Book Simple: The Perfect Short Story for Office Drones
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a new blogumn by Amy Brown
Photo Credit: Xhanatos
I don’t really like short stories. After years of struggling through the New Yorker’s weekly fiction, I finally gathered up the courage to admit I couldn’t glean anything from it. Beyond the fact that the spare prose and in medias res storytelling make each week rather indistinguishable from the last, the settings (two off my shelf: memories of African life and Midwestern hipster poverty) leave an office worker reader, like this one, with a vague feeling of inadequacy. Real life is something that happens other places, the stories suggest. Your daily grind is not anything compelling.
Of course, office work often feels the same. When I worked at an east coast consulting firm, my hours spent communing with Excel and lunches spent discussing WSJ articles often blended together in my memory. My dreams at night involved sorting and merging datasets.
So it was a particular treat to follow up on Richard Russo’s recent recommendation on NPR and discover Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the best description of office life I’ve ever read. In our lawyer narrator’s Wall Street chambers, lit by windows offering “an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall,” unfolds a crisp, funny drama, a real New York story, as relevant today as when published in 1853.
Bartleby, a polite, quiet clerk, answers the lawyer’s advertisement for a legal copyist. In days before Xerox, when documents needed duplication, people did it by hand. Actually, one of my consultancy tasks was to copy and bind relevant documents for the perusal of my economist boss. It wasn’t nearly far enough away from Bartleby’s assignments.
At first grateful, and hopeful that Bartleby’s staid aspect will sober up his other two scriveners Turkey and Nippers, the narrator discovers that when Bartleby “would prefer not” to do some office chore, said chore would stay undone.
I’ve tried that, by the way, in real life. Despite my coworkers’ offers to split the workload more evenly, my boss insisted that when I was the analyst in charge of a project, I was on-call each weekend. After a series of on-call weekends, I turned my cell phone off. My boss, wanting a pdf document created, had to hit that “print pdf” button herself. Her subsequent rage that Monday would have not been inappropriate for a victim of a terrorist action.
The relations among the officemates were maybe my favorite part of the story. Bartleby’s arrival does not really disturb the symbiotic relationships of Turkey, Nippers and Ginger Nut, the errand boy, despite their repeated condemnation of Bartleby’s insubordination. Turkey is still drunk in the afternoons, while Nippers continues cranky in the mornings. Ginger Nut delivers snacks to everybody. But the concept of “preference” sneaks into the office vocabulary until the narrator (and the office) cannot bear it.
And isn’t that the truth of any office job? That if we thought too much about whether that job is how we want to spend our lives, we’d all go quietly, politely mad?
Good post.
Ever looked up any crit. on Bartleby?
It's amusing, but more than anything, I think Bartleby survived because it's so weirdly ambiguous. What is that point beyond the smile you get from his initial refusals?
Why is he so dogmatically steadfast in his determination to perform no unpleasent chores?
This story seemed like it was a satire of something pretty specific and of its period, so I started reading essays on it. Far from there being a critical consensus, the story has been read through every lens conceivable from Marxism to Nihilism to Buddhism.
I can't help but think the work survived because any theory can be projected on that blank wall.
By the way, I hope you won't reject the entire short story form because of the New Yorker.
Check out the Selected Shorts podcast–that's my advice
Glad you liked it — I think you're right about that ambiguity, so easy to read ourselves into it. Will definitely check out the podcast — podcasts are my favorite way to block out the sounds of my office mates. Thanks for the recommendation (and for reading)!
Good post.
Ever looked up any crit. on Bartleby?
It's amusing, but more than anything, I think Bartleby survived because it's so weirdly ambiguous. What is that point beyond the smile you get from his initial refusals?
Why is he so dogmatically steadfast in his determination to perform no unpleasent chores?
This story seemed like it was a satire of something pretty specific and of its period, so I started reading essays on it. Far from there being a critical consensus, the story has been read through every lens conceivable from Marxism to Nihilism to Buddhism.
I can't help but think the work survived because any theory can be projected on that blank wall.
By the way, I hope you won't reject the entire short story form because of the New Yorker.
Check out the Selected Shorts podcast–that's my advice
Glad you liked it — I think you're right about that ambiguity, so easy to read ourselves into it. Will definitely check out the podcast — podcasts are my favorite way to block out the sounds of my office mates. Thanks for the recommendation (and for reading)!
Bartleby has always been one of my favorite stories. It's one of the ones I've most re-read. I used to read it about once a year; haven't in a while, you may send me back to it.
I plugged more into how sad and sort of relentless it is. But the ambiguity is certainly part of its magic. There's a mystery at its heart, a mystery at the heart of Bartleby, that resists decoding. And the position he puts the narrator in is similar to the position that every homeless person with his hand out puts all of us in, only much more direct, personal and intense.
Ultimately, it's the story's beauty that gets me. It's beautiful and profound. Unforgettable.
Glad you discovered it; good for Russo to put folks onto it. And thanks for reminding me.
I'm curious what edition you read it in–a stand-alone, a Melville collection, a short story collection?
Bartleby has always been one of my favorite stories. It's one of the ones I've most re-read. I used to read it about once a year; haven't in a while, you may send me back to it.
I plugged more into how sad and sort of relentless it is. But the ambiguity is certainly part of its magic. There's a mystery at its heart, a mystery at the heart of Bartleby, that resists decoding. And the position he puts the narrator in is similar to the position that every homeless person with his hand out puts all of us in, only much more direct, personal and intense.
Ultimately, it's the story's beauty that gets me. It's beautiful and profound. Unforgettable.
Glad you discovered it; good for Russo to put folks onto it. And thanks for reminding me.
I'm curious what edition you read it in–a stand-alone, a Melville collection, a short story collection?
Rats, I just returned it to the library today, so I can't answer with certainty, but I believe I read the story republished in Bartleby the scrivener; a symposium, which was a conference publication from Kent State University Press in 1965. I wish I could recommend the essays that came with the republished work, but they were, well, dense is the kindest word I can think of.
So glad you enjoyed the column! Thanks for reading.
Rats, I just returned it to the library today, so I can't answer with certainty, but I believe I read the story republished in Bartleby the scrivener; a symposium, which was a conference publication from Kent State University Press in 1965. I wish I could recommend the essays that came with the republished work, but they were, well, dense is the kindest word I can think of.
So glad you enjoyed the column! Thanks for reading.
Also, to answer your question, no, I haven't read any criticism, though I might. The essays attached to the edition I was reading were a little unwieldy, but I'd welcome suggestions for better if you have any?
Also, to answer your question, no, I haven't read any criticism, though I might. The essays attached to the edition I was reading were a little unwieldy, but I'd welcome suggestions for better if you have any?