Melancholia=Muse?

Here's the pull quote from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

"We’re in danger of losing a major cultural force, the muse behind much art, poetry, and music. We are blithely getting rid of melancholia..."

Nothing new about this warning; we've heard it all before. Anytime it looks like people in the Western world are finding new ways to actually be happy, critics start lining up to tell us why it's a bad idea. This suspicion of happiness has a long backstory. For much of European history, happiness was a non-issue. Humans weren't the center of the universe, nor were they the appropriate focus of intellectual or artistic contemplation. We were too low on the food chain in the Great Chain of Being. It was all about the divine. Original Sinny and all, we were products of a notorious Fall that pretty much sealed our fate.

Enter the Enlightenment, and humanity takes center stage. Now we're asking questions about epistemology, moral development, social life, and our place in the "natural order." (No, God's not gone, but that's another story). Meanwhile, global exploration kicks into high gear. While Hume and Locke are philosophizing in their dens, sailors, explorers and missionaries are encountering new worlds from the South Pacific to the arctic and beyond. Travelogues written by these erstwhile ethnographers are bestsellers. People can't get enough of them. Why?

Simply this: they offered a vision of - yes - happiness. What a shock for the guilt-ridden, self-punishing Europeans to see an alternative to the daily, dirty, relentless grind of labor, of conflict and class division, of scarce resources and fierce competition, of stern gods and abject sinners. Of course, the worlds they encountered weren't perfect, egalitarian paradises; but they were different enough to suggest to the travelers that misery wasn't universal, and therefore might not be inevitable - that happiness might be attainable in this life, and not simply the next.

Well, suffice it to say that happiness gained a few champions, but misery had a whole bunch of defenders. You can read the entire history of intellectual thought from the Enlightenment to today through this lens: can we, and do we deserve to be happy? For example, Freud sees misery as a psychic inevitability; Marx sees misery as a consequence of capitalism and the alienation of labor (presumably, happiness is possible in an alternative socio-economic system).

So what does any of this have to do with melancholia as muse?

It's part of the same debate. Misery's defenders tend to present said misery as not just inevitable, but necessary. Thus, Freud sees thought - as well as artistic production, indeed, all the treasures of civilization - as the product of want. All our unfulfilled desire (unfulfillable, remember; we can't, after all, go back to the womb) gets redirected, sublimated, into creative expression. We create things - poetry, novels, the Taj Mahal - because we're miserable. Happiness's champions (Schachtel, e.g.) have dared to suggest that we create art despite our misery, or only when we are free enough from need to be able to view the world as something other than an extension of ourselves and our needs.

Oh, I could go on and on. The association of melancholia with muse just pushes my buttons. I think when miserable people write beautiful poems or make brilliant films, it's because they've transcended or bypassed the misery somehow. It's a hopeful step, isn't it, to put words or images on paper. Guess that places me on the side of happiness.