"Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville

21:14Jeff:We did. I think I was a freshman or sophomore. It was early in high school. I remember remembering it fondly and that I read it with one of those English teachers who also loved it, which makes such a difference that he was like kind of he was doing like this is so weird and so great. And this guy like why is he showing up for work and then saying I would prefer not to. And what is it that he actually prefers not to do? And that I remember the texture of those conversations as being so enriching and so enlivening. And one of the early educational experiences I had with reading a work that was really that seems so old to me at the time, like 1853.

21:54Jeff:And this would have been like 1999 probably for me. So 150 years old. But how that could still feel fresh and exciting, first with the right teacher, but also given the right lens to appreciate the story. And so I hope that's what we're doing here. But I just love this. I revisit it more often than most old things. And Bartleby is on my extremely short list of literary dog names that I would consider someday. Oh, OK. Interesting. I would prefer not to. I'm sure it's got to be in the top 50 literary tattoos. I didn't even mark it down because it's just so obvious. I did this. Go ahead. I think I would prefer not to has even ascended to that level of things literary people know that they can say.

22:34Jeff:And there are people quoting it who don't know what it's from. Yep. I read this in high school AP Lit. as the big year-long survey course I did there. It's coverage for the AP exam, but also there. It, like the characters in the book, became a bit of a meme before we had the word for meme amongst my AP lit nerd friends. Like we would just say, I would prefer not to each other for a while. I think it's my earliest memory of making a literature joke, making up one myself. I asked my friend Max, hey Max, ask me to prove that I'm a book nerd. He said, hey Jeff, prove you're a book nerd. And I said, I prefer not to.

23:09It's very meta. I really like that joke. I remember to this day. Bless your little heart. I repeat it here some 30-odd years later. I love that.

23:18Jeff:It's been in heavy rotation in my house this week as I've been reading and talking about Melville. I would prefer not to. It was getting a lot of play. It's a good time. Yeah. All right. We're transitioning to what it's like to read this and what it's all about. The big ideas, Rebecca, what can people expect to find should they crack open Bartleby the Scrivener? It's quick. Like, it's 50 pages long. So literally quick, but also the writing feels quick and kind of crackly. It is so funny and absurd. The narrator's bafflement is hilarious. In today's parlance, Bartleby would be one of those Gen Zers on the internet going, I do not dream of labor.

23:56Jeff:And this man who hires him and exists within a capitalist system and has been successful in a capitalist system has no idea how to process Bartleby or respond to it. To me, this also feels really timely right now. But the thing about Bartleby is that it always feels timely. But right now it feels timely in the context of COVID, of the quiet quitting discourse we just came out of, of return to office debates. and in Gen Z's, I think, justifiable disillusionment with a system that seems bound to fail them. There are just so many things you can read into Bartleby. And even that these are the things I'm saying I see in it are Rorschach tests and reflections of me as much as they are of Bartleby and of my sensibilities.

24:41Jeff:But I love, I think the best part is that Bartleby is just so quiet and so passive. And it's that passivity that really makes it maddening to the narrator. It's a vibe and a dynamic that I think we all recognize and is just a nightmare to be part of. But it's so fun to watch. There's so many readings here. I think for me, free yourself and remember that Melville is odd and he is interested in odd things. and he would have some experience with legal documents, with manifests, with publisher contracts. He's lived in New York. He's on Wall Street. Wall Street is not yet what Wall Street would come to be in 70 years.

25:29Right. But it's not not that. Like we're in the early stages here of commerce and this world of paper. The world of paper that exists before that was largely an ecclesiastical one of monks and scribes and sacred texts. But here we have a tidal wave of paper and ink and a whole ecosystem of people whose job is to sit in a chair and copy 500 page documents out in quadruplicate. And I think remembering that fundamental absurdity is the bedrock of which this other absurdity sits. And I don't know. I find the critiques of work interesting. But I don't – that's not the part that resonates with me, I should say.

26:14I find myself oscillating between more of an absurdist angle. Like, isn't this weird? What a strange thought experiment. Like, what if someone woke up as a cockroach? The metamorphosis wouldn't be written for another 60, 70, 19, 15, so 60 years or so, and a nihilistic one, which I'll talk a little bit more about that. Or maybe I'll do it here. Some problems can't be solved. There's a limit to our knowledge. As the liberal humanist project was really cresting, the shadow behind that is there are things we cannot know. There are still mysteries out there. And even if we do not consign them to the divine, that doesn't mean they're a noble.

26:56And what do you do with that? And the thing I thought about here is one of the narrator's problems is what is his obligation to Bartleby? We're going to talk about that a lot. And I think I've told you before, I think I've talked about the BookRab podcast before, there's a part in the gospel where I think it's Judas that says to Jesus, you know, we should be using this money. You're taking these baths and using these oils. Should we just give them to the poor? And Jesus says the poor will be with us always. That really bothered me as a 15-year-old. It's like, gee, really, even Christ is going to take the bath and use the Sephora shit.

27:28And I think as I've gotten older, the thing I've come to understand about that or the useful understanding to me is that you cannot solve the world. There will always be cracks, fissures and brokenness and mysteries and things that you are beyond your individual or even collective can to fix. And I think that's where I kind of come to with Bartleby is he to me, he stands as a manifestation of the imperfectibility and the unknowability of certain parts of lives and certain other people. And that's the part that really gets me. And then that it changes, that the narrator's trying to do his best, as he understands it, to be a good boss, a good neighbor.

28:07He is a creature of conscience, but not one of self-sacrifice. He is not Mother Teresa. If he were a real humanist of a certain kind, maybe he would do something else with Bartleby. But nor is he just going to cast him off. He very much talks about his ethical obligation to not immediately throw him in jail. I think there is a more modern version of this where this is vagarism. I live in Portland, Oregon, and there's a very prevalent unhoused population, and there's a lot of discourse about what shouldn't be, shouldn't be done. And I continually find myself shocked by the number of people who think of it as an aesthetic problem rather than a moral one.

28:45And I can't say that that didn't occur to me here, too. And also I find that very indicting to think of this. the well-intentioned but ultimately impotent good person I think is very interesting to me at the same time but on the other hand Bartleby makes no he makes no effort to improve his station he has it's a one-way communicative street Bartleby takes no responsibility for his well-being and that I think to a modern reader and I'll include myself I find that very indicting of Bartleby. There's sympathy for Bartleby, like the opting out, quiet quitting. But also we're here on Earth and we got to pitch in, Rebecca.

29:25Maybe that's a Midwesterner in me, but that's part of it too.

29:27Jeff:I mean, I think just the fact that Bartleby doesn't tell us anything or tell the narrator anything about why he's doing this is both maddening and really human about this story that you can see Melville doing the like, gosh, aren't we weird? Aren't humans just weird? Or in the Don Draper quote that we both love and refer to all the time, people do things. Like this could be Bartleby the Scrivener's subtitle, People Do Things. Like he comes to work, but then he refuses to work. But he won't leave when he's asked to leave. He's living in the place. And then he goes to jail and doesn't fight it and dies in jail and does suffer the consequences of that choice.

30:06Jeff:But it's a choice he freely made and he did have alternatives. And so what do you do with this? What do you do with that? That alternatives are available to people and people choose not to take them. They choose to pursue their own end or, in Bartleby's case, to allow their own death to come about rather than take the help that's offered to them or, yes, our Midwestern upbringing, try to help themselves. But I don't even think that we can say for sure that Bartleby needs to help himself. We don't know anything about his motivation. Like, it may be fine with him to get thrown in jail and then just die.

30:44Jeff:Like resisting the urge to read this through modern sensibility is the hardest thing and I also think the most rewarding thing about it. Like, if you can put aside your 2025 lens and then realize that even in 1853 when this came out, nobody knew what the hell to do with it. Like, no one knows really what Bartleby is about. The narrator doesn't know. Bartleby may not even know. Melville is not making an argument. So, like, if you Google what is Bartleby the Scrivener about, you're probably going to get, this is a Marxist critique. Like, that is what all of the Googles say. I went down some weird rabbit holes in getting prepped for this show.

31:24Jeff:But Marxism is not widespread for another 50 years after Melville writes this. He doesn't identify that way. Melville identified as a radical individualist and a right wing anarchist. And that sense of anarchy, I think, really pervades this of like, if you just let people do whatever they want, which is that free will stuff that's in the water at the time and is new at the time, then part of that means letting people. There's going to be some strays. Wait, hold on. Here's my hot take. Is Bartleby the Scrivener the original let them theory? Well, yeah, I mean, that's, I think this nod of questions, we're getting into a stray thought, a little bit territory here, but it curls back on itself because then you come back to, you know, the narrator says like, there was something wrong with his soul and I could not approach his soul.

32:18Is there a version of this where the narrator just kind of lets him be in the office? Okay, this is a strange person. He can't take care of himself. He won't take care of himself. In lieu of that, I'll let him sit in the quarter and eat ginger nuts until he, into old age. Like that's a plausible, you know, humanist, ethical kind of a situation. It doesn't seem askable of most people. It's not impossible. It doesn't seem askable of most people.

32:49Jeff:This narrator is already tolerating less than stellar performance from his other employees. Turkey is drunk by noon every day. Yeah, this is not Ebenezer Scrooge, right? They're paid pretty well. He kind of lets him be. It's a good point. Yeah, Turkey's drunk every day by noon. Nippers comes in in a bad mood in the morning. And the two of them, there's a great line where he's like, at least I didn't have to deal with their problems at the same time. Their eccentricity is traded off like guards. And he's like, so this is fine. Only one of them is like one of them is useful at any given time and the other one is kind of useless.

33:24Jeff:But there's always somebody around. And the narrator is struggling as he bumps up against the limits of his own ability to tolerate. Like he can tolerate it that one of these guys is kind of toasted for half of the day. But he finds out that he can't tolerate it, that someone just won't do any work. And he is tormented by it. He's tormented by what does it mean and why would Bartleby do this? But also what does he owe Bartleby? How should he? The unspoken should of this is really powerful. And there's no clear answer. We all have that dream trip we've been wishing we could go on. But too often life, or usually price, gets in the way.

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35:20I think there's a couple of turns. We'll get to them in specific quotes that I think pivot points that are worth looking at in detail. But one of them is the narrator lets him be, you know, in his most preferred not to state in the narrator's office until the point where it starts affecting his business because people are coming to his office like, what the hell is going on with this guy?

35:39Jeff:Why is that guy here when you're not here? The imposition of the social. Personally, the narrator, it's a flawed understanding. Ruinous empathy is a term that we use at work, coming out of Kim Scott's radical candor. But I think that narrator has some sense as a guy who can't fend for himself and he'd rather deal with it in his house than cast him out on the street, which is laudable, noble even. But then his peers, the wider social realm is like, what are you doing? His judgment gets called into question. People don't want to be there. And at that point, he's like, I got to do something else.

36:13And I'm not going to kick him out. He takes, I don't know if it's a coward's way out. I don't know what this would be. Paul Simon's 50 ways to leave your Scrivener. I think kind of a situation where you just leave the office, get out the backjack. And then he could have left him there for the new tenants to deal with. But they come to him and he quite charitably tries to help. So there's a version of this narrator that's quite silly and quite ridiculous. But I find quite a bit of sympathy. And maybe it's my own silliness and ridiculousness and mushiness. I found myself very sympathetic to the narrator trying to do a good thing, but stopping short of radical self-sacrifice or self-abnegation or something like that.

36:52I think that is extraordinarily relatable.

36:55Jeff:Yeah, I love that reading of it. And if you're looking for like an English paper topic for Bartleby the Scrivener, the way that the narrator's descriptions of Bartleby shifts over the course of the story is really interesting. And I think telling of both his own frustration, but also of that imposition of outside perspective and judgment that he experiences, because he starts off assuming that Bartleby is innocent and helpless and assuming that Bartleby is working in good faith and just like kind of for whatever reason can't get there, can't function in this office place. And he's concerned about mental illness at some point.

37:31Jeff:But then he shifts to calling him the unaccountable Bartleby and then later on describes him as the intolerable incubus. And then finally, as he sees him in the yard of the jail where he dies, the wasted Bartleby. And that evolution of perspective on this man and the choices that he's made that also conveniently, perhaps, like as Bartleby is more unaccountable and more of an incubus, frees the narrator from some obligation or helps him feel justified in stepping away. is it's so complex and just so human. This just feels human in its tangliness to me that there are not straight, easy to execute solutions to these problems much as we would like there to be.

38:19All right, Rebecca, straight thoughts. This is one of the great 50 page straight thoughts. There's a lot of ways you could go here. We could go back and forth. Why don't you lead us off?

38:26Jeff:I mean, we've talked some about this, to me at least, it's not the I would prefer not to so much, But the silence and the stillness that are Bartleby's biggest flex. It makes him into this screen that the narrator projects things onto. We as readers project things onto. Like, I love your idea of sit down with your book club and read this live in the moment and then talk about it. Like, you want to talk about this when folks have not had a chance to Google what's it all about. Yes. Great point. beforehand and and what how they interpret the story and how you interpret the story will be an interesting revelation about yourself and the people that you're talking with um i just love that i also can i incept your stray thought real quick before you move on we've been thinking someday we'd like to do a live um zero to well read blank you just everyone on an envelope of everyone's chair is a short story in the first 20 minutes is everyone reading it and it's just a Wild card.

39:24And then we talk about it. Shoot us an email. Zero to Well Read at Book Riot.com if you like that. And I would take short story recommendations. There's a lot of great short stories I haven't read or haven't read in a long time. I think probably 45 pages for everyone sitting in a room is a little long. But I love that idea of not just that you know they've read it, but they haven't been processed. They haven't Wikipedia'd it. And, you know, sort of assume the mantle of someone else's eyes.

39:50Jeff:There's a big trend right now of reading retreats where people do this. Like it's a weekend long and you get there on Friday and find out what book you're reading. And maybe you read the first chapter aloud together. Then everybody goes off to their corners, finishes the book over the course of the day Saturday, gets back together Sunday. But I really like that idea of doing this as short stories and having a moment together to move away from the serious readings and the screen projection Rorschach test nature of it. Melville is up there with Dickens on the Mount Rushmore of character naming. He's a great namer.

40:25Captain Ahab? What is that?

40:26Jeff:Right. Like, the jail grub man's name is Mr. Cutlets, as we said. Like, that's A-plus work. Then the other workers in the office are Nippers, Turkey, and Ginger Nut. And these are nicknames that they've all come by. And the narrator tells us the story of how they earned these nicknames at the beginning of the book. But I just, I loved that. And I love knowing that Melville was probably reading Dickens. You know, like we talked about A Christmas Carol a couple of weeks ago, and that came out 10 years before this did. And Dickens was in the literary zeitgeist at the time. So, like, these guys are also in interesting conversation with each other.

41:02Jeff:I think there's a way of reading this that looks like Bartleby is the bizarro world version of Scrooge's office. I think that's great. And I have one of my thoughts that feels like a presages the modern workplace comedy. You have this affable goon of a boss, drudge tasks. You know, the actual work doesn't really matter. You have the cast of misfit employees. Like Melville does a pretty good job in like two pages giving us this. This is kind of a weird place. Like these are they're not bad people. Like they're not grotesque, but they're pretty odd and they feel like misfits. So you get your cast of misfit employees.

41:38You get your office food dynamics. That's very important to all office workplace. You also get death in prison from voluntary. Oh, that's unusual. That's not usually. That's not something. Is that your understanding, too, that Bartleby just stops eating?

41:51Jeff:I think so. He would just prefer not to do that as well. That's sort of the last thing you can say no to before you expire, I guess. I love that you hit on the bullshit jobs of it all. And just for folks who, like, if you have not read this or you're really wondering, like, what the hell was a Scrivener doing? Oh, great point. We should have done that before. Well, you alluded in the intro to copying things in quadruplicate, but that's it. Like if people had legal documents and they had to be issued in quadruplicate for four different people to sign, guys had to copy those out by hand because mimeos don't exist, copy machines don't exist.

42:29Jeff:And so it's Bartleby and Nippers and Turkey in the office, each copying their own, like one of those triplicates or quadruplicates. And then when they were finished, the boss would stand with the master copy and read it aloud. And each person would check line by line to make sure that their copy was accurate. Like you are this is not an act of creation. It is just an act of reproduction. And I understand how people arrive at like serious political interpretations of this. Like there's a way of reading this where Bartleby seizes the means of production by refusing to produce anything. But I, again, think that's like far too easy of a reading, way too convenient.

43:11I think it's pretty convenient and tend to ally with the reader's politics, I would say, when they make a reading like that. I have here, the narrator does a little like proto-linguistics. I know philology was the major academic discourse of the time, but modern linguistics, he sort of watches, I prefer not to go viral in the office as other people start saying it first sort of ironically, and then they just say it as part of their regular speech. And he notes that, which I thought was really interesting. It's like, oh no, you've got it. It's contagious. Yeah, it just becomes part of how they understand things.

43:45And then one, I don't remember which of the other Scriveners it was, but he has his own little linguistic tics. He always says with submission, right? With submission, I present to you like with all due respect is sort of his version of all due respect is what we have now. Or if I could just say something or no offense or like one of these framing devices we use to try to say something true without getting in trouble. But I thought that was – there's a part of me that wondered if this shows that Barter Blee is not like a real outlier, but he's one end of a spectrum, right? With the narrator and sort of one end sort of more fits in with regular society.

44:23I'm trying to avoid normal here with sort of mean – the median in society like – Typical. typical. And then the three other Scriveners are kind of dots on the way to radical eccentricity that Bartleby sort of represents, just one version of it. But I don't know. I was thinking about that. Did Melville invent the idea of burnout? The phrase itself came to first use exactly 50 years later in 1903. You don't read books about monks getting burnout, though they were copying down the Bible and stuff. What's the first story about burnout, especially as it applies to non-physical labor, like tiredness.

45:04Jeff:And is Bartleby even burned out? We don't know. He's not working. We don't know. Or the possibility of burnout. Maybe if he had the word burnout, it would have been completely different. I have this. If my life consists of copying out 500-page legal documents day after day, I probably would crack as well. Yeah. Yeah. It's understandable. I also have there should be more 50 page things. Yes. I like 50 pages. Yes. It's longer than a short story. You get time to develop things. You can create a snow globe world here and then you're out. Yeah. And there is a full snow globe world. Like the first several pages are the narrator telling us about his own work history and how he came to have this job.

45:46Jeff:And these are the other guys in the office and sort of setting the scene before we get to the Bartleby weirdness. And it does just feel fully like there's not a word that feels extraneous, but it also doesn't feel too short. This is like a perfect length. And it was originally it was in two parts. He published it in the magazine originally in two parts. The first one was anonymous. And then he gets outed in between the first and the second issue. When did that stop? where people would just publish stuff anonymously. Like, I know it still happens. Like, I just wrote about Freedom McFadden for the newsletter the other day, which is a pseudonym, which is different than being anonymous.

46:30Yeah. Like, she's giving interviews to Jenna Bush Hager, but she uses – that's a whole different rant. I don't know what to do about that. Like, her photo is in the New York Times.

46:36Jeff:Yeah, I don't understand it. Anyway, but this idea of you just publishing things anonymously, we talked about it with an episode that definitely is out already. Little Women, of course. Yes. You know, this idea of anonymously, what you can and can't do. But I don't – this is not my period of greatest expertise in American literature, so it's a little confounding. But this idea that you would just publish stuff anonymously is pretty strange. In the year of Our Lord 2025 where everything is about influencers and branding, the idea of doing something anonymously seems not just quaint but paleolithic.

47:07Jeff:Well, twice a year when twice a year when TikTok decides that some author who's writing under a pseudonym must actually be Taylor Swift. This is the thing that we come back to is like, no, Taylor Swift would trade on her name in a time where as everything is about what is your platform and how can you reach people and how influential will you be? that if you have influence, you want to leverage it. Publishers regularly ask authors about their platform and their following. And how are you going to participate in publicizing this? Yeah, I don't know when we stopped doing it, but it was definitely before 2008.

47:45Top five Hermans. Herman Melville, Herman Hess, Herman Munster. And I think I'm out. I've got three. Do you have any more Hermans? Herman's Hermits? I don't know the Herman that owned the Hermits.

47:57Jeff:Oh, I don't either, but my dad owned the Hermits. The relationship to Herman to his Hermits is something I've really understood. I think there's a Herman reference in a Judy Blume book, but it's not a fella. It's a fella's fellow. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, shoot us the email, zerowillread at bookwrite.com. If I've elighted a notable Herman. uh we should tell the lighting notable herman wait for a mailbag episode where we're like and now and other notable herman and now in office hours we're going to run down notable herman honorable mention um edward herman who played uh richard gilmore and last name is no counting i'm just doing last names don't count don't count all right notable quotes rebecca where do you want to go i won't say this before we get started maybe it's because i knew it was short but my highlight to total character count ratio is way off the charts for this one.

48:53Jeff:Oh, me too. Me too. Yeah. And there's so much that feels, at least when you're reading, like, oh, this might turn out to be important for the conversation. I had a lot of underlines. I think it's like all conspiracy theories where the less direct evidence there are, the more you want to pick up scraps of paper and collect them. Yeah. And actually, I think that's a fun way to think about people's interpretations of this story is like whatever your personal conspiracy theory about Bartleby is, you're looking for scraps to put on your red string board. You're just one yarn on the cork board, baby.

49:23Jeff:You really are. The narrator tells us right from the start how he understands himself. And if this is about anyone's perception of anybody else, it's about the narrator's perception of himself throughout. He says, I am a man who from his youth upwards has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. And to him, ease is not the same definition that he sees Bartleby take. He works, but there is a point where he wants the path of least resistance. And he reaches for like, okay, well, now Bartleby is an incubus, and he's sort of beyond my kin to help him. Other notable quotes, the most notable quote, I would prefer not to, Though I think the real goat of the Bartleby canon is at present, I would prefer not to be a little reasonable.

50:14It's pretty good.

50:16Jeff:And then also right up there, nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. Really good. That's really good. I have here, this is the narrator. Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience, or impertinence in his manner, in other words, had there been anything ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises. But as it was, I should have soon have thought of turning my pale plaster of Paris bust of Cicero out of doors. Also, we should bring back plaster of Paris bust of great thinkers and writers. We can modernize them, right?

50:50We can get Zora and some other folks. But having plaster of Paris bust of thinkers, can we do that instead of laugh, love? Live pillows. Can we do that? Target? Great. Love it. Let's see what else to hear. I find it super fascinating that at first Bartleby is extraordinarily productive. So the quote is, at first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. Rebecca Shinsky, I come to you humbly and say, I don't know what to do with that. I don't either. That he went from doing everything to sort of stopping.

51:25Jeff:Like, did he burn himself out or is this a ploy and he's like, let me come in and make a good impression and I'll trick them. And then once I've got him, I'll start preferring not to. And you can make any of these assumptions. Yeah. Sometimes a text will give you little skeleton keys, but sometimes those skeleton keys are actually finger traps. And there's a couple of them left for us here. Here's one. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable. I mean, Melville, it's kind of like in the sixth sense where we're all shocked that Bruce Wallace is dead, even though we saw him get shot in the beginning.

52:02Melville's telling us we cannot understand Bartleby, and everyone's like, well, let me try to tell me what Bartleby's about. I love that. It's amazing.

52:10Jeff:Yeah, it is great. The one that sticks with me, and I'll throw it back to you to wrap this up for quotes for now. This is the real thinker for me. So this is the narrator again. Upon asking him why he did not write, he said that he had decided upon doing no more writing. Why? How now? What next? exclaimed. I do no more writing. No more. And what is the reason? Do you not see the reason for yourself? He indifferently replied.

52:43Jeff:That's one of those, like, that depends on the line reading so much. Because I also sat with that passage and there's a way of like putting intonation on it where Bartleby could sound like he's gaslighting the guy. Like, don't you see the reason? Sounds a whole lot like, well, you know what you did. Yes. If I have to tell you why I'm mad at you, that's part of the problem. And I think at that moment, there's a metafictional thing happening where if you find yourself trying to map reason onto Bartleby, you are now the narrator. Yes. Right? You are in the position that the narrator is of trying to parse, parcel, and package up Bartleby to be understood, quantified, and packed off.

53:28but there's this sort of sphinx-like moment of, wait, am I supposed to see? Do you not see the reason for yourself? And I guess the answer to any riddle like that is sort of war games like is to not play the game. But that's the one where I stopped in my reading tracks to be like, wow, that is something else that Melville is doing to us right there.

53:48Jeff:That's a good one. And you know, like we know that folks are listening to this for English classes. English teachers are listening to this with their classes. So like here is your just like one stop pass to being insufferable but also correct is if your English teacher is standing up there telling you what this story is about. Give them the meta read that actually it's it's unascertainable. And so is Bartleby. Right. It's about not knowing. That's a real that's a real that's a real a-hole English student A-minus paper you could do. You can do worse than A-minus. How many high school students have submitted their Bartleby essay with I prefer not to?

54:27You weren't the first out there 16 year old. We've all done it. We've all thought about it. There's nothing new under the sun.

54:34Jeff:Oh, God. And the Melville House Publishing House has made a jillion dollars on I would prefer not to merch. Like you can you can get that. Right. Let's see. This is is it for you? You had the best take here. And I have a follow on Remora Eel take. Yeah. Just take an hour and read this and then you can say that you've read Melville. I just made a marine biology malapropism. Remorae is the thing that sticks to the bottom of a whale. A moray eel is something else. There is no such thing as a remorae eel. Remorae made me think of Dr. Drake remorae from Friends. Oh, no. It's like when there's a fish on your belly and you're going through the tide, that's a remorae.

55:12That's remorae. That's remorae. So my maybe not is, yeah, if you can't get through this, I don't know what to tell you.

55:19Jeff:It's just, it's super fun. And also it's on Project Gutenberg. It's in the public domain. You can get it for free. I'm sure this would be fun as an audio experience. It would take an hour or so. I thought the whole time about how much I would love to see a good onstage version of it as well. But yeah, just go do it. You got 50 minutes. No. The immortal questions aren't asked. Which of these are primary here? Here are the questions. What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be?

55:54What's the deal with good and evil? I think number one with the bull is what do I owe my neighbor?

56:01Jeff:Yes. Beyond that, Rebecca, I find it a little harder. It's a big step off the staircase for the next one. There's a, like, 2B maybe of what is the good life. Yeah. But that's a reflection of what do I owe my neighbor? Like, as the narrator is looking at Bartleby, he's trying to figure out how much he should be helping him. And some of that is based in the narrator's own definition of what a good life is. Happiness, productivity, all that. Participation in society, all that kind of stuff. But he's wrestling with can I project my own understanding of good life onto Bartleby and what do I do with that?

56:42Jeff:But deeply, deeply about what do I owe my neighbor? Yeah, I think how do I know what I know is nested within that, too. And what can I know is maybe the warrant for the question of how do I know? Like, what is possible to be known? And then how do I know what I know within the realm of the possibly known? Boy, that really got my old analytic philosophy brain. There's your English paper that'll confound everyone, including yourself. But like this just sort of a he runs up against a nothing of understanding. And then all that is left is his machinations and evasive maneuvers to try to deal with the lack of his knowing.

57:17I think there's also something about how to deal with the certainty of death at the end. You know, ah, Bartleby, ah, the humanity. Yeah. Kind of interesting going on there.

57:28Jeff:Up there with last lines, like, ah, Bartleby, ah, humanity. Right up there with, so we beat on boats against the current. I think now, ah, humanity reads as a little over the top, a little melodramatic. It's like the poster for Casablanca, the original one. The logline was, you know by the cast it's important. We can't do that anymore. Bring back melodrama. Really? Yeah, why not? You know how I feel about exclamation points, Rebecca. You're talking to the wrong person. Once a year when you send me a text that has an exclamation point in it, I do feel like I have won the lottery. I feel that. It's probably just cold medication, but you do what you want with that.

58:07Yeah.

58:09Jeff:There's too much performed coolness. Let's bring back a little melodrama. I'm down with it. Oh, I see other people have to perform their coolness. I always forget that, that that's what people have to do. Whereas for you, it just oozes out. Oh, no. It's just not even at stake. It cannot be performed. It's like performing levitation. Yeah, it's just, no, it's not, it's un-possible, as my kids used to say. Spring is here, and the shopping list is long. Time to make a Lowe's run. Buy three bags, get three free of stay green one-cubic-foot garden soil. Plus, right now, members can earn four times the points on an eligible purchase.

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59:25The final show featuring for the first time the Tortured Poets Department. Streaming December 12th, only on Disney+. This episode is brought to you by White Claw Surge. Nice choice hitting up this podcast. No surprises. You're all about diving into tastes everyone in the room can enjoy. Just like White Claw Surge. It's for celebrating those moments when connections have been made and the night's just begun. With bold flavors and 8 % alcohol by volume, unleash the night. Unleash White Claw Surge. Please drink responsibly. Hard seltzer with flavors. 8 % alcohol by volume. White Claw Seltzer Works.

1:00:02Chicago, Illinois. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing?

1:00:07Jeff:I mean, nothing could be more about art and writing than a story about a guy refusing to read back over what he has written. Yeah, the dead letter office. That's a wonderful point. I had forgotten about that completely until reading. so barbably eventually... The one thing we learn about his backstory is he used to work in the dead letter office. And my understanding of that is literally where the person, the people were dead that the letters were going to. And someone, you would go through the letters of the dead and just make sure there was nothing super valuable or you'd write back or I don't actually know the manifestations of the dead letter office.

1:00:41It feels like a Tim Robinson sketch right now. But I find, again... Are we sure this is my hot take? Are we sure Melville's not effing with us with some of this stuff? Like, he's like Taylor Swift Easter egging us with like little bits of things that feel like they could mean something. But they're just Melville like sort of snickering in the corner. Like, oh, man, they're going to try to do so much of this.

1:01:05Jeff:We're not sure of that at all. It feels a lot to me like reading Percival Everett, where like, if you think that you have gotten on to everything the author is doing, my friend, you have lost the plot. You are now a trophy on their wall, if that's what you think. Your sensibility is stuffed and taxidermied. It's a real literary rope-a-dope. Like, if you're like, I know it. I've cracked the code to Bartleby. Melville got you. Art for art's sake I have down here. Bartleby as being completely unproductive and yet still being interesting. I don't know. It's humanity for humanity's sake. Yeah, or just like, you know what, you can exist outside of other people's understanding.

1:01:52That's sort of radical freedom of a way. The last freedom is to do nothing. I don't know. I found that interesting. Art doesn't have to really do anything. It could do whatever it wants, but not that it's without consequences, but it's given a space to say, allowed to say many different things. Could you get most of the gist of this from watching the signal adaptation? There is not one. There have been attempts at it, but there's not a signal one. And I do think like you, I think a good one act play would be pretty cool. I would like to see this.

1:02:19Jeff:I found a record of Paul Giamatti having done a live reading of it at the 92nd Street Y in New York. But I could not find a recording of that. There's a recording of him having a conversation with a Melville scholar afterwards. But like put me in the time machine and take me back to that night and let me see Paul Giamatti do this. Do the reading. Yeah. Movie, musical, TV series or Muppets? I think this is a wonderful Muppet category. I like your Josh O 'Connor, as Bartleby as Josh O 'Connor is having a real moment. I also like Bill Murray. He's just this weird smirking passivity that could be interesting.

1:02:54But really, the star of the show would be Kermit as the narrator getting increasingly frustrated. And wearing his little Dickens hat, like the costumes would be amazing. Like his little period pieces. Oh, yeah. And all the Muppets as the other Scriveners would be terrific.

1:03:08Jeff:Yeah, like drunk Muppets, like who animal as turkey drunk by noon every day. Just a great time. Terrific stuff. Yeah. This is a fun one. The Starvation by Death is a lot of these is a tough look at the end. Although like A Christmas Carol is pretty dark. And having watched that with Muppets not too long ago. Ultimately hopeful, but it can be quite dark. Trivia adaptations, rumors, mystery trivia quotes, etc. Rebecca, what do you have for this? Talked already about how this was published in two parts. It was in Putnam's magazine. But the really interesting thing is this blank screen nature of Bartleby means that the story has been co-opted by all kinds of movements.

1:03:48Jeff:It was co-opted by the Occupy Wall Street movement in the early 2000s. But I found like you could have a really interesting hour on Google with Bartleby. Like there are conversations that refer to him in medical ethics, mental illness, where people are like, maybe Bartleby's just depressed. There's an architectural review journal article that's like drawing on the philosophy of Bartleby the Scrivener. Business magazines have op-eds from people about how Bartleby the Scrivener tells us everything we know or everything we need to know about how the post-COVID return to office push misses the point.

1:04:21Jeff:And that's just a handful of them. Like, there are any industry that you can think of, there is probably some nerd who remembers Bartleby and was like, let me just tie this. And it goes back to that, like, because it's a Rorschach test, because Melville doesn't tell us anything about it, you can just make any argument that you want with a little textual cherry picking. But I was really just kind of staring at my laptop screen like, what are we doing here? Architectural review and Bartleby the Scrivener? I'm going to get to a point here. It's going to take me 30 seconds to get there. I apologize.

1:04:58Even the apology is already 10 seconds. One of my favorite factoids is the state in the U.S. with the lowest, highest point is Delaware. Okay. I think we could do a segment of the smartest dumb take of this. And I think you found like six here. Yeah, yeah. Or we could do the inverse, the dumbest smart take. Everybody's got a take. A dumb take that goes all the way back around to actually being clever. um my it's mine is more fitting of the nature of this story is more of an absence is as far as i can tell we have no record of melville's thoughts about this story at all which i think is the the blank wall that allows us to all graffiti all over it with our musings and thoughts how much worse how how much more impoverished would we we be if melville says yeah it was just kind of a gas and it doesn't mean anything or you know what i worked for this boss and i thought about the drudgery of modern America.

1:05:50Isn't that, aren't we poor for having that written down somewhere?

1:05:54Jeff:I totally agree. This is in one of my hot takes, but that anybody who's ever complained about a book having an ambiguous ending should have to read this. Or maybe this is like the Dante's hell punishment for people who complain about ambiguous endings is just read Bartleby forever and struggle with it. It doesn't work nearly as well. I don't think really it works at all if Melville makes an argument on the page or goes off on an author tour and starts talking about, like, well, here's actually what I was trying to achieve with Bartleby. Like, this writing a thing, putting it out into the world, and then letting it speak for itself and letting everybody be baffled by it, maybe sitting in the corner, as you were saying, chuckling over, like, watch him go.

1:06:34Jeff:Watch him go. Well, those bastards out there running around now. Yeah, the intellectual dead end that is the likable versus unlikable character thing, not that people can't read however they want, But there's not an interesting conversation to be happy. You say, I didn't like any of the characters. Really just ends, it's a stop sign of conversation or inquiry or sort of meaning making. So I like that that's not even taken here. I guess we're into hot takes. My related hot take is maybe writers should talk less about what their work means. Yes, yes, yes. Which for people who are interested in talking to writers and understanding this stuff is sort of a contradiction of some kind.

1:07:09I think I'm interested in hearing writers talk about what they were wrestling with. But I guess we talked about that there are questions, there are works that answer and works that ask. And the ones that say, that ask a question or pose a statement or conundrum are more interesting. And if anything, knowing less about a writer because they weren't all that famous at the time, like Shakespeare or, well, that's more conditions of, you know, we just weren't keeping records for writers and playwrights back then. And like it really opens up space for us to play, which, again, I'd rather Melville got to reap the rewards of his later fame for his sake.

1:07:46But for our sake, the paucity of meanings and, you know, here's what he actually meant is pretty, pretty great for me. What else do you have for hot takes?

1:07:56Jeff:Oh, I mean, in really lazy hot takes, this is a story about boundaries and why they matter. But the narrator is like he's got and he's also just a terrible manager. Like if this is a story about a toxic work environment, it's not a story about capitalism being bad. It's a story about how like if you let guys come to work drunk and you let them be cranky all the time and you let them get away with it the first time they tell you that they would prefer not to do something. Of course, they're going to escalate it as far as they can. So you think you're saying that this story is that Ginger now is getting away with too much.

1:08:29And Bart was like, look what I can do. I can starve myself to death in prison.

1:08:33Jeff:Yeah. He gets hired. He's working like a dog. He's very, he's tireless and he's got high productivity. Like his output is high at the beginning. And then he looks around, like this is my lazy take, but he looks around. Your dumbest smart take or smartest dumb take? Yeah, this is my dumbest smart take that he looks around and then he sees like, well, this guy's drunk by noon every day. And this other guy's cranky. And the third guy is like 11 years old and spends most of his time going to get people cakes. So like, what could I get away with? Yeah, if you don't look at it directly, you've missed that a 12-year-old is working in this office full-time.

1:09:06That's the real horror of this thing.

1:09:12Hot take. I don't know if this is a hot take. I would prefer not to the most famous line in American literature.

1:09:21Jeff:It's got to be up there. It has to be on the leaderboard. Like, what else is up there? Because a lot of the ones that people quote often are actually like Brit-lit. English, yeah. Yeah. The Dickens stuff and the Jane Austen, you know, it's a truth universally acknowledged. A bunch of Shakespeare. I mean, there's just a lot. Call Me Ishmael is also up there. Call Ishmael, that's also Melville, yeah. Right, yeah. I don't know. Email zero to wellread at bookriot.com. Hot take, if you have a single coherent reading of this, you're doing it wrong. Agreed. I already said writers should talk less about what their work means.

1:09:58Is this The Raven for white-collar workers? So The Raven, we haven't talked about on the show, Edgar Allan Poe's very bizarre tale of obsession about a raven that just keeps saying the same thing over Nagovan and drives a narrator mad. Came out eight years before Barber be the Scrivener. Melville would have certainly have read The Raven. It was a huge sensation. I don't know. It feels like there is something there. Interesting. Kind of interesting. And my hottest take is the naming of the short story and the positioning and the fascination of Bartleby confuses us. Because what we should be trying to understand is not Bartleby, but we should be trying to understand the narrator.

1:10:36Jeff:Yes. So that's my hottest take. That's a good take. Anything else on your hot takes you want to get in? No, I think I've gotten them all off my chest today. Yeah. Okay. I like this too. Rita likes. Tough one. This is a tough one. I have, well, you had Kafka first, so why don't you talk about Kafka? I mean, it's not the same, but a similar kind of dislocated, slightly alienating, absurdist. Like, as you alluded to it at the top of the show, what if a guy woke up one day and he was a cockroach? Like, the feeling of— What if a guy woke up one day and just didn't? Yeah, right. The feeling of reading this is kind of similar to me to the feeling of reading Kafka.

1:11:19Jeff:And that's the best place I can get for read-alikes with a story like this. I think maybe also Twain. Like Mark Twain is way funnier than we remember him. Especially if the last time you read Twain was in English class when you were 15. Like it's a lot sharper and a lot funnier. And that Melville is working on so many levels. Twain was too. They're doing different things. But if the thing you're looking for is that like the humor written through it, Twain is a good way to go. But there's nothing that's just like a— Yeah, like in Tori's Jumping Frog or even like a Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court have this sort of—it's zanier, I think, whereas Melville can be darker, macabre, and this one feels like almost nihilistic.

1:11:58Jeff:I mean, maybe it is—maybe this is like, just go to Percival Everett today. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I have Ital Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, The Baron in the Trees, Invisible Cities. Sort of strange, elusive meetings. You've got narrative questions. They're quite short. There's a fable-like quality to Bartleby. I think a fable of Wall Street may be an interesting, if I were to amend this subtitle, much like A Fairy Tale of New York has a sort of, there's a version of this that exists outside of our normal being and understanding. And I have The Raven again. I keep thinking about The Raven as being a, The Raven ultimately becomes about the narrator's reaction to this bird and not about the bird itself.

1:12:42And I can't help but think they're writing contemporaneously. And they're just both antagonized.

1:12:48Jeff:Yeah. Yeah. That's a good way to think about it. So, I mean, Poe's main characters get obsessed with something that's not even real, let alone a raven that says never more. Over and over again. Cocktail party crib sheet. Three to five takeaways. Rebecca, go for it. You don't need to read Moby Dick to know that Melville was a genius. You just need to see him pull off a trick with Bartleby the Scrivener that would have been 100 % insufferable in almost anybody else's hands. When you say insufferable, I think I get in my gut what you mean, but what do you mean by that? He's so masterful at pulling our strings.

1:13:21Jeff:He is just yanking us around on what does it mean? What do you think about Bartleby? Maybe you've got it figured out. What should the narrator do? What's the right thing? And that anybody, almost anybody else trying to manipulate a reader in that way, you feel the manipulation, you feel the effort. And like the hardest thing for a writer to do is make a hard trick look easy. And this just feels so effortless from Melville. Yeah, I agree. It would be a didactic bore in most other people's hands of that kind. But I've got, let's see. Bartleby stops working. It's not that he never does. In fact, he's super industrious until he isn't.

1:14:03And I think that he starts out being industrious matters to the shape because if he gets hired and does nothing, he just gets fired right away. Like it's important to the shape of the narrator's empathy or whatever you call it, sympathy, that he sees that there is some potential for potential in him. And that he stops midway is meaningfully different that he just never does the work at all. He's not a goldbricker. He doesn't come across as like a con man, Jean-Ralphio-like trickster trying to get a paycheck. Something else is happening. Oh, you had one more. You had one more here.

1:14:37Jeff:Oh, just the kids did not invent the I do not dream of labor interpretation of things. I don't think that's the correct or full interpretation of this story, but that's been around. Yeah. The idea that working sucks, newsflash has been around. Yeah. Or can suck. A final beat, our zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one to 10, with 10 being the highest. Our five categories are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd read cred, oh damn factor. Historical importance is a very, these are all difficult to parse. Let me lay out some consternations about this, and then I'll let you do the hard thing of giving it a number.

1:15:24But first of all, it can't be 10, right? Because Moby Dick is a 10. Shakespeare is a 10. It's not that. On the other hand, we just said this is one of the most, if not the most famous short story in American literary history. The Lottery, I think, is way up there. But Bartleby is well known. I would prefer not to. It's taught everyone in English class. On the other hand, does it lead to anything? It's like this was the beginning of the Scrivener movement. Rebecca, what do you do with historical importance for Bartleby?

1:15:51Jeff:I am so biased because I just love this story so much. I think probably it's like a six. It's over a five for me. Oh, I'm giving you more than that. I was going to go seven and a half, eight. Great. Let's do it. I was kind of sandbagging there. Let's give it an eight. Eight. Readability. I'm inclined to be in the eight, nine range as well. I agree. Let's go 8.5. Eight and a half. Yeah. Current relevance of central questions. This is a trick one for us because that presumes, And we're not going to fall into this La Brea Tarpe of saying we know what the questions are. Well, hold on. If the real question above it all is can you understand other people and the choices they make and why they do things, then it's permanently relevant.

1:16:35I think the answer to this is the current relevance of several questions. The score is yes.

1:16:41Jeff:It's all of the numbers, everything from zero to 10 at the same time. It's an irrational number. It's like the square root of negative one. Is that the one that's an irrational number? It's been way too long since I was came with it. Let's say that. We're going to call that the current relevant is the square root of negative one. Great. Book nerd read cred. I think this is high. A lot of people are assigned it, though. I think that's the only mitigating factor to that, but I agree with you. I think it's high for the fact that the reference to the quote is in literary lingo and culture. Like the joke that you told your friend.

1:17:19Jeff:Yes. You don't ever age out of being able to make that joke in book nerd circles. Like, that's a sort of lingua franca. The shibboleth of your nerddom. Yeah, shibboleth, exactly. Yes. So what do you want to do with that then? Let's give it an eight. Eight, yeah. Oh, damn factor. I think this is pretty high. I do too. To create this effect and this palimpsest of head-scratching awesomeness is maybe for me the highest goal of writing, he said, trailing off. I'm going to give it like nine, nine and a half. And that you could make a career of reading this over and over and over and finding different things in it over and over and over.

1:18:06Jeff:You could do this in your book club once a year. Like we could come back and do Bartleby every year and find different things in it to talk about. That's a high factor. Nine, nine and a half. Yeah, which means it scores extremely high, except we don't know if one of the cards in the deck is a joker. And we don't know if that's a high or low or we win or we lose. You draw the joker when you're playing the game of reading Bartleby the Scrivener. Rebecca, you can join us for detailed show notes, our free newsletter and membership options at patreon.com slash ZO2WellRead. That will include bonus content, some of which we're about to make right now.

1:18:45We'll do a little post-show conversation for subscribers over there. You can also follow us on the social at ZO2WellRead podcast, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok. I hope by now we have some stuff up. We'll see. We're coming to you from the past right now. As always, email us at ZeroToWellRead at BookWare.com for comments, questions, resources, links, requests, whatever. We'll take them all. There is no dead letter office over there at that email inbox. Thanks so much to Thrift Books for sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read. And Zero to Well Read is also a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network.

1:19:25Rebecca, I always prefer to podcast with you, but thank you so much for joining me today.

1:19:29Jeff:What a delight.

1:20:00Jeff:Thank you. apps today in app or at order.sweetgreen.com available at participating locations only.