Bartleby, the Situationist
Written for Lit Studies Class
In this paper on Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, I’m going to argue the most radical thing one can of Bartleby in a modern context: that he is the text’s most rationally driven character. It is improper to write him off as irrational or as acting in absurdity, conferring with the narrator’s own inability to truly condemn or speak ill of the man (beyond, perhaps, “inscrutable” and “strange”). As we’ll close-read, Bartleby, when given proper credence, is a gadfly in the meaning-making halls where capital and law intersect, where economic policy becomes transcribed into social doctrine. His seeming irrationality can only be deemed in reference to the logic of the space he occupies. He is allowed access to these spaces by virtue of his respectability and industriousness, but he quickly becomes unaccountable, challenging the logic of the space through remaining. He shows no hesitation at merging social spheres and denies the narrator the discourses of power that undergird all capitalist modes of production. Finally, he threatens and infects the modes of logic of the other workers in their pursuit to form a frictionless labour force, for which his times have no choice but to excise him. He holds his beliefs irrefutably true and with conviction unto death, for which he is more principled and considered than any other character in the text.
To support these readings, I’d like us to consider the French situationist movement of the 20th century, of whose logic Bartleby is exemplary, and apply relevant theory as is compiled in Kara Keeling’s Queer Times, Black Futures. The situationists were a collection of artists, academics and students that brought together Marxist theory and Dadaism to raise an alternative mode of thinking against the deeply-embedded logic of capital, weakening thought-restricting hegemonies. By the logic of capital, I refer to how capitalism thrives on asserting itself; its viability and current political/economic reality dictate its perpetuation, individualizing all modes of life under it in conformity, because to do so is the highest, most effective form of social organization (even where it is in conflict with other human values or requires a higher productive capacity than a human can muster). To challenge this logic, they created works that dismantled their medium, moved about public spaces in non-standard, attention-raising ways and made an all around spectacle of themselves in order to command reflection from members of the public. Given this information, let’s now spend the rest of this paper examining how Bartleby manifests these same revolutionary values.
Even as we are first introduced to Bartleby, in submitting himself to labour for a capitalist, we are given enough to question his role as an economic unit. Our “eminently safe” (or in other words, unchallenging) narrator allows Bartleby into his office first by his merit of being “pallid,” “pitiable” and “forlorn,” then by merit of his “respectability” and “industriousness.” It is also believed by the narrator that his countenance will “sedate” the ills of fellow scriveners, Turkey and Nippers (Melville, 7). Even before expressing that he “prefers not to”, Bartleby’s quietude also allows him to transgress boundaries, placing his boxed-in office on the side of the wall in which power is centralized, within the narrator’s office (or the ‘master’s house’). He is both empathized with and accommodated for out of the narrator’s emotionality and trust that he will continue his unceasing service to the narrator’s economic ends. As Bartleby shrinks further from his servitude, the narrator still holds value in Bartleby, continually disarmed and empathetic. Misguidedly, however, the narrator only parses these disruptive emotions within the rationality of capital, never understanding why Bartleby’s demeanor so thoroughly captivates him. ‘Surely he just prefers to work alone, surely he will get back to work, surely another job offer will do him good’. Bartleby’s merits are first emotional, but through justification in the logic of capital, such emotion is suppressed to fit him in as negating the unlaborious, yet human flaws of the other scriveners, allowing the office to become a more seamlessly productive machine. This is the narrator’s own supplied narrative why he never gives a reliable account of Bartleby’s reasoning while alive.
Even without Bartleby, Melville weaves the logic of the capitalist narrator as full of holes. Turkey and Nippers are best seen as imperfect workers, whose flaws are chinks in the armour of a perfect economic machine ever being viable. Nonetheless, they embody all they can to serve it well enough, dedicating their loyalty (Turkey’s “with submission, sir” before he speaks) and strength (both characters offer to hit Bartleby to knock sense in him) to the narrator’s economic project. In identifying with their status as economic units over their status as laborers, they deny their own capacity, pursuing the potential of upward mobility and good favour against their bodies and temperament. They are the subjects, underreasoned yet conformist, that the situationist seeks to provoke.
This is what makes Bartleby’s disruptive of preference so situationist. He continually reasserts his agency and responds with silence to any attempts to move his individual reason into the capitalist logic of conformity on behalf of order. Even where they are of the same social class, Nippers and Turkey are blind to their own submission by only looking up the ladder. Bartleby, on the other hand, bears no illusion and coincides with the goals of the system within his own time. As Deleuze suggests to us in Keeling’s piece, Bartleby exists in a queer temporality, not confining himself to the rigid restrictions of formal labour (working non-intermittently and eventually not at all), never doubting or moving into conformity the work he already finished (his refusal to proofread his transcripts) and “tying [and contaminating] the tongues of others” (Keeling, 9). Bringing it together in Naomi Reed’s words, “The lawyer’s system of reasoning cannot account for him, cannot insert him into a system of economic calculation” (Keeling, 5). He provokes questions of the space that grant him room in spite of his challenge, capturing imaginations against the idea that both the office and its denizens need to produce on someone else’s time.
While the lawyer’s capitalist logic can’t account for Bartleby, it is crucial to Bartleby’s function as a situationist that the lawyer himself can. In spite of the outcome, Bartleby succeeds at disruption because the narrator continues to give him space, show him intrigue and concern. Bartleby’s queer logic enters the narrator’s tongue against his careful artifice, stating: “Somehow, of late I had got into the way of involuntarily using this word “prefer” upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions. And I trembled to think that my contact with the scrivener had already and seriously affected me in a mental way.” (Melville, 17). He can’t help but consider Bartleby at all levels of consciousness. He is terrified that Bartleby is right, that his rationale is so effective that it overrides the capitalist identity the narrator has uncritically coasted on his entire life. The lawyer knows Bartleby’s actions are victimless, but cannot juggle his professional reputation with the nagging growth of Bartleby’s disruptive logic.
Crucially, it is by social pressure from attorneys of industry that leads the lawyer to truly process this incompatibility. The lawyer does not immediately submit, however, still weighing his values even where Bartleby has utterly ceased to abide by capitalist logic. Even in abandoning Bartleby, it is by Bartleby’s logic that he does so, preferring to live somewhere else rather than to deny him. He offloads the application of his own capitalist reasoning onto others, only distancing himself from Bartleby and betting on Bartleby’s steadfast logic to similarly infect any who might next come to possess him. Even in the novel’s last words, “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” (Melville, 30), our narrator still reckons with the divide. It wasn’t Bartleby that took an inhuman path, but humanity that has left the Bartleby’s of the world behind in adopting capitalist logic. I read this final plea to be a concession, to say that Bartleby was the sole flag still flying of non-capitalist humanity, of our individuality. With his death, capitalist hegemony is able to completely capture the public imagination (at least in the narrator's sphere). The lawyer, an old man whose birth coincides with the birth of Wall Street, now sees the searing whiplash, the prosecution and incompatibility existing between the logic his life has been founded on, and the logic of Bartleby.
As a side point to this read, the lawyer discovers Bartleby formally worked in a dead letter office, a fact which contains two fascinating interpretations. The first is the one given by the lawyer, that “does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it” (Melville, 30). This suggests that Bartleby was an inevitably doomed figure simply by existing as a “queer” presence in the narrative, simultaneously before and after his time. Interestingly, missed by the lawyer, yet certainly not missed in Melville’s word choice, “dead letter” is also defined as “a law or agreement that has lost its force without being formally abolished” (American Heritage). Bartleby is thus revealed here as a representative not only of himself, but of a time, doctrine and logic left behind in the mounting presence of capital-centered law, the very law which our narrator helped usher in.
Having demonstrated Bartleby’s capacity to threaten and infect the capitalist logic through which the narrator reasons, in the tradition of the situationists, we ought now to read the situations he is drawing attention to that pervade our capitalist narrator. The walls of the text thus too exist in a capitalist logic, one that is unreliable in not granting Bartleby interiority or shown-not-told sympathy. It is only by the narrator's repressed kinship with Bartleby that he can observe but not understand his profound emotions towards him. If we are to give credit to Bartleby as a rational agent, we also must reread his actions as rationally driven, intent on a situation.
Let’s return to the text. Bartleby, as the narrator discovers, has made a home of the office when all others leave, and later on selectively privatizes that space, encouraging the narrator to go for a walk. Capitalist logic fractures the individual through isolating the territories of our different spheres of life. Bartleby resists this with a one-track ideology and presentation of self, not accommodating for the favour of the social sphere, not privatizing property in the domestic sphere and only functioning in the economic sphere when he wants to. He never denies, but suggests otherwise. In all spheres, he is himself, an unwavering agent enacting his own values. He lets in and entertains no discourse, refusing to be synthesized into the social machine and embed himself with fracturing contradiction.
Further, Bartleby grows to install himself at various junctures as the story progresses. First, he positions himself at a window, looking “upon the dead brick wall” (Melville, 15), then in the middle of the office (Melville, 23). Later on, after he is evicted, Bartleby finds himself “sitting upon the banisters, haunting the building generally” (Melville, 25). The intent symbols of literature bear a lot of structural similarity to situations (what situationists create). Thus, as responsible readers, we must consider Bartleby’s gaze as situational.
In his first situation, he calls attention to the brick wall, a means of sectioning and alienating spaces. Offices, private spaces and their functions are concealed from public view. Crucially, this story also occurs on Wall Street, the fountainhead of American capitalism. Perhaps Bartleby is suggesting to us, by his situation, that capitalism is an ideology of walls, of creating territories and alienating individuals. Next, he makes himself an office centerpiece, human-faced yet there for non-economic reasons. He asserts himself simply by his capacity to, demanding the space to be viewed outside of its economic goals. It is only when he is made a “figure” by the narrative, fully transformed into a spectacle, rather than an agent that any of the text’s characters could similarly conduct themselves as, that the system starts to eject him. Yet it can’t, which brings us to his third situation. He is a spectre of a different time, of alternative ideologies abandoned by the demand for logical conformity, left without a home yet lingering still in the senses against the notion that a world defined without him is fully real. All who acknowledge yet refuse to consider him become complicit in the very violence that made such a lifestyle so inalterably “queer.”
Given our capacity to ascribe logic to his behaviour, it is improper to consider Bartleby as an indiscernible oddity, to think like our narrator. He must be read as a rational agent or we can’t reconcile with him. He is the embodiment of a “queer” ideology of subversion and one that derealizes the assertion that he ought to be commodified. The situations he creates simply by being unceasingly himself show how much we give up in submitting to capitalist logic, be it denying our own autonomy, as the other scriveners do, or being unable to act on emotion and empathy to serve the lives of those around us. Bartleby succeeds at infecting us all with literary situations and transgressive logic of how to break down the walls imposed, in text and in daily life, by capitalism and be ourselves in spite of it all.