Lives of the Saints

The following essay was written by me in 1994 while I was still a student at Temple University. Besides its brilliant defense of Herman Melville, customs clerk nonpareil, this piece contains a weird foreshadowing of a major catastrophe that befell the United States in the decade after its appearance. I have no explanation for it, and I am sure the reader will wonder with me at the essay's uncanny synchronicity with forces unseen.

I used to read Moby Dick on buses and subways going to and from a dreary job in a video rental store. Besides brooding about vanity and implacable Fate, I often thought about that Herman Melville, his twenty years as a customs agent. Surely, I knew more about the author than I needed to read him, but I used to imagine the old salt found comfort in his obscure clerkship after all those years of trying to hack it in the arts community. Melville was an inspiration to me on endless, unvarying commutes, crammed elbow to elbow with barely sentient humanity.

That Herman Melville rated himself some kind of hero is inconceivable. In fact, his is a case where even the most admiring critic has difficulty reconciling the greatness of the work with the mediocrity of the life. In The Creators, a pernicious, 800-page Lives of the Saints for idolators of Art, Daniel J. Boorstin struggles to explain Melville's audacious achievement. "[N]o Melvillian mystery is more tantalizing than how and why he became a writer," Boorstin decides (Boorstin 645). "We might say that Melville was an 'accidental' author, an inspired amateur. Or less charitably, that he came to writing as an act of desperation– for lack of anything better to do" (646).

These absurdities are full of the crude assumption that one must become an author the way one becomes a prophet, by answering an unmistakable voice whose origins are divine. Melville wrote the archetypal American novel, but the impulse to do it was native to his own frail circumstances, not the Heaven of artists in Boorstin's pantheon. Why invent a category of mentalisms to account for an effect that can be explained empirically? At the dirty street-level of subsistence, all behavior is commerce with the environment. According to his opportunities, a man becomes sailor or mutineer, dinner for cannibals, or a prisoner in the brig, a customs agent or the Toast of New York. By accident, one may become the greatest novelist of the century or a footnote in an unfinished dissertation. Nothing is served by the popular myth that writing is a sacred vocation.

Accident brings the author to the writing desk. It intrudes again when a reader tries to deduce the man from his work. For instance, the Norton Anthology of American Literature (1980) requires a few short stories and poems, all written after 1853, (the year "Bartleby" was published and two years after Moby Dick), to stand for Melville's entire achievement. Facts that are extraneous to Melville, the fire at his publisher's warehouse that destroyed copies of his adventure stories and rare copies of "The Whale" or the spatial limitations of textbooks and college surveys, become a major determinant in our understanding of the man and his message.

The Melville of the adventure novels and Moby Dick is not the same author who writes "Bartleby, The Scrivener." Ishmael begins Moby Dick expansively, with a global range of possibilities stretching away from Nantucket, while the narrator of "Bartleby" assures us his remarks will be limited to a puny fiefdom of copy clerks. It is sad to think a reader will pursue Melville in Norton's anthologized edition, when the optimism of his embarkment had eroded to a fine dust.

At this point, I want to assure the reader that the essay unveils the aforementioned, eerie premonition of a national catastrophe shortly, and he or she will be amazed and confused all in good time.

Additionally, I should break in on the essay to say the next page of the original, page three, has sadly been lost, whether by an oversight at a copy machine or because I loaned it to a sympathetic friend for feedback. I honestly don't remember. Be that as it may, I would prefer not to produce a true bridge between the last sentence on page two and the first sentence on page four; instead, I would remark that the missing section moves the essay along to a direct critique of "Bartleby." I use the story to show how the Herman Melville of his short fictions is no longer a young man trying to grasp the universe and the potentially grand vistas and extraordinary adventures it contains.

Instead, the author becomes a kind of frontier Franz Kafka whose literary turf is existential man, desperately facing a claustrophobic reality which is easier written about than observed. He has learned on the instrument of slow torture in Kafka's "The Penal Colony," that everyday life is a cryptic mix of metaphor and asphalt, concreteness (the empty icebox and the landlord pounding on the door for his money) and incantation (for example, the invisible, restraining power of language artifacts that define "old" money and "new" money in hide-bound, mid-19th century New York).

[The manager of the office where Bartleby declines to do any work while refusing to give up his job title, lacks] the will to impose discipline on his idiosyncratic staff. The improbable Turkey, who blots pages with ink and ginger cake, and Nippers, who cannot sit comfortable at a desk, are completely incompatible with their service, or at least half so. When Bartleby arrives, the worsening dysfunction of the office soon earns the condemnation of other members of the legal brotherhood but does not disturb the inertia of the weak-willed lawyer and supervisor. He will not replace his clerks.

Melville describes the inevitable disintegration of purpose which accompanies everyday friction with other beings. Humanity coexists awkwardly with the lofty roles people aspire to play. We have at least job titles, even though no actual accomplishment legitimizes those convenient labels. Perhaps Melville believed the office of "writer" is the most shameful pretense of all. Like the narrative of the deedsmen, it projects itself beyond the influence of critics, sentimentality, or fear while wearing the semblance of immutable virtue.

The narrator's case shows the running down of the will from too much comfort, "prudence" and "method" (Melville 636). In Bartleby, the will persists in such abundance it is damned obstinacy. The gaunt clerk defies the very foundation of his post as Ahab perverted his commission by choosing to contend with a single brute whale. The Law is a pattern one must trace exactly. It binds the will. At first Bartleby refuses to repeat the word with his voice, and inevitably he won't copy it with his pen. The will, what Bartleby would prefer to do, is a ridiculous excess that leads to extinction. The image of the would-be scribe disdaining to repeat what has already been written recalls the writer who refuses to repeat the same adventure tales to please his audience. The nobility of the gesture is immediately swallowed up by its absurdity: a silent writer contemplating a blank wall is no writer at all, a paradox which Melville sums up completely in the story's title.

The ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides considered action itself to be paradoxical and, by extension, all plots and stories. Since the many are an indivisible whole, the apparent diversity of objects and their movement hither and yon is impossible, an illusion created in the imperfect human mind. "Bartleby, the Scrivener" expresses Melville's adherence to classical metaphysics. He will not write a giddy popular fiction full of novel happenings but only this claustrophilic thesis on the impossibility of action and individuality.

The characters in "Bartleby" are truly compartments in a systematic whole. The continuity of the narrator and the scribe is evident in the way Bartleby is never allowed to leave the law office. "One prime thing is this–he was always there," the lawyer says, remarking on Bartleby's "steadiness, his freedom from all dissipation...his great stillness" (649). Experience disproves the assumption that Bartleby must venture out sometimes from the walled-in darkness of the firm.

In the Sunday episode and following Bartleby's "dismissal," the lawyer's attempts to find his office emptied of the cadaverous clerk are like a man's conscious thoughts trying to sneak up on his own body. Every aspect of the lawyer and his recording clerk seems to refer to a constant selfhood contained within a husk of sense. The office partitions that prevent seeing but permit talk, the numerous walls throughout the tale and the constant, unidentified narrative all suggest to me the persistent internal monologue by which we identify ourselves, imprisoned in a corpse. Our bondage to this phantom, though unconfirmed by the senses, is as permanent as the narrator's connection to Bartleby, that is, until death:

Gradually I slid into the persuasion that these troubles of mine touching the scrivener had all been predestined from eternity, and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an all-wise Providence, which it was not for a mere mortal like me to fathom. Yes, Bartleby stay there behind your screen, thought I; I shall persecute you no more; you are harmless and noiseless as any of these old chairs; in short, I never feel so private as when I know you are here. At last I feel it; I penetrate to the predestined purpose of my life. I am content. (662)

In the same way Melville presents a false twinning of the narrative consciousness and Bartleby's pale cadaver, he creates a chimerical division of the physical functions of the law office. The copyists and their employer fulfill the medieval prescription of the humours. Red-faced Turkey is governed by an excess of blood that makes him sanguine; Nipper is bilious, prone to indigestion and discontentment. Their employer embodies drained out lethargy. Movement in such a system is impossible, and Melville's solipsistic parable has all the drama of a body getting stiff. The illusion of plot in "Bartleby" is a "diseased ambition" (639), like that which causes Nippers to grind his teeth and grind the legs of his desk against the floor. The story gives a convincing display of energy, tides of humours sloshing in a systematic frame, but it goes nowhere.

In Melville, we find the premature emergence of a fiction of entropy (not to mention, in the chapters conveying encyclopedia abstracts to gloss the fiction, a postmodern sensibility). The infinite possibilities of story are denied; fortune is replaced by amputation and eventual paralysis. Melville's entire career conforms to the entropic path of the sun that governs Turkey's ineffectiveness. South Seas heroics and sailor's yarns carried their teller to a bright meridian followed by a long and slow decline. "What I feel most moved to write," Melville complained, "that is banned–it will not pay" (Boorstin 652). He persisted without an audience and produced a series of "dead letters," like those short-falling missiles in "Bartleby"'s denouement.

Melville's fiction had no true precedent, and it alienated him from his own time. In 70 years, some of his obsessions appear in Kafka. How similar to the scrivener's simple "I would prefer not" is the fey revelation in "A Hunger Artist"? About his interminable fasting, the artist admits "I couldn't find the food I liked" (Kafka 255). Kafka makes no audience for a literature of declining possibilities, and the reception for Gaddis, Wallace, and Pynchon since the 1950s is only a little better. Do we know what it was like to be Melville in 1853, an anachronistic, metaphysical freak; a shrill Cassandra, borrowing to live, depending on the depleted charity of anxious friends and family, eating grace, refusing safety and routine like some crusty saint?

I do step into the car that beckons to me in the ______block of East 26th street, and the bus jerks upwards, leaving Melville's old neighborhood. The object of Clarel's pilgrimage remained obscure, obliterated by a scaffolded renovation. Knocked about by my vehicle's sudden lift skyward, I sprawl on a bench. What I had been searching for no longer matters. Below, rowhouses on Grammercy Park dissolve into jagged blocks, and then, streets like black knife strokes on a rough, gray board receding from view.

The capsule has reached its apex. The engine sputters and dies. Falling through miles of howling space, only one landmark stands plainly against the skyline– a Colossus of Rhodes straddling the docks. For this destination, growing larger and larger in the windshield panorama, we do not need an address. Human achievement visibly surges towards it, as if the great furnace of commerce requires twin gigantic chimneys to modulate its flames. The bus plummets towards the complex at the base of the towers' glinting shafts and I realize I know the precise place I will meet my destiny. I read the words, "U.S. Customs House," on a very impressive sign. They are the last words that pass through my consciousness before [silence finally puts an end to all].

(1994)