What's Depressing

Lisa Zunshine was asking the Narrative List about instances of narratives they find depressing, or reasons why they find them depressing.  I might have suggested Beckett (How It Is comes to mind) but I named Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes. Others gave other titles, such as Thomas Hardy's novels, Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, Kafka, King Lear, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment...  Here follow two interesting answers, and my second answer at the end.


Marshall Gregory:

Dear Professor Zunshine,

I think the question you posed below to the Narrative group is quite interesting, and I have been fascinated by the many responses to it, fascinated in part by how quickly the responses devolved into "like this" or "don't like this" evaluations of the sort we generally deplore from our undergraduates, and how few responses, if any, gave you the kinds of data that would help you answer your question of whether there is any general principle of psychological or ethical response to literary representations that would be predictably depressing, not just ad hoc depressing for this or that individual.

I also think it interesting that no one referred to Matthew Arnold's notion in "Preface to Poetry" that there is indeed a recognizable principle of depression. He is quite clear about the nature of the principle.

"What then are the situations from the representations of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them in poetry is painful also."

This sounds like a perfect account, to me, of why so many of your respondents find this literary representation, or another one, "depressing."

Of course, Arnold goes on to make a point about this issue that is primarily ethical, not psychological. The persistent ingestion of literary representations that are depressing in the sense that he defines, he says, is not good for us as moral and ethical agents in the world. It undermines our willingness to believe and act as if the things we believe and the things we do really matter. This kind of depression, a kind of depression that Arnold assumes we can "catch" from literature, like catching a cold, cheapens life and forestalls effective human effort.

I am interested in ethical criticism myself. I don't know if you have seen my 2009 book from the U. of Notre Dame P Shaped By Stories: The Ethical Power of Narratives in the context of which I don't give Arnold much credit for being a really good ethical critic, but it does seem to me that on this narrower psychological issue of which stories people find depressing (and especially on the issue of why,) Arnold is spot on.

Much later in the semester (in my Literary Criticism class), my students will be reading your "Why Do We Read Fiction?", so thank you for this fine piece. I'll attach my latest piece on ethical criticism that appeared last fall in The Journal of Literary Theory.



H. Porter Abbott:

A few more thoughts, Lisa. One is that we may be the wrong group to ask. We are as a group inclined and trained to move smoothly into the analytical mode, which is a way of displacing depression with 1) something interesting to occupy the mind (ftnt: a common characteristic of clinical depression is the way it sucks all the interest out of things) and 2) a sense of power over the text (re: Allison's comment on powerlessness).

Another is that I don't think you will get a thematic answer to your question -- witness the variety of responses so far, sometimes regarding the same text.

And finally, my hunch is that what counts is the success with which the narrative counterbalances its depressing content *for a particular reader.* I think something like this chemistry, as it works out in the mind of any particular reader, is what releases that reader from the depressing content. This counterbalancing can be affected by any number of things: management of the plot, the comparative grace of language, how the material is focalized, a sense of striking originality, catharsis. Depends on who you are and how you read/view. It depends even on how much counterbalancing you need. Some depressive types are half in love with sinking into a swamp of the irremediably, irredeemably depressing.

Whatever, this gets us away from personal votes (e.g., "This book really depresses me" -- "What? I found it wonderful!" etc.). So, in my own case, for one example, feel-good stories generally depress me. Why? Because they're not convincing. I don't buy the end of Crime and Punishment. On the other hand, Kafka's The Trial is a great treat, but because the irremediable/irredeemable is counterbalanced by a feeling of awe for the book's originality. Stewart O'Nan's Songs for the Missing takes the worst thing that can happen to a parent and for many his treatment performs the counterbalancing magic. Not for me. On the other hand, Laura Lippman's I'd Know You Anywhere devastates others but succeeds for me. The point here is not my votes on these texts, but what makes me, and those unlike me, vote in the different ways we do.


 J. A. García Landa:

Then there's the particular context or frame (interactional, critical) in which the text is being discussed or considered. Looking at a black canvas with a glimmer of light, some people will turn their attention to the predominant black, which is justifiable, while others will take that for granted (both as a matter of fact and as a point already made) and will inevitably point to the glimmering light as striking the most significant note in the picture. There's no way the issue can be completely de-contextualized, least of all in this kind of context, with theorists lurking behind the screens. There are a number of frameworks in anthropological criticism to describe what is "depressing" in general terms—from Northrop Frye's autumn and winter cycles to contemporary analyses of aesthetics from evolutionary and sociobiological viewpoints. But then the context varies, and the frame, and the frame is more important than the picture. If you're looking for the general anthropological structures, go by all means to Northrop Frye's demonic imagery, or Jung, or Gilbert Durand's Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary. But the modulation added by any particular response has to be studied in context, and it's individual by definition, not even the reader's but individual in the sense of the interactional event.



____




PS, on Samuel Beckett's pessimism, "The Dark Is in Reality My Most Precious Ally." http://www.superfluitiesredux.com/2011/12/13/the-dark-is-in-reality-my-most-precious-ally/



 

Teoría interaccionalista del significado