Graham Thompson

Periodizing the '80s: "The Differential of History" in Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine

This essay examines how Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine shifts engagement with the details of the material world consistently onto the axis of temporality. It also examines how, in so doing, Baker’s novel fashions a theory of periodization in which historical and social trends and events are relegated in importance. Asking how the detail or moment might both alter an understanding of the general and spread time to infinite proportions, The Mezzanine casts doubt on the process of periodizing by way of metonymy and synecdoche and offers instead a contingent and improvised version of the 1980s.

The “Plain Facts” of Fine Paper in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”

This essay intervenes in conversations about mid-nineteenth-century authorship and print culture by distinguishing between the economy of paper and the economy of print. He argues that critical treatments of Melville’s work, and particularly “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855), have not adequately attended to the material economy of paper that existed for Melville before the cycle of literary publication, distribution, and circulation began. Living in the important papermaking region of rural west Massachusetts allowed Melville to experience the raw materials of that economic sector not as a distant or vicarious consumer but, following his visit to the Old Berkshire Mill in Dalton in the winter of 1851, as a specialized purchaser. Instead of treating paper as a metonym of literary-market exchange, then, Thompson’s essay examines Melville’s experience and imagining of this raw material—literally avant la lettre—as a way of better understanding the economy of a substance whose manufactured sizes (folio, octavo, and duodecimo) he had already used to classify whales in Moby-Dick and on which his recalcitrant copyist, Bartleby, refuses to write.

“Dead letters! … Dead Men?”: The Rhetoric of the Office in Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener”

Although a good deal of recent critical attention to Melvilles writing has followed the lead of Robert K. Martin in addressing the issue of sexuality, the predominant themes in discussions of “Bartleby” remain changes in the nature of the workplace in antebellum America and transformations in capitalism. But, if one of the abiding mysteries of the story is the failure of the lawyer–narrator to sever his relationship with his young scrivener once Bartleby embarks upon his policy of preferring not to, it is a mystery that makes sense within both of these critical discourses. On the one hand, the longevity of the relationship dramatizes a tension implicit in Michael Gilmores suggestion that the lawyer–narrator straddles the old and the new economic orders of the American market-place. Although he may employ his scriveners “as a species of productive property and little else”, his attachment to his employees is overwhelmingly paternalistic and protective. On the other hand, James Creech suggests that Pierre (published the year before “Bartleby”) is a novel preoccupied with the closeting of homosexual identity within the values of an American middleclass family, while Gregory Woods describes Melville as the nearest thing in the prose world of the American Renaissance to the Good Gay Poet Whitman. In this critical context the longevity of the relationship suggests that the lawyer–narrators desire to know Bartleby, to protect him, to tolerate him, to be close to him, to have him for his own, and then to retell the story of their relationship, needs to be considered in relation to sexual desire.

“Bartleby” and the Magazine Fiction

For a few short weeks, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” was a piece of anonymous magazine i ction. The i rst installment appeared toward the end of the November 1853 issue of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine and was just one of the many other anonymous poems, stories, essays, and reviews making up that issue. By the time the second and i nal installment was published in December 1853, however, The Literary World had revealed Melville as the author of this “Poe-ish tale.” 1 Thereafter, the lawyer and his copying clerk move beyond the bounds of the magazine world. Reprinted simply as “Bartleby” with four of Melville’s other Putnam’s stories in The Piazza Tales (1856), the seriality and full title of the magazine version were lost as Melville’s authorship was formally instituted. Continually reproduced and anthologized as a freestanding short story in the wake of Melville’s canonization during the twentieth century, “Bartleby” has become a milestone for any understanding of Melville’s authorial persona. As a consequence, Putnam’s Monthly attracts little more attention in the vast expanse of “Bartleby” criticism than the object to which the magazine compared itself in its very i rst editorial of January 1853: a “speck of star dust” in “the celestial dairy” of America. 2 But what would it mean to reconnect the most famous and widely read of Melville’s short stories to the magazines of the 1850s? And what does it mean to read “Bartleby” as magazine i ction ? Some questions often asked of the story might become less important. Who is Bartleby, why does he “prefer not to,” why does the lawyer not dispense with him more quickly, and how should Bartleby’s death be interpreted? Questions of this nature have preoccupied two dominant approaches to the story. The i rst tries to identify the literary and historical sources on which “Bartleby” is based. Because of his preference for refusal, Bartleby has been read as the Thoreau of “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849) and often biographically as Melville himself as he became alienated from writing and publishing after the commercial failures of Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852). 3 Melville’s friend and traveling companion Eli Fly, who worked as 7