Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of the Modern World
View of Wall Street, 1867
Mention Herman Melville and most people will assume you want to talk about Moby-Dick. It’s one of the all-time great novels. Though, along with Cervantes’ Don Quijote, possibly more talked about than actually read. But one of Melville’s finest works is a much shorter proposition. A short story called “Bartleby the Scrivener”, published in 1856.
Like much good art, there’s a studied ambiguity to it that has puzzled readers and critics over the years. And this ambiguity may reflect Melville’s contradictory perspective on the path his country was taking as the economy evolved from a primarily agricultural base into an industrial and financial giant. His early optimism about America’s future bumped up against the implications of the ferocious search for profit that characterised the US brand of capitalism and brought civilisation’s flaws into sharp relief.
Bartleby became a vehicle for exploring those contradictions. Bartleby is a scrivener – an office clerk or copyist. He is taken on by a lawyer – the narrator in the story – to cope with an increase in business at his Wall Street office. The narrator notes his impression of him at interview as ‘pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!’. He engages him nonetheless and finds Bartleby initially industrious. But, when asked to undertake a different task, Bartleby replies, ‘I would prefer not to’. This effrontery astonishes his employer. But Bartleby continues to deploy this response to further requests to do anything other than his own copying work. Always offered in a mild but firm voice.
The cycle of passive resistance continues and the narrator – who regards himself as a fair man – alternates between moods of irritation, exasperation and resignation as he attempts to understand the reasons for the odd behaviour of this scrivener, ‘the strangest I ever saw or heard of’.
Alienation and the estrangement of man in industrial society
Before long, the narrator realises that Bartleby appears to have given up work entirely: ‘I noticed that Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his dead-wall reverie. Upon asking him why he did not write, he said that he had decided upon doing no more writing.’
By this point it’s become apparent that Bartleby is sleeping in the office overnight. But the narrator is unwilling to fire him, or physically eject him from the office, recognising that, ‘he seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe’. In desperation, the narrator moves his business out of the building, which Bartleby then refuses to leave.
The narrator visits Bartleby, who rejects all offers of help. Eventually, he is forcibly removed and imprisoned in the Tombs - the gloomy, unsanitary city jail. Shortly after, he died of starvation, having preferred not to eat.
The Lawyer ends his narration with a tantalising clue to Bartleby’s history. He had previously worked at the Dead Letter Office in Washington. Reading, and burning, letters carrying affirmations of life, sent to those now dead. And he finishes with a poignant lamentation, ‘Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!’
Some interpretations of the story have viewed it as a study of clinical depression. Or a reflection of the creative challenges Melville was experiencing as he sought to move from crowd-pleasing adventure tales to fiction that explored deeper themes. I think the clue to understanding the story lies in the full title: "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street".
Now a symbol of the U.S. financial markets, the New York Stock Exchange was established on Wall Street in 1792. And financial activities were becoming increasingly important by the time Melville wrote the story. He was acutely aware of both the possibilities and limitations of 19th-century capitalism. He also knew that Wall Street was a centre of labour activism and the struggle for workers’ rights.
Resistance is fertile
The relationship between Bartleby and the narrator is crucial to understanding the story. The lawyer feels impelled to help Bartleby but finds him unreadable because he can’t slot him into his worldview. His passive resistance to a dehumanising system, to work that degrades and commodifies people, and refusal to accept outside help, challenges the logic of capitalism.
The philosopher Erich Fromm once wrote,
From birth to death, from Monday to Monday, from morning to evening – all activities are routinised, and prefabricated. How should a man caught up in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and separateness?
How indeed. Bartleby, a tale of the steady erosion and eventual destruction of the human spirit, reminds us of the necessity of creating what the critic John Berger once called ‘pockets of resistance’. Spaces where we can challenge the stultifying narrative that resistance is futile. Spaces where we can imagine a different and better world.