by CARINA DEL VALLE SCHORSKE
Melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition we now call depression. The fact that our language has changed, without the earlier word disappearing completely, indicates that we are still able to make use of both. Like most synonyms, melancholy and depression are not in fact synonymous, but slips of the tongue in a language we’re still learning. We keep trying to specify our experience of mental suffering, but all our new words constellate instead of consolidate meaning. In the essay collection Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag writes about her intellectual heroes, who all suffer solitude, ill temper, existential distress and creative block. They all breathe black air. According to her diagnostic model, they are all “melancholics.” Sontag doesn’t use the word depression in the company of her role models, but elsewhere she draws what seems like an easy distinction: “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” But what are the charms of melancholy?
There is a long history in Western thought associating melancholy and genius. We have van Gogh with his severed ear. We have Montaigne confessing, “It was a melancholy humor … which first put into my head this raving concern with writing.” We have Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace. We have the stubborn conviction that all of these artists produced the work they did not in spite of, but somehow because of, their suffering. The charms of melancholy seem to be the charms of van Gogh’s quietly kaleidoscopic color palette: in one self-portrait, every color used on his face is echoed elsewhere in the surroundings. His white bandage complements the canvas in the corner, his yellow skin the wall, his blue hat the blue window. The charms of his work become the charms of his persona and his predicament.
But there’s another kind of portrait possible: the melancholic has not always and everywhere been cast as the romantic hero. In fact, Montaigne’s discussion of melancholy was meant as a kind of Neoplatonic corrective to the old medieval typology of the four humors which cast the “melancholic,” choking on an excess of black bile, as an unfortunate miser and sluggard, despised for his unsociability and general incompetence. That sounds more like it. Indeed, the medieval portrait of melancholy seems to have something in common with our understanding of depression today—or at least of the depressed person we see in pharmaceutical advertisements, whose disease seems to be lack of interest in the family barbecue. We do have our share of romantic geniuses—the suicide of David Foster Wallace is a dark lodestar over recent generations of writers. The pharmacological discourse of depression has not entirely replaced the romantic discourse of melancholy. But on the whole, contemporary American culture seems committed to a final solution.
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