A new book by Anne Cvetkovich, Depression, A Public Feeling (Duke University Press, £15.99), sets out to challenge “contemporary medical notions” of depression “that simultaneously relieve one of responsibility (it’s just genes or chemicals) and provide agency (you can fix it by taking a pill)”. Depression, she says, “can be seen as a category that manages and medicalises” the feelings associated with “keeping up with corporate culture and the market economy, or with being completely neglected by it”. A section in which Cvetkovich describes her own depression is followed by chapters that focus on contemporary artists and also on a number of writers, each of whom suffered from depression and writer’s block. In anatomising her “lived experience” of writer’s block, Cvetkovich invites the reader to ask whether, despite the trade-specific terminology, this is still a symptom exclusive to writers.
In a celebrated essay published in Harper’s magazine in 1996, Jonathan Franzen describes being “a local kid returning to St. Louis on a fancy book tour”. This was “obscurely disappointing” to him, but he said nothing, having “already realised that the money, the hype, the limo ride to a Vogue shoot weren’t simply fringe benefits. They were the main prize, the consolation for no longer mattering to the culture.” What kind of mattering would have been enough? (...)
Franzen’s “obscure disappointment” developed into what he called “depression”. He is a writer, so it got pretty intellectual and complicated. He describes his emergence from this state in terms of his writing, as “a move from depressive realism”, in which “you decide that it’s the world that’s sick”, to “tragic realism . . . the most reliable indicator [of which] in a work of fiction, is comedy”. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described aspects of infantile development that bear comparison with Franzen’s ordeal. In order for a baby to emerge from a primitive mental state, which Klein called “paranoid-schizoid”, he must acknowledge the separateness and the coexisting virtues and flaws of his mother. This new consciousness comes with grief but it also engenders compassion and art, and one of its reliable indicators is comedy. Once experienced, the paranoid-schizoid state is not forgotten, however; it is recalled in adult life through paranoia or any state that seeks to locate an unequivocal badness outside the self. There have always been experiences afforded by a writing life – the omnipotent fantasy at the desk, the horrors of the mixed reviews – that seem to invite this recollection.
But as a psychotherapist I see people with solicitor’s block and banker’s block and designer’s block and surgeon’s block – and the pain is the same pain in each case. The variation is in its intensity, the circumstances in which it is experienced and the vocabulary used to describe it. The degree to which the “block” gives rise to “depression” in writers, or non-writers, may depend on each individual’s adjustment to the impossibility of “mattering” in any way that obliterates the fact of death, the possibility that there is no God and the minuteness of the self in the grand scale of time. Existential fears, like the literary ones that give them a specific iteration, may be a grown-up way of recalling the first experience of powerlessness, of “not mattering” to a mummy busy with an independent life.
When asked to name what sort of training is required to become a writer, Hemingway is said to have replied “an unhappy childhood”. Could it be that people are all somehow becoming more like individuals who have, historically, become writers? Could our lives all somehow be offering experiences very like writers’ experiences? No matter how extraordinary the circumstances in which they experience their “not mattering”, writers are themselves extraordinary only in the sense that our maladjustment to ordinary vulnerabilities requires such extraordinary palliation – whole lives spent toiling away at not very lucrative works of art. Tolstoy eventually gave up writing because he felt it distracted him from the more important work of prayer. He was probably right but it is hard to be so generous to his private soul as to wish away his art, even though its production must have required him to realise – even after Anna Karenina – that he still didn’t matter enough and there would need to be another book.
Cvetkovich notes the universal vulnerabilities exacerbated by the specific crises of her academic life – getting tenure, writing papers, teaching, publication. This widescreen perspective makes room for her abstract idea that “depression emerges in response to the demand that the self become a sovereign individual defined by the ability to create distinctive projects and agendas”. The consequence of this “demand” is that “those who fail to measure up . . . are pathologised as depressed”. Sasha’s to-do list captures precisely this contemporary desperation to “create distinctive projects”, which, if you don’t write a book, require a personalised and personally demanding array of accomplishments. And alongside this need to prove oneself sits the related longing to achieve a meaningful role in an unfathomable, media-imparted sense of the world. Or, in Egan’s excruciating abbreviation, to “understand the news”.
by Talitha Stevenson, The New Statesman | Read more:
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