Another Look had a full house on Monday, January 8, as we explored Herman Melville‘s 1853 classic story Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. Every seat was taken – literally, every one – with hundreds more of you at home, watching on zoom. The discussion was insightful, lively, and engaging …. and seemed to go on forever. Thank you all for your questions. We regret that we didn’t have time to answer them all.
Panelists included Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, author, director of Another Look, host of the radio talk show and podcast series Entitled Opinions, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers and the founding director of Another Look, as well as a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. Two special guests rounded out the high-powered panel out to four: Robert’s brother Thomas Harrison, professor of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Katie Peterson, an award-winning poet and professor of English at UC-Davis, and a Stanford alum.. You can see them in the photo above, taken by Another Look fan and photographer David Schwartz.
Now you have a chance to see it again – or for the first time if you missed it. The video is here, and the podcast is here. It’s certainly a discussion that would merit “another look.”
What did you think? Feel free to comment on the book or the discussion. Meanwhile, we had so many questions! Here’s a few we didn’t get a chance to ask our panelists. You can reply to them in the comments section below.
- Bartleby never said ‘no’, he always preferred not to. And yet nobody ever challenged him to make a more clear response. Do we learn anything by the narrator’s never choosing to challenge the equivocation?
- Isn’t it more illuminating to see Bartleby as existing within the narrator, as a product of the lawyer’s decision to live an easy life, as a double of the lawyer — as his unconscious. A no-saying of the unconscious that can’t be explained or penetrated.
- At the same time, isn’t Bartleby a vision of the power of nihilism, a silent cousin of the “Underground Man” ten years later, created out of the same interest of Melville’s as Dostoevsky’s in the nature of meaning in a world where God is rejected.
- It struck me that Bartleby was in some ways like a Rorschach inkblot test – onto which the narrator projects a changing array of attempted interpretations. But for someone who seems to have made a living by writing (if as an automaton rather than a ‘creative’ writer), Bartleby is unintelligible, unreadable – provoking the narrator’s and the audience’s speculations about what he might be or mean. So in some ways, is the story about the impossibility of both interpretation itself and interpretation of the inner lives of other people? By the way, postal “dead letter” offices deal with all undeliverable mail – not just mail addressed to people who have died.
- I agree that with the earlier comment that Bartleby lacks generosity. I found it disconcerting that the compassion shown by the narrator to Bartleby was not in the least returned. When the narrator seeks out Bartleby in the Tombs, Bartleby says without looking around “I know you”… and I want nothing to say to you”. I’m curious if the panelists also think this is quite harsh.
- Do you believe Melville meant Bartleby to be a direct critique of Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists?
- Bartleby was written before Melville’s Moby Dick and decades before his Billy Budd. [Moby Dick was published in 1851, Bartleby in 1853, Billy Budd was unfinished at his death in 1891 – ED.] All three narratives center on a character who is a standout or outlier from the mass of humanity. That apparently was a theme that Melville could not resist, and my question is: What was Melville driving at by looking so fully at these strange people? What was his obsession about them?
- Fortunately we know lawyers today are much more creative, interesting and imaginative than simple copyists as in the story. We are artists in our way. Give us some grace.
- any reflections on the story as a modern day allegory to quiet quitting? or more specifically, doing what is on the job description only?
- Do you see parallels between Bartleby’s incessant “I prefer not to” and Poe’s Raven’s “Nevermore”: neither will leave, nor will they explain…
- The magazine The Economist has a Bartley by weekly column under its business section each week… it’s still relevant…John in Singapore
Finally, someone sent us Melviille’s poem “Buddah”:
Swooning swim to less and less,
. Aspirant to nothingness!
Sobs of the worlds, and dole of kinds
. That dumb endurers be –
Nirvana! absorb us in your skies,
. Annul us into thee.
