Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
Description
Looks at the American quest for happiness and rejection of melancholy and argues that melancholia is actually essential to a thriving culture, the underlying impetus for creative thinking, and the muse of great art and innovation.
User reviews
LibraryThing member msbaba
Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy by Eric G. Wilson is brilliant in parts, but seriously flawed.
This is a small book with a simple thesis: the experience of melancholy is an essential part of the human condition—when it occurs, we should embrace it, not repress it. Wilson claims that if
Much of the book is one long rant against a contemporary American culture that requires artificial happiness at all times. Wilson shows that our melancholic side is absolutely essential. He insists that melancholy is necessary to connect us to our fundamental self. He claims that to reject melancholy is to reject life.
Wilson writes: “A person seeking sleek comfort in this mysteriously mottled world—where love is always edged with resentment and baseness beds with grace—is necessarily required to perceive only small parts of the planet, those parts that fit into his preconceived mental grids… But some people strain all the time to break through their mental manacles, to cleanse the portals of their perceptions, and to see the universe as an ungraspable riddle, gorgeous and gross. Happy types, those Americans bent only on happiness and afraid of sadness, tend to forgo this labor. They sit safe in their cages. The sad ones, dissatisfied with the status quo, are more likely to beat against the bars” (p. 24). [Note: If you found this quote somewhat dense and difficult, be forewarned: this type of prose is typical of the entire volume. Although some of Wilson’s writing is dynamic, rich, and lyrical, I often found it also turgid and unnecessarily arcane.]
Wilson goes on to argue that sadness is “the enabler of joy,” and that the “true path to ecstatic joy is through acute melancholia.” You can’t have one end of the continuum without the other. Thus, people who strive for happiness at all times limit their capacity for joy.
So far so good—I truly welcomed, enjoyed, and agreed with Wilson’s point of view throughout the first half of the text. But in the second half of the book, I was shocked to see the author dangerously overstepping the boundaries of his academic credentials and making serious mistakes—here, Wilson fails me, and thus my overall rating for his book slips significantly.
In the second half of the book, Wilson argues that the experience of normal melancholia makes us creative. To back up his arguments about the connection between melancholia and creativity, the author cites examples using a number of very famous historic and contemporary creative geniuses—artists, he suggests, who derived their creative power from their frequent bouts of melancholia. But that is precisely where his arguments fall. Virtually all the creative geniuses that he cites as examples to support his claims about the connection between normal melancholy and creativity were, in fact, at the far extremes of the continuum, not in the middle. These artistic geniuses suffered either from bouts of deep clinical depression, or they were manic-depressives who experienced both depressions and mania.
It is important to note that the author is a professor of English at Wake Forest University. He is not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but a “literary humanist searching for a deeper life.” He makes it clear in the beginning of the book that this work is about the normal mood state of melancholia. He sets out to focus on the middle of the continuum, with happiness on one side, and melancholy on the other. He claims that this book is not about the aberrant extremes of the continuum—the ends where melancholia slips into major depression, and happiness soars into mania. Yet he supports his ideas about normal melancholy giving rise to creativity using examples about artistic geniuses who either suffered from clinical depression or manic-depressive illness.
Most of the highly creative geniuses who Wilson uses briefly as examples in the second half of his book can be found discussed in great depth in Kay Redfield Jamison’s groundbreaking book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is considered by most psychiatric professionals to be the definitive expert on manic-depressive illness. Amazingly, Jamison herself suffers from manic-depressive illness and wrote a moving memoir about her life and journeys into madness. Fifteen years ago, she published Touched with Fire, and it instantly became an academic and popular bestseller. It is still in print and is considered to be the fundamental work on this topic. The depth of scholarship and research in this work is astonishing—not only does Jamison know psychiatry; she also appears to have a doctorate-level understanding of world literature, and many other fields of scholarship, as well. Jamison’s prose is exquisite, structured, and easy to understand; in addition, she frequently makes room for elegant lyrical phrasing that leave the reader stunned with their beauty and insight.
It is interesting to note briefly how Jamison’s views about the wellspring of artistic creativity differ from Wilson’s. The purpose of Jamison’s book, Touched with Fire, is to explore the compelling association between the artistic and the manic-depressive. The emphasis of the book is “on understanding the relationship between moods and imagination, the nature of moods—their variety, their contrary and oppositional qualities, their flux, their extremes (causing, in some individuals, occasional episodes of “madness”)—and the importance of moods in igniting thought, changing perceptions, creating chaos, forcing order upon chaos, and enabling transformation” (p. 5). She makes it clear that an artistic work “that may be inspired by, or partially executed in, a mild or even psychotically manic state may be significantly shaped or partially edited while its creator is depressed and put into final order when he or she is normal. It is the interaction, tension, and transition between changing mood states, as well as the sustenance and discipline drawn from periods of health, that is critically important; and it is these same tensions and transitions that ultimately give such power to the art that is born in this way” (p. 6).
Thus, when it comes to the connection between melancholy and artistic genius, Jamison’s book is by far the more scholarly, accurate, and enjoyable to read.
In summary: I enjoyed the first half of Wilson’s book, but found considerable problems with the second half. Wilson’s polished literary rant about America’s overemphasis on happiness and its commensurate societal dangers is well-founded—my problem is that it does not take an entire book to make this point; a magazine article would have been more appropriate.
My overall recommendation: read about Wilson’s rant against the American happiness culture on the Internet; then, instead of buying Wilson’s book, buy Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. It has been fifteen years since this book was first published, but it is still in print, and easy to obtain…it is three times as long, costs half as much, and is infinitely more enjoyable.
This is a small book with a simple thesis: the experience of melancholy is an essential part of the human condition—when it occurs, we should embrace it, not repress it. Wilson claims that if
Show More
you eliminate melancholia either through medications (like Prozac), or through a forceful cultural bias toward perpetual happiness such as currently exists in America, then life ceases to be authentic, and society fails.Much of the book is one long rant against a contemporary American culture that requires artificial happiness at all times. Wilson shows that our melancholic side is absolutely essential. He insists that melancholy is necessary to connect us to our fundamental self. He claims that to reject melancholy is to reject life.
Wilson writes: “A person seeking sleek comfort in this mysteriously mottled world—where love is always edged with resentment and baseness beds with grace—is necessarily required to perceive only small parts of the planet, those parts that fit into his preconceived mental grids… But some people strain all the time to break through their mental manacles, to cleanse the portals of their perceptions, and to see the universe as an ungraspable riddle, gorgeous and gross. Happy types, those Americans bent only on happiness and afraid of sadness, tend to forgo this labor. They sit safe in their cages. The sad ones, dissatisfied with the status quo, are more likely to beat against the bars” (p. 24). [Note: If you found this quote somewhat dense and difficult, be forewarned: this type of prose is typical of the entire volume. Although some of Wilson’s writing is dynamic, rich, and lyrical, I often found it also turgid and unnecessarily arcane.]
Wilson goes on to argue that sadness is “the enabler of joy,” and that the “true path to ecstatic joy is through acute melancholia.” You can’t have one end of the continuum without the other. Thus, people who strive for happiness at all times limit their capacity for joy.
So far so good—I truly welcomed, enjoyed, and agreed with Wilson’s point of view throughout the first half of the text. But in the second half of the book, I was shocked to see the author dangerously overstepping the boundaries of his academic credentials and making serious mistakes—here, Wilson fails me, and thus my overall rating for his book slips significantly.
In the second half of the book, Wilson argues that the experience of normal melancholia makes us creative. To back up his arguments about the connection between melancholia and creativity, the author cites examples using a number of very famous historic and contemporary creative geniuses—artists, he suggests, who derived their creative power from their frequent bouts of melancholia. But that is precisely where his arguments fall. Virtually all the creative geniuses that he cites as examples to support his claims about the connection between normal melancholy and creativity were, in fact, at the far extremes of the continuum, not in the middle. These artistic geniuses suffered either from bouts of deep clinical depression, or they were manic-depressives who experienced both depressions and mania.
It is important to note that the author is a professor of English at Wake Forest University. He is not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but a “literary humanist searching for a deeper life.” He makes it clear in the beginning of the book that this work is about the normal mood state of melancholia. He sets out to focus on the middle of the continuum, with happiness on one side, and melancholy on the other. He claims that this book is not about the aberrant extremes of the continuum—the ends where melancholia slips into major depression, and happiness soars into mania. Yet he supports his ideas about normal melancholy giving rise to creativity using examples about artistic geniuses who either suffered from clinical depression or manic-depressive illness.
Most of the highly creative geniuses who Wilson uses briefly as examples in the second half of his book can be found discussed in great depth in Kay Redfield Jamison’s groundbreaking book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is considered by most psychiatric professionals to be the definitive expert on manic-depressive illness. Amazingly, Jamison herself suffers from manic-depressive illness and wrote a moving memoir about her life and journeys into madness. Fifteen years ago, she published Touched with Fire, and it instantly became an academic and popular bestseller. It is still in print and is considered to be the fundamental work on this topic. The depth of scholarship and research in this work is astonishing—not only does Jamison know psychiatry; she also appears to have a doctorate-level understanding of world literature, and many other fields of scholarship, as well. Jamison’s prose is exquisite, structured, and easy to understand; in addition, she frequently makes room for elegant lyrical phrasing that leave the reader stunned with their beauty and insight.
It is interesting to note briefly how Jamison’s views about the wellspring of artistic creativity differ from Wilson’s. The purpose of Jamison’s book, Touched with Fire, is to explore the compelling association between the artistic and the manic-depressive. The emphasis of the book is “on understanding the relationship between moods and imagination, the nature of moods—their variety, their contrary and oppositional qualities, their flux, their extremes (causing, in some individuals, occasional episodes of “madness”)—and the importance of moods in igniting thought, changing perceptions, creating chaos, forcing order upon chaos, and enabling transformation” (p. 5). She makes it clear that an artistic work “that may be inspired by, or partially executed in, a mild or even psychotically manic state may be significantly shaped or partially edited while its creator is depressed and put into final order when he or she is normal. It is the interaction, tension, and transition between changing mood states, as well as the sustenance and discipline drawn from periods of health, that is critically important; and it is these same tensions and transitions that ultimately give such power to the art that is born in this way” (p. 6).
Thus, when it comes to the connection between melancholy and artistic genius, Jamison’s book is by far the more scholarly, accurate, and enjoyable to read.
In summary: I enjoyed the first half of Wilson’s book, but found considerable problems with the second half. Wilson’s polished literary rant about America’s overemphasis on happiness and its commensurate societal dangers is well-founded—my problem is that it does not take an entire book to make this point; a magazine article would have been more appropriate.
My overall recommendation: read about Wilson’s rant against the American happiness culture on the Internet; then, instead of buying Wilson’s book, buy Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. It has been fifteen years since this book was first published, but it is still in print, and easy to obtain…it is three times as long, costs half as much, and is infinitely more enjoyable.
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LibraryThing member Sullywriter
A book with a title like this is irresistible to a pessimistic, curmudegeonly misanthrope like me and I was not at all disappointed. I thoroughly enjoyed the witty, eloquent case Wilson makes to recognize the beauty and necessity of melancholy, a state in which I frequently find myself. Wilson's
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approach to the subject is more literary and artistic than psychological which I found all the more appealing. This book is an excellent complement to Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided which skewers the positive-thinking movement and industry. Show Less
LibraryThing member sdho
The introduction and first chapter of this book are really quite excellent, but it's just downhill from there. In the heart of the book, Wilson spends very little time talking about what he introduces in the beginning -- Americanized pseudo-happiness. Instead, it's just a pretentious admiration of
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as many melancholy-inspired artists as he can think of. The book is short, but still painful to get through. Do not recommend. Show Less
LibraryThing member PuddinTame
I expected to like this book more than I did. I am often exasperated by “happiness-mongers” who think they are spreading cheer and are often spreading irritation. I don't believe that anyone was ever successfully nagged into being happy. Not all happiness-mongers are happy; some just don't want
An underlying problem is the survey that Wilson references. Asking people whether they are happy or unhappy is a silly unnuanced question. That binary choice does not begin to cover the range of human personalities and attitudes. How about "reasonably satisfied" or "aware of my advantages or so-so?" I also recoil from generalizations about large groups of people. According to Census, there are more than 227 million people of voting age in the US. If 85% are happy, that is 193 million people that Wilson thinks he can sum up in a few sentences. I don't find that credible or consistent with my own experience. Interestingly enough, and unconsidered by Wilson, lifetime rates of depression in the developed world vary, but average 15%. He gives no thought to temperament, circumstances, personality, or consideration of what various people regard as happiness. Christine Wicker said of herself "I am an upbeat, cheerful person. [...] I have a perfectly reasonable sense that happiness is fleeting, that death, pain, and destruction could befall me and the people I love at any minute. That's normal, I think." William Bradford and Benjamin Franklin are odd choices as the founding fathers of the vapid and the vacuous. I suppose that if one fancies oneself to be elite, one needs a madding crowd to look down on. The book begins as a rant, which is wearing to read and the latter part is repetitious. Wilson has some nice turns of phrase, but he repeats the same things in different ways. This would have made a better essay.
It is unclear what Wilson means by “melancholy.” It is hard to believe that he is unhappy when he seems so smugly self-satisfied and pleased with all the gifts of his melancholy with which he hopes to attract disciples. It is often used as a synonym for clinical depression; he that he is referring to something different, but never says how it differs. It appears to me that it is a slightly morbid Romanticism. He was inspired partly by Kay Redfield Jamison's Touched with Fire : Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperment. I call attention to the words “manic” and “illness.” The people that he offers as examples of how melancholy provides inspiration in fact had serious mood disorders. According to Jamison, some worked best when depressed, others when they were manic, in a mixed state, or normal. They also had a high suicide rate, contrary to Wilson's claim that melancholy makes life more precious. Jamison, while questioning the wisdom of eliminating manic-depressive (bipolar) disease, also remarks “it would be irresponsible to romanticize an extremely painful, destructive and lethal disease.” The minority who stop taking their medicines do so because they miss their hypomania, not their depression. Many creative people are normal, and people with mood disorders have periods of normalcy. Wilson does say that he knows this, but in proportion to the amount of space that he has used saying the opposite, the caveat is feeble. While I wish him all the melancholy that he and his allies could desire while wandering through the winter woods or roamin' through the gloamin', he is wrong to distort other people's lives.
Wilson oversteps when he “forgives” creative depressives who commit suicide. He has no right, he is not an injured party. Similarly, people argue that depressives should not be allowed anti-depressants lest it diminish their creativity. Arguing that someone should suffer so that others can enjoy the fruits of their suffering is akin to arguing for slavery. Only the person with the mood disorder has the right to choose.
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others to waste time being negative that could spent listening to them complain.An underlying problem is the survey that Wilson references. Asking people whether they are happy or unhappy is a silly unnuanced question. That binary choice does not begin to cover the range of human personalities and attitudes. How about "reasonably satisfied" or "aware of my advantages or so-so?" I also recoil from generalizations about large groups of people. According to Census, there are more than 227 million people of voting age in the US. If 85% are happy, that is 193 million people that Wilson thinks he can sum up in a few sentences. I don't find that credible or consistent with my own experience. Interestingly enough, and unconsidered by Wilson, lifetime rates of depression in the developed world vary, but average 15%. He gives no thought to temperament, circumstances, personality, or consideration of what various people regard as happiness. Christine Wicker said of herself "I am an upbeat, cheerful person. [...] I have a perfectly reasonable sense that happiness is fleeting, that death, pain, and destruction could befall me and the people I love at any minute. That's normal, I think." William Bradford and Benjamin Franklin are odd choices as the founding fathers of the vapid and the vacuous. I suppose that if one fancies oneself to be elite, one needs a madding crowd to look down on. The book begins as a rant, which is wearing to read and the latter part is repetitious. Wilson has some nice turns of phrase, but he repeats the same things in different ways. This would have made a better essay.
It is unclear what Wilson means by “melancholy.” It is hard to believe that he is unhappy when he seems so smugly self-satisfied and pleased with all the gifts of his melancholy with which he hopes to attract disciples. It is often used as a synonym for clinical depression; he that he is referring to something different, but never says how it differs. It appears to me that it is a slightly morbid Romanticism. He was inspired partly by Kay Redfield Jamison's Touched with Fire : Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperment. I call attention to the words “manic” and “illness.” The people that he offers as examples of how melancholy provides inspiration in fact had serious mood disorders. According to Jamison, some worked best when depressed, others when they were manic, in a mixed state, or normal. They also had a high suicide rate, contrary to Wilson's claim that melancholy makes life more precious. Jamison, while questioning the wisdom of eliminating manic-depressive (bipolar) disease, also remarks “it would be irresponsible to romanticize an extremely painful, destructive and lethal disease.” The minority who stop taking their medicines do so because they miss their hypomania, not their depression. Many creative people are normal, and people with mood disorders have periods of normalcy. Wilson does say that he knows this, but in proportion to the amount of space that he has used saying the opposite, the caveat is feeble. While I wish him all the melancholy that he and his allies could desire while wandering through the winter woods or roamin' through the gloamin', he is wrong to distort other people's lives.
Wilson oversteps when he “forgives” creative depressives who commit suicide. He has no right, he is not an injured party. Similarly, people argue that depressives should not be allowed anti-depressants lest it diminish their creativity. Arguing that someone should suffer so that others can enjoy the fruits of their suffering is akin to arguing for slavery. Only the person with the mood disorder has the right to choose.
Show Less
LibraryThing member jonfaith
Samizdat selected this one, it was slight, hardly philosophical, (you know ,mannnn) made more references to pop songs than any weighty (yeah, I made that distinction) tome and it was over before really beginning. What really sucks is that I bought it new. Any further irony with the thematic is
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understood and inscribed upon the flesh like the hapless colony campers in Kafka's purview. Show Less
LibraryThing member CosmicBullet
Wilson depicts the drive toward constant happiness as a kind of misguided fundamentalist ideal. The melancholic is an individual who looks unflinchingly at the the world, having lived richly enough to know that the response to life is a choice between a beautiful and rich uncertainty and a shallow
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and simplistic clarity. Happy people do not create great works of art. For that, we are indebted to uncertainty, to despair, and depression, To experience all of these things to experience life versus only pretending at life. Well-written, sublimely thought out. . . but not for the practical minded or those who would reduce all experience to abstractions. Show Less
Subjects
Language
Original publication date
2008
Physical description
166 p.; 20 cm
Pages
166
ISBN
9780374240660