IN MELVILLE'S "BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER"
Cathy Davidson
Herman Melville, in "Hawthorne and His Mosses," pictures truth as a "white doe" fleeing through the woodlands. Only by "cunning glimpses" can the would-be honest artist briefly discern his quarry. And just as the determined artist--in a milieu that would rather ignore essential metaphysical and moral questions--discovers his vision, so too does he communicate it to those perceptive enough to grasp his meaning. Consequently, for writer and reader alike, "in this world of lies," any real comprehension must be achieved "covertly and by snatches."
This idiosyncratic theory of fiction is obviously consistent with its proponent's practices as a writer. Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence-Man are three of the densest, most demanding novels published during the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, one major Melville work is still occasionally read as if its focus were self-evident. I refer to "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street." That title seems to promise a certain type of tale: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, "Bartleby of Wall Street." But as numerous critics who have tried to explicate "Bartleby" by examining the nature and actions of the title character have discovered or should have discovered Melville's scrivener remains frustratingly enigmatic. Except for a few basic facts and certain examples of his obvious penchant for preferring not to, we are given very little definite information about this individual. Moreover, what little we do "know" is so refracted through the consciousness of the lawyer-narrator who relates the story that any resultant image must be blurred and imprecise. Bartleby, in short, is not definitively portrayed. Dubious biography, however, does not necessarily lead to flawed fiction. On the contrary, the limitations of the biography, the narrator's inconclusive adumbrations on the nature of the scrivener, derive directly from the narrative perspective employed in the story, and it is this perspective that allows Melville to achieve one of his more subtle artistic successes. By carefully controlling such formalistic elements as point of view and narrative technique, he provides increasingly revealing "cunning glimpses into the character of the unnamed lawyer.
The author thus encourages the reader to formulate moral evaluations of the lawyer and of the ethos this character ambivalently attempts to uphold in the course of his narration. In other words, the subtitle of this particular tale might be more significant than the title, for the work that purports to be the biography of Bartleby is definitely a "story of Wall Street." In this "parable" of commerce and charity, Melville explores the dichotomy between Christianity and laissez-faire capitalism. By so doing, he also demonstrates how the essential contradictions between the two necessarily lead the narrator--a proponent of both--into a series of narrative contortions with which he attempts to exonerate himself and to rationalize his conflicting assumptions. "Bartleby" thus becomes the story of a lost soul, a confused, ambiguous Everyman who is finally morally exposed and condemned. Ironically, this lost soul is not Bartleby but the initially smug businessman who seeks to tell his employee's story.
Characteristically, Melville's indictment of the seemingly respectable lawyer is not immediately obvious. But various clues as to how the narrator might be evaluated and his narration assessed are encountered early in the story. Perhaps the most obvious of these occurs when the lawyer, alluding to a contemporary event, tells how John C. Colt killed Samuel Adams. This passage can even be seen as a synecdoche of the narrative method employed throughout "Bartleby." The narrator, recalling the "tragedy of the unfortunate Adams and the still more unfortunate Colt," shows that his sympathies lie primarily with the killer and not with the victim. In fact, in the mind of the lawyer, the murderer becomes, essentially, the victim's victim: "poor Colt, being dreadfully incensed by Adams [...] was at unawares hurried into his fatal act" (64). Further excusing a misfortunate murderer, his apologist also supplies an almost deterministic explanation of the offense:
It was the circumstance of being alone in a solitary office, up stairs, of a building entirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic associations an uncarpeted office, doubtless, of a dusty, haggard sort of appearance this it must have been, which greatly helped to enhance the irritable desperation of the hapless Colt. (64)
This brief assessment of a contemporary crime must be seen in context.1 Now upstairs in his own desolate, dusty office and in a "state of nervous resentment" (64), the lawyer, by justifying Colt, emphasizes and even vindicates his own violent passions emotions inconsistent with the self-image he wishes to project. He would be seen as a reasonable, prudent, "safe" man. Yet his curious account of Adams' murder clearly suggests the extent to which he can distort reality and twist common morality in order to rationalize his own feelings toward the frustrating, but nevertheless harmless, Bartleby. By his own logic, the narrator would be justified if he also were, like "poor Colt," "hurried" into violence. Overcome by an intransigent scrivener, he would be another victim of circumstance and desolate surroundings. And thus he merits special praise when he does not commit an "understandable" assault, as is shown by his self-flattering claim: "But when this Old Adam of resentment rose in me and tempted me concerning Bartleby, I grappled him and threw him" (64). The narrator here claims for himself a great triumph. Yet this "victory" is nothing more than his quite unsurprising ability considering his "prudent" temperament--to refrain from physically attacking his clerk. There is really no victory at all. In short, one of Melville's basic strategies is to allow the lawyer to speak of others and himself in such a fashion that he, as narrator, inadvertently emphasizes the comic contrast between the sententious humanist he pretends to be and the pretentious hypocrite he seems to be.2
The clues whereby the narrator can be evaluated serve, however, a second function. These same details provide a reading direction for the story as a whole. Clearly, the lawyer is not a particularly reliable witness; consequently, all that he narrates must be weighed for possible bias, especially when it relates to his own case. Furthermore, as Nicholas Ayo notes, his retrospective telling of the life--and death--of his employee does turn into a trial.3 Despite his initial claim that "I am one of those unambitious lawyers who never address a jury, or in any way draw down public applause" (8), as this man of law's tale progresses, it becomes increasingly evident that he is pleading a case and attempting to elicit the approval of a jury comprised of all prospective readers. Thus, as he writes of his own involvement with Bartleby, the lawyer regularly tries to rationalize or justify his actions and attitudes in order to present an account that will both preserve his self-esteem and merit general praise. It is not just a disinterested dedication to the study of clerks that prompts the narrator to recount the biography of "the strangest [scrivener] I ever saw." He is also substantially motivated by his desire to convince himself of his own decency and thereby absolve himself of any possible guilt or blame accruing from his association with Bartleby. But just as the lawyer, remembering a recent crime, inadvertently exposes his own dubious assumptions, so too is he revealed throughout "Bartleby." The judicious reader must note how Melville continually juxtaposes evidence of his narrator's obtuseness or callousness with the same individual's repeated proclamations of virtue. This man of self-asserted "prudence" and "method" thereby unintentionally reveals a duplicity that he would never recognize much less confess to in himself.
From the first statement of the story, the lawyer attempts to win the sympathy of the reader, his jury: "l am a rather elderly man" (8). Old men need not be strictly judged. Like children, they must be evaluated by special criteria. As Turkey later maintains: "Surely, sir, a blot or two of a warm afternoon is not to be severely urged against gray hairs. Old age--even if it blot the page--is honorable" (14). The employer readily accepts this argument. It makes him, also, an honorable man. And from the start, the narrator plays the role of the dignified elder. He is sedate, solemn, pompous; can proudly pronounce that "all who know me consider me an eminently safe man" (8). Expediency, masquerading as morality, prevails. One immediate consequence is that the lawyer need only seem to be an essentially humane man who always thinks and does the decent thing.
The flaws of the person, however, are not completely hidden by the facade of the persona. For example, immediately after stressing the "cool tranquility" which has characterized his long life, the narrator discusses the termination of his post as the Master in Chancery:
I seldom lose my temper; much more seldom indulge in dangerous indignation at wrongs and outrages; but I must be permitted to be rash here and declare, that I consider the sudden and violent abrogation of the office of Master in Chancery, by the new Constitution, as a--premature act. (10)
In all his repressed indignation--signalled by the long pause preceding the comically anticlimactic "premature act"--the lawyer seems foolishly cantankerous. He is more a pathetic old man than a distinguished elderly gentleman. Moreover, even though he, with effort, controls himself, this display of "self-control" still reveals a distinct lack of self-awareness. He writes of the anonymous legislative decision to abolish the superfluous Master in Chancery position--"not a very arduous office, but very pleasantly remunerative" (10) as if it were an entirely personal, vindictive measure enacted only to thwart his own happiness. He apparently believes that some basic right has been maliciously denied him. Likewise, when Bartleby's preferences do not accord with his own, the narrator responds in a similarly hyperbolic manner, assuming the same tone of abused righteousness. His prejudices, whims, desires, obviously represent universal truth and justice. Those of others--especially when they contradict his own--must be selfish and unjust.
The narrator, of course, does not intend to reveal any of his own possible faults or failings. Throughout the biography, he attempts to conceal all but the most superficial aspects of his character by presenting himself as simply a successful man of business and a moderate Christian. The pretense, however, is unconvincing. As Melville, through the lawyer, demonstrates, capitalist and Christian cannot comfortably reside in one body. These two ways of life entail assumptions and ideals totally contradictory. Thus the narrator's inescapable ambivalence, an ambivalence Melville progressively reveals, exposing, in the process, the shortcomings of a character who attempts to juggle material against spiritual profit and loss, while, at the same time, insisting he is both "wise and blessed" (68):
If I turn [Bartleby] away, the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to starve. Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange willfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience. (34)
The reader should note how effectively Melville alludes to the story of the rich man who sought to "lay up" morsels for his soul (Luke 12: 19).4 In the Biblical parable, it will be remembered, the protagonist soon discovered that he was mistaken. Melville's parable of Wall Street similarly shows that the lawyer, with such calculated considerations of Bartleby's plight, does not at all merit the commendation he attempts to claim. All he really demonstrates is a spiritual selfishness.
Most appropriately, this man of modest charity boasts that John Jacob Astor is his mentor. Yet Melville undermines the lawyer's attempt to assert his success in another realm, the world of business, almost as effectively as he compromises his narrator's pretense to Christian virtue: "I was not unemployed [...] by the late John Jacob Astor" and "was not insensible to [his] good opinions" (10). Such double-negatives, like the scrivener's "preferences," imply more than they assert. They do not, however, automatically demonstrate the elevated social status that the narrator seems to claim. In this case, the lawyer's assertions actually suggest a hollow existence of subservience and wishful thinking, a life so empty that a tenuous connection with one rich and famous becomes its chief highlight.5 If such is, indeed, his situation, the employer has no self-evident reasons for condescending to his copyreader or for assuming his own superiority.
The lawyer's predicament is especially emphasized by the presence of the implacable scrivener. The former has devoted his life to maintaining his role as a functionary in the larger social system. But the latter's preferences offend against that system and might thus precipitate, for the lawyer, a crisis of conscience. Are Bartleby's preferences--preferences which do not derive from playing a socially imposed role--any less valid than those of his employer? Must the lawyer admit to himself the futility of his own life, a life which, it should be emphasized, is nearing its end; or must he reject Bartleby? The biography suffers because the biographer cannot make this choice. He cannot even acknowledge that he is confronted with such a choice. Instead, he resists to the end--even in retrospect--all promptings to question overtly his own assumptions. His dealings with his clerk simply demonstrate, he insists, that he is the man he pretends to be.
Of course, he is not. Melville regularly shows that, since the model is self-contradictory, the Christian-capitalist role-playing must be confused. For example, early in the story the narrator conjures up an image of the pathetic figure of Bartleby. His description implies a properly sympathetic assessment of this most dejected of men. Subsequent statements, however, indicate that the lawyer hires the scrivener primarily to profit from his pallid, pitiable condition: "I engaged him, glad to have among my corps of copyists a man of so singularly sedate an aspect, which I thought might operate beneficially upon the flighty temper of Turkey, and the fiery one of Nippers" (22). In a similar vein, he later revealingly rationalizes the tomblike enclosures he sets around Bartleby. He wanted to "have this quiet man within easy call, in case any trifling thing was to be done" (22, italics mine). When the narrator adds that, by this arrangement, "privacy and society were conjoined" (24), it is clear that only his privacy and his society are at issue. The same reluctance to assess his real motives is also indicated on a more general level. The lawyer retains Bartleby, he asserts, as an act of charity, yet he also lays claim to a "natural expectancy of instant compliance" on all "trivial occasions" (24).
The narrator's moral "cost accounting" continually compromises his claim to Christian kindness. His attempts to act the capitalist are equally halfhearted. In the social structure of Wall Street, underlings (including, in many contexts, the lawyer) must immediately execute any superior's command. Bartleby, however, refuses to do so and thus creates a definite problem for his employer. The lawyer's initial response is characteristically self-deceiving. He proclaims his decisiveness while deciding nothing. In fact, at first, he cannot even conceive that his demands might be ignored: "Immediately it occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or Bartleby had entirely misunderstood my meaning" (26). Then, in reaction to the reiterated "I prefer not to," he questions Bartleby's sanity: "Are you moonstruck?" (26). When it appears that Bartleby is both rational and collected--two attributes the narrator prizes in himself--he decides Bartleby is not "ordinarily human" (26). And then, because "my business hurried me," he "concluded to forget the matter for the present" (26). In essence, he evades the problem posed by an uncooperative Bartleby even while he is deeply concerned with it. He does so, paradoxically, by rationalizing his unwillingness to confront the clerk with an unconsciously ironic appeal to the very business ethic against which that employee has offended.
Successful neither as capitalist nor Christian, the lawyer cannot cope with his scrivener. His dealings with Bartleby too much uncover the contradictions in his own life inconsistencies he would prefer not to acknowledge. The narrator's successive encounters with his clerk therefore become more and more emotionally taxing and make it increasingly difficult for him to tell of some incident while, simultaneously, attempting to preserve his image of himself as a man kind, capable, and soberly rational. Most ironically, either ethos--calculation or charity--would provide a solution to the problem of Bartleby. But in neither capacity can the lawyer meet the challenge presented by his clerk. With respect to the two supposed cornerstones of his life, he can neither believe nor rest content in his disbelief.
Although his failure is twofold, the narrator seems particularly concerned with hiding his shortcomings as a Christian, for he especially attempts to rationalize these. One obvious example occurs when he claims that, had public opinion not intruded, he would never have turned Bartleby away. Nevertheless, his various confrontations with his clerk clearly reveal that he has his own motives for acting as he finally does. The lawyer's supposed charitable indulgence is, in fact, early compromised by his reluctant admission that he "half-intended" some "terrible retribution" (38). Later, equally ambivalent, he half "fears" he will find the scrivener "all alive at my office as usual" (60, italics mine). Similarly, when Bartleby is finally removed to the Tombs, the narrator claims that his only desire is to have the clerk "remain in as indulgent a confinement as possible" (80, italics mine). The contradiction between "indulgent" and "confinement" starkly reflects the general contradiction inherent in the narrator's dissociated consciousness.
Yet the lawyer periodically attempts to salvage his concept of himself as a charitable man. One device that obviously serves this purpose is his habit of interspersing his outbursts against Bartleby with cliches proclaiming brotherly love. For example, finding Bartleby in his office one Sunday morning, he posits a bond of common humanity, "and claims to feel a "fraternal melancholy" arising from the sense that "both I and Bartleby were sons of Adams" (44). Unwittingly ironic at his own expense, he quite forgets that Cain and Abel were the sons of Adam. Not surprisingly, when the narrator next encounters Bartleby alone in the office, he is overcome by a homicidal old Adam of resentment" (64).
But the final meeting in the law office between Bartleby and his former employer especially reveals the latter's self-deceived ambivalence because the two sides of his life then come into direct conflict. The scrivener is, on the one hand, merely a "nuisance" that must be eliminated if the office is to function effectively. But he is also, at the same time, a man desperately in need of charity. The narrator, apparently believing he should be more a Christian than a capitalist, would respond with kindness. Yet his response consists of no more than an attempt to maintain that he had "done all that [he] possibly could, both in respect to the demands of the landlord and his tenants, and with regard to my own desire and sense of duty, to benefit Bartleby, and shield him from rude persecution" (78).
He will not recognize that he has failed in both respects. The alternative jobs he offers the scrivener (significantly, he does not offer to reemploy him: "would you like to reengage in copying for someone?" ) are all demeaning. Bartleby would remain subservient, doing something meaningless at someone else's bidding. But the narrator's final suggestion especially illustrates his lack of even a superficial understanding of his former clerk: "How, then, would going as a companion to Europe, to entertain some young gentleman with your conversation--how would that suit you ?" (76). Here the narrator is comically obtuse. He was himself hardly "entertained" by Bartleby's "I prefer not to." One suspects that some "young gentleman" would be no more impressed. Even his ultimate offer to take Bartleby home is undercut. It is made out of "despair," which was the "kindest tone I could assume under such exciting circumstances" (78), hardly a tone which encourages Bartleby to accept the invitation.
The narrator's attempt to rationalize his role in the scrivener's pathetic tragedy culminates with their meeting in the prison. Bartleby's "I know you and I want nothing to say to you" (82) is countered with a denial of all moral culpability. The lawyer is even, he claims, "keenly pained" at Bartleby's "implied suspicion." Such "pain" supposedly attests to both his innocence and his sensitivity. But since Bartleby did not accuse, the narrator's intimations of immorality must result from his own feelings of guilt. And even more obviously, his subsequent attempts to console Bartleby by observing that confinement is not so bad--"there is the sky, and here is the grass" (82) --reveals him to be still callously complacent about the other's plight. The same conclusion is fostered by his dealings with the "grubman." The lawyer can comfortably assuage whatever guilt he might feel by playing the role of the philanthropic capitalist, a generous John Jacob Astor. He would believe he truly benefits the scrivener by buying him "the best dinner you can get" (82). Such "kindness" only reveals how little he understands Bartleby and how superficial are his own pretensions to charity and a humanitarian concern for others.
The epilogue confirms the narrative pattern established by the story as a whole, and the narrator's retrospective account of Bartleby's possible employment in a Dead Letter Office displays the same rationalizations which pervade the rest of this biography.6 As in his account of the Colt and Adams murder, physical circumstances supposedly explain an emotional state of being. Furthermore, by hypothesizing about Bartleby's former occupation, the narrator implies that the clerk was earlier reduced to a condition which could not be alleviated or relieved by any subsequent employer. If Bartleby was lost before he came to the law office, the lawyer is absolved of any guilt. He was merely the last witness to a process begun much earlier. But this "explanation" obviously evades a basic issue. The narrator rhetorically assesses how much clerking in a Dead Letter Office would have damaged Bartleby's psyche and all the while he overlooks the equally unfortunate consequences his own business copying the dead letter of the law might have had.
But Melville's final irony can be best perceived when one contrasts the body of the epilogue to its concluding statement, "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!" Again, we encounter a sentiment designed to suggest some larger awareness. And again there is no real basis for crediting the lawyer with such understanding. The narrator regularly maintains, in both his account and the appended epilogue, that Bartleby was "by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness" (88). Seeing the scrivener only as an individual innately unfortunate, the lawyer cannot really recognize Bartleby as a symbol of humanity, an embodiment of mall's general condition. Moreover, such a recognition would make the narrator equally unfortunate, a possibility he is never willing to admit. His encounter with Bartleby brings him to investigate only "who Bartleby was, and what manner of life he led prior to the present narrator's making his acquaintance" (86). Rather than extrapolate from Bartleby's condition to the human one, this biographer has merely become "curious," more anxious to gather the facts that might enable him to label and classify his former employee. Above all, the lawyer, instead of discovering some bond of identity, attempts to place himself in a position from which he might judge Bartleby. He would be an "historian" who can objectively assess the deceased. His epilogue is, therefore, a fitting conclusion to his tale. The narrator finally accomplishes what was impossible while Bartleby was alive. He can now cope with the scrivener by categorizing him and flatter himself in the process.
This final self-flattery rings hollow. The narrator can seemingly evaluate Bartleby only because the latter is no longer present to challenge the former's views. But the interpretations and assessments advanced in this story merit challenging. The lawyer, I have argued, is a most unreliable narrator. Uncertain about his own assumptions, he still relentlessly defends them and thus consistently evades his own spiritual and psychological problems. Nevertheless, in an account ostensibly centered on another equally intriguing and problematic character, the narrator, "covertly and by snatches," reveals much about himself. In fact, Melville, throughout "Bartleby the Scrivener," masterfully demonstrates the ways in which supposed biography can also be self-apology, apology ultimately unconvincing. Bartleby abides by his preferences. The lawyer, who greatly prefers not to reveal his real nature, stands, finally, self-condemned.
Cathy N. DAVIDSON
NOTES
(1) The historical account of the murder is included in Jay Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 1, 121. More recently, T.H. Giddings, in "Melville, the Colt-Adams Murder, and 'Bartleby,'" Studies in American Fiction, 2 (Autumn 1974), 123-32, has reviewed the details of this incident to show how it fits "chronologically and geographically" into Melville's story (p. 130). Giddings, however, is most unconvincing when he discusses the thematic significance of the reference to this particular crime. Melville, he claims, "seems to see Colt as a victim of a sort of environmental determinism" (p. 129); "Melville sympathizes with Colt as the lawyer sympathized with Bartleby" (p. 130). As these quotations suggest, this critic naively assumes that the views of a narrator necessarily reflect those of the author. Thus, he attributes to Melville the sentiments Melville explicitly attributed to the lawyer. Such a procedure, of course, tells us nothing of what Melville might actually have believed and also precludes employing the Colt and Adams allusion to assess the nature of "Bartleby" 's narrator or the larger significance of the story he tells.
(2) A number of critics have noted that the narrator himself plays an important role in this story. For example, Alexander Eliot, in "Melville and Bartleby," Furioso, 3 (Fall, 1947), 11, observes that the story is told in the first person and thus can reveal nothing more of Bartleby than the I-narrator, a "good natured Pilate," might grasp. Conversely, John Gardner, in "Bartleby': Art and Social Commitment," PQ, 43 (1964), 95, suggests that readers should pay greater attention to the narrator's Jehovah-like voice behind the story since the lawyer becomes a human symbol of the divine Creator. William Bysshe Stein, in "Bartleby: the Christian Conscience," in Melville Annual 1965, a Symposium: "Bartleby the Scrivener," ed. Howard P. Vincent (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 104-05, maintains that Melville shows the lawyer-narrator to be "a kind of homo absurdus." And, most recently, in "Bartleby's Lawyer on Trial," ArQ, 28 (1972), 27-38, Nicholas Ayo, providing a comprehensive assessment of the narrators function in the story, argues that the lawyer, by his inability to help Bartleby, demonstrates the failure of commonsensical solutions when dealing with metaphysical problems. Although I am indebted to these and other critics, l would still maintain that the implications of the lawyer's biographical method what he narrates and his possible reasons for doing so - have not been fully investigated.
(3) "Bartleby's Lawyer on Trial." p. 27.
(4) For an extensive discussion of biblical allusions in the story, see Donald M. Fiene, "Bartleby the Christ, "in Studies in the Minor and Later Works of Melville, ed. Raymona E. Hill (Hartford, Conn.: Transcendental Books, 1970), pp. 1825.
(5) Mario L. D'Avanzo, in "Melville's Bartleby' and John Jacob Astor," NEQ, 41 (1968), 259-64, presents another interpretation of the Astor allusions.
(6) A few critics have left the epilogue to be both anticlimactic and an artistic flaw in the story as a whole. Cf. Charles G. Hoffmann, "The Shorter Fiction of Herman Melville,", South Atlantic Quarterly, 52 (1953), 420; Mordecai Marcus, "Melville's Bartleby as a Psychological Double," CE, 23 (1962), 368; and Kingsley Widmer, "The Negative Affirmation: Melville's 'Bartleby,'. MFS, 8 (1962), 284.