CHAPTER TEN

Melville's "Bartleby" and Carlyle

MARIO L. D'AVANZO*
Providence College

Of the several interpretations of "Bartleby" in recent years none have identified Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Heroes and Hero Worship as sources and keys to an understanding of Melville's short story. These two works are references or points of departure for Melville, and when properly collated with "Bartleby" can lead to some valuable insights into the complex character of Bartleby (particularly the nature of his malaise), the theme of the artist in society, the use of point-of-view, the ironies of the story, and the symbolic dimensions of Melville's language.

Jay Leyda and Lawrance Thompson have commented on the value of Melville's use of source material as a way to understanding Moby Dick, Pierre, Billy Budd, and some of the short stories.¹ Leyda remarks, by way of example, that a reading of Cotton Mather's chapter on thunder in Magnalia Christi Americana strikes to the kernel of meaning of "The Lightning-Rod Man." Further, he explains that Melville's theme is so devastating that the artist must write by concealment and camouflage.

We are compelled to regard these stories as an artist's resolution of that constant contradiction--between the desperate need to communicate and the fear of revealing too much. . . . In "The Tartarus of Maids" Melville gives one the impression of seeing how close he can dance to the edge of nineteenth century sanctities without being caught.²

Taking Leyda's observations, Thompson has gone further in identifying Melville's novels as ironic paraphrases or inversions of the Bible and the writings of Plato, Calvin, Carlyle, and other transcendentalists. Though overstating his argument, Thompson is generally correct in claiming that Melville is a master ironist whose use of source and allusion in his literature often served the purpose of subtly disguising an ingrained skepticism and religious dissent. Of Carlyle's influence on Melville he states:

both Carlyle and Melville were approaching the same basically religious and philosophical problems from diametrically opposed viewpoints.³

In Sartor Resartus, which Melville read in 185O,⁴ three years before writing "Bartleby," Carlyle's transcendentalism served as a reference against which Melville waged dialectic warfare; the Godless, God-like Ahab assumes the role of Teufelsdröckh.⁵ Thompson's point is here convincingly made: Melville felt so uncomfortable over the facile idealism arrived at by Carlyle towards the end of Sartor Resartus that he was forced to retaliate by conceiving the character of Ahab. That Melville's preoccupation with the tortured, defiant, isolated character of Ahab did not die out can be seen in his portrait of Bartleby; however, Bartleby's defiance and negativism are not at all active, but wholly passive. Melville, it would seem, by a turn of the screw, creates a totally uncommitted character who is a "victim of innate and incurable disorder,"⁶ unable or unwilling to cope with whatever unnamed force is immobilizing him. Bartleby's malaise is fundamentally spiritual, a fact which critics too often overlook. The narrator remarks tellingly, "it was his soul that suffered" (p. 25). The exact nature of Bartleby's spiritual paralysis cannot be fathomed precisely in the story itself. Yet the narrator provides a clue as to where some insights might be had. He states:

Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from original sources, and in his case those are very small. (p. 3)

What are we to make of this statement, coming at the beginning of the story? If the narrator himself does not have access to the "original sources," who then does? And how does he know that there are any sources? I suggest that the possibilities of interpretation lie in an answer to these questions. It would not be past Melville to be speaking behind his invented point-of-view here, giving the reader a subtle hint that Bartleby's character is somehow involved in and takes on meaning in other contexts or "original sources." I submit that the sources are Sartor Resartus and, to a lesser degree of importance, Heroes and Hero Worship, and that Bartleby's malaise is an ironic inversion of the spiritual development of Professor Diogenes Teufelsdrökh and the Carlylean hero as a man of letters.

A review of Teufelsdrökh's spiritual growth in Sartor Resartus seems necessary at this point if we are to understand the decline and death of Bartleby as a carefully contrived counterpoint played against Carlyle's hero. Briefly, Teufelsdrokh's progress of the soul moves from negation ("The Everlasting No") to apathy ("The Centre of Indifference"). By a leap of faith he arrives at affirmation in God ("The Everlasting Yea"). Integration, harmony, and order are shaped out of the chaos around him. Man fulfills himself spiritually in work, or as Carlyle states:

Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. . . . Know what thou canst work at. . . . Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by Action . . . . Whoso walks and works, it is well with him. . . . Yes here in this poor, miserable, hampered despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself. . . . Produce! Produce! were it but the pitifulest infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it, in God's name!⁷

Bartleby's repeated remark, "I would prefer not to," negates life, involvement, and the putative spiritual fulfillment in work. His progress moves from commitment to labor to indifference and then to utter negation. "I would prefer not to" is a genteel way of expressing The Everlasting No firmly, willfully, and irrevocably. And the turning point in the story comes in his first and ultimate refusal to do work, a decision that is tantamount to denying God's benevolence, man's divinity, and the meaningfulness of the natural universe. This attitude is, it would seem, the "paramount consideration prevail[ing] within him to reply as he did" (p. 15). Duty has no meaning for Bartleby as it had for Carlyle, who claims that it is a "divine Messenger and Guide" (SR p. 159). And duty involves not only work, but faith in God; "without it," states Carlyle, 'Worldlings puke-up their sick existence by suicide, in the midst of luxury" (SR p. 159). Bartleby's self-willed starvation is suicide, which Teufelsdröckh, in his lowest point of negation, was tempted to commit.

Before proceeding to a closer analysis of character, setting, and incident in order further to substantiate my claims, it is necessary to make a few remarks on the narrator of "Bartleby"; for it is his "Story of Wall Street" and his account of the main character. Interpretation depends solely on what he sees, surmises and reports about Bartleby. Obviously if the story were told from Bartleby's point of view, then the tone and mood, the tension, mystery and dramatic force would be vastly altered. The lawyer-narrator should be regarded as a Benthamite in the establishment that is Wall Street. The morality of his actions is rooted in an expediency that can be identified as utilitarianism.⁸ He is motivated by self-interest; he pursues the easiest and snuggest way of life; he governs his office by observing the principle of laissez-faire by allowing his employees considerable free play. He would attempt to achieve harmony in his office, and happiness for Bartleby by personal kindnesses and care. He would meet crises by utilitarian acts of charity in order to produce happiness and accord for all. All his acts and ideas seem to conform to the doctrines of Benthamism.⁹ His values are sufficient for the legalistically oriented world of getting and spending, of which he is a ranking officer. He has been identified as a man of reason and Bartleby as a man of unreason.¹⁰ And yet there is a lurking suspicion in the narrator that Bartleby harbors values that may be superior to the lawyer's, perhaps more reasonable. That the narrator is solicitous, charitable, and accommodating there can be no doubt. But he represents an ethos which Bartleby has chosen to confront and reject just as Carlyle in "The Hero as a Man of Letters" rejects the creeping ethics of Benthamism as a heathen and Philistine creed paralyzing the spirit of man, particularly his creative spirit. The narrator, in reviewing Bartleby's recalcitrance, is shaken in his faith. "He begins," Melville writes, "to stagger in his own faith. He begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side" (p. 15).

But the lawyer would still regard his employee in terms of reason. Here Carlyle as a source provides a helpful clue in ascertaining the role and character of the narrator as Bartleby's antagonist. Teufelsdröckh identifies those mundane men who reduce everything--including the mysterious, the mystical, the apparently unreasonable--as Attorneys of "vacancy and vocables":

Thou wilt have no mystery and Mysticism; wilt walk through thy world by the sunshine of what thou callest Truth, or even by the hand-lamp of what I call Attorney-Logic; and "explain" all, "account" for all, or believe nothing of it? Nay, thou wilt attempt laughter. (SR pp. 69, 116. Italics mine)

To the end, the lawyer cannot fully fathom Bartleby precisely because he exercises "Attorney-Logic"; his role is that of Benthamite-adversary harboring values that Bartleby implicitly rejects. Because of his limitations, he remains narrator and not interpreter.

In his function as narrator the lawyer parallels the puzzled narrator of Sartor Resartus, who has only the fragments of Teufelsdröckh's writings in front of him. The readers of both Sartor Resartus and "Bartleby" are invited to puzzle out for themselves the fragmentary incidents of the main characters' lives by using their imagination and whatever sources they might have at hand. The lawyer remarks at the outset:

I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener, the strangest I ever saw, or heard of. While of other law copyists, I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe no materials exist, for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable. (p. 3)

To the myopic utilitarian, insight into the spirit remains an impossibility. Carlyle imposes a like degree of difficulty in interpreting the inner spirit of Teufelsdröckh, a difficulty rooted in his choice of point-of-view. Note how the following passages in Sartor Resartus present the same epistemologic quandary found in the narrator of Bartleby" (quoted above):

Would to Heaven those same Biographical Documents were come! For it seems as if the demonstration lay much in the Author's individuality; as if it were not Argument that had taught him, but experience. At present it is only in local glimpses, and by significant fragments, picked often at wide enough intervals from the original Volume and carefully collated, that we can hope to impart some outline or forshadow of this Doctrine. . . .

Biography or Autobiography, of Teufelsdrokh there is, clearly enough, none to be gleaned here; at most some sketchy, shadowy fugitive likeness of him may, by unheard-of-efforts, partly of intellect, partly of imagination, on the side of the Editor and of Reader, rise up between them. (SR pp. 52, 79)

If Carlyle seems to have impressed on Melville the fact that "nothing is ascertainable," he also appears to have provided him the technique of expressing that tentativeness; for the wrought quality of "Bartleby's" point-of-view (as a device and as a character) has the unique Carlylean stamp.

Because the narrator's faith in the rightness of his values is shaken, he is softened to Bartleby. I have stated that he is well-intentioned, in fact a Benthamite. He can hope to reason with Bartleby and thus educate him to the ways of respectable society. And one of his prudential, sanctified, and Christian acts is charity. He resolves that:

To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange wilfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience. (p. 17)

There is even "profit" in this excellent endeavor. But it is "Attorney-Logic," the golden rule of society that assumes that spiritual unhappiness and sickness can be surmounted by charity. In the section on "Attorney-Logic" in Sartor Resartus, Teufelsdröckh attacks the sand-blind pedant," the myopic do-gooders who attempt to cure, by charity, the delirious victims of spiritual uncertainty:

whoso recognizes the unfathomable, all-pervading domain of Mystery, which is everywhere under our feet and among our hands; to whom the Universe is an Oracle and Temple, as well as a Kitchen and Cattle stall,--he shall be a delirious Mystic; to him thou with sniffing charity, wilt protrusively proffer thy hand-lamp, and shriek, as one injured, when he kicks his foot through it?--Armer Tenfel. . . . Retire into private places with thy foolish cackle; or, what were better, give it up, and weep, not that thy reign of wonder is done, and God's world all disembellished and prosaic, but that thou hitherto art a Dilletante and sandblind pedant. (SR pp. 69-70)

Thus Carlyle judges those sniffing attorneys who proffer the handlamp of charity, radiating a dull earthly light. There is no comfort here, as there is no comfort to Bartleby. But the passage goes deeper into Melville's quick, adaptive imagination: it suggests to Melville how his lawyer will react when his charity is rejected by Bartleby and misunderstood by others. While the lawyer thinks that he has thrown the "old Adam of resentment" by offering charity "often operating as a vastly wise and prudent principle" (p. 24), he is in fact meddling and is paid his Carlylean wages by Melville. He is forced to "retire into private places"--almost living in his rockaway for the time, in which, as he says, "I drove about the upper part of the town and through the suburbs . . . crossed over to Jersey City and Hoboken, and paid fugitive visits to Manhattanville and Astoria" (p. 24).

Because the lawyer is repeatedly rebuffed in his acts of charity, he becomes despondent. To the reasonable man everything must be reasoned. The lawyer finds comfort in reading "Edwards on the Will" and "Priestly on Necessity." Bartleby's presence and behavior now becomes clear to the narrator. He concludes that "these troubles of mine, touching the scrivener, had been all predestinated from eternity, and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an all-wise Providence, which it was not for a mere mortal like me to fathom. . . . I penetrate to the predestinated purpose of my life. I am content" (p. 35). Here the narrator remains in character. He stated earlier that the "easiest way of life is the best"; and, certainly, resigning everything smugly to necessity at the same time smothers the "old Adam of resentment" in him.

Bartleby, in contrast, is free-willed--"wilful" as his employer describes him. And the repeated remark, "I would prefer not to" is a statement of choice. The basic opposition or contrast has its significance; for in his exercise of will, Bartleby denies the way of thinking and also the way of life that the lawyer stands for. We may see in Melville's source what allegorical implications are involved in "Bartleby's" main characters. Both Bartleby and the lawyer carry on in subtle fashion the philosophical warfare that raged throughout Moby Dick, the relationship between fate and free will. Note how in this regard Sartor Resartus informs us of the meaning of "Bartleby." Teufelsdröckh remarks:

Not so easily can the old Adam, lodged in us by birth, be dispossessed. Our life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force: thus have we a warfare; in the beginning, especially, a hard fought battle. For the God-given mandate, "Work thou in Welldoing," lies mysteriously written . . . in our hearts . . . till it burn forth, in our conduct, a visible acted Gospel of Freedom. (SR pp. 183-84)

Melville's dissent and irony in "Bartleby" stem from this passage. Working in "Welldoing" is necessitarian (the narrator sees the Divine Will behind his acts of charity): negating work and refusing good works is at least to be free.¹¹ Thus is Carlyle's idealism washed down the drain.

Melville does battle not only against necessitarian theology and the "divine injunction" of charity, but also against the vested authority and well-buttoned respectability of the lawyer. The lawyer-narrator, as we have seen, would base all distinctions and judgments on external appearances, never getting beneath the surface of Bartleby's actions to understand his soul. Melville carries these themes by using Carlyle's organizing metaphor of clothes. Note that at each moment of crisis, when he resolves to confront Bartleby with an ultimatum, he buttons up his coat. He is in effect symbolically performing the Carlylean ritual of hiding the eternal soul and presenting the temporal, authoritarian man-animal to his inferiorly dressed employees. And this distinction is, I feel, at the heart of the contrast and conflict between Bartleby and the lawyer. Carlyle remarks tellingly:

Teufelsdröckh undertakes no less than to expound the moral, political, even religious influences of Clothes; he undertakes to make manifest, in its thousandfold bearings, this grand Proposition, that Man's earthly interests "are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up by Clothes." He says in so many words, "society is founded upon cloth." (SR p. 51)

Conventional morality, polity and class distinctions, in fact all "earthly interest"--that which Bartleby is rebelling against--are all linked with the philosophy of clothes. Melville spends a good deal of space having his narrator account for the clothes of his underlings, all of whom are clearly discontented with their menial work. Nippers, the more mannerly of the clerks, "always dressed in a gentlemanly sort of way," and so, says the lawyer, "reflected credit upon my chambers" (p. 8). Turkey, the Englishman, however, wears "execrable coats" and "baggy pantaloons" which the lawyer would change for the sake of a better office appearance. In presenting his coat to Turkey, the lawyer would symbolically invest his employee with the values of his society, whose center is Wall Street. This act dramatizes Teufelsdröckh's proposition that "Man's earthly interests . . . are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up by clothes":

One winter day, I presented Turkey with a highly respectable-looking coat of my own--a padded gray coat, of a most comfortable warmth, and which buttoned straight up from the knee to the neck. (p. 9)

But Turkey's symbolic elevation, momentarily hooking and linking him to the temporal authority of the lawyer, has the singular effect of making him insolent. Carlyle's remark that "Clothes gave us individuality, distinctions and social polity; clothes have made men of us; they are threatening to make Clothes-Screens of us" (SR p. 41) provides the clue to interpret the abrupt and otherwise unaccountable change in Turkey's behavior. Melville, following Carlyle, regarded man's immersion wholly in the temporal world as an occasion of ruin or at least eclipse of his soul. The trinity of office workers in "Bartleby" represents the mundane world. Turkey, like most men in the world of getting and spending is "a man whom prosperity harmed" (p. 9).

And what of Bartleby in the world of clothes? Though he is described as "pallidly neat" and "pitiably respectable" (p. 11), we see him one Sunday "in his shirt sleeves, and otherwise in a strangely tattered dishabille, saying quietly that he was sorry, but he was deeply engaged just then" (p. 21). The lawyer is stunned by Bartleby's firmness and mystified by his semi-nudity. He dismisses the thought that Bartleby "would by any secular occupation violate the proprieties of the day" (p. 22). At yet another time in the story the lawyer cannot gain entrance to his office because Bartleby is "occupied." Because of the restricted point-of-view, we can know nothing of Bartleby's activities directly. But his state of "tattered dishabille" and the subsequent puzzlement of the lawyer provide a faint clue to the nature of Bartleby's activity. If Bartleby is not performing any secular occupation on Sunday perhaps it is spiritual. (We are reminded that his room is described as a "hermitage" on several occasions.) For interpretation we move again to Carlyle, who, through Teufelsdröckh, remarks in a chapter entitled "The World out of Clothes" that to the degree that man strips off his rags or "adventitious wrappings" (SR p. 57) he may see and examine his soul. And what he sees, according to Carlyle, may be "an unutterable mystery of Mysteries" (SR p. 57). He may also see what the "unaccommodated" Lear sees in his melancholy: the immense nothingness of the universe. It appears that Bartleby's Sunday occupation has something to do with the spirit and that what he sees is the source of his own melancholy forlornness. Teufelsdröckh's description of the speculative man's inward-turning regard for his soul may be regarded as the source defining the nature of Bartleby's Sunday "occupation":

"With men of speculative turn," writes Teufelsdröckh, "there come seasons, meditative sweet, yet awful hours, when in wonder and fear you ask yourself that unanswerable question: Who am I; the thing that can say 'I' (das Wesen das sich ICH nennt)? The world, with its loud trafficking, retires into the distance; and through the paper-hangings, and stone-walls, and thick-plied tissues of Commerce and Polity and all the living and lifeless integuments (of Society and a Body), wherewith your Existence sits surrounded,--the sight reaches forth into the void Deep, and you are alone with the Universe, and silently commune with it, as one mysterious Presence with another." ( SR p. 53)

This passage, I submit, dives to the heart of the meaning of Bartleby's enigmatic character, and to the proper interpretation of the story as a whole. Teufelsdröckh's physical and spiritual isolation in the midst of the integuments, wallpaper, and walls of commerce finds its precise counterpart in the hermitic isolation of Bartleby. The passage informs us of Bartleby's inner character, points to the anxiety in his soul, suggests the theme of the story, and accounts for Melville's use of image and setting. I shall have more to say about walls in "Bartleby" and Sartor Resartus. I should now like to turn to Wall Street itself, the citadel for Bartleby's meditations that ultimately drive him to complete isolation, negation and death.

Bartleby's "passive resistance" toward work, the ethos of Wall Street, and the Benthamite charity of his employer grows in the law office. Though never aggressive in his "pallid haughtiness" (p. 24), he has nonetheless come to Wall Street of his own volition and defies it. He could hardly be described as an infidel, storming the citadel to do battle with his adversary, but he does carry on a passive kind of guerrilla warfare. Why? Precisely because the tortured but still freely willing soul must confront its oppressor and do battle with it. Bartleby's "storming" of the citadel that is Wall Street takes its source and meaning in Carlyle's account of the embattled soul asserting itself:

For the fire-baptised soul, long so scathed and thunder-riven, here feels its own Freedom, which feeling is its Baphometic¹² Baptism: the citadel of its whole kingdom it has thus gained by assault, and will keep inexpugnable. (SR p. 169)

Beneath the surface of "Bartleby" (a surface of astonishing camouflage for Melville's underlying meaning), there is grimmest battle, though Melville's hero ironically carries it on so mildly and apparently passively; it ends in defeat for Bartleby, but in his dissent he remains heroic, a kind of Ahab without tragic vitality or aggressive authority. Yet as Carlyle and Melville suggest, heroism lies in asserting free will rather than in resignation to necessity. The paradox of Bartleby's character is this: he cannot change or subdue the Citadel (Wall Street)--as Carlyle asserts he can--but he can reject it and in this choice of action lies his freedom. Bartleby practices what Teufelsdröckh preaches: the man of spirit must confront, rebel and resist Tophet--i.e., all that Wall Street represents--even though it destroys him:

canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come then; I will meet and defy it. ( SR p. 167 )

Bartleby has his mandate in Teufelsdröckh. Tophet, Wall Street, the Citadel, the lawyer (they are all the same) must be confronted by the son of Man:

The clay must now be vanquished, or vanquish--should be carried of the spirit into grim Solitudes, and there fronting the Tempter do grimmest battle with him; defiantly setting him as naught, till he yield and fly. Name it as we choose: with or without visible Devil, whether in the natural Desert of rocks and sands, or in the populous moral Desert of selfishness and baseness,--to such Temptation we are all called. (SR p. 184, Italics mine)

The altar or inner sanctum of Wall Street is the office which fronts a "cistern" of huge walls. Here Bartleby performs his hermitic suffering, as Teufelsdröckh and Goethe did, but not for the purpose of spiritual growth and affirmation. Whereas Teufelsdröckh urges the man of spirit to withdraw into the temple of sorrow in order to grow in soul--"venture forward, in a low crypt, arched out of falling fragments, thou findest the Altar still there, and its sacred lamp perennially burning . . . thou canst love Earth while it injures thee, and even because it injures thee" (SR p. 193 )--Bartleby in ironic contrast, finds despair and spiritual paralysis in the temple of Mammon, massive and cistern-like. Teufelsdröckh's ruined temple accounts for the recurrent imagery of wreckage, destruction and abandonment associated with Bartleby. He is described as "the last column of some ruined temple" (p. 30), "a transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage" (p. 23); indeed Wall Street is the hub of secular worship, "deserted as Petra," an abandoned commercial city of Asia. Clearly, Wall Street and the age are identified as the Carlylean "age of Downpulling and Disbelief" and a "vast gloomy solitary Golgotha" (SR p. 164) for Bartleby, ultimately, since he is consigned to the Tombs and death.

Within the office at Wall Street, battle is done by copyists other than Bartleby. Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut wage rebellious war not against their employer directly but against their inane work. Being unfulfilled, they indulge in all sorts of neurotic behavior. Carlyle assumed that in creative work man's personality may grow out of the wreck of the real, though sham and illusory, world around him. In the Carlylean microcosm of "Bartleby," the work of the office scriveners reduces them to half-men who are able to work only half a day. Melville had in mind in rendering the spiritless, menial tasks of Turkey, Nippers and Ginger Nut the following significant passage in Sartor Resartus on the "moral desert of selfishness and baseness" that is Wall Street's labor and business:

Unhappy if we are but Half-men, in whom that divine handwriting has never blazed forth, all subduing, in true sun-splendor; but quivers dubiously amid meaner lights. (SR p. 184)

Melville's repeated references to "twelve o'clock meridian" has the function of calling attention to the halved day's work done by half-men. At twelve noon Turkey's work is, for all intents and purposes, done. Turkey does not "blaze forth" in divine handwriting (i.e., creative pursuit) but merely blazes in half-drunken resentment over the mechanical copying he must perform. Melville's description of Turkey closely follows Carlyle's passage, but with ironic intent. In the morning Turkey is "the blandest and most reverential of men" (p. 6) but after twelve o'clock he "blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals" (p. 5). His "inflamed," "reckless" condition reduces his work to red blots, whereupon he boxes his papers about in the manner of the pugilist that he is. His desk throughout the day is identified as a battlefield where in the morning "he but marshalls and deploys his columns." At least this part of his day's work involves some creative organization; but the afternoon is given to mere copying: "I put myself at their head and gallantly charge the foe thus" (p. 7). Turkey, after his namesake, is penned, prodded and driven by his driver.¹³ He insists on some form of imaginative, maybe even creative labor in the afternoon and so indulges in inertial capers. These are regarded as "his afternoon devotions"; his facial blazonry betokens a stimulation of his fancy, not by the Carlylean divine inspiration, but by alcohol. Withal, he is most oratorical, another hint of his need for the creative or imaginative life that his work cannot offer him.

Turkey's counterpart, Nippers. is also a half-man. He too works efficiently half the day. His discontent takes the form of indigestion, irritability, swearing, and a curious kind of ritualistic behavior at his work-desk. He is "exquisite" in his inventiveness toward the arrangement of his table, surely a compulsive act indicating a creative impulse within him that finds some release; but even this activity is unsatisfactory to him. Nippers "knew not what he wanted" (p. 8). Underlying the behavior of both Nippers and Turkey is a need to fill a spiritual or creative void within them and within the environment that fails to accommodate any creative life. Melville, it would seem, can sympathize with the ache of the spirit, or creative faculty "smoulder[ing], in dull pain, in darkness, under earthly vapors," as Carlyle describes the malaise of the "populous moral desert of . . . baseness." Even more clearly Carlyle delineates the nature of Turkey's and Nippers' malaise, which is at its center spiritual. Turkey, Nippers and even Ginger Nut conform in every detail to Carlyle's account of man's unhappiness and frustration:

Man's unhappiness . . . is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in some joint stock company, to make one Shoeblack happy? They cannot accomplish it, above an hour or two; for the Shoeblack also has a soul quite other than his stomach; and would require, if you consider it, for his permanent satisfaction and saturation, simply this allotment, no more, and no less: God's infinite Universe altogether to himself, therein to enjoy infinitely. . . . Try him with half of a universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. (SR p. 190. Italics mine)

Turkey and Nippers dramatize man's existence in the half universe of Wall Street which fosters the limited life of law, finance and the "stomach"; the souls of these "Shoeblack" menials rebel against the drudgery and quarrel with the "proprietor" of this half of the universe. Uneasy sits the crown of Mammon, typified in the lawyer and his friend, John Jacob Astor.

The scriveners compensate for their frustrations by indulging in the gustatory life, an activity which Carlyle links with the spiritless world of his century. As Melville remarks, "Copying law-papers, being proverbially a dry, husky sort of business" (p. 10), the scriveners often gobble up scores of wafer-like spice cakes. This particular habit and the peculiar symptoms of Turkey's and Nippers' spiritual distress are not arbitrary but, rather, highly significant in the light of Melville's source. For Carlyle's world of the industrial revolution in England finds happiness in "cookery" and "sound digestion," the virtues of Benthamite utilitarianism. Teufelsdröckh again provides the key to our understanding of the scriveners in "Bartleby" by remarking:

If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray. With Stupidity and sound Digestion man may front much. But what, in these dull unimaginative days, are the terrors of Conscience to the diseases of the Liver! Not on Morality, but on Cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his Elect! (SR pp. 160-61)

Turkey and Nippers are not stupid; but they are unhappy and abject. They find in the cookery of ginger cakes some relief from the dull business ever before them. Their daily communion with the counting house devil seems a hedonistic ritual. The fact that Nippers suffers from indigestion--no doubt the Carlylean "disease of the liver"--suggests that he is not wholly in harmony with the world of Mammon. His distress may be read as an analogue for a spiritual unhappiness finding no relief in "dull unimaginative days." Because of their discontent and idiosyncratic behavior, Turkey and Nippers may not be considered wholly as the "Elect" of Tophet, or Wall Street, or the establishment and all its attendant values, but rather as men half in the lawyer's world and in the dissenting world of Bartleby.

The account of Ginger Nut is a very brief but significant one. We are told that he is a purveyor of food for the scriveners, and a cleaner and sweeper. But his desk drawer is crammed with nut shells. A "quick witted youth," he thinks that "the whole noble science of the law was contained in a nutshell" (p. 10). This attitude seems to reduce law to something insignificant, unless the law by which he operates is expediency. ( Note that he sweeps the nut shells into his desk. ) On the surface these details are themselves insignificant. But in the light of Sartor Resartus' specific references to shell splinters, egg shells and man's "feast of shells," the apparently literal and straightforward description of Ginger Nut's role radiates several different levels of meaning. First, the shells in Ginger's Nut's desk serve the highly allusive role of identifying human life and endeavor as empty, meaningless, and virtueless. Further, the stupidities of war are linked with the equally great inanities of the world of commerce and law; the battlefields in history are identified with the "battles" in the law offices in "Bartleby." Note how the following passage from Sartor Resartus provides the key to interpreting Melville's shell symbolism and exposing the irony of Ginger Nut's remark that "the whole noble science of the law was contained in a nutshell":

"Horrible enough! A whole Marchfeld strewed with shell-splinters, cannon-shot, ruined tumbrils, and dead men and horses; stragglers still remaining not so much as buried. And those red mould heaps: ay, there lie the Shells of Men, out of which all the Life and Virtue has been blown; and now are they swept together and crammed-down out of sight, like blown Egg-shells!" (SR p. 173)

The law, like war, is empty. The shells are the husks of man's virtue and spirit strewn on the continental Marchfeld and on that other battlefield of Wall Street. They are the testament of Turkey's, Nippers', and Ginger Nut's hollow, splintered lives which know the sensory life alone, specifically, the hedonistic life of cookery. In Ginger Nut's ironic words (he speaks better than he knows), the noble science of law--in the widest sense the customs, rules, and canons of a society, and in its limited sense the codes of finance, commerce, and even scrivening--are all "contained in a nutshell."

Melville's adaptation of Carlyle takes us further to the thematic center of Bartleby. For if, according to Teufelsdröckh, the kernel or essence of life is the soul, and only its shell remains in the Carlylean wasteland, then Melville appears to be suggesting a quite similar attitude in a much more disguised though referential symbolism. In brief, the conflict between the temporal and the spiritual, so dominant a part of Carlyle's theme in Sartor Resartus, finds expression in "Bartleby" in Melville's use of Carlyle's symbolism of shells:

'To me, in this our life,' says the Professor, 'which is an internecine warfare with the Time-spirit, other warfare seems questionable. Hast thou in any way a Contention with thy brother. I advise thee, think well what the meaning thereof is: If thou gauge it to the bottom, it is simply this: "Fellow, see! thou art taking more than thy share of Happiness in the world, something from my share: which, by the Heavens, thou shalt not; nay, I will fight thee rather."--Alas, and the whole lot to be divided is such a beggarly matter, truly a "feast of shells," for the substance has been spilled out: not enough to quench one Appetite; and the collective human species clutching at them!' (SR pp. 194-95)

The passage identifies and characterizes the nature of the "internecine warfare" in the office as essentially stemming from a spiritual disorder. Bartleby's warfare with the lawyer is symbolic of the beleaguered Spilit warring against the temporal order--the "Time-spirit warfare" of the above passage.

On a lower level of contention, Turkey, Nippers and Ginger Nut indulge in their "share of happiness," that is, cookery, which we have already identified as a kind of hedonistic substitution for their spiritual unhappiness. Ginger Nut's remark now takes on an added dimension of meaning. "The whole noble science of the law [is] contained in a nutshell" in the sense that ethics and values in a utilitarian society (which in fact fosters hedonism) are rooted in the senses rather than in the spirit, in the material, in tasty food, in spicy ginger cakes themselves. Cakes and ale and ginger hot in the mouth¹⁴ bespeak a hedonism that is the greatest good for the greatest number and presumably bring happiness according to the Benthamites. But to Carlyle and Melville such beliefs and practices are empty, worthless, a "feast of shells" with the real substance of life--i.e., the spirit or essence-- "spilled out." Turkey, Nippers and Ginger Nut represent the "collective human species"; their leader, the lawyer, is progressively shaken in his faith in Benthamite Utilitarianism.

Bartleby, in contrast to the scriveners, refuses contention with his brothers, a "beggarly matter" to be avoided for the greater spiritual and philosophical contentions plaguing him. His greater "internecine warfare" is with the Carlylean "Time-spirit," and in that battle he is properly isolated. The ever-present wall which he faces is meant to suggest the dead end of his philosophical speculation. He rejects society, but even more important, he rejects any meaning to the universe and to human life. His isolation and muteness within the "stone walls, and thick plied tissues of Commerce and Polity" (SR p. 53) are meant to suggest the teleological dead end of his speculative life. Truth apparently never comes to the thinking man as Carlyle promises it will:

Had a divine Messenger from the clouds, or miraculous Handwriting on the wall convincingly proclaimed to me "this thou shalt do," with what passionate readiness, as I often thought, would I have done it. (SR p. 162)

But the wall for Bartleby remains blank, white, and oppressively massive. He can neither strike through it to truth or see through it as if it were glass. Carlyle promises vision through the window of nature, as the following passage from Sartor Resartus reveals. On this passage the ironic Melville erects an impenetrable wall for Bartleby:

All visible things are emblems; what thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly taken, is not there at all; Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some Idea, and body it forth. . . . Rightly viewed, no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into Infinitude itself. . . . So that this so solid seeming World . . . were . . . the living visible garment of God. (SR p. 72, 55)

The despair of Teufelsdröckh parallels the paralysis of Bartleby; both front the wall, in despair of ever envisioning the "Mystery of life" (SR 163). Bartleby, like Teufelsdröckh, maintains his Everlasting No towards the possibility of attaining truth and of communicating with his fellow man.

Invisible yet impenetrable Walls, as of Enchantment,
divided me from all living: was there, in the wide world,
any true bosom I could press trustfully to mine? O Heaven,
No, there was none! I kept a lock on my lips: why
should I speak much with that shifting
variety of so-called Friends, in whose withered, vain, and
too-hungry souls Friendship was but an incredible
tradition? In such cases, your resource is to talk little. . . .
It was a strange isolation I then lived in. The men and
women around me, even speaking with me, were but
Figures; I had, practically, forgotten that they were alive,
that they were not merely automatic. (SR pp. 163-64)

The wall in "Bartleby" in relation to the wall imagery in Sartor Resartus, suggests the solipsistic dilemma of Bartleby, his dogged silence and his complete indifference to his would-be benefactor and the other office workers. In summary, the passages on walls in Sartor Resartus account for the character and behavior of Bartleby.

If the wall would hide from Bartleby the promised transcendental vision, so does his eyesight. Bartleby's eyes appear "dull and glazed" to the narrator, a sign that the scrivener "might have temporarily impaired his vision" (p. 28). The dimness of the office may explain the inflammation of his eyes, but with reference to Carlyle's remarks on the sickness of man in a materialistic world, Bartleby's ailment takes on figurative value. At one point in Sartor Resartus Carlyle associates the lack of eyesight in scientists and philosophers with spiritual blindness--"the man who cannot wonder . . . and worship . . . is but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no eye" (SR p. 69). And in "The Everlasting No" the grinding laws of the classical economists so affect the spirit of man that his eyesight fails him; his vision of God dims and dies as his eyes seal:

In spite of all Motive-grinders, and Mechanical Profit-and-Loss Philosophies, with the sick ophthalmia and hallucination they had brought on, was the Infinite nature of Duty still dimly present to me: living without God in the world, of God's light I was not utterly bereft; if my as yet sealed eyes, with their unspeakable longing, could nowhere see Him, nevertheless in my heart He was present, and his heaven-written Law still stood legible and sacred there. ( SR p. 162)

It should be noted that Bartleby's diligence toward his work, that is, his "Duty" in the Carlylean sense, profited him little in terms of spiritual fulfillment. Copying law papers results only in eyestrain rather than in fulfilment of an unspeakable longing in Bartleby's heart: to achieve some kind of afffirmation or vision of truth. This quest remains throughout the story "unspeakable" and unutterable because Melville chooses to disguise his meaning.

As an ironic spiritual wanderer, Bartleby ends his quest not in affirmation, as Teufelsdröckh does, but in willed death, the ultimate negation. Bartleby's fate can be considered as Melville's answer to the Carlylean view of spiritual redemption. Teufelsdröckh's moment of affirmation takes place in a kind of mystical, healing sleep, and proves important to our understanding of the ironies compounded in Bartleby's starvation in the Tombs. Teufelsdröckh remarks:

I paused in my wild wanderings; and sat me down to wait, and consider; for it was as if the hour of change drew nigh. I seemed to surrender, to renounce utterly, and say: Fly then, false shadows of Hope; I will chase you no more, I will believe you no more. . . . Let me rest here: for I am way-weary and life-weary; I will rest here, were it but to die: to die or to live is alike to me; alike insignificant . . . . Here then, I lay in that Centre of Indifference; cast, doubtless by benignant upper Influence, into a healing sleep, the heavy dreams rolled gradually away, and I awoke to a new Heaven, and a new Earth . . . And my mind's eyes were now unsealed. (SR p. 186)

Bartleby's annihilation of self has no such healing effect. His sleep is final. The lawyer's last words to him, "Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass" (p. 43), attest to the goodness of life as he knows it and the worth of nature's beauty and possible healing effect. Bartleby's last remark, "I know where I am," denies the lawyer's reasoning. It denies, in fact, the Carlylean or transcendental world of beauty, new life, and resurrection; the meaning of life and the ways of God seem not to be garmented in nature. The world of sky and grass hold no value to Bartleby, as it did to Teufelsdröckh, whose moment of transformation uses the imagery of sky and grass to carry the theme of rebirth into new life.

Spiritual Unbelief, as Disappointment, in thought and act, often-repeated gave rise to Doubt, and Doubt gradually settled into Denial! If I have had a second-crop, and now see the perennial greensward, and sit under umbrageous cedars, which defy all Drought (and Doubt); herein too, be the Heavens praised. . . .

The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the rudely-jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves into separate Firmaments; deep silent rock-foundations are built beneath; and the skyey vault with its everlasting Luminaries above: instead of a dark wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile, heaven-encompassed World. (SR pp. 185, 197)

Bartleby's prison house of the soul, taking its source in Sartor Resartus, provides the access not to a transcendental world but to death and, apparently, nothingness. Hunched over and facing the wall, Bartleby lies dead, "his dim eyes . . . open" (p. 46). His tempest-tossed soul experiences no divine vision, but only rigid-eyed negation; he resolves no "mad primeval Discord"; he experiences no "blooming, fertile" growth of soul. The arid prison yard of sparsely sown grass growing between stones in the "deep, silent rock-foundations," the massive, Egyptian-like "dead-wall" (p. 44) all suggest the impasse to which Bartleby's spiritual life has come. Again Melville's honed irony rifts through Carlyle's idealism.

In closing his story, the narrator offers "one little item of rumor" to those whose curiosity has been aroused "as to who Bartleby was" (p. 46). The "vague report" of Bartleby's past, rather than being an appendage to the story, provides a clue of "certain suggestive interest" to the narrator and also to the careful reader. For Bartleby is reported to have been a clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, posting letters of love, charity, pardon, good tidings and hope to the furnace. The hopelessness, pain, and futility mirrored in Bartleby's character seem to be the effects of his past office. This report of his past serves in fact as a thumping denial of Carlyle's claims that men are woven together into an indivisible body politic of love and that every human act has its consequences for all humanity. The following passage from Sartor Resartus presents Carlyle's idealism and at the same time provides Melville the source for his ending to "Bartleby." Further, it tends to identify Bartleby as Teufelsdröckh's isolated "Brotherkin" whose thoughts, letters and messages to the world go unheeded, whose works go unrewarded, whose life, because cut off from the "World tissue," must end:

'Wondrous truly are the bonds that unite us one and all; whether by the soft binding of Love, or the iron chaining of Necessity, as we like to choose it. More than once have I said to myself, of some perhaps whimsically strutting Figure such as provokes whimsical thoughts: 'Wert thou, my little Brotherkin, suddenly covered-up within the largest imaginable Glass-bell,--what a thing it were, not for thyself only, but for the World! Post Letters, more or fewer, from all the four winds, impinge against thy Glass-walls, but have to drop unread: neither from within comes there question or response into any Postbag; thy Thoughts fall into no friendly ear or heart, thy Manufacture into no purchasing hand: thou art no longer a circulating venous-arterial Heart, that, taking and giving, circulatest through all Space and all Time: there has a Hole fallen-out in the immeasurable universal World-tissue, which must be darned up again!'

'Such venous-arterial circulation, of Letters, verbal Messages, paper and other Packages, going out from him and coming in, are a blood-circulation, visible to the eye: but the finer nervous circulation, by which all things, the minutest that he does, minutely influence all men' (SR pp. 245-46. Italics mine)

The significance of this passage on dead letters cannot be overestimated. For one thing, it tells us that the nature of Bartleby's isolation behind "ground glass folding doors" in the law office takes reference from Carlyle's "Brotherkin" trapped behind glass walls. The passage shows the integrity of the last paragraph of "Bartleby" to the story as a whole;¹⁵ neither love nor necessity can allay Bartleby's hopeless isolation. The last paragraph of "Bartleby" proves, in fact, to be the one significant work of patching and tailoring done to the story by the narrator, and calls attention to the method of presentation of the editor's like role in Sartor Resartus. In the light of "Bartleby's" source, therefore, the ending has a stylistic appropriateness. But more important, Carlyle's passage tends to identify Bartleby's isolation as somehow connected to the world of letters and to the plight of the alienated artist.

Richard Chase has commented on the allegorical and biographical implications of "Bartleby" by stating that "Melville was consciously writing a parable of the artist."¹⁶ A study of Sartor Resartus and a chapter in Heroes and Hero Worship entitled "The Hero as a Man of Letters" tends to support, deepen, and amplify this theme. Melville evidently found great personal relevance in Carlyle's remark that writers such as Johnson, Burns, and Rousseau lived lives of great adversity, unhappiness and poverty. Further, it appears that Melville found Carlyle's statement of intention in Heroes and Hero Worship --"It is rather the Tombs of three literary Heroes that I have to show you"¹⁷--fraught with possibilities for artistic expression, the result being "Bartleby." Many details of Carlyle's essay tally with Melville's story. Most obvious is the scrivener's (or writer's) consignment to the Tombs. Further, the unknown origins of a great writer parallel the obscure background of Bartleby, as Carlyle states:

Whence he came, whither he is bound, by what ways he arrived, by what he might be furthered on his course, no one asks. He is an accident in society. He wanders like a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is as the spiritual light, either the guidance or the misguidance! (H&HW p. 206)

An Ishmaelite, Bartleby is also a hermit. His glass cell serves as a "hermitage." This detail seems prompted by Carlyle's exclamation:

What if our Men of Letters, men setting up to be Spiritual Heroes, were still then, as they now are, a kind of involuntary monastic order." (H&HW p. 215)

But Bartleby does not assume the role of priest-prophet in the sense that Carlyle characterized the man of letters, that is, the visionary quester for light and truth. Bartleby's "vision" for his age, it would appear, involves denial, dissent and the most withering sort of "descendentalism." Melville repudiates Carlyle's claim that the man of letters "will not always wander like unrecognized, unregulated Ishmaelites among us" (p. 215). Nor does the death of a man of letters "deeply concern the whole society" (H&HW p. 217). Bartleby's negativism, social and spiritual, would perhaps make him unpopular for any age. His vision of truth about his effectiveness as a writer, and about the world around him, would disqualify him from fame. Thus does Melville ironically reply to Carlyle's statement that:

Light is the one thing wanted for the world. Put wisdom in the head of the world, the world will fight its battle victoriously, and be the best world man can make it. (H&HW p. 217)

Bartleby's fate is inaction; heroism in letters is a fraud. What is left for the man of letters in an unacknowledging, companionless, chaotic world according to Melville? He found his answer in Carlyle, who notes that triviality accompanies spiritual paralysis:

The very possibility of Heroism has been, as it were, formally abnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever; Triviality, Formulism and Commonplace were come forever. (H&HW p. 220)

The kind of triviality, formulism and commonplace that Bartleby must follow is the mechanical task of copying in a law office rather than creating. Bartleby's job conforms to Carlyle's observation that the man of letters is debased in a paralyzing age in which "nothing [is] left but a Mechanical life" (H&HW p. 221). In scrivening Bartleby is momentarily dragged down to the level of ordinary men. Melville's own plight in the world of letters seems suggested in another of Carlyle's accounts of what happens to the frustrated writer:

To the strongest man, only with infinite struggle and confusion was it possible to work himself half-loose; and lead as it were, in an enchanted, most tragical way, a spiritual death-in-life, and be a Half-Hero! (H&HW p. 221)

Insofar as Bartleby withstands the blandishments of his employer and maintains his dissent in dignity can he be considered a "Half-Hero." Further, he is a half-hero in the sense that he does not reduce himself to the abject level of Nippers and Turkey. If he cannot write creatively he will not write at all. Scrivening and proofreading lead to a situation, described by Carlyle and dramatized by Melville, wherein "the world's wages are pocketed, the world's work is not done" (H&HW p. 225 ). No wonder that Bartleby lets his severance pay fall to the floor in indifference.

It is clear that Carlyle provided a philosophic stimulus to Melville; the response is "Bartleby." Everything that is left unsaid about Bartleby's inner nature--his motives and beliefs, or as Melville puts it, his "paramount consideration"--serves the purpose in "Bartleby" of dramatizing the heroism of the man of letters. For Bartleby's inner doubts and spiritual anguish are unutterable. The story is Melville's way of expressing in the most indirect, allusive, and tenuous manner the ineffable anguish of the soul. The style of "Bartleby" is its meaning; Melville has written his tale to the very specifications of Carlyle, who demands a certain silence on things unutterable:

Doubt, truly, is not itself a crime. . . . But now if, even in common things, we require that a man keep his doubts silent, and not babble of them till they in some measure become affirmations or denials; how much more in regard to the highest things, impossible to speak-of in words at all! That a man parade his doubt, and get to imagine that debating and logic (which means at best only the manner of telling us your thought, your belief or disbelief, about a thing) is the triumph and true work of what intellect he has: alas this is as if you should overturn the tree, and instead of green boughs, leaves, and fruits, show us ugly taloned roots turned-up into the air,--and no growth, only death and misery going on! (H&HW pp. 224-25)

Herein lies the significance of Bartleby's muteness, and the nature of his heroism. Melville would not tell us of Bartleby's doubts and despair; rather, through the artistic use of a severely restricted point-of-view, by a referential symbolism and by a highly allusive use of source material he would indirectly speak of "the highest things, impossible to speak of" at all in direct words. Melville's elaborate concealments in "Bartleby" are the "triumph and true work of what intellect he has."

1. Jay Leyda, ed. The Complete Stories of Herman Melville (New York, Random House, 1949); Lawrence Thompson, Melville's Quarrel with God (Princeton, 1952).

2. The Complete Stories of Herman Melville, p. xxviii.

3. Melville's Quarrel with God, p. 438.

4. Merrell R. Davis, Melville's "Mardi": A Chartless Voyage (New Haven, 1952), p. 180, n. 2. That Melville's interest in Carlyle was considerable can be further substantiated by biographical information. In 1849, Melville wrote to his father expressing a desire to have a letter of introduction from Emerson to Carlyle. See Eleanor Melville Metcalf, ed. Journal of a Visit to London and the Continent by Herman Melville (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), pp. 123-24.

5. Melville's Quarrel with God, p. 444, n. 88.

6. The Complete Stories of Herman Melville, p. 25. Subsequent page references to "Bartleby" are from this edition and shall be placed in parentheses within the main text.

7. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (New York, Odyssey Press, 1937), pp. 162-63, 192, 196- 97. Subsequent references to this book will be placed in parentheses within the main text and designated SR.

8. My claim conforms to Kingsley Widmer's perceptive interpretation of the narrator as a benevolent rationalist. However, his focus in Bartleby himself is inadequate, for the scrivener stands for more than perversity and perverse negation; there is method and logic to his apparent madness. Mr. Widmer's commentary I find the best intratextual criticism of "Bartleby," but from my own critical understanding of the tale, severely limited. See "The Negative Affirmation: Melville's 'Bartleby,' Modern Fiction Studies, VIII, iii, pp. 276- 86. (See also reference to Widmer in the final chapter, p. ..).

9. For a useful definition of utilitarianism and Benthamism see Charles F. Harrold and William D. Templeman, eds., English Prose of the Victorian Era (New York, 1956), pp. xxiii-xxiv.

10. Mordecai Marcus, "Melville's Bartleby as a Psychological Double," College English, XXIII, p. 366.

11. My reading stands in direct contrast to Richard H. Fogle's assertion that "Bartleby" is a story of absolutism, predestination, and free will, in which predestination undoubtedly predominates." See Melville's Shorter Tales (Norman, Oklahoma, 1960), p. 26. (See also reference to Fogle in final chapter, p. ..).

12. Meaning "A sudden culmination of suffering leading to a blinding (flame-like) spiritual illumination or understanding." (SR, p. 168, n. 1).

13. Turkey is not, as commonly regarded, a mere Dickensian caricature; rather, he is Carlyle's beleaguered, psychically infirm humanity and derives from Teufelsdrökh's description of Adamic nature: "O my friends, we are (in Yorick Sterne's words) but as 'turkeys driven, with a stick and red clout, to the market.'" (SR p. 63).

14. The name "Ginger Nut" and the cakes and ale referred to in "Bartleby" are, most likely, derived appropriately from Twelfth Night, II, iii, 123-26, where Sir Toby defends the gustatory life while scolding Malvolio's Puritanism. In addition, Melville's account of Ginger Nut's origins--his father was a carman, ambitious of seeing his son on the bench instead of a cart" (p. 10)--refers significantly to Sartor Resartus. Carlyle praises the "carman" for being the spiritual equal of kings and for being more "cunningly gifted" in their natural, productive life. He "understands draught-cattle, the rimming of wheels, something of the laws of unstable and stable equilibrium . . . and has actually put forth his hand and operated on Nature" (SR p. 64). But Melville undercuts the premise of the superiority of the natural life by attributing worldly ambition to his carman, who would have his son join the world of clothes, polity and social respectability "at one dollar a week." The shepherd also pipes for Mammon in Melville's world.

15. The ending has occasioned the most adverse critical commentary. Charles G. Hoffman states that it is an aesthetic flaw damaging an otherwise perfect tale because it is inconsistent with the idea of "the element of mystery in the world, against which all reason is helpless." See "The Shorter Fictions of Herman Melville," South Atlantic Quarterly, LII (July, 1953), p. 420. (See also reference to Hoffman in final chapter, p. ..).

16. Richard Chase, Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York, 1949), p. 146. While I agree with Chase's claim that Melville was trying to understand the artist's relation to his society, I do not find adequate his explanation of Bartleby's refusal to write. It is true that Bartleby will not write on demand, but not simply in order to refuse to compromise with the injunction of capitalism so that he might "devote his energies to the task of surviving in his own way." Bartleby's motives go much deeper into the spirit, as I have been attempting to show. (See also Chase, final chapter, p. ..).

17. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (London, Collins' Press [undated], p. 204. This edition will henceforth be identified as H&HW in page references in the main text.

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