Bartleby - A Patron Saint for Occupy Wall Street

I loved Bartleby, The Scrivener (you can read it free at the link) when I read it college. It, to me, was one of the great novellas ever, and my favorite piece by Herman Melville. In this excellent article from The New Republic, Nina Martyris argues that Bartleby is the patron saint of the #occupywallstreet movement.

A Patron Saint for Occupy Wall Street

Nina Martyris
October 15, 2011 

As the Occupy Wall Street protest blossoms across America, they are no doubt being watched over by the country’s patron saint of civil disobedience. Bartleby, the hero of Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, Herman Melville’s deeply ambiguous ode to passive resistance, published in 1853, didn’t bang on a bongo drum, sport dreadlocks, or march on Manhattan with an “Eat the Rich” placard. But he did occupy Wall Street. He did so quietly, with a stubborn calm, and without a single television camera in sight.


But while Bartelby is a refugee from the American Dream, the average OWS demonstrator desperately wants the Dream back. Today’s demonstrators could learn something from Bartelby’s story, even if, in the end, his model of resistance is insufficient.


Readers are introduced to Bartleby when a wealthy Wall Street lawyer hires a "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn" man as a human Xerox machine. Initially, the scrivener proves to be an outstanding copyist, so diligent that he is in danger of wearing out his wrists and retinas. Inexplicably, however, when the lawyer asks him to do anything apart from copying briefs (like, say, running an errand), Bartleby politely refuses with, “I would prefer not to.”


To an ever greater degree, the very essence of his work ethic is expressed in this negative refrain. Eventually, he prefers not to do any work at all. He offers no reason for his resistance, makes not one single demand, and spends all day in a reverie staring at the brick wall outside his window. He turns into a squatter, sleeping in the office and never leaving the premises. The other employees urge the boss to kick him out, but the lawyer, who fancies himself a humanist (if corporations are people, why not lawyers?), finds that he cannot bring himself to act. Instead, he develops a creeping respect for this stoic mule, and even begs him to come home with him, which of course, Bartleby prefers not to do.


Finally, spooked by the whole business, the lawyer ups and leaves for a new office The New York Police Department, sans pepper spray, marches Bartleby off to jail for vagrancy. In jail, he refuses all food, wastes away, and dies under a tree. The only clue to Bartleby's behavior comes at the tail end of the story when readers are told that thereclusive clerk had previously worked at the Postal Service’s Dead Letter Office, a job even more annihilating than copying title documents of rich men with only a brick wall for a view.


It is hard to pinpoint what Melville had in mind when he created America's first slacktivist, but implicit in his character’s passive aggression is a devastating critique of Wall Street.

Read the whole article.