Bartleby at the Wall
What can we learn from Melville's Bartleby about workplace refusal?
How can fiction and popular culture inform the way we promulgate or refuse crisis & scarcity narratives in librarianship?
As Andrew Delbanco comments, [It's] “An old pice of writing by a guy who lived almost two hundred years ago and was describing a world that in some ways is very far from our own but it connects intimately and immediately to our own experience. (Giamatti & Delbanco 2020)“
Diana Schaub
Bartleby has given up on the word, given up on communication . . . Melville might be suggesting that there’s a kernel of truth about Bartleby’s intuition about the status of letters and the status of the word in modern life.
92nd Street Y. 2020. Paul Giamatti in Conversation with Andrew Delbanco. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbDDIbI9BtA&feature=emb_logo.
Lawyer says: Nothing so aggravates an earnest man as a passive resistance
Anybody who thinks about history knows passive resistance has proven to be a very effective weapon to change the world.
What Bartleby does is make it harder and harder for boss not to look at him . Pretty soon everyone's looking and they can't look away. https://youtu.be/kbDDIbI9BtA?t=1559
All of us do a good job at not looking at other people, particularly if they look like a problem that we don’t want to have to deal with, then we’d rather they were somebody else’s problem.
Simón, Ryan. 2019. “Editorial: Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” AMERICAN VULGARIA. April 21, 2019. https://americanvulgaria.com/bartleby-scrivener/.
as Camus suggests in The Rebel, a “man who says no… is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.” And so for each of Bartleby’s rejections, might there be an unspoken acceptance of — or, at the least, a preference for — something else? Or is this guy so hardcore punk-rock that he’d even go so far as to eventually reject preferences altogether?
From Bartleby can we learn how to say:
I prefer not to take you up on your offer to expand my duties.
I prefer not to be the beneficiary of others' largess if the strings are too tight.
I can fully occupy my role, my space, my destiny.
