Bartleby

by Chris Scott, Grant Loewen (Introduction)

Bartleby is an endlessly inventive comic masterpiece, and the finest continuation of Tristram Shandy ever written. The novel contains copious interruptions and digressions, parodies of the picaresque, Dickensian grotesques, sensationally outré wordplay, an abundance of lists, wildly unhinged improvisation, obsessive riffs on authorship, and characters cribbed from Beckett, Vidal, and Melville. All rise to salute the triumphant return of Bartleby to print! “The end of all this flamboyance is not merely to bewail the rigidity of the straightforward narrative process of modern realistic fiction but also to affirm the joyful, invigorating spontaneity of the spoken/written word—and not merely to berate the categorising impulses of the modern society that are epitomised by the realistic novel, but also to insist on the continuing human capacity to utter the idiosyncracies, potentialities, aspirations, and unpredictable forays of the creatuve mind.” — Canadian Literature

490 pages, Paperback

Published May 16, 2016

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Born in Hull, Yorkshire, England, he was educated at the University of Hull (B.A., 1966), Manchester University (M.A., 1967), and then at the University of Pennsylvania. After a period of teaching at York University, Toronto, he moved to a small town north of Kingston.

He became a Canadian citizen in 1975, and resided on a farm in Lanark County, Ontario during much of his writing career. He is noted for his mixture of genre literature with experimental fiction.

Scott unleashed his formidable literary learning in Bartleby (1971), an anti-novel, in which the reader is guided by a Shandean narrator through a series of intricate, clever literary parodies. Much of the novel turns on literary puns and references. To catch a spy (1978) takes the delicate convolutions of the Le Carré thriller a step further—towards a world in which the doubleness of agents is both assumed and unprovable. The plot is a fictional response to the Burgess-MacLean-Philby spy scandals of the Cold War years that moves towards a meditation on the necessity of living with borrowed faiths and contingent truths in the face of an inscrutable divinity.

Antichthon (1982), a historical novel, continues where the spy novel left off, exploring the universal suspicion in the Renaissance world of casuistry and the Inquisition in which Giordano Bruno is burnt as a heretic. Like the previous novel, it centres on a ‘fictional’ death, whose reality is called into question, making truth itself the subtlest corrosive in a corrupt world. Scott's concept of the suppleness of truth underlies the vitality he has brought to two otherwise hackneyed genres—the espionage novel and the historical novel.
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Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

A précis of the plot will prove impossible, since there is no plot to précis. The novel’s hero, openly cribbed from Melville, is a precocious five-year-old with an unparalleled amorous capacity, and the novel chronicles his attempts to locate his missing ward. Making use of imitative Sternean English, the various interruptions and insertions and digressions, the novel plays around with the picaresque form, Dickensian grotesques, and the notion of authorship in the wake of Barthes. A full-on assault on good taste, the novel is not for the squeamish. De’Ath is a necrophiliac open about his sexual assault on corpses, and the bawdy humour (from the masculine perspective) passes into the sexist (the virgin maiden is ravished by the five-year-old hero, there is a ten-page paean to the naked female form), which explains this novel’s out-of-print status for 45 years. Like the finest self-indulgent metafiction, the novel mingles characters from other books, pinching from Beckett, Vidal, and Melville, and demonstrates some A-grade wordplay and devilish twists of language. The principal pleasure of Bartleby (aside from all those listed things), lies in Scott’s fantastic language, and despite the absence of plot and manic sense of unhinged improvisation, the novel keeps the reader in love with each euphonious turn of phrase. Something of an ur-text for the self-eating prospect of self-referential postmodernism.

[George]

“For now all things are writ large and apocalyptically, and the world outside the poor writer’s playroom falls into little pieces, what does he have at hand but an abacus of sorts, whereon to spell out—as best he can—the words Alpha and Omega? Let other bards plagiarize life; I have plagiarized a book.”

This meta-feast-ional anti-novel by a Canadianized Brit came out in 1971, predating Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew by almost a whole decade, each a paradigm of schizophrenic manuscripts on the fritz. However, Scott throws a few more Rabelaisian bones into his stew, and when he went to add a dash of Sternean salt, the shaker’s top fell off! As one furious and censorious character in Bartleby puts it, “‘Jesus, since when are characters supposed to look after their fucking authors, anyway? […] there’s nothing here but a stinking stew, a rancid, vile, putrid stew with a few spicy episodes thrown in to fool the taste.’”

Read my full review for free here: https://thecollidescope.com/2022/10/0...

I tracked down the author and interviewed him here: https://thecollidescope.com/2022/10/0...

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This ticks a lot of my boxes, discursive, metafictional shenanigans featuring characters set loose from their authors.
It turned out to be a game of 2 halves. 1st half was 5*, really good fun and games. But somewhere around the halfway mark it stopped grabbing my attention as the various characters, narrators and authors flounder around. 3* for this half.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

This novel is a total train wreck. Probably a very well designed trainwreck. You ever go out and try to like artistically assemble a trainwreck? Not easy. Maybe you've got this HO layout in your basement and maybe you've got this one stretch of track and you thought (maybe inspired by a real wreck you saw on the news last night about one of those North Dakota coal trains derailing and falling into the Columbia polluting that year's salmon run) Hey! maybe I should model a trainwreck. Not easy. And it'll never have that je ne sais quoi of the "real" thing. Why? Well, some of it has to do with intentionality (not the Husserlian kind). A real trainwreck is not intended. It is not performed with fore=sight. In fact, it is the very opposite of what literally everyone intends to avoid. BUT, if you model a trainwreck on that one stretch of track on your HO layout, you actually intend shit to go (literally) off the rails. Because you know when unintentionally your little BN SD-whatever model hits a bat spot of rail and does literally go off its little HO-rails and crashes into some scale model depot shit you built? how it don't look nothing like a real trainwreck which at a minimum has broken glass everywhere and probably some broken bones and blood and maybe even some dead bodies and very likely some shit that really should not get into our environment, serious pollutants. Thank god. So you just go ahead and model a train wreck along that stretch of track there and we'll send out a model cleanup crew complete with one of those cranes that roll down the track and lift heavy equipment back onto the rails and is generally just a really cool model.

Unrelatedly, anyone that can model a trainwreck this thoroughly deserves one's attention. I've done it and gathered together each and every one of Scott's books. Because if a guy's got balls to wreck shit up to this level ; his other stuff's worth at least a look.

[Andrew Sare · Rating 5 out of 5]

"And upon the mobs there fell a hail of scythes, scimitars, quills, keys, axes, arrows, wigs, blots, bones, nooses, maces, mooses, camels, stars, sickles, plagues, crutches, crosses, scrolls, bandages, scourges, blots, roc, griffins, chimeras, flails, garlands, chains, masks, thrones, powers, pigs, pies, plots, sub-plots, climaxes, a withering hail of symbolic instruments, followed by the golden crown which fell not upon the mobs but upon the prepuce of the Dildo's tip just before the phallus itself slid down, at such a viscus orgasmic spray was ejaculated forth, covering the entire square wit a surging sickly sweet lobolly, a white caparison signifying death." - Scott

This book is written - according to Scott - for those who might review it and perceive failure if they felt that they could not masterfully describe and analyze it, and should thus be consumed with it. I will dodge this call and leave that responsibility to others, and just leave you with a few fanciful comments.

What we have here is an entirely exhausting and thrilling mass of brain pain. With countless inventions, arguments wrought on the reader past discomfort, tricks, self categorizations and explorations.

Bartleby was recommended by Christian Bok in his book of Canadian criticism and exploration "Avant Guard for Thee". I'm fairly confident that I was the first reader of my first edition hard cover library copy from 1971. It was in mint condition. That means that it sat on a shelf for 54 years waiting for me. In order to prepare myself I read of course the titular Bartleby by Melville, as well as Tristram Shandy, which this is said to be a successor of. To me though this seemed more a successor to Gargantua and Pantagruel as taken on by depraved Alexander Theroux. I'm not sure it had anything to do with Melville's Bartleby in the end - though Scott does address the connection upfront in one of his many metafictional digressions and apologies. Anyway, I've had it in mind for a long time. Of the 6 ratings and 5 reviews on goodreads it turns out I already know 5. It feels like the lot of such a group should put on our best tweed jackets and turtlenecks, take out our pipes and grow long curled mustaches in order to be ready to discuss this.

To Geoffrey - the only one I have not already come to know by some twist or turn - here is a hello and friend request, though I see you haven't been on since 2024.

[Geoffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a way, it may be pointless to give this a star rating. But I have. In a way you've gotta admire the extremity with which it warps narrative form; in a way you've gotta find it a little tedious. And the fact that the title character (who has zero to do with Melville, no matter what anyone says) is a horny five-year-old having sex with his middle-aged aunt is just gross beyond all bearing (the gender politics in general ain't great, but that's sort of de rigueur for a book like this from a time like this). I admire certain aspects of it, but I'd only recommend it to an extremely specialized audience. In spite of the back-cover copy, Scott is no Sterne.