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Bartleby the Scrivener" Laleh Atashi Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran Email Address: [email protected], [email protected]

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Bartleby the Scrivener International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Submitted: 2016-07-06 ISSN: 2300-2697, Vol. 73, pp 7-16 Revised: 2016-08-25 doi:10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.73.7 Accepted: 2016-08-31 CC BY 4.0. Published by SciPress Ltd, Switzerland, 2016 Online: 2016-09-29 An Ecocritical Reading of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" Laleh Atashi Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran Email Address: [email protected], [email protected] Keywords: Bartleby the Scrivener, urban culture, environment, ecocriticism, place, non-place Abstract. This research is an ecocritical reading of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener". Melville's treatment of the environment is described and analyzed with regard to Augé 's theory of non-Places. The examples of non-place in Melville's Wall Street story include the compartmentalized office, the urban labyrinth, artificial and natural greeneries and oriental landscapes. The motif of compartmentalization forms the binary of insider and outsider. A close attention to the binaries in this story reveal Melville's critical attitude towards urban culture that threatens the American identity and mocks the American predilection for mobility in open spaces. This story reveals the way social institutions of an urban culture can determine the tragic fate of an out of place individual. Melville, in this story, reveals the consequences of marginalizing nature and indicates his ecological concerns in mid-nineteenth century America. He mourns the fading out of biocentric view of nature and warns against the domination of the anthropocentric worldview which is brought about by modernity, enlightenment and capitalism. 1. Introduction The purpose of this research is to show how Melville, in the middle of the 19th century, almost a decade before the civil war, wrote "Bartleby the Scrivener" to indicate the consequences of silencing nature. In order to run this argument home, an ecocritical perspective is adopted and the relation between human and the environment is examined. "Bartleby the Scrivener" has already been analyzed within the theoretical frameworks of biographical criticism, psychoanalysis, Marxism and Historicism. Beja analyses Bartleby's behavior in terms of schizophrenia the main traits of which he defines as "withdrawal, introversion, aloofness, difficulty in recognizing or relating to ‘reality’ or an acute over sensitivity coupled with an inability to express ordinary hostility or aggressive feelings” [1]. Deleuze describes Bartleby's mission as a "schizophrenic vocation" and identifies him as a Christ figure: "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” [2]. Sullivan's catchphrase is "Bartleby Complex" which he explains as infantile autism [3]. Lorenze has a Marxist reading of this Wall Street story and considers Bartleby's denials as his subversive effort to "define himself by a vocabulary of production" [4]. Foley historicizes the story and analyses it with regard to the class system in mid-nineteenth century New York [5]. Mitchell distinguishes Bartleby from the narrator in that the pallid scrivener embraces death while the attorney endorses life. Mitchell evaluates the dead letter as the symbol of silence that represents Bartleby. As a response to Bartleby's unsettling silence, the narrator takes it upon himself to give voice to the scrivener's tale. Davis focuses on the narrator who owes his awakening to Bartleby's death [6]. In contrast to Davis, Dilworth believes that the narrator feels guilty and his lengthy commentaries on different philosophical issues throughout the story are in fact aborted efforts to hide his guilty conscience [7]. Thomson looks at the story from a new perspective and comments on the notion of euthanasia in “Bartleby" [8]. All these readings have greatly contributed to the literature published about this typical American story, but an environmental approach to Melville's canonized story of Wall Street is rewarding because it sheds light on mid-nineteenth century ecological awareness of New Yorkers. This article offers an environmental reading of "Bartleby" and reveals the relationship between man and his surrounding world. Places and non-places, and the role they play in establishing the individual identity have been analyzed in this paper in order to show how Melville, This paper is an open access paper published under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) 8 ILSHS Volume 73 in the middle of the 19th century, warned against the oppressive urban culture that threatened the American identity. Ecocroticism is significant in that it increases the environmental awareness of the public and criticizes anthropocentric view and "his compulsion to conquer, humanize, domesticate, violate, and exploit every natural thing” [9]. An ecocritical study of Melville's Bartleby matters because it indicates that Melville in mid-nineteenth century warned against the dehumanizing effects of anthropocentrism as an urban ideology. 2. Theoretical framework Ecocriticism, generally speaking, is aimed at increasing the environmental awareness by focusing on the way humans interact with the nonhuman world, the way nature is framed and constructed by humans who consider themselves the centers of universe and marginalize, otherize and exploit nature. Alan C. Braddock in "Ecocritical Art History," distinguishes ecocriticism from other branches of cultural studies: Ecocriticism borrows from existing interpretative modes and expands on them. It may adapt aspects of phenomenology or postcolonial theory, for example, but give them an environmental focus. What distinguishes ecocriticism is an effort to reorient and widen the scope of cultural studies by emphasizing the ways in which human creativity—regardless of form (visual, verbal, aural) or time period (ancient, modern, contemporary)—unfolds within a specific environment or set of environments, whether urban, rural, or suburban. Far from confining its purview to “landscape” or other received aesthetic categories of environmental perception, ecocriticism knows no such limiting frames of reference. [10] Buell refers to the shortcomings that ecocriticism might have. The problems of this theory, notes Buell, arise when the urban environment in which ecocriticism is practiced, turns out to be "cloistral and urbanized" itself: when an author undertakes to imagine someone else's imagination of a tree, while sitting, Bartleby like, in a cubicle with no view, small wonder if the tree seems to be nothing more than a textual function and one comes to doubt that the author could have fancied otherwise. [11, p. 5] Buell seems to be concerned about the degree of subjective interpretation involved in ecocriticism. If subjective interpretation be a threat to ecocriticism, it is indeed an indispensible part of almost any critical and intellectual activity across humanities. In addition, in the analysis of "Bartleby the scrivener," being Bartleby-like does not cause serious logical contradictions because the environment in Melville's story of Wall Street is not a forest full of trees, nor is it the wilderness, the frontier or the wild west, but a world of interlocking walls, not unlike the world in which we live today. Ecocriticism, Estok notes, "at its best seeks understandings about the ways that dynamics of subjugation, persecution, and tyranny are mutually reinforcing, the ways that racism, sexism, homophobia, speciesism, and so on work together"[12]. Therefore, by looking at the way human relations get defined in terms of hierarchy, it is possible to explain the way the obliteration of naturecan run parallel with the subjugation of individuals. Marc Augé in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995), distinguishes supermodernity from modernity and notes that while in the latter, "everything is combined, everything holds together" and the old and the new are interwoven, supermodernity changes "the old(history) into a specific spectacle, as it does with all exoticism and all local particularity." The past and the present only coexist and no synthesis occurs. Supermodernity, therefore, deals "only with individuals (customers, passengers, users, listeners), but they are identified (name, occupation, place of birth, address) only by entering or leaving." The non-place, Augéexplains, "is the opposite of utopia: it exists, and it does not contain any organic society." Augé considers non-place as the measure of supermodernity. He distinguishes place which is "relational, historical, and concerned with identity" from non-places of supermodernity that are public places, neither relational nor historical and nor concerned with identity. He goes on to International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 73 9 characterize the person who enters the non-place as one "relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer, or driver." Augé argues that such a space does not lead to the formation of identity or meaningful relations with others, it only creates "solitude and similitude." Within the non-place, identity can only be retrieved at "Customs, at the tollbooth, at the check-out counter"[13].There are rules that must be obeyed by everybody in the non-place, certain things must be done and certain things must be avoided, therefore no one can stand out as an individual, subjectivity is erased in such spaces. Melville has a critical attitude towards "non-places" that are dominating the cityscape and reducing the life of individuals to a temporary residence in the course of which identity does not get a chance to be formulated. In order to apply Augés theory of non-places to Melville's Wall Street story, the researcher traces binary oppositions between self and other, insider and outsider, material and spiritual, and western and oriental and indicates which side of the binary is deprived of the American identity. An analysis of such binary oppositions would reveal the oppressive and suffocating effect of the urban hierarchy at work in Mid-nineteenth century New York.
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