See my previous post on “Bartleby” as a Christian parable, giving a contemporary context for the injunction in Matthew 25 to show compassion to the “least of these.”
What I want to focus on today is the general sympathy in our class toward the narrator and the feeling of exasperation many seemed to feel toward Bartleby. To be sure, Melville’s narrator is a more compassionate employer than the average boss in today’s corporate workplace. What I find notable about his evaluation of Bartleby (and his estimation of Nippers and Turkey) is his reductive view of them as valuable commodities. Despite Turkey’s recklessness in the afternoon hours, the narrator concludes that he is a “most valuable person,…accomplishing a great deal of work in a style not easy to be matched.” Nippers, likewise, is a “very useful man” to the narrator, since he “[writes] in a neat, swift hand” and is “not deficient in a gentlemanly sort of deportment,” which the narrator appreciates since it “reflect[s] credit on [his] chambers.” In this vein, despite Bartleby’s initial resistance to menial tasks, the narrator tolerates his behavior because he is “useful” and a “valuable acquisition” in whose hands the most important documents are safe. It is only when Bartleby’s behavior becomes a liability, “scandalizing [the narrator's] professional reputation,” that the lawyer decides to “for ever rid [himself] of this intolerable incubus,” as if Bartleby is a demonic presence in his office.
One question Melville poses is how far our responsibilities to fellow humans extend. Surely we cannot expect the narrator to keep Bartleby in employment if he does no work, but does the end of employment mean the end of human interest? Are we, as customers or customer service, as bosses or employees, as teachers or students, so defined by our professional identities that our private lives have no relevance to our daily work? If someone gets cancer or falls into mental illness or suffers brain damage in an injury and is thus made “useless” to the marketplace, does this make him/her useless to humanity?
If we assess one another based on our utility, how useful we are, it would seem that we have lost even the guilt that Melville’s narrator feels about fleeing from Bartleby. Our culture glorifies competition, and so we glorify the superhuman, the overachiever, the self-reliant hero. This Nike ad sums up that sentiment:
I wonder, though, if what some might see as the “inner coward” could actually be the kind of lost purpose that we find in a character like Bartleby. While the paralyzing state that leads to Bartleby’s demise is terrifying, it seems too easy to dismiss it as mere apathy or laziness. There are larger forces at work in his character, a life story that informs his malaise. The narrator concludes: “I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him, it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.” What can we say to the “forlornest of mankind,” to those whose soul-sickness is so great that they cannot find meaning in our present society?
The conclusion to “Bartleby” does not give us any heartwarming answers, because it suggests that the narrator’s fascination with Bartleby stems, in part, from the dark message that his story suggests for humanity. Could the corporate world, where humans are reduced to commodities, where relationships are judged by their usefulness for business, be another version of the Dead Letter Office? “On errands of life,” Melville concludes, “these letters speed to death.” While we might not conclude, as Bartleby does, that the modern world is so bereft of meaning that extreme withdrawal is necessary, even to the point of death, there is a cautionary image here in Melville’s story, a picture in the mirror of his fiction that is worth considering in an age when, as this 1999 study suggests, “tens of millions of Americans suffer from major depression every year” and roughly 16% of Americans have experienced major depression at some point in their lives. What are the causes of this psychic distress? Melville seems to suggest that part of the answer lies in our commercial workplace.
