American Literature

Ere introducing the scrivener, as he first appeared to me," writes the lawyer in Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853), "it is fit I make some mention of myself, my employés, my business, my chambers, and general surroundings."¹ Intriguingly, the lawyer does not say he met Bartleby; instead, Bartleby "appeared" to him. We might read the word appeared as the diction of a man who has practiced law for many years, a profession in which the presence of individuals is often referred to as an "appearance." Yet in legal phraseology the verb to appear is typically followed by the preposition before: one always appears before the bench, the judge, or the jury. Bartleby, however, does not appear before the lawyer but, in a crucial change of prepositions, to him. Bartleby's appearance, of course, creates a subtle, dramatic tension, setting up the eventual climax in which he is shown to be quite different from the person he first appears to be. Yet the word appeared suggests a stranger possibility: perhaps Bartleby quite literally appeared, as would an apparition.

But what would it mean to take Melville at his word and read Bartleby as an apparition? We would be reminded of what current critics of the story seem to have forgotten: Bartleby is strange. Contemporaneous reviewers certainly saw the story's occult possibilities. One wrote of Bartleby's "ghost-like taciturnity"; another called the story a "weird tale," reminiscent of the eeriness of Poe.² Yet for the most part, this sense of the story's weirdness has been lost. Nearly all current work on "Bartleby" follows from another critical genealogy—not the occult but the quotidian, with one early reviewer going so far as to call the story "a portrait from life."³ Marxist criticism of "Bartleby," in particular, [End Page 247] takes its cue from this sense of the tale as a story of the everyday, casting it as a realistic story, with an emphasis on working life.⁴ This line of criticism began with Louise K. Barnett's seminal essay "Bartleby as Alienated Worker" (1974), in which, as the title suggests, Bartleby is the "perfect exemplum" of Marx's alienated worker and Melville's story a parable of the heartlessness of capitalism.⁵

This early Marxist criticism of "Bartleby" has come under fire from several critics. Pointing to the fact that the lawyer continues to pay Bartleby's salary and to help him even after he has stopped working, Dan McCall suggests that readings of "Bartleby" as a parable of the dangers of capitalism hinge on a fundamental misreading of the text, and of the lawyer in particular, who cannot easily be put into the mold of a typical heartless capitalist.⁶ While McCall seems not to recognize that the motor of capital is the systemic exploitation of the worker to produce surplus value and thus does not depend on the personal characteristics of any one individual, he does point to the problem in early Marxist criticism of "Bartleby": reading the story as a simple parable of the alienated worker cannot account for a number of its aspects, such as Bartleby's ghost-like presence, the sequel of the Dead Letter Office, and the fact that Bartleby refuses many things other than work.

In recent years, Marxist criticism of "Bartleby" has moved from this more thematic approach, which presents the story as illustrative of Marxist concepts, to rigorously historicist readings. While Marx is present methodologically in this later criticism, Marxism's relationship to Melville's critique of capitalism tends not, for historical reasons, to be an overt subject of discussion, since there is no real evidence that Melville was familiar with Marx's writings at the time he composed "Bartleby." Instead, these critical interventions root "Bartleby" in labor debates going on in New York City at the time of the story's composition and publication. The...