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Pill Pod 55 - ”I Would Prefer Not To” · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:00
  All right, Welcome everybody to the Pill Pod. This week's intro comes to
• 0:05
  you courtesy of TF Prodigy two. Thank you, TF Prodigy two. I
• 0:12
  kind of wondered what his name meant. TF Prodigy like Team Fortress is the
• 0:15
  only thing I can think of. He was very good at Team Fortress as
• 0:19
  a child Team Fortress too. That would explain the two fully leaning into his
• 0:23
  identity. Anyway, he didn't like my intro last time, which is a
• 0:27
  bit meandering, so I crowdsourced it and he just gave me an intro to
• 0:32
  read, so we're gonna read this. Welcome to the Pill Pod, your
• 0:36
  weekly philosophy and critical theory podcast. You can find our regularly scheduled bonus episodes
• 0:42
  and content on our patriot that's right. Also, TF Prodigy two, you
• 0:49
  forgot to mention we release every Friday, and we don't call them bonus episodes.
• 0:54
  We call them exclusive episodes. So other than that, thank you very
• 0:58
  much for the help. But he is right because he's if he's a longtime
• 1:00
  listener, he knows that there is a time when you would just call them
• 1:03
  bonus interviews if we did some interviews so well, the interviews I do consider
• 1:08
  bonus because they are bonuses in addition to our regularly schedule pill podse So there's
• 1:15
  different tiers. There's so there's there's exclusive, and then there's also bonus.
• 1:19
  There's exclusive pill pods and the exclusive bonus. Well we have that too.
• 1:23
  That's a bonus interview only on the patren So maybe what if it's a Patreon
• 1:27
  only interview, If it's a Patreon only bonus interview, and then that would
• 1:30
  be exclusive bonus content, right exactly? Okay, got it? Quit rock
• 1:36
  in the boat. We are joined today by our number one guest at long
• 1:48
  last Ya back, the long awaited Richard Guys. The other the other Victor
• 1:53
  as I like to think of him. I know, it's nice. It's
• 1:57
  very strange to have that, to be confronted with other victors. It's actually
• 2:00
  when when I met Pills. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this to
• 2:04
  the audience, but the first time I met Pills, he told me,
• 2:07
  like, to my shock, it's never happened. He's like, oh,
• 2:09
  I have three other friends named Victor. Victor you are still You're still in
• 2:15
  my phone as Victor. Four is in my phone as Victory. Yeah,
• 2:21
  that's the funny originally. Now it's a little more manageable. We're just there's
• 2:24
  just two, right, Like, like, do you talk to the other
• 2:27
  two victors? Well, one accused me of being illuminatis so he cut me
• 2:30
  off, and the others at the bottom of a k hole as far as
• 2:34
  I know, So it's just the two victors remaining. I remember, I
• 2:36
  remember when you told me as I hung out with with these guys more.
• 2:39
  Eventually I remember Pills telling me, oh, like you've you've moved up in
• 2:44
  the ranks. I now consider you Victor three. And it's like, oh,
• 2:46
  now this is lit Vic, which is still Victor two. Though not
• 2:53
  the name of an Eastern European DJ as it might sound, but shocker in
• 2:59
  this case, I actually is an Eastern European DJ. I've dabbled, Yeah,
• 3:04
  damn not not. No, I'm an English PhD student. Yeah,
• 3:08
  so my main research is actually on globalization in the Renaissance, but I also
• 3:13
  have some background on American literature, which is what we'll be talking about today.
• 3:16
  So PhD candidate uft down the road and uh, usually we start out
• 3:23
  with some news stories, but literally nothing happened in Canada, not in this
• 3:30
  country this week, So we're just gonna not a damn thing. Yeah thing
• 3:35
  you telling me boy? In all seriousness, though I did, I did
• 3:38
  feel like shan Tealebert that she's the CBC, like one of the political commentators.
• 3:43
  She she did say, like you know, and then I thought her
• 3:46
  take was the best in an election that no one wanted, nobody got what
• 3:49
  they wanted. Yeah, like, no no party got any of like accomplished
• 3:53
  any of the goals they had, and no one wanted the election, and
• 3:57
  it's like no one got like like every disappointment all round, no one gets
• 4:00
  anything. And there's something kind of satisfying about seeing that happen. Yeah,
• 4:04
  to our listeners who know we're Canadian but aren't from Canada and demand that we
• 4:09
  give them a thorough breakdown, I'm not going to give. This is the
• 4:13
  thorough breakdown. Everything is exactly the same. The party that I wanted to
• 4:16
  win gained one seat and the party that I dislike lost too. There you
• 4:20
  go, there's your thorough breakdown. Congratulations, and if you'd like a more
• 4:25
  thorough breakdown, I would prefer not to. Let's not overuse it. First
• 4:34
  of many, so specific or today we're talking about literature, which is why
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  Litvic is here not his only area of expertise, but it's in the name,
• 4:45
  so you know that he's an authority on it. We're talking about Herman
• 4:48
  Melville and specifically the short story of Bartleby, which I highly recommend. It
• 4:54
  was really fucking funny and it's only my audition was like, what thirty five
• 4:58
  pages? Yeah, it was a good one, I really I also really
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  enjoyed it. The scrivener I had to look up. I learned what a
• 5:03
  scrivener was, which is interesting. I get like it's one of those things
• 5:09
  that today you're like, well, we just have like typewriters and computers.
• 5:12
  But basically they were just like people who copied legal documents, right, So
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  like when someone write them and like you need to distribute copies of the legal
• 5:17
  documents, they just worked in lopses and we're just copying shit all day,
• 5:21
  right, That's what it was. A human photocopier. Yeah, you called
• 5:25
  them a copyist. If it's more broad, I guess scrifner is specific to
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  legal documents. Well, Jack famously has the shirt and he came up or
• 5:34
  this story came up in our episode on Beong chal Han, which was Pilpod
• 5:39
  twenty seven I checked, but it's also referenced by the Lu's a Gombin Heart
• 5:45
  and Negri Gick of course, so we got a few philosophical references that kind
• 5:50
  of do whatever they want to this story. They bugger it. Am I
• 5:55
  missing anybody? I think that's all Jim it was. I don't know if
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  he referenced the story directly, but he was deeply inspired apparently by Melville and
• 6:04
  his kind of absurdist slash proto existentialist approach to the world. And you can
• 6:10
  also see it in his style, especially his short stories like The Guests.
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  I really had like strong guest vibes throughout this and it's pretty fucking funny,
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  even though it was written in what eighteen fifties or sixties. Yeah, So
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  Bartleb is the not the main character. It's the story is told from the
• 6:30
  perspective of Bartleby's boss, so we have the class antagonism reading into there.
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  He never speaks unless spoken to. Pretty much. His only documented words are
• 6:41
  I prefer not to, even though the narrator does account for him saying certain
• 6:46
  other words. The narrator is his boss but is also concerned about him out
• 6:50
  of Christian charity. He doesn't eat anything. He sits in this legal office
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  and copy stuff out all day longinger nut cakes, ginger nutcakes, whatever.
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  Those are no family or friends to speak of, So he's like a humanity
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  free human. Yeah. I did want to say I did love that fucking
• 7:10
  sequence because I like this story a lot. I thought it was hilarious and
• 7:13
  what its boss just gets Uptiight. He's like, well, if you're not
• 7:15
  gonna leave my fucking office and let me do my job, then I'm just
• 7:17
  gonna fucking let you have the office and move somewhere entirely new, and that'll
• 7:21
  fucking show you you ass whole. It's genuinely a fun story, right,
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  Like, don't think like, if you think of Melville, you probably think,
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  oh, tw hundred pages on how to hunt and kill and process a
• 7:32
  whale, Like this is legitimately really funny, not quite a laugh a minute,
• 7:36
  but observitist and it's quick. I really believe. Yeah, it's funny.
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  The dry, matter of fact way that he describes these extremely absurd characters
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  creates this really comic effect that I quite enjoy. Yeah, So, before
• 7:50
  we turn to the various interpretations of the story, I thought we'd get to
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  something that none of us know well except our guests here at least I think
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  us you guys are secretly Melville scholars. But we got lit Vick here who
• 8:05
  can speak to the context and to Melville as a dude who I've always seen
• 8:09
  as kind of a psychologist author, and which is particularly important given his context
• 8:13
  in the early moments of American capitalism kind of zeitgeisting its way into the world.
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  And this is someone who's writing at kind of the time when that's appearing,
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  and as a psychologist, I don't know. I want to just kick
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  it to you, Victor. Is that a good way to portray that?
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  And is there anything else you'd say? And why? And what's the significance
• 8:37
  of Melville in literature? Yeah? For sure, So I mean we can
• 8:41
  consider him a psychologist. Now. Many of his relatives actually thought that he
• 8:45
  was a little bit crazy, Like they kept trying to get him like normal
• 8:48
  government jobs and everything, and he kept just wanting to write crazy existentialist stories
• 8:52
  about Wales and Scriveners. But yeah, so he lived in the nineteenth century.
• 8:58
  He was actually born in New York City, where the story takes place.
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  Bartleby and he had quite the resume. So before becoming a writer,
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  Melville was also he worked at a bank, He worked as a whaler.
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  He allegedly lived among cannibals for a couple of months in the Pacific. He
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  was actually known as the man who lived among the cannibals to his peers.
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  So that tells you something about his reputation at the time. And on what
• 9:24
  some island or something, Yeah, from Wall Street to the cannibals, the
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  full range of the nineteenth century experience. Yeah, And it's so it's worth
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  noting he had already published his epic Moby Dick about two years before he wrote
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  Bartleby the Scrivener, and around that time his reputation wasn't really great. He
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  wasn't critically regarded like Melville's own reputation as a writer. And Moby Dick's reputation
• 9:52
  is like the great American novel really only picked up steam in the twentieth century
• 9:56
  because in some ways his writing and his outlook was so out of sync with
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  his own time. It really anticipated elements of modernism and postmodernism much more than
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  it did sort of his contemporary literary scenes. So Moby Dick for example,
• 10:11
  is a very unconventional kind of novel. It's a mix of genres. It
• 10:15
  ostensibly starts off as like a conventional whaling voyage, but then it becomes like
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  this metaphysical epic quest between of course, Captain Ahab and the white whale.
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  So this really threw off readers and writers or reviewers at the time, but
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  it became much more impressive within a twentieth century context. So that's sometimes the
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  context to which Bartleby is also sort of looked at in terms of, you
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  know, Melville's own frustrations as a struggling writer, like this misunderstood artist,
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  and the fact that he wrote Bartleby like just two years after mobi Dick sometimes
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  plays into this sort of autobiographical reading of Melville the man and Bartleby the scrivener.
• 10:54
  But that's just sort of a brief overview of Melville and kind of how
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  he stood in relation to his own peers, at least in the literary scene.
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  And did he work on Wall Street because he always he never gives the
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  address of the place, at least in the version that I have, the
• 11:09
  address is blanked out. So I wondered if there was like some personal there
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  that's a common literary convention of like the nineteenth century, Like you see it
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  even in Russian novels. Certain like formal businesses and addresses are not mentioned.
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  But yeah, I don't think he's actually protecting his own former employers or anything.
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  So we have the nineteenth century version of any relation to actual people as
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  entirely coincidental. Don't sue us. Cool, but it is based on personal
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  experience, Yeah for sure. Yeah, yeah, he was a New Yorker.
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  Yeah. I just want to add one thing because it's kind of crucial
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  to my own reading. This is kind of Ciceronian piece. But apparently his
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  family started off very, very wealthy, one of the wealthiest families in New
• 11:52
  York. But the dad had serious debts and when he died, it turned
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  out that there was nothing to the family name, and so he kind of
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  just made his way, initially living on the charity of his various relatives before
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  they eventually kicked him out and said, you got to go make a living
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  of your own. And that's why I ended up doing all these different odd
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  jobs. And I really like that actually, because he really almost was a
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  character in the nineteenth century novel. I mean it kind of reminded me a
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  bit of David Copperfield, just learning a little bit about his own biography.
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  Right, it's like, oh, so wealthy family falls apart, goes lives
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  amongst the cannibals, writes TYPEE, becomes a success, then all this random
• 12:24
  shit happens and artistic stuff. I'm like, you couldn't. You could write
• 12:28
  this stuff, but you'd have to be pretty talented to come up with a
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  story like Melville's life and his family legacy actually lives on. So little known
• 12:35
  fact is that the minor celebrity, the electronic musician Moby, is actually one
• 12:41
  of his descendants. So his great great great great nephew or something. Channel
• 12:46
  artistic talent apparently is genetic, right, Yeah, so that's where Moby talented.
• 12:52
  Like I said, a minor celebrity of the nineteen nineties perhaps, but
• 12:54
  yeah, he got his stage name from the famous movie that guy. In
• 13:01
  those eminent songs he can get Stopper by Obi better known from the eminem Yeah
• 13:09
  Porcelain good songs from them from the movie The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio. I
• 13:11
  feel like that that that that mobile album from before is like fully featured in
• 13:15
  that movie. If any of you remember it? Good soundtrack. The only
• 13:18
  song I remember is the one where he's like, hey, he well,
• 13:22
  yeah, that's that's the one. What's the what's the name of that again?
• 13:26
  Porcelain? Oh? Okay, yeah, and that's not a bad song.
• 13:28
  Okay, Victor. Can you connect us to I'm really into this idea
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  that he was out of sync with his time for whatever reason and then became,
• 13:39
  you know, like the American novelist later on. So can you connect
• 13:43
  that to I guess the germinating state of capitalism. I mean, this happens
• 13:48
  on Wall Street, but it's before Wall Street was Wall Street, which is
• 13:52
  a more than a happy accident, of course. But how did his uh
• 13:58
  position and the context lead from him becoming a quack to the great American novelist.
• 14:05
  Yeah? So perhaps because of his somewhat you know, David Copperfield resume.
• 14:09
  As Matt noted as well, he had a somewhat pessimistic vision at times
• 14:13
  of our ability to form meaningful narratives in this increasingly kind of industrialized, secularized
• 14:18
  world of the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties in the US. And that's something
• 14:24
  that this was a recurring interest for him. He comes back to this in
• 14:26
  a lot of his writing, and even before we kind of turn to Bartleby,
• 14:31
  it's worth actually foregrounding the opening of Moby Dick because there is an interesting
• 14:35
  similarity there where Ishmael himself in the famous opening passages where you know, he
• 14:39
  starts with call me Ishmael and everything like that, specifically remarks how he feels
• 14:46
  alienated and sort of like detached from the nine to five kind of work grind
• 14:50
  that he sees his peers having to participate in in New York City, and
• 14:54
  that's actually what kind of makes him look out to the sea and out to
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  like a different kind of existence and what makes him ultimately join the faded whaling
• 15:03
  voyage. But he specifically kind of like comments at length on how he's he
• 15:07
  doesn't understand how people can live sort of like tied to counters, nail to
• 15:13
  benches, clinched to desks, basically kind of like as captives in the sort
• 15:16
  of office space environment, which is what makes him then look to the broader
• 15:20
  kind of global sort of like stage that he could sort of live on.
• 15:26
  So already we see elements of Bartleby, the scrivener's own dissatisfaction, even in
• 15:31
  Moby Dick's, even in Ishmael's own kind of like restlessness in New York City.
• 15:37
  And I would say in relation to the broader kind of cultural moment in
• 15:41
  the US, Yeah, Melville's kind of interest in this restlessness, I think
• 15:45
  highlights attention maybe between America's growth as an industrialized economy during this time and it's
• 15:52
  older kind of like frontier spirit. It's emphasis on individualism, you know,
• 15:56
  self reliance, of making your own destiny and kind of not conforming to institutions.
• 16:02
  And there's this friction that you see start to emerge between that sort of
• 16:06
  American spirit and experience and the reality of having to become you know, like
• 16:11
  basically a human photocopier for the middle class, right for so many Americans who
• 16:17
  had to do what Bartleby ends up having to do. Right. So that
• 16:21
  tension between sort of your own you know, manifest destiny, the frontier spirit
• 16:25
  as an individual, and then the reality of like having to work as a
• 16:30
  copyist as a scrivener. That's something that Melville kind of recognized and put his
• 16:34
  pulse on, and something which of course only becomes more relevant as we go
• 16:37
  into the twentieth century, and you know, labor takes on even more forms
• 16:41
  of significance. Yeah, I do want to say that I worked as a
• 16:45
  secretary to a secretary at one point for a couple of months, and my
• 16:49
  job is just responding to people's complaints, usually via emails and haws. We
• 16:52
  a lover, And there were parts of this that like personally resonated with me
• 16:56
  where I was just thinking, like, holy fuck, Like the number of
• 17:00
  times I thought like I'd prefer not to do that, but then of course
• 17:03
  I did do it, right. It's just unfathomable. Oh, man,
• 17:06
  if you've ever worked in an office, this is the most relatable essay,
• 17:11
  yeah, short story you've ever read. So I don't know if we have
• 17:15
  to do any more. I mean, this is really fascinating because he was
• 17:18
  kind of at the heartland. This is pre Civil War right also yeah,
• 17:22
  yeah, so it's kind of the center of this new burgeoning Republican power in
• 17:29
  New York City Wall Street. And I find it so fascinating that it wasn't
• 17:34
  recognized at the time. Did he die in obscurity or anything like that,
• 17:37
  or did this book sell or did Moby Dick sell By the end of his
• 17:41
  life was called catastrophic failure. Yeah, oh wow, and Melville doing increasingly
• 17:48
  depressed. He lived for another couple of decades until the eighteen nineties, but
• 17:52
  the critical reevaluation of Moby Dick did not begin until the nineteen twenties. And
• 17:56
  it was actually the English press, like in the UK who for took a
• 18:00
  renewed interest because it was the sort of the centennial of Melville's birth. But
• 18:03
  during his own life he was very much the unappreciated kind of struggling artist.
• 18:07
  Yeah, because this is this is incredible that you have this like urban professional
• 18:12
  class. This is supposed to be the land of opportunity, but then it's
• 18:17
  turning out to be you just sit and copy other people's work all day.
• 18:21
  Nothing's original and nothing's expected of you to be original. So then there's this
• 18:25
  look to the an old frontier actually like going to whale. And then there's
• 18:30
  this mythologized journey that happens in Moby Dick where it's yeah, like you said,
• 18:36
  it sets off as this escape from an entrapped cage of the urban even
• 18:44
  the middle class. At this point, I wanted to say, though,
• 18:47
  I do actually feel a little bit bad for him, because you seem to
• 18:49
  be cognizant of the fact that his reception of that book was going to go
• 18:52
  south. Like his first novel, Tepee, apparently was a huge success.
• 18:57
  And the person that I was listening to was talking about the book said,
• 19:00
  what's not to like? You know, it was based on actual experience.
• 19:03
  It was about landing on an island of cannibals. He ends up getting a
• 19:04
  wife, so you know, there's sex, violence, adventure, big gigantic
• 19:08
  hit, and this is what people just expected Melville to keep churning out,
• 19:11
  you know, these kind of ocean adventure stories like Robert Louis Stevenson. And
• 19:15
  then he wrote a letter apparently to Nathaniel Hawthorne saying, be it. You
• 19:18
  know, the public, be damned. I know it's not going to sell
• 19:21
  a bit, but I have to express myself with this book. And he
• 19:25
  seemed cognizant of the fact that it was going to be a flop, and
• 19:26
  then it was. And it's kind of disappointing when your low expectations of the
• 19:33
  public turn out to be vindicated and nobody actually wants to deal with like this,
• 19:37
  big meaty stories. They just want sex and violence and cannibalism, I
• 19:41
  guess because it's tastier, right, absolutely, yeah, And it is worth
• 19:45
  noting that Melville seems to have kind of revised his plans even for Mobi Dick,
• 19:48
  Like he started writing off the more conventional kind of Robert Lewis Stevenson,
• 19:52
  you know, maritime adventure, but then he also got caught up in kind
• 19:55
  of the some of the literary currents of the time, including Nathaniel hall Thorne
• 20:00
  as you mentioned, but also Walt Whitman kind of the American literary renaissance of
• 20:03
  the eighteen fifties, and he had a grander idea in mind. He wanted
• 20:07
  to kind of write, you know, the existential epic of the century.
• 20:10
  So he definitely kind of delivered something far more unconventional, and the audience just
• 20:15
  wasn't ready for it, Like the public was not sure what to make of
• 20:18
  this strange novel. Again, the reception was somewhat warmer in England ironically again,
• 20:23
  but in most of the US. Yeah, this novel was a failure.
• 20:26
  And then eventually he had to kind of settle for writing short stories like
• 20:32
  Bartleby. But you could tell that even there, of course, he's still
• 20:33
  kind of pushing back against what's expected of him, like he still is very
• 20:37
  much a nonconformist as a writer and sort of a public figure. Yeah,
• 20:42
  so I want to ask you about my interpretation of this, because I'm sure
• 20:48
  the others are going to give a fairly left wing interpretation of it, which
• 20:51
  I think is I mean, there's nothing wrong with interpreting it. Talks like
• 20:53
  this in a variety different ways, because I think it lends itself precisely this
• 20:56
  kind of archetypal quality right where you read into it the expertations of your era.
• 21:00
  But one of the things that I noted is that one of the only
• 21:03
  figures that he refers to twice in the text is Cicero, in particularly the
• 21:07
  bust of Cicero, which itself is telling. And Cicero was this famously aristocratic
• 21:12
  member of the optimic class in republican Rome who fought against, oddly enough,
• 21:17
  the populist princip popularities of Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony, insisting that, you
• 21:23
  know, the Senate needs to kind of push back against the degradation of the
• 21:27
  people. And eventually they lost, and of course, you know, the
• 21:32
  populace rose to power, and eventually we get the Roman Empire stuff, and
• 21:34
  Cicero ends up getting killed, right. But the way that I interpreted this
• 21:37
  was he was kind of almost a modern Cicero. He has this kind of
• 21:41
  aristocratic veneer, not quite necessarily working class, but almost above the kind of
• 21:47
  mediocrity of the middle class that's insisting that you engage in these banal tasks in
• 21:51
  order to make money and elevate yourself. He has the higher aspirations and interest
• 21:55
  than that. Would that be like a wrong interpretation, Oh for sure.
• 21:59
  Yeah. I mean you have to remember too that everything we see about Bartleby
• 22:03
  is from the narrator's point of view, right, or from the lawyer's point
• 22:04
  of view his boss. So his boss doesn't understand him. He can't sort
• 22:08
  of classify him in any of the conventional categories that would make sense to him.
• 22:11
  So of course he tries to think of him as a vagrant, as
• 22:15
  somebody who's not doing his job, you know, the lofer. But of
• 22:18
  course he can be seen as somebody who has a much more noble, kind
• 22:22
  of like response to the work that he is sort of being forced to do.
• 22:26
  Bartleb can be seen as kind of like this, so he can seem
• 22:29
  to have an almost aristocratic attachment, a Ciceronian sense of like this work being
• 22:33
  beneath him. So it's very notable that we don't sort of see Bartleby's own
• 22:37
  perspective or his own thought process as the why is he refusing? Why does
• 22:41
  he prefer not to do what the lawyer boss expects of him? Right?
• 22:45
  And that's what makes this I think, what has made it such a rich
• 22:48
  text for critical readings. Because there is no final answer. We have to
• 22:52
  sort of finish it ourselves. We have to interpret it on our own terms,
• 22:55
  in terms of like, why does Bartleby not conform to the expectationations presented
• 23:00
  of him? Okay, so since you brought up the context of the story,
• 23:04
  we might as well go over the story spoiler alert. Weren't going to
• 23:08
  spoil it. But does anyone want to take that on? Eric? You
• 23:12
  haven't, You haven't talked much. Do you want to summarize what happens for
• 23:15
  us? Yeah? I mean basically the narrator who is also the owner of
• 23:21
  this business of scrivenering. Yeah, it's it's well, it's a law firm,
• 23:29
  but it seems like they mostly specialize in certain kinds of property and certain
• 23:36
  kinds of like really boring, out of the way cases. The guy said
• 23:40
  he's the owner, is not one who to do the sort of valiant lawyering
• 23:45
  in front of a jury, and like no romantic view of lawyers for this
• 23:52
  guy. He's just like a law firm slash copyist firm. And what happens
• 23:56
  is he gets appointed to this serious office that I'm not sure of called the
• 24:03
  Chancery, which, to my understanding delt was the highest court of appeal in
• 24:07
  the United States and in many places until it got sort of, you know,
• 24:12
  absorbed into the Supreme Court. But this new appointment that he receives necessitates
• 24:19
  his hiring new scrivener to supplement his office for the extra work they'll be getting.
• 24:27
  He already has three very sort of colorful, strange characters working for him,
• 24:34
  and then his search for a new employee leads him to receive this Bartleby
• 24:41
  as an applicant, who he promptly hires, not realizing the extent of the
• 24:48
  strangeness of this guy. He just seems like a kind of laid back,
• 24:52
  very morose, not very lack of affect kind of guy. And he works
• 24:59
  day and night. And I mean, we already sort of went over the
• 25:03
  rest of it. You know, this guy Bartleby refuses, He refuses to
• 25:08
  do anything except sit at his desk and work, you know, and just
• 25:14
  copy and copy and copy. But he refuses so politely too. He prefers
• 25:18
  not to, which is what's It's also interesting that he does keep doing his
• 25:25
  job, at least to the beginning, right like nominally, like he's just
• 25:26
  he's doing the copying. It's just like, initially, I think, like
• 25:30
  the boss is like, come, come to come to this meeting in my
• 25:33
  office where we can like go over the copying to like look for errors or
• 25:37
  something like that, and then he's just like, I would prefer not to.
• 25:41
  Yeah, part still have a copy as job. This reminds me so
• 25:45
  much of like working in an office and you have to do all this team
• 25:49
  building shit and you have to go to meetings that don't actually involve you.
• 25:53
  They just say we'd like you to know what's going on, And the most
• 25:56
  relieving thing would be to say I prefer not to and not have to go,
• 26:02
  but then of course your job's on the line. Yeah. It reminded
• 26:06
  me almost of one of those morale building exercises that they do where it's like,
• 26:08
  listen, you know your company and the people at it really care about
• 26:11
  you, so come to us and share your feelings. And you know perfectly
• 26:15
  well though, because the power dynamics involved, you can't just fucking say how
• 26:18
  you really feel about it. And what's kind of sharply amazing about this is
• 26:22
  he does say how he feels about it, and his argument is, I
• 26:25
  don't want to go to these fucking morale building exercises where I tell you what
• 26:26
  I feel. I feel I prefer not to Right. It's really refreshing in
• 26:30
  a lot of ways. Yeah, And the and the setup of the office
• 26:34
  is kind of significant as well, right, Like we've been talking about Cicero
• 26:38
  a bit, there's a there's a bust of Cicero prominently on display in the
• 26:42
  boss's office. Really, it's just one room that's divided in two by glass
• 26:48
  doors. There's a sort of view of a brick wall in like a sort
• 26:55
  of one of those internal light shafts inside of buildings. There's a window that
• 26:59
  views a brick wall, and then there's the other side of the office.
• 27:03
  Not really much to look at. I kind of picture this office almost as
• 27:06
  like a reprise of the inside of the whale. It's an enclosure, and
• 27:11
  it's got a certain kind of division. The boss has got his own half,
• 27:15
  which he ends up sticking Bartleby in the corner of his half of the
• 27:21
  office. And then his three very odd and irritable employees are in the other
• 27:27
  half, and he calls them in to do the reading of the copies,
• 27:32
  of course, and that's the first thing that Bartleby refuses to do is check
• 27:36
  his work. Basically, all he wants to do is sit there day and
• 27:38
  night and copy. They don't say that, or he doesn't say this explicitly.
• 27:42
  But is Turkey just a drunk because he says he comes in he's morose,
• 27:47
  he's in a good temper, but then as the day goes on,
• 27:49
  his face gets redder, he gets more animated and angry. Yeah, there's
• 27:53
  something about him drinking beer with what they're oddly calling in which seems to be
• 28:00
  lunchtime. And yeah, so and then there's this weird swap right where Turkey,
• 28:07
  the first guy, becomes very irritable and excitable and crazy in the afternoon,
• 28:14
  whereas the other guy nippers is this can I just say that the morning
• 28:19
  the street street name they're supposed to. They're nicknames, and they're supposed to
• 28:23
  express something about their characters. So Turkey is like a short squat out of
• 28:29
  breath English guy, and Nippers is always grinding his teeth right, and ginger
• 28:34
  Nut is the boy of the office who goes out to get the ginger nut
• 28:37
  cakes and brings them back. So they all kind of like they're these really
• 28:41
  sort of flat, almost like literary caricature people who just have these sorts of
• 28:48
  very prominent features but no real backstory. They're just they're they're very I don't
• 28:53
  know, they're they're they're satirical. They're just like pure personalities with a couple
• 28:57
  of traits. And we're too like contrasting them with Bartleby, how predictable they
• 29:03
  are, right, Like one guy is reliably more productive in the morning,
• 29:06
  the other one swaps with him and he's more productive in the afternoon. And
• 29:10
  so this is like almost there's a reliability to them, which then completely goes
• 29:14
  out the window with Bartleby. That's what kind of sets up the punchline with
• 29:17
  I would prefers. Does he even try like at the beginning, am I
• 29:19
  am I misremembering? Or does the boss also like talk about like how the
• 29:23
  nicknames and how he's trying to think of one for Bartleby, how he'll like
• 29:26
  eventually develop one but never does or is that is that? Is that my
• 29:30
  imagination? I don't recall them thinking of a nickname for Bartleby, and they
• 29:34
  just kind of refer to him. Well he doesn't. I know he doesn't,
• 29:37
  But I thought like he there's a I thought there's like an antwer where
• 29:40
  he talks about, like why how he thinks about the other employees and exactly
• 29:44
  like predictably, he like talks about how like oh like whatever Turkey does this
• 29:48
  and he's and it's like just like Victor was saying with the predictability. But
• 29:52
  I thought he also said something like, you know, eventually I'll get a
• 29:55
  name once I understand this new employee Bartleby, like he'll get one, but
• 29:59
  he ne does. He does exactly, And it's it's worth noting how he
• 30:03
  does describe bartle because it's an increasingly like kind of uncanny terms like oh,
• 30:07
  this apparition, this this incubus who haunts the office right like he's really unsettled
• 30:14
  by the fact that he can't give him a nickname in a way that he
• 30:17
  can't really assert his authority in the office with him. Yeah, yeah,
• 30:23
  I want to say though, like I did, I think Eric, what
• 30:26
  Eric said is are what you said, Victor is really telling right, because
• 30:30
  there is almost the Stickanzie quality to the three central characters. Like when I
• 30:33
  heard the name Turkey and ginger Nut, it really reminded me of like oh
• 30:37
  Fezziwig or mister Murdstone, where the minute you hear the name, you think,
• 30:40
  oh, this is who this person is going to be in the story.
• 30:41
  And Diket's had a real knack for that. But like Barbaby almost kind
• 30:45
  of is insulated from this attempt to kind of classify him under the label of
• 30:51
  any of these kind of cliches or expectations. Right. But like even more
• 30:55
  than that, right, it's the fact that he deliberately provokes the characters around
• 31:02
  him into acting in ways that are counter to their own initial inclinations. So
• 31:07
  there's almost this expectation that because you have these characters at the outset that are
• 31:10
  supposed to behave this way, you know what's going to happen, and then
• 31:12
  his presence prevents them from acting in the scripted way, which is big reason
• 31:18
  why it is that they all react so fiercely to him. Oh, by
• 31:21
  the way, pills. There is a point where they do reference that Turkey
• 31:23
  is a drunk. It's when his boss tries again in a coat and he
• 31:26
  says, the problem with Turkey is that a man who likes to drink like
• 31:30
  he does can also afford a nice coat. So in the contest between the
• 31:33
  coat and the drink, the drink always wins. And then he goes on
• 31:37
  to say, so, I just bottomed him a coat one day, and
• 31:38
  it didn't make any difference because it came in and he was greasy and smelty
• 31:41
  anyway, which I thought was pretty amazing. Yeah. Yeah, they're really
• 31:47
  insubordinate, but he finds a way to sort of work with them, right,
• 31:51
  Like, Turkey's really productive in the morning, so he gives them all
• 31:53
  this work to do in the morning. But then he sort of spills ink
• 31:59
  everywhere and is really clumsy and turns to this red faced drunk guy in the
• 32:05
  afternoon. So he's like, okay, he just give him like sort of
• 32:07
  busy work to do. And then this other guys who kind of I don't
• 32:13
  know, nippers is a bit of a strange dude. Right, he never
• 32:15
  sleeps well, so he always comes in like he's woken up on the wrong
• 32:19
  side of the bed. He's pissy. He'll the boss will glance out and
• 32:22
  see him like fighting with his desk. Like he's almost like a precise engineer
• 32:28
  trying to just get his desk just right. It's too high, it makes
• 32:31
  his it makes his arms lose their circulation. Right, it's too low,
• 32:37
  he has to hunch over, it makes his back hurt. He's putting little
• 32:39
  pieces of paper under his desk to get it just right. And then he'll
• 32:44
  look back and a few minutes later and Nippers will be like wrestling with his
• 32:47
  desk like it's got a mind of its own. It's yeah, when he
• 32:51
  says, like, I send Jingernut out to get those cakes, but then
• 32:53
  Turkey is fucking drunken fat, so he just eats like six of them all
• 32:57
  in a go, and I have to send him out to get more.
• 32:59
  Right. Really, it's great stuff, And I'll tell funny, like the
• 33:04
  boss kind of just accepts that low key alcoholism or insomnia is just part of
• 33:07
  the job. Like it says so much about the work space, about the
• 33:12
  kind of work that these people have to do. Yeah. Also it says
• 33:15
  something about like the manager like his managerial philosophy. He's just like, okay,
• 33:19
  like I'm gonna like my He almost like he's like, my job is
• 33:22
  to like I have these people and I'm gonna like work with them and I'll
• 33:24
  find a way. It's just but I need to understand them first. I
• 33:27
  need to see their patterns and then I'll be able to like plug them in
• 33:30
  and then this will be the solution. And he has that, and then
• 33:32
  you can tell as the narrative goes on when he tries to solve Bartleby and
• 33:36
  he just can't. You know, typical office environment. We got all our
• 33:39
  characters. I just want to finish sort of these synopsis here, he increasingly
• 33:45
  gets frustrated, but not specifically mad at Bartleby because whenever he asked Bartleby to
• 33:52
  do anything, he says, can you go pick something up from the post
• 33:55
  office? I would prefer not to. Can you come go over these edits
• 33:59
  with me? I would prefer not to, And then he just asks him
• 34:01
  the most basic thing, can you go get the guy from the other room
• 34:05
  and tell him to come here? I would prefer not to. Bartleby where
• 34:07
  are you from? I would prefer not to speak on that at this time.
• 34:12
  So he just refuses to work with this guy at all. We only
• 34:15
  get the boss's inner monologue and he brings in all this Christian morality sort of
• 34:22
  language and says, this is one of the most miserable, pitiable creatures I've
• 34:28
  ever seen. I knew I couldn't fire him, because if I fired him,
• 34:31
  then a worst boss would not treat him as well as I'm treating him.
• 34:35
  So it's almost we know that it's written in the past tense. It's
• 34:37
  almost justifying that he did everything he could for this guy. The guy just
• 34:43
  wouldn't obey, wouldn't serve, And then we find out by the end of
• 34:46
  the story, Bartleby eventually refuses to work. So the boss moves his entire
• 34:52
  law firm to a different building and just leaves Bartleby standing in the middle of
• 34:57
  the room by himself. He refused to leave too. He stops paying him.
• 35:00
  He gives them like a severance package bonus, and Bartleby refuses to leave.
• 35:06
  He just wants to stand in the office like this guy is sleeping in
• 35:08
  the office. So then the building just to quickly finish then the building manager
• 35:14
  tries to re rent out the office, bartle B is still standing in there.
• 35:19
  Long story short, Bartleb ends up in prison, not having committed an
• 35:23
  actual crime. They never charge him with anything, but he won't move,
• 35:27
  so he ends up in prison. There they start trying to feed him.
• 35:30
  He says, I don't like eating dinner. I prefer not to eat dinner.
• 35:35
  And eventually he starves to death in prison. And that's the end of
• 35:38
  the story. And then there's a weird appendix at the end. But I'm
• 35:44
  not sure how to interpret that. But anyway, Victor, I wanted you
• 35:45
  to catch us up on how we go about literary interpretation of this whole almost
• 35:52
  increasingly absurd story. No, that's the thing. Yeah, it gets almost
• 35:57
  kafka esque, right, And in our little dickn En, you know,
• 36:00
  nineteenth century short story, once Bartleby shows up, the other characters have no
• 36:05
  clue how to deal with him, because he really is like from another century,
• 36:07
  from another genre. They just like look at each other and they shrug
• 36:10
  like, why aren't you sort of conforming to the script. Why aren't you
• 36:14
  one of the office employees? Right? He just doesn't want to. He
• 36:19
  starts to infect the others too. Interestingly, ye, right, they all
• 36:22
  start to use this word prefer without they say prefer to this, prefer that,
• 36:27
  would you prefer me? I never used the word prefer before, but
• 36:30
  I find myself using it. Doesn't even notice. I think there's a really
• 36:34
  important point though, this earner makes about himself relative to Bartleby at the very
• 36:37
  beginning, which kind of explains why these characters are there and why it tolerates
• 36:42
  them, but also like his relationship to Bartleby, which he says, I'm
• 36:45
  a guy who always wants things to be easy, right. I always on
• 36:47
  the person who thinks that the easiest path is the one that you should take,
• 36:52
  right. And what's kind of paradoxical about him is, despite the fact
• 36:54
  that that's his philosophy, he's the one who does almost all the work in
• 37:00
  the short story right. He ends up moving offices, hauling ass somewhere else,
• 37:04
  is just desperately trying to play Kate Bartleby and Bartleby, despite the fact
• 37:07
  that he doesn't adopt this kind of philosophy of taking it easy if anything's extremely
• 37:12
  hard on himself. Near the end, he's the one who actually does actually
• 37:15
  absolutely nothing at the finale of it, right, he just stands there,
• 37:19
  like Pills was saying, then lets himself gets dried to prison and then dies.
• 37:23
  So there's this really interesting juxposition between a man who wants to take things
• 37:27
  easy and winds up turning his whole life around because of somebody who just will
• 37:30
  do nothing but stand in one place and looking out and look at a wall.
• 37:36
  Yeah, and to your point, Pills, so at the literary level,
• 37:37
  like Bartleby's almost like an anti character, right, Like he kind of
• 37:40
  blows up the story because this is you know, you're expecting a more typical
• 37:45
  kind of office space comedic kind of short story, and then this existential character
• 37:50
  shows up again who clearly is not like really at home in the nineteenth century
• 37:53
  at this point in terms of what American readers were expecting, and he just
• 37:57
  completely throws the story upside down. So that's what's really interesting here is that
• 38:01
  you know, you can almost see what how Melville's readers would have reacted to
• 38:06
  a story like this, or even to like Moby Dick like we were talking
• 38:07
  about earlier. They would be like as confused as the bosses as to like,
• 38:13
  why are you subverting the expectations why are you not playing along with the
• 38:16
  system right, whether it's like genre expectations or like economic expectations. He's like,
• 38:23
  you know, that's what's so interesting here that this is working at many
• 38:25
  different levels. Yeah. It made me think like if a Terrence Malick character
• 38:30
  just happened to step into like the office or something, and like Michael Scott
• 38:34
  was just like, how the fuck am I supposed to deal with you?
• 38:36
  And he just kept on saying these very soft epigrams. But then there's a
• 38:39
  voiceover where there's all these profound lots flowing right, and it's just this person
• 38:45
  doesn't belong in the genre. But I think that's kind of where a lot
• 38:46
  of the comedy comes out, right. Yeah, and Scrivener's are an odd
• 38:51
  bunch as the narrator sort of relates, but he wants to focus on this
• 38:55
  one. He wants to tell this story of Bartleby, even though he doesn't
• 39:00
  know anything about him, because Bartaby wouldn't say anything every You can't ask him
• 39:05
  who he is, where he's from, if he has any relatives, nothing.
• 39:08
  It's just this unicorn fucking character who we just get a few snippets of
• 39:15
  his last bit of his life. It's also interesting about the way that the
• 39:22
  boss kind of tells himself, like his rationalizations. So like for me,
• 39:28
  there's a bit of ambiguity about what it meant, because Pills was saying,
• 39:30
  like, there's all this Christian morality there, and like, I mean,
• 39:34
  I like it's true that came across, but like I don't know, like
• 39:37
  like my thought when I was reading it was more that he's such a coward
• 39:43
  or something that like that, like he's just making up these rationalizations for like
• 39:46
  what a good person he is, when really he's just like a non confrontational
• 39:50
  coward who liked who like doesn't know how to how to like how to just
• 39:54
  like say, like get the fuck out of here and like exert some force
• 39:58
  because he's always been able to finagle his employees to do what he wants with
• 40:01
  these kinds of like generous nice things. But he's really non confrontational. So
• 40:06
  I didn't I didn't see the main motivation as being Christian reality. I saw
• 40:08
  it as just like the boss's own psychological cowardice. Well, he's fascinated by
• 40:14
  him, right, he's fascinated and repelled by this character, and then and
• 40:17
  then the rationalizations too. He like talks about how he's like, oh,
• 40:21
  what a poor soul. Like it's like I'm gonna help him, I'm gonna
• 40:23
  do these things. And then to me, I'm just like, you're just
• 40:25
  lying to yourself because you're just too scared to just like do what's necessary.
• 40:29
  Well, like any normal boss would just be like set this guy out on
• 40:32
  his ass immediately obviously, but he kind of like, you know, the
• 40:37
  delay of what do you call it, the u the delay of the desire.
• 40:40
  This story is that he's trying to indulge this guy. Sure, i'd
• 40:45
  like Christian grounds, but really that's just a justification for it. Bartleby is
• 40:51
  completely disarming in his sort of you know, if there's a hint of combativeness
• 40:58
  in his utterances of this phrase over and over, I prefer not to then
• 41:01
  you know, the boss would say, there's the spark of humanity. I'm
• 41:05
  gonna fuck this guy up. But Bartleby is almost like an automaton with no
• 41:09
  affect whatsoever, just complete, like placid as a lake. His emotions are
• 41:15
  just like all flat and it is and it is interesting like that when in
• 41:21
  thinking about like non confrontational kind of and like avoiding pure confrontational, I mean
• 41:25
  clearly like Bartleby's like form of resistance is also very non confrontational, right,
• 41:30
  so it's like you have two non confrontational characters like like, so it's like,
• 41:34
  as Bartleby's just like I would prefer not to, he never just says
• 41:36
  directly no, and then like the boss also just like is flummixed and is
• 41:43
  dealing with it in very non confrontational manners. So it's like so it's like
• 41:47
  neither of them actually says like kind of what what I mean. I mean,
• 41:52
  Bartleby's clear right, he's like I would prefer not to, but he's
• 41:53
  doing it in a very like the least confrontational way of saying no possible.
• 41:58
  And that's like interpretation of the story, right, It's the great refusal.
• 42:04
  It's what we need to do to capitalism is just a negative. The boss
• 42:09
  describes several times, I mean, Bartleby is living in this guy's head,
• 42:14
  rent free, like every day the boss is trying to work, but he's
• 42:16
  focused on Bartleby. And then he describes how much power Bartleby has over him,
• 42:22
  even just like he shows up to the office on a Sunday. No
• 42:25
  one's supposed to be in the office. He's going to go like pick up
• 42:28
  some work. Bartleby's in there just like sleeping or changing or something, and
• 42:32
  he goes, I'm not done yet, go walk around the block a few
• 42:36
  times. And the guy does it and then describes to us the reader,
• 42:39
  I don't know why I did that. I just felt like there was nothing
• 42:44
  else I could do because he'd never been challenged before. No, and it's
• 42:47
  great to see how this really undermines his authority over his own workspace right over
• 42:52
  like his firm there, because by the end of it, he's almost like
• 42:54
  convincing himself that like, no, this must be like have been predestined by
• 43:00
  God. This is my struggle to bear. Like he's trying to justify it,
• 43:04
  like he's searching for meaning as to why he has to deal with Bartleby
• 43:07
  all because like he senses like the limits of coercion with someone like this,
• 43:12
  right, like he is actually sort of like his life begins to revolve around
• 43:15
  Bartleby. Bartleby is just there, right, He's not really doing anything,
• 43:19
  but Yeah, the questions of agency are so interesting here as to like who's
• 43:22
  really free and who isn't. Yeah, but that's what I was going to
• 43:25
  get it. I don't really think that the Landlord, if you want,
• 43:29
  reflects like a genuine kind of Christian morality. I think that Pills is absolutely
• 43:32
  right that it's the kind of satire of Christian reality, because it's really like
• 43:36
  a kind of white middle class Christian reality, right where almost everything that he's
• 43:39
  doing is about his own self gratification or trying to placate his uneasy conscience.
• 43:45
  Because one of the things that's distinctive about this, you know, this story,
• 43:49
  is that he never really makes a sincere effort to try to understand Bartleby
• 43:52
  the way that Bartleby might understand him. He's not interested in his own internal
• 43:55
  life, his own soul. If you want, all that he tends to
• 43:59
  think about is this would be a nice thing to do for him, or
• 44:00
  he wants the same things that I do, So I just need to find
• 44:04
  the lever and I'll get him to move right. And in many ways,
• 44:08
  there's this kind of almost proto Nietzschean satire of all the different ways that he
• 44:14
  tries to construe this indifference to his inner life as some kind of moral act
• 44:17
  on the boss's part, when really it all services this kind of narcissistic yearning
• 44:22
  for acceptance and for gratification from somebody who makes it really clear from the get
• 44:27
  go that he's not going to give it to that guy, right, He
• 44:30
  has no interest. He prefers not to give him any of that kind of
• 44:32
  recognition or consolation. Man, Michael Scott popped into my head more than a
• 44:37
  few times reading this, like he wants to be friends with anybody, everybody,
• 44:42
  but he cannot stand that this guy does not like him, does not
• 44:45
  want to be friends with him, wants nothing from him, and then doesn't
• 44:50
  like accept his generosity as a boss. Yeah, and that's why people don't
• 44:55
  really like Michael Scott a lot of the times, right because most of the
• 44:59
  nice thing that he does for people are kind of foe and there. He
• 45:01
  doesn't really pay that much attention to his employees as people. He just kind
• 45:06
  of does what he thinks that that they want, whereas Bartaby makes it like
• 45:09
  emphatically clear what he doesn't want. At least, he kind of wants to
• 45:13
  be left alone, and he preferred not to do any of the bullshit that
• 45:15
  he's told to do. And that's the one thing he can't wrap his head
• 45:19
  around. So Victor, can you help us out with the dominant reading of
• 45:23
  this story now is a class analysis. It's we got the boss, we
• 45:29
  got the lower class. The lower class not understood the boss, you know,
• 45:34
  making every effort to be friendly, but still doesn't understand authority being subverted
• 45:40
  in this way. Are there other readings of this or is that kind of
• 45:45
  what you think Melville was going for? Yeah, I mean, there's so
• 45:49
  many ways to approach this text. You could look at it again as like
• 45:52
  the writer being misunderstood by society at the most basic kind of autobiographical level.
• 45:57
  Everything from that to even you know, like disabled readings, queer readings,
• 46:00
  right like okay, the worker who does not receive the accommodation he needs,
• 46:04
  or even we could like turn it on its head, okay, the conservative
• 46:07
  point of view, a cautionary tale about welfare system abuse, like there's really
• 46:12
  something here for everyone, There's I was actually reminded of a Simpsons moment where
• 46:16
  Ned Flanders is asked by one of his sons, like why do we pay
• 46:20
  taxes? And he says, well, you know, it's partly for the
• 46:22
  people who just don't want to work, God bless him, And that's kind
• 46:25
  of yeah, I mean maybe that's bartleby situation. By the end, he's
• 46:29
  just he wants to be in it, but not of it. He's just
• 46:31
  part of society, but not really in the way that society needs him to
• 46:36
  be. So we could be critical of Bartleby too. There's we could take
• 46:38
  the side of the narrator. Why not. Yeah, I wonder if this
• 46:43
  this sort of image at the end we get think think about the capitalist what
• 46:46
  about him? He had to move his whole office, turn his whole life
• 46:50
  upside down, I mean the poor man, right, he tried everything.
• 46:52
  You see that like part in the end right where Bartleby's in prison. I
• 46:58
  don't know if this is the big like sort of origin of this image.
• 47:01
  You know, you picture like nineteen eighty four, right, this like this
• 47:07
  sort of horrible totalitarian world. But somehow, you know, like a blade
• 47:12
  of grass blooms through all the heavy heavy like machinery, right, and like
• 47:15
  love sort of finds a way. And in the end of this story too,
• 47:20
  like you know, Bartleby's there in prison, and then he writes,
• 47:23
  you know, comparing this prison to like an Egyptian pyramid where people are just
• 47:29
  entombed. He says in the heart of this pyramid here where by some strange
• 47:34
  magic, through the clefts, grass seed dropped by birds had sprung, and
• 47:38
  there's little there's this sort of we're left this image of grass growing through the
• 47:44
  like cracks in the prison floor, and it's it's a really strange sort of
• 47:50
  image. I don't know what it is it's supposed to be. I guess
• 47:52
  it's been interpreted in an almost you know, going to like Biancho Han's reading
• 47:59
  of Actually this is a Gombin's reading gives it a kind of a messianic interpretation,
• 48:06
  right the sky and the blades of grass, and it's like, I
• 48:10
  don't know, Bartleby almost as like a messiah, you know, being chill
• 48:14
  hand will completely disagree with this reading, but you know, these weird sorts
• 48:19
  of moments, I guess they recommend that reading in a way. Can I
• 48:24
  ask you a different question, Victor, because this is kind of that the
• 48:28
  This is one of the problems I've always had with Melville, and I've ever
• 48:31
  been able to wrap my head around it. So maybe you'll have the answer
• 48:34
  right. Because I've seen a lot of different readings of Moby Dick, which
• 48:37
  I'm more familiar with, which try to really insist that the story is an
• 48:42
  allegory, you know, and they'll say, Ishmael is Ishmael from the Bible,
• 48:45
  the whale is God, Ahab is insert your favorite thing, Lucifer,
• 48:50
  you know, is what I've seen a lot, you know. And you
• 48:54
  could do something similar to this, which is to try to read into this
• 48:58
  like, oh, you know, the boss represents capitalism, Bartleby represents the
• 49:01
  oppressed workers. That's the allegory of the story, right. But it seems
• 49:05
  to me that this is a story kind of like my interpretation will be Dick,
• 49:08
  that almost distanced itself from the possibility of being read allegorically. It almost
• 49:14
  seems to invite archetypal kinds of readings where you're gonna deliberately read into it what
• 49:19
  it is that you want to see, because there's so many different ways that
• 49:23
  this was deliberately intended to be construed. Absolutely, Yeah, I mean,
• 49:27
  I think at some level, as long as we're trying to sort of pin
• 49:29
  bartle Be down and interpret it in one way, we're still kind of doing
• 49:31
  what his boss is doing, right, we're trying to give him like a
• 49:36
  nickname. But in some ways, yeah, you're right, maybe Melville is
• 49:38
  actually inviting us to kind of go beyond that level and to recognize, like
• 49:42
  there's something deeply ungraspable here and that's fine, Like you have to be okay
• 49:45
  with that kind of ambiguity, and he does sort of. Yeah, it's
• 49:49
  so hyper allegorical in some ways, he's almost like tossing out so many little
• 49:52
  references, you know, Cicero, Egypt, everything that. Yeah, I
• 49:57
  think that in some ways. Yeah, you could sort of compare to Mobi
• 50:00
  Dick where ultimately, like you don't want to kind of fall into like Ahab's
• 50:04
  position and try to like figure out what does the white whale mean? What
• 50:07
  does Bartleby mean? Like it's more about the process of interpretation itself that perhaps
• 50:13
  Melville is kind of trying to steer us towards, is to actually like it's
• 50:16
  it's it's a meditation on critical reading, right, and more more so than
• 50:21
  the actual sort of like destination of like the definitive take on this character or
• 50:27
  anything like that. Yeah, Yeah, I think that's right, because the
• 50:30
  narrator really projects like the possibility of his own salvation onto Bartleby, right,
• 50:37
  Like Bartleby's a blank slate, he's a he's a he's a blank piece of
• 50:40
  paper, and the narrator, you know, in the end, oddly like
• 50:45
  spoiler alert, when Bartleby sort of dies in the end, right, he
• 50:50
  just kind of stops living and and he touches him and he feels that he's
• 50:55
  cold. And then when the grub man of the prison asks, you know,
• 51:01
  oh, dinner's ready, is he coming? And he said, I
• 51:05
  know, he's sleeping. Oh, he's asleep, and then the narrator ends
• 51:08
  the sort of main part of the story ends with him saying he's sleeping with
• 51:13
  kings and counselors. This sort of odd, wistful moment that the narrator ends,
• 51:19
  like, Bartleby becomes almost like a prop in the narrator's own internal epic
• 51:23
  rather than yeah, rather than a substantial character. So I kind of get
• 51:29
  that reading where Bartleby resists interpretation, so we just kind of violently appropriate him
• 51:36
  for our own sort of thoughts. Right, But then there's this weird epilogue.
• 51:40
  And in this weird epilogue, the narrator finds out that Bartleby came from
• 51:46
  the dead letter office and dead letters are like dead men, so he kind
• 51:52
  of exhumes his conscience at the end of the story saying there was something wrong
• 51:57
  with this guy before I got him. I didn't fuck him up. He
• 52:00
  was fucked up before he got here. And it's going to be like until
• 52:04
  the early twentieth century, like sixty years after this was written, that we
• 52:07
  get the internal monologues of character like Bartleby in Camu or Kafka, where you
• 52:14
  get what Bartleby's actually thinking. But until then, it's kind of just projection
• 52:19
  from the outside. Because I'm just gonna give full disclosure, right, Like,
• 52:22
  I've been so used to the left wing reading of this that I immediately
• 52:25
  went into it thinking that that's what I was going to see, right,
• 52:29
  Like I was going to see basically a proto Marxist Bartiby, you know,
• 52:32
  carrying the red flag before the red flag even existed, right, And I
• 52:37
  like that reading. I think there's nothing wrong with it. But like I
• 52:38
  said, the way that I came away from it was almost the exact opposite
• 52:40
  reading, where I saw him as almost a kind of nostalgic reactionary figure,
• 52:45
  you know, a man outside of modernity who resists his vulgarity and has this
• 52:50
  kind of nobility to him that resists being reduced to the level of the mass
• 52:54
  and refuses to abide by that right, which is not which is a very
• 52:58
  different reading than that one. Right. But now I'm kind of wondering if
• 53:00
  that's just also me reading too much into the Sister roll comments kind of like
• 53:05
  Victor was saying, you know, seeing those as the clues to answer the
• 53:07
  riddle of what this is about, and opposing my own kind of answer into
• 53:12
  like Bartleby equals you know, the modern Cicero or something. Bartleby kind of
• 53:16
  had this entire nichean monologue going all the time, like this fucking asshole is
• 53:22
  telling me to do stuff. I'm just gonna say, no, it's hard
• 53:25
  to believe that there's anything going on in there. He seemed just kind of
• 53:30
  dead inside. No, it's it's hard. It's hard to believe that there
• 53:34
  hasn't been a follow up from like Bartleby's point of view, right, like
• 53:36
  the the the untold story and it is something like Nietzsche or something. Yeah,
• 53:42
  yeah, No, I mean I also think like the one of the
• 53:45
  things about the left wing reading, I mean, because I came into it
• 53:49
  hearing I mean, I'd read what philosophers like Gujak had said about it,
• 53:52
  but I hadn't actually read the short story myself, and you know, reading
• 53:58
  it like coming away from it, I guess I I do see like the
• 54:00
  left wing potential, I suppose, but I also I don't know. But
• 54:02
  to me, it's like, well, he just like dies at the end,
• 54:04
  and he just I mean, he just seems like a like a like
• 54:06
  a madman, like he doesn't see he died a hero victor he died to
• 54:08
  hear, I don't know. But and it's I don't know, it just
• 54:13
  doesn't It doesn't that that reading doesn't seem as clear cut to me after after
• 54:16
  actually reading the source material. All right, let me go into these I
• 54:20
  don't know if you guys, if you have just interrupt me if you have
• 54:22
  any points. But the left ring reading that we're referencing generally is sort of
• 54:29
  shared by a gombin Heart and Negar and Jijiak and Deluz and young chal Han
• 54:37
  have a different reading against those that left wing reading. But it's generally if
• 54:42
  you're in a system where you if you're saying no to the system, then
• 54:46
  you're basically accepting its authority. But this is revolutionary because not only is he
• 54:52
  just not saying no, but he's affirming a negation, saying I prefer not
• 55:00
  to. He's not saying no, I won't, but just I prefer not
• 55:02
  to, meaning he's not giving any assent to the system. You can force
• 55:06
  me to go to the prison, I prefer not to. You can force
• 55:08
  me to work, I prefer not to. And by that mechanism, I
• 55:13
  think, which is accurate to the story, he takes away all of the
• 55:16
  boss's power. The boss has no idea what to do with him, and
• 55:21
  in terms of agency in the story, Bartleby ends up becoming the most agentic
• 55:24
  character, Like after he moves his office, basically a mob comes over and
• 55:30
  says, Yo, you fucking left this dude in our apartment building. You
• 55:34
  have to get rid of him. And he goes, well, why do
• 55:37
  I have to get rid of him? I don't know him. He was
• 55:38
  just a former employee, but he causes such a big stir about around the
• 55:43
  city and around the system by not doing anything. Yeah, yeah, absolutely
• 55:50
  right, I mean yeah, speaking of Christian characters, you know, there
• 55:52
  we go. You can terp it out. Maybe not as the modern Christ
• 55:54
  cister O, but the modern Christ you know what I mean? A man
• 55:58
  too good for this world because you were used to work and shown a light
• 56:01
  of shame upon the rest of us or something. All right, well,
• 56:04
  here's here's a one quote from Jijik's parallax view. He says, Bartleby symbolizes
• 56:09
  sort of the pass from a politics of resistance or protestation, which parasitizes upon
• 56:15
  that which it negates, to a politics which opens up a new space outside
• 56:20
  of the hegemonic position and its negation. So he just passes beyond negation into
• 56:27
  a totally new space. Victor, how do you feel about that? Reading?
• 56:31
  Well, I was wait, which which I met you because you said
• 56:35
  you don't buy this. I didn't say I don't buy it. It just
• 56:37
  didn't seem as a clear to me anyway. I mean I think that he's
• 56:43
  you know this like, but there's also no content to Bartleby that we can
• 56:45
  see. So it's like so it's like, yeah, sure, he's like
• 56:49
  affirming in negation, but it's like for what, like like there's nothing,
• 56:52
  there's no content. He's just standing in an office till like until people remove
• 56:57
  him and then he just like decides not to There's nothing, there's nothing,
• 57:00
  It's just a pure negation. Yeah, it's the sort of master slave kind
• 57:05
  of like boss worker interpretation, whereas like you know, biumcho Han goes for
• 57:09
  the more like psychological interpretation. So he disagrees, but like a Gombin,
• 57:15
  for instance, kind of reads it along the same line, right, he
• 57:19
  elevates Bartleby into this sort of metaphysical onto theological character, right, and he
• 57:24
  so a Gomblin makes these grand pronouncements which you'd be probably hard pressed to find
• 57:30
  evidence for in the text except for giving a Gombin the creative room to say,
• 57:35
  this is the philosophical constellation to which Bartleby, the Scrivener belongs. As
• 57:39
  a scribe who has stopped writing. Bartleby is the extreme figure of the nothing
• 57:45
  from which all creation derives. And at the same time he constitutes the most
• 57:51
  implacable vindication of this nothing as pure absolute potentiality. Scrivener become the writing tablet.
• 58:00
  He is now nothing other than his white sheet. Right. So this,
• 58:04
  this idea of in this negative act signals the infinite potentiality. Is this
• 58:10
  reading that, you know, the kind of Hegelian master slave reading of the
• 58:15
  sort of absolute negativity of the active refusal. And you know, bunchal Hans
• 58:22
  just doesn't have that. You know, he says, like bunchal Hans reading
• 58:27
  is more. You know, Bartleby is a product of a disciplinary society,
• 58:31
  right, because what Melville's describing as a disciplinary society, there's walls, there's
• 58:37
  dividers, there's interiors, there's prisons. Yeah, there's references to internment,
• 58:45
  interurring in death tombs and things like that, right, and bartle b actually
• 58:52
  has this condition we'd probably described today as neurasthenia where he's just completely dead and
• 58:58
  flat, flat affect. Right, He's got nothing going on in there,
• 59:00
  and he's just this sort of you know, reading Biungchalhan reading it into his
• 59:07
  book called the burnout society. Right, Well, in Melville's day, it
• 59:13
  hasn't reached this sort of be all you can be excess, right, this
• 59:19
  achievement society we live in, right, like the Nike just do it society.
• 59:23
  They're still in the disciplinary society of the nineteenth century. So Bartob is
• 59:29
  a kind of product of that milia where he manifests this complete refusal to do
• 59:37
  anything, even eat and feed himself. And you know, it's a very
• 59:40
  kind of deflationary reading when you read it up against the sorts of meanings that
• 59:45
  a Gombin and Jijak want to put into it, But I don't know about
• 59:49
  the other ones who else interprets this. Can I just summarize these three positions
• 59:54
  just in case anyone's not on track. So a Gombin for a Gomba,
• 1:00:00
  and this is the site of pure potentiality because Bartleby has escaped the dialectic.
• 1:00:05
  He refuses to be a master, refuses to be a slave. He just
• 1:00:07
  opts out. For young Cholhan, he's the figure of burnout, condemned to
• 1:00:13
  a bureaucracy while all he does is copy other people's work with no relief,
• 1:00:20
  the pre burnout burnout. He's he's like the disciplinary society's like ultimate product,
• 1:00:27
  its ultimate positivity, no drive, no apathy, crushed spirit. Then the
• 1:00:32
  third reading is ANDK is saying, this is a correct response to you know,
• 1:00:37
  modern capitalism today, which is the self help. You've got to go
• 1:00:42
  to the gym, you've got to do this, you've got to be an
• 1:00:44
  ethical consumer, you got to pay attention to politics everywhere, and I would
• 1:00:47
  prefer not to. Is kind of the correct escape from that. So the
• 1:00:52
  thing is I resist that a little bit because even though I think again it
• 1:00:57
  can be which one do you? It resists kind of the ethos underpinning all
• 1:01:00
  of them, which is to kind of interpret him as a radical or insurrectionary
• 1:01:04
  figure. And the reason is that, first off, like Eric said,
• 1:01:07
  I don't think there's a lot of textual evidence to support that. But last
• 1:01:10
  week you were fine with violent readings when it was Yujik putting words into Dello's
• 1:01:15
  mouth, But now that it's philosophers putting words into a blank character's mouth,
• 1:01:21
  Now you're going to take a fence to textual evidence. Sure, sure,
• 1:01:24
  and I have no problem with that, But I think again, if you
• 1:01:28
  interpret him, it's very hard for me to read him as a kind of
• 1:01:30
  heroic figure, right. It seems to me that he's leading a kind of
• 1:01:34
  petty bourgeois life. His boss makes it pretty clear that he's not exactly going
• 1:01:37
  to go hard on his employees, right, that they can eat cakes and
• 1:01:40
  drink and have a good time and do whatever it is they're one in the
• 1:01:44
  office as long as they're relatively productive, and he himself ends up dying.
• 1:01:47
  And there's not even a sense that there's this kind of either Christian or Buddhist
• 1:01:52
  quality to his passing away and the sense of either escaping suffering or vindicating suffering
• 1:01:57
  through his death as a kind of grace just gone right. And it would
• 1:02:01
  seem to me that if Malvil was trying to convey this kind of insurrectionary quality
• 1:02:06
  to him, something like that would be suggested in the text, right,
• 1:02:09
  And I have no problem with, you know, to put a violent reading
• 1:02:13
  of this. But the reason why I resisted is also it seems to me
• 1:02:16
  that if we were to interpret the inner monologue of somebody like Bartleby, it
• 1:02:22
  wouldn't be as an insurrectionary figure. That what kept on coming to mind when
• 1:02:24
  I thought about him was something more like Dostievsky's underground man, right, who
• 1:02:29
  refuses but does so out of almost spite in a certain sense. Right,
• 1:02:32
  that he's going to cancel the dialectic of existence by just negating even his own
• 1:02:37
  desires for existence and doing something that's so contrarian that even if it hurts him,
• 1:02:44
  it's still kind of free act, right, or has this free quality,
• 1:02:46
  and that's not intended as a compliment. I have a textual evidence against
• 1:02:51
  that, at least from the narrator's point of view, of course. But
• 1:02:52
  he said nothing was so aggravating to me as an earnest person in passive resistance.
• 1:02:59
  Poor fellow, I think thought he means no mischief. It is plain
• 1:03:01
  he intends no insolence. His aspect sufficiently evinces me that it's his in eccentricities.
• 1:03:08
  Oh yeah, so maybe it lacks that quality. Well, that's that's
• 1:03:13
  interesting because that to me, Like I remember when I read that, I
• 1:03:15
  was like, oh, like, he just wants to avoid confrontation, so
• 1:03:20
  he's just telling himself the story that it's like, oh, he's not actually
• 1:03:23
  like doing anything malicious, like he's just that's just his weird peculiarity because it's
• 1:03:28
  like it's it's allowing him to defer responsibility to actually have to respond in a
• 1:03:32
  confrontational manner. That's how I read it. When the narrator does visit him
• 1:03:37
  in the prison at the end, though he can tell it's clear that Bartleby
• 1:03:40
  blames him that he ended up in prison. So interesting, Yeah, he
• 1:03:45
  had some responsibility towards it, it seems. Yeah. No, I really
• 1:03:49
  like these readings like a Gombins that like you know, Bartleby is actually new
• 1:03:52
  in the matrix or something, and it's just like at the end of the
• 1:03:55
  first movie, he says no, and he just stops the woo's. I
• 1:04:01
  think that's that says a lot more about like a Gombin's reading that it does
• 1:04:05
  about Melville's story. But no, I think that gjak is probably closest to
• 1:04:10
  like maybe the spirit of the story, where I mean he compares Bartleb's I
• 1:04:14
  prefer not to with the like protest politics of Occupy Wall Street where okay,
• 1:04:18
  like it's great to clear the table kind of, but you have to offer
• 1:04:21
  a viable alternative afterward, right, And so that's the problem with bartleb ends
• 1:04:27
  up just dying, right, Like he negates himself out of existence. So
• 1:04:30
  if we're going to read this politically, I think it's an interesting first step,
• 1:04:33
  but I think Gjack would suggest it's not enough. I prefer not to,
• 1:04:38
  and then you know, like there has to be something more to this.
• 1:04:42
  Yeah, that's what's about the underground kind of reading, right, which
• 1:04:44
  is that this guy also has a kind of radical antagonism towards modernity, but
• 1:04:48
  his primary target at the end of the day is always himself, right,
• 1:04:51
  And it's hard for me not to look at this and say, I admire
• 1:04:56
  the fact that he did dissociate from the system, but it it seems like
• 1:05:00
  the main outcome of this is that he ends up dying and suffering at the
• 1:05:03
  end. That's hard for me to interpret this as a kind of heroic act
• 1:05:06
  that presents it as an insurrectionary figure the way some of these people seem to
• 1:05:11
  want. Right, Yeah, No, that's exactly how I felt about,
• 1:05:13
  like feeling like, yeah, it's interesting, but there's like no content.
• 1:05:15
  It's just like there's like an emptiness to it. It's just I mean,
• 1:05:18
  it's true, it does map on. Maybe Nelville preferred not to give content
• 1:05:23
  to this. Yeah, sure, sure, but but I mean it does
• 1:05:26
  I go, I hear what Victor is saying, because like I think that
• 1:05:29
  that Jack like I'm sympathetic to that because it, like you know, it
• 1:05:33
  is this idea like you guys know for long time listeners, like you'll know
• 1:05:36
  that I that I have my gripes about just like edgy protest politics that just
• 1:05:41
  gets caught up in fact, like my dissertation work to some extent, it's
• 1:05:44
  just like about like you know, just just protest politics that gets caught up
• 1:05:47
  and just like being against anything positive, just being like like you know,
• 1:05:51
  trying to negate institutions, negate like like political order, for something else,
• 1:05:57
  for this vague notion of like whatever. And I think, like maybe that
• 1:06:00
  that fits in with those other kinds of readings that want to see Partleby as
• 1:06:04
  a heroic figure. It fits in with that inclination towards more like Yeah,
• 1:06:10
  I don't know, edge lordy politics. I think in terms of a textual
• 1:06:14
  correl it, the closest thing I can think of is Kafka's Hunger Artist,
• 1:06:18
  because the Hunger Artist doesn't he starves himself to death spoiler alert. He starves
• 1:06:24
  himself to death for no reason except that he never found any food that he
• 1:06:28
  liked. So he ends up in a cage in the middle of town and
• 1:06:30
  he's doing he's like a circus act where he just doesn't eat, and then
• 1:06:33
  people come by and go, oh, look, there's the Hunger Artist not
• 1:06:36
  eating. But we find out that the reason that he didn't eat and starved
• 1:06:41
  himself to death was that he didn't like anything. I think Metamorphosis is also
• 1:06:45
  like a great parallel, where again this character who is just completely misunderstood by
• 1:06:48
  society. They don't know what to do with him. He's so grotesque in
• 1:06:51
  the fact that he no longer works and eventually he also dies from starvation.
• 1:06:56
  Right, And that's a much more extreme, absurdist example. But I do
• 1:06:59
  think that's an interesting parallel. Yeah, this is so cafcaz died that starvation
• 1:07:03
  plays a role in all three of these characters, also again as a kind
• 1:07:08
  of self implosion, rather than this an external act of violence that's inflicted upon
• 1:07:13
  you. Yeah, and not just starvation, but hunger, because hunger is
• 1:07:15
  also the reason that Ishmael left his urban environment to go on the whaling voyage.
• 1:07:20
  Hunger here and starvation here is seen not just as the effect of modernity,
• 1:07:27
  but the condition of modernity, and hunger for what. Well, we
• 1:07:30
  don't know that hunger for anything but this. Yeah, But I mean I
• 1:07:35
  can say because I think I know we said that we had to end up
• 1:07:39
  saying I really enjoyed this, right, I enjoyed the conversation. I learned
• 1:07:42
  a lot, and it kind of reminded me of a lot of great literature
• 1:07:45
  is supposed to do. In the sense that I've been thinking of very little
• 1:07:46
  else aside from this story and Leserto over the last two days, and for
• 1:07:53
  a thirty page story. That's quite accomplishment. Yeah. No, I also
• 1:07:57
  very much enjoyed the story. And I was going to say before, like
• 1:07:59
  when we were talking about how Bartleby affirms nothing like it. I mean people
• 1:08:02
  have made the parallel with you know, the the nineteen I think like nineteen
• 1:08:05
  ninety eight movie, you know, Office Space with that guy and and and
• 1:08:10
  there is a scene when when the main character right in that mo in that
• 1:08:13
  movie, he obviously has that weird I mean, they're not the same stories
• 1:08:16
  at all, but I think maybe there's some inspiration Office Space from to the
• 1:08:20
  Bartleby story. At least there's some parallels. But it's just I'm reminded of
• 1:08:24
  when Peter Gibbons, like the main character just stops going to work and stops
• 1:08:28
  listening to his boss. And I guess there is the one parallel to where
• 1:08:30
  Peter Gibbons's boss is also extremely non confrontational. Right, It's like doing everything
• 1:08:35
  he can to like avoid confrontation. That's why he always says He always like
• 1:08:40
  says like, yeah, if you could just go ahead and do this,
• 1:08:43
  and he's like saying yeah when he's actually saying no. Right, it's like
• 1:08:45
  this kind of like non confrontational yang. But but there's a scene when Peter
• 1:08:50
  Gibbons is like talking to like his love interest Jennifer Aniston. She's like,
• 1:08:54
  well, what are you like, You're just gonna not go to work,
• 1:08:56
  Like what are you gonna do? And he's like nothing. He's like,
• 1:08:58
  I would just want to sit on my ass us and do nothing. And
• 1:09:00
  it's just like this affirmation of just like nothing, and like that's really what
• 1:09:04
  he wants. His agenda really is to do nothing. And it's just reminded
• 1:09:09
  me when we're talking about like that, Bartleby's kind of affirming nothing. You
• 1:09:13
  forgot the most important part of that movie, which is the Getta Boys classic
• 1:09:16
  song Damn it Feels Good to Be a Gangster, which accompanies the montage if
• 1:09:20
  He's doing nothing. It's a fucking classic song. It deserves more respect than
• 1:09:25
  it got. And if you're listening Ghetto Boys because you happen to like classic
• 1:09:28
  bills, shout out to you. Great song deserves more respect than it gets.
• 1:09:32
  Send me a message, DM me, whatever happens to be, let's
• 1:09:35
  get it back on traction. I think the Razor's Edge we've kind of talked
• 1:09:41
  touched around it a few times. But is first of all, is the
• 1:09:44
  narrator reliable, because if we take his point of view, Bartleby's treated very
• 1:09:49
  well, like no one arresting him as a very last resort. People try
• 1:09:55
  to understand him, and I guess it falls on your interpretation whether or not
• 1:10:00
  he was treated well, whether or not you trust the narrator that he was
• 1:10:02
  treated well. But that kind of diffuses this radical political protest to a degree
• 1:10:10
  unless you think that Bartleby is the kind of person who just protests against the
• 1:10:15
  entire system and this is like his artistic act is to let himself die at
• 1:10:19
  the hands of the system by forcing it to kill him. What reasons do
• 1:10:24
  we have? What reasons do we ever thinking that he's an unreliable narrative?
• 1:10:28
  Is there like is there evidence of that in the text? I mean,
• 1:10:30
  I'm no literary, Like that's not my feeling. Even the fact that he's
• 1:10:33
  writing like after Bartleby has already died, right, like he knows how this
• 1:10:39
  ends, that already can make us a little suspicious of Okay, you know,
• 1:10:43
  what is he trying to prove here? Who is he trying to convince?
• 1:10:45
  I was this day I asked him about his family. I did so
• 1:10:49
  removed from Bartleby's own thought processes. We have to be a little bit skeptical
• 1:10:54
  when we see him project so much onto this character. Yeah. Yeah,
• 1:10:58
  a lot of the characters in the in the story, I was almost called,
• 1:11:00
  the novel remind me of what like de Takaville said about the democratic spirit
• 1:11:04
  in America at the time, which is that it's kind of compassionate and it's
• 1:11:09
  motivated by sentiment, but it's a very superficial and soft sentiment, right.
• 1:11:13
  It's not really interested in probing into the individuality or particularity of people. It's
• 1:11:17
  universalized in the kind of a Noll sense of I care for everybody and I
• 1:11:20
  want everyone to like me, right, And that struck me as this narrator
• 1:11:25
  to a t. It's kind of a zemplar of this democratic ethos focused on
• 1:11:30
  ease, tranquility and taking the quickest pass and yearning for people to like him.
• 1:11:34
  Right. But I never got the sense he really cared about understanding bartle
• 1:11:38
  b as person. Yeah, we're confined to the narrator's point of view,
• 1:11:42
  and it's told out of memory, obviously, So yeah, that's the that's
• 1:11:46
  the probably the extent of the unreliability. But interestingly, we're never given a
• 1:11:51
  name. The narrator is never named, but we know things about him,
• 1:11:56
  whereas Bartleby is named about him. Yeah, oh wait, what are we
• 1:12:02
  talking about. No, bartle B is named, but the narrator never is.
• 1:12:06
  We don't know who the narrator, we don't know his name, really,
• 1:12:10
  so that kind of invites some interesting examples. But you know, bunsch
• 1:12:15
  Olhan's reading is just this is just a tale of exhaustion, That's what it
• 1:12:20
  is. He's a product of a disciplinary society. You know, this,
• 1:12:26
  the soul crushing work of scrivenering, is in a way sort of representative of
• 1:12:30
  these new sorts of like one dimensional men as as they'd be called maybe in
• 1:12:38
  the mid twentieth century. In this one dimensional man, bartle B, who
• 1:12:43
  is Who's who is there? You know? He says in the prison,
• 1:12:45
  he says, I know where I am. You know, when the when,
• 1:12:47
  the when? The narrator kind of recounts him coming himself, coming in
• 1:12:53
  and trying to be like, oh, well, you're gonna be treated well
• 1:12:56
  here, and you have all your own space and you're fed, and then
• 1:12:59
  and then Bartleby kind of just says, I know where I am. Like
• 1:13:01
  he knows, he knows what's happening, but he just has no desire to
• 1:13:05
  stop it, no drive, no ambition. He's completely apathetic. And that's
• 1:13:12
  it. I don't think. I don't think there's any necessity to read into
• 1:13:15
  this some kind of messianic you know, second coming decreation so that the second
• 1:13:23
  creation can take place, and Bartleby's the messenger of this. Like all that
• 1:13:27
  just seems like such an unnecessary interpretive apparatus, built up around wishful thinking and
• 1:13:34
  with a dash of Marxist hopefulness, which is not bad, but I mean,
• 1:13:40
  you know, it's not what the story is conveying. The story is
• 1:13:43
  just cheer, you know, hopelessness. That's what it is. There's no
• 1:13:47
  hope here, and the narrator at least he can save himself, he can
• 1:13:51
  save his own soul if he can't save Bartleby's. But he's never going to
• 1:13:56
  escape that guilt that he could have done something he did. And yeah,
• 1:14:00
  like there's that really funny sequence at the end in the prison where he's giving
• 1:14:03
  him like a list of different jobs he can do, and he's like,
• 1:14:06
  what about being a bartender? He's like, I think I prefer not to
• 1:14:10
  do that, even though I'm not particularly particularly especially particular. And then he's
• 1:14:14
  like, well what about you know, would you like to work for it
• 1:14:15
  as another scribner? He's like, I prefer not to even though I'm not
• 1:14:17
  particular. And it's very kind of anti t Kenzie in that sense, because
• 1:14:21
  you'd almost think at the end of this he winds up in prison, and
• 1:14:25
  if you wanted a happy ending, or he's intended to be heroic store character,
• 1:14:28
  there'd be a rejuvenation at the end, he would find his calling and
• 1:14:30
  go do that, and that would be the story about modernity. But he
• 1:14:34
  just wants at to do absolutely nothing, even though apparently he's not opposed to
• 1:14:39
  doing any one job in particular, it's the whole lot of them that he
• 1:14:43
  just rejects. Right, that's a really funny sequence. I think he even
• 1:14:45
  offers him a trip to Europe. Would you like to travel overseas? I
• 1:14:49
  know, no, thanks, He's got no interest in anything. I mean,
• 1:14:53
  that's that's almost what you feel like today, when you have all these
• 1:14:57
  choices, it's hard to be interested in some thing. But you know at
• 1:15:00
  the end that juxtaposition to use Matt's favorite word is Bartleby humanity at the end
• 1:15:09
  there, right, like like you know, Bartleby's death is the death of
• 1:15:13
  you know, not humanity literally, but you know, oh the humanity of
• 1:15:15
  it. You know, right, there's no humanity is dead. Bartleby is
• 1:15:20
  dead. We live in this disciplinary society and there's no hope. You know.
• 1:15:25
  Bartleby is the last column of a ruined temple and he falls over,
• 1:15:29
  and you know it will die with a whimper, not with a great bang.
• 1:15:34
  I think I'll just read the last phrase, the last bit, because
• 1:15:38
  I had a bit of trouble. I'm not really sure what it means.
• 1:15:41
  I'll just read at length, if you'll permit me. So the narrator,
• 1:15:45
  here's a rumor that before Bartleby came to work in his office, he worked
• 1:15:48
  at the dead letter office in Washington, which our male that can't get to
• 1:15:53
  the recipient for whatever reason. And I thought it was significant that it's in
• 1:15:58
  Washington. I don't know why it feels like it is. And he says,
• 1:16:02
  when I think over this rumor, hardly can I express the emotions which
• 1:16:06
  seize me dead letters? Does it not sound like dead men conceive a man
• 1:16:12
  by nature and misfortune, prone to a pallid hopelessness. Can any business seem
• 1:16:16
  more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting
• 1:16:21
  them for the flames for the cart load they are annually burned. Sometimes from
• 1:16:27
  the folded out paper. The paled clerk takes a ring the finger. It
• 1:16:30
  was meant for, perhaps molders in the grave, A banknote sent in swiftest
• 1:16:35
  charity, he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers anymore. Pardon
• 1:16:41
  for those who died despairing, hope for those who died unhoping, Good tidings
• 1:16:45
  for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities on the errands of life. These
• 1:16:51
  letters speed to death, Ah Bartleby, Oh the humanity. What I want
• 1:17:00
  to say is what this remind I actually took this as a sign in factor.
• 1:17:04
  Maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong about this, that the narrator
• 1:17:08
  is unreliable and still doesn't understand what he's going on. If anything, I
• 1:17:12
  took this as an affirmation of his searching to kind of incorporate this into his
• 1:17:15
  cliched mode of thinking. And it's still resisting that kind of interpretation. His
• 1:17:20
  kind of oh the humanity at the end of this reminded me a bit of
• 1:17:25
  Helen Lovejoy from The Simpsons, you know, when she goes, oh,
• 1:17:27
  please think of the children. Right, That's the sense I got from this,
• 1:17:30
  like, oh the humanity, Think of the profundity of this guy who
• 1:17:32
  was like too good for this world or wasn't able to handle this world,
• 1:17:36
  which kind of to me signified he still didn't quite get it or something.
• 1:17:40
  I think there's two interpretations here, either like Bartleb got his mind infected by
• 1:17:45
  death and hopelessness by reading all these letters that were meant for dead people somehow,
• 1:17:50
  or that Bartleb is just us, like a regular figure, just like
• 1:17:56
  all these people who wrote the dead letters that are all dead. Everyone's going
• 1:17:59
  to die, just like Bartleby did. Yeah, he's a being unto death,
• 1:18:04
  as Han points out, his dasign as a negative being unto death.
• 1:18:11
  But it does seem like to your point, Matt, yeah, the narrator
• 1:18:14
  is like clutching to this one biographical detail he's dug up on Bartleby and it's
• 1:18:17
  like, Oh, that explains it all. Oh the humanity, right,
• 1:18:21
  And it's like, is it that simple? You know, because we also
• 1:18:25
  remember, like he was the one describing Bartleby this whole time as like this
• 1:18:28
  apparition, this cadaverous entity in my office. So like this is still how
• 1:18:32
  he's now constructed, you know, his interpretation of Bartleby. Okay, the
• 1:18:36
  dead letters stuff that resolves it. Oh the humanity I can go to sleep
• 1:18:41
  now, Like yeah, but that's what's interesting, is like do we buy
• 1:18:44
  that? Do we accept that? That's like the final sort of like take
• 1:18:46
  on this, because ostensibly he could have kept Bartleby alive just by letting him
• 1:18:50
  sit in his office and do his thing. It's by as a result of
• 1:18:56
  his actions that Bartleby is dead. And then he kind of goes at the
• 1:18:59
  end, well everybody dies. Is that? Is that what you're getting at?
• 1:19:02
  But that's what I mean. Yeah, there's almost this kind of suit
• 1:19:05
  of profundity to it where he's still searching to kind of incorporate them into his
• 1:19:09
  cliched way of thinking about things. He resists that, so now he kind
• 1:19:13
  of looks at this as the kind of explanatory device that gives him a way
• 1:19:18
  out right. It's like, oh, he was depressed, he read all
• 1:19:20
  these letters, think of all the depressed people out there, kind of like
• 1:19:24
  a Simon and Garfunkl song, you know, all the lonely people out there,
• 1:19:28
  Oh the humanity, and then I can rest easy now, kind of
• 1:19:30
  ruminating on that, right, Whereas to me, there's nothing that suggested that
• 1:19:34
  he wasn't particularly melancholic figure in that sense of the word. Right Again,
• 1:19:42
  there's almost this kind of greater nobility to him that resists that interpretation of Bartleby
• 1:19:47
  for me at least, right that he was just really sad, listen to
• 1:19:50
  too much nine and snails all night long, and then just decide he's going
• 1:19:54
  to start himself to death. Right, Yeah, I mean he does want
• 1:19:57
  to let bartle Be, you know, stay in the office. But you
• 1:20:00
  know, we get the whole explanation that his professional network starts looking at him
• 1:20:05
  funny, that is, who's this unaccountable character hovering in your office that won't
• 1:20:12
  do anything we ask, you know, so he starts to get a bad
• 1:20:15
  reputation for it. So, you know, on errands of life, these
• 1:20:17
  letters speed onto death. Right. I don't know his letter a kind of
• 1:20:20
  interpretation or metaphor for Bartleby or something that just falls out of the system.
• 1:20:27
  You know, when we're I think we're going about our business and certain necessities
• 1:20:30
  are enforced on us. And so Bartleby is like one of those victims of
• 1:20:35
  life, you know, and like so these letters speed onto death. Bartle
• 1:20:41
  B is just the element of death, and we feel guilt. We feel
• 1:20:45
  racked with guilt, and we layer on these explanations and like, you know,
• 1:20:50
  we're carried along by necessity, and sometimes you can't you know, it's
• 1:20:55
  like it sounds stupid and cliche, but you can't save everybody from the system
• 1:21:00
  that you're trying to fight. That's they're there, those kinds of people like
• 1:21:04
  bartle B, and they're the reason we do what we do. We critique,
• 1:21:10
  we criticize, but you can't save them, and you feel guilt.
• 1:21:15
  I really think that's it. Just like a dead letter. Just like a
• 1:21:19
  dead letter, Bartleb fell out of the system, and just like a dead
• 1:21:23
  letter, he has no recipient recipient as in like a purpose here. So
• 1:21:29
  bartle B didn't really have a purpose here to whom was he sent. There
• 1:21:33
  was one point at which the narrator questioned, was this vagrant sent from God
• 1:21:39
  to test my compassion? And then of course his professional network gets in the
• 1:21:44
  way and he has to cut Bartleb loose. But I have this suspicion too,
• 1:21:48
  And here's my interpretation. I guess I have the suspicion that Melville saw
• 1:21:53
  us in bartle B. And then when you get to Kafka and Camu,
• 1:21:58
  now we are are truly Bartleby. We're sent here like a dead letter addressed
• 1:22:04
  to someone who isn't here to receive us. Very kind of purloined letter,
• 1:22:11
  Like you know, it's even we never read the contents of it, but
• 1:22:15
  it's there in plain sight, but we don't know what the fuck it says.
• 1:22:18
  But everybody seems to be looking for it, but nobody could find it.
• 1:22:21
  We should do that one next time with with Litvic the poet on an
• 1:22:30
  excuse to talk about Lacan two. Yeah, that's a good idea. All
• 1:22:34
  right, let vic any conclusions on how we did as as political philosophy and
• 1:22:41
  philosophy nerds. How how did our analysis go? No? I think this
• 1:22:45
  was a great discussion. Yeah, I really liked Matt's take on the elite,
• 1:22:48
  aristocratic kind of bartle B. That's really cool. Before we've just been
• 1:22:53
  reading Leserto a lot, so like that kind of yeah, yeah, no,
• 1:22:57
  I actually just wanted to on a more personal An anecdote mentioned a Bartleby
• 1:23:00
  moment that I saw in grad school once. This is a mutual friend of
• 1:23:03
  ours, but I think I was the only one who saw this in person.
• 1:23:08
  We had a friend in our master's program who worked as a research assistant
• 1:23:11
  for a prof. No names mentioned, but he was a pretty laid back
• 1:23:14
  guy. He organized files with this program for this prof. And one morning
• 1:23:18
  in class, the prof mentioned this program to the class and he asked our
• 1:23:21
  friend, in front of everyone else, perhaps you'd like to explain how this
• 1:23:26
  program works, since you've worked with it so much, And he tosses in
• 1:23:30
  the easiest ball to catch, and our friend just like looks up and he's
• 1:23:33
  like, you know, never talked in class before. He's like, no,
• 1:23:35
  no, that's fine, And the prof was so the prof was so
• 1:23:44
  confused because he didn't even know, like, you're allowed to do that,
• 1:23:46
  like none of us did that. You can just decline to participate in like
• 1:23:51
  this academic like whatever workplace kind of facade. And yeah, so there are
• 1:23:57
  real Bartleby's out there, and we've seen some of him. Yeah, the
• 1:24:01
  humanity, that's hilarious. Exactly. Oh the humanity. Yeah, all right,
• 1:24:10
  Shelley, sign off, or yeah, let's sign off. You can
• 1:24:15
  prefer not to say anything else, the good one. Yeah, I'm going
• 1:24:20
  to get some ginger nut cakes and me I'm hungry. I would We got
• 1:24:25
  to say thank you very much Victor for coming, uh welcome your comments.
• 1:24:30
  If you want us to do another book, we'll bring them back. We'll
• 1:24:31
  do Purloined Letter. We'll do Purloined Letter with Lacan. That'd be fun and
• 1:24:34
  we'll bring it back. Or if you'd like to write the introduction to our
• 1:24:39
  show, we're crowdsourcing that. Now send them to me somehow. Float that
• 1:24:44
  out there. All right, take care everyone, see you guys. This
• 1:24:46
  has been what Pillpod fifty five cheers late. How about that the FAMI