Melancholy, Love, and Time: Boundaries of the Self in Ancient Literature

Appendix: Giorgio de Chirico, Time, Odysseus, Melancholy, and Intestinal Disorder with Kathleen Toohey

Giorgio de Chirico, Time, Odysseus, Melancholy, and Intestinal Disorder with Kathleen Toohey Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), the Italian surrealist painter, is known well for his studies of melancholy and to a lesser extent for his interest in time. He is even less well known for his abominable digestion. In the phase of his career immediately before World War I, de Chirico painted a number of very powerful and often beautiful canvases focusing on the theme of melancholia (a few are reproduced in this appendix). Some of these make the link of melancholia to time apparent—above all by the inclusion of clocks. De Chirico does not necessarily link these with digestion, but he does seem elsewhere rather more concerned with food than might have been expected. We note the regular presence in his prewar painting of bananas (notably in The Uncertainty of the Poet [1913]), artichokes, pineapples, pomegranates, and eggs, then later of fish, biscuits , bread, and wine.1 Occasionally one reads that his continuing fascination with the theme of melancholy may have been the result of the “intestinal disorders which plagued him from his youth” (Soby 1955, 31). We will return to de Chirico’s Petronian—or, more correctly, Trimalchionic—gizzards. To start we would like to demonstrate how some of the key themes of chapter 6 (death and the destructive linearity of time) are to be seen in his The Delights of the Poet (1912) and how these, through Greek and Roman precedent, have classical origins and a remarkable link with melancholia, both classical and modern. De Chirico, we will therefore suggest, offers a very striking instance for the continuity of the ancient themes that have been discussed within chapter 6 and throughout this book. He also provides a remarkable example for what has been termed the corporealization of affective registers. In de Chirico’s case, time and melancholia blend viscerally, on his own say-so, with a purportedly 283 appendix  
dire indigestion (see Soby 1955, 34, 36). A number of the motifs that we have seen in chapter 6 are apparent in his painting. It provides, as it were, an expressive and affective mirror reflecting back, though no doubt unintentionally, to the Trimalchionic and the Senecan vision of time and its passing and to one of their chief means for affirming the integrity of the self. The place to begin to illustrate this is with The Delights of the Poet (fig. 10) and, within this painting, with de Chirico’s clock. Time, through this piece, stands at the near center of the picture. The clock looks down from the railway -station building in The Delights of the Poet and across the empty piazza toward its viewer. The picture demands that we interpret time’s significance. That the hour is 2:00 in the afternoon is telling. The direction of the shadows indicates that the sun is now off its zenith and that, therefore, we are looking, past the clock, toward the south or southwest. The sun streams in from the southwest. That, too, is important. The ghostly wraith in the mid-background, gaze fixed on the ground, is turned toward the place where the sun will set. The wraith is turned to the directive distance traditionally associated with death.2 Time, therefore, both through the angle of the sunlight and through the gaze of the wraith, is firmly, if not unexpectedly, linked with death. Time in this picture , on such a reading, is an absolutely linear affair. It has as its end point human death. That knowledge makes the train more comprehensible. The train is a familiar motif in de Chirico’s painting.3 Soby links it with a favorite childhood train set of de Chirico’s. It is also true that from his childhood garden in Volos, Greece, de Chirico could see trains passing by. His father, moreover, was an engineer who worked on the railways in Thessaly. The train was also de Chirico’s means of escape to Paris from the Italian military in Turin, whither he had been summoned and charged with desertion in 1913, the very period in which The Delights of the Poet was composed.4 Whatever the case, the train functions as a symbol for youth, life, expectation, and fulfilment. It is not a symbol, however, that is always unambiguous.5 In this picture the train, moving away from the west and death, draws into the railway station (as is indicated by the vertical direction of...