Bartleby the Socratic - Critical Essay Studies in Short Fiction - Find Articles:
Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1997 by Andre Furlani

to assert an affinity between the withdrawn scrivener and the gregarious philosopher seems only more preposterous than previous efforts
to trace Bartleby's ancestry to Melville's literary contemporaries, to his friends, to Jesus Christ, to Buddha, to various psychiatric patients.
the laconic scrivener, who scarcely qualifies as a human being oh , has undergone sufficient comparisons with celebrated authors, the founders of world religions, and psychotics. Now Socrates.
Ah, Bartleby! Ah, scholarship!

Seldom is the attorney's observation in the story's first paragraph heeded: "I believe that no materials exist, for a full and satisfactory biography of this man.... Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable except from the original sources, and, in his case, those are very small."

Reduced to a diagnosable pathology or to a helpless victim of a misunderstanding social order, Bartleby is merely pathetic and rather a cliche. Such readings disregard Bartleby's peculiar strength, his baffling ability to trouble and foil a conventionally successful Wall Street attorney.

The only real character here is the attorney himself. Bartleby is an affect rather than a personality--he is a force, almost talismanic, exerting an influence on a character. The question is, what kind of force, and how is it exerted? I wish to argue that he is a Socratic force.

{...p11... the story, and not strictly Bartleby himself, as implicating the reader in the narrator's failed test. That rhetoric is elenctic--of drawing out beliefs, inspecting and exposing their faults.}

By 1850 Melville had begun to acquire the six-volume Bohn edition of Plato's works, and the use he made of it is everywhere apparent in Melville's works...In a letter to Hawthorne, Melville compares his friend to Alcibiades and himself to Socrates in an allusion to the Symposium: "Once you hugged the ugly Socrates because you saw the flame in the mouth, and heard the rushing of the demon--the familiar,--and recognized the sound" (Letters 142).

goodness (Ah, scholarship!) 18 pages. in full avail to read here.
bibliogr on p16-17
notes on p12 -15
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(1) The story's earliest critics claimed that Bartleby was a sketch from life--various lawyers, copyists, and at least one victim of agoraphobia were seen to fit the description. Attention eventually turned to Melville's literary peers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe and Emerson all appeared suitably deranged and quixotic to critics to arouse suspicion of having inspired Bartleby's creation. ...For Oliver, Bartleby "is a reductio ad absurdum of the convictions Thoreau expressed," pointing to the moral that "try as you will, you cannot cut yourself off from society, and to persist in such a direction can only destroy the individual" (434, 439). Where Oliver detects literary parody Mumford sees literary magnification. His Bartleby is the heroic embodiment of Melville's refusal to pander to popular taste: "People would admit him to their circle and give him bread and employment only if he would abandon his inner purpose; to this his answer was--I would prefer not to" (234).
This divergence of readings becomes only more extreme. Howard Bruce Franklin suggests that Bartleby's behavior may have been based on that of Hindu Saniassi ascetics; Saburo Yamaya associates it with Buddhist quietism. Several critics have declared Bartleby, a friendless near-mute who propounds no doctrine, to be the representative of Christ on earth.
Jungians have been less approving: Clifford Hallam argues that Bartleby is a projection of the attorney's inability to achieve psychic integration. Several critics, taking the parts of clinical psychologists, have diagnosed Bartleby like a patient in a test case, and disclosed a wealth of pathologies. Marvin Fischer identifies Bartleby as a catatonic schizophrenic who serves thematically to represent a larger social ill.
Critics sensitive to ideological issues, noting the story's subtitle "A Story of Wall Street," see in Bartleby an effort to undermine laissezfaire capitalism and flout wage-slave economic relations. Charles Weeks argues that Bartleby is a representative of an alienated proletariat who, while struggling to assert a radical independence from despotic capitalist practices, fails ultimately to transcend his condition.
Existential critics have also made of Bartleby a confederate. Herbert F. Smith identifies Bartleby as an existential anti-hero whose rebellious negation involves, especially in his use of the word prefer, the expression of one of those private choices that this critical movement champions.


(11) ... "Bartleby's role as psychological double," claims Mordecai Marcus, "is to criticize the sterility, impersonality, and mechanical adjustments of the world which the lawyer inhabits" (365).

(12) Hershel Parker suggests that "with the stubborn Bartleby no longer disturbing his carefully nurtured states of mind, he can indulge safely in such sentimentality" (164).

(13) Richard Chase: "The last words of the story are, `On errands of life, these letters speed to death'. For Melville, literature was life; ideally "Bartleby" should have been able to convey its message of love and vitality hhrmmm. ??. bcs lit is life? to the readers who awaited it. But there were no such readers--at least none such as might rescue Melville's fiction from the death he accurately predicted for it" (82).

(15) Marx thus aligns himself with the attorney, who, struggling to assuage a guilty conscience when he visits Bartleby at the Tombs, has the audacity to itemize to the inmate the advantages of his confinement. Not surprisingly, Bartleby will have none of this and delivers a terse but demolishing line: "`I know where I am,' he replied, `but would say nothing more" (613). Marx, however, is more gullible hrrm, and ascribes a whole redemptive Weltanschauung to a patch of prison sod.

Sometimes from out of the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:--the
finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent
in swiftest charity:--he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any
more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died
unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities.
On errands of life, these letters speed to death. (615)

(10) John Seelye notes that "the most he can give is pity, and that is not enough for the scrivener, who continues to put his employer's neat compartmentalizations to the test, confronting his convenient relativism with an absolute demand" (97).