All claim in one way or another to have identified Bartleby and to have accounted for him, to have done him justice.” (Miller 173) Dan McCall calls this multitude of critical accounts “the Bartleby Industry” (McCall x, cf. Hillis Miller argues that “A large secondary literature has grown up around ✻artleby,« remarkable for its multiplicity and diversity. The short story’s significance in both Melville’s oeuvre, as well as in American literature in general, is beyond doubt, despite the fact that its meaning constantly eludes us, or, it might be argued, precisely because it eludes us. At all events, all the horrendous things that novelists think they are making up always fall short of the truth.” (Balzac 82-83) We could argue, law and literature are two very powerful discourses that we have for apprehending the unnarratable, yet in Derville’s view, they are both bound to miss: the lawyer’s words testify to the inability of both literature and the law to understand and deal with what can be labeled as “the horror of the real.” As a way for thinking through the theoretical issues stemming from this insight, I will turn to a reading of Herman Melville’s masterpiece, “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853). At the end of Honoré de Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, the lawyer Derville comes to the following conclusion about certain cases that he witnessed in his legal praxis: “I can’t tell you all that I’ve seen, for I have witnessed crimes against which justice is impotent.
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