410
PARTISAN REVIEW
an adequate understanding of the chief character about to be pre–
sented." The lawyer plainly speaks for the average man as early
bourgeois; the minor eccentricities of his other employees are the
foibles of ordinary clerks; and all others in the story literally go about
their business-save for Bartleby, who neither goes about nor does
anything. The story's name is Bartleby's. The lawyer remains anony–
mous as do all others, save for those who have nicknames or quintes–
sential ones-like "Mr. Cutlets," the prison"grub-man"; indeed, no
one in the story but Banleby, its least real person, has a real or personal
name. Thus, all lines seem
to
converge on Bartleby. Yet the story offers
no way into Banleby; rather, Bartleby illuminates the ordinary world
about him. As some of the story's commentators have seen , its center is
not the scrivener but the lawyer.
That we know Banleby only as he affects the lawyer has deterred
few critics from constructing an inner existence for the scrivener. Yet
the limits to our knowledge of Bartleby are plainly stated at the very
outset:
While of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of
Bartleby nothing of that son can
be
done. I believe that no materials
exist for a satisfactory biography of this man.
It
is an irreparable loss
to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is
ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case those
are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby,
that
is
all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report which will
appear in the sequel.
Melville begins by establishing a strict rule: we know nothing of
Bartleby save that which the lawyer's " own astonished eyes " see: like
the lawyer,
that
is all we can know of him. Midway in the tale, the
lawyer sees that his "assumptions" about Banleby's purposes and
intents were "simply my own, and none of Bartleby's." The critics have
largely taken this as an occasion to draw upon the dense cluster of ideas
that swirl about the anguish of Modern Man, reading one or another of
them into Banleby. They encourage readers to take a position superior,
in moral stance and subtle perceptiveness, to that of the story's
narrator. But Melville's text really requires us not
to
assume that we
can know Bartleby any better than the lawyer can.
The lawyer indeed begins by seeking comprehensible reasons for
Bartleby 's refusal
to
work:
Recovering myself, I ... demanded the reason for such extraordi–
nary conduct.
