Dead Wall Reveries in Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”

Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” is subtitled a “Story of Wall St.,” yet there is almost nothing in it of the bustle of city life, and entirely nothing in it of the hustle of the trading floor. The story’s walls block out the streets, serving on the one hand as a container for a colorful assortment of human Xerox machines, on the other as a blank projection screen for the reveries of a man who seems to quietly rebel against the very concept of imitation. Can we continue to live and work, if we strongly prefer to do nothing that is derivative? What happens to our aspirations, if we come to fully appreciate the gravity of fate? Could we continue to tell our own stories, if we were liberated from all idiosyncrasies of character? Wes & Erin analyze.  Thanks to our sponsor BetterHelp. Get 10 percent off online therapy at betterhelp.com/subtext. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:09 Wes: Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener is subtitled A Story of Wall street. Yet there is almost nothing in it of the bustle of city life and entirely nothing in it of the hustle of the trading floor. The story's walls entirely block out the streets, serving on the one hand as a container for a colorful assortment of human Xerox machines, and on the other as a blank projection screen for the reveries of a man who seems to quietly rebel against the very concept of imitation. Can we continue to live and work if we strongly prefer to do nothing that is derivative? What happens to our aspirations if we come to fully appreciate the gravity of fate? Could we continue to tell our own stories if we were liberated from all idiosyncrasies of character? This is Wes Alwan. 0:54 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. 1:00 Wes: So, Erin, I think if I had to choose a title for this book, it would be Not Bartleby, but Dead Wall Reveries, which is. There's a few phrases I really like in the book, but that I think it would also be a great name for a band that would be. I'm like, I can't believe this is just sitting there in the text. This should be a title. 1:25 Erin: It's funny that you should say that, because I think I told you offline at some point that I teach the story, or taught now, former teacher, taught the story every year to my high school students, my 10th graders. And I always gave pop quizzes, or not always, but, you know, frequently gave pop quizzes, like the morning after they were assigned a reading. And I'd always try to trip them up with a painfully obvious question. So one of the frequent ones I used was, like, who wrote this? And they would ignore the name of the author. But for Bartleby, I always asked, what was the subtitle? And they never knew. And somehow, not only would they forget the subtitle, but they always forgot where the story was set, that it was set in Wall Street. And I had to explain to them that was really crucial because they didn't seem to think that it was important at all, just like they didn't seem to think it was important that Melville wrote it or anything like that. So, yeah, but I think if I had to title this, what would I title? No matter how dissimilar, I always see a continuity, or at least some surprising thematic crossover between and among episodes that are adjacent to each other. And as we've been talking and thinking about Alien, certain similarities presented themselves to me. So maybe Space Invader. 2:43 Wes: I don't know. Oh, I love that. 2:47 Erin: Something. 2:48 Wes: I know Space Invader. That would be a great adaptation of this actually short film. All right, I want to take your quiz now. The subtitle. It's either a Wall street story or a story of Wall Street. 3:02 Erin: That's right. I would have accepted either one. Which one is it a story of Wall Street? 3:08 Wes: Yeah. It's so interesting. Yeah. Because there really is very little of Wall street in this. Right. There's not. There's one scene where you get a sense of the hustle and bustle of the city. That's the scene where Bartleby is actually being escorted off to prison, to the tombs. And there's a kind of. When I did my first reading, I kind of got the sense that this was a raucous crowd. Right. Some of them were arm in arm with Bartleby and that they were. Maybe there was something sadistic about this when he was being hauled off to jail. And. And then when I reread it, doing my notes, I saw that it's actually. They're silent. Let me just read the part here that's relevant. As I afterwards learned, the poor scrivener, when told that he must be conducted to the tombs, offered not the slightest obstacle, but in his pale, unmoving way, silently acquiesced. Some of the compassionate and curious bystanders joined the party and headed by one of the constables, arm in arm with Bartleby. The. The silent procession filed its way through all the noise and heat and joy of the roaring thoroughfares at noon. Which is a sentence I really loved. And, yeah, I see now, even rereading this, it's a constable who's arm in arm with Bartleby. I think I was imagining, like a bystander on either side of him and people being somewhat raucous and making light of it all. But really, it's silent. And I guess the bystanders feel allied to him in some sense. But anyway, just the contrast of the silence of that procession and then that sense that we get of the noise, the heat and joy of the roaring thoroughfares at noon. I think that might be the only real sense that we get of. I think, what our stereotype of Wall street would be, which is the kind of busy hustle and bustle of the city at day. There is one other mention of the contrast between the city at day and the city at night. This is just after where the narrator finds Bartleby living in the office and reassures himself that he would not be sitting down at the desk in any state approaching nudity. And then when he gets back there, he figures out that Bartleby has been living there. And reflects on his friendlessness and his loneliness and his poverty. And so he says, think of it of a Sunday. Wall street is deserted as Petra. And every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building, too, which of the weekdays hums with industry. And life at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy. And all through Sunday is forlorn. And here Bartleby makes his home sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous. A sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage. So I guess when you directed our attention to the subtitle of the story. The idea that it's a story of Wall Street, I was. I guess my project was to show that there really wasn't much of Wall Street. I guess there's enough now that I've found a. Now that I've looked for the places where he gives it some characterization. 6:33 Erin: I think its lack of character is one of its characteristics. The more I read this story, the more I think it's a story about zoning or city planning or something like that. It's a business district whose opposite, I suppose, is a bedroom. So you have people who come into the business district for work during the day and who leave at a certain time. Leaving the business business district completely abandoned after certain hours and abandoned on Sundays, as Melville writes. And then you have the bedroom community, which is the place where you just go to sleep. So you have the two different zones of your life are very clearly marked. And so the idea that someone has invaded business with bedrooms. It seems to be like one of the main transgressions that's happening here. 7:20 Wes: It's interesting. I worked in the financial district from 2000 to 2002. And it was the same way. This characteristic, this thing that Melville was describing was absolutely true at the time. I think it probably still is true. Maybe even more so now after Covid. But this weird contrast, so busy during the day, so crammed full of people, and then completely deserted at night. So I don't know, what are we supposed to make of that? There's something about that contrast that is important here. And something about the contrast between associations between human beings, which are based on business, and then something that is actually more intimate. 8:07 Erin: Yeah, it's about the rhythms of life. And I think something, too, is here about the kind of work that they're doing that is. That plays into this, too, in a way. Bartleby is like re. Injecting some sort of vitality into this. Into this dead area by living there. So when we have these two zones of. And I'm not using this in the like, literal zoning way, we have these two areas of work and of recreation very clearly demarcated. And then you have, for instance, turkey and Nippers beginning to defy that. So turkey and Nippers are like the precursors to Bartleby. So you have someone who can only work half the day, so he's starting to encroach the bedroom or the. The home space into the workspace. Because there's something about this work, I think, demands what Wall street demands, which is a total shutting down for all things that are not business to only be open during business hours. And so Turkey and Nippers have already allowed something of home, something. Something that's not professional, into the workspace. And the narrator has been. Has allowed this. He allows these peccadillos. And we could talk about the narrator, obviously, in a minute. But so there's a kind of an understanding that the sacrosanct nature of Wall street is something extremely unnatural. And the narrator sees this and allows a certain amount of eccentricity on the part of his employees. I guess the problem is then what happens when you take it too far and you are. You're the equivalent of sitting around in your pajamas and eating cereal and playing video games all day, but at your place of work, but to be unemployed while you're at work, what that might mean. 9:55 Wes: That's. That's hilarious. Yeah. Before Google was offering napping pods and ping pong, narrator of the story was ahead of his time. 10:03 Erin: Well, exactly. And I mean, what is that designed to do except to get you to confuse work for home, to get you to be willing to live at your job and to make your job your life. So what happens when that unravels and you can't do that anymore and you're not. You're not living to work, you're working to live only that. I guess the only living that you can do is an extremely limited one within the parameters of an office building. I don't know. Yeah, I think of someone living in the cubicles. 10:32 Wes: Yeah, I was thinking too, with turkey and Nippers, I was thinking about how. Yeah, that is true. People really don't. In office jobs, there's a lot of being around the water cooler and these days the Internet. And you get. There's a small amount of time that you actually use for work when you go to an Office job. And then there's meetings which are in a way, themselves completely. It's just time wasting. It's a form of time wasting where people can feel important, but for the most part, time wasting. But in this case, I think what's interesting here is these are human copy machines. Basically, it's a law office. And he brags in the beginning about being focused on material gain, but not actually overly ambitious and says that the easiest way of life is the best. And he's a safe sort of man. And he has a. 11:22 Erin: This is the narrator, we should say. Yep. 11:25 Wes: And is. He has a job that's not difficult, but pays well. And it's basically a government job in a way because it was connected to a kind of sinecure, even though he lost it. And so he's an easygoing guy in a way. But he does want to get his. His work done. So it's not like he's on some extreme. He's not cracking the whip with his employees. But on the other hand, people there actually have to work. But I think part of it is the kind of work that's being done. They're taking legal documents and then making copies of them because there's no copy machines. And then having to proofread them by reading them out loud. Some of them, as long, I think he says is 500 pages. Right. It sounds just mind numbingly dull. So that what, you think that the ideal sort of person to do that sort of thing would be someone like Bartleby actually. Right. Who seems to be free of these human traits which define turkey and nippers and gingernut. So I. What I put down in my notes is just a synopsis of that whole introduction where he describes these characters in the kind of a very Dickensian way with their tics and everything. Right. He's setting us up for something that in a way the story is not going to deliver on. As if the story is going to be centered around these types of colorful characters, when really it's not. But I think that he tolerates the eccentricities of these people. They're flawed. Right. So they're colorful and they're very, very flawed. But he tolerates them because he finds them useful. He uses that word. What does he say? He. He says, basically he says, whatever the failings of them, they were very useful to me. And then we get someone who comes in who in a way is. I think of Bartleby as an uncharacter. If you were doing. If you set out a kind of literary exercise for yourself. We thought, well, what if I wanted to write the antithesis of a story that's focused on colorful characters, Someone who's basically just almost like a blank space in the story? How would I do that? In a way, that's the way I think of this as a kind of literary experiment on the part of Melville and then see what happens. See what that does to the story. 13:33 Erin: That's really interesting. And you're making me think of Hal from 2001 as well. The idea that we have these flawed humans who are all appetite is built into their names. One side note, whenever we would do this, I'd bring in ginger snaps for my students to eat while we would discuss it. So they're all, they're all fluctuation and appetite. They're all the, the, the humors. Yeah, the, the things. The pesky things about human beings find so difficult to program out of us. And, and then Bartleby is. He's less interesting than Hal, but he's. If a Xerox machine became self aware and suddenly decided to, to stop working, which is mostly what Xerox machines do is not work, but that kind of emptiness. The idea that this is a machine that just. You should be able to punch something in and get something out. And Bartleby seems like he's going to be the perfect Xerox machine. I think it's really interesting and fitting that he ends up being like you say, this sort of black hole at the center of the story. I think that's why Melville's little postscript might fail. I'm not totally sure about this, but I think there's a chance that any effort to explain Bartleby actually cheapens the mystery of the story. But we can address that later. But do you think that there's anything pathological in the narrator? Do you think that his, his complacency and the fact that he, in a way he's the most interesting character. Right. I mean, someone who moves their offices to get away from a pesky employee is psychotically passive, if that's a term that works. In a way, it's like Bartleby. 15:05 Wes: Yeah, yeah. He is strangely passive. And I suppose his passivity has worked in a way because he's ended up with the irritable because of the brandy like disposition of nippers and then turkeys incautiousness and rashness afternoon. That sort of thing I think, I guess is the result. Result of his passivity and allowing these types of flawed but useful characters into his office. But it doesn't Work when the. There's a sort of resistance in character, right? People's characters are. They're recalcitrant in a way. They're persistent. It's hard to change our personalities. And it also creates. Our personalities create problems for other people because they're often a reflection of defense mechanisms or they're quirks that become annoying after a certain time. Or there are ways in which we are very. They reflect certain compulsions to do things in the same way, repetitively. That may not necessarily be all that productive. But if you have someone like the narrator who can just tolerate that stuff and say, you know, he calls it a good natural arrangement, this whole turkey being only productive in the morning. And I think, I guess nippers is only productive in the afternoon. Is that the way it works? That's fine with him, but that's the resistance that he's used to dealing with. And his passivity works because he can get some use out of these people. But in the case of Bartleby, his passivity. It's strange because in a way, Bartleby is very passive himself, except in one important way. But the narrator's passivity can't cope with the absence of character, with the uncharacter, with the blank space, or someone's defiance to not be anything in particular, not do anything. That's where his method of tolerance, right, of being the cool boss who's going to tolerate this type of thing just isn't going to work. 17:08 Erin: Well, your characterization of gingernut and turkey and nippers as being ruled almost like by the humors is exactly what I put down in the margins. The narrator is describing them eating these ginger nuts, which are just ginger snaps. He lives then on ginger nuts, thought I. This is the narrator talking about Bartleby never eats a dinner, properly speaking. He must be a vegetarian then. But no, he never eats even vegetables. He eats nothing but ginger nuts. My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger nuts. Ginger nuts are so called because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents. And the final flavoring one. Now, what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing? Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger then had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should have none. So, you know, I think this kind of plays into this idea that you're talking about of. Of human behavior being rather difficult to change on our part and of the narrator's expectation that. That the. His employees are just going to have these prop. You know, that nothing is really within their control. That why are they this way? Well, maybe. Maybe it's because they eat too much ginger, you know, And. And even their choice of eating too much ginger also seems to be beyond their control. Why do they eat so much turkey? Because their name is Turkey. There seems to be no first cause. Only. Only the fact of this is the way it is. You can't change it. You just have to work around it. And. And yeah. And so I think what you're showing me is. And what is ironic is that Bartleby's. You would think it would play right into the narrator's hands, this idea of you just have someone who you just can't change. But. But there is a limit. 18:50 Wes: Yeah. And you have no explanation of his behavior. If I'm taking this idea of him not having a character in a way, very seriously. So that's. And I may push it too far, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, but. Because, of course, one could argue actually Bartleby is a very interesting sort of character. But. So I'm treating it as him in a way, as symbolic of characterlessness in a literary sense. But what I'm trying to say is that part of the appeal of the concept of character is that it explains people's behavior. And you can say someone behaves this way because of this personality trait. That's just who they are. And their behaviors are expressions of that. And with Bartleby, there is no. If there is no character, there's no explanation of his behavior. And the narrator even tries to get him to say, tell me, aren't you going to tell me something about your history? Tell me why you prefer not to do X, Y and Z. Explain yourself. And that's one of the. It's important that Bartleby uses this word prefer as opposed to say something like desire or ought. We can talk about that in a second. Why this word prefer. But it's also important that he doesn't. For most of the story, he doesn't explain himself. There are hints of him explaining himself at the end, but for the most part, he is just. It's almost godlike in a way. He just is. He is. That he is or he is. There's no explanation. He's just kind of bare fact, in a way. 20:30 Erin: Yeah. In one of the classes in which I studied this as a student, it was a grad school class that was really fabulous about these various 19th century American stories. Bartleby was one, Wakefield was another by Hawthorne. And I guess some of them Came later, too. But this idea of the retreat from society and the sort of blank in the middle of a story as being a fundamental element of this character mystery. Why does this character do the things that he does? And it's something in teaching this story that I brought up with my students a lot and we would. I usually went into this discussion of fate and free will and to what extent Bartleby can be seen as being in control of his own actions. And I think that this is where the Dead Letter office ruins the arc of my argument for these students who I think really want to pathologize characters. And so in the end, if you just read the Dead Letter postscript, they all say, oh, okay, this is because he had a chemical imbalance. Because it was really depressing to work in the Dead Letter office. And so he just didn't want to live anymore. And this immediately figured him out. And that's why I think that ending part doesn't work. 21:41 Wes: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. It's very lame. If that's. If. And the narrator probably. Yeah. That to the narrator, it is. That is what it is. It's just a. 21:50 Erin: It's just a psychological explanation. 21:53 Wes: Right. 21:53 Erin: And that's exactly what the narrator wants. He eats too much ginger. He has a chemical imbalance. This is one of the things, too, that really bothered me about that. That Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock. Did you ever watch that? 22:04 Wes: Yeah, for the most part. 22:06 Erin: So I liked it a lot too. But the thing that bothered me about it, and I didn't really know why until I read Bartleby in that grad school class, was that he calls himself something like a high functioning sociopath or something like that. 22:17 Wes: Is that what he calls himself something? Or autistic or. 22:24 Erin: Yeah. He has a label. 22:26 Wes: Asperger's. 22:27 Erin: Yeah. And that kind of takes all the complexity out of that character. For me, when you're going to view him through that lens, I would rather have the Bartleby as a completely blank slate and not know anything about his past as a way of. 22:38 Wes: Right, right. I think it's important in a way that he remained something symbolic. Otherwise the story starts to become less interesting and falls apart. I know papers have been written about this, relating it to schizophrenia or to autism, and I do. That's recognizable to me because. Because of the work that I've done for so long, being a director of a transitional environmental eel. I have seen people. I have seen people basically stare at a wall for a long time. Period of time. 23:15 Erin: Sure. 23:16 Wes: And it can be a lot of different things. It can be schizophrenia. It can be hallucination. It can be. It can be obsessive compulsive disorder. It's easy to look at someone like Bartleby and want to give a kind of psychological explanation of him. And it, you know, there might be some utility to that for understanding the story. But I think, for the most part, I think he has to serve a kind of symbolic function or else the story loses its power. As you were pointing out. The one thing I was actually thinking of beginning the episode by asking you, what do you think he's thinking about in his Dead Wall reveries when he's just staring at the brick wall? Is he thinking about something? What's Bartleby actually doing? What's going on in his head, in his imagination? Or is that the wrong. Is that the wrong question? 24:10 Erin: So I couldn't. I couldn't say that I've ever thought really deeply about the nature of what he might be thinking of other than a sort of feeling of regret for his life thus far. And I don't know. I mean, what does a person with no past to us, you know, what can we imagine that they're thinking about? It's an interesting idea, but, yeah, suppose 24:35 Wes: you had no personality. What would you be thinking? 24:37 Erin: Right? And we know that he's not even thinking about eating. And I guess that would be the one thing that you would have to think about just to keep you going. Right? 24:45 Wes: I think that's a very important point because normally when we think about a reverie, right? We're thinking about something like a fantasy. And our fantasies are often about wish fulfillment. They're about desire. So this is normally the way what we would think someone is doing. If they're staring often into space, thinking, we'd be thinking about. We'd expect them to be thinking about getting something that they want, maybe their aspirations. It could be desire, it could be longing. It could be what they're going to have for lunch. It could be anything like that. But that's obviously not what Bartleby is doing. And that's why I think it's important. This word prefer, it's not desire or want, it's prefer. So we can talk about that in a second. But. So whatever he's doing there, it's got to be the fantasy version or it's got to correspond to, you know, if we fantasize about desire, it's the Dead Wall reverie is Bartleby's version of that with respect to preference, where the preference is for to be left alone and to have no desire, essentially. 25:54 Erin: Yeah. Which I think relates to the narrators perceiving in him something essentially genteel. Right. Which is also related to the nature of his refusal. I think that's the only hint of anything that we get about his personality. And I don't know if that's because of an inherent gentility in reticence and in the absence of perceivable desire. 26:18 Wes: Yeah. Gentility is all about concealing the depth and of our passions or it's, you know, genteel manners are shows of restraint. And a lot of classes, a lot of status signals involve, you know, socially. A lot of status signals involve displays of restraint. Even like lifting the finger when you're drinking from a teacup. That's about doing something extra. That has nothing to do with the actual. It's not just about getting tea into your face. Right. It's. Anyway, Sorry, did you. 26:47 Erin: Oh, and it's also visually, you know, you're refusing it by holding onto it with as few fingers as possible. 26:53 Wes: Yes. That's great. What you're doing is you're not grasping. It's not like you're an animal with paws and you're just using all of your strength and your grip to get something into your mouth. You know, it's not functioning appetitively to, you know, get what I'm saying. 27:08 Erin: Absolutely. And that. That reminds me. So we do get. At this first sight of Bartleby. The narrator does remark that he's pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn. Later, more of a straightforward reference to what he sees as his gentility. But oddly enough, in describing his work manner. At the very beginning of the story, when he comes in and does his work faithfully, the narrator does describe it as being appetitive. He did an extraordinary quantity of writing, as if long famishing for something to copy. He seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sunlight and by candlelight. I should have been quite delighted with his application had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically. So we have a lot of things in here which are so the appetitive quality, but in a very mechanical way, which is very jarring. And also the day and night work. So first, Bartleby violates the rules of the bedroom community by working late and intruding the business district on it. And then he goes back and intrudes with the bedroom into Wall Street Maybe I'm not thinking of his gentility. I mean, I think there is some of that. But maybe his mildness, the fact that he's. Oh, yes, he says. His cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance. 28:32 Wes: There you go. 28:33 Erin: And then he says it would not be thought of for a moment that Bartleby was an immoral person. So it's interesting because he's sleeping there and he's walking around in his under things. And yet the narrator knows intuitively that nothing hinky's going on. There's no hanky panky or anything like that happening. So it's. It's strange. I don't know. 28:53 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. So I'd like to take a break to talk about the sponsor for this show, Better Help. That's H E L P. As someone who works as a therapist, I know that one of the biggest problems that people have is actually finding a therapist, having access to a therapist that works with their insurance and getting to appointments, taking time out of their day to actually go to an office. One of the things I like about this episode sponsor, BetterHelp, is that they're expanding access to licensed professional counselors by providing a way to connect in a safe and private online environment. So if there's something preventing you from achieving your goals or something interfering with your happiness, Please go to betterhelp.com/text and BetterHelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist. You can send a message to your counselor anytime. You'll get timely and thoughtful responses, and you can schedule either video or phone sessions. 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Lead a life which is all kind of busy work or something like that. Or something. Or lead a life which is all copying and all repetition and nothing genuinely spontaneous and new and creative. The point in the story where he finds him in the office and then he has those. This is actually shortly after what you just cited about the cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance and then the talk of Wall street, busy during the day and empty at. But there is a. He'll say. He'll basically describe when he realizes Bartleby is making his home of the office and that he is the sole spectator of a solitude, the solitude being the way Wall street is at night. And then I think he thinks about him as being someone who's very lonely and very alone. And then he'll say, for the first time in my life, a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. And then he'll call this a fraternal melancholy, which seems to suggest that it's not just a melancholy on behalf of Bartleby, but a melancholy for his own situation, which is something that Bartleby makes more obvious. Right. It's something that's been externalized. 32:31 Erin: Well, you're making me think of an even more extreme reading of this, which is that the narrator has an office alone and none of these people exist, and they're all elements of his personality. Even having the little boy, you know, the industrious little boy working there. 32:44 Wes: Absolutely. Yeah. So what is the. You know, what is this whole thing about preferring. I would prefer not to. What is going on with that? I'm wondering what. Trying to get into Melville's head and thinking what was his. I'm wondering where the story came from and how this kind of. Because this is sort of. Right. The central conceit of the story is someone who walks into an office and when he receives a request to do something that is part of his job, and that, in a way, is. Most of us would see as a normal thing to do, as an obligation, the kind of thing that would mean we're playing by the rules. It wouldn't occur to us not to do it. He can, Bartleby can, up and say, I would prefer not to, and throw a wrench into things. I was thinking of this before in terms of introducing an UN character into a story to see the effect. And of course, it has a. You know, it drives a plot. Obviously, when someone throws a complete wrench and everything, it's perfectly good for the plot. 33:47 Erin: The grammatical construction of it is a negative so it's also. It's. It maintains that emptiness that you're talking about. 33:54 Wes: Exactly. Yeah. And again, the preference like that. That word preference is very. I think, is important because instead of I don't want to, or something more. But, you know, the word prefer is more formal and it's not. It doesn't seem to fall within the. It's not exactly like desire, because we think of desire as a positive thing. There's something that I want, and this is just completely negative. This is. I would prefer to remain motionless. I would prefer to do nothing. And it's hard to think of desire or appetite as simply directed towards nothing. So I think that's part of why the word prefer is very important and why, again, the dead wall reverie is not the typical sort of fantasy. So if there were actual windows and Bartleby could look out into the world, that would be something representative of aspiration, of being able to look forward and being able to look out onto something. But if you're looking at a blank wall, aspiration and desire are foreclosed. 35:17 Erin: I love when the narrator says it's not what landscape painters would call life. Like, it doesn't have much of landscape painters. 35:23 Wes: Or does he say. I thought he said something like deficient or deficient in. 35:28 Erin: Oh, okay. 35:30 Wes: Painters might say it's deficient in life. Something like that. 35:33 Erin: It's just so funny that he even refracts it through art or through an artificial form of nature rather than actual nature. 35:41 Wes: Right. 35:42 Erin: He doesn't say, you can't see any trees, you can't see any living thing. He says a landscape painter would find this deficient for his subject. 35:49 Wes: This view might have been considered rather tame than otherwise deficient. What landscape painters call life. So I love that because it's sort of ironic, or he's making this purely to be something funny or amusing when, of course, it's really kind of an oppressive environment to work in. You've got an office that is. All the windows basically open onto walls. So you get nothing of the outside world. And the narrator's. The narrator's attitude towards that is just one of kind of bemusement in a way, that's he's joking about something being deficient of life. And then. Yeah, as you point out, referring that back to landscape painters. 36:35 Erin: And the intrusion of art is a strange thing too, because this is. It's essentially a factory. It's a factory kind of environment, or it's a place that is. Is made possible because of the explosion of factories, not the literal explosion but the proliferation of factories during this time. And this is, I guess, in a way, it's a fact of. Of. Of ideas, but of stale ideas and of stock lawyeries, stock phrases. So the repeated. I would prefer not to phrase what I love about that. There's the idea of preferring. As if he's opened the space for a choice where there is none. Something that, like you say, want or desire. That almost implies less of a choice. This is what I want to do or I have to do. So for something to be preferable is that you have an option and you're choosing to take one or the other. So he's opening this space of an option where there isn't one. He's there to do work, and yet verbally he opens it and then, in fact, he makes it happen. He sort of speaks this option into existence by really choosing not to, but anyway. But what I love about that repeatedness of it is the fact that it seems like he might have picked it up from a law document or something. And there is this precedent for these stock phrases with. I think it's Turkey saying, with submission, sir. He said that a bunch of times, which is funny because he's not a very submissive guy in the afternoons. So whenever they mean to indicate. Whenever the narrator means to indicate what time of day it is, he'll portray nippers as saying something similar to that, something docile and submitting to the narrator's opinion. And then Turkey will be really violent and say, you know, he'll punch Bartleby or whatever. And then the opposite for Turkey in the morning, he'll say, with submission, sir, Which I love. It's like submitting a. You know, there's. The idea of submission too, is interesting. Submission to someone else's will or. I don't know. I'm sure there's something lawyer y about submission as well, or just submitting documents to be reviewed. I don't know. 38:33 Wes: Yeah, it's that weird idea that the narrator has about people being useful to him. Yeah. So this. This idea that these different characters in the beginning are useful to him, and that's. That's why they can go ahead and be eccentric. And in the same way, he rationalizes some of Bartleby's eccentricities later on by saying that they're involuntary. And then he'll say, he is useful to me. And his whole attitude when Bartleby arrives is very. What's the word? Is exploitative. The word. What he does is he takes the guy and he puts him behind the screen so that within his own office, so that he can. He doesn't have to. The screen is to quote entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not remove him from my voice. And thus, in a manner privacy and society were conjoined. He needs to be within call of the narrator's voice because in case there is any trifling thing that had to be done, he uses this word trifling. So he's really maximizing the utility aspect of the relationship. And he wants to minimize the impact that the other person will have on him while maximizing the ability to actually get them to do things for him. So you need someone that he doesn't have to hear or see, but they will hear him when he needs something from him. So I was trying to get at what you were thinking about with this word submission. 40:14 Erin: Yeah, I like that a lot. There's also this. I was thinking too of the fact that everybody starts picking up the word prefer in their speech after Bartleby starts using it. And it's very sticky, sticky phrase that everyone starts using. And that might be another element of submission that Bartleby ends up having to sway over everyone else. 40:33 Wes: He's inducing people to copy him. 40:38 Erin: So I think that's the other. 40:40 Wes: Yeah, I forgot to get back to what you were saying, which is really interesting to me. I hadn't thought about it. Which is the idea that prefer is a legalistic term that Bartleby has picked up from all his copying. It's as if the copy machine read some of the text that you're trying to put through it and then changed its operating procedure according to what was in the law document or something and is glitching in that interesting sort of way, and then is inducing others to. With that same virus, let's say. But go ahead. 41:13 Erin: Yeah, that's great. That's a great way of putting it. I guess you mentioned something about. Something about involuntary behavior on the part of Bartleby at the beginning of what you said before. 41:24 Wes: Yeah, the narrator says it's involuntary. This is just. 41:28 Erin: Yeah, and that, that, that. That stuck out to me because I'm. I'm thinking about this idea of choice and having options. And I guess this is getting to the. I don't mean to constantly be like, well, in my 10th grade class that I used to run, but this is one of the things that, you know, that we talked about a lot. Are Bartleby's behaviors the result of choice or how much choice does he have? I mean, how much can we buy into this idea of the narrators, that you're just a product of all these forces working upon you, whether they be Wall street or. Or the presence of ginger in your food or whatever. Because it seems to me that Bartleby is fated from the beginning to be tragic as too grandiose of a word. But it's. He's almost. He's the Chekhov's gun that gets fired right away. Like, he's. He. The industrious guy who we know is going to break down and not do any work. And I guess I don't want us to have to circle back to this idea of pathologizing him and saying he's a depressive and therefore doesn't have any choice in the fact that he doesn't want to work anymore. But. But I'm interested in that kind of tension in the story between something that seems like a compulsion on the part of Bartleby to refuse work and at the same time speaking in a manner that implies choice. 42:47 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think this. You can read the story as a reflection on the possibility of freedom, or what freedom might mean. Because if we. One of the problems of talking, trying to understand something like free will is it seems to suggest if we are going to be completely free, it seems like we might have to be unmotivated. Right. Because to the extent that we're motivated, we are driven by desire and, you know, desire for things outside of us. This is what the philosopher Kant called heteronomy. Right. Other things outside of us sort of pull our strings. That's what desire does to us. And that undermines our ability to be free. So how do we get beyond that? The traditional philosophical explanation is just that. We can be reasonable. So we have the capacity to recognize what is good and to be rational, to reason about how to get that. So we can be reason responsive and good responsive. And even though, in a way, we are beholden to such things, it's not like we have free will to say. To say which reasons work and which reasons don't, or what's good and what's not good. We're beholden to the way things are. There's some sort of autonomy and some sort of freedom in the ability to do that. And the autonomy arises only in situations where one is ethical, essentially, only in situations morality and autonomy just are the same thing. And in contexts where morality is not at stake, freedom is irrelevant. And if we do something immoral, that is the most unfree thing we can do. And the very possibility of freedom lies in the possibility of being ethical. So I bring all that stuff up because when we think about this word prefer, it seems to stand outside of all the different possibilities that we might typically think of as motivating a person. Right. What does Bartleby after? Is he after. He's not after dinner or getting something that he positively wants. He's not going to listen to reason. Right. There's a scene where the narrator says. He says we're going to. When Bartle says he prefers not, basically tries to reason with him and says every copyist is bound to do X or why don't you understand that such and such is the irresistible conclusion of an argument? So the suggestion there is. That there is that one can appeal to a sense of obligation, one can appeal to rationality. And that is not something that is going to work with Bartleby. So whatever preference is for him, if it amounts to freedom, it's not freedom in some traditional rational sense. It's not connected to obligation. But it's also not connected to just doing whatever the hell he wants, whatever he desires. Because desire doesn't really seem to be a part of it. Right. There's a wall between him and desire. And what's happening is entirely negative. And this may be kind of the Hedda Gabler thing. Right. Where true freedom means leaving all possibility open, which means doing nothing. That's it. That's the only way you can be free, and that's the only way you can actually resist this, the oppressiveness of life. 46:31 Erin: Yeah. It's like freedom from action. 46:33 Wes: Yes. 46:34 Erin: Yeah. 46:35 Wes: Yeah. And I think there might be a point to that. I don't know. 46:37 Erin: You're just trying to justify the fact that you never do any work and you just sit there. 46:40 Wes: Exactly. Well, maybe, you know, maybe the key to life is just going on strike. 46:45 Erin: It's really funny because with a bunch of teenage boys, you never have to explain why a character is just sitting and staring at the wall. That's the funniest part of teaching this to them. 46:56 Wes: Yeah. What's not normal about that? 46:59 Erin: I know. 47:01 Wes: I don't get it. He just doesn't want to do a boring, stupid job. 47:07 Erin: Right. 47:10 Wes: You have to explain to them that wall is not a TV screen with video games on it. Yeah. So you could see this as another manifestation of death drive. Right. So when we talk about human motivation, we often think that we have to talk about pleasure and desire and not much else. Maybe status, which is another thing that Bartleby is obviously not after a recognition, but. And so that's why your word compulsion, I think, is you know, it's. It's hard for us to resist. It's natural to think in those terms because it does seem. If there's a death drive aspect to this, which is just to say, I don't want to do anything. I don't want to have desire. I don't want to engage. Be engaged with life, then it'll. It seems like a very mechanical, lifeless thing that's happening. And it's still. We can still entertain the possibility that this is the only thing that one can do freely. But it's a dark possibility, right? The idea that freedom is weirdly wrapped up in mechanical compulsion, in the sort of eradication of subjectivity, of desire, of interest and status, all those things. Because those things are too, in a way, more forced. Right. It's better to be just some mechanical thing in nature. A billiard ball being shoved around or a planet subject to gravitational forces. There's something freer about that, maybe, than being this being with a subjectivity who's beset with desires and indigestion like nippers and irascibility and all the things that. That make us characters. 48:58 Erin: It's funny then, that the. You're shedding a little light now for me on the Dead Letter Office, which maybe we should turn our attention to, which is about thwarted desire. Right. I mean, it's kind of like he works in a sort of prehistoric version of the Craigslist Missed Connections page. 49:16 Wes: That's great. Yeah. 49:17 Erin: So do you want to read a 49:19 Wes: little bit of that passage first and then. 49:21 Erin: Yeah. So the narrator says that he received this. This report about one element of Bartleby's history that he was able to ferret out. He says 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. Oh, so he's a government appointee. When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. 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 cartload they are annually burned, Sometimes from out the folded paper. The pale clerk takes a ring, the finger it was meant for perhaps molders in the grave, a banknote sent in swiftest charity. He whom it would relieve, Nor eats, nor hungers anymore 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. Ah, Bartleby. Ah, humanity. Best last line in the world. 50:29 Wes: Yeah. I like your characterization as the. What is it? Working in the missed connections department at Craigslist. Because these letters reflect people's desires and aspirations. Right. Someone is there. Is someone sending a wedding ring through the mail? That's really interesting. It's an interesting way to do it. Someone is sending money to family members that needs money. So people are trying to gratify desires and hopes or they're expressing those desires and hopes. 51:04 Erin: Yeah. No one receives bad news from these letters, do. They're all expressions of charity, love. 51:11 Wes: Yeah. But somehow, you know, the letters are undeliverable. So apparently whoever is going to receive them, these good things, they've died. That's the idea. So the dead letters are. Correspond to dead people. And so what intervenes here between our. Between us and our aspirations? Even if we. It could be death, but it could be just fate. 51:38 Erin: Bureaucracy. 51:39 Wes: Yeah, but so in a way, Bartleby in that dead letters office is in a. The position of fate or death. I was thinking about this in my second reading. I was thinking, huh, what if I wanted to tell a sort of parable about death coming into the world, having a kind of Pinocchio moment and saying, yeah, I don't want to just be death anymore. The guy in the black robe with scythe. I. I want to see what it's like to be real. I want to see what it's like to be a human. So I'm going to take human form and try to change his personal brand. Yeah. See what the world is all about and go into the world. It's a Pinocchio thing. The boy wanted to be. Wanted to be real. And not just wouldn't anymore, but in this case, not just be. Be the. Be death, but to be alive. And so you could read it that way as a poignant story of what happens when death tries to become incarnate and live and the way in which it falls apart and it just can't work. But anyway, I think the important thing is that this connects up to Bartleby's problem with aspiration. Right. So to look out a window onto a world in which there are living things. Right. That would be reflective of aspiration. To look at a dead wall is a reflection of preference, which is to say a lack of desire. Desire to do nothing of desire to not have desires. And not have aspirations. Because in the dead letter office, one sees the true fate of such things, which is that they always come to naught. We all die. Or desire is never fully fulfilled. It wants something that it can't actually fully have. So Bartleby, even if he's not literally death or not literally fate, psychologically comes to reflect that insight. And Bartleby's behavior is meant to be a manifestation of or a personification of fate or death. Something like that. 53:43 Erin: I like that a lot. I think that's the same is true, or maybe even doubly true for the narrator in confronting Bartleby. Right. I mean, I made that bureaucracy comment kind of flippantly. But it occurs to me that in a way, bureaucracy is like institutionalized fate, you know, Very nice. And in a way, bureaucracy is what Bartleby represents for the narrator. He's coming up against. It's like dealing with a dmv. You just. He's. I'm full of epigrammatics tonight and bizarre metaphors. But anyway, he's coming into contact with the immovable object that he can't avoid. He can't. He tries to run away and he can't. He sort of runs away, but it's dealing with the thing that refuses to deal with you or refuses to treat you like a person. It's as if, you know, his practice of the law and his holding the law loosely has now sort of detached and become a man. Then he has to deal with all of the institutionalized elements of the profession that this man is in and maybe those that he subjects others to by nature of being an administrator or whatever an actor in the law is now. 54:54 Wes: So you're saying Bartleby is a personification of the law? Could be. 54:58 Erin: I don't. You know, it's. It's. 54:59 Wes: No, I think that's great. 55:00 Erin: This is a real flight of fancy on my part. 55:02 Wes: I think that's spot on. I mean, it connects to him as a personification of fate or death or law. And that fits very nicely with its concept of preference. And the idea that you had that he picked up the idea of preference from reading too much law. 55:16 Erin: Yeah. So maybe he's not the Xerox machine becoming cognizant. He's like the law code of New York, just as heavy as a Xerox machine. 55:24 Wes: Yeah. That's very interesting. Because with the law, you can. Again, this is. Desire is irrelevant. And even ultimately, reasons and obligations and everything else is irrelevant at bottom. Because what is written is what is written. And the law may not be ethical, the law may not be right, but it is definitive and final. And it's like, you know, the kids, and you say, you have to do this, and the kids say, why? And you just say, because. Because I prefer you do this, do it that way. And that's it. 55:58 Erin: Yeah, great. Well, should we stop there? Yeah, I think that was good. 56:02 Wes: All right. Thank you, thank you. And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. [email protected] subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com