today in my law and literature class (yes, i'm taking a class during my last semester of law school entitled "law and literature," in which we read books such as Oedipus, Saint Joan, Bleak House, and The Trial), we were discussing Bartleby the Scrivener by Melville, and the discussion took us to an interesting place i thought i'd share.
in this book, the attorney hires on bartleby as a scrivener in his office. things are going well for the first few days, and then, on the fourth day, the attorney asks bartleby to examine a document (which is the job of the scrivener) and bartley simply says, "i prefer not to."
the attorney is shocked and dismayed initially, but comes up with many varied reasons why bartleby would take such a departure from his usual head-in-the-books type of work ethic, and eventually just excuses him. unfortunately, this "i prefer not to" response becomes a trend to the point where bartleby is simply not working at all. the other scriveners in the office are getting upset, and the attorney finally attempts to fire bartleby and get him to vacate the offices. to this, bartleby says (predictably) "i prefer not to."
long story short, the attorney ends up moving his office to another location because bartleby (who has begun living in the office, and refuses the attorney's offer to come home with him) just won't leave, nor will he do any work. and when he still doesn't leave even after new tenants move in, the tenants call the police and have him arrested. the attorney visits bartleby in prison a few times and learns that he "prefers not" to eat anything, and eventually the attorney finds him dead by starvation. it's a lot...bleaker than how i'm describing it, but bartleby irritated me throughout the entire book so there you go.
in class, we were presented with the obvious question of "what is bartleby trying to tell us?" and the suggestion was presented that he exemplifies moral choice in a world where we have become obsessed with procedure. more specifically (and personally for those of us in the class), bartleby is pointing out the attorney that he (the attorney) has lost all contact with humanity. his life is his job, and his job consists of procedure he oversees in offices which have windows facing brick walls or air vents. he totally cuts himself off from the rest of common humanity for his job. the people he employ are no longer people, but have become nicknames like "nappers" and "ginger nut". he comes to work, and goes home just to wait until he can come back the next morning. he never discusses family or hobbies or life really.
bartleby represents the anti-attorney. he represents the humanity we lose to our ambition, our jobs, our careers.
and this realization led our class to begin discussing what law school has "done" to all of us. how, after our first year of school we found it hard to hold normal conversations with people in social settings and not discuss civil procedure, or that crazy case we read in crim, or how our contracts professor may actually be crazy. our relationships suffered. and i mean suffered. and most interesting to me was that a girl spoke up about how, this past summer, she decided that she wasn't going to get a legal position. instead, she got an internship with her "dream job". and found that she had changed so much because of law school that she couldn't function outside of a legal position. she wanted to treat her supervisor with the calm, cool, competent collection we treat managing partners with. she can't tap in to her creativity and ends up writing things that are rule-based when there are no rules. she doesn't get along with her fellow interns because they don't speak the legal language she's so used to communicating in.
and it just struck me, i guess. first as sad, because it pointed out that a lot of us sitting around that classroom (and a lot of my friends in general) have a dream job. and that dream job is most often not a practicing attorney. it's usually something creative or flexible and less demanding. and when we put that aside (for what we think will only be a little while) to establish ourselves and make the money that seems to be so necessary in our society, according to bartleby we're actually losing ourselves as well. but this conversation also made me thankful. thankful that i blog and i write somewhat regularly. that i exercise my creative muscle. and that i've more or less realized (before embarking upon a career) that i don't want to be a practicing attorney. because this means that maybe i haven't lost it, you know?
or heck, maybe bartleby is just full of it.
