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a whale of an existentialist was Herman Melville's
BARTLEBY
by
YAHIA LABABIDI
_______________
Yahia Lababidi
is the Egyptian-Lebanese author of Signposts
to Elsewhere (Jane Street, 2008), selected byThe
Independent (UK) as one of their 2008 Books of the Year.
To date, Signposts has been translated into Arabic,
with selections in Slovak and Swedish. His work has also appeared
in Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great
Aphorists, The Week, AGNI, Cimarron
Review, Rain Taxi, and Philosophy Now. Lababidi’s
poetry chapbook, Fever Dreams, is forthcoming from
Crisis Chronicles Press in early 2010.
[Yahia
Lababidi makes the case that one of the world's first existentialists,
or proponents of the absurd, was in fact "Born in the
USA." Which is to say, there may not have been a Joseph
K. without Bartleby, and that the initial Notes From The
Underground Man was not Dostoyevsky but Herman Melville]
ed.
Herman
Melville published his first short story Bartleby, the Scrivener:
A Story of Wall Street in 1853, anonymously. By that time,
the author already had behind him seven years of novel writing,
culminating in his great work of allegory: Moby Dick.
Republished in 1856, under the author’s name and an abbreviated
title, Bartleby is a miniature masterpiece, all the
more captivating for its evocation of the uncanny. The enduring
fascination it exerts is that of the cipher, as represented
by the enigmatic character of the anti-hero, Bartleby, a strangely
doomed figure of unfathomable depths lurking behind an inscrutable
surface. As the story charts the gradual exasperation and emotional
bafflement of his employer, our perception of Bartleby ever-so-faintly
shifts, from strangely helpless to obscurely sinister.
The
story begins well enough. The elderly narrator, an unambitious
lawyer and Bartleby’s employer is keenly observant and
sympathetically tolerant of the eccentricities of human nature
as manifested by his law-copyists. He faithfully renders their
idiosyncrasies in a loving and droll drawl, before lingering
on the biography of Bartleby, “one of those beings of
whom nothing is ascertainable.” One day, in answer to
an advertisement, Bartleby appears at his office like an apparition:
“pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn.”
He soon proceeds to gorge himself on documents, only cheerlessly.
By the third day however, in response to an ordinary request
to examine a paper with his employer, Bartleby first utters
his inexplicable (and soon to become maddening) mantra: I
would prefer not to. Rallying his stunned faculties, our
narrator finds he is incapable of responding to this bizarre
reply delivered with such perfect comportment. He may as well
be cross with his bust of Cicero, he reasons. A few days later,
summoned to a similar request, Bartleby again mildly repeats
his startling reply, and gently takes his leave. Yet, somehow,
Bartleby’s dispassionate weirdness endears him to his
employer, and he is left to retreat to his ‘hermitage,’
a high green folding screen in the corner of the room with a
window facing onto a brick wall.
In
time, the narrator comes to pity Bartleby’s ascetic existence,
living as a monk of an unnamed order, never dining, never leaving
the office, and concludes that his eccentricities must be involuntary.
He fears that if he were to turn him away Bartleby would surely
find a less indulgent employer, and keeping him becomes a question
of conscience. Thus, in his superhuman effort to humour Bartleby’s
perverse willfulness, his employee comes to enjoy strange privileges
and exemptions. Yet there are times when, prey to an all-too-human
need for a reaction, any reaction, our narrator is irritated
by his employee’s “unalterableness of demeanor”
and “great stillness.” Early for church one Sunday
he decides to pass by his office only to find that Bartleby,
in an unusual state of tattered dishabille, would “prefer
not to” let him enter as he is “deeply engaged.”
Not without a certain impotent rebellion, the narrator slinks
away from his own door. He returns later, out of curiosity,
to discover (from belongings left behind) that Bartleby has
been living in his office. Contemplating the sheer friendlessness
and solitude this implies, he is overcome by a ‘fraternal
melancholy’ for the “pallid copyist.” Yet
by the mystery of emotions and the magic of moods, a deeper
meditation on Bartleby’s morbid condition causes melancholy
to recoil into fear, and pity to slip into revulsion. Registering
this new-found visceral understanding, the narrator decides
to dismiss his unwholesome employee. But, first he must master
his own superstitions at forsaking this “forlornest of
mankind.”
At
some point in the story, Bartleby decides to take up the indefensible
position of blankly declining to do any more writing,
indulging only in his ‘dead wall revelry’ all day,
with dull glazed eyes. The narrator, desperately, provides him
with the excuse that his eyes must be ailing and exempts him
from working for some days, only to have his employee confirm
to him that he has permanently given up copying. Nevertheless,
Bartleby stays on “useless as a necklace, but afflictive
to bear,” not unlike Coleridge’s albatross in The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and invested with the same
allegorical gravitas and sense of foreboding. “A bit of
a wreck in the mid Atlantic” the narrator helplessly notes
of Bartleby. By now though, his compassion is laced with a deep
unease and he issues a six day ultimatum during which time Bartleby
must unconditionally leave the office. And, yet, peeping behind
the screen on the sixth day, there was Bartleby. “You
must go,” repeats the narrator, good-naturedly offering
him $20 and inviting him to write if he should need anything,
“I would prefer not to” is his employee’s
only reply, standing in silence “like the last column
of some ruined temple.”
The
next morning, following frantic conjecture as to whether or
not Bartleby has finally vacated the premises, the narrator
returns to his office. “Not yet, I’m occupied,”
comes the familiar voice from within. Submitting to the scrivener’s
“wondrous ascendancy,” he retreats with a mixture
of perplexity and nervous resentment. But pity triumphs and
as a result of his spiritual readings and temperament, our narrator
experiences a sublimely ridiculous epiphany. He must accept
Bartleby as predestined from eternity, and his mission in life
to furnish him with office room. This generosity of spirit,
alas, is fated not to last. Whispers of wonder over the strange
creature he keeps abound among his professional acquaintances
and spark his own dark anticipation to overthrow the “intolerable
incubus.” The only way to rid himself of this “ghost”
he decides is to change offices, which he does, albeit in terror
that Bartleby might return to haunt him. Instead, it is the
incensed landlord and tenants of his abandoned place of business
who pay him a visit. They urge him to reason with Bartleby,
who sits perched on the stair banisters by day and sleeps in
the entrance hall by night, to everyone’s consternation.
Relenting to a thinly-veiled threat of public scandal, the narrator
returns to present Bartleby with this necessary life choice:
“Either you must do something, or something must be done
to you.” “No, I would prefer not to make any change,”
offers Bartleby, and our narrator flees the scene and town.
Upon
his return, he finds a note. Bartleby has been removed by the
police as a vagrant, taken to a prison known as the Tombs, and
the narrator is summoned to make a statement. In prison, he
finds Bartleby alone in a quiet yard facing a high wall, and
their exchange is strained, defensive on the narrator’s
side and accusatory on Bartleby’s. Before leaving, the
narrator requests that particular attention be extended to his
ex-employee (the best dinner . . . ) but Bartleby does not dine
at all. When the narrator returns a few days later he finds
him huddled at the base of the wall, in a kind of fetal position,
and dead. Before parting with the reader, the narrator volunteers
that if this tale should stir curiosity as to Bartleby’s
past, he shares in it. Ultimately, he must profess ignorance
of this “man by nature and misfortune prone to pallid
hopelessness.”
At
this point, several questions pose themselves. Why
is this man by nature and misfortune prone to hopelessness?
Is he a casualty of the workplace, assaulted by pointlessness,
or does he take refuge in the wearisome or lethargic to drain
himself of some inner poison? Meaning, who introduced the hopelessness,
Bartleby or the Office? And, what does he mean by his confounding
mantra: I would prefer not to? Prefer not to what
exactly? And, prefer to do what, instead? Existentially,
what does this position entail: to do nothing and prefer not
to make any change? To approach these questions, we may try
to reconstruct an imaginary past to account for this unaccountable
life: its quiet despair, its irrefutable sorrow, its ambiguous
pain. In short, we must discover what went wrong, what wound
it expressed, what injury not to be healed. “What had
the man had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed, and yet
live?” These words are from a short story by Henry James,
The Beast in the Jungle. They occur to the protagonist
as he passes a stranger in a cemetery, and they serve to frame
our inquiry of the living-death that is Bartleby, with his entombed
spirit, undying and unliving, wandering in the land of shades.
If
existentially speaking, life may be likened to standing before
a blank canvas, and living as filling that space, then
what can be made of the proposition of refusing to engage? Or,
to put it differently, if in response to our thrownness-into-being
(Heidegger’s words) we decide not to get up,
walk or walk away? To resolutely shrug off the responsibility
to participate, is to reject life itself. It is the nihilist
impulse personified, the very embodiment of negation. For, in
actively rejecting everything, is it not Nothing that is passively
sought? “Nothing is more real than nothing,” offers
Beckett, a literary Bartleby given to his own endgames, and
condemned to life in his way. The narrator of Beckett’s
The End may well be speaking for Bartleby when he describes
himself as, “without the courage to end or the strength
to go on.” Something of this nothingness infiltrates Bartleby,
saps his strength and is at the heart of his inertia. For, with
despair as with night-vision, the eyes soon grow accustomed
to the dark.
Greek
poet, Constantine Cavafy, is another example of an artist with
such night-vision. In one poem, Walls, we find him
imperceptibly walled-in and in another, The Windows,
he is shutting out the “new tyranny of the light.”
His poem The City -- with its hissing hopelessness,
paralysis of will, early surrender and ashen gloom -- is not
unlike the mental space inhabited by Bartleby:
New
lands you will not find, you will not find other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
in these same houses you will grow gray.
Always you will arrive in this city. To another land -- do
not hope --
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have ruined your life here
in this little corner, you have destroyed it in the whole
world.
This bleak world
view of life as inescapable sentence is also suggested in Rilke’s
poem, The Panther:
His vision, from
the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary
that it cannot hold anything else.
It seems to him
there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars,
no world.
As
he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of
his
powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center
in which
a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Returning to Bartleby,
pacing in cramped circles around a center in which his will
stands paralyzed, we must again ask why this is so.
Is his will spoilt by misuse, disuse or abuse? Is it ravaged
by a savage boredom? Is his imagination starved, his mind malnourished?
Rilke’s answer to this corrosive paralysis is the opposite
of Bartleby’s, namely, affirmation:
Whoever
does not affirm at some time or other with a definite resolve
-- yes, jubilate at -- the terribleness of life, never takes
possession of the unutterable powers of our existence; he
merely walks at the edge; and when the decision is made eventually,
he will have been neither one of the living nor one of the
dead.
And in fact if it
is the work that has depleted Bartleby’s resources,
then why does he stay? Why do people stay in occupations,
relations, and spaces (inner and outer landscapes) that cease
to nourish and sustain, or worse, never did? Stuck in their
own mud, their wheels vainly spinning, why do people form spiritually
deadening habits, what proves their undoing: which loss, what
slight, what cumulative weariness or disenchantment? These are
questions tied up with what is deep and unreasoning, questions
of self-worth, or perhaps some perceived and invisible crime
that is being atoned for.
Philip
Larkin, a poet of bittersweet defeat, much of whose energy was
drained (by his own admission) running a university library
for decades, is in a position to answer some of these questions.
In his poem, Toads, he sardonically interrogates himself:
Why should I let
the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
. . .
For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,
. . .
I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.
In
another poem of his, tellingly entitled Poetry of Departures,
the fifth-hand news of the “audacious, purifying elemental
move” of someone who “chucked up everything and
just cleared off” suffices to help Larkin stay on, albeit
with envious resignation.
Undoubtedly, there is a deep-seated fear at bottom of this great
unwillingness to engage, change, leave and start again. Kafka,
who in his letters to fiancé Milena, agrees that he “may
sometimes look like a bribed defender of [his] fear,”
is another connoisseur of things he would “prefer not
to do.” A law clerk throughout his life, and writer by
night, he sums up his existence in his diaries as “a hesitation
before birth.” Yet in another letter, this time to friend
Max Brod, he is capable of seeing his situation with more clarity
and courage. Speaking of a hypothetical writer, Kafka says:
“. . . he has a terrible fear of dying because he has
not yet lived . . . what is essential to life is only to forgo
complacency, to move into the house instead of admiring it and
hanging garlands around it.” This recognition of complacency
and moving into life’s house is precisely what Bartleby
seems incapable of.
In
the course of the story, the complacency of Melville’s
scrivener becomes complete, monumental. He had arrived already
half-wasted, a guardian of some obscure pain, and dangerously
flirting with non-being. His “great stillness,”
which alternately fascinated and rattled his employer, may hold
the key to the mystery.
After
reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra,
author Paul Lanzky decided to seek out the philosopher who was
living in complete isolation in Italy. Despite being struck
by his humaneness and amiability, Lanzky notes: “Nietzsche’s
being displayed so much naiveté . . . so much wise devotion
to the most modest and world-remote life, that to me the catastrophe
[his madness] seemed unavoidable . . . this longing for stillness,
indeed this temporary reveling in the idyllic, suddenly seemed
. . . like a weariness of soul . . . ”
Analyzing
Gogol’s genius in The Overcoat, writer Vladimir
Nabokov also touches on some of the themes that pertain to Bartleby.
“The absurd,” he writes, “has as many shades
and degrees as the tragic . . . You cannot place a man in an
absurd situation if the whole world he lives in is absurd.”
The real “message” of the story, he tells us, is
that “something is very wrong and all men are mild lunatics
engaged in pursuits that seem to them very important while an
absurdly logical force keeps them at their futile jobs.”
Speaking of the hero of The Overcoat, Nabokov comes
close to summarizing Melville’s anti-hero when he says:
“[He] is absurd because he is pathetic, because
he is human . . . that meek little clerk, a ghost, a visitor
from some tragic depths who by chance happened to assume the
disguise of a petty official.” After reading Gogol, Nabokov
admits that one’s eyes may become “gogolized”
with fragments of Gogol’s world surfacing in unforeseen
places.
Yet,
Bartleby’s ancestors and heirs are not merely literary,
nor is he the exclusive property of a select band of eccentrics.
Rather, he is the patron saint of the civil servant, the dispirited
automatons of an absurd workplace, the insulted and injured
of the world. In other words, all who “measure out their
lives in coffee spoons” (Prufrock’s famous
phrasing) in demoralizing circumstances, performing tedious
tasks that, quite frankly, they would prefer not to.
In this sense, Bartleby may be read as a cautionary
tale concerning the perils of passive resistance and spiritual
stagnation; the dust, rust or moss that gathers from staying
in place. “The man who never alters his opinion / Is like
standing water/ And breeds reptiles of the mind,” writes
William Blake. Resentment, bitterness, complacency, paralysis,
or hopelessness are such examples. In that sense, Bartleby may
be said to exist in everyone, in various concentrations and
various combinations. Ah Bartleby, Ah humanity!
Also
by Yahia Lababidi:
The
Art of Fasting
On
Susan Sontag
Michael
Jackson: The Awe and the Aw
Notes
On Silence
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