It is a fitting tribute to the perennial
popularity of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy that the last decade should
have seen not one but two new editions of that work – one (published in six
volumes by the Clarendon Press) large, extensively footnoted in the most
thoroughgoing scholarly fashion, and offered at a cost likely to deter all but
the most devoted bibliophiles – and the other a compact chunk of a book small
enough to read on the train, or in bed, and costing little more than a sandwich
and a mug of beer. Given the heft of the Oxford edition, it is gratifying and
delightful that Burton’s glorious Anatomy should have been part of the New York
Review of Books list of quirky and interesting Classics titles alongside such
long out of print or neglected treasures as J.L.Carr’s A
Month in the Country, the stories of Richard Hughes, and Memoirs of My Nervous
Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber.

Favorite reading of Dr Johnson and of
Keats, the Anatomy is still resonant enough to lend its title and its glamour
to contemporary authors who find the dull and clinical connotations of
‘depression’ insufficient to encompass their varied and profound states of
suffering. While for most of its long history the Anatomy has been in print and
read as appreciatively as it is today, it was neglected, and even disparaged,
during the first half of the eighteenth century. By the next century it was restored to popularity again, however:
as Holbrook Jackson tells us in the introduction to the 1932 Everyman’s Library
edition (of which he was editor) reproduced in this 2001 edition by The New
York Review of Books, Byron applauded it, Charles Lamb gave a copy to Keats,
who based “Lamia” upon it, and forty more editions appeared before the 1932
“all English” Everyman edition reproduced here. (The “all English” text, quite
unnecessary in Burton’s time, and essential in ours, provides translations of
all Latin, Greek and other non-English passages in a parenthesis within the
text, making for easeful and comprehending reading.)

Jackson’s brief introduction not only tells us something of the
Anatomy’s history but captures its singular virtues. Few books, as he says, are
more definitely or more curiously imbued with their authorship: “To read it is
to read him: to read him is to talk with him, to know him as we know the great
persons of fiction, or those few writers who have so projected themselves into
their works as to have achieved for their own personalities what the great
novelists and dramatists have achieved for the characters of their stories or
plays.”

Those unfamiliar with Burton’s text will find
it an absorbing and dense 1200+ pages worth (the notes, glossary and index take
up another hundred odd pages), organized into parts, sub-sub and sub-parts, in
which every imaginable kind, cause, occasion of and remedy for melancholy is
introduced with copious quotations and illustrations in a text so amusing and
vital in style, combining remarks at once learned, true, wordy and
breathtakingly irrelevant, that it resists all summary.

William Gass also offers an introduction
to this 2001 edition, a lively and masterful discussion worthy of the Anatomy,
in which he plays on Burton’s notion that his work on melancholy would dispel
his own gloom. By reading Burton, Gass assures us, so might we also chase away
melancholy, and Burton’s “unashamed display of his lust for the word – his
desire to name each thing, and find a song in which each thing can be sung – is
a passion that we might emulate to our assuredly better health.”

We
should read Burton for our health, certainly, but why else should we read him?
For hundreds of years melancholy was a fundamental category in Western culture,
used to explain, order, illustrate and comprehend human experience and all
manner of human suffering. (In a small way, it is still.) Reinvigorated,
embroidered and glamorized through the Renaissance, the humoral ideas of the
Greek philosophers and physicians served as the basis for an elaborate,
multi-stranded explanatory system and a way of seeing and experiencing the
world. That glittering amalgam of Greek and Renaissance ideas reaches its
zenith, but also its final expression, with Burton. The enchantments of the
Anatomy are soon succeeded by the sourer and more rationalistic tones of the
eighteenth century.

One of the ironies of this great ‘age of
melancholy’ (Schiesari) which stretched from classical times through the
beginning of the eighteenth century, was that while the subject of melancholy
was a man, its symbol – “Dame Melancholy” as Burton calls her — was a woman
(whereas in today’s dulled and depleted descendant category of depression, the
subject and symbol both are female). Along with the ‘gendering’ in Burton’s
text we also encounter his persistent misogyny: women were the cause and source
of melancholy, but their experience of it was a lesser one, and one which
marriage and domesticity would be quite sufficient to dispel. To today’s
reader, Burton’s misogyny, while no more than a reflection of his time, is one
irksome note in an otherwise irresistible book.

©
2002 Jennifer Radden

Jennifer Radden, D. Phil., is a member of the Department
of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts, Boston, and President of the Assocation
for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry. She author of Divided
Minds and Successive Selves and she is editor of The
Nature of Melancholy : From Aristotle to Kristeva.

Categories: Depression, General

Tags: Depression (Unipolar)