Abstract
When considering representations of autism many critics have settled, and continue to settle,1 on Herman Melville’s 1853 short story ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ as an example of a fictional text that contains a character whose strange behaviour and attitudes can only be accounted for by diagnosing some form of developmental or mental health problem, most frequently: autism. In Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination (2008) Disability theorist Stuart Murray proposes that ‘“Bartleby the Scrivener” presents a radical narrative of autistic presence, and that it does so some ninety years before the condition began to be recognised within the terms of clinical medicine’.2 Murray states that the initial basis for this claim is that ‘[t]he narrator’s descriptions of Bartleby time and again echo the description of impairments — of communication, imagination and socialization — that would come to be central to twentieth-century outlines of autism’ (p. 51). Murray’s analysis addresses many difficulties and complexities around claims to Bartleby’s autism, including those which continue to recur in writings on autism — both in relation to literature, but also more widely — to the present day. I do not wish to agree or disagree with Murray’s claim here but instead to explore in close detail the terms with which Murray puts the case for an autistic presence in ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, and think about what is invested in this particular reading of autism precisely because Murray’s critique addresses such a range of relevant and complex issues.
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Notes
See, for just some of the more recent instances: E. Semino, ‘Pragmatic Failure, Mind Style and Characterisation in Fiction about Autism’, Language and Literature, 23 (May 2014), 141–158;
A. Pinchevski, ‘Bartleby’s Autism: Wandering Along Incommunicability’, Cultural Critique, 78 (Spring 2011), 27–59;
E. Fisher, ‘Autism in Literature: The Negotiation between Syndrome and Silent Wisdom’ (2011) at: http://aladinrc.wrlc.org/bitstream/handle/1961/9279/Fisher,%20Evelyn% 20-%20Spring%20’10%20 (P).pdf?sequence=1 [accessed on 13 August 2014]. Each of these articles take different approaches, key aspects of which are each critiqued in this chapter, but see for my extensive critique of Pinchevski’s specific approach: H. Ainslie (now Santa Maria), ‘Chapter 2: Deconstructing Autism’ in H. Ainslie (now Santa Maria), ‘“Why Autism?” Perspectives, Communication, Community’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Reading, 2009).
S. Murray, Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), p. 51.
For a critique of the notion of recognition see, for instance: G. Deleuze: ‘The Image of Thought’, in Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (London: Continuum, 1994): ‘There is indeed a model, in effect: that of recognition. Recognition may be defined by the harmonious exercise of all the faculties upon the supposed same object: the same object may be seen, touched, remembered, imagined or conceived’ (p. 133, my emphasis).
L. Norman, ‘Bartleby and the Reader’, The New England Quarterly, 44:1 (Mar., 1971), 22–39, at 22.
Richard J. Zlogar, ‘Body Politics in “Bartleby”: Leprosy, Healing, and Christness in Melville’s “Story of Wall-Street”’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 53:4 (Mar., 1999), 505–529, at 506.
A. Beverungen, and S. Dunne, ‘I’d Prefer Not To: Bartleby and the Excesses of Interpretation’, Culture and Organisation, 13:2 (2007), 171–183, at 172.
In a related analysis of constructed versus biological, essential, approaches to gender, Parveen Adams in ‘A Note of the Distinction Between Sexual Division and Sexual Differences’ in Parveen Adams and E. Cowie (eds), The Woman in Question: m/f (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 102–109, argues against a straightforward division between identity as either readable as constructed or essential and present. For instance, she writes: ‘ironically, these two apparently opposed views which could be respectively called biologistic and sociologistic are in fact two sides of the same coin. The biologistic view assumes already constituted capacities, and while the sociologistic view assumes a tablula rasa, it also always has to rely on already constituted capacities of experience, cognition, and purposeful action’ (p. 104).
S. Felman, Writing and Madness, trans. M. Noel Evans (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
In a related analysis, Karín Lesnik-Oberstein in Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), discusses the same issue in relation to children’s literature critics: ‘We might therefore want to reformulate the “conviction of knowledge” as need. That is, critics of children’s literature (as with many other people involved somehow with children) usually display an urgency of belief, asserted as knowledge, which is intricately involved with the need within Western society to capture, define, control, and release and protect the “child”’ (p. 8).
H. Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener (London: Hesperus Classics, 2007 [1853]).
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© 2015 Helen Santa Maria
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Maria, H.S. (2015). Reading Autism in Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’. In: Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (eds) Rethinking Disability Theory and Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137456977_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137456977_5
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