It can be said, without even exaggerating, that Herman Melville’s literary career lasted for twelve years. Fine: it is an exaggeration, but the victim of the exaggeration was the first one to promulgate it. In 1851, the year of the (frustrating) appearance of Moby Dick, Melville, who had yet to turn thirty-two, wrote a famous letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne. “Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all,” he writes. “From my twenty-fifth year I date my life.” And he sees himself as an old seed, a seed that has spent three thousand years being only a seed and which then, in a sudden burst, grows, flourishes, wilts, and returns to the earth. The flourishing, according to Melville’s own chronology, began with the writing of Typee; to my mind, it ended in 1856, with the appearance of a collection of short stories that, after other options were discarded, wound up with the title The Piazza Tales. That volume included two of Melville’s four marvels: “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” which we can now read in Spanish in Enrique de Hériz’s gorgeous translation, and “Benito Cereno.” The first marvel, of course, was Moby Dick, one of the few novels that one can mention, without embarrassment, in the same sentence as Shakespeare; the fourth marvel, Billy Budd, was the manuscript Melville was working on at the time of his death, in 1891. The novel was published thirty-three years later, which gives an idea of the discredit (or, perhaps, the premature oblivion) into which the author had fallen during the last years of his life.
The odd thing about his letter to Hawthorne is its clairvoyance, not to mention its mysterious prophetic ability. It’s true there’s a hint of pretense to Melville’s victimhood, because Hawthorne, who the previous year had published The Scarlet Letter, was much more than an older, respected author, much more than a literary godfather: he was almost an idol. But Melville, even before the disappointing reception of Moby Dick, had already realized that success was not part of his destiny. (Here, I confess, I’ve been on the verge of launching a brief invective against the critics of his day, who were incapable of recognizing the formal ambition, stylistic virtuosities, sublime vitality, and metaphysical daring of Ismael’s tale; but then I remembered that Joseph Conrad, with the benefit of more than a half century of perspective, reduced Moby Dick to “a rather strained rhapsody with whaling for a subject,” and even went so far as to declare that there was not “a single sincere line” in the entire book.) In any case, no matter how conscious Melville may have been that his readers would make him pay for the audacity and impenetrability of his rhapsody on whales, I don’t believe anything had prepared him for what happened with his next novel. After the publication of Pierre in 1852, the reviews were a disaster fest, a veritable catastrophe for any literary reputation. One headline serves as the devastating sum of the critics’ attitude: “HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY.”
That journalist wasn’t the only one, apparently, who thought so. Within Melville’s family, there was concerned talk about his mood swings. “This constant working of the brain, & excitement of the imagination, is wearing Herman out,” his mother wrote in April of 1853. Other things were wearing him out as well: his finances were in bad shape (the failure of his books was also economic); and his friendship with Hawthorne was growing unaccountably chilly. In an attempt to procure a change of scenery which everyone thought necessary, his father sought to secure him a diplomatic post: he spoke of Honolulu, considered England and even Antwerp, but nothing panned out. Both his family and the press were beginning to consider the possibility that Herman Melville, at thirty-four years of age, was finished. In one of his letters, he mentions his eyes, turned “as tender as young sparrows” from so much work, and I can’t help but think of Bartleby, the protagonist of that inexhaustible tale which Melville, miraculously, published toward the end of that ill-fated year of 1853. Bartleby, whose “dull and glazed” eyes put an idea into the narrator’s head: the diligence of his work—at least during the first few days—may have damaged his eyesight. The narrator pities him, and so do we. Just as we have up until this moment; just as we will continue to do, like it or not, for the rest of our lives.
Melville’s fictions cannibalize his memories and experiences: I’ve not found a single page of his writing that isn’t built from his own life. Such is the case with “Bartleby.” At twenty years old, Melville, who had already discovered the sea (during a trip to Liverpool) and the interior of his own country (during a trip that took him from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River), returned to New York to seek his fortune in a world that had turned hostile to him. Eli Fly, his friend and travel companion, hired him as a copyist; but office life already produced in Melville a concerted revulsion, apart from the fact that his talents with a pen were not up to the standards necessary to such an occupation. It never ceases to amuse me that Bartleby, the scrivener, is the creation or the invention of a man of imperfect education who’d been obliged to leave school due to his family’s economic straits—a family of good pedigree and bad finances—who was a terrible speller with sloppy, even ugly handwriting. Be that as it may, the memories of those days are like a distant seed of the narrative; as are other, much later memories. Years later, after having traveled the world on whaling ships and having written a first, modestly successful book, Melville returned once again to New York (he was always, apparently, returning to New York), where he visited the law offices in which his brothers worked. He sat down at an empty desk and spent the day writing, it was rumored, a tale of erotic experiences in the South Seas. When I imagine him there, busily scribbling away at Omoo, the scene surrounding him is the same one that surrounded Bartleby. But it’s quite possible that I’m wrong.
Like the future Joseph K. (whom he prefigures and in some way allows), Bartleby is more than a character: through time and readers, he has turned into a symbol. A symbol, as was Captain Ahab before him; I’ve always liked to think of him as an Ahab of an opposite sign and on a minimal scale, another form of monomania. His phrase—the words that, with few variations, are the only ones we hear him utter in the entire story: “I would prefer not to”—has become a hallmark of identity, just as Kurtz’s words would nearly half a century later in Heart of Darkness: “The horror! The horror!” With “Bartleby,” Melville was among the first to explore the new realities of work in a world in the throes of brutal transformation; among the first, I mean, to perceive the delicate tragedies living beneath the patina of respectability of that urban world. But in that mysterious man’s (civil) resistance, there is a great deal more than a quiet rebellion against a dehumanizing epoch, against a social order revealing its capacity, bit by bit, to consume people’s lives. No: “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is not a parable. It approaches parable, flirts with parable, but it surpasses or transcends it, and in this way it also resembles anguished meditations such as The Trial or The Castle, those claustrophobic universes in which we never really know why what happens happens, but that we read as though they were speaking about our own lives. Finally, I’ll point out one last strange link between Melville’s story and Kafka’s: in reading them, we surprise ourselves letting out a sudden, more or less guilty laugh.
There is something supernatural about the figure of Bartleby, the strange rebel who refuses to enter into communion with civilized man. When Bartleby appears for the first time, the narrator of the story, a lawyer whose diction and life are the perfect sum of that civilization, speaks of him as “pallidly neat,” and also of his “morbid moodiness”; the word “cadaverous” is used frequently to describe him or his actions. At some point, the narrator realizes that this mysterious man doesn’t eat like everyone else, doesn’t behave like everyone else, never leaves that office that isn’t his: that office where he refuses to write (much to the delight of Enrique Vila-Matas, who made him into a metaphor), but where he also (and we often forget this part) has no interest in reading. He is not of this world: he seems apathetic, he seems like a distant cousin of Oblómov or a remote descendant of Hamlet, but the sensitive reader will quickly become aware that his drama is of a different order. But which one? That is the problem; it is also the story’s center of gravity. Because that is precisely the invitation Melville is issuing to us: a journey towards the mystery of the other, the other who is all others. And this, perhaps, is the reason I return so often to the story. We always talk about Bartleby, but the most moving part of the narrative is not the pathetic and forlorn, tender and laughable figure of the scrivener who prefers not to work, prefers not to go to the post office, prefers not to move from the place where he is. The truly moving part is the lawyer who tells the story, or, rather, his marvelous effort—so very human—to understand this being who’s gotten under his skin. In other words, to find his hidden truth, to penetrate his secret. What we see in the story is a man in the act of putting the limits of moral imagination to the test. In this way, but not only in this way, the narrator of “Bartleby” behaves like a writer of fiction.
The final two paragraphs of the story—about which I will offer no details so as not to rob the reader of the pleasure of discovering them—are still capable of making me shiver, the sensation that, according to Nabokov, is proof that we are in the presence of a work of art. From a strictly narrative point of view, there is remarkable boldness to those paragraphs. For the interested reader, I’ll add that what is told in them may well correspond to a true event: one that occurred in the spring of 1853 and may have whispered to Melville the idea for the fate of his scrivener. Then we will have to consider if another writer—Hawthorne, let’s say, or Edgar Allan Poe—someone who wasn’t in his lowest moment, who didn’t have the symptoms of what we would today call manic depression, would have been capable of what Melville did: transforming a curious story into the immortal tale that today, more than a century and a half later, continues to touch our souls.
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Notes on contributors
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Juan Gabriel Vásquez has published eight works of fiction (available in thirty languages), including Ruido de las cosas al caer (2011; The Sound of Things Falling, 2012), La forma de las ruinas (2016; The Shape of the Ruins, 2018), and Volver la vista atrás (2020; Retrospective, 2023), winner of the Mario Vargas Llosa Biennal Award. Translator of works by Conrad, Hugo, and others, he is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and received Spain’s Orden Isabel la Católica. In 2022 he was honored by the Royal Society of Literature. This essay was the prologue for a Spanish edition of Bartleby, the Scrivener, published by Barcelona’s Editorial Navona.
Jessica Powell
Jessica Powell is the translator of Antonio Benítez Rojo’s Woman in Battle Dress (2015), Silvina Ocampo’s The Promise (co-translated with Suzanne Jill Levine) (2019), Gabriela Wiener’s Nine Moons (2020), and Sergio Missana’s The Transentients (2021). Her translation of Pedro Cabiya’s novel Reinbou is forthcoming in 2024.