Bartleby, the Scrivener - Daniel Stempel and Bruce M. Stillians (essay date 1972-1973)
Daniel Stempel and Bruce M. Stillians (essay date 1972-1973)
SOURCE: "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Parable of Pessimism," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 1, 1972-73, pp. 268-82.
[In the following essay, Stempel and Stillians consider "Bartleby" to be the result of Melville's interest in Schopenhauer.]
In October 1853 a troubled Matthew Arnold explained why he had chosen to drop Empedocles on Etna from his new collection of poems. Certain situations, Arnold suggested, are intrinsically devoid of the power to provide "poetical enjoyment": "those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous" [Poetical Works]. And so, Empedocles, having...
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