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.”