The Bartleby Industry and Bartleby’s Idleness

Unidentified mid-nineteenth-century daguerreotype portraits produced by Matthew Brady’s studio. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, clockwise from top left: LC-USZ62-110123, LC-USZ62-110112, LC-USZ62-110191, LC-USZ62-110177.

Bah! Bartleby!

No work in the whole of American literature is more profound in its attention to the meaning of idleness than “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” It is perhaps the story’s crowning paradox, then, that Melville’s is among the tales in that tradition that have been most badly overworked. Suspecting that “Bartleby” has been done to death, one initially recoils from the duty of critically rewriting this scrivener’s tale once more. Yet the tensions of this contradictory position—of being compelled to rework the text and simultaneously preferring not to—may only be discharged by a renewed engagement with “Bartleby”; one can inquire in-to the history of neither American literature nor American productivity without confronting the problems that the story persists in raising.

To confront “Bartleby” is to hazard a small contribution to the proliferation of criticism that Dan McCall, seizing on this paradox, has termed the “Bartleby Industry.”¹ The critical machinery of that uncommonly productive industry has long strained to dissect the tale’s various ambivalences; innumerable critical ventures enter into contradiction, overwhelm each other, and refuse to work together. Often, the highly productive application of all this “industry” appears to draw us further from the possibility of getting anything substantial done; when it comes to “Bartleby,” our considerable critical energies seem hopelessly diffused. Precisely because of the excess of energy it attempts to marshal, the Bartleby Industry risks exposing the unproductivity that lies at its very heart. And yet to say something important about nineteenth-century literature’s encounter with idleness, it is through this industry that one must push. It is perhaps a matter of kicking poor old Bartleby’s corpse around one more time, firm in the conviction that some reflex from this apparently catatonic hulk will confirm the presence, there, of life.

Considering Melville’s tale as a meditation on unproductivity, we find that though Bartleby is deservedly one of the most widely beloved of nineteenth-century idlers, he is certainly not alone among his contemporaries. The implications of the story’s obsession with unproductivity become clearer when “Bartleby” is juxtaposed with a previously undiscovered source text: Robert Grant White’s Law and Laziness; or, Students at Law of Leisure (1846).² Borrowing both from White’s cast of characters and from episodes in his narrative, Melville’s 1853 story renews the earlier tale’s concerns and conducts an exceptionally sustained and subtle inquiry into just what nineteenth-century idleness is and what it means. Founded itself on these questions, “Bartleby” explores how the problem of unproductive activity constitutes a limit for the imperatives of the work ethic and the jurisdiction of Enlightenment certainty; here we discover how the economic intangibility of idleness undermines both the rationality of modern time and space and the autonomy of the modern subject. This reconsideration of “Bartleby” will thus be a means of producing a new understanding of the unusual significance—even productivity—of the unproductive.

We can grasp what is at stake in the historical moment of Melville’s tale by revisiting Max Weber’s famous exploration, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, of the delicate accord forged between Christian and capitalist ethics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Especially in its later Calvinist variants, Protestantism wedded the moral and the economic, redefining the relationship between modern subjects and their activity and insisting that “labour must . . . be performed as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling.” This peculiar ethic became the centerpiece of Calvinist and Puritan exhortations to increase, simultaneously, both one’s capital and one’s possibility of salvation. As the notion that “only activity serves to increase the glory of God” supplanted the comparatively situational and isolated character of previous Christian ethics, the imperative of worldly exertion extended itself across the domain...