Herman Melville

Two classics in one volume: "Bartleby," a disturbing moral allegory set in 19th-century New York, and "Benito Cereno," a gripping sea adventure that probes the nature of man's depravity.

Bartleby and Benito Cereno

Bartleby le scribe

Bon, mais il me semblait que j’attendais une fin plus grosse ou un plus gros punch. Lecture rapide, mais pas ma préférée. Répétitive par moments.

Sophie Maude

"Academics hail it as the beginning of modernism, but to readers around the world even those daunted by Moby-Dick Bartleby the Scrivener is simply one of the most absorbing and moving novellas ever. Set in the mid-19th century on New York City's Wall Street, it was also, perhaps, Herman Melville's most prescient story- what if a young man caught up in the rat race of commerce finally just said, ""I would prefer not to""? The tale is one of the final works of fiction published by Melville before, slipping into despair over the continuing critical dismissal of his work after Moby-Dick, he abandoned publishing fiction. The work is presented here exactly as it was originally published in Putnam's magazine to, sadly, critical disdain."

Bartleby, the Scrivener

I really liked the first half of the book but the rest was a bit confusing and boring. Either way, very interesting story.

Evan

I found Melville's writing style to be pretty obnoxious and overly wordy. There's an impressive aspect of his ability to cram a sentence full of commas and semicolons, run-ons that simply need not be; it's also as annoying as Bartleby.
 
I haven't read any Melville before, and after this, I'm worried about finally taking on "Moby-Dick". It's pretty amazing that you can read something and just immediately tell that it's painfully old. Maybe it's the hyphenated "to-day" or simply word choices, but "Bartleby the Scrivener" is as stiff as Melville's long-dried corpse.
 
I had to look up what was going on with this after finishing it and I found a theory that Bartleby is actually Melville, that this story was his admission that he didn't want to do what was popular or "working" and would rather do as he pleased... but that's seemingly nothing, here. I'm confused why I'm supposed to root for Bartleby (or perhaps Melville) in this case. As the analysis pointed out, we learn almost nothing about Bartleby, but it's rather the narrating lawyer who reveals that maybe he's a bit of a prick. Is he, though? And if that's even true, is he deserving of Bartleby's haunting? I don't know. The narrator is seemingly stingy with cash, but he's actually okay with letting Bartleby do this own thing, letting him dodge assumed responsibilities because he's prioritizing what he's good at. And he does pay him; though I'm not 100 so I'm unsure if four cents did much back then. Houses could have been $3 for all I knew.
 
I didn't care for this short story and it made me quite tired. The drawn-out buildup to the next Bartleby interaction reminded me too much of coworkers who're poor storytellers. I enjoyed his thought that happiness is obvious while misery is secluded; too true, Melville.
 
Not the worst thing, far from the best. I don't recommend "Bartleby the Scrivener".

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, also called a masterpiece of short fiction, is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville. It tells about a Wall Street lawyer who hires a new clerk who, after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to make copies or do any other task required of him, refusing with the words "I would prefer not to."

Bartleby the Scrivener — A Story of Wall-Street

Lowkey reminded me of American Psycho except without resorting to murder and obsessing over business cards

sophie <3

Gavin

One of the Frankensteins, those endlessly interpretable load-bearing columns dotted around literature. Of negation, dignity, irrationality, silence, impermeability. 

What is Bartleby, if not just depressed or hyper-lazy? Well there’s the defensive Stoic catatonia, or wu wei; Bartleby as crypto-proto-Marxist; Bartleby as waning Übermensch, squatter monk, annoying Christ; Bartleby as dissociating schizophrene or autist; Bartleby as Death of Dead Letters; Bartleby as PTSD ghost; Bartleby as all our inarticulate idiosyncracy, as utter Other – “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!” 

Some people (e.g. Blanchot, Hardt & Negri, Setiya) view him as heroic, but he’s more hallucinogenic and morbid: he lacks everything but refusal; he throws his life away. And that’s a living death, a non-human void (“I never feel so private as when I know [Bartleby is] here”). 
 So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul be rid of it.


That copyists are an extinct breed only adds to the seething flavour; it is possible that OCR and distributed Captchas could have minimised Bartleby’s suffering - that the condition the piece wrangles with isn’t eternal. What would Bartleby be today? Not, I think, an Occupier; rather a impassive backstreets bookshop owner, or a kombucha stallholder or whatnot. 

I prefer to read Melville’s voice - waffling Victorian persiflage - as an assumed decoration for the windbag lawyer’s voice (however much Moby Dick shouts otherwise).

Trever

Autumn 

Simon Elliott Stegall

Depressing, and yet somehow totally inspiring. But mainly depressing.

Magdalene Lim

I don't get this story. Absurdist literature indeed.


Reread? I would prefer not to.

Bartleby and Benito Cereno

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