Herman Melville is venerably included among the Nation’s best novelists and short story writers, universally known for his literary masterpiece, Moby Dick. However, we maintain an immeasurable degree of gratitude for the enlightenment subtly delivered in his novella, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” which has served to put to rest a presently confusing dilemma. We will elucidate.
We, and presumably, a great many fellow Americans, have been in a deeply confusing quandary as to the elevation of Donald J. Trump to the elevated and powerful Oval Office and the tolerated endurance of his amoral, grotesque and dystopic behavior. The dilemma has shocked and confused the rationality of the mainstream citizen, in its manifest miscreant behavior, inarguably contrary to, and in disregard of legal precedent, and moral expectation. We have, in previous writings, detailed many typical examples of the unprecedented plethora of his egregious behavior, domestic and international, ubiquitously ranging from unconstitutional and criminal to outright treasonous.
The contextual anomaly consists of his apparently singular teflon-like immunity from appropriate punishment and the endurance of his blemished acceptability by a Nation, which historically has avowed the foundational principle of ” equality under the law.” His exotic endurance challenges the very foundations of our Nation’s basic expectations concerning acceptable social behavior. It is irrefutable that other miscreant American citizens, evincing far less repetitive venality, have been, expectantly chastised and punished. Notably, it is to Mr. Herman Melville, specifically, in his novella, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” that we gratefully find the subtle explanation for our long-standing, disturbing dilemma.
In the novella the protagonist. Bartleby, employed in the law office of a prominent Wall Street lawyer as a document copier (“scrivener”), on a singularly significant occasion, when routinely requested by his employer to copy a particular document, surprisingly chose to reply, “I choose not to do so.” and persisted in his unprecedentedly societally aberrant and revolutionally refusal.
The fictional employer, experientially accustomed to stereotypical obedience from an employee concerning matters within the definitional scope of his job, was not only dismayed but profoundly nonplussed, regarding such unexpected and revolutionary refusal. Despite repeated requests, Bartleby persisted in his reply, “I choose not to do so,” including, ultimately, the acceptance of his firing and the strident demand to remove from the office. As we recall the narrative, the employer was, himself, ultimately required, in desperation, to move to another office.
The enlightening message of Melville is that there are certain fundamental, metaphysical expectations, hard-wired by our socialization into our psyche (here, the expected obedience of a servant to his master, or an employee to his employer) that are not only normalized, but existential to the effectuation of any cognizably appropriate response. Absent the hard-wired, societally predictable response, the reality of an appropriate reaction to a stimulus is empirically confused and disabled.
Our thematic conundrum is explicable in an analogous fashion to the exotic, unprecedented, and precedentially inconceivable behavior of Melville’s unique protagonist, Bartleby. The prodigiously remarkable, overflowing dumpster of wrongdoing, universal disregard of the law, and of the basic strictures of the societal moral compass, evinced by the exotically singular persona of Donald J. Trump, is far outside empirical experience and thus of sufficient comprehension to enable appropriate response, or empirical experience.
Like Bartleby, the metaphysical offense against human expectation and acceptability is, apparently, outside the empirical capacity of societally adjusted mainstream citizens to referentially comprehend, leading to their temporal humanistic amazement and responsive paralysis.
Donald Trump, however, is an ultimate societal lesson in the art of sociopathy and egoistic lack of humanism; an advancing understanding and rational acceptance of which, before long, will be succeeded by appropriate censure and legal retribution.
-p.
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