OWW 3: Melville’s instability

The last two editions of Other Writers’ Words have focused on phrases that stick in my head for their massy perfection: strings of sounds that do exactly what they need to and can’t be improved.

This one is a bit different; it’s compact and effective but it’s also unstable—a sort of fulcrum on which turns the entire interpretation of a story.

It’s from early in Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener, set in New York around 1850 and published in 1853. It’s a short novel about a legal copyist (scrivener) who frustrates his employer by refusing most tasks with the calm phrase, “I would prefer not to.” Eventually this “prefer not to” costs him his job, lodging and life. It’s a weird story about a strange man: possibly depressed, possibly ill, possibly feeling a nonspecific modernist ennui. Bartleby’s employer, an unnamed lawyer, narrates the story and introduces himself to the reader with a total lack of ego. He says he is convinced that “the easiest way of life is the best” and that he is considered a “safe man” who does a “snug business.” He calls on the authority of the late John Jacob Astor, a famous businessman and philanthropist, who allegedly praised the narrator’s “prudence” and “method.”

The narrator then goes on: “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, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion.” This is the sentence I want to consider today, because of the instability it creates in the reader’s perspective on the narrator. Who says “orbicular”? We have to understand this because we only experience the story through the narrator’s perspective. Most readers of this story have seen the narrator as a cold, unsympathetic, emotionless, immoral. They see a smug man in a high office who fails to connect with a suffering employee. A minority of readers, though, think the narrator is, if not admirable, at least funny, self-aware, responsive and dynamic: someone who sees his own absurdity and weakness and works through them to a more sympathetic response.

It’s unfair to boil this complicated reaction down to a single word, but I really do think you can see a lot in “rounded and orbicular.” The sheer absurdity of this phrase is hard to notice because, frankly, most writing from the 1850s sounds a bit weird. But this is a story where ancillary characters say things like “I think I should kick him out of the office” or that Bartleby is “a little luny” (i.e. loony). Not all of the characters’ voices are absurd. For the narrator to use the redundant “rounded and orbicular” is, to my eye, so highly stylized as to make me ask: is this guy just a pompous moral idiot, or is he being self-deprecating?

If “orbicular” is (appropriately enough) unstable, I think the other evidence of the story tips the balance firmly towards self-deprecation. What kind of person cites “prudence” and “method” as the two pillars of their personality? Who feels so oppressed by the eminence of John Jacob Astor that he refers to his professional relationship as being “not unemployed”? I don’t think it’s possible to read the absurd descriptors in the story with a straight face; and if we read them in a sympathetic light we see a narrator who has gone through a sort of conversion experience, someone who encountered an experience he didn’t understand and was profoundly changed by the encounter.

I mention “orbicular” not to convince, but to explain how much heft individual word choices can have. I was very fortunate to learn about this story in college under the supervision of Dan McCall, a formidable Melville scholar who also held the minority view on this story. I still recall him grinning when he pointed out the sheer absurdity of this word choice, and how the story’s alien coldness dissolved when we considered that maybe the narrator was aware of his own silliness. If you can imagine the narrator as self-aware, then the moral journey of the story becomes far more interesting. His initial self-regard and security are precisely why the challenge of Bartleby is so important to him, but his ability to move beyond those is why the story is haunting rather than just grim. As McCall put it elsewhere, the narrator’s “initial boasting about his virtues becomes his tortured exploring of them as weakness and failure.” He eventually comes to ask, in effect, “What happens when you run into something you cannot explain and cannot remedy? Where is your humanity then?” In this reading of the evidence, the narrator is revealed as a “brave”, “lovely and spiritually generous” figure.*

All this from a word you’d never seen before now. Neat how that works, isn’t it?

*McCall, Dan, “The Reliable Narrator” in Melville’s Short Novels, Norton 2002. p.272, 275