hutchinson review_the art of melancholy

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The art of melancholyMARK HUTCHINSON

MLANCOLIEGnie et folie en OccidentGaleries Nationales du Grand Palaisuntil January 16

Jean Clair, editorMLANCOLIE Gnie et folie en Occident504pp. ditions de la Runion desMuses Nationaux/Gallimard. 59euros.2 07 0111831 2

Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz SaxlSATURNE ET LA MLANCOLIE738pp. Paris: Gallimard. 79euros.2 07 071566 3

Hlne PrigentMLANCOLIELes mtamorphoses de la dpression160pp. Gallimard. 13.90euros.2 07 0305996

Among the nearly 300 works on show in Mlancolie: Gnie et folie enOccident, the complex and hugely ambitious exhibition currentlyrunning at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris, is a copyof Robert Burtons miscellaneous masterpiece, The Anatomy ofMelancholy. Littered with Bible quotations, Latin tags and allusions toeverything from Chinese jugglers to the diversity of meteors, thispromiscuous leviathan of a book is a good example of the dangersthat lie in store for the student of melancholy. Originally designed as amedical treatise, it had grown, by the time Burton had seen it throughits fifth and final edition, to half a million words and touched onvirtually everything under the sun: literature, religion, philosophy,climatology, cosmography, folklore, politics, love, social reform.Burton even gives us a blueprint for Utopia. There is, it seems, noarea of human activity that is not, in some shape or form, subject tothe baneful influence of black bile, no nook or cranny of the mind intowhich this roving humour has not insinuated itself. It is inbred inevery one of us, an infirmity of body and soul that dogs our everystep.

Burtons genial masterpiece is also a good illustration of one of themore puzzling features of melancholy. That reclusive clergyman mayhave lived and died in melancholy, as his epitaph in Christ Churchsays, but, paradoxically, this doesnt seem to have hampered hisgenius in any way. On the contrary, we may find ourselves wonderingwhether the good-natured gusto with which he gives himself up to histask, the ferment apparent on every page, isnt connected in some


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mysterious way with the very nature of his theme.

This fundamental ambivalence is what the Paris exhibition sets out toexplore. That a condition which we would today class as an acuteform of depression might, under certain conditions, not merely have aconstructive role to play in the life of the mind, but be the main drivingforce behind creative inspiration, is an idea that first gainedwidespread currency in the Renaissance and was to have profoundimplications for the development of every aspect literature, painting,science, medicine, technology of intellectual life in the West.

To understand how this revolutionary transformation came about, weneed to turn to a book long out of print in English, but reissued inFrench to coincide with the exhibition in which three distinguishedscholars, Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, set outto examine the subject, and from which all subsequentinterpretations, including many of the essays in the exhibitions bulkycatalogue, take their cue. According to the authors of Saturne et lamlancolie, this reappraisal of the notion of melancholy was firsteffected very early on in the history of medicine, sometime in thefourth century bc when the doctrine of the Four Humours recentlyformulated by Hippocrates came under the influence of the portrayalsof madness in Greek tragedy and the Platonic notion of divinefrenzy. The text in which this new conception of melancholy isintroduced for the first time is known as Problem XXX, I, and isreproduced, along with a detailed commentary, at the beginning oftheir book; attributed by the Greeks to Aristotle, it is probably, we aretold, the work of Theophrastus.

The question posed by Problem XXX, I is in the opening sentence:Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy orpolitics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics . . . ?. By way ofexample, the text cites not only tragic heroes such as Herakcules,Bellerophon and Ajax, but philosophers (Empedocles, Plato andSocrates) and almost everyone in the realm of poetry. For theauthor of Problem XXX, I, that is, the sufferings of the philosopherand the frenzy that led Ajax to slay a flock of sheep in the belief thathe was actually slaying his enemies can alike be attributed to theinfluence of black bile. What makes this text so important, Klibanskyand his colleagues argue, is that in distinguishing betweenmelancholy as a sickness, or medical pathology, and melancholy as adisposition characteristic of the outstanding individual, it opens theway not only for the transformation of an essentially pathologicaltaxonomy (the classical doctrine of the Four Humours) into apsychological one (the medieval theory of the Four Temperaments),but also for the Renaissance rehabilitation of melancholy that was toprove so influential in so many spheres.

There was nothing inevitable about this. Tucked away in a relativelyminor text from the Aristotelian corpus, the new conception ofmelancholy could easily have passed unnoticed, and, according tothese authors, this is precisely what happened. For 1,200 years, theidea of the gifted melancholic was forgotten, and it wasnt until themedieval schoolmen began their rehabilitation of Aristotle that anyattempt was made to integrate the ideas set out in the Problems witha Western perspective. Even then, they tell us, what references therewere to the Problems were little more than scholarly allusions, with noserious bearing on science or philosophy. It was only when thehumanists of the Quattrocento turned their attentions to his work thatthe decisive shift occurred,due largely to the efforts of one man, thegreat Italian philosopher and scholar, father of Renaissance Platonism, Marsilio Ficino.

In De vita triplici (1489), the first book to treat of melancholy at anylength, Ficino not only rehabilitated the Aristotelian notion of thegifted melancholic, but expressly tied it in with the Platonic notion ofdivine frenzy, thereby laying the intellectual foundations for a newtype of man, the homo literatus or tortured genius, pitched back and


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forth between the heights of rapture and the depths of despair. Thebook, Klibansky tells us, is a marvel of its kind, elegantly binding inhermeticism and Neoplatonism with classical and Christian themes,and offsetting the negative influence exercised by Saturn/Kronos inmedieval astronomy against the healing power of Jove/Jupiter. Thebook was hugely influential throughout Europe, particularly insixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and without it therewould probably have been no Burton, no Il Penseroso, no Ode toMelancholy, and, very likely, no Doctor Faustus either.

For the visitor to the exhibition, it is important to know something ofthe scholarly background, for while some of the works on show Goyas Saturn Devouring His Son, say, or Rodins Thinker canbe taken at face value, so to speak, there are many whoseconnection with melancholy is by no means evident. This is true notonly of the early part of the exhibition, which follows closely theiconographic scheme outlined in Saturne et la mlancolie (the firstroom contains a series of works made between the sixth and thefourth century bc, including a black-figure amphora of Ajax PreparingHis Suicide and a red-figure one of Medea Slaying Her Child, thenleads straight on into the late Middle Ages), but true also of some ofthe later sections as well, which carry on the work begun by Panofskyand his colleagues whose book basically stops with DrersMelencolia I down to the present day. The English-speaking visitoris at something of a disadvantage here, for, though the exhibition isimpeccably laid out, it is the kind of show that can only be fullyunderstood by sitting down and reading the catalogue edited by JeanClair. If you want to know what Antoine Chintreuils luminous littleSilver Birch is doing in a show on melancholy, or how DavidNebredas horrific self-portrait photographs fit into the overallargument, you will need to consult the catalogue; which,unfortunately, is only available in French and German (the exhibitionwill be going on to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in February2006).The key exhibit in the early part of the exhibition is, of course, DrersMelencolia I, and the various works on show to either side of itchronologically from Grard de Saint-Jeans St John the Baptist inthe Wilderness (c148085) to Cranach the Elders 1532 version ofMelancholy all bear in one form or other on the dilemma whichfirst finds expression there. Drers engraving is not simply the firstgreat representation of melancholy, the first in which it takes on a lifeof its own, but the work on which the whole argument of Saturne et lamlancolie and, by extension, the exhibition turns.

The picture is at once immediately legible and deeply ambiguous.Seated on a step outside a narrow building with a ladder leaningagainst it is a winged angel. Her right arm rests on a book in her lap,the hand holding a compass; her left hand supports her head.Hanging from the belt of her long, rumpled skirt is a set of keys and apurse. Seated on a millstone to her right is a plump little putto bentstudiously over a slate, and, curled up asleep next to the millstone, ascrawny-looking dog. Strewn about the ground are a variety of toolsand instruments a self-feeding furnace, or athanor, a polyhedronwith a hammer lying beside it, a sphere, a set square, a pair ofpincers, a plane, a handsaw, a ruler, three nails, and some sort ofsyringe. Fixed to the wall of the building are a set of scales, their pansexactly balanced, an hourglass with equal amounts of sand in eachbulb, a bell at rest, and a magic square composed of sixteen smallersquares, each inscribed with a number so that whichever way youread the numbers (vertically, horizontally, diagonally) they always addup to thirty-four. In the background is a stretch of coastlineoverlooking an alarmingly calm lake or sea, and in the sky a comet, arainbow and a batlike figure brandishing a streamer with theinscription Melencolia I. The scene is steeped in a lugubrious greytwilight.

What makes Drers picture so enigmatic is precisely thissuperabundance of objects: it is overdetermined has too many


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clues and signposts pointing in similar but not quite identicaldirections. What do the comet and the rainbow signify? Why does theladder appear to change plane halfway up? Why are there threenails, one with a double tine? Are they an allusion to the Crucifixion?(Jean Clair thinks they are.) After reviewing in great detail the positiveand negative associations of the various symbols and motifs (thepurse, the keys and the clenched fist, for example, are all associatedwith avarice, one of the vices attributed to melancholy in the medievalperiod; the crown of watercress and waterparsley around the angelsbrow are an antidote to the dry humour of the melancholic; the magicsquare is designed to invoke the healing influence of Jupiter, and soon), Panofsky concludes that Drers angel is a personification ofGeometry overcome with Melancholy (or Melancholy giving herself upto Geometry) and was in all likelihood inspired by a follower of Ficino,the German philosopher Agrippa devon Nettesheim, whose book, DeOcculta Philosophia, draws heavily on the Italians work, and a draftof which was sent to Drers friend Johannes Trithemius, in 1510, justfour years before the engraving was made.

Panofskys argument is persuasive, not least because it affords anexplanation for one of the many riddles posed by the engraving: thenumber attached to the title. In De Occulta Philosophia, Agrippadistinguishes three kinds of melancholy: melancholia imaginationis,melancholia rationis and melancholia mentis, arranged in anascending hierarchy. The first holds sway over the untutored, acategory that includes architects and painters; the second, overphilosophers, physicians and orators; the third, over contemplativesto whom Gods mysteries have been revealed. Panofsky concludesfrom this, not unreasonably, that Drers angel is a portrayal of thefirst of these, melancholia imaginationis, surrounded by herinstruments but sunk in gloom at the thought of having accomplishednothing.

This is not the only way of reading the picture, of course, and inMlancolie: Les mtamorphoses de la dpression, the author HlnePrigent shrewdly observes that Drer could very well have includedobjects associated with melancholia rationis (books, instruments forweighing and measuring) to indicate the direction in which the firststage of melancholy was moving. This is perfectly plausible, since notonly are the rainbow and the comet associated with both categories inAgrippas system, but the system itself, unlike Ficinos, was fluid, notfixed, with the individual soul free to move up or down the hierarchy.In the catalogue, the curator of the German leg of the exhibition,Peter-Klaus Schuster, also takes issue with Panofskys interpretation,arguing that Drers angel is an allegory, not of geometry but ofastronomy, a noble art, and cannot possibly be taken as a symbol ofFaust-like despair. Schuster then proposes a reading of his own,based on a division of the picture into two halves, the right sideembodying virt, the left side fortuna. I happen to find hisinterpretation unconvincing, in part because it involves seeing thesphere as a symbol of instability and the figure I in the title as asymbol of divine unity. There is nothing to prevent us putting a morepositive gloss on the picture, however. As Schuster points out, Burtonthought Drers sad angel . . . judicious, wise and witty, and AbyWarburg saw her as Melancholy triumphing over the madness thatthreatens to engulf her. Nor, we should remember, was Drer himselfgiven to romanticizing melancholy: among the guidelines he sets outfor the young apprentice in his Outline of a General Treatise onPainting we find, Sixth, if the child works too hard, wherebymelancholy might superabound in him, that he be drawn awaytherefrom by merry lute-play to the pleasuring of his blood.

In a sense, the precise interpretation we put on the picture is notimportant. What matters is the intimate bond it establishes betweenthe rational imagination and the black waters of despair. As JeanClair remarks a little further on in the catalogue, Melencolia I marksthat fleeting and remarkable moment in the history of western thoughtwhen the artist believes he has become a polymath, an engineer, a


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geometer, a botanist and a physician, capable of taking theknowledge and measure of all things, numero et pondere, even as hediscovers, with a start, that no mathesis universalis can re-order andgather together the disjecta membra of the real. And it is this outlookor belief, Clair suggests, that lays the foundations for the growth ofscience and, ultimately, for the domination of the world by technology. This is an intriguing thesis, and one that, because it touches on somany different fields, the works on show can only go so far towardsillustrating. Even with the aid of wall texts, there is a limit to how mucha painting or sculpture can be made to say. Both the Mlancolieexhibition and the catalogue grapple with this problem, not alwayssuccessfully, and the solution they adopt is a mixed one, particonographic, part chronological. Broadly speaking, the shiftingattitudes to melancholy are treated century by century, but within thatscheme, works from a different period may be interpolated to point upechoes or affinities. The section on the late Middle Ages, for example,also includes one of Max Ernsts most powerful and disturbingpaintings, the large, flying version of The Angel of the Hearth, inwhich the somewhat pantomime-like monster of the smaller canvas(mistakenly reproduced in its stead in the catalogue) has beenreplaced by a truly hideous and altogether more ominous-lookingangel, part bat, part witch, lurching menacingly towards the viewerover a deserted landscape. The reason it has been placed there isnot only for the echoes it contains of various late medieval paintingsof the Temptation of St Anthony (one of the themes explored in thesection), but, as Werner Spies remarkssays in the catalogue, for thehistorical pessimism it implies: as though, with the horrors of thetwentieth century, the West had finally come full circle. Painted in1937 after the defeat of the Spanish Republicans, it was almostcertainly inspired by Guernica and, impressively, bears comparisonwith Picassos famous icon.

Achronological juxtapositions of this kind can be found all through theexhibition. Picassos Deaths Head, for example, modelled duringthe Occupation, appears among a group of grislyseventeenth-century works on the theme of vanitas, whileGiacomettis so-called Cube a twelve-sided polyhedron madeafter visiting a Drer exhibition in Paris in 1937 has been installed inthe middle of the exhibitionsMlancolies cabinet of curiosities, aroom given over to the instruments and emblems of seventeenth- andeighteenth-century science. The objects and works in this room which include a planispheric astrolabe, a gilded bronze heavenlyglobe, a bats skeleton, a unicorns horn (that is, a narwhals tusk)and an anonymous, sixteenth-century copy of a Drer watercolour ofblue columbine are particularly well chosen, and all, of course, arelinked in one way or another to the theme of the exhibition: unicornshorn, for instance, was widely believed to be a remedy formelancholy, and blue columbine had been associated with theaffliction ever since the fifteenth century.

The main iconographic thread running through the show is theposture of Drers angel, with the head propped disconsolately on thehand. Drer didnt invent the pose, of course: there is a Romanbronze of Ajax in much the same attitude in the very first room, andtwo of the most beautiful examples in the entire exhibition Nicolasde Leydes Bust of a Man Leaning on an Elbow and anastonishingly vivid polychrome wood carving with the same title by ananonymous matre Strasbourgeois predate Drers engraving byseveral decades. What Drer did do, on the other hand, is identify thepose so closely with melancholy that it became a code. There aremany examples of this on display, some more memorable thanothers; among the more striking ones, I would include DomenicoFettis Melancholy, a Double Portrait attributed to Giorgione,Georges de la Tours Madeleine at the Candle, a very beautifulCorot(Melancholy) and Ron Muecks hugely imposing Big Man, slumpedin a corner in the final room.


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There are also moments when the connection with melancholy seems a touch strained. This is particularly true of the small room on music. Designed to illustrate the therapeutic powers ascribed to music ever since antiquity, this is probably the weakest room in the exhibition. Among the works in this section are a seriesof seventeenth-century paintings of David playing for Saul, Valentinde Boulognes Caravaggesque Musicians and Soldiers and FernandKhnopffs Listening to Schumann, painted in 1883. The Khnopffcanvas likewise seems a little far-fetched. The woman at the centre ofthe composition, who is listening to a figure playing the piano in thebackground, is indeed resting her head on her hand, but the pose isslightly different from the one we associate with melancholy; it issimply the posture that many music-lovers adopt in order to shut outvisual interference. True, shes listening to Schumann and is wearingblack, but the mood of the picture, the palette of which is dominatedby warm reds and golds, has nothing conspicuously gloomy about it.As for the positioning of the hand, it is one in a series of devicesdesigned, in true Symbolist fashion, to conjure up a synaestheticeffect. Like the cropping of the pianist, of whom we see only a handon the keyboard, and the uniformly soft-focus texture of the picture,the screening of the listeners face from view tones down our ownvisual response and thereby helps suggest the experience of listeningto music. As for Musicians and Soldiers, it is without question a verybeautiful painting, but Im not sure it has much to do with melancholy.If the catalogue entry is to be believed, the connection is borne out bya second painting, Fortune Teller with a Drinker, a Lute Player and aPick-pocket, probably conceived as a pendant to the present work;but since the painting is not included in the exhibition, we are nonethe wiser.

If music played such an important role insixteenth- and seventeenth-century life, it is partly, no doubt, becausethe cataclysm that looms on the horizon of Drers engraving hasnow occurred. For all its feverish activity and empire-building, that is,the period is one of intense anxiety and gloom, as so many of theworks in this section bear out. The medieval world-view that Drersangel had hoped to reconcile with the new humanist learning isfading, and the heavens are slowly being dismantled. The gentlescholar embodied in Drers portrait of St Jerome, meanwhile, isgiving way to a rather more shadowy figure. The shift here, Clairargues, is decisive: when Marlowes Faustus, greedy to increase histreasure, asks Mephistopheles to fly to India for gold [and] ransackthe ocean for Orient pearls, he is behaving much like so manyprinces and monarchs of that time (Francesco de Medici in Italy,Philip II in Spain, Rudolph II in Prague, among them) who, if theywere unable to dominate the universe, could at least reproduce thevariety of the world in miniature in their palaces and halls. Collectingcan itself be considered a melancholy pursuit, since it is part of thelogic of a collection that it can never be complete. But when Faustusstarts wanting to experiment with and transform the materials in hisworkshop, he converts the scholars study into an alchemists forge,and, in so doing, marks the turn from a theological age to onegoverned by technology. In Adriaen Mathens drawing of Dr Faustusin His Study, both the scholars posture and the plethora ofinstruments, we notice, are reminiscent of Drers Melencolia I;there is an important difference, however, for it is no longer thescholar who is winged, but the horned figure of Mephistopheles in thebackground.

By the time we reach the eighteenth century, the divorce betweenmelancholy and the imagination is all but complete. Neither thephilosophers of the Enlightenment, nor their Revolutionarycounterparts, had much time, it seems, for the English malady, as itwas called. As Prigent remarks, neither of the Encyclopdies articleson the imagination so much as mentions it, while Diderot, in a shortarticle on the subject, describes melancholy as a kind of spiritualexercise designed to shelter the soul from the more violent passions.This, as Guillaume Faroult explains in the catalogue, is la douce


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mlancolie of the age of Watteau, whose TheTwo Cousins is one ofa small handful of works (Joseph Marie Vien the elders La DouceMlancolie, a few etchings by Piranesi) on show from that period.Only towards the very end of the century, when the FrenchRevolution begins devouring its own children, does the black sun ofmelancholy once more start to rise. In an essay on terror andmelancholy in the Salon of 1801, Stphane Gugan argues that thisrenewed interest in the subject on the part of Constance Charpentier,Franois Andr Vincent and Jean-Antoine Gros (the three artistsrepresented in this part of the exhibition) should not be seen merelyas a response to the fall of Robespierre: like the Enlightenmentmovement of which it was part, neoclassicism, he argues, had alwayshad two faces, and Davids The Lictors Bringing Home to Brutus theBodies of His Sons is as prescient of the Terror as it is of the fall ofthe ancien rgime.

As one would expect, the Romantic movement, in redrawing theboundaries of the sacred and the profane and rejecting what Audencalled the mechanized desert of the city, is particularly rich in worksrelating to melancholy. If there is a bridge figure here, it isprobably Goya, who has no fewer than eight works on display:Saturn Devouring His Son, Self-Portrait, Self-Portrait withSpectacles, Cannibals Preparing Their Victims, Capricho 43: TheSleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters , Gaspar de Jovellanos,Time or the Old Ones and what is arguably the single mostdistressing painting in the entire show, Yard with Lunatics. The linkbetween imagination and madness is also touched on briefly inpaintings by Fuseli (Self-Portrait, Ezzelin and Meduna, Portrait ofJohn Cartwright, Silence), Blake (Nabuchodonosor) andVictor Hugo (Planet (Saturn)). The bulk of the works in this section,however, are concerned with the revolution in mans attitude toNature and are organized around two broad themes: landscape andthe sublime (le paysage comme tat dme) and the melancholy ofruins. Among the most striking works in the first group (one or two ofwhich, like the silver birch mentioned earlier, seem to stretch a point)are a series of landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich, Moon Risingover the Sea, Monk by the Sea and the astonishingsepia-and-pencil desolation of View of Arcona withRising Moon; in the second group, Hubert Roberts Ruined Templeand Arnold Bcklins The Island of the Dead and Villa by the Sea.Both themes, of course, contain echoes of the Middle Ages, for, muchas the medieval hermit withdrew to the desert for purgation, only tofall prey there to the temptations of demons, so the solitary Romanticturns to nature for spiritual replenishment, only to be beset by visionsof an infinite and possibly indifferent universe. As for the Romanticfascination with ruins, it can ultimately be traced back, Clair argues,to a melancholy medieval tradition of Apocalypse.

And an apocalypse, as the exhibition sees it, is pretty much what the twentieth century amounts to. Lest the visitor have any doubts that he is entering a madhouse, it is brought home to him by two grim, reclining figures between which he must pass on his way intothe final rooms: Caius Gabriel Cibbers seventeenth-century carvingsof Melancholy Madness and Raving Madness, which originallyflanked the gates to Bedlam. The reason they have been placedthere is bound up with one of the most sinister chapters in the historyof medicine: the introduction, sometime around the middle of thenineteenth century, of the notion of decadence or degeneration.As the neurologist Laura Bossi explains, in an essay tracing thehistory of this peculiarly toxic notion, its dissemination was largely thework of three men: the psychiatrist Bndict Auguste Morel, thecriminologist Cesare Lombroso and the writer Max Nordau. How theirideas played out when taken up by the Nazis, in conjunction with thesister science of eugenics, is too familiar to need rehearsing here.Not the least alarming aspect of this whole dark chapter, Clair argues,is that it reverses the process carried out in the Renaissance: wherethe Neoplatonist philosophers had seen in the spirirtual torments ofthe children of Saturn the seeds of genius, for Lombroso and


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company the imaginative powers of Baudelaire, for example (severalof whose self-portraits are included here), mark him out as, quiteliterally, a madman. Baudelaire, the criminologist writes, strikes usas the true type of lunatic possessed by the manie des grandeurs:provocative appearance, defiant gaze, extreme self-satisfaction andso on. And it cuts both ways, of course: if there was no real place forthe outstanding intellect in the new orders of twentieth-centurytotalitarianism, only for petit-bourgeois thinking and neo-Imperialkitsch, there was no place for the children of Saturn either, theGypsies and the Jews, the misfits and the maladjusted, the elderlyand the infirm, who were among the earliest targets of the new Reich.There is a very real and depressing sense in which the barbarities ofthe twentieth century marked, not so much a return to as an actingout of the most horrific visions of the Middle Ages.

As anyone who has read his books will know, this murky confluenceof clinical psychiatry, totalitarian ideology and art is classic Jean Clairterritory, and everything in the modern section is designed to throwlight on it: from Van Goghs Portrait of Dr Paul Gachet and somedistinctly eerie plates from the French edition of Darwins TheExpression of the Emotions in Man and Animals to Mario SeronisSeated Woman and Landscape: Melancholy and Antonin Artaudsportraits and drawings, and on down to Anselm KiefersMelencholia, a fighter plane made of lead that looks as though ithad been cobbled together in a madmans garage in a grim tribute,not only to Drer but to the dead weight of Germanys Nazi past. Imight also add that the eight essays Clair has contributed to thecatalogue form the best introduction to the show, which, as I havetried to suggest, could be said to reverse the usual relation betweenexhibition and catalogue.

There is one last question this complex exhibition raises, and it is animportant one: have we, or have we not, put behind us the poisonousconfusion fostered by Lombroso et al? Judging by some of the works(Artaud, David Nebrada) in the final rooms, the answer is Yes andNo. No, because it wasnt all that long ago that Gilles Deleuze andFelix Guattari, whose appalling co-opting of mental suffering topolitical ends in LAnti-Oedipe has long been an object of Clairswrath, were holding up Artaud as the fulfilment of literature andcomparing the grandeur of the revolutionary schizophrenic with thedestitution of the reactionary paranoiac. Artaud, as Jean Clairsuggests, may well have suffered, like the artist DavidNebrada, froma condition known as Cotards syndrome or negation delirium, inwhich the patient believes he has no bodily organs and, in extremecases, no body at all, and consequently that he is either immortal oralready dead. Eugenics, too, is still with us in the form of biogeneticengineering. And Yes, because in the far corner of the last room isRon Muecks great golem of a man who, whatever else may be saidof him, has looked melancholy clearly in the face. And the effect isexhilarating.

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hutchinson review_the art of melancholy

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