![]() ‘Bartleby’ has also been viewed as prefiguring existentialism, with Bartleby offering a neutral ‘no’ to the demand to roll the Sisyphean boulder back up the hill. Indeed, Borges pointed out that Melville’s story anticipates Kafka’s work in ‘the genre of fantasies of conduct and feeling’. ![]() Indeed, with its emphasis on the symbolic activity of writing and the ways in which bureaucracy can imprison us into a passive and pointless existence, ‘Bartleby’ can be analysed as a forerunner to the works of twentieth-century writers like Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. His determination to resist this demand will lead to selling fewer books in ‘Bartleby’, it will end with the scrivener losing his job and starving himself to death (like many a less successful author before). The capitalist machine wants Melville to continue producing more formulaic works which would sell copies and make his publishers lots of money: the system wants to turn him into nothing more than a ‘scrivener’, of sorts. Herman Melville ‘preferred not to’ continue writing the sea stories which had proved hugely popular early in his career, preferring to branch out into more experimental and challenging fiction (including, most famously, Moby-Dick, published a couple of years before Melville wrote ‘Bartleby’ and greeted by a number of hostile and bewildered reviews). Bartleby stands out to the narrator because he pushes back against this urge to conform and comply.īecause a scrivener is a kind of writer, numerous critics have viewed Bartleby as an autobiographical portrait. The story’s setting on Wall Street, the financial centre of the United States, is no accident: the world of finance, law, and business, Melville appears to be suggesting, stifles and restricts the individual, turning everyone into mindless cogs in the machine of industry.Įven the job which appears in the story’s title, ‘scrivener’, involves not writing original content but merely copying existing documents. Bartleby is the politest form of rejecting all the reasons for which we have politeness.Alongside such passivity, we find, in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’, the theme of conformity. He is absolutely outside the influence of what Jacques Lacan called the “Big Other”, that inner/outer voice that makes us gravitate towards a force that sanctions us. His is a more powerful defiance he is a figure who negates all the conventional, social, political and theological norms. Of Herman Melvilles shorter works, Bartleby, the Scrivener has remained the most popular and widely studied. And as the narrator is forced to admit, Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a. ![]() Satan still wants there to be a universal monarchy, it’s just he wants to be its monarch.īartleby is different. Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) is a story of passive resistance. Most of literature’s glorious proponents of defiance – I am thinking of Melville’s own Captain Ahab, but also Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, or Steerpike in Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy – are defying the person in power, not the structure of power. They eventually have Bartleby put in prison, where the narrator pays for him to have better meals, but he again prefers not to, and eventually dies of, what? Starvation? Melancholy? Because he did not prefer living? The overlooked subtitle is “A Story of Wall Street” Bartleby is a strange premonition of the Occupy Movement.Įventually, in frustration, the lawyer relocates his offices, but the new leaseholders become concerned about the man who sits all day on the banister. Bartleby is always there when work starts and stays after they leave on an unplanned visit on a Sunday, the narrator finds Bartleby there, and wonders if he is actually living in the offices. ![]() It is never said aggressively or impertinently. It is never “no”, never “will not”, never even an outright refusal. He tries to garner the slightest biographical scraps: “Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?” To which the answer is, of course: “I would prefer not to.” The narrator, who prides himself on knowing about Astor on prudence, Edwards on will and Priestley on necessity, cajoles, offers alternative employment, even a room in his own house. He says – and it is almost the only thing he ever says in the story: “I would prefer not to.” He instead prefers, if anything, to look at the blank brick wall that is the entire view from his window.įrustrated, Turkey and Nippers threaten to blacken his eye. He works “silently, palely, mechanically”, and on the third day of his employment is asked to proofread a document. Business is doing so well that the narrator takes on Bartleby, described as “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn”.
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