The Importance of Flat Characters

It's odd that I find myself this week in the position of defending the flat. Aesthetically I don't particularly like the flat, and in some cases I find it to be opposed to sublime experience. But when I read Flusser's "Line and Surface," a chapter in "Writings," I can't help but be reminded of the flatness of Bartleby as a character. Let's look briefly at several passages from the text and then look at "Bartleby the Scrivener."

Flusser describes the difference between reading a text and reading a picture, and in doing so arrives at a preliminary conclusion that becomes the foundation for his argument. First he suggests that the difference in reading techniques relates to the inherent structure of texts, which demand that the reader's eyes move from left to right or right to left or top to bottom. This codified way of reading is "imposed upon us," while in reading a picture we are free to move about within a structure that has been "proposed to us." (22) This comparison is rhetorical, however, which he indicates in the very next paragraph, saying "this is not a very good answer to our question," and proposing instead that the freedom we experience in reading a picture is only the first step. (23) The second step involves reading a picture systematically, as we would a text, in a system that is imposed on us.  All this leads Flusser to conclude that we must read systematically to gain any meaning from a written text, but we can immediately grasp the meaning in a picture, and our subsequent reading serves to "decompose it." (23) Then drawing a more far-reaching conclusion, he writes:

This points to the difference between the one-dimensional surface and the two-dimensional surface: the one aims at getting somewhere; the other is there already, but may reveal how it got there. This difference is one of temporality, and involves the present, the past, and the future. (23)

Briefly: I'm not sure this characterization of texts as one-dimensional and flat pictorial surfaces as two-dimensional is entirely accurate, though I want to use it in reading Bartleby. Sure when we encounter language written on a page, letters that form words or symbols scrawled in a handwritten script, Flusser's point seems well-conceived. Language speaks meaning in structures imposed on us systematically. But what happens when it doesn't? In the 20th century there were a number of interesting efforts to complicate this notion of reading structure, and unfortunately, most of these have historically fallen under the rubric of "art" instead of "poetry" or "literature," but perhaps it is precisely because these works do not impose a structure on the reader that they exist outside of traditional categories of texts. Here I am thinking of the works of Brion Gysin, Cy Twombley, Alfred Jarry, Morita Shiryu, Henri Michaux and others. 

Brion Gysin, 1963.

When we are confronted by a text like the one above, a page from Brion Gysin's notebook, we are unsure of where to begin. Even the question of how to begin or why seems mysterious, especially in light of the fact that the words on the page are expressly meaningless. When we look at Gysin's work, we perceive a maze of symbols, mysterious calligraphy, one-dimensional lines that fold over onto themselves, forming a barrier that keeps us out of the text. With this distance, the reader is forced to scan the text and the text is transformed into art object. But being composed of symbols and letters,  we may or may not find an initial meaning, when we scan the "picture," and if we move to the next step, the analysis, and we try to read this like a picture, we again face resistance because we move back to looking at it like a text. Let's look at another example:

Cy Twombley, Poems to the Sea, 1959.

Twombley blurs the lines a little more between poetry and art. His work uses pencil, crayons, pastels, and oil paints. It appears to our eyes like a child's drawing. But there is something else going on. The white oil paint looks like whiteout, the marks of correction on a child's homework. So this gives us the hint of a cultural reference, and it also gives us movement off the page, something we might more readily think of as art. But with his title, Twombley moves back to poetry. What effect does this move, from text to art to text have? Is this interpretation right, or are there other possible readings of this work?

In recent times, there has been a curious effort to historicize many of these works and authors and to group them together under the umbrella of "Asemic Writing." A sort of manifesto of for Asemic writing can be found here.

This discussion has led me to another curiosity. In American Hieroglyphics, John Irwin describes the exciting discovery and translation of the Rosetta Stone by the Frenchman Champollion and the effect this had on American writers in the 19th century. One whole section of the book he devotes to Melville and "The Book as Partial Object." This is a really curious connection, and something I hope to return to in subsequent weeks.

Back to "Bartleby." There is an odd flattening effect in the repetition of the phrase "I would prefer not to," and as this sentiment grows, it gives a monolithic appearance to the character of Bartleby. With each successive repetition, he seems to become more distant. The phrase is repeated verbatim 14 times throughout the story. By the third time he refuses to comply, saying "I would prefer not to," already the narrator begins to question his humanity:

I looked at him steadfastly. His face was leanly composed; his gray eye dimly calm. Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him. Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises. (25)

This phrase in fact seems to replace him as a character in our modern minds. No one remembers the characteristics of Bartleby as they might remember Oliver Twist. Bartleby seems to become an object, something I have argued before, but in reading "Line and Surface" it's interesting to think of Bartleby as a character who is "already there" in Flusser's words. Indeed, the problem of Bartleby is "how [he] got there." (23)