“The Silhouette of a Content”: “Bartleby” and American Literary Specificity

Abstract

Judging from the history of its critical reception, to read Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” has been to suffer a kind of enchantment. For all the light it has shed on this mysterious text and notwithstanding the diversity of interpretive approaches, much “Bartleby” commentary collectively reproduces, as a kind of critical initiation rite, the sacrificial dilemma at the heart of the story’s drama. As if inevitably, it inaugurates itself by restaging the trauma of choice suffered by the lawyer who employs the scrivener and who survives to tell his tale. It is as though in order to write, the critic must first choose whether to ascribe primary significance to the mundane concerns of an antebellum lawyer’s office or to the embodied abstraction—the pale and silent copyist—who suddenly occupies it. Should the critic prefer to refuse the choice, the lawyer’s narrative makes it increasingly clear that the mundane and the exceptional, the quotidian and the aberrant, cannot, finally, co-exist: first, the mundane is routed when the lawyer moves shop because he can’t move Bartleby and won’t have him removed by force of law; then Bartleby is evicted when the subsequent tenant proves not so fastidious. Melville gives us a striking image of this eviction, which is also an arrest (Bartleby is simply removing from one enclosure to another): a constable links arms with the copyist and “the silent procession filed its way through all the noise, and heat, and joy of the roaring thoroughfares at noon” (PT 42). We know how it ends: the conscience-stricken lawyer finds his former employee dead of starvation in the Tombs, in a corner of the empty yard, with its walls of an exaggerated (a pyramidical) thickness.¹