The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Herman Melville · Bartleby, the Scrivener. A Story of Wall-Street · a long story told in the first person by the lawyer who employed him · first printed anonymously in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in two numbers, November and December 1853, and reprinted as “Bartleby” in The Piazza Tales, 1856 · scored on the 1856 text in Melville’s English, read from knowledge, with no text in hand; only words that are certain are quoted
Mode
Urban sketch of eccentric clerks turned into a tale of motiveless refusal; comedy of humours, case history and lament told by one voice
Mythos
The stranger at the door whom charity cannot take in; pure refusal; the dead letter; Job’s rest among kings and counsellors
Phase
From the hiring of a copyist to his death in the Tombs, with a rumour told afterwards of what he had been before
Presentation
Fiction; a single story without chapters, narrated by his employer: a preface on the narrator, portraits of three clerks, the case, and a coda of hearsay
Register
Dry comedy in an urbane, self-approving lawyer’s prose, rising three times to desolation and ending in a cry
Scale
One office, four clerks, a landlord and a prison; Wall Street seen from one room and one conscience
Governing Proposition
An elderly lawyer hires a copyist who, asked to check his copy, answers that he would prefer not to, and then prefers not to do anything else: not to copy, not to leave, at last not to eat. The lawyer reasons with him, pays him, dismisses him and, when nothing works, moves his own office away; the next tenants have the copyist taken to the Tombs as a vagrant, where he dies at the foot of a wall. The wager of the story is that a prudent benevolence, which wants its charity safe and cheap, cannot meet a person who asks for nothing it can give, and that a refusal which claims nothing and gives no reason is a power the whole order of work and law has no answer to.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The story is told by the man who employed Bartleby, and it begins with him. “I am a rather elderly man”, he says, and from that first sentence the story is his. He is an unnamed lawyer who held the office of a Master in Chancery, an office he tells the reader is now extinct in New York: the Court of Chancery was abolished under the state constitution of 1846. His prose is urbane, Latinate and pleased with itself, and the story never steps outside it. Everything the reader learns of Bartleby comes through this voice, and so does everything the reader learns of the voice.
Before the copyist, the office. Its windows look onto walls. Three employees work in it, known only by their nicknames: Turkey, Nippers and Ginger Nut. Turkey and Nippers are drawn at length in comic portraits, two copyists whose fits of temper relieve each other, one in the morning and the other after noon, so that the office always has one of them in working order. The narrator tolerates them both, and is proud of tolerating them. The portraits read like the magazine sketch of eccentric clerks that Irving, Lamb and Dickens had made familiar, and they are more than that: they set up an order in which any eccentricity can be accommodated so long as the copy is produced.
Melville wrote the story after Moby-Dick had failed to sell and Pierre (1852) had been received with hostility, for a magazine that paid him by the page. Putnam’s Monthly Magazine printed it anonymously in two numbers, November and December 1853, as “Bartleby, the Scrivener. A Story of Wall-Street”. In 1856 he reprinted it, with the title shortened to “Bartleby”, as the second of five stories after the introductory sketch in The Piazza Tales (New York: Dix and Edwards), and the story is judged in that text. It is a single telling without chapters: a preface on the narrator and his office, the portraits, the case, and a short coda of hearsay.
Movement II
The narrator advertises for another copyist, and the man who answers is Bartleby, who has no first name, no history and, as the story goes on, no stated cause for anything. The narrator describes him as “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn”, and is as pleased with the phrase as with the man. He gives him a desk behind a screen, by a window that looks onto a wall. At first Bartleby copies.
Then the narrator calls him to help examine a copy, and Bartleby answers: “I would prefer not to.” The narrator is astonished, and the scene is comic: a sentence so mild and so final that the employer cannot find anything in it to argue with. The formula comes again, and again, with the same courtesy, and each time the narrator’s astonishment has a little more alarm in it. It is not a refusal. It claims nothing, gives no reason and makes no demand; and because it is only a preference there is nothing to answer.
The preferences spread. Bartleby prefers not to examine copy, and then not to copy at all. The word spreads too: Turkey and Nippers begin to say “prefer” without noticing that they are saying it. The narrator reasons with Bartleby and gets the formula. He learns that the copyist lives on ginger nuts, and that he has nothing to look at but the wall outside his window. The comedy of the opening is still in place, and it has become the setting of something it cannot contain.
Movement III
One Sunday morning the narrator comes to his chambers and finds the door locked from within. Bartleby is inside, and the narrator learns that the copyist lives in the office, alone, through the days when no one else is in it. Wall Street on the Sabbath is deserted of people, and the narrator is seized by a sadness he has not known before. The city, the centre of its business, becomes a ruin with a single inhabitant.
It is the first of the story’s three heights, and it is reached without leaving the narrator’s voice. For a moment the comedy gives way and he sees what he has employed: a man with nowhere else, in a place built for work, on a day when no work is done. Then he begins to manage what he has seen. He pities, he reasons, he offers money, and he congratulates himself on his patience, a charity that is safe and costs him little. The story lets the reader watch the pity become a policy.
He turns to books on the will and on necessity, and persuades himself that Bartleby has been sent to him to be borne, that the copyist is his to keep. The resolution lasts until his colleagues begin to talk about the strange clerk in his chambers. Then he tries again to make Bartleby go, and dismisses him. Bartleby stays. He would prefer not to leave.
Movement IV
Unable to expel the man and unable to take him in, the narrator moves his office. He leaves his own premises to escape a man who will not leave them, and the move is the story’s exact image of his charity: he changes his address rather than his conscience. Bartleby stays behind, and the new tenants have him removed to the Tombs as a vagrant: a man who does nothing has become an offence.
The narrator visits him there. The prison yard has grass in it, and walls around it, so that the walls the office window looked onto have closed to a yard. Bartleby is calm, and will not be consoled into thinking the place anything but what it is: “I know where I am.” A grub-man who feeds the prisoners takes him for a gentleman forger and offers him dinner, repeating on a lower floor the narrator’s own misreading of him. Bartleby prefers not to dine.
On a later visit the narrator finds him curled at the foot of the wall, dead, and meets the death with Job’s phrase for the dead at rest: “With kings and counsellors.” It is the second height, and it is made in the narrator’s borrowed words; the scriptural frame he brings to the end is his own, offered for comfort, and the story keeps it at that remove. The order of work, which could tolerate every humour that produced copy, has met a man who would not copy, and has put him where it puts what it cannot use.
Movement V
After the death the narrator adds one thing more, a rumour he has heard and cannot vouch for: that Bartleby had once been a clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, among letters that would never reach the living. He offers the explanation and doubts it in the same breath. It is the last of his explanations, and like all the others it comes from outside, by hearsay, after the event.
Then the turn to lament, in a few sentences. The rumour of “dead letters” sent to the dead becomes the story’s last image, and the narrator, who has explained and failed to explain from the first page, ends with a cry: “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” Whether the cry includes himself, whether it is grief or one more phrase he is pleased with, the story does not say. It is the third height, and it is reached in the voice that has stood between the reader and Bartleby throughout.
The story was little read for seventy years, until the Melville revival of the 1920s, and has not been closed since. It has been read as Melville’s parable of his own refusal to write what paid, as a study of alienated labour, as a Christian parable of the stranger, as a case of depression, as a critique of liberal benevolence; Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben wrote on it at length, and Enrique Vila-Matas’s Bartleby y compañía (2000) is one of its descendants in fiction. Copying by hand has gone, and Chancery with it. The formula has passed into speech, and the man who spoke it remains, as the story left him, unexplained.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive and finds almost nothing to take. The materials are few and each is used twice: the formula; the walls, onto which the office looks and at the foot of which Bartleby dies; the copying that becomes the refusal to copy; the word “prefer” itself, which spreads through the office until Turkey and Nippers use it without noticing. The long opening portraits of Turkey and Nippers, whose tempers relieve each other morning and afternoon, look like the padding of a magazine sketch and are not: they set up an order in which every eccentricity is tolerated so long as copy is produced, which is the economy Bartleby breaks. What holds the axis is the coda. The rumour of the Dead Letter Office is told as hearsay after the death, and the story could be argued complete without it; it stays, because it gives the narrator his last failed explanation.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a benevolence that is prudent, that wants its charity safe and cheap and the giver comfortable, cannot meet a person who asks for nothing it can give; and a refusal that makes no claim and offers no reason is a power the whole order of work and law cannot answer. The narrator is the instrument. He reasons, bribes, pities, congratulates himself on his patience and finally moves his office rather than his conscience. The story discloses as well the copyist’s labour, the reproduction of other men’s words, as a condition that can end in a man who will not go on. Bartleby’s opacity is the point at which the disclosure about the narrator, and the reader, is made. Held off the top because it is made through one office and one conscience, and Bartleby himself is, by design, not disclosed at all.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The register for most of the story is dry comedy, and the comedy is the ground the heights rise from. They are three, and each is earned. On a Sunday morning the narrator finds that Bartleby lives alone in the office over the empty days, in a Wall Street deserted of people, and the city becomes a ruin with one inhabitant. In the Tombs the copyist lies curled at the foot of the wall, and the narrator answers with Job’s words for the dead at rest: “With kings and counsellors.” And after the rumour of “dead letters” sent to the dead comes the last line: “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” The height is real. What holds the axis in the middle eights is frequency: three summits in a comic story, low by the form and by choice.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. Bartleby is a particular man, a copyist hired in answer to an advertisement, with a screen, a desk by a window onto a wall and a diet of ginger nuts; and he becomes, without a symbol pointed at, the figure of pure refusal, the stranger at the door whom charity cannot take in, the man who is a dead letter. The structure carrying it is load-bearing: the formula repeated until it is a rite; the scriptural frame the narrator brings to his own trial, from the commandment of love to Job at the death; the walls closing from the office window to the prison yard. The proof that the figure was built is that it detached from the story and became the name of a human possibility. Held below the top because the scriptural frame is partly the narrator’s, borrowed for comfort, and the story keeps it at that remove.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the magazine sketch of eccentric characters and the genial urban humorist: the manner of Irving and Lamb, and Dickens’s law clerks, from whom Turkey and Nippers plainly descend. Melville begins inside it and turns it into something without precedent in the fiction of the 1850s: a story whose central figure has no motive, no history and no explanation, in which the comedy of humours stays in place and becomes the setting of an absurd and fatal refusal. The stake was real. Melville wrote it after Moby-Dick had failed to sell and Pierre (1852) had been received with hostility, for a magazine that paid him by the page and printed him anonymously; to hand a paying public an unexplained story was to risk the one income left to him. Held below 9.0 because the swerve is placed inside an inherited frame that does much of the work, and the first-person tale of a strange acquaintance was established by Poe and Hawthorne.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the story loses what it knows. Told by Bartleby, or by an omniscient narrator, it would have to explain him or decline to; told by the lawyer, it can show a man who cannot explain him and will not stop trying, and that is the knowledge the story has. Every explanation offered is the narrator’s, and every one fails; the reader is put in the narrator’s chair and handed the same failure. The formula is the second instrument: one sentence, conditional and courteous, whose repetition is the action, and whose softness, a preference and not a refusal, is what makes it unanswerable. The coda’s rumour, offered and doubted in one breath, is the form’s last move, an explanation the teller can only report. Held a tenth off the top because the opening portraits work in an inherited form that the story turns but did not make.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over the century since the Melville revival of the 1920s, and of a density few works of its length have drawn. It has been read as a parable of Melville’s own refusal to write what paid; as a study of alienated labour on Wall Street; as a Christian parable of the stranger; as a case of depression or catatonia; as a critique of liberal benevolence; and in philosophy, at length, by Gilles Deleuze in “Bartleby; or, The Formula” and Giorgio Agamben in “Bartleby, or On Contingency”. None has closed it, and none excludes the others, because the story leaves Bartleby wholly unexplained. The narrator’s sentences yield on return, their self-regard visible only the second time. Held below the top because the yield, wide as it is, turns on one figure and one formula, and some of the theoretical return uses the story as a sign more than it reads it.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is American fiction of the mid-nineteenth century and the short tale as Poe and Hawthorne had made it. The intrinsic force is high: the story changed what a short fiction could hold at its centre, not a mystery to be solved, as in Poe, nor an allegory to be read, as often in Hawthorne, but an opacity that will not resolve, set in an ordinary office and told as comedy. It reached a possibility that the fiction of the absurd, in Kafka and Beckett, later reached by other roads; the resemblance is not influence and is not counted as reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, after seventy years in which the story was little read, and the delay is discounted; since the revival, a fixture of the teaching of American literature, a documented descendant in Enrique Vila-Matas’s Bartleby y compañía (2000), and the formula taken into philosophy and political theory as a figure of refusal. Held below 9.0 because its reach into later fiction is harder to document than its fame suggests.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred and seventy-three years. Form: the text survives whole in both its first printings, with no loss and no dispute of substance; nothing is charged. Presence is now about as wide as an American story’s can be: in every survey of American literature, widely translated, the formula current in speech, in philosophy and in protest. The charge falls on the early presence: from the 1850s to the Melville revival of the 1920s the story was barely read, and those seventy years keep it off the widest figure. Fabric: the surface is fixed to a moment that has ended, a Chancery office and copyists working by hand in the Wall Street of the 1840s, and the story has outlived it untouched. Copying by hand is gone, and the condition remains.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Melville’s English. The command is of a voice: the lawyer’s urbane, Latinate, self-approving prose, which the story lets condemn him without ever stepping outside it. Bartleby on arrival is “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn”: three adverbs and three adjectives that place him exactly and show the narrator pleased with his phrase. The formula is placed with a dramatist’s timing, first as comedy, then as alarm, then as doom; the escalation of the preferences, not to examine, not to copy, not to leave, not to eat, is exactly measured; and the last paragraph turns from hearsay to lament in a few sentences. The portraits of Turkey and Nippers are comic set pieces of a high order. Held at 9.0 because the opening, for all its function, runs long in the magazine manner, and some of the narrator’s digressions are more discursive than what they show of him.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One law governs the whole: an order that accommodates any eccentricity that still produces copy cannot accommodate the man who prefers not to, and the narrator, its gentlest servant, can neither expel him nor take him in. Take the two most distant elements, the comic portraits of Turkey and Nippers at the opening and the death in the Tombs at the close. They obey the same law: the clerks’ humours are tolerated because they copy, and Bartleby dies because he will not, in a prison that is the same order with the comedy taken away. The grub-man in the Tombs, who takes him for a gentleman forger and offers him dinner, repeats the narrator’s misreading on a lower floor. The coda is in another key, hearsay after the event, and obeys the law by being one more explanation from outside. The range, from comedy to death, is wide for a story of this length.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on what one story holds. Consciousness, fully, in the narrator’s mind observed by itself. Labour, as copying, and as an office divided into tempers that produce. Capital and the city, as Wall Street, its rents and its walls. The law and the state, as Chancery, the landlord, the police and the Tombs, where a man who does nothing becomes a vagrant. The sacred and the moral, as charity, the commandment, Job and the question of will and necessity. Death. They are integrated: one office joins them, and Bartleby passes through each in turn. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the count and the vantage. The family is absent; the natural order is absent but for the walls that shut it out; history appears only as an extinct office; and every order is seen from one room and one conscience. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form, The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 9.1. A form that tells the story through the one man who cannot explain Bartleby and will not stop trying, and hands the reader his failure; a century of readings, from labour to theology to philosophy, none of which has closed it; and a text whole since 1853 whose presence, after seventy years of neglect, is now about as wide as an American story’s can be.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6, held by the count and the vantage: consciousness, labour, the city, the law, the sacred and death are joined in one office, but the family is absent, the natural order is shut out by walls, history appears only as an extinct office, and every order is seen from one room and one conscience. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.6: three heights, the Sunday, the death and the last line, each earned and few by the form, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7, a reach delayed seventy years and carried more by teaching and theory than by later fiction.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, Pressure on Tradition by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.8.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener. A Story of Wall-Street”, first printed anonymously in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in two numbers, November and December 1853, and reprinted with the title shortened to “Bartleby” as the second of five stories after the introductory sketch in The Piazza Tales (New York: Dix and Edwards, 1856). The unit scored is the single story in the 1856 text, in Melville’s English; no translation stands between. It is a short work and is weighed at its own scale: nothing is charged on The Encompassed beyond what a story of its length can hold, and its other axes are not capped for its length. No text of the story was in hand; nothing was measured by script, and no quotation was checked against a file. The story is quoted only where its words are certain: the narrator’s first sentence, the formula, the description of Bartleby on arrival, his words in the Tombs, the phrase from Job, “dead letters” and the last line. Everything else is paraphrased. The story has no divisions, and passages are cited by episode. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the story’s length in words, the extent of the differences between the magazine and book texts, the number of times the formula recurs, the narrator’s exact words where he is paraphrased, and the names of the persons and books he alludes to.