Multiple Reading Personalities

“Poor fellow, poor fellow! thought I, he don’t mean anything; and besides, he has seen hard times, and ought to be indulged.”

Fenêtre sur mur (Gimli_36/ flickr)

I recently wrote of starting a Jane Austen book full of questions, only to end up oblivious to anything but the story one third of the way into the book. With Bartleby, it was the opposite: questions started to overwhelm me at the end.

The story is told from the point of view of an unnamed Lawyer, a man of experience who professes to look for tranquility foremost in life. His stated intent is curiously at odd with reality: out of three clerks in his employ, one (Turkey) is irate every morning, the second (Nippers) incensed in the afternoon, and the third (Ginger Nut) a rather distracted young boy. The situation and the way the Lawyer describes it make it clear that behind pompous manners and an appearance of respectable bourgeois greed lies a generous heart kept in check just enough to fit in the Wall Street society, with an innate sympathy for his misfit employees. The Lawyer keeps finding reasons to “excuse” his not firing his employees, a behavior the reader could see as either weakness or kindness; because of the story of a few charitable acts, I decided for the second, but reading comments on amazon.com, I might be in the minority.

Yet I was touched by the decency of the character, and not surprised that when he needed to hire a fourth clerk and Bartleby presented himself looking “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn” – he should be engaged on the spot. But where the other clerks regularly erupt (against their copyist lives?) and move on, Bartleby soon starts resisting fulltime. He starts by refusing to read aloud his work, debuting the famous phrase – “I would prefer not to” – which soon will come to characterize his entire behavior, including the most basic of his work duty, copying. The man also settles at the Lawyer’s office. The occupation is discrete but firm; the Lawyer is refused entrance when he stops by out of business hours.

After some struggle, the Lawyer comes to accept Bartleby’s unexplainable conduct, and probably would have let him stay forever in his chambers where every window opens on a wall, were it not for social pressure. His patience for lunacy threatens his reputation, maybe ultimately his business, and the Lawyer is not foolish (or strong enough) to dismiss the concern. He tries to dismiss Bartleby, but when the later resists; his reserves of “fight” exhausted, the Lawyer decides to flee to new offices, leaving Bartleby behind.

Even then, the Lawyer doesn’t really desert Bartleby: when the office’s new occupant has him arrested and sent to the Tombs, the Lawyer traces him and attempts to make his life there more comfortable, notably by buying Bartleby food privileges. But ever refusing, Bartleby has ceased to eat whatsoever. He dies, probably of starvation, eyes wide open on another wall.

My confusion (mostly at Bartleby’s behavior) was not allayed by a “potential explanation” the Lawyer offers (that Bartleby had been a clerk in the office of the Letter of the Deads, opening for the administration the last missives of the now-defunct, and that this dreadful occupation might have damaged him in some way). Some further reading however helped. Two interpretations in particular seemed illuminating, “Bartleby as criticism of the then-emerging office life”, and “Bartleby as a mirror of Melville’s depression at the time of writing”. It seems to me that the presence of other angry clerks and of a judgmental society of lawyers might give credence to the first. The second, richer interpretation is based on the fact that when Melville wrote Bartleby, he was at a difficult time professionally. After a number of successful adventure books, he was encountering harsh criticism and low sales for books dearer to him (including Moby Dick). Bartleby represents the temptation to curl up in a corner and just stop –stop writing first, then stop living. The Lawyer would be another aspect of the writer – the well-educated, well-adjusted man with an unexplainable sympathy for the quirks of mankind, the one whose tolerance might (or not)have enabled Bartleby’s refusals. The absurdity of the story might reflect the one Melville would have felt in his own life; in that sense, the story would be interesting to confront to Kafka’s work.

The Judgment

A young man, Georg, writes a letter to a friend living far away in St-Petersburg. He had hesitated to announce his upcoming marriage to the friend, as he was reticent to create an obligation to come back for the wedding, but finally decided to do so at the insistence of his fiancée. When he talks about this to his father, whose business he has mostly taken over and developed since his mother’s death, the old man reacts violently, first accusing his son of having invented the friend, then telling him that he has contracted an alliance with the friend against a fiancée depicted as a seductress. Georg tries to defend himself, at first feeling pity, then anger, for his diminished father, but the father wins the confrontation and condemns his son to die drowned – a sentence Georg promptly carries out by throwing himself under the nearest bridge.

The Stoker

For an indiscretion with a maid, Karl has been sent to America by his parents. As his ships docks in the New York City harbor, the young man realizes that he has forgotten his umbrella in his cabin. Leaving his luggage with a ship acquaintance, he rushes back, only to get lost and end up in the cabin of the ship’s stoker. The two men strike a discussion, and Karl decides to support the stoker’s complaint against his officer to the ship captain. The two men find the captain in a large room, with a following of other men, and bring the case to his attention. Unfortunately, the stoker ruins this artful introduction by mangling his explanations, hindering his cause instead of defending it. In the animation that follows, Karl is recognized by a Senator uncle alerted to his presence by a letter from the loving maid. Much to his dismay, Karl is dragged along the man and forced to abandon the stoker to fend for himself.

In the Penal Colony

A tourist visiting a penal colony is required by the new director to attend a ceremony – a complex, almost mystical way to execute a man for a minor offense. The executioner, an officer faithful to the memory of the previous colony’s director, implores him to support his methods to the new director. The tourist, quite disgusted by the method, refuses. The officer then decides to be the last one to die through his machine, but every ounce of dignity is denied to his sacrifice as the machine breaks down and kills him without grace. The tourist flees the colony, followed by an inmate and a guard he barely manages to leave behind.

A Fratricide

This very short story depicts a stabbing in a street, at night, with a cold precision. It could seem very pedestrian but for two elements nagging the reader: one is the presence of a witness, Pallas, who seems to condone the murder but will speak out against the murderer; the second, of much greater interest to me, is the title. Even more radically than with the opening sentence of Metamorphosis, Kafka kills the apparent source of tension in the story, revealing its murderous object before even revealing a single narrative detail; and yet, the motive is never explained, and the fraternal relation between the men neither confirmed nor denied, leaving to the reader free choice to interpret that “fratricide” literally, figuratively, or anything in between.

Gregor, a traveling salesman, is in the clutches of an exploitative boss to whom his father has an important debt. Being a model son and a good employee, Gregor keeps his life is firmly in the camp of hard work and self-sacrifice, his only aspirations being to send his sister to the Conservatory and to one day, all debts repaid, leave his job for a more lenient one.

Inexplicably, Gregor wakes up one day transformed into a repulsive insect and what is worse, late for work. Never thinking to hide his condition, Gregor is rapidly exposed for what he has become, driving away the clerk who came to check on him; his family, more tolerant, will content itself with his exile in his bedroom. His sister Grete even takes it upon herself to feed him to his new tastes, which go to the rotten and the foul, and to clean his bedroom.

Little by little, the situation degrades. The family struggles not only financially (as even with the three of them working, they do not seem to bring in the same income than Gregor used to), but also mentally, as their jobs sap the energy to deal with Gregor. Things come to a first crisis when Gregor’s sister and mother decide to empty his room of furniture so he can crawl on walls more easily; in a fit of attachment to his human past, Gregor tries to protect a picture from their zeal, but his attempt is misunderstood by his mother and scares her so that his father ends up pelting Gregor with apples, one of which becomes embedded and rots in his back.

After this episode, Gregor’s care deteriorates, and when the family takes lodgers, they have no second thoughts about using his room as storage space for anything unwanted. A second crisis occurs when one night Gregor’s sister plays the violin: listening to her, Gregor forgets himself and comes in full view of the lodgers. Driven back to his bedroom, he overhears his family renouncing him. He dies during the night. After a few minutes of mourning, his family regains a dose of optimism, realizing that their hard labor is opening new possibilities to them, especially now that they are free of Gregor.

Notes:

• Why and how does everyone know that the bug is Gregor? Is it really a totally unheard of phenomenon?
• There could be a darker subtitle to Gregor’s family – possibly that they have been consciously exploiting him (the dad looking suddenly weaker when he is around, then proving himself quite capable to work; the money he set aside instead of reimbursing the boss, not mentioning it to Gregor). Similarly, the exploitation of Gregor, which seems extreme even for the time (or when he compares himself to other traveling salesmen, when he says that his colleagues think he makes a lot more money than he does). Is it just an abusive boss emboldened by the debt, or is there some collusion?
• The tendencies in this family to have the children do the dirty work (Gregor’s hard work, Grete’s taking care of him) could lead to a facetious reading of the last lines of the story – a creepy, suspenseful question mark to the project of marrying off Grete now that their “work” with Gregor is done.
• On the other hand… Gregor’s taking the family in charge, and later his mere presence, confines them to being his “parasites”. They find new purpose and strength in his degradation and then death…
• Could it be the aspirations of Gregor that makes him an outcast? (he framed a portrait just before his transformation, which ends up being the cause of the first crisis; he is so attracted to the music played by his sister that it causes the second).
• Is there something to the mom’s feelings than by treating Gregor like an insect, they’re making him become one? The family rejects the idea that he still understands them, though he gives them evidence to the contrary, and little by little convince themselves he is not Gregor anymore.
• Note his inability to feed – “nothing appeals”, nothing nourishes me in what the family has to offer, this sense that there might be “something else”, locked in the pantry, that is refused to him. Does that mirror his new inability to feed his family?
• Physicality of rejection (each time Gregor gets emotionally hurt, it translates physically)

“We admire in her what we are far from admiring in ourselves; in which matter, by the way, she is in full agreement with us.”
Josefine, the Singer, or the Mouse People

The 2007 Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Kafka’s short stories and novellas covers 20 years of his literary life, from 1904 to 1924. While it includes published fragments of his three unfinished novels (such as Before the Law, which was part of The Trial, or The Stoker, the first chapter of Amerika), it stops just short of anything longer than the Metamorphosis novella.

The collection is organized chronologically, and it is interesting to witness the evolution of the writer as he grows into a more expert storyteller. The early pieces often feel more like exercises, exquisite vignettes depicting an isolated incident without meaning or point-in-time sensations; it is however striking how artful they are already, the writing precise and elegant, the pictures vividly drawn.

In time the fragments expand to short stories, or even novellas, and yet the reader never loses the troubling sensation that something is missing. The explanations are just not to be found, whether it’s Kafka’s way of saying that they do not exist, that they do not matter, or that they’re just absent for the reader that we are, but who knows if another… Another feeling I had was that the stories grew darker. Certainly, the same themes kept reappearing: the call of freedom, the attraction of otherness, the deadly wonderfulness of people, the pragmatic world and its demands not to be denied, the constant judgment characters endure… But where the child in the very first story, Children on the Road, was a first-person hero who broke free of his origins to joyously go become “a fool”, the later characters will not quite so succeed. It is perhaps telling than in the very last story of the collection, Josefine, the Singer, or the Mouse People, the artist is held at a distance from the narrator, considered a little absurd and denied the freedom she requests to better dedicate it to her art.

It would not make sense here to look at every single story, as the collection contains forty of them, but that theme of the artist as an outsider who cannot be completely approved of is probably the one that struck me most. Much has been made of Kafka’s status as a perfect outsider (a man who “consisted of literature”, in his own words, born to a pragmatic and somewhat narrow-minded businessman; German-speaking among the Czechs, Jewish among Germans, and a non-believer among Jews), and he himself probably has added to the image with such pronouncements as “I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe”…  Yet there is something amused in his looking at artistic pretenses; it is Gregor, in Metamorphosis, who gets transformed into a giant insect, not his somewhat predatory parents, and to add insult to injury, this happens just after his menial talents have been put to creative use making a frame for a pretty picture, and just before he can put to execution his plans to send his sister to the Conservatory; it is the free monkey who tries to become a crude human in A Report to an Academy; it is the Hunger Artist, in the eponymous story, who dies disregarded when he finally realizes his art to the fullest; it is Josefine who embodies something un-admirable in her race, which she simply brings to light, feeling full of herself for doing so – and whatever it is that she does, which appears to be indescribable, certainly it is made clear that it should not be excessively valued.

To my current state of mind of wanting to escape the necessities of business to explore my literary side and aspirations, this was an interesting read, id slightly anxiety-inducing at times. To this reader, in this reading, Kafka’s humor remained quite secondary to the anguish seeping from stories such as The Judgment, In the Penal Colony, Metamorphosis or A Country Doctor! And yet it was there, pointed not only at the absurdity of the world but also at the ridiculousness of our pretense, and I cannot think that Kafka excluded himself and his oft-commented life struggles from this amusement. Certainly that makes the task ahead seem a little less daunting: if ever he can be poked fun at, then my own ridicules will be in good company!

[summaries in a different article]