There is, however, one striking omission in the scrivener’s anti-theodician stance: the disappearance of the Joban cry. This lacuna is undoubtedly one of
17Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 14.
18Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 28.
“Bartleby”’s most dramatic exegetical departures from Moby-Dick. Ahab, as one recalls, never hesitates to cry against his dismemberer as he “chases with curses a Job’s whale round the world”: “Aye, aye! It was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!
[...] Aye, aye! And I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn [...]
and round perdition’s flames before I give him up [...] How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. [...] He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it.”19
Setting out to “strike through the mask,” Ahab seeks to lay bare the arbitra-ry malevolence which lies behind the impenetrable overbearing wall of the deity – be it Moby Dick or God. Blasphemy seems closer to the bleak Truth and serves as a means to unmask the false presuppositions of theodician claims.
Bartleby, in stark contrast, hardly even utters a word let alone cries. The only formula he stubbornly reiterates whenever he is asked to copy a document is brief, plain, and monotonous: “I would prefer not to.” Nothing seems farther from the poetic grandeur of the “roarings” that “pour out” of Job’s mouth “like waters” in an unending stream of painful sighs bearing the volume and force of a lion’s growl. Nothing seems farther than the poetic power of Ahab’s ever flowing, blunt, blasphemous cries.
“Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter,”
writes Melville to Hawthorne in June 1851, as he was putting the final touches on his “Whale.”20That Melville could anticipate the failure of his grand, all-encompassing Bible did not make the lack of recognition that followed the publication ofMoby-Dickany easier. In his 1853 Wall Street tale, Melville seems to prefer not to invent another grand poetically-inspired Job; he also appears to prefer not to be a scribe (his privileging of the term “scrivener” over “copyist”
underscores such theological connotations) in a world in which a writer’s voca-tion is treated like a low Wall Street clerical job: rarely acknowledged and poor-ly paid.
But the wonder at the base of “Bartleby” is Melville’s paradoxical insist-ence, in spite of himself almost, to draw from dead letters and dead walls a new Joban figure and a new mock aesthetic that could serve, at the same time, as a different kind of aesthetic. A closer translation of Job into modern times, Melville ventures to suggest, would entail the invention of a sufferer whose fate is so bleak that he is not even granted the privilege of expressing his grief,
19 Melville,Moby-Dick, 163–164.
20 Melville, Herman,Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth, Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, Evanston and Chicago 1993, 192.
Melville’s Wall Street Job: The Missing Cry 109 misery, and protest in grand poetic form. Melville opts to probe the potential for a minimalist language and mute gestures to serve as the most effective modern equivalent to Job’s cry.
InThe Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot, the first in a long genealo-gy of continental thinkers fascinated by the tale, regards Bartleby’s formula as exemplary of the language of disaster.
Bartleby gives up (not that he ever pronounces, or clarifies this renunciation) ever saying anything; he gives up the authority to speak. This is abnegation understood as the aban-donment of the self, a relinquishment of identity, refusal which does not cleave to refusal but opens to failure, to the loss of being, to thought. “I will not do it” would still have signified an energetic determination, calling forth an equally energetic contradiction. “I would prefer not to ...” belongs to the infiniteness of patience; no dialectical intervention can take hold of such passivity. We have fallen out of being, outside where, immobile, proceeding with a slow even step, destroyed men come and go.21
Blanchot’s observations shed light on the contours of Melville’s redefinition of Joban aesthetics in “Bartleby.” The scrivener follows Job in the trail of “de-stroyed men” but carves out a somewhat different space. Whereas the biblical rebel immerses in dark, detailed imaginings of self-erasure and de-birthing, Bartleby’s minimalist formula offers an even more radical “abandonment of the self” and “falling out of being.” In Melville’s Wall Street tale, the melan-choly Job of Chapter 3 adopts, as it were, the patience of Job of the Prologue, only to create the kind of passivity that is so extreme in its “infiniteness of patience,” in its lack of will, and lack of language that it becomes utterly unset-tling.22
The power of this irreverent formula to do precisely what Job’s blasphe-mous cries do – to probe the very limit of faith, language, and life itself – becomes all the more apparent in light of Gilles Deleuze’s renowned elabora-tion of Blanchot’s brief comments. At each occurrence of the formula, writes Deleuze, in “Bartleby; or The Formula,”
there is a stupor surrounding Bartleby, as if one heard the Unspeakable or the Unstoppa-ble [...] Without a doubt the formula is ravaging, devastating, and leaves nothing standing
21Blanchot, Maurice,The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 1995, 17.
22InThe Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida mentions the affinity between Bartleby and the Job who “dreams of not being born” but does not develop this observation. See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1995, 74. For a recent, extensive treatment of “Bartleby” and the question of passivity, see Branka Arsić, Pas-sive Constitutions, or, 7 1/2 Times Bartleby, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2007.
at its wake [...] Bartleby has won the right to survive, that is, to remain immobile and upright before a blind wall. Pure patient passivity, as Blanchot would say. [...] He is urged to say yes or no. But if he said no (to collating, running errands ...) or if he said yes (to copying), he would quickly be defeated and judged useless and would not survive. He can survive only by whirling in a suspense that keeps everyone at a distance.”23
Deleuze goes so far as to see in Bartleby’s formula a continuation of the “lan-guage of the Whale” that Melville had fashioned inMoby-Dick, a language that
“runs beneath English and carries it off,” a language capable of sweeping up
“language in its entirety, sending it into flight, pushing it to its very limit in order to discover its Outside, silence or music.”24
If Job questions the ways of the divine Judge, the scrivener’s “I would pre-fer not to” interrupts the normative hierarchies and procedures of earthly law-yers. Nothing remains the same once the scrivener introduces this formula into everyday life at the lawyer’s office. The copying of legal documents is suspend-ed and with it the belief in their inherent value. A new minimalist language emerges in the midst of this Wall Street void, sending the Joban cry “into flight, pushing it to its very limit,” laying bare the unspeakable that lurks behind.