Customer Reviews

The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects

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I found Schwenger's model of melancholy, locating it in the tensile space between self and other, drawing on Freud and Lacan, to be utterly compelling and persuasive. I am an author who is writing academically for the first time about creating and I was very moved and inspired by this beautifully written, approachable book. From a personal point of view, being very interested in childhood poetics, I would have loved to have seen more attention paid to toys and Winnicott's concept of the transitional object in terms of melancholia, but I understand there are always limitations in any work. I do love the way Schwenger writes - it's a dream narrative in its own right.

In his book-length essay with elements of philosophy, art criticism, and literary critique, Schwenger ruminates on the incompleteness of perception, "always falling short of full possession [as comprehension or understanding], giving rise to a melancholy that is felt by the subject and is ultimately for [italics in original] the subject." The author--a professor of English at Mount St. Vincent U. in Canada--detects the limits of the connection with things in a world of physical objects, including an individual's own body; which limits inevitably give rise to feeling of melancholy and loneliness. Art works of Georgia O'Keeffe and Rene Magritte, writings of Borges and Virginia Woolf, and sculpture by Duchamp and Louise Bourgeois are among the many and varied art by recognized modern artists the author brings in for his illumination of this mood of melancholy which is ordinarily faint in the hustle and bustle of daily life and its simple, practical relationship with things. One appreciates the author's unapologetic use of psychology in this sensitive movement in this central, yet for the most part unrealized feature of human existence. The psychology brings an illumination and reach to the subject which semantics, semiology, aesthetics, and the study of "material culture" cannot with their formalistic, postmodernist methods and styles. Schwenger finds in the end that although it is bound in with anxieties over "real and metaphysical death," since it is essentially a desire refusing "to conclude...always impelled past conclusion," melancholy is a part of the life force.

As an artist contemplating making more stuff in a world full of stuff this book is excellent at looking at how we relate to objects. Very useful.