Chapter 14 of Between Two Deaths
Searching for the meaning of the word Desistence, Michael could not help but speak out loud about Bartleby the Scrivener, the novelette by Hermann Melville.
He gave a rapid, indirect wink to the old man on his left, to the third-year law school student and to Emmanuel in front, and received a tacit okay. Silence could happen in the margins, surreptitiously; they had to talk it through.
“Every day of the week, the famous clerk does his work on Wall Street. He works long hours, scrupulously, but says “I would prefer not to” whenever asked to do what he would rather not do. I would prefer not to. Bartleby’s boss, who happens to be the narrator of the story, is bewildered by this response, his tone of voice when Bartleby, asked to do a task, withdraws into himself and simply does not do what he would prefer not to. Which takes more and more of his time as the story goes on…”
“Yes, I remember,” said George, “Melville even writes that Bartleby says I would prefer not to ‘in a singularly mild, firm voice’… That phrase has always bewildered me. Which it is? Mild or firm? Both, Melville writes. Firm in its Desistence; mild because of Desistence… The funny way Melville describes Bartleby, the good boy seating on the front row in class and the one you cannot count on, who destabilizes the whole thing.”
Michael was impressed by the old man’s memory. Nevertheless, he put a word in edgewise and added that in English the verb “to desist” does not have good press. One desists from drugs, from committing crimes.
Emmanuel intervened: “But Desistence in the mouth of Bartleby is an idea we should revisit: one can relinquish, cede, desist from a lot of things, and without having to say no, simply by not playing the game and preferring not to. Hey, how about we start by no longer following the sweet injunctions of the toilets, even the best suggestions, the perfect advice. We don’t give a damn what is best for us? We give up on that, and for good reasons.”
Now, what Emmanuel says carries weight. People listen, even when he goes off.
The third-year law student: “There are variations to Bartleby’s formula: I will do it because you want me to do it and it’s important for you that I do it, but understand that I’d rather not. It’s your will, not mine and you have power over me… It’s unstoppable, this way of resisting …”
Philosophical. Not a legal reasoning, Emmanuel could have said. More like ancient Stoicism. Take my arm, my leg; you won’t have my mind.
Michael: “Like a woman coldly looking in the eyes of her rapist and making clear she is unassailable.”
“Yes, you’re so right, Sir, to bring Bartleby,” yells the old man with false decorum, but also to bring back the conversation to loftier grounds. “What a pleasure you give me, lucky we are to have people like you to elevate the debate!” He means both Michael and Emmanuel, disparaging the mother and Mercedes by the same token. Luckily today the two women have not climbed down from their cocoons.
George leans forward to meet Michael and Emmanuel face to face. He then speaks loud and as articulately as if he were addressing an amphitheater full of Melville’s specialists: “Okay, the narrator is obsessed as you say by Bartleby, intimidated by his employee, whom he cannot pull himself to reprimand and fire. Bartleby’s work, when he prefers to do it, is flawless. But as he prefers less and less to do anything and does not get fired, we can say that, though negative, his winning attitude removes all substance, relevance and value to his colleagues’ slavish work, all purpose to the floors of clerks and their bosses doing overtime to ease the transfer of money from one rich account to the other.”
They smile. It’s well said.
Michael nods, frowns like he does when serious, and adds: “Pay attention, Melville is explicitly talking — and this, way before his time, late nineteenth century — about ‘the strange power of passive resistance’… these words I always remember…”
Then he reads on the faces of Emmanuel, the old man and the third-year law school student that they have spoken enough, too much. Let’s give silence a chance.
George Détienne and his companions have retreated from intensive silence conceived as the cure-all solution to their problems, but that does not mean they have to reveal all their cards before even knowing them.
Later the old man, Michael, the third-year law student, the adolescent and her expert silent-talker little brother — and, of course, Emmanuel — mull in silence the idea of Desistence. Bartleby the Scrivener is fine literature, modern as it gets; only problem, to the train, they cannot speak softly but “in a firm voice” and say yes but no. No to what? I would rather not — what? Everything comes to you on-demand. No imposition of any kind. It’s you who has to desist from your own pleasure-seeking self.
What would it achieve to go shouting: This trip is the worst disaster that ever happened to me, and you are the author of my debacle, Madam la Machine? If I could, I’d cut the metal tentacles from your hydra head, the integrated circuits and flimsy plastic neurons of your hollow brain, and reduce your convertible toilets to ashes!
Emmanuel has to recognize he no longer wants to leave the machine, unless it means joining his family. It’s from inside that a tenuous solution must be found.
Outside, well, he reads articles about what’s going on outside the train that make his hair stand on end. From articles published in 2030 in The New Yorker, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and others, he learns that Capitalism has no future. In fact, it belongs to the past. This is not supported by theories for graduate students, but by actuality. Capitalism has disintegrated. A force of integration and progress through the globalized economy after WWII, after 2009 and the great recession Capitalism back-pedaled and entered a phase of fragmentation. No longer a progressive force at the forefront of bright humanistic ideas, the upper classes and the multinational mafias have allied themselves to the most reactionary factions on the planet, religious sects, extremists, gangs and thinly disguised terrorists. The concentration of wealth at the top, the massive unemployment of the working classes and the growing proportion of poor; the dwindling buying power of the educated American, German or French middle-classes; add to this mix, the technology to control millions through AI; add still, virulent nationalism and persistent racism, and what you get is varied degrees of fascism, from soft to hard dictators. And soon wars on a planetary scale between them. Not quite the Armageddon depicted in the movies. Nor the Apocalypse desired by the mother and Mercedes. Reality is more nuanced, nonsensical, ugly and complex. Something along the lines of the warring empires of nonsense George Orwell predicted would divide the globe. Wars by proxy to avoid frontal atomic confrontation; yet local wars everywhere, that’s nothing new. What is new to Emmanuel is that in 2030, there are clashes, rampant civil wars inside nations and crucial institutions: the wounds of the Civil War have reopened in the Unites-States; the results of elections in half the states (West Coast and East Coast) are no longer respected by the other half (South and parts of the Midwest). America has two presidents: one elected; one refusing the results of the election and carrying 40% of the electorate. The reality Emmanuel had known since his youth in France and in his mature life in America, that global peace, that veneer of diplomacy and collaboration between nations, social classes, colleagues — respect for human rights, for democracy and the state of law, the idea that human progress was still possible against all odds, that’s long gone by 2030.
Observing through the window and on his screen the progress of destruction, not merely of Nature but of all that humans seemed to have put together over their few thousand years’ history, Emmanuel came to the conclusion: “Let’s be honest, this train is saving what’s best in our world. It’s an advanced expression of our science, an extrapolation that would never have seen the light of day without human contribution. It’s not true that I’d rather not be in this train. If I have to live for the rest of my life in some vehicle, let my family be with me, in the same cocoon, that’s all I ask.
“And then, but only then, I will no longer think about desisting in any way or form, if that’s what you prefer?
“Confiscate us, but together!”
