1/10/2023 0 Comments Bartleby the scrivener themesWas it a critique of the spurned writer against the reading community, as some commentators would have it? After writing Moby Dick, Melville had lost his early fame gained by writing yarn-ripping adventure style stories such as Typee or Omoo and was forced to become somewhat of a peddling functionary himself.Īny attempt at classification is always guesswork, especially when a writer does not leave behind diary entries or correspondence to clear up the matter for one.īut never before had it seemed so appealing to me not to know something. Was it an anti-capitalist fable? A satire aimed at the well-to-do, against the mindlessness that can come with operating within the cogs of the wealth machine? Critics had remarked on the similarity in tone and voice but there is no reason to suppose Kafka read Melville, seeing as interest in him was only revived after Kafka’s own death. Was this the origin story of Kafka? A functionary who decided not to toe the line anymore, ultimately descending into madness or even turning into a bug seemed much like the famed Czech writer I’d come to appreciate during school days. It is here that he dies unexpectedly, the mystery of who he was and what he intended to do with his actions ultimately remaining unanswered. Yet even then the man continues to stay till he is finally committed to a prison for being a vagrant. His exasperated boss, a lawyer who owns the offices in question and is also the narrator of the tale, after failing to motivate him or even to get him to leave, relocates himself, leaving Bartleby behind. The legal copyist working in a New York law office one day simply refuses to do his work, content to sit at his desk, day-in and day-out, re-iterating only the bland statement: ‘I’d prefer not to’. It was then that Bartleby the Scrivener spoke to me.Ī character whose thoughts and motivations are impossible to eke out, he leaves the reader as well as his fellow characters flummoxed. And that I was not only not going to be there to celebrate that but that I’d probably be curling up, like a hedgehog at home, alone, with no job in sight for the foreseeable future, looking towards a life that was not hopeless but unknowable, like a blank slate. Suddenly, watching the Federal Chancellor talk on my laptop screen, I realised archival science was about to experience a revival. Maintaining the records to always have something on file when you couldn’t travel to another country, maybe due to political or financial reasons. Keeping history alive for posterity, that was it, in a nutshell. Just a few weeks ago, I’d been working in one of the largest media archives in Europe, indexing, cataloguing, sorting and watching through piles and piles of original video footage-all the things you’d never see in the news for fear of the amount of gore or even just for the plain shaky camera movements. I’d just left an internship and was in the middle of applying for jobs, when, out of nowhere, the Austrian government decided to proclaim a nationwide lockdown. Technology, politics and societal mores may have been transformed yet the rhythm of daily work, in some ways, never did.Ī few months ago, I was scouring the internet looking for a quick read to divert myself from the spectre of moral panic that was Covid-19. Give or take a 150 years, not much has changed. A feather quill lying on a sheet of paper. Credit to Bill Bragg, (2012)Ī blinking computer screen, a cursor stuck on a blank page.
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