Bartleby, the Hero?

I think I would prefer to, actually

I was reading an essay written by an English professor the other day—which has already been returned to the library, or I would cite it—which seemed to take for granted that Bartleby the Scrivener, from Melville’s famed short story of the same name, was a kind of hero, a figure who obviously (to this writer) invited sympathy and a sense of kindred feeling, with whom the average reader might identify. Which seems mind-boggling to me. Melville's passive-resistant scribe is many things, among them inscrutable, mysterious, and irritating. But is he the hero of the story?

Melville’s story centers on a New York City lawyer, somewhere in his late 50s or early 60s, who describes himself as “an eminently safe man,” one who believes that “the easiest way of life is the best.” He is a conformist and is perhaps a little priggish, but he also seems to earnestly try to do the right thing. He hires the pale, thin Bartleby as a scribe, or essentially a human copy-machine. At first, Bartleby does good work, dutifully copying out tedious legal documents, but he declines to double-check any of his work: an annoyance for the narrator, but not a huge deal. Eventually, though, Bartleby starts declining to do any work at all, then declining to move; it becomes clear that he is sleeping in the shared office space. The narrator, full of an admixture of pity and resentment, asks, bribes, and attempts to reason with Bartleby, but when asked to do anything, all Bartleby will say is “I prefer not to.” He spends most of his time staring unnervingly at a brick wall just outside an office window.

The narrator, who doesn’t want to call the cops on Bartleby, decides to just move his office across town. Bartleby stays there, haunting the stairwell. The new tenants call the narrator to get him to get rid of Bartleby. The narrator tries everything, even offering Bartleby a place in his home. Bartleby refuses, and the new tenants call the cops, who take Bartleby to prison. The narrator visits him there; he tries to buy Bartleby some decent food, but Bartleby won’t even eat. When the narrator checks in on him next, he has died outside, staring at a wall, with his eyes open, emaciated.

Is it completely callous of me to see nothing heroic in Bartleby at all? As annoying as the narrator can be, he sympathizes with Bartleby and tries to help him. He tries to learn more about Bartleby, driven possibly by prurient curiosity but also, it seems, by a real desire to understand him. Bartleby refuses all advances or attempts to help. He’s antisocial and silent, an object of pity and sympathy who refuses both.

Some have found in Bartleby a kind of political inspiration. The chief engine of this Bartleby-love, in the past decades at least,¹ seems to be the impish Lacanian political theorist Slavoj Zizek, whose appropriation of Bartleby’s catchphrase, “I would prefer not to,” has become a sort of meme. An anonymous drop-shipping company offers t-shirts, hoodies, tote bags, and mugs with the phrase emblazoned on it. (The website where you can do this helpfully informs you that the phrase is “the ultimate rejection of ideology in its purest form.”)

The meme seems to originate, more or less, in Zizek’s 2006 book The Parallax View. To resist cruelty and evil, Zizek suggests, is to help prop up the system, for “resistance” “parasitizes upon what it negates.” Small acts of charity or activism (much like the small acts of charity that Melville’s narrator attempts) only really function to make the capitalist system work more smoothly.

Zizek’s reading of “Bartleby”²—if you can call it a reading—concludes the volume. Political action, argues Zizek, tends to involve solving small problems without radically altering the entire political system, and is contrasted unfavorably with “revolutionary violence,” which changes the entire structure of society. By “violence” Zizek doesn’t mean killing, exactly, but a special “violent act of actually changing the basic coordinates of a constellation”—i.e. changing the terms of politics on a fundamental level. This “violent act” is doing nothing, withdrawing, negating, refusing to help people in need, etc. Why is this good? Well, I’m not exactly sure, but it seems that it helps people achieve a kind of revolutionary consciousness, devoid of the assumptions and underlying principles that limit our current thought, which could eventually be used in the construction of some totally new world order. Or, as the philosopher Simon Critchley put it in a critical response to Zizek, “the only thing to do is to do nothing. We should just sit and wait. Don’t act, never commit, and continue to dream of an absolute, cataclysmic revolutionary act of violence.”

We might apply Zizek’s reasoning to a test-case to assess its value. Take the issue of American slavery, since “Bartleby” is set in the 1850s, a decade when abolitionists debated whether they should break the law by sheltering escaped slaves. Some abolitionists broke the law, risking great harm to help escapees. But some, like Lydia Maria Child and Nathaniel P. Rogers, suggested that the Underground Railroad should be shuttered because the rescue of individual slaves distracted from the more important work of universal emancipation. These acts of charity did not dismantle the system of slavery, they argued, and it was the system which was the problem.

One problem with this objection is straightforwardly moral: as Melville’s contemporary Harriet Beecher Stowe might argue, could anyone really turn away a fugitive who stood at your door, beseeching you for help, because to do so would be to muddy your shoes in the abstract assumptions of the dominant Order? Is that really admirable behavior? But another problem is: if you want to dismantle the “system,” what exactly do you mean? Which system? The institution of legalized chattel slavery? Or the larger institution of industrial capitalism, which some slaveholders argued replicated the some of slavery’s crimes? Or the institution of private property, which enabled the coercive sharecropping system that emerged after the Civil War and which, to many, signified an essential continuation of slavery? Or do you go even further, dismantling any system that depends on any form of coercive power at all? To suggest that one not engage in acts of charity or activism, instead simply waiting for “the system” to collapse about one’s ears, is to permanently forestall any kind of action at all, for there is always going to be some larger system that must be dismantled in order to make whatever social change you crave truly revolutionary.

I am not a revolutionary, so perhaps it is the case that Zizek and I are simply talking past each other: after all, Zizek seems to assume that his readers are united in the conviction that a revolution whereby any assumption associated with capitalism is necessary. (I’m not there.) But one need not even disagree with Zizek’s political theory to note that his reading of Melville’s story is not really geared toward the particulars of the story in the first place. All he mentions is the line “I would prefer not to.” After all, Zizek’s interest is not in the story itself, but in the vast and abstract concepts that certain characters can be said to represent. Zizek’s use of Bartleby’s phrase, severed from its original context, has defined, to a not-insignificant degree, the reputation and cultural meaning of Melville’s story today. Bartleby’s phrase has become meme, a kind of cute signifier of a vague political rebelliousness, one which is easily co-opted by the consumeristic tendencies of our culture. The advertising copy for another cheap drop-shipped “I would prefer not to” t-shirt reads: “The design…captures the spirit of resistance and personal choice, making it an ideal choice for individuals who value their independence and are unafraid to assert their boundaries…It is a powerful yet simple way to express one’s preference for autonomy and an unwillingness to conform.” In this implied reading of Melville’s story, Bartleby loses any sense of radical rebelliousness: he is one more American individual engaged in a kind of therapeutic boundary-assertion, which you, too, dear reader, can participate in too, if you’ll only buy the shirt.

If Bartleby’s reputation is now defined by this kind of elaborately justified political inertness, we might begin to correct the record by turning toward the story itself and asking what it does and how it does it.

The story is structured like this: a short introduction, wherein Melville shows his sense of humor and capacity for characterization by giving the reader a pretty good idea of each employee in the narrator’s office. Then, the action of the story begins, inaugurated by Bartleby’s arrival at the office. After Bartleby initially refuses to check his work, Melville uses the time-tested structure of escalation. A pattern emerges: the narrator asks Bartleby to do something even more reasonable, Bartleby refuses, but Melville refuses to let the narrator simply kick Bartleby out (the most realistic outcome of this escalating insubordination) by making him tender-hearted and by showing Bartleby’s poverty. Eventually, the escalation must break out of this pattern; simply turning Bartleby out on the street would be too cruel, so the narrator moves his office away from Bartleby—arguably a morally equivalent action, but one which doesn’t bother his sensibilities as much. But this is no escape at all: Bartleby now refuses to move at all, a further escalation that re-establishes the pattern. Eventually, the structure must change and the story must end, so Bartleby is taken to jail, where he perishes, refusing food in a final escalation. The narrator reveals that he only knows one little bit about Bartleby’s biography: that he worked in the Dead Letter Office, a place where postal officials attempt to decipher illegible addresses written on envelopes and decide what to do with undeliverable letters. And here are the best few sentences in the story, for my money: “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!”

What does the Dead Letter Office have to do with the themes established by the story so far? For one thing, the narrator seems very concerned with the idea that the Dead Letter Office shows the limitations of human charity, communication, love, all of which can be stopped short by circumstance, with no recourse. The narrator tries to connect with and understand Bartleby throughout, and he’s always concerned with how partial his narrative is, by how little the story is able to explain Bartleby. If the story “awaken[s] curiosity as to who Bartleby was, and what manner of life he led prior to the present narrator’s making his acquaintance, I can only reply, that in such curiosity I fully share, but am wholly unable to gratify it.” Right at the beginning, the narrator writes that “no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable.” This problem—that it is impossible to really know Bartleby—seems to bother the narrator more than his mere insubordination.

On the one hand, as the story escalates, Bartleby refuses the narrator’s more and more reasonable requests. On the other hand, those requests get more and more beseeching and reasonable—there’s a parallel escalation. The narrator attempts to befriend Bartleby and fails. Bartleby won’t talk, doesn’t read, just stares out the window. When he asks Bartleby directly where he was born, Bartleby calmly refuses. It seems that Bartleby’s refusal to talk is at least as bothersome as his refusal to work, and his refusal to accept help is at least as infuriating as his refusal to do his job. Indeed, the narrator’s threat to move seems more like a gambit for a response from Bartleby—an attempt to force reciprocal interaction—and is only followed through with when it fails to get a response. What the narrator is mourning in his conclusion (“Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”) is his inability to know and understand others and, through that knowledge, to help them. What makes this so painful in the case of Bartleby is that there is no clear reason why this mutual understanding and sympathy is resolutely impossible to find. Dead letters are undeliverable for particular reasons: an illegible address, the death of the addressee, and so on. Whatever bars Bartleby from society and sympathy is invisible, inscrutable, yet no less insurmountable.

To be sure, the narrator’s charity seems self-interested: “Here,” he tells himself when preparing to befriend Bartleby, “I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval.” (And who, when acting morally, is not trying to purchase for themselves at least some self-approval, at least on some level?) On top of that, he seems to underpay his employees; his older employee Turkey is so indebted that he can’t afford a decent coat, and when the narrator gives him an old coat, he sees it as a mistake: “It made him insolent. He was a man whom prosperity harmed.” He’s not the best employer in the world, clearly, and perhaps he only wants to “know” others so that he can justify his own superiority to them. But perhaps not. In his narrator, then, Melville gives us a flawed, priggish man who is nonetheless, I daresay, more generous than most people would be in the given circumstances. He offers to shelter Bartleby in his own home, forestalls Bartleby’s firing for far longer than most employers would, makes at least an attempt at some kind of friendship, visits Bartleby in prison, tries to buy him meals. Judged by his actions, I do not think it would be unreasonable to characterize the narrator as an unusually good person. Bartleby refuses all attempts to connect, choosing to die rather than to enter into any sort of relation with any other human being. I do find it unreasonable to suggest that this behavior is worthy of emulation, or even within the bounds of normal sympathy. It is precisely our inability to know Bartleby, and therefore our inability to sympathize with him, that Melville is attempting to draw out of us.

Some readers might regard this judgment as a sort of bootlicking, but I see the narrator as—well, he’s certainly not heroic—but much more sympathetic than Bartleby, right? He is a morally normal narrator, the kind of person who academic readers love to mercilessly critique but who is no less contemptible than they are—and likely far less contemptible in many ways. Like other nineteenth-century humanitarian types, like the temperance people and the labor activists and the suffragettes and the Northern teachers who went South after the Civil War, he is certainly flawed, and it is easy to criticize him from the morally elevated and perhaps smug position of a comfortable reader for his shortcomings, his blindnesses, his careless cruelty; but in his attempt to know, to sympathize, and to help, incomplete and unsuccessful as it may be, there is something valuable.

Note on the ‘stack

I’m going to make a serious effort to post at least once a week from here on out—I am interested to see how and whether I can make this blog grow with sustained effort and a more regular publication schedule rather than posting only when I feel like it. If you’re suffering from email overload, you might want to modify your delivery preferences. And, if you are interested in helping me try to expand my readership, you might want to send your favorite post to a friend.

1. This seems to be sort of accurate in terms of the work’s popular (read Internet) appeal; but, as Kevin Modestino helpfully points out, this isn’t the case with academic Melville critics. In the interest of transparency and learning as I go, I’ve left the original text as it is and inserted footnotes where I need to make corrections. Maybe I’ll add more as I go!

2. I’m not going to pretend to have read all of The Parallax View. Life is too short for that. I did the introduction and Chapter 6, and in the interest of transparency and intellectual honesty I feel that I should reveal this. Zizek is a purveyor of a particular brand of political theory that I don’t enjoy: one that appears to be the product of a mind very different from mine, a mind obsessed with airy abstractions and hairline distinctions but easily able to take for granted that the reader will share with its author an automatic rejection or abiding suspicion of anything labeled using broad and imprecise terms like “power” or “Empire” or “coercion,” all three of which terms appear to have approximately equivalent meanings, if we are to judge their meaning by their apparently interchangeable usage. He uses the theoretical vocabulary of Lacanian psychoanalysis, a brand of thinking that, to my mind, sheds little light and serves primarily to obfuscate and/or bemuse. Couple this with a self-conscious cheekiness and reflexive counter-intuitive sensibility wherein anything commonsensical must be negated and you have a recipe for, in my opinion, tedious reading indeed, although there are undeniably moments of fun and real perspicacity. My failure to take a leading and eminent philosopher very seriously, perhaps, makes me anti-intellectual. Perhaps you, if you find reading entire volumes of Zizek a worthwhile way to spend your time, can let me know what exactly I am missing out on by neglecting him.