When a New York lawyer needs to take on another copyist, it is Bartleby who responds to his advertisement, and arrives "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn." At first a diligent employee, he soon begins to refuse work, saying only "I would prefer not to." So begins the story of Bartleby—passive to the point of absurdity yet paradoxically extremely disruptive—which rapidly turns from farce to inexplicable tragedy. Accompanying Bartleby, Benito Cereno was first serialized in 1855, and centers around a slave rebellion on board a Spanish merchant ship in 1799.
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Most famous for his works Billy Budd and Moby Dick, Herman Melville (1818–1891) is a key figure in 19th-century American literature.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ah, Melville! Ah, Humanity!,
By Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)
This review is from: Bartleby the Scrivener (Hesperus Classics) (Paperback)
The first thing to say about Bartleby is that it's marvelously funny. It's Herman Melville's best assimiliation of the ludricrous style of Charles Dickens and other Victorian writers. The first dozen pages, before the appearance of Bartleby, are devoted to comedy in the form of exaggerated portrayals of the three hapless employees of the nameless narrator. Each of these comic-relief figures will be brought back into service at intervals in the subsequent tale. It's supremely important, dear reader, to recognize Melville's sardonic humor; other reviewers who rated Bartleby at two stars or less clearly "didn't get the joke."
"Bartleby" is strictly speaking just a magazine sketch, one of a batch of informal sketches from magazines reprinted together as The Piazza Tales. It has the format of a memoir of an eccentric character, Bartleby, as told by a nameless first-person narrator, "an eminently safe man" by his own account, a lawyer who earns his living through the most mundane, routine legal paperwork, who also complains that 'reformers' have deprived him of his lucrative sinecure in state government. "I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has ben filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best," he says of himself. In short, in this "Story of Wall Street", he is a drone, a financial parasite, and he would have been recognized as such by Melville's readership in the 1850s, a era when Wall Street was regarded with as much suspicious as in 2009. He is also a smug, sanctimonious, cautious man, irritably comfortable to exploit the labor of his copyists, one of whom is an impaired alcoholic and the other perhaps a pre-medication psychotic. When the third impaired eccentric, Bartleby, joins the staff, our Narrator is readily 'generous' in tolerating him as long as he can make a dime. It seems to me fairly obvious that we readers are supposed to treat the Narrator with distrust, perhaps even dislike. Melville wrote at the beginning of the now-established literary tradition of the 'unreliable narrator', supplanting the omniscient narrator of the majority of 19th C novels. But Melville transcends that tradition in his first effort, giving us a 'clueless' narrator, an observer who is honest only in his acknowledgement of his complete non-understanding of his subject. To accept the Narrator's analysis of Bartleby would be a fatal error of readerly judgement. Whatever Melville's subtext in this story -- whatever Melville wants to tell us -- that Narrator is the one person who can't possibly be expected to comprehend it. Melville also wrote at the end of the ancient tradition of 'allegory.' His only literary peer and friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, was the grand master of slyly allegorical short tales, and it makes sense to examine Bartleby as a specimen of the allegorical genre. Thus we need to ask who the Narrator figures for, and who the Scrivener, and then what it is, really, that Bartleby "prefers" not to participate in. My interpretation is that N represents the entire commercial/financial culture of 19th C America, while Bartleby embodies all those who are aliens within that system, first by necessity and then by bitter choice. Bartleby, in effect, prefers not to be a link in that chain, a cog in that machine. Another school of literary criticism would examine Melville's personal life for clues of his authorial intentions. It's widely known that Melville was finding his inability to "make a decent living and support his family" both frustrating and frightening during the decade after the commercial failure of Moby Dick. In fact, Melville found himself on the verge of becoming a patronage drone, a place-holder in the New York Customs Office. It may be important to realize that Melville's father-in-law, Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, was both an extremely powerful man in America at the time, and a man of energetic personal forcefulness. It's hard to believe that Melville was not intimidated and oppressed by Shaw, yet no more able to make a case for himself than poor Bartleby. I'm just tossing off suggestions here, my friends. Bartleby is an enigma wrapped in complexity, and no final interpretation would stand up to a second reading. When I first read it, in the 1960s, it was still neglected and overshadowed among Melville's works by "Billy Budd". It's been interesting to watch the emergence of recognition among readers that Bartleby is one of the greatest short masterpieces of the English language.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
fabulous,
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This review is from: Bartleby the Scrivener (Hesperus Classics) (Paperback)
Herman Melville is a beautiful writer. "Bartleby the Scrivener" is a fabulous and hilarious story. In addition, you get "Benito Cerano," which is shocking and excellent. Both stories are worth a double-, triple-, and even quadruple-reread.
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