The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance

6. My Self, My Sepulcher

200 6. My Self, My Sepulcher “Humours Black”: Samson as Melancholic Concluding our sequence of portraits in black, it must be said that Samson makes an unlikely candidate for melancholy. If we take up Robert Burton’s portable definition of this condition as “feare, and sadnesse without any apparant occasion,” then the application of this modish misfortune of early modernity to the Biblical hero from the Book of Judges seems,literally,woefully inadequate.1 However densely overdetermined,Samson’s causes for fear and sorrow are all too obvious: his compromising relationship with Dalilah; his disastrously credulous confession of the secret of his strength; the subsequent shaving of his hair and putting out of his eyes;his capture and enslavement at the hands of the Philistines; and a grim future of continued political imprisonment, public humiliation, and forced labor. One could go on.And yet Samson’s affects and actions, at least as they are represented within the seventeenth-century poetic and dramatic framework of John Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671),seem to repeatedly produce explanation in terms of melancholic disease. Samson shows up for others as melancholic.The way he sits, the way that he moves his body, the way that he speaks, the kinds of desires he voices, the overall affective impact of his person registers for both strangers and intimates in terms that would have been familiar to Milton’s readers as citations from the cultural repertoire of black bile. Samson’s physical posture is instantly recognized by the chorus as such, and relayed to the readers of this closet drama in a manner that recalls atrabilious iconography: CHOR: See how he lies at random, carelessly diffused, With languished head unpropped, My Self, My Sepulcher 201 As one past hope, abandoned, And by himself given over; (118–121) These are the downcast eyes of despair, of retreat from others and from outward-directed interest, that can be found in countless images from Cranach , Feti, and Dürer on the continent, and in the miniature melancholic portraits of Hilliard and Oliver executed for clients of taste in Tudor England already discussed in the first chapter of this book. In presenting Samson as “unpropped,” Milton one-ups the by-now-overfamiliar melancholy propping posture by suggesting that his hero lacks even the energy for a minimal act of self-support. Samson describes symptoms that would have been familiar to patients and doctors in the period (“I feel my genial spirits droop/My hopes all flat, nature within me seems/In all her functions weary of herself” 594–596). Samson’s interlocutors, particularly his father Manoa, explicitly diagnose him as suffering from an internal imbalance or dyscrasia: MANOA: Believe not these suggestions, which proceed From anguish of the mind and humours black, That mingle with thy fancy. (599–601) What are the cumulative effects of this complex of symptomatic complaints from “inside” and humoral diagnoses from “outside” the black box of Samson’s blind interiority? Are these just momentary excursions into the fluid-soaked language of humoralism, mere detours into the somatic en route to the more respectable, not to mention more modern, protopsychological registers of “inwardness” and moral crisis that famously conclude Samson Agonistes? Do these melancholic diagnoses amount to merely passing references, local details, a few drops of black bile that dissolve within the blood, sweat and tears of the larger work that surrounds them? What might a melancholy Samson contribute to the anxious problems of interpretation posed by Milton’s text today? I hope to argue that this curiously extended series of references to melancholy casts a corrosively reductive physiological meaning onto the very “inward motions” upon which Samson’s heroic final transcendence from abjection to martyrdom depends. If we are to risk parodic deflation, it may be that the flames that stoke the Phoenix-like “fiery Virtue” of Samson’s self-sacrificial passions derive their source not from some powerfully exceptional moment of sovereign 202 My Self, My Sepulcher consciousness but stem instead from an overheated liver and a bloodstream clogged with the soot of burnt black bile. Samson Agonistes has enjoyed a dubious vogue since the events of September 11th. Its already-formidable internal complexity and multivalence has only been magnified by the work’s perhaps fatally overdetermined relationship of resemblance with what, until recently, one might still have termed our own contemporary theologico-political situation. As a mood of stasis that tends to...