On Writers & Writing

Bartleby:

Art and Social

Commitment

IN BARTLEBY, MAN LOOKS AT MAN, ARTIST looks at artist, and God looks at God. To understand that the narrator is at least as right as Bartleby, both on the surface and on symbolic levels, is to understand the remarkable interpenetration of form and content in the story. Most Melville readers have noticed that on one level, Bartleby can represent the honest artist: he is a scrivener who refuses to copy, as Melville himself refused to copy—that is, as he refused to knock out more saleable South Seas romances. But if Bartleby is the artist, he is the artist manqué: his is a vision not of life but of death; the man of silence, he creates nothing. A better kind of artist is the lawyer, who, having seen reality through Bartleby’s eyes, has turned to literature. Nor is he the slick writer: If I pleased, he says, [I] could relate divers histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep. That is, popular fiction. The phrase If I pleased is significant: please is the narrator’s substitution, later, for Bartleby’s infectious prefer. Like Bartleby, the narrator does what he prefers to do—but within certain reasonable limits. The reader may weep or smile at Bartleby’s story, but the narrator’s chief reason for choosing it is that he is seriously concerned with literature. Close reading reveals that the story he tells is indeed a highly organized literary work, a story that is as much the narrator’s as it is Bartleby’s, ending with the narrator’s achievement of that depth of understanding necessary to the telling of the story.

An important part of what the narrator at last understands is the conflict between the individual and society. The individual feels certain preferences which, taken together, establish his personal identity; society makes simultaneously necessary and unreasonable demands which modify individual identity. Thus the individual’s view of himself and the view others have of him can become two quite different things separated by a substantial wall (communication is difficult); thus, too, the socialized man’s identity and his view of his identity can be walled apart (self-knowledge is difficult). And man’s dilemma cannot be resolved, for if one insists on one’s own preferences and thereby affirms one’s identity, one finds oneself, like Bartleby, walled off from society and communion with other men; and on the other hand, if one gives in to the necessary laws of social action, one finds oneself, like Bartleby’s employer, walled off from active obedience to the higher laws of self and, in a sense, reality. Wall Street is the prison in which all men live.

The conflict between the rule of individual preference and the necessary laws of social action takes various forms in Bartleby. Conflicts arise between individual and social impulses within each of the first three scriveners, Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut, and also between individual traits in the scriveners and the necessary requirements of their employer, whose commitment is perforce social, for he must do his job well to survive. But for the action of the story, the most important conflicts are those rooted in the relationship of the lawyer and Bartleby, that is, the conflicts between employer and employee, between the lawyer’s kindly nature and his recognition of the reasonableness of society’s harsh demands, and between Bartleby and the world.

In many ways the lawyer and Bartleby differ. The lawyer is a successful, essentially practical man with highly developed feelings for social position (he mentions coyly that he was not unemployed by John Jacob Astor), the value of his money (the office of Master in Chancery is pleasantly remunerative), common usage and common sense, and above all, as he tells us John Jacob Astor has observed, prudence and method. Bartleby, on the other hand, is merely a clerk with an obscure past, a man little concerned with practicality in the ordinary sense, and apparently quite uninterested in social position, money, or usage and sense. He is totally lacking in prudence—he courts dismissal at every turn—and for method he relies on preference, often preference at present. The narrator at first cannot understand Bartleby, for good reason, and Bartleby prefers not to understand the narrator or the society the narrator represents. At the same time, the two characters are in some respects similar. Early in the story, the narrator tells us, I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best; and Bartleby shares the narrator’s profound conviction: what he cannot share is the narrator’s opinion that the easiest way must be socially acceptable, or even reasonable. The narrator is also like Bartleby in that he does not seek public applause; but Bartleby goes further, he does not avoid public censure. Finally, the narrator is decorous and "eminently safe"; so is Bartleby: the narrator is positive that Bartleby would not copy in shirtsleeves or on Sunday, and the narrator has singular confidence in his honesty.

Perhaps partly because the narrator and Bartleby are both different and similar, the conflict between them triggers a conflict within the narrator’s mind. He knows that as employer he has the authority to make demands of a scrivener, whatever the scrivener’s preference, for if employers cannot function as employers, society cannot work; but despite his knowledge, the narrator cannot bring himself to force Bartleby to obey or get out. When Bartleby first refuses to comply with a request, the narrator merely thinks, This is very strange … What had one best do? and, being pressed by business, goes on with his work. When Bartleby refuses to comply with another request, the narrator is shaken and for a moment doubts the assumption behind employer-employee relations. When Bartleby uses it as a modus operandi, the narrator’s opinion that the easiest way of life is the best conflicts with his equally firm opinion that the laws of social action are of necessity right; and in his momentary uncertainty the narrator turns to his office, a miniature society, for a ruling. Even their ruling is not much help, however, for to act on it would be to become involved in unpleasantness, and this the narrator would prefer to avoid in favor of some easier way—if any is to be found. Once again he avoids the issue, in the socially approved way, by turning his mind to his work.

Bartelby’s unconventional insistence on his preferences, and his indifference to the demands of his social setting, the office, leads the narrator to wonder about him, that is, to want to understand him. He watches Bartleby narrowly and finds him more enigmatic than before. Bartleby never seems to leave, he exists on ginger nuts, and in the miniature society of the office his corner remains a hermitage. Judgment cannot account for the man, and though imagination provides delicious self-approval, it too fails to provide understanding. The conflict in the narrator’s mind between acceptance of Bartleby as enigmatic eccentric, on one hand, and insistence on Bartleby’s position as employee, on the other, leads to no action while the narrator is in a charitable mood; but when he is not, he feels a need to force Bartleby into revealing himself actively, not just passively—that is, to make himself vulnerable by showing some angry spark answerable to my own. The narrator’s goading excites the other scriveners, but it cannot reach Bartleby. At last, for the sake of keeping peace in the office, and also because some of Bartleby’s preferences coincide with the preferences of society (his steadiness, his freedom from all dissipation, his incessant industry), the narrator comes to accept Bartleby, and the narrator’s internal conflict is temporarily resolved.

When the narrator learns that Bartleby lives at the office, the internal conflict reawakens. As he looks through Bartleby’s things, the narrator’s judgment hurls him onto the truth: Bartleby is the victim of innate and incurable disorder, in a word, he is mad. Common sense demands that he be gotten rid of, for, as the narrator sees, the practical fact is that pity is not seldom pain, and one cannot work well (as one must in this world) when one is suffering. The narrator gives his scrivener one last chance: he asks Bartleby to tell him about his past; if Bartleby will answer like a sensible man, the narrator will keep him on. As he asks it, the narrator insists, sincerely enough, I feel friendly towards you. And the effect is interesting: Bartleby hesitates a considerable time before answering, and for the first time his composure breaks—his lips tremble. At present, he says (and he is using the phrase at present for the first time), I prefer to give no answer. It seems that the narrator has cracked the wall between them; but if so, he does not know it at the time. The narrator’s common sense goes deep and now, when he is on the threshold of his scrivener’s secret self, self-delusion saves the narrator from what, as he rightly sees, cannot help Bartleby and can only hurt himself. Misinterpreting what has happened, he feels nettled and says, Not only did there seem to lurk in [Bartleby’s manner) a certain calm disdain, but his perverseness seemed ungrateful, considering the undeniable good usage and indulgence he had received from me. Even so, common sense is not quite triumphant: I strangely felt something superstitious knocking at my heart, and forbidding me to carry out my purpose [of firing Bartleby], and denouncing me for a villain if I dared to breathe one bitter word against this forlornest of mankind. Instead of sensibly dismissing the mad scrivener, the narrator chooses mercy, not justice, and humbly begs Bartleby to promise to be a little reasonable in a day or two. Bartleby’s answer, of course, is as delightfully mad as the request: At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable. And Bartleby, or the will of the individual, wins. Indeed, individualism is doing very well: Everyone in the office is saying prefer these days. Social dicta become polite suggestions waiting upon the individual’s taste (If [Bartleby] would but prefer to take a quart of good ale every day …); legal etiquette becomes a matter of individual choice (the narrator is asked what color paper he prefers for a certain document). Bartleby’s success is complete when, preferring to do no more copying, and preferring to remain in the office, he gets the narrator to prefer to put up with him.

In voluntarily choosing to accept Bartleby as the predestined purpose of my life, the narrator makes a choice which, unfortunately, he is not free to make. From the point of view of society, the choice is odd, unacceptable (like Colt’s choice to murder Adams—a choice Colt would not have made, the narrator says, if the two of them had not been alone). Bartleby is such an oddity in the office that at last the narrator must choose between Bartleby and his own professional reputation. As the sane man must, the narrator chooses society and denies Bartleby: he moves out of the office. When moving out proves insufficient—for society holds him accountable—the narrator reluctantly goes the whole route: he would not have acted with the cruel common sense of the landlord, but preferring to choose the inevitable, he gives the testimony requested in the landlord’s note. The betrayed Bartleby pronounces the judgment: I know you. Even now the narrator feels friendly toward Bartleby, and certainly he cannot be blamed for his action; nevertheless, betrayal is betrayal, and both of them know it.

The sequel provides us with an insight into the background of Bartleby’s derangement and provides the narrator with belated understanding of his scrivener. As the narrator understands the matter, and we have no reason to doubt his interpretation, Bartleby’s former occupation as dead-letter clerk heightened the natural pallid hopelessness of Bartleby’s character by giving him a queer and terrible vision of life. The narrator thinks, as Bartleby must have thought before him, Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Letters sent on missions of pardon, hope, good tidings—errands of life—end in pointless flames; and the dead-letter clerk sees no other kind of mail (if, in fact, there is any other kind). What he knows about letters he comes to know of man. The bustle of activity, scrivening, clerking, bartending, bill-collecting, traveling—all tumble at last against the solid wall, death. Bartleby prefers not to share the delusions of society. For him, the easiest way of life is the best because whether one spends one’s time not unemployed by John Jacob Astor or spends it sitting upon a banister, one dies. He is not luny, as Ginger Nut thinks, but mad. Estranged from the ordinary view of life (he does not even read the papers), Bartleby perceives reality; thus whereas the narrator, when he looks out his windows, sees at one end a wall deficient in what landscape painters call ‘life’ and at the other end a huge, square cistern, Bartleby sees, respectively, death and the grave.

Except at that moment when he is tempted to feel affection for the man who feels friendly toward him, there is within Bartleby no conflict at all. He is dead already, as the narrator’s recurring adjective, cadaverous, suggests. Whatever the exigencies of the moment, he cannot be made to forget the walls enclosing life. He has walked for some time in the yard not accessible to common prisoners, for the yard in the Tombs is life itself: The surrounding walls, of amazing thickness, kept off all sounds behind them. The Egyptian character of the masonry weighed upon me with its gloom. But a soft imprisoned turf grew under foot. The heart of the eternal pyramids, it seemed, wherein, by some strange magic, through the clefts, grass-seed, dropped by birds, had sprung. But though Bartleby suffers no conflict within, he is engaged in a conflict more basic than that in which the narrator is involved. The narrator wishes to avoid unpleasantness—and if possible, to do so without loss of self-respect. Bartleby wishes to shape his own destiny, at least within the little space between the walls of birth and death. The narrator, when he has looked a little into ‘Edwards on the Will,’ and ‘Priestley on Necessity,’ slides into the persuasion that his troubles have been predestined from eternity, and he chooses to accept them, voluntarily relinquishing his will to an all-wise Providence. But Bartleby insists on freedom. When the narrator suggests that he take a clerkship in a dry-goods store, he answers, There is too much confinement about that. The narrator’s reaction: why, you keep yourself confined all the time! misses the point, for confinement, if one chooses confinement, is free agency, and circling the world, if required of one, is not. Melville makes the point dramatically. When Bartleby will neither tour Europe with some young man nor live in the narrator’s home, the narrator flees from Bartleby, the landlord and the tenants who may again besiege the law office. He runs from the building, up Wall Street toward Broadway, catches a bus, surrenders his business to Nippers, and turns to still wilder flight, driving about in his rockaway for days. In his restless flight he is less free than the man on the banister.

But in the end, no individual, not even Bartleby, can be free. The freedom of each individual curtails the freedom of some other, as poor Colt’s freedom curtails the freedom of Adams (murdered men have no preferences), and as Bartleby’s freedom curtails that of the narrator. Thus the limits imposed upon freedom by the laws of Nature are narrowed by the laws of society: Bartleby must be jailed. Inside the prison, individuals; outside, functionaries. Betrayed by the narrator and the society he represents, confined in a smaller prison and, as he says, knowing where he is, Bartleby has only one freedom left: he may prefer not to live. And he does.

Melville suggests in various ways that the conflict between Bartleby and the world (and the conflict within the narrator’s mind) is one between imagination and judgment, or reason. Judgment supports society: ethical law is the law of reason; imagination, on the other hand, supports higher values, those central to poetry and religion: moral law is the law of imagination. Ethical law, always prohibitive, guarantees equal rights to all members of the group, but moral law, always affirmative, points to the absolute, without respect to the needs of the group. Thus ethical law demands that scriveners proofread their copy; but the narrator says, I cannot credit that the mettlesome poet, Byron, would have contentedly sat down with Bartleby to examine a law document of, say five hundred pages … And when the narrator sees that Bartleby is mad and must be dismissed, that is, when common sense bids the narrator’s soul be rid of the man, the narrator cannot bring himself to go to Trinity Church. Reason and imagination also divide the narrator’s mind: each time Bartleby’s stubborn preferences force the narrator into thought, the narrator thinks in two ways, by imagination (when he sees in poetic or religious terms) and by reason (when he works out logical deductions after studying facts); and the results of the two ways of thinking differ sharply. Reason tells the narrator that Bartleby exists on ginger nuts but somehow does not become hot and spicy; imagination, explaining what proves to be impossible to be solved by his judgment, tells the narrator that Bartleby is a poor fellow who means no mischief and intends no insolence. When the narrator examines Bartleby’s belongings, imagination leads him close to an understanding of Bartleby the individual: as he detects, through empathy, the loneliness of Bartleby, he sees that he and Bartleby are both sons of Adam, and he begins to suffer sad fancyings—the chimeras, doubtless, of a sick and silly brain. He adds, Presentiments of strange discoveries hovered round me. The scrivener’s pale form appeared to me laid out, among uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding sheet. Reason, however, leads the narrator in a different direction. He sees that the man is mad (a social judgment) and that, after giving Bartleby a fair chance to prove himself sane, he must fire him. Throughout the story, the narrator’s generous impulses, as well as his attempt at self-justification when common sense fails to drive out the sense of guilt, take religious form: by leaps of faith, or imagination, he understands Bartleby, and when he is considering doing harm to Bartleby for the sake of his own reputation, he consoles himself with words like charity and love, allowing himself to believe that what he plans is after all for Bartleby’s good, not his own. (The narrator is self-deluded, not hypocritical, for as he tells the story now he understands and, usually, acknowledges the mistakes he made at the time of his Bartleby troubles. Mistakes he does not acknowledge openly he treats in comic terms, as he treats his ethical perversion of the moral injunction that ye love one another.)

If the narrator’s interpretation of Bartleby’s madness is correct, imagination, presenting a metaphor which relates dead letters and men, is the basis of Bartleby’s plight. In other words, he is a man who has seen a vision and, holding true to his vision, can no longer operate in the ordinary world. In a sense, he is a queer sort of fanatic, operating on the basis of a religion of his own.

Obviously the conflicts in Bartleby, together with the germs of symbolic extension of meaning, are rooted in character; and the legitimacy of the conflicts, whether they are seen as conflicts between the individual and society or between will and necessity, is equally clear. Thus the story is not a melodrama (between, say, the stupid reviewer of Pierre and the pure, heroic author) but an honest fictional representation of a dilemma which, in ordinary life, cannot be resolved. In the end the narrator understands. Learning that Bartleby was a dead-letter clerk, he achieves Bartleby’s vision: he sees by a leap of imagination exactly what Bartleby must have seen—dead letters, dead men, limited human freedom. This vision is the terrible outcome foreshadowed earlier: And I trembled to think that my contact with the scrivener had already and seriously affected me in a mental way. And what further and deeper aberration might it not yet produce? From the beginning the narrator has been imaginative—in fact, like Bartleby, has been given to fancyings and chimeras; but unlike Bartleby, he also possesses judgment. When he needs to, he can control his fancies. Unlike Bartleby, he creates: he originally created his practice, he has created recondite documents, and he is now creating a work of art. Reason must impose order upon the chaos of imagination.

Symbolism in Bartleby supports this view of scrivener as visionary and narrator as creator. The religion of ordinary scriveners is the routine of the law office or the will of the lawyer: the narrator speaks of Turkey as the most reverential of men, values his morning services, and cannot get him to give up his afternoon devotions; and the narrator tells us that Turkey eats ginger nuts as though they were wafers. Bartleby is another matter: his arrival is an advent, there is nothing ordinarily human about him, he is full of quiet mysteries, and when the narrator leaves Bartleby alone in the office Bartleby stands like the last pillar of a ruined temple. He dies at last among murderers and thieves. And whereas Bartleby is Christ-like, the narrator is Jehovah-like: the voice behind the story, like the voice behind The Confidence-Man, is mythical, for the speaker here is God, the story of his reluctant change from the legalistic, tribal deity of the Old Testament to the God of Love and Justice in the New Testament. As Melville treats the material, Christ is not a son of God but (as the Old Testament Jehovah sees him) an incubus, thus not a revelation sent by God to man but rather a nightmare creature who drives God into self-knowledge (as, on the literal level, Bartleby drives the lawyer to self-knowledge).

The narrator and Jehovah are linked in numerous ways. The narrator is officially Master in Chancery. Like Jehovah, he keeps out of the public eye and works in the cool tranquillity of a snug retreat. The narrator’s first scrivener, Turkey, is the militant archangel Michael. His nickname is possibly meant to suggest not only the red-necked, irascible fowl emblematic of thanksgiving but also the terrible Turk. He has a face which beams, blazes, and flames like the sun, and he considers himself, rather insolently, the narrator’s right-hand man. He uses his ruler as a sword and is in charge of the narrator’s forces, marshalling and deploying columns (the narrator speaks later of his column of clerks), and charging the foe. His inflamed ways are always worse on Saturdays (the Sabbath). The second scrivener, Nippers (pincers),I is symbolically linked with Lucifer. He is a whiskered, sallow, and, upon the whole, piratical-looking young man who suffers from ambition as well as indigestion. He is impatient with the duties of a mere copyist, and his ambition is evinced by an unwarrantable usurpation of strictly professional affairs, such as the original drawing up of legal documents. (The Devil is famous for making pacts: consider poor Faust.) His indigestion (spleen) is betokened in an occasional nervous testiness and grinning irritability, causing the teeth to audibly grind together … , unnecessary maledictions, hissed, rather than spoken, in the heat [inferno] of business … He has his own kingdom, for the narrator says, Among the manifestations of his diseased ambition was a fondness he had for receiving visits from certain ambiguous-looking fellows in seedy coats, whom he called his clients. He is considerable of a ward-politician, occasionally does a little business at the Justices’ courts, and is not unknown on the steps of the Tombs. As gods and would-be gods control willful men, so Nippers jerks his desk about as if it were a perverse voluntary agent and vexing him. The third scrivener, Ginger Nut (Raphael, perhaps—for Milton the messenger and sociable angel), is official cake (or wafer) and apple (forbidden fruit?) purveyor for the establishment.

Much of the humor in Bartleby depends upon the reader’s perceiving the symbolic level, for comic effect arises out the tendency of surface and symbolic levels to infect one another: the narrator, an ordinary man, is comic when he behaves like God, and God is comic when he behaves like man; and other tensions between surface and symbol (Turkey—Michael, Nippers—Lucifer) work in the same way. Ground-glass folding doors (through which, presumably, we see darkly) divide the narrator’s premises into two parts. According to my humor, the narrator says, rather pleased with himself, I threw open these doors, or closed them. He also takes pleasure in his clever disposition of Bartleby: Bartleby sits inside the doors (all others are outside) but sits behind a screen which might entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not remove him from my voice. Puns frequently contribute to this humor. The words original and genius work as they do in The Confidence-Man. And when the narrator becomes resigned to Bartleby he says, "One prime thing was this—he was always there … (Melville’s italics). When the scrivener’s being always there" proves a not unmixed blessing, the narrator says:

And as the idea came upon me of his possibly turning out a long-lived man, and keep occupying my chambers, and denying my authority; and perplexing my visitors; and scandalizing my professional reputation; and casting a general gloom over the premises; keeping soul and body together to the last upon his savings (for doubtless he spent but half a dime a day), and in the end perhaps outlive me, and claim possession of my office by right of his perpetual occupancy … I resolved to gather all my faculties together, and forever rid me of this intolerable incubus.

Ere revolving any complicated project, however, adapted to this end, I first simply suggested to Bartleby the propriety of his permanent departure … But, having taken three days to meditate upon it, he apprised me, that his original determination remained the same; in short, that he still preferred to abide with me.

(The funniest barrage of puns in the story is keeping soul and body together to the last upon his savings.) But the effect of the symbolic level is not always—and is never entirely—comic. When the narrator abandons his office to Nippers at the time of Bartleby’s arrest, one is more distressed than amused. One is moved, too, by the rich final line of the story: Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity! A man who behaves like God may be queerly admirable. The narrator puffs up his chest like God, but he is also capable of infinite compassion, he is dedicated to the spirit of the law (he will not get rid of Bartleby by laying an essentially false charge on him), and he can survive.

The lawyer-turned-artist is creative, like God, because he has judgment. He has imagination like the mettlesome poet, Byron, but unlike Byron (Melville seems to suggest) the lawyer has the judgment to see that the commitment of art is to man. One reason for the social commitment of art, as we have seen, is that society cannot operate without voluntary or involuntary diminution of the individual will. But Melville offers, in Bartleby, another reason as well. The final line of the story is both an equation and an opposition: Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity! Man lives on a walled-up street where the practice of law flourishes and justice is operative only in the mind. If justice is to be introduced into the ordinary world, if man is to receive recompense for being stopped in mid-action by dry lightning (like the narrator’s man from Virginia), justice must come either as a Christian afterlife or as a transmutation of purely conceptual experience—that is, as art. The first seems no longer certain: the office of Master in Chancery is now defunct, a [damned] premature act. We must find some other pleasant remuneration. The betrayed Bartleby gets justice and mercy at last, though; for Bartleby, whose freedom was limited in life by the inescapability of death, is now transmogrified to eternal life in art. Before Bartleby, the office was governed by law; but the recondite document at hand is a New Testament of sorts, at once ethical and moral. It insists upon law in this world, but it also provides justice. Though life must of necessity be characterized by limited freedom, voluntary self-diminution, there will be, after life, art. The artist rolls the stone away—that is the narrator’s creative act—and man escapes from the Tombs.

NOTE

I. For suggestions concerning the names Nippers and Ginger Nut I am indebted to E. M. Glenn of Chico State College.

An Invective

Against

Mere Fiction

AS EVERYONE KNOWS, THE WHOLE TENDENCY of modern life and thought is against the absolute. Metaphysics is out, alternative conceptual systems are in. Kings are out, pluralism is in. Relativity is all. But however useful relativism may be as a way of running daily life—keeping fascists out of power, keeping tea parties civilized—it has nothing to do with art. Relativism denies those finalities toward which man’s spirit has always groped.To admit that there are no finalities is to put the spirit out of business; to say that finalities are a matter of personal assertion is to make the spirit’s business insignificant.

Despite the vogue of relativism, good painters and composers continue to make absolute affirmations, but they do so in spite of their critics, their happy, horn-swoggled audiences, and the richly rewarded hacks who call themselves painters or composers. As for literature, the two most important of the established novelists in America are that great gossip Saul Bellow, with his personal vision, and that master of illusion, prankster, puzzler, Vladimir Nabokov. Both are solid writers, but neither is so vulgar or obsolete as to admit his fiction (as Chekhov said) tells the truth. The fact is that, despite their protestations, Bellow and Nabokov do tell the truth, insofar as they are significant writers—Bellow clumsily, Nabokov with careful craftsmanship.