"Bartleby the Scrivener" and Silent Speech
Bartleby’s Reticence and Melville’s Refusal to Explain His Story
The narrator of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” relates his experience with Bartleby, a former employee who remains an unforgettable mystery. Bartleby answers most requests by stating he “would prefer not to,” soon demonstrating his lack of preferences and unswerving devotion to inaction.
Speech as Silence: “I would prefer not to”
When asked to work, talk, explain, or move, Bartleby’s responses rarely vary from “I would prefer not to”. This does not illuminate Bartleby’s preferences, but rather illustrates his lack of preference, and ultimately his refusal to live.
After some time the narrator begins to expect this answer, but he feels driven to test Bartleby, to make sure he will not respond. There is something inexplicably compelling about Bartleby’s unsatisfying responses.
Critic Todd Giles argues that “When Bartleby speaks, he highlights his silence. That is, at this moment language calls attention to itself by acknowledging its absence, and at this same moment, too, others want to turn to language to describe the silence, as if silence were a removal of language, rather than language a supplement of silence” (89).
Giles argues that for Bartleby, speech becomes equivalent to silence, “a silence that at once pushes away and calls hither”. This echoes the narrator’s and reader’s compulsions to analyze Bartleby, despite his deterring blankness.
Describing Silence
Giles notes that “others want to turn to language to describe the silence, as if silence were a removal of language, rather than language a supplement of silence”, as if Bartleby’s words were actually a negation, rather than an empty reply.
Understanding Bartleby’s speech as creating emptiness, as making a gap or a hole instead of creating meaning, helps explain why others are drawn to fill this void of blankness with their own explanations.
Bigelow comments that “Most of us feel uneasy in the presence of something that resists the grasp of our minds. We have that little corner of Ahab in us which hates the inscrutable thing” (358). We cannot understand Bartleby, so we feel compelled to create explanations for his behavior, in order to make the absurd and unfathomable reasonable.
However, various readers fill up this hole of silence with widely different explanations. Bigelow argues that “Meanings stream forth from the story, but one sees only those meanings caught by one’s own lens or filter. In part one sees a vision of oneself reflected back from the story” (352).
This portrays blankness as containing infinite possibility, much as white is the sum of all color. For this story, then, reading becomes an act of co-creation, as readers’ preconceptions and interests serve as filters to capture the meanings to which they can relate.
It is then those meanings that readers superimpose over Bartleby, those meanings that readers hurl at the chasm of emptiness he creates.
Melville’s Silent Speech
“I would prefer not to” can be regarded as the crux of Bartleby’s character: polite, non-obtrusive, both passive and firm. This “innocuous refusal” repeated so many times is also arguably a statement by Melville, who is aware of the blankness of his story.
This repetition of polite denial expresses Melville’s refusal to further elucidate the enigma of Bartleby. Giles notes that “Melville, in writing this story, creates something that undoes itself with every reading, unwrites itself as it is written, erases itself through its very inscription” (90).
Works Cited
Bigelow, Gordon E. “The Problem of Symbolist Form in Melville’s ‘Bartleby the
Scrivener’.” Modern Language Quarterly, 31:3 (1970): 345-358.
Giles, Todd. “Melville's BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER.” Explicator 65.2 (2007):
88-91.
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor & Other Stories. Ed. Harold Beaver. New York:
Penguin Books, 1967.
Essentially Silence
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