Of Disoriented Penguins, Bartleby, and the Search for Self

In his 2008 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog visits the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica, the largest habitation at the southernmost reaches of the earth.  There he finds an assortment of eccentrics, adventurers, and gifted visionaries who have come to perhaps the last true frontier in order to find themselves and study nature in its most rugged forms.  Among the oddballs and misfits he finds there is one scientist that Herzog makes a point of introducing by saying even the other researchers and support staff at the station seem to leave alone.  He is a man who has gone off to live with the penguins, and Herzog says that he rarely speaks to other humans.  The man, identified as Dr. Ainley, has agreed to give Herzog an interview, but throughout the interaction the viewer can see that clearly he is uncomfortable.  He acts almost as if he has lost the function of language, pausing before every answer, trying to finds the words.  Herzog seems oblivious to this, plunging in with his characteristic style, asking in a thick, articulate enunciation whether penguins have homosexual relationships.  One shivers a little at the question, if only out of empathy for the struggling scientist, who seems to be out of his element in the company of another man.  Couldn’t Herzog have started with a simpler line of questioning, one wonders?  He shows no mercy, however, pressing the scientist, when the scientist denies that he has seen gay penguins, by asking whether penguins show signs of insanity.  The viewer winces a little, wondering what point, exactly, Herzog is trying to make – whether he means, in fact, to couple homosexuality with insanity.  But Dr. Ainley soldiers on and claims that, no, he has not seen crazy penguins either – he has never seen, for example, one bashing its head against a rock.  Herzog simply will not let it go, and he keeps pushing the scientist, as if he means to make him admit that penguins are ultimately just like humans, gay and crazy.  The scientist wants to be helpful – this becomes obvious.  He struggles to accommodate Herzog in making the comparison of penguins with humans, and in the end he offers an enticing observation:  “They do get,” he claims, “disoriented.”

In the next scene, Herzog follows a group of penguins as they move off screen towards the water where their feeding grounds lie, following their colony across the snow, walking in single file.  He pauses the camera on one particular penguin that has stopped midscreen and turned its back toward the camera.  The penguin faces the inland mountains straight ahead and stands stock-still for a moment, as if deep in thought, contemplating the mountains, entranced by something it sees in them.  Then it slowly begins to make its way inland toward the mountains, turning plaintively for a brief and wistful look back at the camera, before trudging away toward what Herzog points out is 5000 kilometers of rugged, untamed territory.  Herzog voices the question that arises in the viewer’s mind as the penguin walks away, skirting past the humans who stand in its way but refuse to stop it because they argue that it would be pointless to stop it, because the penguin will simply return on its path toward a “certain death” –  Why?  Is the penguin operating from some Freudian drive toward self-destruction?  Is it simply, as Herzog suggests in his commentary, deranged?  Has it had enough of community?  Then one comes to the realization that the penguin, while perhaps neither gay nor crazy nor deranged nor disoriented, is certainly like the humans who have come to study it.  One realizes that the scientist, Dr. Ainley, who has just described the penguin’s odd behavior has more in common with it than perhaps even he might admit.  The penguin has set off after adventure, seeking unexplored frontier.  The scientist, too, has become a disoriented penguin, stepping off the face of the earth, becoming dislodged from his community.  He has come to the end of the world in a march to a drummer that no one hears but himself.

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When I was in college my favorite writer was Melville and my favorite Melville story was “Bartleby the Scrivener.”  I was intrigued at the fascinating story of this odd little man who answered every query about why he would make no effort to fit in, to do what was expected of him, with the retort “I prefer not to.”  I found his story –  as an existential crisis that led him ultimately to prefer not even to eat, to live – to be troubling in the extreme.  At the time I was an ambitious young man and thought I had the world at my feet.  I couldn’t understand why he would prefer not to, when he could so easily prefer otherwise.  To be or not to be? I wanted to be.  I remember identifying with the Wall Street lawyer who narrated the story and lamented the fact that he could not find a way to make Bartleby see the error of his ways.  Caught up as I was in the world’s understanding, I could not understand why this man, Bartleby, who seemed to be good at his job, who seemed to show great potential, would simply decide that he didn’t want to participate in the human community.  Ahh, the humanity, indeed.

As a reader and also a seeker, even at that early age, I wanted to find meaning in Bartleby’s story.  In attempting to give a name to the cause behind Bartleby’s actions I settled on a psychological one – depression.  As I read Melville’s enigmatic story, I thought I saw in the episodes in which Bartleby stood for long periods in the frame of his office window, staring out at the brick wall of the building adjacent to his office, an inner tension, a disappointment with life, that I was familiar with through the person of my own father.  I thought how my father seemed to struggle for most of his adult life with periods of depression and regret.  I remembered coming home in the middle of the night during my teenaged years and finding my father sitting in the dark in his underwear smoking a cigarette, the bright red point of fire punctuating the night, hidden behind a penumbra of smoky haze.  I knew that my father was a man of considerable intellect and social ability yet I knew that he felt he had never quite reached the height of that potential.  What I couldn’t understand at that tender age was why he would, like Bartleby, give up trying.  When I suggested that it was never too late to pursue whatever dreams gnawed at him, I was dismayed at his wave of the hand, his dismissal, his preference to remain in a standstill.  I thought I was, like the lawyer, attempting to bring him back around and he, like Bartleby, refused to be swayed.  I decided that Bartleby, like my father, had simply stopped trying to scale the walls of his self-made prison in order to pursue his dreams.  I thought he had thereby squandered his potential.  I was determined not to do the same.

The walls in Melville’s story are everywhere pronounced.  There are walls that enclose and surround, that seem to protect but also contain.  They are, like the setting in a Wall Street law office, economically determined.  But they are also psychologically and sociologically impenetrable.  Bartleby stands at his window and contemplates his predicament.  He has very little room for maneuver and so, it seems, he sits down and turns inward.  He gets lost inside himself and seems cut off from the human community by something that he cannot name.  Or, at least, that is the interpretation that presents itself from a consideration of the story through the lawyer’s eyes.  It is natural to read his tale, I think, when reading from the viewpoint of society, as if he were a deranged and disoriented penguin, voluntarily trudging into the wilderness of his soul, and cutting himself off from the community that wants to save him.  It is easy to feel pity and remorse for him, as I did in the case of my father, and to wish he would come back to the fold.  And yet, like all tragedies, there is another way to view the story that understands his actions not as a signal that he is lost forever, but as an example of a man who has found the only possible path to redemption.

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There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an exchange between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau that occurred while Thoreau was in jail for refusing to pay his taxes in protest of the Mexican-American War.  It’s a story that revolves the moment when Thoreau penned “On Civil Disobedience,” in which he writes that he was never more free than when he was jailed for acting on his convictions.  Emerson, the story goes, walks around the jail to the window of Thoreau’s cell and lifts himself up to peer in on his young friend.  He asks Thoreau in a voice that is somewhat disapproving, “What are you doing in there?” – to which Thoreau replies, “Waldo, what are you doing out there?”  There is something in this story that I think speaks to the question of why Bartleby, and my father, in their refusal to bring themselves around, can be seen not as depressives but as men who have sought the last refuge left to them.  In refusing to accommodate they are perhaps not models of lives lived in waste of potential, but lives lived in contemplation of something higher, something offering freedom even within the walls that society builds around them.

What I don’t think I understood when reading Bartleby as my youthful self, and what I only now beginning to understand well into my middle age, is that society wants to fashion us, as much to control us as to free us.  I heard one of my elderly uncle joke once that you spend the first thirty years of your life digging a hole and the next thirty years digging your way back out.  That has certainly been the case in my own life – although I am not yet through the maddening cycle and so I cannot say yet whether his timetable is correct.  As a young man I entered the workforce and tried to do what society expected of me.  I took all the necessary steps – climbing the corporate ladder, building a family, participating in my community, voting, paying taxes.  For my troubles, I found one day that, waking up, I was confronted with what Nietzsche speaks of when he writes that philosophy comes whistling through the keyhole saying “come away with me” only to find the man chained to his bed, unable to follow.  Having become indoctrinated into the reality of the world, the expectations of the community, I slowly realized that my father in his underwear and Bartleby at his window may not have been merely feeling sorry for themselves.  They may have, in fact seen a higher calling, one that could only be contemplated in silence, one that could not be pursued except from within.  Of course, some come to this realization earlier than others do, and for these we often reserve terms like “rebellious youth” or “artist.”  Such people are eventually either brought around to “maturity” or else they lead their lives as outliers.  The problem is that once one sets in with the herd, it becomes more and more difficult to extract oneself, and the walls that are set up around a man or woman become higher and more difficult to scale.  They often become impossible.  And so the only choice is to break through them entirely or to take the ladder down and begin to confront the soul.

In his 1957 review of Kerouac’s On the Road, Gilbert Millstein in the NY Times paints the picture of a set of youthful extremists in a bygone era who have come to embody one of our cultural notions of the type of people who refuse to accept socialization, the beats.  He argues that in the characters of Sal Paradiso and Dean Moriarty we find two of the tendencies with this youthful generation that ultimately come to react to the world in different ways.  Paradiso, as a young man, seems to long for freedom and to be fascinated by his free-wheeling, free-thinking, free-living friend, but he is ultimately headed towards an acceptance of his place in society.  Moriarty, on the other hand, is portrayed as a man lost to his times, who ultimately breaks our hearts because he breaks himself upon the ideas of an all-but-impossible freedom.  Millstein writes that the variety of beat intellectuals, wastrels, oddballs, and outlaws that these two comes across in their travels seek a life of freedom but that such a seeking frequently ends “in death or derangement.”  He calls the search for belief and for meaningful, purposeful freedom “very likely the most violent known to man.”  When one is free and can roam about the country without cause or destination, this search can be told in all its epic grandeur.  When one grows old and can merely lie in bed or stare out the window in thought, it becomes sad in a way beyond words.  But I believe it is the same search for freedom.

There is another moment, more recent in our popular culture that I like as an example of this search.  In one of his many temporary dalliances with smart and resourceful women on Mad Men, Don Draper is asked by one of them why he won’t come with her, why he won’t allow himself to be caught up in their relationship.  What, in fact, is he looking for?  He shakes his head as if unable to even contemplate it.  “It’s so big,” he replies.  This man who, as a fictional character has come to represent our most skilled and passionate wordsmith, cannot bring himself to define what he seeks.  Like the words of the U2 song, he simply knows that he still hasn’t found it.

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So what to make of this story, this man Bartleby, my father’s search, my own, yours?  I think that we are all like that penguin.  Disoriented, perhaps.  But faced with a choice.  We either take up our cross and follow our dreams.  Or else we let them die.  But even if we let them die there is a search to be made.  Sometimes we find that we cannot leave.  Sometimes, we are bound within walls of our own making and walls we have accepted from others.  I no longer think it a sin to sit up at night and contemplate those walls or that path.  They are by their very nature uncertain.  We do not know what is on the other side, or whether we will find suitable travel companions.  Certainly there are vast and untamed wildernesses.  And certainly there are those who will go the ends of the world to help us if we stay but won’t lift a finger to help if we go.  I would still like to think of myself as having the spirit of Whitman, who seemed to have no limit to his freedom or his willingness to pursue.  But I also realize that even Whitman found himself homebound in his later years, his mind ranging across the free universe but his body crippled and insecure.  I take some comfort in that.  The choice is ultimately up to us, to each of us.  Will we turn within and seek what may seem a negation but can be, at last, an example of freedom as renunciation, or will we renounce society and trudge across the snow and tundra in pursuit of our better selves?

Happy trails.

(Picture Source: link)