Allan Silver
THE LAWYER AND THE SCRIVENER
More than with most literature, a notion of what
Bartleby,
The Scrivener
"means" risks diminishing it. The story's sparse line
and rich resonance have inspired its critics to much interpretive
ingenuity.
Bartleby
comes to readers surrounded by a close foliage of
commentary, springing from the anti-bourgeois sensibilities of Mel–
ville's critics and such luxuriant themes as alienation and existential–
ism, the meaningless and the absurd. Criticism made of such pliable
stuff has on the whole paid insufficiently sustained attention to the
text, tending rather to work with a selection of amenable fragments,
each pulsing with some fraction of the story's power. Melville's most
perfect short story is not read with the precision it demands.
The story takes place at the very center of mid-nineteenth century
commercial society; its subtitle on appearing in
Putnam's Monthly
Magazine
in 1853 was "A Story of Wall-Street." In it figure law suits,
clients and colleagues, the hiring and firing of employees, city govern–
ment, crowded streets and solitary rooms, landlords and tenants, police
and a jail - scenes of the modern city. Most readings develop the
themes, so richly stated in the literature of our century and the last,
associated with city life as an expression of the modern. On these views,
Bartleby is Melville himself-the serious writer in commercial society,
whose protest is his silence. Or Bartleby is the common man, defeated
by the cash nexus. Bartleby is alienated man, anticipating Joseph K. Or
he is oppressed labor, sabotaging by mute passivity the social machin–
ery of Wall Street. He is the repressed double of the narrator-lawyer,
acting out the despair that underlies a placid commitment to profes–
sion and the convention. He is a Christ figure, a martyr of modern life.
He is the stranger in the city. He is a schizophrenic or a nihilist. All
such views, however, rely on a reading of Bartleby's inner state, and no
such reading can be made.
Bartleby's eerie, inexplicable conduct claims total attention. The
lawyer begins his narrative with expressions of wonder at the scrivener,
"the strangest I ever saw or heard of," and breaks off to speak of himself
and his world only "because some such description is indispensable to
