SOURCE: Toal, Catherine. “Contemporary American Melancholy.” Journal of European Studies 33, nos. 3-4 (December 2003): 305-22.

[In the following essay, Toal analyzes the representations of melancholy in The Corrections and two other American novels, arguing that the respective authors find problematic the cultural threat to their definitions of masculinity.]

Any discussion of the relationship between ‘melancholy’ and contemporary literature must take account not only of a continuing theoretical and philosophical debate surrounding the category, but of a recent voluminous expansion—encompassing, most notably for literary studies, the genre of the ‘memoir’—in popular discourse on ‘depression’.¹ As Abigail Cheever argues, though the development of ‘cures’ for depression might have been expected to dissolve its cultural importance, the resulting separation between the illness and its symptoms established it, with the help of the memoir, as ‘an identity in its own right independent from any particular characteristics or behaviours’.² In contrast to this empty but fixed diagnostic frame for selfhood, theoretical discussions of melancholy figure a fluid and shifting concept, capable of advancing either a militant or reactionary politics, of describing the obstacles to but also the very possibility of criticism, and of exploring the fractured incompleteness of identity.³ The two terms (the ‘depression’ of the bestselling ‘memoir’, the ‘melancholy’ of theory) represent an opposition between a commodified subjectivity and the promise of critical reinvention and reflection.

In this paper I will examine three narratives which, bridging the ‘literary’ and the ‘popular’, contain the imprints of a broad cultural preoccupation with ‘depression’. The first (Rick Moody's The Black Veil)⁴ is a ‘depression memoir’ by a novelist; the other two are novels (Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections⁵ and David Foster Wallace's The Infinite Jest)⁶ whose language and plots register the impact of therapy, pharmacology and the terminology of clinical psychology. In addition to reflecting the cultural dominion of a ‘therapeutic’ discourse, these texts often highlight the social preconditions both of its classificatory power, and of the inner experiences that it is supposed to characterize. Each writer's landscape contains markedly similar motifs: the grip of narcotic or media stimulation; the collapse of fatherly authority; and the rise of a dislocated, disoriented adult selfhood. However, despite their scrutiny of ‘depression’, all three narratives yield ground to the values and assumptions which drive its ascendancy. Their sustained engagement with the popular lexicons of mental health ultimately formulates an incapacity to claim a robust critical authority—one that might imagine identities which escape the designations of self-help jargon, or resist the malleable, vacant kind of subjectivity confected in the asocial void of ‘entertainment’. The resulting impasse, in these texts by young male authors, also traces the contours of a crisis in masculinity, whose ‘traditional’ and patriarchal forms are seen as being—or are inadvertently revealed to be—under siege both from the reduction of the self to a set of symptoms, and the replacement of social formation with recreation and addiction. Due to their ambivalent relationship with cultural authority, the three writers are inclined to affirm and occasionally exalt the shapeless masculinity generated by the very social ills—and accompanying ‘remedies’—that they resist and criticize.

I would suggest that, in their compromises with the dystopia they confront, the memoir and novels betray the symptoms of a specifically ‘American’ cultural ideology, which takes all processes of formation for mechanisms of control, and any advocacy of particular ones for an illegitimate arrogation of authority. Thus, even as they anatomize an individual and a general debility, the narratives considered here also tend—justifying their surrender to the side-effects of contemporary culture—to create substitute objects of condemnation and blame: chiefly those associated with authority (discipline, the patriarchal father), even though such influences are almost defunct in the environments described. In grappling with the language of pop psychology and therapy, these texts often use ‘melancholy’ as an alternative reference-point, sponsoring a broader or more profound exploration of individual and cultural discontents. But, as I will show, their deployment of ‘melancholy’ in fact conceals a submission to ‘depression’, while the use of both terms, in all three texts, occludes a more determinative, unacknowledged melancholic structure, outlining a dilemma over the problem of formation and the authority of critique. Moody's memoir, focused on an individual psyche, provides the most concrete sketch of this melancholy's form, helping to locate its more abstract emergence in Franzen's and Wallace's work.

The publisher's blurb for Rick Moody's The Black Veil gives a misleadingly factual summary of its subject matter: a chronicle of how ‘while still in his twenties, Moody found that a decade of alcohol, drugs and other indulgences left him stranded in a depression so severe that he feared for his life’.⁷ The book's reviewers, on the other hand, frequently complain that its concerns expand so extensively beyond its autobiographical material that they slip ‘out of focus’.⁸ Their irritation indicates the dubious ambitiousness governing Moody's relationship to the ‘depression memoir’ genre: the degree to which his narrative veers away from his life's details in the direction of a precariously broad cultural significance. The vehicle for this journey is nothing other than an immensely capacious idea of melancholy: before mentioning the problem of ‘addiction’—never once regarded as the cause of his psychological difficulties—Moody announces: ‘melancholy isn't about anything. Melancholy has a style or manner but no subject. Melancholy is a way of thinking, a way of thinking about thinking’ (137).

Moody's highly abstract notion of melancholy has pretensions to philosophical profundity, but its elasticity in fact enables and hides a strategy of evasion, whereby certain kinds of social experience, including an experience of ‘depression’, are attributed to things that they may not be ‘about’. The memoir's title already gestures towards a substitute story within Moody's own: the biography of Joseph ‘Handkerchief’ Moody, the probable real-life source for Hawthorne's ‘The Minister's Black Veil’. Moody becomes interested in the eighteenth-century minister when his father informs him both about Hawthorne's tale and a possible ancestral connection (24); attracted by the idea of a genealogical legacy of morbidity, Moody makes the decision to write about ‘Handkerchief’ during his recovery from a nervous breakdown (205). Placed within this contextual framework, his narrative presents itself not as a study of depression and alcohol-/drug-abuse, but as a reflection on ‘patrimony, with all the characteristics attendant thereupon’ (11). Joseph Moody's life, sporadically interwoven with that of his putative twenty-first-century descendant's, reveals these ‘characteristics’ to be: a complicity with patriarchally driven designs of domination—evoked through references to the exterminatory wars against the Indian population in Handkerchief's New England (151-7)—and an undesired subjection to them, conveyed by the conflict between a guiltily rebellious yet ultimately obedient Handkerchief and his exacting father. For Moody, the suffocating paralysis of Joseph's position in the patriarchal order is encapsulated by the ambiguities surrounding the childhood incident—most probably an accident—in which the future clergyman kills his friend Ebenezer: in this scenario Joseph appears at once ‘guilty’ perpetrator and hapless innocent, forced by his father to take the full burden of culpability, and never completely exonerated by anecdotal record (131-2).

The gradual unfolding of these historical details, however, highlight their jarring incongruity, and not their potential resonance, with Moody's life. Most obviously, the author's interaction with his father, despite frequent, strained comparisons, hardly resembles that between the ‘punitive’, ‘unyielding’ Samuel Moody and the son whom he perpetually dogs with ‘correction’ (129). The narrative's attempts to build up an emphasis on the father's rage appear on the one hand wildly overblown, founded on trivialities, as when the two visit a quarry (on the family ancestral trail) and Moody refuses to get out of the car for fear of ‘security’:

What are you doing in there? That guy is probably asleep! The same tone as in the frequent remark of my childhood: what the hell are you doing in the house on a day like this? And it played just about as well in this venue. What the hell was I doing outside? As Kafka says in his letter to his father. …

(263)

Equally strangely, references to such outbursts negate the presence of important contributing factors, as in the description of the father's irritation at not being able to contact his son to tell him of his sister's death:

His voice sounded incredibly irritated, Call me as soon as you get this. Click. As must be clear to you, the sound of my father enraged is a sound to be avoided at all cost … Whole tributaries in the river of my life have gone unnavigated simply because they might engender this sound of my father enraged.

(296)

A doubtful claim to representative status constitutes the greatest peculiarity of these moments, since the father depicted in Moody's early years is uncommunicative, occasionally sympathetic and largely absent, not ‘enraged’. The italicized voice of fury therefore seems almost to come, in several senses, from nowhere, lacking determinative or recognizable background. Instead of summarizing a whole relationship, the vignettes of ‘rage’ register the trauma of exposure to a traditional fatherly power that is not a constant or a familiar presence, but the inexplicable, incomprehensible residue of a context in which it might have had some meaningful and viable role.

In addition to misaligning his filial miseries with Handkerchief's, Moody largely ignores the patent differences between his ancestor's environment and the scene of his own growing up: while Joseph Moody ministered to a community dependent for its continued existence on genocide, and was himself a ‘murderer’ of sorts, life in 1970s' Connecticut involved no direct or visible collusion with atrocity, and no trauma of extreme culpability. Puritan disciplinary rigours are wholly absent from the kind of adolescence and young adulthood to which Moody sporadically alludes, usually with a certain parodic nonchalance: he and his friends dread being expelled from school (for using hallucinogenic drugs) because ‘this would make it more difficult to get into a good college, which would make it more difficult to get a good job, which would make it more difficult to make money … to afford good drugs’ (83).⁹ When contemplating his alcoholism counsellor he concludes: ‘it seemed impossible that she had once been a person in her twenties who stuck needles in her arm or sold her possessions in order to buy cocaine or who simply totaled cars and left friends in wheelchairs’ (178). Pondering Samuel Moody's sermons, he himself sums up, without considering its implications for the framework of his own narrative, the contrast between the constraints of Handkerchief's era and youthful social experience in contemporary America:

How long can you read this stuff? How many pages can you read of the very philosophy from which you, contemporary American, emerged, before you yawn and reach for the antithetical comforts, for the remote control, for the beer in its Styrofoam sleeve, for the joint that goes around?

(160-1)

The stark, unexplored contrasts between the features of Joseph Moody's world, with its gruelling duties, its violence and suffering, and the contemporary condition of prolonged adolescence that The Black Veil intermittently recalls, begs a question about the real function of the historical scaffolding on which the text relies. In the case of the father-son relationship, the blunt parallel serves to figure Moody as an anguished victim of patriarchal oppression; towards the end of the narrative it bestows on him an intractable culpability, a sense of having himself participated in patriarchal crimes. Chapter 15 stages a sustained experiment in (alternate) identification with each position in the dyad of guilt and innocence, which it locates in a wide variety of deadly, violent acts. Moody abruptly shifts from a study of the Littleton High School shootings—when he asks us to consider how much murderers sound ‘just like us’, to William Burroughs' killing of his wife Joan Vollman—occasioning a look at Burroughs' revisions of the incident and a close imaginary alliance with Vollman—to a final, sweeping attack on the whole progress of American (and ‘Western’) history, ending with an exhortation to the reader to ‘cover your face’ (303). The very disparateness of these events, and their undifferentiated amalgamation, as well as the totalizing, monumental nature of Moody's parting indictment, betray the insubstantiality of the guilt he urges on us, and the phantasmal quality in the feeling of victimization dominating his reflections.

A turn away from the imaginary superstructure that Moody creates and back to the details of his life uncovers the purpose of the ‘black veil’ of suffering and persecution woven over his biography. The chimera of guilt and the fantasy of victimization can only be mechanisms for eliding any examination of the effects generated by the state of aimless leisure, addiction, and political and cultural dislocation, noted or laid bare in the narrative's asides. They also work indirectly to validate a kind of subjectivity apparently fostered by such an experience: an ineffectual fearful, introverted masculinity, the persona Moody occupies in every encounter he relates. One incident in particular concretizes the resurrection of historical burdens for the ends of self-justification. Recollecting the day when a Hispanic woman acquaintance who wants to escape her abusive husband asks him for help, Moody is too transfixed by his embodiment of white America's misdeeds to come to her aid (209). His paralysis in this instance resembles that in other portraits of friendships and relationships, which surreptitiously displace responsibility for self-declared inadequacies onto the larger social expectations and perceptions of others (70, 121). The narrative's absorption in the trials of Handkerchief obviates the need for Moody to analyse these involuted dynamics, since it lends his perennial discomfort weighty historical proportions, divorcing it from his own immediate milieu.

Ironically, Moody's self-serving and misleading escape into Handkerchief's biography matches aspects of the minister's own story, and of the literary work he inspired, better than any assertions of historical continuity. The history of the ‘black veil’ contains a series of appropriations and substitutions designed to process a crisis of masculinity. Hawthorne, profoundly ambivalent about intimacy, reconceived the minister's self-concealment as a refusal of marriage and family. Joseph Moody, as Moody observes, memorializes his repentance over his childhood crime when he pens the narrative of Patience Boston, a Native American forced into slavery who murdered her infant son. The fact that the minister used, as the vehicle for his miseries, the life of someone whose afflictions considerably exceeded his own—in American terms, the most unambiguous composite victim imaginable—ought perhaps to have alerted Moody to the suspect underpinnings of the enterprise of memoir—its search for a genuine historical suffering to fill in a desultory suburban emptiness. In making Handkerchief his surrogate, Moody proves himself a worthy heir to his clerical ‘ancestor’ (the more so, paradoxically, in that they are not after all related). His approach also conforms to a structure of ‘melancholy’ more classical and typical than the vague, deliberately open definition offered in his text, while ignoring the nebulous, disorienting indeterminacy of the contemporary environment that may have given rise to it.¹⁰

While Moody leaps outside the classification of ‘depression’ (or ‘addiction’ or ‘alcoholism’) deploying a malleable concept of ‘melancholy’ to launch what he takes to be a thoroughgoing exposé of American guilt, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections explicitly theorizes the problem of critique and judgement in the relationship between individual (psychological) and cultural dysfunction. Covering similar terrain to Moody's memoir, the novel poses this problem in terms of its bearing on the status of contemporary masculinity. All three of the central male characters are menaced by a diagnosis of ‘depression’, which undermines their claim to either fatherly authority or analytical independence (or both). Gary, father of three, who wants desperately to forestall the incursions of consumer culture into ‘traditional’ family life, finds his dissatisfactions transformed by his wife into symptoms, making him afraid that he will ‘forfeit the right to his opinions’ (161). Chip, Gary's brother, who early on in the narrative offers a slick précis of the kind of diagnostic blackmail that closes in on Gary—‘the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as “diseased” … when you buy into therapy, you're buying into buying’ (31)—has already been shaken up by a female student's attack on the chauvinism of his ideological analyses. Her objections make him secretly wonder whether he was really ‘criticizing a sick culture’ or somehow damaged himself (45). After a brief affair with the girl, whose unassailable self-complacency saps his dwindling reserves of self-respect, Chip is ready to submit (as Gary finally does) and become one of the ‘depressed’ (77). At the same time, Alfred, Gary and Chip's father, who is struggling with Alzheimer's, is deemed first by Gary and Caroline (Gary's wife) and then by his own wife to be ‘depressed’, a supposition which, rather than recognizing an inevitable side-effect of his disease, implicitly pathologizes his old-fashioned patriarchal values (65).

In the case of the first two characters, Franzen depicts an antagonistic stand-off between masculinity and the language of popular psychology through a series of contorted paradoxes. Chip discovers that the very possibility of ‘depression’, its existence as a potential identity to be inhabited, exerts an alienating influence; concluding that he is ‘behaving like a depressed person’, he simultaneously feels that he ‘lack[s] the ability to lose all volition and connection with reality’, that he is ‘failing even in the miserable task of falling apart’ (77). Gary, on the other hand, finds the jargon of pharmacology encroaching on the parameters of his consciousness to the point of actually reconfiguring them altogether; even as he fends off his wife's assessment, his crumbling resistance is charted in terms of flagging ‘neurofactors’. For both brothers, the workings of ‘depression’ and the possibility of chemical cure for it isolate all abnormality within the individual, dismantling the legitimacy of any claim to authority, whether of critical commentary or fatherly control: The Corrections' delineation of the double-binds they face mounts a comic defence of a certain individual masculine agency against the therapeutic coercion that Chip excoriates.

Yet Franzen complicates and compromises this critique in his portrayal of the third male figure said to be ‘depressed’: Alfred. Counterpoised with Caroline's appraisal of her father-in-law's mental health, is another view of him—as a Schopenhauerean melancholic convinced of the inescapability of suffering and the decline of value and dignity: ‘Alfred believed that the real and the true were a minority the world was bent on exterminating’ (258). Ostensibly less reductive and demeaning than Caroline's, the narrative diagnosis eventually enables a highly strategic historicization of the father's role akin to that which occurs in Moody's memoir. Like the fixation on an ‘ancestor’ in The Black Veil, the historical associations permeating Alfred's depiction succeed in raising the phantasm of a political patriarchal tyranny, and in substituting the validation of a disintegrative masculinity for a critique of the ideological and economic preconditions of ‘therapeutic’ culture. The operation of these effects discloses the debilitating impact of ‘depression’ on the novel's own claims to cultural authority, as well as the extent of its submission to the suppositions governing the category's power and importance. A useful precursor text, the 1996 ‘Harper's Essay’, often seen in the aftermath of The Corrections' popularity as the ground-work for its composition, glosses the dilemmas the novel confronts and prefigures the manner of their resolution.¹¹

As its title, ‘Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels’, suggests, the piece explores the prospects for reading and for literature in a TV-dominated, socially isolating landscape, reviewing literary art's ‘engagement with the culture’ (37-8) and deciding on the best way of justifying the writing process and framing its wider relevance. However, concurrently with its sociological and literary investigations, the article explores Franzen's own psychological position in the environment he evokes, rendering the essay a kind of miniature ‘depression memoir’ as well as an examination of the contemporary role of the novel in America. Franzen places himself in a position comparable to that of the character he later invents, Chip:

Even harder to admit is how depressed I was … It's not just that depression has become fashionable to the point of banality. It's the sense that we live in a reductively binary culture: you're either healthy or you're sick, you either function or you don't. And if that flattening of the field of possibilities is precisely what's depressing you, you're inclined to resist participating in the flattening by calling yourself depressed. You decide that it's the world that's sick … The invitation to leave your depression behind, whether through medication or therapy or effort of will, seems like an invitation to turn your back on all the insights into the corruption and infantilism and self-delusion of the brave new McWorld … Instead of saying I am depressed you want to say I am right!

(44)

In addition to foregrounding the paralysis that threatens Chip, the essay prefigures his sense of beleaguered redundancy in the face of the assertive female student's critique. ‘Perchance to Dream’ relates the marginalization it broods over to the uneasy state of white masculinity, whose former cultural dominance has given way to the proliferation of ‘ethnic enclaves’ (40).

Despite the autobiographical elements in the essay, its subject matter and informational researches might lead us to expect a final set of propositions about the future of literature in a high-speed visual culture. As it turns out, the personalized motif overtakes broader cultural reflection, formulating not a theoretical or practical but a therapeutic resolution. Franzen decides that his alienation from the surrounding world should be ascribed to an innate, apparently a-or trans-historical condition, unconnected with the problems he has been considering (the decline of intellectual challenge, artistic struggle, linguistic nuance): ‘depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is surely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity’ (50). Franzen uncovers the ‘reasons’ for this estrangement when he confesses:

there was growing inside me a realization that my condition was not a disease but a nature. How could I not feel estranged? I was a reader. My nature had been waiting for me all along and now it welcomed me … How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit in to the ‘real’ world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it.

(54)

Franzen's conclusion poses obvious difficulties: he replaces the hypothetical, reluctantly uttered phrase ‘I am depressed’ with a new statement ‘I was a reader’, and in doing so follows the logic of ‘depression’—its power to confer identity and to sanction a release from the burdens of criticism and opposition. In establishing ‘reading’ as an identification, his statement also accepts the organizing authority of the ‘identity politics’ he had questioned elsewhere in the argument. Later revisions (‘corrections’?) of the Harper's essay made after the success of The Corrections reinforce its move towards the autobiographical and away from analysis of the cultural and social circumstances that militate against ‘reading’ and the importance of literature.¹² Franzen subtly augments the personal, individual nature of the ‘depression’ to which he succumbed by making several references—rather than just one (47)—to the break-up of his marriage. Furthermore, as if to conceal his chosen complicity with ‘the new politics of identity’, he omits a brief but crucial point about the resonances between this politics and ‘corporate speciality marketing’ (47), and excludes an extended reflection—aided by an energetic letter from David Foster Wallace—on the current predicament of the white male (51).

The Corrections, lodged chronologically between the two essays, gives embodied, characterological form to the compromises they reach. Most importantly, it converts their focus on literature and cultural authority into an exclusive preoccupation with the first version's other major theme: masculinity. Where Franzen in Harper's relinquishes his rights to critique by assuming the identity of ‘reader’ (more appealing than that of ‘depressed person’), the novel, while resisting the threats posed to masculinity by ‘therapeutic’ assumptions, simultaneously makes a hero of the hapless, depleted maleness that they generate, and stigmatizes forces hostile to it, namely the patriarchal rigour traduced by the ideologies of popular psychology. With these tactics The Corrections adopts the position and the method found in Moody's memoir, using an overestimation of patriarchal dominance to accept and validate rather than fully confront the cultural problems it has recorded. In concert with this approach, Franzen's novel also protects its central model of masculinity by recapitulating a key move from the essays: their gradual erasure of an initial critique of identity politics. Attributing Chip's disorientation not only to patriarchal discipline but to the overwhelming institutional power and social confidence of women and minorities, the novel draws on the stereotyping that Franzen had queried in the first Harper's essay.

Even as it mocks a perception of Alfred, the patriarch, as ‘depressed’, The Corrections implicitly condemns his mode of life—his self-denial, strictness, exertion—by giving it a broad historical and political frame, whose connotations resemble those that Moody loads upon his father. Well versed, like all three of the writers discussed here, in ‘theory’, Franzen develops a Foucauldian sketch of American ‘discipline’, moving from the penitentiary and the electric chair to a fantasy of the future promulgated by the Axon Corporation, in which criminality will be ‘cured’ by pharmacological means (209). Alfred, whose patented chemical-engineering discovery will, ironically, aid Axon's plans, is repeatedly associated with the earlier type of ‘correction’: Gary makes a popsicle-stick prison—with an electric chair added by Chip—to impress his father (256); Alfred believes that ‘the only thing wrong with the death penalty was that it wasn't used often enough’ (129). As in Moody's memoir, the historicization enveloping the father identifies him with phenomena that have little to do with his behaviour in practice: Alfred never imposes incarceration on anyone and exhibits in general a ‘distaste for discipline’ (129). The meaning of the alignment between father and prison must therefore be sought in the connotations it creates: a heightening of the sympathetic valences surrounding the character (Chip) least associated with patriarchal and political regimes of correction. Perhaps the clearest indication of such an underlying agenda can be found in the humiliations—more considerable than any inflicted on Gary or Chip—to which the narrative subjects Alfred: the upbraidings of a talking turd (285) and aggressively explicit erotic temptations (28). These degradations insinuate an almost vengeful delight in the father's unravelling, as well as an enjoyment—echoing the narrative's extensive indulgence of Chip's sexual fixations (246-7)—of the excesses to which his life is supposed to be antithetical.

If the text pledges its allegiance to Chip by amplifying his father's coerciveness, it also gives him sympathetic priority from another direction, by presenting him as a victim of the social power of women and minorities. As has been mentioned, Chip's collapse begins when Melissa, a student, attacks his deconstruction of a commercial: ‘things are getting better and better for women and people of color, and gay men and lesbians, more and more integrated and open, and all you can think about is some stupid lame problem with signifiers and signifieds’ (44). The strangest aspect of the role played by this statement of Melissa's—of greater importance than the impression it makes on Chip—lies in the way the novel leaves her claims largely unquestioned. Indeed, forgetting the 1996 essay's perception of the affinities between marketing and identity categories, it transforms their supposed ‘truth’ into a vision of ferocious conspiracy against the white male, replete with the familiar exaggerations of stereotype; Chip is not simply undone by a preternaturally confident female student, but overlooked for tenure in favour of a Hispanic woman without a Ph.D. (who replaces his appropriately terminally ill male patron on the faculty) (83-4), and dumped by an opportunity-seeking beauty with a forceful female mentor (107). As in the portrayal of Alfred, the main effect of these elements is to ratify the position of the disintegrating white male, imputing his problems to the strength of other ‘identities’ and consequently creating, in a move much like the declaration ‘I am a reader’, a discrete, self-enclosed identity for him.

Rick Moody's The Black Veil leaves aside the issue of clinical designations to pursue a phantasmal revival of patriarchal oppression, a device that conforms to a recognizable (psychoanalytic) ‘melancholic’ structure. It might also be said to rest on some of the beliefs driving the supremacy of ‘depression’ as parodied by Franzen: a pathologization of discipline, rigour and all that obstructs the unbounded expansions of the child-like self. But, as we have seen, The Corrections also surrenders to the ideology of ‘depression’ in fashioning and dismantling a monolithically repressive patriarchal melancholia, thereby glorifying, through juxtaposition, an adolescent masculinity. David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, though predating the other texts and addressing the same phenomena, seems dramatically to overskip (and render irrelevant) the compromises they resolve upon.

In contrast to Moody's artificial resuscitation of patriarchal authority, Wallace literalizes its destruction at the hands of an entertainment and drug culture, multiplying instances of parental bodies rupturing due to overloads of stimulation or addictive substances or both.¹³ The novel's content and its form are pervaded by an element of contemporary life only casually alluded to by Moody, charting the subjectivity of characters almost entirely through the vertiginous grooves of their relationship to drugs (including entertainment). Additionally, Infinite Jest forecasts a supremacy for the culture of depression-speak that is of greater moment and intensity than any painted by Franzen: when not channelled through addiction, characters' emotions are harnessed to a therapeutic jargon which not only mischaracterizes their feelings, but (in one instance of parodic irony which surpasses any in The Corrections) substitutes for them. Hal Incandenza, the main protagonist, treats the ‘grief therapy’ he must undergo after his father's death like an exam, reading up on likely symptoms and ‘vacillat[ing] plausibly between and among them’ (253); when this fails to convince, he stages a fake angry outburst which (paradoxically) expresses his true (absence of) feelings, but amply fulfils the expectations of his therapist (255-6).

Because of its massive escalation of the scale of contemporary cultural ailments, Wallace's text, unlike Franzen's novel and Moody's memoir, leaves itself (one might think) no possible scapegoat for the kinds of captivity he catalogues, content instead merely to anatomize them. Infinite Jest even includes a running commentary on the question of fathers and formation from the mouth of the Quebec terrorist Marathe, who attacks the American prejudice against the shaping of individual subjectivity:

But what of the freedom-to, not just free-from? Not all compulsion comes from without … How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?

(320)

Nevertheless, in Wallace's discussions of ‘depression’, an anomaly emerges that reveals a much closer affinity with Franzen and Moody than might at first glance be evident. Though he parodies therapy, Wallace at the same time enthusiastically approves its formulae, arguing that the commanding slogans of AA provide a necessary substitute for the addict's own willpower; that the organization's publicly performed emotional confessions fill in for the addict's own lack of affect; that involvement in its cult-like rituals eventually provides a viable and defensible replacement for addiction itself.¹⁴ The contradiction might be taken for another instance of the candidly dualistic affiliations of Wallace's aesthetic: A. O. Scott notes that Wallace at once repudiates and produces metafiction, denounces and deploys irony; ‘Janus faced, he demands to be taken at face value’.¹⁵ But the paradoxes concerning ‘depression’ lay bare a more fundamental opposition animating the novel, one that shows Wallace's participation, with Moody and Franzen, in the shared belief—glanced at in Marathe's impassioned speech—that concepts and processes of formation can only be rigidly disciplinary, prescriptively ‘corrective’.

The terms of the opposition become clear in a segment of the text exclusively devoted to ‘depression’, which purports to take up once again the case of Kate Gompert, a suicidal marijuana addict whose state of mind and body has been described (in another therapeutic encounter) 600 pages earlier (68): ‘and re Kate Gompert and this depression issue’ (692) Wallace begins, as if following on from a previous paragraph. Surfacing like a (long) afterthought, the sentence appropriately reflects Gompert's function in the exposition: her case acts as a framing device or a cipher in an anatomy of depression which pertains more directly to the male characters it mentions (Hal, his father, a patient on Kate's ward) along the way. In a book filled with pseudo-information and endlessly re-routed mechanisms of communication, the section is unusual for its unambiguous didacticism: Wallace unpacks, though maintaining a characteristic ludic inflection, the meaning of two distinct kinds of depression: ‘anhedonia or simple melancholy’ (692) and ‘clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria’ (695). His approach shows signs of having exited from the novel's ornate pastiche of the near future to confront concerns of the present moment. We see a rare mention of shared community with the book's readers—‘since we (who are mostly not small children) know’—and a reference to a set of entertainments apparently not included in the book's own exhaustive record of the content of various film-cartridges: ‘the lively arts of the millennial USA’ (694). These elements communicate a certain suasive urgency, alerting us to the embedded presence of an argument that Wallace is eager to get across. His central point emerges, another seeming non sequitur, after he sums up the mental health of the main character Hal, who hasn't had ‘a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny’ (694).

It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial USA treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip … we are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naiveté … Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to avoid being human, at least as far as he conceptualizes it, is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal probably is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pulses and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

(694-5)

Wallace's account here of the place of ‘depression’ in youth culture, and of the underlying reality of ‘humanness’ that it belies, contains several obvious peculiarities. Firstly, the idea that the overtones of this culture may be a conspiracy of the older against the younger, even if accurate, fails to explain the reasons for the ‘hip ennui’ mode or its appeal. Secondly, the ascription of psychological ills to styles, images, etc. expresses a naïve location of causes in representations, rather than in the wider social environment (or absence thereof).¹⁶ Equally dubious is Wallace's condemnation of the ‘lively arts’ for stigmatizing sentiment: whatever arts he is thinking of, it can probably be agreed that ‘sentiment’, far from being a stranger to popular culture in general, constitutes its defining commodity.

These oddities acquire key significance in the light of Infinite Jest's central features and preoccupations. By blaming youth-cultural arts for anhedonia, Wallace makes non-clinical depression a learned affect, a subjection to a rigid regime of instruction. Most of the individual experiences the novel includes—even those it considers useful or beneficial—are figured as an enthralment to some gruelling and brutally simplified regime, whether it be that of athletic training, sexual promiscuity, addiction or cure from addiction (the mantras of AA).¹⁷ In the passage on anhedonia, however, the slender, highly codified range of human physical and emotional sensation ceases to confer a coherent, organizing order: depression is initially said to be the result of withdrawal from a regime (that of addiction or high achievement), subjection to a regime (the ideology of the ‘lively arts’) or, in the case of clinical depression (whose strict inevitabilities and tyrannical compulsions Wallace is much more comfortable discussing), a regime in itself (692-7). The evocation of a drooling, anaclitic infant might be understood as a way of coming up with an ‘outside’ to depression, and an antidote to it. But, as I have noted, the nature of this antidote does not really introduce characteristics that oppose those promulgated by contemporary popular culture; instead, what the gooey, drooley child denotes is an ‘outside’ to Infinite Jest's stringent and limited protocols of selfhood. In (supposedly) epitomizing humanness, in having a utopian value, the infant inversely highlights the novel's portrayal of processes of formation as relentlessly narrow and punishing. By exalting formlessness, the mini-essay on depression elides the possibility of criticizing the preconditions for the limited, enclosed modes of subjectivity that the novel as a whole catalogues, and approves a state that, far from being their antithesis, is their raw material and perhaps (as in the case of popular culture and sentimentality) their product.

Wallace's argument thus offers an abstract blueprint of the logic governing Moody's and Franzen's texts: they monumentalize fatherly despotism as the primary source of the sense of inadequacy afflicting youthful male subjectivity, thereby affirming this directionless masculinity, and shifting attention away from its actual social background. Wallace's novel repeatedly dramatizes the redundancy of fatherly authority, but nonetheless conceives of human existence as a constricting grid of disciplines. In counterpoising to this grid an utterly shapeless (and masculine—the gooey inner child is Hal's, not Kate Gompert's) ‘humanness’, he promotes identification with the kind of creature who would in fact be most susceptible to the imposing force of the technologies and dependencies he delineates. In the work of all three writers, solidarity with a crumbling or regressive masculinity represents a deep ambivalence about claiming the authority to criticize the cultural malaise they document, and a consequent entrapment within—sometimes even a compensatory relish for—its corrosions. Rick Moody replaces his contemporary social environs with a historical reconstruction, ignoring (and preserving) its problems of stagnation; Franzen's novel defends male characters from the inroads of ‘depression’ but, in extolling the value of the main protagonist, cedes ground to the ideology that underscores the category's cultural power. Wallace's recourse to the anaclitic infant, meanwhile, enacts a paradoxically aggressive renunciation of critical authority. He avoids advocating a model of formation (one that might be an alternative to all the exhausting technologies of the self found in Infinite Jest) by pressing upon his readers—roundly disparaging all those who would prefer to disown it—an ideal of formlessness.¹⁸

The evasive (and defensive) nature of Wallace's strategy is sharply underlined by its proximity to a familiar psychoanalytic structure of melancholia. He links Hal's numbness, his ‘anhedonia’, to a feeling of separateness from his mother: ‘his Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely’ (694). According to Kristeva, melancholy results from the father's failure to assist the child's separation from the maternal ‘thing’ by establishing language as an adequate compensation for ‘losing’ the mother, a failure that renders the melancholic subject either incoherent or ‘hyperlucid’.¹⁹ The Kristevan schema finds a crude recapitulation in the Incandenza family romance: Hal's father, one of the book's exploding alcohol-and/or entertainment-addicted parents, is ill-fitted to mediate between his children and the maternal powerhouse (whose nickname, ‘the Moms’ pluralizes her into omnipotence) that is Avril Incandenza.²⁰ Judging from the only scene of family gathering, the young Hal has a severe case of ‘hyperlucidity’ (745). When Wallace tells us what Hal is lonely ‘for’—his internal self, the anaclitic infant—he contemplates the hero's reunion with the maternal ‘thing’. Wallace's paean to the uncoordinated creature hints at a homology between Hal's subjective paralysis and the form of the novel itself: on the one hand clinging to the notion of a shapeless, incontinently emotional, infantile self, on the other ‘hyperlucid’, proliferating mechanistic outlines for bodily and affective experience. To observe this contrast is not to treat the novel's linguistic profuseness like a symptom, but to pinpoint its entanglement in the crises it rehearses. Like The Black Veil and The Corrections, Infinite Jest's use and explication of the categories of ‘depression’ and ‘melancholy’ simultaneously trace its own burdens and attachments.

Notes

1. The epilogue to Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation charts this ‘depression outbreak’. Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation, London: Quartet Books, 1996, pp. 298-311.

2. Abigail Cheever, ‘Prozac Americans: Depression, Identity, Selfhood’, Twentieth-Century Literature 46(3) (2000): 360.

3. See, for example, the expansive cultural politics claimed for melancholy in David L. Eng and David Kazaijian, eds, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2003, p. 2. For an account of criticism's current relationship to melancholy, see Brian Dillon's review of the work of Giorgio Agamben. Brian Dillon, ‘Work Suspended: Criticism and Melancholia’, Paragraph 23(2) (2000): 222-32.

4. Rick Moody, The Black Veil, London: Faber, 2002.

5. Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections, London: Fourth Estate, 2002.

6. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1996.

7. The Bookmark, 2003.

8. Andy Battaglia, ‘Review of The Black Veil’, The Onion, 29 January 2003 at: http://www.theonionavclub.com/reviw.php?reviewid5474. Other widely circulated reviews include, most notoriously, Dale Peck's ‘The Moody Blues’, The New Republic, July 2003, and Paul McLeary's ‘Moody's Dream of Invented History’, PopMatters, 27 June 2002 at: http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/b/black-veil.shtml

9. Benjamin DeMott observes that ‘drug addiction comes across in The Black Veil as a distraction or a peccadillo’. He proposes that this can be read as ‘a sensible reluctance to indulge in simplistic denunciation’. Taken in the context of The Black Veil's strategies as a whole, however, it can also be seen as a refusal on Moody's part to examine the actual character of his social experience. Benjamin DeMott, ‘Guilt Stalker’, The New York Review of Books, 26 September 2002: 74.

10. The notion of melancholy as attachment to a lost love object or cherished abstract belief is at the heart of Freud's theorization of the phenomenon. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, London: Penguin, 1991, pp. 245-9. The Black Veil in a sense fabricates this condition of bereavement within its narrative, in order to avoid the vacuous nature of the contemporary social experience it describes.

11. Jonathan Franzen, ‘Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels’, Harper's, April 1996: 35-54. All parenthetical references to the essay will be to the Harper's version unless otherwise stated.

12. The revised version, ‘Why Bother’, appears in Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone, London: Fourth Estate, 2002, p. 4.

13. The incidences of this include Hal's alcoholic and filmmaker father's sudden death-by-microwave (248); Lenz's mother's fantastic, fatal obesity (575); Gately's father's expiration in front of an episode of M.A.S.H. (448); and Green's mother's death from shock on receiving a novelty jack-in-the-box gift (579).

14. These assertions are repeated at many points, but appear, for example, at 349 and 352-3.

15. A. O. Scott, ‘The Panic of Influence’, The New York Review of Books, February 2000: 4.

16. A focus on the importance of entertainment over and above the world it feeds into is also the premise of Wallace's article on ‘Television’. He seeks to explain the medium's domination of American leisure time on the basis of its complexities. David Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 13(2) (1993): 151-94.

17. Like the rituals of AA, the programme of training at Enfield Tennis Academy is repeatedly described and theorized. Its status as a regime is pointed out by the coach, DeLint (681). A systematic, codified promiscuity is the preserve of Hal's brother Orin, who has ‘internal addictive-sexuality issues’ (289).

18. The strained and opportunistic quality of Wallace's antidote to depression is also suggested by its contrast with an essay entitled ‘The Depressed Person’, in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1999). In this piece Wallace depicts a helplessly needy female depression sufferer, but figures her condition as selfish and banal. The change of emphasis that accompanies a difference of gender further confirms that the ‘drooling infant’ is a celebration not of ‘humanness as such but of an inchoate masculinity akin to that found in Moody's and Franzen's texts.

19. Julia Kristeva, Soleil noir: dépression et mélancholie, Paris: Gallimard, 1987, p. 34. I am also drawing here on Susan Gustafson's reformulation of Kristeva's theory in ‘Abject Fathers and Suicidal Sons: G. E. Lessing's Philotas and Kristeva's Black Sun’, Lessing Jahrbuch 29 (1997): 22-4.

20. N. Katharine Hayles notes the importance of Hal's mother's nickname in her analysis of ‘the dark underside of Avril's policy of trust’. Her argument does not mention, however, Wallace's more extreme departures from the maternal ideal in the construction of Avril: his portrayal of her as a sexual predator (Wallace, Infinite Jest, 552). N. Katharine Hayles, ‘The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment and Infinite Jest’, New Literary History 30 (1999): 690-1.