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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Sat Apr 19, 2003 12:36 pm
Subject: Heidegger & Bartleby: Being Which Unveils

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=55875

Heidegger & Bartleby: Being Which Unveils

One reader comments: I like What Mark Twain said "sometimes authors
just write their stories to be understood as is, not disected and
butchered and analyzed"

http://www.twain2004.com/index.html

http://www.janushead.org/JHSumm99/sundararajan.cfm

Being gives, and man "is the peculiar being with respect to whom
Being unveils and discloses.. he stands out in order to be where
Being unveils"- Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking.

Being as Refusal: Melville's Bartleby as Heideggerian Anti-Hero

Melville's "Bartleby, the scrivener: A story of Wall-Street" (
Berthoff, 1966) has a simple and straightforward story line: A former
clerk in the Dead Letter office at Washington, by the name of
Bartleby, was hired as a copyist at a law office in Wall Street. Much
to the dismay of his employer, Bartleby refused to comply ("I would
prefer not to") with certain routine obligations at work, such as
proofreading manuscripts and running errands, and when eventually
fired, refused to leave the office, which he had made into his
domicile. After all attempts had failed to evict Bartleby, his
employer moved the law office to another location, abandoning
Bartleby to the landlord, who subsequently called the police and had
Bartleby removed to the common jail, where he perished from not
eating.

This paper attempts a Heideggerian reading of the story with a
special focus on three themes: Bartleby as mental patient, Bartleby
as "standing reserve," and Being as refusal -- themes that intertwine
to paint a scenario of postmodern transcendence.

According to Heidegger, what is essential to human nature is not to
reveal, unveil, or render accessible to direct observation what is
hidden, so much as to be drawn toward what is concealed. This
tendency of the human to be drawn towards the withdrawn is referred
to by Heidegger as "a sign":

http://www.alpha-net.ne.jp/users2/omth2/dampen/montreal.html

For Heidegger, Being speaks silently, without any sound.

http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/WeirdWildWeb/courses/mwt/dictionary/mwt_
themes_755_tillich.htm

Revelation unveils what concerns us ultimately. Tillich distinguishes
two categories of revelation, namely, original and dependent
revelation. An original revelation is a "giving" side revelation
which never "gives" to us before, while the dependent revelation is
a "receiving" side revelation by which the individual and the group
are transformed. "Jesus is the Christ both because he could become
the Christ and because he was received as the Christ" (126). Thus,
the revelation of Jesus as the Christ, in which Christian message is
rooted, is the final and actual revelation, and which in turn resolve
the finitude of our existential reason. Revelation unveils our
ultimate concern. Yet, the ground of revelation, for Tillich, is
described as the "ground of being manifest in existence" (155). In
terms of Christianity, "the ground of being is God" (156). Revelation
mediates knowledge through human cognitive reason. The knowledge of
revelation is the knowledge of God which must be described
symbolically. The "Word of God" is a symbol for God revealing itself
in Jesus as the Christ, because the Word of God reveals God's
manifestation in Jesus as the Christ which is the meaning of the
symbol. For Tillich, symbols direct above themselves to something
else. Symbols, not like signs, participate in the power of that which
they symbolize. "A symbol has truth: it is adequate to the revelation
it expresses. A symbol is true: it is the expression of a true
revelation" (240). Religious symbols can be true symbols only if they
participate in the power of the divine to which they point. Religious
symbols are "double-edged," they point themselves to the infinite as
well as the finite; they drive the infinite toward the finite and the
finite toward the infinite; they unveil the divine life for the human
and the human for the divine. Religious symbols transfer ultimate
truth through things, persons and events.

http://router.fil.us.edu.pl/neolit/shadows/articles/enquires.htm

The apocalypse, as we already know, is unveiling, but let us ask with
a more critical frame of mind, what exactly is unveiling? To unveil
is to lift the curtain, to reveal the truth which so far has been
concealed, simply to make one see more or see truly. As a sometime
Blake scholar I just cannot help drawing an analogy with Blake's
distinction between seeing with the eye (or the natural sight) and
seeing through the eye (or the spiritual sight). The apocalyptic act
of unveiling is equivalent to the cleansing of the doors of
perception or the expansion of the senses. (No doubt it was the study
of William Blake that infected me with the prophetic spirit I am now
exercising.) Blake's oeuvre, with its insistence on the moment of
unveiling, expanding and opening, fully deserves to be
called "apocalyptic" in form and spirit.

In "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" Heidegger
problematizes the traditional or metaphysical understanding of the
notion of the end as a simple limit or boundary. He says: "We
understand the end of something all too easily in the negative sense
as a mere stopping, as the lack of continuation, perhaps even as a
decline and impotence." [4] Writing more specifically about the end
of philosophy, he describes it as "that place in which the whole of
philosophy's history is gathered in its most extreme possibility,"
[5] where the fundamental questions are not simply dispensed with,
but on the contrary, intensified to a point where they open up new
spaces for thinking. The end, then, can be thought as a place of
radical possibility, the point of history's extreme concentration
rather than its cancellation or termination. It is remarkable that by
problematizing the end, Heidegger seems to speak from beyond
philosophy's self-inscribed limit, from behind the curtain, like St.
John of the Apocalypse, he is un-veiling the unthinkable sphere
beyond the end.

Heidegger was not the first thinker to announce the end of
metaphysics (Hume was convinced he had effectively nullified it), but
he was probably the first one to predict that its ending will
last "longer than the previous history of metaphysics." [6] Thus the
postmodern man and postmodern woman find themselves in a paradoxical
negative space, the open-ended space of the end, the space of
endgame. The end becomes extended in time, as if diluted, eternally
unfinished. There is an apocalyptic particle to every moment, an
electron of the end to every proton of a second. This extended end
(is it not what we call time?) counterpoints the end as a point of
extreme concentration, thus putting us in an even doubly paradoxical
situation, between two ends, one radically diluted and one radically
condensed.

http://members.tripod.com/ulagank/sufi-1.htm

BEING is the One who UNVEILS and through that lead the individuals in
the right path i.e. the Authentic Existence. This presupposes that
our ordinary understanding is VEILED .i.e there is always hidden ,
concealed from being SEEN. In Saivism this same notion is termed
Thirobavam, casting a screen so that somethings are hidden from being
understood but disclosed as the person develops. The "darkness of the
sensory realms " is the realm that remainss unavailable for the
physicalistic seeing , the kind of seeing that remains locked towards
the sensorial refusing to acknowledge to Hermeneutical, transductive,
the trans-personal or in short the Metaphysical. When a person
remains physical and refuses to become metaphysical , he condemns
himself to an existence in Darkness, in Ignorance or anjnjaanam. The
conviction in the metaphysical possibilities of various kinds , that
there are realities behind the phenomenal, an understanding that's
already there but perhaps only vague and unclear is termed here
the 'faith'. And the believe that it is BEING and no other can
destroy this metaphysical Darkness is termed here god-wariness. The
paradise is the CONCLUSION and NOT the beginning; it hovers as the
metaphysical possibility YET to be enjoyed; the End -In -Sight but
which is NOT encountered and lived or enjoyed as such. And BEING
takes the believers towards this and only He can do that for he is
Loving King, a metaphor that even Meykandar uses, someone knows
everybody with the POWER to provide to each according to his needs.
BEING is the Leader for the creatures involved in the phenomenal game
that we call Existence. The paradise is the HIGHEST GARDEN, which
means there is NO garden BEYOND it and which means this is the Moksa,
the FINAL HOME( Ta. viidupeeRu). Both are metaphoral terms but with
sameness of meaning. And this implies that BEING through facilitating
metaphysical excursions, uplifts the veil and through that bestows
Moksa, existing in the Highest Garden.
- Dr. K. Lognathan, Agamic Psychology

http://www.webcom.com/paf/Dwellers_on_the_Threshold.html

Being gives, and man "is the peculiar being with respect to whom
Being unveils and discloses.. he stands out in order to be where
Being unveils"- Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking.

This is his distinction and is expressed in his resolve for the
requirement of truth, but the understanding of truth as the truth of
Being obviously cannot be the truth of metaphysics or of logic or of
science for these cast a net that secures beings for their own
devices and conceptual constructions and thus is at root a relation
between beings. To be sure beings are disclosed, after a fashion,
through the apparatus of this kind of propositional truth but this is
a truth that is derivative of the first opening of Being to things
through man and one in which the essence of Being remains hidden or
withdrawn. It is this forgetfulness that we should be alert to, for
the alternating withdrawal and disclosure of the Being of beings
cannot be avoided. This is the nature of the immediacy of the essence
of things; as an aspect is lit up, the rest falls into darkness, -
this is the basis of Heidegger's foundational understanding of truth
not as a rigorous dismantling and sorting into true or false
propositions but as unconcealment (alethia).
- Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking.

There are no limits to the genius of the poet beyond how much he
gives himself to his work, the work of allowing Being to express
itself through him, for the horizon can be transcended in myriad ways
and in infinite degrees, "The greater the master, the more completely
his person vanishes behind his work"(27). A similar structure can be
found in Eckhart, who first of all lays out the requirements for
hearing the Word of God and then expresses an identical sentiment for
transcendence of rigid and thematised meanings of beings and
deliverance over to God. For Eckhart the penetration conferred on the
mystical vision unveils the divine vestures such that it knows no
bounds aside from the impurities of the mind not wholly given over to
God; "God desires nothing more of you than that you go out of
yourself according to your creaturely mode of being and let God be
God in you… Everything which we are able to hear on earth and
everything which can be said to us has within it a further, concealed
sense.. [for] All words have power from the first Word... [and] where
all the powers have removed all their works and images, there is this
Word spoken"

Being plays through me, I am without will.

I am embedded in the world and led to its unconcealment in silence
in which is given to me the truth of my being.

I do not err on the side of representation and idolatry but wait upon
the voice of Being in its authentic disclosure.

Though I have my dwelling within the horizon of my field of awareness
and suffer the withdrawal of Being, I know that this is but one side
of the openness of Being as such,

for this is given in the event of appropriation, in which the essence
of things is
restored.

Ontological truth outlives all ontic configurations of itself, the
epochs of Being do not

hold sway over the bestowal of truth to the anointed listener, in all
things.

Surely I shall not succumb to metaphysical thinking or forget my own
mortality as I

go forth in truth, and guard the house of Being.

Because the Being of beings is essentially a nothing it is the
possibility of all things and, in the case of Dasein, that most
transcendent of beings, the groundless ground of the radical
instability and changeability of his existence and his language. It
is the dynamism that is the possibility of the disclosure of the
truth of being, the abyss over which we must retain an authentic
waiting upon its occurrence as Being in beings and offset its
oblivion in technological thinking. The animal has no understanding
of its own mortality for its limited transcendence precludes the
possibility of nothingness upon which its being is staked, it thus
knows neither Being nor mortality, but man is the gatekeeper who
stares into the abyss and must make something of it. By its power he
can forget himself or deliver the words of power that keep the light
of truth flickering in the world.

========================================
http://www.ku.edu/~zeke/bartleby/brodwin.html

To the Frontiers of Eternity
Melville's Crossing in
"Bartleby the Scrivener"*
(excerpts):
Why is light given to a man whose
way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in?

We remember Father Mapple's humbling peroration: "Yet this is
nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should
live out the lifetime of his God?"

Theologically, however, despair is precipitated in "Bartleby" by the
failure of religious faith in immortality in the face of the
absoluteness of death. And certainly this is a problem that lies at
the very heart of Christianity itself, for without belief in Christ's
resurrection, Christianity loses its central consolatory nature.
While Melville was not acquainted with the works of Kierkegaard,
there are many striking similarities in their theological and
psychological analyses of the "sickness unto death" and the crises of
faith in contemporary Christianity as a whole. For example, consider
this short dialogue in Pierre, Or, the Ambiguities, ed. Harrison
Hayford et al. (Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern University Press &
Newberry Library, 1971), p. 184:
"Is my mother up yet?" said he to Dates. . . .
"Not yet, sir;--heavens, sir! are you sick?"
"To death! Let me pass."

Melville was compelled to pursue his existential exploration of the
problem of resurrection or immortality

"Bartleby" dramatizes the conflict of two radically different
spiritual personalities who are compelled to participate in the
dialectics of faith and doubt which gradually and unnervingly reveal
the frontiers of eternity they live on. Bartleby withdraws into death
because he perceives that the Christian faith it takes to carry one
over those frontiers into eternal life has been hopelessly blasphemed
and spiritually trivialized. His Christ has died but not risen and so
he accepts that fate for himself. The lawyer's Christianity ignores
the Gethsemane that is part of the agony and triumph of faith, but,
unlike most critics, I feel his experience with Bartleby offers him
an intimation of this.

His laconic "prefer nots" define his inner and outer responses
unequivocally and control the action of the story. He is a kind of
unmoved mover, goading and outrageous to those around him. His fetal
death in the pyramid that is the Tombs serves as a metaphor for the
death-depressive symptomology which has made him one of the most
vivid characters in American fiction.

Into his world enters Bartleby who is living death itself, and who,
at last, denies all possibilities of action in the face of this
reality, lacking that Christian faith in immortality which would make
a walled existence tolerable. No wonder, then, that it is necessary
for the lawyer to write Bartleby's biography, for the only spiritual
materials that really matter are abundantly there for him to grapple
with. In doing so, the lawyer describes a world which is a veritable
representation of a passage from Proverbs (21:16) Melville had used
in Moby-Dick: "But even Solomon, he says, 'the man that wandereth out
of the way of understanding shall remain (i.e., even while living) in
the congregation of the dead.'" And then the admonition: "Give not
thyself up, then, to the fire, lest it invert thee, deaden
thee. . . ."8 Now the lawyer and Bartleby are no Ahabs, to be sure,
but the spiritual "inversions" they are subject to are no less
significant for Melville's view of the "human condition."

Bartleby's behavior seems to dramatize Melville's view that the
exercise of "free-will" is an exercise in futility, or conversely,
that it is a radical instrument of defiance, literally to the death.
But these various readings can perhaps be subsumed in a more
comprehensive framework which embraces Melville's thematic movement
from the microcosmic self to the frontiers of eternity circumscribing
the action. My contention is that Bartleby begins and ends
as "incurable" and inconsolable because his disease is the
Kierkegaardian "sickness unto death"12 that is drawn as only the most
vividly etched characterization within the total world of "sickness"
the story creates. When Bartleby stops working, he has simply
surrendered to that reality where all "reasonable" action,
philanthropy and economic activity crumble beneath the pyramidical
weight of that sickness. Only an act of Divine Grace or existentially
authentic sign of faith in the Christian promise of resurrection
can "cure" this illness, but the symbol of Christ's life-giving body
has been instead transubstantiated into ginger cake "seals."

His litany of "I prefer not to" does not so much initiate an anatomy
of freedom and fate as it points to a more comprehensive dimension of
social challenge and theological truth. In the congregation of
the "dead" the freedom to accept or reject may exist, but it has no
meaning if it is merely part of the "vanity" the Preacher speaks of
and society reflects. What possible meaning can the dialectics of
freedom and fate have in the walled grave? That is the crisis
Bartleby faces and the challenge he symbolizes. Responding to that
challenge by reading Jonathan Edwards and Joseph Priestley who attack
the concept of "free will," the lawyer piously rationalizes that he
is Calvinistically "predestinated" to care for Bartleby. Nevertheless
the scrivener's testimony to the truth that all is vanity comically
spreads to Turkey's use of the term "prefer" as well as to the
lawyer's own growing sense of confusion and hopelessness. This is
suggested by the lawyer's image of himself as a "pillar of salt" upon
hearing Bartleby's first "I prefer not to" (48). In Genesis 19:26,
Lot's wife looks back to see God raining death and destruction (fire
and brimstone) on Sodom and Gomorrah and is punished both for
disobeying God's command and observing His divine intervention. What
the lawyer hears that so stuns him is a statement more calculated
than any to rain destruction on the safety of his world.13 For not to
accept "freely" the world of accommodation and balance--the good
natural arrangement--is to destroy it at its core. Through
the "prefer not," the terror and the reality of the sickness--their
own mortgaged lives--can be let in. Indeed, the lawyer writes that he
is "Mortified" (57) by Bartleby. Yet he is also constantly disarmed
by Bartleby's "mildness," that joyless peace that passeth all
understanding the scrivener possesses. Even if his mildness hides--as
we might easily surmise from a psychological point of view--a
terrible anger or wound that has rendered him incurable, nevertheless
Melville has chosen to emphasize the fact that Bartleby somehow
transformed and healed his hurt at the price of internalizing the
objective death around him. One of the ways, after all, of accepting
death both psychologically and philosophically is to believe that
death, too, is a vanity, leveling all in the world. One can rail
against the wall like Ahab, angry or Promethean, or embrace the peace
that comes when one knows nothing matters. Thus, on the Sunday--the
Lord's Day--when the lawyer discovers Bartleby living in his
chambers, he is both overcome by a genuine sense of "overpowering
melancholy" (55) and is "awed" by Bartleby's "pallid haughtiness"
(56), a brilliant ironic touch wherein we see the very triumph of
Bartleby's self-assured "truth." And Melville's syncretic style never
worked to more significant purpose than in having the lawyer describe
Wall Street that Sunday as "deserted as Petra," the
building "forlorn" like Bartleby (incurably so, no doubt), and the
scrivener "a sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all
populous--a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among
the ruins of Carthage!" (55). Wall Street is likened to an ancient
biblical city noted for tombs cut from pink rock; Bartleby and the
building are one in their capacity to evoke the forlorn and dead.
Like the lawyer who at this point recognizes their kinship to Adam,
Bartleby is also a dead spectator--another pillar of salt--viewing
what had once been not only all populous but sinful, too. Finally,
Melville refers to John Vanderlyn's famous painting of 1807, which
portrays a virile, brooding and togaed figure against a romantically
gloomy background of the Parthenon and Claudian aqueduct.

Bartleby, in fact, is left only with "preferences," a final emotional
sanctuary in which he can prefer or prefer not to do the tasks the
world imposes on him. This is a condition of negative, even
meaningless, freedom because it is not really informed by the
capacity to make real "assumptions," i.e., to believe in true
possibilities or have faith in the idea that reality is filled with
living potentialities one can positively examine and act upon with
the hope that meaning or human goals truly exist. Mere preferences
are in the end but a vanity. One preference is not really more
meaningful than any other one. But assumptions imply a kind of faith
in the order and logic of things: Melville's design is clearly to
pull the word into the full theological meaning of ascension to
Heaven by making the lawyer continue to comically play upon the term
after he is "thunderstruck" to discover that Bartleby has not left--
has not "assumed" anything. The entire scene is fraught with images
of death and "assumption," and may be regarded as a dramatic and
thematic paradigm for the story as a whole.

The stunning juxtaposition between death and life, appearance and
reality in the context of an exquisite, peaceful silence, embodies a
primal aspect of Melville's tragic vision. On one level, the image
acts merely to define the initial, temporary moment of shock; on
another level it dramatizes the existential condition of the lawyer
and his world, dead upon touch. And on its deepest level, it is an
image of man's fate, death stalking him even as he dreams on a
beautiful cloudless day. We are at once reminded of Ishmael's dreamy
reveries on the masthead, suddenly aware of the silent death beneath
him, and of Hunilla's vision of her brother and husband drowning
soundlessly at sea: "Death in a silent picture; a dream of the eye;
such vanishing shapes as the mirage shows'' (129). Ishmael and
Hunilla both endure, but Bartleby's effect is "cadaverous triumph"
(62) as the lawyer remarks, and so, after his shock, he begins to
wonder about what else he could "assume in the matter?" (62). What
follows is a seriocomic rumination by the lawyer in which he uses the
word "assume" or "assumption" five times in order to determine
whether it were best for him to treat Bartleby "as if he were air."
He tries to convince himself that "It was hardly possible that
Bartleby could withstand such an application of the doctrine of
assumptions" (63). As critics have noted,16 Melville is here punning
on the Catholic doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, a
comic verbal thrust which is then followed up by the lawyer asking
Bartleby, "What earthly right have you to stay here?" (63). But
Bartleby answered "nothing."

The scene illuminates for us what is the true, underlying tragic
sense of the story. It is not the sense of death itself, however
pervasive in the self, society, or universe, which is the rooted
terror. Rather, it is loss of faith in resurrection, the Christian
faith that in Christ there is the promise of eternal life. This is
the question or belief which Melville agonized over within himself
and which he saw disintegrating his society. It is the loss or
questioning of this faith which Melville knew left man alone,
helpless and hopeless against the reality of death. From that
perspective, Bartleby himself is not so much a tragic Christ figure
as he is a Christ-less, communion-less figure, a condition he, unlike
the lawyer, is aware of. The crisis of faith for Melville is
crystallized by the agony and theological terror of St. Paul: "If
Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is
also vain" (I Corinthians 15:14). And so Bartleby moves through the
story as the symbol of vanity Melville saw in Ecclesiasties and not
the rejected Christ of the New Testament. Anger and resentment are
seemingly all that is left for the narrator to cope with his sense of
impotence over Bartleby's incurable truth. Only the memory of a
recent murder case checks his rage and leads him to what must be the
most comically facile spiritual "conversion" in American literature:
But when this old Adam of resentment rose in me and tempted me
concerning Bartleby, I grappled him and threw him. How? Why, by
simply recalling the divine injunction: "A new commandment give I
unto you that ye love one another." Yes this it was that saved me.
(64)
The lawyer did not have to be a saint to save Bartleby; he only had
to have that authentic faith that could be a witness to the ultimate
hope Bartleby had lost. Bartleby's physical starvation at the end is
a metaphorical embodiment of spiritual starvation. The "bread of God"
(John 6:33) is not his to have and in the absolute acceptance of that
condition he must not only die, but also continue to be thought of
as "deranged" (72). A last "insult" is for Bartleby to be taken for
a "gentleman forger" (72) by the grub-man, a description that
ironically reduces the terrible confusion and mystery of
his "innocent" and radically authentic despair to the likes of one
who lives by faking things.

The scene is structured physically and symbolically as a secret
funeral rite within the pyramid whose traditional function should
suggest a Pharaoh's resting place to prepare the soul's flight to the
Beyond.17 At this point Melville gives his lawyer a poetic language
and tone that lift his awareness to a startling level of authentic
metaphysical consciousness and, however, briefly, challenge the
intensifying despair the entire story has dramatized. If he is not
crossing a frontier of eternity himself, he is at least catching a
lyrical glimpse of it, while Bartleby has contracted himself into a
fetus whose next transformation ought to be rebirth. The lawyer's
potentially affirmative help is too late:

The Egyptian character of the masonry weighed upon me with its gloom.
But a soft imprisoned turf grew under foot. The heart of the eternal
pyramids, it seemed, wherein, by some strange magic, through the
clefts, grass-seed, dropped by birds, had sprung [73]

Apart from the allusive imagery and poetic tone, the very syntax of
that last line with its choppy, periodic form, phrase by phrase
moving to the completing verb "had sprung,'' tells us that Melville
has joined his sensibility with his character's. A phrase like "soft
imprisoned turf" qualifies and yet extends the emotional meaning and
tone of the prison itself; "by some strange magic" adds another and
different dimension of mystery to an already profound one. If we do
not know what lies beyond death, do we know where green life comes
from? Those birds-carriers of immortality perhaps, certainly
creatures who live beyond the walls of earth-drop magic seeds as in
some fairy tale, challenging if not defeating the power of the walls.
Indeed, it is hard to read this passage as yet another effusion of
the lawyer's felicitous Victorian sentimentality. The thematic and
connotative subtlety of the lines defies such a reading, and alerts
us, instead, to one of those "divine intuitions" forever fleeting in
and out of Melville's world of doubt and spiritual agony. We note how
the word "strange" is again picked up with reinforced meaning as the
lawyer begins his very next line taking us back into the world of the
dead: "Strangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up,
and lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones, I saw the
wasted Bartleby" (73). A "tingling shiver" wracks the lawyer's body
as the obsequy ends:

"Eh!-He's asleep, ain't he?"
"With kings and counselors," murmured I. (73)

The brief and sudden intrusion of the hope of immortality announced
by the image of the magic grass is quietly shattered by Melville's
biblical allusion to Job 3:14.18 The imprisoned turf that grows
through the clefts of stones may well symbolize Nature's eternal
rebirth with its "magic" cycles of death and life--a Whitmanesque
vision--but Melville's struggle is with the Christian promise of
personal immortality. Now Bartleby has died the Christian death
Redburn and other Melvillean characters lauded: bravely (he asks for
no pity), humbly (he utters no blasphemy or blame), and without
bravado. And yet his death seems more like a tragic parody of those
qualities than an affirmation of them. It is Bartleby's perverse
power to take every value to its absolute inverted end. This is what
the lawyer sees and shiveringly feels when he touches death itself
and his allusions to Job illuminates who and where he really is. For
the phrase "With Kings and counselors," though it superficially acts
as a quiet benediction and recognition that death levels all--
scrivener and king--expands its meaning to a terrifying revelation if
we read it in its full context of Job's anguished lament on being
born:

Why died I not from the womb?
why did I not give up the ghost when
I came out of the belly?

Why did the knees prevent me? Or
why the breasts that I should suck?

For now should I have lain still
and been quiet, I should have slept:
then had I been at rest,
With kings and counselors of the
earth, which built desolate places for
themselves;

Or with princes that had gold,
who filled their houses with silver:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Why is light given to a man whose
way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in?

For my sighing cometh before I eat,
and my roarings are poured out like the
waters.

For the thing which I greatly feared
is come upon me, and that which I was
afraid of is come unto me.

I was not in safety, neither had I rest,
neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.

I have quoted this long passage for two reasons: the first is to show
that the chapter, though taken out of context from the Book of Job as
a whole, is tonally and thematically congruent with the despair in
Ecclesiasties, a vivid underscoring of the biblical ethos in
Melville's story; and second, because I believe that it establishes
the lawyer's disquieting awareness--at least at the moment of
Bartleby's death--that, contrary to his earlier conviction, he
was "not in safety," but a co-inheritor of desolate places. I am
aware, of course, of the problem that attends this interpretation.
Did Melville intend the lawyer or the reader to grasp the full
context of the allusion? Or does it stand merely as a pious cliché?
Obviously we can never know definitively, yet Melville's work as a
whole and the well demonstrated literary habit of manipulating and
extending his wealth of biblical allusion and knowledge beyond
surface meanings, give us some firm basis for accepting the view that
the lawyer well knew the full significance of Job's lament and his
own searing pun on "counselors" (at law). His "shiver" told him more
than the fact of Bartleby's death; it told him that his vaunted
safety was, in the end, the most destructive and vulnerable illusion
of all. And not unlike Ishmael or the messenger in Job, he has
escaped to tell us. Hence, his epilogue, completing the "biography."
In order to make some meaning out of Bartleby's life for himself, he
is forced to truly interpret that life and the sparse materials at
hand.

The rumor of the Dead Letter Office looms in his mind as the final
clue to the mysterious riddle of which he has been a part. "Dead
letters! does it not sound like dead men?" is his interpretation of
the matter, as if he were dealing, like the critic, with a living
text full of hidden or symbolic meanings. His interpretation,
therefore, must fundamentally indicate the nature of whatever
spiritual or intellectual change he has undergone, which can then be
used as the reader's critical tool. What emerges in the lawyer's
imaginative account of the dead letters is a series of images whose
symbolic import is that the Gospel message--the "good tidings"--has
never reached those whom it could have saved: a marriage with all its
sacramental connotations of love and new life; an economic victim of
society for whom there can be no salvation; pardon or forgiveness for
the sin of suicide or despair (they are theologically the same); and,
finally, those "who died stifled by unrelieved calamities," i.e.,
those who died without a voice of protest or hope. The horror of the
dead letters is not that they have caused death--that is the fated
human condition--but that they have robbed humanity of its spiritual
means in life and at the moment of death to transcend that condition.
The lawyer's last lament, "Ah, Bartleby! Ah! humanity!" is therefore
a genuine cri de coeur and not a maudlin Victorian cliche. For in
filling out his final portrait and interpretation in the epilogue, he
has, however unconsciously, completed his biography in terms of three
narrative and symbolic structures of death. The first of the unholy
trinity is the city of dead walls and its inner chambers; the second
is the Tombs; and the third is the Dead Letter Office. He is
spiritually unaware of the first, shaken by the second, and becomes
an interpreter of the last. From that narrative and psychological
angle of vision, Melville allows the lawyer to reveal himself as a
spiritual failure throughout his conflict with Bartleby; looking
backwards his behavior had to seem self-justifying and confused since
he could not know he was dealing with dead faith. This is what
provides for the "comedy of faith" as William Bysshe Stein has called
it,19 but which changes into "tragedy" when his safety is darkly
touched and he learns what it means to be, with Bartleby, a son of
Adam.

But Melville was compelled to pursue his existential exploration of
the problem of resurrection or immortality. Remarkably enough, even
for a writer so committed to "ontological heroics,"20 Melville
published a full-dress but comically affirmative parable on the theme
of resurrection, "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! Or The Crowing Of The Noble Cock
Beneventano," in the same month the second half of "Bartleby"
appeared (Dec. 1853). Though each story stands on its own as an
independent work of art, they nevertheless can be viewed as a kind of
diptych on the theme. As Sidney P. Moss remarks,21 "Where Bartleby is
defeated by life . . . the narrator of 'Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!' comes to
defy and even deny death while exulting in life." What I would like
to emphasize is that a comparison of the stories also reveals the
dominance of Pauline imagery and theology in this period, though of
course it extended throughout much of Melville's major work. For the
great Chanticleer or cock the poverty-stricken Merrymusk and his
family owns, a cock that sounds the cry "Never say die!" (78),
enables yet another version of a despairing Solomon to triumph over

. . . my debts and other troubles, and over the unlucky risings of
the poor oppressed peoples abroad . . . and over even the loss of my
dear friend, with a calm, good-natured rapture of defiance, which
astounded myself. I felt as though I could meet Death, and invite him
to dinner, and toast the Catacombs with him, in pure overflow of self-
reliance and a sense of universal security. (82)

It is--a key phrase--a "magic cock" (92) whose sound is "equal to
hearing the great bell on St. Paul's rung at a coronation!" (79). At
the same time it is also a frightening cock "like some overpowering
angel in the Apocalypse" (93). These few passages do not, of course,
exhaust the full complexity of this fascinating story, for the theme
of resurrection is bound up organically with Melville's parody of
Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence" and the obvious sexual
meanings implicit in the central image. Sexual potency, i.e., a sense
of phallic resurrection and feelings of immortality, clearly defines
the narrator's unsuccessful quest to buy the cock from poor
Merrymusk. The final scene enacts a brilliantly realized domestic
apocalypse as the cock crows over each dying member of the Merrymusk
family, "as erewhile the trophied flags from the dome of St. Paul's.
The cock terrified me with exceeding wonder" (95). At death, the
paupered family is "transfigured" as the cock gives its last "Three-
times-three hip! hip!" and dies itself. The gravestone of the family
reads:
O death, where is thy sting?
O grave, where is thy victory?
(I Corinthians 15:55)

And so down to the last terrible ambiguity surrounding Billy Budd's
taking the "full rose of the dawn,"22 Melville searched for the
rising coffins or Gabriel-like trumpet peals that had enabled his
Ishmaels and Merrymusks to cross the frontiers of eternity, in
different ways, but which Bartleby missed.

1. This is the famous image Melville used in his letter to Hawthorne
of 16 April 1851: "For all men who say, yes lie; and all men who say
no,--why they are in the happy condition of judicious, unencumbered
travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with
nothing but a carpet-bag,--that is to say, the Ego." In The Letters
of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New
Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1960), p. 125.
2. "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street," in Great Short
Works of Herman Melville, ed. and with an introduction by Warner
Berthoff (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 40. All further
references to "Bartleby" and "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!" are to this text
unless otherwise noted.
3. So, for example, Gordon E Bigelow's "The Problem of Symbolist Form
in Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener,"' Modern Language Quarterly,
30 (September 1970), 345-58, virtually despairs of getting at
any "meaning" of the story because of the countless interpretations
given it, arguing that it acts less to produce themes and ideas than
to be merely "affective." He also gives a useful list of the various
critical modes of interpretation applied to the story, e.g., symbolic
suggestiveness including "juxtaposition" and "resonance";
metamorphosis of form, ambiguity,''field" context, etc. My own study
clearly employs some of these principles; indeed, Melville's work
demands a variety of technique only because he suggests so much.
There is no real reason to give up the attempt because we can never
have a definitive interpretation. Also, R. Bruce Bickley, Jr. remarks
that "Melville's rhetorical strategy dictates that no interpretation
of Bartleby offered by the lawyer could ever be complete, for the
scrivener is a phenomenon totally alien to the narrator's experience
and sensibilities." This is certainly true, but I disagree with
Bickley and other critics who, in the main, see Bartleby's death
as "self willed'' because he can't find love, help, etc. My position
is that Bartleby is seeking for that authentic faith in immortality
which can only give his life meaning, a need that goes beyond that of
human understanding. But see Bickley's The Method of Melville's Short
Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975), p. 36.
4. Thus, signaled by his early juvenile gothic sketch "The Death
Craft" (1839), Melville's "life and art . . . was haunted by
thoughts, fearful thoughts, of premature aging and of death,"
according to Edwin Havilland Miller, in his Melville (New York:
George Braziller, 1975), p. 109. Also see Edwin S.
Schneidman,''Orientations toward Death," in The Study of Lives, ed.
R. W. White (New York: Atherton Press, 1963), pp. 221-27, who,
however, primarily deals with Moby-Dick's obsessive exploration of
the subject. But many critics, with varying emphases, have commented
on the pervasiveness, if not predominance, of the problem in
Melville's work. As to the related problem of immortality and
resurrection, William Braswell, Melville's Religious Thought (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press. 1943), p. 28, remarks: "As it was, this
was one of the subjects that occupied him most."
5. Redburn: His first Voyage, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston &
Chicago: Northwestern University Press & Newberry Library, 1969), pp.
291-92. Further on Melville writes that "we are blind to the real
sights of this world; deaf to its voice; and dead to its death. And
not till we know, that one grief outweighs ten thousand joys, will we
become what Christianity is striving to make us" (p. 293). Mardi,
too, is filled with similar dicta. The great ideal is to conquer
the "last enemy of all" and "To expire, mild-eyed, in one's bed,
transcends the death of Epaminondas." But "death damps" drive the
frenzied Taji on his seemingly fruitless quest, "eternity in his eye."
6. Redburn, p. 292.
7. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart,
reprint of 1941 edition (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), pp. 432-
33. It is in this entry (November 20,1856) that Hawthorne records
Melville's statement to him that he had made up his mind to
be "annihilated." At the time Melville was traveling to Palestine on
his ''Quest for Confidence" as Leon Howard terms it in his Herman
Melville: A Biography (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1951), chapter 10.
8. In Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1967), p. 355. Also see Nathalia Wright, Melville's Use
of the Bible (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1941). Melville
accepts the traditional view that Solomon wrote both Ecclesiasties
and Proverbs.
9. My interpretation of Clarel considers the problem of death and
resurrection in the poem, concluding that the famous epilogue
beginning "Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea" is a forced
affirmation of immortality belied by the poem's
overwhelming "existential" despair. But this is a much debated
critical issue. See my "Herman Melville's Clarel: An Existential
Gospel," PMLA, 86 (May 1971), 375-87.
10. Moby-Dick, p. 314.
11. Since Leo Marx's seminal analysis "Melville's Parable of the
Walls," Sewanee Review, 6l (Autumn 1953), 602-27 and the Melville
Annual 1965: A Symposium: Bartleby the Scrivener, ed. Howard P.
Vincent (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press,1966), Melville's
story has received wide-ranging critical attention. Of the many
excellent studies on "Bartleby" l have found the following most
helpful: John Seelye's "The Contemporary 'Bartleby,'" American
Transcendental Quarterly, 7, Part I (Summer 1970), 12-18, which
analyzes the influences on the tale; Daniel Stempel and Bruce M.
Stillians' ''Bartleby the Scrivener: A Parable of Pessimism,"
Nineteenth Century Fiction, 27 (December 1972), 268-82, a fine
analysis of the influence of Schopenhauer on Melville's treatment of
Bartleby's denial of the will to live; Nicholas Ayo's "Bartleby's
Lawyer on Trial," Arizona Quarterly, 28 (Spring 1972), 27-38, which
demonstrates the lawyer's failure to deal with Bartleby's radical
freedom and his betrayal of Bartleby in a Peter-like way; Norman
Springer's "Bartleby and the Terror of Limitation," PMLA, 80
(September 1965), 410-18, who analyzes the class and caste structures
within the story that link to society's walls of noncommunication and
death; Kingsley Widmer's The Ways of Nihilism: Herman Melville's
Short Novels (Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie Press, 1970), who sees
Bartleby as a character of "nihilistic awareness" (p. 125) resisting
the "technological bureaucracies we must refuse to acquiesce . . . ";
H. Bruce Franklin's The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), pp.126 ff., which gives
the most suggestive and pointed of the many treatments of Bartleby as
a Christ figure; and, finally, Allan Moore Emery's "The Alternatives
of Melville's 'Bartleby,"' Nineteenth Centary Fiction, 31 (September
1976), 170-87, which discusses the various studies of ''Bartleby" as
an anatomy of freedom and fate and gives a detailed analysis of the
influence of Edwards' and Priestley's ideas of free will on
Bartleby's behavior. In the end, Bartleby's "free-will'' simply acts
in a void leading only to "oblivion," while the lawyer's attitudes
condemn him to "obliviousness."
12. While Melville was not acquainted with the works of Kierkegaard,
there are many striking similarities in their theological and
psychological analyses of the "sickness unto death" and the crises of
faith in contemporary Christianity as a whole. For example, consider
this short dialogue in Pierre, Or, the Ambiguities, ed. Harrison
Hayford et al. (Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern University Press &
Newberry Library, 1971), p. 184:
"Is my mother up yet?" said he to Dates. . . .
"Not yet, sir;--heavens, sir! are you sick?"
"To death! Let me pass."
Pierre is really a kind of demonic Bartleby who has "ringed himself
in with the grief of Eternity" and who oscillates from
being "passably well one day, but the next, he may sup at black broth
with Pluto." Above all, Pierre is obsessed--as is the entire novel--
with silences (p. 204). The causes for such despair are of course
manifold in Pierre. Theologically, however, despair is precipitated
in "Bartleby" by the failure of religious faith in immortality in the
face of the absoluteness of death. And certainly this is a problem
that lies at the very heart of Christianity itself, for without
belief in Christ's resurrection, Christianity loses its central
consolatory nature.
13. This will be borne out later by the lawyer's reference to Job. In
any case, this reaction simply prefigures a series of "death" moments
that reaches its full climax at the Tombs, where, I believe, the
narrator's defenses are broken through.
14. Vanderlyn's "Marius amidst the Ruins of Carthage" was one of the
most famous paintings of the period. After his great recognition,
Vanderlyn tried exhibiting his works in New York but failed. Perhaps
Melville knew this. Vanderlyn himself described his Marius as a man
in whom "bitterness of disappointed ambitions" were "mixed with the
meditation of revenge." See Kenneth C. Lindsay, The Works of John
Vanderlyn (Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton,
1970), p. 71.
15. ''Silence is the only Voice of our God" is Melville-
Pierre's "truth." Perhaps Melville was thinking of Revelation 8:1
which reads: ''And when he opened the seventh seal, there was silence
in heaven for about the space of half an hour." Needless to say, the
ensuing triumph of Christ does not take place in Pierre, "Bartleby"
or Clarel. And it is a very ambiguous event in Billy Budd.
I6. See Bickley, The Method of Melville's Short Fiction, p. 39. But I
think that Bickley fails to see the full theological dimensions of
this witty pun.
17. H. Bruce Franklin has demonstrated fully Melville's knowledge and
use of Egyptian mythology and culture. See his In the Wake of the
Gods: Melville's Mythology, passim. It is very possible that the
grass breaking through the stones may symbolize the leaves growing
out of Osiris, the god of the dead and of resurrection. If so,
Melville would be characteristically holding in tension both "pagan''
and Christian symbols of afterlife though it seems to me that both
are denied here.
18. See Janis P. Stout, "Melville's Use of the Book of Job,"
Nineteenth Century Fiction, 25 (June 1970), 69-83.
19. "Melville's Comedy of Faith," ELH, 27 (December 1960), 318-19.
Stein also sees the dead letters as reflecting the Epistles of the
Apostles whose religious virtues have gone "astray." I agree with him
that the story generates the "despicable comedy of Christendom," but
I place the central cause of the breakdown primarily in the problem
of belief in immortality and/or Christ's resurrection.
20. Melville's phrase in his letter to Hawthorne of 29 June 1851. In
The Letters of Herman Melville, p. 133.
21. In his "'Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!' and Some Legends in Melville
Schcolarship," American Literature, 40 (May 1968), 210. It is
possible, however, to see some characteristic ambiguity in the ending
of this story, some "dissonances" as R. H. Fogle puts it in his
Melville's Shorter Tales (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1960), p. 27. In my own reading of the story, there seems to be a
note of joy turning into pain as the narrator crows his cock-a-doodle-
doo-oo-oo! And while he is thrilled by the sign of resurrection, he
is also "appalled" by looking on death. And William Braswell reminds
us that Melville was sometimes "amused at the idea of the
resurrection of the body," an attitude particularly reflected in some
passages in Mardi. See Melville's Religious Thought, p. 28. Finally,
we remember Father Mapple's humbling peroration: "Yet this is
nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should
live out the lifetime of his God?" Moby-Dick, p. 51. But such ideas
do not seriously affect Melville's constant struggle to believe that,
through Christ's sacrifice and triumph over death, man could overcome
it, too.
22. As Nathalia Wright points out in Melville's Use of the Bible, pp.
134-35, the passage on Billy's "crucifixion" "contains the suggestion
of the Ascension and of the doctrine of Atonement. Interestingly,
Melville had originally used the Hebrew word "shekinah" instead
of "rose" which he subsequently inserted. Shekinah means the Divine
Presence--a manifestation of God's holiness--but does not signify
personal ascension or immortality in the way that the traditional
Christian symbol of the rose does.

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