Sherry Chandler

The Communist Manifesto was written in 1848 and “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street” in 1853.

That realization, which I had while reading Doing Nothing, struck me hard. I had always thought of Marx as somehow a modern man and Melville as belonging to an earlier antebellum era. I think this probably has to do with my failure to merge the European and American time lines. It’s my version of American exceptionalism — or maybe the way I was taught history — to somehow feel that the United States existed in a bubble until sometime around WWI. Europe had Marx, Freud, and Darwin. We had Daniel Boone, Sam Houston, and Andrew Jackson.

That the United States was vibrating with utopian thought in the early 19th century — Brook Farm, Harmony, Indiana — I’ve always considered somewhat quaint. And Melville I’ve thought somewhat preternaturally modern (maybe even post-modern), especially in works like “Bartleby” and The Confidence Man, dealing in existential angst and alienation long before Jean-Paul Sartre was a gleam in his daddy’s eye.

I take great delight in “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” but, though “I would prefer not to” has been a family joke for years, I’ve never really known why, maybe haven’t really wanted to know. So why not go with Tom Lutz — “Bartleby” is a story about a slacker (talk about post-modern). Says Lutz:

Whatever else it is, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is a tale about work, and specifically about work in the brave new world of Wall Street’s capitalist offices. …Bartleby is not a workplace revolutionary. Although the story is published while strikes regularly hit the nation’s factories, five years after The Communist Manifesto (and it is clearly in line with Marx’s later writings on alienation), “Bartleby” has no direct mention of any of the various workers’ movements of the time. …Bartley is absolutely nonviolent and never makes a case for his own rights, much less his rights as a worker or as part of any group. He has no sense of himself, apparently, as a social being, no desire to go with the other workers for lunch or drinks—in fact, no desire to go out at all. He ends up living in the office and won’t leave even when the narrator closes it down.

In the end, Bartleby prefers not even to eat and so dies. Sort of the American individualist as hunger artist.

For Lutz, the central conflict in the story is between Bartleby and the narrator, who like any modern entrepreneur is not too interested in working himself though he goes to great lengths to get work from Bartleby. It’s the Ben Franklin syndrome: create a work ethic that applies only to other people.

Bartleby continues to resonate with readers because the fundamental conflict—between people who, whatever their own questionable relations to work, are perversely dedicated to making others work harder, and those who, for whatever nameable or unnameable reason, prefer not to—continues to animate debates between workfare and welfare proponents and detractors, between bosses and workers, between fathers and sons.

A bit of a reductio perhaps. But I’m willing to lay blame on the office clockwatcher.