Few short stories have occasioned as much critical commentary as Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." Since 1960, approximately thirty journal articles have debated the various interpretations of the first of Melville's magazine fiction, which followed close upon the popular displeasure with Pierre and Moby-Dick.1 The story remains unresolved, an open invitation to cryptic explanations, and an enduring challenge for any perceptive reader who chooses to comment upon "Melville's most artistically successful and thematically enigmatic tale." First published in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in two issues of 1853, Melville collected the tale a few years later in his Piazza Tales volume of short stories (1856).2 Many readers were convinced that the anonymous magazine story of Bartleby, the scrivener who preferred to copy no longer, bore a biographical resemblance to Melville, who gave up writing longer fiction because the kind of novel he preferred to write did not sell.
The biographical interpretation of Bartleby usually not only compares Melville with the scrivener who prefers not to copy, but also draws parallels with such details of the story as Bartleby's eyestrain and Melville's eye trouble, the dead letters and Melville's unpopular manuscripts, and even with the flames that consume the post office letters and the fire "that gutted the quarters of his publisher, Harper's, in the year the story was written, destroying the plates of all his novels, and almost all the printed copies of his books." Other biographical interpretations have also been offered. Bartleby is no longer Melville, but one of Melville's acquaintances, such as Eli James Murdock Fly, an unhappy scrivener, or George Adler, confined in an asylum because of severe agoraphobia.
Moving away from the biographical readings, several commentators have discussed the story in terms of an artist-allegory. Bartleby becomes the typical frustrated nineteenth-century American man of letters who finds no welcome in society. Another interpretation holds the story as an account of Melville's reductio ad absurdum of the overdone individualism of Henry David Thoreau. With some sense of relief, a number of critics have preferred to eschew all allegorical parallels and assert that "Bartleby as representative man is certainly more interesting than Bartleby as author, or than Bartleby as Melville."
In the discussion of the relationship of Bartleby and of the lawyer a diversity of opinion prevails. For some critics Bartleby is an "innocent," a "Christ-figure,"and a "typical Melville isolato," while to others his behavior is categorized as "schizophrenia" or as "perversity." Taking a lead from Poe's "William Wilson," one commentator considers Bartleby as the lawyer's "doppelganger," and the lawyer himself calls Bartleby his "incubus."
The identity of the lawyer also has occasioned a diversity of opinion. According to the biographical theory, he bears a resemblance to Lemuel Shaw, both Chief Justice of Massachusetts and Melville's father-in-law. Though Shaw was generous in financial support of the Melville family, the novelist never felt comfortable with the judge. Moreover, Melville's brother, Allan, practiced law on Wall Street.
Characterizations of the lawyer run the spectrum from "narrator-God" and "fate" to "representative benevolent rationalist," "nineteenth-century utilitarian," and "the complacent representative American." Several critics conclude the lawyer is "eminently decent," "a model of Christian humaneness," and "certainly the most charitable character in the story." Others judge the lawyer to be "one of Melville's bachelors, a man uncommitted to life," somewhat "self-deluded, not hypocritical," and a figure who "invites an association with Judas."
If the characters turn up sometimes heads, sometimes tails in the critical literature, it is no surprise that the overall story has stimulated opposite evaluations. Some commentators conclude that "Bartleby" reflects the "nihilistic meaning of life" or a "metaphysical negation" in place of predestinarianism. Others propose Gandhi's passive resistance and Buddha's quietude as a final meaning. Finally, to make the divided picture complete, there is no agreement, not only about what the story means, but also concerning whom the story is about. Some critics claim "Bartleby" is actually the lawyer's story, since we learn everything about him and practically nothing about his scrivener. Differences are reconciled by those who propose the story belongs to both main characters, or who offer an interpretation that even includes the reader as "representative man."
To place the lawyer in the dock, and to make a case against him as well as a reply in his defense, will depend in fairness upon what standards of justice are to be applied. Shall the court judge him by a humanitarian ethic, or by a gospel standard? Is the latter to be interpreted strictly in an evangelical tradition, i.e., unconditional demands and unconditional acceptance, or are the moral imperatives of the Scriptures to be tempered by reason and good judgment (even Paul said, "if any would not work, neither shall he eat" II Thess. 3:10)? No such distinctions are followed thoroughly in the lawyer's behavior, and perhaps "Bartleby" is such a poignant story precisely because the lawyer in his ambiguity represents the typical modern American, who is both secular and religious, who can neither believe nor disbelieve, as Hawthorne said of Melville himself.
Let us take a look at the record. The lawyer, "a rather elderly man," considers his multiple contacts with scriveners, whose "divers histories" might make "good natured gentlemen smile" and "sentimental souls weep," a part of his avocation. From the beginning he appears to be a disinterested observer who collects the eccentric stories of clerical laborers. Bartleby is a prize specimen in his collection, since the lawyer alone through personal observation knows what little is ascertainable about Bartleby. How callous toward human misery such a hobby might prove to be remains in question.
In his own character defense the lawyer volunteers the following information. "Imprimis: 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" (p. 16). Content to "do a snug business among rich men's bonds, and mortgages, and title-deeds," he cherishes his "peace" above the usual "ambitions" and turbulence of his colleagues at law, who must go to court and face a jury and judge. The reader may well conclude that Bartleby's employer is somewhat self-righteous, complacent about the dominant business ethic, and quite willing to have peace at any price. His acquaintances consider him "safe" and the late John Jacob Astor, mentioned as a name-dropping aside, praised him most for "prudence" and then "method." The lawyer lays no claim to the courage and risk of a prophetic man. His rhetoric contains a humility that sounds assumed: "not unemployed" by John Jacob Astor and "not insensible" to his good opinion. The very rich and the strong he adulates openly.
His anger, which he seldom indulges "in dangerous indignation at wrongs and outrages," he vents upon the supposedly unjust repeal of an outdated sinecure, the Master of Chancery, whose profits he had counted upon for a "life-lease." Peace at any price apparently does not include a threat to the lawyer's own interests. The new State Constitution, which abolished the "chancery" office, is judged to have acted with a "sudden and violent abrogation," not the usual adjectives for democratic constitutional changes.
The lawyer's attitude toward his several employees appears to be almost entirely utilitarian. He keeps them to the extent they prove useful to him. One exception stands out. Thinking to put Turkey on half time because of old age, he relents when Turkey reminds him he too was growing old. Nippers, who is not old, suffers under the mechanical and thoughtless routine of a human copy-machine. Muscle tension makes him irritable, and the six-day week with hours until 6:00 P. M. compounds his difficulty. His employer, however, judges Nippers to be too "ambitious." Similarly, after giving a coat to Turkey to make his appearance more presentable for business reasons, he concludes that new clothes breed only "insolence." Turkey becomes "a man whom prosperity harmed." Ginger Nut, the office boy of twelve years of age, works for a dollar a week, and the drawer to his desk is not considered private. Upon acquiring more business, the lawyer determines, "not only must I push the clerks already with me, but I must have additional help" (p. 23). In short, the employer seems exclusively productivity-minded and quite willing to manipulate and exploit his employees for his own ends, according to a business-is-business ethic.
When Bartleby is hired, he proves an industrious scrivener, until his uncompromising refusal to do any proof-reading for his employer. Because Bartleby evinces no anger or impertinence in his manner, he deflects the righteous anger of his superior, who, however, admits that "had there been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises" (p. 25). "Ordinarily human" behavior is apparently not tolerated. The second time Bartleby refuses to read "copy" the account continues: "With any other man I should have flown outright into a dreadful passion, scorned all further words, and thrust him ignominiously from my presence. But there was something about Bartleby that not only strangely disarmed me, but, in a wonderful manner, touched and disconcerted me. I began to reason with him" (p. 26). Blind obedience from all employees is presumed, but in Bartleby's special case a reasonable approach to obedience will be tried out.
The worst condemnation of the lawyer, however, comes from his own mouth in the many unexamined explanations of his motives. Deciding to tolerate Bartleby's eccentricities and insubordination as involuntary and deserving of some human compassion, he triumphantly recounts, "here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval" (p. 28). Charity is a bargain, and virtue is its own reward.
On a Sunday the lawyer-narrator visits Trinity Church at the foot of Wall Street in order to hear an extraordinary sermon. He indicates his belief in the "proprieties" of the Christian Sabbath. According to custom it should be a day of rest. Stopping briefly at his law office, he discovers Bartleby, who apparently was making use of the apartments for his lodging. In his plight, alone on Wall Street of a Sunday, Bartleby evokes a compassionate response from his employer: "The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam" (p. 33).
The lawyer's solidarity with the human condition is short-lived, however. He searches Bartleby's desk after he leaves under the excuse that "the desk is mine." Diagnosing Bartleby's misery as an "incurable disorder" of the soul rather than the body, he concludes that whenever "pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul be rid of it" (p. 35). When virtue does not become its own reward in self-satisfaction and therefore standing at the foot of the cross remains the only help at hand, the lawyer turns away from Bartleby's misery. Faced with the inadequacy of any merely "social gospel," he feels disqualified to attend services at Trinity Church on this particular Sunday.
Exasperated at "no remedy" for Bartleby, he resolves to send him away, as decently and as well provided for as possible. But, Bartleby prefers not to leave, even with generous severance pay. His employer reveals something of his mixed motives by adding "ungratefulness" to the catalog of complaints against his clerk. When Bartleby develops eyestrain, however, the lawyer briefly recovers his compassion, only to lose it all when it appears Bartleby intends to give up copying for good, regardless of whether his eyesight improves. Trapped by the intransigence and inscrutability of the scrivener, the lawyer decides Bartleby must go away. Again the employee does not share his employer's assumptions that "depart he must." When challenged with the logic of private property ("What earthly right have you to stay here?" (p. 423), Bartleby proves himself to the end a "man of preferences rather than assumptions."
Finally, tempted to the brink of violence by Bartleby's passivity, the lawyer turns to the gospel ethic, "A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another" (p. 43). His dominant motive for keeping the commandment appears to be, however, that charity is the best policy. "Mere self-interest, then, if no better motive can be enlisted, should, especially with high-tempered men, prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy" (p. 43). Even common sense knows that.
Hard pressed for some intellectual justification as well as reasons of the heart, the lawyer proposes to himself that his religious mission in this world might well be to provide a safe refuge for Bartleby, according to "some mysterious purpose of an allwise Providence" (p. 44). His providential mission collapses, however, given some mild pressure from his law friends, who deride Bartleby and raise fear in the narrator that his business might suffer the consequences of his unexplained behavior in befriending a scrivener who does not work. Reluctantly and somewhat guiltily he moves his chambers to a new address and leaves Bartleby, who would not quit him and who had become an "intolerable incubus."
The "history" of Bartleby then draws to a close swiftly and tragically. Haunting the now deserted premises, he becomes a nuisance to the new tenant. The landlord tries to place responsibility on the shoulders of the lawyer, but three times in Peter-like fashion he insists that "the man you allude to is nothing to me" (p. 47).3 Pressed upon to take care of Bartleby or suffer the consequences, the lawyer makes Bartleby a magnanimous invitation to come home with him. An unforeseen future and an unconditional involvement in Bartleby's life could be required from such open generosity. But Bartleby refuses. Thoroughly bewildered, the lawyer escapes into travel, while the law takes its course and Bartleby is led at noon amid a procession of onlookers to the Tombs (New York City jail).
Even now, the lawyer feels compassion for Bartleby, abandoned among "thieves and murderers." Money he can and will provide, so that any of Bartleby's needs will be taken care of. The extra services of the "grub man," however, do not tempt Bartleby to eat. "I know where I am," he cryptically replies. Walled in again on all sides, imprisoned in a limited and limiting human condition, unable to be an absolutely free self, Bartleby dies curled up like a foetus at the base of the thick Egyptian pyramid-like stone walls. At the end, the lawyer recognizes sadly that all helps to Bartleby were received like "dead letters," delivered too late or not at all. With sudden insight into his employee, who apparently worked long before in the Dead Letter Office, he recognizes in Bartleby's aloneness the larger implications of the imperfect human condition: "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!"
Although I know of no other article that gives the lawyer's case as detailed an exposition as I have just completed, many verdicts have already been handed down. Few commentators judge the lawyer's character to be "black or white," and the more plausible critiques treat the gray shadings that Melville readers anticipate.
H. Bruce Franklin poses this problem, "Can the narrator, the man of our world, act in terms of Christ's ethics? The answer is yes and no." The lawyer fulfills all the injunctions of Matthew 25 concerning corporal works of mercy, but he keeps only the letter of the law and not the spirit. Furthermore, he finally betrays Bartleby. A somewhat harsher verdict is brought in by Kingsley Widmer, who judges the lawyer's "caritas as the product of `mere self-interest.'" The story manifests "a generosity which reveals both incomprehension and contempt" and further "shows the obtuseness of such rationality and the brutality of such decency."4
The most condemnatory verdict, however, would seem to be W. B. Stein's judgment that Bartleby's employer through "inadverdent revelations of his corruption" demonstrates the "hypocrisy of contemporary Christianity."5 Verdicts which, to the contrary, establish the lawyer as hero, or at least as sinner converted, are also not lacking. Sculley Bradley argues that the narrator was won over to Bartleby's side: "the gradual unfolding of the lawyer's human understanding, responding to Bartleby's passive resistance against all that he is or serves, until he is on Bartleby's side-- this theme is perhaps central."6 And Leo Marx proposes that at the end in the Tombs, where life in terms of sky and earth can still reach, grace is given only to the lawyer, who alone is "aware of the grass and to whom, therefore, the meaning is finally granted."7
Of all the final judgments, however, the most challenging, and I think the most valid, remain those which pose the lawyer's case in terms of an irremediable dilemma and a permanently hung jury. One critic offers an interpretation that emphasizes the perennial tension between individual freedom and social responsibility--an obvious polarity, but a helpful starting point. No formula, of course, will satisfactorily balance these two competing claims, and Melville's story does not succeed in proposing a solution that could easily be applied to Bartleby's nonnegotiable demands to be himself.
Beyond the Thoreau-without-a-pond dilemma, there loom metaphysical quandaries that transfer the story to a profound existential level. Newton Arvin was the earliest critic to point out this dilemma in Bartleby, wherein lawyer and scrivener are both to be blamed and to be compassioned, according to the "cosmic irony of the truth that men are at once immitigably interdependent and immitigably forlorn."8 In the same vein Richard Fogle writes that the lawyer discovers in Bartleby "an everlasting sign: there is evil in the world, and irremediable suffering, which good will cannot touch, nor good judgment avoid."9
The existential interpretation of Bartleby, which pivots the story around the irreducible limitations of human finiteness, is treated at length in two recent articles. Maurice Friedman comments: "The guilt of the employer is here no moral one. It is the guilt of human existence itself, the guilt that every man feels when his responsibility for another is unlimited while his resources are limited."10 In what is perhaps the most thoughtful single monograph about "Bartleby," Norman Springer comes to a similar conclusion. The "education" of the lawyer, which takes place throughout the story, culminates in his awareness of the dilemma of existence as such: "To his credit, the 'terrible' which he sees is the strictly limited nature of his own pity and his perception that inherent in human beings is the incapacity for infinite pity." Furthermore, the lawyer recognizes that this unresolved tension creates an awareness that is terrible precisely "in that he cannot do anything about it, and at the same time cannot adequately explain or understand why he is accountable."11
Having considered closely the data concerning the lawyer in the story itself, and having surveyed the conclusions of the rather large number of commentaries on "Bartleby," what kind of overall picture emerges? First of all, it seems well established that Melville's story does indeed center around the lawyer as main character, for we learn everything about him and almost nothing about Bartleby, except as seen and interpreted by the lawyer himself. That the lawyer is proud, complacent, ethically smug, an exploiter of his employees, and an uncritical supporter of the social and economic status quo seems undeniable. That he also attempts, following his own lights, to feed, clothe, shelter, and visit Bartleby in prison according to the Gospel mandates seems equally indisputable.
The various strategies of the lawyer cover the spectrum from "common sense, authority, . . . flight, morality, and even at the end, reverence."12 None of them, of course, comes close to grappling with the existential dilemma of the human condition, i.e., the mystery of being, the questioning of truth, and the boundlessness of spiritual freedom, which is ultimately the core of any human preference. "I want to" because "I want to" remains a subjectivity that a Wall Street objectivity concerning decisions will never comprehend. In some ways Bartleby appears as forerunner of Camus's Stranger and Kafka's Mr. K.
The failure of common sense is nowhere more apparent than in the lawyer's goal to make Bartleby adjusted to normal social life, as if social adjustment could substitute for a failure of metaphysical adjustment to the essential fragility, aloneness, and unsharable responsibility of the individual before the naked light of self-existence. To be capable of unlimited knowledge and unlimited freedom, and yet to be surrounded in fact by walls should be maddening. Whether the walls are brick, glass, prison walls, pyramid walls, or the lawyer's intellectual walls, made of assumptions that isolated as well as insulated him from his fellow man, makes little difference. Like Ahab, every Bartleby recognizes that finite solutions avail not at all in solving transcendent questions of why anything, why evil, why good, why go on, why choose? Why "why"? As the book of Job so dramatically exclaims, "Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? . . . For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest, with kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves" (Job 3:11-14; reference to this passage is made by the lawyer when he learns of Bartleby's death).
What finally is behind the wall, behind the mask, behind all the goals of self-adjustment in society? What grounds are presupposed in the exercise of common sense, without which common sense becomes a variety of folly just as grotesque as the "neurotic" behavior of an apparently social misfit like Bartleby? History records no justice in this world, and the lawyer who does not recognize the radical failure of all law practices to relieve the misery of humanity, though reasonable laws may be the best strategy available to mankind, becomes a man walled into a very narrow world, without grace, mercy, mystery, and ultimately without any destiny that transcends and beckons toward some unmerited entree into the good life.
What the lawyer fails to grasp, of course, and what common sense always fails to comprehend, is that there exists no remedy for finiteness, "no exit" from the sentence of death and the encroachments of nonbeing. Common sense presupposes certain assumptions, boundaries unchallenged, unexamined, and often unconfessed. To acknowledge these walls on every side and to accept the terror of the unknown beyond them involves risking the kind of paralysis or impotence to do anything at all that inflicts Bartleby. Bartleby remains a metaphysical question mark, which must always escape the understanding and practicality of the law, based as it is on common sense. Melville recognized the core vulnerability of all men and all cultures, which stretch out a historically conditioned and somewhat arbitrary bridge over the ever-surrounding formlessness. That insight into mystery and that lesson in humility escaped the lawyer, whose common sense broke down only for a moment now and then, when he recognized the radical aloneness of all men before the wall, beyond which communication is limited to so many "dead letters."
Nicholas Ayo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Portland.
1 See Donald Fiene, "A Bibliography of Criticism of 'Bartleby the Scrivener'" in Melville Annual 1965, a Symposium: Bartleby the Scrivener, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1966), pp. 140-90. The annotated bibliography contains 117 entries.
2 All references to the text come from Piazza Tales, ed. Egbert S. Oliver (New York: Hendricks House, Farrar Straus, 1948), pp. 16-54. The text is based upon Melville's first book edition, which revised slightly the text in Putnam's.
3 For an elaboration of this point, see H. Bruce Franklin, "Bartleby: the Ascetic's Advent" in The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1963), pp. 127-36.
4 Negative Affirmation: Melville's 'Bartleby,'" Modern Fiction Studies, 8 (1962), 283.
5 "Bartleby: the Christian Conscience," Melville Annual 1965, p. 105.
6 The American Tradition in Literature, ed. Sculley Bradley, R. C. Beatty, and E. H. Long, Revised (New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1961), I, 962.
7 "Melville's Parable of the Walls," Sewanee Review, 61 (1953), 626.
8 Herman Melville (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1950), p. 243.
9 Melville's Shorter Tales (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), p. 17.
10 "Bartleby and the Modern Exile," Melville Annual 1965, p. 75.
11 "Bartleby and the Terror of Limitation," PMLA, 80 (1965), 412, 417.
12 Widmer, pp. 285-86.
*Arizona Quarterly 28 (1972), 27-38. Reprinted by permission.