Linguists have rigorously analyzed what is called “agrammaticality.” A number of very intense examples can be found in the work of the American poet e. In all these respects, it has the same force, the same role as an agrammatical formula. Murmured in a soft, flat, and patient voice, it attains to the irremissible, by forming an inarticulate block, a single breath. Its repetition and its insistence render it all the more unusual, entirely so. Certainly it is grammatically correct, syntactically correct, but its abrupt termination, NOT TO, which leaves what it rejects undetermined, confers upon it the character of a radical, a kind of limit-function. But the strangeness of the formula goes beyond the word itself. The usual formula would instead be I had rather not. We immediately notice a certain mannerism, a certain solemnity: prefer is rarely employed in this sense, and neither Bartleby's boss, the attorney, nor his clerks normally use it (“queer word, I never use it myself”). But in what does the literality of the formula consist? A gaunt and pallid man has uttered the formula that drives everyone crazy. This is the formula of its glory, which every loving reader repeats in turn. And what it says and repeats is I would prefer not to. It is like the novellas of Kleist, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, or Beckett, with which it forms a subterranean and prestigious lineage. It is a violently comical text, and the comical is always literal. “Bartleby” is neither a metaphor for the writer nor the symbol of any thing whatsoever.
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