Americans are addicted to happiness. When we’re not popping pills, we leaf through scientific studies that take for granted our quest for happiness, or read self-help books by everyone from armchair philosophers and clinical psychologists to the Dalai Lama on how to achieve a trouble-free life: Stumbling on Happiness; Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment; The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. The titles themselves draw a stark portrait of the war on melancholy.
More than any other generation, Americans of today believe in the transformative power of positive thinking. But who says we’re supposed to be happy? Where does it say that in the Bible, or in the Constitution? In Against Happiness, the scholar Eric G. Wilson argues that melancholia is necessary to any thriving culture, that it is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation—and that it is the force underlying original insights. Francisco Goya, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Abraham Lincoln were all confirmed melancholics. So enough Prozac-ing of our brains. Let’s embrace our depressive sides as the wellspring of creativity. What most people take for contentment, Wilson argues, is living death, and what the majority takes for depression is a vital force. In Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Wilson suggests it would be better to relish the blues that make humans people.
Eric G. Wilson is the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The recipient of several important awards, including a National Humanities Center year-long fellowship, he is the author of five books on the relationship between literature and psychology.
Consumer trends and popular medical and psychological interests indicate that Americans are addicted to happiness. At an increasing rate, they pop pills, seek both clinical and non-traditional therapies, read recent scientific studies that take for granted the population's quest for happiness, or buy self-help books by everyone from armchair philosophers and clinical psychologists to the Dalai Lama on how to achieve a trouble-free life: Stumbling on Happiness, Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment; The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. The titles themselves draw a stark portrait of the war on melancholy.
More than any other generation, Americans today believe in the transformative power of positive thinking. Happiness is considered a liberty, if not an ultimate life goal. But the scholar Eric G. Wilson argues that melancholia is necessary to any thriving culture, that it is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation—and that it is the force underlying original insights. Francisco Goya, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Abraham Lincoln—all confirmed melancholics.
What most people take for contentment, Wilson argues, is living death, and what the majority sees as depressive is a vital force that inspires creativity, spurs ambition, and helps people form more intimate bonds with one another. It's time to throw off the shackles of positivity and relish the blues that make us human.
"Mr. Wilson's basic thesis is that, without suffering, the human soul becomes stagnant and empty . . . We must live between the poles of sadness and joy and not try to expunge misery from our lives. Mr. Wilson makes a strong case . . . to deny our essential sadness in the face of a tragic world is to suppress a large part of what we are as human beings."—Colin McGinn, The Wall Street Journal
"Utilitarianism is the philosophical doctrine according to which happiness is the sole intrinsic value—the only thing that is good in itself. Although invented by 19th-century Britons, notably Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill, utilitarianism has some claim to be the official philosophy of the U.S.A. or, as a philosopher might have it, the 'Utilitarian States of America.' In America, happiness is what makes life good, and unhappiness is what makes it bad. We must therefore seize the former and avoid the latter. Eric G. Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University, disagrees, contending that utilitarianism has it the wrong way around. The 'happy types,' as he calls them, are apt to be bland, superficial, static, hollow, one-sided, bovine, acquisitive, deluded and foolish. Sold on the ideal of the happy smile and the cheerful salutation, they patrol the malls in dull uniformity, zombie-like, searching for contentment and pleasure, locked inside their own dreams of a secure and unblemished world, oblivious to objective reality, cocooned in a protective layer of bemused well-being . . . Mr. Wilson's basic thesis is that, without suffering, the human soul becomes stagnant and empty. We can only reach our full potential through pain—not a pathological kind of pain but the kind that comes from a recognition of death, decay and the bad day (or decade). We must live between the poles of sadness and joy and not try to expunge misery from our lives. Mr. Wilson makes a strong case for this anti-utilitarianism, in prose both spare and lavish. (Of Coleridge he writes: 'He was hurt into these sublimities. He was axed into ecstasy.') And indeed, to deny our essential sadness in the face of a tragic world is to suppress a large part of what we are as human beings. It is to retreat into a fearful solipsism, refusing to peep out into the world beyond—an approach to life that is all the more fatuous in that it can never succeed . . . Mr. Wilson's case for the dark night of the soul brings a much needed corrective to today's mania for cheerfulness. One would almost say that, in its eloquent contrarianism and earnest search for meaning, Against Happiness lifts the spirits."—Colin McGinn, The Wall Street Journal
“[Wilson has] the passionate soul of a nineteenth-century romantic who, made wise by encounters with his own personal darkness, invites readers to share his reverence for nature and exuberance for life. Providing a powerful literary complement to recent psychological discussions of melancholy . . . this treatment is variously gloomy and ecstatic, infuriating and even inspiring.”—Booklist
"An impassioned, compelling, dare I say poetic, argument on behalf of those who ‘labor in the fields of sadness’. . . a loose and compelling argument for fully embracing one's existence, for it is a miracle itself — a call to live hard and full, to participate in the great rondure of life and to be aware of the fact that no one perspective on the world is ever finally true."—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“[A] lively, reasoned call for the preservation of melancholy in the face of all-too-rampant cheerfulness . . . pithy and epigrammatic."—Bookforum
“Wilson's argument is important, and he makes it with passion."—Raleigh News and Observer
"This slender, powerful salvo offers a sure-to-be controversial alternative to the recent cottage industry of high-brow happiness books. Wilson, chair of Wake Forest University's English Department, claims that Americans today are too interested in being happy. (He points to the widespread use of antidepressants as exhibit A.) It is inauthentic and shallow, charges Wilson, to rele
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Enough with the power of positive thinking, says literature professor and self-confessed melancholic Wilson in this ardent entreaty for the honesty and beauty of gloom. Exasperated by the shallow consumerist contentment pursued by “American happy types,” Wilson aches for the roller coaster of intensified feeling and heightened creativity that often arises from the “somber and weird depths of the melancholy imagination.” It is thus fitting that his narrative is profoundly turbulent, lurching from bile-spitting condemnations of gated communities and shopping malls to self-absorbed reveries on rusty radiators and rotting leaves, to brilliant, soaring celebrations of melancholic geniuses such as Coleridge and Springsteen (two among many famous melancholic artists noted by the author). But beneath the many trappings of polemic lies the passionate soul of a nineteenth-century romantic who, made wise by encounters with his own personal darkness, invites readers to share his reverence for nature and exuberance for life. Providing a powerful literary complement to recent psychological discussions of melancholy, such as Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy (2005), this treatment is variously gloomy and ecstatic, infuriating and even inspiring. --Brendan Driscoll
Eric G. Wilson is the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University, where he teaches British and American Romanticism, film and literature, and creative nonfiction. Wilson has recently turned his academic training into a major new trade title, EVERYONE LOVES A GOOD TRAIN WRECK: WHY WE CAN'T LOOK AWAY (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), a mixture of memoir, journalism, scholarship, and cultural analysis that explores the origins, functions, and values of morbid curiosity. The book was recommended as one of the top books of the spring of 2012 by Oprah magazine, Details magazine, and Amazon.com; and it was positively reviewed in several publications, including NPR.com, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, the New Orleans Times Picayune, The Buffalo News, Booklist, Books and Culture, and Rue Morgue. Excerpts or adaptations have been published in Salon, The Christian Century, and Psychology Today, and the book has been featured in several radio venues. Wilson also achieved success with a 2008 scholarly-trade title, called AGAINST HAPPINESS: IN PRAISE OF MELANCHOLY (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). The book, an L.A. Times best seller, was featured on NBC's Today Show, UNC TV's Bookwatch, NPR's All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation, as well as in Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times, and the New York Times. Against Happiness was also favorably reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, Booklist, Bookforum, the Globe and Mail, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Playboy.com, Publisher's Weekly, the Raleigh News and Observer, the Christian Century, The Missouri Review, and the European Romantic Review. Excerpts have appeared in The Longman Reader, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the L.A. Times, and the book has been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Croatian, Korean, Chinese, and Portuguese. Wilson has also published a memoir, THE MERCY OF ETERNITY: A MEMOIR OF DEPRESSION AND GRACE (Northwestern University Press). His creative nonfiction has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, the Georgia Review, and r.kv.r.y. Wilson continues to produce more traditionally scholarly works, such as his recent MY BUSINESS IS TO CREATE: BLAKE'S INFINITE WRITING (University of Iowa Press). His other academic books include THE STRANGE WORLD OF DAVID LYNCH (Continuum, 2007); SECRET CINEMA: GNOSTIC VISION IN FILM (Continuum, 2006); THE MELANCHOLY ANDROID: ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SACRED MACHINES (State University of New York Press, 2006); COLERIDGE'S MELANCHOLIA (University Press of Florida, 2004); THE SPIRITUAL HISTORY OF ICE (Palgrave Macmillan); ROMANTIC TURBULENCE (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); and EMERSON'S SUBLIME SCIENCE (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). These studies, along with his numerous articles on cinematic and literary subjects, have garnered Wilson several awards, including a fellowship at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, N.C. and the university-wide prize for excellence in research at Wake Forest University. Wilson is currently at work on two scholarly-trade titles: Keep It Fake: The Art of Being a Real Phony (under contract with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) and How to Make a Soul: The Wisdom of John Keats.
This book is in one sense a diatribe against the Happiness Industry , the whole Positive Psychology shtick, the mentality which says you have a right to happiness, and you should be happy, and if you are not happy something is wrong with you, and you must do everything possible to make yourself happy, and show the world that you are happy , because happiness is success. It is against the Culture of Superficiality which would make us all plastic robots pleasure- hooked forever. On the other hand and more seriously it is a study of Melancholy and its uses in literary and artistic creation. This positive side of the work seems to me a much more persuasive than the attack on the Happiness Industry. My own sense is that there is so much suffering and pain in the world, and that each human being at some point or perhaps throughout their lives has so much of it, that it doesn't make much sense to attack those who are trying to alleviate that suffering. Or to put this another way. I don't buy the figure which is cited that eighty- five percent of Americans consider themselves happy, unless that is we combine that with another figure that ninety- five percent of people lie at one time or another. In any case this is pretty much irrelevant to the heart of this book which again provides examples of the way the use and transformation of Melancholy create great Art and Literature. Wilson is not simplistically and stupidly advocating that people become depressed. He writes, "Depression (as I see it, at least) causes apathy in the face of this unease, lethargy approaching total paralysis, an inability to feel much of anything one way or another. In contrast, melancholia generates a deep feeling in regard to this same anxiety, a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing." Wilson writes beautifully in showing the way the great poet of Melancholy Keats was also a person of tremendous courage in contending with the very many losses and trials he had in his brief life. As Wilson understands it Melancholy leads us to struggle with the polarities and complexities of Existence. He speaks about how it moves us toward striving towards perfection, using our freedom in a fragmented reality to move towards greater connection and wholeness. He is of course not alone in seeing how the darker side of our heart and mind has moved us to great literature. Kay Redfield Jamison one of the world's foremost experts on Manic -Depression has written on this subject. The great Art-Historian Rudolf Wittkauer studied the Saturnic dimensions of Creation. The writer Amos Oz often says that almost all great Literature comes out of suffering, of difficulty. I do not buy the 'Against Happiness' straw- man part of this book as I do not believe the the world is in danger of being overcome by universal happiness. The studies in fact show that Americans are not on the whole more happy today than they were half a century ago. But the literary analysis here is outstanding, and this is the real beauty and value of the book.
In this wise (and at times irritating) little book, Eric Wilson asks readers to reflect on three things: first, that all of us read our experiences through a filter of abstractions and preconceptions that mold reality into what we want it to be; second, that the American consumerist, instant-gratification culture encourages us to fashion filters that breed a bovine contentment by devaluing anything that smacks of sadness and ignoring the darker, untamed aspects of human existence; and third, that our cultural obsession with certainty, clear classifications, and airtight definitions may be a sign of repressed anxiety.
Wilson argues that "melancholy," or a restless dissatisfaction with the status quo, serves as a check on our tendency to personal and social self-deception. Moreover, it weans us of our need for certainty by encouraging us to explore the "dark boundaries between opposites" (p. 73), thereby inviting "a vision of a healing third term" (p. 76) which embraces rather than denies ambiguity and discordance. The melancholic mood accommodates insight into the fact that the world isn't fixed, that beauty and all good things in life are possible only because they and we are transient, and that a human being is homo viator, a pilgrim open to possibilities because refusing to embrace false certainties. This "ironic" orientation to the world acknowledges the anxiety that impermanence and uncertainty bring, but also recognizes that the anxiety can go hand in hand with a sense of imaginative playfulness and profound gratitude.
Wilson insists that he's not trying to trivialize clinical depression or genuine joy. His concern is to counter what he describes as the "soul-deadening" cult of faux-happiness that breeds narcissism, an arrogant sense of control and entitlement, and a frightened blindness to the rich depths of experience. Most of us have the intuition that an honest recognition of suffering and despair is a necessary condition for living fully. Wilson's book explores this intuition with sensitivity and erudition. He adroitly illustrates his defense of melancholic restlessness by appeals to classical (Blake, Keats, Schiller, & Ficino) as well as popular culture (John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Joni Mitchell, & Bruce Springsteen)
This isn't to say that the book doesn't have its weaknesses. Wilson's style at times becomes pompously oracular. He favors repetitious short sentences that often obfuscate more than reveal, and he lapses occasionally into tedious Emersonisms: "Plumb down into your interiors. There find the sullen ruler of the underworld. On his face is an ambiguous grimace. It is possibly a clinched product of the somber dark. But it is more likely a squinting before the amber glow growing before his eyes" (p. 106). This sort of prose isn't helpful.
Moreover (again, rather like Emerson), Wilson overgeneralizes sometimes--as in his distinction between "happy" and "sad" people--and is frustratingly vague at still others--his discussion of polarities in the chapter on "Generative Melancholia" is especially unclear, falling into the very abstractionism he thinks melancholy cures.
But all in all, Wilson raises issues that need to be thought and talked about. There is value, wisdom, and insight to be found in insecurity and the melancholic restlessness that attunes us to insecurity. A hard thing to hear, perhaps, but a necessary one.
After hearing an interview with this authour on NPR, I couldn't wait to read this book. Finally someone was talking about that big pink elephant in the room-America is obsessed with happiness and we'll do anything not to feel unhappy. There was an 800 percent increase in the use of anti-depressants in the US in four years.
Personally, I'm sick and tired of the happiness industry, so this book found the right audience. Against Happiness explores what's wrong with the happiness industry as well as what's right with feeling down. Wilson argues that melancholy does have it's use in life, particularly a life of literary and artistic creation.
Wilson does not advocate becoming depressed or suicidal to be creative. He writes, "Depression causes apathy in the face of this unease, lethargy approaching total paralysis, an inability to feel much of anything one way or another." On the other hand Wilson argues that melancholy generates "a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing." In other words, hang on to your melancholy and listen to it. It's an important tool for development.
Wilson illustrates his theories with the lives and writings of authours like Keats and Blake. His literary analysis is very good and one of the outstanding features of this book.
