Written by Herman Melville, and published in 1853, this is more a short story than a novella (in my audio-version it took Stefan Rudnicki just 1 hour and 48 minutes to read it).

When I was reading reviews of Convenience Store Person, I came across this comment by Katy Waldman: "Keiko's self-renunciations reveal the book to be a kind of grim post-capitalist reverie: she is an anti-Bartleby, abandoning any shred of identity outside of her work."

"Bartleby?" I wondered. "Who he?" Well, it turns out he's quite the enigma...


Surabaya, Indonesia, 2017

The story itself is simple enough. Our narrator is a lawyer; he's unambitious, and convinced "that the easiest way of life is the best". Bartleby joins him in his legal chambers on Wall Street in the role of scrivener (someone whose job it is to make copies of documents). Working there already are two other scriveners (rejoicing in the nicknames of Turkey and Nippers) and an office boy (Ginger Nut). Things go well for a while, but then Bartleby is asked to join in the tedious but necessary task of proof-reading. And he lets fall the first of many, many polite refusals: "I would prefer not to..."

Bartleby continues to prefer not to: not to proof-read, not to run errands, and eventually not even to copy; not to leave his screened-off corner of the office (which he has now made into his home), even though he has in effect been fired and evicted; not to leave the building (when the narrator, in desperation, moves his offices somewhere else, and the new tenant throws Bartleby out of his "hermitage"); not to accept money, or help in finding a new post; and not to fall in with the narrator's kind suggestion that he go to live with him for a while.

Eventually, the new tenants have him removed by the police, and taken to a prison for the penniless. The narrator again tries to help him. But now Bartleby prefers not to eat as well.

And so he dies. The narrator finds him "strangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, and lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones".



It's a really curious story. As it unfolded, I couldn't help but feel impatient with the "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn" Bartleby. If you're being paid, you have to do your job, right? And that means all aspects of your job. Preferring not to is just not fair on your colleagues, and certainly not fair on your employer (who -- to my mind -- really has gone the extra mile here).

But Bartleby's career and fate are chilling.

We find out at the end of the story that he previously worked at the Dead Letter Office at Washington. Does this, wonders the narrator, constitute some kind of explanation? "Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned... On errands of life, these letters speed to death. Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"

But this is the only speculative clue we have as to Bartleby's state of mind, and it doesn't seem quite enough to explain his curious life-course.

Why, then, did he behave as he did?



Well, critics disagree as to the meaning of the story, and there is -- surprise, surprise -- a "raft of interpretations".

Some relate the story to Melville's career: "Because a scrivener is a kind of writer, numerous critics have viewed Bartleby as an autobiographical portrait. 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). 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."

This view already touches on the political interpretation, which sees America's capitalist expansion as the crucial backdrop to Bartleby's passive resistance. Desmarais enlarges on this view: "Bartleby refuses to accept the structures imposed on him by a modernising world interested more in collective strategies and 'Yes' men than the individual seeking to live outside mainstream ideals... Thus Bartleby is an allegory of modern America and the failure of democracy to preserve the individual’s right and freedom to choose. It is a story about the failure of modern social life."

Then there is the psychological viewpoint: "Bartleby’s lifelessness is both the product and outcome of a sterile bureaucracy which as an external reality has little to do with the natural impulses and desires of the individual... Such is the incurable isolation of individuals whose personal histories are lost in and to the System... His elegant and economical 'I would prefer not to' becomes the mantra of the dispossessed and unlocated. It becomes another wall between him and external reality."

The political and psychological facets, combined with the story's undoubted surreal, absurdist qualities, foreshadow, says Urie, the modernist, existential, and postmodern literature to come.



Which brings us to what I consider the most convincing interpretation of the story -- the one, in my view, that does most justice to Bartleby, to the narrator, and to Melville. Unfortunately, it is also the most depressing interpretation...

I'll be quoting here from an article by Daniel Stempel and Bruce M. Stillians, whose subtitle -- A Parable of Pessimism -- already explains the direction we're going in.

The authors start by highlighting a series of events clustering around the year 1853:

1. In April of that year, the first summary in English of the work of pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was published, in the shape of an article by John Oxenford. Melville would have had access to the article, and had already demonstrated an interest in German philosophy.

2. Over the course of that spring and summer, Melville was also in a state of mind that was receptive to pessimism: "He was seeking desperately for an escape from the pressures of a career as a professional writer and finding it almost impossible to continue because of failing sight and mental strain." Schopenhauer's "Will" -- the mindless, aimless, non-rational impetus that drives the world and us in it, and ensures that our daily life will be one of suffering -- is certainly uncheering. However, there is one way out of the system Schopenhauer envisages -- "an ethic of total disengagement from life and its obligations". This certainly throws light on the story. Asceticism as the answer... The gradual reduction of the normal radius of activity, the gradual cutting of all ties with the surrounding world, in order to assert the only freedom possible...

3. In October, Matthew Arnold dropped one of the poems from his new collection, on the grounds that it was too relentlessly gloomy; his explanation for this decision constitutes a condemnation of "the literature of futility". In November and December, the two installments of Bartleby the Scrivener appear: "Through one of the ironic coincidences of literary history, Melville's story exemplifies every one of the gloomy traits which Arnold had listed."



The idea of Bartleby as Schopenhauerian ascetic is very convincing: "The passing of Bartleby is played out against a background of comic Dickensian clerks, pompous lawyers, and all the money changers of Wall Street. His passing affects no one except himself and the narrator. The world goes on, pursuing its illusions, but Bartleby is no longer part of it, and his employer, shaken by his brief glimpse of the real nature of things, is left a much sadder and somewhat wiser man. Thus, the structure of the tale is developed from the interaction of the narrator, the smug and comfortable attorney, and the 'forlorn' Bartleby."

I read the narrator as easy-going, tolerant, generous, and reasonably kind. It's not only Bartleby that he puts up with, after all: Turkey, always drunk after lunch, spends the afternoons making a mess; Nippers, ambitious and restless, spends the mornings discharging uncomfortable amounts of nervous energy... But it's true that our narrator is a bit complacent, not at all the sort of person to make too many enquiries into things if they're going well for him... (Urie, for example, is quite hard on him.)

But Bartleby disarms and enlightens him. When he realizes the young man has taken to living in the office -- in an area that at night is the reverse of convivial, "an emptiness" -- he begins to be conscious of the real existence of suffering: "For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me... What I saw that morning convinced me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach."

This "disorder" -- this denial of the will to live -- represents Bartleby's decision to choose the only freedom within his grasp: "It opposes and negates every value which the Master in Chancery, that cheerful lover of life, cherishes. Thus, even the mere contemplation of Bartleby's passive but unfaltering withdrawal from the world stuns and repels him... [Nevertheless] Bartleby's 'holiness' has touched him deeply."

By this account, the Dead Letter Office "explanation" must seem unlikely even to the narrator: "That deep intuitive compassion which Bartleby has stirred in him [expressed by that last line: 'Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!'] testifies against all reason that Bartleby's fate is man's fate."



In 1856, Melville visited friend and author Nathaniel Hawthorne in England: "He seemed to Hawthorne 'a little paler and a little sadder'. Perhaps Bartleby the Scrivener was the journal of a descent into that valley of the shadow which Schopenhauer had charted for the nineteenth century, a metaphysical desert in which so many perished."

I guess one of the reasons I found this interpretation compelling was that it reminded me very strongly of a chapter called The Nun's Tale in William Dalrymple's Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. Here, Mataji, a Jain nun, explains why she is embarking on "sallekhana", the ritual fast to the death that Jains regard as the culmination of an ascetic life.

The nun didn't see what she was doing as suicide: "Suicide is a great sin, the result of despair. But sallekhana is as a triumph over death, an expression of hope... We believe that death is not the end, and that life and death are complementary. So when you embrace sallekhana you are embracing a whole new life -- it's no more than going through from one room to another... Sallekhana... is the last renouncement. First you give up your home, then your possessions. Finally you give up your body."

I remember being terribly struck by this (true) story. My reaction was a combination of fascination, admiration, and horror.

Melville may well have been influenced by Indian thought, and Schopenhauer definitely was. (And Schopenhauer, like Mataji, distinguishes between suicide and death by voluntary starvation.)

All in all, Bartleby offers a very memorable little tale. And, unexpectedly, it contributed to fulfilling one of my New Year's resolutions ("read more philosophy"). Whether I'm brave enough to go deeper into the strange world of Herman Melville, I'm not sure...