Bartleby is the story of a mild-mannered but stubborn clerk who one day politely refuses work with the words: “I would prefer not to.” He never explains himself and the hunt for the rationale behind this sudden decision to opt out has given rise to a whole “Bartleby industry.” At the same time, this strange and mysterious short story is not only the best Melville wrote, but ranks as the number one short story in American literature.
[Wall Street]
First the plot, which is simple. A kind elderly lawyer with a Wall Street practice hires a new scrivener (copyist), a pallid funereal young man named Bartleby. After working in the office for a time, Bartleby informs his employer that he would prefer not to copy legal documents anymore. Instead he begins a sort of vigil behind a screen in the office, just sitting there and staring out of a window at a bare brick wall. All efforts to rouse him are met with passive resistance. When one Sunday the lawyer happens to visit his office, to his surprise he finds Bartleby there – and realizes that the copyist in fact is living in the office. Bartleby resists his efforts to fire him and have him move out of the premises and in the end, it is the lawyer who moves out. His orderly life and sense of decorum have been severely disrupted by Bartleby, but he is too kind to just kick him out or have him arrested. But after the office has moved away, Bartleby’s life further deteriorates and he ends up in prison.
Bartleby is only seen from the outside, we can’t look into his heart, and he never explains himself. Mild and unprepossessing, hostile to change, he prefers not to work, not to answer questions, not to move out of the office. Later it becomes also clear he has no home and no family or friends. He is the archetype of the person who opts out, who quits.
[View of Wall Street from corner of Broad Street, 1867]
So what could his reason be? The elusive allegory of the story has produced countless interpretations. Some say Bartleby is just a lunatic – psychological assessments have included depression, schizophrenia and autism. This does not convince me as it would make the story rather trite. More interesting is the idea to see his behavior springing out of a despairing sense of the human condition, of the futility of labor, and the inevitability of death – a 20th c. existentialist interpretation. Or should we seek the explanation in the field of literature, is Melville writing about his own situation – in that case, Bartleby could stand for the author Melville, who was unwilling to “copy” then popular literary styles and never had much success with his books?
A modern explanation is also the one that sees this as a class conflict. Bartleby refused to supply his labor to the capitalist mill, he said a resounding NO to the modern nine to five world of work. Or, this story being set in Wall Street (in some versions the subtitle is “a story of Wall Street”) and his employer a corporate lawyer, perhaps we can see Bartleby as the first laid-off worker to occupy Wall Street, all the time just squatting in his office cubicle. In the same contemporary sense, Bartleby was also the first hunger striker, for after he is put in prison he refuses to touch any food.
Or is this quiet bureaucrat a second Josef K. and a Christ-figure? Or does his passive resistance remind one of Gandhi?
My favorite interpretation is that Bartleby was the first American Buddhist. Like Bodhidharma, the legendary founder of Zen Buddhism, he sat the whole day facing a bare wall (and that in Wall Street!). Of course, according to my interpretation, he was meditating, and he allowed nobody to disturb his meditation.
Whatever explanation we favor, we should remember one important thing: Bartleby is not a procrastinator in the sense of idleness, like Oblomov. His stance requires exertion and resistance, and his stance is redemptive rather than pessimistic.
Available edition: Penguin Classics, or in the Library of America (with Moby Dick etc.). Also free on the internet at Gutenberg.
Photo Wall Street: via Wikimedia Commons