JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2043    

[This post is included in the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things series.]

“Bartleby the Scrivener, a Tale of Wall Street”, is a well-known, much-loved and magical/dark short story written by Herman Melville in 1853 (in two installments in Putnam’s Magazine). For a major figure in the history of American literature, Mr. Bartleby has generated a lot of scholarship, in spite of the briefness of the piece, and the very scant information we have from Bartleby himself.  He never lets us into his mind, himself, and we have just the barest glimpse into what drives him through his spoken words–we find out what we know of him through his self-appointed-friend and employer, who writes:

  “I now recalled all the
quiet mysteries which I had noted in the man. I remembered that he
never spoke but to answer; that though at intervals he had
considerable time to himself, yet I had never seen him reading—no,
not even a newspaper; that for long periods he would stand looking
out, at his pale window behind the screen, upon the dead brick wall;
I was quite sure he never visited any refectory or eating house;
while his pale face clearly indicated that he never drank beer like
Turkey, or tea and coffee even, like other men; that he never went
any where in particular that I could learn; never went out for a
walk, unless indeed that was the case at present; that he had
declined telling who he was, or whence he came, or whether he had any
relatives in the world; that though so thin and pale, he never
complained of ill health. And more than all, I remembered a certain
unconscious air of pallid—how shall I call it?—of pallid
haughtiness, say, or rather an austere reserve about him, which had
positively awed me into my tame compliance with his eccentricities,
when I had feared to ask him to do the slightest incidental thing for
me, even though I might know, from his long-continued motionlessness,
that behind his screen he must be standing in one of those dead-wall
reveries of his.”

For all of his influence, Bartleby spoke only 32 times, and used 246 words, only 55 of them are unique carriers–the the rest are repetitions, especially in the first half of the story, and then particularly with the use of the word ‘prefer” in the famous “I would prefer not” and “I prefer not” phrases. (I looked at this earlier in this blog in the post “A Census of “Prefer” in Bartleby.)

IT would be an interesting exercise to write in the spirit of Bartleby and use only those words that he spoke in the story. To paraphrase Mark Twain, “if I had more time I would have written a shorter letter”–it would take a bit of an effort to turn out a good story using just these words; after all, Dr. Seuss used 236 to produce A Cat in the Hat (and brilliantly so). 

The Different Words Spoken by Bartleby: