On the problem of the relations of production in Melville's short stories of the 1850s

The aim of the article is to examine the specific features of the production process as well as the characteristics of teamwork in Herman Melville's short fiction. Short stories written by Melville during his most productive period, the 1850s (such as "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "The Happy Failure", "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids", "The Bell-Tower", "Benito Cereno"), is chosen as the material. Such methods as comparativism, structuralism and narratology are used in the article. The work revealed certain patterns in Melville's representation of production relations. Technical progress, a sudden increase in mass production, and the rapid growth of industrialization lead to the emergence of complexly organized mechanisms and production chains. At the same time, the number of operations that the product must go through before reaching the consumer is growing. In other words, there is a gap, or a void, between the original goal and the final result. Melville shows the danger of such voids: production loses its practical, concrete meaning and turns into the realm of the abstract and unformed, whereas the product loses its valuable properties; it thins, shrinks in size, becomes discolored. Instead of the desired and planned progress, the production process, on the contrary, returns to an archaic state: the finished product loses its familiar shapes and assumes chthonic properties. Another reason for unsuccessful production is a mismatch between the actions of the leader and the team. Leaders of the "authoritarian" type organize teamwork in a strictly hierarchical manner, in which the most difficult work is assigned to the lowest in rank, and the leader distances himself from the team. As a result, he loses not only leadership but also individual qualities (turns into a silhouette, a skeleton). The activity of the team under authoritarian leadership is reduced to the achievement of the goal, and the value of the life of individual team members is lost, individual properties of personality are erased, the team becomes a single, indistinguishable mass. Constructive industrial relations are not so clearly defined by Melville. To set up production, the leader must cut away all unnecessary elements in a sudden movement, thus returning the process to its former practicality. Melville contrasts the "authoritarian" type of relationship with the "democratic" one, in which the leader is more concerned not with achieving the goal, but with taking care of his employees, trying to harmonize the different "parts" of the team, considering the specifics of each member of the staff. By placing himself at the lowest rank, the leader is able to correct his former imperfection, go beyond pattern thinking, and optimize the production process. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

Keywords

Authors

References