Tag Archives: Herman Melville

Book review

Bartleby the Scrivener, by Herman Melville, 1853

Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener, A Story of Wall Street‘ tells the curious story of a scrivener – a copyist – who gives up on work and life, responding to all requests for him to do anything with the simple “I would prefer not to“. The narrator, his employer, knows almost nothing about Bartleby – he remains an enigma throughout the story. His reasons for declining specific tasks and then for stopping work altogether are let to the reader to decide.

The story opens with an introduction by the narrator, an elderly New York lawyer. He employs two clerks, Nippers and Turkey, to copy legal documents by hand. Nippers and Turkey are, as their names suggest, comic figures, both with substance abuse issues. The narrator, looking to expand his business, hires Bartleby, partly in the hope that he will moderate the extremes of temperaments of the other two. Initially Bartleby is an exemplary worker, but one day, when asked to help proofread a document, he answers with what soon becomes his catchphrase:

“I would prefer not to”.

Bartleby slowly shuts down, completing less and less work and spending long periods of time staring out one of the window at a brick wall. All attempts to persuade him to do some work or to leave fail, so eventually the narrator himself moves out. The new tenants come to him to ask for help in removing Bartleby, who now sits on the stairs all day and sleeps in the building’s doorway. Finally Bartleby is forcibly removed and imprisoned where he dies of starvation. The story closes with the narrator’s refrain, “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”. (This phrase reminded me of the words of the newscaster at the explosion of the Hindenburg).

This is an enigmatic story, not what I was expecting at all from the author of Moby Dick. It’s an intense psychological piece reflecting on the pointlessness of the human condition that could easily have come from a French existentialist author. It is also a very personal piece – for an author to imagine a character who thinks writing – scrivening – is a pointless, empty activity is in some ways quite shocking. Melville is very much ahead of his time in other ways – Bartleby can be read as a warning of the industrialisation of office work in which people are hemmed into ever smaller cubicles without any personal life outside the office, eating meagre meals at their desk, performing menial repetitive tasks for little reward (Bartleby moves into the lawyers office and never seems to leave).

“Ah, Bartleby, Ah humanity”.

Bartleby is a short story but an immensely impactful and surprising piece that I am very glad to have read – it gives another dimension to one of America’s most significant authors who I had previously only known through Moby Dick.

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Book review

Moby Dick, or the Whale, by Herman Melville, 1851

I now understand Moby Dick’s reputation for being unreadable. The core of the novel is the well-known whale-hunting adventure, with the obsessive Ahab pursuing the white whale to the ends of the farthest ocean, with the “from hell’s heart I stab at thee”, and all that.  This material would have made an excellent longer short story, a novella perhaps, with the excitement of the pursuit and the psychological portrait of the captain at its heart.zzmoby-dick

However, Melville chose to pad this story out to four or five times its length with an interminable, extraordinary amount of additional information about whales and whaling. It read very much as if he did a lot of background research to his subject and included it all in the novel. Can you imagine ‘Heart of Darkness’ with four hundred additional pages on the ivory trade? Or ‘The Great Gatsby’ with a detailed history of the prohibition movement? I found wading through the chapters on the different types of whale, how they are caught, processed, defined and anatomised really difficult, not least because of the brutality and callousness of the process, and the narrator’s wilful ignorance of the impact of nineteenth century whaling on the whale population.

If you can muscle your way past this issue, or perhaps find an expurgated version, there is plenty of interest elsewhere in the novel. Whaling was a dangerous occupation, and the thought of the small sailing boats setting off to harpoon mighty sperm whales has become an iconic image. I am sure I was not the only reader who at times was cheering on the whales. The opening chapters of the novel, when Ishmael meets Queequeg the cannibal harpooner, are very different in tone from those towards the end, and are surprisingly funny. Their relationship is openly homosexual and comically and euphemistically described. Ishmael advises the reader that it is ““Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.” On their first night together sharing a bed, Ishmael catches sight of the “bald purplish head” of the “purple rascal,” and “shrieks” when Queequeg springs under the covers with his tomahawk. After some “kicking about”, Queequeg begins “feeling” Ishmael; next morning they awake with “Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner…You had almost thought I had been his wife.” That Melville was able to get this past his publisher, and the reading public, probably says more about their racism towards the strange habits of the South Sea islander than it does their tolerance of alternative sexual lifestyles!

Ostensibly the narrator of the novel is Ishmael, but we are told very little of his back story, and even less about him as a character. Increasingly as time passes he fades into the background, to be replaced with a traditional omniscient narrator who can see multiple separate and simultaneous events, is able to tell us what characters are thinking and feeling, and is indistinguishable from Melville himself. Call me Ishmael if you like, but Herman would be more polite.

The climax of the novel, a reward for those who make it that far, is stunning. It shows what a good adventure novel has been struggling to emerge all that time. The white whale is sighted, pursued, harpooned, and – well for once I won’t spoil the ending. Suffice to say it was not the one I was expecting. I am conscious I am being quite philistine here – I really should be exploring the novel’s heavy symbolism, its complex literary allusions, and the multiple literary styles employed. Certainly that’s all there for the reader who wants to explore in more detail and read the text with more care – I was simply glad to make it to the other side. Incidentally, this novel ends the nineteenth century section of my read through of the Guardian’s top 100 novels written in English.

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