Rebellious Projections
Existentialism inverted in Melville’s “Bartleby The Scrivener”
Melville House Publishing’s “The Art of the Novella” series, like the Penguin 60s classics before it, offers up bite-sized classic works in an attractively minimal trade dress, with succinct supplemental text contextualizing the work and its authors. Though they are listed at $10 apiece, they can often be found for less, particularly in prominent bargain shelves of well-curated bookstores like Green Apple. More developed than the typical short story, while easier to consume and focus on than an epic novel, the literary efficiency of the novella makes the themes and styles of many essential writers that much more accessible to busy readers.
Pivoting upon the title character’s sudden intransigent yet polite objections to his employer’s instructions, Bartleby’s “I prefer not to” has become a signature statement as steeped in audience consciousness as Howard Beale’s “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!” Like many literary catchphrases, particularly those around which the motifs of the work crystallize, the speaker’s original intent erodes or gets washed way entirely in its proliferation, but in that fashion, their impact remains fresh for every reader discovering and revisiting them in the proper context.
The unnamed employer provides the observer narration, and the reader processes Bartleby’s increasingly bizarre behavior through the employer’s surprisingly empathetic eyes. The novella is subtitled “A Story of Wall Street”, calling to mind the ruthless dealings of its oligarchical financial institutions. And true, the employer seems firmly entrenched in a rather stratified professional system offering few if any opportunities to his subordinates for upward mobility. Indeed, the publisher itself introduces the novella as a “prescient story” about “a young man caught up in the rat race of commerce,” prefiguring the Occupy movement.
While the interpersonal effects of Bartleby’s understated stubbornness is certainly shown to have a similarly potent impact upon the machinery of capitalism, it is filtered through the internal turmoil of his employer, opening up a more abstract read into the novella as Melville’s dismantling of the entire social contract, not just the formal ones on paper. Melville establishes the narrator, a 19th century Wall Street lawyer operating a solo practice with three scriveners (longhand copyists, consisting of Turkey, Nippers, and the newly hired Bartleby) and an office-boy (Ginger Nut), as a supervisor who knows how to make room for the unprofessional idiosyncrasies of his underlings, balancing Nippers’ morning indigestion-driven distemper with Turkey’s afternoon ineffectiveness upon habitually imbibing his midday meal. The very assignment of nicknames for the staff demonstrates the narrator’s intimate familiarity with them, something that has been somewhat lost in modern cubicle-farm environments, yet seems to survive in the professional relationships between today’s attorneys and their indispensable clerks.
So when Bartleby, theretofore an industrious scrivener, gently refuses the additional obligation of proofing and reviewing his work with his employer with the mysterious yet unequivocal “I prefer not to,” the narrator is relatably stymied. One would expect a Wall Street fixture to simply fire the rebellious employee and move on, but there is a personal pride in the narrator’s maintenance of his office— if his managerial prowess is able to wring productiveness from the imperfections of his other three hires, should it not be able to continue to make good use of that of Bartleby’s?
Conceding to limiting Bartleby’s duties to the copying of text, the narrator remains puzzled but reasonably content, until he discovers that his wayward clerk has surreptitiously been making his home in the office. Far from pulling the all-nighters of many a modern professional, Bartleby simply seems to have no other space to call his own, and offers no explanation for his situation, just as he prefers to keep his reasoning for refusing his professional responsibilities private. The narrator’s empathetic instincts, directly self-described as something beyond fleeting pity, nobly kick into high gear, immediately obsessing with arbitrating Bartleby’s salvation:
I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him— it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.
As the number of tasks he prefers not to do increases until he is but a static fixture in the office, Bartleby thus emerges as a human manifestation of the synecdoches challenging and satirizing social graces, as might be found in the Nose and Overcoat of Nikolai Gogol. While cited as Michael Stipe’s favorite literary character, the title figure informs the narrator’s heroic arc much more than his own, serving as a dramatic pivot for a comprehensive exploration of the existential limitations on empathy. The human draw to find a way to assist and moderate Bartleby’s mysterious existence can then be read as a projection for the author, narrator, and reader’s rebellious propensities.
The narrator unexpectedly goes well out of his way in attempting to ensure Bartleby’s well-being, going against better business senses with incredibly flexible justifications for humoring the scrivener’s perplexing demeanor and situation. As his actions become as pronounced as Bartleby’s are muted, the employer asserts his altruism with increasing commitment, through all the institutions into which his recalcitrant catalyst takes him. His own presence becomes defined by the other’s relative lack of same, inverting existentialism through the tragedy of the individual’s common inability to improve the lives of others.
More a surrealist fable than an anti-capitalist screed, Melville wrote his novella as his own star was quickly fading, forcing him to retreat back into the industrial professions of his past as he completed the remainder of his professional life in a customs house. While Bartleby can be read as a stand-in for the lately downtrodden Melville, the focus on the narrator’s attempts to adjust the institutional values to accomodate such resistance speaks to far more than wish fulfillment. The scrivener becomes his employer’s Tyler Durden in an acknowledgement of the individual’s station resounding more loudly than the social structures that it serves— the enlightenment denied assuredly propelling the societal movements to come.
