By Ted Billy
The final comment of Melville's narrator in "Bartleby the Scrivener" ("Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!") acts as a synecdoche for the irreconcilable struggle that animates the novella. This brief statement of commiseration does more than merely link Bartleby's predicament to the universal human situation. It pinpoints the root of the conflict--the antagonism between the isolated individual and the whole of society. Melville chooses as his theme the tragic fragmentation of the human sensibility. This fragmentation in man's psyche stems from the loss of the intrinsic interaction between the human organism and his immediate physical environment. "Bartleby" serves as the literary objectification of Melville's intense awareness of the psychological trauma of fragmentation, anxiety, and alienation. And behind it all lies the source of psychic disequilibrium--a dead, blank wall--the void of nothingness.
The narrator and Bartleby are fictional projections of the eros and thanatos principles in Melville's divided self. Bartleby embodies the death instinct, separateness, negation, the futility of existence, masochism, and the desolation of human mortality. But the pathetic scrivener also signifies the impulse toward self-preservation through the isolating independence of the individual life, which utterly rejects the collectivity of the human species. The narrator represents eros, the life instinct, the desire for communion among the collective unconscious of mankind. In this respect, he is Melville's fictional representative of the love impulse (specifically charity) which seeks union and interdependence to promote the survival of the human species. The narrator's various attempts to empathize with Bartleby and offer the morose scrivener the community of his own home are expressions of the human need for the life instinct to attain unification with its opposite, the death instinct. For man can never be free of paralyzing anxiety until he accepts the nothingness of death.
This antagonistic dualism of eros and thanatos really oversimplifies a perennial and complex problem. Yet this conflict remains the basis for all human neuroses and discontent. For man's entrance into self-consciousness is a fall "from a condition of undifferentiated primal unity within himself and with nature"1 into a state of anxiety and alienation in which human individuality is promoted through differentiation and antagonism within the self and with his physical environment. Self-consciousness shatters the primal unity between individual and species, independence and interdependence, union and isolation, and the end result of this division is anxiety. As the ultimate cause of repression and neurosis, anxiety thrives as the human response to separateness, individuality, and death. Anxiety builds up in that part of man which refuses to accept the insulation of individuality and rejects the finality of death.
This fragmentation of human nature breeds free-floating anxiety and nourishes man's estrangement from being. The ego or conscious will should be considered a social convention, not a psychological entity. The ego is an imaginary, socially fabricated self working against the whole organism, the biologically grown self. Isolation of the conscious will from the total organism spawns alienation.2 Thus, man lives in the symbolic self-image that he projects artificially rather than in the real self which is housed in his total organism. The attempt to adapt to life in an artificial way further separates him from his essential grounds of motivation. This fragmentation of man's functional processes distorts the individual's relation to his physical environment. As Norman O. Brown describes it, "civilized objectivity is non-participating consciousness, consciousness as separation, as dualism, distance, definition; as property and prison: consciousness ruled by negation, which is from the death instinct."3
Bartleby's consciousness is ruled by negation, a manifestation of the death instinct. His behavioral pattern involves passive resistance to everything. By refusing to act at all, for good or ill, Bartleby negates his reason for being. In existential terms, he is nothing (the sum of his actions), for he prefers to endure his suffering, without hope and without choice. By negating all alternatives, Bartleby abandons himself to a suicide of the will. He dies as a martyr to the futility of existence.
Bartleby's negation of the will is a kind of perversion of the Oriental doctrine of nonaction. This doctrine derives its substance from the belief that the self is merely an illusory fabrication which, when properly understood, dissolves into the maya of nonexistence. Thus, since the self doesn't really exist, action is an exercise in foolishness, and nonaction (contemplation) is the highest activity.4 But Bartleby's nonaction is the response of a diseased organism, a dying man. Freud's assertion that "a negative judgment is the intellectual substitute for repression"5 can be applied to the scrivener's everlasting NO.
Bartleby represents a fictional manifestation of the thanatos principle in Melville's consciousness. Throughout the narrative, Bartleby's passive resistance, absolute resignation, and specterlike appearance mark him as a tragic figure embodying the artist's submerged death wish. This is further illuminated by the biblical phrase which the narrator quotes over the prostrate form of the dead scrivener in the Tombs. Bartleby is indeed asleep "with kings and counsellors."6 Melville alludes to the Book of Job, specifically to Job's plaint, one of the most powerful poetic statements, rich in existential impact, in the Old Testament. An examination of the full text of Job's plaint significantly broadens the psychological horizons surrounding Melville's creation of Bartleby.
Job, unlike Bartleby, possesses a deeply moving lyrical voice to articulate the despair inflicted upon him by his manifold sorrows. Job wishes that the day of his birth would be annihilated. He asks for blackness, gloom, and darkness to obliterate its intolerable reality. He implores the night to be barren and joyless, and he wishes that he had perished upon emerging from the womb. Job bitterly expresses the death impulse when he desires that his existence had been stillborn or else aborted prior to his birth. He regards the dismal atmosphere of Sheol (the Hebrew version of hell) to be preferable to all the maladies of earthly life.
For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept; then had I been at rest,
With kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves;
Job 3.13-14
Sheol's morbid monotony at least gives rest to the weary and means the cessation of all trouble for even the most wicked sinners. Job identities himself with those who wait in agony for death and rejoice when they finally reach the tomb. Job begs for ease, peace, and a final rest, but he is denied all this.
For my sighing cometh before I eat, and my roarings are poured out like the waters.
For the thing which I feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.
I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.
Job 3.24-26
The Book of Job concerns the problem of evil in the world. Job demands that God reveal the reason behind unjust human suffering. This is a thoroughly reasonable request. The dialectic of the Book of Job resolves itself solely through divine intervention. God cannot provide Job with a rational explanation of the problem of evil. But the fact that Job can see and hear the Lord saves him from the abyss of nothingness, and only because of this, he is willing to repent in dust and ashes before God. The experience of nothingness, rather than the problem of evil or unjust misery, is the true cause of despair. Because Job can substitute an inscrutable God for an impenetrable emptiness, he escapes the anxiety and alienation that overwhelms Bartleby.
The experience of nothingness, not the problem of evil, looms as the central issue in "Bartleby." It is not the power of blackness so much as the power of blankness that Melville depicts in his novella. Melville's chief symbol for the emptiness of existence is the series of dead, blank walls that enclose the scrivener within a repressive atmosphere throughout the tale. Melville relies upon architectural details and other physical references to convey his metaphysical observations. The Wall Street offices exhibit mute white walls in the interior and Bartleby's small side-window faces "a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade" (p. 21). The high green folding screen which the narrator employs to isolate Bartleby from his sight is another blank barrier prohibiting the free flow of life. Melville uses the expressionless impersonality of walls as graphic emblems of the forces that isolate and imprison man.
Melville forges a direct relationship between Bartleby's visual perception of the vacancy of existence and the constant anxiety that paralyzes his will. When the narrator finds Bartleby transfixed in a dead-wall reverie and preferring not to copy, the cursory reader may tend to overlook the scrivener's curious explanation--"Do you not see the reason for yourself?" (p. 45). Bartleby asks the narrator to open his eyes to the realization that the sensible world is only a panorama of illusions and therefore void of meaning. All organic life is enmeshed in a process of dying and decaying. This is the fundamental reality behind Bartleby's fixation on dead-wall vistas. Another glimpse of this concrete nihilistic vision occurs when the narrator tries to console the incarcerated Bartleby in the Tombs. The narrator assures him that the present moment is not unbearable and the future can be better. But Bartleby deflates all hope with his chilling remark: "I know where I am" (p. 62). The scrivener declines to transcend the rock-bottom reality of his human situation. He stands face to face with nothingness. The illusion of freedom is circumscribed and his doom is inevitable. Bartleby sees the world as a prison that can only be escaped through the pangs of death. Any hope for eternal life only begins a new round of meaningless illusions. Engulfed by anxiety and estrangement, Bartleby forlornly renounces his will to live.
Bartleby's conduct neutralizes his freedom of choice. He is a silent spectator, not an active participant, in the life he perpetually denies. Behind his green barrier, Bartleby barely exists--quietly, without external agitation, "oblivious to everything." "He was a perpetual sentry in the corner" (p. 33). The narrator considers Bartleby's plight an incurable disorder of the soul. The prolonged dead-wall reveries are transfixed emblems of hopeless spiritual suffering. Bartleby "prefers" to be stationary, an organic fixture sullenly composed behind his screen. "He seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of wreck in the mid-Atlantic" (p. 47). Even as his tragic existence approaches its end, Bartleby still clings to his hopeless doctrine of nonaction. "The poor scrivener, when told that he must be conducted to the Tombs, offered not the slightest obstacle, but, in his pale, unmoving way, silently acquiesced" (p. 61). Ultimately, Bartleby does lie down forever "with kings and counsellors" (p. 64).
Like Goethe's Mephistopheles, Bartleby is a "spirit that negates." His stolid "I would prefer not to" is completely divorced from the normal realm of human emotions. It's the muffled outcry of a pathetic victim--"pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn" (p. 27)--who prefers to dwell silently in his hermitage, oblivious to all but his own anguish. Bartleby is not only alienated from the barren world around him but also from the internal void of his existence. He is so estranged from his own being that "he had declined telling who he was, or whence he came, or whether he had any relatives in the world" (p. 41). To the narrator, Bartleby is the "sole spectator of a solitude"--a sort of "transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage!" (p. 40). Melville's reference to ruins in his story, especially when he likens the Tombs to Egyptian pyramids, again suggests the "waste places" of kings and counselors in the Book of Job. "Like the last column of some ruined temple, he remained standing mute and solitary in the middle of the otherwise deserted room" (p. 48). In this respect, Bartleby is a kind of inverted Ozymandias figure, silently protesting the ephemeral quality of man's life and works.
There is a double irony implicit in the humorous scene in which the narrator suggests an assortment of alternative occupations for Bartleby. Melville displays light comedy when the scrivener proclaims "I am not particular" three times (pp. 58-59) after he refuses the series of choices. Bartleby's obstinate behavior contradicts the apathy of his assertion. But the scrivener's "I am not particular" also contradicts Bartleby's individuality, the disease of unnatural separation from the total organic life that afflicts him throughout the novella. It is because Bartleby is "particular" that he cannot be reintegrated into his physical environment. Bartleby's particularity is the result of the fragmentation, anxiety, and alienation which isolate him from the collective whole of humanity and annihilates his will to resist disintegration. For this reason, his reiterated response ("I am not particular") is doubly ironic.
On one level of interpretation, Bartleby stands as a fatalistic victim of the basic human predicament: individualized man confronted with nothingness and devastated by fragmentation, anxiety, and estrangement. But on another level of meaning, Bartleby and the narrator function as fictional projections that mirror the interior landscape of Melville's psyche--the debilitating tension between the death and life instincts.
Melville's language firmly establishes Bartleby as the personification of death. The scrivener is described as "motionless," "pallidly neat," "dismantled," "immovable," "haunting," "cadaverous"--all suggesting a corpselike appearance. As the narrator observes, "the scrivener's pale form appeared to me laid out, among uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding-sheet" (p. 40). Often portrayed as an "apparition" and "ghost," Bartleby casts a spectral shadow of gloom on the dead blank wall of Melville's stage. In the Tombs, Bartleby's corpse is a "wasted" prostrate body. The stifling atmosphere of the Tombs only intensifies the funereal character of Bartleby. "The Egyptian character of the masonry weighed upon me with its gloom. But a soft imprisoned turf grew under foot. The heart of the eternal pyramids, it seemed" (p. 64). It is indeed a heart of darkness: dead in the center.
Just as Bartleby embodies thanatos, separation, the death instinct, Melville's narrator represents eros, the impulse toward unification, the life instinct in the author's psyche. The "life instinct also demands a union with others and with the world around us based not on anxiety and aggression"7 but on love, freedom, and the release of nervous tensions. "The principle of unification or interdependence sustains the immortal life of the species and the mortal life of the individual; the principle of separation or independence gives the individual his individuality and ensures his death."8 In this regard, the narrator acts as the agent of the life impulse to react against the death drive of Bartleby in Melville's literary dialectic.
Eros operates through the narrator's personality chiefly in the guise of Christian compassion. The theoretical Christian concern for the community of souls is diametrically opposed to Bartleby's heightened individuality and the diseased consciousness it engenders. The greatest example of love for Melville, as it is for St. Paul, is the act of charity. Surely charity is the predominant virtue in the narrator's character. Time after time he offers substantial financial help to the morose scrivener with the promise of further aid. The narrator visits him in prison and sees to it that Bartleby will receive good treatment, should he "prefer" to accept it. The narrator exhibits generosity and selflessness in reaction to Bartleby's eccentricities. "... when this old Adam of resentment rose in me and tempted me concerning Bartleby, I grappled him and threw him .... simply by recalling the divine injunction: 'A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another.'... charity often operates as a vastly wise and prudent principle--a great safeguard to its possessor .... no man, that ever I heard of, ever committed a diabolical murder for sweet charity's sake. Mere self-interest, then, if no better motive can be enlisted, should ... prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy" (p. 52).
There is only one thing wrong with the narrator's charitable behavior toward Bartleby--it doesn't work. No amount of well-meaning humanitarianism can unravel the knot of tension built into the conflict of eros and thanatos in human nature. The narrator is most vulnerable to appeals to the bond of "fellow-feeling." He finds it difficult to divorce himself from Bartleby's plight. "The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam" (p. 40). Bartleby's corrosive individuality would not permit him to share this sentiment. His self is severed from its natural relation to life.
The narrator's original feeling of pity turns to repulsion when Bartleby's pervasive despair infects him with the hopelessness of ever relieving the scrivener's anguish. "Disarmed" and "unmanned" by Bartleby's fatalistic resignation, the narrator feels "sundry twinges of impotent rebellion" (p. 38) in the antagonism. Despite the constant sympathy he expresses for the scrivener, the narrator is overburdened by the afflictive "millstone" of Bartleby on his conscience. The cross is too heavy for this Christian to bear. "The scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach" (p. 42).
The narrator recognizes that Bartleby's pathetic condition is the cruel result of an existence "unhallowed by humanising domestic associations" (p. 52). He wants to draw Bartleby into his own sphere of interdependency, to meld together into a collective whole the scattered, fractured fragments of Bartleby's malignant consciousness. Yet reason tells him that the man he has abandoned should mean nothing to him. The narrator's gnawing sense of responsibility to the scrivener, which extends to the hour of Bartleby's death, is proof of the irreconcilably contrary forces of the life and death instincts at war in the human personality.
"Bartleby" is by no means an isolated nihilistic chronicle in the Melville canon. As early as 1849 Melville was preoccupied with the themes of alienation, nothingness, and self-annihilation. The author concludes Mardi, a probe into the validity of man's search for meaning, with a dithyrambic self-destruction of his questor-hero Taji: "Now I am my own soul's emperor; and my first act is abdication! Hail, realm of shades!"9 In Moby-Dick, Ishmael, the only survivor of Ahab's Faustian assault on the power of blankness, is saved ironically by a coffin life buoy, after he has been spinning around in a slowly wheeling circle of water that suggests the spirals of Dante's Inferno. Melville compares Ishmael to Ixion, whose punishment was to slowly revolve on a wheel of fire in Tartarus for eternity. For Melville, the wheel of life rolls only to death and oblivion. Pierre, too, ends on a grotesque suicidal note in a dank prison where virtue goes unrewarded and all values devaluate into nullity.
The years following the controversial publication of Moby-Dick and Pierre were dominated by an intense artistic and intellectual crisis in Melville's career. A period of deep dejection followed the critical attack on Pierre. Melville was plagued by a nagging sense of failure and many of the stories he wrote between 1853 and 1856 are tales of passive suffering, stoic endurance, renunciation, and defeat. "Bartleby" is chronologically the first of these stories, but was preceded by an impulsive burning of some of Melville's unsuccessful fictional works.
Three years after the publication of "Bartleby," Hawthorne records a revealing historical meeting with Melville in his English Notebooks on November 20, 1856. He observes:
Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists--and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before--in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.10
Melville was caught in the self-torturing oscillations of his eros and thanatos impulses. The year after his despondent "annihilation" remark to Hawthorne, he wrote The Confidence-Man, the last work of prose fiction to be published in his lifetime. The final paragraph in this multifaceted novel is an inversion of the "Let it be" act of creation, as a solar lamp is extinguished--enshrouding Fidèle (the ship of the world) in darkness--the final event in Melville's cosmological negation.
Melville ultimately recognized that his philosophic dilemma could not be resolved, but only endured. However, he did commit a kind of symbolic self-annihilation after 1857. For almost three decades he abandoned prose fiction rather than compromise his talent by producing potboilers to appease the demands of the public.
Melville's declining stature as a man of letters and the burning of some of his literary failures are partially reflected in the narrator's account of Bartleby's routine in the Dead Letter Office:
Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring--the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity--he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death. (p. 65)
"Bartleby" is the creation of a man who believed himself speeding toward certain annihilation. Melville's novella is a literary last resort to blunt the impact of his nihilistic vision. Enacting the tragic conflict between eros and thanatos in the human psyche, the two major characters in the story dramatize the modern predicament of the fragmentation, anxiety, and alienation of life. In the midst of his despair, Melville sensed his heightened artistic awareness in conflict with his bitter feeling of personal failure. Bartleby, the man who is nothing, emerges as a sullen sentinel to announce that Melville "would prefer not to" exist merely as a man of "dead letters."
Notes
1. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), p. 86. I am indebted to Professor Brown's two major studies, Life Against Death and Love's Body for much of the psychological material contained in this essay.
2. Cf. Alan W. Watts, The Joyous Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), passim.
3. Brown, Love's Body (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 254.
4. Ibid., p. 105.
5. Quoted in Brown's Life Against Death, p. 321.
6. Herman Melville, "Bartleby," The Works of Herman Melville, X (London: Constable & Company, Ltd., 1923), 64. Subsequent parenthetical page references pertain to this edition.
7. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 307.
8. Ibid., p. 105.
9. Herman Melville, Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, The Writings of Herman Melville, III (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1970), 654.
10. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks, edited by Randall Stewart (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1941), pp. 432-33.
Ted Billy is in the Department of English at the State University of New York at Binghamton.