30.05.1996

Two worlds collide

Phil Rudge reviews Bartleby by Herman Melville (Penguin 1996, pp47)

There is a brilliant line by Alfred Pareto about Marx that could also apply to Herman Melville. He says that Marx’s words are like bats: one can see in them both birds and mice.

Bartleby is a great short story written in 1855 and now reprinted in the Penguin pocket book series. It is narrated by an “eminently safe” lawyer who employs a pallid, “incurably forlorn” scrivener. This silent man tirelessly copies out documents all day but will answer, “I would prefer not to”, to any other request made of him. The perturbation the money-loving lawyer feels at the absolute nature of both Bartleby’s physical containment within his job (he takes to sleeping in the office) and his heroic spiritual opposition creates irreconcilable tensions, as two worlds seem to have been forced into one. 

Like Marx, Melville understood the mad, mysterious paradox that characterises capital as a social relation. In his work, things and their interrelations are not fixed but always changing. There is an art of internal relations, so that what appears as a thing here may be taken as an attribute of some other things there.

Bartleby is at first a half comic, half pathetic figure who by degrees comes to embody a heroic protest against his exploitation. A protest that allows no help from his employer, because that would not alter his basic condition. “‘I know you,’ he said without looking round - ‘And I want nothing to say to you’.” (p43)

There is a scrivener within all of us under capitalism, consigned to mechanically reproduce like human typewriters the “dead letters” of a world we make, but which we do not belong to.

Melville’s genius in Bartleby is to look scientifically at this dark, hemmed-in world and drag into the light the most passionate, proletarian impulses - then follow them with joy and suffering to the point of ignominious death and noble life.

Phil Rudge