Melancholy: Uncertain Aspects

1

Melancholy Jacques, in As You Like It, hardly conforms to type: far from drifting about in a more or less permanent cloud of unknowing, he has analysed some symptoms of his malaise and can explain to Rosalind that its particular degrees correspond to a person's activity:

I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud; nor the lawyer's, which is politic... but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects; and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness. (IV,1).

Apart from implying that those several activities, each having its own degree or mode of melancholy, must for Jacques be precipitated out of a persistent 'humour', atmosphere or condition of soul, this curious statement suggests that rumination itself is for him the source of a sadness. Analytic as his thinking is (with a distinct function in the comedy) he cannot therefore analyse melancholy itself away: for all the parts played it remains a steady reminder of a nothingness to come - 'sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything' (II,7).

From there one might argue that, as some activities induce a ruminative sadness, so too cultural conditions generally shape different modes and degrees of melancholy in peoples. To each people its own slant, at least, its own melancholic habitus. Also of countless writers touched or afflicted by melancholy, each has a sharply distinct profile (e.g., Beddoes, Blanchot, Montaigne, Dostoevsky, Leopardi, Cioran, Coleridge, Kafka). Might then the dark fundamental propulsive humour itself vary from people to people, culture to culture - with historical mutations, changes actually morphological, intervening as times go by? And I could think of not one woman to include in the above short list: might there have been some, one hundred years from now?

Jacques' travels: he is the constant, the travelled scenes various, succeeding one another like the stages of a lifetime, or airy segments between spokes in Fortune's Wheel. Of course a monotonous friction between the One and the Many could make someone melancholy, whereas a harmonisation might seem to allow the restless cogito some lucidity, if not induce a state of grace.

2

At the 'Melancholia' exhibition (Neue National-Galerie Berlin, 2006), trotting about in a family group and dressed in a rather shabby pink frock, a little girl, about four years old, was singing a song for all she was worth.

3

Geometry figures prominently in the iconology of Melancholia, also the book, the skull, and the ruins. In certain pictures, traps for the peregrine spirit are set: the instruments of knowledge, rulers, dividers, globes, set-squares, texts. Heaps of these - a surfeit, as if satiety, bringing sloth (accidia), were reason enough for the victim portrayed in the midst of it all, or on the margins, to be stymied.

Typically (in an old painting that looked heavily restored), kneeling at a prie-dieu, with a full head of curly black hair, into which his fingers creep, a monkishly attired man of perhaps thirty is shown to be in a quandary. Head thrust forward, he is so much flesh, how should he ever issue from the chasm of it? Beneath the prie-dieu there reposes a large grey dog, with a remarkably well articulated dog-face. There is also a book. No help for this person in animal or intellectual realms. Even while he prays, he is confined, trapped. For melancholy, like aboulia, entails a loss of any initiative, a lethargy of the will.¹ He leans over books and a skull. (Petrarch actually died leaning over a pile of books.) No dove descends. But another head comes to mind, that of Pierrot, it droops, aslant toward a shoulder, too heavy for its neck - even the Commedia de l'Arte needed such a figure.

There does exist a melancholy of the average sensual man. Search as he may for an outlet, for insight, for spiritual release, his will has seized up. Then ruins enter the iconology as a quasi-historical extension of personal devastation - sorrow in pointlessness, horror at being cloyed in oneself. Melancholy comes to seem like a blockade on the promised way to oceanic life, it accompanies frustration of an average person's desire to be always, if possible comfortably, moving on. Entangled in time's coil, he is unable even to flower into the mortal moment. How touching, then, whatever the tune or the words might have been, the little voice of the girl who sang. Might hearing it have put some fibre back into Pierrot's neck?

4

Whereupon I asked myself: Are such juxtapositions kitsch? Have these pictures contaminated my reflections? Have varying degrees of kitsch in the pictures made me so susceptible to kitschy thinking that, instead of waking up to a cruel discrepancy, I feel 'warmed' by that child's cheerful voice?

So engulfing is melancholy that representation of it can only be achieved on the recoil, to shrink and to flatten the phenomenon. Hence the kitsch, insofar as kitsch shrinks and flattens formulaically any experience out of which it is drawn. The representation of melancholy induces a 'kitsch-effect' - and there ensues a capitulation to vanitas, to a feeling, that is, of 'emptiness deep inside' (as a pop song has it). That feeling in turn is reacted upon by a recourse to the trite, to compliance with cliché, a fingering of any slick convenient façade. At any 'beauty', even, any suspension of torment, any facile understanding, no less, the nervous system lunges for safety. It is then that kitsch usurps the place of art.

Huge screenprint faces by Andy Warhol came at the tail-end of the Berlin exhibition. I was surprised not to find a desolate garden dwarf. Genormt ausdrucklos is the epithet which Arno Schmidt applied in 1953 to Nazi kitsch: 'so standardised as to be expressionless'.² Representations of melancholy are hardly that slick, but some kitschiness accompanies their touching-up of pre-formulated themes: they come to be, at most, illustrations.

5

If Oriental melancholy exists, is it as amply and deeply documented as are the Occidental varieties? If there exists no Oriental counterpart to those varieties, is this due to there being, in those regions, no Original Sin? Or have missionaries disseminated that bitter pollen? Might Chinese Christians be more subject to melancholy than other thoughtful Chinese? Besides, there was melancholy long before the doctrinal epoch - or the Renaissance - changed the complexion of Europe and the modes of Tragedy too. Yet was King Saul, was Aeschylus melancholy in any sense akin to ours? Were Sumerian appeals to the gods occasioned by feelings we might recognise - of having erred, of needing correction, of a suffering that only contrite expression might alleviate - as long as the god invoked is so touched that a new theodicy is dispensed?

The Christian Saviour certainly modified older conceptions of sacrifice; and melancholics are perhaps subject to their 'humour' because sacrifice is a stage in personality development, in the process of individuation, that they are powerless to attain. They cannot do without their skulls, their books, without the satiety, even, stuff that, along with other clutter, cancels their will, if they still have any, to achieve freedom in the spirit. The singing girl stood for the naïve, which, once lost to thoughtfulness, to Jacques' 'rumination', is not recovered. No rosy-fingered dawn explodes from her shimmering frock. Melancholy, however, is not depression. The latter is 'clinical' (and currently epidemic); the former may even, as Robert Burton declared, be a source of pleasures, than which 'none are as sweet' - 'All other pleasures are empty.' Quoting this, Orhan Pamuk goes so far as to say that hüzün, the melancholy peculiar to inhabitants of Istanbul, is 'an ache that finally saves our souls and gives them depth'.³

Consumers of Prozac may be missing something, but depressives are too hurt to wait for what 'finally saves', saves from the lacerating oscillation between the down and the up, the mania and the depression. Pamuk was able to detect the shining side of hüzün, having discovered that it is shared by an entire population living amid old familiar ruins and startling fresh catastrophes. In the state of hüzün, nobody is condemned to the melancholic's absolutely fruitless solitude.

Fruitless solitude: that is a poor prospect for the consumer heeding instructions to be 'productive', and beset by confusing desire even to be 'creative'. It might be that the spread of melancholy now is due to feelings of inner emptiness bred from the frenzy of advertising coupled with delusion as to the worth of the commodity consumed. More busily than ever, more savagely, media-agitation masks the fact that price and worth are seldom compatible. The visible and the tangible overpower judgement and crush all feeling for the invisible, for the intangible.

6

This must be the ruse of kitsch, that into cliché it shrinks and flattens, diminishes and banalises, whatever it represents, whatever image or language also represents it. Investing thought about it with the fussy tenacity of a horsefly, kitsch is a sort of agent provocateur conning its beholder into states of mind that are powerless to see through its foul play. It reduces the plenitude of real art - not to zero, but to a lifeless formula, while it also reduces the beholder from unwary witness to conniver in the process. One element in real art has broken loose, or fallen out, as Lucifer fell evilly from heaven, to establish its own shrill or dim schematic domain, that of nullity, of cute façade, or, in literature, of merely vehicular language that simulates poetry.

What then of Morandi's bottles? They have often seemed to me the work of an artist with a melancholy no less Italian than that of Caravaggio. Over and again the bottles are arrayed on a table, nothing but bottles, yet they were never exhausted. The paintings remain strange as ever, and there's the artist as distiller, his bottles elude formulaic repetition every time, for they contain, inextinguishable, aura.

7

The empire of melancholy is vast, marvellously varied, nocturnal. Its archipelago underpins civilisation as we pretend to know it - over it, at least, for our evolving we construe a seamless continent. It is also an empire with scattered colonies: Tristesse, Schwermut, Cafard, Hüzün, and words Hungarian or Uzbek. Some of those are waystations to joys more intense, to a confutation (devoutly hoped) of Privy Crusaders whose self-righteousness is anyhow self-condemning, since, in presuming to rectify history so narrowly, those who so judge others' errors become history's dupes.

Must then defenders of the archipelago be condemned to contrive such dependent clauses? Does a prospect of melancholy induce a dragging grammar, in which afterthoughts eclipse main clauses? If one could diagnose the failings of melancholic grammar, might one make the archipelago less bleak, lift it up, let be shown, with a long and clear view of ocean, the table in the sunlit olive orchard, a Morandi bottle on it, just one, and a glass, or two? Was melancholy, long before industrialism reified kitsch, apt to be branded by kitschy language? Are the actual melancholic's neural toes merely stuck in flypaper language? Did the painter have to rely on hearsay, or on otherwise verbal reports?

Yes and no, of course. Melancholy may subtend the various particles of language that apply to it, but it was not by them consumed or projected. Its modes and degrees, its levels and moods, so the story goes, originate in an inchoate magma building up, year after year, during a person's creative lifetime. The person, when melancholy pays a visit, so it was also supposed, was not extinct, the volcanic energeia could be dormant. When the crust in the crater has become too thick, then the inchoate is felt not as a force awaiting release, but as emptiness. When the crust had a few holes in it, what came whistling out was kitsch. When a real aperture is vent enough, what then appears? A Herculaneum, or the Sistine Chapel? The popular analogy, though not all bad, soon breaks apart. Van Gogh was not a molten mass crashing over the table with its bottle and glasses. Magma must articulate itself, in turbulence exact, in designs that are most delicately animated, hence miniatures can display magnitude. Even then, the 'creative person' is something of a volcano, and something of a dark subjacent archipelago is what melancholy is. Time there, even while it drags, with flesh saddening, heaping books, is always almost up. Apollinaire was the right one to ask, of carp:

Est-ce que la mort vous oublie,
Poissons de la melancholie?

Oddly enough, not only in the pictures, anxiety about time makes undramatic the melancholy stasis. Somewhere out of the mire, in The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zosima was saying that every thought and feeling had its roots 'in other worlds', not here. Has the melancholic no time of relief in which to experience the 'intimate sentiment' of such a transcendental liaison? Or does the malaise, at its worst, eradicate the faculty of belief? The man in monkish apparel might be torn between his options - another Hercules at the Crossroads. It is high time he took that heavy dog for a walk.

References

1 'Lethargy' is preferred to 'inertia', because of its derivation from Lethe (forgetfulness). Current sources of damage to memory are surely connected with depression (juvenile or adult).

2 Aus dem Leben eines Fauns (Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1953), p. 102.

3 Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul - Memories of a City (London: Faber and Faber 2005), p. 93.