Melville’s search for a different Joban cry that would be attuned to modern sensibilities is inseparable from a new experiment with fluid typologies. The key to understanding Melville’s ongoing fascination with the splitting and merging of his biblical characters lies in Chapter 14 ofThe Confidence-Man.In a self-reflexive moment, the narrator protests against the common expectation of readers to find consistent characters in the novels they read: “Upon the whole, it might rather be thought, that he, who, in view of its inconsistencies, says of human nature the same that, in view of its contrasts, is said of the divine nature, that it is past finding out, thereby evinces a better appreciation of it than he who, by always representing it in a clear light, leaves it to be inferred that he clearly knows all about it.”27To represent human character as
26Arsić,Passive Constitutions, 49.
27Melville,The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Hershel Parker, Norton Critical Edition, W. W. Norton, New York 1971, 59.
consistent means to smooth out the incomprehensibility of human nature, the prevalent lack of coherence that characterizes human life. In a playful icono-clastic move, Melville demands that the same attention given to divine incon-sistencies (all the more so since the rise of biblical criticism) should also be given to human ones.28
In his Wall Street tale, Melville fashions one of his most intriguing exegeti-cal inconsistencies as he undermines a boundary he had never previously questioned: that between Job and his friends.29His strategy is an unusual one.
He follows the supposedly normative perspective of a prudent Wall Street law-yer (his narrators are typically more immediate spokesmen of their author) and probes the biblical dichotomy between Job and his comforters through the splits and inconsistencies of this peculiar narrative voice.30
Against his better judgment, the lawyer, who should have been the discur-sive authority of his office, finds himself overwhelmed and infected by the scrivener’s words. “Somehow, of late,” he notes, “I had got into the way of involuntarily using the word ‘prefer’ upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occa-sions.”31Bartleby’s formula turns out to be a contagious formula with the mad-dening power to seep into others’ mouths and debilitate any sense of stable subjectivity or mastery.
The linguistic merging of the two characters underscores an emotional merging whereby the lawyer gradually identifies with Bartleby to the extent of losing, at times, any sense of distinction. One Sunday morning, instead of visit-ing Trinity Church (an emblem of institutional religion and the site of a major scandal regarding the use and abuse of church wealth in the late 1840s), the lawyer goes to his office only to find that Bartleby is inside, preferring not “to admit” him at that moment. Perplexed, he wanders the empty streets of New York’s financial district and is suddenly struck by the same kind of melancholy he attributes to Bartleby:32
28 On typologies inThe Confidence-Man, see Shira Wolosky, “Melville’s Unreading of the Bi-ble:Redburnand theConfidence Man,” in:Letterature D’America,21: 88–89 (2001): 31–52.
29 The multiplePequodJobs live within an ambit of their own, rarely having any interaction with the ship’s principal owners, Captains Peleg and Bildad, the latter of whom is named after one of Job’s comforters. Allan Silver was among the first to call for a more nuanced reading of the lawyer; see Allan Silver, “The Lawyer and the Scrivener,” in:Partisan Review,48.3 (1981):
409–424.
30 On the unique position of the narrator in “Bartleby,” see Michael T. Gilmore, “‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ and the Transformation of the Economy,” in:American Romanticism in the Mar-ketplace,The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1985, 145.
31 Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 31.
32 For more on the history of Trinity Church, its ties with John Astor, and the pertinent real estate scandals, see Barbara Foley, “From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville’s
‘Bartleby,’” in:American Literature, 72.1 (2000): 87–116.
Melville’s Wall Street Job: The Missing Cry 113
For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me.
Before, I had never experienced aught but a not-unpleasing sadness. The bond of a com-mon humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam. I remembered the bright silks and sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swan-like sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway; and I contrast-ed them with the pallid copyist, and thought to myself, Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.”33
He speaks of himself and Bartleby as the “sons of Adam” but the “stinging melancholy” he experiences makes their “common humanity” more Joban than Adamic in character. Although the lawyer was initially locked in the posi-tion of Job’s friends (admiring his chambers on Wall Street, never experiencing but a “not-unpleasing sadness”), his tantalizing encounter with Bartleby leads to a dramatic transformation: he becomes more Joban in character. He now questions the availability of American pursuits of happiness and discovers be-hind “the bright silks and sparkling faces” of Broadway the hidden misery that courts no light.
Later, visiting the prison of the Tombs, on viewing the dead scrivener (his wasted body huddled by the wall) the lawyer expresses a similar critique. This time he chooses to use Job’s own words, defining Bartleby as one who “sleeps with kings and counsellors.” The quotation, with which I opened, is part of a longer provocative presentation in which Job renders death as the most com-pelling equalizer of all: “There the prisoners rest together / They hear not the voice of the oppressor / The small and the great are there / And the servant is free from his master” (Job 3:18–20). In addition to the kings and councilors, one finds in the tombs all the wretched of the earth, among them prisoners, the most relevant to this final episode in the scrivener’s life. Much as Job, with bitter irony, speaks of the realm of the dead as the only realm in which justice reigns, where no oppression is heard of, the lawyer now intuits that, even in a nation that defines itself as the epitome of all democracies, death remains the most effective equalizer of all.34
The lawyer uses Bartleby’s words and Job’s words but he cannot fully relin-quish the theodician, Christian rhetoric that for so many years had defined his prudent, protected world. He is ultimately torn between being one of Job’s friends and being a Job of sorts. The clash between the two roles becomes
33Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 28.
34For a succinct analysis of “Bartleby”’s dismantling of cherished American ideals, see Mi-chael Rogin,Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville, University of Cali-fornia Press, Berkeley 1979.
particularly humorous (in characteristically dark shades) when, crazed by Bar-tleby’s inescapable “wondrous ascendancy” and haunting presence, he justi-fies his choice to furnish the scrivener with “office room” as a mission “billeted upon” him “for some mysterious purpose of an all-wise Providence.”35
The closest the lawyer comes to the scrivener and his formula, as surpris-ing as it may first seem, is at the story’s end, in his final cry: “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”36No one in his right mind would have dared to end a story with words so vague and banal. In Melville’s hands, however, they become the most moving words in the lawyer’s narrative. It is here, more than ever before, that the lawyer leaves Prudence and Providence behind and, like the scrivener, ven-tures to approach the very limit of language, touching on the silences of a minimalist utterance that in itself holds no poetic grandeur. For once, “hardly can [he] express the emotions which seize [him]”37– be they his acute longings and compassion for Bartleby, or his mourning over the scrivener’s unjustifiable death, or his sense of guilt at being implicated in this death, or his sense of loss on discovering that the Wall Street he believed in had collapsed, or the despair vis-à-vis the incommunicability that prevails in an irredeemable world in which letters and people fail to reach their destination, or his growing fear as a narrator that his own tale may meet the fate of the dead letters he de-scribes in his concluding note, or any other unutterable emotion. The lawyer had his exclamatory moments earlier in the tale – “Ah, happiness courts the light”38– but in this final line, his apostrophic words are bare and starved, set apart and isolated, without accompanying explanation or poetic metaphor (his figurative language having elsewhere been quite remarkable).
But something else can be heard in the collapse of the lawyer’s language in the final note that goes with Bartleby beyond Bartleby. I would go so far as to define the final apostrophe – “Ah humanity!” – as the lawyer’s unwitting delivery of the Joban cry over humanity which Bartleby never releases. In its minimalism, in its departure from canonical aesthetic language, the lawyer’s final words are akin to Bartleby’s formula, but insofar as it is a cry and a sigh it underscores the Joban roaring that until now had been utterly repressed, blocked by the walls of Wall Street and within the scrivener’s incommunicable world.39
35 Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 31.
36 Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 45.
37 Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 45.
38 Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 28.
39 Eyal Perez definesMoby-Dickas the “teacher of the cry” through its preoccupation with the “whale” and the “wail.” See Eyal Perez, Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power,
Melville’s Wall Street Job: The Missing Cry 115