ABSTRACT

It has become typical for readings of ‘Bartleby, The Scrivener’ to discuss the many interpretations which have accumulated around the text. A standard move is to point to the similarities between the critic seeking to understand the story, and the story’s narrator seeking to understand Bartleby. The critical heritage of ‘Bartleby’ therefore becomes an ironic spectacle whereby readers fall into a trap signalled bluntly by the text. The irony of the ‘Bartleby Industry’ has been noted by critics, as has the specific form of its collective error: the conversion of the text and its titular character into other modes of critical interpretation. But are all such conversions equal? Does every analogical reading of ‘Bartleby’ result in the same critical blindness, or might we make the case for a more nuanced set of results? Might we even think of interpretations which are formally closer to Bartleby than to the narrator? I look at two responses to ‘Bartleby’, by Adam Phillips and J. Hillis Miller, which explicitly proceed by converting the text to other terms. Through a reading of these analogical approaches I suggest important critical differences, and draw out the relevance of these differences for thinking about this enduringly impassive text.

摘要

阅读“Bartleby, The Scrivener”已经成为典型的讨论围绕文本积累的许多解释。一个标准的做法是指出试图理解故事的评论家与试图理解巴图比的故事叙述者之间的相似之处。因此，《巴图比》的批判性遗产变成了一种讽刺奇观，读者因此陷入了文本直言不讳的陷阱。批评家们注意到了“Bartleby Industry”的讽刺意味，以及其集体错误的具体形式：将文本及其名义特征转换为其他批判性解释模式。但是所有这些转换都是平等的吗？对“Bartleby”的每一次类比阅读是否都会导致同样的批判性失明，或者我们是否可以证明一组更细微的结果？我们甚至可以考虑在形式上更接近巴特比而不是叙述者的解释吗？我查看了 Adam Phillips 和 J. Hillis Miller 对“Bartleby”的两个回应，它们明确地将文本转换为其他术语。通过对这些类比方法的阅读，我提出了重要的关键差异，并指出这些差异与思考这个持久冷漠的文本的相关性。