe was this like, really shy guy," for example. So, naturally, I just stopped paying attention, and instead decided to expand a joke I'd made about Bartleby being the original Occupy Wall Street movement with the following contemplation:
Bartleby, living dead man, died alone and lived again, in pages, in pages. You were a machine man, zombie blank, computing capitalism since the beginning, sorting through the ruins of a system born broken, born jagged and cold as an upturned car. Your hands charred and stained with dead words, dead ink, dead paper, thoughts extracted and fallen short, you were put to the task of recreating the dead place all around you, cloning and copying the dead ideologies, dry word after dry word, your very ink blotted out the sun. You were a solemn gray shadow, persistently eating through the lawyer soul; you laid heavily against those profitable brands of apathy, and with all the weight of your whole, evaporating existence, stood. Stood as the brick walls climbed up, closed in, crushed your thin flesh, weak bones, and consumed your disturbed, subversive soul. You were a skeletal occupation, a haunt as white and persistent as breath. You preferred not to exist within the parameters available to you, and therefore you became a person disordered, out of order, unwell; you became as broken as the brick garden you were born into. Spindly and steadfast, Bartleby, you died when they dragged your passive, certain body away from the white walls and ideals to which you’d fused your soul. You occupied with the slender bulk of your inconvenient body, preferred to waste away in passive resistance instead of working your bones into the tomb—still as gray in wealth as in poverty.
As you maybe can tell, I'm having trouble deciding how funny or serious this idea is, but I think Bartleby is kind of like that. Absurd and funny but deeply disturbing and kind of tragic.
Anyway, Monday was my last day with my favorite professor, because there is someone else coming to teach the second half of Pragmatics today, which makes me kind of nervous. It's a complicated subject and I was really excited about the old professor's teaching style. She was awesome, friendly and also easy to understand and really careful to make sure I knew what was going on. So. We'll see how that goes.
In other news, not having money sucks. As far as food goes its come down to half a tomato, half a jar of aioli (pretty useless without bread) and some noodles. Time to chip into my savings! (By savings I mean the five euros I found in my jacket pocket. )
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