Office Lit 101: Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

Someday, I’d love to pull together an anthology of office literature, assuming one doesn’t already exist, which would include everything from Melville and Dickens to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to Dilbert and “Office Space.” Often, I believe, literary artists have presented a far truer picture in poems, plays, stories, novels, cartoons, and films of office life as real people experience it than any nonfiction writer ever has. Thus, in this blog, I intend from time to time to take a look at one or another of these works and consider what it might have to teach us about the office world.

Our subject in this post is the classic, "Introduction to Fiction" story “Bartleby,” which I reread last night for the first time since teaching it in a community college course. The author, Herman Melville, is best known as the creator of Moby Dick, a huge, cosmic-symbolic adventure tale featuring a white whale, and it’s hard to imagine that its author would have anything to say about office life. Wondering what kinds of experience informed both works, I turned to the obvious place for answers – Wikipedia – and found that Melville spent his early adult years at sea having adventures and writing novels about them, then got married and spent some years in a cabin in the Berkshires writing his two greatest novels – Moby Dick and Pierre – during this time he also got to know Nathaniel Hawthorne -- then, in the 1860’s, he got a job in a customs house, where he wasted away for nineteen years and wrote hardly anything before finally escaping back to full-time writing. So, notwithstanding his sea voyages, Melville did spend a substantial chunk of time in an office, though most of it was long after the years he spent in the Berkshires, which was when he wrote “Bartleby.”

The plot of the story is simple. The narrator is a lawyer who believes in taking the line of least resistance. He’s created a nice cushy life doing routine legal work for rich people on Wall Street (the street name is symbolic,of course – this is Melville!), working as little as possible himself and demanding even less from his employees. Then one day he hires a copyist named Bartleby who immediately begins to test his limits. When the lawyer makes a simple request, rather than complying, Bartleby answers with the words “I prefer not to.”
From then on, these words becomes his litany, which he repeats in response to more and more requests until he is doing no work at all while also refusing to leave the office (where he sleeps, it turns out) even after the lawyer fires him. Finally, in desperation, the lawyer moves to a different building while Bartleby continues to hang around the old one until the landlord has the police take him to “The Tombs,” a prison, where he dies. All this time, the lawyer, caught between his hypersensitive Christian conscience and the desire for a more peaceful existence, agonizes over how best to deal with Bartleby’s strange behavior.

Critics have argued about what Bartleby’s “I prefer not to” means. As a therapist, I’m tempted to diagnose him with Asperger’s syndrome plus depression, possibly brought on by a medical condition, but that doesn’t really explain what his creator, the author, was getting at. As a writer who often feels frustrated by the demands of a “day job,” I can’t help wondering if Melville, newly married and having trouble selling his books, is contemplating the need to get practical himself, while at the same “preferring not to.” The story takes place on Wall Street and all of the windows look out only on brick walls. Bartleby spends his days staring out at the walls from within the cubicle that the lawyer, ahead of his time as an office designer, constructs for him. Eventually, Bartleby ends his life in a prison. To me, the message is clear: working in an office equals imprisonment. Apparently, even in the nineteenth century, office confinement was beginning to get to people, especially creative artists and nature-loving, globe-circling adventurers like Melville.

Bartleby is not the only character in the story whose psyche may have been twisted by confinement to the unnatural environment of a Wall Street office. One of the other copyists, Turkey, is an alcoholic, and the other, Nipper, suffers from indigestion, restlessness, irritibility – he is forever fooling with the height of his table and muttering curses to himself – and a kind of inappropriate ambition. A third employee, a twelve-year-old boy, is described as intelligent, but mainly interested in collecting nuts, perhaps destined for obesity. And the lawyer himself seems to be caught in a kind of paralysis, incapable of taking any kind of constructive action.

How does Bartleby’s office differ from a present-day one? One obvious difference is that the workers are all men, as was typical in the nineteenth century. (Meville seems to like to write about groups of men – think Moby Dick – and male bonding is a favorite theme of his. In this case, the bonding seems to be dysfunctional, symbiosis rather than love.) A second difference is in the pace of life, which appears much less frantic in the days before “scientific managers” started timing typists with stop-watches than it is now. Finally, the technology is different – there are no computers or even typewriters, the lion’s share of the work being copying documents out by hand.

But in other ways, Bartleby’s office may not be that different from our own. Then, as now, bored, lonely, unfulfilled, sensory deprived workers feel trapped. Then, as now, a kind-hearted supervisor agonizes about how to be both firm and compassionate with a troublesome employee. Then, as now, office culture keeps humans from forming healthy connections. Then, as now, a single individual’s faulty brain wiring wreaks havoc on his own life and that of others. Then, as now, we see men in an office worrying about whether or not they’re really men.

To me, “Bartleby” feels like the first piece of writing that called office life into question, anticipating The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by a hundred years or so. It’s an old story, and thus the pace may be slower than what we’re used to, but if you want to understand how offices got to where they are now, it’s a good place to start.

Coming Next: They Just Keep Piling Up: Papers in the Office