It's hard to get to your point because as a Melville scholar, I promise you no Melville scholars read Zizek and that's not where a more sympathetic reading of Bartleby originated.
I think the question of the text is not what we think of Bartleby, but what we think of the narrator.
Melville was not an abolitionist and distrusted the discourse of liberal sympathy in white abolitionism greatly.
He was interested in labor and places of work. And refusal to work is a local tactic of labor and class struggle. (Slaves, for one practiced it, and Melville saw it in action on whale ships and the merchant marine as a local strategy of workers to carve out spaces of independence from domination by command).
The problem becomes Bartleby's employment of a labor tactic in a situation of complete alienation where there is no collective, Melville's shocking recognition that the growing world of information work to manage global capitalism was a much more dominated and alienated workplace and that workers had no real options--so total that the bosses domination could be coded as sympathy (and something he was struggling with as a failed writer who had been told by the presses that he had gone insane).
This is great, useful context, and a nice reminder that I'm clearly less of a clear writer than I think I might be (and definitely not a Melville scholar!). To clarify--not suggesting that Melville was an abolitionist, just using the argument about systemic vs. pragmatic change to illustrate the stakes of what I think is a badly mistaken argument by Zizek. (I have my own view on the white liberal sympathy debate, but that's probably a discussion for another forum.)
Hope you don't mind if I pin this comment.
One reason why I did not initially think of Bartleby as a striker, beyond the lack of a collective, is that he has no demands that I can discern. Maybe that's because everything we get is through the perspective of the boss.
Where I do get confused with what I understand your reading to be is how the narrator's self-perceived acts of sympathy are akin to a form of domination. The episode where he buys Bartleby food in prison, for example, doesn't appear to me to be obviously an act of domination--nor does his attempt to know Bartleby's history. Any thoughts on this? Clearly, I've got some more reading to do.
I think by the end he's struggling with confusion that the sympathy didn't work to help Bartleby, but I do think there's domination in being the one to claim his story as your own (in a non-moral sense). But at work, I think it's more clear the ways the boss confusion about workers action and motivation is about making them legible to boss logics (you've traded your labor for a wage, surely you accepted that contract!) and missing the tactics of resistance. Bartleby is inscrutable, but the narrator is very invested in reading him, in making him legible. Why? (Also seen convincing queer readings of that investment)
I think maybe a problem with Zizek's take is his immediate jump from resistance to revolution. Tactical moves by workers at work are very often not revolutionary, and not even fully political. But they are still the class struggle playing out.
To come out of scholar mode, and think of Melville as a worker recognizing workers, and what other workers in the wider internet recognize is sometimes you don't have union demands (or a right to form a union and make demands) you have little tactically refusals to carve out a space for your personhood. I prefer not to isn't a politics, but its all you have sometimes at work.
The boss insisting on understanding Bartleby I think is recognizable as domination because I've been a minimum-wage worker. I don't want the boss to know me or know why I act, I want to carve out a space even at work where I'm not seen, just to be a person with my own thoughts or movement (i.e. THE BATHROOM or the CIGARETTE BREAK), the narrator won't give Bartleby any space, keeps pushing him into a corner by demanding to know why, and the guy has nowhere to go, just shutting down into alienation.
And I'm sorry for any "humph well scholars say" in my original response, which was fueled more by my strong disaffiliation with Zizek (even as a Marxist type) than any sense anyone should bow to the scholarship just cause
Humphing is more than welcome! Maybe I wrote a real turkey with this post--happens to the best of us--in which case humphing is justified. I certainly understand the impulse to distance oneself from Zizek--and although that's not what I intended, I can see that I implied a continuity between "English profs" and the Zizek stance.
(I guess my primary objection to Z's "Bartleby politics" is that it prizes a "revolution" that seems to be primarily about convoluted abstractions above the needs of real, suffering people, who I think often deserve more primary consideration. I guess I can't help seeing piecemeal amelioration of suffering as politically beneficial.)
One difference between us that's interesting to me here is that I do want to be known by my bosses! I've worked my share of minimum-wage jobs, too, and in most of them, I've had cordial relations with supervisors, managers, business owners. In fact, if I worked in a place where my boss showed no interest in getting to know me at all, I'd probably try to work somewhere else, if I had the option. So maybe one reason that the story struck both of us so differently is that I'm spending a lot of the story thinking, "I wish more of my bosses wanted to get to know me, cared about where I live, whether I can access wholesome food, etc.--this narrator is more generous and interested than any boss I've had!" I would think of that sociality as basically beneficial, even if it's between a boss and worker. Whereas you're reading it, thinking, "Jeez, this narrator's pushy, invasive, keeps cornering Bartleby, won't let him alone, and he probably only wants this information so that he can manipulate Bartleby into doing his will and making him money." Quite outside of the realm of literary interpretation, I can't help but wonder if we would read the same interpersonal workplace interaction with similar levels of difference.
Possibly! I can see this. I mean I've also worked jobs where I've responded like you mention, and other jobs where I just want to do my thing be left alone and leave. It's all depended on how alienated I felt from the work itself.
You have a very cool mind, there, dear. I’ve often thought of Bartleby as an exploration of such dynamics, but without a clear result to his musings, no?
Oh absolutely. If I don’t miss the mark, I believe this essay isn’t so much about the story as the current co-option of it. Have you stacked anything about this story, or do you have such in print? Oh, how I wish I had time to read, well, everything!
I don't see much in the story to elicit our sympathy with that... seems like a big leap from that to literally dying from inertia because, what, being a clerk is **as bad as being on a ship**.....ok then! The end is a clear statement of Bartleby's nihilism. Also, he doesn't really strike, he sits there eating biscuits or whatever. Melville could just have written a strike story if he wanted to.
I don't think "as bad as a ship" is remotely the bar for the labor environment of the clerkship being bad. It's disfiguring of the bodies and personalities of the other members of the office, and I think Melville is fascinated throughout his work in how labor changes people in ways liberal discourses are blind to. He wrote "Paradise of Bachelors, Tartarus of Maids" about the same time. But the differences between his ships and this office is that the ships have (often very queer) collectivities that create fleeting spaces and embraces (of hands and bodies) away from the gaze of the captains (intolerably to some of those captains/authorities). The office (which is HARD work, endless copying in low light that makes workers' hands cramp and them lose eyesight), has none of that. Power, work, bodies, knowledge--these are Melville's core themes across his work, and its no different here.
You can call Bartleby's response nihilistic, maybe it is, it's a product of alienation, and a refusal to let his boss know him, and the boss cannot accept that, although his authority over his workers is functionally and ideologically different than the ship. Melville abandoned the whaling ships he was on and found a space to live away from work for a time in the South Seas. Bartleby would starve. I don't think he has to be a hero of resistance to capitalism to sympathize with his refusals. It's a temptation at every shitty job. Unless you see yourself as a boss...
There are some communal aspects: the clerks give each other nicknames, the narrator is hardly immune to the fellow-feeling of the old employee who blots his paper. Bartleby arrives "incurably forlorn". Although the narrator acknowledges that the work can be dull (Byron wouldn't do it, lol), it's hardly a persistent theme of the story.The narrator is bad at firing people because he is nice. He can't bear to do what he obviously ought to and let Bartleby go! Bartleby's resistance *significantly* pre-dates the boss taking an interest in him. The office is a home for people who wouldn't get employed on such easy terms elsewhere. Whereas Bartleby never goes anywhere, but not because he is prevented. He is a blank. He is the lonely one, not the rest of them. He arrives like that, makes his sad home there, refuses to participate with them in the communal task of checking work but does continue the solitary work. For goodness sake, the boss does Bartleby's work for him! It's not alienation caused by the office.
and again, a strike story is a very different story than one about worker behavior in a specific new type of workplace. Tactics are still legible as class struggle. He did write a strike story of sorts, Benito Cereno, around the same time. Which also centers on the misperceptions of command and authority of what workers are doing and why....
Just read it! Important words, the narrator MAKES Bartleby into a metaphor, it’s like he pins him like a butterfly into his collection, an interesting bit for his memoirs. I like your use of the piece to celebrate life, positive action. It may not have been Melville’s intent, but each generation I believe has the right, the task, the responsibility to not just appreciate literature but to breathe new life into to nourish ourselves.
I think it was Melville's intent or that the story did in fact come out that way, I'm not as big a believer in the constant re-interpretation idea as many others.
The thing I’ve always loved about Bartleby is how OPEN it is as a text. You can decide to read him in some radically different ways and find really good textual support for all of them. I generally agree with your perspective here (and also have no time at all for Zizek) but I also think there’s a good argument for seeing Bartleby in many other ways (maybe not ‘heroic’ but potentially as an appropriate or necessary response to the impossible burden of universal love). Anyway, enjoyed reading this and have subscribed!
Wonderful! I too have noticed the co-option on the tag line, and your attribution seems correct. Melville, I believe, was much more talking through his time’s lamentable mental healthcare. There were places to house and “treat” people exhibiting outright “mania,” and of course alcoholism, but there was so little understanding of depression, anxiety, and such. Could Bartleby have been on the autism spectrum, perhaps? Regardless of what the diagnosis may be, the fact was that a person in need of any sort of healthcare who was without friends or family, simple, well, died. Can we create some sort of metaphor out of this? Should we? If we do, I don’t see it as much of a revolutionary battle cry. Oh, and what a hoot to see someone who has read poor misguided Child! She reminds me of Charles Brocken Brown’s Clara Howard, all about moral equations and no idea about the real world.
I lack the authority to diagnose anyone, let alone fictional characters of whom I have been given an intentionally partial picture--but the story certainly makes me wonder what might be done for a Bartleby. Should he be force-fed? That seems... not great. What would "care" mean for someone who won't, or can't, communicate their needs? In a weird way, I'm almost reminded of "The Metamorphosis," in that both feature a character who is sort of ejected from the possibility of sympathy, and both feature horrifying/tragic consequences that are at once disturbing and upsetting and are the result of essentially normal people responding to an extraordinary situation in an imperfect way.
Ejected from the possibility of sympathy, very well put. I’ve seen educators put these two stories together in syllabus, there’s real potential for discussion and reflection there. Or perhaps I’ve had way too much caffeine today.
I love the story and have read it many times. Never thought of Bartleby as a hero. It seems Melville is drawn to and repelled by the inscrutable in Bartleby, as he is with the white whale. Haven’t read any criticism on this — maybe this observation is a commonplace.
It's hard to get to your point because as a Melville scholar, I promise you no Melville scholars read Zizek and that's not where a more sympathetic reading of Bartleby originated.
I think the question of the text is not what we think of Bartleby, but what we think of the narrator.
A few closer historical points.
Melville was not an abolitionist and distrusted the discourse of liberal sympathy in white abolitionism greatly.
He was interested in labor and places of work. And refusal to work is a local tactic of labor and class struggle. (Slaves, for one practiced it, and Melville saw it in action on whale ships and the merchant marine as a local strategy of workers to carve out spaces of independence from domination by command).
The problem becomes Bartleby's employment of a labor tactic in a situation of complete alienation where there is no collective, Melville's shocking recognition that the growing world of information work to manage global capitalism was a much more dominated and alienated workplace and that workers had no real options--so total that the bosses domination could be coded as sympathy (and something he was struggling with as a failed writer who had been told by the presses that he had gone insane).
This is great, useful context, and a nice reminder that I'm clearly less of a clear writer than I think I might be (and definitely not a Melville scholar!). To clarify--not suggesting that Melville was an abolitionist, just using the argument about systemic vs. pragmatic change to illustrate the stakes of what I think is a badly mistaken argument by Zizek. (I have my own view on the white liberal sympathy debate, but that's probably a discussion for another forum.)
Hope you don't mind if I pin this comment.
One reason why I did not initially think of Bartleby as a striker, beyond the lack of a collective, is that he has no demands that I can discern. Maybe that's because everything we get is through the perspective of the boss.
Where I do get confused with what I understand your reading to be is how the narrator's self-perceived acts of sympathy are akin to a form of domination. The episode where he buys Bartleby food in prison, for example, doesn't appear to me to be obviously an act of domination--nor does his attempt to know Bartleby's history. Any thoughts on this? Clearly, I've got some more reading to do.
I think by the end he's struggling with confusion that the sympathy didn't work to help Bartleby, but I do think there's domination in being the one to claim his story as your own (in a non-moral sense). But at work, I think it's more clear the ways the boss confusion about workers action and motivation is about making them legible to boss logics (you've traded your labor for a wage, surely you accepted that contract!) and missing the tactics of resistance. Bartleby is inscrutable, but the narrator is very invested in reading him, in making him legible. Why? (Also seen convincing queer readings of that investment)
I think maybe a problem with Zizek's take is his immediate jump from resistance to revolution. Tactical moves by workers at work are very often not revolutionary, and not even fully political. But they are still the class struggle playing out.
To come out of scholar mode, and think of Melville as a worker recognizing workers, and what other workers in the wider internet recognize is sometimes you don't have union demands (or a right to form a union and make demands) you have little tactically refusals to carve out a space for your personhood. I prefer not to isn't a politics, but its all you have sometimes at work.
The boss insisting on understanding Bartleby I think is recognizable as domination because I've been a minimum-wage worker. I don't want the boss to know me or know why I act, I want to carve out a space even at work where I'm not seen, just to be a person with my own thoughts or movement (i.e. THE BATHROOM or the CIGARETTE BREAK), the narrator won't give Bartleby any space, keeps pushing him into a corner by demanding to know why, and the guy has nowhere to go, just shutting down into alienation.
And I'm sorry for any "humph well scholars say" in my original response, which was fueled more by my strong disaffiliation with Zizek (even as a Marxist type) than any sense anyone should bow to the scholarship just cause
Humphing is more than welcome! Maybe I wrote a real turkey with this post--happens to the best of us--in which case humphing is justified. I certainly understand the impulse to distance oneself from Zizek--and although that's not what I intended, I can see that I implied a continuity between "English profs" and the Zizek stance.
(I guess my primary objection to Z's "Bartleby politics" is that it prizes a "revolution" that seems to be primarily about convoluted abstractions above the needs of real, suffering people, who I think often deserve more primary consideration. I guess I can't help seeing piecemeal amelioration of suffering as politically beneficial.)
One difference between us that's interesting to me here is that I do want to be known by my bosses! I've worked my share of minimum-wage jobs, too, and in most of them, I've had cordial relations with supervisors, managers, business owners. In fact, if I worked in a place where my boss showed no interest in getting to know me at all, I'd probably try to work somewhere else, if I had the option. So maybe one reason that the story struck both of us so differently is that I'm spending a lot of the story thinking, "I wish more of my bosses wanted to get to know me, cared about where I live, whether I can access wholesome food, etc.--this narrator is more generous and interested than any boss I've had!" I would think of that sociality as basically beneficial, even if it's between a boss and worker. Whereas you're reading it, thinking, "Jeez, this narrator's pushy, invasive, keeps cornering Bartleby, won't let him alone, and he probably only wants this information so that he can manipulate Bartleby into doing his will and making him money." Quite outside of the realm of literary interpretation, I can't help but wonder if we would read the same interpersonal workplace interaction with similar levels of difference.
Possibly! I can see this. I mean I've also worked jobs where I've responded like you mention, and other jobs where I just want to do my thing be left alone and leave. It's all depended on how alienated I felt from the work itself.
You have a very cool mind, there, dear. I’ve often thought of Bartleby as an exploration of such dynamics, but without a clear result to his musings, no?
Oh absolutely. If I don’t miss the mark, I believe this essay isn’t so much about the story as the current co-option of it. Have you stacked anything about this story, or do you have such in print? Oh, how I wish I had time to read, well, everything!
I think you’re right, he’s an anti hero https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/bartleby-the-scrivener-herman-melville
Any thoughts on the reading that Bartleby is on strike and therefore a tragic example of what striking looks like without group solidarity?
I don't see much in the story to elicit our sympathy with that... seems like a big leap from that to literally dying from inertia because, what, being a clerk is **as bad as being on a ship**.....ok then! The end is a clear statement of Bartleby's nihilism. Also, he doesn't really strike, he sits there eating biscuits or whatever. Melville could just have written a strike story if he wanted to.
I don't think "as bad as a ship" is remotely the bar for the labor environment of the clerkship being bad. It's disfiguring of the bodies and personalities of the other members of the office, and I think Melville is fascinated throughout his work in how labor changes people in ways liberal discourses are blind to. He wrote "Paradise of Bachelors, Tartarus of Maids" about the same time. But the differences between his ships and this office is that the ships have (often very queer) collectivities that create fleeting spaces and embraces (of hands and bodies) away from the gaze of the captains (intolerably to some of those captains/authorities). The office (which is HARD work, endless copying in low light that makes workers' hands cramp and them lose eyesight), has none of that. Power, work, bodies, knowledge--these are Melville's core themes across his work, and its no different here.
You can call Bartleby's response nihilistic, maybe it is, it's a product of alienation, and a refusal to let his boss know him, and the boss cannot accept that, although his authority over his workers is functionally and ideologically different than the ship. Melville abandoned the whaling ships he was on and found a space to live away from work for a time in the South Seas. Bartleby would starve. I don't think he has to be a hero of resistance to capitalism to sympathize with his refusals. It's a temptation at every shitty job. Unless you see yourself as a boss...
There are some communal aspects: the clerks give each other nicknames, the narrator is hardly immune to the fellow-feeling of the old employee who blots his paper. Bartleby arrives "incurably forlorn". Although the narrator acknowledges that the work can be dull (Byron wouldn't do it, lol), it's hardly a persistent theme of the story.The narrator is bad at firing people because he is nice. He can't bear to do what he obviously ought to and let Bartleby go! Bartleby's resistance *significantly* pre-dates the boss taking an interest in him. The office is a home for people who wouldn't get employed on such easy terms elsewhere. Whereas Bartleby never goes anywhere, but not because he is prevented. He is a blank. He is the lonely one, not the rest of them. He arrives like that, makes his sad home there, refuses to participate with them in the communal task of checking work but does continue the solitary work. For goodness sake, the boss does Bartleby's work for him! It's not alienation caused by the office.
and again, a strike story is a very different story than one about worker behavior in a specific new type of workplace. Tactics are still legible as class struggle. He did write a strike story of sorts, Benito Cereno, around the same time. Which also centers on the misperceptions of command and authority of what workers are doing and why....
Just read it! Important words, the narrator MAKES Bartleby into a metaphor, it’s like he pins him like a butterfly into his collection, an interesting bit for his memoirs. I like your use of the piece to celebrate life, positive action. It may not have been Melville’s intent, but each generation I believe has the right, the task, the responsibility to not just appreciate literature but to breathe new life into to nourish ourselves.
I think it was Melville's intent or that the story did in fact come out that way, I'm not as big a believer in the constant re-interpretation idea as many others.
The thing I’ve always loved about Bartleby is how OPEN it is as a text. You can decide to read him in some radically different ways and find really good textual support for all of them. I generally agree with your perspective here (and also have no time at all for Zizek) but I also think there’s a good argument for seeing Bartleby in many other ways (maybe not ‘heroic’ but potentially as an appropriate or necessary response to the impossible burden of universal love). Anyway, enjoyed reading this and have subscribed!
Wonderful! I too have noticed the co-option on the tag line, and your attribution seems correct. Melville, I believe, was much more talking through his time’s lamentable mental healthcare. There were places to house and “treat” people exhibiting outright “mania,” and of course alcoholism, but there was so little understanding of depression, anxiety, and such. Could Bartleby have been on the autism spectrum, perhaps? Regardless of what the diagnosis may be, the fact was that a person in need of any sort of healthcare who was without friends or family, simple, well, died. Can we create some sort of metaphor out of this? Should we? If we do, I don’t see it as much of a revolutionary battle cry. Oh, and what a hoot to see someone who has read poor misguided Child! She reminds me of Charles Brocken Brown’s Clara Howard, all about moral equations and no idea about the real world.
I lack the authority to diagnose anyone, let alone fictional characters of whom I have been given an intentionally partial picture--but the story certainly makes me wonder what might be done for a Bartleby. Should he be force-fed? That seems... not great. What would "care" mean for someone who won't, or can't, communicate their needs? In a weird way, I'm almost reminded of "The Metamorphosis," in that both feature a character who is sort of ejected from the possibility of sympathy, and both feature horrifying/tragic consequences that are at once disturbing and upsetting and are the result of essentially normal people responding to an extraordinary situation in an imperfect way.
Ejected from the possibility of sympathy, very well put. I’ve seen educators put these two stories together in syllabus, there’s real potential for discussion and reflection there. Or perhaps I’ve had way too much caffeine today.
I love the story and have read it many times. Never thought of Bartleby as a hero. It seems Melville is drawn to and repelled by the inscrutable in Bartleby, as he is with the white whale. Haven’t read any criticism on this — maybe this observation is a commonplace.