Melville and Bartleby: Facing the End of an Audience
by Jon Thompson
Posted: February 18, 2008
Everything is again set in motion--called into
question--by writing.
-Edmond Jabès
§ What can we face? The face as mystery, sign, image.
"Bartleby" stages the terrible unworkability of faces, the equally
terrible unknowability of our own. Facing it, face offs, to turn
one's face to the wall, to lose face, to gain it. The tragedy of
each is the tragedy of all...
§ The worker consents or faces death. This is Bartleby's
recognition. But in consenting, ironically, he also faces death,
the death of the self. It doesn't matter that the self is
a fiction. In fact, the murder of the fictive self, the self that
finds a place within society, that has basked in social approval,
is more tortuous and painful than the death of any actual self.
This is what it means to "lose face."
§ Becoming a pariah is one thing; becoming exiled from who
you thought you once were is another. Or is Bartleby's slow,
deliberate journey of self-exile a journey to freedom? So: Heaven
has levels, degrees. In reality, it is only an idea.
§ The slow, sad spectacle of the self, staging its own death
for an audience that doesn't exist.
§ The audience that has not yet found the means to look about
and see that the drama is in the clapping, not in the performance,
the one loud roar of approval that sweeps aside both the past and
the future.
§ Freedom from external restraint, unto death. "Freedom-from"
versus "freedom-in": in this most free of nations, there
is no freedom-in being. Your freedom is guaranteed by the right
to die by yourself, with whatever self you can covet unencumbered
by love or relation. No one would dream of curtailing that freedom.
Bartleby: the nineteenth-century ancestor to every homeless person
wandering aimlessly on America's streets, each one the sovereign
of all he surveys.
§ Bartleby never argued with anyone; he never tried
to prove a point, win converts, vanquish foes. What does this lack
of rhetorical aggression signify? The fruitlessness of conversion
via argumentation? The failure of rhetoric? The contamination of
rhetoric by a culture in which most "disinterested"
expressions cloak naked self-interest? Bartleby's "I
prefer not to" exists as an assertion of will--but not
will-to-truth.
§ The most destructive of all faces: benign tolerance. This
is the face of Bartleby's employer. It disguises its own intolerance
within a mask of benevolence. Worse: because that intolerance cannot
be admitted, it does not exist. And because it does not exist, it
is free to become pitiless.
§ Behind the narrator's courteousness, theatrical benevolence,
and good manners lurks the threat of violence. Without these rhetorical
forms, manners, forms of self-presentation, capitalist society would
be undressed, its violence made manifest. With them, it is dressed
up as civilized, moral, benevolent. Bartleby forces it to undress;
he forces it to endure the shame of exposure, the danger of self-recognition.
Therefore society takes its revenge upon Bartleby.
§ About Bartleby, the narrator says, "No materials exist,
for a full and satisfactory biography of this man." In being
unknown and unknowable, Bartleby exists as a threat to society's
will-to-know, to narrative itself. That which is un-narratable must
be narrated, must be known.
§ Everyone, everything must be faced, categorized, reported
upon. To be unknown and unknowable is to incur the wrath of custom
and law that demands a modest amount of submission.
§ Those about "whom nothing is ascertainable"
defy the order of things, which rests on the ability to recognize,
ascertain, assess. One death meets another.
§ "What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that
is all I know of him." Astonishment polices reality: it turns
it into heaven or hell. Hell is what is unrecognizable; heaven is
only a name for what can be recognized.
§ The voice of doxa is the voice of comfort and reassurance.
It speaks--not in terms of certainties, but givens. It refuses
its own name.
§ To trade in "bonds," "mortgages"
and "title deeds" is to trade in articles of possession.
Within this world, language--writing--becomes the guarantor of ownership.
The language of the law attempts to contain the irreducible play
of meaning in language, its fundamentally mercurial dynamic nature,
by means of complete discrimination, complete description. Through
exactitude and precision it attempts to forestall all contingency,
all unforeseen contexts. Bartleby's refusal to yield his soul
defies a social order possessed by the desire to possess everything
and to translate its own imperial ambition into an idiom of benevolence
and generosity.
§ The soul is what is withheld; the soul is that which is
proffered without being acknowledged as such. It is then
material and invisible. The achievement of Bartleby is that he maintains,
in large part, the invisibility of his soul. This, too, is his tragedy;
it is also the tragedy of the society that demands it.
§ What is safety in a world made "safe" by money?
The mansion becomes the mausoleum.
§ "Poetic enthusiasm" will always be an embarrassment
in the face of prudence and method. Prudence--thou knows not
what thou art!
§ In a society in which the lack of "poetic enthusiasm"
is judged to be good, any evidence of it will be seen as a weakness,
a failure of restraint.
§ Wall Street. Even the name is mythological: destiny materialized
within the flux of numbers rising or falling on the stock exchange.
The market depends upon fluctuation, but fluctuation within limits.
Wall Street creates walls, as well as the need for them. It also
creates a demand for a limit to tolerance. In a market society,
tolerance must be limited else there will be no profit.
To be infinitely tolerant, that is, to be meaningfully tolerant,
would require unending expenditure. Thus in market societies, tolerance
becomes a most precious commodity; its value is dependent upon it
being "cashed in" only rarely.
§ In 1653, Wall Street was named for a "barricade built
by Peter Stuyveysant to protect the early Dutch settlers from the
local Indians," writes Peter Geisst in Wall Street: A
History. Wall Street has always been then a place of barricades,
an instrument of separation, a means to distance "entrepreneurial"
settlers from the locals, a place of appropriation and exploitation.
Indeed, it marks a border, a boundary, a space designed to produce
both wealth and alienation. It marks a frontier; a defensive establishment
already prepared against the backlash of the people beyond it. It
thus exists as a predatory commercial site, though so "normalized"
it virtually ceases to look or feel like one. Necessarily, it is
a place of self-righteousness; wealth must be a sign of God's
favor. Yet there is uneasiness here too, rooted in the partially
repressed recognition of the illegitimacy that comes from appropriation,
which must always be legitimized. The aggressor must always be the
victim.
§ Through his unorthodoxy, Bartleby challenges the liberal
definition of benevolence. His employer, however, writes to convince
us of his unsullied liberalism. The reader too is called upon to
confirm the narrator's own skewed self-image. In doing so,
Melville shows the insecurity of the liberal mind--and its
monstrosity. The entire world exists to confirm it in its essential
benevolence. But since at some level it knows that it is
not benevolent, the world exists to prop up a tattered fiction.
Everything is sacrificed. The liberal mind: pitiless, egotistical,
endlessly benign, endlessly serene.
§ Wall Street is presented to us as dialectic of "industry
and life" by day an "emptiness" and "vacancy"
by night. Bartleby shows, by contrast, the emptiness and vacancy
of industry itself. Even to the narrator, Wall Street is a "Petra"
and a ruined "Carthage."
§ To blot a document for a scrivener is a mortal sin, for
it reminds the reader that the law is not a distant, Olympian arbiter
of right and wrong, but a frail, imperfect human institution...
lawyers, not surprisingly, want to exorcise blots form their records.
As if the law could be unblemished.
§ The impertinence of Bartleby: he does not negotiate
the terms of his employment; he decides and acts off his own bat.
Despite his mildness, his is the grossest kind of insubordination.
Subordinates who take their own preferences in hand and follow them
up challenge the legitimacy of authority. Thus the latent, nearly
extinguished utopianism of "Bartleby": what would be
if all the wretched of the earth declared, "I prefer not to"?
§ Bartleby alone appears to be self-conscious, undeceived.
This degree of self-awareness renders him unfit for labor which
depends, to varying degrees, upon a dimming of self-knowledge, self-consciousness.
Within American capitalism, self-knowledge brings the individual
to a state of unfreedom. Its price: exile. To be self-conscious
in America is to become an exile, a social outcast. Individualism
becomes the compensatory myth for a society intolerant of it.
§ What is the black wall that Bartleby sees through his windowpanes?
It is nothing but sheer blankness, Necessity, the limitation that
he endures, the sum of limitations upon individual desire by the
rule of law and social custom. It is the pitilessness of all laws,
written and unwritten, that demand conformity and obedience. It
is the primal scene of socialization in which the implacable order
of things confronts human desire with its inhuman face.
§ To write the law over and over again, to copy it repeatedly,
is to perform the individual's subjection to the law: he is
embodying it within language, enabling it to take material form;
he is giving it his life force. The scrivener is not writing the
law; it is writing itself through him. It is impervious to death
and decay; the scrivener, by contrast, is mortal, temporal, frail,
corruptible. The scrivener embodies the fate of the subject: to
be subjected to the law is to be its subject. Which is synonymous
with being subject-less. The irony of Melville's parable:
fleeing the death of the subject only hastens it.
§ The labor of the scrivener: writing without thinking, writing
that faithfully and mindlessly duplicates the signifier, writing
that has as its sole object the reproduction of the word
of law--is this not a symbol of the co-opted labor of the intellectual
working under the aegis of a reifying capitalism?
§ Bartleby arrives at his employer's premises as an
adult, but an adult without a history. It is this emptiness, this
lack of a knowable past, the silence of his past, his solitude and
lack of connection that distinguishes him, paradoxically, as history's
subject. His silence about his past only amplifies that untold drama.
That past, that history, becomes too monumental to be written. It
is unrepresentable, but in becoming unrepresentable, it acquires
a ghostly presence. History haunts Bartleby. It is unseen but everywhere
it makes itself felt with its uncanny presence. (Bartleby, too,
becomes a wraith.)
§ Bartleby is stricken with life, with the burden
of living.
§ Why does Bartleby begin his employment with an orgy of productivity?
To obliterate the past? To identify himself with social expectation
in a failed attempt to conform? The reasons are unknowable, perhaps
to himself as well as Melville. That is respect for fiction.
§ Alternatively: Bartleby's orgy of productivity at
the beginning of his employment is the sign of the unconsciousness
responding to the demands of everyday life. Bartleby's frenzy
mimics the law of productivity, becoming a grotesque parody of it.
To live as a conformist is to live as a parody, to live as a mimic
man. Bartleby prefers to live as a grotesque.
§ For Bartleby's employer as for most representatives
of the law, civil disobedience--"I prefer not to"--is
a species of madness. In Paradise, refusal has always been a form
of heresy, of madness. "What right do you have to reject Eden,
my Eden"? (Even Ginger Nut thinks Bartleby is "luny.")
§ For Bartleby, "reason" is unreason. Its tyranny
is met by mildness, mildness that exists as reproach, gentle condemnation,
a refusal to enter into the ugly economy of compulsion. Bartleby's
mildness, then, is utopian--or at least a faint sign of the utopian
in a world degraded by imperatives. By contrast, Turkey affirms
his employer's rules "with submission."
§ Bartleby is regarded by his employer as unreasonable, the
very embodiment of unreason. What Bartleby forces us to see is that
reason is a fiction authored by certain interests (the legal profession,
the middle class, etc.) in order to legitimize themselves. Reason,
of course, is always what you have but the other person does not.
Since the Enlightenment, reason has been deified as Truth, but in
so doing it betrays its own idealization. That which cannot be proven
wrong becomes, by definition, an article of faith. We should speak
of reasons rather than Reason. In actual practice, Reason
has little to do with itself.
§ "Come forth and do your duty " declares Bartleby's
employer to Bartleby. Duty: every society induces it to ensure its
own reproduction. Duty is needed to overcome the inevitable revulsion
toward the menial, the abhorrent, as well as the mundane. Doing
one's duty always involves an annihilation of the self--as
well as a fulfillment of it.
§ Without irony, the master looks to the slave for confirmation
of his essential benevolence; similarly, the employer demands of
his employee that he confirm his employer's sense of tolerance
and benevolence. The annoyance Bartleby's employer feels toward
Bartleby is, if anything, exceeded by the irritation the other scriveners
feel toward Bartleby for "shirking" his work. Turkey
and Nipper's inflamed response to Bartleby's non
serviam--"Shall I go and black out his eyes"--expresses
the narrator's own rage against Bartleby, a rage he cannot
express himself inasmuch as it would give the lie to his own magnanimity.
But it also allows him to act the role of the liberal, long-suffering
employer (which in truth he is). "Bartleby" thus explores
the psychic organization of labor under capitalism in which the
wage earner expresses the anger and frustrations of his boss, which
also become his. Melville reveals a system in which one
class not only exploits another, but it also expects the exploited
class to voice the angers, the frustrations, and the point of view
of the dominant class, that is, the middle class. For Melville,
this system is essentially two-faced. The question of voice or expression
(the representation of what is internal) then becomes immensely
fraught, caught up in the unconscious social imperative to speak
for interests that are not one's own. In part this explains
Bartleby's linguistic miserliness: to speak more would be
to invite his speech to be infected by the speech and interests
of another class. Bartleby's linguistic minimalism resists
this enforced class-based ventriloquism.
§ Failing to reform Bartleby, his employer takes it upon himself
to read Bartleby's protest as an opportunity to exercise his
own moral improvement. That he fails is not a sign of his moral
turpitude but a sign that moral improvement in a Puritan society
is impossible.
§ Bartleby repossesses his employer's premises. He has
a fine indifference for property. Is it any wonder he must die?
§ "Immediately then the thought came sweeping across
me, what miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed."
To have his life interpreted for us by one with such suspect motives:
this is Bartleby's fate and that of all the dispossessed.
He cannot narrate his own life, tell his own story in his own words.
In Melville's America, identity is not something you have
or own; it is instead something conferred upon you by others. Identity
is a function of how you are seen. In a society possessed by the
drama of individualism, the social rears its ugly head by silently
and efficiently forging an identity for every American, an identity
that is never wholly available for inspection and understanding
by the individual. The American self: one who thinks he
knows himself utterly.
§ Spectre, spectator, specimen: Bartleby cannot escape the
imprisonment of categories, more carceral than mortar.
§ The narrator says he feels a "bond of a common humanity"
with Bartleby, yet his actions do not acknowledge the sanctity of
any such bond. This then is the fate of the liberal mind: to feel
one thing, but to have that feeling, that liberal sentiment, overborne
by the "more practical" demands of class and the conformities
a market society exacts.
§ "Pallid," "miserable," "silent,"
"pale" "cadaverously gentlemanly": Bartleby
is not only deathly in appearance; he is death. Death to social
convention, death to social custom, to normative expectation, to
social behavior. Negating social expectation, Bartleby is negated.
That is, he becomes more like who he is. He approaches the horizon
of his identity, which is paradoxically nothing as well as being
the unspeakable form of his resistance to social law. This is why
the narrator pities him, hates him, loves him. As an object of pity,
Bartleby's unspoken critique of everything that narrator stands
for (professionalism, class, respectability, tolerance, etc.) does
not have to be engaged. Indeed, once made an object of pity his
unspoken condemnation can be dismissed as eccentricity or lunacy.
§ The laws of property permit all kinds of plunder, invasion,
appropriation. Because the narrator observes that Bartleby's
desk "is mine," it, too, can be penetrated by him. He
has in law, if not in ethics, a right to rifle Bartleby's
desk. The narrator possesses a will-to-truth vis-à-vis Bartleby:
his mysteriousness, his reserve, his enigmatic taciturn character
must be made explicable. That it is not defies the narrator's
complacently bourgeois worldview, which demands attribution, causal
hermeneutics, simplicity, clarity. Bartleby gives this will-to-truth,
which is also a will-to-power, no relief. What knowledge cannot
know it must dismiss, pity or deligitimize as contemptible or a
mere object of curiosity.
§ Bartleby: the exemplary American. He tries--and fails--to
make a home for himself within the ever-mutating, ever-the-same
precincts of capitalism and ends up being imprisoned by it.
§ "... standing in one of those deadwall reveries
of his": the reverie, long the ally of American self-invention,
self-fashioning, can also be its undoing, especially when reverie
becomes a substitute for doing. Bartleby is Benjamin Franklin's
nemesis, the presence of a horrific unproductivity in American culture
that Franklin sought to annihilate or at least shame out of existence.
The narrator (Benjamin Franklin's alter ego in the story)
initially feels pity for Bartleby, a pity that transmogrifies into
repulsion. It is not only that Bartleby represents an entirely different
principle of living; it is that he cannot be changed to be in alignment
with the narrator's complacent establishment values ("What
I saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim
of an innate and incurable disorder.") Hence Bartleby must
be cast out.
§ The initial test of Bartleby's excommunication will
be whether he will divulge the particulars of his deliberately veiled
history. If he refuses to do so, the narrator is determined to fine
him. Significantly, he is not first asked to become more
efficient. He is asked to reveal his soul, to become transparent
before the gaze of his employer, to lose his identity as a separate,
equal, and distinctive life, indeed to lose his private history.
He is asked, in short, to become a case, an aggregate of facts,
an object of narration, a known story, an employee instead
of an individual. To the question, "Will you tell me anything
about yourself?" Bartleby responds "I would prefer not
to."
§ Bartleby's presence, his example, is a contagion that
must be contained. Within the highly conventionalized world of employer-employee
relations, preference cannot be allowed to have much more than a
rhetorical significance. Preference speaks to individual will, which
in Melville's America, exists only ideologically, or at the
level of enunciation. Individual will haunts America, its brick
and mortar, its devil-deal with Wall Street, its boom times and
its bust ones; it is dead, but its uneasy spirit is everywhere,
a reminder of what has been lost, or perhaps what once was envisioned
but never realized.
§ In the face of society's "thou must,"
Bartleby heroically maintains his own sense of will. He cannot be
bribed to conform; he will not acknowledge the coercion of politeness,
the ascendancy of manners. Yet he is not free. Obedience to social
law and defiance of it are seen by Melville to be equally constraining.
Defying social law defines Bartleby, almost absolutely. Wherever
he turns there are walls. Bartleby is an individual who cannot free
himself from his narrator, even from his author. Melvillean tragedy:
narration itself as a form of subjection, unless the reader rewrites
the story...
§ Self-interest, too, dictates the ultimate removal of Bartleby
from the narrator's law offices; the narrator decides he cannot
afford generosity beyond the recognized border of conventional liberalism:
the silent uncooperative presence of Bartleby has begun to affect
his "professional reputation." In a society actuated
in the main by the profit motive, self-interest will always be the
cardinal value; other pretenders exist, but none command the same
degree of allegiance.
§ "What earthly right do you have to stay here? Do you
pay any rent? Do you pay my taxes? Or is this property yours?"
In nineteenth-century America, as now, rights are, in practice,
guaranteed by money and property, not by "higher" ethical,
legal, or constitutional principles. Melville's postmortem
on the body politic reveals not so much a divide between ethical
and political life but a conquest of ethical principles by capitalist
premises such that thinking beyond them requires an immense act
of the imagination. By 1854, the "cash-payment nexus"
had thoroughly colonized America; the only space outside it was
the space of the imagination. The great achievement of capitalism
is that it forces its dissidents and critics into exile, it forces
us to inhabit the territory of the imagination, which it then delegitimizes
as unreal, as mythical, a place of childish fantasy, a land of improbability.
From whence will come the beast, slouching toward Bethlehem.
§ Horror--that Bartleby should dispossess his employer. He
worries that "...in the end [he might] perhaps outlive me, and claim
possession of my office by right of his perpetual occupancy." Fear
of dispossession leads to dispossession. Fear the devil! Possession,
the devil! Legitimacy, the devil!
§ From valued employee to recalcitrant employee to enigma
to apparition: by the end of the story Bartleby is made to metaphorse
again: in a final incarnation he is seen to be an "intolerable
incubus." This is no exaggeration; he is an incubus. He haunts
the living by his mere being. Merely being in a nonconformist
fashion becomes an affront to bourgeois propriety, to professional
decorum, to normativity itself. Bartleby becomes burdened with the
socially unsaid in America, particularly the gap between our idealistic
image of the American body politic and the harsher reality. Bartleby
is--the worst sin of all--an embarrassment. He embarrasses the narrator's
notion of himself as a generous individual; he embarrasses society's
pretense to be a society in which action is grounded in principle.
His mere presence mocks the American claim to have established
a uniquely free polity.
§ "Bartleby" is about the magical power, the horrific
power, of representation to transform lives. The narrator defines
Bartleby's life; his definition of Bartleby as an outsider,
an "intolerable incubus," becomes material, actual,
in the body of Bartleby, wraithlike in prison, by the wall, awaiting
death. In representing others as inhuman, supernatural, mythical,
fantastic, they are metamorphosed into fiends, spirits,
ghosts, devils, diseases, witches. Via this magic they can be annihilated,
burned, slaughtered, converted, exorcised, chained, imprisoned,
starved and mocked--made to gabble, made to flee, made to fly.
§ Once Bartleby's employer deserts his law offices,
he is finally able to separate himself from any sense of responsibility
to Bartleby. But his departure does not signify a new disavowal
of Bartleby, only the acting out of a disavowal that has already
taken place. The disavowal merely becomes visible, public, as he
makes clear to the new occupant of his former premises on Wall Street:
"'I am very sorry, sir,' said I, with assured
tranquillity, but an inward tremor, '"but really the
man you allude to is nothing to me--he is no relation or apprentice
of mine, that you should hold me responsible for him.'"
What fear there is here:--fear of a social contract that would bind
one individual to another, make one responsible to another, or merely
genuinely responsive to another. Bartleby's employer is desperate
that he not be made "responsible for him." He expresses
a horror toward social responsibility. "Bartleby" is
in this sense a dramatization of the American horror toward the
notion of the social as the environment in which individual destiny
receives completion. It ironizes--despairingly!--the narrator's
desire for the social to be replaced by an environment in which
individuals pursue their ambitions limited only by the pressures
of economic necessity, class, and a legal system firmly rooted in
the prerogatives of wealth and property.
§ Within this vision, the social makes no demands on individuals
vis-à-vis other ones, and should not. It is a space populated
only by a single individual and his solipsistic ambitions. Yet the
emptiness of this social space demands the most rigorous policing.
It must not be filled up, certainly not by a vision of the social
as fulfilling. The social is defined by Melville as the space of
the prison yard, demarcated by "the surrounding walls, of
amazing thickness."
§ Ironically, in so privatizing the dream of the social as
a source of support and enrichment, the social domain actually is
reduced to becoming barren, coercive and exploitative. Melville's
irony: horror at the horror we have allowed the social to become.
§ "As I afterwards learned, the poor scrivener, when
told that he must be conducted to the Tombs, offered not the slightest
obstacle, but, in his pale, unmoving way, silently acquiesced."
The shameless of false pity, false piety! Bartleby acquiesces in
the face of death. Pity is death too--in this sense, Bartleby's
removal to the Tombs is merely the actualization of the living death
that he has already endured. Bartleby faces this fate without flinching.
He acquiesces not only because he knows his end is inevitable, but
because it is the ineluctable fulfillment of the social law, of
social life. (To say that the social does not exist in "Bartleby"
would be to simplify and to miss a finer irony. The social exists--but
it exists in its purest form only negatively, punitively; it exists
as a coercive power applied to those who violate the law of unfettered
individualism or the law that sanctifies existence as a process
of accumulation.)
§ Bartleby is imprisoned with other social discontents as
a way punishing him for resisting the dictates of individualism.
The strongest social taboo in Melville's America is a taboo
against thinking beyond the narrow confines of individualism. If
you cannot live as an individual conforming to a liberal worldview,
then you will die as something unrecognized: a true individual.
Whether or not you want to conform then becomes a superannuated
consideration.
§ In refusing to become an object of his employer's
gaze, Bartleby becomes an object of the gaze of murderers and thieves.
His dissident behavior is lower than that of the lowest of criminals.
How ironic that this most private of individuals should suffer the
indignity of having his privacy stripped away, made an object of
curiosity, a spectacle for the amusement of society's outcasts (who
only violated the letter, not the spirit of the law). Glassed in,
he lives under the gaze of society's condemned; his unrecorded
sentence is to suffer the loss of privacy endlessly. Having defied
the imperatives of materialistic individualism, he is made to endure
a degraded and grotesque sociality. This is his "freedom."
And in giving him the run of the prison, society can be persuaded
of its own generosity. "Being under no disgraceful charge,
and quite serene and harmless in all his ways, they had permitted
him freely to wander about the prison, and especially, in the inclosed
grass-platted yards thereof. And so I found him there, standing
all alone in the quietest of the yards, his face towards a high
wall, while all around, from the narrow slits of the jail windows,
I thought I saw peering out upon him the eyes of murderers and thieves."
§ Bartleby is never charged with any crime; to charge him
with one would be to face the unacknowledgeable, the brutality of
the unwritten law of individualism. He is, indeed, "under
no disgraceful charge."
§ Bartleby's face is "toward a high wall,"
the wall of Necessity, the wall of repression, the wall of the law
that condemns Bartleby. Bartleby can see it; he knows what it is.
Likewise when saluted by his former employer who visits him in the
Tombs, Bartleby replies "'I know you,' he said,
without looking around--'and I want nothing to say to you.'"
§ And the meretriciousness of his former employer's
response! "'It was not I that brought you here, Bartleby,'
said I, keenly pained at his implied suspicion. 'And to you,
this should not be so vile a place. Nothing reproachful attaches
to you by being here. And see, it is not so sad a place as one might
think. Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass.'"
The narrative voice smoothly defines reality. There is no presumption
in this--for he belongs to that class that has defined
reality. For those who do not have to live with the falseness of
representation, hell can be a form of heaven.
§ But there is meretriciousness here, meretriciousness based
on an invincible form of self-deceit. While the narrator did not
technically remove Bartleby from his premises, his own behavior
made that all but inevitable. The narrator will not face his complicity
in bringing Bartleby to this end. He will not accept responsibility
for it, or for his own actions; his is the voice of individualism:
not thou but I! His rhetoric transforms himself into a martyr to
Bartleby's unwarranted and unjust suspicion; likewise, it
makes a heaven of hell.
§ In the narrator's last attempt to convert Bartleby
to accept the world as it is, he encourages Bartleby to accept the
"grub-man" in the Tombs as his servant. Bartleby rejects
the role of master just as he rejected the role of servant.
§ His emaciated, wraith-like body symbolizes his lack of visibility,
his social invisibility. Bartleby is out of bounds, beyond the narrator's
ability to recognize him. Why then eat? What is there to eat? Eating
is a form of hopefulness. It expresses a hope about the future,
or at least the belief that the future will be responsive to individual
human desire. What is there to sustain Bartleby? His frail body
records the cost of defying the social law, which enshrines mastery
and slavery as society's modus vivendi. He becomes--another--invisible
man.
§ "'Deranged? Deranged is it? Well, now, upon
my word, I thought that friend of yourn was a gentleman forger;
they are always pale and genteel-like, them forgers. I can't
help pity 'em--can't help it, sir.'" This,
the grub man to the narrator, about Bartleby at the story's
end. Forgers pass off fake documents as manufactured ones, as "authentic"
originals. Forgers thus exist as the doppelganger to scriveners.
Scriveners produce copies, but copies recognized as copies.
Their copies do not destabilize this economy of authenticity; indeed
they affirm it. Bartleby's refusal to work is also a refusal
to work as a scrivener, as a worker who supports this economy of
authenticity. Has not the law forged itself? Has it not declared
itself authentic--indeed the source of authentic behavior for the
body politic? Doesn't the law's excessively punitive
stance toward forgery betray its own anxiety about its own "authenticity,"
its own insecurity about its status as the embodiment of transcendent
truths about justice? Doesn't Bartleby's wasted body
declare the inauthenticity of the law, and the inauthenticity of
the lawyer-narrator who presumes to narrate Bartleby's life?
§ "Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive
a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can
any business seem more fitted to heighten it than by continually
handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames.
For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out
the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring--the finger it was
meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank note sent in swiftest
charity--he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more;
pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping;
good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities.
On errands of life, these letters speed to death. Ah, Bartleby!
Ah, humanity!"
§ The fact that the narrator--the agent of Bartleby's destruction--is
also his elegist is a sign of the text's veiled outlook: he signifies
either the first shoots of change, or the final cruelty of the dream
of a New Jerusalem in the New World.
§ "Bartleby the Scrivener" is composed of dead letters:
the dead letter of the law; the dead letters of a constitutional
democracy; the death of individualism; the death of narrative's
power to transform social failure; the death of authenticity and
benevolence; the death of humanity. Just as dead letters are letters
sent too late to those who were despairing, and now are dead, so
too "Bartleby" is a dead letter sent to a reading public,
which by accepting, indeed internalizing, compromised versions of
freedom and community, is also dead.
§ But the letter itself, like the letters Bartleby consigned
to the flames, is also charged with redemptive energy, with the
desire to redeem loss and failure. The irony is ineluctable: redemption
for those who are beyond it. The imperative is to look at the death-face
of the American body politic face on, to see it in all of its ghastly
pallor. Seeing--recognition--is the necessary prerequisite for social
transformation. Melville's text is haunted by loss, by almost-extinguished
hopes. Hauntings terrorize, but they may also be quests for redemption.
Just as it awaits a general resurrection of all dead letters, Melville's
text awaits, still, its audience.
All references to "Bartleby the Scrivener"
are from Herman Melville's Billy Budd and Other Stories,
edited and introduced by Frederick Busch (New York: Penguin Classics,
1986).
___
Jon Thompson
teaches at North Carolina State University where he edits the online
journal Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
and the new poetry series, Free Verse Editions. His first collection,
The Book of the Floating World, has just been reissued
in an expanded edition. Thompson's essay on "Bartleby"
is part of a book-length manuscript entitled After Paradise:
Essays on the Fate of American Writing.
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