No Trump.
Not my
President.
I’d prefer not.
There is something about this simple demurral
that seems both appropriate and necessary under the circumstances.
Necessary because it may be the best (if not
the only) response that many of us are capable of at present.
Besides I don’t think there’s any need for
further explanation.
The
U.S. electorate has shit the bed, and we should feel no compunction about simply
declining the opportunity to roll around in it.
Against this backdrop, I’ve been thinking a lot about
Bartleby the Scrivener. I have the sense
that this is a Bartleby moment for many of us.
If asked to express my feelings
about the recent presidential election my response is simply thus: I’d prefer not to. I see no reason to cooperate or involve
myself in any material way with what’s currently happening in American public
life. Bartleby’s dead-wall reverie seems
like a completely rational response instead of watching the latest updates on
the circus now in underway in Washington and at Trump Tower in New York.
Not watching television news or reading the papers since the
night of November 8th (which is when my self-imposed news blackout went into effect) has
already provided a number of significant benefits. My mood has improved immeasurably. It has also given me lots of time to catch up
on more worthwhile reading. Yesterday I
decided to go back to the source, as it were, and took the occasion to reread
Melville’s classic story about the scrivener of Wall Street. It made an indelible impression when I first
read it more than 40 years ago, no matter how dimly I may have understood it at
the time. So if nothing else, I was
curious to see how it holds up, particularly in light of its strong resonance
with my current frame of mind.
And I was pleased to discover that it’s still a great read, even
better than before. Back in high school
I remember thinking it was a relatively straightforward story – more a fable really
– something simple enough for even a high school student to grasp; Bartleby
being a symbolic figure much like Billy Budd, the namesake of the only other
Melville story I remember reading in high school, I thought of him as the
personification of long-suffering humanity.
Ah Bartleby. Ah humanity! That’s the note of pathos that stuck in my
craw.
But rereading provided an entirely fresh perspective.
First of all, it’s incredibly well written, rich in subtle
irony. Far from being a somber, or
straightforward moral fable, it’s really social satire of the highest order, worthy
of Dickens or Thackery. The descriptions
of Wall Street office life are laugh out loud funny as well as dead-on accurate in the portrayal of the spiritual vacuity at the heart of a commercial law practice -- as I know only too well from first hand experience. Turkey and Nipper, Bartleby’s fellow
scriveners, one of them a dipsomaniac the other dyspeptic; the squirrelly
office clerk Nutter, who is always being sent out to fetch Ginger Nut cake; Melville provides
a brief account of the absurdities of office life that is really second to none in
American literature.
And funniest of all is the sly portrayal of the unnamed
narrator, Bartleby’s well-intentioned employer, the Wall Street lawyer (or
Conveyancer) who alternates between feeling pity and rage at his inscrutable
scrivener. As the target of
Melville’s sharpest satire – it’s the story of his moral obtuseness after all -- the narrator's tone perfectly captures the spirit of Wall Street pettifoggery, full of sanctimony, always ready to applaud
himself for his good scruples and common sense, yet strangely ineffectual,
impotent with his own clerks, particularly powerless in the face of Bartleby’s impassivity,
and most of all craven in his fear lest anything should happen that would
diminish his social or professional standing.
He is the embodiment of Wall Street’s then emergent commercial culture,
which Melville skewers with precision, eloquence and irony.
And what of Bartleby, the cipher at the center of the story?
As I read it today, Bartleby doesn’t
strike me as a symbol for pitiable humanity so much as a stand in for the
author himself. Intransigent in his dead
wall reverie, Melville pulls this strange switcheroo by placing Bartleby, the impassive
cipher and the narrator’s mysterious semi-doppelganger, at the moral and emotional
center of his universe. I prefer not to thus becomes much more
than a reply to any particular unwanted task requested of the scrivener. It’s Melville’s cri du coeur (however oddly impassive) and overall response to newly
emergent social order -- the commercial and legal culture of Wall Street, typified
by the “reasonable man” standard -- which was already well on its way to
redefining social obligations in the US of A, very much in derogation of the
country’s traditional Puritan heritage.
And it’s very much in that same spirit I offer up Bartleby
as a potential role model for us today.
The problem we face is how to position ourselves as the certainties of
the old neo-liberal political and social order slip away, and well before
anything else has emerged to take its place.
What should we do in response to the rampant insecurity and instability
in American public life? Please make no
mistake about it: the problem is not
Trump. He is merely the most glaring
symptom of deep systemic dysfunction that is the root cause of our
distress. Most of us realize that at all
costs we must avoid acting in a way that would normalize what is in no way a
normal situation. But beyond that, it’s
damn hard to know where to turn or look for guidance.
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Old walls are rapidly crumbling and the new one that Trump
has promised we can only hope will never rise to take their place. For the moment, then, dead wall reverie seems
to be the best response that we can muster; far from appearing pitiable, Bartleby’s
utter impassivity seems to be a very sensible course of action (or inaction)
given the current state of our nation state, so utterly lacking in sound policy
choices, leadership or grace.
