An Account of Common Motifs in Gogol’s “The Overcoat”, Benedetti’s The Truce and Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” Augusto Pérez Romero Master’s Degree Thesis Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages Faculty of Humanities UNIVERSITY OF OSLO th Oslo, May 16 , 2001 An Account of Common Motifs in Gogol’s “The Overcoat”, Benedetti’s The Truce and Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” Augusto Pérez Romero II © Augusto Pérez Romero © Cover Picture taken from Bureaucratics by Jan Banning, used with permission of the author. 2011 An Account of Common Motifs in Gogol‘s ―The Overcoat‖, Benedetti‘s The Truce and Melville‘s ―Bartleby, the Scrivener‖ Forfatter http://www.duo.uio.no/ Trykk: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo III Acknowledgments Thanks to my thesis tutor Audun Mørch. Thanks to all my culture, language and literature teachers in Mexico City, Tromsø, Oslo, York and Saint Petersburg. Thanks to my family and friends for their support. Thanks to Tanja Christiansen, Matthew Frear, Claire Baron, Omar Einaudi, Jodi Sher and Jan Thomas Lerstein for proofreading. Thanks to Saint Petersburg for inspiring me. IV Content 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 2 Conceptual Framework ...................................................................................................... 3 2.1 Thematics..................................................................................................................... 3 2.1.1 Definition of concepts .......................................................................................... 3 2.1.1.2 Theme, motive and motif ................................................................................... 4 2.2 Bremond‘s method ...................................................................................................... 6 2.2.1 Perception ............................................................................................................. 8 2.2.2 Position ............................................................................................................... 10 2.2.3 Conceptualization ............................................................................................... 11 3 The Copyist ...................................................................................................................... 13 3.1 The writer-character .................................................................................................. 13 3.1.1 The copyist as a subcategory of the writer-character ......................................... 15 3.2 The copyist‘s routine ................................................................................................. 17 3.3 The irony of author vs. copyist .................................................................................. 20 3.4 The biographical-historical method ........................................................................... 21 3.4.1 The authors‘ experiences .................................................................................... 22 3.4.1.1 ―Office-phobia" ................................................................................................ 22 3.4.1.2 Being misunderstood as an author ................................................................... 24 4 The Tailor ......................................................................................................................... 26 4.1 The tailors in literature .............................................................................................. 26 4.1.1 Benedetti‘s tailors ............................................................................................... 27 4.2 Petrovich and Mr. Avellaneda ................................................................................... 28 4.3 The tailor as a demonic figure ................................................................................... 31 4.4 The tailor as a father figure........................................................................................ 35 4.5 The tailor as a craftsman ............................................................................................ 38 5 Passion for handwriting .................................................................................................... 41 5.1 To write and to handwrite .......................................................................................... 41 5.2 The ―handwriting passages‖ ...................................................................................... 42 5.2.1 The ―calligraphy passages‖ ................................................................................ 43 Childlike features in the ―calligraphy passages‖ .......................................................... 45 V 5.2.2 A Freudian approach to the ―calligraphy passages‖ ........................................... 47 5.3 Other handwriting passages ....................................................................................... 51 6 Loss of affection object .................................................................................................... 54 6.1 The lost object ........................................................................................................... 54 6.2 Graffy‘s structural model towards loss ...................................................................... 56 6.2.1 Lack .................................................................................................................... 57 6.2.2 Desire ................................................................................................................. 59 6.2.3 Gain after major strivings and privations ........................................................... 61 6.2.4 Short-lived joy .................................................................................................... 62 6.2.5 Loss as climax .................................................................................................... 63 7 Sickness of the copyist ..................................................................................................... 65 7.1 Sickness as a literary motif ........................................................................................ 65 7.2 The responsibility of the narrative voices .................................................................. 67 7.3 Saint Akakiĭ? ............................................................................................................. 69 7.4 Not a martyr ............................................................................................................... 74 7.5 Bartleby‘s sickness .................................................................................................... 75 8 Death of the copyist .......................................................................................................... 78 8.1 Akakiĭ‘s death ............................................................................................................ 78 8.2 Bartleby‘s death? ....................................................................................................... 79 8.3 To die for love ........................................................................................................... 82 8.4 Death in time and space ............................................................................................. 82 9 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 87 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 90 Primary sources ............................................................................................................ 90 Secondary literature ...................................................................................................... 90 Dictionaries and Lexicons ............................................................................................ 95 Appendices ............................................................................................................................... 97 VI A note on transliteration In this project I am using the transliteration system used by the Library of the Congress for Russian names. The only exception will be the last name of Gogol, whose transliteration would be Gogol‘. However I will not alter the spelling of Russian last names in the bibliography, or whenever I am quoting a work, which is the reason why a name may be spelled in two or more different ways. VII A note on translation In this thesis project the three works analyzed will be cited in their original languages: Russian, Spanish and English. All the Russian and Spanish citations will be translated into English, using translations whenever available. Mario Benedetti‘s novel The Truce was first translated by Benjamin Graham and published in English by Harper & Row in 1969. In 1998 Sun & Moon Press offered Benedetti to publish again The Truce, an offer that the Uruguayan author rejected. Nowadays the few surviving copies of Graham‘s translation are available for sale through the internet. One of them is being sold for 1323 USD. Public libraries do not have it either in their catalogues, neither in Norway, nor in other countries where I tried to find it through my contacts. A few days ago I found out that the University of Essex has a copy. However,