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English R1B: SILENCE, Christine Sun Kim, The Sound of Obsessing (2020) -…
English R1B: SILENCE
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Herman Melville, "Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street" (1856)
"I Would Prefer Not To"
Writer and artist Jenny Odell references Bartleby in her argument for the value of doing nothing. Watch the video above for a recap of Odell's ideas ^^
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The title of Odell's book How To Do Nothing (2019) suggests a striking affinity with Cage's thinking in "Lecture on Nothing" (1959). Odell cites a number of Cage's artworks as well as more recent pieces in the minimalist tradition Cage inaugurated, such as Scott Polach's Applause Encouraged (2015)
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"He wrote on silently, palely, mechanically" (6). What do we think about the fact that Bartleby was okay with working on his own and in silence, but he didn't want to join the other scriveners to check the copies? Could it be that checking the copies is a collaborative activity and he doesn't feel comfortable socialising? Is he an introvert who doesn't do well in groups?
"Poor fellow! thought I, he means no mischief; it is plain he intends no insolence; his aspect sufficiently evinces that his eccentricities are involuntary." (10) If Bartleby's eccentricities are "involuntary", then he wouldn't be disobeying the lawyer on purpose and would instead be the product of forces working upon him. Do you agree with this interpretation of the story? What, if any, are Bartleby's motives for preferring not to?
Different kinds of negation in the story: a) Bartleby negates capitalist society because he's an alienated worker in the marketplace b) Bartleby negates communication because he won't talk to anyone or participate in the illusion that understanding one another is possible c) Bartleby negates psychological satisfaction because he makes the Lawyer unable to feel good about himself
After reading the story, what do you make of Bartleby's silence? In class, we used the scene where the Lawyer opens Bartleby's desk as a springboard for considering how a character's silence might make us as readers more curious about how they think and feel. Does silence imply an inaccessible interior life, which could be shared with us using language but is being withheld even as it invites us to know more about it? Is the reader enticed, like the Lawyer who opens Bartleby's desk, to know Bartleby's interior life? Does Bartleby's silence prevent his thoughts and feelings from being known?
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Melville's story is set amidst the hustle and bustle of Wall Street, the busy world of getting and spending that America was emerging into in the 19th century. In Quiet, Cain refers to this moment in time as the transition from the "culture of character" to the "culture of personality". At a simple level, the story is about someone who wants to get work done. But Bartleby has no appetite for the job.
John Cage, 4"33 (1952) and "Lecture on Nothing" (1959)
The idea behind this piece is explained in Cage's book Silence, where he argues that absolute silence does not truly exist, and is therefore not opposed to voice or music. He writes: "There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot."
Much of the musical world is defined by silences. In 1952, the American composer John Cage wrote a piece titled 4"33 in which the performer is instructed not to play any instrument at all for four minutes and thirty three seconds.
In his "Lecture on Nothing" (1959), Cage uses the image of an empty glass to articulate his refusal of absolute silence: just as the emptiness of the glass is only possible through the existence of a container for us to perceive as empty, what we perceive as an absence of sound is simply the gap between two moments of utterance.
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It is undoubtedly John Cage who first and most perfectly deployed this fixed sound plane, which affirms a process against all structure and genesis, a floating time against pulsed time or tempo, experimentation against any kind of interpretation, and in which silence as sonorous rest also marks the absolute state of movement -- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Silence and Gender
Kelly Reichardt, Old Joy (2005) and Wendy and Lucy (2008)
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970)
Samuel Beckett, Happy Days (1952)
Eliza Hittman, Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020)
One productive way of thinking about the texts we've studied this semester is to consider their engagement with silence as it relates to gender. Are female characters more likely to fall silent than male characters? If so, why?
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Christine Sun Kim, The Sound of Obsessing (2020)
