Download Melancholy - York University

Rosinska
Zofia Rosińska
University of Warsaw
Poland
Memory and the Emigration Experience
1. Memory-emigration- melancholy
All three phenomena mentioned in the title are not fully comprehended although
they have been the subject of interest for the European culture since antiquity.
Memory remains an enigma and so does melancholy. And, surprisingly perhaps,
so does emigration.
The melancholic, mnemic, and emigrative discourses are not homogeneous.
Memory is construed very differently by philosophers than by psychologists or
by neurologists. Likewise, melancholy is a subject of independent investigation
by philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry, and the respective discourses
employed by each discipline differ considerably.
Emigration here is somewhat special. Commonly assumed to be a purely societal
phenomenon, reserved for the study by the social sciences, in fact, it is a complex
and multileveled phenomenon of a psychological and spiritual nature.
What ties all three phenomena together is their connection with identity.
A question that needs to be addressed now is what elements characterize identity
and what their hierarchy of importance is.
Emigration
Encyclopedias define emigration as an “act or phenomenon of leaving one’s
country and settling abroad, whether permanently or for an extended period of
time, for political or socio-economical reasons.” Sociologists categorize
emigration, depending on its ends and its causes, as voluntary, forcible,
permanent, temporary, political, economical, etc. Such a broad characterization
does not permit a clear distinction between emigration and migration. Again,
dictionaries define the former as an act of leaving one’s home country, while the
latter is a permanent or seasonal change of settlement. Although intuitively we
feel the difference between emigration and migration, yet in many situations this
difference blurs. Moreover, it is clear that it is not any spatial characteristics of
1
Rosinska
the translocation that mark their differentia specifica. The necessary condition for
migration to become emigration is the change in identity-forming factors.
Nomadic tribes are not emigrants although they change their place of residence,
because the relevant factor determining their sense of identity is the group. The
sense of belonging to the group, the kinship of language, custom, traditions, and
lifestyle are what fixes their sense of identity, and these factors do not change
with the relocation to a different area. Nomadic tribes then, although spatially
relocating between often drastically different regions, do not change that which
they identify with: their group and their custom. Thus, they retain their identity.
They are not emigrants but migrants.
We should further distinguish emigration from travel, tourism, exile, and from
aimless globetrotting. A good criterion to use here might be the sources
motivating the translocation. It seems that curiosity or boredom rarely initiate
emigration, but rather travel, tourism, or globetrotting. An emigrant, even if
voluntary, does not become one out of curiosity or boredom. Both of these,
however, can be the result of emigration. But such search for a simple
distinguishing criterion is of dubious utility and does not do justice to many wellknown phenomena.
A phenomenological description of emigration as an experience must contain and
account for the following elements: 1. The sense of identity 2. Rebellion, outrage,
disagreement with something. This “something” might be the societal norms, the
custom, tradition, any kind of pressure or repression, or discomfort whose source
may be the inability to realize one’s potential. The expression of rebellion may be
one’s own decision to change, but it may result in a punitive action on the part of
the group. 3. The sense of inability to change one’s situation and the belief that it
might be easier to realize one’s plans, ambitions, and hopes in another group or
place. 4. Emigration in the strong meaning of the word requires another
condition, the impossibility of return. Irrespective of its kind, emigration has a
transcendental character in the sense of being a condition for the possibility to
experience one’s own identity. We might add that these four conditions need not
be satisfied in every empirical case; they are a type of model or, to use the
language of phenomenology, the essence of the emigrative experience. [****
istota to bedzie tutaj essence???***]
I have not come across any work that looks for the roots of the phenomenon of
emigration in antiquity. However, although concealed under different terms, we
discover it both in Ancient Greece and in the Bible. In the Book of Exodus, the
2
Rosinska
description of the Israelites’ flight from Egypt can be interpreted as a description
of emigration. It meets the above conditions. However, the case of the Israelites
is difficult to categorize because their experience is quite unique in many ways.
First of all, their sense of identity as well as subjectivity was mandated by God,
Jahweh. The Israelites were going to a “beautiful land,” to the “land of milk and
honey,” and they were leaving a “house of slavery.” The exodus was not
accompanied by the sense of loss of fatherland. As long as they remained faithful
to God, they maintained the sense of identity and subjectivity. In the moments of
rebellion against God they would become nomads rather than emigrants. Unless
we speak of “emigration” metaphorically and consider spiritual emigration.
The unique characteristic of the Israelite experience is best revealed by contrast
with the travels of Odysseus. In both cases memory is of paramount importance,
but its subject is in each case quite different.
Odysseus remembers and longs for his Ithaca: “To see the smoke from his loved
palace rise\ While the dear isle in distant prospect lies,\ With what contentment
could he close his eyes!” 1 Calypso offered him immortality so he would forget
Ithaca; he would not. He remembers and is remembered. To the Israelites,
Jahweh commands to remember the events that have taken place, the miracles
worked by Him, and the moral commandments that were to regulate personal
conduct. In both models we have to deal with an external sovereign power ruling
over human life, Jahweh for the Israelites, gods of fate for Odysseus. In neither
do we face melancholy and its main characteristic, the sense of loss and
floundering identity. The guarantee of the Israelites’ identity is God; and of
Odysseus’s, Ithaca. The promise made by Jahweh to Moses, that he will lead the
Israelites to a “land of milk and honey” is a vision rather than a concrete
destination.
Emigration in cultures that have not developed principium individuationis is never
voluntary. It’s always a punishment. The kris – the council and highest court of
the Gypsy communities – considers exclusion from the community as the highest
punishment. The Inuit communities are similar in this respect. In anthropological
1
The Odyssey, 1,57-59
3
Rosinska
descriptions an Inuit is invariably described as a model of strength and toughness,
a man who can cut off his frost-bitten fingers without so much as a groan, yet
cannot handle one thing – being alone. Anthropology is full of similar
descriptions. Here we see most clearly how intimately intertwined the fate of the
individual and the life of the group can be; how deeply rooted in a human being is
the sense of belonging to a group.
In the Euro-American culture, the relation between the group and the individual is
no longer perceived as an obvious subjugation of the individual to the group. We
observe here not only the need and longing for a sense of belonging, but also the
inability to satisfy them and the desire to be free of them. The experience of these
ambivalences and anxieties is painful. Socrates prefers – to emphasize: prefers,
chooses – death to existence away from Athens. Walter Benjamin would like to
belong but cannot: “Your draw to society puts you in greater danger […] than the
terrifying fear of solitude that speaks from many of your writings” 2 – wrote G.
Scholem in a letter to Benjamin. But Witold Gombrowicz would like to liberate
himself from these group ties and of the sense of belonging. He writes: “To relax
our subjugation to Poland, to tear ourselves away just a bit. To reveal and legalize
this other pole of sensing that commands the individual to defend himself against
his people as against any tyranny of the collective […] being Polish, to be
simultaneously someone ampler and grander than a Pole.” The fact that he wants to
be free of this attachment, does not mean that it is a stranger to him. To the
contrary, he feels it very powerfully. At the same time, however, Freud will say
expressis verbis that “we must protect the society against the individual.” Let us
also quote Julian Tuwim’s “Polish Flowers” which is recognized as the most
“emigrant” of all Polish poetry. Tuwim, like Gombrowicz on emigration in South
America, but in Rio de Janeiro rather than in Buenos Aires, writes: “As with that
drawer, so is with the homeland. You won’t throw anything away. Something
forbids you to clear out the attic of attachments and discard the ‘unnecessary’ and
the ‘unused.’”
It seems that in our times, the “model” emigration experience described above is
rare, though perhaps not completely disappeared. The inability to return occurs
only in special instances. Gombrowicz’s “other pole of sensing” also has much
more weight today, which means that identity is commonly identified with
personal subjectivity rather than with a group, and the unsatisfied desire to belong
to a group no longer threatens with death.
In the modern experience, emigration extinguishes itself and transforms itself in
migration. In the world dominated by technology and principium individuationis
2
Walter Benjamin, Pasaże,
4
Rosinska
we cease to be emigrants. Once again, we become nomads, but in contrast with the
nomadic tribes, we become individual nomads. Emigration becomes solely the
transcendental condition for the possibility of experiencing one’s own identity.
“The other pole of sensing” (i.e., the subjectivity) whose strengthening craved
Gombrowicz, reveals in experience its dark side. Subjectivity as the obvious
source of certainty and autonomy begins to be disputed. We experience anxiety,
uncertainty, and discomfort. The feeling of “not here” and the sense of loss
become acute. Emigration permits the confrontation with the other, or more
precisely with one’s self through the other. We experience dependence on those
from whom we strive to liberate ourselves, such as false, casual identity; but at the
same time, as a result of breaking with these dependencies, we experience
alienation, emptiness, lack of meaning, and solitude. We feel a want.
Let us point out that the experience of certain elements of the emigrant structure as,
for instance, of estrangement and alienation, is related to socio-political
transformations and to broadly understood progress. This experience as the
experience of a loss is described by young Polish writers. One of them, Janusz
Lewon, writes that after the move “nothing was like it used to be, the shards of the
shattered world have not re-collected themselves. In the condominium apartment
there was a bathroom and hot water and gas in a bottle; but there was no longer the
post offices […] And the post office ceased to exist as our world and our
kingdom.” So why didn’t the broken shards “re-collect themselves”?
It is not so with Odysseus. He knows where he is going. He remains himself. The
sense of identity of his subjectivity remains intact. Why is it that Odysseus,
despite such long seafaring peregrinations and myriad adventures, does not doubt
the identity of his subjectivity? And we today doubt it? Do we not trust Odysseus?
Is it that we no longer identify with him but rather with the experience of Walter
Benjamin, his homeless wanderings, exile rather than travel? “Exile is a form of
being whose end is forever far” writes Bauman in the afterword to his “Passages.”
Odysseus’s travels also had no close end in sight. Thus it is not the distance of the
end that divides these two visions of experiencing life away from one’s homeland.
“Exile is the permanent act of fleeing, ceaseless and hopeless” Bauman writes
elsewhere, and this seems to be the definitive difference: existence of the final
destination, the end of the journey, or lack of it; the negative vs. positive purpose
of travel. In the end Bauman characterizes this purpose as follows: “Declaring
oneself on the side of possibility, raising it onto a pedestal, means ridiculing the
dreams of clarity, fundamental values, and destiny. It means irony.” I am not
convinced that this characterization gives justice to the position of Benjamin. It
does, however, reflect the difference between him and Odysseus. Odysseus
5
Rosinska
alongside other mythological heroes had their images besmirched and “spat upon”
by Daumier who portrayed them as used up heroic puppets, taking snuff when no
one is watching” (Benjamin, s 790).
Melancholy
Analysis of the emigrant experience shows that, in part at least, it contains traits
characteristic of the experience of melancholy: the sense of estrangement, of
sadness, of loss, and lack of meaning. Melancholy demands expression and
understanding; expression in words, pictures, music, but also in illness, mystical
experience, and philosophy. It wants to be understood. But although the efforts at
understanding melancholy have been undertaken ever since Ancient Greece, and
although all the time they continue to reveal its new qualities, no one can claim to
have understood it fully. Melancholy does not take kindly to the doctors who
would like to shut it inside of the body and call it depression. But what is it, then?
The effort at grasping and describing it has endured – as I mentioned – ever since
Antiquity. Freud likens it to mourning, though discovering differences as well as
similarities: 1. “Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or
to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s
country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. In some people the same influences produce
melancholia instead of mourning...” ( v.XIV,p.243) W melancholii jednakże
“there is a loss of a more ideal kind”
2. “...it never occurs to us to regard it [mourning – Z.R.] as a pathological
condition, and to refer to it for medical treatment.
3. “...Profound mourning the reaction to the loss of someone who is loved
contains the same [as melancholy –Z.R.] painful frame of mind, the same loss of
interest in the outside world...the same loss of capacity to adopt any new object of
love...and the same turning away from any activity that is not connected with
thoughts of him...it is really only because we know so well how to explain it that
this attitute does not seem to us pathological.
4. In melancholy one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost...he knows
whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him”
5. Melancholy is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from
consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning in which there is nothing about
the loss that is unconscious.”(p245)
6. The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourning –
an extraordinary diminution in his self regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a
grand scale… In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in
melancholia it is the ego itself. In Freud’s opinion, melancholy is the disease of the
conscience: “We see how in him one part of the ego sets itself over against the
6
Rosinska
other, judges it critically and as it were, takes it as its object. What we are here
becoming acquainted with is the agency commonly called <conscience>...it is one
of the major institutions of the ego...it can become diseased on its own account. In
the clinical picture of melancholy, dissatisfaction with the ego on moral grounds is
the most outstanding feature.”3
I will not here analyze Freud’s conception in any detail. I just want to underscore
two observations he makes, namely, the “cracking” of the ego and the permanent
self-analysis and self-evaluation that this cracking entails and the inability to ever
know precisely what it is that we lost together with the lost object.
To the characterization of the melancholic state, one often also adds the sensation
of “not here.” Jerzy Pluta writes: “For only I know that I was born in the wrong
century, in the wrong country, in the wrong family, and on the wrong planet.” 4
Emil Cioran also emphasizes the esthetic tinge to melancholy. He describes it as
peacefulness, lack of tension, dreaminess.5
We can observe these qualities in the experience of Polish emigration in the period
of Romanticism, spurred by the disappearance of the homeland due to foreign
power partitions. Similar to the case of the Israelites, here we are dealing with a
flight from enslavement; except that there is no Promised Land and the return to
Ithaca (i.e., partitioned Poland) turns out to be impossible. Inconsolable laments,
the feeling of solitude and isolation, being “not there” are the expression of a
melancholy state of mind, but also, as highlighted by Freud, are accusations of fate.
Here as well memory aids us in keeping our identity, but most of all, it has a
therapeutic effect, healing the suffering caused by the sense of loss. Memory calls
back the lost reality, and as Plato writes in the dialogue “Ion,” it transports the
listener into that reality. 6 A perfect example of this is the epic poem “Pan
Tadeusz.” Adam Mickiewicz, its author, found himself alongside other Polish
poets in Paris as a political émigré. Here is what he wrote:
For us unbidden guests in every clime
From the beginning to the end of time
There is but one place in this planet whole
Where happiness may be for every Pole
The land of chilhood!
3
4
5
6
S.freud, Mourning and melancholy, p.248
Jerzy Pluta, Melancholica Polonaise, s.3
Emil Cioran, Na szczytach rozpaczy, Krakow, 1992, tłum. I.Kania
Platon, Ion
7
Rosinska
Memories described in “Pan Tadeusz” distracted from the hostile reality and
transported into the world that had been. They brought back the lost past but also
created a community of those who had to leave their homeland and suffered on
account of this loss. Mickiewicz read his poems at meetings with friends. They
made comments, added their own memories, corrected one another – in other
words, they co-created the past:
“And in those days my friends would oft afford
Help for my song, and threw me word on word”
Mickiewicz himself wrote: “I live thereby in Lithuania, in the woods, in the
taverns, with the Polish noblemen, with the Jews. If not for the poetry, I would run
away from Paris.” He was also conscious of the fact that he was preserving and
recording in human memory a world that was already passing. Was he recording a
true image? In the opinion of Czeslaw Milosz, “Pan Tadeusz” is a metaphysical
work. Its subject is the order of existence, as the image of pure being. Sunrises and
sunsets, ordinary activities like making coffee and picking mushrooms are just a
surface which hides underneath the great acceptance that animates and upholds the
descriptions. 7 One might ask how it is possible that in the state of embitterment,
resentfulness, and solitude there appears a poem that is the extreme opposite of
melancholy, which epitomizes order and groundedness. Let us remember that one
of the qualities of the state of melancholy is the external self-revelation. For
grievances and complaints are accusations and these must be publicly exposed.
Thus, we can speak here of the power of the desire and of the talent that created
this illusion (in the psychoanalytical sense) satisfying the desire. The esthetics of
melancholy, then, turned it into the harmony of fulfillment, a utopia.
To sum up, we have just described the third type of role that memory plays in the
emigration experience. When the emigration experience is of the melancholy kind,
which is related to the floundering sense of identity, art, aided by memory,
provides the images out of which arise a vision of the world that permits the
preservation of internal balance.
Let us recall here that it was the Italian Renaissance that began the process of
nobilitation and elevation of melancholy. From a despised ailment, it grew to be a
prerogative of genius. Ficino contributed greatly to this process, but he was greatly
aided by Aristotle’s formulation: “All truly exceptional, whether in philosophy or
in the art of governance or in poetry or in the arts are melancholics, some of them
7
Cz.Miłosz,
8
Rosinska
to such an extent that they become ill as a result of black bile.” Furor
melancholicus becomes equivalent to furor divinus. 8
Is estheticality always present in melancholy? Let’s recall again Benjamin and his
desire to belong. Teodor Adorno, his friend, wrote about him: “He knew that it is
impossible to adapt, yet he never gave up that wish. In all the households he called
on the one thing he could accomplish without fail was to make all the residents feel
more like household members” 9 Z. Bauman wrote in the afterword to Benjamin’s
“Passages”, “No, one cannot say that Benjamin’s melancholy was accompanied by
esthetic fulfillment.”
Memory
The concept that unites emigration, melancholy, and memory is the notion of loss.
The experience of loss is a common element in all three phenomena. Its presence
in melancholy and in emigration, at least the model type described above, is
noncontroversial. But what constitutes the loss in the modern experience of an
individual nomad? It seems to be the lost sense of identity, or at least the
experience of it as something secure and permanent. We stop knowing who we are.
Must one lose in order to remember? Aristotle writes that memory refers to the
past, but already St. Augustine does not limit the concept of memory to the past
only, but enlarges it to include present experience and the future. He links it with
personal identity and to describe it employs, among others, the metaphor of the
stomach: he likens memory to the belly of the mind. He says: “The memory
doubtless is, so to say, the belly of the mind: and joy and sadness are like sweet
and bitter food, which when they are committed to the memory are, so to say,
passed into the belly where they are can be stored but no longer tested” (Book X,
8
The rehabilitation of melancholy may also be used for ideological ends. This is noted by
Slavoj Ziżek. He emphasizes, against Freud, the ethical primacy of melancholy over mourning.
He claims that the melancholic subject remains faithful to the lost object and does not renounce
the existing link between them. The link with the lost object is also the loyalty to one’s ethnic
roots. In his belief, the rehabilitation of melancholy favors cynicism in the sense that it turns the
real bond into an ilusory, melancholic one, which permits the justification of full participation in
the global capitalist game.
.Julia Kristeva writes: „ Semiology, concerned as it is with the zero degree of symbolism
is unavoidably led to ponder over not only the amatory state but its corollary as well,
melancholija; at the same time it observes that if there is no writing other that amorous there is
no imagination overtly or secretly melancholy”(Black sun)
9
( On Walter Benjamin, Critical Essays and Recolections, red. G.Smith, Cambridge, Mass., 1988,s.19)
9
Rosinska
ch.XiV) Clearly he notices a “loss of taste” or distortion of recollected emotions.
This is borne out by another quotation from the Confessions: “This same memory
also contains the feelings of mind; not in the manner in which the mind itself
experienced them, but very differently according to the power peculiar to the
memory. For without being joyous now, I can remember that I once was joyous,
and without being sad, I can recall my past sadness. I can remember past fears
without fear, and former desires without desire. Again the contrary happens.
Sometimes when I am joyous I remember my past sadness, and when I am sad I
remember past joy”.
Remembering then does not presume loss and, although it typically refers to the
past, the past need not be perceived as a loss. How can we comprehend memory
so that it contains the experience of loss? How can we comprehend it in order to
understand the role played by art with respect to the feeling of loss? First of all,
memory would need to be construed as a mnemic experience, which is a temporal
construct. This construct would contain in itself elements such as committing to
memory or forgetting, but also the processes of remembering, recollecting,
repetition, and narration. Mnemic time would not be linear but rather circular
mixing and overlapping the past, the present, and the future. As noted already by
St. Augustine and developed by Freud and Heidegger – contrary to the views of
Bergson – memory is not capable of storing and preserving the past intact and
unchanging. A recollected memory is never the same but rather changes its
meaning depending on the horizon of other experiences that surround it.
Understood and experienced in this way, memory contributes to the floundering
sense of identity and the self-effacement of the emigration experience.
10