Re: RARA-AVIS: Billy Budd and Bartleby

From: Michael Robison ( miker_zspider@yahoo.com)
Date: 28 Aug 2006


david wrote:

bartleby was the one story by melville that i got into. maybe it was all the windows that opened onto brick walls. i remember an overwhelming sense of confinement. i don't think the lawyer was intended to be sympathetic. his inaction was not so different from bartleby's. the dissatisfaction with modernity makes it the most noirish (if you will) of the melville's i read in college.

************* One thing I neglected to say was that although I didn't like the story, I still could see the craftsmanship in it. I like your comment that the lawyer's reaction is similar to Bartleby's. That's dead on. All three Melville stories have struck me as noirish. My preference is for a gaudy struggle, so Moby Dick was way satisfying. And thumbs up to noir as a rejection of modernism. That was what Gothic was all about. Look what science did for Frankenstein.

miker

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