The Bartleby Case

 

Melville’s “Bartleby,” which has often been the object of metaphysical and theological interpretations,1 also admits a pathological reading. This “Story of Wall-Street”2 describes an inhumane working world whose inhabitants have all degraded to the state of animal laborans. The sinister atmosphere of the office, choked by skyscrapers on every side, is hostile to life and portrayed in detail. Less than three meters from the window there surges a “lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade” (5). The workspace, which seems like “a huge square cistern,” proves “deficient in what landscape painters call ‘life’” (5). Melancholy and gloominess are often mentioned, and they set the basic mood for the narrative. The attorney’s assistants all suffer from neurotic disorders. “Turkey,” for example, runs around in “a strange, inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness of activity” (6). Psychosomatic digestive troubles plague the overly ambitious assistant “Nippers,” who grinds his teeth perpetually and hisses curses through them. In their neurotic hyperactivity, these figures represent the opposite pole of Bartleby, who falls into silent immobility. Bartleby develops the symptoms characteristic of neurasthenia. In this light, his signature phrase, “I would prefer not to,” expresses neither the negative potency of not-to nor the instinct for delay and deferral that is  essential for “spirituality.” Rather, it stands for a lack of drive and for apathy, which seal Bartleby’s doom.

The society that Melville describes is still a disciplinary society. Walls and partitions, the elements of disciplinary architecture, traverse the entire narrative. After all, “Bartleby” tells “A Story of Wall-Street.” “Wall” is one of the most frequently used words. Reference often occurs to the “dead wall”: “The next day I noticed that Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his dead wall revery” (28). Bartleby works behind a screen and stares empty-headedly at the “dead brick wall.” The wall is always associated with death.3 Last but not least, disciplinary society is signified by the recurrent motif of the thick-walled prison called the “Tombs.” There, all life is extinguished. Bartleby ultimately lands in the Tombs and dies in complete isolation and solitude. He still represents an obedience-subject. He does not develop symptoms of depression, which is a hallmark of late-modern achievement society. Feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, or fear of failure do not belong to Bartleby’s emotional household. Constant self-reproach and self-aggression are unknown to him. He does not face the imperative to be himself that characterizes late-modern achievement society. Bartleby does not fail in the project of being an “I.” Monotonous copying—the sole activity he has to perform—leaves no free space in which private initiative would prove necessary, or even possible. What makes Bartleby sick is not excessive positivity or possibility. He is not burdened by the late-modern imperative of letting his self flourish [das Ich selbst beginnen zu lassen]. The activity of copying, in particular, does not admit initiative. Bartleby, who still lives in a society of conventions and institutions, does not know the wearing-out of the ego that leads to depressive I-tiredness.

Agamben’s ontotheological interpretation of “Bartleby,” which pays no attention to pathological elements, already founders on the facts of the narrative. It also fails to take note of the change of mental structure [psychischer Strukturwandel] in the present day.  Problematically, Agamben elevates Bartleby to a metaphysical position of the highest potency:

This is the philosophical constellation to which Bartleby the scrivener belongs. As a scribe who has stopped writing, Bartleby is the extreme figure of the Nothing from which all creation derives; and at the same time, he constitutes the most implacable vindication of this Nothing as pure, absolute potentiality. The scrivener has become the writing tablet; he is now nothing other than his white sheet.4By this logic, Bartleby embodies the “mind”—a “being of pure potentiality”—as signified by the empty tablet (on which nothing yet stands).5

Bartleby exhibits neither self-reference nor reference to anything else. He exists without a world and is absent and apathic. If he counts as a “white sheet” at all, this is because he has been voided of any and all relation to the world or meaning. Bartleby’s “dim eyes” (45) already speak against the purity of divine potentiality he is supposed to embody. It is just as unconvincing when Agamben claims that Bartleby’s stubborn refusal to write announces the potency of being able to do so—that his radical renunciation of willing [das Wollen] betokens potentia absoluta. As Agamben views things, Bartleby’s refusal is kerygmatic. He embodies “pure being without any predicate.” Agamben makes Bartleby into an angelic messenger, the Angel of Annunciation, who, for all that, “predicates nothing of nothing.”6 Thereby, he disregards the fact that Bartleby refuses every “errand.” He steadfastly refuses to send the mail: “‘Bartleby,’ said I, ‘Ginger Nut is away; just step round to the Post Office, won’t you?’ . . . ‘I would prefer not to’” (19). As is well known, the tale ends with the curious addendum that Bartleby formerly worked as an employee of the Dead Letter Office:

Dead letters! 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 than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? (46)

 Racked by doubt, the attorney-narrator exclaims: “On errands of life, these letters speed to death.” Bartleby’s Dasein is a negative being-unto-death. This negativity contradicts Agamben’s ontotheological interpretation, which makes Bartleby the herald of a second Creation—of de-creation [Ent-Schöpfung] that undoes the border between what has been and what has not, between Being and Nothingness.

Melville allows for a tiny sprout of life to appear in the Tombs. However, given the utter hopelessness, the massive presence of death, this small, “imprisoned turf” (45) only underscores the negativity of the realm of the dead. The words of comfort the attorney addresses to the incarcerated Bartleby also offer no help: “Nothing reproachful attaches to you by being here. And see, it is not so sad a place as one might think. Look, there is the sky and here is the grass.” Unimpressed, Bartleby responds, “I know where I am” (43). Agamben interprets both the sky and the grass as messianic signs. The small patch of lawn—the only sign of life in the midst of the realm of the dead—only augments the hopeless emptiness. “On errands of life, these letters speed to death”; this is the central message of the tale. All efforts to live [Bemühungen ums Leben] lead to death.

Kafka’s “Hunger Artist” harbors fewer illusions. His death, which no one remarks, provides a great relief to onlookers—“even the most insensitive felt it refreshing.”7 His death makes room for a young panther, which embodies the joy of living free of desire:

The food he liked was brought him without hesitation by the attendants; he seemed not even to miss his freedom; his noble body, furnished almost to bursting with all that it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it too; it seemed to lurk somewhere in his jaws; and the joy of living streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and would not move on.8

In contrast, the hunger artist derives a feeling of freedom only from the negativity of refusal; this feeling is just as insubstantial [ scheinhaft] as the freedom that the panther guards “in his jaws.” Likewise, Bartleby is joined by “Mr. Cutlets,” who looks like a piece of meat. He extols the establishment and attempts to induce his companion to eat:

Hope you find it pleasant here, sir;—spacious grounds—cool apartments, sir—hope you’ll stay with us some time—try to make it agreeable. May Mrs. Cutlets and I have the pleasure of your company to dinner, sir, in Mrs. Cutlets’ private room? (44)

What the lawyer says in response to Mr. Cutlets after Bartleby’s death sounds almost ironic: “‘Eh!—He’s asleep, ain’t he?’ ‘With kings and counsellors,’ murmured I” (45). The narrative does not open onto messianic hope. When Bartleby dies, the “last column of some ruined temple” falls. He goes under like a “wreck in the mid Atlantic.” Bartleby’s phrase, “I would prefer not to,” defies any Christological-messianic interpretation. This “Story of Wall-Street” is not a tale of de-creation [Ent-Schöpfung], but rather a story of exhaustion [Erschöpfung]. The exclamation that ends the tale is both a lament and an indictment: “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”

Byung-Chul Han

Collected Works