Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Advertisement
- 1 Casting Off
- 2 Reading a Novel
- 3 Reading a Poem
- 4 Drama: An Aside
- 5 The Essay: A Note (On Being Late)
- 6 On Critical and Creative Writing
- 7 The Literary Turn
- 8 Veerer: Where Ghosts Live
- 9 Veerer: Reading Melville's ‘Bartleby’ A Small Case of Civil Disobedience
- 10 Veering with Lawrence
- Appendix: A Note on Nodism
- Index
9 - Veerer: Reading Melville's ‘Bartleby’ A Small Case of Civil Disobedience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Advertisement
- 1 Casting Off
- 2 Reading a Novel
- 3 Reading a Poem
- 4 Drama: An Aside
- 5 The Essay: A Note (On Being Late)
- 6 On Critical and Creative Writing
- 7 The Literary Turn
- 8 Veerer: Where Ghosts Live
- 9 Veerer: Reading Melville's ‘Bartleby’ A Small Case of Civil Disobedience
- 10 Veering with Lawrence
- Appendix: A Note on Nodism
- Index
Summary
‘Nobody should ever forget the debt of eternal gratitude they owe to whoever it was first got them to read Herman Melville properly.’
(John Burnside)The aircraft veered into position, halting.
(Don DeLillo)Veering is my subject. My subject is veering. I would like to leave these sentences side by side here, in all their undisambiguated simplicity, as a kind of Tweedledum and Tweedledee entrance-way to a reading of Melville's ‘Bartleby’. I propose to begin with a recapitulation of what I have been trying to explore in this book. There is something a bit odd, even perverse about the gesture of recapitulating. As Rachel Bowlby has noted, recapitulation has ‘the peculiar quality of being an ending that includes a beginning. To recapitulate is to go over the main points of an argument, at the end, but from the start.’ In short, there is something veerable about a recap. To veer – just to recap – is to change direction, to turn aside or away, to alter course; veerable is ‘tending to veer; changeable’ (OED, ‘veerable’, adj.). It is perfectly possible for a person to veer, but just as likely there is a vehicle of some sort involved: a ship veers round, a car veers off the road. Non-human animals veer. Veering is not necessarily human. It points, we might say, in significantly non-anthropocentric directions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- VeeringA Theory of Literature, pp. 151 - 176Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011