The primary ethical question in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” from the perspective of contemporary economics, is what value is Bartleby providing for his employer, our unnamed narrator? Bartleby claims he is “not particular,” but also that he “prefers not to” do any particular task with which he is charged, any of the common things a scrivener was commonly made to do: proofing copies, running errands, and by the middle of the tale, even any scrivening. Bartleby was, economically speaking, a nonentity, and it is only through his crime of loitering that he makes his presence have an impact on the GDP. Indeed, in economic terms, Bartleby would not even register as unemployed as he seems not to be in the business of actively pursuing a job.
Economies have no place to put such a creature, even one not scintillatingly alive, as Bartleby certainly wasn’t. That Melville gives the story the subtitle “A Story of Wall Street” drives home the notion that our narrator, despite his protestations, is, in fact, a stand-in for that august region and its values, mores, or lack thereof. He describes himself as “an eminently safe man,” as one declared by the late John Jacob Astor to possess the qualities of “prudence” and “method.” But even dropping the name of such a luminous “personage”—a name, our narrator notes, which “rings like unto bullion”—he reveals himself to be above all worried about station. It is through his respectability, his prudence and method, his eminent safety, that he secures what he can of Astor’s sound riches.
By ultimately having him fail to act in Bartleby’s behalf, Melville indicts not just his narrator’s lack of follow-through and lack of sincerity in his perceived duties to his fellow man, but all of Wall Street as well. At issue is the question of whether or not work, in that work creates surplus value for the economy, is of greater worth than the life of a man, even if that man is as frustrating and sullenly impossible as Bartleby.
This same question is the subtext of every public debate over welfare, Social Security, Medicare, the waging of war, or the brokering of peace. Would we rather have people working or would we rather have them dead? All too often, the answer is the latter.
This is all merely theoretical if you are a policy maker, of course, a matter of pride if you are gainfully employed. Our policy makers are, after all, set for life: guaranteed a government pension and a lobbying career, they need not concern themselves with the messy realities of starvation or grinding poverty. This sort of distance encourages them to come up with euphemisms such as “low nutritional security” instead of “starving.” It’s as if the problem with poor people is that they don’t have their refrigerators under lock and key. The gainfully employed in the middle and upper reaches of their class (the truly rich do not have to work, thus can’t be counted as “employed”) shunt their fears of job loss and decline of fortune off onto matters of character. The poor have “failed.” They are scapegoats for our anxiety, the “other,” our antitheses: lazy, weak, stupid, losers. The system being what it is, it only recognizes that which can be translated directly into monetary gain. People like Bartleby, who seems constitutionally incapable of working after a certain point, simply become valueless, at best. They become embarrassments to business, encumbrances, dead weight, eventually, just dead.
That our pro(?)tagonist finally decides to leave Bartleby behind instead of having him bodily removed shows the cowardice of the capitalist system as it is engendered here. It is unable to deal with any beings that are not in some way definable by the pecuniary. The narrator’s flight to new premises mirrors that of the middle-class family fleeing the inner-city for the suburbs. Homo economicus cannot allow being an active part of supporting his community interfere with his prime directive: the creation, dispensation, and display of wealth and status. He builds equity by gaining and servicing credit through debt, and building equity in the inner city takes adding value beyond the direct service of said debt, adding value to the properties of others, helping fund and create community amenities like parks, policing his own adolescents so they do not contribute to blight.
This is not tangible in the narrow terms of capitalism and is, therefore, not worth the time (money) of homo economicus.
Capitalism, currently constituted, is, like Melville’s narrator, cowardly since it cannot lose its sense of propriety, method, prudence, safety, however formulated. Thus Hollywood, a capitalist enterprise, will produce no artistically risky films, though risqué sometimes does sell (Showgirls), and violent and sensationalistic always do. Thus energy companies refuse to risk their prodigious capital on alternative fuels. Thus investors refuse to place confidence in markets, like those in the E.U., that don’t conform to laissez-faire orthodoxy. The notion that people are valuable in and of themselves is anathema to capitalism because it exists outside of that orthodoxy. It is blasphemy upon the name of The Market.
Melville’s narrator is ultimately thwarted from going to church by the agitation caused by finding Bartleby occupying his office and using it as a home. The narrator feels no longer fit to sit and be pious after this encounter, yet his conscience is not, in the end, sufficiently moved to save Bartleby’s life. This indicates two things. First it says that religion, specifically Christianity, has yet to triumph over the market. Second it implies that we are all, perhaps, unable to change our relationship to existing market ideology. The failure of Christianity to avert our devotion from the god of lucre is less a failure on the part of Jesus to warn us away as it is a failure of the institutionalization of faith. Christianity, or any religion, as soon as it becomes caught up in the affairs of those who govern, becomes dependent on prevailing economic systems for its continued existence. In Christianity, this happened with the Constantinian Synthesis and resulted in a shift away from a grassroots movement concerned with “the least of these” to a faith willing to if not positively support the rapine of the secular leaders with threats of purgation if a tithe is not made then at least to sanctify the inherently unjust systems already in place. This now takes the form of the worship of power and “godly” leaders from the pulpits of purportedly Christian churches and the demonization of the welfare state. This continues through the promotion of a god who “helps those who help themselves” (a line of satire from Poor Richard, not from the bible as is commonly thought by conservative Christians), and the torturous creation of a theology of laying up a store in heaven by laying up a fortune on earth.
A very few still hold to the ideals that inspired the civil rights movement of the ‘60s and before that abolition, but their numbers decline with every broadcast of The O’Reilly Factor. The church Melville’s narrator failed to attend that morning may have preached charity, but it never would have suggested a complete re-evaluation of institutional values.
And this is, perhaps, where we are forced to end up, as the narrator notes with frustration perhaps and with resignation undoubtedly, “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” What can one do when one is beholden to the system? What can one do when torn between respectability, the market orthodoxy that creates and sustains his own being, and creating and sustaining the being of another? Capitalism creates, even in the would-be altruist, a double-bind, pitting altruism against self-preservation in a zero-sum game. It makes a crisis of assisting all those who fall outside of the capitalist framework, as if the land were full of burning buildings and every helping hand were in danger of self-immolation. Market-speak calls this “staying competitive,” of course, and it is meant to create a meritocracy, to reward the best and the brightest. But it has the effect of blunting the moral sense, and in its place is a muddled veil of half-truths through which we view masks painted to resemble faces we think are real.
In the end, the narrator is forced to concede that he is powerless. He has been trained to distrust his moral sense and must assuage his conscience with his own sense of helplessness. Ironically, it is not the “motionless” scrivener who is unable to act, but the narrator, who is arguably the most powerful character in the piece. All of his movements within the text are actually flights away from the scene in which he must act: the plane upon which both he and Bartleby live, the plane of humanity measured out in a snug office doing a snug business on Wall Street.