Bartleby the Scrivener

Here's how naive I was when I became a high school English teacher: I thought my biggest problem would be that I wasn't familiar enough with 19th-century America writers. So after I left Yankee that summer, I read Melville.zyzy As it turned out, my ignorance of Melville was the least of my problems. Ranking well ahead of that was my arrogance, my lack of teaching tools, and my lack of experience with emotionally damaged adolescents. At Yankee, I had worked with talented and industrious adults who loved their jobs. At school for the first time I faced young people who didn't seem to care about anything. They didn't care about getting good grades. They didn't care if they didn't graduate. Their lives in school were a turbulent mixture of apathy and rage, and they could go from one to the other in an instant.

Some were bullies, thugs, deliberate saboteurs. Confronting them was terrifying, leaving me with shaking hands. The only way I could deal with them was to get them out of my classroom. But where were they supposed to go? They were not old enough to drop out, and the law guarantees them an education. So they sat in 'study hall' or in detention, or they wandered the halls. Often they just didn't bother to come to school. And when I marked them absent, I breathed a sigh of relief.

Others, however, were silent. They didn't cause as much trouble, but they didn't do any work, either. They were immune to threats, immune to sympathy, immune to offers of extra help. They slept in class or simply stared at the walls. They didn't frighten and anger me, the way the thugs did. They just broke my heart.

And I recognized them right away. I had read about them in Melville.

Melville's story 'Bartleby the Scrivener' is about a man whose job was to copy legal papers -- a human Xerox machine. It was brutally dull work, and the narrator of the story, a lawyer, is willing to put up with Bartleby's oddities -- he eats and sleeps in the office, for example -- in order to fill the position.

After a while, though, Bartleby begins refusing to do certain jobs. 'I should prefer not to,' he tells his boss politely, and no amount of threats, bribes, or pleading will move him. In time, he does nothing but stare at a blank wall. The narrator -- a kindly person, as shy of confrontation as I was when I started teaching -- eventually moves his business to another building, leaving Bartleby behind like a piece of furniture. The next tenant, a practical man, calls the cops. Bartleby ends up in a debtor's prison, where his apathy is so profound he refuses food and wastes away, staring at the prison walls.

There aren't many Bartlebys at ConVal, but one or two are enough to suck all the energy, vitality, and community out of a classroom. Like Bartleby's employer, we teachers bribe, threaten, and plead with them, but to no avail. Somehow, their experience of the world has led them to the conclusion that the only power they have is the power to say no. And make no mistake about it -- that is an awesome power. As the song goes, 'Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.' It may be hard for the rest of us to understand that, because we are industrious or talented or lucky. But if one feels sufficiently powerless, responding to the world with 'I should prefer not to' -- or its modern four-letter equivalent -- makes a kind of sense. Unfortunately, it leads to starvation.