In sooth I know not why I am so sad,
It wearies me, you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn:
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself...
The Merchant of Venice
Act 1, Scene 1
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| Shakespeare knew. |
These are the opening lines of The Merchant of Venice, in which that very merchant, Antonio, describes his condition to his friend, Salerio. It is a perceptive description of a certain kind of depression, with which you feel a thing like sadness but which isn't actual sadness - you have nothing in particular to be sad about. (Although this condition often causes you to mine thoughts and memories that increase your sadness, it tempts you to inflate things or deflate things as necessary, to see the bad as worse and the worst in everything.) As Antonio says, the feeling wearies you; you are sure it wears on your friends and family, your co-workers and your neighbors. Certainly it wears you down physically and emotionally, but you cannot trace its origins in any very satisfactory way. Whatever it is and wherever it came from, it clogs and slows your mind, robs you of whatever spirit and wit you might formerly have possessed, and just makes you feel generally dumber than you used to feel.
Shakespeare being Shakespeare, surely he was capable of describing this condition perfectly without ever having experienced it. However, it's what ensues that makes me think the author may well have suffered himself from depression. As the scene progresses, Antonio's friends try to cheer him up, despite his suggestions to them that it's futile, that "I hold the world...a stage, where every man must play a part,/ and mine a sad one." Still, they keep trying. "Let me play the fool," says Gratanio, "with mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come."
Again, Shakespeare might have understood or imagined, accurately, that this is what happened with certain sad people who cannot be roused from their condition. But it has for me the feeling of lived experience. Because it is what happens. Loved ones and other kind people see you in what looks like sadness and try to help you. They want you to feel better and so they do for you the things that for them would lift them out of a bad mood or a melancholy day. But it doesn't work the way they had hoped it would.
Antonio's friends try to show understanding, try to help him make sense of what he is feeling. They suggest to the importing-exporting merchant from Venice that he is worried about his ships at sea, laden with his goods. But he tells them he is not worried. Only Salerio, inadvertently, says something that rings true. "Your mind," he tells Antonio, "is tossing on the ocean." Salerio means that Antonio is imagining his ships in peril. He's wrong, but as a description of Antonio's state of mind, probably he is not far off the mark. One way or another, Shakespeare knew.
I've found myself reading old anthropology texts, nearly 100 years old, as a friend pointed out, ones which I'm told marked the beginning of a change in the attitudes of anthropologists who studied contemporary African and other native tribes. Previously, these academics had seen the communities and nations they studied as inferior, primitive, superstitious and irrational in their beliefs about life and the natural world. But beginning in the early 20th Century, in part with the book I'm reading now, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, that began to change. The author, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, an Oxford-trained anthropologist, lived for almost 2 years, in the late 1920s, with the Azande, of what is today the new and troubled country of South Sudan. Back then it was part of the Republic of Sudan, under the colonial rule of the British, in cooperation with their protectorate, Egypt.
In writing about the integral role witchcraft played in the lives of the Zande people, Evans-Pritchard made no judgements. He described, explained, worked to give context and perspective. His answer to those in the West who might think it was absurd for the Zande to believe that every death was the result, not only of a natural cause, but always, in addition to that, witchcraft, was to quote a Zande friend: "Perhaps in their country people are not murdered by witches, but here they are."
Anyway, all this is to introduce a passage I ran across, not from E.E. Evans-Pritchard, but from Norman Brown's Life Against Death, that, though written later, echoes those earlier, condescending attitudes of anthropologists and that, full of dated jargon as it is, amazes me in its opacity, although I admit that I have not come to terms (by negation) with my own pregenital impulses. But I am trying.
Archaic man is preoccupied with the castration complex, the incest taboo and the desexualisation of the penis, that is, the transference of the genital impulses into that aim-inhibited libido which sustains the kinship systems in which archaic life is embedded. The low degree of sublimation, corresponding to the low level of technology, means by our previous definitions, a weaker ego, an ego which has not yet come to terms (by negation) with its own pregenital impulses. The result is that all the fantastic wishes of infantile narcissism express themselves in unsublimated form so that archaic man retains the magic body of infancy.
