The Book of Job, interestingly enough, maintained its prime position as an aesthetic touchstone in twentieth-century literature. Indeed, it has been used as a key text for exploring the melancholies of modern times by writers and artists as different as Franz Kafka, S.Y. Agnon, and Joel and Ethan Coen.
“Bartleby” is primarily Kafka’s precursor. In transferring the biblical suffer-er into a modsuffer-ern work setting and allowing him to die without being granted either a divine response from the whirlwind or a happy end, bothMoby-Dick and “Bartleby” lead toThe Trial; Bartleby’s Wall Street, however, with its law-yers and copyists and its vivid dramatization of Job’s legal metaphors, is even closer to the Kafkaesque Job.53 Thomas Mann’s comment on The Trial high-lights the affinity between the two texts and their respective irreverent opening of the concept of “sublime.” Mann characterizes Kafka as a religious humorist who depicts the transcendent world “as an Austrian ‘department’; as a magni-fication of a petty, obstinate, inaccessible, unaccountable bureaucracy; a mam-moth establishment of documents and procedures, headed by some darkly re-sponsible official hierarchy.”54
52Rancière, Jacques,The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2004, 147.
53For more onThe Trialas a rereading of Job, see Harold Fisch,New Stories for Old: Biblical Patterns in the Novel, St. Martin’s Press, New York 1998, 81–99; Susan E. Schreiner,Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Calvin’s Exegesis of Job from Medieval and Modern Perspectives, Uni-versity of Chicago Press, Chicago 1994. The affinity between “Bartleby” and Kafka has been noted earlier but not in relation to Job. See Deleuze, “Bartleby; or The Formula,” 68. Agamben offers a similar observation; see Agamben,Potentialities, 243.
54See Schreiner,Where Shall Wisdom Be Found,181.
Kafka’s America, though less pronouncedly Joban thanThe Trial, sheds light on how we might imagine a Kafkaesque Job within an American context.
Like Bartleby’s Wall Street, Kafka’sAmericalays bare the imprisonments of the American workplace and the absurdities of its rhetoric of redemptive happi-ness: “The great theatre of Oklahoma calls you! Today only and never again!
If you miss your chance now you miss it for ever! If you think of your future you are one of us! Everyone is welcome!”55The Coen Brothers’ film “A Serious Man” makes the American Kafkaesque Job all the more vivid in flaunting the absurdities of various Jewish institutions in suburban America of the early six-ties. Larry Gopnik goes from one rabbi to another in search of an explanation for the sudden calamities that have beset him but waits in vain before the office door of the great Rabbi Marshak, having been blocked by the stern secre-tary from approaching the Law.
But perhaps, above all, Melville anticipates Kafka in foregrounding herme-neutic questions in the course of reinventing Job. Jacques Derrida’s renowned essay “Devant la Loi” positions the parable in the Cathedral as an exemplary text in its insistence on the impossibility of interpretation.56 What emerges from the discussion between Joseph K. and the priest on the meaning of the parable is that all readings are necessarily misreadings. We shall never com-prehend with certainty what lies behind the succession of guarded doors which divide us from the Law. Following Derrida, Harold Fisch wonders whether the parable in the Cathedral is specifically meant to question the very possibility of interpreting the Book of Job with its inexplicable trial.
Melville, I suspect, is not concerned with misreadings. The profusion of potential readings, as far as he is concerned, does not imply that any are neces-sarily erroneous. That such a study of biblical texts and characters is always on the verge of admitting – through its unparalleled exegetical excess – that hermeneutic enigmas are “past finding out” does not make it less alluring.
Somehow, it is the impossibility of fathoming divine and human character and the vanity of all knowledge that seems to propel Melville with an ever growing drive to prefer “not to be a little reasonable.”57
55 Kafka, Franz,America, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, Vintage, London 2005, 234.
56 Derrida, Jacques “Devant la Loi,” trans. Avital Ronell, in:Kafka and the Contemporary Criti-cal Performance,ed. Alan Udoff, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1987, 128–149.
57 Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 30.
Melville’s Wall Street Job: The Missing Cry 121
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