"Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"
A look at Herman Melville's novella, "Bartleby, The Scrivener." In response to his gruelling "scrivening," rebel Bartleby taps out with his mutinous cry against capitalism: "I prefer not to."
What to read next? Sometimes the decision is made serendipitously!
I had read Bartleby, the Scrivener in a second year American Literature course over twenty years ago. I can only recall it being a short, easy read that allowed me to quickly knock it off the required reading list.
The impetus to re-read Bartleby was driven by two factors. First, after a brief Camus phase of reading The Plague and The Outsider, I continued to read articles on Camus. One particular article mentioned Melville as Camus’s favourite American author with Bartleby being an exemplar of a metaphysical rebel, complete with catchy absurdist tagline: “I prefer not to.” Second, while reading Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, I stumbled upon a second Bartleby reference. In King’s novel, the protagonist’s younger, sexy love interest, Mattie Devore, is reading Bartleby for a book club. Unable to make sense of it, she asks the novel’s protagonist writer, Mike Noonan, to explain. All too distracted by the ghosts that haunt him, Mike Noonan never gets around to an explanation. Unable to count these factors as mere coincidence, I quickly found an ebook version at my local library.
Naturally, interpretations of Melville’s short story will focus on ways to unpack the significance of Bartleby’s puzzling “in office” rebellion. Most readers, perhaps like King’s Mattie Devore, would get stuck, unable to make sense of Melville’s defiant worker bee. He is being paid to work. Why is he not working? Why has he moved into the office? Applied to our own work contexts, Bartleby’s actions represent fully ridiculous actions. Further, the boss’s inaction seems incomprehensible. However, the story would end rather quickly if Bartleby’s boss had acted reasonably and fired his insubordinate charge. To me, that represents the more fascinating angle of the short story.
Why, then, does the narrator/boss not fire Bartelby? The story’s historical context would suggest a summary firing: 1850’s capitalist dog-eat-dog Wall Street. Does the boss’s referenced church going trump his servitude to capitalism? Seems a stretch. What I propose is that the boss is entirely sympathetic to Bartleby’s implicit claim: the painful redundancy and tedium of a scrivener gives the worn down copyist the right, at any time, to abdicate his responsibilities.
Day in and day out, the boss oversees the work of two half employees, Turkey and Nippers. One is useless in the morning; the other one, the afternoon. Grinding out copies, the only highlight of the day is when the young intern, Ginger, goes out for ginger nuts. So, to say that the boss is familiar with the tedium of the work would be understating the point. When Bartleby utters his first “I prefer not to,” the office dynamics change irrevocably. Again, many readers may be stumped at Bartley’s ridiculous utterance, unable to get beyond to the grander absurdity that triggers the scrivener’s mutiny. That is, Bartleby’s utterance is less disobedience and more of an avowal of the absurdity of daily life in uber-capitalist New York City. And, the boss’s inability to resolve the Bartleby “problem” represents his own recognition of the absurdity of the daily drudgery that is their work life.
The fact that the boss is unable to resolve the Bartleby situation is evidence of his complicity in encouraging Barteby’s existentialist moment. In one episode, the boss witnesses Bartleby staring absently, hypnotically at the blank wall outside the office window. To the boss, this act represents relief from the work of which the narrator describes as a “very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair.” As the boss’s responsibility for Bartleby’s psychic break expands, so does his guilt. He, then, tries to assuage his guilt by offering Bartleby money, lodging, and, finally, decent food at the jailhouse. He can, then, do nothing but witness Bartleby’s expiration. With the novella’s famous last line, the narrator/boss echoes his despondency and exasperation of the plight and misfortune of not only his rebel clerk, but all people: "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"
In the end, is Bartleby a tragedy or a cautionary tale? To what degree do we, in our daily lives, attach excess significance to our “daily grinds” only to be disappointed by the spiritual vacancy it leaves? Or, does it make better sense to attach meaning to even the most mundane of tasks? Either way, Melville’s story provides a richness of possible interpretations.
Now, on to the next book to re-read: Gulliver’s Travels.
Throughout reading Bartleby, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Gulliver’s Travels. Particularly, in the land of the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver meets a race of highly intelligent, noble horses. Not only noble, but also inquisitive, the Houyhnhnms are curious about life in Britain. Their perplexity peaks when Gulliver begins describing the law profession. To the Houyhnhnms, lying is inconceivable. Ergo, without lying, lawyers are unnecessary. Perhaps that is partly the rub to which drove Bartleby to deem his legal copying work unnecessary after a mere two days work?
