Although it could have been halved, all I could think was, "Thank God, somebody finally gets me!" ;-) ( )

The introduction and first chapter of this book are really quite excellent, but it's just downhill from there. In the heart of the book, Wilson spends very little time talking about what he introduces in the beginning -- Americanized pseudo-happiness. Instead, it's just a pretentious admiration of as many melancholy-inspired artists as he can think of. The book is short, but still painful to get through. Do not recommend. ( )

Good stuff! I think Wilson a good point of that it would be very dangerous to try to eradicate melancholy. Wilson has quite an extensive vocabulary which, as a non-native speaker in English I had a hard time following, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. ( )

Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy by Eric G. Wilson is brilliant in parts, but seriously flawed.

This is a small book with a simple thesis: the experience of melancholy is an essential part of the human condition—when it occurs, we should embrace it, not repress it. Wilson claims that if you eliminate melancholia either through medications (like Prozac), or through a forceful cultural bias toward perpetual happiness such as currently exists in America, then life ceases to be authentic, and society fails.

Much of the book is one long rant against a contemporary American culture that requires artificial happiness at all times. Wilson shows that our melancholic side is absolutely essential. He insists that melancholy is necessary to connect us to our fundamental self. He claims that to reject melancholy is to reject life.

Wilson writes: “A person seeking sleek comfort in this mysteriously mottled world—where love is always edged with resentment and baseness beds with grace—is necessarily required to perceive only small parts of the planet, those parts that fit into his preconceived mental grids… But some people strain all the time to break through their mental manacles, to cleanse the portals of their perceptions, and to see the universe as an ungraspable riddle, gorgeous and gross. Happy types, those Americans bent only on happiness and afraid of sadness, tend to forgo this labor. They sit safe in their cages. The sad ones, dissatisfied with the status quo, are more likely to beat against the bars” (p. 24). [Note: If you found this quote somewhat dense and difficult, be forewarned: this type of prose is typical of the entire volume. Although some of Wilson’s writing is dynamic, rich, and lyrical, I often found it also turgid and unnecessarily arcane.]

Wilson goes on to argue that sadness is “the enabler of joy,” and that the “true path to ecstatic joy is through acute melancholia.” You can’t have one end of the continuum without the other. Thus, people who strive for happiness at all times limit their capacity for joy.

So far so good—I truly welcomed, enjoyed, and agreed with Wilson’s point of view throughout the first half of the text. But in the second half of the book, I was shocked to see the author dangerously overstepping the boundaries of his academic credentials and making serious mistakes—here, Wilson fails me, and thus my overall rating for his book slips significantly.

In the second half of the book, Wilson argues that the experience of normal melancholia makes us creative. To back up his arguments about the connection between melancholia and creativity, the author cites examples using a number of very famous historic and contemporary creative geniuses—artists, he suggests, who derived their creative power from their frequent bouts of melancholia. But that is precisely where his arguments fall. Virtually all the creative geniuses that he cites as examples to support his claims about the connection between normal melancholy and creativity were, in fact, at the far extremes of the continuum, not in the middle. These artistic geniuses suffered either from bouts of deep clinical depression, or they were manic-depressives who experienced both depressions and mania.

It is important to note that the author is a professor of English at Wake Forest University. He is not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but a “literary humanist searching for a deeper life.” He makes it clear in the beginning of the book that this work is about the normal mood state of melancholia. He sets out to focus on the middle of the continuum, with happiness on one side, and melancholy on the other. He claims that this book is not about the aberrant extremes of the continuum—the ends where melancholia slips into major depression, and happiness soars into mania. Yet he supports his ideas about normal melancholy giving rise to creativity using examples about artistic geniuses who either suffered from clinical depression or manic-depressive illness.

Most of the highly creative geniuses who Wilson uses briefly as examples in the second half of his book can be found discussed in great depth in Kay Redfield Jamison’s groundbreaking book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is considered by most psychiatric professionals to be the definitive expert on manic-depressive illness. Amazingly, Jamison herself suffers from manic-depressive illness and wrote a moving memoir about her life and journeys into madness. Fifteen years ago, she published Touched with Fire, and it instantly became an academic and popular bestseller. It is still in print and is considered to be the fundamental work on this topic. The depth of scholarship and research in this work is astonishing—not only does Jamison know psychiatry; she also appears to have a doctorate-level understanding of world literature, and many other fields of scholarship, as well. Jamison’s prose is exquisite, structured, and easy to understand; in addition, she frequently makes room for elegant lyrical phrasing that leave the reader stunned with their beauty and insight.

It is interesting to note briefly how Jamison’s views about the wellspring of artistic creativity differ from Wilson’s. The purpose of Jamison’s book, Touched with Fire, is to explore the compelling association between the artistic and the manic-depressive. The emphasis of the book is “on understanding the relationship between moods and imagination, the nature of moods—their variety, their contrary and oppositional qualities, their flux, their extremes (causing, in some individuals, occasional episodes of “madness”)—and the importance of moods in igniting thought, changing perceptions, creating chaos, forcing order upon chaos, and enabling transformation” (p. 5). She makes it clear that an artistic work “that may be inspired by, or partially executed in, a mild or even psychotically manic state may be significantly shaped or partially edited while its creator is depressed and put into final order when he or she is normal. It is the interaction, tension, and transition between changing mood states, as well as the sustenance and discipline drawn from periods of health, that is critically important; and it is these same tensions and transitions that ultimately give such power to the art that is born in this way” (p. 6).

Thus, when it comes to the connection between melancholy and artistic genius, Jamison’s book is by far the more scholarly, accurate, and enjoyable to read.

In summary: I enjoyed the first half of Wilson’s book, but found considerable problems with the second half. Wilson’s polished literary rant about America’s overemphasis on happiness and its commensurate societal dangers is well-founded—my problem is that it does not take an entire book to make this point; a magazine article would have been more appropriate.

My overall recommendation: read about Wilson’s rant against the American happiness culture on the Internet; then, instead of buying Wilson’s book, buy Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. It has been fifteen years since this book was first published, but it is still in print, and easy to obtain…it is three times as long, costs half as much, and is infinitely more enjoyable. ( )