2/1/2024 0 Comments Bartleby the scrivenerThey have anxiety like nobody else, and so he was the perfect person to talk to about how to pass through it.” įew of us can even imagine the pressures of being the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) who is not allowed to fail, the face of the Olympics, America’s standard bearer, and the always dependable foundation of the team’s success. … Pianists have it worse than anybody in the world … If you have to play Carnegie Hall, and you know that one performance will define your whole life, and if you have a memory slip, or if your finger goes rogue, you’re going to be living with the ramifications of it for the rest of your life. “The bottom line of the conversation: most artists are not nervous enough. “I decided to confide with him that I’d been performing with a crippling stage fright,” said Hawke in an interview. When Hawke first encountered Bernstein at a dinner party and learned his story, the actor/director found himself sharing his own anxieties with the older man. In Ethan Hawke’s 2014 documentary, Seymour: An Introduction, we meet Seymour Bernstein, a celebrated concert pianist who disappointed his public by quitting the stage at age 50 after becoming “a total wreck” from the pressures of performance. And she has been credited by many for making a memorable case for self-care-mental as well as physical-in the pressure cooker of elite public performance. It probably helped the team, which might not have medaled had she continued to underperform. I have never felt like this going into a competition, and I tried to go out and have fun. “You have to be there 100%,” she explained in a press conference. A mistake in gymnastics can mean a broken neck. It’s not like dropping a pass or missing a putt. Her body and mind had slipped “out of sync” in Tokyo, causing her to feel lost in midair during her twisting somersaults off the vault table. She told the press she was taking care of her mental health. Unlike Bartleby, however, Biles made known her motivation. Why did she prefer not to perform? Some were puzzled, even outraged, and, like Bartleby’s frustrated colleagues, they rushed to supply their own speculative interpretations. The world immediately demanded explanations. We want to know why, but in Bartleby’s world there is no why.īartleby came to mind this week when “the greatest gymnast in history,” Simone Biles, withdrew from the Olympic team competition after a flawed performance in her first event. Or the story itself is Melville’s practical joke on the reading public, luring us down the hermeneutic rabbit hole of a world without reasons. He’s the embodiment of modernity’s “sickness unto death,” the enervation of purpose and will. He’s the existential resistance to a deadening, soulless economy. Literary critics and perplexed readers have been trying to explain Melville’s tale for 168 years. And what is true of Bartleby the character is also true of “Bartleby” the story. Neither reader nor narrator can solve the puzzle of his abiding negation. And he is not a character as we know them in life, with their bundling bustle of details … He is indeed only words, wonderful words, and very few of them.” Įvery attempt by the bewildered narrator to categorize or interpret his eccentric employee vanishes into the black hole of Bartleby’s essential unknowability. As Elizabeth Hardwick describes him, “Bartleby is not a character in the manner of the usual, imaginative, fictional construction. His past is unknown he is barely present in the here and now. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him.” įor his employer, Bartleby remains an unknowable blank, an impenetrable opacity. “Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable except from the original sources, and, in his case, those are very small. The story is narrated by his employer, who finds himself “strangely goaded on” to discover the motivation for Bartleby’s eccentric behavior. When, in the end, he lands in jail, he prefers “not to dine,” and dies of starvation. When finally discharged by his boss, he prefers not to leave the premises. He prefers not to perform assigned tasks, or to explain why. In “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Herman Melville’s notoriously perplexing short story, his principal character speaks just thirty-seven lines, over a third of them variations on a simple declaration: “I would prefer not to.” Having taken a job copying documents in a law firm, he offers that same maddening reply to every request. “Wandering away from everything, giving up everything, not me anymore, not any of it.” Aurélien Arbet and Jérémie Egry, I would prefer not to (2005).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |