On Elusive Allusions and Other Shit
By ice rivers
- 217 reads
Everybody gets jugged in a Jesuit education. No surprise. For Jug punishments in my day we had to gather in the Prefect of Disciplines office and print copies of segments of papal encyclicals which made me that much more sympathetic of Bartleby in Herman Melville's short novel Bartleby the Scriviner.
Ice Rivers
Even though I'm a frequent practitioner, I am not a fan of undeveloped allusion. Too often, undeveloped allusion serves as a Rorsach test to determine the cultural quotient of an audience be it readers or viewers. If you get the allusion without further development you're "cool" and if not well go ahead and laugh at your own degree of insouciance and the superior consciousness and intelligence of the host and/or his/her writers
Late night show opening monologues are the ground zeros for undeveloped allusions. Hosts use them as all purpose name drops which get the "laugh" cue blasted at the live audience, at least half of whom don't get it ,eagerly go Pavlovian when the signal is given.
(See, I just dropped an allusion under the suspicion that everyone intelligent enough to read this particular essay would also be informed enough to know about the experiments in conditioning conducted by Pavlov and his drooling dogs. If you don't know Pavlov and aren't interested, just forget the allusion. If you don't know about Pavlov but are a good reader you can figure out the meaning and accuracy of the allusion through context. In the twenty first century. if you don't know but are interested/curious enough to find out more you can just Google Pavlov and find out more etc.)
English teachers develop the undeveloped allusion strategy to determine who has read the assignment. English students practice the "I know what you're talking about" look and the more successful the practice, the higher the power of teacher pleasing. The higher the power of teacher pleasing the higher the grade, the higher the grade the better the college, the better the college the better the network, the better the network the better the job, the better the job the more money made, the more money made th biggere thcontribution to the collegiate alma mater etc.
Perhaps this is where my habit began in my first few years of teaching. I soon grew tired of that game. I wanted everybody in the class to get the allusions even if it meant revealing the plot so that no student would be left out of the story. I was tired of punishing intelligent students whose reading and masquerading skills skills didn't match their intelligence.
For example, yesterday I name dropped Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener as a metaphoric allusion to the drudgery of having to copy, in perfect cursive, omiscient Latin writings of unknown popes which was the ancient Jesuit discipline system imposed on me which I compared to the current Jesuit discipline system imposed on my grandson Oliver.
If you haven't read Bartleby the Scrivener, you can't judge the accuracy of my comparison. Why the hell could/should I assume that anybody except for me and oddballs like me would know a goddamed thing about either Melville or Scrivnering or Wall Street in the nineteenth century.
Maybe a development is in order.
I come from Rochester, New York....the home of Kodak. We in Rochester know a thing or two about development, at least we did before digital cameras.
The fictional story of Bartleby is written in the third person from the viewpoint of a lawyer who makes his living on the preparation wills and deeds and mortgages and "real stuff" like that. This is a lawyer who never appears in court. These legal documents tend to be very long and very specific. Our narrator hires three scriveners whose job is to make painstakingly accurate copies of every document. This is way before typewriters and copiers.
Rochester, by the way, was also the hometown of Xerox but that's another story.
Ya still remeber Xerox don't cha?
With his business booming, the narrator of BTS decides to hire another Scrivner. He hires a man named Bartleby. Bartleby gets right to work and in the first few weeks proves to be consistent, diligent and dedicated.
After a document has been "scrivven" four times, the scriveners gather together and read the results of their labor. It is a standard practice. When Bartleby is summoned for the proof reading He astonishes everybody in office by saying that he "does not prefer" to attend to that particular function.
The narrator interprets this seeming insubordination as Bartleby's pride in his job as a scrivener and that he is reluctant to condescend to the role of reader. The narrator is patient for a few weeks although the other members of the office seethe.
Once again, the narrator requests Bartleby to help with the reading and once again Bartleby would "prefer not to'. The narrator increase the intensity of the request to a command which Bartleby "prefers" not to obey as he retreats to his cubicle and continues to copy.
The narrator rationalizes Bartleby's insubordination. He goes back to Bartleby's cube and gives him another scrivener assignment while the others are doing the proofreading. Bartleby considers the assignment before telling the narrator that he would "prefer" not to do that assignment at that time.
As you may imagine Bartleby takes up residence in the office but "prefers" not to do any work. He begins sleeping in the office. The narrator discovers this one Sunday morning when he drops by his own office and discovers that the door is locked. He knocks on the door until finally Bartelby emerges. The narrator asks to be admitted to which Bartleby responds that he would "prefer not" to admit the owner of the building into his own building at the "present time" and urges his boss to walk around Wall Street for awhile then come back and try again.
The narrator can not stand for this behavior so he makes up his mind to fire Bartleby the next day.
He is kind and gentle in his approach to Bartleby's termination. He offers him what we would call a severance package and assure Bartleby that if he could be any service in the future, he would gladly help out.
He puts the money on the table and urges Bartleby to accept the money and the termination to which Bartleby responds that he would "prefer not to" on this occasion.
By this time, Bartelby has become a presence in his cubicle who doesn't do any work other than stand around for which he does not prefer to be paid even though no payment can be offered since no services are being performed.
The narrator gathers his resolve and kicks Bartleby out of the office entirely but Bartelby prefers not to go.
Eventually, the narrator sells his building rather than deal with Bartleby. A month after the sale, the new owner of the building tries to convince the narrator that Bartleby is the narrator's responsibility as he is "part of the building" which the narrator needs to remove because on his own Bartleby would "prefer" to stay and just hangs around the stairwell of the building getting in the way.
At last Bartleby is taken away to jail. He dies in jail from malnutrition. The narrator of the story had been warned by the prison chowmaster that no one can survive on prison rations so he the chowmaster receives payment for food that he will provide to sponsored prisoners.
The narrator decides to visit Bartleby in prison because Bartleby "prefers not" to accept the meals provided by the chowmaster and purchased by the narrator .
The narrator visits Bartleby. The narrator asks Bartleby if Bartleby recognizes him and if he would like to talk to which Bartleby responds that he recognizes his former employee but that he would not"prefer to talk at this time."
Since no one is sure exactly what crime to charge Bartleby with, he is free to walk around the jail yard which he seems to enjoy and where the narrator finds him on his final visit. Bartleby is crumbled up against the wall, lifeless with open eyes.
Now at last perhaps, you can latch on to my original allusion which describes the deadening effect of mindless copying such as the jug assignment we would be tasked with in high school. That's if you've read this far and weren't the one out of a hundred who understood the allusion in the first place for which this entire essay has been an exercise in superfluosity.
Today, Bartleby is often used a a metaphor to describe the work habits of our millennial crowd. I reject that metaphor as far too all encompassing. I prefer to think of it in terms of art as obsession, an American version of The Hunger Artist minus the panthers and the filthy hay.
Whoops!
A whole new problem
How many people know what I'm talking about when I allude to The Hunger Artist by Kafka as a metaphor for Bartleby the Scrivener? I'm gonna say one out of a hundred so it looks like I better recap The Hunger Artist in order to provide a better idea of what I meant when using Bartleby the Scrivner as to add meaning to the Jug discipline that I remembered with such disdain etc.
Or maybe I should just say that copying incomprehendible shit is a drudgery that sucks.
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