Bartleby, the Scrivener
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"Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a long short story, or novelette, by American author Herman Melville (1819–1891). The story first appeared anonymously, in two parts, in the November and December 1853 editions of Putnam's Magazine. It was reprinted in Melville's The Piazza Tales in 1856 with minor textual alterations.
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[edit] Inspiration
Herman Melville wrote the story as an emotional response to the fact that his masterpiece Moby-Dick was not selling as well as he had expected.[1]
The work is said to have been inspired, in part, by Melville's reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and some have pointed to specific parallels to Emerson's essay, "The Transcendentalist".[2]
[edit] Plot summary
The narrator, an elderly lawyer who has a very comfortable business helping wealthy men deal with mortgages, title deeds, and bonds, relates the story of the strangest man he has ever known.
The narrator already employs two scriveners, Nippers and Turkey. Nippers suffers from chronic indigestion, and Turkey is a drunk, but the office survives because in the mornings Turkey is sober even though Nippers is irritable, and in the afternoons Nippers has calmed down even though Turkey is drunk. Ginger Nut, the office boy, gets his name from the little cakes he brings the older men. Bartleby arrives in answer to an ad for another scrivener, and the narrator hires the forlorn-looking young man in hopes that his calmness will soothe the temperaments of the others.
One day, when asked by the narrator to help proofread a copied document, Bartleby answers with what soon becomes his stock response: "I would prefer not to." To the dismay of the narrator and to the irritation of the other employees, Bartleby performs fewer and fewer tasks around the office. The narrator makes several attempts to reason with him and to learn something about him, but Bartleby offers nothing but his signature "I would prefer not to." One weekend the narrator stops by the office unexpectedly and discovers that Bartleby has started living there. The loneliness of Bartleby's life impresses him: At night and on Sundays, Wall Street is as desolate as a ghost town. The narrator's feelings for Bartleby alternate between pity and revulsion.
For a while Bartleby remains willing to do his main work of scrivening, but eventually he "prefers not to" do this as well, so that finally he is doing nothing. And yet the narrator finds himself unable to make Bartleby leave; his unwillingness or inability to move against Bartleby mirrors Bartleby's own strange inaction. Tension gradually builds as the narrator's business associates wonder why the strange and idle Bartleby is ever-present in the office.
Sensing the threat of a ruined reputation, but emotionally unable to throw Bartleby out, the exasperated narrator finally decides to move out himself, relocating his entire business and leaving Bartleby behind. But soon the new tenants of the old space come to ask for his help: Bartleby still will not leave. Although they have thrown him out of the rooms, he continues to haunt the hallways. The narrator visits Bartleby and attempts to reason with him. Feeling desperate, the narrator now surprises even himself by inviting Bartleby to come and live with him at his own home. But Bartleby, alas, "prefers not to."
Deciding to stay away from work for the next few days for fear he will become embroiled in the new tenants' campaign to evict Bartleby, the narrator returns to find that Bartleby has been forcibly removed and imprisoned. The narrator visits him, finding him even glummer than usual. As ever, Bartleby rebuffs the narrator's friendliness. Nevertheless, the narrator bribes a turnkey to make sure Bartleby gets good and plentiful food. But when the narrator visits again a few days later, he discovers Bartleby newly dead. Bartleby, who had "preferred not to" eat, has starved.
Some time afterward, the narrator hears of a rumor to the effect that Bartleby had worked in a dead letter office, but had lost his job there. The narrator reflects that the dead letters would have made anyone of Bartleby's temperament sink into an even darker gloom. Dead letters are emblems of our mortality and of the failures of our best intentions. Through Bartleby, the narrator has glimpsed the world as the miserable scrivener must have seen it. The closing words of the story are the narrator's resigned and pained sigh: "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!"
[edit] Media adaptations
The story has been adapted for film three times: in 1970, starring Paul Scofield; in France, in 1976, by Maurice Ronet, starring Michel Lonsdale; and in 2001, Bartleby starring Crispin Glover.
In 2003, a loosely adapted version of the story, called "Partanen", was filmed for Finnish TV by Juha Koiranen.
In 2007, Organic Theater Company of Chicago presented its adaptation of Bartleby at the Ruth Page Theatre. This production was repeated a year later at the LaCosta Theatre.
In 2007, Chatterbox Audio Theater of Memphis created a freely available audio version of the story.
In 2009, Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company of Chicago presented an adaptation by R.L. Lane at the Angel Island Theater, directed by Richard Cotovsky.
In 2009, La pépinière théâtre of Paris presented as public reading by the famous French author Daniel Pennac, directed by François Duval.
- The Season two episode from The Office, Halloween was based on the moral of this story
[edit] Influence
Although not popular at the time of its publication, "Bartleby the Scrivener" is now among the most famous of American short stories. It has been considered a precursor to absurdist literature, touching on many of the themes extant in the work of Franz Kafka, particularly in The Trial and "A Hunger Artist". However, there exists nothing to indicate that the German-language writer was at all familiar with Melville, who was largely forgotten until after Kafka's death.
Albert Camus explicitly cites Melville as one of his key influences in a personal letter to Liselotte Dieckmann which was published in the French Review in 1998.
Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas wrote the award-winning novel entitled "Bartleby & Co." that creates a catalogue of the many "bartlebys" in literature: writers who gave up writing, the "Literature of No", writers who sought denial.
In contemporary political thought, writers such as Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek (in The Parallax View) have posited examples, based on Bartleby, of the ideal revolutionary subject in the struggle against imperialism and capitalism. All three thinkers may have followed the lead of Gilles Deleuze's essay "Bartleby, ou la formule" (originally published in 1989, translated in: Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical).
In the 2001 novel By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Bartleby's catchphrase "I prefer not to" is alluded to by the main character, Saleh Omar, to explain his unwillingness to speak English upon entry to the British Isles to claim asylum.
The story was adapted into a play by Alexander Gelman and Company of Organic Theater Company, in Chicago, Illinois. It premiered on March 16, 2007.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Wells, Daniel A. ""Bartleby the Scrivener," Poe, and the Duyckinck Circle". University of South Florida
- ^ Sten, Christopher W. "Bartleby, the Transcendentalist: Melville's Dead Letter to Emerson." Modern Language Quarterly 35 (March 1974): 30-44.
[edit] External links
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- Sources
- Commentary
- A Cultural Context for "Bartleby the Scrivener"
- A bibliography of criticism relating to the story from the University of Kansas.
- A detailed explanation of the historical allusion (to the Colt-Adams murder) in the story.
- "Bartleby the Scrivener," Poe, and the Duyckinck Circle. A scholarly essay discussing Melville's allusions to Poe in the story.
- Other
- A study resource for " Bartleby the Scrivener"
- Br. Bartleby at the Zoon Blauw Monastery
- Bartleby at the Internet Movie Database
- Follow Bartleby on Twitter The BartlebyJR Project aims at responding to the twitterian question "¿What are you doing?" by quoting Bartleby's inmortal reply "I would prefer not to" in all of the world's languages.
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