Veering is my subject. My subject is veering. I would like to leave these sentences side by side here, in all their undisambiguated simplicity, as a kind of Tweedledum and Tweedledee entrance-way to a reading of Melville's ‘Bartleby’. I propose to begin with a recapitulation of what I have been trying to explore in this book. There is something a bit odd, even perverse about the gesture of recapitulating. As Rachel Bowlby has noted, recapitulation has ‘the peculiar quality of being an ending that includes a beginning. To recapitulate is to go over the main points of an argument, at the end, but from the start.’ In short, there is something veerable about a recap. To veer – just to recap – is to change direction, to turn aside or away, to alter course; veerable is ‘tending to veer; changeable’ (OED, ‘veerable’, adj.). It is perfectly possible for a person to veer, but just as likely there is a vehicle of some sort involved: a ship veers round, a car veers off the road. Non-human animals veer. Veering is not necessarily human. It points, we might say, in significantly non-anthropocentric directions.