Home > Notes from the Underground
I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
This piece from Morgan Meis in The Smart Set struck a chord with me:"Criticism isn’t powerful anymore. It doesn’t drive anything, it doesn’t define what is good and bad in culture. Surely this has mostly to do with all the changes in the media landscape over the last few decades. Basically, culture has been democratized. It has been flattened out and multiplied. There are no longer real distinctions between high and low. There’s just more... The blogosphere and social networking sites allow anyone to communicate tastes and opinions directly to those people with whom an outlook is already shared. Criticism is essentially bottom-up now, whereas it used to be practically the definition of top-down. The audience does not look to an external authority to find out what to think — it looks to itself...
Critics have, traditionally, prided themselves in a certain amount of distance. There’s even a name for it: "critical distance." To some extent this distance was always an illusion, the byproduct of a metaphysics that saw mind and world as fully separate and staring at one another from across an epistemological abyss. But more importantly, people believed that critical distance was possible and that they were achieving it. This self-perception was enough to fuel the practice from at least the early Enlightenment until some time in the middle of the last century... Trying to maintain critical distance today is thus a practice in self-alienation. The distance might as well be infinite. The proclamations might as well be made in outer space. So we need another metaphor. If criticism isn't about distance anymore, maybe it can be about closeness....
Pleasingly, a version of this argument was made by George Nathan, the co-editor (along with H.L. Mencken) of the original version of The Smart Set back in the early 20th century. Nathan wrote a little book called The Critic and the Drama. It was, I think, ahead of its time in setting up the dilemma of criticism in an age of too much art and suggested some ways to deal with it. Here's the crucial paragraph:
If art is, in each and every case, a matter of individual expression, why should not criticism, in each and every case, be similarly and relevantly a matter of individual expression? In freeing art of definitions, has not criticism been too severely defined? I believe that it has been. I believe that there are as many kinds of criticism as there are kinds of art. I believe that there may be sound analytical, sound emotional, sound cerebral, sound impressionistic, sound destructive, sound constructive, and other sound species of criticism. If art knows no rules, criticism knows no rules — or, at least, none save those that are obvious.
That last sentence is particularly crucial. Art, Nathan is perfectly willing to accept, has no rules. Another way to say this is that each work of art generates its own set of rules. The only way to deal with any individual work, then, is to read out that set of rules, to discover something about its own internal logic. A criticism that wants to step away, to achieve distance in order to apply a set of external rules and to make judgments, ends up stepping away from the only criterion available: the criterion there within the work. Nathan doesn't use the metaphor explicitly, but he is talking about closeness versus distance. He is talking about a kind of criticism that stands there right alongside the work of art, participating in it rather than holding it at arm’s length.
Going a little further into the metaphor of distance and closeness brings us inevitably to the grand master of critical distance, Immanuel Kant. It is simply impossible to talk about the modern critical attitude without addressing the sage of Königsberg. A central component of his aesthetics is the idea of disinterest and then of universality. For Kant, when we make genuine aesthetic judgments we do so with the implication that they are not made 'for ourselves' but with the implicit idea that they stand on their own, that anyone else would make the same judgment, that the judgment ought to be universally true even if that cannot be proven. This is how Kant puts it:
For if someone likes something and is conscious that he himself does so without any interest, then he cannot help judging that it must contain a basis for being liked that holds for everyone. He must believe that he is justified in requiring a similar liking from everyone because he cannot discover, underlying his liking, any private conditions, on which only he might be dependent, so that he must regard it as based on what he can presuppose in everyone else as well.
In contrast, here's a comment by William Hazlitt, an anti-Kantian in terms of aesthetics in every bone of his body: I hate people who have no notion of any thing but generalities, and forms, and creeds, and naked propositions, even worse than I dislike those who cannot for the soul of them arrive at the comprehension of an abstract idea…They are for having maps, not pictures of the world we live in: as much as to say that a bird's eye view of things contains the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."
It's always seemed to me that the idea of universal standards of taste was an obvious absurdity; any such standard wide enough to encompass Perec, Dante, Orwell and Rabelais would be so generalised as to be meaningless. There's often something quite unpleasant about aesthetic demagoguery of critics; Ruskin's praise of gothic architecture and Pre-Raphaelite painting was predicated on a dismissal of Whistler's painting or architects like Cuthbert Broderick who disdained the gothic revival. Leavis praised Eliot, James, Lawrence and Conrad in The Great Tradition while dismissing the experimental on the one hand (Woolf, Joyce) and the gothic or sensational (Dickens, Bronte) on the other. Both essentially make the mistake of conflating their own predelictions with the universe and do so on grounds that are often moral or political. In either case, it's doubtful that many of us would agree with them now. In many respects, the idea of someone whose sole function is to tell us what to think about art or literature seems a form of impertinence.
When I was first introduced to the ideas of Barthes and Derrida, it seemed to me that much of the basis for criticism as a specialised function had been demolished. If literature was less the product of a single individual writing at a specific historical period and more the product of an endless play of differance in the mind of the reader, then meaning became a subjective affair. Sceptical even then, I'm less attached to either Barthes or Derrida now, but I do still think this view holds. Matters of interpretation or hermeneutics arose out of religious exegesis, the assumption that there were transcendent meanings encoded in texts that could be divined. I suspect I'd still agree with Derrida that such concepts have become untenable. Criticism as a professional activity might do well to be based on Moretti's sociological techniques or exploring reception theory through study groups, but the idea of interpretation as a valid function is one that probably should be discarded.
If there is a problem with the argument outlined above, it's less likely to be an aesthetic one and is rather more likely to be a political or social one. For example, Matthew Arnold's Kantian defence of criticism is partly due to his desire for a set of universal aesthetic standards to replace universal religious standards. Since criticism is derived from the study of religious texts and operates in a similar fashion, Arnold presumably saw the critic as an ideal replacement for the priest. A lot of this assumes that art is a form of individual expression and that the response to it is equally individual. Morgan's arguments are the perfect ones for an atomised, individualistic post-traditional society where consumption is as much a matter of individual preference as it is one of collective identification. But there is something rather ahistorical in this view and it does seem to me that there's a good case to be made that art if an expression of collective mores. That might be why particular genres tend to cluster in certain places at certain times. Labels like Greek tragedy, Restoration comedy or the nineteenth century novel are undoutedly generalisations but they do nonetheless exist for a reason; the works in question did not orginate in a vacuum.Labels: Culture, Hermeneutics, Literature
posted by Richard 2:57 PM
Monday, May 26, 2008
On the one hand:"Brecht... was a communist writer, not a writer who happened to support communism. The normal injunction to never judge an artist by his or her politics is an insult to his ghost because politics dominated his work. The Good Soul of Szechuan ends with the narrator asking if it is possible to lead a good life in a rotten world. The expected, indeed demanded, answer is "no". Individual morality will only be possible when the collective morality of communism comes.
Nothing, not the mountains of corpses or the cults of the personality, could shake Brecht's confidence. He preferred silence about the vast crimes of the Bolsheviks, including the murders of his friends and translators, to admitting that his god had failed... The American socialist Sidney Hook put the case for indifference best after Brecht came to dinner in Manhattan in the mid-Thirties. Stalin was forcing thousands of Soviet communists to confess to fantastic crimes, and Hook asked Brecht what he thought of the show trials. It was at this point that he said in words I have never forgotten, 'As for them, the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.' I was so taken aback that I thought I had misheard him."
And on the other:"It's strange how forgiving we are of artists who were involved with Hitler's Third Reich. In 1933, Goebbels appointed the composer Richard Strauss - whose dreamily decadent operas Salome, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier remain central to any contemporary opera house's repertoire - president of the Reichsmusikkammer, the state music bureau. In 1936, Strauss composed the Olympic Hymn for the infamous summer games and befriended some high-ranking Nazis.
He was probably politically naive. He may have been acting to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law; and he refused to have the name of his friend, the Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig, removed from the playbill of his opera Die Schweigsame Frau. This, it seems, is now enough to redeem Strauss the man... The early Brecht was a wild, anarchic poet. Productions of his 1928 Threepenny Opera often struggle to find in it a consistent political line... For a short time in the 1930s, as German society became more divided, Brecht's plays took a decidedly Leninist turn. His play The Mother shows a working-class woman struggling to reconcile individual needs with the demands of a political cause. It's a beautiful, moving piece, painfully ignorant of the horrors of Stalinism that were to follow. How strange that this play is considered beyond the pale in Britain and no longer performed - yet the Economist can declare, in 2003, that Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, marks her out as "the greatest female film-maker of the 20th century".
Brecht was very clear about one thing: his resistance to fascism. Before the Nazis came to power, Hitler's brownshirts were disrupting performances of Brecht and Weill's 1930 opera Mahagonny, claiming that it brought the contamination of black and Jewish musical influences into the German opera house. Brecht dedicated the next 15 years of his writing - plays, film scripts, poetry - to the anti-fascist cause."
I'm not really sure why the second excerpt believes an analogy between Strauss and Brecht to be especially helpful. His complicity with Nazism is rather better documented and more frequently discussed than the above article might suggest, but it is nonetheless rather improbable to imply that Strauss was a fascist composer in the same way that Brecht was a communist writer. A better analogy might have been Hamsun, Celine or Pound, but then the issue of their engagement with Nazism is equally well known and all three faced legal reprisals for their views during their lifetime. The point about Riefenstahl also seems misplaced (although there is a good case to be made that her treatment after the second world war probably was too lenient), particularly given that an especially harsh biography of her involvement with the Nazis was only published a few years ago. Worst of all is the insinuation that Brecht's opposition to Nazism exculpates his support for the other great totalitarianism of the twentieth century. While there's certainly no reason to single Brecht out for more criticism of his art or politics than Pound or Hamsun, there is a good case to be made that communist writers have only comparatively had their political commitments subjected to the same scrutiny that writers associated with fascism did long ago.Labels: Communism, Fascism, Literature
posted by Richard 2:17 PM
Friday, May 23, 2008
An article questions the resurgence of graphics in modern fiction:"The Lazarus Project features a twin narrative, telling the story of a murder in 1908 and a present-day writer investigating the death. In both cases, the images are intended to add depth and resonance to both stories. The effect, however, is the opposite: their inclusion only suggests that Hemon lacks confidence in his present-day narrator, and the verisimilitude of his historical reconstruction. Last week, I asked a friend, and fellow Hemon admirer, what he thought about it all. "Sebald has a lot to answer for," he said.
WG Sebald subtly altered the literary landscape with his fiction/travel/history books. Melancholic, digressive and erudite, his unsettling narratives are punctuated with photos, landscapes, diary entries and other images. It's the tension between these two elements - between what is real and fake, what words can describe and what they can't - that gives his books their dream-like power. It also allows Sebald to give a direct line into the mental landscape of his narrator, one that is visual as well as linguistic.
Sebald was a master of this device, but it's a technique that can scupper otherwise good novels... Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer's image heavy second novel, also suffers under the weight of its artistic leanings. I'm still undecided as to whether the last pages which depict a man falling from the Twin Towers, are an ambitious attempt to prove that sometimes words are not enough, or whether it's a final tricksy passage to a book over-stuffed with visual stimuli."
It's not particularly new; prior to the advent of the printing press, image and text were inextricably entwined. With the Victorian period, the love of medievalism led to a revival of sorts; editions of works by Chaucer issued by the Kelmscott Press were illustrated by Burne Jones. In parallel, Paget's illustrations for Conan Doyle were sufficiently powerful to create an image of Sherlock Holmes that failed to resemble that described in the text. The same followed for Phiz and Cruikshank's illustrations for Dickens and in the case of Tenniel's Alice in Wonderland; although modern readers might find themselves reading an edition illustrated by Mervyn Peake. George Eliot had her novels illustrated by no less a figure than Lord Leighton. Much of Dore's work was done as book illustrations, while Rossetti served as both writer and illustrator. Photographs occurred in fiction as early as Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte, followed by the work of Andre Breton. In a sense, modern fiction has been aberrant for relying solely on text. Nonetheless, the above comments immediately brought an essay by Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line to mind:"Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself--and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.
Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces, and embracing graphical or sensorial ones--a trend that accounts for the success of both Microsoft and Disney? Part of it is simply that the world is very complicated now--much more complicated than the hunter-gatherer world that our brains evolved to cope with--and we simply can't handle all of the details. We have to delegate. We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft to make a few choices for us, close off some options, and give us a conveniently packaged executive summary.
But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.
A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people's minds."Labels: Images, Literature
posted by Richard 8:01 PM
Thursday, April 10, 2008
An interesting summary of Beckett's lectures on literature:"Beckett first defined his literary criteria by way of the contrast he set up between the 19th-century French authors Balzac and Flaubert. Unlike his Irish contemporaries, Beckett saw Balzac as the counter-example of the modern novel, and Flaubert as the great innovator. For Beckett (as he has the protagonist of his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, put it): "To read Balzac is to receive the impression of a chloroformed world." He resented both the lack of confusion and the lack of self-criticism in Balzac. What fascinated him was the clair-obscure (the painterly distribution of light and shade) he found in the writers he admired, like Dostoevsky and Flaubert. Balzac, by contrast, only transcribed the surface, creating a fictional world that resembled a pool table on which balls are perfectly arranged and sent in one direction or another according to a very precise strategy of control. In Beckett's eyes, Balzac divested his fictional universe of the unexpected and the unknowable, properties which, for Beckett, lay at the heart of human experience and whose expression must find its way into fiction.
Art for Beckett at this period was the progressive discovery of the "real", as Burrows remembered in an interview in 1982: "The artist himself was changing all the time and his material was constantly in a state of flux, hence you had to do something to organize this mess, but not to make puppets and set them in motion." Beckett favoured the absence of a controlling authorial personality and any sense of finality in a text, and was opposed to the control, embellishment or glorification of reality. In these respects, Flaubert was an exemplary modern author for him. Citing Madame Bovary and Salammbo he explained that Flaubert was neither photographer nor image monger, but a writer who displayed an honest apprehension of reality.
Beckett denied any modernity in Balzac, whose flawed duality he denounced - on the one hand he was a realist, and on the other a romantic psychologist. But, for Beckett, these two aspects did not fit together, resulting in a profound lack of cohesion in Balzac's work. According to Beckett a modern writer must seek "homogeneity". Thus, Flaubert was at once coherent and complex, in the manner in which the extreme precision of his texts revealed the contradiction of so-called 19th-century realism: exactitude was inevitably bound to be frustrated because confusion cannot be reduced to a neat narrative à la Balzac.
Beckett also appreciated that Flaubert, rather than fabricating heroes, created circumstances that reduced his characters to their just level of banality, thus revealing their paradoxical nature and sometimes their stupidity, an approach which shocked Henry James, who said: "Why did Flaubert choose, as special conduits of the life he proposed to depict, such inferior and ... such abject human specimens?" Madame Bovary's creator had anticipated such a charge by once writing that there were neither good nor bad subjects, and that, from an artistic point of view, the subject was irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things. He refused to dissociate form and content. "Here form is content, content is form. [...] His writing is not about something; it is that something itself" was Flaubert's motto, which Beckett used to champion Joyce's Finnegans Wake. It's a formula at one with Flaubert's notion of the ideal book - that would be about nothing, one that would rely on its style alone and whose subject would be invisible."
As noted on my previous post on this subject, there's a lot about this that reminds me of the distinction Keats drew between Milton (the egotistical sublime) and Shakespeare (negative capability) or that outlined by Berlin in the case of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, with Balzac firmly characterised as a writer who celebrates diversity and the contradictory and Doestoevsky described as the type of writer who sees the world through the lens of a single lens (itself an opposed description to Bakhtin's characterisation of Dostoevksy's work as polyphonic). It's certainly true that in Flaubert, we have the sense of consciousness as something submerged and independent from the normal categories of the social novel, as with Emma Bovary's romantic longings or Frederic's admission at the end of Sentimental Education that the zenith of his life was a hitherto unmentioned visit to a brothel. It's also not difficult to see how Flaubert's stated aim to "derouter le lecteur" would appeal to Beckett. Sentimental Education in particular goes a long way to confirming Beckett's contention; in a Balzac novel the different paths taken by the characters would often lead to different moral outcomes, whereas in Flaubert all paths lead to the same destination. The usual teleological structure of the nineteenth century novel, with its remorseless progress towards tragedy or marriage, is abandoned. While the depiction of Dambreuse is not that far removed from that of Merdle or Melmotte (the poverty of Madame Arnoux and Rosanette is also not that far from Dickens), Flaubert is equally cynical as to the alternatives, as with his observation that Senecal is filled with love towards the mases in their aggregate state and is merciless towards individuals; "a sort of Athenian Sparta in which the individual would only exist to serve the state... anything which he considered hostile to it he attacked with the logic of a mathematician and the faith of an inquisitor." Frederic is at once an aristocratic snob ("he felt utterly nauseated by the vulgarity of their faces, the stupidity of their talk...the knowledge that he was worth more than these men lessened the fatigure of looking at them.") and is fired with revolutionary ideals ("I think the people are sublime"). Deslauriers similarly notes that "he had preached fraternity to the conservatives and respect for the law to the socialists." Sentimental Education is the great novel of the middle ground, with all viewpoints contested and all found wanting Frederic and not steering a straight enough course, and Desluariers being too rigid, with the same applying to the aesthetic debates of Pellerin and Senecal.
Nonetheless, I'm still not quite convinced I find Beckett's argument wholly meaningful. It's certainly true that, like Dickens, Balzac seems to see his characters as caricatures, driven by social and moral concepts rather than an idea of human consciousness (his idea of each individual having only a certain amount of life force that can be frittered away by dissolute or hubristic behaviour has a rather medieval quality to it). On the other hand, there is the difficulty that Balzac, like Thackeray is not an especially good moralist, and the moral fables that lie at the centre of his work either lack conviction or simply go awry altogether, leading to something rather more interesting. In short, I think that the disconnection of the romantic and realist in Balzac is a strength rather than a defect - not the first time, I find myself preferring the dissonant and inconsistent to the consistent and harmonious. Homogeneity is probably the very last thing the novel should aim for. To take the example of The Black Sheep, I was struck by what an anti-novel it is. The form of the novel should be similar to that of Nicholas Nickleby but instead of simply dwelling on the notion of the good and neglected Joseph eventually receiving his dues, Balzac pays as much attention to Philippe, the prodigal son, and instead of solely focussing on the dissolute aspect of his life, depicts the raw will to power as someone could have been a great general but is left out of place in the world he finds himself in. Instead of a simple moral fable, Balzac instead describes "a place where speculation and individualism are carried to the highest level, where the brutality of self interest reaches the point of cynicism." Philippe's rapacity is as vital and necessary here as Eugenie Grandet's self sacrifice or Cousin Pons's good nature is as pointless or helpless in the novels of those name. In Balzac, we always feel that we are reading a novel where the characters are evaluated primarily in moral terms, only to discover that such considerations are never of any importance.
To take another example, Lost Illusions I was struck by how it forms a mid-point between the picaresque novel (since although Balzac's narrative is highly plotted, the plot nonetheless tends to turn through unexpected events in an episodic fashion, a moral fable depicting the travels of a young man from country to city and consequently from innocence to corruption and redemption) and later social novels (where morality has a much more problematic relationship with social conditions and where the character of society is not necessarily regarded as a given, though Balzac is markedly more nonchalant on that score than Zola). For instance, Balzac writes of Lucien that "he was under the spell of luxury and the tyranny of sumptuous fare; his wayward instincts were reviving," but in practice the majority of the narrative is driven not by Lucien's fall into immoral debauchery but by the machinations of society driven by the cash-nexus; "everything is taxed, everything is sold, everything is manufactured, even success." Accordingly, Balzac links dissipation with the society that produces it; "the helotism to which the Restoration had condemned young people... having no outlet for their energy they... frittered it away in the strangest excesses." The consequence is that although 'Herrera' is clearly marked as a Faustian figure, both author and narrator are left pinioned by the novel's own logic when he declares that any morality can only come after financial security. A statement that is worthy of Brecht's What Keeps Mankind Alive?
Update: an interesting comment on the same theme from a review of a history of modernism:"Each of Gay’s dramatis personae exhibit his two key modernist traits – that is, the desire to challenge the cultural establishment (Ezra Pound’s 'make it new') and to give expression to hitherto unencountered depths of the self, be it the 'monologue interieur' of Joyce or the near pathological self-portraiture of Max Beckmann... Modernism, for its constituents, was experienced not simply as liberation, but as crisis. It bespoke something profound: the cultural experience, indeed, the disillusionment of modernity’s promise of autonomy. The emancipation of individual subjectivity, encouraging self-scrutiny as Gay sees it, if bereft of social bonds becomes as much a prison as a promise of freedom.
This is writ large in the development of literary modernism. As Gay notes, the mimetic, realistic component typical of nineteenth-century realism was increasingly experienced as a formal inhibition. But he fails to tell us why this was the case. What had changed between the time of Balzac and that of Flaubert and Baudelaire, the two progenitors of modernism identified by Gay? As the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs explained, between these two generations of French writers 'lies the year 1848 and the bloody days of June, the first independent action of the working class, which left so indelible an impression on the ideology of the French bourgeoisie, that after it bourgeois ideology ceased to play a progressive part in France for a long time'. In other words, universal aspirations were abandoned in favour of the protection of particular interests.
This is crucial. For the realist writer, the ability to narrate, to find meaning in social praxes, rests, as Lukács argues, on the artist having a 'living relationship to the real life of the people'. Be it Balzac or Walter Scott, the vital problems of the time are experienced as their problems; the life and struggles of the community as their struggles. Modernism’s emergence depends on the dissolution of just such an involvement. As Peter Nicholls notes, it is with Baudelaire, writing during the 1850s, that 'a cleavage begins to open up between bourgeois modernity, on the one hand, and aesthetic modernity on the other'.
The sovereignty of the artist, his autonomy, is set against the political sovereignty and autonomy won in 1789. Although free to experiment, to push the boundaries of their art, the artist loses those with whom he had previously found common, if problematic cause. His professionalisation becomes a burden. Bereft of something like solidarity, he is left before his fellows – the market – as before an antagonistic mass: 'Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere!'"Labels: Hermeneutics, Literature
posted by Richard 8:16 PM
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Philip Hensher writes on the history of the state of the nation novel:"Several things define this genre: a range of social settings; the coverage of an extended period of time; a sense that the lives described reflect major social shifts or matters of public importance; and, often, open debate on political concerns and the nature of the nation itself. Commentators on the English novel have often claimed to find works of this type in 19th-century fiction. In fact, few of Dickens's or Eliot's works really analyse the whole of a society. However, some 19th-century authors certainly did set out to write state-of-the-nation fiction. The title of Trollope's The Way We Live Now is a clear indication of intent, and the book conscientiously covers a range of social settings and roles, from the agricultural to the new capital markets of the City. Disraeli's splendid "Young England" trilogy of the 1840s, Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred, with its broad social spectrum and tendency to political solutions, is virtually the founding example of the state-of-the-nation novel. The celebrated passage from Sybil about the two nations, rich and poor, is one of the very few examples of a piece of state-of-the-nation rhetoric making its way permanently into the political debate. Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, Middlemarch and, probably, Little Dorrit all have a state-of-the-nation flavour: they have an acute sense of the larger implications of the individual situation; their ambitions are both literary and, in a general sense, policy-directed in ways which go beyond the aspirations of, say, Great Expectations or Daniel Deronda.
The novelist's concern with the state of the nation has never gone away, but it only occasionally emerges in the form of a state-of-the-nation novel. Nothing could be more telling about Britain's unhoused exhaustion at the end of the second world war than the rush of enthusiasm for novels about country houses and fantastical, often demonic palaces—Brideshead Revisited, Love in a Cold Climate, Gormenghast and The Lord of the Rings. None of them, however, was exactly state-of-the-nation, and the taste for the national diagnosis was satisfied by the factual discussions of the Beveridge report, which sold an astonishing 600,000 copies, at two shillings each.
Since then, the state-of-the-nation tendency in fiction has surfaced from time to time. The mid to late 1970s saw a small run of such books concerned with what seemed the collapse of the Attlee consensus. AS Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden (1978), set in the early 1950s, was the first volume of a tetralogy that traced the developing state of the nation in the following decades. William Golding's Darkness Visible (1979) seems to give in to despair in a tale of motiveless violence. In Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age (1977), commerce and property become evil, empty values in ways that foreshadow the "Thatcher's Britain" novelists... Why are we seeing such a range of state-of-the-nation novels at this moment? Perhaps the last occasion when such novels seemed urgent and vital was not the "Thatcher's Britain" years but the years which produced Drabble, Byatt and Golding, the fag-end of the Callaghan Labour government. The public consensus then was clearly breaking down under a prime minister who had no mandate from an election. The trust between people and elected representatives was evaporating, and acts of individual violence were common."
This is something I've been thinking about recently and something I have my doubts about. London Fields by Martin Amis is characterised by a sense of English life as an irrelevance, a place from where history has fled ("Bellow says that America is the only place to be, because it contains the 'real modern action'"). I recall him later comparing England to Switzerland, making me think of Greene's comment about centuries of peace and prosperity creating nothing more than the cuckoo clock. By contrast, the London of Trollope and Dickens was an economic experiment, a place wholly unlike anywhere else on Earth and which represented the shape of things to come. There's also the sense of Victorian society as having been considerably more cohesive; even with two nations there is the sense of inequality as a source of collective shame that needs to be addressed collectively. This isn't something that is obviously a part of modern England, where the return of Victorian social conditions does not seem to have led to any similar set of social concerns. Modern England seems to be comparatively atomised, it's individualism and multiculturalism making state of the nation fiction difficult at best and often confined to minority groups, as with Smith or Hollinghurst.
Perhaps this is why much modern social fiction seems a rather poor substitute for its Victorian counterpart; Arnott's He Kills Coppers spans a social history of decades but its characters remains as they are, unaffected by social upheaval, whereas the Victorian assumption was that the individual and society were inextricably intertwined. Similarly, McEwan's On Chesil Beach certainly contains several passages that suggest a degree of scepticism as to political radicalism; Florence's mother describes the Soviet Union as little different to Nazi Germany. As Florence believes it to be essentially benevolent it is a little inconsistent for her to describe Edward's membership of CND as being akin to a medieval millenarian cult (particularly when she too belongs to it). However, whether any of this really translates to support for conservative ideas is an extrapolation the novel fails to justify, particularly when McEwan comments that he has not disavowed any of the views he once held as a member of CND. My own reservations about McEwan are rather different. As the above descriptions attest, the novel is concerned with events in the years that Larkin described sexual intercourse as having invented in ("This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine ...This was still the era when to be young was a social encumbrance.") At one point McEwan's omniscient narrator declares that "Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself." This seems true of one of the characters, Edward, who travels in the course of the novel from English middle class awkwardness to becoming a sixties dropout. However, Florence's "visceral dread" of sex is deliberately left unexplained and can certainly not be laid at the hand of history. Similarly, her suggestion that their relationship be platonic, with her tolerating him having sex with other women hardly seems to be ahead of its time in the way McEwan seems to believe it to be; quite the contrary. The idea that Edward's life would have been much better if he had accepted also seems somewhat unwarranted, given that the novel itself holds out little more than a post in her father's firm for choosing that road. McEwan generally seems to prefer the aberrant and unexplained too much to be able to work fully within the constraints of the realist novel, where the struggles of Julien Sorrel or Dorothea Brooke is entirely in keeping with the spirit of their age.
Update: an interesting, and to my mind quite persuasive, article from Alan Massie takes an approach that rather recalls Lukacs. In this context we might compare the 'closed' Madame Bovary to the 'open' Lost Illusions:"One may make a distinction between two types of novel: the self-enclosed and the open. The distinction is not absolute. Such things never are. Genre fiction may merge with what is called the literary novel, for instance. Still the categories I have in mind are useful, or at least interesting. By the self-enclosed novel, I mean one which makes no reference — or almost no reference — to anything beyond itself. It belongs to its age of course, but it does not appear to be set in time. Time naturally passes, as it must in a narrative, but there is no suggestion that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters, influence their behaviour, or affect the course of their lives. The doors of the novel are closed against the winds of the world. In the open novel, these winds, which are the winds of history, beat upon the characters. Indeed history is itself a character in this kind of novel, even if the author chooses not to introduce real-life historical figures. In, for instance, that fine novel by Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day, the second world war is a character as the Napoleonic Wars are not in Jane Austen’s beautifully self-enclosed novels. The treason of which the heroine’s lover is guilty would seem less significant if we didn’t bring to our reading of the novel our knowledge of the enemy he has chosen to serve — the enemy whom his lover, Stella, rightly calls ‘horrible — specious, unthinkable, grotesque’.
The open novel was invented more or less by Walter Scott, though it had ancestors in Defoe and Fielding. Especially in the series of great novels set in the Scotland of the 17th and 18th centuries, Scott demonstrates that, for a man of a certain stamp at a certain time, there is no escaping history. It is history, the world of harsh political fact which, working in conjunction with personal qualities, forms or deforms men’s lives. Henry Morton’s dilemma in Old Mortality is certainly occasioned by his character, but it is specifically provoked by the temper of the times in which he lives and the bitter animosities with which he is confronted are historical facts...
Some frown on this. A work of art, they say, should be self-sufficient, needing to make no reference to anything beyond itself. This argument is advanced more often in discussion of painting than in literary criticism — Roger Fry’s doctrine of ‘significant form’, for instance — and would have puzzled the Old Masters who expected people to bring their knowledge of the Bible or Classical mythology to the contemplation of their work. It would likewise have puzzled the poets who expected their readers to catch their classical allusions.... The self-enclosed novel will always be written, but Scott’s example was soon followed by Stendhal, Hugo and Tolstoy. Most novels are perhaps hybrids. Sometimes you get an open novel, like Thomas Mann’s masterpiece Doctor Faustus, which, for much of the time, pretends to be self-enclosed. Nowadays the problem for the writer of the contemporary open novel is that news and the sense of immediacy press so hard and insistently upon him. This is perhaps why so many of the best open novels are set in the past, even if that past is quite recent, as in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy."Labels: Literature
posted by Richard 11:08 AM
Sunday, February 03, 2008
"Besides my other numerous circle of acquaintances I have one more intimate confidant—my melancholy. In the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, she waves to me, calls me to one side, even though physically I stay put. My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known, what wonder, then, that I love her in return." — Kierkegaard
Following my earlier piece on ruins, I had for sometime intended to write a companion piece on melancholy. This intent never succeeded in fully manifesting itself, until I was reminded of it by this article, In Praise of Melancholy:"I for one am afraid that American culture's overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society's efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?
My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life's enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.
I'm not questioning joy in general. For instance, I'm not challenging that unbearable exuberance that suddenly emerges from long suffering. I'm not troubled by that hard-earned tranquillity that comes from long meditation on the world's sorrows. I'm not criticizing that slow-burning bliss that issues from a life spent helping those who hurt. And I'm not romanticizing clinical depression. I realize that there are many lost souls out there who require medication to keep from killing themselves or harming their friends and families. I'm not questioning pharmaceutical therapies for the seriously depressed or simply to make existence bearable for so many with biochemical disorders... Our culture seems to confuse these two and thus treats melancholia as an aberrant state, a vile threat to our pervasive notions of happiness — happiness as immediate gratification, happiness as superficial comfort, happiness as static contentment. Of course the question immediately arises: Who wouldn't question this apparently hollow form of American happiness? Aren't all of us late at night, when we're honest with ourselves, opposed to shallow happiness? Most likely we are, but isn't it possible that many of us fall into superficiality without knowing it?"
As an argument, this cleaves to the ideas of dystopian novels like A Clockwork Orange or Brave New World that the possibility of stripping away unwanted aspects of ourselves will also dehumanise us or deprive us of our freedom. It's an argument I have a lot of sympathy for, as I tend to feel that modern society mandates happiness, demands it as something to be conformed to even as depression becomes an every greater social ill. According to the World Health Organisation, depression is now the fifth leading cause of death and disability in the world, leaving ischemic heart disease trailing in sixth place. I also feel that modern society is equally capable of embracing melancholy as a uniform, as with the gothic subculture. It becomes a little difficult to complain too much of modern happiness when bands like The Cure, The Smiths, The Manic Street Preachers or Nirvana have had albums outselling their manufactured counterparts.
Melancholy as a concept exists in multiple forms, which warily circle one another, never joing but never quite departing from one another. The Portuguese term, saudaude denotes a feeling of longing for something that one is fond of, which is gone. It is as close to nostalgia as melancholy. The Finnish Kaiho means a state of involuntary solitude in which the subject feels incompleteness and yearns for something unattainable or extremely difficult and tedious to attain. The German Sehnsucht relates to an inconsolable longing, while Japanese "empathy toward things," or "pity toward things," is used to describe the awareness of the transience of things and a gentle sadness at their passing. The importance of the cherry in Japanese culture is due to cherry blossoms symbolising the transience of life because of their short blooming times. In Italian, noia, or ennui, is a particular nuance of melancholy, infused with lingering, incompleteness, loss, and inconsolability. In Russian, toska translates as "the ache." As Nabokov put it in his notes on translating Eugene Onegin; "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, lovesickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom, skuka." The Arabic word found as huzn and hazan in the Qur'an refers to the pain and sorrow over a loss. Two schools further interpreted this feeling. The first sees it as a sign that one is too attached to the material world, while Sufism took it to represent a feeling of personal insuffiency, that one was not getting close enough to God and did not or could not do enough for God in this world. Orhan Pamuk argued in his recent biography of Istanbul that in modern Turkish it has come to denote a sense of failure in life, lack of initiative and to retreat into oneself, symptoms quite similar to melancholia.
Nonetheless, melancholy was known within Europe as "the English disease." Even as apparently stolid a figure as Dr Johnson could believe that he was damned, wished to be confined and whipped, take opium to alleviate his miseries and write that "this day it came into my mind to write the history of melancholy. On this purpose to deliberate. I know not whether it may be too much to disturb me... I inherited a vile melancholy from my father, which has made me mad all my life" In 1733, Dr George Cheyne speculated that the English climate, combined with sedentary lifestyles and urbanisation, "have brought forth a class of distemper with atrocious and frightful symptoms, scarce known to our ancestors, and never rising to such fatal heights, and afflicting such numbers in any known nation. These nervous disorders being computed to make almost one-third of the complaints of the people of condition in England." To the English, the disease was "the English malady." One can go back further, to 1586 and Timothy Bright's A Treatise of Melancholie; "The perturbations of melancholy are for the most parte, sadde and fearful, and such as rise of them: as distrust, doubt, diffidence, or dispaire, sometimes furious and sometimes merry in apparaunce, through a kinde of Sardonian, and false laughter, as the humour is disposed that procureth these diversities."
The term "melancholia" comes from the old medical theory of the four humours: disease being caused by an imbalance in one or other of the four basic bodily fluids, or humours. Personality types were similarly determined by the dominant humour in a particular person. Melancholia was caused by an excess of black bile; leading to a melancholic disposition. Melancholia was described as a distinct disease with particular mental and physical symptoms in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Hippocrates, in his Aphorisms, characterized all "fears and despondencies, if they last a long time" as being symptomatic of melancholia. The actual word Melancholia is derived from Arabic, specifically Ishaq ibn Imran's essay entitled Maqala fi-l-Malikhuliya, which discovered a foolish acts, fear, delusions and hallucinations under the term "malikhuliya," which Constantine the African translated into Latin as "melancolia." The doctrine of the four humours was modified somewhat in the fourth century when it came under the influence of the portrayals of madness in Greek tragedy and the Platonic notion of "divine frenzy," beginning the transformation of an essentially pathological taxonomy (the classical doctrine of the Four Humours) into a psychological one (the medieval theory of the Four Temperaments). As Agamben puts it; "Melancholy or black bile (melaina chole) is the humour whose disorders are liable to produce the most destructive consequences. In medieval humoral cosmology, melancholy is traditionally associated with the earth, autumn (or winter), the dry element, cold, the north wind, the color black, old age (or maturity); its planet is Saturn, among whose children the melancholic finds himself with the hanged man, the cripple, the peasant, the gambler, the monk, and the swineherd."
Aristotle had seen a connection between melancholy - an excess in a person of black bile - and eminence in philosophy, politics, and poetry, instancing the mythic hero Hercules and the great philosophers Empedocles, Socrates, and Plato. According to Aristotle, the ancients called melancholy "the sacred disease." Before him Plato had linked trance-like raging or frenzy to the abilities to prophesy, to perform priestly functions, to compose divine poetry, and, even, to love truly. Marsilio Ficino's De vita triplici (1489), the first book to treat of melancholy at any length, rehabilitated the Aristotelian notion of the gifted melancholic, and expressly tied it in with the Plato's "divine frenzy," thereby laying the intellectual foundations for a new type of man, the tortured genius, pitched back and forth between the heights of rapture and the depths of despair. Ficino linked melancholy to the astrological notion of being born under, or being at critical moments influenced by, Saturn or his spirits - Saturn being the furthest and slowest of the seven known planets and the god of old age and contemplation. From this analysis of planetary influence emerged the idea of our possessing an inner "saturnian" spirit, "daemon," or genius, and eventually the romantic and modern notion of the mad, afflicted, or wounded genius.
Predictably enough, the origins of English and European melancholy are also inextricably linked to christianity and the context of a society with high rates of mortality and comparatively brief lifespans. Rather than looking to medicine, early christianity had attributed sadness and lethargy to a condition called acedia, which opened the way to the work of the Devil. Anglo-Saxon literature was preoccupied with ideas of destiny and transience, with the Old English word dustceawung denotes contemplation of the dust. The Ruin depicts a fallen city, whose majesty has been vanquished. Poems like The Wanderer and The Seafarer treat of exile and isolation, with the latter proclaiming that "hotter for me are the joys of the Lord than this dead life fleeting on the land. I do not believe that the riches of the world will stand forever." The typical images of melancholy are often those that arise from medieval art; the danse macabre, with its dancing depiction of the Grim Reaper carrying off rich and poor alike, as with Holbein's later engraving of the Totentanz. Doom painting would show rich and poor languishing in the fire of hell, as well as graves opening on the day judgement. The imagery of skulls and hourglasses on tombstones. Sundials decorated with refrains like 'Orimur morimur' (We have risen and we have set) or 'We shall soon die all' (the latter being a rather excruciating pun on sundial). The thanatophilia is qualitatively different from the sense behind 'carpe Diem' or 'nunc est bibendum.' Clocks were decorated with mottos such as 'ultima forsan' (perhaps the last) or 'vulnerant omnes, ultima necat' (they all wound, and the last kills) and most famously 'tempus fugit' (time flies). Private people carried smaller reminders of their own mortality. Mary Queen of Scots owned a large watch carved in the form of a silver skull, embellished with the lines of Horace, Nunc est Bibendum. Astronomical clocks would often have the skeletal figure of death emerge to strike the hour.
Nonetheless, the period most associated with melancholy is the fifteenth century. At this period, the transi, or cadaver tomb, a tomb which depicts the decayed corpse of the deceased became a fashion in the tombs of the wealthy. The advent of painting created the Vanitas genre, with its depiction of skulls, flowers losing their petals and broken loot strings. Holbein's The Ambassadors famously includes the distorted image of a skull as an intercision into a scene of courtly ostentation. This is the period of Dowland's In Darkness Let Me dwell, Campion's The Cypress Curtain of the Night (both following Josquin Desprez's chanson Plaine de dueil et de melancolye, which speaks of an unbearable woe which can be relieved only through complete submission to an object of love.) and Donne's A Valediction of Weeping. As Dean of St Paul's, Donne carried a hourglass into his pulpit to remind the congregation "from the first minute that thou beginst to live, thou beginst to die too." This is also the man who proclained; "they tell me it is my melancholly. Did I infuse, did I drink in melancholly into myselfe? It is my thoughtfulnesse, was I not made to thinke?" Shakespeare was to return to the theme many times, as in The Taming of the Shrew, where "melancholy is the nurse of phrenzy." Later, John Milton was to write in Il Penseroso; "Hail, divinest Melancholy!, Whose Saintly visage is too bright, To hit the Sense of human sight; And therefore to our weaker view, O'er-laid with black, staid Wisdom's hue."
More specifically, this is the period that saw the rise of subjectivity or the discovery of the individual and of the artist, with the transition from craftsman and workshops to named artists. The European nobility had already undergone this sort of psychological shift in their transformation from a warrior class to a collection of courtiers. In the late 16th and 17th centuries, the change becomes far more widespread, affecting even artisans, peasants, and labourers. The new emphasis on disengagement and self-consciousness made the individual potentially more autonomous and critical of existing social arrangements, but also transformed into a kind of walled fortress, carefully defended from everyone else. Mirrors in which to examine oneself become popular among those who can afford them, along with self-portraits (Rembrandt painted more than fifty of them, not to mention Foucault's preferred examples of Velasquez and Las Meninas or the fact that Durer was one of the first artists to draw and paint his own mirror reflection) and autobiographies in which to revise and elaborate the image that one has projected to others. In bourgeois homes, public spaces that guests may enter are differentiated, for the first time, from the private spaces - bedrooms, for example - in which one may retire to let down one's guard and truly "be oneself." More decorous forms of entertainment - plays and operas requiring people to remain immobilised, each in his or her separate seat - begin to provide an alternative to the promiscuously interactive and physically engaging pleasures of carnival. The very word "self," ceased to be a mere reflexive or intensifier and achieves the status of a freestanding noun, referring to some inner core, not readily visible to others.
A number of social trends are cited in this context, such as the prevalence of death through plague and warfare and the failure of the society to provide occupations for its educated class. Under Elizabeth there had been a considerable increase of educational activity, with a consequent heightening of men's expectations, exacerbated by self-fashioning texts in the vein of Castiglione's The Courtier. Even before the close of the sixteenth century there were more than a few who could find no place in the existing organization of the state. The notion of a self hidden behind one's appearance and portable from one situation to another is also often attributed to the new possibility of upward mobility. In medieval culture, you were what you appeared to be - a peasant, a man of commerce or an aristocrat - and any attempt to assume another status would have been regarded as rank deception. But in the late 16th century, upward mobility was beginning to be possible or at least imaginable, making "deception" a widespread way of life. You might not be a lord or a lofty burgher, but you could find out how to act like one. Hence the popularity, in 17th-century England, of books instructing the would-be member of the gentry in how to comport himself, write an impressive letter and choose a socially advantageous wife. Hence, too, the new fascination with the theatre, with its notion of an actor who is different from his or her roles. Shakespeare's Portia pretends to be a doctor of law; Rosalind disguises herself as a boy; Juliet feigns her own death. Writing a few years after Shakespeare's death, Burton bemoaned the fact that acting was no longer confined to the theatre, for "men like stage-players act [a] variety of parts." It was painful, in his view, "to see a man turn himself into all shapes like a Chameleon ... to act twenty parts & persons at once for his advantage ... having a several face, garb, & character, for every one he meets."
Most importantly, the reformation has inaugurated a shift from the more socially directed aspects of Catholicism to Protestantism's focus on faith alone; an emphasis of the self was an unintended product of this, in contrast to the medieval focus on the extinction of the self advocated by Thomas a Kempis. Catholicism offered various palliatives to the disturbed and afflicted, in the form of rituals designed to win divine forgiveness or at least diminished disapproval. By contrast, the Puritan strains of Protestantism did no such thing; instead of offering relief, they provided a metaphysical framework for depression: if you felt isolated, persecuted and possibly damned, this was because you were predestined to be so. In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, carnival is the portal to Hell, just as pleasure in any form - sexual, gustatory, convivial - is the devil's snare. Durkheim found that Protestants in the 19th century - not all of whom, of course, were of the Calvinistic persuasion - were about twice as likely to take their own lives as Catholics. More strikingly, a recent analysis finds a sudden surge of suicide in the Swiss canton of Zurich, beginning in the late 16th century, just as that region became a Calvinist stronghold.
The overthrow of the Catholic church was also an assault on all known metaphysical certainties, leading to the importance of the concept of mutability in Elizabethan literature, as in Spenser's cantos on the subject. As such, with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the melancholic is also often the malcontent, the overreacher. Edmund in King Lear notes that "My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o'Bedlam." For Shakespeare, living in an age whose metaphysical certainties had been upturned by state decree, conviction is rarely possible. His characters instead defy augury, dramatising their consciousness and examining their own roles. Hamlet is the overreacher, the machiavel, the fool and the wronged hero, failing to become, as Eliot had it, a clear objective correlative for the events of the play. The particular religious significance of Hamlet is that at the head of the hierarchy of sins held by the Elizabethan religious orthodoxy lies the sin of despair. Despair represents a refusal or inability to enter into relationship with God, and, as a result, a distancing from God's grace. Hamlet's melancholy causes him to distrust his first inclinations toward the apparition he has encountered (an apparition whose very existence ran contrary to the theology of the time), and to test them through the device of the mousetrap scene. In effect, he accepts the popular belief that the Devil considers melancholics to be ripe for deception - a belief which looks suspiciously upon melancholy and considers it to be a possible reflection of moral or ethical lapses. But equally, Hamlet's soliloquies can be read as conventional statements on the transience of mortal life; "I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire: why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." If medieval melancholy is a simple ailment or expression of theological commonplaces, it is an expression of both theological and metaphysical confusion in Elizabethan literature. Hamlet's "fellow of infinite jest" is surely a conventional and orthodox memento mori.
The same theological and metaphysical confusion lies at the heart of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, with its influence on Byron, Keats and Lamb. Burton describes his text as "a rhapsody of rags gathered from several dung hills, excrement of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out," and frequently withdraws from any sense of authorial authority; "But where am I? Into what subject have I rushed? What have I to do with Nuns, Maids, Virgins, Widows? I am a bachelor myself and lead a monastick life in a college." It can probably be best described as a fallen summa theologica, an attempt to account for the lack of metaphysical certainty in a post-reformation world ("the superstition of our age, our religious madness"), cataloguing the myriad schisms undergone by the church and the number of fanatics that have founded new cults as "they drive out one superstition with another... how many silly souls have imposters deluded!". It incessantly probes the boundaries of the immaterial and the naturalistic, cataloguing anecdotes in an encyclopaedic manner (a painter who tortured a man in order to depict it, a Swiftian tale of medical treatment by applying bellows to the fundament). The summa encompasses both the christian and the pagan, leading Burton into some rather heterodox observations. For instance, his dismissal of asceticism; "a company of cynics... that contemn the world, contemn themselves... yet in that contempt are more proud than any man living whatsoever," his dismissal of the virtuous nature of poverty "there are those that approve of a mean estate but on condition that they never want themselves," or his appeal for understanding of suicides; "we ought not to be so rash and rigorous in our censures as some are." Whilst still avowing religious orthodoxy, the dialogic approach Burton adopts castigates other religions and christian sects as well as questioning some of the basic tenets of christianity; "why does he suffer so much mischief and evil to be done, if he is able to help, why doth he not assist good or resist bad?" Burton also decouples religion and morality, arguing that "the nature of injury" is sufficient to keep men obedient to the law. Finally, he also questions the validity of a universal religion, suggesting the need for infinite religions for infinite circumstances.
Similarly, Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Burial has a marked tension between Browne's faith in christ and the resurrection on the one hand and by his antiquarian interest in such pagan habits as cremation and mummification on the other; Baconian scepticism and mysticism in one text. As he put it "I perceive I doe anticipate the vices of the age, the world to me is but a dreame or mockshow, and wee all therein but Pantalones and Antickes to my severer contemplations." Therefore "tis all but one to lie in St Innocent's Churchyard as in the sands of Aegypt... The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow.... The heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man is to tell him he is at the end of his nature."
The consummate expression of melancholy in the visual arts is undoubtedly Durer's Melencolia I, with its individualized and self-absorbed figure, lost in thought and unable to take up her tools. The prototypical pose of melancholy dates back to the classical period, with statues of the deranged Ajax existing in that pose. It was followed by Domenico Fetti's St Peter (Fetti also gave one of his works the simple title Melancholy), Mary by de Zurbaran, St John, a 13th-century icon by Deodato di Orlando, and St. John the Baptist in the Desert (1480-85), a painting by Gérard de Saint-Jean, both show the prophet's head resting on his right arm. The posture was soon borrowed by secular painting, as in Nicholas Hillard's Portrait of Henry Percy and, in the 17th century, in Michael Sweerts's Portrait of a Young Man. A century later, Goya used it for Portrait of Don Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, as did van Gogh in Portrait of Dr. Paul Gachet and arguably Rodin in The Thinker.
Erwin Panofsky believed that Melencolia I presented "a spiritual self portrait of the artist inspired by celestial influences and eternal ideas, but [one who] suffers all the more deeply from his human frailty and intellectual finiteness." One of the characteristics of Durer’s picture is its superabundance of 'overdetermined' symbols, the comet and the rainbow, the ladder that appears to change plane halfway up, the three nails, one with a double tine and their possible allusion to the crucifixion. The purse, the keys and the clenched fist, for example, are all associated with avarice, one of the vices attributed to melancholy in the medieval period; the crown of watercress and water parsley around the angel’s brow are an antidote to the dry humour of the melancholic; the magic square is designed to invoke the healing influence of Jupiter. Panofsky concluded that Durer’s angel is a personification of Geometry overcome with Melancholy (or Melancholy giving herself up to Geometry) and was in all likelihood inspired by a follower of Ficino, the German philosopher Agrippa devon Nettesheim, whose book, De Occulta Philosophia, draws heavily on the Italian’s work, and a draft of which was sent to Dürer’s friend Johannes Trithemius, in 1510, just four years before the engraving was made. In De Occulta Philosophia, Agrippa distinguishes three kinds of melancholy: melancholia imaginationis, melancholia rationis and melancholia mentis, arranged in an ascending hierarchy. The first holds sway over the untutored, a category that includes architects and painters; the second, over philosophers, physicians and orators; the third, over contemplatives to whom God’s mysteries have been revealed. Shakespeare advanced something similar in As You Like It: "I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud; not the soldier's which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness." Panofsky concludes from this that Durer’s angel is a portrayal of the first of these, melancholia imaginationis, surrounded by her instruments but sunk in gloom at the thought of having accomplished nothing. More recently, Joseph Leo Koerner, has argued that Durer's symbolic presentation of melancholy offers more clues for cultural analysis more than personal biography: "The Melencholia engraving thus seems to articulate a pivotal moment in the history of subjectivity. Where the Middle Ages substantialised inwardness as the excess of black bile and moralized that excess as the deadly sin of acedia [moral sloth], the Renaissance abstracted inwardness as an inherent quality of creative genius and valorized its effects in the originality of the artist, whose works are wholly his own."
Subsequently, melancholy seems to be held in abeyance. Diderot and Alembert dedicate a short article in their encyclopaedia to it, which recapitulates many medieval commonplaces regarding bile in spite of references to examining the brains of melancholics during autopsies. This is the age of "la douce melancolie." Nonetheless, the school of graveyard poetry developed much of what was to become romanticism, as with Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard; "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife... Melancholy mark'd him for her own" Sentimental novels like Manon Lescaut were to create a new focus upon the interior life in terms that were often highly similar to sixteenth century descriptions of the melancholic lover. Prevost's Manon Lescaut is like the works of Defoe and Fielding, episodic in nature rather than operating a linear narrative; events proceed through coincidence and accident rather than by causality. The characters of the novel accordingly vary with the circumstance; Manon being devoted and fickle by turns. Although the narrative is cast in the form of a fable, there is no redemption or repentance anymore than there is damnation ("a craven little soul, so devoid of feeling, that he could not see the humiliation of it... or else a christian... I was neither one thing or the other"), with Des Grieux even arguing that his love for Manon is akin to religious devotion or that it is unexceptional when one considers "that a mistress is nothing to be ashamed of nowadays." Prevost also suggests that Des Grieux's crimes are not of his own making; "knowing neither the mad lust for money.. nor the fantastic notions of hnour that had turned my father into an enemy." The novel is fundamentally a sentimental one, valuing natural emotion over the unnatural morals of his father, something that further serves to distort the moral fable at the novel's core.
Similarly, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther also presents an interesting dialectic between Romantic ideas of nature and rationalist ideas. Werther speaks of "my resolve to keep to Nature alone in future. Only Nature has inexhaustible riches, and only Nature creates a great artist." Nonetheless he also later reverts to a less idealised conception of nature when he writes; "Nature, which has brought forth nothing that does not destroy both its neighbour and itself." Werther's fall is characterised by his loss of feeling for nature (though the editor speaks of Werther's 'natural powers' being confounded) but it equally suggests that Nature has a dual role within the novel. When debating with Albert he defends the Romantic individual against the contempt of the mundane masses, only to be told; "a man wholly under the influence of his passions has lost his ability to think rationally," before Albert states that suicide is simply a display of weakness where fortitude was called for.
Only towards the very end of the century, when the French Revolution begins devouring its own children, does the black sun of melancholy once more start to rise. Most famously, the term is reintroduced by Keats in his Ode to Melancholy; "Aye, in the very temple of Delight, Veiled Melancholy has her sov'reign shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue, Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine, His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung." Keats had written that "I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence... Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?" repeating the idea of the melancholic as one given special insights; the only way to engage the great mysteries of life is to suffer "Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression."
This next chapter in the history of melancholy comes once more with a change to how society came to regard the individual, with the advent of romanticism. The romantic stress upon the internalised quest romance further accentuates the role of the individual, as tormented genius and as rebel, as in Byron's Manfred and Shelley's Alastor. There are two aspects to this. Firstly, the destruction of the ancien regime itself acted to further decouple the individual from their assigned social roles, ending Burke's "age of chivalry" and introducing a paradox whereby although romanticism often tended to be radical in its politics it also aestheticised medieval chivalry. Individuals felt that they should be able to rise up through society in the same way that Napoleon had done, leading once more to the problem of over-educated young men unable to realise their ambitions, as with Stendhal's Julien Sorel or Balzac's Philippe Bridau. More crudely put, the unleashing of the terror, and the consequent betrayals of enlightenment aspirations, create a new emphasis on the melancholic, the most noted examples of which being Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son, The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters, and Yard with Lunatics, the latter rearticulating the melancholic linkage of imagination and madness that is also present in Fuseli's paintings (The Artist Moved by the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins alludes to sublimity in its title but also uses the standard tropes of melancholy in its depiction).
Secondly, romantic aesthetics existed at a particular intersection with religion that emphasised only remote and fleeting glimpses of the infinite being granted to solitary individuals. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Burke had defined these two modes as being "ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain , the other on pleasure." , going onto define the one as dark and gloomy, the other the reverse." Kant views the sublime as an attempt to grasp an absolute conception of magnitude, while the beautiful is restricted to the phenomenal world. Kant describes the sublime as a complex feeling that combines both displeasure and pleasure. The displeasure is caused by the agitation and overwhelming of the senses and imagination which struggle but fail to take in the vastness or power of the sublime object. In the dynamically sublime the displeasure also seems to be caused by a feeling verging on fear. We feel so overwhelmed by the object that we would fear for our lives, except that we are safe and secure, and thus able to experience a sense of awe rather than genuine fear. Kant points to how sublime objects invite melancholy: "Thus any spectator who beholds massive mountain climbing skyward, deep gorges with raging streams in them, wastelands lying in deep shadow and inviting melancholy meditation, and so on is seized by amazement bordering on terror." The experience of the sublime is consequently a devastating one that the individual is not fully able to intuit. Thus Wordsworth in The Prelude writes of how "I grew up, fostered alike by beauty and by fear... terrors, pains, and early miseries, ... interfused within my mind ... (made) up the calm existence that is mine." The Lyrical Ballads are replete with examples of solitary figures; for example in The Mad Mother the narrator writes that "I am happy when I sing, Full many a doleful thing... if thou art mad, my pretty lad, Then I must be for ever sad." In some respects romantic melancholia is a critique of Kantian aesthetics, emphasising horror and fear rather than awe and terror. Something similar pertains to literature and to the creation of the gothic novel in particular. Ann Radcliffe drew a distinction between terror and horror; the former we are told expands the soul, the latter only creates revulsion, with that being the part dwelt on by the likes of Lewis, Beckford and Maturin. Similarly, Edgar Allan Poe opens Premature Burial by declaring "there are certain themes of which the
interest is all absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction". The opening section of the story constitutes a discussion of the division between the sublime and the grotesque, terror and horror. The discussion is nonetheless strangely inconclusive. Intitially, we are told "these the mere romanicist must eschew, if we do not wish to offend, or to disgust". Many of Poe's critical principles are romantic so we would naturally assume that
he himself ought to avoid such themes, but the phrase "mere romanticist" alerts us that this issue is more complex that that. Poe justifies his continuation by saying "they are with propriety handled only when the severity and majesty of truth sanctify and sustain them". As the story progresses the cataleptic malady becomes equated with horror rather than terror. The narrator describes his "very horror of thought" and states that "my fancy grew charnel". In
the earlier section we had been told that "fancy" usually viewed as inferior to the imagination in romantic thought, as with Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, is impressed by terror which is here seen as inevitably degenerating to horror and disgust, as in the narrator's dream "I fell prey to perpetual horror". By Poe's own criteria, he seems to indulge these "morbid" instincts on the part of both reader and author, only to disperse them "the imagintion of man is no Carathis, to explore with impunity its every cavern".
This critique of sublimity through melancholy is perhaps most evident in the work of Kleist and Thomas DeQuincey. Kleist's works presents rather bizarre combination of ontological ideas. One the one hand, he developed a pre-Nietzchean form of pessimism surrounding Kant's distinction of the unknowability of things as noumena and as phenomena, so that his work is replete with ironic misprisions, with tragic consequences in The Betrothal in Santo Domingo, The Foundling and The Earthquake in Chile. However, this also leads to an emphasis on supernaturalism as inThe Beggarwoman of Locarno and St Cecilia or The Power of Music, implying a divine ordering in the sense that Kant had originally intended, rather than Kleist's original pessimistic interpretation. At one point in The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater DeQuincey informs the reader that "in his happiest state, the opium reader cannot present himself in the character of L'Allegro; even there he speaks ... as becomes Il' Penseroso." In his Letters To a Young Man DeQuincey writes that Kant did not offer universal rules by which certain problems could be tested, but that "by raising the station of the spectator... the very faculty of comprehending these questions will often depend on the station from which they are viewed." The spectator is the centre of a number of varying reactions, making the narrator the centre a function as much as a persona. To Kant the mind exists in an indeterminate relation to the aesthetic object, unless in the presence of the sublime. At this point the imagination fails to grasp totality but because of this failure the reason is able to intuit the existence of the infinite. The obvious problem with this is that order in the system is maintained at the temporary expense of the subject, which is crushed by the overbearing presence of the sublime. Whereas to Wordsworth the shock of the sublime encoded within the spots of time has the effect of forcingan ultimate awareness of the infinite upon an closed mind, DeQuincey remains unconvinced as to whether the sublime allows anything other than the mind reconstructing reality upon its own terms. It therefore comes as no surprise when The English Mail Coach we were told of how "the dreamer finds housed within himself - occupying ... some separate chamber in his brain ... his own nature repeated." The finite self is left eternally striving in much the same manner as Piranesi on his staircase, "God, seems to be scure and deep, only so long as the presence of man and his restless and unquiet spirit are not there."
Pre-eminent in the visual arts are works like Caspar David Friedrich's Cloister Graveyard in the Snow and Arnold Bocklin’s The Island of the Dead. As an aspect of conventional romantic aesthetics, David Friedrich's paintings often feature landscapes with a single figure with her or his back to the beholder, but both themes, dwell rather more on decay and contain echoes of the Middle Ages, for, much as the medieval hermit withdrew to the desert for purgation, only to fall prey there to the temptations of demons, so the solitary Romantic turns to nature for spiritual replenishment, only to be beset by visions of an infinite and possibly indifferent universe. The Romantic fascination with ruins can, after all, ultimately be traced back to the medieval tradition of apocalypse.
The nineteenth century can in many respects be regarded as the zenith of melancholy. Schopenhauer had written of how "abnormal sensitiveness produces inequality of spirits, a predominating melancholy, with periodical fits of unrestrained liveliness. A genius is one whose nervous power or sensitiveness is largely in excess; as Aristotle has very correctly observed, Men distinguished in philosophy, politics, poetry or art appear to be all of a melancholy temperament." The pessimism of Schopenhauer's philosophy, combined with the death of god heralded by Nietzsche and Darwin led to Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Tennyson's In Memoriam and Arnold's Dover Beach (" Sophocles long ago, Heard it on the Aegaean, and it brought, Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow, Of human misery... The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore, Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear, Its melancholy"). The lines in Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, "While you live, Drink! — for, once dead, you never shall return," mark the return of a pagan melancholy that had not been witnessed since the likes of Horace. Equally, this was a period that constructed lavish funerary monuments in the style of classical temples or gothic cathedrals and decorated them with Egyptian spinxes. The impression is invariably of an industrialised and deracinated society that had lost contact with its own funerary traditions and instead retreated into something that more resembled a collage of differing styles. The invention of photography also ushered in the advent of mortuary photography, something daguerreotype photography was well suited to. Intrigued by psychiatric research some artists and photographers followed in Hogarth's footsteps to visit asylums to paint and draw the insane. Nonetheless, it was also a period when melancholy's connections with ideas of the divine frenzy and the sublime were severed and it grew increasingly marginalised as something decadent and diseased. This went hand in hand with, for the middle classes at least, a declining awareness of death and mortality. Even tuberculosis, the disease feted by Sontag as the central metaphor of the Victorian era, was something increasingly confined to sanatoria. As Walter Benjamin put it; "It has been observed for a number of centuries how in the general consciousness the thought of death has declined in omnipresence and vividness... in the course of the nineteenth century bourgeois society has, by means of hygienic and social, private and public institutions, realized a secondary effect which may have been its subconscious main purpose: to make it possible for people to avoid the sight of the dying. Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one. In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not died. Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs." Put in Foucauldean terms, it was a period when the birth of clinic sundered the melancholic from society into a specially devised category. Experiences like those of the Bronte sisters, growing up amidst the graves of the churchyard, were to become increasingly unusual, with new cemeteries being built outside of populous areas, as with Brookwood and Kensal Green.
During this period, the historian Janet Oppenheim argued, "severely depressed patients frequently revealed fears of financial ruin or the expectation of professional disgrace," as with characters like the Dorrit family in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit. This is not autonomy but dependency: the emerging "self" defines its own worth in terms of the perceived judgments of others. For far from being detached from the immediate human environment, the newly self-centered individual is continually preoccupied with judging the expectations of others and his or her own success in meeting them. As Emile Durkheim saw it, "Originally society is everything, the individual nothing ... But gradually things change. As societies become greater in volume and density, individual differences multiply, and the moment approaches when the only remaining bond among the members of a single human group will be that they are all [human]."
This led Durkheim to draw theoretical conclusions on the social causes of suicide, seeing it as resulting from too little social integration (London and London bridge were almost synonymous with suicide, as with the Hexams in Our Mutual Friend or any number of suicides in his novels, from Merdle to Lady Dedlock). Those individuals who were not sufficiently bound to social groups (and therefore well-defined values, traditions, norms, and goals) were left with little social support or guidance, and therefore tended to commit suicide on an increased basis. Sporadic decreases in the ability of traditional institutions (such as religion, guilds, pre-industrial social systems, etc.) to regulate and fulfil social needs played a part in this, as did the long term dimunition of social regulation. Durkheim identified this type with the ongoing industrial revolution, which eroded traditional social regulators and often failed to replace them. Industrial goals of wealth and property were insufficient in providing happiness, as was demonstrated by higher suicide rates among the wealthy than among the poor. Thus opens the canvas of the nineteenth century social novel, with its scores of atomised characters and suicides, characters like Dicken's Miss Wade and the narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground or works like Thomson's City of Dreadful Night where Melancholy presides as London's goddess; "O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark!, O battling in black floods without an ark!, O spectral wanderers of unholy Night!.. My wine of life is poison mixed with gall, My noonday passes in a nightmare dream.".
As the century drew on, melancholy was increasingly regarded not only as an illness but as a form of criminal degeneration. This change was effected by three men; the psychiatrist Benedict Auguste Morel, the criminologist Cesare Lombroso and the writer Max Nordau. Where the Neoplatonist philosophers had seen in the spiritual torments of the "children of Saturn" the seeds of genius, for Lombroso and company the imaginative powers of Baudelaire, for example mark him out as, quite literally, a madman. "Baudelaire," the criminologist wrote, "strikes us as the true type of lunatic possessed by the manie des grandeurs: provocative appearance, defiant gaze, extreme self-satisfaction" and so on.
Baudelaire's poetry itself reminds me of Arnold's line about "alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night." Where Arnold's response to the death of god is comparatively straightforward, Baudelaire's is considerably more complex. In reading Baudelaire, one soon discovers that his world is urban (following the lead of Poe's The Man of the Crowd with its depiction of the regimented urban bustle thrown up by the Industrial Revolution), where that of his predecessors was natural; the world of the flaneur is one of alienation and anomie, not encounters with the sublime. The poet, the artist, was thereby displaced, even in his own eyes. He was no longer the hero, the seer and prophet who leads a grateful people to a higher spiritual life. He was now an outcast — maudit (accursed), doomed to misery, poverty, disease, and death. The city it is that gives rise to the comprehensive word for the unrelieved Baudelairean experience: "Spleen." Its connotation in French is depression; it is not tender like melancholy, nor does it carry the idea of resentment as does English "spleen." In a sense, Baudelaire's egotistical sublime rather resembles Burton's encylopaedianism. Since his work is essentially symbolic, the symbol always seems to lack something stable to represent, so that his Hymn to Beauty asks "did you come from the depths of heaven or up from the pit?" (just as Horreur Sympathetique speaks of how "your shafts of light are the reflection of hell") suggesting that clear knowledge of the noumenal is beyond the poet. The result is that his poetry is over-signified, being replete with meaning. At times, his stance seems to be akin to that of Arnold, of a poet caught in a world without the divine (the line about "my soul tossed.. on a monstrous, shoreless sea" in The Seven Old Men having more than a passing resemblance to Dover Beach), at other times his mythology remains essentially christian ("a damned man without a lamp" in Abel and Cain) and at others he resembles Blake, feeling sympathy for the devil (in The Irremediable there is "an angel, unwary traveller tempted by the love of the misshapen... as if it were reproaching god" while in The Rebel there is "a furious angel... but the damned rebel always answers "I won't!" Finally, Abel and Cain speaks of throwing god down upon the earth). Baudelaire's poetry works by overthrowing oppositions between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, company and isolation as he writes in Crowds that "the poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able at will to be himself and someone else."
Similarly, De Nerval's writing is deeply embued with German metaphysics but nonetheless represents a point where the death of god leaves sublimity undermined by melancholy (Nerval's Aurelia, his Beatrice, is imagined as Durer's Angel of Melancholy). Whereas earlier Romantic aesthetics emphasised the ability to intuit the noumenal through the phenomenal in brief epiphanies, Nerval foregrounds the question of the potentially subjective and misleading character of such spots of time, both through his emphasis on the difficulty of distinguishing the real from the metaphysical and through the foregrounding of his insanity and experience of the asylum. For example, in The King of Bedlam, Spifame's imaginings of himself as the king lead to his being placed in the asylum only for him to end up leading a parallel existence to the monarch as he lives in luxury and has most of dictats implemented; "Spifame could recognise himself in a mirror or dream, he could take stock of himself even as he changed roles and personalities." Sanity and reason exist in a strangely liminal relationship rather than as opposites in Nerval; his characters remain aware of themselves even as they lose themselves. Similarly, in The Tale of Caliph Hakim, the sultan emerges first as the double of himself, sane even while mistaken for a lunatic, only to realise that he has a double he had been unaware of. The ruin strewn landscape of Sylvie similarly emerges as a place of mistaken identities where neither the phenomenal nor the noumenal can be taken for certain; "but how could I be sure I was not merely the victim of one more illusion.. such are the chimeras that beguile and misguide us." Travelling to the Orient, Nerval found it too quotidian ("the Orient is no longer the land of marvels") and prefers his friends's opera set designs, travelling to Paris, Nerval found it a land of fantasy in contrast to British realism. His masterpiece, Aurelia, continues this: "the overflow of dream into real life... Spirit from the external world suddenly takes on the bodily shape of an ordinary woman." although at one point after a vision of the afterlife, Nerval proclaims that there is a god, he elsewhere proclaims that there is no god ("the virgin is dead and all prayers are useless... there is no god, god is no more!") and that he is god ("I myself was god, trapped in some sorry incarnation"), with the additional complication of his frequently esoteric view of religion, which has more in common with the druze than with christianity. Nerval is plagued throughout by his own double, as well as the question of whether his beloved exists as spirit or simply as a lost love, whether is insanity is precisely that or simply a form of vision. Throughout, Aurelia, opposites are overturned and nothing is left stable; everything is swallowed by the black sun.
In their fascination with ruins and the macabre the Romantics had gestured toward the existence of melancholy, but its scientific grounding came with the work of Freud. Here, the melancholic is no longer a romantic figure. Entrapped in narcissistic regression, he or she resists any consolation and inhabits a surround devoid of affect and feeling, other than that of a compulsive desire to "repeat the trauma of loss." Ever since he wrote On Transience in 1915, Freud acknowledged that mourning was the crucial conundrum that the therapist must penetrate. "Mourning over the loss of something that we have loved or admired seems so natural to the layman that he regards it as self-evident. But to psychologists mourning is a great riddle, one of those phenomena which cannot themselves be explained but to which other obscurities can be traced back." In Freudian theory, "mourning follows a loss that has really occurred," asserts Agamben; "in melancholia not only is it unclear what object has been lost [self or other], it is uncertain that one can speak of a loss at all." In a 1917 essay titled Mourning and Melancholia, Freud began a meditation on the manner in which the human psyche deals with loss. "Mourning," he wrote, "is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person." We rest assured that after a lapse of time it will be overcome, and we look upon any interference with it as inadvisable or even harmful." This is grief at the "normal" register. By contrast, "melancholia," though sharing many of the surface characteristics of "mourning," is identified by Freud as a pathological illness, marked by an inability to recover from the loss, to "overcome" it, and to return to daily activities. Thus, "the complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound," a wound that refuses to heal, a loss that cannot be salved.
Unsurprisingly, after Freud melancholy lost its organizing status and became a minor category subsumed into the larger realm of developmental psychology. Similarly, the melancholy and the tragic are perhaps too integral an aspect of modernist aesthetics for it to be distinguishable amidst the surrounding sound and fury; consider Eliot's "Webster was much possessed by death, And saw the skull beneath the skin" or Benjamin's "Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them.... The persistence which is expressed in the intention of mourning is born of its loyalty to the world of things." Modernist literary discourses are generally haunted by the spectre of loss: loss of a coherent and autonomous self, loss of a social order in which stability reigned, loss of metaphysical guarantees, and in some cases loss and fragmentation of an empire. Holderlin's elegiac sense of modernity's profound loss; Rilke's elegiac metaphysics of absence, the loss of personal identity in Woolf's novels, the loss of authentic existence in Hamsun's novels (Hunger perhaps being the modern work that most deserves to be labelled melancholic) Heidegger on the forgetting of Being or the nightmare worlds of Beckett and Kafka. In the midst of all this, the pleasurable sense of melancholy is either at a loss or is simply subsumed, in the same way as the traditional idea of the ruin began to seem merely picturesque by the twentieth century. As EM Cioran put it "Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it." Modernism was the culture of an age of mass death. It was, as Matei Calinescu has said, an "aesthetic thanatophilia." Richard Howard, in his homage to Ford Madox Ford, called the modern "that all-inclusive negative." By the end of the second world war the question had become even more difficult, with the likes of Plath termed a depressive rather than a melancholic; the two terms may be congruent but they are far from synonymous.
Some visual arts continue to reference melancholy, as with De Chirico's Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, or several works by Edvard Munch all entitled "Melancholy," Several versions depict a pensive man sitting by the sea (for example, paintings from 1891; 1892), many repeating the pose depicted previously by Fetti and Durer. Even so, there's little doubt that his painting of The Scream was rather more in keeping with the spirit of that age. Conspicuously present in the background of Durer's engraving is an enigmatic, eight-sided, and up to the present inscrutable polyhedron, one whose very inscrutability makes it mysterious, even uncanny. Alberto Giacometti based a sculpture on this work, sculpting a plaster version of the singular-looking polyhedron in Durer's composition. It seems to summarise well the displacement of the traditional iconography of melancholia.
Melancholy was ultimately parasitic on christian theology and its secularised equivalents in romantic aesthetics. However, there has been at least one noteworthy resurgence. In his recent book Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk draws connections between representations of Istanbul by French writers who visited the city in the nineteenth century such as Nerval and Gautier, and those by prominent Turkish writers of the early twentieth century. Pamuk emphasizes the melancholic tone in all of these "western" and "eastern" representations of Istanbul, which in turn constructed his own perceptions of his home city. "A sense of deprivation and hopelessness" which was verbalized by Baudelaire as the definition of beauty, and which can be seen in Nerval's and Gautier's depictions of Istanbul's landscape, also appears in Pamuk's Istanbul, as the melancholy raised by wandering in the poor back-streets of Istanbul, in its ruins from past civilizations, in the midst of an urban landscape that has lost the glorious days it had during the Byzantine and Ottoman Empire. The huzun inscribed deeply in the urban landscape of Istanbul is a collective melancholy for Pamuk that unifies its residents. In Baudelaire and Pamuk, melancholy is no longer something internal to the subject, but something connected to the object. It is not a single individual who is melancholic, but the city's landscape (manzara), "the beautiful object", that elicits the feeling of melancholy as a collective emotion. Melancholy thus leaves the isolated individual and infiltrates the city itself. In the book that juxtaposes his autobiography with the biography of the city, Pamuk suggests melancholy caused by "poverty, defeat, and the feeling of loss" as the primary common emotion of Istanbul.Labels: Art, Culture, Literature, Melancholy
posted by Richard 5:29 PM
Saturday, January 26, 2008
This section leapt out of a review of The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt:"The Indian Clerk is the latest adornment of an increasingly fashionable literary sub-genre: what might be called the fictive biography. At least half a dozen of them have appeared in the last half-decade, from David Lodge's Author! Author! (chapters in the later life of Henry James) to Julian Barnes's Arthur and George (Conan Doyle and the Edalji affair) and Benjamin Markovits's ongoing Byron trilogy. In most cases the reader's interest in these real lives, painstakingly set out in the pages of something advertised as a novel, is trailed by a mild anxiety about the form."
One might also have mentioned that this is something that seems to apply to both the 'literary' and 'popular' strains of writing, with thrillers written in the last few years featuring the likes of Freud and Marlowe as their protagonists. The review also neglects to mention that Lodge's novel was issued at roughly the same time as Colm Toibin's The Master as well as a number of other novels about Henry James. This review by Terry Eagleton summarises some of the complexities of this affair:"Lodge argues in The Year of Henry James, his record of the affair, that James has always been both a writer's writer and a critic's writer. Since Lodge himself is both together, the allure in his case proved doubly strong. But as he points out, James also created some of the most memorable women characters of the period, which makes him fit meat for the feminists; and queer theory gets a look in, too, as gay critics debate exactly how repressed his (probable) homosexuality was. In any case, novels about historical figures have become fashionable in the past decade or two, as Lodge reminds us, and a lot of these have been writers on writers.
There's another reason, however, for this rash of Henriads, which one wouldn't really expect Lodge to note. In a post-political age, writers are more likely to be enthused by exquisite states of consciousness or the intricacies of personal relationships than by more workaday matters; and the aloof, fastidious James, a man famously described as chewing more than he could bite off, appears to fill this bill exactly.
The appearance, however, is mostly illusory. Few writers have been so haunted by the themes of power and possession. James's unfathomably subtle mind is materialist to its roots. Lodge admires him because he's all about "consciousness", but he is even more about ownership and exploitation. His fictions may be full of delectably cobwebby sentences, but they are also populated by bloodied victims and monstrous predators, and what drives them is a force as mysteriously elusive as art, known as money. It's this interaction between artistic (or moral) beauty and the brutal workings of power which make James so magnificent an artist. Lodge, Toibin and Hollinghurst, one suspects, want the beauty without the brutality."
In part, one might be generally dismissive of this sort of writing as a form of escapism in the way historical fiction often is. But this is something that takes place against a backdrop of biography being one of the most widely practised forms of modern writing. It does seem to suggest a certain inadequacy to the form of the realist novel, an attempt to marry the dramatic principles of that form to the solidity of non-fiction, without having to venture as far as Sebald's experiments in non-fiction (after all, Sebald often wrote about figures like Stendhal or Fitzgerald) or the likes of Capote and Wolfe.Labels: Literature
posted by Richard 10:34 AM
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
There's been quite a bit of comment in a recent talk by Mike Figgis on the subject of whether there's too much culture. The essential argument is that immediate access to digitally stored copies of films, texts and music has had a stultifying and conservative effect on art. As transcribed by Imomus:"The 1950s was the birth of rock'n'roll. And let's say we can argue that the king of rock'n'roll is Elvis Presley. One of the most famous actors of that period is Marilyn Monroe, but there's also James Dean, there's Marlon Brando, and any number of other figures that we would now call icons. And they were recorded in the 1950s. And I wonder why, fifty years on, 2007, when you go to an event, say popular music, we're still seeing Elvis Presley. We're still seeing someone accompanied by two guitars and a bass and drums, and a chord structure which is pretty much three chords and twelve bars. There's nothing wrong with rock'n'roll in its limited way. But fifty years on they're still wearing the same clothes. They're still singing the same songs. And they're still trying to look like Elvis. Think about it -- it's jeans, it's leather jackets, nothing's changed. Now let's take 1957, say, and go back fifty years. That would be 1907, right? Can you imagine in 1957 the youth wanting to look and sound like someone from 1907? It's unthinkable. Because that seems like the dark ages. That's prehistoric, baby. So why? Why suddenly are we stuck in 1957? And I think the reason why is that we've become the prisoner of this reproductive image of ourselves, and we can't let it go."
Figgis is quite good on the subject of the emotional implications of our access to digital reproduction, with films and programmes instantly available where they would previously have been something ephemeral, that one might see only once, performed and consumed simultaneously. Nonetheless, I find it rather hard to agree with him with for any number of reasons. As several of the commenters at Click Opera acerbically point out, Mod culture was to a large extent predicated on imitating Edwardian styles of dress (in exactly the same way as David Wilkie Wynfield's photographs depict Victorian writers and artists dressed in medieval costume), which would seem to rather vitiate the argument from the outset. Art does after all tend to evolve very gradually with often little change or development over protracted periods of time; modernism's exhortation to make it new is the exception, not the rule. Nor is Figgis entirely consistent on this point; while decrying the conservatism he see digital reproduction as enforcing, he also welcomes its economic implications for film production, seeing it as leading to smaller and less mass market films.
More specifically, these sort of arguments could easily have been debated in relation to earlier forms of reproduction, such as photography or printing. This sort of argument tends to remind me of Gianni Vattimo’s essay The Death or Decline of Art which argues that once art resists tradition and loses its cult value, it loses its status and has to engage in self-referential dissidence and postmodernist pastiche; a kitsch aesthetic played out against a vapid culture. Bt contrast, Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction argued that modern art had discarded with the ritualistic cult value attached to works characterised by their unreproducability and authenticity. To Benjamin