“Bartleby & Co.” by Enrique Vila-Matas (translated by Jonathan Dunne)

Vila-Matas knows how to open a novel. “I never had much luck with women. I have a pitiful hump, which I am resigned to. All my closest relatives are dead. I am a poor recluse working in a ghastly office. Apart from that, I am happy.” The narrator creates a book comprised entirely of footnotes, dedicated to all the Bartlebys of the world, an appellation of Melvillian fame. Vila-Matas’ narrator states, “It is my intention, therefore, to make my way through the labyrinth of the No.” Each footnote details a famous writer who has chosen, for whatever reasons, to stop. Speaking of Pepin Bello’s choice to forgo writing, the narrator opines, “To renounce without lamentation the expression of one’s own gifts can be a spiritually aristocratic virtue and, when one yields to it without recourse to contempt for one’s peers, boredom of life or indifference towards art, then it has something of the divine.” Digressing on Hofmannsthal and the record of Bartleby syndrome, the narrator explains, “Although the syndrome already had a long history, with the “Letter of Lord Chandos” literature lay completely exposed to its insufficiency and impossibility, drawing from this exposure—as is happening in these notes without a text—its fundamental, necessarily tragic question. Denial, refusal, mutism, are gaps in the extreme forms in which the unease of culture presented itself.” Further, he recounts that “Vargas Llosa—always harboured the suspicion, which turned into a conviction, that there is a series of books which formed part of the history of the No, though they may not exist.” Most of Vila-Matas’ novel proceeds in this way, detailing instances, throughout history, when writers have refused to write. “These footnotes cannot have an essence, neither can literature, because the essence of any text consists precisely in evading any essential classification, any assertion that establishes or claims it…. So I have been working on these footnotes, searching and inventing, doing without any rules of the game that exist in literature. I have been working on these footnotes in a slightly careless and anarchic manner.”