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Bartleby, the Scrivener (2)
作者Author  /  Herman  Melville  梅維爾

Lan Wenlin (藍文玲)

Sep. 11, 2010

 

Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener”:

Bartleby as an Excess without Excess

 

(1) Grammatical vs. Agrammatical

(2) Bartleby as Excess

(3) A Psychotic Language and a Psychotic Industry

 

In his short fiction “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Herman Melville delineates a mysterious young man Bartleby, who is, as the attorney-narrator says, “one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable” (19). It is Bartleby's unascertainability that offers the critics a space for diverse interpretations. For example, Leo Marx suggests that “Bartleby” is “a parable having to do with Melville's own fate as a writer” (12), whereas Barbara Foley argues that the story of Bartleby should be understood in the context of the mid-nineteenth-century discourse about the contemporary class struggles in the United States (88). In the perspectives of interpreting “Bartleby” as Melville's autobiographical career dilemma or as a reflection of the contemporary class conflicts in the capitalist society, however, Bartleby is deprived of the essence of a being. He is analyzed as a projection, a representative, a metaphor, but not a physical being even as a fictional character. As the attorney-narrator always implies, it is difficult to find the human characteristics in Bartleby. Before referring to his first meeting with Bartleby, the attorney-narrator says “it is fit I make some mention of myself, my employés, my business, my chambers, and general surroundings; because some such description is indispensable to an adequate understanding of the chief character about to be presented” (19). His introduction to himself, his business and employees not only provides the readers the background in which an unusual story is going to happen but also reveals his personality: he is trying to tell a story in the framework of a traditional narrative, with a well-organized structure, a detailed setting and several distinctive characters. Nonetheless, Bartleby's arrival compels the supposedly traditional story to go out of the attorney-narrator's control, that is, out of rationality. Bartleby finishes “an extraordinary quantity of writing” at first, but one day, when the attorney asks him to examine some documents, he replies “I would prefer not to” (Melville 25-26). Then, day by day, he refuses to do copying, refuses to leave the office, and refuses to give a reason of his refusal. Eventually, Bartleby is sent to the Tombs, “the Halls of Justice” (Melville 47), and dies there. The story ends with a rumor about Bartleby: he “had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration” (Melville 49). Instead of asserting Bartleby's role as a victim of some certain social systems, this ending essentially reinforces Bartleby's unascertainability for all the attorney can report about Bartleby's history is a rumor.

 

Grammatical vs. Agrammatical

As Melville inserts an unascertainable being into an organized law office in his short fiction, what he problematizes not only the dilemmatic relationship between employers and employees in the modern industrialized world, but fundamentally the pan-scientific Western social standard to distinguish the unreasonable from the reasonable. The following sections of this paper would scrutinize the relation between Bartleby and the attorney-narrator. Their interaction is actually a confrontation of two epistemological systems, if the way Bartleby acts and speaks could be induced to a system according to the conventional definition. Bartleby's unascertainability exposes the limit of verbal representation based on linguistic norms, that is, rationality. In “Bartleby; or, The Formula,” Gilles Deleuze defines Bartleby's “I would prefer not to” as an agrammatical formula, a gesture by which Bartleby “rejects a nonpreferred” and “does not affirm a preference” (71). In other words, stating this formula, Bartleby retreats himself from the attorney's grammatical logic of binary oppositions, either affirmation or negation. Through his retreat, Bartleby opens up a “zone of indiscernibility or indetermination between some nonpreferred activities and a preferable activity,” and offers “a negativism beyond all negation” (71). Thus, though the attorney often feels disturbed by Bartleby's imperviousness, Bartleby does not hold an ungrammatical statement against the grammatical language, but instead, holds an agrammatical one, which differentiates himself from the social collective language determined by “reference” rather than “preference.” Bartleby does not oppose the social collective language, but marks a not-the-same spot within the language. As Deleuze points out, on the first day the attorney decides to place Bartleby “in a strange arrangement” to sit near the attorney's own desk, separated from the section occupied by the other two scriveners (75). Hence,

it is the attorney who broke the arrangement he himself had organized, and from the debris Bartleby pulls a trait of expression, I PREFER NOT TO, which will proliferate around him and contaminate the others, sending the attorney fleeing. (76)

In brief, it is the attorney who diminishes the grammatical logic by providing Bartleby an opportunity to “proliferate around” and “contaminate the others.” In a sense, the attorney performs a paternal function when he is rendered as a figure that has the right to depict all the characters and all the events in this story. Simultaneously, being an employer, he is supposed to have the right to demand. However, Bartleby's appearance is the crisis that “blurs the image, marks it with an essential uncertainty”[1] and meanwhile “undoes the subject, sets it adrift and abolishes any paternal function” (Deleuze 77). Therefore, the confrontation between the attorney and Bartleby can be deemed a confrontation between an assumptive authority in a certain system and an unascertainable being that belongs neither to a certain system nor to the uncertain chaos.

The interaction between the authority and the mysterious figure is exhibited in an unbalanced situation: the attorney has the power to narrate the story in the first-person perspective, whereas Bartleby's voice is reduced to minimum. This phenomenon fundamentally reflects a power hierarchy not only in the employer-and- employee relationship but also in the social logic based on rationality. As the critic Rosemarie Garland-Thomson remarks,

[b]y withholding what is “wrong” with Bartleby, the story focuses not on the scrivener's emotional, psychological, or physical disability but on the narrator's response to the problem Bartleby represents: the disruption of the law office, protocols of work, relations among the other characters, and the lawyer's self-image. (786)

In other words, it is the attorney-narrator who decides what readers can hear and perceive, and the mysterious man Bartleby is presented through the attorney's observation, which means, Bartleby's “wrong” is based on his encounter with the attorney. If Bartleby does not have the employed relation with the attorney, his “I would prefer not to” would not have any effect on the others, and the attorney would not endeavor to figure out its meaning. Moreover, the person Bartleby might never be known through pages. As the attorney says at the very beginning, he “believe[s] that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature” (19). When he says that it is “an irreparable loss” for there is no biography of Bartleby, he partly justifies his purpose of writing, and simultaneously implies that Bartleby's “complete life” would be an eternal loss. In a word, the story is actually an episode of Bartleby's life, told from a distorted point of view. Although Garland-Thomson claims that Bartleby performs a disabled figure because his “differences from normative expectations constitute a problem” (783), Bartleby's situation is not quite similar to a disabled in any period of social welfare history. His voice may be reduced, but it is his silence that discloses the existence of the unpresented, which is essentially impossible to be presented in the rational logic.

Such a dilemma of the unpresented or the unpresentable in writing is an irresoluble difficulty for every writer, a person trying to express, explain, or record some certain things through language. In “Benito Cereno's Mute Testimony: On the Politics of Reading Melville's Silence,” Shari Goldberg notices that “Melville's last works bear a relationship to silence because he was writing that he was not writing” (3). While describing Melville's act as “not writing” which bears little devotion and may not earn the public recognition and financial reward, Goldberg criticizes those who easily relate Melville's “not writing” to the silence of slavery subsisting in the American history (3). In her opinion, Melville should not be classified into an “American hero” who illustrates the historical trauma of the oppressed; rather, the silence of the text and the characters exposes the author's intention to “ignore the fact that the author's experience was, precisely, authoring them” (3). Thus, the silence in a text indicates not simply the disability of language or the muffled speaking of a certain group, but also an authoritative power that holds the right of writing. Here a power struggle is generated: it is the authoritative power that provides a distorted view of the silence; otherwise, the silence cannot be perceived at all, and the lack of linguistic record, on the symbolic level, will define such silence as non-existence. The strangeness or silence of some characters becomes a counterforce against the authoritative text within it. When Bartleby's formula challenges the binary logic of being either grammatical or ungrammatical, either certain or uncertain, either affirmative or negative, and etc., Bartleby's silence and existence inactively threaten the concept of “humanity,” on which the so-called “logos” is established.

 

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Bartleby as Excess

In this short fiction, the other characters in the office all have some odd habits, temperaments, or qualities, and such oddity circumscribes them as human, whose essence is never entirely flawless or profitable for oneself and the others. When the attorney describes himself as “one of those unambitious lawyers,” who stays “in the cool tranquility of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men's bonds, and mortgages, and title-deeds,” he manifests that he would not like to be deeply engaged in his profession, which is “proverbially energetic and nervous, even to turbulence” (Melville 19). His choice to be an unambitious lawyer results from his “profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best” (Melville 19). Hence, his choice exemplifies a reasonable contradiction in humans: though it seems to be inconsistent for an unambitious person to pick up an “energetic and nervous” profession, this inconsistency is based on a personal motto, namely, a private reason. Moreover, while he uses the phrase-pattern “one of,” he is reassuring that he is not the first and sole one. Compared with the self-assertive attorney, the two scriveners, Turkey and Nippers, are represented as complement to each other. Before twelve o'clock, Turkey is “the quickest steadiest creature, too, accomplishing a great deal of work in a style not easy to be matched,” but after twelve, he shows “a strange, inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness of activity” (Melville 21). Nippers is Turkey's counterpart: “the irritability and consequent nervousness of Nippers [a]re mainly observable in the morning, while in the afternoon he [i]s comparatively mild” and can write “a neat, swift hand” (Melville 23-24). In view of the “value” of their work in the morning or afternoon and some of their admirable personalities, the attorney recognizes that it is “a good natural arrangement under the circumstances” (Melville 24). As the critic Andrew Knighton notices, “[e]ach scrivener functions as an exchangeable half of the copying machinery of the office, such that their respective penchants for production and dissipation are yoked together into equilibrium” (202). As long as they do not damage the whole authoritative regulation in the professional domain, it is acceptable that people have some excessive or useless dispositions against the requirement of their profession. That is the reason why the attorney regards Turkey's being “too energetic” and Nippers's “indigestion” as the endurable “natural.”

Situated in such a complementary balance comprised of these two scriveners, the attorney misestimates that Bartleby, as “a man of so singularly sedate an aspect,” would “operate beneficially upon the flighty temper of Turkey, and the fiery one of Nippers” (Melville 25). In short, the attorney attempts to remove the excessive parts of his employers by offering them a companion without excess. Nevertheless, Bartleby cannot be deemed a companion for men because he shows no human excess though with a human form. The crucial point here is not that Bartleby is an extraordinary human for his motionlessness and little ingestion of food, but that his appearance associates him with the human race. As Slavoj Žižek contends, Emmanuel Levinas's idea of “face” not only “serves as the nonlinguistic point of reference that also enables us to break the vicious circularity of the symbolic order,” but also “‘gentrifies' the terrifying Thing that is the ultimate reality of our neighbor” (146). For Žižek, the ethics emerging from seeing human faces provides a false Cause that prevents people from confronting the Otherness in the Other. This visual ethics, in the Lacanian psychoanalytic sense, avoids the direct contact with the excess from the Real and the abyss in the Symbolic through appealing to the Imaginary. Žižek underscores that even in the traditional psychoanalytic surrounding, the contact between the subject-patient and analyst is concealed: both of them stare “into the same void in front of them” (148). Hence, what can really bring out a change is not the sympathy generated from a visual image, but the honesty and courage to recognize that “[t]here is no ‘intersubjectivity' here, only the two without face-to-face, the First and the Third” (Žižek 148). In “Bartleby,” the protagonist's image haunts the attorney after he finds Bartleby starts to live in his office, and the haunting image urges the attorney to wonder what kind of life this man has. In nervousness aroused by Bartleby's quasi-omnipresence, the attorney quickly constructs Bartleby as a man living in “miserable friendlessness and loneliness” when he finds there are some daily trifles, such as soap and a towel, around Bartleby's desk (Melville 33). The attorney's discovery of the daily trifles enables him to create a human face for Bartleby, and then to rationalize Bartleby's eccentricities as a consequence of some traumatic human moods in order to convince himself that Bartleby is no more than an extremely extraordinary human being.

In other words, to diminish Bartleby's destructive effect on all the people in the office, the attorney has to reconnect Bartleby with the conventional concept of humanity to some extent. As the attorney confesses, “[i]f the individual so resisted be of a not inhumane temper, and the resisting one perfectly harmless in his passivity” (Melville 29). That reveals his purpose of detecting the human temperament in Bartleby: he will treat Bartleby in the same way as he treats a plain employee if he can recognize Bartleby as a human, and doubtlessly he will not hesitate to fire an employee who obstructs the normal working procedure. However, the human Bartleby invented by the attorney's imagination arouses his sense of “[t]he bond of a common humanity,” which drives him into the “fraternal melancholy” (Melville 33). While Bartleby keeps his mild “I would prefer not to” and the attorney endeavors to explains Bartleby's eccentricities in the reasonable or humanistic “assumptions,” Bartleby's eccentricities are destined to remain incomprehensible. When the attorney asks Bartleby why he wants to quit writing, Bartleby answers “Do you not see the reason for yourself” (Melville 37). Then the attorney indeed “sees”: he sees that Bartleby's eyes look “dull and glazed,” and presumes that Bartleby's vision is impaired by copying (Melville 37). Nevertheless, Bartleby's answer can be understood as another meaning: “If you need a reason, find one for yourself.” It is an implicit declaration made by Bartleby, clarifying that “reason” is never in his concern. After starting to decline the attorney's demands, Bartleby acts in a constant mode; it is the attorney who sticks himself in a paradoxical mental struggle when facing Bartleby. At one moment, the attorney has recognized that “how could a human creature with common infirmities of our nature, refrain from bitterly exclaiming upon such perverseness—such unreasonableness” (Melville 31), but at the next, he asks Bartleby to give a reason for his decision to quit writing. The attorney's alternative feeling of melancholy and fear, pity and repulsion toward Bartleby exemplifies his “common humanity”: people's attitudes and actions are not always constant because their emotions will affect their external acts, and human emotions rise and fall according to the events taking place in daily life. The real trouble for the attorney is not merely that Bartleby has no function in the office, but that Bartleby marks an ambiguous space between the spheres of human/inhuman. He is excluded or he excludes himself from humanity, becoming a disturbance to the system to construct the humanity, while he invades it but is not a part of it.

As Deleuze suggests, Bartleby is a creature belonging to the Primary Nature, [2] and the attorney plays the role of a prophet, “the guardian of the divine and human laws of secondary nature” (80). The prophet is a figure who wears the paternal-authority mask, being fascinated by the beings in the Primary Nature but simultaneously condemning them based on the Law (80-81). Regardless of the hierarchy implied by the adjectives “primary” and “secondary,” Deleuze introduces the idea of two natures, between which there is a fundamental abyss even though one is fascinated by the other. In this sense, the attorney's “gloom” and “sadness,” aroused by “[t]he bond of common humanity,” result from his own false recognition. From the very beginning, there is no “common humanity” shared by Bartleby and him; they belong to two different “humanities” if what Bartleby presents can be called as humanity. In such a situation, as the critic Arne De Boever claims, “[t]he only way to listen to Bartleby is to overhear him. To listen to him means precisely not to listen to him: to speak not as a listener who expects that something will be communicated” (152). That is, the attorney would be able to “communicate” with Bartleby only when he forgoes the intention to communicate. If the solution proposed by Boever is workable, it is significant that the attorney consciously puts Bartleby's desk besides his but places “a high green folding screen, which might entirely isolate Bartleby from [his] sight, though not remove him from [his] voice” (Melville 25). When the attorney supposes that it is necessary to put the desks of Turkey and Nippers in a section separated from his own in the office, he acknowledges that the two men are two independent individuals who need the “complete” privacy as he himself does. In contrast, he does not regard Bartleby as an integral human being so that he can conjoin “privacy and society” by placing Bartleby nearby. Bartleby is reduced to be merely a voice, which is expected to answer whenever the attorney calls him. While only the voice can affirm Bartleby as a living being, the voice demonstrates the Lacanian lamella, “libido as an organ,” “the remainder of the life-substance which has escaped the symbolic colonization” (Žižek 167). Bartleby exhibits no excess in his appearance and external actions; it is his voice which performs the trigger of exposing his existence as an excess outside the human society.

It is noteworthy that the attorney's arrangement aims to keep Bartleby under the control of his voice, but such an arrangement does not constitute an audio-panoptic surrounding, in which the supervisor has an authoritarian power to overlook and overhear. Instead, when the attorney assures his power to be heard and answered, it is Bartleby who has the power to overhear. Bartleby becomes the ultimate supervisor of the supervisor of the office, and in a sense, the Bartleby-like supervisor is the most terrifying one because of his indifference toward the supervised, namely, the unascertainability of what he really sees and hears. In “Detention without Subjects: Prison and the Poetics of Living Death,” Caleb Smith argues that the subtitle of this short fiction, “A Story of Wall Street,” actually implies a prison-like environment where Bartleby can see only a wall from his desk. Therefore, Bartleby's transformation from a diligent worker to a “living dead” is a predictable consequence in the torture of idleness and loneliness in such a quasi-prison (258). However, the power relation between the attorney and Bartleby is so complicated that Bartleby should not be classified simply as a victim of the capitalism prison. Putting the story of Bartleby in the scale of the discourse about prison, yet Smith points out that the attorney always seeks to “repair the ethical relation of master and worker and, along the way, to discover a narrative pattern fit to hold Bartleby—comically rehearses the history of punishment in miniature” (259). The “comical” sense comes from the fact that the attorney attempts to restore his status as a master by “rehearsing the history of punishment” but his action essentially mars his master authority: it is unnecessary for a true master to seek a pattern to “hold” his employee. The attorney's arrangement does not create a unidirectional government over his employee, but exposes the fragility of a master's power and even of one's human dignity when blurring the delimitation between privacy and society. Contrastively, denying “the logic of interpretation and action upon which the lawyer relies,” Bartleby represents “the outward manifestation of a radical individualism” (Davis 48). By the juxtaposition of the attorney and Bartleby, Melville pinpoints an ironical fact in the enlightened capitalism society: while the attorney endeavors to claim for his rights as a master and an individual, he fails because the rationalism he relies on does not provide those rights as he presumes. On the contrary, Bartleby, as a man of “preference,” is given the power to counteract his employer and to manifest a radical individualism by doing nothing.

 

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A Psychotic Language and a Psychotic Industry

In “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” Giorgio Agamben begins his discussion with the role of a“scribe.” A scribe is the mediator between potentiality and actuality: he/she possesses the ability to transcribe the thoughts in mind into the actual written documents, namely, the ability to create Something from Nothing. According to Aristotle, “nous, the intellect or potential though,” is comparable to “a writing tablet on which nothing is written” (244). In other words, potentiality indicates a possibility for something to happen, but the moment of that thing's occurrence, the potentiality cannot be called potentiality anymore. From this perspective, Bartleby's occupation as a scrivener signifies an important position. In Agamben's term, “[a]s a scribe who has stopped writing,” Bartleby “constitutes the most implacable vindication of this Nothing as pure, absolute potentiality” (253-54). Being a scrivener, Bartleby is supposed to write and his right to write is totally justified, but it is remarkable that all Bartleby can and need to write is the copies of the attorney's legal documents. If Bartleby can be defined as a scribe, a profession to write down oracles and religious canons in the ancient time, the Symbolic mighty authority in this context is the legal institution. As Arne De Boever notices, what Bartleby refuses is not to copy, but to “verify whether his copy is identical to the original”; that means, he does not mind whether his copy is “accurate” or not (151). Bartleby's indifference toward the accuracy demonstrates his non-resistant resistance, non-negative negation toward the institutional Symbolic. As Agamben argues,

[t]he formula that he [Bartleby] so obstinately repeats destroys all possibility of constructing a relation between being able and willing, [3] between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata. [4] It is the formula of potentiality. (255)

Based on Agamben's concept of potentiality, if Bartleby shows the least of human will, his effect on the attorney and the Symbolic would not be so disturbing and influential. Bartleby's effect is generated only in the scale of potentia absoluta, the potentiality which transgresses the rational limitation. Throughout the whole story, without clearly indicating what he wants and does not want to do, Bartleby merely states what he “prefer[s] not to” do.

In this short fiction, the attorney is represented as the agent of assumption/will, whereas Bartleby is the embodiment of preference/potentiality. When Bartleby keeps his position of “pure, absolute potentiality,” he must be a being without wanting because his expression of wanting would be a surrender to will. As the attorney makes the last effort to draw Bartleby back to be a “normal” worker by suggesting some jobs to him, such as a clerk in a dry-goods store, a bartender, and a traveling bill-collector, the attorney is trying to transform Bartleby's potentiality into actual labor. Bartleby declines the attorney's suggestions by replying “There is too much confinement about that” (Melville 45). Hearing Bartleby's reply, the attorney exclaims that it is Bartleby who keeps himself confined. Although the attorney always wants to offer Bartleby some aid by money or advice, he never detects any hints in Bartleby's answers. Those hints disclose the fact that the meaning of Bartleby's actions and his language should not be interpreted in the logic ofassumptive rationalism. Bartleby speaks a “psychotic” language, which

characteristically brings into play a procedure that treats an ordinary language, a standard language, in a manner that makes it ‘render' an original and unknown language, which would perhaps be a projection of God's language, and would carry off language as a whole. (Deleuze 72)

In brief, Bartleby's language creates a discourse without lack. Thus, it is unnecessary and impossible for him to further explain his words because the meaning of every statement is complete as soon as it is made. In this psychotic linguistic system, the attorney's request for an explanation is actually a request for an excess to such a completion, an attempt to transcribe the psychotic statement into a neurotic one. That is the reason why the attorney censures Bartleby for self-confinement: Bartleby's psychotic logic terminates all other possibilities within a statement.

On the base of their linguistic systems, the attorney and Bartleby represent two epistemes, and the setting and their relationship reveal the predicament between the dimension of work and the fundamental humanity. As the value of professional skills has been noticed and emphasized since Industrialization, “Bartleby” essentially questions the boundary between productive and unproductive activities. In “The Bartleby Industry and Bartleby's Idleness,” Andrew Knighton ponders upon the idea of “productivity” in Melville's “Bartleby Industry.” Some activities generally deemed “unproductive,” such as “education and training, improvements in physical capacity, and augmented facility in exploiting professional opportunities,” are “discovered to intensify productive power, via what Gary Becker called ‘the imbedding resource in people'” (197). The study of “human capital” aims to “resolve the problem of the nebulous residual, and thus to explain the productivity of the unproductive, through an adjustment to accounting rubrics that recast the category of ‘consumption' as ‘investment'” (Knighton 197). In other words, in the consideration of human capital, there is a kind of activities, “investment,” which cannot brings profit directly but increases one's productivity to generate more profit in the future. In the case of Bartleby, the point is to clarify the definition of productivity as the attorney is troubled by Bartleby's idleness. From the employer's angle, Bartleby does not have any productivity after he quits writing. Nonetheless, his idleness is not a consumption of libidinal energy or working ability, but instead, he becomes a preservation of possibility, which implies an unpredictable productivity as long as he starts to work. In contrast to Bartleby, Turkey and Nippers present a stable result of productive effort though their efficiency changes during a day. Yet, their stability exposes an individual deadlock in a professional environment: when they keep a regular working procedure and their employer is seemingly satisfied with such a condition, they have no opportunity to elevate themselves to a higher position financially or socially. Under this circumstance, they are more like two working machines than the volitional humans. As some critics tend to interpret “Bartleby” from the traditional Marxist angle, the flat characters Turkey and Nippers more exactly play the role of exploited workers than the focal figure Bartleby.

Yet, Turkey and Nippers are seldom regarded as victims of capitalism; that is due to an often neglected fact that some critical information is concealed. As the attorney tells the whole story from his perspective, the specific number of salary of the three scriveners and the lad Ginger Nut is never mentioned. The attorney seems to be generous because of his tolerance of Turkey's and Nippers's oddities and his willingness to offer Bartleby help, but consciously or unconsciously, he eliminates one of the most important elements to construct the typical Marxist relationship between capitalists and laborers. Actually the attorney's selective narrative obscures the standard to define productive and unproductive activities. Such information concealment unveils the attorney's purpose, or intuition, to prevent himself from looking like a victimizer according to the Marxist definition, but meanwhile, it implicitly demonstrates Bartleby's peculiar standpoint in a capitalistic office. For a worker like Bartleby, the point is not really surplus value. Bartleby's concern is not a reasonable way to distribute net profit, but the concept of “being productive.” Adopting a psychotic language, Bartleby is running a psychotic industry: a vital industry, in which a worker does nothing else but lives. Such kind of industry may be the most radical resistance against Industrialization and capitalism because it is not only an unmovable obstacle in the way of the “normal” business, but a silent challenge to the essence and value of “productivity.” When the attorney asks Bartleby to copy documents or check the copies, or later suggests him to be a clerk or bartender, the attorney represents a social and capitalistic view on productivity, which must be exhibited through some actual work. However, in the case of “Bartleby,” the diligence in work does not “produce” personal benefit. As the instance of old Turkey implies, he would work as a scrivener in a constant mode until he retires from this occupation. In a word, from the individual angle, work nearly equals wage, without concern for self-investment or improvement. The ultimate goal of work is to make a living, namely, to live. In this sense, Melville probes into not simply the possible damage of capitalism on human, but the pivotal ideas of “production” and “productivity.” In “The Specter of Wall Street: ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener' and the Language of Commodities,” the critic Naomi C. Reed regards the story of Bartleby as “a complex meditation on the structure and workings of capitalism and of circulation under capitalism” (249). Putting stress on circulation, Reed notices that Bartleby “refuses every form of circulation in which he is pushed to participate, and his incredible stillness is both part and product of these repeated refusals” (256). When Bartleby obstructs the circulation, a necessary procedure which enables capitalism to function normally, his action affects the entire foundation of capitalism.

This interactive chain discloses a capitalistic doctrine: the value of each item has to be manifested through its exchangeability. Based on such an idea, the Dead Letter Office becomes a symbol. As Reed points out, the Dead Letter Office executes “the punishment for those missives that can not be delivered,” and the “logic of the Dead Letter Office insists that those letters that have failed to circulate properly must be destroyed, that is, they must cease to be letters at all” (259). In brief, as a repository of undeliverable letters, the Dead Letter Office is indeed an institution to delete the failed products. Nevertheless, rather than considering the Dead Letter Office as a censorship institution, the attorney understands it through a sympathetically imaginative association. He connects “dead letters” with “dead men,” asking himself, or the readers of his record of Bartleby, that “Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness: can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames?” (Melville 50). In the attorney's imagination, there is a hopeless man doing some hopeless work in the Office. Bartleby's death echoes the destined destruction of dead letters when the man and those letters do not measure up to the capitalistic requirement of circulation. As the attorney deems the clerk in the Office as a pallid living dead, to some extent he betrays his capitalistic logic that would classify the clerk into a “productive” occupation. Under this circumstance, the “sudden removal” due to “a change in the administration” is more than an act of exploiting, but a symbolic change between the living and the dead If the clerk, whose job is to eliminate the disturbance within capitalism, is a despairing living dead, the removal is a transformation from dead to living but if the clerk should be regarded as a productive worker, Bartleby is forced to leave a “normal” way of life.

Here the point is not to make a decision between transforming from the living to the dead or the dead to the living, but to acknowledge the coexistence of two paradoxical interpretations of one phenomenon, one action, or one identity. Actually the two paradoxes constitute the Saussurian linguistics, on which the basic symbolic logic of human society is established. More significantly, as either of them can be deemed as a reasonable explanation, in between emerges an abyss, a space denying that “reason,” that is, refusing to take sides. When this obscure space does not provide another binary opposition to create another abyss, it becomes a psychotic deadlock, which forbids any explanation for it as if its existence could explain itself. In the human system, however, this unexplainable entity becomes an excess while it excludes the possibility for other excesses to appear. If binary opposition suggests an unconscious desire to have more than enough, the consequent psychotic excess exemplifies a metaphysical completion, a self-contented enough. In “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the character Bartleby just marks the abyss in humanity, and through the attorney's narrative, Melville illustrates the relationship between human beings and the internal impasse generated from the society.

 

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Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. “Bartleby, or On Contingency.” Potentialities: Collected Essays on Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. 243-71.

Davis, Clark. “‘Not Like Ant Form of Activity': Waiting in Emerson, Melville, and Weil.” Common Knowledge 15.1 (2009): 39-58.

De Boever, Arne. “Overhearing Bartleby: Agamben, Melville, and Inoperative Power.” Parrhesia 1 (2006): 142-62.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Bartleby; or, The Formula.” Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. 68-90.

Foley, Barbara. “From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville's ‘Bartleby.'” American Literature 72.1 (2000): 87-116.

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Goldberg, Shari. “Benito Cereno's Mute Testimony: On the Politics of Reading Melville's Silence.” Arizona Quarterly 65.2 (2009): 1-26.

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Žižek, Slavoj. “Nieghbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. 134-90.


[1] Here Deleuze means those images which are easy for the viewers to comprehend, such as the image of Dickens's London. Deleuze argues that “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is designed in so similar a setting to the ones in English novels that it is difficult to believe the story takes place in New York (77). Thus, it can be said that Bartleby “blurs the image” not only of the attorney, who attempts to play the role of a traditional master at the beginning, but also of the conventions of Victorian novels.

[2] In the Primary Nature, everything sets the inhabitants “in opposition, and yet they are perhaps the same creature—primary, original, stubborn, seized from both sides, marked merely with a ‘plus' or a ‘minus' sign” (80). The opposition in the Primary Nature is related to Deleuze's opinion of Melvillian psychiatry, which invokes two poles, such as “demons and angels,” torturers and victims (78-79). To sum up, the two poles in the Primary Nature do not stand for two extremes which are incompatible with each other, but signify all those opposite qualities that leave out the influence of Law.

[3] Agamben specifically points out that it is an illusion of morality to “believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality” (254). In short, will is incapable of manipulating potentiality. Although Agamben affirms that “a potentiality without will is altogether unrealizable and cannot pass into actuality” (254), still, will is not a hegemony on a higher hierarchy than potentiality.

[4] According to medieval theologians, potentia absoluta is the “‘absolute potentiality,' by which God can do anything,” whereas potentia ordinata means “‘ordered potentiality,' by which God can do only what is in accord with his will” (Agamben 254).

 

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