대도시 삶에서의 관계의 운명과 감정의 발굴

The Fate of Relationships and the Discovery of Emotion in the Metropolitan Life in "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

This paper attempts to study emotions in metropolitan life. According to Georg Simmel, the metropolitan type creates a protective organ for itself against the profound disruptions which threaten it. Punctuality, calculability, and exactness are not only intimately connected with its capitalistic and intellectualistic character but also with its color and the content of life. In addition, there is perhaps a psychological phenomenon which is so unconditionally reserved to the city-the blase outlook. This is not only indifference but more frequently a slight aversion, a mutual strangeness and repulsion. Our minds respond, with definite feeling, to almost every impression emanating from another person. The same mental experiences in the metropolis are described by the narrator in Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener." Although the novel focuses on Bartleby's negative potentialities by the answer "I would prefer not to," this paper explores the narrator's emotions which are interpreted as a failure of the affective relationship between Bartleby and the narrator. In the first part of the novel the narrator mentions he is an eminently safe man and therefore does not allow anything to invade his peace. Bartleby's invasion, however, changed his whole sense. The narrator falters as his feelings are moved by Bartleby's non-replies. Although the comments about the narrator whose attempts to build a meaningful relationship with Bartleby fails, the narrator himself is not a failure. He was strangely disarmed, touched and disconcerted, perplexed and distressed. Finally, the narrator stays by Bartleby's deathbed in the possible act of building an inoperative community. As Jean-Luc Nancy says "community is revealed in the death of others; hence it is always revealed to others." Community is what always takes place through others and for others.