art as medicine in late civilization

Alisdair Gray quotes from Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia for the epigraph to his Unlikely Stories, Mostly as a vindication of his, and all, art:

It seems to have been erected only in compliance with that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life, and must always be appeased by some employment. He who has built for use till use is supplied, must begin to build for vanity, and extend his plan to the utmost of human performance that he may not be soon reduced to form another wish.
I consider this mighty structure as a monument to the insufficiency of human enjoyments.

Gradgrinds of the world demand art’s worth be put in terms of ‘use’. Gray’s epigraph re-orientates Johnson’s pessimism to contend that its ‘use’ encompasses more than the narrow, measurable, strictly material sense of the word. Art’s refined or majestic works – such as the pyramid Imlac philosophizes upon and the books that Johnson and Gray write – are the special produce of civilization. Only a society replete with necessities will ‘begin to build for vanity’, for its component individuals – confronted by the ‘insufficiency of human enjoyments’, the ennui of civilized repose – must perpetually distract themselves. Art’s ‘use’ lies in that for which it is a palliative, of which Rasselas is an emblem: long-term sadness, or melancholia.

To this purpose, the text deploys an intimate knowledge of melancholia’s felt experience to make Rasselas its emblem. Two revealing quotations regarding his psychology come soon after he arrives in Cairo:

 I see them perpetually and unalterably chearful, but feel my own mind restless and uneasy. I am unsatisfied with those pleasures which I seem most to court; I live in the crowds of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself, and am only loud and merry to conceal my sadness.

 To which Imlac replies, ‘there was not one who did not dread the moment when solitude should deliver him to the tyranny of reflection’. In his essay Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud describes melancholia as a narcissistic mutation of mourning, entailing a repetitive, futile circumnavigation of a traumatic absence. Rasselas anticipates Freud’s description in being too preoccupied with his sadness to forget it for even a moment. The attempt to ‘shun’ his own consciousness with ‘sprit and gaiety’ is both frustrated and motivated by a feeling of intense inwardness, expressed in the verb ‘conceal’ and by juxtaposition of the emphatically repeated ‘I’ with ‘crowds of jollity’. His entire thwarted quest, as he energetically inserts himself into other’s lives, is a larger expression of this self-effacing drive. The quixotic fantasy of chasing the ‘treacherous lover’ is a paradigm of its futility, and totemic of melancholic absence. The ‘orphan virgin’ is a projection of his wifeless and practically parentless self, the ‘little portion’ is his own happiness, and the treachery is its mysterious loss. At the end of the day as at the end of the quest and each of its episodes, he is inescapably given over for a while – as the word ‘deliver’ intimates, ‘him’ becoming the grammatical object helplessly acted upon – to that dreadful self-consciousness. A lasting happiness, in turn, escapes him. His ‘useless’ attempts at catching the lover both symbolizes the seeming hopelessness of long-term sadness and its unknown cause.

From Hippocrates to Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, melancholia was thought to stem from an excess of black bile. Johnson was an admirer of the latter, recommending to James Boswell he peruse the ‘valuable work’ to ‘compose himself to rest.’  Rasselas’s melancholia, however, is not presented as humoral but seems to exist rather without any ‘real cause’. His home, the Happy Valley, is an abstraction of civilization that provides every necessity and luxury. By all indications, it should make him happy. Yet such language as ‘artificers of pleasure’ and the ‘appearance of security’ imply a façade unsupported by substance. Hollowness is built into the valley’s palace, where ‘many of the columns had unsuspected cavities, in which a long race of monarchs had reposited their treasures’. The recursive image of hoarded wealth within hoarded wealth – a hidden palace filled with secret treasure – symbolises the exorbitance civilization can afford and emphasises its antipole of emptiness. With an inevitable circularity, the Happy Valley overdetermines the melancholic symptom it embodies. That is to say, the text renders the absence that Freud later postulates to be at the centre of melancholia as a pre-existent nothingness at the centre of human life, that only civilized humans – or the privileged overclasses of whom Rasselas is metonymic – must confront. In both, there is a futile circuitry around said absence. Without the worry of staying alive, one worries about the point of living, as expressed by Rasselas’s ennui. Melancholia is therefore reimagined away from a physical malady and towards an essential condition. Only those in a civilized repose can and must confront it. It is the ‘king’, after all – head of the Leviathan, whose bodily needs are all met –, who ‘is compelled to solace, by the erection of a pyramid’.

Such is the way a man ’whose power is unlimited’ seeks refuge from consciousness. For Rasselas, however, this is not possible. He has grown weary of the corporeal pleasures afforded him but, while rich, has no means of extending them to ‘the utmost power of human performance’. Rather, he engages in ‘solitary walks’ and ‘silent meditation’ – tokens of rumination – retreating, as Matthew Arnold might put it, to the life of the mind. ‘With observations’ of a philosophical inclination,

the prince amused himself as he returned... with a look that discovered him to feel some complacence in his own perspicacity, and to receive some solace of the miseries of life from consciousness of the delicacy with which he felt, and the eloquence with which he bewailed.

The pseudo-masochistic onanism of drawing pleasure from one’s sadness humorously likens Rasselas to an exaggerated stereotype of the self-conceited artist. Thus, it anticipates Freud’s postulation that melancholia is narcissistic. In so doing, however, it proffers a personal and honest account of creative motivation, distinct from the noble or dutiful, and less useful – in its narrow sense – than the monetary or pragmatic. It is in stark contrast to Imlac’s lofty ideal of the poet, who must labour as philosopher, scientist and moral ‘legislator,’ while relaying their truths in beauteous metrical arrangement.  Rasselas – who derides Imlac’s ideal as impossible – instead simply amuses himself. Emptiness can only be filled by imagination. In the pathological language of Freud, ‘a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object’ – in this case, the pursuit of happiness – ‘through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis ensues’. Thus, it is pertinent that in the end Rasselas retires to an imaginary kingdom. By embracing a new, creative self he ‘shun[s]’ the old, miserable self. He is not reaching a state of inner-enlightenment, rather continuing his previous hedonism from a depleted exteriority to an as-yet untapped interiority. His ‘secret stock of happiness’ attends his creativity, invigorated by the prospect of escape and expressed in flights of fancy.

Conversely, his happiness diminishes when ‘his imagination [is] at a stand’. But the theme of perpetual frustration teaches that this dissatisfaction is inevitable. Rasselas supposes, for some reason, that ‘happiness... must be something solid and permanent’, yet everything that happens to him et al. would suggest otherwise. The characters never experience a moment of aporia, whereat a perpetual impasse they revise their definition of happiness. They persist in looking for it, as if it is an object to be found and not a mode to inhabit. Thus, the empty circuitry of melancholia endures. The text’s refusal of character development means that the instructive and pertinent theme of ‘rest and motion’, or ‘flux of life,’ stays implicit. ‘Surely’ says Imlac, ‘the ocean and the land are very different; the only variety of water is rest and motion’. ‘Land’ and ‘ocean’ are elemental opposites, yet – in being of that elemental semantic field – they imply their place in a larger scheme of irreducible truth. Rhetorically, the effect is an undergirding of the metaphor that ‘land’ – as a synecdoche for human life, in being the place it unfolds – is, in fact, exactly like ‘ocean.’ Like Rasselas, Imlac seeks to shun himself. He travels from place to place in constant pursuit of distractive knowledge. This pursuit’s exhaustion in Agra, where ‘having resided... till there was no more to be learned,’ must ‘deliver him’ like Rasselas ‘to the tyranny of reflection.’ Thus, he indentures himself in the Happy Valley, believing his emptiness will be filled by a life of ‘rest’ and security. But this ‘rest’ is tantamount to the ‘rest’ that drove him there. Conversely, Rasselas declares ‘I should be happy if I had something to persue.’ And indeed, just like in his imagination, ‘in... fruitless searches [Rasselas] spent ten months. The time, however, passed chearfully away... rejoicing that his endeavours, though yet unsuccessful, had supplied him with a source of inexhaustible enquiry’. As Sisyphus will not find life’s meaning at the top of the hill but must make it for himself in pushing the boulder, so Rasselas and Imlac will only find happiness in motion. The pursuit of – the movement towards – knowledge stimulates the imagination. ‘Do not suffer life to stagnate,’ a cognitively dissident Imlac advises, ‘it will grow muddy for want of motion’.

The pseudo-conclusion of Imlac is to hope that the afterlife might afford some lasting, static contentment. Perhaps it will. But the more actionable conclusion lies with the rest of the text; where satisfaction and the shunning of internal emptiness is achieved in the imagination for as long as one has something to pursue, as long as one is in motion. Discontent is for those at rest. But the condition of civilization, as the condition of the Happy Valley, is one in which individual motion is depleted and rest is abundant. From inception to execution, the creation of art is a movement of the imagination. No one could look upon or create all possible artistic content. To the individual, then, it represents a practical infinitude, for all intents on par with the universe. This is a blessing, for ‘to a poet’ – that is the imaginatively engaged person – ‘nothing can be useless’. Art, as the universe itself, affords ‘inexhaustible enquiry,’ distraction, and possibility for artistic reconstitution. As William Blake writes in his Parables of Hell, ‘the busy bee has no time for sorrow’. No one work will ever give to its appreciator or creator the unthinkable permanent contentment for which Rasselas quests. So, he must resign himself to a near-constant motion if he wishes to experience any happiness at all.