Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "IN THE WINTER of 1620 William Bradford's battered and scarred shipcalled, perhaps too hopefully, the Mayflowerhit land at Cape Cod..." (more)
Key Phrases: happy types, against happiness, melancholy irony, The American Dream, Terrible Beauty, John Lennon (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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 relentlessly seek happiness in a world full of tragedy. While he does not want to romanticize clinical depression, Wilson argues forcefully that melancholia is a necessary ingredient of any culture that wishes to be innovative or inventive. In particular, we need melancholy if we want to make true, beautiful art. Though others have written on the possible connections between creativity and melancholy, Wilson's meditations about artists ranging from Melville to John Lennon are stirring. Wilson calls for Americans to recognize and embrace melancholia, and he praises as bold radicals those who already live with the truth of melancholy. Wilson's somewhat affected writing style is at times distracting: his prose is quirky, and he tends toward alliteration (To be a patriot is to be peppy a person seeking slick comfort in this mysteriously mottled world). Still, beneath the rococo wordsmithing lies provocative cultural analysis. (Feb.)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Louis Bayard

If only we'd listened to John Locke. In his Second Treatise of Government, he declared that human beings were entitled only to "life, liberty and" -- get ready -- "estate." As in property. Leave it to Mr. Jefferson of Virginia to change that last item in the trinity to "pursuit of happiness." What he neglected to tell us was that, 230 years later, we would still be pursuing it.

Make even a passing scan of today's bestseller lists, and you'll find a veritable happiness racket: titles urging us to start "Living Well" and "Become a Better You" and master "The Secret" and (my personal favorite) be "Happy for No Reason." Between all the Tony Robbinses and Rick Warrens and Deepak Chopras of the world, happiness is perhaps our last growth industry, and it even has a volunteer sales force. "Smile!" a stranger recently exhorted me on the street. "It can't be that bad." To which my only response was: "How do you know?"

Maybe it's all paying off, though. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, nearly 85 percent of us believe ourselves to be happy or very happy. All power, then, to Eric G. Wilson for writing a book with the refreshing title Against Happiness. Wilson, an English professor at Wake Forest University, is seriously bummed by the cultural landscape. "Everywhere I see advertisements offering even more happiness, happiness on land or by sea, in a car or under the stars. . . . It seems truly, perhaps more than ever before, an age of almost perfect contentment, a brave new world of persistent good fortune, joy without trouble, felicity with no penalty." This "overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness," he writes, produces only blandness, conformity, "a dystopia of flaccid grins" fueled by Lexapro and Paxil.

Melancholia, by contrast, is "the profane ground out of which springs the sacred." To prove his point, Wilson takes us on a private survey course, retreading the lonely paths of Beethoven and Coleridge and Rothko and even Bruce Springsteen and John Lennon and Joni Mitchell. In each case, he finds the same equation of melancholy and creation. "Our sadness," suggests Wilson, "is not aberrant or unseemly or weakness but instead a call to interior depths, to cauldrons out of which will bubble new solutions, crimson and sweet and unforgettable."

As you may have guessed, Wilson's idea of melancholia is thoroughly Romantic and more than a little romantic. He's the kind of guy who likes to wander through solitary landscapes, thinking sad and beautiful thoughts. Unfortunately, once he's refracted his thoughts through the prism of his prose, they sound pretty goofy: "What is existence if not an enduring polarity, an endless dance of limping dogs and lilting crocuses, starlings that are spangled and frustrated worms?"

Even laughter, I'm afraid, eventually falters beneath the weight of Wilson's inflated sentences. "I'm trying to imagine poems more beautiful than the quiet cruising of devious sharks and symphonies more sonorous than those songs of the aloof birds of summer. I'm attempting to concoct a cosmos out of chaos." He's also attempting to repeat every consonant he hears. The hard "c" is a particular favorite -- "the crepuscular continuum between clarity and clarity" -- but there's also "mulling over moons" and "solipsistic silos" and "bizarre breathings" and "grimaced grin." If you weren't depressed before you started reading, a sentence like "Invisible potencies would actualize in the palpable" might just do the trick.

Even these stylistic horrors wouldn't matter so much if there weren't, lying beneath them, an unseemly preening. Sadness, in Wilson's eyes, isn't just good philosophy, it's good living. Not for him the gated suburb. "We melancholy souls," he writes, "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. We also adore those ancient and lovely woodlands where we can walk alone and hear geese honking over the horizon." I see nothing here to distinguish melancholics from Martha Stewart.

What really exercises Wilson's glum aesthetic, though, is the prospect that antidepressants will one day "destroy dejection completely." Yeah, yeah, we've heard it all before: The pharmaceutical industry is turning us into blissed-out zombies. But have the folks behind this argument ever met the zombies in question? In my experience, people on antidepressants don't walk around in a cloud of Disney birds; they have simply hoisted themselves from a prone to a sitting position. And they are wise enough to know that no drug could possibly "eradicate depression forever." It's hard-wired into life, largely by virtue of death's inevitability.

Wilson at least has the good grace to quote Ecclesiastes, that skeptic in biblical clothing, whose thoughts on the subject are still unimprovable after 2,250 years. "Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. . . . All go to one place. All are from the dust, and all turn to dust again."

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (January 22, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374240663
• ISBN-13: 978-0374240660
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #327,015 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

75 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Muse- Melancholy , February 7, 2008

By	Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

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.

32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Resisting our craving for certainty, February 18, 2008

By	Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Talking About The Big Pink Elephant In The Room, February 26, 2008

By	SORE EYES (Boulder/Wellington) - See all my reviews

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.