1“Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) is a story of passive resistance. And as the narrator is forced to admit, “Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.” Refusing to kow-tow to the demands of his employer, and working to his own individual rule, Bartleby represents a challenge to capitalist, corporatist ideologies. He declines to do what is asked of him over and above the basic task of copying documents. He is an unostentatious figure, “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn”, who works “silently, palely, mechanically”, but he exercises enormous power by refusing to comply with simple and undemanding requests. On the third day of being installed in a legal office in Wall Street, he is asked by his boss to examine a paper with him, but “without moving from his privacy”, he replies “I would prefer not to”. Towards the end of the story, he is discovered occupying the office at weekends. Bartleby’s verbal obstruction becomes physical.

3Bartleby’s loss of appetite and his increasingly pallid and deathly demeanour offer valuable clues to our understanding of his character. Bartleby does not like change. “I would prefer not to make any change” he says, and a little later states “I like to be stationary”. In fact, he prefers not to go very far at all, working, eating, sleeping all in the same place. He is unable to move out of his private world and make public aspects of himself. He copies documents, but refuses to compare them for that would mean working with someone, and his aim is to remain autonomous and self-contained. This neurotic behaviour is underlined by Bartleby’s anorexic characteristics. Ultimately he refuses to take in any nourishment, but this is prefigured in the text by his refusing to take on more work.

4Melville uses the metaphors of eating and digestion repeatedly. Before Bartleby’s arrival we are apprised of the alimentary economy of the law office. The work habits of Turkey, whose “clothes were apt to look oily, and smell of eating houses” complement those of his colleague, Nippers, whose “brandylike disposition” rendered him irritable for a morning’s work. In spite of these idiosyncracies, they perform their roles “like guards”. The lawyer-narrator informs us that he “never had to do with their eccentricities at one time.... When Nippers’[fit] was on, Turkey’s was off; and vice versa.” Bartleby disrupts this economy. When he arrives at the office he appears to be breaking some kind of fast:

At first, Bartleby 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.

6In the course of the story Bartleby concedes a few biscuits and a morsel of cheese, and accordingly expends little energy. Repeatedly he is described as “motionless”, “sedate” and “still”. This reliable serenity is described at one point as an attractive feature, but the narrator becomes only temporarily “reconciled” to Bartleby’s “unalterableness of demeanour”. By refusing to move, take on more work and take in more food, Bartleby achieves an ascetic purity, and this is borne out by significant references to his “hermitage”, a place of silence and solitude for him. By the end of the story, the constant refusals wear everyone down. Locked away in prison, Bartleby refuses to eat:

'I prefer not to dine today,' said Bartleby, turning away. 'It would disagree with me; I am unused to dinners'. So saying, he slowly moved to the other side of the enclosure and took up a position fronting the dead-wall.

7This is portentous, for the man who “lives without dining”, gives up living. Even in death -the ultimate defence- Bartleby is mild and courteous. He politely refuses to eat, and simply so to live. Curled up, foetus-fashion, he becomes identified with the object against which his head rests -the prison wall. We are prepared for this early on by references to his pallid complexion, his withdrawal from social life and refusal to take anything- food, money and even the offer of human empathy. The emptiness of Bartleby’s life is alluded to in the paradoxical references to Egypt. There might be a regal dignity to Bartleby’s last moments, but unlike Egyptian kings, he is buried without sustenance for the afterlife, but this is appropriate since he is a man without power, appetite or desire.

9An absent figure in so many ways (he says little, does little, is little), Bartleby has a powerful presence, and we are astonished, I think, at how so slight a character can represent, in F.O. Matthiessen’s words, “a tragedy of utter negation” (493). The haunting reality of Bartleby’s situation is real enough, and his increasing isolation combined with his determination not to comply creates the most intriguing and perplexing psychological profile of passive resistance in nineteenth-century literary history. In 1978, Q.D. Leavis, declared of “Bartleby” that in spite of “plenty of critical attention... there is no disagreement as to its meaning and the nature of its techniques... present no difficulty” (199). This characteristically dogmatic view is not only outmoded, but is demonstrably inaccurate. The proliferation of critical readings of “Bartleby” testify to the story’s complexity and significance. Some critics, like Morris Beja, have warned against an “either/or approach”, but the tendency has been to view the story as either a socio-economic parable or a psychological study. This probably accounts for why much of the critical work on “Bartleby” is disappointing. Some readings overemphasise aspects or elements of the story at the expense of others. In 1962, when the psycho-critics were refining their notions of doppelgangers and split selves, Marvin Felheim, in an article in College English, tried to categorise the various treatments of the story. His categories were not helpful, but his project highlighted two readings of the story that were particularly popular.

10The first, political, reading locates the story within the context of America’s capitalist expansion. Bartleby refuses to accept the structures imposed on him by a modernising world interested more in collective strategies and “Yes” men than the individual seeking to live outside mainstream ideals. The lawyer-narrator’s chambers become, so to speak, Everyoffice. Bartleby becomes the archetypal clerk, a figure bowed to his task and of whom it is demanded absolute compliance and reliability. His preference “not to” becomes the insistent and impeccable articulation of resistance in the wilderness called Modern America. He fights by refusing to fight and so he has become an icon for various Peace Movements in the twentieth century. Thus “Bartleby” is an allegory of modern America and the failure of democracy to preserve the individual’s right and freedom to choose. It is a story about the failure of modern social life. It is also the story of political unrootedness, of the consequences of living in a society operating at an alienatingly high level of production and consumption.

11It is not surprising that many critics sought to locate the source of this political reading in the writings of H.D. Thoreau. As Michael Paul Rogin comments in Subversive Genealogy, although Bartleby’s “I prefer not to” is an echo of Thoreau’s “I simply wish to refuse allegiance, to withdraw”, it is not a straightforward debt to the author of Walden. Rather, Melville’s tale inverts Thoreau’s notion of passive resistance. Thoreau went to jail for not paying his poll-tax (because it contributed to slavery), but unlike Bartleby whose sense of self is dramatically reduced by confinement, Thoreau felt that to be physically immured was not to lose his sense of personal civic liberty:

I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

13The psychological reading presents a more disturbing view. Bartleby’s lifelessness is both the product and outcome of a sterile bureaucracy which as an external reality has little to do with the natural impulses and desires of the individual. This reading offers an image of neurotic vulnerability. Such is the incurable isolation of individuals whose personal histories are lost in and to the System. Desks and chairs may be repositioned and partition doors may fold down, but there is little change or hope for the individual like Bartleby whose internally-constructed walls are more impermeable than any person can understand. His elegant and economical “I would prefer not to” becomes the mantra of the dispossessed and unlocated. It becomes another wall between him and external reality.

14Both readings have their merits, but are often presented as mutually exclusive; whereas the political-allegorical reading hails Bartleby as a hero, the psychological spin demonstrates the ways in which he fails. Might there be a way of transcending the distinction between a political and a psychological reading? Might there be an alternative, paradoxical, reading of the text, which puts the psychology at the heart of the politics rather than treating them as discrete? The language of anorexia is helpful here, because, as an illness with which we are becoming increasingly familiar, that condition operates extremely successfully as a form of resistance. The nature of the resistance, however, is paradoxical and tragic. In many cases, as in Bartleby’s, it is withdrawal in extremis, a slow suicide. By keeping everything and everyone out, the anorexic is able to achieve a state of ascetic purity, but this purity leads ultimately to death and is quite literally short-lived. When Bartleby is at his most resistant, the office becomes his “hermitage”. He changes working space into a space of retreat, as he does with his own inner life. As many studies show, anorexics prefer to retreat from social life and seek out places of silence and solitude, where they are able to regulate meagre meals and live on virtually nothing. This is how the narrator describes Bartleby’s routine. The paradoxical nature of anorexic behaviour, the diligence and energy involved in not eating, in not consuming, in not complying, is also represented in Melville’s text by character of Bartleby and his recurring phrase, “I would prefer not to”. As I explained earlier, the force of this refusal derives from the way in which the comparative statement is turned into an absolute. At a social and political level, this mode of resistance is highly effective, and capable of undermining oppressive governments and military regimes. When adopted by the individual, the consequences can be self-destructive. Melville offers both possible outcomes in “Bartleby” and by so doing reveals the contingent nature of the distinction between private and public realms and thus of denial.

15It would be a mistake to treat Bartleby as a case study of anorexia, as it has been to see him simply as a schizophrenic with various compulsion neuroses. Although some early critics have identified Bartleby with Melville himself (Mumford 238), Bartleby is a literary construct, and provides only an abstract version of a psychological case study. However, the paradoxical condition of anorexia is a useful model in analysing the complexity of Melville’s characterisation, and is suggested by the metaphors of feasting and fasting, the recurring statement “I would prefer not to”, and also by what Leo Marx has called the “controlling symbols of the story”: the walls.

16In his study of the relationship between Melville’s politics and art, Rogin makes reference to the various walls in the text. He describes the way in which Bartleby is confined in his work, screened and “bounded” by a “white wall” at one end and a “lofty brick wall” at the other, and the way in which he withdraws to “dead-wall reveries” when he is sick of copying. And Wall Street, of course, provides the appropriate backdrop. More concerned with the political resonances of Bartleby’s character for Melville, Rogin merely alludes to the psychological significance of these walls. He refers to them in the mode of leitmotifs, as boundaries, partitions, parameters, which create the idea of isolation and the breakdown of “rooted relationships” (194). Bartleby, according to Rogin, is a cog in the political machine; he is “Tocqueville’s democratic individual, cut off from family, class, and community” (196). This is a useful reading but it does not take into account the screen and the walls within walls which constitute Bartleby’s paradoxical and tragic condition.

If the whole of the individual’s being cannot be defended, the individual retracts his lines of defence until he withdraws within a central citadel. He is prepared to write off everything he is, except his “self”. But the tragic paradox is that the more the self is defended in this way, the more it is destroyed (80-1).

19As Laing remarks this can be a strategy adopted by all types of person, not just the “unembodied” schizoid personality, and in Melville’s story the line between sanity and madness is shown to be thin. “Normal” behaviour is behaviour which fits in with the majority view. Those, like Bartleby, who do not measure up, are “luny” and “deranged”, and their defence becomes one of self-ostracisation and petrification.

I think it becomes clear ... that the relinquishment of defences against forming a dependent relationship on a human being, free to come and go ... represents a shift especially in the area of eating disorders, from valuing possessions to valuing a different aspect in one’s quality of life. It could probably be most concisely defined as a transition from lending value to having, to finding greater fulfilment in the more painful but richer predicament of being (13-14).

21Bartleby does not make this transition, because he cannot move beyond a state of self-denial. In order to be he would have to dissolve some of the boundaries and walls and admit (in both senses of the word) assistance (and existence). He is concerned most of all to protect himself from invasion. His invasion anxieties are not circumscribed, but manifest themselves variously as refusals to take food in, to take work on, to admit the need of help, and to allow others access (into either a physical or psychological space). Most pertinently in the story they manifest themselves as refusals of nourishment. In Williams’ terms, these refusals constitute a “no-entry” syndrome which “performs the defensive function of blocking access to any input experienced as potentially intrusive and persecutory” (121). Bartleby constructs a chinese box of walls, and, paradoxically, this is both a gesture towards life and death.

22This “no-entry” syndrome is psychological stoicism and we should recall by way of conclusion Melville’s references to Cicero - a re-presentation of reason, eloquence and stoicism. We encounter the bust first of all through the eyes of the lawyer-narrator, who remarks that “doubtless I should have violently dismissed him [Bartleby] from the premises. But as it was I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-Paris bust of Cicero out of doors.” A little later on, Bartleby fixates on the head. He declares that he preferred not to examine the fourth quadruplicate, but instead “kept his glance fixed upon [the] bust of Cicero”. Through the suggestive double appearance of the bust in the text, Melville is able to adopt into “Bartleby” both the political and psychological notions of stoicism, which becomes a way, as I hope to have shown, of setting up the problem of Bartleby’s retreat from the public world and his self-denial. Using political thought as well as psychology in our reading of the text allows us to overcome the dichotomy in the critical literature. In the end, because the story of Bartleby is a “tragic paradox” in psychological terms it must be a “tragic paradox” in political terms. Bartleby’s freedoms are incompatible with life.