Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning by Sanja Bahun (review)

Melancholy’s protean character carries manifold levels of interest. There is melancholy’s inherent ambivalence, its first conceptualization already oscillating between being a pathological curse and a divine gift, and there is melancholy’s semantic vagueness, making it suited to stand for existential forms of sadness, social modes of behavior, and mood phenomena in feeling, or a blend of all three. The 1980s and 1990s saw a stunning proliferation of critical studies on mourning and melancholy from multiple angles: recall such formidable studies as Hans-Jürgen Schings’s Melancholie und Aufklärung (1977), Anselm Haverkamp’s Leaves of Mourning (trans. 1995), Ludger Heidbrink’s Melancholie und Moderne (1994), Anette Schwarz’s Melancholie: Figuren und Orte einer Stimmung (1996), or Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf’s Die Melancholie der Literatur (1997). In 2000, Slavoj Žižek provocatively discerned a new symbolic rule in the critical exaltation of melancholy as fidelity to loss over against the denigration of mourning as betrayal, yet it would also be possible to ask what the surge of interest may have had to do with the then reigning discussions of postmodernism. For Albrecht Wellmer, postmodernity was a modernity without mourning, whereas for Wolf Lepenies it was the end of utopia that signaled the return of melancholy, and both positions do not necessarily exclude one another.

Sanja Bahun’s original study seeks to explore new sociohistorical, aesthetic, and theoretical territory. She convincingly charts a conceptual reframing of melancholia after 1850 and sees modernism as marking “the first time in the history of representational arts” that the melancholy dynamics “are not—or not only—depicted” but performed (10). It is countermourning, she explains, that functions like a counter-monument in obstructively aggravating rather than alleviating mourning: the goal is not to overcome but to perpetuate the loss it memorializes. Countermourning thus serves “as a superior framework” to unpack the deeper logic of many modernist texts (18) as an aesthetic strategy that activates the socially critical potential of melancholia “through a performance which, rather than curing, sustains the melancholic symptom while articulating it” (39). It is fiction writing “in between mourning and melancholia” that “preserves the lost object, in all its cognitive obscurity and semantic instability, as a vital part of the fictional subject’s world” (60) and that “postulates, performatively, that we can (and should) aspire to resurrect what has been obscured in cultural memory but that we can never (and should not) ‘write in’ those gaps, subject them to unproblematic cognition and articulation” (62). Bahun also describes it as the “counter-mourning chronotope,” and the way it is inflected in Bely’s Petersburg, Kafka’s The Castle, and Woolf’s Between the Acts forms the rich substance of her imaginative study.

I shall comment only on the German material and two crucial points. It will come as no surprise that Bahun engages with Freud’s theory of melancholia as a narcissistic type of object-choice and invokes the economy principle underwriting the libidinal reorganization (in successful mourning), as much as the narcissistic regression, as a substitute for the erotic cathexis. The melancholy identification with the lost object qua introjection seems only like a symbolic merger, when in fact the narcissistic melancholic suffers the introjected reanimation not as a true restitution but as a repetition of fragile—i.e., latent but suppressed—ambivalences characterizing the relationship when still in place, leading to a debasement of the object. Is it not the economy principle that, geared toward finality, devalues the lost object, thus barring the way to contemplating it as a subject worth saving? Here, Bahun’s energetic yet careful interrogations offer countless fresh insights. She returns to and comparatively contextualizes Freud again and again, to address a number of key questions: Freud’s suggestively modernist indecisiveness about what is actually lost in melancholia, the feeling of guilt as melancholia’s key symptom, Freud’s potential hesitation to develop a theory of mourning beyond its discursive juxtaposition vis-à-vis melancholia, and the ultimate...