Assistant Professor of Writing and Literature
New York City (NHUM3025)

In a semester that takes us from Bartleby to Bateman and beyond, my students see all kinds of dramatizations of the blasé attitude. Whether it’s Ellen Thatcher in Manhattan Transfer or Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby or the maniacal Patrick Bateman of American Psycho, all of these metropolitan types exhibit this intellectual characteristic of the urban psyche attributed by Georg Simmel in his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” But none of these fictional characters seems as downright inscrutable as the pale young man that gives his name to Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853). Bartleby’s refusal to work in his Wall Street office is a challenge not only to his co-workers but to my students, as well (and a challenge, perhaps ultimately, to the city itself). Just how are we to read Bartleby’s famous response—I would prefer not to—when he is asked by his employer to do the job for which he was hired? Perhaps one way into exploring the enigma of Bartleby is to begin by identifying Melville’s “story of Wall Street” as an inherently urban text. Although much of the action takes place inside, the story might well be considered a Simmelian critique of urban life. When Bartleby mysteriously appears one day looking for employment at the door of a Wall Street law office, wherein work characters as interchangeable as they are insubstantial, the young scrivener never again crosses back out over that door’s threshold into the depths of lower Manhattan. Initially, he takes up his work well; however, soon he abandons it, refusing to do a single thing his employer asks. But he does not abandon the premises. When commanded finally to do his job or leave, Bartleby replies yet again, “I would prefer not to.” Why Bartleby refuses to work and refuses to leave is one of literature’s great mysteries. Yet perhaps we can glean some insight if we view Bartleby’s actions through the lens of Georg Simmel. In “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Simmel writes that in modern life the individual’s deepest problem is to “preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces.” He goes on to say that the nineteenth century, Bartleby’s own time, “demanded the functional specialization of man and his work,” making each worker more “directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others.” In this modern moment the city itself becomes “directly dependent” on the activities of all its inhabitants. When one worker refuses to work, when “the strictest punctuality in promises and services” isn’t carried out, “the whole structure” breaks down into an “inextricable chaos.” “Thus,” says Simmel, “the technique of metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all activities . . . . Punctuality, calculability, exactness are forced upon life by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence.” In the face of this conditioning, Simmel says that a person has one basic motive: to resist “being leveled down and worn out by a socio-technological mechanism.” Is this perhaps Bartleby’s own “basic motive”? His peculiar actions—or inactions—nonetheless threaten the smooth functioning of this Wall Street law office and, as Simmel suggests, threaten the functioning of the city itself. For the city runs on an intellectual track (intellectualism going hand-in-hand with the blasé attitude), and to counter that heady rationalism, one runs the risk indeed of being considered irrational. When his employer asks him to be a little reasonable, Bartleby responds, “At present, I would prefer not to be a little reasonable.” For Simmel, Bartleby represents a threat: “Even though sovereign types of personalities, characterized by irrational impulses, are by no means impossible in the city, they are nevertheless, opposed to typical city life.” Bartleby summons what Simmel refers to as “the utmost uniqueness and particularization in order to preserve his most personal core. He has to exaggerate this personal element in order to remain audible even to himself.” He has to adopt “the most tendentious peculiarities.” In this light, Bartleby may well be our first great anti-urban character, a resister. His quietly stated preference not to participate may in the end be his full-throated affirmation of his human self.

Resources:

From On Individuality and Social Forms, edited by Donald Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971

Georg Simmel "The Metropolis and Mental Life"

Herman Melville Bartleby, the Scrivener

Simmel in Bangkok: The Mega-city and Mental Life - Brian McGrath