The Behaviorist Character: Action without Consciousness in Melville’s “Bartleby”

I. Introduction: Bartleby’s Ordinariness

Over the past century, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” has generated a wild proliferation of critical interpretations, drawing upon theoretical lineages ranging from continental philosophy to American historicism and presenting the story as anything from a Marxist fable to a psychoanalytic confession.¹ Behind these diverse arguments, though, rests a single shared presupposition: Bartleby is a thoroughly alien intruder into the world of Melville’s narrating lawyer, pushing the latter to a moral and epistemological crisis by evading or indeed destroying the basic heuristics by which the narrator has hitherto made sense of the world. Within the continental tradition, such heuristics have typically been presented as linguistic (as in Deleuze’s characterization of Bartleby as a “pure outsider” whose speech refuses any shared syntax) or metaphysical (Agamben’s appropriation of the scrivener as an avatar of “pure potentiality”)—not so much specific and adaptive strategies of interpretation as conditions of sense-making itself, whose contours and limitations Bartleby exposes by existing stubbornly beyond them.

Yet even recent efforts within cultural studies and cognitive narratology to define the lawyer’s interpretive paradigms as psychologically localized and historically bounded persist in representing Bartleby as the victim of a pathology that sets him apart from “normalcy,” whether the norm is defined by contemporaneous cultural discourses or by the storyworld itself. Ralph Savarese’s historically nuanced reading of the story, for instance, links Bartleby’s asocial, mechanistic behavior to the symptoms of post-traumatic melancholia and “dyspepsia,” both objects of increasing attention among mid-nineteenth-century physicians treating railroad accident survivors. Although the trauma suffered by Bartleby turns out in Savarese’s account to be not a train crash but the constant disruptive motion of capital, the result is much the same: Bartleby becomes “the quintessential . . . ‘accident figure,’” a sick soul whose refusal of treatment constitutes an “unmasterable utopian communiqué” (“Nervous Wrecks” 49). In reframing Bartleby’s presumptive illness as a mark of distinction and resistance rather than an impairment to be fixed, Savarese aims to undermine the gospel of human perfectibility and reductive “radical democratization” that he sees as characteristic of nineteenth-century medicine, trying to salvage Bartleby’s disruptive difference rather than to cure or conceal it. Like its theoretical predecessors, however, Savarese’s understanding of “Bartleby” starts from the presumption that its title character is different—one of Melville’s asocial “isolates”—and that this alienating difference stems from a wound, whether physical or psychic.

The interpretive limitations of this assumption become more evident in the context of a similarly pathologizing reading, this time from the perspective of neurological disability. Rosemarie Garland Thomson again shifts the terrain of the scrivener’s exceptionality from the absolute to the contingent, but remains convinced that Bartleby’s disorienting impact on the lawyer results from the former’s “differences from normative expectations,” which “constitute a problem that the narrator takes as his mission to solve” (783). By assuming that Melville’s narrator, and Melville himself, had available only one (culturally dominant) set of strategies for explaining behavior, Thomson makes of Bartleby a mere prompt to assimilative activity for the normative subjects that surround him. Because the character is assumed neither to fit within existing societal concepts of agency and humanness nor to inhabit an epistemically viable alternative to such concepts, Bartleby elicits from those around him only endless, vain attempts to reinscribe him within those societal norms—not unlike, perhaps, the hermeneutical effusion that Melville’s troublingly reticent story has incited among literary scholars.

Although Thomson, following Melville himself, refuses to specify Bartleby’s ailment, others have not been so hesitant: as Amit Pinchevski notes, schizophrenia, the favored diagnosis of the 1960s and 1970s, has given way in subsequent decades to assertions of Bartleby’s “autism.”² Such accounts read into the stereotyped actions of the minor character the symptoms of a real-world disorder clinically characterized not only by perseverative behavior, but also by a deficit in the “Theory of Mind” skills, which allow us to explain our own and others’ behavior as motivated by propositional mental states like beliefs, desires, and...