SOURCE: " 'Bartleby the Scrivener': Language as Wall," in College Literature, Vol. II, No. 1, Winter 1975, pp. 17-27.

Melville's puzzling story "Bartleby the Scrivener" threatens to make scriveners of us all, endlessly writing those dead letters called literary criticism. Scholars with a biographical bent have pointed out the parallels between the disaffected Bartleby and his equally disaffected author. Both were professional scriveners; both "preferred" to withdraw. For others, the story is a study in the application of passive resistance, one a Gandhi might have read for aid and comfort. More recently attention has shifted from Bartleby to the lawyer who narrates Bartleby's tale and, in the process, attempts to understand him. I am convinced that looking an enigmatic figure like Bartleby in the eye is something akin to staring into a blank wall. And whatever else critics might be, they are not Supermen. One must come at a Bartleby from a safely oblique angle—by focusing on that "eminently safe man," the lawyernarrator, whose sensibilities are crucial to an understanding of Melville's story.

As epigraph for that impressionistic study in human guilt, Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad chose the following maxim from Novalis: "It is certain my conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it." Granted, willing believers are never found in large supply, Lord Jim is an account of the complications that arise when one heart opens to another. Initially, it is Jim who needs a sympathetic Marlow; later, it is Marlow who is haunted by Jim's memory, as he tries to convince an "audience" (and himself?) about the meaning of such a life. The novel's "title" may refer to Jim, but the novel itself is Marlow's. For the ambivalent Marlow, to become Jim's secret-sharer is as dangerous and slippery an enterprise as it ultimately is a humanizing one. Thus, Conrad tests out the complexities which lurk just beneath our clearly defined notions about right and wrong, as well as the isolation which results from even the best attempts at empathy. Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," on the other hand, is less concerned with the possibilities of opening oneself to another "conviction" than it is in demonstrating the barriers which impede the process. Significantly enough, Melville's sub-title is "A Story of Wall Street." Unlike Marlow, Melville's narrator discovers that language only makes the haunting Bartleby more perplexing and less definable. "Walls" are the central motif of Melville's story, extending from the Wall Street locale suggested by the sub-title, through a maze of physical walls which separate one man from another and, finally, to those walls of language which make human understanding impossible.

According to the late John Jacob Astor, the lawyernarrator is a man whose first grand point is "prudence" and his second, "method." Such commendations mean much, especially to one who loves repeating Astor's name because "it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like bullion." The symmetry here—circular, rounded images, as if an emblem of completeness itself—suggests a man with a taste for the classics, exactly the sort of person who would keep a bust of Cicero on his shelf. To be sure, ironies always lurk around the dark corners of such a walled-in, safe world. By safe, what the narrator really means is unthreatened, secure, pompously smug in his assurance that God is in His heaven, Cicero is on his shelf, and all is right on Wall Street.

In short, the lawyer is a man out to control a tiny universe with an inflated and self-serving rhetoric. Melville's tone, on the other hand, makes it clear that the lawyer is no exception to the rule which operates daily in, say, angry letters-to-the-editor: given enough space, most people betray themselves in print. For example, the lawyer-narrator proudly claims that he seldom loses his temper. And yet Melville juxtaposes this quietism with a revealing burst of indignation:

. . . but I must be permitted to be rash here and declare that I consider the sudden and violent abrogation of the office of Master of Chancery, by the new Constitution, as a pre-mature act; inasmuch as I had counted upon a life-lease of the profits, whereas I only received those of a few short years. But this is by the way.

Whatever else the deleted expletive and unbridled passion might signify, it is hardly "by the way." The lawyer's sensibility is revealed by the widening distances between rhetoric and existential reality. In this sense descriptions given to Turkey and Nippers are necessary pre-conditions of a world in which Bartleby will become an unsettling intruder.

Turkey is characterized as:

.. . a short, pursy Englishman of about my age, that is, somewhere not far from sixty. In the morning, one might say, his face was of a fine florid hue, but after twelve o'clock meridian—his dinner hour—it blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals; and continued blazing—but, as it were, with a gradual wane—till 6 o'clock P.M. or thereabouts, after which I saw no more the proprietor of the face, which gaining its meridian with the sun, seemed to set with it, to rise, culminate, and decline the following day, with the like regularity and undiminished glory.

The result may be an eccentric, volatile personality, but one with clock-like regularity: during the morning hours he is "the quickest, steadiest creature, too, accomplishing a great deal of work in a style not easy to be matched," while, in the afternoon, he is "incautious in dipping his pen into his inkstand." Blots, a noisy chair, spilled sand boxes, split pens and a generally "indecorous manner" follow lunch like the night the day. An older notion of psychology might write Turkey down as a Humour character, most probably phlegmatic. To modern ears the lawyer's description sounds like a textbook definition for the manic-depressive—albeit, one regularized until he emerges as tolerable.

This is especially true if one sees Turkey and Nippers as complementary units in a scenario of absurdity. Nippers is a neurotic, one who brings his anal temperament to the scrivener's table; as compulsion would have it, he "could never get this table to suit him":

He put chips under it, blocks of various sorts, bits of pasteboard, and at last went so far as to attempt an exquisite adjustment by final pieces of folded blotting-paper. But no invention would answer. If, for the sake of easing his back, he brought the table lid at a sharp angle well up toward his chin, and wrote there like a man using the steep roof of a Dutch house for his desk—then he declared that it stopped the circulation in his arms. If now he lowered the table to his waistbands and stooped over it in writing, then there was a sore aching in his back. In short, Nippers knew not what he wanted.

To the beleaguered lawyer, there is a "logical" explanation and/or convenient rationale for the apparent craziness which surrounds him. Turkey claims that "we are both getting old" and the remark strikes home. Prudence demands that he restrict the sort of work given to the afternoon (and, therefore, accident-prone) Turkey, but "humanity" requires that he keep him. With Nippers, "Ambition and indigestion" explain the neurotic quirks. In short, there are words—names, labels, etc. —which help to bring the erratic behavior within the bounds of what could be called "tolerable irritations." Besides,

It was fortunate for me, that owing to its peculiar cause—indigestion—the irritability and subsequent nervousness of Nippers, were mainly observable in the morning, while in the afternoon he was comparatively mild. So that Turkey's paroxysms only coming on about twelve o'clock, I never had to do with their eccentricities at one time. Their fits relieved each other like guards. When Nippers's was on, Turkey's was off; and vice versa. This was a good natural arrangement under the circumstances.

In short, there is a fearful symmetry here which the lawyer can depend upon. Such is the stuff of which his "good natural arrangement" is made.

Bartleby calls the consensus reality into question by refusing to be rhetorically understood. The physical walls which separate employer and scrivener operate at one level of reality; the walls of language operate, more insidiously, at a deeper one. According to the lawyer, compromise is what makes life both safe and comfortably satisfying. His description of the office provides a model of the bureaucratic mind at its most functional:

I should have stated before that ground glass folding-doors divided my premises into two parts, one of which was occupied by my scriveners, the other by myself. According to my humour I threw open these doors, or closed them. I resolved to assign Bartleby a corner by the folding-doors, but on my side of them, so as to have this quiet man within easy call, in case any trifling matter was to be done. I placed his desk close up to a small side-window in that part of the room, a window which originally had afforded a lateral view of certain grimy back-yards and bricks, but which, owing to subsequent erections, commanded at present no view at all, though it gave some light . . . Still further to a satisfactory arrangement, I procured a high green folding screen, which might entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not remove him from my voice. And thus, in a manner, privacy and society were conjoined.

The "high green folding screen" suggests an ironic garden in much the same way that the lawyer's notion of a "privacy and society" conjoined is an ironic comment on the facts of the situation. Removed from sight—the purpose, after all, of walls—Bartleby is, nonetheless, within easy range of verbal commands. His is a "green world," albeit one made from barriers of convenience. It is here that the nuances suggest ironic parallels to the biblical Garden. Like Adam, the lawyer gains dominion over the "others" of his world by naming them. Language is, then, a medium of control, of that which simultaneously creates a reality and imposes it. To be sure, if the green screen is an ironic touch, so too are the identifications between an Adamic use of language and that found in the postlapsarian world of Wall Street. Which is to say, the law office is emblematic of the human tragedy writ small; if the timid lawyer is no Cicero (on principle he "never addresses a jury," much less a Cataline), he is also no Faust, no Hamlet. In his insistence that language can pluck the heart out of human mysteries he is more akin to meddlers like Rosencranz and Guildenstern.

Bartleby's recurrent "I would prefer not to" is as effective a ploy as his "choice" of this particular lawyer-narrator is fortunate. What is essential, of course, is not so much the battle cry of passive resistance (anybody can learn to regurgitate "I would prefer no to") but a certain style on the part of the speaker and a certain vulnerability in the audience. The alternating current thus established completes the necessary relationship between victimizer and victim. In Melville's story, the special (albeit, acceptable) tyranny of the lawyer is obvious; he manipulates office personnel in much the same way he rearranges furniture, balancing a Turkey with a Nippers, the tedious work of copying against his own best advantage. If eccentricity of the Turkey/Nippers stripe betrays a human touch which can be controlled, Bartleby's very passivity calls the prevailing ground rules into question:

Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him. Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been anything ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises.

This is what I mean by the force of personal style. Bartleby is the enigmatic personality par excellence, the mystery always incarnate. His haunting presence brings the lawyer's half-ridden vulnerabilities into bold relief. In a recent psychoanalytic treatment of the story Morton Kaplan quotes this line—"But there was something about Bartleby that not only strangely disarmed me, but in a wonderful manner, touched and disconcerted me"; and then adds this commentary:

We note that he still imagines violence, which he refers to now as a "dreadful passion," as his only alternative to inaction. There is, in his repeated association to violence, the suggestion that he is passive with Bartleby because, for him, any action implies getting violent. . . . Perhaps, we can begin to infer, the overridding motive of his life has been a struggle to contain violence latent within him, violence needing only the smallest conflict to set it off. [Morton Kaplan and Robert Kloss, The Unspoken Motive, 1973]

Later Kaplan provides a psychoanalysis of Bartleby himself, suggesting that he suffers from a psychosis "so complete that he breaks with reality." However, such confusions of a character's function and an analysand's problem reduce literature to mere formula, and criticism to Viennese jargon. This is especially true of Melville's disturbing story. That Bartleby may—or may not—be a psychotic is simply beside the point. In any event, the textual evidence is scanty, and it is Bartleby's impact on the lawyer which remains the crucial matter. As Kaplan would have it, the lawyer's vulnerability results from overcompensating for a latently violent personality. As a man of law, intimations of the "criminal hidden within" can indeed have unsettling consequences. That story, however, is Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Sharer," not, I would submit, Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener."

Rather it is the silence in Bartleby's posture, his Sphinx-like refusal to elaborate, which is so distressing. In the crucial scene when Bartleby first utters the choral refrain about "preferring not to," sound business practice, pragmatism and all the lawyer has lived by would demand that he simply chuck the insolent fellow out. Instead, he hesitates, betraying himself in a highly significant bit of rationalization: "But as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-Paris bust of Cicero out of doors." Later it is Bartleby who will keep "his glance fixed upon my [i. e. the lawyer's] bust of Cicero, which, as I then sat, was directly behind me, some six inches above my head." The plaster-of-Paris bust not only represents that blankness associated with the story's motif of "walls," but the efficacy of language as well. As I have mentioned, rhetoric is the means by which understanding is achieved and necessary accommodations are made. The tight-lipped Bartleby signals that final breakdown of communication which is one form of the apocalypse. The lawyer's deepest fears are not those of latent violence made manifest, but fears of having to confront the isolation and loneliness which result when language itself disintegrates.

The remainder of the story, then, is a carefully paced account of the lawyer's reluctant initiation into these dark realities. It begins with an appeal to consensus reality, one the lawyer describes as "some reinforcement for his own faltering mind." Ironically enough, to ward off the absurdity which Bartleby represents, the lawyer confides in Turkey and Nippers:

'Turkey," said I, "what do you think of this? [i.e. Bartleby's refusal to proof-read copy] Am I not right?"

"With submission, sir," said Turkey, with his blandest tone, "I think that you are."

"Nippers," said I, "what do you think of it?"

"I think I should kick him out of the office."

Certainly their moods shift with the stylized grace of a Morris dance—on this occasion [i. e. morning] Turkey is as tranquil as Nippers is frenetic. Subsequent confrontations about the reluctant Bartleby reverse the poles. Only Ginger Nut, the office errand boy, has a view which does not change: "I think, sir, he's a little luny"

Naturally the lawyer cannot accept such a simplistic (however accurate) view of Bartleby, despite his need for even Ginger Nut's assurance. "Luny" is, after all, hardly a sophisticated and/or ingenious way of accounting for the pale scrivener's psychology. But to deduce a theory of vegetarian/ginger-nut psychodynamics—ah, that is a Bartleby (and a causation) of quite another stripe:

He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian then; but no; he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts. My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts. Ginger-nuts are so called because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents, and the final flavouring one. Now what was ginger? A hot spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then, had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should have none.

Such "logic" betrays a sensibility bent on reducing the enigmatic to the managable. Language can only function as a cul de sac where a phenomenon like Bartleby is concerned; once again, Melville's comic tone tells us more about the lawyer's limited sensibilities than it does about the object of his scrutiny. And, yet, the lawyer persists. No matter how much a Bartleby might "prefer not" being defined, Melville's narrator is obsessed with definition.

The Sophoclean ironies that result from such crossed purposes are foreshadowed early: "To befriend Bartleby; to humour him in his strange wilfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience." Befriending a Bartleby, is, of course, a dangerous and very costly business. As the innocent lawyer soon discovers, it requires more than merely carrying a skittish employee on the pay-roll or disrupting an already tenuous office routine. Rather, it is to risk daily exposure to a nihilism so complete that normal life—with its normal illusions and vanities—is no longer possible.

For example, one Sunday morning the lawyer happens to stop into his Wall Street office, only to discover that Bartleby has assumed squatter's rights. The desolate scene inspires the following gush of purple prose, suitably sprinkled with classical sound and fury:

His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall Street is deserted as Petra; and every night of every day is an emptiness . . . And here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous—a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage!

What the bombast leaves out, of course, is that this is a loneliness both Bartleby and the narrator share. After all, the narrator, too, spends his Sundays alone. In something like the unconscious motivation associated with primal scene fantasies, the lawyer "accidently" discovers his lonely alter-ego. The difference, however, is that the lawyer resists what such an initiation might teach. Language serves as a means to both falsify (sentimentalize?) the experience and reinforce the barriers between Bartleby and himself.

Granted, the seeds of curiosity have been sown. But while the narrator might escalate the degree of his concern, it remains depressingly similar in kind. By this I mean, the lawyer continues to believe that human behavior is rational, that, with the right information, he can understand Bartleby at last:

"Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?"

"I would prefer not to."

"Will you tell me anything about yourself?"

"I would prefer not to."

Unlike the lawyer, Bartleby appreciates the power of silence. His rule—like that of the Delphic oracle—is a simple one: Never too much.

But if Bartleby lingers on as a noncooperative mystery, his impact—i. e., on the lawyer-narrator and the law firm—is all too clear. "Prefer," for example, gets picked up as a grim office joke:

"Prefer not, eh?" gritted Nippers—"I'd prefer him, if I were you, sir," addressing me—"I'd prefer him; I'd give him his preferences, the stubborn mule! What is it, sir, pray, that he prefers not to do now?"

Bartleby moved not a limb.

"Mr. Nippers," I said, "I'd prefer that you would withdraw for the present."

Worse, people outside the office begin talking—or, at least, that is what the obsessed lawyer imagines. In short, the consensus reality about Bartleby also has a "preference."

Appropriate action must be taken—Bartleby must be dismissed. But as the lawyer soon discovers: "The great point was, not whether I had assumed that he would quit me, but whether he would prefer so to do. He was more a man of preferences than assumptions." Assumptions, of course, depend upon a world where causes lead to predictable effects; you fire an employee—he then leaves your office. Bartleby's "preferences" destroy that fragile fabric by substituting a highly personal reality for the one others live within:

"Will you, or will you not, quit me?" I now demanded in a sudden passion, advancing close to him.

"I would prefer not to quit you," he replied, gently emphasizing the not.

"What earthly right have you to stay here? Do you pay rent? Do you pay my taxes? Or is this property yours?"

He answered nothing.

Even selected readings in predestination ("Edwards on the Will"; "Priestly on Necessity") are to no avail. In something like a direct proportion, the lawyer's obsession to know about Bartleby (i. e., to label his bizarre behavior) increases as the whispered rumors about this curious employee spread along Wall Street. The impossible situation reaches its crescendo when the lawyer decides that moving his office (rather than Bartleby) is the better part of valor.

One is hardly surprised when this frantic escape to a newer, larger office does not work. The psychological cords which bind the lawyer to Bartleby may have been woven from interlocking strands of attraction/repulsion, but they retain a potency mere distance cannot remove. The lawyer feels a responsibility nearly as insidious as their relationship has been. One side of the coin speaks to his self-styled humanism, his sense of charity and fair play, while the other is bent upon bringing Bartleby into that circle of human beings defined by pragmatism and the preservation of the status quo. The result is a last-ditch effort at saving the self-destructive Bartleby; its form is that of desperate catechism:

"Now one of two things must take place. Either you must do something, or something must be done to you. Now what sort of business would you like to engage in? Would you like to re-engage in copying for some one?"

"I would prefer not to take a clerkship," he replied, as if to settle that little item at once.

"How would a bartender's business suit you? There is no trying of the eyesight in that."

"I would not like it at all; though, as I said before, I am not particular."

His unwonted wordiness inspired me. I returned to the charge.

"Well then, would you like to travel through the country collecting bills for the merchants? That would improve your health."

"No, I would prefer to be doing something else."

"How then would going as a companion to Europe to entertain some young gentleman with your conversation, —how would that suit you?"

"Not at all. It does strike me that there is anything definite about that. I like to be stationary. But I am not particular ... "

"Bartleby," said I, in the kindest tone I could assume under such exciting circumstances, "will you go home with me now—not to my office, but my dwelling—and remain there till we can conclude some convenient arrangement for you at our leisure Come, let us start now, right away."

I have quoted this negative catechism at some length because the rhythm of practical solution and nihilistic refusal is crucial to an understanding of the story. Some human complexities cannot be radically reduced, however wellintentioned the advice. At a certain point Melville's comic tone intrudes upon the confrontation. Bartleby, for example, insists too much about not being "particular," while the lawyer suggests, in all seriousness, that a Bartleby "entertain" some young gentleman with his "conversation."

Moreover, the contrapuntal rhythms cited above have a Modernist parallel in Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers." Like Melville's lawyer, Nick Adams is a believer in practical solutions to existential problems. Ole Andreson's recurrent "no" in the face of imminent death provides that stark initiation which seems every American protagonist's fate. Adams's Innocence is, of course, suggested by his highly emblematic name. The anonymous lawyer of Melville's tale puts the matter more obliquely:

For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. Before I had never experienced aught but a notunpleasing sadness. The bond of common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam.

Confronted by Ole's utter resignation, Nick suggests alternatives which include "taking a powder," calling in the cops, fighting back and, finally, making a "deal." When his illusions are systematically destroyed—and Ole's death promises to become a brutal fact—Nick takes refuge in a final emotional summation: "It's too damned awful!"

Melville's lawyer, on the other hand, takes his solace in extravagant and falsifying rhetoric. Which is to say, if Bartleby steadfastly refuses to be reasonable in life, the lawyer can provide a missing rationale posthumously:

. . . Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office in Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in administration. When I think over this rumour I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men . . . ? For by the carload they are annually burned. 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!

Like his ingenious theory about the effects of eating ginger-nuts, rumors about the Dead Letter Office provide the lawyer with a convenient platform on which to replace enigmatic silence with inflated language. But this time, of course, Bartleby cannot interfere, cannot "prefer" some other, more complicated, explanation of his life. Death may well be the final barrier which human understanding cannot cross. And yet, as Bartleby puts it at the Tombs, "I know where I am." It is the lawyer whose rhetoric falsifies not only the strange compulsions which drive a Bartleby, but those which continue to affect him as well. Melville's vision is split into two voices—one incorporated in the exclamatory phrase "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!" and the other which whispers about a darker humanity we cannot know in words.