This semester I'm taking a class called Law and Literature. Our first assignment was Billy Budd and Bartleby the Scrivener, both written by Herman Melville. Somehow I've never become a Melville fan, even though I love nautical stories and maritime history (and have read most of David Cordingly's books on the subject, which I highly recommend). Maybe it's the fact that the stories move so slowly, or that they are so allegorical as to become uninteresting to me. Anyway, here are the thoughts I wrote for our first assignment:
When I read these stories, I was home for vacation. My father asked me what “Bartleby the Scrivener” was about. “Well, it’s about a copy clerk in a law office who does nothing, but his boss feels awkward and doesn’t fire him, and then the clerk dies,” I replied.
Perhaps I was being too harsh in describing the story so simplistically, but I found the story quite dull and Bartleby unsympathetic. The narrator went out of his way to say that Bartleby was irreproachably honest and decent, but I was unconvinced. The narrator claimed to be irritated and repulsed by Bartleby because he was a lost soul and pity was no longer helpful, but I think my dislike of Bartleby came from a different source – what, though, was hard to determine.
Perhaps I am just not as curious about Bartleby as the Lawyer was. I did not wonder where Bartleby came from or what his story was – I just wondered what was the point. And a paragraph at the end did not serve to satisfy or even whet my appetite. So . . . Bartleby was a dead letter personified? He was dead inside? He was just extremely dissatisfied with his job? Perhaps I’m not smart enough to get it, but that still doesn’t make me care about a character so impassive and unchangeable.
The Lawyer attempted to be charitable towards his employee, and refused to fire him. Me, I felt no such charity: Bartleby didn’t seem infirm or so aged that he required compassion. Rather, he seemed to require a good shaking to get him to do something – anything! – for his own good. I felt like calling the police to remove him from the office might serve the same purpose as slapping someone who is being hysterical (Do people really do this? It make sense to me, but I’ve only seen it in the movies.).
Perhaps it is my youth that makes me so unfeeling towards copyist, while the Lawyer’s age gives him wisdom to see Bartleby as “the victim of innate and incurable disorder.” Or perhaps it is my all too American urge (encouraged by Harvard Law School) to value productivity above all else that gives me no pity for Bartleby, no inclination to cry out about the man and his symbolism for all humanity. The Lawyer himself is unambitious and has created “the cool tranquility of a snug retreat.” Even in my envy for that sort of life, I feel slight aversion to the Lawyer in his own complacency. How much further beyond aversion, then, do Bartleby and his inaction inspire? (And how much does it prove my point about American compulsion to productivity when Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize the word “unambitious?”)
My hope is that I would not be so unfeeling towards a real person – that I would feel some sort of compassion towards and interest in a real-life Bartleby. I hope that my disdain for Bartleby is for him as a character in a story. My movie-trained sensibilities were frustrated by a story that revolves around an immovable person. The other clerks were no exemplars of Puritan work ethic, but they interested and amused me because they did things. The Lawyer was unambitious, but I still respected him for his introspection and desire to do something, even if he decided on something so ridiculous as moving his offices in order to avoid his own clerk. Bartleby, on the other hand, was like a passive rock, and I felt that, like a rock, he didn’t warrant twenty pages of narration.
