This Version of Bartleby: Making Melville’s short story present

Abstract

This Version of Bartleby is a film adaptation of Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’. How to adapt cinematically a character so closely related to writing? Bartleby works copying texts non-stop in order to face nothingness. He is, in the words of Spanish philosopher José Luis Pardo, a graphic sign, and Bartleby’s favourite expression, ‘I would prefer not to’ is close to what Deleuze called ‘agrammaticality’. It might be that the best film adaptation for Bartleby is one that deals with these issues while also questioning the nature of images. This Version of Bartleby has no images or sounds. It consists of an animated text that becomes an image in its own movement. The text, in conditional tense, describes how a hypothetical Bartleby’s movie would look and sound: ‘Here, this or that would be seen’; ‘Here this or that would be heard’. The result is a non-movie. Like Melville’s Bartleby character, the film’s power emerges from its own nothingness. In the film, the old battle between image and the word takes shape. However, we might get glimpses of a connection between both media through the spectator. Both viewer and reader, the spectator creates their own meaning. They could be Bartleby himself, looking at something beyond the blinds, while nobody around him really knows what it is that he sees. This way of seeing, is it not essentially cinematographic?