DAN McCALL
THE SILENCE OF BARTLEBY
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Praise
“McCall’s book is alive and bright and sane… a breath of fresh air.”— Milton Stern, author of The Fine hammered Steel of Herman Melville
Inside Jacket
In The Silence of Bartleby Dan McCall proposes a new reading of Herman Melville’s classic short tale “Bartleby, The Scrivener.” McCall discusses in detail how “Bartleby” has been read in the last half-century by practitioners of widely used critical methodologies—including source-study, psychoanalytic interpretation, and Marxist analysis. McCall argues that in these elaborate readings of the tale the text itself may be lost, for critics frequently seem to be more interested in their own concerns than in Melville’s. Efforts to enrich “Bartleby” may actually impoverish it, preventing us from experiencing the sense of wonder and pain that the story provides.
McCall combines close reading of Melville’s tale with a lively analysis of over four decades of commentary, and includes the text of the original “Bartleby” as an appendix. The Silence of Bartleby helps us to read the story on its own terms, and offers a provocative assessment of modern critical strategies and the way that reading is now taught in American colleges and universities. Students of Melville, American literature, and literary theory will welcome this book and profit by it.
Excerpt - from the Preface
While writing this book I was chastened by something I heard at a memorial service for one of my best beloved colleagues. He died a month before he was scheduled to begin his last semester of teaching. A man who had known him for forty years said of him, “He never forgot that the work he was studying was more important than he was.”
A practical corollary of that principle is Jacques Barzun’s assertion that “the critic’s duty is to leave the beholder’s soul to its adventure, to its enjoyment”:
It is not the critic’s business to disembowel the work by applying to it a
doctrine which leaves the reader feeling that the critic’s essay is so complete
that reading the work itself would be at once superfluous and less
comprehensive. The critic, we must never forget, is but a handmaid.
-- (J. Barzun, “A Little Matter of Sense,” New York Times Book Review)
I hope I haven’t forgotten, and I have put Bartleby, The Scrivener at the end of this book because the story itself is what we should always be reaching for and coming back to. Bartleby is a masterpiece by our most powerful writer, a central text in what we have come to call the American Renaissance, one of the very finest works of short fiction in our literature. By itself, the story warrants—may even require—elaborate analysis. But going through the voluminous criticism and scholarship devoted to Bartleby, I felt more than once that I had lost the story. I’d lost what got me interested in the first place. So I hope this book provides some illustrative examples of “the critic’s duty” and “the critic’s business.” What I have to say about reading Bartleby is about reading Melville, about reading in general, and especially about the way reading is taught in our colleges and universities today. Bartleby, The Scrivener is my case in point, and my discussions of it are intended to be paradigmatic.