Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Although Herman Melville never received sufficient recognition for literary genius during his lifetime, he has since come to be known as one of the great patriarchs of American literature. During his writing tenure, the new “short story” emerged as a legitimate genre, and his stories, including “Bartleby the Scrivener,” appeared alongside those of Poe and Hawthorne in national periodicals. “Bartleby” shows the influence of Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) in its plot, setting, and characterization. It is also a good example of a short story that reveals how its author understood his own neurological difference and its impact on his work life and family life.
Throughout his life, Melville displayed traits of AS. As a boy, he was “backward in speech” and “inarticulate,” even though he was highly intelligent. As a teenager he was withdrawn and usually preferred to be alone. As an adult his social skills remained awkward, and he felt uncomfortable around other people. Acquaintances said he was hampered by his inability to make “normal” eye contact with others. He usually talked with his mouth full, and his personal grooming habits were less than stellar (more than one person remarked that he never changed his underwear). Herman’s father was baffled by his behavior and was either too strict with him (even abusive) or neglected him entirely. Melville struggled to find a workplace that would accommodate him, until he finally shipped out to sea.
“Bartleby the Scrivener” is Melville’s most famous, and most intriguing short story. It tells the story of an attorney who hires a scrivener to copy documents by hand. Bartleby is strange: he does not mix with his co-workers, he eats alone, and after a short time he starts to answer “I would prefer not to” whenever his boss asks him to do something.
Throughout the story, the lawyer asks Bartleby to do simple tasks, and at least 20 times Bartleby replies “I would prefer not to.” The lawyer can’t figure out how to get rid of Bartleby, so in the end he moves his entire office, leaving Bartleby behind. Eventually Bartleby is jailed for trespassing, and he dies, alone, in confinement.
The use of repetition strikes me as being an autistic way of building a plot. Repeating “I would prefer not to” functions as a type of echolalia, or perseveration. It is not a standard way of talking to one’s co-workers. There is also a quality of randomness. Bartleby shows up from nowhere, and the reader doesn’t know who his family is, or what his life has been like so far. We don’t know anything about him, really. He just shows up one day. His death at the end feels a bit arbitrary, since we don’t know exactly what he died of (a heart attack? Loneliness?). He is a flat character with little depth or development, similar to the characters in Andersen’s fairy tales or the citizens of Alice’s wonderland.
The setting of this story, similar to what we find in Winesburg Ohio, features an autistic architecture. The office where Bartleby works (and lives) is located on Wall Street in a sturdy brick building with few windows. Walls and partitions separate the different characters. Bartleby has only one small window in his cubicle, and it faces another brick wall. Bartleby’s location, surrounded on all sides by walls, isolates him from humanity. It is tempting to read this setting as a symbolic presentation of autistic alienation. The setting is surely open to this interpretation.
Yet for some individuals on the spectrum, this work environment would be ideal. Rather than isolation, this setup provides Bartleby with solitude, which might be a nice contrast to the noisy, busy city around him. Rather than dreariness, perhaps this environment gives him a measure of calm by allowing his senses to heal and decompress. Copying documents all day long would surely seem like a boring job to many people, but to a person with AS the predictable rhythm and repetition might be appealing. Donna Williams, an Australian author who has autism, described a job she once had working in the storage room of a department store. Her job was putting items on shelves, organizing shelves, and finding things for people—she enjoyed the quiet respite from the world and the sense of calm order that this situation provided for her.
The title character, Bartleby, provides a good example of how writers on the spectrum often create interesting characters that are also on the spectrum. It is easy to see how Bartleby fits the profile of a person with AS. The lawyer himself recognizes that Bartleby does not deliberately cause problems in the office, but finds that he is a “little deranged.”
Bartleby shows AS impairments in several different ways:
His social skills are problematic. He seems to have no ties with family, and he clearly has no friends. The lawyer observes that Bartleby is “alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of a wreck in the mid-Atlantic.”
His communication skills are not typical. He does not initiate conversations, nor does he speak unless spoken to. His repetition seems to be an echolalic pattern, and his voice has an odd pitch and is “flute-like.”
He is unable to think outside of a rigid pattern, which is typical of AS individuals. He can’t give any explanation for why he prefers not to work. He also can’t go for a walk, visit a park, or go out to lunch. At the end he can’t seem to imagine doing anything else besides standing around in his old office until the police haul him away.
He has a few sensory impairments. We know that he has vision problems (like several of Melville’s relatives). He eats a limited number of foods, apparently subsisting on only cookies and cheese. He does not want to risk eating unfamiliar food in restaurants.
All in all, Bartleby is portrayed as an autistic hero in this story. The sensory problems, rigid thinking, communication problems, and social impairments all point to a place on the spectrum. Many of the traits he exhibits are those that Melville himself also had. Bartleby’s very existence points to the fact that AS has been around for some time, even if a name for it had not yet been provided when Melville wrote this story.
There is much to admire about this character, especially his unquestioning loyalty to his boss and his ability to express his preferences. Bartleby is determined to retain control of his life as much as he can, given the circumstances. He doesn’t compromise or give in. The story says a lot about an autistic person’s place in the workforce a hundred years ago, and the harm that can be caused when others fail to accommodate them. Long after we have finished reading the story of Bartleby the scrivener, the words “I would prefer not to” continue to echo in our hearts. Characters like Bartleby—both loyal and stubborn—remind us that “those with autism show us how they determine the tenor of their lives, and in so doing ignore and escape the many narratives that would contain and define them, and turn them into something else” (Stuart Murray). Melville was correct to provide an ending for his story that lets Bartleby remain Bartleby, a character driven like Melville by integrity and determination, no matter how much the lawyer, or others, might wish that he would change.