The Power OF oNe Man

Obey! That is my command. Obey! Do not question my word. Obey! Or you shall be punished...Those are words that would make us, the people from the 21st century, sick and rebellious, but only if they were not pronounced in the correct way.  

But oh! Surprise, there is a way of having the people, the mass of voters and non-thinkers, quite and calm, even when saying those horrendous words, and that is by supplying us enough information about any topic that detours our attention from what is happening in the real world. That’s why we can find news about everything; sports, gossip, movies, elections, politics, economy and many more, but all those websites, papers and T.V programs cover only a small percentage of what is really going on in, for example, the political and economical side, we hear about a little struggle here and there a disagreement between this party and the other over there, a collusion now and then, but what else? Nothing, what is done with our taxes? What is happening with the banks? Not the workers, but the institutions, how many ISAPRES are colluded to change the prices of their plans? Etc...As we can see there is a big gap that we in fact are omitting, and as explained in the work of Shabir, Farooq, Amin, and Chaudhry, there is a far more important gap of knowledge and it is the use of mass media: “News programmers reflect the interests of the society’s major power groups---corporations

and the wealthy. The media are themselves controlled by major corporate entities and the primary sponsors of programming are corporate advertisers. Television commercials encourage a materialistic consumer mentality, regardless of necessity, safety, or effectiveness

of products. Advertising creates a consumer culture in that it defines individuals’ needs and

then entices people to fulfill them by purchasing goods and services, an activity that is the

lifeblood of capitalism” (page 481).

It may seem as a big paragraph of nonsense but after reading 1984, V for Vendetta and Bartleby, The Scrivener: A story of Wall-street I found a pattern that left me feeling uneasy about many of the characteristics of our society. The connection that I could find there was the power of a single man, indeed is the fear that a single man can make a whole movement, nation, class feel when he does not behave as he is expected to, as the regimen establishes as the proper manner of behaviour.

Now, if you have read the three books, you should know that there is one character that does not fit this description, or so I thought when I finished reading Melville’s story, but after many considerations, and some other comparisons between the protagonists with the other two books, I realized that Bartleby was obviously the same as the other characters, the point was, that Herman Melville, “had a way of writing that at first glance makes you overlook the strange ways of Bartley and feel the same that the lawyer, that is; disoriented and inclined to feel pity for him and forgive Bartleby’s manners, My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion” ( Melville, 1999, page 14).

So, this three protagonists have some traits that relates them one another, for example, they create chaos and make a rigid structure collapse, by being aware that there are things in the system that are failing and that need to be changed, in the case of Winston in 1984, he is preoccupied by how the history is changed and is aware that THE war that is currently going on between Oceania and the other country has not been always like that. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may we'll bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the newsflash----'  Bad news coming, thought Winston...description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty. Winston belched again...The telescreen--perhaps to celebrate the victory, perhaps to drown the memory of the lost  chocolate--crashed into 'Oceania, 'tis for thee'. You

were supposed to stand to attention. However, in his present position he was invisible (Orwell, 2001, page 21).

They doubt the system, in different degrees and express it in different ways, V knows that the system will collapse if part of the facade is exposed to the people, and so he leaves Head with no other option than changing the voice of Fate, even though they know that the reason of Fate being so successful and so useful is that is precisely his voice, the voice of no one else but him, and so as they are forced to replace him because of what V did, the people knows that something is wrong, as we can see in the stripes of the graphic novel (Moore, 1989).  They also deceive the system, even if it’s just an illusion. They try to make others aware of these mistakes, and here is where Winston plays his most formidable role, or at least that's the part that we see, since all his journey to discover the Brotherhood and become a part of it, since he is tired of the Party was a lie, one created by the party in order for him to fall and be arrested.

However we can also see the levels of involvement in which they are and how it affects their future. These levels differ in great amount, since V is the one who shows more his distress with the system and is the one who fights against it, quoting famous artists and exposing himself to the danger knowing that he needs to do it in order for the mass of people to react, to wake and realize that they cannot be frightened by the Head, the Voice, the Eyes or the Fingers, that they need to fight against them and win, because is not the people who should fear their government, but the government who should fear their people. (Moore, 1984). Then we have Winston, who is at first ruled by the fear of being discovered by the thought police, who deals with changing the past and being conscious of those changes, of remembering, and that was the beginning of his own destruction, He, overcoming his fears, little by little, and encouraged by the “existence” of a Brotherhood, committed several acts of rebellion, acts not only thoughts, and as he did it, his destiny was sealed, the Big Brother is watching you . And finally we have, my favorite, Bartleby, whose name took me an eternity to learn, he is, without a doubt the one character that is allowed to collapse the system, and what is more and even a little bit sad, is that he is the only one that is not capable of making any change in the collective way of seeing reality

However there are certain doubts that I have in terms of this character, since he seems to be uninterested in everything happening around him, he gets a job, and works efficiently at it, but he is full of “I would prefer not to” excuse, and as time passes, that becomes his motto, he does not even eat and we do not know the reason of it, since we are reading the story from the point of view of his employer: “I AM a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would see man interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:—I mean the law-copyists or scriveners. I have known very many of them, professionally and privately, and if I pleased, could relate divers histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep. But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener of the strangest I ever saw or heard of” ( Melville 1999, page 2). The only thing that we know for sure about this man, Bartleby, is that he cannot be corrupted, or moved without his will, since the lawyer tries by every possible mean to throw him out of his office, paying him, threatening, offering another job, etc, and Bartleby never gave in: At the expiration of that period, I peeped behind the screen, and lo! Bartleby was there.

I buttoned up my coat,balanced myself; advanced slowly towards him, touched his shoulder, and said, “The time has come; you must quit this place; I am sorry for you; here is money; but you must go.”

“I would prefer not,” he replied, with his back still towards me.

“You must.”

He remained silent.

Now I had an unbounded confidence in this man’s common honesty. He had

frequently restored to me sixpences and shillings carelessly dropped upon the

floor, for I am apt to be very reckless in such shirt-button affairs. The proceeding

then which followed will not be deemed extraordinary.

“Bartleby,” said I, “I owe you twelve dollars on account; here are thirty-two;

the odd twenty are yours.—Will you take it?” and I handed the bills towards him.

But he made no motion ( Melville, 1999, page 18).

Now, what I want to show with this post, is that we may see the difference of character between these three stories, but they are not just similarities, and it is not a random event that we had to read them for the same evaluation. I wanna focus on how it is not a group of people who starts unfolding the truth behind a regime, but one person, just one little head was enough in all three books to start a chaotic chain of events, in which there was never a happy ending.

Much thought has been given to Melville's story and how the relationship between employer and employee share a natural capitalist relationship, what is more, the pure reaction of Bartleby of refusing to eat, generates a whole new meaning of his stance as an oppositional part of the system, in the essay written by Naomi C. Reed called “The Specter of Wall Street: ‘‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’’ and the Language of Commodities” she tackles this topic and states:

Of course Bartleby refuses to do his job as a copyist, but his refusals go far beyond that, taken to their most extreme in his refusal to eat. While haunting the office, Bartleby lives only on ginger nuts. By the end of the story, when Bartleby has been imprisoned in the prophetically named Tombs, the grub-man asks of the lawyer: ‘‘‘His dinner is ready. Won’t he dine to-day, either? Or does he live without dining?’ ‘Lives without dining,’ said [the lawyer], and closed the eyes’’ (45). Gillian Brown diagnoses Bartleby’s refusal to eat as anorexia, which she suggests is a ‘‘radical refusal to partake of, and participate in, the world,’’ concluding that ‘‘anorexia secures the agoraphobic division of self from world, home from market.’’ Brown ultimately reads Bartleby’s behavior as ‘‘a repudiation of the market-place and an expression of self-control  (page 252)

I will not keep on going on about only the books, because the point that I am trying to make is how power or more specifically the power that is held by a superior entity can be destroyed by just a single man, and the 3 books reflect that, in 1984, we have the authorities preventing Winston to expose the truth, preventing him by the end to even think, in V for Vendetta, we have the authorities fearing what he may do next, fearing that he is way beyond them, because he has been watching them, he knows the truth and he knows what they are and how they work, and they, have no control over his actions, and no control over the actions of the people who has just been awoken for a long nightmare, who in fact is just starting, finally in “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story Of Wall-street”, Bartleby who is our true protagonist creates such a fuss by being a ghostly appearance in the building that there cannot be any kind of work done, and he even creates a sense of guilt in the lawyer for not knowing how to help the poor man, who is most of the time silent and refuses to eat, and be an human being.

As to conclude this entry I would like to state that as defined by Lasswell and Kaplan (2013). “Def. A group is an organized aggregate. An association is a highly organized group, a demigroup one with a lower degree of organization. An aggregate of person mechanically cooperating with one another does not constitute a group, nor is a group constituted merely by the sharing of reciprocal perspectives” (page 34). We can find in this definition why these 3 characters could not behave in the way that they were expected to, they were isolated parts of the society, the did not belong to their jobs, or to the places assigned to them, and I am not talking about wanting more as in becoming richer, but they wanted to have opportunities and to let the people know that there was more than just obeying Big Brother, or the Head, or even the Lawyer, there was more and the ones that were alienated were the only ones that were watching for a safe distance what was happening. So are you going to follow the rules or are you going to see the big picture?

Thanks for reading.

References

Reed, N. C. (2004). The Specter of Wall Street:" Bartleby, the Scrivener" and the Language of      Commodities. American Literature, 76(2), 247-273.

Shabir, G., Farooq, U., Amin, R. U., & Chaudhry, A. W. (2013). Mass media, culture & society    with the perspective of globalization, modernization and global culture. Asian journal of    social  sciences & humanities, 2(3), 479-484.

Lasswell, H. D., & Kaplan, A. (2013). Power and society: A framework for political inquiry.        London: Transaction Publishers.

Melville, H. (1999). Bartleby the scrivener. Plain Label Books.

Moore, A. (1989). V for Vendetta. (Vol. 7). New York: DC comics.

Orwell, G. (2001). 1984. New York: Penguin readers.