"Still more a fixture than before": Poe and Melville Working in Close(d) Chambers

Abstract:The label "a Poeish tale" was tagged to "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" since its serial publication in 1853. In 1969, James Colwell and Gary Spitzer offered a compelling comparison between the story of the copyist who resists both obeying the orders and abandoning the chambers of his legal employer, and the tale of the stubborn raven of ill-omen who harasses the "chamber door" of a studious subject in Poe's most famous narrative poem, "The Raven." This paper tracks Poe's poem as a possible subtext for Melville's Bartleby, analyzing what, in Melville, departs from Poe's solipsistic view of the poet as reader tortured in a cloistered, immanent world of his making, and instead takes as its focus the man of letters in an expanding marketplace, and his confrontation with the scrivener and the wall, or page, which neither his eyesight nor his report can interpret or illuminate. The essay describes three structural dichotomies in both works: the settings of the chamber and the office; the tone of the refrain and the formula; and the widening scope of "letters," from literature to law, which facilitates the fluctuation of signs. The analysis argues for the centrality of language and heuristic (in)capacity as crucial for Poe and Melville, both of them heralds of the Romantic crisis of literature where the human subject is left dwelling alone, reading obscure material (in "The Raven") or writing copies (in "Bartleby"), and shut off from words or referents outside or beyond the imagination.