À la recherche de Bartleby

Excellent piece by Jake Nabasny in 3:AM, ‘Bartleby politics: disavowal, derangement, and drugs.’

I began this short discussion of the politics of disavowal with a comment about Proust. He may not be the best example of a disavowalist, but his life was not just a search for the truth of the past. Proust returned continually to his deliriums, fighting off every anchor that weighed him down. Likewise, the disavowalist favors the pole of derangement, compassion, and drug over and against the pole maintained by the state and its program of sobriety. More aptly, the politics of disavowal might name the figure of Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener as its spokesperson. It is precisely the difference between weak and radical disavowal that is illuminated when one utters: “I would prefer not to.”

Many have taken and mistaken Bartleby; he has been put to use in more campaigns than any other literary anti-hero in the past two hundred years. In Bartleby & Co., Enrique Vila-Matas traces the pathology of what he terms “Bartleby syndrome,” present long before its appearance in Melville’s story. By outlining the “literature of the No,” Vila-Matas catalogs writers who have quit writing or never even wrote a single word. Bartleby & Co. vacillates between the avowal of writing and its disavowal, which is characterized by prolonged silence. Through an archeology of silence, Vila-Matas hopes to find the path to the “writing of the future.” However, his pursuit never points to a revolution in literature because it remains chained to contemporary standards by establishing a negative identity through weak disavowal (“I am not x”), not a radical one.