Where Seas Meet Mountains

Herman Melville was one of the greatest American writers of the nineteenth century, and Ron Rash is one of the best of the twenty-first. While readers know that Melville’s sailing years provided material for his work, they are less aware of how his various jobs gave him a painful intimacy with the drudgery of the working class. Rash is celebrated for giving voice to the people of lower Appalachia, but his readers may not be aware of how much he shares with Melville.

Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivener” (1853) is about a copyist working for a New York attorney. The attorney, who narrates the story, is so accustomed to the banality of urban, office life that he speaks pleasantly of the sterile views from his windows. Such bland conditions are representative of new professional categories arising in the nineteenth century because of a changing middle class imposing new values upon the working poor. The dehumanizing effects of these work environments are seen in the other copyists in this office. Melville never gives the real names of the three more experienced scriveners but instead diminishes their identities by referring to them only by nicknames. These inefficient workers spend half their day on frivolous engagements, and thereby become clowns, perhaps just what one should expect from such mind-numbing work.

In contrast Bartleby performs his duties with precision and efficiency. What soon exasperates the narrator is that Bartleby carries out his duties but nothing more. When asked to do anything out of the ordinary, Bartleby replies, “I would prefer not to.” This refusal to comply with any request from a supervisor defies the evolving, office-world arrangement, and the attorney is flabbergasted. Although on the surface the other copyists may seem more social than Bartleby, they are as alone in the crowd as he.

The narrator finds Bartleby’s behavior increasingly curious, noting that Bartleby never leaves the office. It is as if Bartleby becomes a part of the office, no more alive than his desk. The frustrated lawyer abandons the office for another, but Bartleby stays, is thrown into prison and dies alone, just as he lived alone even in the presence of others. The narrator discovers that the scrivener was once employed by the Dead Letter Office in Washington and attributes his “pallid hopelessness” to such depressing work.

The contrast between leisure and working classes is starker in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855). Although one group revels in luxury while the other is confined to squalor, they both experience the dehumanizing effects of the industrial age. In the first half of the piece, the narrator travels through a bustling center of business where men have “ledger-lines ruled along their brows” to meet with a group of attorneys/industrialists for an evening of debauchery. In the second half, the narrator visits the Devil’s Dungeon, a paper mill where at “blank-looking counters” and loud, formidable machines he finds “blank-looking girls” who are “sheet-white,” suggesting that they are drained of life-sustaining blood by the parasitic bachelors. These blank workers are indistinguishable not only from each other but also from the machines they operate, as “mere cogs to the wheels.”

Melville’s critique of class division extends beyond offices and factories. In “Billy Budd, Sailor” (1924), the handsome young Budd, like Bartleby, is the hardest worker on the ship. When the jealous Claggart falsely accuses Budd of planning a mutiny, Budd is powerless to defend himself. Budd slugs Claggart, Claggart dies, and despite the captain’s belief in Budd’s innocence, Budd is summarily hanged. In Budd’s case, hard work led to his death.

An overlooked theme in Moby Dick (1851) is, as in the stories above, the plight of the working class. Ishmael is a destitute young man who, like Melville himself did, seeks to earn a living at sea. Meandering his way to port, he rejects two inns as too costly and finds a room that he can afford only by sharing a bed. Ishmael meets a...