Nervous Wrecks and Ginger-nuts: Bartleby at a Standstill

Nervous Wrecks and Ginger-nuts: zy Bartleby at a Standstill‘ RALPH JAMES SAVARESE Grinnell College Where, however,from disease, or thefood being inappropriate, the stomach is injured by what is eaten, consciousness then becomes painful for the express purpose o f warning us that mischief has been done, and we must take means for its removal. In some kinds of dyspepsia, indeed, the sensibility becomes exalted to an extraordinary degree. -William Beaumont2 ecall the moment in Moby-Dick when Stubb proclaims, after Queequeg has been pulled from the shark-infested waters, RGinger? ginger? and will you have the goodness to tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy,where lies the virtue of ginger? zyxw . . . Is ginger the sort of fuel you use . . . to kindle a fire in this shivering cannibal? . . . The steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the steward an apothecary , sir? . . . We’ll teach you to drug a harpooneer; none of your apothecary’smedicine here., Now recall the moment in “Bartleby,the Scrivener”when the lawyer meditates on Bartleby’speculiar eating habits: He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly speaking. . . . My mind ran on in reveries concerning the probable effectsupon the human constitution of livingentirely on gingernuts . . . . Now, what was ginger?q Despite the nearly seven hundred essays on Melville’sfamous story, this striking parallel has remained untreated. Such an omission would seem more ’The author wishes to thank David Blake, Sheila King, David Leverenz, Maureen McEvoy,John Murchek, Robert Ray, Stephanie Smith, and Emily Thornton Savarese for their help with this essay. Hereafter cited as Combe. As qtd. in Andrew Combe, The Physiology of Digestion, 7th ed. (London: Simpkin, Marshall zyxw Q Go., 18471, p. zyx 26. Heman Melville, Mob-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford. Hershel Parker, and zyxwv G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988).322. Hereafter cited as NN zyxw MD. Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 19871, 23. Hereafter cited as zyxwvuts NN Piazza Tales zyxwvutsr Tales. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 1 9 R A L P H J A M E S S A V A R E S E understandable if Melvillehadn’t engaged the topic of patent medicine in other works from the 1850s. In The Confidence Man, for example, Melville devotes several chapters to the dealings of an herb doctor who prescribes “OmniBalsamic Reinvigorator” and “Samaritan Pain Dissuader” to passengers on a steamboat ironically named Fidele.5 There, Stubbs skepticism in the face of such medicine finds expression in the voice of a Missouri bachelor who derides one of the herb doctor’spatients: “Yarbs,yarbs; natur, natur; you foolish old file you! He diddled you with that hocus-pocus, did he? Yarbs and natur will cure your incurable cough, you think” (NN CM 106).Directly connecting the phenomenon of herbal medicine to the novel’s central conceit of the confidence game, Melville even has the Missourian remark, “I have confidence in distrust; more particularly as applied to you and your herbs” (108). Finally, in “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! zyxwv ” a story with references to steamboat and railroad disasters, a less skeptical but much more desperate narrator speaks of money as “a drug in the market,” lamenting, “Butblame me if I can get any of the drug, though there never was a sick man more in need of that particular sort of medicine” (NN Piazza TalesTales 270). Checking his pockets, the narrator then declares, “Ha! here’s a powder I was going to send the sick baby in yonder hovel, where the Irish ditcher lives.” Clearly, Melville is playing games with patent medicines in his fiction from the 1850s.This essay seeks to answer the lawyer’squestion in “Bartleby, the Scrivener”-“Now,what was ginger?”-as a way of trying to elucidate...