SOURCE: "Up Wall Street towards Broadway: The Narrator's Pilgrimage in Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 3, Summer, 1987, pp. 263-70.

"No materials exist," says Bartleby's worldly employer, for "a full and satisfactory biography of this man."

For nothing is ever "ascertainable" about such men, except what our own "astonished eyes" tell us. Perhaps such men hardly "exist" except deep in our mythic imaginations where, as archetypes, they rest, until their presence is urged forth by the call of touching, sympathetic imaginations, Coleridge's, Melville's, Conrad's. Or the writers of Isaiah, or the Gospels.

But the surprising thing is not that we should discover such a mythic presence in this character—after all, we've met Ahab and Billy Budd. The surprising thing is that it should be recognized by an elderly, conservative, "eminently safe" prudent, methodical attorney-at-law, whose vision has been long dimmed by unambition and the dolor of pencils and dust in his walled-in quarters in New York's financial district. Exactly what "materials" are missing? Do not the parts make up the whole? Has not everyone by the mid-nineteenth century caught the spirit of Positivism and Scientism?

Apparently not. And yet critics differ quite widely on this question of whether there is any development, or "growth" in the narrator of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," and if there is, of what kind of change he undergoes. Most critics are willing to grant that he has at least been "vaguely perturbed" or "temporarily shaken" [Maurice Friedman, "Bartleby and the Modern Exile," in Melville Annual 1965, edited by Howard P. Vincent, 1966], but no more, perhaps because, as William Bysshe Stein puts it, he is "incapable of moral regeneration," and therefore unable to exhibit "[any] evidence of contrition" ["Bartleby: The Christian Conscience," in Melville Annual 1965]. In fact, Stein actually finds Melville inviting "an association with Judas" in the figure of the lawyer, suggesting perhaps that the lawyer's "change" was not exactly for the best.

At the other extreme, there are those who see the lawyer as almost beatified through his association with Bartleby. Leo Marx, for example, in his well-known and influential article "Melville's Parable of the Walls"[ Melville Annual 1965,] sees in the lawyer's famous peroration ("Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!") neither rhetoric nor self-pity, but rather a "deeply felt and spontaneous . . . expression of human brotherhood as persistent, as magical as the leaves of grass"; and more recently, Donald H. Craver and Patricia R. Plante have described the pusillanimous attorney as "[rising] to heights of nobility every bit as ethereal as those reached by [Bartleby]" ["Bartleby, or the Ambiguities," in Studies in Short Fiction 20, Spring-Summer, 1983].

Part of the difficulty in understanding the kind of change, if any, the lawyer experiences lies in the fact that, although he is quite frank about his "snug" life before Bartleby arrived, he reveals little about his existence after Bartleby's death: does he return to his new chambers? if so, what is his attitude towards his work, his employees? and if not, what does he do now?

Such speculations are not tantamount to asking what becomes, say, of Coleridge's sadder but wiser wedding guest when he arises the morrow morn: after all, we never hear from him again. Melville's narrator, on the other hand, has presented us with a twenty-thousand word "biography" (confession?) he expects us to read, and that in itself should tell us something about how he has been affected by his relationship with Bartleby.

To some extent, our understanding of Melville's intentions with regard to the lawyer is aided by the recent turn in "Bartleby" criticism which identifies the scrivener as a Christ-figure. For once this connection is made, the role of the timid attorney can be seen as similar to that of the shady night disciple of the Gospel of John: Nicodemus, the wealthy Pharisee who comes to Christ at dusk, and receives the devastating knowledge that he must be "born again." A literalist, he of course misses the metaphor: can one "enter the second time into his mother's womb?" he asks, densely (John 3:4).

Nicodemus leaves, apparently puzzled; and we almost totally lose sight of him, until John 19, where he reappears silently to enact, along with Joseph of Arimathaea, the great redeeming love-labour of the embalming and entombment of the Christ (39-42). Apparently, something had entered the good man's soul, and whatever else John wanted us to see in the myth of Nicodemus, we certainly learn from it the transforming (or biblically, cleansing or healing) power of faith brought by the recognition of God's presence.

Something similar, I think, is Melville's intention with the narrator of "Bartleby," that is, to depict an instance of what Joseph Campbell has identified [in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces] as the hero-archetype who "refuses the call," because he is "walled in by boredom" or (in Freudian terms) "bound in by the walls of childhood" (i. e., unable to shed the "infantile ego"). Such characters are sometimes unable (Minos, Daphne, Lot's wife) to confront the possibility of their salvation, but there are many examples of characters (Brynhild, Sleeping Beauty) whose "obstinate refusal of the call proves to be the occasion of a providential revelation of some unsuspected principle of release"[The Hero with a Thousand Faces. ]

Such is the case with Nicodemus, and such is the case with Bartleby's hesitant biographer who, like his fellow biblical lawyer, is first presented to us as a literalist, bent on drawing a picture of himself as the epitome of cool dispassion and Latinate formality, determined to avoid the trivial or sentimental yet (now, in any case, if not before his experience with Bartleby) sensitive and literate enough, and apparently at great enough leisure, to consider writing biographies of scriveners he's known. In those pre-Bartleby days, he was an homme moyen, a peace-loving, "snug" man who has been deeply shaken by his meeting with this mythical presence for whom no biography can be written—this Cain, this Wandering Jew, this Ancient Mariner, this Christ. His life was gray: like the angel of the church of the Laodiceans in Revelation, he was "neither hot nor cold"; he was a man whom we, like the angel of the Lord, would "spue out of our mouths" (3:16). He has been strictly a man of this world, never thinking beyond the realms of animal, mineral, vegetable, terms reflected by the names of his employees—"Turkey," "Nippers," (which Melville's Webster would have defined as "pliers") and "Ginger Nut" respectively. The four lived perfectly harmoniously in the confines of their office-cum-cell on Wall Street.

Until He appeared, in answer to a Help Wanted advertisement. And while the lawyer, like the biblical Nicodemus, has shown a preference for darkness, Bartleby by contrast is immediately associated with light: upon his "advent," he is framed by the light of the open door; and he is soon placed in a corner of the office where "the light came down from far above . . . as from a very small opening in a dome."

The story of the hermit's "ascendance" from the life of copy-clerk, and the narrator's rather hesitant epiphany, begins tenia die, "on the third day" of his employment. It begins, of course, with one of literature's most famous refusals to comply, a rebellion which cannot, in terms of this type of myth, end, until the attorney has been shown the way to "come to the light," to quote Christ's challenge to Nicodemus (John 3:20).

Melville presents the stages of the lawyer's growth with care, building gradually towards the story's climax, which occurs on that fateful Sunday morning, when the narrator decides to go to church to hear "a celebrated preacher." Halfway there, he is drawn to his chambers, where he finds "the apparition of Bartleby," who refuses the lawyer entrance. Bartleby says he is "deeply engaged."

Bartleby's presence in the office of a Sunday has "a strange effect" on the lawyer. He finally begins to perceive a certain aura of holiness about his erstwhile tenant: could Bartleby be desecrating God's law by copying on a Sunday? No: "there was something about Bartleby that forbade the supposition that he would by any secular occupation violate the proprieties of the day." Bit by bit, the lawyer begins to die, painfully, to the world. For "the first time" in his life, as he admits in this his most passionate confession yet, he finds himself in the grip of an "overpowering stinging melancholy." He suddenly feels drawn "irresistably to gloom," and, more important, begins to realize a new, "fraternal" relation to Bartleby: "For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam."

Now we are at the dead centre of the story: this experience has obviously been a deeply searching one for the lawyer, so much so that he now sees his past religious life as gesture and empty ritual. As he puts it, he "did not accomplish the purpose of going to Trinity Church that morning," realizing that "the things [he] had seen disqualified [him] for the time from church-going"—a surprising description of the dark he walks in from this benighted somnambulist!

As a further sign of his "enlightening" attitude, the lawyer begins to be genuinely solicitous towards Bartleby. He tries to find out about Bartleby's past, his needs; he even begins to defend him against the tormenting Nippers, just as the gradually awakening Nicodemus finally began to defend Jesus against his detractors (see John, 7:50-52).

Nevertheless the narrator, unable to find in his heart the necessary compassion to reach out to Bartleby, tries to fire him, and then to buy him off. "What earthly right have you to stay here?" demands the lawyer in frustration.

It's a rhetorical question: his being there has nothing, of course, to do with "earthly" rights. Bartleby's mission is divine: to awaken the narrator to his responsibility with regards to the keeping of his brother.

At this point in the story, the narrator drifts into a contemplation of a bloody 1841 Wall Street murder of "the unfortunate Adams" by the "still more unfortunate Colt." At first glance, this allusion hardly seems appropriate for a person who has begun to awaken to his fraternal responsibilities, and who has just admitted to Bartleby's "wondrous ascendency" over him. And in fact many critics, including the most recent and thorough chronicler of the Colt-Adams murder, T. H. Giddings, find in the allusion an incongruous associative leap, i. e. from the mere "nervous resentment" the lawyer felt over Bartleby's recalcitrance, to thoughts of mayhem.

In fact Giddings thinks the association so inapt that he judges it an artistic blemish; he goes so far as to accuse Melville here of "carelessness" in plotting, of poorly "imagining the scene"; and to imply that in any case the allusion was and is too topical to serve the needs of fiction ["Melville, the Colt-Adams Murder, and 'Bartleby,' " in Studies in American Fiction 2, Autumn, 1974].

If we regard the event as just another New York homicide, it's hard to disagree with Giddings; it happened eleven years before the appearance in print of "Bartleby," and, obviously, has faded farther and farther into obscurity with each successive generation of readers. And even if, for whatever narrative reason, Melville did wish the allusion to the historical case to register at least with his contemporary readers, he gives precious few details of the case to trigger their recollections.

But what if the murder be seen not as just another down-town homicide but as the archetypal homicide: the murder of Cain by Abel, an event which figures again and again in Melville's works. Not only do the initials (C, A) fit but we also have the specific allusion to Cain's father in the name "Adams," which is emphasized in the line following this paragraph when the lawyer talks of "the old Adam of resentment" rising in him. Also, this interpretation accounts for the lack of specific details of the New York murder in the allusion, and for the reference to the murderer as being (i. e. like Cain) "more unfortunate" than his victim. As well, it emphatically saves Melville from the charge of poor plotting and imagining.

Indeed, the opposite becomes true; seen in this way, the allusion becomes a master-stroke of plotting, as perfectly placed to develop the theme of the lawyer's moral awakening: for it is immediately after this allusion, with its attendant question of fraternal responsibility, that the narrator suddenly finds himself able to "grapple" and "throw" his old streak of meanness, simply by recalling the redeeming injunction:

" 'A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another.' " "Yes," muses the lawyer, as if to underline this moment of redemptive release, "this it was that saved me."

Gradually, the lawyer begins darkly to perceive that Bartleby was "billeted upon [him] for some mysterious purpose of an all-wise Providence," recalling the verse from John 3 where Nicodemus tells Christ, "we know that thou art a teacher come from God" (2). The lawyer now sees comforting Bartleby as his "mission in this world" and his new frame of mind as "blessed."

Tragically, however, he cannot live up to the demands made on him, and Bartleby ends up being led to prison in a scene "contrived," as Stein says, "to parallel the scenario of the crucifixion." And since the story is set in downtowm Manhattan, Melville can build on this line of Christian (Easter) imagery by referring to the name of the prison to which Bartleby has been led, "The Tombs," as it was and still is (appropriately) called. And when the guilt-stricken narrator finally goes to visit Bartleby there, he is greeted with Christ's admonition to the unbelievers in John 5: " 'I know you.' "

This line of imagery comes to a point when, the last time the narrator goes to the Tombs, he is unable to find Bartleby. And although (again like Nicodemus) he does find the martyr's pitiable physical remains (in a position, says [Ray B. Browne in his Melville's Drive to Humanism, 1971], "suggestive of the picture of the crucified Christ taken down from the cross"), Bartleby's self, according to the narrator, has arisen from the Tombs, to live—and here he quotes from Job, "with kings and counselors."

With this poignant reference to the life-curse of the Old Testament's most exquisite sufferer, we see how much the narrator has grown in his thought and feelings. No longer the homme moyen of pre-Bartleby days, the "unambitious," "snug," "cool," and "eminently safe" attorney, who breathed, perhaps, but was nonetheless "deficient in life," he now clearly brims with it, having learned about suffering and despair, about human hope and hunger; having clearly heard the cries for compassion and brother-hood. In Melville's clever play on Manhattan street names, he has passed "up Wall Street towards Broadway."

But perhaps the best evidence of the effect Bartleby has had on the lawyer is supplied by the short epilogue attached to Bartleby's "biography." Often skimmed or seriously misread as appended solely to satisfy some supposed interest we may have (according to the narrator) with respect to "who Bartleby was" or "the manner of life he led," clearly the real reason for its inclusion by the narrator is to help himself (and the reader) find out who he is and what manner of life he lives. Otherwise, there would be no excusing the passage from the charge that it is an "artistic flaw" of the sort that tries to "[take] the reader outside of the confines of the story itself" [Charles G. Hoffman, "The Shorter Fiction of Herman Melville," South Atlantic Quarterly, 52, 1953]. For notwithstanding the narrator's assumptions to the contrary, the reader of literature no more needs nor wishes such "real" information about literary characters than he needs or wishes fictional information about real people. In literature, the engagement of our moral and aesthetic senses points our interest less towards how characters may exist "outside the confines of the story" than towards the consideration of how such lives affect those which they touch in the narrative.

From this point of view, the function of the "sequel" is clearly to confirm how profound and lasting and morally chastening was Bartleby's effect on the lawyer. For, first, we learn from the epilogue that the Bartleby "episode" had occurred perhaps years before this narrative was written: the information about the Dead Letter Office came to the narrator's ear "a few months after the scrivener's decease" and he confesses that he "could never ascertain. . . how true it is." This fact, of course, requires us to ask why he is telling the story at all. And why after all this time? Surely, Melville intends us to see that his narrator is seeking some kind of release here: like Dostoevsky's Underground Man or Lagerkvist's tortured Barababas, or (once again the analogy is irresistible) Coleridge's Mariner, an agony constantly "burns" within his heart, as it will do until he "teaches his tale."

Second, the power and permanence of Bartleby's effect on the lawyer are demonstrated by his very anxiousness, also revealed here in the sequel, desperately to grasp for scraps of information about Bartleby, an anxiety which has, apparently never diminished over time. And when he did learn something, we can't help but notice what a powerful impact it had on him, one which he clearly wants to share with his readers. Nor can his thoughts on the subject of Bartleby in the Dead Letter Office be considered those of a "cool. . . eminently safe man": " . . . hardly can I express the emotions which seize me," he exclaims in passion: "Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?"

And now comes the third point: the narrator clearly shows, in his summing up at the end of the epilogue, that he has learned what all our Bartlebys have to teach us: the dread, fatal consequences of human alienation. We cannot, surely, resist the notion which is so powerfully suggested by these concluding sentences that the narrator has truly struggled to arise redemptively to a view of love and charity embraced by the Sermon on the Mount:

Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a banknote 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 circumstances. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.

Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!

Are these sentiments, as Hershel Parker has called them [in "The 'Sequel' in 'Bartleby,' " in Bartleby the Inscrutable, edited by Thomas M. Inge, 1979], merely "sententious"? Is their expression simply a matter of the narrator allowing himself to "feel a gentle, superior sadness, a delicious melancholy"? Do these concluding words merely serve to "reduce his experience with the strange scrivener to manageable, non-unpleasing terms" in order to "show that he is at last in control?" What textual reason is there to read this passage ironically? Surely, there is far too much evidence both here and in the narrative that the lawyer has undergone a strong spiritual challenge to raise the possibility that Melville would end the story so cynically. For granting that the lawyer failed Bartleby in some important way, and that he was in fact the deadest of the dead letters, it is also true that he now knows how weak he was. He also knows that his actions, when he did act, were just funeral flowers: beautiful, well-meant, but uselessly after the fact. The very telling of the tale attests to such knowledge. And so, although he may, like the magi in Eliot's poem, finally return to his little kingdom, his walled-in life, his triplicate non-existence, his straitened world of Turkeys, Nippers, Ginger-Nuts, he will have been changed greatly by this painfully acquired knowledge.

"How can a man be born when he is old?"

The question is asked of the Christ by the night-visiting Nicodemus. It is a question Bartleby's elderly biographer will carry with him heavily, as he stumbles in wonderment towards his own dark, private Tombs.