"I Would Prefer Not To"

I'm amazed by my ability to read things now that I found way beyond the pale in high school and college.  Herman Melville has always struck me as the most unreadable of a passel of unreadable American authors (my opinions of all of whom have changed dramatically in the past few years). Can we all chant, "Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, ewwww!"  Well, that was then, and this is now and I'm grateful that I now have access to these previously opaque authors.

Last night I had the delightful pleasure of reading "Bartleby the Scrivener" for the first time.  (In high school I had read "Billy Budd" and in college I had read at Moby Dick, neither of which looms large in memory--but, I've discovered, that is less a comment on Melville than it is on Steven.) And while I have asked myself to review this particular work, I find that at present I would prefer not to.  (See the story.)

I have the distinct impression that had I read this in high school or college I would have mouthed whatever it was the critics and the chief critic (teacher/professor) had to say about it without any real understanding or regard for the text.  I don't think that I would have really understood the utter nihilism of Bartleby or the awed reaction of the Lawyer who employed him in the face of it.

My overwhelming sense of the story is the triumph of the nihilistic passive-aggressive over the material. I don't know whether I am supposed to feel any sympathy or commonality with Bartleby.  I can say with certainty, that I did not. The lawyer narrator keeps trying to get us to look at Bartleby sympathetically, but he is himself so unreliable and so variable in his own reaction that it is hard to listen to his more "Christian" interpretations and surmises about Bartleby.

Read simply it is a tale of the will to destruction and the will to nothingness. Bartleby is a walking dead man who gradually gives up even the remotest attempts at communication, cooperation, and humanity, spending his time instead staring into the abyss.

What is remarkable is how well done it is, and how believable even when unbelievable.  We've all known people who exhibit the worst characterisitcs of Bartleby, we've just never known (m)any who were so consistent in follow-through and so thorough-going about it. Melville nicely balances Bartleby's refusal to exist with the lawyer's constant attempts to drag him into being.

And perhaps more impressive to me, is how well structured Melville's prose is.  At one time I thought it ornate and overly fussy--a kind of butch version of Hawthorne's prose.  But again, I merely expose the impatience of my youth--now replaced by a desire to read only the best of the best.  And I'm not sure I'll know that until I see it, but certainly I have a better appreciation of Melville than I once did.  There is tremendous pleasure in being able to encounter and make sense of things that before one scorned as antiquated and irrelevant.