Library of Babel
10345 Bartleby lo scrivano
Herman Melville. Edited and with an introduction by Jorge Luis Borges
1978 I ed. .
Language: Italian
Bartleby, who not only unfolds illogically, but also forces others to become its accomplices, is more than the fruit of an idle dreamlike imagination; it is a sad and truthful book that shows us the essential futility that is one of the ironies of the universe.
Bartleby is a Wall Street scrivener working in a lawyer’s office, who refuses, with a kind of humble stubbornness, to do any work. The style of the prose is no less grey than the protagonist. One would say that the author deliberately sought out the four walls of a small office, somewhere in the city. The protagonist is senseless and incredibly spreads his insanity infecting all around him. The Wall Street lawyer and the other scriveners oddly and passively accept Bartleby’s position. Melville, who discovered by critics and perhaps more importantly, by all readers around 1920, with Bartleby enters a famous branch of the genre; in these unforgettable pages, the absurd and incredible aspects reside in the characters’ behaviour rather than in the facts. More than half a century before Kafka’s The Trial, in which the protagonist is judged and executed by a court that lacks any authority, and whose rigour he accepts without the slightest protest, Melville fashions the strange case of Bartleby, who not only behaves illogically, but forces others to become his dismayed accomplices.