Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 31

Avatars of the Third Other

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warding metaphysical values in a techno-capitalist society. For the
Puritans, typological signs were perceived in every facet of daily life
as evidence of the robust existence of a spiritual "Other." Even a
misplaced letter or a dropped thimble, a pricked finger or a sudden
hailstorm might constitute an earthly signifier, a divinely-inspired
lesson to be learned. In New York of the 1850s, the metaphysical
landscape has changed a great deal. "The connection between signs
and significance," as Michael Clark points out in a study of
"Bartleby," "[is] no longer secure." Bartleby, quite simply, is a
mystery, or a human sign without a signified. In Puritan America,
even in Jonathan Edwards' latter-day brand of Puritanism, such a
fractured idiom was unthinkable. Clark emphasizes the cultural
changes between the two American eras:
Touched by his own sense of a 'Puritanic gloom,' at one
point the narrator turns to Jonathan Edwards for
solace and advice and conducts a persistent if
somewhat self-conscious and embarrassed quest for
Bartleby's soul as a means of restoring discipline to
his office and a placid surface to his life. But what
worked in Salem fails on Wall Street (136-137).
Bartleby serves several thematic functions in Melville's story.
Because he is a living critique of the narrator's desire to live life on a
"placid surface," the genial, befuddled boss emerges as Melville's
archetypal American bourgeois, a distant cousin of Flaubert's
pharmacist Homais in Madame Bovary. Bartleby's fellow workers in
the copyist firm have also chosen to live life on a superficial level, a
decision reflected in their habits of language. Leo Marx n\akes a
connection between the speech of Nippers and Turkey and Bartleby's
favorite word, "prefer":
When Nippers and Turkey use the word 'prefer' it is
only because they are unconsciously imitating the
m anner, the surface vocabulary of the truly
independent writer [Bartleby]; they say 'prefer,' but
in the course of the parable they never make any real
choices (25).