I read Bartleby, the Scrivener in the eleventh grade. It was required reading for IB English I at my high school.
For the uninitiated, Bartleby was a scrivener, a writer, if you will, who worked for a real estate lawyer. Our modern tongues would define his position as ‘administrative assistant’, or ‘paralegal.’ And while the narrator of the story itself suggests that Bartleby offered no indication of any emotion to his circumstance, I’d submit that underneath the veil of ambivalence, Bartleby hated his job. Bartleby was bored out of his mind. Bartleby only offers a very controlled and passive response to all the directives issued by the boss, ‘I prefer not to.’ We watch this détente between boss and employee unfold over a period of time, and the slow degeneration of Bartleby, the office relocates and Bartleby, the everyman working in the offices of a boom economy, condemned to banal tasks of recording mortgages, deeds for would-be moguls, all the while passively resisting any work that demanded more of his mental mind. The story concludes with the discovery that Bartleby lived in the old offices and died bereft.
Yeah.
Bartleby is pretty existentialist as far as American fiction goes. Bartleby. A story written some 160 years ago that examined man’s existential quest in the pursuit of happiness. We’d later go on to read some pretty bleak stuff afterward. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka and Darkness at Noon, by Artur Koestler. Simultaneously, we were also reading Voltaire’s Candide and Camus’ The Stranger in IB French. How’s that for contrast?
Bartleby. Bartleby, the Scrivener was written by Herman Melville in 1853 and during a time when the American economy began to shift from agrarian to industrial. The economy was booming, growing rapidly and simultaneously unstable. The odd bit about this tale in my mind is that we’re watching a man drown in the banality of abundance. Thinking of it now, I can’t help but feel its resonance for the modern worker being sucked in the undertow of false prosperity during the last five to six years.
Bartleby. Some quirky hipsters made a film about it too. I’m not sure who saw it.
Those world weary eyes filled with dreams of financial security only to watch them dissolve in falling retirement accounts. Le grand sigh.
I guess Bartleby is burbling to the top of my memory because of the in the early ‘90s, we were at an economic low, and during my most formative years, I was cognizant of existentialism, dreams deferred, or the malaise that occupies your head space in the wake of wars. And what of our economy now? Well, it’s shifting sands, no? There are deep structural changes underway in our economy that haven’t heard discussed in any great detail to date. The manufacturing jobs of yore have long since moved to India, China and Mexico. I’ve seen allusions to the concept of a perm-a-lancer economy, indicating that over the next 10 years, 40% of the workforce will consist of highly skilled independent contractors. India’s economy grew by nearly 8% last quarter. Ours grew by maybe a 1% (I’m being generous). Over the past 10 years, we’ve imported talent to fit the demands of the tech economy. And while foolish, short-sighted conservatives argue that O is trying to indoctrinate our youth in some new socialist world order, the fact that we lag behind India and China in math and science can account for the dearth of employment opportunities for American youth. Notwithstanding the decade long depression in regions like Appalachia and formerly big manufacturing towns in the Hudson River Valley, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc. and beyond.
Work, as we know it, has changed and is changing still.
I think of Bartleby here: living during a time of great upheaval, the capitalist beast gaining its legs and torque, propelling the slave economy forward, testing human exhaustion and depravity, its abusive practices devouring our ecosystems. And while some may dismiss the need from folks working in the current capitalist construct for a work/life balance, the truth is we can’t afford to ignore it. Sustainability means work too.
