Bartleby, the Scrivener

Bartleby, the Scrivener Review

Herman Melville published “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1853, two years after Moby-Dick had failed commercially and his reputation was beginning its long decline. The contrast between the two works is absolute: where the whale novel is vast, encyclopaedic, philosophically oceanic, “Bartleby” is compressed, precise, and domestic — the scale of Wall Street against the scale of the Pacific, a copyist against a captain of the Pequod. The compression is not a retreat but an intensification. In thirty pages, Melville anticipates Kafka, Beckett, and the literature of passive resistance, and produces what may be the most analysed story in American literature.

The narrator is a lawyer on Wall Street, comfortable, practical, and genuinely well-intentioned in the limited way of comfortable, practical, well-intentioned men. He employs scriveners — copyists — and hires a new one named Bartleby, who at first works with quiet, industrious dedication. Then, one day, when asked to help examine a copied document, Bartleby replies: “I would prefer not to.” Not “I won’t.” Not “I refuse.” “I would prefer not to.” The lawyer, temporarily nonplussed, lets it pass. Bartleby continues to prefer not: to examine copies, to run errands, eventually to copy at all, eventually to leave the office when the lawyer vacates the premises, eventually to eat. The preference extends across every domain of life until it includes life itself.

The lawyer’s response is the story’s real subject. He is neither a villain nor a hero. He feels genuine distress at Bartleby’s condition. He tries to help, within limits. He offers money, alternative employment, lodging in his own home. All the while, his primary concern is his professional reputation — the eccentric scrivener in the corner is an embarrassment, a professional liability, something that must be managed. He eventually moves offices to escape Bartleby, which does not work. The building’s new tenants have Bartleby removed to the Tombs prison, where he dies, having preferred not to eat. The lawyer learns afterward that Bartleby had previously worked in the Dead Letters office, sorting undeliverable mail — letters written to the living, never to arrive, bearing errands of life dispatched to death. The lawyer treats this as explanation. The story suggests it is not.

What “Bartleby” inaugurates is the literature of bureaucratic absurdity and passive resistance: the system is exposed not by confronting it but by refusing it, politely, indefinitely. Bartleby is not angry. He does not argue. He simply prefers not to participate in the smooth operation of the world that employs him, and this preference, extended without explanation or rage, is more subversive than any protest. The story was published the same year as Bleak House, Dickens’s great novel of legal obstruction, and it belongs to the same tradition — the critique of systems through the figure of the individual caught within them — but concentrates everything Dickens needed a thousand pages to say into thirty.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — The most economical philosophical story in American literature, and the one that has proved most durable: Bartleby’s preference is still being enacted, in every office and institution, every day.