The Meaning of Writing in Enrique Vila-Matas’s Work: Focusing on the Novel “Bartleby And Company”

This study looks at Enrique Vila-Matas’s novel “Bartleby And Company” using ideas from Maurice Blanchot’s concepts. Blanchot writes about the writer, writing, and the work, especially about solitude. Vila-Matas’s novel is unusual because it is made of 86 footnotes to a book(maintext) that does not exist. This study focuses on the first 10 footnotes. Instead of telling a normal story, the novel uses footnotes to talk about different ‘Bartlebys’, people who refuse to write in different ways. The narrator, ‘Marcelo,’ writes about them but also becomes one of them. In this way, he enters the special space of literature that Blanchot describes, where the self breaks down and language loses its order. The refusals take different forms, and the gaps between the footnotes are not empty. They show silence, pauses, and even the symbolic death of the writer. These spaces also show the narrator’s thoughts and feelings. This study explains how the novel develops what can be called the ‘Bartleby syndrome,’ different forms of refusal, giving up, and not writing. It connects this idea with Blanchot’s thoughts about the writer, writing, and the work. In the end, Vila-Matas uses literature to show that the impossibility of literature is itself a possibility for literature. The novel makes the writer’s solitude and the work’s solitude real, showing how writing can be both impossible and possible at the same time.