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Bartleby's Closed Desk: Reading Melville against Affect
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2017
Abstract
To reconsider the affective turn in American literary studies, this essay reads Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), with reference to “Benito Cereno” (1855) and The Confidence-Man (1857), as an anti-affect story. By shedding light on silent characters in these works – Bartleby, Babo, and Black Guinea – it argues that Melville endeavors to adumbrate, not articulate, their private interiorities through language. Calling the inner recesses of his silent characters “secret emotions,” Melville probes into the boundaries between the effable and the ineffable by testing the limits of literary language. If “affect” refers to the kind of emotion that eludes signification through language, reading Melville in this manner encourages a reappraisal of the relationship between affect as a non-linguistic emotion and literature as a linguistic construct.
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References
1 Melville, Herman, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” in Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces: 1839–1860, ed. Hayford, Harrison et al. . (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987), 13–45Google Scholar, 28.
2 Ngai, Sianne, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Hurh, Paul, American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frank, Adam, Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015)Google Scholar. For other notable monographs on affect and American literature see Thrailkill, Jane F., Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Houser, Heather, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Ana, Jeffery Santa, Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
3 Throughout this essay, I alternate between “emotion” and “feeling,” while explicitly distinguishing them from “affect.” Sara Ahmed argues, “For Massumi, if affects are pre-personal and non-intentional, emotions are personal and intentional; if affects are unmediated and escape signification; emotions are mediated and contained by signification.” Ahmed, Sara, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2015), 207Google Scholar. For further discussions on the distinctions between these terms see Cvetkovich, Ann, “Affect,” in Burgett, Bruce and Hendler, Glen, eds., Keywords for American Cultural Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 13–16Google Scholar; Massumi, Brian, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 28–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Altieri, Charles, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 2Google Scholar; Ngai, 25–26.
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12 Melville, “Bartleby,” 16.
13 Ibid., 17.
14 Ibid., 17.
15 Ibid., 16, 20, 21, 27, 28, 35, 35, 36, 36, 38, 40, 42, 42.
16 Ibid., 14.
17 Ibid., 14.
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19 Melville, “Bartleby,” 21; italics added.
20 Ibid., 26–27; italics added.
21 Ibid., 20.
22 The narrator's inability to express his feelings toward the scrivener denies him a sense of catharsis. Due to Bartleby's “passive resistance,” the narrator cannot feel anger toward the scrivener strong enough to express in words, suffering only a minor sense of uneasiness. Looking for ways of emotional catharsis, he feels “burned to be rebelled against” more by Bartleby. Melville, “Bartleby,” 23, 14.
23 “Affect” as a critical term is so complicated that it is virtually impossible to pin down a single definition. As Jonathan Flatley notes, “while there is a great deal of excellent recent work on affect in several disciplines … this does not mean that a general consensus, or even a common conversation, has emerged.” Flatley, Jonathan, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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25 Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, 3, defines “affect” as what “designates body-based feelings that arise in response to elicitors as varied as interpersonal and institutional relations.”
26 Hemmings, “Invoking Affect,” 550.
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30 Reed, “The Specter of Wall Street,” 249.
31 Melville, “Bartleby,” 36.
32 Ibid., 23–24.
33 Kuebrich, “Melville's Doctrine of Assumptions,” 396.
34 Melville, “Bartleby,” 14.
35 Goldfarb, “Charity as Purchase,” 240.
36 Ibid., 258.
37 For the conception of philanthropy in Melville's day see Ryan, Susan M., “Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence,” American Literary History, 12, 4 (2000), 685–712CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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39 Ibid., 29.
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41 Ibid., 31.
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43 Gasché, Rodolphe, “The ‘Violence’ of Deconstruction,” Research in Phenomenology, 45 (2015), 169–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 174. Gasché’s discussion of the violent nature of names revolves around Jacques Derrida's argument about names in Of Grammatology. In the book, Derrida elaborates on the violent nature of naming: “To name, to give names that it will on occasion be forbidden to pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute.” Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 112Google Scholar.
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46 “Bartleby” itself constitutes the narrator's effort to give some distinct, linguistic form to the narrator's feelings toward Bartleby's inscrutable existence. As Margaret Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 52, observes, narrating a story is an act of anti-affect because it can be considered to belong to the realm of emotions: “affect as embodied intensity is more instinctive and immediate than any language-based act such as telling a story or having conversation. Discourse is identified with the conscious, the planned and the deliberate while affect is understood as the automatic, the involuntary, and the non-representational. Discourse and affect are seen as having an almost antagonistic relationship.” Elizabeth Wissinger also argues, “The act of actualization is to assign meaning to an image, to delimit it, to bring it to the conscious plane of interpretation, as, for example, when affects are narrated as emotions, among other things.” Wissinger, Elizabeth, “Always on Display: Affective Production in the Modeling Industry,” in Clough, Patricia Ticineto, ed., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 231–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 243–44.
47 For an important discussion of silence in Melville's works see Goldberg, Shari, Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 87–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lee, Maurice S., “Melville's Subversive Political Philosophy: ‘Benito Cereno’ and the Fate of Speech,” American Literature, 72, 3 (2000), 495–519CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48 Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno” in Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 46–117, 116; italics added.
49 This paragraph on “Benito Cereno” is largely quoted from my previously published essay. See Furui, Yoshiaki, “Transcending Distances: A Poetics of Acknowledgement in Melville's ‘Benito Cereno,’” Canadian Review of American Studies, 44, 3 (2014), 450–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 465–66.
50 Melville, Herman, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Hayford, Harrison et al. . (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1984), 11–12Google Scholar; italics added. This paragraph on The Confidence-Man is largely quoted from my previously published essay. See Furui, Yoshiaki, “Secret Emotions: Disability in Public and Melville's The Confidence-Man,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, 15, 2 (2013), 54–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 65–66.
51 Melville, The Confidence-Man, 12.
52 Ibid., 251.
53 Butler, Judith, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
54 Frank, Transferential Poetics, 54–55; italics added.
55 This refusal-of-depth model is typical of affect-oriented scholars. For instance, Wendy Ann Lee argues, “Thus, Bartleby cannot be made to move since there would be nothing to move … The evacuation of volition implied by Bartleby's motionlessness collapses the distinction between voluntary and involuntary motion … The lawyer's futile search for Bartleby's vital signs indicates a disrupted relation between surface and depth.” Lee, Wendy Ann, “The Scandal of Insensibility; or, the Bartleby Problem,” PMLA, 130, 5 (2015), 1405–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1412; italics added.
56 Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy, 11.
57 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 10.
58 Ibid., 32.
59 Gilmore, American Romanticism, 142.
60 Melville, “Bartleby,” 26, 31.
61 Lee, “The Scandal of Insensibility,” 1408–9.
62 On this ownership of emotions, Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 24, observes that an emotion “is a relation to others, a response to a situation and to the world. An emotion is above all a relational pattern and as such, I would say, is automatically distributed and located across the psychosocial field. Affect is never wholly owned, always intersecting and interacting.”
63 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 8–9.
64 Millner, Michael, Fever Reading: Affect and Reading Badly in the Early American Public Sphere (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012), 13Google Scholar.