Herman Melville
Bartleby lo scrivano

Like a small cloud that innocuously appears on the horizon on a serene summer afternoon and gradually approaches, growing heavy with rain. It pours down for half an hour on houses and buildings, trees and avenues, only to make way for serenity again.

Like an imperceptible symptom that, growing, disrupts a tranquil bourgeois existence.

Thus the great depression cast shadows on the path to the best of all possible worlds for the liberal man of the nineteenth century.

Thus Bartleby insinuates himself and fractures the life of the narrator of a Wall Street story.

He was (I mean the narrator, not Bartleby) a lawyer well advanced in years, who, over time, had deeply matured this conviction: “in life the easiest way is the best.” Disinterested in fame and the limelight, desiring a peaceful life, he specialized in civil law, dealing with titles, bonds, and mortgages. A cautious and reliable man, his virtues were prudence and method, he always remained calm and was not swayed by indignation in the face of wrongs and outrages.

As a narrator, he demonstrates knowledge of multiple rhetorical artifices. He discusses the sources, distinguishing between reliable ones (“What my eyes saw”) and uncertain ones (“a vague piece of news that will appear later”). He reflects on them and then comments with distanced and measured bourgeois irony. He addresses the subject with a calm tone because he modestly believes that the topic, never before addressed, is useful and interesting for the human community. His words have the calm gait of someone who knows their place in the world and, unperturbed, has no intention of questioning it even in the face of the strangest and most singular cases.

Among these were those represented by his three employees who shared the office with him, located on the first floor of Wall Street, no. - ..

Turkey was an English copyist, about sixty years old; professional and with a florid complexion in the morning, he became strangely flushed and irritable in the evening. Nippers was the other copyist, a sallow young man with sideburns and a piratical air. Exactly the opposite of Turkey, his nervousness manifested in the morning and disappeared in the afternoon. However, he wrote with a neat and quick hand, and had a gentlemanly demeanor. Finally, Ginger Nut was an alert jack-of-all-trades who, due to his aversion to legal subjects, was employed to serve the other three. As you can see, they were certainly not free from oddities and peculiarities, yet our lawyer, unperturbed, coexisted with them, analyzing them methodically and directing them to protect his habits and tranquility.

Compared to Bartleby's, however, their singularities could merely lead to a smile.

Hired in the office due to an increase in workload, his figure appeared “pallidly neat, painfully decorous, hopelessly forlorn,” overall, he seemed extremely meek. He appeared to be an excellent employee for the firm, as he was a tireless and voracious copyist, diligent and hardworking, silent and mechanical. However, he also had a subdued and stubborn spirit, gentle and obstinate, which he showed for the first time, unexpectedly, when, called upon by the lawyer to perform a different task, “without moving from his little corner, with a singularly gentle but firm voice, responded: “I would prefer not to.”

What an answer!? What could be the meaning of such a response? The lawyer wondered, the narrator wonders years later, and finally, surely, so does every reader.

However, the only one who could have done something, the lawyer, for the sake of peace or because he was caught up in duties, decided to let it go. Unfortunately, just as the flap of a butterfly's wings can provoke a distant hurricane, Bartleby's behaviors ended up repeating and taking root, disturbing the peace the lawyer had defended at all costs until then…

From what has been said, it may seem evident that underlying this story is an analogy between extremely boring and repetitive work (it was rumored that Bartleby had worked in sorting undelivered mail), and solitude and alienation in hyper-bureaucratized societies.

However, that’s not all. In this novella, the facts are told in a very regular and almost traditional form, yet the explanation of the Bartleby case is very vague and undefined, indeterminate and indefinable in its meaning: the result is delightful. It goes beyond this correspondence, alienation and solitude are sprinkled with a touch of mystery, of absurdity, of no-sense.

These elements are surely the precursors of much twentieth-century literature and, with them, all the traits of Bartleby's figure; however, nineteenth-century is the obstinate faith in an explanation for all this, a faith that brings order and can insert even the most eccentric of oddities into a logic; classical is the theory of humors to which our narrator lends credence here and there; finally, biblical is the conclusion, along with much of the cultural substrate, of Bartleby the Scrivener.

This mixture renders the fascination of this novella imperishable.

To read and reread.