North American Fiction and Film
Chapter 2: Herman Melville
In this chapter we will examine Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"
and "Benito Cereno" by exploring the stories in some detail, and
then by examining some of the ways in which these stories have been read
by the critics.
Table of Contents
Discussion
Critical Readings
Review Questions
"Bartleby, the Scrivener"
The narrator
"I am a rather elderly man," says the lawyer-narrator of "Bartleby"
(3), and thus begins a tale which is full of contradictions and gaps and
which has been read in various and apparently opposite ways. By introducing
his story with the Cartesian "I am" ("I think, therefore
I am"), the lawyer mimics not only the power of God ("I am"
the light, the word, and so) but also the originary gesture of all biographies
(and indeed, fiction generally)-the idea that the self is knowable (and
will be laid out for your convenience in the following story, so to speak).
Having made this gesture, however, the narrator undermines it, for he equivocates,
then denies that the self is at all knowable. This pattern is repeated throughout
the story in relation to all the characters the lawyer attempts to characterise,
including himself. For example, he says that although he could tell us a
thing or two about other scriveners he has known, he will concentrate on
Bartleby, the "strangest" scrivener he ever saw. However, he then
admits the following:
While of other law-copyists [scriveners] I might write the complete
life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no materials
exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. . . . Bartleby
was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable except from the
original sources, and, in his case, those are very small. What my own astonished
eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague
report, which will appear in the sequel. (3)
In effect, the lawyer is telling us that although he wants to tell Bartleby's
story, he cannot because not much is known about him. His story then becomes
an admission that he knows very little about Bartleby.
He does not indicate, moreover, what he means by "original sources":
Bartleby himself? eye-witness accounts? documents? We already know that
Bartleby is dead ("Bartleby was . . "), so he is unlikely to be
of any help. Bartleby starts out as an enigma and remains that way for the
rest of the story: we, as readers, find out very little about Bartleby other
than that he has a penchant for responding to requests or questions with
"I prefer not" to do this or that, and that he dies, more-or-less
from starvation.
The lawyer reveals the "real" purpose of his story when he says:
"Ere introducing the scrivener, as he first appeared to me, it is fit
I make some mention of myself" (3). One could argue that narratives
are always about the narrator, especially first-person narrators, and that
this narrative proves to be no exception. The lawyer continues in this vein
by giving us a summary of his character: "I am a man who, from his
youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest
way of life is the best" (3).
Clearly, as we subsequently find out, the narrator likes to earn easy money
and not to be bothered too much by the necessities of his chosen occupation:
as a lawyer, he does not take on cases which require him to address a jury,
and unlike his peers, he has no political ambitions.
This point is significant because we might wonder why someone who desires
an easy life would have bothered to pen the story we are reading. In any
event, how much does this really tell us about the lawyer? Perhaps something
has happened which has stirred him from his "sloth" and stung
him into writing this story. Has he had a change of heart about something
to do with his easy life? Certainly, we are alerted to be on the look-out
for clues to this change as we read on.
The surroundings: Wall Street
Having alerted us to the idea that he is an "eminently safe man,"
that he likes the sound of "bullion," and that he was really annoyed
when a sinecure he had as "Master in Chancery" was removed by
legislation (4), the lawyer then proceeds to tell us about the surroundings
which will form the backdrop of his tale. The first of these concerns his
chambers in Wall Street, which was then and is now the financial and legal
hub of New York. In many ways, the failings of the lawyer which are revealed
subsequently are the failings of capitalism: poverty; dead-end jobs and
dead-end lives for the exploited workers; pathetic rationalisations of the
status-quo by those who benefit most from it.
Much of this is done symbolically
For example, his chambers appear to be lost somewhere in the depths of Wall
Street because although they look out on a "spacious skylight shaft,"
the view is "deficient in what landscape painters call 'life'"
(4). The other end of his chambers simply look out on a "lofty brick
wall," which means that the whole thing resembles "a huge square
cistern" (4). Clearly, this is not a pleasant place, and it represents
symbolically the idea that if one is at the centre of Wall Street activities
then one has stepped (or even lives) right in it.
For those, like the lawyer, who benefit from the activities in the cistern
but who live in pleasant suburbs away from its effluent, things are not
so bad though clearly they need to conform and compete to avoid s(t)inking.
For those, like Bartleby, who, it turns out, actually lives in Wall Street,
in the offices, life is not quite so good; the trap is inescapable as is
evident in Bartleby's "dead wall reveries" (25) where he simply
stands motionless looking at the wall opposite his window. In fact, he dies
curled up against a prison wall of "amazing thickness" (33).
Other characters in the story
This symbolic interpretation of Wall Street is exemplified in the lawyer's
analysis of his employee's characters. Whatever his own aspirations, the
lawyer obviously cannot afford (or does not wish) to employ scriveners other
than those who are themselves at the bottom end of the scale. For all the
comedy of the lawyer's descriptions, the image of them treading water in
the effluent of the cistern (system) is inescapable.
Turkey
Turkey, it seems, works quite well in the morning, but after lunch at the
local saloon, he becomes irascible and his "business capacities"
are "seriously disturbed" (5). It is in his descriptions of Turkey
that the lawyer introduces an element of the comic. After lunch,
There was a strange, inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness
of activity about him. He would be incautious in dipping his pen into his
inkstand. All his blots upon my documents were dropped there after twelve
o'clock, meridian. Indeed, not only would he be reckless and sadly given
to making blots in the afternoon, but some days he went further and was
rather noisy. At such times, too, his face flamed with augmented blazonry
. . . . He made an unpleasant racket with his chair; spilled his sandbox;
in mending his pens, impatiently split them all to pieces and threw them
on the floor in a sudden passion; stood up and leaned over his table, boxing
his papers about in a most indecorous manner, very sad to behold in an elderly
man like him. (5)
The lawyer says that he is prepared to overlook these eccentricities because
Turkey is "valuable" to him. Besides, the lawyer is reluctant
to remonstrate with Turkey because although the "blandest and most
reverential of men" in the morning, he was disposed "upon provocation
to be slightly rash with his tongue-in fact, insolent" in the afternoon
(5).
The lawyer does remonstrate with Turkey and suggests that he might like
to "abridge" his labours and not come to the chambers after twelve
o'clock, but Turkey insists "upon his afternoon devotions" because
he considers himself the lawyer's "'right-hand man'" and in any
event reminds the lawyer that they are both "'getting old'" (5-6).
The lawyer comments: "This appeal to my fellow feeling was hardly to
be resisted" and he compromises by resolving not to let Turkey deal
with important papers in the afternoon.
Nippers
Nippers in many ways mirrors Turkey in that he suffers from a "nervous
testiness and grinning irritability" the lawyer attributes to an indigestion
which causes
the teeth to audibly grind together over mistakes committed
in copying; unnecessary maledictions, hissed rather than spoken, in the
heat of business; and especially by a continual discontent with the height
of the table where he worked. Though of a very ingenious mechanical turn,
Nippers could never get this table to suit him. He put chips under it, blocks
of various sorts, bits of pasteboard, and at last went so far as to attempt
an exquisite adjustment by final pieces of folded blotting paper. But no
invention would answer. (6)
The narrator notes that Nippers "knew not what he wanted," a comment
which might also apply to Turkey and, indeed, to Bartleby.
Nippers, perhaps because he is much younger than the sixty-year old Turkey,
has ambitions which go beyond his station as a scrivener and seems to be
engaged in certain nefarious activities, some of which he conducts at the
chambers (such as being visited by debt collectors). The question these
descriptions raise is: why does the lawyer as their employer put up with
Turkey and Nippers? He does acknowledge that they are "valuable"
several times, but he seems not to exercise his right as their employer
to ensure that they behave in a manner suitable for his business.
Turkey's "execrable" coat
The lawyer does indirectly acknowledge part of the problem in his discussion
of Turkey's "execrable" coat. He tries to reason with him about
it, but comes to the conclusion: "The truth was, I suppose, that a
man with so small an income could not afford to sport such a lustrous face
and a lustrous coat at one and the same time" (7). He even presents
Turkey with one of his own coats. Unfortunately, this present only makes
Turkey more "insolent" than normal. The lawyer seems not to notice
that both Turkey and Nippers not only resent their lowly occupations in
life, they also give life to their resentments in their eccentric behaviour.
The lawyer counts himself as a clever observer of life, but his comic descriptions
of his employees' behaviour does not abrogate his condescension to them
and their circumstances. They are amusing if somewhat annoying employees,
but they more-or-less get the job done and for very little money. The lawyer's
timidity in the face of their behaviour, then, might be explained by the
benefits he receives at their employ. Or more simply, he exploits them and
in return is prepared to allow a little eccentric behaviour provided it
doesn't affect his profits. To his mind allowances must be made for employees
who are, after all, hardly of his social class and standing.
The "motionless young man": Bartleby
Much of this seems to change when a "motionless young man" responds
to an advertisement for employment. The narrator is taken by Bartleby: "I
can see that figure now-pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!
It was Bartleby" (8-9). Whether these are the responses of the lawyer
on the day, or of the later lawyer/narrator, is not clear. Bartleby is put
to work at a window which affords no view, and on the lawyer's side of the
office-partitions, though he purchases a folding partition so that Bartleby
is concealed from his sight.
Bartleby, in effect, is placed in a dark corner of the "cistern"
and begins "an extraordinary quantity of writing," as if he seemed
to "gorge himself" on the lawyer's documents (this image of Bartleby
"eating" the contents of the cistern is noteworthy). This seems
to be the only thing and the only time Bartleby gorges himself on anything,
for when it comes time to check document and copy, an occupation the lawyer
acknowledges would not have interested Byron, Bartleby responds to the lawyer's
peremptory call with: "'I would prefer not to'" (10).
The lawyer demands to know what Bartleby means by this refusal, and suggests
that "had there been anything ordinarily human about him," he
would have dismissed him at once. All he can do is think how "strange"
it is, and he calls Nippers in to do the checking. The scene is repeated
a few days later, and Bartleby again "refuses." The lawyer tries
to reason with him, explaining that all copyists have to check their own
work and that of others, an explanation which he believes makes his "request"
one made "according to common usage and common sense" (11).
Bartleby is not to be moved, however, and the narrator observes:
It is not seldom the case that, when a man is browbeaten in
some unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger
in his own plainest faith. He begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that,
wonderful as it may be, all the justice and reason is on the other side.
(11)
This is a crucial admission on the part of the narrator, for not only has
he gone beyond the compromises he allows with Turkey and Nippers, he has
also admitted that the things he has believed in about his occupation (and
his way of life) have been challenged by Bartleby's "unreasonable"
refusal to do what even the most eccentric scrivener would accept as part
of the job.
Gingernuts and rational thinking
The lawyer decides to observe Bartleby closely, and he discovers that he
rarely if ever actually leaves the office. He observes the office-boy (Gingernuts)
bring Bartleby gingernuts:
My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the
human constitution of living entirely on gingernuts. Gingernuts are so called
because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents, and the
final flavoring one. Now, what was ginger? A hot spicy thing. Was Bartleby
hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then, had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably
he preferred it should have none. (13)
The absurdity of this so-called "rational" process, particularly
given the lawyer's apparent earnestness in pursuing it, strikes a very comic
effect. It also clearly shows that the lawyer's attempts to account for
Bartleby's character, in a gesture which mocks somewhat his attempts to
characterise his own and that of his employees', is nothing more than uninformed
speculation. This is reinforced by some of his other rationalisations: he
believes, for instance, that Bartleby's eccentricities are "involuntary,"
which is an odd thing to say given that he has spent some time already explaining
the "involuntary" eccentricities of Turkey and Nippers against
which Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" seems deliberate and
calculating. He does appear to have some compassion for Bartleby, however,
because he worries that if he turned Bartleby out, he might fall on hard
times, be forced to work for a "less indulgent employer," or even
starve (13).
"Love one another"
The lawyer seems spellbound by Bartleby, and by the commandment "'that
ye love one another'" (25), though this is tempered by his desire to
do Bartleby some serious harm:
Men have committed murder for jealousy's sake, and anger's sake, and hatred's
sake, and selfishness' sake, and spiritual pride's sake; but no man ever
I ever heard of ever committed a diabolical murder for sweet charity's sake.
(25)
Bartleby, meanwhile, progressively refuses to do anything: he refuses to
run errands (14), to reveal anything about himself (19), to take money to
leave (22), to copy (21), to quit the offices (24), to take up any other
occupation (29-30), and finally to eat (30). Or perhaps, finally, to live
(33).
Bartleby: A blow to the lawyer's sense of
certainty
Much of the rest of the story is taken up with the lawyer trying to deal
with the blow to his sense of certainty which Bartleby represents. He tries
to bring his other employees in on his side of the argument (12, 20). He
tries to reason Bartleby out of his unusual behaviour (13, 14, 19, 24, 29-30).
Both he and the others in the office even start using the word "prefer"
in all manner of inappropriate situations, though they deny it (20). The
narrator starts reading about "Will" and "Necessity"
and "Determinism," but without finding an answer or, indeed, an
appropriate question (26). Defeated, he finally quits his own offices when
Bartleby refuses to leave them (27).
Having moved out of his chambers to avoid Bartleby, in an incident which
shows just how far his sense of certainty has been threatened, the lawyer
returns at the request of his former landlord to speak to Bartleby, who
had remained behind and now "haunts" these chambers. The lawyer
absurdly threatens to quit what he has already quit ("If you do not
go away from these premises before night, I shall feel bound-indeed, I am
bound-to-to-to quit the premises myself'" 30).
The "vague report"
The story finishes with the "vague report" the lawyer had promised
earlier. In this, the narrator seems to find some sort of answer to the
conundrum which is Bartleby. Evidently, Bartleby had worked at some stage
in a "Dead Letter Office," a place of infinite despair because
of the hopelessness of the communications one finds there ("Sometimes
from out of the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring-the finger it was
meant for, perhaps, molders in the grave" 34).
This report is told in the subjunctive; that is, it is clear that the lawyer
has no first hand knowledge of the office itself or of Bartleby's working
experiences (if, indeed, he ever worked there). The lawyer sees these as
messages of life which go astray ("On errands of life, these letters
speed to death" 34), and he concludes with the memorable phrase: "Ah,
Bartleby! Ah, humanity!" (34). The question remains whether this is
a prophetic announcement of the constitution of the self, or an admission
of failure on the part of the narrator, a failure of knowing.
Critical Readings
We would now like to provide you with two very different critical readings
of the story which should give you an idea of the complex ways in which
"Bartleby" has been critically received. Some other critical readings
are listed at the end of the chapter for those of you who are interested
in writing on "Bartleby" in your essays.
We are our brother's keeper
This story has been read in a variety of ways. Walter E Anderson, for instance,
argues that the "Christian moral" reading, that "we be our
brother's keeper," is the correct reading even though it is not the
moral of the story (329). The moral of the story, as with Captain Delano
in "Benito Cereno," is, for Anderson, the failure of insight on
the part of the lawyer/narrator represented by his less than gracious throwing
up of hands in his comment: "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!" (Melville
34).
If the focus of analysis is on the lawyer, this failure of insight raises
a number of questions, Anderson suggests: is the lawyer the cause of Bartleby's
suffering? does the lawyer continually if inadvertently reveal his moral
corruption (that is, through his desire for an easy life and through his
exploitation of the workers, Turkey, Nippers, Ginger Nuts, and Bartleby
himself)? is the rhetoric of the narrator inflated and self-serving, a sort
of Christian with a blind spot? is the lawyer's failure one of empathy (that
is, he continually fails to comprehend Bartleby's anguish and loneliness)?
given that the lawyer believes in the metaphysics of the rational individual,
is his failure also a failure of both metaphysics and of rationality (384)?
Perhaps, suggests Anderson, the lawyer's failure is simply one of timidity:
he seems incapable of disciplining either Turkey or Nippers for the inconsistencies
of their morning/afternoon tag-team act, or to deal with Bartleby as any
number of his legal colleagues might have (385).
Anderson asks: does Bartleby truly possess a free will (385)? Is he, as
a scrivener who refuses to conform to the dictates of existing art forms,
a symbol of the "risky nature of intellectual rebellion"? Anderson
believes that one way of reading Bartleby is to see him as practising a
"strict asceticism" through which freedom is possible; that is,
a freedom from the delusions of this world which manifests itself, finally,
as one which extinguishes the will to live (385). Or to put it another way,
the lawyer only lives in the world under the false assumption of its "reality."
Anderson believes that the lawyer's charity seems to go beyond what most
would have given. This raises a question, he believes, which underpins the
story: is it possible to perform acts of altruism without, finally, having
regard to self-interest? What this suggests is that Christ's commandments
reflect an ideal, one that the rest of us find impossible to live up to
because, at a certain point, we all turn back to self-preservation (that
is, unlike Christ who went "all the way" and gave up his life)
(386).
The contrast between capitalism (Wall-Street being one of its dominant symbols)
with its self-interest, and the Christ-like Bartleby could not, Anderson
argues, be stronger. He concludes that the "divine-logos," which
Bartleby represents, shows itself as an impossible practice within the confines
of "institutionalised self-interest" (386). Or to put it another
way, if we are our brother's keeper, Bartleby, in demanding to be kept without
offering anything in return, is so exasperating that even the apparently
charitable lawyer gives in and moves out when Bartleby refuses to quit his
offices (387).
Another way to put this question is to ask whether it is a "moral"
or "natural" necessity to be one's brother's keeper. Anderson
quotes Jonathan Edwards who believes that a moral necessity is
that high degree of probability which is ordinarily sufficient to satisfy
and be relied upon by mankind, in their conduct and behaviour in the world,
as they would consult their own safety and interest, and treat others properly
as members of society. (qtd in Anderson 387)
Anderson believes that whilst Edwards believes that it is a moral necessity,
Melville believes it to be a "natural" one. Bartleby's failure
is that he literally "goes to the wall"; whereas the lawyer's
frustration and failure comes from a sense of guilt mingled with a self-serving
sense of virtue (387).
Anderson believes that one cannot consider Bartleby without considering
both Turkey and Nippers as they both form part of the same paradigm (388).
Both are eccentric and radically different from the lawyer, as is Bartleby.
The lawyer overlooks these eccentricities provided Turkey and Nippers appear
useful to him. This is a kind of social compact into which Bartleby will
not enter, or at least, out of which he quickly opts (388).
Finally, Anderson asks whether the lawyer obtains self-approval (i.e. his
conscience is appeased) too cheaply; that is, the lawyer turns from Bartleby,
just as Saint Peter had done, and the "good tidings" of brotherhood
fall as a "dead letter" (393).
A failure of insight
Thomas Mitchell argues that both the lawyer's warnings about the difficulty
of understanding Bartleby (a person of whom "nothing is ascertainable")
and the lawyer's own failure to do so are ignored by critics and readers
who nonetheless make their own attempts. This leads, Mitchell believes,
to a series of readings by the critics who attempt to fill in the gaps in
that they try to understand Bartleby in a way that exceeds the lawyer's
understanding of him-the assumption being that readers and critics are capable
of knowing things that the lawyer does no-yet which unwittingly replicate
the lawyer's failure of insight (329).
This "diversity of interpretation" is a function, says Mitchell
(quoting Leo Marx) of the story's "ability to say almost nothing on
its placid and inscrutable surface, and yet so powerfully to suggest that
a great deal is being said" (qtd in Mitchell 329). Moreover, Mitchell
suggests (quoting Milton R. Stern) that the story offers numerous "ideological
possibilities," which means that "the seer of psychiatric, political,
literary, metaphysical, or religious positions is sure to find in the tale
a paradigm for his own advocacy" (qtd in Mitchell 329). Donald Craver
and Patricia Planter support this view when they argue that although its
scale is small, "Bartleby" has a quality which enables it to suggest
a whole group of meanings, none of which "exhaust" the possibilities
(132).
That the story is a sort of surface on to which readers and critics etch
their own concerns mimics, thinks Mitchell, both in gesture and effect,
the lawyer's own selfish embodiment of capitalist principles as these manifest
themselves in a repressive world of law and order-a world of self-deceiving
rationality, genteel consciousness, orthodoxy, and surfaces. Bartleby, on
the other hand, represents a man who will no longer conform to the standards
of the capitalist world, a Christ-like figure, the unconscious, a hidden
recognition of the world as meaningless chaos and absurdity, the lawyer's
conscience, the world of preferences and free will, revolution, the Stoic
tragic view, the defeated Stoic writer or artist rebel, the defeat of the
human will, or any or all of the above (329-330).
Consequently, sympathy for Bartleby precludes understanding for the lawyer,
the paradox of the narrative being that the lawyer is "damned"
by his own "revelations" whereas Bartleby "reveals nothing"
(330). Bartleby's inscrutability prevents any "traditional" analysis
of his character or his actions, a situation which re-focuses the attention
on the hapless lawyer (331). Mitchell asks why, if the lawyer is as smug
as he is supposed to be, he is telling the story at all?
The story itself is hardly flattering to the lawyer revealing, as it does,
details about how he could not fire his recalcitrant employee, could not
bring himself to call the police to have him evicted (as his successors
did), could not think of an alternative to fleeing the building and moving
his entire business, could not get Bartleby to leave the building even after
he had himself left, could not persuade Bartleby to live with him, could
not write Bartleby off as a lunatic, and finally, could not get him to eat
(331). The tale itself, in other words, is self-consciously about the narrator's
failures using self-directed irony (333).
Mitchell thinks that the epilogue deflects some of this interpretive dialogue.
Apparently, the lawyer muses, Bartleby had once been a "subordinate
clerk in the Dead Letter Office" (Melville 34). Mitchell believes that
"Bartleby" is itself a kind of "dead letter", because
dead letters represent the ultimate difficulty humans have in communicating.
The meaning of the story is lost, as it were, like Bartleby in the Dead
Letter Office, as Bartleby is himself a kind of dead letter with his "dead
wall reveries," his withdrawal from life (333-334).
Common compulsion neurosis
Dennis Perry believes that Bartleby needs to be considered as a character
in relation to the other characters because it is in this relation that
it is possible to see their "common compulsion neurosis" (407).
The tale is based, he believes, on the "ego defences" the characters
erect against their "compulsions and obsessions." According to
Perry, Freud's definition of the mind involves the notion of the ego (the
psychic function whose operations govern the construction of reality) in
conflict with the id (the unconscious system of personality that acts to
reduce pain and to enhance pleasure, by giving free reign to primitive impulses).
In other words, "the ego functions to mediate between the natural impulses
of the id and external reality"; or, the ego functions to physically
and psychologically preserve the self-it pursues pleasures by "adapting
to, running from, or modifying the external world." Problems arise
when the id attempts "to force its way through the protective barriers
erected by the ego": via "conversion" (that is, where the
ego is simply overthrown and actions occur which were not intended by the
ego); and via compulsions and obsessions (where the ego still governs but
does not feel free to use its power) (408).
What this adds up to, Perry suggests, is that "In 'Bartleby' all of
the major characters vainly attempt to use ego defence mechanisms to reduce
the anxiety produced by the sterile activity of the law office," and
that these mechanisms manifest themselves as compulsive behaviour. Consequently,
the story documents the way the characters "ultimately fail to wall
out the natural impulses of the id with the artificial social conventions
erected by the ego" (408-409). For example, the lawyer represents the
prudent life of the material status quo with his desire for an easy life,
one which is "safe" and well rewarded. In this, says Perry, his
"instinctual life is anally oriented" (409).
In other words, the ego re-routes his anti-social tendencies in the form
of compulsions and obsessions: in his orderliness; in the careful structuring
of his tale; in his sectioning of his offices (he enjoys the class benefits
of his position by isolating himself from his scriveners); in his denial
and his limited self-perception (he denies the motivations and the unconventional
behaviours of his scriveners, which are reminders of his own id, by portraying
them in comic terms-i.e. by attributing their behaviour to intemperance
and indigestion); in his attempts to control his emotions; and in his frugality
(even the sound of money gives his pleasure). In short, his "rationalisations"
are a form of irrationality (409-410).
Perry believes that the weakness of the lawyer's ego defences lie in his
"vacillating emotional responses" to Bartleby's enigma and irrationality.
As Bartleby refuses, progressively, to do anything at all, the lawyer's
attempts to find explanations for him become increasingly bizarre. Perry
says that struggles between the lawyer's hatred of Bartleby (id inspired)
and his formulations of pity and patience (ego inspired) characterise the
lawyer's responses. Perry concludes:
Faced with his own rational fall and the cumulative realisation
of the futility of his irrationalisations as well as his other rhetorical
strategies to maintain a consistent Wall-Street image, he flees to Broadway
to find temporary asylum. He must, therefore, find peace on Broadway where
imagination and emotion rather than the rationality of Wall Street rule.
Thus his ego has temporarily broken down and seeks the state of the 'ideal
ego,' wherein the id and the ego are in harmony. One characteristic of the
'ideal ego' is the fantasy of returning to the womb, a regression that seems
apparent in the lawyer's huddling in a rockaway. (411)
Perry believes that in contrast to the lawyer, Turkey and Nippers are only
able to deny the id's impulses for half a day; that is, while they both
recognise the need to accept the Wall Street values of rationality and professionalism
(as the lawyer does), there is a neurotic split in the ego which enables
the id to surface but not erupt. Perry quotes Freud to support his case:
It is indeed a universal characteristic of neuroses that there
are present in the subject's mental life, as regards some particular behaviour,
two different attitudes, contrary to each other and independent of each
other; in that case, however, one of them belongs to the ego and the opposing
one, which is repressed, belongs to the id. (qtd in Perry 411)
In other words, Perry believes that both Turkey and Nippers use fantasy
as a means of denial, but both are unable to maintain their defence mechanisms
for more than half a day. Their fits are the means of expression which go
beyond their assigned tasks of copying the words of others (which itself
represents a sort of ego copying and maintaining the conventions of reality);
that is, Turkey and Nippers both try to maintain a fiction of self-worth
by denying their status as copyists.
Perry believe that all three-the lawyer with his orderliness, Turkey with
his ale and his ginger cakes, Nippers with his "psychomachia"-illustrate
the conflict between the id and the ego as compulsion neuroses. Bartleby,
too, suffers from this malaise with one difference: his ego is progressively
unable to sustain the conventions of external reality: he refuses to check
copy, to copy, to move, to talk and finally to eat. Perry believes that
in this we see a "deeper manifestation" of the neuroses of the
other three (413-414).
For example, when the lawyer appeals to him to be a little reasonable, Bartleby
responds: "'At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable'"
(Melville 19). In this, he negates (both his ego and the lawyer's) rather
than simply prefers. Perry suggests that Bartleby is aware of the sterility
of life on Wall Street, but unlike the lawyer, Turkey and Nippers, he refuses
to invent or engage in a false rhetoric to protect and maintain his ego.
Despite his "counterphobic" reaction (Perry believes that he adapts
the language of copyists in order to reject them), Bartleby is simply an
extension of the other characters, a reverse of the socialisation process,
a symbol which "epitomises the inevitable fate of all humanity trapped
in its own decaying systems of arbitrary conventions and linguistic cliches"
(415).
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Review Questions
- "Herman Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener' and 'Benito Cereno'
have been read as tales of the failure of 'insight' on the part of the lawyer/narrator
('Bartleby') and Captain Delano ('Benito Cereno'). However, a close reading
of both reveals the possibility that this notion of 'insight' implies an
ability to know the 'self' which each of the stories, in their own way,
shows as impossible." Discuss.
- Do you agree with Anderson's suggestion that "Bartleby" is
about the moral, "we are our brother's keeper"? What evidence
can you provide to support your case?
- Do you agree with Anderson's suggestion that one way of reading Bartleby
is to see him as practising a "strict asceticism" through which
freedom is possible; that is, a "freedom from the delusions of this
world which manifests itself, finally, as one which extinguishes the will
to live"?
- Do you agree with Mitchell's suggestion that readers and critics, by
trying to interpret "Bartleby" in ways that the lawyer more-or-less
admits are impossible, actually replicate his "failure of insight"?
- Do you agree with Perry's suggestion that all of the characters suffer
from obsessive/compulsive type disorders?
Last updated August 1996
Comments to Dr John Fitzsimmons:
Phone: (079) 309240; Email: j.fitzsimmons@cqu.edu.au
Humanities Department
Faculty of Arts
Central Queensland University
Rockhampton MC Queensland 4702
Australia