"This Intolerable Incubus": The Melancholia of Bartleby, the Scrivener

Abstract

Herman Melville's Bartleby begins in a very strange way. The narrator—the lawyer in the narrative's law office setting—grieves that Bartleby, a scrivener who he had employed some years ago, presents an "irreparable loss to literature," to the extent that his biography cannot be told given the paucity of records detailing his life. Despite this, the lawyer assures that an "adequate understanding" of the scrivener's life is possible so long as the reader allows that this understanding must necessarily be formed in connection with the lawyer's life. This, I suggest, intimates that the understanding is a melancholic one: neither Bartleby nor the lawyer can be adequately known without taking account of the other, just as Freud argues the melancholic patient cannot be understood without considering whom the patient has lost. I use the structure of the melancholic introjection—of self-formation founded on mimetic relations—to fashion an "adequate understanding" out of the "irreparable loss" by thinking through the ways the lawyer and Bartleby "mimic" each other in the text and by paying close attention to how the lawyer, to whose thoughts and feelings alone we are privy, is affected by the mimetic symmetry of the relationship. I find that his sense of identity—especially his sexuality—grounded on the presumption of a wholly self-determining interiority, is implicated by Bartleby's "intrusion" and that this accounts for the lawyer's seemingly inexplicable handling of the scrivener.