Written by Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame and published in two parts in 1853, “Bartleby,
the Scrivener” is the sad story of a man, Bartleby, who finds work as a scribe with a Wall Street lawyer. Though the work consists of copying by hand reems of dull legalese, his efforts, at first, are productive. He is a model employee. Soon, however, quiet and aloof Bartleby begins to answer his employer’s assignments with the phrase, “I would prefer not to.” He continues to show up for work, but instead of copying page after page after page of some meaningless document, he responds again and again with the same line. He stares out of the window into a brick wall. “I would prefer not to.” He stands in silence at a distance, never bothering to socially connect with anybody. “I would prefer not to.” Eventually, the Wall Street lawyer moves his business to another building, leaving behind poor Bartleby. The new tenants, unable to evict Bartleby, plead with his former boss to have the disturbed man removed. He sits on the building’s stairs. He sleeps in the doorway at night. Bartleby is eventually arrested as a vagrant and taken to a place called The Tombs where he dies of starvation, preferring not to eat anything.
The story, to me, is fascinating because two characters, the lawyer and Bartleby, seem to be deadlocked in a persistence the former cannot explain and the latter will not explain. The lawyer could have had Bartleby physically removed from the premises, yet he decides to move his business operation instead. To be sure, he could have simply refused to play along with Bartleby’s peculiar behavior and sacked him in the beginning the first time he uttered those passive aggressive words. But he didn’t. He begged Bartleby. Checked up on him. Seemed to be genuinely concerned if not mystified by his willful inaction. Bartleby, on the other hand, sticks with his banal proclamation all the while showing up to the office. He goes through the motions. Physically, he is there but, otherwise, he is absent. Seemingly hollow. Checked out.
Of course, Melville may have been making a comment on the nature of some work in his industrialized America mid-19th century. The breakdown of work meant massive profits for the titans of industry, but it meant soul-draining labor for everyone else. Craftsmanship was being replaced by low-skilled labor, which often meant mindless repetition, maddening boredom not unlike copying by hand legal documents. Fair enough. But I wonder if Melville was also anticipating an exodus that reached its zenith with the “turn on, tune in, drop out” countercultural movement of the 1960s.
Timothy Leary, the popular psychologist who advocated the use of psychedelic drugs, pushed for the young in particular to dramatically step away from their parents’ society to form something Utopian in nature. We know, of course, how that turned out, but this should not detract from the question of what makes some want to quit altogether. What is it about society that inspires one to take a long look at it and conclude, Nope. Not for me.
I am reminded of a recent story of a domesticated cow. Somehow, the cow escaped from a Polish farm and could not be found for days. Eventually, someone spied the cow grazing with a herd of wild bison. The bovine had gone rogue. Entered into an alternative way of existing. Without convention. Absent the arbitrary. And free. Ultimately, free.
If anything, Melville’s short story begs the question of how we each should exist – indeed, how we were meant to exist. It is less a “what” question and more a “why” question. Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” refrain seems to have as its subtext “And why, really, should I trouble myself with such vapid, senseless labor.” It is a legitimate question in the face of what truly matters: how God meant us to live. If a task, any task, chips away at the integrity of our very soul then the red flag should immediately go up. It becomes a task that diminishes us and, therefore, inhibits the possibility of our fullest self-realization. For some, namely the lawyer, the ins and outs of the law might be very fulfilling. It was why, in small part, he was put on this earth. For Bartleby, that was not the case. He would prefer not to. The takeaway for us, then, is clear: What, deep down, would we prefer not to do? How is the rogue in each of us yearning for open fields?
