![]() ‘A document of which Lord must be ashamed,’ wrote one lawyer at the time. His will, which left a measly US$400,000 to public good out of a roughly twenty to thirty-million-dollar fortune, caused widespread opprobrium when it was published in 1849. Between 18, investments in US factories had risen from US$50 million to a staggering US$250 million, and land speculation, transport, fur and cotton trades continued to make the fortunes of the likes of John Jacob Astor, whom the narrator boasts of having worked for: ‘I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor a name which, I admit, I love to repeat.’ Astor, a fur trader and real-estate magnate who died in 1848, just a few years before ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ was published, was known for having created his fur monopoly by purchasing raw hides with diluted alcohol from Native American tribes, and for selling opium to China and Britain, before diversifying into real estate. Such mind-numbing, back-breaking and poorly remunerated labour helped prop up a financial system that had given rise to extraordinary inequality by the mid-19th century, particularly in urban centres such as New York where, in 1845, four per cent of the city’s population owned 80 per cent of its wealth. For this, they are paid four cents (roughly US$1.50 today) per page of correctly copied words. Helping him draw up these documents are scriveners, whose gruelling task it is to produce four handwritten copies of each of the lengthy legal texts, non-stop, six days a week. It is in such a gloomy ‘cistern’ of an office that the narrator of ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ oversees ‘a snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title-deeds’. The novella includes some of the most detailed descriptions, alongside Melville’s contemporary Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and ‘A Christmas Carol’, of what such chambers might have looked like, and the conditions the copyists worked under: think Bob Cratchit’s ‘dismal little cell, a sort of tank’. This is the Wall Street of the mid-19th century, one of the birthplaces of securitisation where financial capitalism as we might recognise it today was forged in the New York Stock Exchange, and in the brokerage and mortgage houses, banks and lawyers’ chambers that served it. He is an elderly and, by his own admission, ‘unambitious’ lawyer whose chambers in Wall Street provide the primary setting for the story. Its protagonist is not, in fact, Bartleby but his employer – an unnamed narrator – who recounts the story of the recalcitrant scrivener and reveals a great deal about himself, and the economic model he represents, by doing so. ‘L ike architectural workers, from builders on-site to architectural assistants in offices, the law-copyist engaged in labour that was adjacent to creating – in their case, writing – but devoid of much, or indeed any, personal agency’Īs ever, it is helpful to return to the original text. In London, Bartleby haunted the Architectural Association’s 2021/22 prospectus, where several unit briefs made mention of him – apparently independently of each other. In a 2007 edition of El País, Spanish architect Iñaki Ábalos ventured that the character ‘represents the most compelling evocation of sustainability’s aesthetic dimension’, while a 2017 lecture series organised by Peter Swinnen at ETH Zürich took ‘I prefer not to’ as its prompt to consider what architects ought not to do, and included Anne Lacaton and Arno Brandlhuber on its list of speakers. More recently, it is the architectural community – especially the more academically minded parts of it – that has embraced Bartleby. By the 1920s, a Melville revival was under way in the US literary community, which re‑established ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ as a masterpiece of short fiction, and from the 1980s onwards, the character became something of a darling of continental European philosophy: Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben wrote lengthy essays on Bartleby Slavoj Žižek donned an ‘I would prefer not to’ T-shirt. But over time, the story’s titular character – a pallid law-copyist who stops working because, he says, he ‘would prefer not to’ – would, along with Melville himself, be consigned to relative obscurity for more than half a century. When ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’ was published in The Piazza Tales, an 1856 anthology of Herman Melville’s short stories, a reviewer singled it out as ‘one of the best bits of writing which ever came from the author’s pen’. ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’ by Herman Melville
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |