The above reasoning could lead to the assumption that woman is a symptom of man, that woman has no existence, as such, outside of the man/woman discourse. But if women should cease to be symptoms, would man's illness disappear? Without a symptom, there would be no language; and without language, no men.

"Bartleby" is the fable of man and his symptom, or perhaps of man as subject and of his most precious possession, his "self". The English language encourages reflection on the question of identity with such expressions as "Take care of yourself". Apparently, if one is careless he risks losing his self, but the loss is not irreparable. "He's quite his old self again." This statement leads us to wonder where the old self was hiding, and if it was replaced by someone else during the holidays. How many of us are me? Freud was defining something of the sort with his term Ichspaltung - the cleavage between I and me.

What Freud discovered in the child's game of Fort/Da was not so much that the infant acts out the absence and the reappearance of his mother as a response to the gap in his being which is the inevitable result of the disappearance of the mother's gaze. The game is that, but it is also the words spoken which weave, across the gulf between mother and child, through their rhythmic repetition, an incantatory bridge which does not so much abolish the distance as permit the subject to come face to face with its significance. That which the word creates, in order to outwit the gap, is an object that owes its existence to the power of repetition. That which is represented is that which is lacking. An equivalence has been established between the word and the object of desire.

It is clear that in their play, children repeat everything that has made a great impression on them and that in doing so they abreact the strength of the impression and, as one might put it, make themselves master of the situation. Perhaps the same is true of the recurrent dream. In much the same way, the patient in psychoanalysis cannot be expected to remember what is repressed in him. He is obliged to repeat the repressed experience in the transference situation.

A "rather elderly man", a lawyer, a man of the law, undertakes the writing of the history of one of his employees, a scrivener, a "law-copyist". The story, or history, is one of relations between the man of the law, a "title-hunter" whose business is the establishment of rights of possession, of the identity of property, and his copyist, who transcribes the titles. The copying of law papers is, we are told, "proverbially a dry husky sort of business" (20): an activity that is dry and "husky" like the external covering of certain fruits or seeds, the enveloping layer that is dry and disposable. The legal paper, the letter of the law is the axis of their relationship as it circulates in the office establishing ownership, or responsibility, or perhaps identity. However the letter of the law is also a love letter, for "Bartleby" is, in a sense, a love story.

It is a love story at least to the extent that Freud speaks of love as a brief psychosis. In Melville's story two actors are going through the motions of a joint delirium. If the written word is very prominent on the stage of the narrator's chambers, the evidence of oral communication is apparently lacking. Perhaps the narrator goes about writing Bartleby's story in order to compensate for the words his clerk never pronounced.

Those whose business it is to speculate on the origin of language often attempt to arrange transitions between the appreciation of a situation as a whole, or analog communication as we observe it in animals, and the symbolic fragmentation used by human beings. A phenomenon has often seemed to bridge the gap between the two modes: it is the figure known as the holophrase. This is a word, a phrase or an expression which is not decomposable; it is not the sum of its parts; and it seems to apply to a situation seen as a whole. The holophrase has sometimes been considered a possible junction between the communication of animals which inhabit their environment without attempting to structure it and man who lives, not in the world, but in his own symbolic representation of reality. We could postulate that for human beings the holophrase is the manifestation of a crisis situation in communication where the speaker is situated at the very edge of his possibilities of message transmission. Or, in other words, in the holophrase the difference between the subject of the message and the subject emitting the message is reduced to a minimum. The listener is not so secure in his position either for the message does not so much seem to be directed at him as at the ecosystem as a whole.

The symbolic, on the other hand, is the realm of a contract passed between the members of a linguistic community which binds the individuals to laws of meaning. The actions of human beings have their foundation in the symbols, or laws that define the existence of man. Speech, then, is first and foremost a way of achieving recognition, of establishing identity within a community.

Bartleby rarely speaks. Nothing comes out, but nothing goes in either because Bartleby is anorexic. The refusal of nourishment could represent a nostalgia for an original satisfaction not yet differentiated from the self. Bartleby's message is a silence which is not the counterpart of words. His silence is not the punctuation of speech. It is the white silence of the autist which puts speech into question. It is the silence of a demand that cannot be formulated because it is not in the order of communication.

If speech is repetition, a means to support the desire to desire, we do not speak to say something but rather to simply affirm that we can say. But Bartleby "prefers not to", not to say. This is speech which does not say, silence which neither hides nor reveals. It is the echo of the silence that Freud discovered in the death instinct. Which is why Bartleby's silence is insupportable, why the others must try to trap him into expressing a desire, into being reasonable, into speaking.

Communication which reduces unconscious desire in order to put it into the form of a message is a process of retotalization of a partial process. As such it is comparable to perversion which also attempts, often desperately, to invest the totality of libidinal drive in an organ or an object that is only a part of the whole. The subject of normal genital activity is not duped by sexuality; he knows only too well that total fusion is only a vague memory. But the practician of perversion believes that completeness is within the realm of possibility for the others.

Speech is impossible in "Bartleby" but writing is omnipresent. Writing is also a form of message, but in its fixed state it would seem to attempt some sort of stabilization of the encounter with the other to whom the message is addressed. The written word is always, to a certain extent, addressed to a divinity. Melville's text scatters clues as to the sacred quality of the act of writing. Turkey insists on his "afternoon devotions." (14) The narrator knows that Bartleby would never sit down to copy without being properly dressed for it (42).

Melville's tale has another title: "Bartleby the Scrivener". The character is not the author of his story; at best he would be the rewriter. And at the conclusion, the word scrivener seems to be transformed into scream as the silence of Bartleby underlines the despair of his position. It has often been noted that writing is comparable to parricide, for the writer in his act of creation, is occupying the position of the father. But Bartleby is not a writer. At the end, the grubman takes him for a forger. The existentialist would point out the inauthenticity of his condition. But the narrator refuses to recognize that the history of Bartleby is a counterfeit: "I was never socially acquainted with any forgers." (84)

At first, however, Bartleby does not refuse to write, but he refuses to find satisfaction in the process: "he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically." (24) On the other hand, he refuses to check the correctness of the copy. To be precise, his refusal is not a refusal to read a message, nor even to re-read it; Bartleby will not be confronted with the evidence that his existence is only a copy. This will explain the lawyer's extreme reaction: he is "stunned", for Bartleby's response is not a refusal, but refusal itself, refusal to accept the evidence of the human condition. "Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been anything ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises." (26)

Bartleby's second refusal is even more revealing than the first. Called from his retreat by the lawyer, it is he who poses the question: "What is wanted ?" (28) What do you desire ? but also, what is lacking ? what is needed to achieve completeness ? And the response comes: "The copies." In every love affair there is a difficult moment when the originality of the relationship is contaminated by an impression of repetition. Love is a substitute for an original satisfaction forever lost. This is of course particularly evident in the phenomenon of transference.

When Bartleby hears that what is wanted is a copy, he can only refuse to take the place of what is missing. But the lawyer demands his reasons, why can't he be reasonable ? The narrator uses his other clerks as mirror images for he feels the need to reinforce his "faltering mind" (30). Before Bartleby's refusal of his role the narrator's own identity is put into question. It is significant that his next attempt to recuperate Bartleby takes the form of an errand. The narrator tries to send Bartleby to the Post Office. "Go, in my place, and receive the message destined for me." Just as the narrator will ask the reader to constitute his own story through the history of Bartleby. Melville's tale is full of letters that are copied but never received and the poste restante becomes the dead letter office. In Bartleby's holophrase, language has been pushed to its limits. Affirmation of desire is confronted with negation: "I would prefer not to"; presence and absence coexist.

We have been talking of Bartleby as though he were a character in a story. There is however little evidence of Bartleby's existence. He does not speak or eat and therefore is not part of the circulation of life in the office. His life seems to be limited to the realm of writing. "At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion." (24) Ginger has no effect on Bartleby and indeed he is hardly human. The narrator says that if Bartleby were, he should certainly get rid of him "but as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors." (26) Bartleby says "I like to be stationary, inviting a play on words with stationery and he is identified with the folding screen behind which he muses, which is itself compared to a "folio." Bartleby is a creature of paper, a support for a message which he himself cannot compose.

Is Bartleby living or dead? The narrator wonders if his clerk has any existence outside of the chambers and in fact assimilates the banishing of Bartleby to his destruction. Should it fail, Bartleby "would be found all alive at my offices as usual." (60, emphasis mine) The lawyer wavers between calling Bartleby a man or a ghost and after being expelled from the office, the clerk "haunts" the building. But Bartleby is an incubus, a character from a dream, a double. He addresses himself to none but the lawyer. And when a colleague asks him for information, he gets nothing. "So after contemplating him in that position for a time, the attorney would depart no wiser than he came." (68) And yet to the narrator he professes his final "I know you." (82)

From the beginning the relationship between the lawyer and his clerk had assumed a see-saw motion. "If Bartleby will not quit me, I must quit him." If Bartleby prefers to remain stationary, the narrator is forced into a frenetic mobility. And in front of Bartleby's desk, the lawyer affirms "the desk is mine and its contents too," as he delves deep into the pigeon holes of its interior. Bartleby belongs to the narrator; he is the narrator's death in life, the reminder of the "innate and incurable disorder" which defines his own existence. No wonder Bartleby "lives without dining." (86) Because of Bartleby, the narrator is insecure in his own identity which can at any moment tilt into its opposite. "Indeed it was his wonderful mildness chiefly, which not only disarmed me, but unmanned me as it were." (42)

The very apparition of Bartleby in the narrator's life has something of the appearance of a return of the repressed. And if it is clear that Bartleby belongs to his employer, that he has been "billeted" upon him "for some mysterious purpose of an allwise Providence"(66), is it too much to say that Bartleby is the narrator? Or at least that in himself that the narrator cannot assimilate and must project into the exterior world as a fictional character. For Bartleby's presence provides a means of avoiding a certain encounter. Bartleby's silence is the absence of a demand which would force the subject to come face to face with his desire. The silence of the demand is a means of avoiding the rupture implied in all desire. Bartleby, with his refusal of desire is the narrator's means of avoiding his own fate as a human being separated from his object.

Bartleby comes into the office by breaking into a cycle like a new word which inserts itself into a language which was a complete whole before its appearance. Yet the door was open. A child does not come to fill a place that was left empty, unless, of course, it be the space opened by desire. If Bartleby does have a certain existence in the story, it is as a product of the discourse of the narrator. His statute is then that of a son, but only in so far as the son must be sacrificed to the divinity. The story of Bartleby is the story of the ritual murder of the son, the murder of the other in oneself in order to pay a debt to the divinity. One must always pay for one's presence in the world, but it is a fact that we pay only in the form of images. And when the mirror breaks, when the image is lacking, one can no longer meet one's debt.

The disorder that psychoanalysis has named schizophrenia has its origin in the realization of an antithesis between ego and object. In the transference neuroses (anxiety hysteria, conversion hysteria or obsessional neurosis), there is nothing to give special prominence to this antithesis. In the case of most disorders, frustration in regard to an object brings on neurosis and involves a renunciation of the real object, whereupon the libido withdrawn from the object reverts first to a phantasied object and then is repressed. Transference used in therapy involves and necessitates the ability on the part of the analysand to reinvest in a new object.

In the case of schizophrenia, on the other hand, after a process of repression the libido does not seek a new object, but retreats into the ego, that is to say that a primitive objectless condition called narcissism is reestablished. As a result of this state, no transference is possible, the external world is completely uninteresting to the subject and total apathy sets in.

Freud noted that schizophrenia is accompanied by a change in speech patterns. In the initial stages the patient may devote particular care to his way of expressing himself with the result that his language becomes stilted or precious. It is also common to remark an unusual choice of words. If we take into consideration the hypothesis that in schizophrenia object cathexes are given up, it would seem that this loss is in some way compensated by a cathexis of the word. Schizophrenia operates a split between word and thing. Freud noticed that what schizophrenics do to language is commonly practiced by ordinary dreamers, for in the course of dream work a word is sometimes treated like a thing. In other terms the play of substitution that renders the dream narrative possible is often not based on a similarity of things but on a sameness of words. So that when Bartleby says: "I like to be stationary," the phonetic identity of stationary and stationery permits a reading of the remark that resembles what could take place in a dream or in schizophrenia. As a sequel to Freud's work on schizophrenia, R. Jakobson's text on aphasia explores this sort of phenomenon in more specifically linguistic terms.

The renunciation of object cathexis is simply an example of the ego's flight from suffering in accordance with the pleasure principle. If, in schizophrenia, this flight consists in withdrawal of instinctual cathexis from the object of desire, it may seem strange that an investment in the word remain. Freud theorizes that the insistence on words is not a part of the act of repression, but an initial attempt at recovery. This effort is aimed at regaining the lost object through the magic of invocation, much as man originally called his gods into being by naming them.

The loss of an object structurally necessary for the definition of a subject normally provokes a reaction known as mourning. In some people the same influence produces melancholia instead of mourning. In many cases one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost. This is common in psychoanalysis even when the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost, but not what he has lost in him. Freud suggests therefore that melancholia is in some way related to an object loss which is withdrawn from consciousness.

The most striking characteristic of the melancholic personality is the extreme diminution in self-regard: somehow the loss of an object has triggered an impoverishment of the self. As Freud puts it: "In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself." In other words, while it would seem as though the loss suffered is that of an object, what the melancholic has actually experienced is a loss of self. The most commonly noted symptoms of melancholia are sleeplessness, refusal of nourishment, lack of interest in the external world and eventually loss of the desire to live which can go as far as to provoke death. The center of meaning has been lost and the subject experiences his being as the shell of selfhood, or perhaps he is only the "husk" of himself.

Freud has explained melancholia as a result of an overactive critical faculty. As in schizophrenia, the libido withdrawn from the object has not been transferred to another but interiorized. We know a sine qua non of object cathexis is overestimation. The object must be endowed with extraordinary qualities in order to be deemed worthy of investment. The loss of an object, then, is most often accompanied by a reversal of these sentiments; the object becomes unworthy. Apparently the sufferer from melancholia is unable to overturn his critical judgements with appropriate ease. For him, if the object is unworthy and the self has incorporated this object, then the self is worthless. And when the object is lost, the previous interiorization of the object serves to establish an identification with the abandoned object. The conscience judges the self as an object. Or as Freud notes: "The shadow of the object is on the ego." The sufferer's complaint about his condition in the world has been interiorized; his revolt has been crushed into melancholia. The cleavage between subject and object that defines the fate of the speaking animal has proved impossible to assimilate.

The mechanics of object choice always repeats a very archaic functioning on the part of human beings. The self chooses an object and wants to incorporate it in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of libidinal development. The withdrawal into the self of the melancholic personality is therefore normally accompanied by a refusal of nourishment. This sort of functioning, according to Freud, is the only plausible explanation of suicide, for the self can kill itself only if it can treat itself as an object. The state known as being in love is comparable to a psychosis in that the self loses contact with its boundaries; the frontiers between subject and object become blurred. Suicide is comparable to love then, because in both the self is overwhelmed by the object.

Bartleby's negativity, his absence, his silence, his relinquishing of action is perhaps an invitation to the other to fill the void, a demand addressed to the other to come support a dissolving self. In psychoanalytical terms, this would be a self dying to be reborn. Perhaps Bartleby is the self pursued by repression to the point of being forced to disappear altogether unless he can be called back into existence.

The narrator begins his story with the remark that he is a "rather elderly man" and goes on to describe his "dependant" clerks as children. With their food names, their food hoarding, their spilling and wasting of ink, sand and ginger-cakes, with their comic erections (when Turkey is up, Nippers is down), the clerks seem to represent the instincts: their activities are in turn oral, anal or phallic and they must be constantly forced into the sublimation of work. The narrator, this "eminently safe man", would be the reasoning mature self and his office is divided like the compartments of the ego. Upon the arrival of Bartleby, the narrator proceeds to incorporate him into his personal space but renders him invisible with the addition of the screen, by this means "privacy and society were conjoined." (24) The division of the office is called "a good natural arrangement, under the circumstances." (20)
 

The office itself opens only on blank walls. These have often been discussed. Among other meanings, however, it is possible to see the walls as simple blanks. The narrator's world is a universe without images, without models, without mirrors. The growth of the self in relation to an exterior other is impossible. This is a world of signifiers without references, a world in which the signifier's only signified is the lack of an image. The dead letters of the conclusion come as no surprise in a world where the death of the message has been prepared by the disappearance of the signified.

And of course, in such a world, Bartleby can only become inhuman. But if Bartleby becomes objectified to the point of being compared to the plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero, this sort of petrification is contagious. A few pages further on the narrator questions Bartleby and the clerk looks, not at the speaker, but at the bust of Cicero on a shelf above his head. Soon Bartleby's behavior will transform the lawyer into a pillar of salt or make him feel like a man struck by lightning. Numerous references to immobility in the text suggest the consequences of the loss of self. In his dead-wall reveries, Bartleby becomes identified with the object of his contemplation and his absence of selfhood will trigger the idea that the narrator might try walking "straight against him as if he were air." (62) For as he remarks: "I never feel so private as when I know you are here". (66)

"Bartleby" is perhaps the representation of the failure of the subject to come to terms with the Other. As Lacan points out after Freud, the subject can only constitute itself as an ideal self in the Other. Because the mirror is the only means we have at our disposal for obtaining an image of the self, the idea I have of myself is always situated outside of me. It is in the space assigned to the other that I go about defining myself. And when the subject speaks it is in the place of the Other, and in place of the Other, that he begins to elaborate the discourse of desire which will enable him to exist.

Can Bartleby be reborn ? There are hints that his condition may be temporary. "At present I prefer to give no answer." (50) Will he some day provide the answer ? But perhaps Bartleby does not have the answer. If Bartleby is the narrator's disowned, disavowed self, his double and the personification of his absence of selfhood, if Bartleby is the repressed truth which can only be had from the "original sources," he is not the one who must supply the answer.

The fear of being transformed into stone by the gaze of the Other is not just fear of death (and of castration), it is also a fear of anxiety itself, the idea of being turned to stone represents the paralysis due to fear. The narrator does not want to know what Bartleby can tell him. At the same time, his agoraphobia, his fear of losing his balance, his dizziness in open places forces him to take refuge in his chambers. When Bartleby's presence drives him forth, he exchanges the chambers for another closed space, his carriage, the "rockaway" in which he can seek in the movement that conjures up visions of the cradle, an objectless state of primitive satisfaction.

Bartleby actualizes the pain of the loss of self. And as the narrator merges with Bartleby, first through linguistic mimetism as he adopts Bartleby's word "prefer", then through his sentiment of "fraternal melancholy", he discovers that the damaged soul of the victim of melancholia is not to be consoled: he must remain "incurably forlorn." All of Melville's characters experience the other as stranger; he is projected outward as the white whale or the black slave Babo. In "Bartleby", however, the other is internalized.

For the victim of melancholia, the space of the world, the space of play, what Winnicott calls the transitional space, disappears. The walls close in. Melancholia puts into question the place of the subject in his relationships to opposites, his place between two extremes: between male and female, between mother and father, between birth and death. In the final analysis, melancholia is perhaps the death of desire due to the impossibility to experience existence as a dialectics [sic.].

Bartleby belongs to the narrator. "He remained as ever, a fixture in my chambers." (56) This fixture, this something foreign inexorably attached to the body of the subject can only be a fetish, that is, the sign that in denying underlines the omnipresence of castration, and of death. The fetish is that scrap of material - a garter, a slipper, a braid - called upon to replace a scrap of flesh which just might be lacking. Because if, for any reason, it should be missing, all desire would become impossible.

As fetish Bartleby is unbearable: he represents castration and death. And yet he is; without him even the substitute, the reminder of absence would be missing. Perhaps, it is possible to domesticate death: "Rather would I let him live and die here, and then mason up his remains in the wall." (70) For the final separation will be traumatic: "Strange to say - I tore myself from him whom I had so longed to be rid of." (72) Without the narrator Bartleby does not exist: "The man you allude to is nothing to me." (72) For now that the mirror is broken, the self has fled with the Other, the narrator will inherit Bartleby's melancholia, or his own madness. "The shadow of the object is on the ego". Or else, perhaps the Other has taken the place of the self as he threatened to do: perhaps "he will in the end outlive me, and claim possession of my office by right of his perpetual occupancy." (68)

At the beginning of this essay I remarked that Bartleby is a symptom in much the same way that women are symptoms of men. If it is possible to say that Bartleby plays a feminine role in this story, it is to the extent that femininity represents the castration that is in fact a universal attribute of speaking animals. The absence of the penis is the sign of the absolute alienation implied by the need to invoke the presence of an object of desire through speech.

If "Bartleby" is a love story, it is because being in love is being in a place where the play acting of human language has some chance of being successful. In persuading the other that he has what I need, that he can permit me to achieve completeness, I assure myself the possibility to go on ignoring what I am lacking.

If the lawyer falls into melancholia, instead of love, it is because there is no longer any way of sharing the world with the other. The other has taken his place, his chambers, his body. And the narrator feels his own nakedness as he imagines the eyes of murderers looking out of the prison windows on Bartleby.

Bartleby is a copyist; he will not reread, but he does not read either, not even the newspaper. Perhaps this is because there is no message for Bartleby. The scrivener is the message. He is there for the narrator and for us to read. And if we get the message we are forced, like the ancient mariner, like the lawyer, to tell the story, to recount the history of Bartleby, to make sense out of silence, to do something to get back to our rightful place. As long as we can tell the story we avoid allowing death to have the last word.

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