Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (1853)

Wait, I actually liked a Herman Melville work? Color me absolutely shocked. I've read it three times now (well, it is a short novella) and each time I stumble upon something new. At first look, it seemed rather straight-forward, but with each reread I saw how layered it actually was. Surprising how a story about a man who simply preferred not to do anything could be so eventful. Anyone looking for a quick but satisfying read should pick this up. ( )

> L'histoire folle d'un homme étrange qui réussit à jeter le trouble autour de lui et à se couper du monde. --L'Express

> Bartleby, par Herman Melville
Par Marianne PAYOT, publié le 04/07/2012 à 16:00
"I would prefer not to" ("J'aimerais mieux pas", ou "Je préférerais pas") : répétée inlassablement à son patron par Bartleby, copiste dans un cabinet de Wall Street, cette phrase rythme l'histoire folle d'un homme étrange qui réussit à jeter le trouble autour de lui et à se couper du monde. Daniel Pennac, on le sait, s'est tellement enthousiasmé pour la nouvelle de Melville (1819-1891), qu'il l'a jouée sur scène de multiples fois. Ici, c'est Linda Lê qui dit toute son admiration pour Bartleby : "Mine de rien, le scribe à la "douceur magique" dynamite les conventions, sape l'autorité ; en cela, il a été comme un modèle, un guide, même si, sans doute, il préférerait ne l'être pour personne…" Bartleby est suivi de deux récits, Les Iles enchantées et Le Campanile. --L'Express

Very Peculiar.

No one ever said Melville was a great writer. No wait, yes they did. However I prefer not to say that. This book shows me, a lover of old literature, that not all old books are good. I read this first while in high school in the early 80s, and I liked it. Perhaps because I could overlay whatever analysis I wanted on the one dimensional characters and zero dimensional plot. Reading it again today, I find it verbose and meaningless. And not meaningless in a philosophically waxing way. I certainly don't see the comparisons in content or craft to Camus or Kafka. ( )

I read "Bartleby the Scrivener" as I was told it was a good introduction to Herman Melville because it was short, accessible and showed how ahead of his time Melville was.

All of those things turned out to be true but especially the last.

"Bartleby The Scrivener" was published in 1853, the same year that Dickens published "Bleak House". It's set in the offices of a commercial lawyer on Wall Street and tells the story of a scrivener, (a clerk who hand-writes multiple copies of long legal documents) who changes the heartbeat of his office by greeting all requests to leave his desk and or check he work of others with the phrase; "I would prefer not to, sir"

The opening of the story is very much of its time. The narrator sets about telling his tale much as he might if he was addressing members of his club over an after dinner brandy. There's lots of extraneous detail and the pace is unhurried and the path a little circuitous. Except that this conventional opening is less an attribute of Melville's approach to narrative and more a way of establishing the conventional, conflict-averse, unambitious nature of the narrator. It becomes clear that he is a man whose life has contained few challenges and who has a tendency toward the droll rather than the dramatic. His inability or at least unwillingness to confront Bartleby’s oblique refusals to comply with reasonable request to do his job provides the platform for the humour in the first half of the story. It is amusing but not very, by modern standards but it does cast a light on how offices then were run and the relationship between lawyer and clerk.

One thing that caught me by surprise was that the lawyer/narrator described Bartleby’s behaviour as passive aggression. Passive aggression is a familiar and often misused label today but it did not emerge as a clinical definition until ninety years after Melville wrote this story.

In the second half of the novella, the tone darkens, Barlleby’s behaviour becomes more extreme and our lawyer/narrator moves from amusement through annoyance and finally arrives at sadness as it becomes clear how damaged Bartleby is.

It seemed to me that what initially appeared to be a lighthearted tale of office disobedience became something much more profound: a contemplation on our inability and or our unwillingness to recognise mental illness and shows how our reactions can swiftly move from sympathy to punishment if the behaviours of the mentally ill person challenge our worldview. Melville’s mild-mannered, educated and self-consciously charitable lawyer’s progression from amusement through to empathy is shaped by an only partly voiced concern that the behaviours of the mentally ill are somehow contagious (knowing that this is not true does not dissippate the lawyer’s fear but rather strengthens his worries about the fragility of his own mind.

I was impressed by Melville’s subtlety, by the amount of menace he managed to create in a tale that started off as mildly absurd and most of all for his view of mental illness. ( )