re-reading bartleby silence

Re-Reading The Silenceof BartlebyDouglas Anderson

It probably came as no surprise to Dan McCall that The

Silence of Bartleby, his slender tribute to the pleasures of reading

Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall

Street” (1853), elicited a resounding silence from his professional

colleagues in the years that followed its 1989 publication. A

largely favorable notice appeared in The Yearbook of English

Studies for 1992. In the same year, in the pages of this journal,

Andrew Delbanco’s review essay, “Melville in the ‘80s,” devoted

a paragraph to McCall’s book, praising it as “the single most sen-

sitive response to Melville’s genius” since Warner Berthoff’s

study 30 years earlier (715). Delbanco himself was on the point of

beginning a literary biography of Melville. Surprisingly—or

perhaps not surprisingly—McCall’s work makes a negligible

appearance, at best, in the annotation to Melville: His World and

Work (2005) and little discernable impression on the broad docu-

mentary landscape that Delbanco ultimately depicts in the body of

this book. Why such a sensitive and responsive work of criticism

should exert so little influence on a major biography by an

eminent scholar of American literature is part of the mystery that

lies behind the curious reception of McCall’s book.

With the two exceptions noted above, The Silence of

Bartleby subsided quietly into the bibliographic depths, reappear-

ing now and then amid the schools of footnotes that dart beneath

the surface of an occasional journal article or book chapter, often

as one of the most agile and brilliant of its evanescent species,

though seldom singled out for special regard. The reasons for this

disappearance point both to tactical misjudgments on McCall’s

part and to a type of disciplinary blindness on the part of his

Douglas Anderson is Sterling-Goodman Professor of English at the University of

Georgia. He is the author, most recently, of William Bradford’s Books: Of

Plimmoth Plantation and the Printed Word (2003).

doi:10.1093/alh/ajn021Advance Access publication May 13, 2008# The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

The Silence of Bartleby,

Dan McCall. Cornell

University Press, 1989.

academic audience. The complaint that lies behind his sometimes

truculent critical performance is, in large measure, an outgrowth

of a deep divide between the practical life of the classroom and

the professional imperatives that shape much contemporary

scholarship—between the delights of reading and the preemptive

necessity to explain or justify what we read.

In Delbanco’s words, The Silence of Bartleby amounts to “a

writer’s protest against the technologia of criticism” (715). Every

feature of this assessment, including its italics, helps characterize

the rewards and challenges posed by McCall’s book, beginning

with his unusual willingness to differ, quite openly, with many of

the most prominent scholarly voices of the time. One can hardly

expect a warm reception from an intellectual establishment whose

perceived deficiencies one has cheerfully and repeatedly exposed.

The list of literary critics and historians whose work McCall finds

wanting is long and distinguished. He gives brusque treatment to

Michael Gilmore’s suggestion that Bartleby’s story is an allegory

of the alienated artist (90–91). Michael Rogin’s interest in linking

Melville’s enigmatic scrivener with Thoreau’s passive resistance

to cultural norms strikes McCall as “wrongheaded” (59). Robert

Weisbuch, William Dillingham, and Ann Douglas, in McCall’s

view, all fall victim to versions of the same deep professional liab-

ility: they cannot credit the narrator of Melville’s story—the “safe”

and secure chancery lawyer—with any generous instincts or

actions in his long confrontation with a mysterious, intractable

employee. By default, these critics appear to affirm, the lawyer is

a villain, given over to what Douglas terms “sadistic pity” and

“onanistic indulgence.” McCall quotes Douglas’s invidious

phrases with mischievous glee (105).

Though he repeatedly cites and admires Newton Arvin’s

brief Melville biography, McCall does not hesitate to take Arvin

to task for viewing Bartleby’s response to his existential predica-

ment as Melville’s personal manifesto of creative independence

and its attendant despair. Richard Chase, McCall suggests, is

guilty of a similar offense (91–92). McCall’s merciless broom

sweeps up fugitive bits of Jay Leyda’s and Herschel Parker’s work

on Melville and bustles it too off to the dustbin. The Silence of

Bartleby begins with an appreciative account of H. Bruce

Franklin’s exploration of biblical echoes in Melville’s story, but

by the end of McCall’s book, even Franklin receives an enthusias-

tic slippering for abandoning the high promise of The Wake of the

Gods: Melville’s Mythology (1963) and conscripting “Bartleby”

into the epic proletarian struggle that Franklin himself had come

to find all-consuming during the public trauma of his opposition to

the Vietnam War (4–6, 110–12). Degraded capitalists and heroic

The complaint that lies

behind [McCall’s]

sometimes truculent

critical performance is,

in large measure, an

outgrowth of a deep

divide between the

practical life of the

classroom and the

professional imperatives

that shape much

contemporary

scholarship[.]

480 Re-Reading The Silence of Bartleby

workers may well be gearing up for class warfare throughout the

literary landscape of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but as

far as the subtle fabric of Melville’s story is concerned, McCall

will have none of it.

Delbanco’s decision to characterize McCall’s own tone as a

“protest,” however, is instructively off target. Nor would McCall

be likely to accept the term “technologia” as an accurate diagnosis

of some widespread professional affliction that he hopes to treat.

As the title of his first chapter aptly indicates, McCall sees himself

primarily as “swimming through libraries,” sifting the higgledy-

piggledy extracts that he collects along the way and testing them

against Melville’s prose—an expressive medium in which

McCall’s imagination is thoroughly immersed. He makes plain

that he is, first and foremost, an English teacher, and he never hes-

itates to refer to some memorable classroom exchange in an effort

to describe his intellectual posture or his aesthetic passions. He

listens to his students and to his published colleagues as he navi-

gates the stacks with a copy of The Piazza Tales (1856) in hand,

exploring the responsive community that any great work of literary

art evokes.

The voices that make themselves heard at McCall’s virtual

seminar are a diverse lot. He visits the back issues of the most

prestigious critical quarterlies, as well as the most prominent

monographs and biographies, but he takes delight as well in exam-

ining the implications of an article that appeared in The Bulletin of

the West Virginia Association of College English Teachers linking

Bartleby with the symptoms of infant autism (48). He samples a

range of Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic criticism that casti-

gates the limitations of the bourgeois reader, speculates on the

intriguing consequences of recasting Bartleby as a woman, or

highlights the family romance that seems to play itself out in the

story’s central relationships (44, 61, 141). None of these

approaches finally helps McCall explain the story’s allure, the “lei-

surely little excursion into the uncanny” that Melville’s language

is repeatedly able to achieve using the simplest, least spectacular

verbal means (143), but he almost never dismisses an interpretive

idea or an unexpected reference out of hand. Seasoned teacher that

he is, McCall welcomes any potential source of insight, any contri-

bution to the flow of discussion, however far afield it may appear

to range.

One representative exchange with a graduate student instructs

McCall in the naturalistic basis that lies behind Melville’s descrip-

tion of Moby Dick’s climactic attack on the Pequod—a long way

from the chancery offices of Wall Street, but relevant to McCall’s

larger pedagogical aims. The whale’s strangely vibrating head, the

American Literary History 481

broad crescent of foam that he drives before him, the weird

“subterraneous hum” that intensifies as he approaches the ship, all

portray with perfect scientific accuracy the operation of a sperm

whale’s sonar, the method it uses to find its food in the pitch-black

depths where it feeds. Before turning to literary study, McCall’s

student had spent some years at the Scripps Oceanographic

Institute in La Jolla, where cetacean behavior was presumably part

of the curriculum (55). One less mystery, perhaps, in a great book

of mysteries, but McCall thinks otherwise. Moby Dick is not

hunting squid in this momentous scene, or if he is, it is the

many-armed crew of the whale ship itself, Ahab’s prosthetic

hands, that he targets. The mind hums with a special kind of

hunger as it absorbs such details, reshaping merely physical into

figurative experience—a shorthand (or an allegory, McCall

suggests) for the processes of reading and knowing that The

Silence of Bartleby ultimately explores.

In the course of his eclectic scholarly journey, McCall culls

observations from A Manual of Suggestions for Teachers Using

Short Stories for Study, from the Annali Institutio Universitaria

Orientale, from Strunk and White in The Elements of Style, and

from Harrison Hayford’s unpublished 1945 Yale dissertation—all

participants in what he terms the “fantasia of literary gossip” that

Melville’s story has generated since the end of World War II (14).

McCall sets out to savor the variety of critical performances that

his wide net takes in. Indeed, he savors the uneven performance

history of the story itself: the adaptations of “Bartleby” for tele-

vision, movies, and opera to which McCall repeatedly attends but

consistently finds disappointing, in large part because the adaptors

are compelled to provide some kind of vocal content for

Bartleby’s silence—a necessity that dilutes the story’s pivotal

mystery. To put words in Bartleby’s mouth is to “dishonor” him,

Elizabeth Hardwick insists (qtd in McCall 76)—a response that

forms one of the critical touchstones of McCall’s book.

Had he chosen to do so, McCall might easily have linked

this determination to refrain from the practice of critical ventrilo-

quism with an impressive philosophical lineage: “theorists of the

negative,” in the words that Paul Armstrong applied to an ambi-

tious anthology of these theorists’ recent work, Languages of the

Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary

Theory (1989), edited by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, in

the same year that The Silence of Bartleby was published. Since

that time, a subdiscipline of silence studies appears to have

emerged, experiencing a measure of quiet but steady growth. Its

members might include Janis Stout’s Strategies of Reticence:

Silence and Meaning in the Works of Jane Austen, Willa Cather,


Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion (1990), Leona Toker’s

Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional

Narrative (1993), Silvia Montiglio’s Silence in the Land of Logos

(2000), and most recently Zeese Papanikolas’s American Silence

(2007). Set in this context, McCall’s book begins to seem like a

pioneer on at least one frontier of critical technologia, rather than

the protest of a disaffected reactionary.

A moment’s reflection on titles alone, however, suggests a

key distinction in critical procedure that sets McCall’s work apart.

Unlike those colleagues who otherwise share his interest in the

expressive possibilities of silence, McCall does not take for

granted that the unsayable must have its own languages, its own

strategies of persuasion and standards of eloquence, its own

national inflection. His book does not address Bartleby’s silence as

if it were a singular expression of individual will, a performance

of some special kind, the enactment of a vow, or the fulfillment of

a mystical process. The thesis, in McCall’s view, is that there is no

thesis. Most of his own energy—like Bartleby’s—is devoted to

repeated acts of interpretive refusal.

He appreciates Franklin’s treatment of Melville’s story in

light of Christ’s great injunction to charity in Matthew 25, but he

is not inclined to align Bartleby’s strange behavior with Christ’s

enigmatic stance before Pilate. McCall himself points to Ralph

Waldo Emerson’s account of those aloof and lonely

Transcendentalists who withdrew “from the common labor of the

market and the caucus . . . to find their tasks and amusements in

solitude” (qtd in McCall 6–7). Surely, McCall suggests, this

posture of principled restraint—“We perish of rest and rust,”

Emerson’s idealists cry, “but we do not like your work” (8)—lies

at the core of Melville’s fictional conception: a copyist who

refuses to copy, a worker who declines to work. But the search for

sources and analogues to Melville’s plot ultimately strikes McCall

as beside the point: “How far can we go with all this?” (9).

Emerson’s cultural separatists bask in a heroic self-image that is

completely alien to Melville’s hero. Bartleby’s solitude is filled

with no tasks and no amusements; it is the nothing that is simply

there, thwarting theorists of the negative at every turn but growing,

paradoxically, more replete with emotional energy the more the

story’s narrator engages with this ghostly intrusion upon his safe

life. Edgar Allan Poe would have been the ideal reader for this

quiet, domestic variant of “William Wilson” (1839) or “The Cask

of Amontillado” (1846), but he had been dead for four years when

Melville’s muted New York inversion of those exotic fables

appeared.


Another person’s silence is an excruciating temptation—a

vessel crying out to be filled. McCall’s approach to the enigma is

to rewrite Bartleby’s story itself as a parable of modern criticism,

rather than a parable of Wall Street: to embody Melville’s plot in

his own prose, casting himself as the befuddled chancery lawyer

who tells the tale, amidst a profusion of clerkly assistants whose

work he cites, and partly sympathizes with, but whose judgments

he consistently finds himself unable to embrace or to execute.

Indeed, McCall rejoices in one especially telling instance of his

own befuddlement: the credulity with which he had originally

accepted Charles Olson’s mistranscription of a Melville letter and,

for 20 years, solemnly transmitted the mistake to his classes. The

author of Moby-Dick (1851) (McCall faithfully believed) once

complained that the frenzied reading and writing of his most crea-

tive years had made his eyes “tender as young sperms.” By

chance, McCall happens on the sentence that Olson had misread

when he is browsing the Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman

edition of Melville’s letters on an unrelated errand: “tender as

young sparrows,” Melville had written. McCall terms this episode

an “innocent example of self-hypnotism,” but innocent or not,

readerly self-hypnotism is pervasive, in McCall’s experience (21).

To one degree or another, every reader engages in it, out of recep-

tive exhaustion, interpretive zeal, or personal obsession. The

Silence of Bartleby repeatedly refreshes our attentive powers by

repeatedly chastising them; the eye of even the best reader is

nearly always a fledgling tool.

This gambit is unusual to say the least, but it has the effect

of freeing McCall to adapt Melville’s own reading practices—

insofar as we can reconstruct them—to the treatment of Bartleby’s

story. Books are sources of nourishment in Melville’s imaginative

life, rather than vehicles of the understanding. In his most intense

productive periods, McCall observes, Melville reads instead of

eats, projecting his exuberant appetite for words into the celebra-

tory feeding that preoccupies many of his characters: Ishmael’s

reverence for well-prepared chowder, Redburn’s fascination with

the manufacture of a sailor’s breakfast burgoo, the succulent

edibility of all life in the Typee valley. Earth’s universal “vultur-

ism” is the dark side to this gustatory vision, McCall recognizes,

but for the most part Melville embraces his kinship with the

vulture (41). Or, as McCall puts it, “his genius shattered his

reading in the very act of incorporating it,” taking an almost

“manic delight” in the digestive vigor of consciousness (30, 42).

To some extent, The Silence of Bartleby also shatters and incorpo-

rates the critical conversation on which it draws. McCall does not

engage the interpretive efforts of his predecessors in any depth; he


grazes through them like a filter-feeder, plucking out a few tidbits

from each and passing on, aiming steadily for the complete text of

Melville’s story, with which The Silence of Bartleby comes to a

close.

One risk McCall takes, in adopting this structure, is that his

own chapters may strike readers as little more than an optional

warm-up for the main event. If the story itself “stakes a claim on

our best attention,” as McCall puts it (143), what level of engage-

ment should the best criticism require or expect? Aren’t all inter-

pretive commentaries destined to appear shallow in contrast to the

extraordinary work they hope to illuminate? Delbanco points to

the obvious inadequacies of “appreciationism” as a potential

pitfall in a book like The Silence of Bartleby (715), but McCall

never verges on such a failing, perhaps because his critical per-

spective is shaped by the experience of being a producer, as well

as a consumer, of literary performance. His pages, at their best,

resemble an extended preparatory meditation or prologue to

reading, an instructive service performed by one artist on behalf of

another, whose work appears to invite the solicitous eye of a

fellow craftsman.

An accomplished novelist in his own right, McCall—like the

long list of artist-critics whose work has played such a formative

role in the development of American literary study—adapts his

compositional experience and instincts to the role of an accom-

plished reader, one drawn to what John Ashbery, in Other

Traditions (2000), terms the “jump start” dimension of his peers

and predecessors: those elements of a poet’s performance that

remind one of what poetry is, what appetites it ultimately satisfies

(5). Writers bring hard-earned empirical habits to the practice of

criticism, coupled with a determination to treat the mind’s inter-

pretive or explanatory urges as intrinsic rather than extrinsic to the

creative process. “As I see it,” Ashbery writes at the beginning of

his Norton Lectures, “my thought is both poetry and the attempt to

explain that poetry” (5). In much the same way, McCall insists

that Bartleby’s austere verbal presence in Melville’s pages is

marked by the expressive attempts it makes rather than by those it

seems to defer.

“In the special delicacy of his phrasing,” McCall reminds us,

Bartleby never strikes the reader as mentally crippled. He is invari-

ably “thinking twice, not hearing double” (50). The finely modu-

lated variations in Melville’s dialogue confirm this perception.

“I would prefer not to,” his hero famously observes (McCall 165),

but then goes on through the balance of the tale to give a scarcely

bearable account of his inner life: “I would prefer to be left alone

here” (181), “I have given up copying” (182), “I would prefer not


to quit you” (186), “I know you” (197), “I know where I am”

(197), “Do you not see the reason for yourself?” (181). What lover

of imaginative writing has not defended the frontiers of an interior

world with statements very similar to these, while simultaneously

acknowledging the loneliness of that world? What teacher has not

mirrored aspects of Bartleby’s appeal to unspoken dimensions of

understanding, addressing a mixture of hopes and needs that can

scarcely be stated in fewer or in different words than the artist has

allotted to the task? That is why McCall sets aside his own

mediator’s role, at the end of his book, to reprint Melville’s story.

The Silence of Bartleby dramatizes the extraordinary vitality of

attentive reading and then steps aside to allow its own readers to

practice their rejuvenated powers on a masterpiece.

Works Cited

Ashbery, John. Other Traditions.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.

Delbanco, Andrew. “Melville in the

‘80s.” American Literary History 4.4

(1992): 709–25.

McCall, Dan. The Silence of Bartleby.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1989.


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