Melville's Tale Research Articles

Bartleby's remains

AbstractTaking issue with those readings of Melville's tale that are caught between the need to account for Bartleby and the need to account for the impossibility of the account, this article draws attention to the diverse ways in which ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ harbours a theory of transmission which troubles the function and promise of theory as such. It revisits some of the most influential interpretations of the text before turning to Foucault's ‘Thought of the outside’ and Derrida's late essay, ‘A certain impossible possibility of saying the event’. The nub of the argument is that in the current critical climate, which often seems bent on effecting the most economic relation between textual phenomena and normative orders of historical, cultural or social significance, the most pressing injunction is less to render Bartleby, or his famous ‘formula’, readable than to show how Melville's text preserves the radical originality of an event, giving us to think that which precedes every measure of equivalence and exceeds the equilibrium of exchange: what remains of language when it has been purged of sense.

I would prefer not to: sobre o conceito de inoperosidade em Giorgio Agamben e a arte contemporânea

O presente artigo aborda a formulação de inoperosidade, conceito retirado do corpus filosófico do filósofo italiano Giorgio Agamben, como uma categoria privilegiada para pensar o campo contemporâneo da arte. Ao investigar as transformações que se deram nas relações produtivas na ultrapassagem da modernidade envolvendo o trinômio artista-obra-espectador, o texto pensa a operação inoperosa como uma saída para resistir aos imperativos da finalidade, do sentido e da produtividade que nos capturam no mundo capitalista. Segundo Agamben, o personagem de Bartleby, o escrivão que prefere não escrever no conto de Herman Melville, se mostra como uma figura paradigmática desse novo tipo de atividade. Ao final, propusemos uma referência à obra Escolha, da artista brasileira Laura Lima, como uma proposição artística que reflete sobre a desativação do dispositivo operativo em jogo na inoperosidade agambeniana.

The Scandal of Insensibility; or, The Bartleby Problem

Reviving Thomas Hobbes's definition of the passions as interior motions that originate action, this essay considers the case of insensibility: an absence of feeling that results in immobility. Embodying this lack of feeling is the figure of the insensible, whose signature nonresponsiveness provokes the most vehement emotions in others. Through readings of Hobbes's theories of resistance and contempt, Adam Smith's condemnation of impassivity, and Herman Melville's tale of an “unmoving” scrivener, I examine how insensibility challenges the model of emotions as causes, as accounts of how a moved body moves. Insensibility confuses distinctions between bad feeling and no feeling, agents and patients, living and dead. Finally, I argue for narrative's surprising dependence on the nonnarrative presence of the insensible, a subject that reaches back through the history of philosophy to Aristotle's unmoved mover, the first cause of the universe that makes all motion possible by not being subject to motion itself.

Queer Hospitality in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno"

Queer Hospitality in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" Daniel Hannah (bio) Questions about hospitality (or hostipitality) and about queerness emerge as often implied though rarely articulated bedfellows in both Jacques Derrida's late work and Herman Melville's fiction.1 This essay addresses this surprising alignment of these two writers, arguing that Derrida, specifically in Of Hospitality, and Melville, in "Benito Cereno," elliptically trope queer desire as both enabling and threatening the possibility of hospitality. While Derrida's reading of perverse exchanges between hosts and guests provides, I will suggest, a valuable model for examining the erotically fraught relationships between Melville's captains and slaves, "Benito Cereno" complicates the terms by which readers might frame such exchanges. Reading, Melville's tale implies, is a queerly hospitable act, a taking up and extending of hospitality that calls into being a desire for, and to be, the other. Negotiating uneasy slides between narratorial and authorial voices that position the text within and outside networks of desire, readers of Derrida's meditations and Melville's short fiction are called on to recognize their dysfunctional roles—the guest as host, the host as guest. Queer desire might be said to trace Jacques Derrida's articulation of a politics of hospitality, driving its imaginings of an exchange between self and other even as that exchange erases its erotic potential. This queer trace emerges, first, in Derrida's delineation of the perverse interdependence of conditional and unconditional hospitality in a series of five seminars delivered in Paris in 1996. For Derrida, the term "hospitality" takes the form of [End Page 181] a non-dialectizable antinomy between, on the one hand, The law of unlimited hospitality (to give the new arrival all of one's home and oneself, to give him or her one's own, our own, without asking a name or compensation, or the fulfillment of even the smallest condition), and on the other hand, the laws (in the plural), those rights and duties that are always conditioned and conditional . . . by all of law and all philosophy of law . . . across the family, civil society, and the State.2 These "antagonistic terms," the "two regimes of law," as Derrida goes on to argue are, nevertheless, interdependent and inseparable. While the law of hospitality is "outside the law," it "requires" (79) the laws in order to mark out the possibilities of its coming into effect and, at the same time, the laws depend upon a concept of unconditional hospitality, of the law, in order to define themselves as hospitable. Derrida frames this antinomial relation between the law and the laws, on more than one occasion, through a rhetoric of perversion: "the law . . . needs the laws, which, however, deny it, or at any rate threaten it, sometimes corrupt or pervert it. And must always be able to do this. For this pervertibility is essential, irreducible, necessary too" (79). Derrida's returns to the pervertible and perverting trajectories of the laws of hospitality underscore the instabilities of this "conjugal model, paternal and phallogocentric" (149), this imagining of hospitable home-space as familial, self-contained, private, heterosexual. Indeed, Derrida queerly partners the home and the state as participants in the breakdown of their own principles of inviolability. The "right" to hospitality, "whether private or familial, can only be exercised and guaranteed by the mediation of a public right or State right" so that the sanctity, the hospitality of the "private domain" can only be gained through the State "controlling it and trying to penetrate it to be sure of it" (55). Yet for all Derrida's vested interest in exposing the perverse manifestations of a phallogocentric model of the home and of the host (hôte), his staging of hospitality remains, as a number of feminist critics have pointed out, strangely limited by the very terms it would seek to expose. Indeed, drawing as it does so closely on Emmanuel Levinas's account of ethics as a radical opening of the self to the Other in all their otherness, Derrida's relocation of this scene to the threshold of a masculinized home-space strangely forgets the feminine casting of the host in Levinas's model. Penelope Deutscher notes how...

Conservative Architecture: Hawthorne in Melville's "I and My Chimney"

In Pierre (1852) advises his semi-autobiographical writer/protagonist to thoroughly study architecture. From 18501863 lived with one dominating architectural presence-the chimney at Arrowhead. Little wonder, then, that realities of in and My Chimney (1856) provoke speculations concerning identity, representation, and meaning in Melville's story.' Heavy allusions to three of Hawthorne's sketches of domestic architecture and life--The Old Manse, Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure, and Fire Worship-suggest that meant to endorse Hawthorne's special brand of conservatism and to maintain a role as Hawthorne's cultural ally.2 In opposition to intrusive, exploitative, reformist, feminist, and Transcendentalist tendencies that both writers associate with modern times, writers privilege relics of material culture that represent and preserve a patrician and patriarchal model of individual, familial, and cultural identity. As we shall see, Melville's tale both enshrines Hawthorne as literary mentor and advocates a rhetoric of evasion and resistance against forces of cultural innovation that threaten self and symbolic extensions of self. In 1970 Edward Rosenberry was first to highlight a connection between Melville's and My Chimney and Hawthorne's work. In Melville and His Mosses, an article ofjust four pages, Rosenberry parallels Melville's conclusory words (for it is resolved between me and my chimney, that I and my chimney will never surrender) with Hawthorne's steadfast defense of the traditional rallying point of hearths near end of Fire Worship and The Old Manse (377).' While all studies pursuing Hawthorne/Melville relationship in and My Chimney are indebted to Rosenberry, only two of four pages of article are devoted to Melville's tale; article barely suggests extent and nature of Melville's preoccupation with Hawthorne, a preoccupation at very heart of Melville's role as creative writer and cultural critic during mid-1850s. More specifically, pursuing additional connections is worthwhile for two reasons. First, Melville's story clarifies what Richard Brodhead identifies-in Hawthorne's language-as a crucial

The Disruption of Forms in Billy Budd

textual authority. I would like to follow that lead, but the textual authority to which I refer in this article is not theirs; rather it is the fiction of textuality within the text. The history of the text both doubles and covers the fiction that I would like to consider, and I want, at the outset, to put it aside. Like the tale itself, this network of fictive textuality is an inside narrative, and it is largely a narrative about history. Billy Budd explicates and involves both the signifier and the referent of history: both the various reliabilities of sources, historiographical perception, the historical intellect and imagination, the scope and form of historical structure, and language itself, as well as the presence of history, the living event. In this last work, history is always already written and, therefore, corrupted in the making, and all arguments that invoke what was and what might have been are helplessly refracted in the web of their originating culture. With very few exceptions, critics of Melville's tale have taken its expressibility for granted. Once the outside question of the text is mooted, they have treated Billy Budd as if it possessed a narrative selfevidence upon which arguments as to sincerity or irony or even

The Alternatives of Melville's "Bartleby"

Research Article| September 01 1976 The Alternatives of Melville's "Bartleby" Allan Moore Emery Allan Moore Emery Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1976) 31 (2): 170–187. https://doi.org/10.2307/2933500 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Allan Moore Emery; The Alternatives of Melville's "Bartleby". Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1 September 1976; 31 (2): 170–187. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2933500 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1976 Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Melville's Hawthornian Bell-Tower: A Fairy-Tale Source

IN CONSTRUCTING Bell-Tower and fashioning Talus, its mechanical man, Melville evidently culled material from a variety of sources: Spenser's description of Talus in The Faerie Queene; Pierre Bayle's discussion in his Historical and Critical Dictionary of the alleged alchemy of Albertus and Agrippa; and Mary Shelley's depiction of an overreaching scientist and his man-made creature in Frankenstein: or, The Modern Promietheus. Then too, Moby-Dick itself provided a source. For the complete briefly envisions in Ahab and the Carpenter seems vitalized in the creature of Bell-Tower, just as, in many ways, Bannadonna is a partial re-creation of Ahab. But what is especially interesting-and elusive -about the literary background of Bell-Tower is the vaguely sensed presence of Hawthorne that hovers over the tale, perhaps to its detriment. A number of critics have already noted the Hawthornian nature of Bell-Tower, yet only Egbert S. Oliver has tried to explore this facet by pointing toward a particular source, Ethan Brand.1 Although Oliver is correct in attempting to identify a specific source, the similarities he cites seem somewhat forced. I find, rather, that Bell-Tower was doubly influenced by Hawthorne's Minotaur. For not only did Hawthorne's story suggest the mechanical man of Melville's tale; it also might have inspired the writing of the tale itself. Minotaur, a retelling of the Theseus story, appeared in I853 in Tanglewood Tales, Hawthorne's second collection of Greek myths re-created for children. On January I, I854, a copy of the book