Marx and melancholy

John Pitcher in a recent Omaha.com article, Americans' fear of feeling sad may be threat to great art, questions if there’s a connection between melancholy and creativity. Pitcher’s article makes specific reference to Eric Wilson’s new book Against Happiness which, according to Pitcher, “paints a disturbing portrait of what happens to art in a world filled with ‘happy types’.”

I haven’t read Eric Wilson’s book, but a quote from Pitcher’s article caught my attention. The article quoted Dr Thomas Svolos, an adjunct professor and the vice chairman of the department of psychiatry at the Creighton University School of Medicine, as saying: “When you’re melancholy, you tend to step back and examine your life. That kind of questioning is essential for creativity.”

The article further states, “It’s especially true because the psychiatric community has long known about the link between artistic genius and manic-depressive disorder. History is full of examples. Composer Ludwig van Beethoven, painter Vincent van Gogh and writer Sylvia Plath all were famous depressives.” Among another few thousand personalities from the arts and sciences.

In fact, a fellow blogger, recently, also made references to a possible link between melancholy and creativity while reviewing the writings of Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth – both Austro-Hungarians from early 20th century. This made me think of Karl Marx – perhaps a genius in his own right from half a century or so before Zweig and Roth – who had perpetually suffered from melancholy and creativity.

Karl Marx, like his workers in a capitalist society, struggled forever to be accepted by the world around him. His writing was considered belligerent and anti-government and he was driven out from many places. He was forced to move from Prussia to France to Belgium to, finally, England, where he lived in poverty most of his life.

In spite of Frederick Engels supporting him financially, Marx and his family lived in squalor, were constantly ill, losing three of his four children to illnesses of various kinds, making him incapable of thinking, reading or writing. Although I cannot be certain if Marx was a manic-depressive, his depression did reflect in his productivity and it took him over twenty years to deliver his first volume of Das Kapital in 1867. And, as everyone knows, it was the book that changed the world.

Of course, by that time Marx had written and published various other material, the most famous of which was The Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848. But nothing compared to Das Kapital, his magnum opus, the later three volumes of which were published after his death (in 1883).

Interestingly, Karl Marx was well-read in philosophy and literature, and Das Kapital includes many such references. Although Das Kapital is a work of economics (or political economy), Marx’s initial ambition was to become a poet. In fact, he had published some of his poetry earlier in his life. Marx believed philosophers and poets only analysed and reflected upon the world. What he wanted was to change it.

[Citation: Americans' fear of feeling sad may be threat to great art by John Pitcher in Omaha.com, 19 May 2008.]