SOURCE: "'Ah, Humanity': Compulsion Neuroses in Melville's 'Bartleby'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 4, Fall, 1987, pp. 407-15.

[In the following essay, Perry contends that the character of Bartleby is not schizophrenic, but neurotic.]

Psychoanalytic critics of Melville's "Bartleby" have been remarkably consistent in their diagnoses of the enigmatic scrivener as schizophrenic. Along with the tale's nearsighted narrator, they have isolated Bartleby as a fascinating case study while overlooking the importance of his relationship to the other characters in the tale. The problem with such readings is that, in isolating Bartleby as a psychological aberration, these critics have missed Melville's broader concerns. As we begin on the assumption that Melville constructs a coherent tale in which each character must be understood in the context of the others, it becomes possible to see their common compulsion neuroses. This more inclusive perspective reveals that the tale's structure is based on a continuum of the ego defenses each character erects against its compulsions and obsessions. It is the helplessness of all of Melville's characters and their common confinement, in what Newton Arvin called a "cosmic madhouse," that turn the activities of a Wall-Street law office into a shattering vision of modern times.

Though terms associated with Freud's definition of the mind have been criticized for reducing the complexities of literature, I use them here because they provide both a useful means to distinguish character psychology and a common vocabulary by which to respond to earlier studies. However, I use these terms without assuming their practical psychoanalytic value. As Harold Bloom notes, "Freud's universal and comprehensive theory of the mind probably will outlive the psychoanalytical therapy.… While previous psychoanalytic critics have proceeded as if Bartleby were really insane—as if Melville were trying to realistically portray an interesting psychotic—I find Freud's terms most helpful as a means to define subtleties of character behavior. The characters in "Bartleby," like those in "Ligeia," are not important as real people so much as emblematic of ideas associated with the plight of all people.

Because I rely heavily on Freud's definition of how the mind functions, a quick review of specifics is, perhaps, in order. In Freud's definition of the mind, the ego functions to mediate between the natural impulses of the id and external reality. Thus, in its attempts to physically and psychologically preserve the self, the ego pursues pleasure 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. Otto Fenichel explains [in his The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis] what happens when the id succeeds:

In all psychoneuroses the control of the ego has become relatively insufficient. In conversion symptoms, the ego is simply overthrown; actions occur that are not intended by the ego. In compulsions and obsessions, the fact that the ego governs motility is not changed, but the ego does not feel free in using this governing power.

In "Bartleby" all of the major characters vainly attempt to use ego defense mechanisms to reduce the anxiety produced by the sterile activity of the law office. These mechanisms, discernible along a continuum, are most clearly manifested in the characters' compulsive behavior, the tale documenting the way they ultimately fail to wall out the natural impulses of the id with the artificial social conventions erected by the ego.

The lawyer, whose id seems nearly totally suppressed when we first meet him, represents the extreme right along the ego continuum of responses to Wall-Street's values. His ego's total endorsement of the "safe" and "prudent" life of the material status quo, however, thinly disguises primitive impulses of his id. These impulses are manifested as compulsion neuroses, reaction formations of his ego designed to reroute his anti-social tendencies. Revealing themselves as obsessions with orderliness and money, his primitive impulses suggest that he is, as Freud suggests, one whose "instinctual life is anally oriented." His orderliness—abundantly evident in his careful structuring of his tale, the sectioning of his offices, his attempts to control his emotions, and his profession as a lawyer—points to his "obedience to … environmental requirements covering the regulation of excretory functions." Reflecting his frugality, even the sound of money gives the lawyer pleasure as he expresses his enjoyment of John Jacob Astor's name because its "rounded and orbicular sound … rings like unto bullion." In addition, he finds "snug" comfort in handling "rich men's bonds, and mortgages, and title-deeds." His obsessions with money and orderliness, then, are his ego's means of socializing and sublimating the primitive impulses of his id.

The obsession defenses of the lawyer's ego are visually reinforced by the ground-glass doors that protect him from the disorderly and threatening world of his scriveners, also reflecting his limited self-perception. In order to enjoy the social benefits of his status on Wall Street, he adopts its social class system and isolates himself from his scriveners in two ways. First, he walls them off physically with doors, and in Bartleby's case, with a screen. Second, he denies their behavior's legitimate motivation by characterizing them in comic terms. Because their unconventional and enigmatic patterns of behavior are reminders of the irrational desires of his own id, he attributes them to the convenient external causes of intemperance and indigestion. Moreover, he feels threatened by his inability to deal effectively with the copyists, undermining his Astorian self-image as an efficient and "prudent" business man. His lame attempt to reduce Turkey to part-time duties at one point presents him with further unwanted revelations of irresolution. In order to deny, or at least suppress, the outrageous "fits" of his employees and his own willingness to sanction their financially unproductive behavior, the lawyer resorts to rationalization: "It was fortunate for me that … their fits relieved each other, like guards. When Nippers' was on, Turkey's was off; and vice versa. This was a good natural arrangement, under the circumstances."

The central action of the tale is, of course, the lawyer's confrontation with the inscrutable Bartleby. Bartleby, even more than the other copyists, forces the lawyer to face the fragility of his ego's defenses. The confrontation between the two seems a dramatization of what Anna Freud calls the system of attacks, counter-attacks, and defenses between the id and the ego. The lawyer's inept responses to Bartleby's irrational behavior is his ego's denial of the Bartleby enigma. The lawyer, in fact, repeatedly delays any response at all to the scrivener's inexplicable behavior. When Bartleby "prefers not" to check his own copy, for example, the lawyer assumes that "my ears had deceived me." Later, upon Bartleby's refusal to copy, the lawyer denies the refusal by believing that the scrivener "might have temporarily impaired his vision." The lawyer's illusory world of ego screens and ground-glass metaphysics continues to break down as Bartleby's unconventional behavior causes the lawyer to doubt his own most basic assumptions: "When a man is brow beaten in some unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his own plainest faith."

The real weakness of the lawyer's ego defenses are apparent in his vascillating emotional responses to Bartleby. On one occasion, after telling Bartleby that he feels "friendly" towards him, he confesses to the reader that he became "nettled" by Bartleby's refusal to cooperate. Soon, finding himself in a state of "nervous resentment" following Bartleby's refusal to do anything, the lawyer has to check himself "from further demonstrations." His subsequent revery on murder suggests the frenzied state of his feelings, which he checks with a burst of charity: "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, that ever I heard of, ever committed a diabolical murder for sweet charity's sake." Such struggles between his id-inspired hatred of Bartleby and his ego-inspired reaction formation of pity and patience reappear as the lawyer leaves Bartleby alone in the deserted offices: "strange to say—I tore myself from him whom I had so longed to be rid of."

After these confrontations with Bartleby in which he uses the doctrine of assumptions (ego) to circumvent the preferences (id) of the scrivener, the lawyer is again forced, upon the entreaties of his old offices' new inmates, to confront Bartleby and his own fears. Following the scrivener's wall of incomprehensible rejections to new career suggestions, the lawyer lapses into complete incoherency and despair. The confounded lawyer's rationality—one of the ego's methods for self-preservation—finally snaps: "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." With no verbal recourse available to modify his environment, his rhetorical strategies as bankrupt as Bartleby's, the lawyer must flee external reality. Faced with his own rational fall and the cumulative realization of the futility of his irrationalizations as well as his other rhetorical strategies to maintain a consistent Wall-Street image, he flees to Broadway to find temporary asylum. Significantly, his desire to be "carefree and quiescent" is his recognition of the futility of rational thought to solve his dilemma with Bartleby. He must, therefore, find his 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 ego are in harmony [Leland E. Hinsie and Robert Jean Campbell, Psychiatric Dictionary]. 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.

In contrast to the lawyer who, until his climactic confrontation with Bartleby, uses language effectively to deny the impulses of the id, Turkey and Nippers are between the extremes of the lawyer and Bartleby on the Wall-Street continuum. Each of the scriveners is only able to deny his id's impulses half of each day. While both recognize the need to accept Wall-Street values for professional preservation, neither is able to do so fully. Freud called this condition a split in the ego, in which "an unpleasant knowledge is kept isolated from the rest of the personality." Freud describes the neurotic "split in the ego" as if he had Turkey and Nippers in mind:

It is indeed a universal characteristic of the neuroses that there are present in the subject's mental life, as regards some particular behavior, 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. [An Outline of Psychoanalysis]

In the case of both scriveners, the tedium and socially demeaning nature of law copying, being incompatible with their ambitions, must be partially denied by the ego. Consequently, both utilize fantasy as a means of denial, and their equal inability to maintain such fantasies more than half a day coincides with the difficulty of perpetuating that defense mechanism. Anna Freud suggests that in adults

there is a greater degree of reality testing and intolerance of opposites. Fantasy is not so highly prized, but if there is considerable investment in fantasy, it can become incompatible with reality. [Anna Freud, summarized in Joseph Sandier's The Analysis of Defense]

Their unconventional "fits" are a release from Wall Street's repressive atmosphere, becoming vehicles for self-expression beyond copying others' words. Law copying itself reflects the processes of the ego copying and maintaining the conventions of an external source. To maintain the fiction of worth in the Wall-Street world, each creates a rhetorical strategy during his fit that enables him to deny his status as a mere copyist. Part of the humor of the tale, in fact, is in the grotesque forms their denials take, not quite elevating them to their desired status levels.

Turkey's id successfully attacks his ego's defenses each noon as he drinks his lunch at the local saloon. While he is an efficient and quiet copyist during the morning, adapting himself to the demands of his external environment, he displays his fundamental hatred of his position in the afternoon. In his subsequent drunkenness, he rhetorically substitutes the persona of cavalier gentleman for that of mere copyist. In this way his childish id creates a fantasy persona that, together with the alcohol, overwhelms the restraints of his ego. He displays this side of his personality as he explains to the lawyer his attitude towards copying in the afternoons: "'In the morning I but marshal and deploy my columns; but in the afternoon I put myself at their head, and gallantly charge the foe, thus—,"' which he declares "oratorically" while "gesticulating with a long ruler." His use of this military imagery expresses his desire for a more strategic role than his status as a copyist permits him. As in Anna Freud's example in children, only as Turkey "transforms reality by denying it by means of fantasy … could he accept it" [The Analysis of Defense]. Turkey's frustration is most clearly represented in a gesture that reflects his cavalier rhetoric and ironic social indignity: "Rashest of all the fiery afternoon blunders and flurried rashnesses of Turkey, was his once moistening a ginger-cake between his lips, and clapping it on to a mortgage, for a seal."

Like Turkey, Nippers also attempts to deny his station as mere copyist, a denial the lawyer interprets as a "diseased ambition." Nippers' ego and id also enjoy alternate ascendancy, making him feisty and restive in the morning while contentedly passive in the afternoon. When his ambitious id takes on a "grand air," Nippers imagines himself to be an autonomous man of affairs. In such states Nippers tries to deceive the skeptical lawyer:

Among the manifestations of his diseased ambition was a fondness he had for receiving visits from certain ambiguous-looking fellows in seedy coats, whom he called his clients.… I have good reason to believe, however, that one individual who called upon him at my chambers, and who with a grand air, he insisted was his client, was no other than a dun, and the alleged title-deed, a bill.

Nippers reinforces his desire to be other than a copyist of law documents with a "gentlemanly sort of deportment," ambitiously dressing in a "gentlemanly sort of way." While his ego civilizes his ambition into identification with the lawyer in the afternoon, his id more clearly articulates his frustration in the morning, leading him to grind his teeth together in "maledictions hissed, rather than spoken." Even the fact that he hisses his curses upon life rather than speaks them is a rebellion against the verbal restrictions imposed upon him as a copyist of law documents. Like the lawyer's whose vascillating ego defenses surface in his changing responses to Bartleby, Nippers' psychomachia displays itself in his inability to comfortably adjust his desk height. In a rare burst of insight the lawyer declares that "the truth of the matter was, Nippers knew not what he wanted." Thus, like Turkey and his drinking ale and crunching ginger cakes, and the lawyer with his orderliness and money, Nippers illustrates the result of a conflict between the id and the ego as a compulsion neurosis. In Nippers' case, his constant adjustment of his desk is a "displacement onto a small detail" [The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis], of his ego's inability to find pleasure within the narrow limits of his Wall-Street world.

On the far left of the Wall-Street ego continuum is Bartleby. More precisely stated, in the course of the tale he moves to that extreme. While Turkey and Nippers have reached a kind of metaphysical stasis between discontent (id) and resignation (ego), Bartleby's behavior reflects the diminishing ability of his ego to sustain the external conventions of the Wall-Street world. However, the usually overlooked fact that he seeks a job at the lawyer's offices indicates that at the tale's beginning he is not ready or able to forsake all of Wall Street's conventions or to give in fully to the impulses of the id. Our first glimpses of Bartleby indicate the degree of his ego's deterioration. Like the other copyists, Bartleby's appearance suggests traces of the gentlemanly Wall-Street conventions, but the "pallidly neat" and "pitiably respectable" condition of his appearance reflects the increasing inability of his ego to feign those conventions. Another suggestive contrast between Bartleby and the other copyists is in their similarly erratic work habits. While Turkey's and Nippers' conflicting impulses are in symmetrical check, allowing them to meet the lawyer's minimum professional expectations at least half of each day, Bartleby's id continually breaks down his ego's defenses until the lawyer is strained even beyond his ability to rationalize Bartleby's antisocial behavior. As Bartleby successively refuses to check copy, to copy documents, to move, to talk, and finally to eat, we see a deeper manifestation of—in fact an extension of—the neuroses of the other two copyists.

In the process of his id taking control from his ego, Bartleby actually negates his ego by making the lawyer a "negative ruler of the soul" [Psychiatric Dictionary]. Thus, in identifying with and then differentiating himself completely from the lawyer, Bartleby becomes compelled to do the opposite of the lawyer, or the opposite of what the lawyer would like him to do. This is clearly illustrated in Bartleby's galling refusal to be cooperative: "At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable." Also, Bartleby's nonsensical rejections of the potential career ideas the lawyer gives him—"I am not particular"—seem calculated to needle the lawyer.

Bartleby increasingly becomes aware of and resigned to the sterile life on Wall Street, and rather than trying to deny that reality by the creation of a false rhetoric as do Nippers and Turkey. Bartleby adopts a rhetoric that mimics the speech of the documents he copies. Ironically, by using copy-speech, Bartleby unconsciously re-creates himself in Wall Street's image. This response is a counterphobic reaction, relieving the anxiety he experiences with the struggle between his id and ego. The basic similarity between this response and the behavior patterns of the other characters is indicated humorously in the infectiousness of Bartleby's copy-speech on his fellow scriveners and on the lawyer himself: "Somehow, of late, I had got into the way of involuntarily using this word 'prefer' upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions." Bartleby is related intimately to the other scriveners, then, as one who reacts to the artificiality of the Wall-Street world. In any case, the lawyer, like his scriveners, is affected by Bartleby, and Melville's comic tale darkens as it records the lawyer's and Bartleby's movement along the Wall-Street continuum—a simultaneous movement that epitomizes the inevitable fate of all humanity trapped in its own decaying systems of arbitrary conventions and linguistic clichés.

In effect, as his id begins to dominate, Bartleby's development becomes the reverse of the socialization process. This is what places him on the opposite end of the Wall-Street continuum from the lawyer whose ego is the most powerfully developed throughout most of the story. While people normally develop and mature as the ego learns to control the id, Bartleby's id has reestablished psychological control and the tale is his desocialization into the quiescence of childhood. Even his limited speech, which mimics copy-speech, is the speech of a child taking familiar words and repeating them sparingly. And, like a child, Bartleby does what he "prefers" to do, not what social convention and the ego would have him do. While Turkey and Nippers adopt the childish ability to fantasize—the id's way of pretending to socialize—Bartleby's return is to pre-fantasy infancy. Without a knowledge of convention one cannot fantasize. Also like an infant, Bartleby becomes more and more helpless, unable to move or take care of himself. His id has none of the ego's instinct for self-preservation. Significantly, our last image of Bartleby is as a fetus, curled helplessly before the prison wall.

While Bartleby represents the limits of modern neuroses, his response to Wall Street can only be understood in the context of the neuroses of the other characters. Together they suggest the ways the ego and id struggle to define the self in the crisis state of a Wall-Street world. Thus, the tale's power derives from the fact that Bartleby is not an isolated case, a freak who alone cannot handle modern life. Rather, what disturbs us is that the "normal" characters are intimately related to him and fight the same neurotic battles. The lawyer's story of his scriveners becomes, finally, a test of his and our comfortable rhetorical strategies that insulate from the incursions of the id, devices of the ego to make sense of experience. Fenichel notes that "the compulsion neurotic … flees from the macrocosm of things to the microcosm of words." The narration process, therefore, allows the lawyer to achieve mastery over the events themselves, his attempt to resurrect what Bartleby's words had killed. Melville's shattering message, finally, is the impossibility of language—the external and ultimate convention of the ego—to penetrate the dead-blind wall of reality in the modern world.