I had quickly read Bartleby the Scrivener many years ago during a summer vacation in high school. Although I have always enjoyed reading literature, I have to confess I read it to get a taste of Melville without having to take on Moby Dick just yet. I don’t think I appreciated Bartleby at that first reading. While I found the description of aspects of mid-19th century life in New York interesting, I thought it was an odd work, very gloomy and Dickensian (in all the worst ways). Since that time, I have had the good fortune to read Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Flannery O’Connor’s The Displaced Person, and to have read/heard/seen presentations of Samuel Beckett’s stage and radio plays. When I first got the text for this course and downloaded it as a pdf, I gave it a cursory reading. Then I tried a different approach which I have been using a lot lately with assigned readings in DH and Linguistics courses, namely using the pdf Read Aloud function. While this has been very helpful with extracting enriched understanding of complex journal articles when my attention is flagging, it was not particularly effective with Bartleby for me. The Read Aloud function is just too chopped/clipped and monotone even for a work like Bartleby.
However, when I listened to Georgette’s abridged audio edition read by Matt and produced by Martin and Lola, it was an entirely different experience. Matt’s excellent interpretations of the various characters gave shape and color to the text, while the timbre of his voice reading Bartleby’s lines provided a contrast which brought home to me the lostness and anomie of Bartleby the office drone. Furthermore, although I comprehend the concept of alienation in modernity, the timbre of Matt’s voice strongly conjured up the images of the displaced person (although O’Connor’s example was for more industrious than Bartleby) who does not fit in at his work place, and of the disability and strange otherness of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis. In particular, Matt’s audio presentation reminded me of the alienation and paralytic stasis of the characters in Beckett’s stage and radio plays.
In the early group discussions, we played with the idea of how to exploit the concept of “pandemic chic” to maximum dramatic effect. I am certainly very aware of modern adaptations of historic works, such as those of Shakespeare. However, it was not until I started developing a script to curate the abridged reading that I really saw the full potential of developing the concept of the impact of a pandemic on a socio-economically obscure person such as Bartleby. What really surprised me was how the Lawyer’s narrative could be used to illustrate aspects of white privilege and white guilt.
My major takeaways are the great potential for audiobooks to enrich the consumer’s/audience’s/reader’s experience and how prescient Melville was concerning aspects of alienation in modernity.
Lastly, in group projects I have often in the past become the group organizer. Due to a mistake with the registrar, I joined the class a week late, and was assigned a role. This was a good experience for me and I got a lot out of my assigned role.
