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Against
Happiness comes with a subtitle, In Praise of Melancholy,
and we might as well add a SUB-subtitle: Against Sadness,
Too. Eric G. Wilson says that Americans are split into
three groups. The "happy types" are people who seek "happiness
at the expense of sadness" and become frustrated when the
world doesn't meet their high expectations. The "sad types"
are those "black-clad poseurs who identify only with darkness."
Both groups are doomed to "limp through life, half alive,"
because they deny an essential part of their nature.
But some
people, Wilson says, are fully engaged with the polarities
of life and death. These are the "melancholy souls" who slip
between happiness and sadness, enriching their lives with
a deep awareness of the good and the bad. A melancholy soul
knows that "everything, no matter how beautiful, must die"
and "appreciates things all the more because they die."
Against
Happiness skims the biographies of such eminent figures
as Keats, Beethoven, Coleridge, and Melville to show that
melancholy is the most artistically productive state of being.
Beethoven was alone, dejected, and mostly deaf when he wrote
his magnificent Fifth Symphony. Keats always knew he was going
to die of tuberculosis at a young age. As he builds a case
for melancholy's role, Wilson combines biography with a knowledge
of literature, philosophy, and psychology.
"I
know that we are all this minute, with every new breath,
driving toward death. Knowing this, I for an instant penetrate
the mysteries of the cosmos's organisms. I sound ambiguous
depths. I realize that beneath the surfaces of my very
self are the same rhythms that drive the round earth and
the stars that seem still. I feel at one with what I can
only call Being—beautiful and robust."
When
he isn't writing biographical sketches, Wilson's florid prose
reveals more about his own tastes than about his subject.
He often conflates the inner state of melancholy with a typical
Romantic yearning for beautiful ruins, as if melancholy were
simply a kind of décor.
"We
melancholy souls no doubt keenly feel the loss of our
great old cityscapes and our forests and marshes. We love
the beautiful ruins of aged buildings. We love the intricate
architectural designs, the carvings and the mosaics and
the rough stones. We love high ceilings and crown moldings.
We love worn-down hardwood floors. We love the smell of
rusting radiators. We love rickety windows that rattle
in the wind."
Only
someone who can afford to buy windows that don't rattle in
the wind is amused by windows that do. And only someone who
lives in North Carolina, where Wilson earns a living as the
chair of the English Department at Wake Forest University,
could argue that Times Square in New York was more "expressive"
before the prostitutes and petty crime were swept away by
a new construction boom. And what does this have to do with
the "mental winter" of melancholy, anyway?
A reader
can almost pinpoint the moment in Wilson's life when he opted
out of American pop culture. He praises the rich melancholy
in the music of Joni Mitchell and the comedic stylings of
Jim Carrey. But he draws the line at Seinfeld, which
is "an obvious perversity" that "borders on nihilism." The
same goes for Quentin Tarantino and South Park. It's
a shame that Wilson gives up on the zeitgeist, since he might
have recognized that a show like Curb Your Enthusiasm
is rooted in the same kind of joy-through-sorrow that inspires
all the great melancholic works. Instead, Wilson makes the
curmudgeon's mistake of suggesting that all of human history—from
the Garden of Eden to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska
album—is under attack by the evil forces of the last
five years (Blackberries, Prozac, and Family Guy).
Wilson
also flirts with the English major's fallacy of suggesting
that a better analysis of literature will solve the world's
problems. In an aside about national politics, he names postmodern
irony—as opposed to the Romantic irony of melancholia—as
a "cause…for the general tolerance of a recent war based largely
on fictions concocted by a corrupt administration." The implication
is that if everyone in America shared the melancholic disposition
of Whitman, Keats, and Coleridge, then the public wouldn't
have gone along with such a god-awful war. That's a bit like
a carpenter saying that 9/11 was basically a failure to use
bigger nails in our skyscrapers.
Against
Happiness starts with a compelling premise: that melancholy
is a state of mind that we should embrace and understand more
fully. In a world gone mad with the pursuit of happiness,
that is a welcome proposition. But this book, which feels
like a lecture from a beloved college professor who's drunk
on wine, betrays more about its author than about its noble
subject.
(February,
2008)
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