Melville, Emerson, Thoreau

The Remains of Friendship and the Ethics of Misreading: Melville, Emerson, Thoreau

Naomi Morgenstern

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Volume 57, Number 3, 2011 (Nos. 224 O.S.), pp. 241-273 (Article)

Published by Washington State University DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esq.2012.0001

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/470433

Access provided at 10 Jun 2019 16:46 GMT from University of Toronto Library The Remains of Friendship and the Ethics of Misreading: Melville, Emerson, Thoreau

naomi morgenstern

There is no friendship nor justice towards lifeless things. —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Is it possible, without setting off loud protests on the part of militants of an edifying or dogmatic humanism, to think and to live the gentle rigour of friendship, the law of friendship qua the experience of a certain ahumanity? —Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (1997)

In chapter 39 of The Confidence-Man (1857), the “hypothetical friend,” Charlie Noble, ostentatiously dismisses Frank Good- man’s request for financial assistance: “The negotiation of a loan is a business transaction,” Charlie tells Frank, “and I will transact no business with a friend.”1 Herman Melville’s brief chapter proceeds to unfold the perverse logic of a philosophy of friendship that realizes itself most profoundly in the refusal to heed the friend’s cry for help. According to Melville’s fictional philosopher, Mark Winsome (as glossed by his fictional disciple Egbert), to come to the friend’s assistance is immediately to annul the friendship, to violate “the delicacy of the connec- tion” (CM, 206). Beginning with Carl Van Vechten’s 1922 study, readers have been encouraged to construe such scenes as proof that The Confidence-Man is Melville’s “great transcendental

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satire” and Mark Winsome his witty and critical stand-in for Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Emerson’s fatuous essay on Friend- ship,” wrote Van Vechten, “is required preparatory reading for this book.”2 But this approach to The Confidence-Man ought to be tem- pered—if not significantly complicated—by Melville’s comments to Evert Duyckinck in March of 1849 (“Yet I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow).”3 As this letter (and any extended consideration of his work) makes clear, Melville always preferred the Emersonian “fool” over the many representatives of what he called philosophical “mediocrity”: “I love all men who dive,” wrote Melville. “Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more” (C, 121).4 Melville’s take on Emersonian friendship deserves to be reconsidered, and we might begin by reading The Confidence- Man’s serio-comic account of friendship’s “transactions” alongside an apparently antithetical scene from “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). In a moment of desperation, Melville’s lawyer-narrator tries to buy his way out of an unbearable relationship: “‘Good-bye, Bartleby; I am going—good-bye, and God some way bless you; and take that,’ slipping something in his hand. But it dropped upon the floor, and then,—strange to say—I tore myself from him whom I had so longed to be rid of.”5 No doubt a subterranean humor always threatens to break through the surface of this story too, but few readers would be willing to write it off as satire. In fact, there is ample evidence to suggest that “Bartleby” may well be one of the most philosophically provocative stories in the American literary tradition. Refusing any give or take, Melville’s idiosyncratic friends perform (as farce or tragedy) what might be called the impossibilities of friendship.6 Is the friend he or she who needs nothing from me, who “want[s] nothing” to say to me, to use Bartleby’s enigmatic closing words to the lawyer (“B,” 43)? Does exchange ruin equality? Is friendship a relationship without exchange, without economy, without debt? Without even a gift? But what kind of friendship would that be? How could we ever know that such a friendship has taken place? Such questions might provoke anxious amusement among certain readers of The Confidence-Man, but they also belong to a rich discourse on

242 THE REMAINS OF FRIENDSHIP ethics and friendship that, I would argue, brings Melville and his transcendentalist contemporaries (Emerson and Thoreau) into dialogue with much current work at the intersection of literature and philosophy.7 For those who buy into Van Vechten’s account of transcendental friendship, Melville’s fictional Emersonian engages in a “grotesque inversion of Jesus’ injunctions to lend to anyone, not merely ‘to them of whom ye hope to receive.’”8 But anyone looking to Melville for a reassuringly familiar Christian ethical philosophy will be hard-pressed to find it in “Bartleby.” In- stead, the story seems to call for what Dorothy Hale has recently called an ethics and aesthetics of alterity.9 Seeking to reconcile “post-structuralist” and “humanist” invocations of a specifically fictional ethical demand, Hale identifies a widespread investment in fiction’s capacity to give us a “felt recognition of the limits of our ways of knowing.” Specifically, Hale argues, it is the encounter with an enigmatic and resistant character—with precisely one who refuses to be, in Judith Butler’s terms, so- cially bound—that rivets the reader; if there is a uniquely ethical dimension to the literary experience, Hale continues, it should be located in a revised understanding of what Martha Nussbaum calls a relationship of “care.” Alterity cannot be learned but only “registered positively by our experience of its power to disrupt us,” Hale writes, “to leave us [in Butler’s words] exasperated, cursing, staring.”10 It is hard to hear a reference to exasperation in a discussion of ethics without thinking of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Melville’s beleaguered narrator. Bartleby’s refusal to give ground is Melville’s great aesthetic and, I would argue, ethical risk. But whereas much work on ethics and literature privileges the reader’s encounter with fictional others,11 Melville’s story narrates an internal crisis of reading that refuses any hasty resolutions. “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” in other words, does not issue an ethical call so much as it represents—and thereby theorizes—the scene of such a call. Moreover, if there is an ethical element to the “friendship” between Bartleby and the lawyer, as I hope to show, it cannot simply be described as a “positive” experience gleaned from an encounter with alterity. The lawyer’s “care” for the other is, in Melville’s story,

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intimately bound up with the possibility of a violence done to and by its figure of alterity in the very process of their mutual “apprehension.” And as such, Melville’s story also asks us to revisit the idealizations and displacements of the philosophy of friendship—not, as readers of The Confidence-Man might have been led to suspect, in order to put a safe distance between Melville and the transcendentalists, but in order to push their “exasperating” impossibilities (notably in Emerson’s 1841 “Friendship” and in the Wednesday section of Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers [1849]) toward the edge of deconstruction.12 “Bartleby” is haunted by Emersonian and Thoreauvian motifs that return in late-twentieth century philosophical invocations of Bartleby’s “pure, absolute potentiality” (Giorgio Agamben) or of the “resistant materiality” of his famous utterance (Gilles Deleuze).13 Moreover, read in the wake of the transcendentalist engagement with friendship, the story reminds us that the distinction Hale questions between “humanist” and “post-structuralist” philosophy has always been internal to whatever we might think of as an ethical struggle. “In the final analysis,” writes Barbara Johnson, “it is perhaps precisely as an apprenticeship in the repeated and inescapable oscillation between humanism and deconstruction that literature works its most rigorous and inexhaustible seductions.”14 The story of Bartleby and the lawyer solicits and performs a version of this struggle, and it does so by asking us to consider the place of failed or mis-communication in the structure of relationship. What if failure—the failure to say what we mean, the failure to read the other “properly”—were not simply that which ethical relationship sought to purge but instead that without which no relationship could ever be said to have taken place? This is one way of thinking about the irreconcilable but inevitable oscillation between what might be thought of as a humanist investment in “relationship” and a poststructuralist investment in all the ways language refuses to deliver its letters to the right address. And whereas Hale’s account of the “new ethics” repeatedly equates the ethical with readers’ ability to “successfully occupy the position made for them through narrative,” “Bartleby” suggests that the ethical always escapes “apprehension” or suc-

244 THE REMAINS OF FRIENDSHIP cessful realization in the scene opened up by this oscillation.15 The disjunction between intentionality and signification, in other words, holds open a chance for relationship but it does not guarantee an ethical experience. What we call friendship, or ethical relation, needs to be thought, therefore, alongside a consideration of what, for lack of a better term, we call the materiality of the signifier, or the resistance to signification at work in every event of meaning. Does Melville’s incurably forlorn conjuration embody the tomblike wall of materiality that ruins all communication in advance? Does he, that is to say, figure the insistence of the signifier (there’s simply no get- ting around Bartleby)? Or does he trouble all our attempts to distinguish this kind of ruination or impediment from what is sometimes (humanistically?) called the life of language or the passage of communication? Is it ethical or unethical to misread the materiality of the other into meaning and relation, that is to say, into (human) being? Under what circumstances should we abandon the other to his or her (it’s?) materiality? And how might one depart, in good conscience, from the threshold of undecidability that these questions define?

zzz Before engaging in more detail with Melville’s story, however, I want to recall, briefly, some of the motifs and preoccu- pations of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s transcendental philosophy of friendship. While they participate in many aspects of the classical tradition, Emerson and Thoreau distinctly push this philosophy toward the edge of an urgent incoherence.16 The friend’s enigmatic nonexistence in Emerson’s “Friendship,” for example, first takes the form of an absent presence, a (mere) structure of address: “Our intellectual and active powers in- crease with our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend,—and, forthwith, troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words.”17 Emerson’s friend takes shape as the recipient of a letter, but one whose liminality almost demands that he be written into existence by

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the letter writer. The friend exists as that which is to be an- ticipated, like a return letter, almost to the end of time (“Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years” [“F,” 114]). In fact, Emerson will con- clude his essay by contemplating the complete dissipation of this conjured other, and hence with the difficult thought of a non-reciprocal relation: “It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capa- cious?” (“F,” 127). Friendship may be an exchange of letters (“To my friend I write a letter and from him I receive a letter” [“F,” 124]), but it may also, or even principally, consist of an address to the other, the friend, who may or may not reply. Emerson’s friend is not only the undecidably present or absent receiver; he is also, in one of the essay’s most memora- ble passages, “a commended stranger” for whom “the house is dusted, all things fly into their places, the old coat is exchanged for the new” (“F,” 113–14). With this stranger, conversation is exalted: “We talk better than we are wont. . . . For long hours we can continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, so that they who sit by, of our kinsfolk and acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers” (“F,” 114). The friend in this form represents “humanity,” “what we wish” (“F,” 114). The friend is the good and the new; he is the embodiment of promise, maybe even a specifically democratic promise: with the friend one has a relationship to every other and to one like no other. Yet, in a heartbeat, it is all over. As soon as this stranger is “no stranger,” as soon as he begins to make himself known in his particularity (which is to be particular no longer), the moment has passed: “Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress and the dinner,—but the throbbing of the heart, and the communications of the soul, no more” (“F,” 114). Once again, Emerson’s friend seems to waver, coming in and out of focus on the threshold of the absolutely strange, and as such he seems to anticipate more recent attempts to account for the ethical

246 THE REMAINS OF FRIENDSHIP force of the literary text. “Rather than the familiar model of the literary work as friend and companion, sharing with the reader its secrets,” writes Derek Attridge, “I propose the work as stranger, even and perhaps especially when the reader knows it intimately.”18 Such formulations, virtually indistinguishable from what Van Vechten may have once dismissed as Emersonian “fatuity,” suggest that a certain kind of non-sense adheres to the philosophy of friendship: “O my friends,” Aristotle is said to have remarked, “there is no friend.”19 If we take him at his word, Henry Thoreau was someone who regularly irritated those around him by refusing to re - spond, withholding what others might have considered an appropriate display of emotion, or withholding language itself (“I know that I have frequently disappointed [friends] by not giving them words when they expected them, or such as they expected”).20 Thoreau’s friendship essay, a portion of the Wednesday chapter of A Week on the Concord and Mer - rimack Rivers, is itself a kind of explanation (although hardly apologetic) for these perceived failings: “Whenever I see my Friend I speak to him, but the expector, the man with the ears, is not he” (W, 278). In other words, my friend is not my friend. When I really see my friend, which may be, who knows, never?—in a moment?—then I will speak. Thoreau continues, temporarily identifying himself with his reader: “They will complain too that you are hard. O ye that would have the cocoa-nut wrong side outwards, when next I weep I will let you know. They ask for words and deeds, when a true relation is word and deed. If they know not of these things, how can they be informed?” (W, 278). As it turns out, Thoreau is resisting those merely “outward signs” of relation and respecting his own sovereignty as well as that of the friend through this distinctive and transcendental practice of nonrelated or silent relationship:

Each moment as we nearer drew to each, A stern respect withheld us farther yet, So that we seemed beyond each other’s reach, And less acquainted than when first we met. (W, 261)

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The friend for Thoreau is an island unto himself, and to be more precise “some fair floating isle of palms eluding the mari- ner in Pacific seas.” “I cannot hew the smallest chip out of the character of my Friend,” says Thoreau, “either to beautify or deform it” (W, 262, 284). For Thoreau, friendship involves thinking relationship outside of the blood of kinship and in the absence of any institutional solidity: “There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any reli- gion, no scripture contains its maxims. It has no temple, nor even a solitary column” (W, 263). Thoreau’s friendship is both lawless (outlaw) and obedient to the “natural” and “primitive” law before law. Not surprisingly, then, his philosophy of friendship repeatedly conjures a historical encounter between a white man and a Native American. “The Friendship which Wawatam testified for Henry the fur-trader, as described in the latter’s ‘Adventures,’ so almost bare and leafless, yet not blossomless nor fruitless, is remembered with satisfaction and security,” Thoreau writes. “The stern, imperturbable warrior, after fasting, solitude, and mortification of body, comes to the white man’s lodge, and affirms that he is the white brother whom he saw in his dream, and adopts him henceforth” (W, 274–75).21 Such “Brothers” transcend the political and return us to a pre-Christian state of nature: “When the Friend comes out of his heathenism . . . when he forgets his mythology, and treats his friend like a Christian . . . then Friendship ceases to be Friendship” (W, 276). Thoreau’s friendship is thus both “ancient” and an “anticipation of the remotest future” (W, 276); it is crucially “heathenish” and utopian, both before and beyond Christianity and modernity. Searching for other ways to describe this wordless, and ultimately impersonal, encounter, Thoreau suggests that the ideal friendship “purifies the air like electricity” (W, 275–76). Thoreau’s invocation of electricity ought to remind us that there is a distinctly shocking quality to this transcendental philosophy of friendship. The friendship that both Emerson and Thoreau attempt to put into words has the traumatizing force of a revolution, a new and unanticipatable event. Emerson’s friend-as-stranger announces the revolutionary moment, “in

248 THE REMAINS OF FRIENDSHIP the course of human events,” when something arrives that defies the logic of expectation and recognition (an event that happens “when . . . it becomes necessary”). If there is a radical dimension to Emerson’s philosophy, it is surely discernible here, in his philosophy of friendship. Emerson’s account of friendship, in other words, bears an important relationship to the new forms of relation announced and imagined by the Declaration of Independence (the latter’s “we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” is also echoed in Emerson’s reference, in a June 1840 journal entry, to “brave ties of affection not petrified by law, not dated or ordained by law to last for one year, for five years, or for life; but drawing their date like all friendship from itself only”).22 Friendship is what happens after all the old ties that bind one person (or “one people”) to another have been, to use the Declaration’s vocabulary, “dissolved.” In contemplating friendship, Emerson is distinctively contemplating democratic relation, but democratic relation as perpetually in the moment of revolution.23 This sense of friendship as a revolutionary event is also at work, I would contend, in Thoreau’s figuration of friendship as “interruption.” In one of the most intriguing moments in Thoreau’s meditation, he speculates on the relationship between the sexes and friendship through the vehicle of the visit. He concludes, predictably we might say, that friendship is more likely to take place in an encounter between men. But his logic is not orthodox: “The visit of man to man is wont to be an interruption, but the sexes naturally expect one another” (W, 271). Here, Thoreau imagines relationships between men and women as “natural,” which in this instance means “social” and conventional (the sexes naturally expect one another), while the interruption, the surprise, the guest whom one might not have the capacity to welcome, would be, for a man, another man.24 Indeed, this conceptualization of the friend as interruption condenses much of the distinctiveness of the American transcendental philosophy of the friend. Transcendental friendship recalls not so much a particular individual or individuals, and certainly not an event fully present to itself, but rather something more akin to a disruptive (political) decision or

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intervention. The ideal (male) friends would remain suspended in a state of perpetual interruption, the interruption that also marks the moment of sovereign autonomy, which is to say of sovereign decision.25 Language, we shouldn’t be surprised, flounders in the face of such a relationship: “The language of Friendship is not words,” Thoreau will write, “but meanings. It is an intelligence above language” (W, 273).26 And like Emerson, Thoreau tries to imagine an impossible relationship between sovereign beings, a relationship without concession: “‘Consent only to be what you are. I alone will never stand in your way. This is what I would like,—to be as intimate with you as our spirits are intimate,—respecting you as I respect my ideal. Never to profane one another by word or action, even by a thought. Between us, if necessary, let there be no acquaintance’” (W, 270). Such a sovereign acquaintance stands on the edge of the ludicrous (friendship without acquaintance) and on the edge of language. At this edge, language seems to have been distilled to nomen- clature: “For the most part we stupidly confound one man with another,” laments Thoreau (W, 266); but the friend is he who can speak his friend’s name: “There are few even whom I should venture to call earnestly by their most proper names. A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs” (W, 273). This fantasy of the proper name, of the most proper name, marks the site at which language would appear to operate simultaneously at its most and least arbitrary. In a true democracy, Thoreau implies, everyone’s name would be known and spoken; “everything in the political question of friendship,” Derrida writes, “seems to be suspended on the secret of a name.”27 Finally, the revolutionary aspect of transcendental friendship is also apparent in Emerson and Thoreau’s invocation of a certain crisis of agency in the event of friendship. “Friendship,” writes Thoreau, “is a drama in which the parties have no part to act. We are all Mussulmen and fatalists in this respect” (W, 269). “We talk of choosing our friends,” writes Emerson, “but friends are self-elected” (“F,” 123). “My friends have come to me unsought,” he continues. “The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find

250 THE REMAINS OF FRIENDSHIP them, or rather, not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one” (“F,” 115). For Emerson the “divine” names the supplement that would allow for relationship (and thus an opening to the other) without any violation of sovereign singularity. Anticipating Agamben’s “abyss of potentiality,” Emerson’s “Great God” gathers up all the violence and impossibility of transcendental friendship and opens up a chance for what Derrida describes in Politics of Friendship under the aegis of a deliberately indeterminable “perhaps”:

Perhaps one day, here or there, who knows, something may happen between two people in love, who would love each other lovingly (is this still the right word?) in such a way that friendship, just once, perhaps, for the first time (another perhaps), once and only once, therefore for the first and last time (perhaps, perhaps), will become the correct name, the right and just name for that which would then have taken place. . . . But how can you adjust a name to what could take place only once, perhaps, for the first and last time? In other words—and in a much more general way this time—how can you name an event?28

zzz If the philosophical risk that Emerson and Thoreau take when considering friendship—the risk of never coinciding with a friend, of deferring friendship in the name of friendship—generates a transcendental promise (friendship is that which is always to come), Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” gives an immediate, if inscrutable, face to the evanescence of the friend. Melville’s story, that is to say, helps us come to terms with the difficult Derridean concept of a friendship (or democracy) “to come” that is nevertheless not abandoned to the future. Moreover, Bartleby does not show us the face of

an anthropomorphized abstraction (Bartleby as the incarna- 251 NAOMI MORGENSTERN

tion of the idea of friendship) but that of an undecidable or threshold humanity at once waiting to be recognized as human and already among us, befriendable, with a name and a set of immediate demands. On the face of it, of course, there is something a little perverse about reading “Bartleby, the Scrivener” as a contribution to the philosophy of friendship. It doesn’t appear to give us a portrait of mutuality, equality, reciprocity, or even the faint hope of communion between two sovereign beings. “[It] is not so much the story of Bartleby as it is the story of the narrator’s ethical relation, or failure of ethical relation, to Bartleby,” writes J. Hillis Miller.29 Melville’s story takes the form, Branka Arsić suggests, of “an apology to a friend” in which the friendship always remains at a distance.30 Perhaps, then, if one were going to read about friendship and Melville, one ought to turn to Queequeg and Ishmael or Tommo and Toby? Or even Amasa Delano and Benito Cereno? But this would be to presume that we know, in advance, what friendship looks like, and one of the achievements of “Bartleby” is to trouble any such certainty. The failure of the friendship in “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a failure that has variously been ascribed to the lawyer’s moral-political failings or the scrivener’s incurable resignation, deserves to be read, instead, as an inscription of that radical contingency (or, to recall friendship’s etymology, that freedom) without which no friendship could ever be said to have taken place. Melville’s story presents this contingency, this possibility of failure that is absolutely bound up with what we call the materiality of the signifier, not just as the sign that somewhere, elsewhere, at some moment in time, friendship will have taken or will take place, but as a constitutive factor for every event of friendship. The necessary possibility of performative failure not only haunts from outside but in fact guarantees or seals every event or experience of friendship from within. Friendship, like language, happens on the threshold of its incurable (constative) failure, and we never leave this threshold: “O my friends, there is no friend.” Bartleby, as Melville’s narrator tells us, comes into view on the lawyer’s “threshold,” and he remains identified with the threshold throughout the story. We can think of this as a threshold of performativity from out of which both the lawyer

252 THE REMAINS OF FRIENDSHIP and his scrivener would be called—by each other—into being and, simultaneously, into a relationship that never achieves constative certainty. “Friendship” enters into Melville’s story repeatedly and in a variety of forms. The lawyer’s initial determination to “be- friend” Bartleby proceeds from a sense that Bartleby might be “useful” to him (thereby recalling one of Aristotle’s versions of friendship—the utilitarian friendship that falls short of the most virtuous) (“B,” 17). The lawyer insists on being “friendly” and repeatedly “entreat[s]” Bartleby “as a friend, to comply as far as may be with the usages of [the] office ” (“B,” 25, 26). But the lawyer ultimately comes up against Bartleby’s radical state of “friendlessness” and, despite this glimpse of incomprehensible isolation, is goaded into action by his “professional friends.” The use of the word friend intensifies at the end of the narrative, and by the time the grub-man at the prison in which Bartleby is confined asks a seemingly innocuous question, it resonates profoundly: “As I entered the corridor again, a broad meat-like man, in an apron, accosted me, and, jerking his thumb over his shoulder, said—‘Is that your friend?’” (“B,” 43). While the lawyer answers in the affirmative, it is the performative act of affirming, rather than the constative meaning or content (the affirmation), that keeps the question in play. The question resonates because by this point in the story we have come to appreciate that the lawyer does not have and may never have had any better friend than Bartleby. He prides himself, as the opening of the story tells us, on being “safe”; he is a locked box, with or without contents or even interiority, who oversees the orderly transfer of wealth from one generation to another and, on a day-to-day basis, manages predictably idiosyncratic employees. Until Bartleby. Bartleby happens to the lawyer like an Emersonian event or Thoreauvian interruption. Melville even describes his coming as an “advent,” thus recalling the transcendentalists’ tendency to invoke the divine when writing of the friend (as well as Derrida’s “a venir” of democracy, which, as Peggy Kamuf suggests in the notes to her translation of Specters of Marx, could be translated as “advent.”)31 For both Emerson and Thoreau, as we have seen, the friend is a kind of miracle, a gift from “God.” An advent is, of course, an arrival,

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the coming of a radical and miraculous newness like no other; it announces the newness of an incarnation, a second coming, the world’s salvation (all on the threshold of a law office!). Yet it is important to remember that “advent” is simultaneously itself a threshold term, naming the event but also preceding the event, preceding the nativity, or origin; advent is anticipation or promise. Bartleby is a temporally disjunctive figure, the embodiment of a revolutionary instant that destabilizes, undoes, and “unmans” the lawyer’s sovereignty: “There was something about Bartleby that not only strangely disarmed me, but, in a wonderful manner, touched and disconcerted me” (“B,” 14–15). “If Bartleby is a new Messiah,” writes Agamben, “he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not.”32 The lawyer initially assumes that Bartleby appears in response to his advertised call for help: “Not only must I push the clerks already with me, but I must have additional help,” he writes. “In answer to my advertisement, a motionless young man one morning stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now—pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby” (“B,” 11). But who is answering whom here? Who is respond- ing to whom? Who is asking for help? Perhaps it is Bartleby from the very beginning who makes an enigmatic demand of his own; and then again, perhaps he is simply there, the door being open. The enigma of friendship, that is to say, is always already there, waiting on our doorstep. Bartleby may or may not arrive to answer the lawyer’s call, then, but it is crucial to note that the lawyer initially misreads him as if he does. He misrecognizes the event, and (mis)reads Bartleby into a kind of contractual or legal relation. This relation will gradually break down, however, and the lawyer will eventually come to experience Bartleby as a disquieting threat to his border and to his rights as an owner of property: “What earthly right have you to stay here?” the lawyer asks, fearing that Bartleby will outlive him and “claim possession of [his] office by right of his perpetual occupancy” (“B,” 33, 36). Bartleby announces, right from the start, a capacity to re- place and outlast the lawyer, a capacity that is indissociable from his proleptically ruined presence. This would be another way

254 THE REMAINS OF FRIENDSHIP in which Bartleby figures the materiality of the signifier—that which in the signifier exceeds our intentionality, and thereby outlasts us, because it does not share our mortality. “Every letter also marks the nonoccurrence of something,” writes Agamben; “every letter is always in this sense a ‘dead letter.’”33 Bartleby is ultimately “removed” to the Tombs, even as the well-intentioned lawyer would prefer to return him to his “native place” (“B,” 42, 25). This reference to a native place reminds us of another intriguing ghost story that writes itself into Melville’s tale of occupation and eviction: Bartleby also channels the Native American who has come to demand justice with his mere persistence. But who is the proper addressee for such a call? At once unprecedented and archaic, Bartleby, the returning native, out of place in his place, brings to mind the loaded significance of the word “friendship” in the troubled history of white-Native relationships in America, and his story begs to be compared with the utopian romance of interracial friendship in Thoreau.34 Bartleby’s first act of noncompliance will replay the threshold scene that the lawyer missed. And that he will miss again:

I abruptly called to Bartleby. In my haste and natural expectancy of instant compliance, I sat with my head bent over the original on my desk, and my right hand sideways, and somewhat nervously extended with the copy, so that, immediately upon emerging from his retreat, Bartleby might snatch it and proceed to business without the least delay. In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly stating what it was I wanted him to do—namely, to examine a small paper with me. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consterna- tion, when, without moving from his privacy, Bartleby, in a singularly mild, firm voice, re- plied, “I would prefer not to.” (“B,” 13)

The lawyer initially appears to be incapable of experiencing any otherness; only the most minute spatial or temporal difference

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will be tolerated on its way to being overcome “without the least delay.” Bartleby’s utterance functions like a claim of sovereignty, asserting a border in the face of one who has assumed his own unproblematic ability to conjoin “privacy and society” (“B,” 12). But Bartleby’s is a sovereignty of the threshold: he hesitates between absolute autonomy or independence and absolute insubstantiality. Indeed, his very inhumanity disarms the lawyer: “Had there been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises” (“B,” 13). His strange thingness (“I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-paris bust of Ci- cero out of doors” [“B,” 13]) prevents the lawyer from execut- ing what German political philosopher Carl Schmitt claims is the definitive sovereign decision, namely, the decision as to Bartleby’s status as friend or enemy.35 The immediate illegibility of Bartleby, in other words, constitutes him as a Thoreauvian “interruption,” or Emersonian stranger or beautiful enemy; Bartleby has to be read, where reading begins with being (and simultaneously by resisting being) “disarmed” and “unmanned.” The lawyer, nevertheless, orchestrates his own missing of the event via postponement or deferral: I’ll read him later. I’m too busy (aren’t we all?) for the arrival of the other. The lawyer misses Bartleby precisely because the lawyer is safely enclosed within his own monadic subjecthood (the two seem to encounter one another like “princes” in a Lockean state of nature). But if the lawyer misreads Bartleby as referring to himself—as answering to his call—it would be a mistake, on our part, to identify this as the moment of ethical failure. For at the same time, the lawyer’s misreading could be said to usher Bartleby into subjecthood—not quite into sovereign subjecthood, perhaps, but rather into a more modest form of subjected subjecthood. How can we not call this blindness on the lawyer’s part an ethical act? And how can we avoid seeing in this misreading a formative scene for any subject? When thinking of how the subject becomes a subject, or how the infant (without language) becomes a linguistic being (and this is certainly called for in the case of Bartleby, who, if not for the intervention of the letter, would be a Ba[. . .]by), one might consider various primal proto-linguistic moments: there is

256 THE REMAINS OF FRIENDSHIP the apparently meaningless cry that the parent responds to, rendering it—misconstruing it—into meaning such that the cry eventually and unambiguously does become a call; and then there is the “No” of the two-year-old that expels otherness and establishes a kind of sovereign being complete with ministering underlings (Freud’s “His Majesty the Baby” or the tyrannical terrible twos).36 Both moments are highly relevant to Melville’s story. But consider another scene: the infant says “da da” and the father responds, delightedly, “He is saying my name!” The father, in a self-serving and mildly delusionary manner, misreads the meaningless sounds as meaningful words, as a name, a call, and this very self-serving reading could be said to have an ethical effect: it brings the other into relationship. It is crucial to bear in mind that such a proto-linguistic moment is necessarily impossible and intersubjective: the father is called into being by (mis)reading the infant into subjectivity. But is this also a scene of violence? Speech acts are central to both Emerson and Thoreau’s friendship texts: writing letters in Emerson, silence or speaking the most proper name in Thoreau. And letters figure prominently in Melville (personal correspondence on the one hand, the letter of the law on the other). But Bartleby just as crucially calls our attention to the ur-speech act, to the proto-linguistic moment (always both an event and an irreducible fiction), which, as many theoretical accounts would remind us, is also always a form of subjection. “On the writing tablet of the celestial scribe,” writes Agamben, “the letter, the act of writing, marks the passage from potentiality to actuality, the occurrence of contingency. But precisely for this reason, every letter also marks the nonoccurrence of something; every letter is always in this sense a ‘dead letter.’”37 Bartleby figures the event of the emergence of language from sheer materiality, and thus the emergence of the very possibility of relation (“it evokes the future,” Derrida says of Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to,” “without either predicting or promis- ing; it utters nothing fixed, determinable, positive, or negative”).38 At this threshold it becomes more and more difficult to say where violence begins and ends: “This is the intolerable truth that Bartleby learned in the Washington office,” writes Agamben, “and this is the meaning of the singular formula,

257 The Thoreau family gravesite in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. Photo by en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bikea. For license to reproduce, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/deed.en. THE REMAINS OF FRIENDSHIP

‘on errands of life, those letters speed to death.’”39 But it is also at this threshold of meaning/nonmeaning that friendship takes place. Given what I’m referring to as the irreducible violence of the proto-linguistic threshold, the threshold on which Bartleby stands, it should perhaps not be so surprising to discover that the story of the lawyer’s coming to friendship is, at every moment, accompanied by intimations of extravagant (one might say Poe-esque) aggression. Much could be made of the lawyer’s poignant allusion to the sensational story of Colt and Adams, and when he wildly suggests walling Bartleby up in the office, how can one not recall Poe and his trail of hacked and secreted bodies?40 From the very beginning, the question of befriending Bartleby is bound up with the question of whether or not it will be possible to avoid doing violence to him. And this specter of violence seems to appear before—is perhaps conjured by—the wall of Bartleby’s reticence. Bartleby repeatedly offers a response on the threshold of nonresponse, and this by turns enrages and saddens the lawyer. Violence always appears in the story as a substitute for language or as itself a kind of idealized communication. Put another way, Bartleby’s silence, while it is often read as gesturing toward an idealized or transcendental invocation of perfect communication outside the material contamination of conventional language, comes across in Melville’s depiction as itself a form of aggression provoking acts of equivalence. Part of Melville’s achievement here—and a significant aspect of his distinction from Emerson and Thoreau—is the story’s persistent refusal to quarantine the idealizations of friendship from the possibility of violence. This aspect of the story significantly rewrites and critiques the classical invocation of the epitaphic moment to represent the achievement of ideal friendship over the friend’s grave. “You cannot better be employed, Bassanio / Than to live still and write mine epitaph,” says Shakespeare’s Antonio, an exemplary phallogocentric friend, in The Merchant of Venice (1.1).41 The friend as other self is, in the classical tradition, the perfect and perpetual mourner, the one who mourns me even before he has lost me (thus, in some sense, collapsing any sense of a before): “I love the man so well,” Francis Bacon repeats approvingly,

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“as I wish he may over-live me.”42 “Bartleby” participates in this epitaphic mode so important to the friendship tradition, but not without troubling it at the same time. Melville’s lawyer explicitly vacillates between taking Bartleby home and walling him up in the law office, and this vacillation, I want to insist, has everything to do with the ethics of misreading. One way of thinking about the lawyer’s vacillations and their relationship to misreading is to note their rehearsal in the voluminous secondary criticism on “Bartleby” (what Dan McCall refers to as the “Bartleby industry”).43 Approaches to the story can be provisionally divided into readings that attempt to “fill in” Bartleby’s emptiness or silence (by giving it a name, a purpose, an intentionality or some contextual predetermination) and readings that seek to preserve Bartleby as enigma.44 Both gestures constitute acts of ethical misreading: either Bartleby is to be domesticated (taken home?), his sovereign independence violated by interpretation, or he is to be preserved (archived, walled up), allowed to memorialize unreadability itself. Overreading—which is to say almost any reading—is always in danger of ruining what McCall describes as “the profound emotional experience of realizing Bartleby as Bartleby.”45 But it is precisely the problem of misreading Bartleby by naming his emptiness that my discussion of ethical misreading wishes to draw attention to. Because not only is it impossible to speak about Bartleby without beginning to fill him in, without bringing into focus what Derrida calls the “silhouette of a content that haunts [his] response,”46 but there is also nothing assuredly “ethical” about abandoning him to his inscrutability. “The whole point of Bartleby, the maddening and precious thing about him,” writes McCall, “is that he is a lost cause. He is inconsolable.”47 This seems hard to dispute. And, yet, why does McCall call this inconsolable figure “maddening” and “precious” if not to indicate that his lost cause won’t leave us alone? Our interpretive crisis, indeed, paral- lels Melville’s literary achievement: What is so priceless about Bartleby is his uncanny capacity to signify empty materiality and overwhelming pathos at one and the same time, in one and the same persona. We are prevented at every turn from narrating this incredible simultaneity away.

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Faced with the enigmatic message that is Bartleby, the lawyer doesn’t simply give up on the promise of meaningful speech—he won’t give up on the promise of human being. But this is not simply to praise the lawyer, to locate him on the right side of an ethical divide. For we know that questions about the ethics of insisting on life, of prolonging life where it is not clear there is any desire to live, are among the most intractable of contemporary “ethical” dilemmas. There can be a violence, and a self-preserving violence at that, in refusing to give up on the other’s humanity. Melville’s lawyer insists, quite peculiarly, that Bartleby is an honest man, and he struggles to contextual- ize Bartleby, even if in doing so he is also attempting to get rid of him, to find his origin and send him back home where he belongs: return to sender. For the lawyer’s refusal to give up on Bartleby is also stubbornly self-serving: he reads Bartleby because he doesn’t know what else to do—as if his life, his own crumbling borders, depended on it. It should by now be apparent that in Emerson’s and Tho- reau’s invocations of the non-corresponding friend, the friend who never arrives, or the silent friend, Bartleby was already present. This would be one way of accounting for the fact, not only that Emerson’s and Thoreau’s texts produce figurations that seem to conjure Bartleby, but that both men were described, at various times, in Bartleby-like terms.48 But where in the transcendental account the absence or silence could always be read as the mark of promise—a space to be filled, one day, somewhere—in Melville’s Bartleby, the silence isn’t the silence of anticipation. Put another way, after Bartleby we would have to appreciate that Thoreau and Emerson were always already describing friendship—not friendship to come, not failed friendship or inadequate friendship, but the very structure of friendship as necessary misreading. The transcendentalist friend theorizes an ethical misreading that makes of every subjectivity a missed communication, a misdirected, lost, and illegitimately opened letter. I’m thinking here, of course, of Melville’s epilogue to “Bartleby,” which poses as an origin or explanation, a harbor or home, yet insists once again upon remains, mere traces of relation, dead letters, or a veritable sea of failed acts of address. The lawyer offers us the epilogue

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as a tentative frame (it ends the story but is promised at the outset—the events it narrates took place some time ago, yet they function as a conclusion). But, in fact, what we experience is repetition: the dead-letter story returns only to give us the story of Bartleby and the story “Bartleby” again and again. And with this epilogue, Melville (not unlike Emerson and Thoreau) tells the story of the opening to friendship as an autoeconomy of loss: the lawyer comes into relation by mourning his own refusal to relate. Read through “Bartleby,” this, then, would be the transcendental innovation: friendship mourns—even as it ethically misreads—our own (and the other’s) resistance to relationship. This way of thinking about friendship gives us a new way of reading the long investment in the epitaphic mode of classical friendship. Consummating friendship in the graveside speech would be another way of trying to register, while disavow- ing, the violence of relation—the violence which insures that every friendship proceeds by mourning the loss of sovereign friendlessness, sovereign resistance to legibility. Such sovereign resistance (itself an inscription of the materiality of the signifier) can, as we’ve read in Emerson and Thoreau, generate a discourse of friendship as perpetual promise, of the perfect reading to come. But the notion of an ethical misreading, the proposition that materiality can be—and must be—misread into subjectivity, resists this temporalization or deferral of friendship; ethical misreading undoes in advance the simple opposition of success and failure (felicity or infelicity, to use the language of speech-act theory) in the event of friendship. This deconstructed friendship can be read out of the transcendentalists’ invocations of the impossible or the divine, but such invocations have had less hold on our imagination than has the faceless face of Melville’s Bartleby. Bartleby, unlike the transcendentalist friend, does not wait on any horizon; he is not a fair floating isle; he is not divine. Melville insists that we see him now (“I can see that figure now” [“B,” 11]). Bartleby is there on the threshold; and although he is “not particular,” he is also, uncannily, the only character in the story who has a proper name—as well as, of course, an unforgettable refrain. Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” courteously and peril-

262 THE REMAINS OF FRIENDSHIP ously posits his being on the edge of a negative utterance. For Gilles Deleuze, Bartleby’s “mad,” “agrammatical” signature phrase “ravages” language in both its constative and performative dimensions, “carv[ing] out a kind of foreign language within language, to make the whole confront silence, make it topple into silence.”49 But Deleuze also insists that this ruinous or paradoxically passive attack is not without its radical democratic promise.50 The phrase leaves Bartleby on the threshold of meaning/non-meaning and being/non-being precisely because his “No” isn’t the forceful “No” of a founding. “I would prefer not to” functions as the undoing of “I do,” the words one says if one is prepared to cross, or be taken across, a threshold, and they mark the scrivener as one who doesn’t consent, who doesn’t sign the social contract. Bartleby is the quasi-subject who refuses to enter into almost any exchange—he doesn’t eat, he hordes his money, he barely speaks. But at the same time his phrase appears to position him as a radical Thoreauvian and Emersonian subject of contract, one who assumes the right to offer or withhold his consent in each and every particular instance. Bartleby’s utterance is thus also the negative rewriting of Emerson’s famous “whim” (“I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim”),51 a suggestion hinted at in one of the story’s internal “readings” of Bartleby: “It may only be a passing whim,” says Nippers of Bartleby’s peculiar conduct (“B,” 18). As such, Bartleby’s utterance would constitute a speech act that may or may not come to mean later (“I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last,” Emerson continues, referring to the self’s enigmatic acts and utterances, “but we cannot spend the day in explanation”).52 The phrase functions as a signifier of (sheer) repetition, becoming less constative and more performative as it repeats and empties itself of meaning, but it nevertheless takes on a certain force, infecting the speech of others: “Somehow, of late, I had got into the way of involuntarily using the word ‘prefer’ upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions” (“B,” 27). Indeed, Bartleby himself seems to insist on the materiality of his signifier: “Youwill not?” asks the lawyer, begging for some deviation from the same; “I prefer not,” Bartleby replies (“B,” 19). With Bartleby we are reminded that the best and worst way to say anything is simply to say it again.

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The lawyer struggles to read Bartleby’s maddeningly repeti- tive and thus strangely provocative words, then, but he also has to read Bartleby’s silence. For not only will Bartleby not be bound by “common usage” or “common sense” (“B,” 15); he won’t even be bound by the minimal conventions of the speech situation, the implicit contract or “promise framework,” in Derrida’s terms, whereby one party speaks and the other replies. “Whenever I address the other, when I say to the other ‘I’m talking to you,’ I’m already in a promise framework,” writes Derrida; “I’m speaking to you means, ‘I promise to continue, to go to the end of the sentence; I promise to tell you the truth, even if I lie.’”53 “Will you not speak? Answer!” shouts the lawyer (“B,” 15). Bartleby repeatedly says nothing (“He answered nothing” [“B,” 33]; “He answered not a word” [“B,” 30]; “He made no reply and nothing more was said” [“B,” 37]). One must read, and I am tempted to say listen, very carefully in this struggle to hear the difference between saying “no” and saying nothing. No answer can always be an answer, even a range of answers, or it can be nothing at all. It can always be sheer mechanical/material repetition. But this in turn repeats the problematic of Bartleby’s very existence: is he addressed, does he address, or does he merely repeat, persist, remain? In other words, if Bartleby’s utterance approaches unreadability, this is because Bartleby himself is also always confronting us as a piece of nonsignifying traumatic materiality. Bartleby, the bearer of the name (the story’s only name), is also the site of the always possible impossibility of the event of naming, of successful address, of letters arriving at their destination. Instead of the utopian heights of friendship familiar to us from the classical tradition (“There is, beyond all my reasoning, and beyond all that I can specifically say,” writes Montaigne of his perfect friend, “some inexplicable power of destiny that brought about our union”),54 Melville offers us the merest trace of a meaningful exchange. All the lawyer ever wants to do, one might say, is to speak with Bartleby and yet it is not clear that this ever happens. Facing the prison wall, though apparently addressing the lawyer, Bartleby utters his last words: “I know you . . . and I want nothing to say to you” (“B,” 43). There could hardly be a stronger rebuke: I recognize you and

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I don’t want to speak to you; to you in particular I say, “no.” The lawyer, who will finally go to the prison andbeg to have an “interview” with the “silent man,” holds on to a relation with Bartleby only by misreading or overreading him (“B,” 43). His most marked mistake has been to assume that even if Bartleby does not address him, Bartleby is addressed to him. But here, too, Bartleby proves him wrong. He is, to the end, (almost) completely indifferent, (almost) completely impersonal even as (and the lawyer’s own language suggests this) he can come to stand in for everyone: When the lawyer abandons his Wall Street Office out of frustration, Bartleby stays behind, and the new occupant, another lawyer, calls on the narrator to take responsibility for the vagrant. “In vain I persisted,” writes the lawyer, “that Bartleby was nothing to me—no more than to any one else” (“B,” 39). The lawyer’s words here seem to anticipate Bartleby’s final remark: “I want nothing to say to you.” But this repetition alerts us to an excruciating ambiguity: Bartleby “wants nothing” because he lacks nothing in his relationship to the lawyer: he is all address, his address is meaningful. And the lawyer, in turn, is refused the place of nonresponsibility that he so desperately seeks. “I want nothing to say to you” also says: there is no safe zone of non-relation with Bartleby. Despite the failure of relationship in “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the final scenes in the prison recreate, however minimally, however implausibly, a relationship to an idealized pastoral friendship tradition: the grass insists on growing within this tomb (“by some strange magic, through the clefts, grass-seed, dropped by birds, had sprung” [“B,” 45]), and the lawyer tries to strike up a conversation by doing what we all do everyday: talking about the weather (“Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass” [“B,” 43]).55 Refusing the sovereign materiality of the traumatic signifier, the lawyer desperately offers Bartleby a tutorial on the sign, on reference: here is language; this is how we communicate. Melville’s powerfully disjunctive version of the American pastoral scene of male-male (or white-Native) friendship, once again calls to mind Thoreau: “The Friend,” Thoreau writes, “is a necessarius, and meets his Friend on homely ground; not on carpets and cushions, but on the ground and on rocks

they will sit, obeying the natural and primitive laws” (W, 274). 265 NAOMI MORGENSTERN

As an interruption in the classical discourse, “Bartleby” reminds us that friendship has repeatedly been invoked to veil or deny the self’s perilous relationship to both meaning and being, even at the expense of one’s own life: my friend is he who could adequately write my epitaph, put me into words that will last and belie my merely mortal being; my friend as other- self shores up my narcissism or sovereignty. But to expose this aspect of the friendship tradition is not to call for an ethics of free relations between subjects uncorrupted by the symptom- atic “friendship” of narcissistic indulgence. It is not to call, in increasingly familiar terms, for a cleansing “reciprocity” or “mutuality.” Rather it is, among other things, to reconsider narcissism. My friend is indeed narcissistically indispensable, for my friend is the one for whom my utterances are meaningful. My friend is he who helps me to live out the fiction of my own being. In Bartleby, Melville’s lawyer repeatedly confronts a marginal being who reveals rather than conceals the lawyer’s own tenuous hold on existence. In refusing the terms of friendship, even when there is nothing else left, Bartleby exposes the fantasy of sovereign being and meaningful speech. This cadaverous copyist, who maybe only looks like a man the way certain marks are sometimes said only to look like signs, “calls friendship back to non-reciprocity, to dissymmetry or to disproportion, to the impossibility of a return to offered or received hospitality; in short . . . to the irreducible precedence of the other.”56 But “Bartleby, the Scrivener” also suggests that friendship happens, if it does, where sovereignty collapses, which is also to say, where language confronts its constitutive edge of incoherence. Every event of friendship, by definition, would have to contain, as if walled up in its very structure, this figure for the failure to communicate, for sovereign irrespon- sibility and for the resistance to being.

University of Toronto

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NOTES

1. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Harrison Hay- ford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, vol. 10 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and the Newberry Library, 1984), 202; hereafter cited parenthetically as CM. 2. Carl Van Vechten, “The Great Satire of Transcendentalism,” in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, by Herman Melville, ed. Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer (New York: Norton, 2006), 421. 3. Herman Melville to Evert Duyckinck, 3 March 1849, in Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth, vol. 14 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and the Newberry Library, 1993), 121; hereafter cited parenthetically as C. 4. Branka Arsić has questioned the easy identification of Melville withThe Confidence-Man’s unknown narrator in Passive Constitutions; or, 7 1/2 Times Bartleby (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2007), 204. 5. “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” in Billy Budd, and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 1986), 38; hereafter cited parenthetically as “B.” I cite the Penguin edition because I tend to agree with Dan McCall, for whom Melville’s revisions of the original Putnam’s version (the version repro- duced in the Northwestern-Newberry edition) represent, for the most part, an improvement. See The Silence of Bartleby (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), xiii. See, too, the editors’ notes to the tale in the editorial appendix of The Piazza Tales, and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle, and others, vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and the Newberry Library, 1987), 572–80. 6. On the impossibilities of friendship articulated at the origin of the philosophical tradition, see Plato’s Lysis in Plato’s Dialogue on Friendship: An Interpretation of the “Lysis,” with a New Translation, by David Bolotin (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), 15–61. 7. See, for example, Dorothy J. Hale, “Fiction as Restriction: Self- Binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel,” Narrative 15, no. 2 (2007): 187–206; Lawrence Buell, “In Pursuit of Ethics,” PMLA 114, no. 1 (1999): 7–19; and Robert Eaglestone, “One and the Same? Eth- ics, Aesthetics, and Truth,” Poetics Today 25 (2004): 595–608. 8. Brian Higgins, “Mark Winsome and Egbert: ‘In the Friendly Spirit,’” in Melville, Confidence-Man (2006), 424.

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9. Dorothy J. Hale, “Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century,” PMLA 124 (2009): 896–905. 10. Hale, “Aesthetics,” 901. Rehearsing some of Butler’s principal cat- egories, Hale concludes that the “avowal of our epistemological limits is something that must be freshly performed, undergone again and again” (901). 11. The novel reader is “launch[ed],” writes Hale, “into a transactional relation with another agent, an agent defined by its Otherness from the reader” (“Fiction as Restriction,” 189). The novel issues an ethical call to the reader, says J. Hillis Miller: “I alone must act, must respond. I cannot let anyone else read for me” (Literature As Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James [New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2005], 14). See, too, Geof- frey Galt Harpham’s Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999); and Lynne Huffer, “‘There is no Gomorrah’: Narrative Ethics in Feminist and Queer Theory,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 12, no. 3 (2001): 1–32. 12. While “Bartleby” has not traditionally been read as an account of friendship, it has elicited many commentaries on its relationship to the American transcendentalists. For a sample of such criticism, see Egbert S. Oliver, “A Second Look at ‘Bartleby,’” College English 6 (1945): 431–39; Leo Marx, “Melville’s Parable of the Walls,” Sewanee Review 61 (1953): 602–27; Christopher W. Sten, “Bartleby the Transcenden- talist: Melville’s Dead Letter to Emerson,” Modern Language Quarterly 35, no. 1 (1974): 30–44; Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1983); and Brook Thomas, Cross-examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987). 13. Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby; or, On Contingency,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stan- ford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999), 254; Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), 78. 14. Barbara Johnson, “Teaching Deconstructively,” in Deconstruction: Criti- cal Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Jonathan Culler (New York: Routledge, 2004), 2:211. 15. Hale, “Fiction as Restriction,” 194. 16. A survey of the classical philosophical engagement with friendship would include, among many other examples, Plato’s Lysis, Aristotle’s

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Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero’s De Amicitia, Montaigne’s “On Friendship,” and Bacon’s “Of Friendship.” 17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, Joseph Slater, et al., 9 vols. to date (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1971–), 2:113; hereafter cited parenthetically as “F.” 18. Derek Attridge, “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other,” PMLA 114, no. 1 (1999): 26, 31. 19. Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997) circles back repeatedly to this vagrant quotation: “O my friends, there is no friend.” This line might be compared to Emerson’s proto-Nietzschean description of the friend as a “beautiful enemy” (“F,” 124), a phrase that also figures in Emerson’s exchanges with Mar- garet Fuller. See Jeffrey Steele, “Transcendental Friendship: Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau,” in Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson. ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 121–39; and Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992). Fuller, in turn, writes of visiting her “dear no friends, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson” (quoted in Capper, Margaret Fuller, 214). Gustaaf Van Cromphout notes that “an entry in one of Nietzsche’s notebooks reads (in its entirety): ‘To raise friendship to a higher level. Nota bene Emerson’” ( “Areteic Ethics: Emerson and Nietzsche on Pity, Friendship, and Love,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 43 (1997): 109. 20. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, ed. Carl F. Hovde et al. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), 278; hereafter cited parenthetically as W. 21. The reference in Thoreau’s text is to Alexander Henry’s Travels and Adventures in Canada and The Indian Territories, Between the Years 1760–1776 (New York: Printed and Published by I. Riley, 1809). 22. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Orth, et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1960–82), 7:368. 23. In his study of Melville’s friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Chris- topher Castiglia describes intimacy as a kind of perpetual revolutionary possibility: “If nationalism grounds intimacy, intimacy keeps citizenship unsettled, contingent, moving.” See “Alienated Affections: Hawthorne and Melville’s Trans-Intimate Relationship,” in Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship, ed. Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person (Univ.

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of Georgia Press, 2008), 343. For more on assessing Emerson’s political legacy, see Christopher Newfield, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996); and Jason A. Scorza, “Liberal Citizenship and Civic Friendship,” Political Theory 32, no. 1 (2004): 85–108. 24. The woman also figures as convention elsewhere in A Week, notably in Thoreau’s poem on “free love” that follows the discussion of his less-than-happy relationship with “a woman who possesses a restless and intelligent mind” (probably Margaret Fuller) (279). For more on Fuller’s very present absence in both Emerson’s and Thoreau’s attempts to grapple with friendship, see Steele, “Transcendental Friendship”; Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1995), 240–41, 338–39; and Cap- per, Margaret Fuller, 323–30. While Emerson, unlike his predecessors, can certainly imagine women as friends (“I please my imagination more with a circle of god-like men and women variously related to each other” [“F,” 121]), his friendship remains definitively masculinized. 25. As Jill Robbins explains, “interruption” is also a key component of Levinasian ethics: “For Levinas, . . . ethics is a calling into question of the self’s spontaneity, an interruption of self that is produced in the presence of the other.” See “Visage, Figure: Speech and Murder in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity,” in Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing, ed. Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch (New Bruns- wick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1995), 277. This interruption can, as we shall see, tempt one to violence: “It is in the face’s absolute resistance to possession that the temptation of murder is inscribed.” But it can also be, for Levinas, something precious: “The interruption of the ‘imperialism of the same’ is also welcome, a gift and the originary response of responsibility” (Robbins, 289, 290). 26. David B. Suchoff picks up on the opposition between friendship and language in A Week and on the association of the river itself with this idealized friendship in “‘A More Conscious Silence’: Friendship and Language in Thoreau’s Week,” ELH 49 (1982): 673–88. 27. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 77. 28. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 66. 29. J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), 142. 30. Arsić, Passive Constitutions, 154. 31. Peggy Kamuf, trans., in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourn-

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ing, and the New International, by Jacques Derrida (New York: Routledge, 1994), 177 n. 5. 32. Agamben, “Bartleby,” 270. See, too, Miller’s discussion of Bartleby as a “strange Pygmalion in reverse” (Versions of Pygmalion, 177). 33. Agamben, “Bartleby,” 269. 34. For more on Thoreau’s relationship to Native Americans, see Edwin S. Fussell, “The Red Face of Man,” in Thoreau: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Sherman Paul (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 142–60. For the friendship tradition in relationship to the history of white- Native encounters, see Ivy Schweitzer’s extensive treatment in Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2006). 35. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), 29–30. Friendship (or frenemyship in the clumsy yet current phrase) also defines the borders of the political and polices the zones of indistinction that suspend national entities in their precarious autonomy. 36. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psy- chological Works, ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), 14:91. 37. Agamben, “Bartleby,” 269. 38. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), 75. 39. Agamben, “Bartleby,” 269. 40. For more on the details of this allusion, see T. H. Giddings, “Mel- ville, the Colt-Adams Murder, and ‘Bartleby,’” Studies in American Fiction 2 (1974): 123–32; and Barbara Foley, “From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville’s ‘Bartleby,’” American Literature 72 (2000): 87–116. 41. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (New York: Norton, 2005), 57. 42. Francis Bacon, “Of Friendship,” in The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (Lon- don: Penguin, 1985), 140. 43. McCall, Silence of “Bartleby,” x. For a more recent consideration of “the Bartleby industry” and questions of idleness and industriousness, see Andrew Knighton, “The Bartleby Industry and Bartleby’s Idleness,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 53 (2007): 185–215. 44. Oliver (“A Second Look”), Leo Marx (“Melville’s Parable”), and Sten (“Bartleby the Transcendentalist”) attempt to fill Bartleby’s inscrutabil-

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ity with transcendental resistance. Thomas (Cross-examinations), Rogin (Subversive Genealogy), Foley (“From Wall Street”), and Naomi C. Reed (“The Specter of Wall Street: ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ and the Language of Commodities,” American Literature 76 [2004]: 247–73) hear Karl Marx struggling to speak through Bartleby’s taciturnity. Bartleby has also been diagnosed as suffering from a particular pathology or as figuring a more general socio-cultural malaise. See William P. Sullivan, “Bartleby and Infantile Autism: A Naturalistic Explanation,” Bulletin of the West Virginia Association of College English Teachers 3, no. 2 (1976): 43–60; Morris Beja, “Bartleby and Schizophrenia,” Massachusetts Review 19 (1978): 555–68; Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1990); and Adam Philips, “On Eating, and Preferring Not To,” in Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 282–95. Critics who have tried to describe a radically unspecified Bartleby include John Carlos Rowe, Through the Custom-House: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Modern Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982); and Gregory Jay, America the Scrivener: Deconstruction and the Subject of Literary History (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990). 45. McCall, Silence of Bartleby, 76. 46. Derrida, Gift of Death, 75. 47. McCall, Silence of Bartleby, 77. 48. According to many of his contemporaries, Emerson himself was incapable of any intimate form of bond. “He is an isolation,” wrote Sophia Hawthorne, “he has never yet known what union meant with any soul” (quoted in T. Walter Herbert’s Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family [Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1995], 189). And Emerson, in turn, passed on accounts of Thoreau’s resistance to friendship: “‘I love Henry,’ said one of his friends, ‘but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree’” (“Thoreau,” in Joel Myerson, “Emerson’s ‘Thoreau’: A New Edition from Manu- script,” in Studies in the American Renaissance, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 37, 39. Ronan gives a detailed account of the strained friendship between Emerson and Thoreau and of the impact the relationship may have had on Thoreau’s philosophy of hospitality. See “Thoreau’s Declaration of Independence from Emerson in Walden,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 33, no. 1 (2006): 133–65. 49. Deleuze, “Bartleby,” 68, 72.

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50. “A schizophrenic vocation: even in his catatonic or anorexic state, Bartleby is not the patient, but the doctor of a sick America, the Medicine Man, the new Christ or the brother to us all” (Deleuze, “Bartleby,” 90). 51. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, Joseph Slater, et al., 9 vols. to date (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1971–), 2:30. 52. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 30. 53. Jacques Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 458. 54. Michel de Montaigne, “On Friendship,” in Essays, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1993), 97. 55. This moment also anticipates the culminating exchange between Benito Cereno and Amasa Delano: “See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.” See “Benito Cereno,” in Piazza Tales, 116. Delano tries to rescue Cereno from a traumatic deadness, a threshold, Bartleby-like state; Cereno, too, is reduced to the materiality of the signifier, to the mere repetition of an almost magic or talismanic phrase: “the negro.” Of course, for Delano, both Benito and Babo function as Bartleby-like others (and the play of names here ought to alert us to this). And whereas Mel- ville’s lawyer might be said to know, by the end of his story, that he has paradoxically “received” a dead letter and that, indeed, every instance of humanity is its own piece of traumatic materiality, a necessarily in- complete address—“Ah! Bartleby, Ah! Humanity”—Delano experiences no such recognition. “Benito Cereno” is a letter about race in America that perhaps only belatedly arrives at its late-twentieth-century address. 56. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 63.

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