Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story
Of Wall Street by Herman Melville (1853)
Recommended by Dave
I’m an ignoramus when it comes to Great
American Literature.
Twain? Pynchon? Steinbeck?
Fitzgerald? Whitman? Carver? Hemingway? Besides Of Mice And Men and The Great
Gatsby (and they hardly merit a brag, length- or difficulty-wise) I’ve read not
a one. Those hours spent watching The
Wire, re-watching The Wire,
re-watching The Wire, watching The Wire commentaries, and re-watching The Wire commentaries have to come from
somewhere, and I’m not subtracting them from reading Middlemarch (or re-reading Middlemarch).
Starting something like Gravity’s Rainbow
seems like an overwhelming chore: I would prefer not to.
Moby Dick is my one flimsy defense
against being a total Eurocentric literary fascist. I read it during a university
Easter holiday (and, crucially, I didn’t
have to, it wasn’t part of a course) and loved it. The atmosphere of the Pequod, and its crew under the obsessive
Ahab was magnificently drawn. I’m sure I missed much about American culture and
history in my reading, yet I still feel I ‘got’ the book overall. Melville
didn’t purposefully over-complicate an already Byzantine work; he urged
understanding and care with his meticulous words, and I always appreciate that
in an author.
A motionless young man one morning stood upon my office
threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now –
pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby.
Bartleby is employed in a
Wall Street law office. During the course of the story, he steadily refuses to
undertake more and more of his allocated tasks and, when faced with the sack,
refuses that too. The plot itself has an absurdist and fantastical bent, nicely
captured in this scene from the 2001 movie staring the brilliant Crispin Glover. The full trailer is below, and it looks like it might be a worthwhile adaptation.
The narrator (and
Bartleby’s boss), an elderly lawyer who holds the venerated office of Master in
Chancery, struggles with the unexpected passive resistance of Bartleby. He
swings between indulgence and annoyance. His mania to understand Bartleby’s
behaviour becomes every bit as compulsive as Captain Ahab’s search for the
Whale.
Gradually I slid into the persuasion that these troubles
of mine, touching the scrivener, had been all predestined from eternity, and
Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an all-wise
providence.
Bartleby’s wraithlike
presence could encapsulate a dozen, a hundred, meanings. His thousand-yard
stare, penetrating nothing yet everything – is this modern urban blankness? His
denial of work – is this a comment on the farce of bureaucracy? His squatting
in the offices of his former employer – does this relate to the futile wish to
rid ourselves of psychological baggage?
Or is it a relatively
straightforward tale of a man with chronic depression?
Our narrator takes his
sweet time to get to anything. We get
intricate detail about each of the copyists in his employ (not just Bartleby),
and these descriptions are all in woolgathering prose.
In the morning, one might say, his face was of a fine
florid hue, but after twelve o’clock, meridian – his dinner hour – it blazed
like a grate full of Christmas coals; and continued blazing – but as it were,
with a gradual wane – till six o’clock, PM, or thereabouts; after which I saw
no more of the proprietor of the face, which, gaining its meridian with the
sun, seemed to set with it, to rise, culminate, and decline the following day,
with the like regularity and undiminished glory.
This might be expected in
a book the girth of Moby Dick but Bartleby, The Scrivener doesn’t even
scrape novella status. I rarely read short stories because basically I’m
prejudiced: I believe they will never satisfy me in the same manner as a longer
work, reasoning that the word limitation just does not allow for sufficient richness.
Simply a matter of physics. But Melville proves me
wrong. Wrong with bells jangling. Bartleby
The Scrivener rivals even Moby Dick in
its vision and accomplishment, and it does so in thirty-six pages.
Dave’s first choice of
book to me was something I read only last year: À Rebours. I’ve
already bleated about this unique work in relation to Teju Cole’s fantastic Open City; like Bartleby The Scrivener, À Rebours is another, albeit very
different, portrait of an eccentric at repose with his own thoughts.
Dave certainly has his
fair share of unconventional characteristics. When I first met him he had a
quiff and the type of outré glasses you wouldn’t see on anyone outside of a Top
Man advertising hoarding. I remember there was once a fancy dress party and the
theme was dressing as Dave. I also remember there was another fancy dress party where the theme was dressing as a pop
star; Dave came as this Morrissey!
(I came as this Betty Boo.)
Now the quiff has gone, or
rather it’s migrated south to form a rather impressive beard. Dave looks like
what he is: a musician. His current band is The Drink. I’m almost annoyed that
The Drink are my friends, because it makes people think I’ve a vested interest
in celebrating them. Not at fucking all. Listen to ‘Microsleep’ and tell me
this isn’t the greatest Deerhoof-meets-Essential-Logic-yet-still-utterly-unique
song going.
You may have noticed that
over these past few weeks I’ve been in a reverie myself; like Bartleby, my
default state has been staring into the open plains of the mind. Perhaps with the occasional microsleep.
Come out of it? I would prefer not to.
Come out of it? I would prefer not to.
