bartleby the scrivener i would prefer not to

This is the Wall Street of the mid-19th century, one of the birthplaces of securitisation where financial capitalism as we might recognise it today was forged in the New York Stock Exchange, and in the brokerage and mortgage houses, banks and lawyers’ chambers that served it.

He is an elderly and, by his own admission, ‘unambitious’ lawyer whose chambers in Wall Street provide the primary setting for the story. Its protagonist is not, in fact, Bartleby but his employer – an unnamed narrator – who recounts the story of the recalcitrant scrivener and reveals a great deal about himself, and the economic model he represents, by doing so. ‘L ike architectural workers, from builders on-site to architectural assistants in offices, the law-copyist engaged in labour that was adjacent to creating – in their case, writing – but devoid of much, or indeed any, personal agency’Īs ever, it is helpful to return to the original text. In London, Bartleby haunted the Architectural Association’s 2021/22 prospectus, where several unit briefs made mention of him – apparently independently of each other. In a 2007 edition of El País, Spanish architect Iñaki Ábalos ventured that the character ‘represents the most compelling evocation of sustainability’s aesthetic dimension’, while a 2017 lecture series organised by Peter Swinnen at ETH Zürich took ‘I prefer not to’ as its prompt to consider what architects ought not to do, and included Anne Lacaton and Arno Brandlhuber on its list of speakers. More recently, it is the architectural community – especially the more academically minded parts of it – that has embraced Bartleby. By the 1920s, a Melville revival was under way in the US literary community, which re‑established ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ as a masterpiece of short fiction, and from the 1980s onwards, the character became something of a darling of continental European philosophy: Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben wrote lengthy essays on Bartleby Slavoj Žižek donned an ‘I would prefer not to’ T-shirt. But over time, the story’s titular character – a pallid law-copyist who stops working because, he says, he ‘would prefer not to’ – would, along with Melville himself, be consigned to relative obscurity for more than half a century. When ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’ was published in The Piazza Tales, an 1856 anthology of Herman Melville’s short stories, a reviewer singled it out as ‘one of the best bits of writing which ever came from the author’s pen’. ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’ by Herman Melville

Bartleby the scrivener i would prefer not to