![]() Into this melee comes Bartleby, when an expansion in the business necessitates another scrivener (or copyist). The narrator observes with satisfaction that, whilst both Turkey and Nippers have dreadful tempers apiece, they take it in turns – so when Turkey is apoplectic about something, Nippers is thankfully quiet and sullen, and vice versa. And then there’s an office boy, Ginger Nut, whose working-class father wants him to have a job with a desk instead of a cart, and so has passed him on to the firm as a dollar-per-week apprentice. Nippers is a young man who embodies the kind of directionless ambition to ‘do better’ in life without much in the way of aptitude or focus. Turkey is a man of the narrator’s age who veers between fully inept and bad-tempered, especially after a liquid lunch. Bartleby is the story of a Wall Street legal practice and a narrator who believes that the “easiest way of life is the best”, which is one reason he tolerates a small crew of unpleasant and careless co-workers with bizarre nicknames. But Bartleby is a different proposition altogether, speaking to an extent to Melville’s own personal frustrations with the unglamorous world of making your living by your pen: he had found the process of writing and editing Moby Dick an onerous proposition, and while it’s highly regarded now, its reputation was quite slow to grow after its publication, and not particularly lucrative. Its author, Herman Melville, is renowned these days as one of America’s great novelists, the author of Moby Dick who based many of his seafaring storylines on personal experience. The short story of Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street appeared in Putnam’s Magazine in 1853, and it’s a testament to passive resistance, of opting out of the world of white-collar work completely. Office work doesn’t present the dangers that many working-class professions could boast, but being sat at one’s desk performing a host of tedious tasks certainly, well, took people in different ways. ![]() A new generation of people, educated and trained, took up their places in offices where some of them embodied the new culture of competitiveness and industry and some – didn’t. New York in the 1850s was a rapidly modernising city: as it grew, new strata of white-collar workers emerged to prop up its systems, rules and regulations. ‘Bartleby’ has also been viewed as prefiguring existentialism, with Bartleby offering a neutral ‘no’ to the demand to roll the Sisyphean boulder back up the hill.Literature’s great refusenik remains as ambiguous as ever – the everyman protestor who rebels of all stripes feel represents them. Indeed, Borges pointed out that Melville’s story anticipates Kafka’s work in ‘the genre of fantasies of conduct and feeling’. Indeed, with its emphasis on the symbolic activity of writing and the ways in which bureaucracy can imprison us into a passive and pointless existence, ‘Bartleby’ can be analysed as a forerunner to the works of twentieth-century writers like Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. His determination to resist this demand will lead to selling fewer books in ‘Bartleby’, it will end with the scrivener losing his job and starving himself to death (like many a less successful author before). The capitalist machine wants Melville to continue producing more formulaic works which would sell copies and make his publishers lots of money: the system wants to turn him into nothing more than a ‘scrivener’, of sorts. Herman Melville ‘preferred not to’ continue writing the sea stories which had proved hugely popular early in his career, preferring to branch out into more experimental and challenging fiction (including, most famously, Moby-Dick, published a couple of years before Melville wrote ‘Bartleby’ and greeted by a number of hostile and bewildered reviews). Bartleby stands out to the narrator because he pushes back against this urge to conform and comply.īecause a scrivener is a kind of writer, numerous critics have viewed Bartleby as an autobiographical portrait. ![]() The story’s setting on Wall Street, the financial centre of the United States, is no accident: the world of finance, law, and business, Melville appears to be suggesting, stifles and restricts the individual, turning everyone into mindless cogs in the machine of industry.Įven the job which appears in the story’s title, ‘scrivener’, involves not writing original content but merely copying existing documents. ![]() Alongside such passivity, we find, in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’, the theme of conformity.
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