“when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul be rid of it”

“Bartleby, the Scrivener” is, I believe, normally taken as something of a story against the mindless drudgery of work, especially rote office-work done as an employee rather than one’s own boss. Bartleby, the clerk who refuses to work with his constant refrain of “I would prefer not to,” is something of a hero who sacrifices himself on the altar of capitalism—one of the many slaves in this man-of-war world of ours that Melville is always bringing up.

On my re-reading of “Bartleby” along with the rest of The Piazza Tales, I found what may be a “creative misreading” of the story unfolding in front of me. I had always been sympathetic to the narrator, the man in charge of the law office who hires Bartleby, and taken his description of himself as “safe” as self-effacing and humorous rather than heavy and serious. But this time that impression was even stronger and my ideas about Bartleby himself and the narrator’s relation to him coalesced further—that safeness is not to be scorned, and Bartleby is in fact dangerous through his refusal to play by the rules.

One problem with reading Bartleby as a noble man unwilling to compromise his ideals for lowly copying work is that Bartleby hires himself out as a copyist. He shows up at the law office door when the narrator needs help and accepts a job. He works, seemingly assiduously, for a while, until it comes time to check his copies against their originals. He has made quadruplicates of a single document, and the narrator contrives to read the original aloud himself while his three clerks and one office boy check each of the copies individually—with the whole office working together as a group to help Bartleby in his own work, just as each would do for the others. This Bartleby refuses.

The “eminently safe man,” for all we might make fun of a stodgy lawyer doing his best to make a quick and easy buck on Wall Street, is quite right when he remonstrates with Bartleby:

“These are your own copies we are about to examine. It is labor saving to you, because one examination will answer for your four papers. It is common usage. Every copyist is bound to help examine his copy. Is it not so? Will you not speak? Answer!”

But Bartleby will have none of “common sense” nor “common usage”—it is this he refuses, not simply work. As his employer continues to bend over backward for him, allowing him to refuse tasks at will and after a time to discontinue working at all, the others in the office must pick up the slack. Bartleby can’t be bothered to walk over to the post office, so the narrator must do it himself—what is he paying this guy for?

And this is the danger of Bartleby: he is, as the narrator calls him, a “millstone.” He is not simply idealistic, he is inert, and constantly described as “forlorn.” He has no motivation to do anything; he has no will even to leave the building he works in. All his refusals are just that—refusals, rejections. There is no positive activity to counterbalance them. This is Bartleby’s “modern” alienation and disaffection, but in so many ways he is the perpetrator of that alienation. He refuses to say anything about himself, refuses to engage in any idle chit-chat with his officemates, and, as noted above, causes them more work. If Bartleby worked at your office, he would be the guy that got away with murder and somehow never got fired. He would be the guy that constantly made more work for you because he refused to take responsibility for his own duties and somehow got away with it.

And this alienation is infectious. The narrator can feel it creeping into himself and knows the only way he can stop himself from losing all ambition and motivation as Bartleby has is to remove him from his presence. It also creeps into the other clerks at the office, as they begin to acquire Bartleby’s habits of speech if not (yet) his habits of refusal to work. Where the narrator at first pitied Bartleby, “just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion.” He argues that rather than coming from “the inherent selfishness of the human heart,” his repulsion stems from “hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill.” Bartleby is beyond the narrator’s help, and his forlornness can only cause pain.

When the narrator does attempt to excise Bartleby and his alienation from his own life, it is as though Bartleby is resolved only to make himself as troublesome as possible for those who have shown him fellow-feeling and attempted to help him. This is not something you’d usually find Melville a fan of.

There is still a chance to sympathize with Bartleby at the end, as the narrator does, blaming his past difficult experiences for his strange and uncooperative behavior. But there is nothing at all of the milk and sperm of human kindness in Bartleby, and he nearly succeeds in draining it from the narrator as well. As alienating as the modern work experience might be for some, we don’t have a sympathetic Ishmael on our hands here, but a mope and a drudge that’s not doing much for anyone, himself included.