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DIANA SCHAUB I think that we really should remind ourselves of what a scrivener is, or
a scribe. A scrivener is a public copyist, an official writer, but it is a role that
had a much higher status in the past. So if you go back to Ancient Israel or all the way
up through New Testament times, that the scribes were those who studied scripture, they served
as copyists, and editors, and teachers, and jurists. So that the letters they dealt with
were living letters, the living letters of the word of God.
DIANA SCHAUB But Bartleby now lives in a world where letters serve a very different and a
much attenuated function, and where scribes and scriveners have a much reduced function.
So, so, if I could just tie this into the end of the story, so at the end, the lawyer
passes along this rumor that he had heard about Bartleby having maybe worked in the
Dead Letter Office. The lawyer, who very much believes in the efficacy of letters, speculates
that this experience of letters gone awry would have perhaps contributed to Bartleby’s
affliction: “on errands of life, these letters speed to death.” But it seems to me that
what the lawyer doesn’t really understand is that for Bartleby the letters that he deals
with in the law office are just as much dead letters as those that he dealt with in the
Dead Letter Office of the Post Office. And it’s that dawning realization of Bartleby’s
that I think is the origin of his progressive refusals, and there is a progress in those
refusals, of those withdrawals from life. So Bartleby has really given up on the Word;
he’s given up on communication, and that’s why he lapses into silence, speaks only to
refuse engagement, and starts at these blank walls instead.
WILFRED MCCLAY: I’m very moved by what you say thinking back to the origins of the scribe
and how great the fall. That is clearly one of the meanings here—these guys are human
Xerox machines…
DIANA SCHAUB That’s why he has to reject this entire world of letters and the world.
That’s why he doesn’t read, why he won’t write, why he won’t have anything to do
with the post office. And the lawyer is absolutely wedded to the world of letters. He actually…when
he tries to get rid of Bartleby he says, you know, why don’t you go off, and then write
me a letter if there’s anything that you need from me and I’ll come to your aid.
Or he says, if I could only find out whether he has family, and then I could write a letter
to them. So he really believes in the efficacy of letters, which is to say of reason, even
though his understanding of reason is a rather narrowed one.