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.Someleaning against the piles; some seated upon the pier-heads; somelooking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloftin the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep.New York is the city in which, says Ishmael,  Right and left, thestreets take you waterward, toward both severe risk and limit-less opportunity (Moby-Dick 3 4).In Pierre and  Bartleby New York figures as a scene of frus-trated hopes and self-alienation themes that must have comenaturally to Melville in his disappointment over the poor salesand lukewarm critical reception of Moby-Dick.The full title ofPierre is Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, and the subtitle underscoresthe connection between the uncertainty and mystification thatPierre Glendinning, the novel s protagonist, experiences and thelabyrinthine urban environment that serves as a setting for hisstory.Pierre is a provincial innocent and aspiring writer fromSaddle Meadows who pretends to wed his half-sister Isabel,born out of wedlock, in order to conceal her parentage and thusprotect the family name from dishonor.Lucy Tartan, to whomPierre had been engaged, and Delly, a servant, accompanyPierre and Isabel to New York, where Pierre intends to earn aliving as a writer and support them all.But the move from theupstate New York countryside to New York City provesruinous.Melville is out to critique the individualism, vulgarity,and chaos of the emphatically democratic society of the city bycontrasting it with the aristocratic values family history,50 NEW YORKprivilege, learning, order of the country: .the town is themore plebeian portion: which, besides many other things, isplainly evinced by the dirty unwashed face perpetually worn bythe town; but the country, like the Queen, is ever attended byscrupulous lady s maids in the guise of the seasons, and thetown hath but one dress of brick turned up with stone (Pierre13).Melville somewhat heavy handedly drives his point homeabout the horrors of the urban by incorporating into the novela slew of tragic deaths: Pierre kills Lucy s brother, Pierre smother and Lucy both die, and Pierre and Isabel end up com-mitting suicide in his prison cell in the Tombs.Pierre; or, TheAmbiguities presents an account of New York as a sprawlinginfernal underworld whose promises of recognition and for-tune prove, as they had for Melville in the case of Moby-Dick,disastrously false. Bartleby, the Scrivener partakes of the same complex ofconcerns that Pierre does.Its central character is someone whogoes to New York, writes, fails, is arrested, and ends up dying inthe Tombs of a suicidal disinclination to eat, but the characterhandles these concerns with more subtlety and originality thanthe earlier, longer work does. Bartleby is less the outlashing atthe New York publishing scene that Pierre was, and more of adiagnosis, delivered in the form of a parable, of the extent ofMelville s own resolve not to write the kind of conventionaladventure novel the public seemed to expect of him, much likeBartleby refuses to do the routine copying the narrator hireshim for.The narrator is a kindhearted, mild-mannered lawyerwho is proud of having done business with John JacobAstor one of the city s most wealthy residents, who d made afortune in New York real estate.He hires Bartleby to work forhim as a copyist and sets him up, significantly, in a desk thatfaces  a window which originally had afforded a lateral view ofcertain grimy back-yards and bricks, but which, owing to sub-sequent erections, commanded at present no view at all( Bartleby 110).After doing some work,  silently, palely,mechanically, for the narrator, Bartleby begins to respond toPARADISE AND INFERNO 51subsequent orders with his peculiar, disarmingly simplerefusal:  I would prefer not to (111 12).The narrator isbewildered as to how to handle Bartleby, who, it turns out, isliving in the office at night [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]