Bartleby at the Wall
What can we learn from Melville's (1853) "Bartleby, the Scrivener" about workplace refusal? As Andrew Delbanco comments, the story Bartleby is “an old piece 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 and Delbanco 2020).
Melville's Bartleby character is the fictional cornerstone of workplace refusal. He begins work in an attorney's office as a scrivener, occupying a small work area near a window that looks out onto a brick wall a few feet away. Bartleby's employer is at first impressed by his respectful demeanour and industry—Bartleby appears to work tirelessly and accomplish as much as, if not more than, his coworkers.
Later, however, the boss becomes baffled as Bartleby begins to refuse certain tasks, until eventually he's not working at all, and doing "nothing but stand[ing] at his window in his dead-wall revery."
Let's take a look at this clip from Friedman's 1970 film adaptation, Bartleby:
Bartleby, as an individual refuser, is engaging in a risky act: he is isolating himself from his colleagues, he is likely to draw ire from his boss, and he is risking his livelihood. It is worth noting here, and remembering throughout, that refusal as an individual is an option open primarily to those who can afford it.
As the story progresses, Bartleby's continued refusals eventually cause waves throughout the office, as his coworkers gossip about his lack of work ethic, complain that they have to pick up the work of the slacker, and even encourage the employer to fire Bartleby. Instead of rallying around their colleague, they lose no time in passive-aggressively bemoaning their own situations.
This scene in Friedman's 1970 film captures that moment perfectly:
In the story, Bartleby's employer comments that "Nothing so aggravates an earnest man as a passive resistance" (Melville 1853).
Delbanco observes that "what Bartleby does is make it harder and harder for him not to look at him." Pretty soon everyone's looking and they can't look away. Paul Giamatti in conversation with Andrew Delbanco observes that "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" (Giamatti and Delbanco 2020).
From Bartleby can we learn how to say:"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?" (Simón 2019).
- I prefer not to...
- I prefer not to take on an unmanageable workload.
- I prefer not to take on work outside the scope of my job responsibilities.
- I prefer not to be the beneficiary of others’ endowments if the strings are too tight.
- I prefer to choose where I spend my mental, physical, and emotional energy.
- I prefer to fully occupy my role, my space, my destiny.
Let's look together at Bartleby's fictional descendants and examine the way they promulgate or refuse crisis and scarcity narratives as we try to answer the question:
How can fiction or popular culture inform the way we promulgate or refuse crisis and scarcity narratives in librarianship?
In them we can trace a fictional genealogy of refusal, through which can we together consider the way workplace refusal plays out in fiction and popular culture between Bartleby and today's stories.
Can our observations help us contextualize the way crisis and scarcity narratives influence expectations about the archivist's budget, the librarian's role, the curator's duty to the collection?
