ELL/ENG TUT 4
Bartleby, the Scrivener: Comprehensive Study Notes
Source material spans Melville’s Bartleby (1853) and scholarly/editorial content discussing its context, reception, and modern readings (Delbanco introduction; Blanchot; Graeber; Tocqueville excerpts; Moby-Dick excerpts; Occupy/Washington Post/Labor discussions).
Aim: provide a thorough, organized set of notes that captures major and minor points, context, and critical interpretations found in the transcript content.
Bartleby, the Scrivener: Narrator, Biography, and Self-Introduction (Pages 4–5, 6–7)
Narrator’s aspiration: vow to refrain from writing a full biography of Bartleby; unlike other scriveners, Bartleby resists biographical documentation.
Key line: "While of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature."
Bartleby is described as one of those beings "of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case those are very small."
The narrator notes that only what his own astonished eyes saw, and one vague report, are available.
Purpose of the narrator’s preface: to introduce the scrivener by setting the scene—his employments, business, chambers, and surroundings—to aid understanding of Bartleby’s character.
Self-portrait of the narrator (Imprimis):
Belief in the simplest path as the best lifestyle: "the easiest way of life is the best."
Profession described as energetic and nervous yet the narrator seeks peace; he is "unambitious" and avoids jury addresses or public applause.
He prefers a snug retreat and quiet, steady business, not spectacle.
Recurrent framing: the narrator’s purpose is to illuminate, not to sensationalize; Bartleby’s life is intentionally framed as enigmatic.
Bartleby: The Text, Structure, and Significance (Pages 5–6, 16–18)
Textual structure mirrors Bartleby’s elusiveness: long description of the narrator’s milieu precedes Bartleby’s appearance; emphasis on how rooms, offices, and routines shape social interaction and labor.
Repetition and variation: Bartleby’s narrative is repeated in similar form across pages (e.g., the exact phrasing of the narrator’s self-description appears in several blocks) to underscore rigidity and insularity of the workplace.
Edition and publication cues (Pages 17–18): Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, November–December 1853; front matter and title pages emphasize Bartleby as a “Story of Wall-Street.”
Announcement: No. XI and No. XII issues, 25 Cents each (monetary details).
The presence of a wallpaper-like repetition underscores Bartleby’s almost ritualized entry into the lawyer’s world.
Publication details indicate a mid-19th-century American period piece, anchored in a Wall Street setting and a legal-office economy.
Imagery of the office: a dungeon-like environment with opaque glass doors, offering isolation for employer and employees; windows show a brick wall “black by age and everlasting shade.”
Labor context: the office workers are described as human Xerox machines—labor that copies other people’s property needs, in an era of increasing document production.
Epigraphs and Reading in the AI Age (Pages 6–11)
Epigraph prompt exercise: if teaching a Melville Bartleby lecture, which sentence(s) would serve as epigraphs?
Epigraph candidate 1:
I would prefer not to.Rationale: captures Bartleby’s relevance to an AI age; frames human agency and the limits of rational systems in automation-dominated environments.
Readings in AI terms: resistance to coercive optimization; a statement about human autonomy amid algorithmic systems.
Reading implications: algorithmic consistency paired with opacity of internal processes; a reflection on when systems refuse to cooperate.
Epigraph candidate 2:
Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.Rationale: foregrounds AI-era tensions between drive to optimize and nonconformist resistance that is non-emotional and non-hostile.
Interpretive angle: juxtaposes the rational, productivity-driven mindset (Silicon Valley mindset) with Bartleby’s passive stance; invites reflection on forms of consciousness that do not fit productivity models.
Use: demonstrates how resistance can be quiet, systemic, and subversive, challenging conventional management techniques.
Passage analysis (I looked at him steadfastly passage, Page 9–10):
Quote (paraphrased): Narrator notes the uncanny calm and lack of “anything ordinarily human” about Bartleby; no agitation, no anger.
AI analogy: this calm, almost machine-like steadiness creates discomfort for human managers and readers; it resists traditional management responses.
Consequences: if Bartleby displayed typical emotions, normal management strategies might work; without them, the narrator is left at sea.
Broader implication: signals the “uncanny valley” of AI—extremely capable yet seemingly non-human in motive and affect.
Linking ideas: the AI-age readings stress Bartleby’s resistance as emblematic of human agency beyond utilitarian function; readers are asked to consider what counts as meaningful work and intelligent behavior when human feelings are minimized or absent.
Personal Identification with Bartleby (Page 11)
The narrator admits kinship with Bartleby in terms of labor: both copy-text and transform language; both are isolated in their work; both operate within constrained systems.
Agency within constraint: Bartleby’s famous line “I would prefer not to” represents choice within tight limits; the narrator likewise exercises bounded decision-making in a highly regulated profession.
Distinction: the narrator emphasizes he does not experience Bartleby’s melancholy or resistance; his reflection is observational and analytical rather than existential.
Publication Details and Editions (Pages 16–19)
Repetition of initial passage across pages 16–18 underscores the printed form of Bartleby and its presentation as a magazine feature.
Visuals: page scans include the magazine’s appearance, ads, and cover details (e.g., "No. XI, 25 Cents; No. XII 25 Cents").
Contextual note: these inserts illustrate mid-19th-century publication practices, including serialization and the marketing of literary works in periodicals.
Ishmael and Moby-Dick: Opening, Setting, and World-building (Pages 23–25)
Chapter I, Loomings: Ishmael’s narrator-voice begins with self-deprecating humor and existential musing: “Call me Ishmael.”
Circumstances: Ishmael is low on money, seeks sea as a release from inland life; “This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”
Motive: driving off the spleen, regulating circulation; a mood in which the sea offers solace.
The text casts the ocean as a universal site of kinship among sailors and land-locked readers alike; Ishmael asserts common feelings toward the ocean.
Manhattan setting and maritime imagery: the opening frames New York (Manhattoes) as an urban sea with water-gazers at the Battery; the city is circled by wharves like islands; the passage emphasizes commerce and urban life’s proximity to the sea.
Map and historical note (Pages 25–26): reference to New Amsterdam in New Netherland (Manhattan), 1660; cartographic depiction by Johannes Vingboons; historical context situates the early Dutch settlement within the broader American narrative.
Melville: From His Time to Our Time — Andrew Delbanco Introduction (Pages 26–31)
Scholarly framing: Delbanco presents Melville as a writer who, like the whaleships and the law office in Bartleby, reveals a world usually hidden from ordinary life.
Melville’s worlds: Moby-Dick and Bartleby depict a society dependent on documents and copy-work, yet lacking a technological solution for copying beyond the handheld pen.
Economic and social backdrop: mid-19th-century American labor market was dominated by apprenticeship erosion; in the 1850s, law-office apprenticeship declined; the “No.-Wall-street” office is a dungeon where workers waste away, replaced by alienated labor.
The law office as a social microcosm: the office’s windows—blocked by a brick wall—signal confinement and surveillance; interior arrangement with opaque glass doors embodies employer-employee distance and power.
Marxian lens: Bartleby’s world is a laboratory for examining alienation under capitalism; labor becomes repetitive copying of others’ property via documents; the narrator’s description aligns with Marx’s ideas on alienated labor.
Parallels to Moby-Dick: both works reveal hidden interiors of American capitalism, especially the friction between surface appearance (order, productivity) and inner life (desire, fatigue, disaffection).
Context of 19th-century modernization: the text situates Melville’s work within a period of rapid urban growth, technological change, and shifting labor relations.
Tocqueville’s Democracy and the Manufacturing Aristocracy (Pages 29–33)
Tocqueville excerpt: 1835–1840 observations on class and labor in America.
Key points:
“Not only are the rich not compactly united amongst themselves, but there is no real bond between them and the poor.”
The workman is generally dependent on the master; wages define the relationship; no lasting obligation or mutual duty binds them.
The aristocracy created by business rarely resides among the manufacturing population it directs; its aim is to use rather than to govern.
The manufacturing aristocracy tends to impoverish and debase the workmen and then leave them to public charity.
The relationship between workman and master is transactional, not reciprocal; there is no permanent partnership.
Overall takeaway: a critical lens on class, labor, and social organization; groundwork for understanding Bartleby’s and Melville’s critique of mid-19th-century capitalism.
Financial Crisis, Occupy, and the Age of Corporate Power (Pages 34–43)
Wall Street Journal excerpt (Sept. 19, 2008): a snapshot of the financial crisis and government intervention.
Central issue: plans to take bad assets off balance sheets; possible trillion-dollar scale; potential federal insurance for money-market funds; aim to stabilize markets.
Notes on investor confidence, short-selling restrictions, and market behavior during the crisis.
Occupy Wall Street (2011) summary: a mass movement near Wall Street reacting to inequalities in the financial system.
Slogans: focus on “Banks” receiving bailouts while many lose homes and jobs; inequality framed as “99% vs 1%.”
Tactics: occupy Zuccotti Park; consensus-based decision making; temporary autonomous community; rhetorical impact on public discourse and policy conversations around regulation and wealth concentration.
The broader line of thought: connects Bartleby’s critique of labor with real-world financial systems and the moral anxieties around wealth, power, and accountability in modern capitalism.
David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs and the Managerial Society (Pages 36–40, 38–40)
Graeber’s premise: a social critique of modern work—many people are employed in roles that are pointless or meaningless.
Public dissemination: London Underground guerrilla posters (2015) quoting the original essay, illustrating the ubiquity and social discomfort with meaningless labor.
Examples from the text (persona quotes):
Ophelia: Portfolio Coordinator—describes the job as largely about facilitating relationships rather than concrete tasks; self-recognized as having a “bullshit” title.
Chloe: Head of Department—claims ninety percent of the role is bullshit; focuses on paperwork, audits, and strategic plans that do not affect actual teaching and education.
Core argument: managerial ideology, not capitalism per se, sustains “bullshit jobs” by spinning out paperwork, targets, audits, and strategies that disconnect from the actual lifeblood of institutions (e.g., teaching and learning).
Graeber’s broader claim: as managerialism embeds, entire cadres of staff maintain the system by generating performative work that preserves status and power while masking meaninglessness.
Practical implication: critiques the everyday experience of work in modern organizations and invites reflection on the value and purpose of labor.
I Would Prefer Not To: Kant, Blanchot, and the Philosophy of Refusal (Pages 41–44)
Bartleby’s refusal analyzed through Kantian categories:
Negative vs infinite judgment: in Bartleby’s refusal, the predicate is not negated; he asserts a preference not to act rather than a negation of wanting to act.
The move to a space outside the hegemonic order, a politics of subtraction that opens new space beyond traditional participation.
The gesture is not simply anti-work but a form of philosophical refusal that creates a different kind of political and ethical space.
Blanchot’s Reading (The Writing of the Disaster) (Pages 43–44):
Refusal is the first degree of passivity; Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” is an extreme form of passivity—an abdication that precedes any decision.
Bartleby’s copying work (reproduction) becomes pure writing, where the activity of writing itself disappears into passivity.
The phrase embodies “the neutrality of that which is not among the things there are to do” and the restraint that cannot be called obstinate.
The analysis frames Bartleby’s silence as a form of dying-within-life—an existence that is passive to the point of vanishing, not simply defiant.
Synthesis: Bartleby’s refrain functions as a radical literary gesture—an act of prose that erodes conventional agency, questions the purpose of labor, and unsettles readers with the possibility of non-participation in a system that prizes productivity.
Key Takeaways and Thematic Links
Bartleby’s minimalism: 16,000–odd words; 37 lines; the famous line I would prefer not to (notated here as a central device for interpreting labor, autonomy, and resistance).
The law-office as a microcosm of capitalist modernity: copying, paperwork, alienation, and the alienated labor through the eyes of a sympathetic but constrained narrator.
Reading Bartleby through different lenses reveals: a critique of productivity culture, a mirror to AI-era questions of agency and human value, and a philosophical meditation on refusal as a political act.
The intertextual web:
Moby-Dick as context for maritime and labor concerns; Ishmael’s voice as a counterpoint to Bartleby’s reticence.
Tocqueville and Marx as theoretical scaffolds for understanding class, labor, and social order.
Graeber and Blanchot as contemporary frames for rethinking work, meaning, and refusal.
Key Names, Works, and References (quick reference)
Bartleby, the Scrivener. A Story of Wall-Street. Melville (1853) – narrator’s self-description; Bartleby’s refrain; office as site of labor critique.
Elizabeth Hardwick, Bartleby and Manhattan (quote about the 37 lines and the signature of Bartleby).
Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work – contextualizes Bartleby within Melville’s time, labor, and modernity; introduces the notion of alienated labor and the law office as surveillance-like workspace.
Toqueville, Democracy in America – ch31 excerpts on the manufacturing aristocracy; notes on workmen, masters, and the social structure of labor.
Karl Marx – ideas on alienated labor and the factory; used to interpret the Wall Street office setting.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs – the blame of pointless managerial tasks; quotes about pointless work in modern institutions; the concept of managerialism.
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster – the philosophical treatment of Bartleby’s refusal as passive writing; the “I would prefer not to” as a form of death-like passivity.
Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics? (reference in page 15) – the value of direct reading vs. meta-commentary for understanding a text.
Ishmael, Moby-Dick – opening lines and the sea as a refuge; the city as a launchpad for broader existential questions.
1853 Putnam’s Monthly – publication context and pricing (No. XI, No. XII; 25 Cents).
2008 Financial Crisis materials – WSJ excerpt, bailouts, and the Occupy movement; the moral and political debates about wealth and power.
2011 Occupy Wall Street – movement’s aims and cultural impact; the juxtaposition with Bartleby’s refusal.
60 Wall Street – Graeber reading materials and public events (ex: marathon reading event).
, – Melville’s lifespan
– New York population around the time of Melville’s later life
– Publication year of Bartleby in Putnam’s Monthly
, – Issue details and pricing
USD, ZAR – approximate value/price listed on the pamphlet
– Number of Bartleby’s lines
– Estimated word count of Bartleby
– central refrain (treated symbolically as a philosophical device)
The narrator first introduces Bartleby by vowing to refrain from writing a full biography of him, stating that "no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man." This introduction is unusual because, unlike other scriveners, Bartleby resists biographical documentation, with the narrator noting that only what his "own astonished eyes saw, and one vague report, are available."
The first-person narration in "Bartleby, the Scrivener" profoundly shapes our perception of Bartleby by filtering all information through the eyes and interpretations of the unnamed lawyer. This perspective is inherently limited; as the narrator states, only what his "own astonished eyes saw, and one vague report" are available, and he vows that "no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man." This means we never gain direct access to Bartleby's inner thoughts, motivations, or past, making him an enigmatic and inscrutable figure. We witness the narrator's increasing perplexity, frustration, and eventual profound, if baffled, sympathy, which allows the story to explore themes of profound alienation, the limits of understanding, and the unsettling nature of non-conformity. The narrator's own character—his belief in “the easiest way of life is the best” and his desire for peace—serves as a foil, highlighting Bartleby’s disruptive passivity.
If the story were told in the third person, particularly from an omniscient perspective, several key aspects would be different:
Loss of Enigma: An omniscient narrator could potentially reveal Bartleby’s internal world, his reasons for refusing, or details of his past (like his prior work at the Dead Letter Office). This would likely demystify him, reducing his enigmatic quality and the profound philosophical questions his simple refusal poses.
Shift in Focus: The story's emphasis would shift from the narrator's emotional and intellectual struggle to comprehend and manage Bartleby to Bartleby's own internal experience. This would diminish the biting critique of the capitalist system and managerial attitudes as seen through the lawyer’s evolving reactions.
Reduced Subjectivity: The current narration highlights the subjective nature of human perception and the narrator’s ultimately failed attempts to rationalize or categorize Bartleby's behavior. A third-person perspective would likely offer a more objective, and perhaps less unsettling, portrayal of events.
Weakened Themes: Themes like the "uncanny valley" of human-like but emotionless resistance, the limits of management, and the profound isolation felt when encountering absolute non-participation, all rely heavily on the narrator's baffled and constrained viewpoint. These would be diluted if the reader had direct access to Bartleby's inner life.
Bartleby’s absence of visible emotion or “anything ordinarily human” in the passage from page 7 strongly invites comparisons to mechanical or non-human intelligence, particularly an AI, in several ways:
Machine-like Steadiness: The description of him having “leanly composed” features, a “dimly calm” eye, and “not a wrinkle of agitation” suggests a rigid, unchanging state, resembling the consistent, emotionless output of a machine. This “calm, almost machine-like steadiness” creates discomfort for human managers and readers, as mentioned in the notes' AI analogy.
Resistance to Traditional Management: The narrator's observation that normal management strategies—like violent dismissal—would work if Bartleby showed “uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence” underscores how his non-human demeanor defies conventional human responses. This mirrors how an uncooperative AI system might resist traditional human-centric methods of control or persuasion.
The 'Uncanny Valley' of AI: The notes explicitly link this quality to the “uncanny valley” of AI—where something is extremely capable and human-like in function but unsettlingly non-human in motive and affect. Bartleby’s calm, lack of typical human emotional cues, and resistance to categorization make him feel alien and unsettling, much like an advanced AI that performs tasks but lacks human feeling or understandable motivations.
Algorithmic Consistency: In the context of the “I would prefer not to” phrase, which itself is read in AI terms, Bartleby’s emotional neutrality aligns with algorithmic consistency and the opacity of internal processes. He merely states his preference without emotional display, akin to a system refusing to cooperate without revealing an emotional rationale.
David Graeber’s argument in Bullshit Jobs posits that much modern work is pointless or meaningless, often sustained by managerial ideology that generates unnecessary paperwork and audits, disconnecting from genuine purpose. Bartleby’s work as a scrivener can be analyzed through this lens:
Fitting into the argument (Alienation and Meaninglessness): Bartleby’s job aligns strongly with the theme of alienated labor, which the notes explicitly connect via a Marxian lens. As a "human Xerox machine" responsible for "copying other people’s property needs," his labor is repetitive, detached, and lacks personal creative input. The office itself is described as a "dungeon-like environment" that fosters "alienated labor," suggesting a profound lack of intrinsic meaning or fulfillment for the worker. While the copies themselves were necessary for the legal system of the mid-19th century, the act of copying is reduced to a mechanical function, devoid of personal agency or engagement, thus fitting the sense of individual meaninglessness central to Graeber's critique.
Complicating/Deepening the argument (Nature of the 'Bullshit'): Bartleby’s job isn't "bullshit" in the sense of being entirely socially useless or performative to serve managerial status, which is a key aspect of some of Graeber's examples (e.g., jobs focusing solely on facilitating relationships or endless audits without affecting actual teaching, as described in the notes). Scriveners produced tangible, necessary documents. However, it is precisely this essential yet soul-crushingly repetitive nature that makes it alienating for Bartleby. His refusal, “I would prefer not to,” can be seen not just as a rejection of a specific task, but a profound resistance to this form of alienated labor itself—a refusal of a life defined by meaningless, mechanized copying. This highlights that work can be necessary for the system yet meaningless and dehumanizing for the individual, extending Graeber