"I would prefer not to" — the mystery behind Melville's Bartleby refusal
Herman Melville's 1853 short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" turned its protagonist into an icon of passive resistance — a copyist who refuses every request with "I would prefer not to," earning him the title "patron saint of civil disobedience" from The New Republic. The phrase resurfaced on T-shirts at the Occupy Wall Street camp in Zuccotti Park in October 2011, weeks before the NYPD seized and destroyed the protesters' books. The article examines the literary and philosophical roots of this act of refusal and its lasting cultural resonance.
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“I would prefer not to.”
Those words, printed in white capital letters on a black T-shirt, are worn by a man surrounded by crates full of books in Zuccotti Park, downtown Manhattan. It is late October 2011, and the man doesn’t know it yet, but in three weeks’ time, the books in his crates will be seized by the NYPD and destroyed.
The slogan on the man’s T-shirt comes from Herman Melville’s 1853 short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” The words are spoken by Bartleby, a lawyer’s copyist, who has become, in the words of The New Republic , the “patron saint of civil disobedience.”
In Melville’s fable, Bartleby works diligently for a New York lawyer until one day, for no discernible reason, he stops and instead responds to his employer’s every request with the phrase: “I would prefer not to.” Bartleby remains at his desk, and the lawyer’s every attempt to get him to work proves unsuccessful. Eventually, the lawyer tells Bartleby to pack up and leave the office. “I would prefer not to,” is the reply.
We never learn why Bartleby behaves as he does or, in fact, anything about his past. Melville deliberately avoids clues, and this is perhaps why the story continues to resonate so widely, from The Economist , which has a “Bartleby” column about the mundanity of working life, to the Australian children’s cartoon Bluey , which features a poker-faced “Bartlebee” doll in a Christmas episode. The mystery of Bartleby is unsettling: He’s a blank page. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze argued that his very choice of words — “I would prefer not to” — creates an ambiguous “zone of indetermination” that dissolves normal linguistic binaries and seems to threaten the social conventions on which we rely.
Literature is full of characters who opt out of prevailing worldviews. The interesting question is how far we, as readers, condone their opting out.
The man wearing the Bartleby T-shirt is Zach, one of the librarians who created the People’s Library at the heart of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protest. The protest was a response to the global financial crisis of 2008 and a perceived lack of culpability or contrition amongst banks and corporations. Under the banner “We are the 99%,” protesters staged a 59-day sit-in at Zuccotti Park, highlighting inequality and championing social justice.
At the center of the occupation was the People’s Library, which grew out of donations until it numbered more than 5,000 books. The library adopted Melville’s story — the subtitle of which is “A Story of Wall-Street” — staging readings and printing T-shirts. I’m looking at a photograph of Zach from an old People’s Library blog post , which explains:
“Bartleby” is an imperfect analogy for Occupy Wall Street, but it nevertheless resonates because it is about how a refusal can open up new ways of seeing. Bartleby’s refusal — and his occupation of the Chancery office — punctures the “doctrine of assumptions” that naturalized the power relations governing the employer’s world.
Bartleby’s occupation of a Wall Street office in the story has a direct connection to Occupy Wall Street, but the mystery of his behavior makes him a fickle figurehead. Literature is full of other characters who opt out of prevailing worldviews for more tangible reasons. The interesting question is how far we, as readers, condone their “opting out.”
If we find the status quo dystopian, then opting out is clearly the morally commendable choice. When Winston Smith writes “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” over and over again in his secret diary, we cheer because we know those words represent the first steps of a journey that will place him in opposition to the hideous, authoritarian, joyless world of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). We thrill when the fireman Guy Montag pockets an illicit book in Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and when Offred meets Ofglen in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), we yearn for her to join the Mayday resistance and oppose the Republic of Gilead.
The case is also clear when the prevailing worldview is rife with prejudice or bigotry. The Awakening (1899) by Kate Chopin, for example, dramatizes Edna Pontellier’s gradual rejection of 19th-century marital and maternal expectations in favor of a life marked by artistic and romantic freedom. The same is true of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston, in which Janie Crawford overcomes similar frustrations and the added impediment of racial prejudice.
But the moral status of opting out becomes less obvious in the apparently bucolic genre of “back to nature” stories, in which a character swaps a conventional lifestyle for a simpler way of living. In Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees (1957), the young Cosimo climbs a tree in the baronial garden after arguing with his father about eating snail soup. Cosimo swears he will never come down for the rest of his life and stays true to his promise. He lives in the garden’s trees and the local woods, idling, reading, and pursuing amorous adventures until he is an old man. Similarly, in Joan Barfoot’s Gaining Ground (1980), Abra, driven to desperation, abandons her loving husband and children to live alone on a smallholding in rural Ontario, growing vegetables and forgetting about her family.
Behind both of these stories lies Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), the textbook for this mode of opting out: Its ethos extols this kind of experimental self-dependence, environmental awareness, and spiritual discovery. Indeed, if The New Republic hadn’t already canonized Bartleby, Thoreau would have a decent claim to being the “patron saint of civil disobedience.” After all, the first product of his sojourn at Walden Pond was the 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience,” in which he argues that the “only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”
As readers, we can empathize with the reasons for opting out while simultaneously regretting the circumstances that make it an attractive option.
Much as I admire Thoreau, I detect something naggingly selfish in Walden , as I do at the end of Voltaire’s Candide (1759), when Candide gives up engaging with the world and settles down to tend his cottage garden instead. We understand, of course, that trauma and the frustrations of modern life can motivate a retreat to nature, but abstaining from society still feels, on some level, like capitulation. Voltaire would argue that that is his point: It’s impossible to remain optimistic and engaged in the face of the world’s misery.
My point is that, as readers, we can empathize with the reasons for opting out while simultaneously regretting the circumstances that make it an attractive option.
And of course, there are examples of opting out that lead to obviously negative results. Characters such as Ilya Ilyich Oblomov in Ivan Goncharov’s eponymous novel (1859) or Jean des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours (1884) have opted out of society through an apathetic, aristocratic sense of ennui. Both have become so self-involved that they can barely leave their rooms or even their beds. At one point, des Esseintes encrusts the shell of his pet tortoise with exotic jewels until it is crushed to death under its own weight. Goncharov and Huysmans treat their characters with affectionate humor, but they are hardly role models for fulfilling life choices.
Even more destructive are characters such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who retreats to his subterranean lodgings to stew in frustration and write his diatribe against society, or Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham, who stops all the clocks in her mansion and sits in her crumbling bridal dress amidst a rotting wedding breakfast while plotting the downfall of the male sex. Perhaps the most disturbing example of all is Meursault in Albert Camus’s L’Étranger (1942), who steps so far out of the range of normal human emotions that he feels nothing at his mother’s funeral or when he shoots a man dead on an Algerian beach. At the end of the novel, convicted of murder, Meursault embraces the “tender indifference of the world.”
Bartleby’s motivations are opaque. He can be read as a valiant opponent of capitalism, but he may equally be a victim of depression.
Literature demonstrates that the moral legitimacy of opting out depends on the circumstances in which one finds oneself, and moreover, that people can be skillful at spinning narratives to legitimize their behavior. We need to tune our analytical abilities and reach our own conclusions as to how far opting out is a valid option.
The same is true of politics. We need to use our skills as readers when we consume news feeds. We need to listen to politicians as if they were unreliable narrators; we need to look for ulterior meanings and notice rhetorical techniques. When President Trump withdraws the U.S. from the World Health Organization or Bernie Sanders criticizes the North American Free Trade Agreement, our duty is to analyze their narratives and decide whether their positions are legitimate.
This is why Zach was wearing a Bartleby T-shirt in 2011. But, again, Bartleby’s motivations are opaque. Of all the literary examples we’ve discussed, his decision to opt out can be interpreted most diversely: He can be read as a valiant opponent of capitalism, but he may equally be a victim of depression, or he may be displaying a catastrophically harmful and selfish protectionism.
In the story, Bartleby is eventually dragged to “the Tombs” — the Hall of Justice — where he starves quietly to death because he prefers not to eat. On November 15, 2011, Zuccotti Park was cleared. The protesters were evicted, and the 5,554 books in the People’s Library were seized by the NYPD, loaded into garbage trucks, and destroyed.
Fifteen years later, we can speculate as to whether politicians and corporations are any more engaged with society. Are they seeking to improve the world? Are they looking out for the 99%? Or perhaps, like Bartleby, they would prefer not to.
This article “I would prefer not to”: The mystery behind literature’s most famous act of refusal is featured on Big Think .
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