Bartleby, Radio, and Pulp Sensibility

While we were discussing the history of pulps and their possible areas of overlap with radio, I found myself thinking of this radio "play," which first aired in the UK as one of a four-part series of Lawrence Olivier radio dramas (1952-53). The organizing group, Heritage Media, states as their mission to present "the greatest of vintage artists and classic dramas of the early Americas." This version of "Bartleby" is adapted from Melville's Tale of Wall Street, which we will be reading soon in preparation for Thursday's Melville walking adventure.https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b1OW_6Wis3oWe talked today about realism, style, and authenticity, and I think this radio drama nicely highlights such matters. While I won't give away the adapted ending (Bartleby still dies), I would suggest that, for me, the intersection of this drama with pulps as we discussed them today lies in the way it offers a kind of "happy ending." Here, "happiness" is founded on a strange adjustment of the tale's deep ambiguities and its very conflicted and complex system of personal judgement: is the narrator good or bad? is Bartleby a lunatic or a radical; are those things even different? why does he do what he does? In the way it tries to answer these questions (without acknowledging quite that the original tale raises them so hair-raisingly), this radio version is trying, I think, to provide a kind of "realism" that presents people as knowable to others. While I am not a scholar of pulps--though, thanks to today, perhaps a student of them--it seems to me that the urge to describe and categorize lived experience (and human readers) through types/genres is connected to how this radio play tries to solve the problems of Bartleby. Happy listening!