Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 32

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^Po£ular^Culture^evie^

Marx makes the important point that "Bartleby the Scrivener" is
a "parable of walls," whose appropriate setting is Wall Street,
which by the 1850s had already become the financial heart of
American capitalism, industry, and technological progress. Melville
has chosen the imagery of walls to suggest, among other things, the
shift in American values from the "absolute-Other" Puritan
orientation to a hermetic urban culture whose metaphysical desire for
typological signs is losing touch with meaningful signifieds. The
image of the wall persists to the end of "Bartleby," when the
mysterious scrivener is hauled off to prison. For Bartleby, nothing
really changes:
. . . the important thing is that he [Bartleby] still
fronts the same dead-wall which has always
impinged upon his consciousness, and ufx)n the mind of
the (sic) man since the beginning of time.. . . Bartleby
has come as close to the wall as any n « n can hope to
do. He finds that it is absolutely impassable, and
that it is not, as the Ahabs of the world would like to
think, merely a pasteboard mask through which man
can strike. The masonry is of 'amazing thickness'
(23).
In the end, Bartleby has become a stranger, even an
embarrassment, to modem society, which builds blank walls between
man and Other. Melville's message is not that there is no God or
Other; in "Bartleby," rather, our relationship with the Other is no
longer clearly drawn by nature—for Wall Street is the ultimate
product of technological progress—or by God.
The third major stage in the evolution of American metaphysical
values is marked by the appearance of what I propose dubbing the
"internalized Other." This stage is inextricably bound up with a type
of self-serving mass narcissism in contemporary culture which must be
distinguished from the self-reliant narcissism , or "rugged
individualism," of the American past.^ In contemfwrary fiction, one
of the best critiques of latter-day American cultural narcissism is
Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Both the town of San
Narcisco and the character of Oedipa Maas, who has to forget about
her physical appearance before she is capable of empathizing with