By the American novelist, essayist and poet, widely esteemed as one of the most important figures in American literature and best remembered today for his masterpiece Moby-Dick (1851). His short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1856) is among his most important pieces, and has been considered a precursor to Existentialist and Absurdist literature.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bartleby's journey into passive aggression...,
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This review is from: Bartleby, the Scrivener (Dodo Press) (Paperback)
I had to read Melville in high school and had so few cultural references in those days that little had relevence for me. This is a funny, complex, very brief story of a lawyer's troubles with an uncooperative aid. What is amazing to me is that Melville wrote it so long ago. I think Michael Moore recommended it in this year's election guide. It will take you about an hour to read if you read 400 words per minute comfortably.
2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Both Marx and Durkheim would immediately recognize Bartleby,
By not a natural "Bob Bickel" (huntington, west virginia United States) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE)
This review is from: Bartleby, the Scrivener (Dodo Press) (Paperback)
Hemrman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener presents us with a 19th century character who would be instantly recogniazble by the social theorists Karl Marx and Emile Durkehim. For Marx, though Bartleby works in an office rather than the shop floor of industirial production, Bartleby is an instance of wage labor. From his earliest writings, including the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx often asked (to closely paraphrase) what are the consequences of the emergence of wage labor. Bartleby manifests a primary conseuqnece in thoroughgoing form: Bartleby is alienated.Bartleby's work alienates him from himself because long hours spent doing nothing but hand copying of the work of others forestalls development of the richly variegated potential that Marx thought existed in all of us. Instead of developing into a socially competent, self-actualizing person of multiple attainments, Bartleby copies, and that's all he does. He is a machine-like commodity who works because he has to work, doing what he can get paid for. He occasionally and pathetically manifests a bare modicum of self determination by refusing to do other menial tasks or varying the pace of his copying, but that's it. Bartleby is also alienated from the work itself -- relentless copying of the legalistic words of others -- because they are not his production and do not serve his interests. He has no control over the work, no way to manifest his innate but undeveloped creative capability, no way to do anything but the mindlessly mechanical task of word-for-word copying. There's nothing in this process of value to him except a modest wage. Lacking control over his work, he lacks control over himself and what he becomes. In extreme form he would become The Elephant Man, horribly disfigured mataphor for the Nineteenth Century working class, possessed of real but unrealized developmental potential. Bartleby is also alienated from his co-workers. Their work is solitary, they interact little, cooperative endeavors on the job are out of the question. There are intimations that one of his co-workers is an evening alcoholic and the other suffers from stomach ulcers. Since they function as machines but are really something quite different, it is predictable that each would manifest this gross distortion in self-mortifying ways. Durkheim would regard Bartleby as a victim of the excessive and dehumanizing specialization that is characteristic of the modernizing industrial world. Specialization, in instances such as Bartleby, vastly limits our horizons, our development as human beings, and leads to the kind of social isolation that makes suicide and other forms of social pathology more likely to occur. When most of a man's life is spent in this sort of solitary, mindless, and self-abnegationg work, human beings become not only socially isolated, giving rise to a society charactrized by the pathological condition that Durkheim called egoism or the absence of a sense of belonging, they also lack a common culture based on shared experiences other than those that exist in denaturing work. This condition of cultural deregulation, or anomie, in which norms and standards are unknown or without founation, also gives rise to widespread social pathology. Living an alienated life in a society characterized by egoism and anomie, it makes perfect sense that Bartleby would cease to exist. When your world is inconsistent with your nature, and membership and guidance are missing, motivation is hard to find. Even the motivation to eat or, for that matter, not eat. Bartleby has a lot to tell us about ourselves and the ailments of the present day.
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