In my discussion of “Bartleby the Scrivener” I mentioned the sizable “Bartleby industry.” At the top of this industry stands a wonderful postmodern novel, Bartleby & Co., by the Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas (who with Marias is the top Spanish novelist of today). We saw that Melville’s short story is about a clerk who opts out of work with the polite words “I would prefer not to,” and who as he also keeps sitting in the office and stops eating, in the end opts out of life. Instead of adding another interpretation, Vila-Matas has opted to write about literature, the literature of Opting Out.
[Vila-Matas]
Enrique Vila-Matas’ Bartleby & Co. is a novel about a clerk, Marcelo, who searches through literature for other possible Bartlebys, while in fact being one himself. He once wrote a short novel about the impossibility of love, but since has written nothing. That is why he is interested in other Bartlebys. He writes footnotes about the findings he makes during his search and these notes form the book we have in our hands, a sort of catalog of authors suffering from the “Bartleby Syndrome.”
More specifically, these authors fall into one of the following categories: authors who wrote great books at one point, but then decided to stop writing altogether; potential authors who could have written great books, but who chose never to put the pen to paper; authors who began books magnificently, but then left them sadly unfinished; and authors who were famously reclusive and refused to add their personal presence to their literary efforts.
So this is a book, in true postmodern vein, about the failure to write, a failure regarded in itself as a sort of artistic statement. In the concise span of only 178 pages we meet such “Masters of the Art of the No” as Robert Walser, Laurence Sterne, J. D. Salinger, Fernando Pessoa, Thomas Pynchon, B. Traven, Balzac, Herman Melville, Robert Musil, Wiltold Gombrowicz, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Knut Hamsun, Goethe, Stendhal, Franz Kafka, André Gide, Juan Rulfo, and Guy de Maupassant, to name only the most famous ones. Some, like the reclusive, hunchbacked narrator, can’t or won’t write. Others, most famously Pynchon and Salinger, shun the limelight. While most of the notes are factual in nature, Vila-Matas also slyly inserts several anecdotes that are clearly fictional as well.
The string of 86 footnotes of Bartleby & Co. is in fact attached to a non-existent, invisible text, so Vila-Matas’ metafiction is itself also an important contribution to the Literature of the No (the narrator hints that the full text has been repressed). Vila-Matas confronts us with the process of writing rather than the output itself. It is fascinating to look into the kitchen of Salinger, Rulfo or Rimbaud and explore the reasons why they stopped publishing, or look at those who have written nothing at all and try to think about what their books might have been like…
The copyist becomes the noble word-smith, rejecting the demands of pulp fiction. And even Bartleby’s eventual fate – a quiet hunger strike unto death against the unfeeling world – is interpreted as that ultimate refusal, suicide.