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

From its first pages, Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning revels in melancholia’s contradictions. Melancholia has always been paradoxical. Its twinning of opposites—paralysis and mania; excess and order; marginality and chauvinism; verbal collapse and logorrhoea—has vexed scholars since antiquity. But Bahun’s text dwells in this ambiguity and like melancholia it fragments, forestalls, pauses, doubts, and tarries. Mimetically gesturing to the twists and turns of melancholic language, Bahun creates a dense and labyrinthine exploration of this most paradoxical of states, and in one of its most paradoxical of forms, the modernist novel, exploring the productive space of melancholia as it unfolds in three key texts of literary modernism: Bely’s Petersburg (1916/1922); Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941); and Franz Kafka’s The Castle (1922).

With dazzling clarity, Bahun makes the case for understanding modernism as paradigmatically melancholic. Melancholia and modernity have long been linked. As Harvie Ferguson tells us, melancholia is the defining mood of modernity, giving it its color and tonality. In modernity, humans lose the consolation of religion and the shared identity of communal life, becoming “individuated objects, isolated in space, and set in motion according to universal ‘laws of nature’ devoid of intention or design, and blind to their consequences” (Ferguson 31). Surveying impending epistemic gloom with uncanny prescience, Søren Kierkegaard argued that epistemic melancholy should be faced resolutely: “That our age is an age of mental depression, there is no doubt and no question: the only question is what can be done about it and what the age demands in this respect, for the age is a fashionable patient who is not given orders but is asked what he wants” (qtd. in Bahun 1). Identifying Kierkegaard as the “first modernist melancholic” (1), Bahun finds in the form of this sentence, with its curious inversions, repetitions, accretions and semantic twists, not just a correct identification of the epoch but also a paradigmatic semantic and aesthetic performance of its ambiguities.

Cutting through the muddle of much contemporary writing on melancholia and mourning, Bahun defines melancholia as a dual phenomenon which assumes specific functions in the public sphere: “both as a discourse that interprets, constitutes and produces experiential reality—’a form of social action that creates effects in the world’—and a distinct symptom defined by its historical moment and observable in contemporary artistic performance” (4). Historically contingent, mood bending and an affective trace of a problematic relationship (6), melancholia in literature for Bahun expresses a socially indexed loss through linguistic and formal devices that both instantiate the process of mourning and signify its failure.

The key reference here is of course Freud and his writing on mourning and melancholia which Bahun frames as in itself a modernist paradigm. Bahun’s Freud is fluid, his ideas transitioning over time, his writing on melancholia far more diverse and equivocal than many contemporary studies in the field allow. Spanning the full length of Freud’s writing, she draws attention to how seminal many of his works have been in instigating new directions in psychoanalytic scholarship on melancholia. Breaking down the somewhat calcified division between mourning and melancholia, she reclaims the significance of Freud’s early writing to a significant lineage of thinkers including Klein, Kristeva, and Török and Abraham. Of course, even in Mourning and Melancholia, the opposition between these two affective states is far less clear than is often acknowledged. Freud begins his famous essay with the proviso that melancholia seems to be a group of disorders rather than a single condition and it is from this starting premise of a hydra-headed complex that he develops the famous—and much contested—opposition between mourning and melancholia. This openness to the idea of a multiplicity of forms situates Freud within the long tradition of writing in which multiple causes, symptoms, and associated symbolic forms are gathered together under the general rubric of melancholia. Rather than demarcating the psychoanalytic understanding of melancholia as distinct from all that has...