In the aforementioned Richard Schickel biography of Walt Disney, The Disney Version, an episode occurs early on in which one of Disney's business associates catches the future mogul bent over a drawing board, "practicing variations on his signature." Schickel observes the irony of this fact, since, of course, Disney's loopy rendition of his own last name would go on to achieve iconic brand status (even though, in later life, Schickel reports, Disney in granting autographs could not actually replicate the signature in the logo that was supposedly his own). But Schickel writes that Disney's practicing of his signature also reveals a psychological truth: the activity of rehearsing calligraphic variations on one's own name is, after all, "often associated with willful attempts to resolve the identity crises of adolescence."
I felt instantly called out. For I can't help but notice that there has been a sharp uptick over the past year of the amount of time that I spend in a typical day practicing my own signature. Since starting law school, I have filled pages of notebooks with my own name written over and over again in cursive script, foreboding block letters, cuddly bubble letters, and so on.
This is not an activity I can recall doing at any other time since I was a literal teenager (my high school notebooks are filled with similar artifacts). And perhaps the fact that I have resumed the activity in my early thirties is a product of nothing worse than the fact that it is the first time in recent years that I have found myself once again spending a large part of each day being trapped and bored in hour-long lectures, looking for something to doodle.
But Schickel's psychological analysis suggests a more troubling possibility: that my practicing of my signature indicates a kind of regression to adolescence. Here I am trying to establish my adult identity all over again, after thinking for some number of years—as I emerged from actual adolescence into biological adulthood—that I had one.
I knew that this might happen, of course, when I signed up to return to school. At some point during my last year of full-time work, after I had already laid the groundwork to apply to law school and quit my job at some point in the next twelve months, I was reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and came to a digression about an unnamed "bureaucrat" that appears in one of the protagonist's deceased father's films (itself called "Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat"). This bureaucrat—who is chronically tardy for work—risks losing his job if he misses another train. Because he is a bureaucrat, he equates this threatened loss of employment with the loss of self. As DFW observes: "It’s no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called ‘termination,’ as in ontological erasure."
I felt, even as I planned to go through with quitting my job, that I might be that bureaucrat. On the other side of the rubicon of leaving my post, I might very well—I feared—no longer exist. After all, I had drawn a great deal of psychological comfort over the previous several years from having some identifiable social role, consequent upon holding a "normal job." I woke up each morning in a commuter suburb of Boston, headed along the community path to the Red Line, where I joined a zombie horde of other under-caffeinated professionals in their twenties, and I felt all the pleasing sensations that the drone must experience in his hive. I must be doing right in my life, I thought, since all these other people are doing the same thing. I am recognized; I am accepted. I no longer have to worry about proving myself.
Going to law school meant giving up this social reassurance of self and returning to an unformed "preparatory" stage of life. This meant, in one sense, facing the "ontological erasure" of the no-longer-employed bureaucrat. But, if that is putting it too strongly, it at least meant returning to a phase of my existence prior to adulthood.
I was a teenager again, just starting out. I had regressed to a prior stage of life. I was like the character in Gogol's Dead Souls who enters government service expecting to find there "the great deeds," and ends up instead joining the ranks of clerks and copyists who remind him of an army of schoolboys. "For a moment," Gogol writes, "it seemed to him that he was at some primary school, starting to learn his ABCs over again, as if on account of some delinquency he had been transferred from the upper grade to the lowest." (Pevear/Volokhonsky trans.)
One imagines that, faced with such a re-infantilization, Gogol's character might have found himself suddenly filling notebooks again with his own signature. When one is deprived of the external earmarks of adulthood, after all, one starts making psychological adjustments to that fact. One starts to resemble inwardly one's teenage self again (as I have discussed twice before on this blog).
Of course, maybe Schickel was reading too much into Disney's actions. Maybe practicing one's signature is actually something we are all inclined to do at various points in our life, because maybe forging an identity is not actually a single, final act for any of us, but rather an ongoing process that never fully concludes, except with death.
After all, Schickel's biography, even as it disowns outright Freudianism, is never free from the conventions of psycho-biography from its era. It is a "shilling life," that tells quite literally of "How Father beat him," to quote from W.H. Auden's poem satirizing the biographic form and its conventions, and Disney's life is in part presented at Schickel's hands as a series of Oedipal conflicts, failures to escape the "anal" stage of child development, and so forth. He even quotes from Erik Erikson, so we know there has been an influence there.
In modern, post-Freudian times, by contrast, it's clearer to us that any linear account of human psychological development, which progresses through a series of stages that, once transcended, never recur again, is incomplete at best. We are, in fact, never entirely finished with the key questions that confront us at any stage of our life. The problem of "who am I?" and "what should I do?" may be particularly acute in adolescence, and may drive us with special compulsive force to practice our loopy signatures over and over again, but neither question can ever be answered with perfect completeness.
Though, even if one is faced in the direction of an infinite goal, and knows one will never reach it, one can still measure more or less progress against it. And I fear that, as my signature-making shows, I have perhaps wandered back a step or two on this particular road toward identity formation.
One can only hope that—as the law schools promise—it is the sort of backward step that accompanies three steps forward; i.e. that the process is merely preparing me for "the great deeds" still to come, as Gogol's character would put it. Let us so hope! Let us so pray!
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