IT WAS DURING a Wellness in the Workplace training day that the spectre of Bartleby first appeared. What, I wondered, would HR make of Herman Melville’s anti-hero of Wall Street? Described by his employer – Melville’s narrator – as, variously, ‘demented’, an ‘intolerable incubus’, ‘one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable’, Bartleby – and his devastating refrain, ‘I would prefer not to’ – might present a powerful disruption to the wellbeing flow chart. Presumably his passive refusal would thwart the meagre interventions on offer: lunchtime yoga, frequent hydration, a destigmatising email from a concerned colleague (‘R U OK, Bartleby?’). No doubt he’d be subject to what the resilience manual ominously refers to as ‘early interven-tion’ and attract a host of diagnoses: the ‘long famishing’ scrivener who ‘never went to dinner’ would, in the first instance, likely be deemed anorexic. His ‘retreat from speech’ and its ravaging effect on the social order might prompt an autism assessment. His refusal in the face of exhortations to wellness, ambition, a standing desk, has shades of oppositional defiance disorder; but ‘I would prefer not to’ is, as Deleuze noted, a rejection of ‘a non-preferred’ rather than a negation, so a shrewd diagnostician might instead propose the more elastic designation of ‘complex mental illness’.

But why the apparition of Melville’s neurodivergent scrivener during a workplace wellness training session? What did any of this have to do with the wellbeing and productivity slideshow? Certainly, Bartleby, it seemed to me, incarnated something of the spirit of the self-care axiom arrived at in breakout room 3: ‘you cannot pour from an empty cup.’ And yet, I sensed Bartleby’s particular brand of weltschmerzmight hold some deeper resonance for the constitutionally and chronically mentally ill subject of late capitalism.