Modernism and Melancholia

Melancholia, a favorite subject in antiquity and the renaissance, is making a comeback. After the 2001 reissue of Robert Burton’s 17^th-century classic The Anatomy of Melancholy, 2002 saw the publication of The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (edited by Jennifer Radden) and Anne Anlin Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race. Now joining in is Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia, a volume about the object-relations psychoanalysis of Melanie Klein (1882–1960), literary modernism, and the unique cultural ‘melancholia’ of interwar Europe.

Shakespeare’s line that “melancholy is the nurse of frenzy” serves as the book’s epigraph, and the remark immediately proves apt: in an age of academic cubby-holing, author Esther Sánchez-Pardo is to be saluted for her enterprising interdisciplinarity and credited with having written two books in one: Part I recounts the theoretical developments made by Klein and her followers and provides a “lengthy genealogy of melancholia,” while Part II supplies Kleinian readings of modernist literature (14). It should be pointed out, however, that many more volumes would be required to fulfill the author’s stated goals, for they are numerous and ambitious enough to daunt even the boldest of would-be Robert Burtons. Among other things, the author aims to explore “an endemic mal du siècle that under the guise of melancholia, depression, or manic-depressive illness came to the fore in the period between the two world wars” (7), to show how Klein and her school’s “postulates and ideas work in the interests of a feminist and antihomophobic project” (3), to clarify “the institutional overinvestment in definitions of the modern” (387) and to lay out “strategies for articulating the fields of gender, psychoanalysis, subjectivity, and ethics in innovative ways” (387). That is a lot to accomplish if one also intends to analyze the “intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and cultural and geographical location”—all of which the author considers “crucial elements” (19).

That the impossible has been attempted but not achieved is mostly to the benefit of the book: for readers, rather than passively receiving information, will find themselves forced to participate in a lively thought-in-progress. Indeed the consistently energetic and expatiative writing style suits the book’s thetic exuberance perfectly, and, as it “blends many voices” (19) in the “errancy of a triple modernist dialogue” (200), one can easily get swept up. This reader at least felt the onset of a polyphonic frenzy nursed by melancholy when the titular phrase “cultures of the death drive” was over-exuberantly glossed as “the material historical processes, trends, forces, and regulations that through involution and the deadening movement of repetition, inertia, and stasis force themselves upon individuals (or groups) and implement social and psychic exclusionary spaces encumbered and haunted by the physicality of their lost objects” (13). Ultimately, a good deal must be supplied by the reader; little is said explicitly about the “material historical processes” of the interwar period, for example. But little matter, for the main concern is Klein.

It is “about time to begin assessing Klein’s outstanding contributions to psychoanalysis in a fair and unbiased way,” Sánchez-Pardo announces, and her assessment finds them not only outstanding, but (despite the fact that Klein herself thought she was merely extending Freud’s ideas) substantially different from those of Freud, Abraham, and others (38). Klein’s theoretical contributions, we learn, include analyses of the early infantile development (starting at six months) of a severely sadistic superego, the early onset of genital as well as pregenital impulses, and the importance of social expectations in early anxiety situations. On the key question of melancholia, Klein, like Freud and Abraham, takes it to be the loss of a loved object but differs in seeing the first year of life as crucial in development and strongly marked by sadistic impulses (119). For her, melancholia is “the aborted introjective movement brought about by an excess of sadism in the oral cannibalistic stage...