Re-Reading The Silence of Bartleby

It probably came as no surprise to Dan McCall that The Silence of Bartleby, his slender tribute to the pleasures of reading Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853), elicited a resounding silence from his professional colleagues in the years that followed its 1989 publication. A largely favorable notice appeared in The Yearbook of English Studies for 1992. In the same year, in the pages of this journal, Andrew Delbanco’s review essay, “Melville in the ‘80s,” devoted a paragraph to McCall’s book, praising it as “the single most sensitive response to Melville’s genius” since Warner Berthoff’s study 30 years earlier (715). Delbanco himself was on the point of beginning a literary biography of Melville. Surprisingly—or perhaps not surprisingly—McCall’s work makes a negligible appearance, at best, in the annotation to Melville: His World and Work (2005) and little discernable impression on the broad documentary landscape that Delbanco ultimately depicts in the body of this book. Why such a sensitive and responsive work of criticism should exert so little influence on a major biography by an eminent scholar of American literature is part of the mystery that lies behind the curious reception of McCall’s book.

With the two exceptions noted above, The Silence of Bartleby subsided quietly into the bibliographic depths, reappearing now and then amid the schools of footnotes that dart beneath the surface of an occasional journal article or book chapter, often as one of the most agile and brilliant of its evanescent species, though seldom singled out for special regard. The reasons for this disappearance point both to tactical misjudgments on McCall’s part and to a type of disciplinary blindness on the part of his academic audience. The complaint that lies behind his sometimes truculent critical performance is, in large measure, an outgrowth of a deep divide between the practical life of the classroom and the professional imperatives that shape much contemporary scholarship—between the delights of reading and the preemptive necessity to explain or justify what we read.

In Delbanco’s words, The Silence of Bartleby amounts to “a writer’s protest against the technologia of criticism” (715). Every feature of this assessment, including its italics, helps characterize the rewards and challenges posed by McCall’s book, beginning with his unusual willingness to differ, quite openly, with many of the most prominent scholarly voices of the time. One can hardly expect a warm reception from an intellectual establishment whose perceived deficiencies one has cheerfully and repeatedly exposed. The list of literary critics and historians whose work McCall finds wanting is long and distinguished. He gives brusque treatment to Michael Gilmore’s suggestion that Bartleby’s story is an allegory of the alienated artist (90–91). Michael Rogin’s interest in linking Melville’s enigmatic scrivener with Thoreau’s passive resistance to cultural norms strikes McCall as “wrongheaded” (59). Robert Weisbuch, William Dillingham, and Ann Douglas, in McCall’s view, all fall victim to versions of the same deep professional liability: they cannot credit the narrator of Melville’s story—the “safe” and secure chancery lawyer—with any generous instincts or actions in his long confrontation with a mysterious, intractable employee. By default, these critics appear to affirm, the lawyer is a villain, given over to what Douglas terms “sadistic pity” and “onanistic indulgence.” McCall quotes Douglas’s invidious phrases with mischievous glee (105).

Though he repeatedly cites and admires Newton Arvin’s brief Melville biography, McCall does not hesitate to take Arvin to task for viewing Bartleby’s response to his existential predicament as Melville’s personal manifesto of creative independence and its attendant despair. Richard Chase, McCall suggests, is guilty of a similar offense (91–92). McCall’s merciless broom sweeps up fugitive bits of Jay Leyda’s and Herschel Parker’s work on Melville and bustles it too off to the dustbin. The Silence of Bartleby begins with an appreciative account of H. Bruce Franklin’s exploration of biblical echoes in Melville’s story, but by the end of McCall...