In their simplicity and politeness, these five words -“I would prefer not to”- and the use of the verb “prefer” most notably - achieve a paradoxical significance within the narrative. In Bartleby in Manhattan and O (.)ĢThe phrase “prefer not to”, or what Gilles Deleuze has called the “Formula”, 2 recurs throughout the story and its repetition drives Bartleby’s colleagues to combative fury. 4 Apart from Deleuze no critic has bothered to unpack this statement.
3 The affirmative and negative nature of Bartleby’s “preferring not to” has been noted by Jaworski: (.).
2 Deleuze uses this term in “Bartleby Or, The Formula”, in Essays Critical and Clinical, which was (.). Bartleby’s verbal obstruction becomes physical. Towards the end of the story, he is discovered occupying the office at weekends. On the third day of being installed in a legal office in Wall Street, he is asked by his boss to examine a paper with him, but “without moving from his privacy”, he replies “I would prefer not to”. He is an unostentatious figure, “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn”, who works “silently, palely, mechanically”, but he exercises enormous power by refusing to comply with simple and undemanding requests. He declines to do what is asked of him over and above the basic task of copying documents. And as the narrator is forced to admit, “Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.” Refusing to kow-tow to the demands of his employer, and working to his own individual rule, Bartleby represents a challenge to capitalist, corporatist ideologies. 1 My thanks to Michael Brearley, Joseph Holt, Matthew Pountney and John Shaw for helping to shape my (.)ġ“Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) is a story of passive resistance.
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