“Dead-wall reveries”. The Case of a Wall Street Scrivener
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31261/SSP.2021.18.05Keywords:
Herman Melville, wall, politics of literature, Jacques RancièreAbstract
This article offers a reinterpretation of Herman Melville’s famous short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”, which has been interpreted countless times. Jerzy Franczak describes the operations of “Bartleby’s factory” and polemically refers to all the readings that attribute a subversive and community-forming potential to the idiosyncratic formula of resistance repeated by the protagonist. The trope of the wall is central to Franczak’s line of interpretation. He understands it as the protagonist’s projection of external necessities: unchanging rules that govern the social world. By supplementing Marxist approaches (especially that of Leo Marx) with concepts taken from Jacques Rancière’s writings, Franczak is able to develop a perspective which weakens the deterministic vision of an individual oppressed by the socioeconomic destiny. In Franczak’s interpretation, Bartleby is a victim of his own fatalism, while the lawyer-narrator, commonly portrayed as an embodiment of the system of power, is a political entity whose project of building a shared platform for understanding and acting falls through.
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