As generations of critics have made clear to us, Bartleby is in his refusals infinitely interpretable, elementally mysterious, and perhaps even (as Branka Arsic suggests) a sign of the “unthinkable” itself, of what lies outside our literary frameworks for knowledge, teasing us with their incompletion. All of this is suggestive, and true. It is also true that the protesters at Occupy Wall Street, in turning to Bartleby, were as astute in their instincts as any of the critics who came before them.

For a tale so grim, “Bartleby” shows Melville at near the peak of his comic gifts. (One recent critic, Jonathan Elmer, gets it exactly right: “‘Bartleby’ is both very sad and very funny, but criticism on it is largely humorless.”) It is the story of a lawyer, and of his encounter with a scrivener unlike any he has met before—or rather, it is the story of the lawyer, of Bartleby, and of the lawyer’s effort to turn their encounter into a story. He will interpret Bartleby, and he will write “Bartleby,” though from the first he admits that the task of writing the man may be too much for him. He tells us that “no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man,” adding, “It is an irreparable loss to literature.” From the first, the tale puts to us the question of literature, of what it entails, what it excludes, what conditions enable its emergence. In their different styles, both men, the lawyer and the scrivener, are writers.

At first, the lawyer takes to the telling of his tale with an unguarded, relishing pleasure. He is, he tells us, “one of those unambitious lawyers” who works among the money of the rich, profiting handsomely, and preening a bit in the enjoyment of the favor of the fine.

The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence; my next, method. I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion.

If there is a complacency in the man we might rush to find contemptible—another smug lawyer doing “a snug business among rich men’s bonds”—it is leavened appreciably by the self-puncturing wit here, the wry delight he takes in the telling of his tale and in the making of sentences. The man who says “not unemployed,” who tells us how much the very phrase “John Jacob Astor” sounds like money, is not a man ignorant of his own foibles or of the pleasures of self-mockery.

But then comes Bartleby to the offices, and the narrator’s cheerful self-composure begins to crack. A foil to the comic counterparts Turkey and Nippers, clerks whose flights of ill temper alternate across the course of the working day (“Their fits relieved each other like guards”), Bartleby, after an initially manic burst of writerly productivity, disrupts the business of the office with the simplest of acts. Blandly, calmly, mildly, without “the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence,” he refuses to do what his employer asks of him. At first he keeps up “his incessant industry” and is in his steadiness and his omnipresence an ideal sort of laborer, with the small exception of his staunch unwillingness to examine his work, run office errands, or do anything at all that is not copy writing. But the circumference of his placid refusal grows wider and wider, and as it does it works a startling breadth of effects on our narrator. “I would prefer not to,” Bartleby tells him, and the trace elements of derision in his words—“prefer,” Andrew Delbanco observes, “belongs in a formal dining room, with the ring of silver tinkling against crystal”—drives the narrator out of his wits and, eventually, out of his own office. He struggles to reason with Bartleby but finds reason itself a tool ill-fitted to the task. He begins, he tells us, “to stagger in his own plainest faith,” as Bartleby invests him more and more with the prickly sense that “reason” itself may be less some modicum of sufficient rationality than the name those with authority give to the necessity of acquiescing to their demands. The lawyer is a man who understands himself as easy, genial, safe; he is a capitalist but a good-hearted one, humane and sentimental. He has no heart to insist on his power over Bartleby, though he does not much savor the erasure of that power. Bartleby’s encounter with him reminds us that the lawyer’s knowledge of his own foibles and frailties, which he has broadcast to us from the first, has perhaps stood in too readily for the remediation of them, or of any of their harming effects.

What is it that transpires in the charged space between Bartleby and the lawyer? Why is it that his initial anger, his frustrated will, and his baffled disquiet resolve themselves, finally, into something strung between aversion and an awkward solicitude? “[Y]ou are responsible for the man you left there,” the new tenant of his abandoned offices tells the lawyer, ominously, and the story invites us to observe our narrator as he works out the implications of these alleged responsibilities. Does he owe them to Bartleby merely contractually, as an employer? Does he hear in Bartleby’s refusal to depart—“I would prefer not to quit you,” Bartleby tells him—something nearer to a pledge, perhaps as frontal an offer of love as the preternaturally mild Bartleby is capable of? (In the light of the extravagant male erotics of the early Moby-Dick, and the considerably later “Billy Budd,” the queerer possibilities of the story begin to glimmer and spark, and to cast their own curious glow over the lawyer’s cycles of aversion and ambivalent attachment.) Or does their encounter press rather more painfully on the narrator’s sense of responsibility to Bartleby as a compatriot in what the story names “humanity,” a man estranged from him but sharing enough of something—will, sorrow, hope, hopelessness—to command from the lawyer an obligation he cannot quite think how to discharge? Perhaps unsurprisingly, in moments of crisis he defaults to the capitalist’s proxy forms of care: he offers his charity. He pays the “grub-man” in the Tombs to which Bartleby has finally been sent, greasing his palm with silver and instructing him to “give particular attention to my friend.” Has the scrivener been his friend? Bartleby will have none of it. He starves.

And what of Bartleby himself, and the tantalizing mystery of his character, as blank as the walls he turns to face throughout the tale? In the coda to the story the narrator informs us that “Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington,” and the specter of messages never to arrive at their destinations, of writing destined for the flames, has led a number of readers to see in the scrivener Melville’s own bitter meditation on the hard fate of authorship, and perhaps on the unviability of the whole enterprise of literature. The story came, after all, at the end of a year in which Melville had suffered authorial rejection and critical recrimination. On this reading Melville is lawyer and copyist both: a man possessed of a great desire to communicate but, in a literary world as shaped by the orders of capital as the offices of Wall Street, despairing of the possibilities of delivery no less than of reception.

But Bartleby, though circumscribed to an almost impossibly small array of words, speaks in other tongues as well. He is without question an occupier: he does not cede his claim on the spaces of his labor, the spaces of capital, until like many before and after him he is compelled to do so, by the police. And his protest is not wholly unavailing. If the extremity of his employer’s response is any apt measure, it is fair to say that Bartleby takes his estrangement from the compulsory servility of wage labor and, effectively, weaponizes it. He puts the narrator on his heels, reminding him that his self-pleased view of himself, as a man alive with humane sympathy, consorts uneasily, if at all, with his role as a master of men, whose lives and energies he rents out cheaply, by the word. Perhaps the largest heartbreak of the tale lies in the possibility that Bartleby does all this to the lawyer less vindictively than, we might say, hopefully, yearningly: as a man who arrives at the lawyer’s office “famished,” though not for copy work.