László Földényi - Melancholy

The notion that the melancholic temperament is a characteristic of the creative mind has its roots in a fragment ascribed to Aristotle, or, rather, to the Aristotelian school. Throughout the centuries, especially in the West, this notion acquired both positive and negative connotations and was explored by relating it to somatic causes, psychic inclinations, and spiritual choices, and as a reaction to certain natural or cultural environments. The variety of such ascriptions (explored in their astonishingly vast range in László Földényi’s Melancholy ) is indicative of the notion’s lasting attraction. From Aristotle on (and probably long before), philosophers, artists, psychologists, and theologians have attempted to find in the almost indefinable state of melancholia the source of the creative impulse, and even perhaps that of thought itself. Every study of melancholia (notably Saturn and Melancholy by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, but also legions more) is, in some sense, a reflection on the intellectual act itself.

It could be said that every one of Földényi’s books is a reflection on that same subject. A specialist in aesthetics and artistic theories, Földényi (who was born in Hungary in 1952) is also an essayist and philologist. His numerous books include studies of the young Georg Lukács, the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, Goya, and the reading of works of art ( The Veil of the Veronica ), as well as works on Heinrich von Kleist, on William Blake, and on the contrasting ideas of history in Dostoyevsky and Hegel, this last in a short essay with the irresistible title “Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears.” Melancholia continues and deepens these reflections about the relationships among art, emotion, philosophy, and religion.

The Aristotelian quotation (which Földényi places in the first chapter of his book) is not a statement but a question: Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholic? Notable in this question is the confidence implied in the words “all those” as well as in the specific “eminent”: melancholia is, for Aristotle, the pervading and necessary state of every creative act that is generally recognized as important. The assumption behind the Aristotelian question is that there is indeed such a state that allows for or even fosters creation. Inspiration (the Muses, the Holy Spirit, the poetic experience of the world) might provide the external spark, yet in order to burst into creative flames, the inspired subject must be “melancholic.” But what exactly is this preconditioned temperament common to all notable creators? Over the ages, the melancholic condition has been described as sad, meditative, withdrawn, reflective, morose, ailing, depressed, and bleakly ecstatic, and yet none of these epithets embraces everything that is meant by the word “melancholia.”

Jorge Luis Borges, in one of his late stories, to describe the creative state in the Aristotelian question, imagined a primitive race who engage in a curious ritual of literary creation. From time to time, one of the men will utter six or seven enigmatic words. If the words excite no attention, nothing else happens. But if the words move the audience, everyone will stand apart from him in holy dread. No one will look at him or speak to him, not even his mother. He is no longer a man but a god, whom all have the right to kill. The state this privileged man has entered is that of melancholia.

A related term, nostalgia , was coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in his 1688 medical dissertation, from the Greek nostos , “homecoming,” and algos , “pain,” to describe the mental state of Swiss soldiers on postings far away from their native mountains. “Nostalgia” carries its own etymological definition; “melancholia,” in spite of everything that has been written about it, continues to beg the Aristotelian question.

Though this is not part of Földényi’s exploration, it can be said that not only people but also places can suffer from melancholia, and a vocabulary of poetic fallacies has emerged to characterize some specific geographic instances: the saudade of Lisbon, the tristeza of Burgos, the mufa of Buenos Aires, the mestizia of Turin, the Traurigkeit of Vienna, the ennui of Alexandria, the ghostliness of Prague, the glumness of Glasgow, the dispiritedness of Boston, and the hüzün of Istanbul, the last a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times in the Qur’an) denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life. For the Turkish Sufis, hüzün is the spiritual sadness we feel because we are not close enough to God; for Saint John of the Cross, this melancholia causes the sufferer to plummet so far down that his or her soul will, as a result, soar to its divine desire. Hüzün is therefore a sought-after state; it is the absence, not the presence, of hüzün that causes the sufferer distress.

However, as Földényi points out, it was not suffering and malaise that were first associated with melancholia, but rather excellence and extraordinariness. Two centuries after Aristotle (or earlier, if we accept Földényi’s contention that there are implicit references to melancholia in Homer), the extraordinary quality of the melancholic condition was thought to stem from an excess of black bile, one of the four bodily humors described by Hippocrates in the fifth century BCE. Melancholia then becomes a psychosomatic condition.

Melancholia marks in its sufferers the quality of singularity, the extremes of an extraordinary condition in “the one whom the finger of God crushes against the wall,” according to Sartre’s definition of genius. One such genial extreme is madness. “Madness is a consequence of their extraordinariness,” notes Földényi of the Greek heroes Ajax, Bellerophon, and Heracles, “while they owe their extraordinariness to their inherent possibility of going mad.” The writers of the late Roman age and those of early Christianity agreed that this possibility did not grant the melancholics extraordinary powers. They equated madness with melancholia and argued that mad persons did not possess the gift of divination and prophecy, but were merely deprived of their common senses.

The other extreme of the melancholic condition is the despondency that comes from intellectual learning, as exemplified in the character of Goethe’s Faust: a satiated sense of knowledge fostered by melancholia whose consequence is also melancholia. “A person who possesses knowledge is isolated from people who do not,” states Földényi. Knowledge that lifts the spirit and its corollary, the revelation that one who is truly wise knows nothing, often lead to a state in which everything becomes questionable. This last is beautifully summed up twenty-three centuries after Aristotle in George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self — never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.”

Because of such intellectual perversions, Christianity condemned melancholy under the denomination of acedia, for it could distance the mind from the thought of God, allowing it idly to rove in dangerous or forbidden realms. Dante condemns the melancholic to the fifth circle of Hell, together with the wrathful. There they blow bubbles of air while immersed in the marshy waters of the Styx, because, as one says to Dante, “Sullen we were / In the sweet air that the sun makes glad, / Bearing inside us the smoke of acedia.” One of the many medical treatises of the fifteenth century, the Hortulus reginae of 1487, compares acedia to “the bite of a rabid dog.” Echoes of this simile can be heard centuries later in Winston Churchill’s description of his depression as “a black dog,” an expression that is first recorded as “to have the black dog on one’s back” in a nineteenth-century collection of proverbs and catchphrases. Modern psychoanalytic jargon has retained the expression.