Aspects of Madness in Bartleby, the Scrivener

Abstract

This essay aims to develop, according to Foucault’s and Deleuze’s considerations, a reflection about madness in the Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the scrivener. In the short story, after his refusal to continue with his task as scrivener at the lawyer’s office, Bartleby is diagnosed by his boss, both lawyer and narrator, as “victim of innate and incurable disorder”. To treat that diagnose, I started by the Foucault’s comment on the differentiation between mental illness and madness. At the same time, keeping a prolific dialogue with literature and trying to indicate a madness experience, Foucault points out the medical practice works, by technical means, to control and to treat madness as a simple pathology. For his turn, Gilles Deleuze, in his comment on Melville’s short story, seems to invest on the political potency of madness, understanding that the scrivener has a “schizophrenic vocation”. Thus, Bartleby wouldn’t be properly a person with terminal illness, because, even taken by a mutism almost complete and by the loss of appetite, paradoxically he might have the capability to indicate a cure.