An article in the 1907 The British Medical Journal describes the

methodology of mummification:
The viscera were removed through an opening made in
the left flank either because they were particularly prone
to undergo and set up disintegrationThe body was then
soaked in a bath which probably consisted chiefly or
entirely of a solution of common salt, and the viscera,
having been similarly treated, were sprinkled with the
sawdust of various aromatic woods, wrapped in linen, and
enclosed in four distinct parcels in four.1
The great interest such a description satisfies refers to one of the most
ancient and certainly meticulous considerations of an essence that
transcends the body. It demonstrates that the soul is universal;
pancultural, designating the distinct space that humanity maintains in the
universe. It is this excessive veneration of the soul that compelled
Friedrich Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols to specify Egyptianism as that
which exists exclusively for of its own death.
Might this not describe the mechanics of narrative? Is it not conceived as
a means to an end? Is not catharsis the corollary to poetics? Literature
describes a temporality; it produces a site of meaning that is thrown into
relief through perpetual reference to its poles: the origin and the telos.
Two American narratives separated by only 17 years assert their
significance through reference not only to a literary telos, but to the death
of their subject: Herman Melvilles 1853 short story Bartleby, the
Scrivener, and Edgar Allen Poes 1837 novel The Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym of Nantucket.
Accordingly, each of these novels consists of a textual continuity that by
necessity exceeds the subtextual articulation of the subject. This
divergence denotes a rupture: the detachment of the signified subject
from the textuality of the narrative. The estranged subject, abjected from
the ontological level of the text, is thus placed into the abyss, from which
it communicates with the text according to Brian Mchales criteria of the
mise en abyme:
first, it is a nested or embedded representation, occupying a
narrative level inferior to that of the primary, diegetic narrative
world; secondly, this nested representation resembles
(copies) something at the level of the primary, diegetic
world; and thirdly, this something that it resembles must
constitute some salient and continuous aspect of the primary
worldenough that we are willing to say the nested
representation reproduces or duplicates the primary
representation as a whole.2
1

On what level, however, can the subject reproduce the structure of the
narrative? The conditional potentiality of each is recourse to temporality,
and thus: a comprehensive reproduction is possible by demonstrating
that temporality itself is the corollary to the primeval fabrication of the
subject.
The French philosopher-of-history Michel Foucault presents such a
demonstration in his 1975 publication Discipline and Punish, The Birth of
the Prison, an exhaustive genealogy of western European punitive
methods. Significantly, it challenges assumptions of the psycho-somatic
duality that constitutes the human subject, instead designating the body
as actuality and the soul as the element in which are articulated the
effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of
knowledge.3
This power may be understood as the micro-physics that constitute
disciplinary techniques.4 Consider the animal body: reducible to the
totality of the immanent performativity of its instincts, a spatial
manifestation upon the convergence of evolution; not a singularity, but
an arbitrary distribution of the singularity of its species. Discipline is the
coercion of such a body into a performativity contingent to its instincts.
Thus compelled, the body resists, but in doing so acknowledges itself as
resistant body. That aspect coerced into this artificiality produces a
knowledge of the natural body, the bearer of forces and the seat of
duration, and defines itself accordingly: as the antithesis to the natural
body; as everything the body is not.
Crucially, it is through a polar antagonism to the bodys mortality that
constitutes this aspect as a temporal transcendence. This soul, or its
ontological equivalent, the subject; produces the conditions for
temporality, while temporality in turn produces the conditions for the
subject. They engage each other in a cyclical perpetuality, producing a
universality and self imposing itself as a fixed particularity within its
linear scope: A soul inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is
itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul
is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison
of the body.5
And so, Nietzsches Egyptianism is inescapable; eternity becomes a
euphemism for death, and the subject must act accordingly. This is the
political aspect that Foucault refers to: the production of mythology,
culture, and history as a means of articulating the continuity that entraps
the soul. In his essay Nietzsche, Genealogy, History he elucidates
Nietzsches critique of the origin as a place of inevitable loss, the point
2 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen and Co., 1987),
124.
3 DaP 29
4 DaP 29
5 DaP 30

where the truth of things corresponded to a truthful discourse, the site of

a fleeting articulation that discourse has
obscured and finally lost. The origin is produced at an irreducible
distance, resistant to the structural poetics of the proximate, around which
makes possible a field of knowledge whose function is to recover it, but
always in a false recognition due to the excesses of its own speech. This
field of knowledge corresponds to the ontological locus of the origin as
transcendent: it produces a discourse of universal truth that invests and
assimilates the subject into the signification of its structure.
Accordingly, the literary text produces a structure that at specific points
intersects with the the ontological structures of cultures; histories, etc.
and is thus reducible to an auxiliary discourse:
it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its
signified content than according to the very nature of the of
the signifier. Writing unfolds like a game (jeu) that invariably
goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In
writing, the point is not to exalt the act of writing, nor is it to
pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of
creating a space into which the writing subject constantly
disappears.6
Considering Van Goghs A Pair of Shoes, Heidegger characterizes the work
of art as that which denotes the interplay of the earth and the world;
that achieves unconcealment of the space between them. His error is to
consider the earth as a static truth.7 Rather, the creativity of an artwork
lies in its play of signification; the constitution of a familiar structure
within which the subject/object division can be blurred and chains of
signification rewritten. Thus, the divergence of the literary structure from
the ontological structures in contest denotes not an unconcealment; an
indication of an actuality hitherto obscured, but an abyss in which the
author is granted autonomy from the causality of signification. The writing
subject, or author, is sacrificed upon (disappears within) the ontological
structure the literary work deconstructs.
Such textural structures, however, remain contingent upon the
rearticulation of the more fundamental mechanics of signification: that of
temporality; they must take the form of a narrative in order to convey the
most basic conditions of signification. As such, literary text constitutes
some salient and continuous aspect of the primary world it occupies
a narrative level inferior to that of the primary, diegetic textuality of
history; of the cultural or ideological continuity of the subject. It is
according to this condition that the writing subject constitutes a
reproduction in the formulation of the textual subject: the writing subject
is sacrificed upon the ontological structures of continuity, and the subject
of writing is sacrificed upon the ontological structure of the text. This
6 What is an Author? 102.
7 Origins of the Work of Art 32.

established, the significance of both Herman Melvilles and Edgar Allen

Poes texts may be considered, specifically: they each offer the potential
of a radical subjectivity of the textual subjects, a subjectivity that exceeds
the solipsism of Egyptianism.
In his article The Two Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym Cecil L. Moffitt
admits that Poes text:
presents to a reader, along with some of its author's most
vivid and memorable scenes, an embarrassing number of
lapses and inconsistencies, hardly to be expected in the
work of one whose literary trademark came to be a
pronounced unity of effect achieved through conscious
artistic integration.8
Furthermore, he quotes Edward Shanks declaration that while the text is
alive and readableThe whole work is condemnable on every principle of
the mechanics of fiction.9 Typical among criticism of Poes narrative are
attempts to eclipse or displace such inconsistencies through recourse to
its organic structure;10 or to resolve them, tenuously, through a
fragmentation of textual continuity, urging:
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is actually two stories,
not one. The first two-thirds of the volume is taken up with an
account of the adventures of a boy stowaway aboard a
Nantucket whaler, the Grampus. The boy undergoes a series
of traumatic experiences. But his story never ends; for
instead of supplying a suitable climax and conclusion, Poe
whisks his reader into a second story of polar exploration
aboard another vessel, the Jane Guy. This second story,
independent and complete within itself, is a brilliant fantasy
But it is not an integral part of the Grampus story, which it
follows. In fact, Poe made little effort to fuse the two.11
Indeed, it is a fragmentation that yields the potential of Poes narrative,
but one that dissects not upon a chronological axis, but upon the locus of
signification, abjecting the subject of Pym from the textual continuity;
postulating his subjectivity within a subtextual locus. Within this abyss,
Pym resists the articulation of a textual body; resists a textual
manifestation that constitutes a spatial presence. An absence within the
ontological structure of text, Pym transcends textual mortality, and
hence his subjectivity is impervious to the prison of temporality; to the
soul [as] the effect and instrument of a political anatomy;12 produces a
8 Double narrative, 232
9 Double narrative 233
10 Double narrative, 233
11 Double Narrative 234
12 DaP, 29

new field of possibilities, in which the discorporated subject

circumnavigates the cyclical incarceration of the universal.
Pym demonstrates the possibility of mastery [over the] power exercise[d
upon] the body,13 and accordingly, a mastery over the correlative
function of the text. As such, the inconsistencies of Poes narrative
become expressions of Pyms sovereignty; the text produces him, but it
does not precede him, it articulates itself according to the agency of its
subject. Pym diffuses his subjectivity across the spatiality of Poes text: his
temporal agency manifests its subversion in the form of narrative
inconsistency. Accordingly, a textual fragmentation is fertile, yet it must
adhere not to the agency of Poe but of Pym.
Pym, trapped in the hold, is affronted by the paws of some huge and real
monster, subsequently identified as his Newfoundland dog Tiger. Tiger
enters the narrative, and in seemingly pour artifice, disappears upon the
exhaustion of his potential. Elsewhere, Pym as articulated in text must
affect the correlative logic; annunciate the explicit inconsistencies of Poes
narrative. Pym recalls his discovery by Augustus:
It was at this period that he heard the crash occasioned by
the bottle which I had thrown down. Fortunate, indeed, was
it that the incident occurredfor, upon this incident, trivial
as it appears, the thread of my destiny depended. Many
years elapsed, however, before I was aware of this fact.14
Yet, in a matter of weeks Augustus has is starved to death and thrown to
the sharks; he receives no further mention.
Poes narrative can be understood according to manifold origins and
simultaneous threads; a labyrinth of kinetic subjectivity: in the most
unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history [there lies]
sentiments, love, conscience, instincts.15 Signification entails temporality:
a movement from an origin to a telos that constitutes a progression. Thus,
Pyms textual progression demonstrates a profound detachment,
specifically: a profound lack of empathy, which can be interpreted his
subtextuality, his detachment from the emotional mechanics of narrative.
Poes Narrative is fractured not in two, infinitely, manifesting within each
fragment a subject resistant to the mechanics of emotion.
While Pyms qualitative agency is perhaps exhaustive, his existence is
quantitatively determined. The extent of both Pyms textual domination
and his inherent textual contingency is manifest at the ending of Poes
Narrative. Poe retains the authority of textual annihilation: Pyms
subtextual discorporation may diffuse itself across and against Poes
Narrative, yet it cannot exceed the temporal structure that conditions its
13 DaP, 30
14 Poe, 50.
15 Gen, 76

existence; Poe cannot inhibit Pyms subtextual kinetics, yet he can

demarcate its field of possibility.
The circumstances connected with the late sudden and distressing death
of Mr. Pym are already well known to the public Thus Poe terminates
the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and thus Poe terminates
the literary form in which Pym articulated his subjectivity; a subjectivity so
radical that its cessation precludes the language in which it was
articulated.
Melvilles Bartleby, however, produces a further potentiality of the
subtextual subject: a language that speaks from the abyss, a subtextual
discourse that penetrates and challenges the writing subject at the
ontological structure text. To demonstrate this possibility, the temporalsubjective relationship requires further embellishment: a reduction of the
supra-literary subject; the subject of history or culture, to a textual
construct.
Lacans formulation of the subject does not contradict that defined by
Foucault (if anything the parallels are remarkable), but interprets the
temporal aspect of the subjects cyclical articulation as essentially
textual. In short: the symbolic denotes the semiotic apparatus of
signification that constitutes itself as the antithesis of contingency; to the
subjective impossibility of the real as the locus of non-meaning; the
unrealprecedes the subjective realm it conditions, being in direct
contact with the real.16 This contact denotes the cyclical perpetuality of
the symbolic by the real and the real by the symbolic; the universal
as the antecedent which both conditions and precludes the subject.
Both the origin and the telos accord to the universal; they occupy the
locus of non-meaning from which they impose signification upon the
symbolic existence of the subject. As demonstrated previously, it is
perpetual reference to this polarity of the real that conditions
signification: It is in this way that the axis of poles by which a first field of
speech was oriented, whose primordial image is the material of the
[symbol]17
Accordingly, Lacan defines the sentence as the irreducible unit of
significance; the most fundamental temporal totality, a microorigin and
telos. It cannot convey meaning unless it follows a strict procedure, and
even then, significance occurs only upon its termination. This selfperpetuation of the sentence signifies the progressive stream of time.18
But how can the sentence symbolize temporality if it necessarily
terminates?

16 Ecrits, 847
17 Ecrits, 380
18 248-249, seminar 1

Referring back to the contact of the real and the symbolic, the symbolic
order can be understood as the semiotic apparatus of signification that
both produces the subject and detaches it from the locus of non-meaning:
the real. However, it is the inaccessible Real that maintains the truth
towards which the symbolic aspires. Language, however, cannot exceed
the symbolic apparatus; cannot penetrate the Real and grasp the truth
that constitutes the telos. The sentence progresses, but cannot reach its
telos; for it occupies that space of absolute distance. Thwarted, it defines
its search through another sentence ad infinitum; compelled into an
eternally rearticulated recurrence.19
This compulsion constitutes the actuality of Bartlebys refrain: I would
prefer not to; the implications of which are succinctly considered by
Slavoj Zizek in his 2006 publication The Parallax View:
I would prefer not to is to be taken literally: it says I would
prefer not to, not I dont prefer (or care) toIn his refusal of
the Masters order, Bartleby does not negate the predicate;
rather, he affirms a non-predicate
Bartlebys refrain, however, invests his death with a capacity not afforded
to Pym. He has strangely resurfaced in recent years, invoked as a symbol
of passive resistance. Many of these discussions seem concerned with
assimilating his passivity into some dialectic strategy of effectual action.
Zizeks contemplation of Bartleby can perhaps be read as a response:
Bartlebys attitude is not merely the first, preparatory,
stage for the second, more constructive, work of forming
a new alternative order; it is the very source and
background of this order, its permanent foundation.
It constitutes not a resistance towards the manifestations of power, but
towards the very forces that compel powers performance. In this sense,
Bartleby as a martyr should be reinterpreted. His death does not
retroactively substantiate his ideological resolve, nor does it immortalise
his actions as per the logic of the Ancients: it cheats death of its political
power.
In conclusion, the ending of both Edgar Allen Poes the Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and Melvilles Bartleby, the Scrivener
communicate with the death of their subjects. Each offers the potential for
an ontological dissection, constituting for the subject a space of play
between its fractured aspects. But ontology cannot truly be fractured, only
multiplied. It is to reality what the sentence is to text: the most primal
enunciation. If eternity is a euphemism for death, ontology is its definition:
Hence death brings the question of what negates
discourse, but also the question whether or not it is death
19 Ecrits, 568-572

that introduces negation into discourse. For the negativity

of discourse, insofar as it brings into being that which is
not, refers us to the question of what nonbeing, which
manifests itself in the symbolic order, owes to the reality of
death.