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Bartleby and the Terror of Limitation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Norman Springer
Norman Springer*
Affiliation:
Saint Mary's College Saint Mary's College, Calif.
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Extract

There is no larger horror than that which Bartleby represents in the world Melville creates through his first person narrator. Bartleby calls into question all that the narrator is. The peculiar power of the story arises from the effect of the absolute solidity of the lawyer-narrator: his impeccable respectability, the growing pleasure he takes in his comforts and accomplishments. This man who insists on telling us of Bartleby, “the strangest” scrivener he has ever encountered, is a man for whom all things ought to have their place; he attempts to discover where Bartleby belongs and what things belong to Bartleby. The unique effect of the story lies in the reader's recognition that though the narrator feels, no matter how inconclusively, that he has placed him in some way, he has, in fact, not placed him at all.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1965 , pp. 410 - 418
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 This article was originally read as a formal lecture at St. Mary's College in April 1962. A shorter version was read at the annual meeting of the PAPC at Berkeley in November 1962. It was evoked by Leo Marx's article on “Bartleby,” “Melville and the Parable of the Walls,” Sewanee Review, lxi (Autumn 1953), 602–627, the most extensive treatment of the novella in print. Marx sees a “grave defect in Melville's tale” because “we must go back to Typee and Moby Dick and Pierre for clues to its meaning.” Because he does not see the story as an artistic success, Marx decides that Melville takes “extraordinary means to mask his meaning,” and he attempts to reclaim the tale by treating it as Melville's statement on the writer in society. The work finally becomes, for Marx, an affirmation on Melville's part, “a compassionate rebuke to the self-absorption of the artist Bartleby and so a plea that he [the artist] devote himself to keeping strong his bonds with the rest of mankind.”

Further comment on Marx's article and an excellent short survey of the limitations and hazards of the “social-biographical allegorizing” criticism of Melville appear in Kingsley Widmer's article, “The Negative Affirmation: Melville's Bartleby,” MFS, viii (Autumn 1962), 276–286. (A useful bibliography on “Bartleby” appears in the same issue, which is a Herman Melville Number.) Widmer's perceptive reading properly accepts “Melville's directions of form” and focuses on the narrator. I would disagree, however, with his view that the negation Bartleby represents ever becomes “unmistakable to the narrator” as it does to the reader. This distinction, as my analysis demonstrates, I see as the control on all the parts of the tale, the key to an understanding of its wholeness and beauty.

2 Quotations in this article are from the text of “Bartleby” edited by Egbert S. Oliver, The Piazza Tales (New York, 1948), pp. 16–54.

3 OED: conveyancer. The transference of (esp. real) property from one person to another by deed or writing … the instrument of transfer. …

4 The walls here, as William M. Gibson has pointed out (“Herman Melville's ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ and ‘Benito Cereno’,” The American Renaissance, Frankfurt am Main, 1962, pp. 107–116), are identical with “the dead blind wall [that] butts all inquiring heads at last” in Moby Dick, and therefore with Moby Dick's “impenetrable forehead.”