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Bartleby's Closed Desk: Reading Melville against Affect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2017

YOSHIAKI FURUI
YOSHIAKI FURUI*
Affiliation:
Department of English, Aoyama Gakuin University. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

To reconsider the affective turn in American literary studies, this essay reads Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), with reference to “Benito Cereno” (1855) and The Confidence-Man (1857), as an anti-affect story. By shedding light on silent characters in these works – Bartleby, Babo, and Black Guinea – it argues that Melville endeavors to adumbrate, not articulate, their private interiorities through language. Calling the inner recesses of his silent characters “secret emotions,” Melville probes into the boundaries between the effable and the ineffable by testing the limits of literary language. If “affect” refers to the kind of emotion that eludes signification through language, reading Melville in this manner encourages a reappraisal of the relationship between affect as a non-linguistic emotion and literature as a linguistic construct.

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Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , May 2019 , pp. 353 - 371
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2017 

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References

1 Melville, Herman, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” in Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces: 1839–1860, ed. Hayford, Harrison et al. . (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987), 13–45Google Scholar, 28.

2 Ngai, Sianne, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Hurh, Paul, American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frank, Adam, Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015)Google Scholar. For other notable monographs on affect and American literature see Thrailkill, Jane F., Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Houser, Heather, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Ana, Jeffery Santa, Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

3 Throughout this essay, I alternate between “emotion” and “feeling,” while explicitly distinguishing them from “affect.” Sara Ahmed argues, “For Massumi, if affects are pre-personal and non-intentional, emotions are personal and intentional; if affects are unmediated and escape signification; emotions are mediated and contained by signification.” Ahmed, Sara, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2015), 207Google Scholar. For further discussions on the distinctions between these terms see Cvetkovich, Ann, “Affect,” in Burgett, Bruce and Hendler, Glen, eds., Keywords for American Cultural Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 13–16Google Scholar; Massumi, Brian, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 28–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Altieri, Charles, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 2Google Scholar; Ngai, 25–26.

4 Pellegrini, Ann and Puar, Jasbir, “Affect,” Social Text, 100, 27 (2009), 35–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 37. Clare Hemmings argues that the affect theory's move away from language originates in critics’ antipathy to post-structualism: “What all critiques share is a lamenting of the turn to language represented by poststructualism … Sedgwick and Massumi's interest in affect must therefore be seen within the context of broader challenge to poststructuralist approaches to language, power and subjectivity.” Hemmings, Clare, “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn,” Cultural Studies, 19, 5 (2005), 548–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 554–55.

5 Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/C Journal, 8, 6 (2005), at http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php.

6 For a film study utilizing affect theory see Brinkema, Eugenie, The Forms of Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Ngai discusses in detail Melville's works. Her study takes up mainly The Confidence-Man, though with frequent nods to “Bartleby.”

8 For a critical appraisal of affect studies in the humanities see Leys, Ruth, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry, 37 (Spring 2011), 434–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Ngai, 6; italics original.

10 While much indebted to Ngai's work, my argument ultimately departs from hers by situating taxonomic language at odds with Melville's poetics. Ngai divides Ugly Feelings into seven chapters, each of which has a discrete feeling as its title: “Tone,” “Animatedness,” “Envy,” “Irritation,” “Anxiety,” “Stuplimity,” and “Paranoia.” In neatly categorizing ugly feelings, Ngai's argument can be seen as taxonomic in its overall engagement with a various set of feelings.

11 For noteworthy Marxist readings of the story see Barnett, Louise K., “Bartleby as Alienated Worker,” Studies in Short Fiction, 11, 4 (1974), 379–85Google Scholar; Gilmore, Michael T., American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 132–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Gillian, “The Empire of Agoraphobia,” Representations, 20, 4 (1987), 134–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kuebrich, David, “Melville's Doctrine of Assumptions: The Hidden Ideology of Capitalist Production in ‘Bartleby,’” New England Quarterly, 69, 3 (1996), 381–405; Foely, Barbara, “From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville's ‘Bartleby,’” American Literature, 72, 1 (2000), 87–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reed, Naomi C., “The Specter of Wall Street: ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ and the Language of Commodities,” American Literature, 76, 2 (2004), 247–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goldfarb, Nancy D., “Charity as Purchase: Buying Self-Approval in Melville's ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 69, 2 (2014), 233–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Reed, 248–49, offers a concise, valuable history of Marxist criticism of “Bartleby.”

12 Melville, “Bartleby,” 16.

13 Ibid., 17.

14 Ibid., 17.

15 Ibid., 16, 20, 21, 27, 28, 35, 35, 36, 36, 38, 40, 42, 42.

16 Ibid., 14.

17 Ibid., 14.

18 See Couch, Daniel Diez, “‘A Syntax of Silence’: The Punctuated Spaces in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street’,” Studies in American Fiction, 42, 2 (2015), 167–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the punctuations and dashes in the narrator's mode of writing.

19 Melville, “Bartleby,” 21; italics added.

20 Ibid., 26–27; italics added.

21 Ibid., 20.

22 The narrator's inability to express his feelings toward the scrivener denies him a sense of catharsis. Due to Bartleby's “passive resistance,” the narrator cannot feel anger toward the scrivener strong enough to express in words, suffering only a minor sense of uneasiness. Looking for ways of emotional catharsis, he feels “burned to be rebelled against” more by Bartleby. Melville, “Bartleby,” 23, 14.

23 “Affect” as a critical term is so complicated that it is virtually impossible to pin down a single definition. As Jonathan Flatley notes, “while there is a great deal of excellent recent work on affect in several disciplines … this does not mean that a general consensus, or even a common conversation, has emerged.” Flatley, Jonathan, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Wetherell, Margaret, Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding (London: Sage, 2013), 19Google Scholar, 59.

25 Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, 3, defines “affect” as what “designates body-based feelings that arise in response to elicitors as varied as interpersonal and institutional relations.”

26 Hemmings, “Invoking Affect,” 550.

27 Arsić, Branka, Passive Constitutions, or, 7 1/2 Times Bartleby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 141Google Scholar.

28 Stiker, Henri-Jacques, A History of Disability, trans. Sayers, William (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 153CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Castiglia, Christopher, Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States (Durham. NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael notes the impossibility of classifying the whale's interior: “It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I would now fain put before you. Yet it is no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed … But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished.” Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick, ed. Hayford, Harrison et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1988), 134Google Scholar, 145.

30 Reed, “The Specter of Wall Street,” 249.

31 Melville, “Bartleby,” 36.

32 Ibid., 23–24.

33 Kuebrich, “Melville's Doctrine of Assumptions,” 396.

34 Melville, “Bartleby,” 14.

35 Goldfarb, “Charity as Purchase,” 240.

36 Ibid., 258.

37 For the conception of philanthropy in Melville's day see Ryan, Susan M., “Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence,” American Literary History, 12, 4 (2000), 685–712CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Melville, “Bartleby,” 27.

39 Ibid., 29.

40 Koch, Philip, Solitude: A Philosophical Encounter (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 45Google Scholar.

41 Ibid., 31.

42 Graham, Loren, “The Power of Names: In Culture and Mathematics,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 157, 2 (2013), 229–34Google Scholar, 229.

43 Gasché, Rodolphe, “The ‘Violence’ of Deconstruction,” Research in Phenomenology, 45 (2015), 169–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 174. Gasché’s discussion of the violent nature of names revolves around Jacques Derrida's argument about names in Of Grammatology. In the book, Derrida elaborates on the violent nature of naming: “To name, to give names that it will on occasion be forbidden to pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute.” Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 112Google Scholar.

44 Melville, “Bartleby,” 28.

45 Shamir, Milette, Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 10–11Google Scholar.

46 “Bartleby” itself constitutes the narrator's effort to give some distinct, linguistic form to the narrator's feelings toward Bartleby's inscrutable existence. As Margaret Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 52, observes, narrating a story is an act of anti-affect because it can be considered to belong to the realm of emotions: “affect as embodied intensity is more instinctive and immediate than any language-based act such as telling a story or having conversation. Discourse is identified with the conscious, the planned and the deliberate while affect is understood as the automatic, the involuntary, and the non-representational. Discourse and affect are seen as having an almost antagonistic relationship.” Elizabeth Wissinger also argues, “The act of actualization is to assign meaning to an image, to delimit it, to bring it to the conscious plane of interpretation, as, for example, when affects are narrated as emotions, among other things.” Wissinger, Elizabeth, “Always on Display: Affective Production in the Modeling Industry,” in Clough, Patricia Ticineto, ed., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 231–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 243–44.

47 For an important discussion of silence in Melville's works see Goldberg, Shari, Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 87–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lee, Maurice S., “Melville's Subversive Political Philosophy: ‘Benito Cereno’ and the Fate of Speech,” American Literature, 72, 3 (2000), 495–519CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno” in Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 46–117, 116; italics added.

49 This paragraph on “Benito Cereno” is largely quoted from my previously published essay. See Furui, Yoshiaki, “Transcending Distances: A Poetics of Acknowledgement in Melville's ‘Benito Cereno,’” Canadian Review of American Studies, 44, 3 (2014), 450–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 465–66.

50 Melville, Herman, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Hayford, Harrison et al. . (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1984), 11–12Google Scholar; italics added. This paragraph on The Confidence-Man is largely quoted from my previously published essay. See Furui, Yoshiaki, “Secret Emotions: Disability in Public and Melville's The Confidence-Man,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, 15, 2 (2013), 54–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 65–66.

51 Melville, The Confidence-Man, 12.

52 Ibid., 251.

53 Butler, Judith, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Frank, Transferential Poetics, 54–55; italics added.

55 This refusal-of-depth model is typical of affect-oriented scholars. For instance, Wendy Ann Lee argues, “Thus, Bartleby cannot be made to move since there would be nothing to move … The evacuation of volition implied by Bartleby's motionlessness collapses the distinction between voluntary and involuntary motion … The lawyer's futile search for Bartleby's vital signs indicates a disrupted relation between surface and depth.” Lee, Wendy Ann, “The Scandal of Insensibility; or, the Bartleby Problem,” PMLA, 130, 5 (2015), 1405–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1412; italics added.

56 Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy, 11.

57 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 10.

58 Ibid., 32.

59 Gilmore, American Romanticism, 142.

60 Melville, “Bartleby,” 26, 31.

61 Lee, “The Scandal of Insensibility,” 1408–9.

62 On this ownership of emotions, Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 24, observes that an emotion “is a relation to others, a response to a situation and to the world. An emotion is above all a relational pattern and as such, I would say, is automatically distributed and located across the psychosocial field. Affect is never wholly owned, always intersecting and interacting.”

63 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 8–9.

64 Millner, Michael, Fever Reading: Affect and Reading Badly in the Early American Public Sphere (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012), 13Google Scholar.