"Bartleby" and the Dead Letter - Lewis H. Miller Jr. Studies in American Fiction, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 1980, pp. 1-12 (Article) Published by ...
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"Bartleby" and the Dead Letter
Lewis H. Miller Jr.
Studies in American Fiction, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 1980, pp. 1-12 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.1980.0009
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/440380/summary
[ Access provided at 28 May 2021 10:48 GMT from University of Athens (or National and Kapodistrian Univ. of Athens) ]'BARTLEBY" AND THE DEAD LETTER
Lewis H. Miller, Jr.*
Few conclusions to short fiction have sparked more critical uncer-
tainty than the epilogue which Herman Melville's narrator in
"Bartleby" casually appends to his truncated "biography" of the
"strangest" scrivener he "ever saw or heard of." Recent commentary on
Melville's haunting tale of human suffering and isolation has rightfully
challenged and corrected the view that the lawyer-narrator's final
remarks comprise an aesthetic blunder on Melville's part, an indulgent
nod toward a sentimental and popular taste. Yet the artistic purpose of
the narrator's speculative report about Bartleby's clerkship at the Dead
Letter Office remains to be satisfactorily defined. It is a measure of
Melville's effectiveness as a narrative technician that readers of
"Bartleby" have tended to approach the "one little item of rumor" with
much the same off-handedness and tenuity as that exhibited by the nar-
rator himself, for whom "this vague report has not been without a cer-
tain strange suggestive interest." Of course, it is not the report itself
which holds for the reader "a certain strange suggestive interest" but
the manner in which Melville's prudent and safe narrator presents his
report and draws conclusions from it. Indeed, the epilogue to
"Bartleby" serves to underscore the inveterate nature of the narrator's
habits of self-deception, his stubborn propensity to withdraw into the
safety of a static world buttressed by illusion and insulated from the
flux of contingent reality. What is more, the epilogue is charged with
metaphoric possibilities of which the narrator remains naively
unaware. The narrator's "one little item of rumor," in offering a
gathering metaphor for Melville's concern with language throughout
this story, also provides a definitive ironic perspective from which to
view the narrator, his baroque rhetoric, and the laconic copy-speech of
Bartleby.
Like his glaringly oversimplified responses to Nippers' neuroses
("indigestion") and to Bartleby's preference not to perform his assigned
task as a copyist ("impaired vision"), the narrator's ready inferences
'Lewis H. MUler, Jr., Professor of English at Indiana University, has published ar-
ticles on Edmund Spenser, Emerson, Thoreau, and Frost in Criticism, ELH, ESQ, and
the University of Toronto Quarterly.2 Lewis H. Miller, Jr.
about work in the Dead Letter Office reflect a mind incapable of con-
fronting the realities of what it means to be a law scrivener on Wall
Street:
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?1
On its own, this passage suggests a sympathetic and capacious sensibil-
ity, a mind finely attuned to the vicissitudes of fortune and to man's
(especially Bartleby's) precarious situation in a world of disappointed
hopes and frustrated transactions. Yet with the full weight of the nar-
rative behind it, the question posed here by the narrator and the
answer so patently implied by his question bespeak a myopia on the
narrator's part which severely qualifies whatever charitable impulses
he may exhibit. Failing to perceive that the "business" of being a
scrivener in his own law-chambers may be more fitted to heighten
hopelessness than handling dead letters in a Washington post office,
the narrator fails as a reliable spokesman for Bartleby's forlorn predica-
ment and for the human condition in general. Not only does the nar-
rator display in his epilogue a remarkable obliviousness to the possible
alienating effects of the claustrophobic environment he so deliberately
described at the start of his narrative, he also ignores the relevance of
his earlier pronouncements about law-copying ("a dry, husky sort of
business" [p. 10]) and about proofreading ("it is a very dull,
wearisome, and lethargic affair" [p. 12]). Furthermore, he overlooks
the existential emptiness of the task for which his employees are hired:
condemned to copy and re-copy "recondite documents" in a "closely
written hand," the law-scrivener engages in the hopeless business of
performing linguistic acts void of those opportunities for self-expression
which ordinarily attend even the simplest oral or written communica-
tions. To the diligent copyist, then, language is not mediate but final,
not translucent but opaque. Just as all traces of what landscape
painters call "life" have been blocked by the brick walls which abut the
windows at both ends of the narrator's law-chambers (from Bartleby's
desk there is "no view at all"), so all avenues for creativity and freedom
are perforce denied the law-copyist who must stick slavishly to the let-
ter of the property-deeds he copies. This is to say that the business of
the law-copyist is one which affords "no view at all" of "life"; instead it
confronts the copyist with dead-walls in its demand for total bondage
to the letter, to language itself. The law office in which Bartleby is
employed (and for which the narrator unwittingly provides the
metaphor) is, then, a dead letter office, a place of business whichStudies in American Fiction3
strictly encourages a morbid tyranny of the letter over the human
spirit. The results of such a tryranny are evident not only in Bartleby's
abbreviated mode of communicating with his employer but in the ef-
fusive, strangely contorted rhetoric of the lawyer-narrator himself.
Like the laborious, imitative acts he performs as a law-copyist,
Bartleby's spoken words comprise a copy-speech which ultimately con-
founds a significant view of the elemental satisfactions and dislikes nor-
mally associated with the human personality. Despite its strong sugges-
tion of human volition and control, the genteel phrase "I would prefer
not to" emerges, through Bartleby's persistent, automatic reiteration of
it, as a triggered response, an empty counter much akin to the mimicry
performed by certain trained birds:
"WiU you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?"
"I would prefer not to."
"WiU you tell me anything about yourself?"
"I would prefer not to."
"... Say now, you will help to examine papers to-morrow or
next day: in short, say now, that in a day or two you will begin to be
a litde reasonable: — say so, Bartleby."
"At present I would prefer not to be a litde reasonable . . ."
(pp. 25-26).'
What accounts for Bartleby's strange and perplexing appeal is not his
refusal to perform the various tasks for which he has been hired, but his
refusal to refuse, his unwillingness or inability to articulate any fixed
moral, psychological, or social posture through the words he uses. This
is to say that Bartleby's words are dead words; they fail to reveal what
they promise to reveal—some sort of "preference."3 Even when he is at
his most loquacious and appears to enter the give-and-take of ordinary
conversation, Bartleby uses language which, in spite of sustaining a
tone of reasonableness and accommodation, works to undermine any
meaningful preference it may imply:
"No; I would prefer not to make any change."
"Would you like a clerkship in a dry-goods store?"
"There is too much confinement about that. No, I would not like
a clerkship; but I am not particular."
"Too much confinement," I cried, "why you keep yourself con-
fined all the timet"
"I would prefer not to take a clerkship," he rejoined, as if to set-
tle that litde item at once.
"How would a bar-tender's business suit you? There is no trying
of the eye-sight in that."
"I would not like it at all; though, as I said before, I am not par-
ticular."4 Lewis H. Miller, Jr.
His unwonted wordiness inspirited me. I returned to the charge.
"Well, then, would you like to travel through the country col-
lecting bills for the merchants? That would improve your health."
"No, I would prefer to be doing something else."
"How, then, would going as a companion to Europe, to enter-
tain some young gentleman with your conversation—how would that
suit you?"
"Not at all. It does not strike me that there is anything definite
about that. I like to be stationary. But I am not particular"
(pp. 40-41).
There is a Bergsonian strain of comedy in this unusual exchange, as
Bartleby's rigid, mechanical responses clash repeatedly with the nar-
rator's posture of openness and flexibility. The narrator's arch proposal
that Bartleby "entertain some young gentleman with [his] conversa-
tion" is, of course, patently ludicrous since most conversation requires
an interchange of points of view; and a point of view, any point of
view, is exactly what Bartleby will not articulate. Although Bartleby's
"unwonted wordiness" is momentarily accompanied by an unwonted
intensity of feeling ("I would not like it all"), Bartleby character-
istically will not allow words to express his state of mind: his repeated,
indiscriminate invocation of the phrase "I am not particular" subverts
any attempt on the reader's or lawyer's part at establishing Bartleby's
particularity and suggests (as do the self-cancelling preferences to be
stationary and not to be confined) that Bartleby's "wordiness" serves as
a dead wall or screen behind which his true feelings, whatever those
may be, remain concealed. For Bartleby does not speak in order to be
understood, and his failure to pursue the norms of standard linguistic
practice (what the narrator has called "common usage") leaves the nar-
rator in a state of nervous exasperation quite foreign to his customary
aplomb.
Much as he is prepared to write Bartleby off as "a little deranged"
or "unaccountably eccentric," the narrator can no more relinquish his
impulse to account for Bartleby's unaccountable behavior than can the
reader. Misguided though its inferences may be, the narrator's
postscript to Bartleby's "history" serves to ignite or keep alive the
reader's determination to impose some kind of rationally explicable
pattern upon Bartleby's behavior.4 That readers have shared in the
narrator's impulse to fit Bartleby into deeply constructed pigeonholes is
amply documented by the range and quantity of "Bartleby" commen-
tary published over the past few decades. Most recently, R. D. Laing's
discussions of schizophrenia and Karl Marx's classic statement on
worker alienation have been used effectively to account for Bartleby's
strange behavior.5 Yet fruitful as such approaches have been, they failStudies in American Fiction5
to engage the epistemológica! implications of Melville's "Dead Letter"
metaphor. Admittedly, Bartleby's pallid hoplessness is a symptom of an
ontological insecurity and of a dissociation from the work he performs,
but it is also a symptom of his alientation from language itself. For, as
his story unfolds, Bartleby exhibits a growing recognition of the futility
of all linguistic acts to bridge the gap between one isolate self and
another. Condemned by his employment to observe in its most literal
sense the strict letter of the law, Bartleby displays in a variety of ways
the deadly and deadening effects of the letter which killeth. His pro-
found disaffection with language is progressively revealed by his
preference not to examine copies; his apparent unwillingness to read in
his leisure time ("no,—not even a newspaper"); his unwillingness to
tell the narrator "anything" about himself; his laying down of his pen
as a copyist; and his refusal to employ language as a living medium
through which the human spirit might be exposed. His penultimate
and most spirited utterance is itself a denial of his willingness to engage
in the speech act: "... I want nothing to say to you" (p. 43). Perhaps
only in death—at rest with kings and counsellors—will Bartleby escape
the prison-house of self and in eternal silence manage to transcend the
prison-house of language.
In contrast to Bartleby, the narrator of the story exhibits a marked
tendency to view language not as a dead-wall or prison-house but as a
ready medium through which an individual life, no matter how
isolated or eccentric, might be meaningfully incorporated into the
"bond of a common humanity" (p. 23). At the very outset of his story,
the narrator indicates his trust in the potency of language to organize
experience and to lead, if not to ultimate truth, to "an adequate
understanding of the chief character about to be presented":8
But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners, for a few passages
in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener, the strangest I ever saw,
or heard of. WhUe, of other law-copyists I might write the complete
life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no
materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is
an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of
whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and
in his case those are very small (p. 3).
Although the narrator appears to acknowledge, here, the futility of
language to account for Bartleby's strange elusiveness ("Bartleby was
one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable"), he is quick to
avoid any serious consideration of the ineffable; instead, he concludes
that Bartleby's record is incomplete: if the right "materials" or
"original sources" were available, the narrator wants to suggest that he6 Lewis H. Miller, Jr.
could indeed construct a "full and satisfactory biography of this man."
Just what these "original sources" might be is not certain. But the nar-
rator's prudent and snug cast of mind, his placid confidence in the
power of words to articulate a "complete life" is certain. Such con-
fidence in the efficacy of language is evidenced throughout the nar-
rative by the lawyer-narrator's own loquacity; by his expansive
rhetoric; and, more specifically, by his playful version of an Emer-
sonian correspondence between names and things (". . . John Jacob
Astor; a name which I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded
and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion" [p. 4]); by his
wry, yet urgent expression of concern for linguistic order ("I thought to
myself, sure I must get rid of a demented man who already has in some
degree turned the tongues if not the heads of myself and clerks"
[p. 28]); and by his readiness to locate within his own voice a capacity
for conjoining his snug world with that of his walled-in scrivener ("Still
further to a satisfactory arrangement, I procured a high green folding
screen, which might entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight, though
not remove him from my voice. And thus, in a manner, privacy and
society were conjoined" [p. 12]) .
It is one of the keenest ironies in Melville's story that the narrator,
for all his professions to the contrary, consistently insulates himself
from human contact by the manner in which he proceeds as a user of
words. For despite his self-confidence, his eloquence and prolixity, the
lawyer is very much like Bartleby. Both project verbal constructs
which block the expression of elemental human feelings; both employ
genteel disclaimers to create a "snug retreat" from the rigors of in-
dividual commitment and personal responsibility. Where Bartleby
hides behind impenetrable "preferences," the narrator erects his own
walls through a persistent, often ludicrous, use of litotes: "I was not
unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor. ... I will
freely add that I was not insensible to the late John Jacob Aster's good
opinion" (p. 4); "the interval between this wall and mine not a little
resembled a huge square cistern" (p. 5). Refusing to expose himself
through language in a straight-forward, assertive manner, the nar-
rator, safe man that he is, withdraws behind a screen of multiple nega-
tions which, coupled with an ample use of passive verbs, abstract
nouns, and third-person constructions, clearly out-Bartleby Bartleby:
Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. If the
individual so resisted be of a not inhumane temper, and the resisting
one perfectly harmless in his passivity, then, in the better moods of
the former, he will endeavor charitably to construe to his imagina-
tion what proves impossible to be solved by his judgment (p. 17).Studies in American Fiction7
Just who is resisting whom? The narrator's own "passive resistance" is
so complete here that readers are hard-pressed to discern a specific, in-
dividual identity behind these words. Rather than hold himself ac-
countable for his own emotional and physical conduct, the narrator
abdicates his role as a responsible individual by permitting intangibles
like "imagination" and "judgment" to arbitrate for him. In such a
fashion, the narrator repeatedly indulges in soul-struggles which do
more to deflect than to reflect authentic states of mind: "... A
prudential feeling began to steal over me. My first emotions had been
those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as
the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that
same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion" (p. 24). The
cumulative effect of such insipid derivatives of psychomachia is itself
litotic; rather than body forth a combative soul in vigorous conflict, the
narrator's stuffy rhetoric depicts a cramped, diminished psyche at-
tempting to come to terms with forces it does not understand and over
which it can exert little or no control. In short, the voice talking
throughout much of the narrative is that of a man who is estranged
from his inner feelings, who is held in bondage by the anonymity of his
own dead-wall rhetoric. And since the narrator fails to come into
meaningful contact with himself, his attempts to "touch" the well-
springs of Bartleby's existence must be futile: "It was his soul that suf-
fered, and his soul I could not reach" (p. 25).
Much as Melville's narrator believes in the capacity of his words to
reveal a "complete life," his rhetoric is woefully inadequate to the task.
The failure of language to grapple with human emotions and to bridge
the gap between isolate selves may well lie at the heart of Melville's
epistemológica! assumptions. But in "Bartleby," such a failure is a
specific manifestation of the narrator's expressed desire to withdraw
from the "turbulence" of public exposure; indeed, the peculiar limita-
tions of the narrator's rhetoric can be viewed as an outgrowth of his ex-
clusive commitment to the "snug business" of drawing up recondite
documents. For the language of most documents in the realm of
property-law is highly stylized, patently formulaic, and rigidly self-
contained; it is most effective, from a professional point of view, when
it achieves a level of anonymity that denies avenues for subjective
response and authorial intrusion. Such denials or closures comprise the
hallmark of the lawyer-narrator's rhetoric: his projection of a neat and
tidy verbal universe immune to the messy incursions of the human per-
sonality. Yet Melville is too much an artist of ambiguity and equivoca-
tion to offer so pat and unqualified a perspective on his narrator's
linguistic and perceptual habits. Often at those moments8 Lewis H. Miller, Jr.
when the narrator seems to bask most comfortably behind the
anonymity of an official prose, his dead-wall rhetoric is abruptly punc-
tuated by emotional outbursts and sympathetic probings:
For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melan-
choly seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a not
unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me
irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and
Bartleby were sons of Adam. I remembered the bright süks and
sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swan-like sailing
down the Mississippi of Broadway; and I contrasted them with the
pallid copyist, and thought to myself, Ah, happiness courts the light,
so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that
misery there is none (p. 23).
Midway through this passage, the narrator emerges from his protective
shell by speaking with an assertive, personal voice: "For both I and
Bartleby were sons of Adam. I remembered . . . I had seen . . . I con-
trasted . . . and thought to myself, Ah, happiness. ..." This kind of
ingenuousness has prompted critics to affirm the lawyer's capacity for
"considerable moral growth";7 and one would be wrong-headed to
deny the narrator his humanities. But the charitable impulses of
Melville's narrator are extremely tenuous; they are consistently
qualified and called into question by the narrator's easy return to a safe
and detached point of vantage:
These sad fancyings—chimeras, doubtless, of a sick and silly
brain—led on to other and more special thoughts, concerning the ec-
centricities of Bartleby, Presentiments of strange discoveries hovered
round me. The scrivener's pale form appeared to me laid out, among
uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding-sheet (p. 23).
In typical fashion the narrator divests himself of personal responsibility
to Bartleby by invoking the mysterious, inexorable world of "sad fancy-
ings," "special thoughts," and "presentiments." The reference to
"chimeras ... of a sick and silly brain" blatantly undercuts not only
the sympathetic tendencies just exhibited but also the charitable thrust
implicit in the funereal vision of Bartleby's form laid out "among un-
caring strangers, in its winding sheet." Is this presentiment merely the
creation of a "sick and silly brain"? Or is it a demonstration of the nar-
rator's compassionate nature? Or is it, finally, a revelation of the nar-
rator's latent desire to see the end of Bartleby? The opacity of the prose
will not allow certainty; all that is known is that the narrator prefers to
keep his distance.
The narrator's obsession with keeping his distance is sustained
throughout his narrative not only through protective rhetorical
strategies but through his finicky, anal behavior. His most conspicuousStudies in American Fiction9
physical gesture provides a case in point: whenever he is caught off
guard and finds himself forced to confront Bartleby at an elemental
human level, the lawyer seeks safety by buttoning his overcoat:
At the expiration of that period, I peeped behind the screen, and
loi Bartleby was there.
I buttoned up my coat, balanced myself; advanced slowly
towards him, touched his shoulder and said, "The time has come;
you must quit this place; I am sorry for you; here is money; but you
must go."
"I would prefer not," he replied, with his back still towards me
(pp. 29-30).
Peeping behind one screen, the narrator must "balance" himself by
securing another. Unlike Turkey whose afternoon "rashness and
obstreperousness" were not abated as the narrator had hoped by his gift
of a coat which "buttoned straight up from the knee to the neck," the
narrator finds in his own overcoat a ready means of maintaining his
balance, of containing his own unruly tendencies and of safely achiev-
ing distance from the man whose shoulder he "touched."8 For the nar-
rator's fear of exposure cuts deeper than his fear of "being exposed in
the paper" (p. 40); it is a fear of intimate human contact, and it sur-
faces in the form of an acute squeamishness:
Indeed, it was his wonderful mildness chiefly, which not only
disarmed me, but unmanned me, as it were. For I consider that one,
for the time, is sort of unmanned when he tranquilly permits his
hired clerk to dictate to him, and order him away from his own
premises. Furthermore, I was full of uneasiness as to what Bartleby
could possibly be doing in my office in his shirt-sleeves, and in an
otherwise dismantled condition of a Sunday morning. Was anything
amiss going on? Nay, that was out of the question. It was not to be
thought of for a moment that Bartleby was an immoral person. But
what could he be doing there?—copying? Nay again, whatever
might be his eccentricities, Bartleby was an eminently decorous per-
son. He would be the last man to sit down to his desk in any state ap-
proaching to nudity. Besides, it was Sunday; and there was
something about Bartleby that forbade the supposition that he would
by any secular occupation violate the proprieties of the day
(pp. 21-22).
From its first verbs ("disarmed," "unmanned")to its last ("violated"),
this astonishing passage quivers at every turn with erotic displacement.
Indeed, the passage provides one more telling example of the lawyer's
pinched Puritanism, his refusal to confront, with body or mind, what
Whitman was to call "Nature without check with original energy."
In marked contrast to Whitman's persona (or to Melville's
Ishmael, for that matter), the "Bartleby" narrator shrinks in repulsion
from whatever is alive and pulsating. He is from the outset attracted to10Lewis H. Miller, Jr.
Bartleby's "motionlessness," and he feels most at ease with Bartleby
when the scrivener appears to him not as a flesh and blood individual
but as a pallid object: "His great stillness, his unalterableness of de-
meanor under all circumstances, made him a valuable acquisition"
(p. 20). Small wonder that the narrator can only "recall" but cannot
obey the "divine injunction" that "ye love one another" (p. 34). For
despite repeated claims of tenderness and pity for Bartleby ("But there
was something about Bartleby that ... in a wonderful manner
touched and disconcerted me" [p. 14]; ". . . copying by his dim win-
dow for the first few weeks of his stay with me might have temporarily
impaired his vision. I was touched" [p. 28]), the lawyer can affectively
"touch" and be touched by Bartleby only when Bartleby is dead:
Strangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, and ly-
ing on his side, his head touching the cold stones, I saw the wasted
Bartleby. But nothing stirred. I paused; then went close up to him;
stooped over, and saw that his dim eyes were open; otherwise he
seemed profoundly sleeping. Something prompted me to touch him. I
felt his hand, when a tingling shiver ran up my arm and down my
spine to my feet (pp. 45-46).
This vibrant response to Bartleby's corpse neatly encapsulates the nar-
rator's necrophilic tendencies—verbal, emotional, and physical—
throughout his narrative and throws a lugubrious light upon the
emotion-laden rhetoric which follows in the epilogue:
The report was this: that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the
Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly
removed by a change in the administration. When I think over this
rumor, hardly can I express the emotions which seize me (p. 46).
In a unique moment the narrator signals an overflow of powerful feel-
ings by admitting that he cannot adequately express his emotions; and
one is tempted to conclude that at last the lawyer has attained a
redeeming level of sympathetic awareness. Yet this awareness fulfills
only in part the divine injunction that "ye love one another"; for like
the "tingling shiver" sparked by Bartleby's lifeless body, the narrator's
intense response to Bartleby and humanity reveals more a compas-
sionate engagement with the dead than with the living:
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? For by
the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the fold-
ed paper the pale clerk takes a ring—the finger it was meant for,
perhaps, molders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest
charity—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more;Studies in American Fiction1 1
pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died
unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved
calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death (pp. 46-47) .
While the expansive rhythms of these final sentences contribute to an
assertiveness and enthusiasm rarely found in the cramped, litotic
rhetoric characteristic of the narrator, the narrator's snug, fastidious
nature remains very much in evidence: his imagination is stirred only
by personal transactions which even had they not been frustrated by
death would have been consummated with a conspicuous lack of
human "touch." For the same mentality which had twice assured
Bartleby of a swift, charitable response by letter ("Moreover, if, after
reaching home, he found himself at any time in want of aid, a letter
from him would be sure of reply" [p. 25]; "If hereafter ... I can be of
any service to you, do not fail to advise me by letter" [p. 30]), now con-
ceives of the most personal of rituals (betrothal) in safe, epistolary
terms: "Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a
ring: —the finger it was meant for, perhaps, molders in the grave." The
stark severity of focus here, akin to some of the sharpest imagery of the
Metaphysical poets (e.g. Donne's "A bracelet of bright hair upon the
bone") , reveals once again that only in response to that which is dead
does the narrator of "Bartleby" come fully alive. Conversely, in
response to the turbulent and fleshy aspects of human existence, the
narrator remains masoned up in a wall of his own rhetoric. And one of
the final ironies in Melville's story is that the narrator, in his summary
remarks about the original intent and final disposition of dead letters,
unwittingly describes the lamentable fate of his own efforts as a man of
letters to render a few passages in the life of Bartleby: "On errands of
life, these letters speed to death."
For the story which Melville tells is quite different from the one his
narrator thinks he is telling, and the distance between Melville's
perspective and that of the narrator emerges most poignantly in the
narrator's concluding exclamations: "Ah, Bartlebyl Ah, humanity!"
Ingenuous as this outcry may be, its range is severely restricted by the
narrator's prophylactic relations with Bartleby, with his readers, and
with humanity in general. Yet behind these final words stands Melville
lamenting in his own voice the unbridgeable gulf between all men, a
gulf measured in "Bartleby" by the distance between Melville's com-
passionate vision and the dead-letteredness of his characters.12Lewis H. Miller, Jr.
Notes
'"Bartleby," in The Complete Stories of Herman Melville, ed. Jay Leyda (New York:
Random House, 1949), pp. 46-47; subsequent references to "Bartleby" are from this edi-
tion and will be noted in the text.
'Bartleby's copy-speech has much in common with the limited "stock and store" of
Poe's raven; and like Poe's speaker in "The Raven," Melville's narrator frequently gears his
questions to the predictable answers he knows will be forthcoming. Bertrand Russell's
remark about the speech of animals provides a gloss to Bartleby's limited response to ques-
tions about his origins: "No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that
his parents were poor but honest" (quoted by Peter Farb in Word Play [1974; rpt. New
York: Bantam, 1975], p. 259).
'Compare "Edwards on the Will" (one of two treatises to which the narrator turns for
solace [p. 35]) which affirms the proposition that "in every voliton there is a preference, or
a prevailing inclination of the soul" (Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, ed. Paul
Ramsey [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1957], p. 140). In Bartleby's case, "volition" and
"preference" seem not to be conjoined since Bartleby's articulated preferences tend to
obscure rather than reveal the "prevaüing inclination" of his soul.
'Although recent commentary has pointed up the narrator's overbearing propensity
to fit Bartleby into neat pigeonholes, scant attention has been paid to the readers' own ef-
forts to account for Bartleby in a simUar manner; see, for example, Peter E. Firchow,
"Bartleby: Man and Metaphor," SSF, 5 (1968), 342-48. Also, see the narrator's self-
reflexive description of Bartleby's desk: "Everything was methodically arranged. . . . The
pigeonholes were deep . . ." (p. 23).
"Marvin Fisher in " 'Bartleby,' Melville's Circumscribed Scrivener," Soil, 10 (1974),
59-79, invokes Laing; Louise K. Barnett in "Bartleby an Alienated Worker" SSF, 11
(1974), 379-84, invokes Marx.
"Just who is "the chief character" of the story is open to question; although he clearly
thinks of Bartleby as "the chief character," the narrator unwittingly identifies that
designation with himself: "... Because some such description is indispensable to an ade-
quate understanding of the chief character about to be presented. Imprimis: I am a man
who ..." (pp. 3-4).
'The phrase is Marven Fisher's in " 'Bartleby,' MelvUle's Circumscribed Scrivener,"
SoR, 10 (1974), 59-79. See also Leo Marx, "Melville's Parable of the Walls," Sfl, 61 (1953),
602-27; and Norman Springer, "Bartleby and the Terror of Limitations," PMLA, 80
(1965), 410-18.
"See, also, page 37: "What shall I do? I now said to myself, buttoning up my coat to
the last button. What shall I do? What ought I to do? . . ."You can also read
