The lawyer’s first command (1) to Bartleby to do a specific job, which is reported as indirect speech rather than with his actual words, is a threat to his negative face because it is an imposition. However, due to the institutional relation, the lawyer’s power makes this FTA small enough to be admissible with little or no redressive action. The lawyer’s description of the paper as ‘small’ minimises the size of the imposition to the copyist, showing concern for his negative face. However, this adjective is part of the lawyer’s indirect speech, so that readers do not know whether he really used that word in producing the FTA. What is relevant, though, is that the lawyer does conceptualise the paper as ‘small’, so that readers create a mental representation of the lawyer as being concerned with his employee’s face needs.
Bartleby’s unexpected and straightforward answer (2) refusing to work surprises the lawyer because it clashes with the employee’s obligations, so that, for the copyist, the ranking of this imposition is big and so is the weightiness of this FTA. If a high
number of redressive strategies to the lawyer’s positive and negative faces were used, the threat might be acceptable. However, the threat contains one unique redressive strategy: he is conventionally indirect since he uses ‘would prefer not’ instead of uttering directly ‘no’. Brown and Levinson (1987) do not include this grammatical structure in their explanation of this redressive strategy because they only deal with commands, questions, or criticisms and not with refusals. I do not consider Bartleby’s strategy as ‘off-record’ because in using that strategy, speakers can deny the intention of producing the FTA, and Bartleby repeats the same FTA after the lawyer’s misunderstanding.
According to Searle (1975), ‘one can perform any illocutionary act by asserting (though not by questioning) the satisfaction of the sincerity condition for that act’ (1975: 71). The sincerity condition for a refusal would be ‘S does not wish to do A ’. Thus, Bartleby is asserting the sincerity condition to achieve the illocutionary force of the utterance as a refusal, so that, in politeness terms, he is being conventionally indirect. In conclusion, the lawyer’s negative face is minimally redressed with this negative politeness strategy and, at the same time, the response threatens the copyist’s own positive face, since he runs the risk of not being approved of for this answer.
In the lawyer’s narration of his response to Bartleby, again in indirect speech (5), he provides a clue about the force he concedes to his utterance, a ‘request’, rather than an ‘order’ or ‘command’. Brown and Levinson (1987) explain the process of redefinition of speech acts with the purpose of changing the damage to the hearer’s face. The speaker may redefine something that he wants, e.g. a request such as ‘Would you like to come to the cinema with me tonight?’, which involves an FTA to the hearer’s negative face, into something that the hearer would really want, e.g. an offer such as ‘Let’s go to the cinema tonight’, which removes the previous threat. An
offer is less imposing than a request, and the consequent threat to the hearer’s face is reduced. The lawyer’s definition of his command as ‘request’ instead of ‘command’ implies his intention to minimise the threat to Bartleby’s face. Still, the illocutionary force of the linguistic structure is that of a command under the definition of a ‘request’. If it were really a request, the hearer would have the opportunity to choose to do or not to do what he is being asked, and that is not the lawyer’s intention, although it becomes the copyist’s interpretation.
After a second refusal (6), the lawyer’s next turn contains the first words we hear from his mouth: ‘Prefer not to (...) What do you mean? Are you moonstruck?’. The last question is a rhetorical question which Brown and Levinson would classify as an off-record FTA whose ‘meaning is to some degree negotiable’ (1987: 69). Contrary to this, I would agree with Quirk et al. (1985) who claim that rhetorical questions function as strong assertions, so that there is no negotiability in them. Thus, in this case, we would have a strong assertion of an impolite belief: that Bartleby is moonstruck.
The intention of the lawyer with this turn is that of being offensive, which is not included within Brown and Levinson’s understanding of politeness, because for them politeness is conceived as a means of maintaining social equilibrium and minimising confrontation. Culpeper (2001) analyses this phenomenon describing it as a means of
attacking face and provides an account of the impoliteness strategies used for this
purpose, on the basis of Brown and Levinson’s politeness strategies. The lawyer attacks Bartleby’s face showing disapproval of his behaviour using the parallel of Brown and Levinson’s off-record strategy, which is, according to Culpeper, sarcasm. Sarcasm takes place when ‘an FTA is performed with the use of politeness strategies that are obviously insincere’ (1996: 356), so that the hearer can arrive ‘at the
offensive point of your remark indirectly, by way of an implieature’ (Leech 1983: 82). ‘Are you moonstruck?’ implicates that the hearer is moonstruck; under the polite appearance of a request for information, there is the implieature of an insult.
The lawyer’s turn continues with a change from impoliteness strategies to a negative politeness strategy redressing the copyist’s negative face by being conventionally indirect: ‘I want you to ...’. Nonetheless, the utterance ends with an imperative, a bald-on-record FTA whose force is supported by the kinesic movement of the lawyer: ‘Take it’. Brown and Levinson (1987) argue that one of the most frequent cases of this type of bald-on-record threat occurs when the power differential is great. As in this case, no indirectness is employed when the institutional setting allows this type of linguistic act. Thus, this turn compromises a mixture of politeness strategies: the impoliteness strategy of sarcasm, the negative politeness strategy of being conventionally indirect, and a bald-on-record FTA.
Amazingly, considering the norms of social interaction, the only response the narrator receives back from Bartleby is the same words repeated again in the calmest way (8). This repetition suggests that Bartleby’s concern for his own negative face, his desire not to be imposed upon, seems to be his unique preoccupation. This concern makes him threaten the lawyer’s negative face, with insufficiently redressed FTAs, because it is him and the other employees who have to do his work. At the same time, the copyist would seem to be ultimately threatening his own positive face because the effect of his utterance is the lawyer’s disapproval. However, he does not seem worried about this because maintaining his negative face and achieving his goals appear to be more important for him, as will be seen repeatedly throughout the story. The scrivener’s FTA is repeated three times in this episode and throughout the story when he prefers not to work (see section 4.3.4). It has become apparent by now that
Bartleby’s behaviour is not fulfilling the lawyer’s, and the reader’s, expectations of an employee and is very much revealing about the personality of this character.