Modernism at the Microphone by Dinsman Melissa.;

Author:Dinsman, Melissa.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472595089
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

5

Clogged Communication

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.

Cool Hand Luke1

In the conclusion of “Bartleby,” Herman Melville’s tale of a lethargic and frustratingly uncommunicative scrivener, we learn that the title character used to work in the Dead Letter Office in Washington, DC. This unexpected snippet on Bartleby’s past employment, which is thematically and structurally divorced from the preceding story, is, however, symbolic of Bartleby’s narrative existence. He, like the letters that arrive at the Dead Letter Office, fails to communicate, and, as Welles’ The War of the Worlds shows, when communication ceases, death shortly follows. Even the narrator comments on the eerie connection between failed communication and dying when he exclaims: “Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?”2 This is certainly true for Bartleby, whose increasingly curt replies to the narrator eventually become total silence. As a result, Bartleby’s corporality, which is marked by his, albeit sparing, use of voice, is no longer certain, and the narrator decides that the term “ghost” more aptly applies to Bartleby than does “man.”3 Of course, Bartleby’s haunting of the narrator begins before the scrivener’s untimely demise. Like the letters he once sorted through, which were the lingering, disembodied voices of their writers, Bartleby is frequently only a voice. Even the spatial plan of the law office in which he works isolates Bartleby so that only auditory responses can be heard. As the narrator states: “I procured a high green folding screen, which might entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not remove him from my voice. And thus, in a manner, privacy and society were conjoined.” This screen, however, works both ways, and more often acts as a barrier that keeps the narrator from seeing Bartleby respond to his requests with “I would prefer not to.”4

Although Melville’s story pre-dates the invention of wireless by almost half a century, the portrayal of Bartleby as an acousmatic, or disembodied, voice that “conjoins” both the public and private worlds of the law office presents the reader with an auditory network that seems to anticipate the technological innovation to come. Not to mention that the green screen dividing Bartleby from the working world could be seen as a prototype for the curtain that isolates the Wizard from the rest of Oz (Chapter 1). Thus, with “Bartleby,” Melville portrays two different networks (one written and one auditory) that are perpetually breaking down. The promise of communication implied by a letter or a radio transmission is broken when the letter fails to reach its destination or when no one hears (or in the case of Bartleby, when the hearer ignores) the broadcast. However, this interruption or “clogging” of communications networks is, according to Bernhard Siegert, the historic norm:

Noise and wrangling on all channels: that was the situation to begin with. Language was a pipeline that constantly was clogged with the ambiguities of rhetoric. Philosophers were its plumbers. Thus began an epoch of the postal system that equated transmission channels with language, language with communication, communication with understanding, and understanding with the salvation of humanity.

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