Leashing the Black Dog: Thoughts on Depression Memoirs

A while back, The New York Times had a strong review of Les Murray's memoir Killing the Black Dog and his poetry collection Taller When Prone, both published by FSG. Meghan O'Rourke, in the review's opening sentence, describes the "visceral smoldering" that is the hallmark of Murray's poetry. Certainly true in his poetry--but that vehemence and power seem absent, as if panned away, in the prose of his memoir.

Perhaps, this comes from the fact that Murray's piece isn't a memoir at all; in an afterword written in 2009, Murray informs the reader that Killing the Black Dog was originally written as a lecture in 1998. The piece has the casualness of an oration, a stream-of-consciousness flow that seems more fitting to a speech than a memoir. The text's long, rambling paragraphs contribute to this sensation and flood us with surface-level accounts of the author's psychological and familial troubles.

I don't protest the fragmentation of the narrative--I imagine that, for most folks who have struggled with a mental illness, the worst depressive episodes feel frozen in time, and then memory becomes a desperate jumble to scrapple together some order, some unifying logic to life. It's canning the lecture as a memoir and then appending the 25 "Black Dog Poems" that seems a disservice to the reader. The book--at a meager 84 pages (not including the indices)--needed about another fifty pages to explore the subject matter.

The poems draw from and hearken back to the episodes in the memoir, but the memoir needs to be developed beyond the lecture script and into the memoir. The memoir tells us, flatly, many of the traumatic events, without dramatizing them or analyzing them. His mother's death, for instance, comes to us in such vague approaches as this: "In facing my personal inner history, I had to look at some dark stuff. I had to remember what had felt like a growing dislike of me on the part of my poor mother, as her miscarriages ate her happiness away, and to recall a nightmare sense on my part [...]" (19). The afterword to the memoir attempts to provide the expansion, but it seems--to this reader--to be too little, too late.

O'Rourke's contention--"Now comes a book that offers a powerfully candid view of Murray’s struggles with depression — one that will speak even to readers unfamiliar with his work"--also seems a bit off, since we need the poems (and ergo, familiarizing ourselves with Murray's work) to feel the full impact of Murray's narrative. Best not to let the horse run off without the cart, methinks.

William Styron's Darkness Visible continues to be the standout depression memoir, though Murray's piece can be read as an interesting complement, as the two books are part of the same dialogue. (At one juncture, Murray charges that certain aspects of Styron's book are too facile, but Murray's book would need some expansion to further that claim.)

So pardon the rough review--Murray has assembled his tragic story, and the interplay between the lecture and the poems is an ambitious formal choice. The lecture portion of the book just requires something more--that stylistic, vocal difference between a talk and a confession.

Not Dead Yet: Marginalia and the Book

There was a recent New York Times article on marginalia, those little scribbles that bibliophiles scrawl in books' margins. Dirk Johnson, the article's author, suggests that the increase in electronic publishing modes decreases the interest in books and, consequentially, that little spark of insight that often comes when we read with a pencil in hand. An economic argument saturates the piece, which is noticeable through Johnson's opening anecdote--Mark Twain's notes in Walter Besant's The Pen and the Book. Johnson comments about the marginalia that makes an otherwise unimportant book rather valuable: "The scribbler was Mark Twain, who had penciled, among other observations, a one-way argument with the author, Walter Besant, that 'nothing could be stupider' than using advertising to sell books as if they were 'essential goods' like 'salt' or 'tobacco.'”

Johnson traps his reader in viewing the book only as a fetishized object--the very "essential goods" categorization that Twain derides. If we do not take notes in books, books will depreciate in value, and this important exchange of ideas--like a flow of currency--will get dammed for good. It's a recent tolling of the printed book's death knells.

The essential aspect of marginalia is not the exchange value it generates for a book but--if we're going to get ourselves stuck in Johnson's materialist world--the book's use value. Marginalia creates a community of readers that supersedes generations. I arrived at this idea (and remembered Johnson's article) as I read a poem in Rachel Hadas's collection The River of Forgetfulness. In that poem, "Marginalia," Hadas informs her reader that "[w]ho scans and skips misses the ghostly power / of all the readers who have come before" and that "the measliest annotation / helps us determine by triangulation / what some previous peruser thought." For those of us who have an affection for used books, we can feel the hands of previous readers as we turn through the pages, and if we encounter a note scribbled in the margin, we find ourselves stumbling into a discussion about life, literature, and politics.

But why does this mean the book is dying? Or that marginalia has had its day? We need to consider the possibility that the text is communicating outside the page's confines. Book reviews, critical essays, the lot of literary nonfiction--all of these can amount to marginalia that's too big to smash into the margins. Electronic publishing is good for what it's good for--taking books on the go and having something to read in transit. But there's nothing like a solid, close reading--something that college English professors should make clear cannot occur without a pencil in hand. That can be through marginalia or notations. The whole point of marginalia isn't how it boosts a book's cost but how it boosts the knowledge we get from reading.

Consider this my footnote on Johnson's New York Times article. Especially since I read it online and don't care to run Sharpie all over my MacBook's screen.

Is New Literature Anything More than Repetition?

On 9 October, The New York Times published an op-ed by Maureen Dowd entitled "Lord of the Internet Rings," in which Dowd draws parallels between her experience of seeing Wagner's Ring Cycle for the first time and David Fincher's and Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network. Dowd writes:

But as I watched the opera, my mind kept flashing to the "The Social Network," another dazzling drama about quarrels over riches, social hierarchy, envy, theft and the consequences of deceit. A Sony executive called "The Social Network," the David Fincher-Aaron Sorkin movie about Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and his circle of ex-friends and partners, "the first really modern movie." Yet the strikingly similar themes in Wagner's feudal "Das Rheingold"--the Ring cycle is based on the medieval German epic poem "Das Nibelungenlied," which some experts say helped inspire J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings"--underscore how little human drama changes through the ages.

Dowd's critique, twofold in nature, initially highlights a critique that, like a ceremonial canon blast of grapeshot, discharges and is heard around the world every time Hollywood releases a remake: There's nothing new in literature or film; everything has been done already.

On its surface, this may appear true. So how can a film like The Social Network--or any other piece of literature, written or visual or auditory--possibly do anything new? Remember, for starters, that I said Dowd's criticism was twofold. If one side is that there's nothing new, its inverse--the American seal on the back of the quarter, so to speak--is that mythic archetypes are easily recycled; though the narrative structures appear similar, the form is merely a tool we have to understand our world, its advances, and how those most human of emotions can interfere even in a postindustrial, tech-heavy society.

The mythic, then, isn't simply a myth; it's a way for us to reframe what's happening around us, today. T.S. Eliot, in writing his essay "Ulysses, Order and Myth" about James Joyce's Ulysses, praised what he termed the novel's "mythic method": Joyce took the allusions to Homer's Odyssey, and in a novel he employed the mythic figures, the epic narrative arc, and illuminated the unique characters and ideologies of Dublin, Ireland, as it existed on June 16, 1904.

I don't know about genre theory to say definitively (not that anybody can say something definitively when it comes to literature, though they'll try) that there are no new forms or structures extant in film, music, and literature today. But even if there aren't, even if history seems easily categorized by these same forms and structures, there will always be new characters, new psychologies, new circumstances.

Don't Shy Away When the Bookbug Bites

So why read. It's a question that I've seen flung around time and again, and particularly--especially in the stodgy academic circles--this has become a question meant to test the resolve, the necessity, of the book.

There are simple answers to "Why read?," which include that the Internet--even with its bevy of webcomics (to which I'm admittedly addicted), YouTube (see comment the previous), and other visual media (Google image search!)--is nonetheless based on words, code, language, and all that stuff. We haven't got to what the Beat novelist William Burroughs had expected: a visual society. You can't think of an image of Big Ben and then have that appear in your image search or as a YouTube video. You have to type "Big Ben" in a search bar and strike enter. (Or click on the "Search" button, but who actually takes the time to drag the mouse point and click--with the notable exception of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in You've Got Mail. But it was the '90s. They can be forgiven.)

Words, then, are everywhere, and we're flooded with them. And it's easy to get desensitized in this ocean of language, where things are minimized to quick factoids and reports. So the book...who wants to read after a long day of spending time with words, words, and more words? Why aren't we all singing in time with Eliza Doolittle: "Words, words, I'm sick of words!"?

There's something about books that remind us of what it is to be human. To share something. To connect. And all this talk of the book as just a repository for knowledge...how about as a medium for communicating? I recently came across this NYTimes interview with Charlaine Harris, the author of the book series ported into HBO's True Blood. And some of her answers to the interviewer's questions reminded me of precisely why we read books.

Books make issues personal and connect us to other people. Read the interview, and consider Harris's comments about the sexuality of her characters. Or think about the cult sensation that shows such as True Blood have become. And how these things create conversations. Friends watch the shows and then buy the books and read the books and all the while...they're talking.

So I can't understand why people try to defend the book as some repository of knowledge, some dusty tome that's dry and tedious and dreadfully, dreadfully dull and droll. Let's talk about something that Charlaine Harris apparently knows, that books--regardless of genre, regardless of how intricate or beautifully written--should first and foremost bring people together.

In the words of Stan Lee, "'Nuff said."

Artfully Done

A New York Times article on gay theatre shows us a rather interesting parallel to the political processes at work. Patrick Healy, the article's author, points to plays and musicals about gay life during the 1980s and 1990s, such as Angels in America and Rent, that focused on the political battles and activism, in that they pushed awareness of AIDS and political situations for practicing homosexuals.

That's of course something important to invoke in the cultural consciousness, but Healy argues that gay theatre is charting a new course, following a new tack. Instead of focusing on the political battles, gay theatre--through recent plays such as the off-Broadway musical Yank!--has turned to the domestic side of things. Yank!, for instance, is about a love affair between two men in the Army during World War II; though it has the potential to be political, its primary focus is on the relationship between the two men.

Basically, this theatre trend argues that everybody has an equal right to happiness, with whomever that might be.

It's an idea that I think politicized art often overlooks, that there are human beings out there, each being governed by rules, social norms, and expectations; these people have emotions, feelings, passions, and they cannot be easily reduced to a data set. That ignores who they are, what they feel, what they believe.

(Re)Writing History

Apologies for the title and a use of parentheses that, as far as I can tell, was last acceptable in the ‘80s, when every cool poststructuralist academic, her/his brother, and pet dog were making all kinds of puns. Also adored was the title containing two or more colons (yes, those do exist). Just be glad I didn’t throw one of those at you.

But if I were to write a paper on some of the creative re-imaginings of American history I’ve heard, I might need a colon or three. (And being Patrick Henry, I’ve heard lots of those, especially a teenager at the counter of a Virginia 7-11 asking me if I’m the guy that all those streets and stuff are named after. Note to self: Never pay for anything in Virginia with a credit card, ever again.) And misunderstandings, misconceptions abound not just in storefronts but in pulpits, newspaper columns, conventional wisdom, and--courtesy of Christian fundamentalism--possibly in a classroom near you.

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine features an essay by Russell Shorto entitled “How Christian Were the Founders?” In this piece, Shorto explores a recent push by the Texas State Board of Education--which has enormous sway over other state education agencies--to include details about the founders’ alleged Christianity and how those principles founded American social and political culture.

This is the same state board that, Shorto reminds us, last year had conservative members pushing for a mandatory inclusion of intelligent design and young earth theories in science classrooms.

Shorto writes, “Recently, however--perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists--some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society.”

There’s been ample evidence--on both sides of the issue--that the founding of the United States and the creation of the Constitution may or may not have had religious reasoning to it. But what’s being forgotten in this debate is that such an argument isn’t history--if by “history” we mean an aggregation of facts, the individual datum that like vertebrae stack upon each other and calcify into a backbone, into a linear spine of dates and events.

An argument on either side can occur quite easily. As a writer and literature student, I can easily investigate, for instance, Jefferson’s prose in The Declaration of Independence or the founders’ “Christian” references in the Constitution, things easily explained away by either political necessity, by groups of Enlightenment-era philosophers and humanists and scientists and wealthy business owners employing a religious discourse to validate their control over the economic, social, and political means of power and production (sound like anything that’s happening today?). But the religious movement can point to events--such as one that Shorto references--like Baptist ministers lobbying President Thomas Jefferson for protection, security, and a small bit of constitutional interpretation (hopefully, in their favor).

In requiring textbooks to explicitly reference the country’s Christian creation myth and favoring a conservative agenda (such as including Newt Gingrich, who’s “Contract with/on America” is actually quite minor compared to the prolonged and integral role of Senator Ted Kennedy, not included in the proposal), the Texas State Board of Education is not providing an actual and factual history, but a version of history. A particular critical fiction that they want people to buy into and believe.

Facts are not an argument; facts are the basis for arguments. And that’s what history is: Not a fact but an argument spun from bits of evidence, an argument that--depending upon its creator’s whims--can be contorted into one sort of personal fiction or another. So if you want to teach history, start with the events and don’t give students an interpretation, but encourage them to hunt for the evidence and the details and piece together a personal understanding of the narrative, based on facts and research and critical thinking.

Any of you involved in education (be that as students or teachers), I’d be interested in hearing what you have to say on this. Click on that "Comment" button and let me know what you have to say.