An essay on Melville’s Bartleby
June 20, 2011
Because this is such a great video, I’m going to repost it here.
Bartleby for Donation
Before publishing “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” Herman Melville’s literary reputation was in decline ever since he published Moby Dick, or The Whale. His next novel, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, hardly sold at all, and was criticized, as when Charles Gordon Greene writes on August 4 1852 in The Boston Post: “it might be supposed to emanate from a lunatic hospital,” though he also admits “it is too bad for Mr. Melville to abuse his really fine talents as he does.” In November and December of the same year (1853), however, Melville publishes nonetheless the wonderful story of Bartleby. Though Melville’s first two novels were instant bestsellers, the author would never again write in their same style lest he should betray his artistic integrity. In a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville writes in June of 1851, “Dollars damn me [ . . . ] What I feel most moved to write, that is banned.—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.” “Bartleby” thus vindicates Melville from the “circumstances” of the economic world demanding him write conventional “potboilers.” More importantly, however, “Bartleby” is the development of “ambiguities,” which in the end of the story is identified as “humanity!” Humanity, or Bartleby, is nothing but ambiguity, and it cannot be anything else, for to limit it in a definition would only kill it in its walls, like what happens to Bartleby. Yet to prove this ambiguity Melville must try to deceive us: he must make the story ambiguous, or have several possible legitimate interpretations, in order for his “humanity” to be fully realized as true ambiguity, which is why the narrator is so disgustingly deceptive.
Leo Marx concludes in his “Melville’s Parable of the Walls” that the narrator is saved by his realization of Bartleby’s identity being humanity at large: “Such deeply felt and spontaneous sympathy is the nearest equivalent to [the] grass” growing as if by “magic” within the thick revivalist Egyptian prison and that “[charity] is the force which may enable men to meet the challenge of death, whose many manifestations, real and imagined, annihilated the valiant Bartleby.” Yet charity with the narrator is corrupt and Bartleby nevertheless dies on the “terrible account” of the narrator’s irresponsible complicity with everyone’s wishes. I don’t think the narrator is completely saved as Marx believes; I will only believe that he has tried to save himself by testifying to the misunderstood yet saving power of Bartleby. Rather, Todd F. Davis’ position in “The Narrator’s Dilemma in ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’: the Excellently Illustrated Restatement of a Problem” makes more sense to me. Davis’ article takes its subtitle from Pierre, which I find also to be true and helpful: “mere illustrations are almost universally taken for solutions (and perhaps they are the only possible human solutions), therefore it may help to the temporary quiet of some inquiring mind” (Hayford 210). In it,Davis argues that “There is no talismanic secret in Melville’s world, only writing, writing that moves toward insight but never toward final answers.” I am persuaded to followDavis all the way and agree that Melville is “restating the problem of the human condition” and that the “very act of writing this narrative is an indication that the lawyer still deals with chronometrical guilt in horological time,” which for our purposes is basically just two opposing value systems.
There are three causes why humanity cannot be discovered: the nature of Bartleby himself, the narrator’s motives, and his unreliability. As urbane (he is prudent and methodical) and learned (he is a practicing lawyer who reads theology) as he is, he is suspect because of these very capacities: he can reason himself out of anything, such as throttling, kicking out, jailing, murdering, and helping Bartleby. In this way the narrator mirrors Bartleby. To be specific, Bartleby is passive yet effective and the narrator is frantic yet ineffectual (he never “frightens [Bartleby’s] immobility into compliance” [46]), but to be even more precise, Bartleby and the narrator possess incommensurable ways of life: “[Bartleby] was more a man of preferences than assumptions” (39). Also, the narrator can only comfortably understand Bartleby as a “valuable acquisition,” which on earth is all that matters: “my other clerks being absent [ . . . ] I thought that, having nothing else earthly to do, [he] would surely be less inflexible than usual, and carry these letters” (38). They fundamentally cannot understand one another except by incident as when two people using different languages miraculously come to satisfy the other, which isn’t to say that they understand the other person’s language, but rather that the two have found some way to deal with the other person in their own terms.
In A Handbook to Literature 8th Edition “absurd” is defined as a relationship between people “in a world in which there is no way to establish a significant relationship between themselves and their environment” (2). The most absurd example is when the narrator first thinks of abandoning Bartleby:
something unusual must be done. What! surely you will not have him collared by a constable, and commit his innocent pallor to the common jail? And upon what ground could you procure such a thing to be done?—a vagrant, is he? What! he a vagrant, a wanderer, who refuses to budge? It is because he will not be a vagrant, then, that you seek to count him as a vagrant. That is too absurd. [ . . .] No more then. Since he will not quit me, I must quit him. 44
But legally done is bizarre, only the narrator’s turns of logic are. In the end Bartleby is imprisoned on charge of being a vagrant, which is legitimate at the moment when there is no property to legally protect Bartleby. This is the instance when society through law takes control of the individual if another individual (the narrator) does not. This is one reason for disbelieving the reliability of the narrator: since the narrator is a lawyer he should have known this and prevented it. Abandonment is repeated on page 48 in the Tombs when Bartleby answers, “I know where I am,” and the narrator assuming he “would say nothing more, [ . . . ] left him,” just like that.
In the definition of absurdity the term “significant” is deliberately used to not only denote “important,” but also “signalling.” When something unusual occurs one instinctively looks for something that would make sense of the aberration. But what if something cannot be made sense of? Then we have the absurd, or in this case, Bartleby. He is of course a human being, but he is hardly thought of as one, which the narrator even admits in the first paragraph: “Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable” (italics mine). He even reassures himself, “had there been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises.” In fact, he even thinks that “as it was, [he] should have as soon thought of turning [his] pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors,” an analogy that equated Bartleby with a bust. Whereas Bartleby as an individual at least necessarily signals to himself as an individual, a bust can signal to anything at all, and it is this absence from any definite signification that accounts for Bartleby’s indecipherability. What is particularly saddening about him is that he actually prefers something definite: when asked if he’d like to entertain travelers with his conversation Bartleby replies, “It does not strike me that there is any thing definite about that.” He is inherently vague, but he also apparently doesn’t want anything with “too much confinement” (46).
But why does the narrator tell us this story of the “strangest” scrivener? Here is the motive: “This apprehension had not been without efficacy in determining me to summary means,” the summary of which is the short story itself (37). I have read this story is existentialist, but not understanding fully what that means, let me estimate what is implied. The world that man exists in and must face is an indifferent, meaningless place where things “just happen.” Why is there something rather than nothing? Why did Bartleby show up at the narrator’s open door? The apprehension mentioned above is the fear that the narrator’s psyche was being damaged by taking up Bartleby’s speech patterns. Remember, the narrator is a man of method and order (he contrasts with Bartleby “the deranged” [49]), he is, after all, a lawyer. Whenever something is out of order to him, he finds a reason: why not restrict Bartleby from living in his office? Judging from the contents of his desk, because he is homeless, lonely, and poor. The narrator is mastered again by Bartleby’s “ascendancy” when he is kept out of his own office for the sake of Bartleby’s “occupations” (40), the last time of which is followed by the story’s longest non-dialogue section in which the narrator details in-depth his personal undertakings of self-control. For me, this part best reveals the narrator’s flaws: he is gullible and incapable of standing his ground. The next scene is also the point in the story when society intrudes in both Bartleby’s and the narrator’s peace and rushes the story to its end. The narrator’s most florid passage is a single sentence that ends with “as all these dark anticipations crowded upon me more and more, and my friends continually intruded their relentless remarks upon the apparition in my room; a great change was wrought in me” (43). To me this sounds like a form of denial where the denier attempts to exagerate a secondary cause to shift the blame from him/herself.
And why does the narrator bother with all this? Because he wants to tell the story of Wall-street under the pretense of writing about those “set of men” of whom “nothing that I know of has ever been written,” especially Bartleby (20). And because he thinks “It is an irreparable loss to literature” that such a biography has not yet been written, and that he must now write it, he is also a self-centered man whose act of writing this biography is a mere (self-interested) charity. For him, I believe, Bartleby is only the center of attention because it is his presence that causes the main subject, and terror, of his plight (Wall-street) to come down on him. He is under pressure all the time from everybody beside Bartleby, though he may be the cause for such pressures. The narrator writes on the same page where he calls Bartleby a “valuable acquisition” that he could be reconciled to Bartleby and that the “prime thing” of his clerk was that “he was always there,” which isn’t a problem until his always being there would usurp him of his property rights to his office through legal convention brought into recollection at the heckling of the mob wanting Bartleby out. If he could, I don’t think the narrator would mind keeping Bartleby around as a fixture. In short I do not believe the narrator hates Bartleby, but rather only sees Bartleby’s character as an opportunity to criticize Wall-street’s indifference as exercised in the many situations of circumstances, such as in the anecdote that the narrator easily recalls of Adams and Colt where Colt murders Adams because of the “circumstance of being alone in a solitary office” (41). There are also the circumstances under which the landlord finally manages to evict Bartleby that also manages to change the narrator’s mind to believe that “[the landlord’s actions] seemed the only plan” (47).
It is significant that the narrator is unnamed, for he acts as a representative of humanity. There are several points in the story where the narrator gives away his involvement with Bartleby, which all add up to the death of Bartleby. The text, then, is also an indictment of conservative reactionism that would try to get away with the “anything goes” ethos, since if everything really was left to their own device Bartleby would have ruined the narrator’s business prospects as intimated to persuade the narrator to attempt to remove Bartleby from his old “haunt” one last time. To omit action is nevertheless to choose to not choose a particular action, and if the consequence is a crime then the means is a crime too. The narrator even knows this earlier in the story, as he posits, “If I turn him away, the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he wil be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to starve.” The narrator comes to the conclusion here that to take matters into his own hands is the safest course to undertake. But this is only momentary, self-gratifying, and not to mention self-serving, since he also admits, “He is useful to me” and that by keeping custody over Bartleby he will “cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval [that] will eventually prove a sweet morself for [his] conscience” (30). The narrator here most clearly exposes himself as a false samaritan.
Bartleby, as well as Melville himself, refuses to compromise their integrity and in their non-compliance to conventions act obversely as agents of change in their respective contexts. When the narrator asks Bartleby why he will not write any further, Bartleby replies, “Do you not see the reason for yourself?” (37). A long time later the narrator assumes he has finally caught unto the reason for his clerk’s refusal: “At last I see it, I feel it” (42). He has, however, only caught on after he is incensed by Bartleby’s refusal to leave after an ultimatum’s six days deadline, and also after the narrator entertains thoughts justifying applying “the doctrine of assumptions” and thoughts justifying murder checked by “mere self-interest,” arguing ultimately that “charity often operates as a vastly wise and prudent principle.” His revelation also is one of phony adherence to whimsically picked up theology books. That self-interest should lead to charity is a bizarre paradox indeed because of the inherent contradiction of terms: charity is precisely a self-less act, and that the narrator should deceive himself reveals his absurd character. In effect it is the paradox that nothingness can kill that holds “[the narrator] to the terrible account” of the unaccountable Bartleby. Only coincidence has brought them together.
By making Bartleby into a symbol of enigma Melville nevertheless shows that one thing is certain about humanity: it is something that can die. There is something affirmative, however, in the story. I’ve shown how the narrator equates Bartleby with the bust ofCicero. In the later scene when the narrator asks for his history, Bartleby naturally prefers not to answer while staring at the bust. We also know that Bartleby would prefer something definite and stationary. There is no thing more definite and stationary than a wall, and if Bartleby is already staring at things like himself (the bust) and he also prefers to stare at dead-walls, then in those dead-walls there must be some quality in them equal to himself which he detects. Yet he is not confined to them since in the end he is able to turn from them, the walls of law, and die facing the entrance from which the narrator walks through to find him. Originality may still be found posthumously.
Works Cited
Davis, Todd F.. “The Narrator’s Dilemma in ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’: The Excellently Illustrated Restatement of a Problem.” Studies in Short Fiction. 35.2 (1997): n. pag. EBSCO Host. Web. 29 April 2011.
Harmon, William, C. Hugh Holman, eds. “Absurd.” A Handbook to Literature 8th Edition.Upper Saddle River,New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000. Print.
Hayford, Harrison, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds. Pierre.Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971. Print.
Marx, Leo. “Melville’s Parable of the Walls.” Sewanee Review. 61.4 (1953): 602-627. Web. 29 April 2011.
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First off, Herman Melville is a very complicated and important man. His work after Moby Dick is noted for being abstract, abstruse, and perplexing. Hence why I picked it: because it should give you extra points for ambition and effort. Once you read the story (I recommend at least twice) you should gain confidence about the paper. Granted it could have been written better, but it was taxing even for me, since the subject matter is so difficult. Here’s why: Melville is a very Modernist writer and even a Postmodernist one! He was largely overlooked by the critical audienc in his lifetime so it wasn’t until D.H. Lawrence wrote his Studies in American Literature, Lewis Mumford wrote his biography, and Raymond Weaver’s earlier biography and his 1924 edition of Melville’s unfinished novella Billy Budd, Sailor. Modernism is a trend of thought beginning generally right before World War I and continuing into Postmodernism (some say that Postmodernism is just Modernism in drag). Modernist thought is pretty much the doctrine of “make it new.” In time it is generally seen as the point when civilization seems to have all become self-conscious of itself, many describing Modernism as a “rupture” or “break” from the naïve past when technology and progress were both seen as hands of a benevolent God. What is relevant is that Melville wrote ahead of his time by exploring such themes as the inherent inability in interpretation to grasp absolutes, or the inherent blindspot in our vision of the world that will always thwart us in fully understanding the world, or the inherent impossibility for meaning to be grasped. Bartleby represents this, what Postmodernists call, aporia, or a “perplexing difficulty,” or an impasse. Bartleby is something that cannot be understood or dealt with (nobody knows what to do with him but throw him into jail to die). Of course, the narrator tries but we sense insincerity in his attempt, but his narrative (the story itself, which is his biography of Bartleby) might be sincere, and thus may save the narrator’s soul, but we cannot tell because that, I believe, is not the point of the Melville’s tale. I believe Melville offers us both interpretations equally, that the narrator is equally both sincere and insincere (he is insincere because of his “charitable” self-centeredness yet his showing us his insincereity is sincere because it allows us to grasp his point of Bartleby’s Christ-like divinity, which must die in the corrupt legal world of man), because, he seems to be saying, is just that: ambiguous! Humanity=Bartleby=ambiguities! Humanity cannot be walled into a definition because it will be limited to “copying” (remember Bartleby is a “scrivener,” or a legal documents copier) and not growing and creating and living (which is what Melville the author wishes for, since he is, after all, an artist!)!
As to your sources cited, don’t worry I still have them and I remember how to find them, in case he asks.
Also as a last resort I don’t think it’s a bad idea to mention that you got help from me, a private tutor. Just make sure you say that it was only for up to two hours and after you completed the first draft.
