Taking the path less travelled by with Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville’s first short story teaches you what it means to take a stance in an indifferent world
A blinking computer screen, a cursor stuck on a blank page. A feather quill lying on a sheet of paper. An office worker in Vienna. A scrivener in New York. Give or take a 150 years, not much has changed. Technology, politics and societal mores may have been transformed yet the rhythm of daily work, in some ways, never did.
A few months ago, I was scouring the internet looking for a quick read to divert myself from the spectre of moral panic that was Covid-19. I’d just left an internship and was in the middle of applying for jobs, when, out of nowhere, the Austrian government decided to proclaim a nationwide lockdown.
It felt absurd.
Just a few weeks ago, I’d been working in one of the largest media archives in Europe, indexing, cataloguing, sorting and watching through piles and piles of original video footage-all the things you’d never see in the news for fear of the amount of gore or even just for the plain shaky camera movements. Keeping history alive for posterity, that was it, in a nutshell. Maintaining the records to always have something on file when you couldn’t travel to another country, maybe due to political or financial reasons.
Suddenly, watching the Federal Chancellor talk on my laptop screen, I realised archival science was about to experience a revival. And that I was not only not going to be there to celebrate that but that I’d probably be curling up, like a hedgehog at home, alone, with no job in sight for the foreseeable future, looking towards a life that was not hopeless but unknowable, like a blank slate.
It was then that Bartleby the Scrivener spoke to me.
A character whose thoughts and motivations are impossible to eke out, he leaves the reader as well as his fellow characters flummoxed. The legal copyist working in a New York law office one day simply refuses to do his work, content to sit at his desk, day-in and day-out, re-iterating only the bland statement: ‘I’d prefer not to’. His exasperated boss, a lawyer who owns the offices in question and is also the narrator of the tale, after failing to motivate him or even to get him to leave, relocates himself, leaving Bartleby behind. Yet even then the man continues to stay till he is finally committed to a prison for being a vagrant. It is here that he dies unexpectedly, the mystery of who he was and what he intended to do with his actions ultimately remaining unanswered.
Was this the origin story of Kafka? A functionary who decided not to toe the line anymore, ultimately descending into madness or even turning into a bug seemed much like the famed Czech writer I’d come to appreciate during school days. But oddly, no. Critics had remarked on the similarity in tone and voice but there is no reason to suppose Kafka read Melville, seeing as interest in him was only revived after Kafka’s own death.
Was it an anti-capitalist fable? A satire aimed at the well-to-do, against the mindlessness that can come with operating within the cogs of the wealth machine?
Was it a critique of the spurned writer against the reading community, as some commentators would have it? After writing Moby Dick, Melville had lost his early fame gained by writing yarn-ripping adventure style stories such as Typee or Omoo and was forced to become somewhat of a peddling functionary himself.
Any attempt at classification is always guesswork, especially when a writer does not leave behind diary entries or correspondence to clear up the matter for one.
But never before had it seemed so appealing to me not to know something.
The drudgery of work
Bartleby is a copyist. Anyone working in a legal clinic or a law firm as a first year associate should know what that means- being buried in stacks of paper work. Interns of any profession are intimately familiar with the phenomenon as well. Imagine a world where there are no computers and copy machines and the horror of it all may start to sink in. Court documents, wills, contracts, memoranda and letters, a never ending pile, to be minutely copied, hour by hour and then painstakingly revised-that is the job Bartleby has to do.
As someone who has experienced paper spill-over and floating tabs ranging to infinity on a screen, I can emphatize with the mind-numbing nature of the work. Catching the elusive comma hidden between fifty pages can make for a dreary monotony, especially when your mind cannot wander elsewhere out of fear of loosing focus.
Paired with being constantly alone while doing said work- and only work of such a nature!- it’s the perfect recipe for burnout.
Before the current crisis hit us, how many were facing the same dilemma? (Maybe still are!) It’s sad that something like an infectious disease is what has us talking about flexible work-models, a healthy work-life balance as well as the importance of self-care in times. It’s enough to echo Melville when stating ‘Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity’, the final line of the story.
An original soul
The keen attraction of the story lies in said words as well.
We have an invocation to the human race, that, nominally, at least, includes Bartleby, yet we feel that there is some kind of chasm that separates him from us. Trying to figure out his mind is like trying to understand whether Hamlet was ultimately mad or not-essentially unknowable. It is what makes him one of the few original characters in Western literature, next to Hamlet and Don Quixote. An omniscient third-person narrator would be able to clear everything up for us but seeing as we are stuck with a lawyer who doesn’t know more than we do, the mystery remains tangible.
Had Bartleby just said ‘I don’t want to’ rather than ‘I prefer not to’, the theory of a 19th-century social revolutionary would be apt. Yet he is not refusing too, he is choosing not to work. A choice is always based on knowledge or conviction yet what are his? And we’re back to square one.
Funnily enough, the narrator, after consulting two books on the nature of predestination after his encounters with Bartleby contents himself with the idea that their interaction must have been foretold, and, therefore, inevitable. It’s not an answer but it soothes his mind-the hint that the scrivener may have messed up his mind after copying one too many ‘dead letters’, letters literally intended for the dead, ranging as a fit explanation for the eccentricity encountered. But, as a lawyer, working with essentially ‘dead’ correspondence, functioning in a cold, legal world of phrases and rules, the narrator may very well have argued that he himself and everyone working with him was mad as well.
I still chuckle, imagining that Bartleby may have been the sane one out of the whole bunch.
‘I prefer not to’, he respectfully and slowly said, and mildly disappeared
Transcendentalist roots exposed
It is reported that Melville shut himself up in his study one afternoon to read Emerson’s Nature. The book features an interesting passage about the rise of solitary recluses, individuals who choose to withdraw from ‘common labours and competitions of the market’ as well as society, something the latter is not too fond of, seeing as it is an indirect indictment of the world, ‘declaring it to be unfit to be his companions’.
The lonely and withdrawn young man that is Bartleby certainly makes the narrator question himself and his avowed practices. From consulting books to peers to his own mind, he finds himself questioning his very life due to the strange confrontation with an uncanny man.
When the lawyer asks ‘What is the reason?’, Bartleby replies ‘Do you not see the reason for yourself?’. Emerson’s young man, in his answer to a sage, says that if the wise man cannot already tell, he would not understand the answer even it was given to him.
One possible reason for Bartleby’s inactivity may be contained in this passage taken from Nature:
‘We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust: but we do not like your work.’
‘Then’, says the world, ‘show me your own.’
‘We have none.’
‘What will you do, then?’ cries the world.
‘We will wait.’
‘How long?’
‘Until the universe beckons and calls us to work.’
‘But whilst you wait, you grow old and useless.’
‘Be it so: I can sit in a corner and perish (as you call it) but I will not move …your virtuous projects, so called, do not cheer me.’
Bartleby, as the man who opts out, waiting to grasp the true purpose of his life and ready to confront ruin to achieve that goal rather than succumb to the world.
In this case, Madness maddened as a descriptor for him seems unjust.
This bleak, bleak world
Crumpling papers into wastebaskets, spreading chocolate sticks like the nuts Bartleby seems to eat exclusively, I wondered sometimes if this was just me wanting to be seen. If I took up this much space and munched my way through a mix of sweet and salty snacks and spread my papers enticingly, maybe I would be assigned a challenging task. There would be flourishes on the keyboard and flashes of genius and pure, good fun-as much as you can safely have on a job, anyway.
I’ve already mentioned the dull monotony of a scrivener’s duties-it cannot be too far-fetched to guess that Bartleby knew how dull his everyday life was and just begged to be understood, in his entirety, by a fellow human being. The fact that there is only his boss who is clearly exploiting his labour to answer that call is sadly ironic. Opting out of the American Dream of a little more, only a little more, to finally make it big in a capitalist society, does he die out of want of genuine human compassion? The office he works at is on Wall Street, after all, the mecca of capitalism even today-surely a conscious choice by Melville.
There is a hint of hope at the end though.
Our lawyer, who had abandoned his charge in anger, finds his heart opened towards love, understanding and compassion, as he goes beyond himself to apologize to Bartleby and pays to make sure he receives good nourishment while he is locked up. He has learned that there is something more to the world than money, business or reputation- individual worth. The walls which he notes close Bartleby off from the world may very well surround millions, his soul-sickness being theirs as well.
I propose we adopt ‘Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity’ as a much-needed call to action for human solidarity in our present times and a future yet to come, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.
References
Bloom (2009) Blooms Literary Themes: Alienation. New York: Infobase Publishing
McCall, D. (1989) The Silence of Bartleby. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Available from https://books.google.at/books?id=9BZOguYs-4MC&printsec=frontcover&dq=bartleby+the+scrivener&hl=de&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwifkb2_-bbrAhV5AWMBHQwUDxg4FBDoATAAegQIAxAC#v=onepage&q=bartleby%20the%20scrivener&f=false [accessed 08 September 2020]
Paliwoda, D. (1973) Melville and the Theme of Boredom. Jefferson: McFarland and Company. Available from https://books.google.at/books?id=fjd0BsTeKMwC&pg=PA146&dq=bartleby+the+scrivener&hl=de&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwifkb2_-bbrAhV5AWMBHQwUDxg4FBDoATAEegQIBhAC#v=onepage&q=bartleby%20the%20scrivener&f=false [accessed 08 September 2020]
