I am not the cheeriest person around. I take a sort of perverse joy in the unseemly, and I find many darkly hilarious things in Naturalist writers like Frank Norris. I feel deeply uncomfortable when faced with the bright, the bouncy, the perky, and the peppy. My favorite Christmas decoration is a huge spray-painted sign I usually see outside a house in western New York that reads “Bah Humbug!” To top it off perfectly, the sign is festooned with Christmas lights. My favorite New Yorker cartoon shows Edgar Allan Poe contemplating the raven sitting upon the bust of Pallas above his chamber door. A thought bubble above his head shows a white dove perched happily there instead. “Edgar Allan Prozac” reads the caption, implying that too much happiness would harm literature.
So, why does Eric Wilson’s book, Against Happiness, annoy me so much? His point is certainly something I agree with, and something I have often thought about myself: we Americans tend to make an unhealthy fetish of happiness, and try far too hard, and to our detriment, to avoid anything that might possibly cause us to feel pain or unhappiness. But I find so many things about this book to be squirmingly uncomfortable. Perhaps he tries so hard to preach the gospel of melancholy that he becomes a cheerleader as annoyingly sure of the rightness of his position as the most blissfully saccharine proselytizer for eternal happiness. Perhaps he takes a good idea for a deeply thoughtful essay and turns it into a bloated monster of 150 pages that is really neither a light nor a quick read. Perhaps he makes too many broad, sweeping, and entirely unhelpful generalizations for me to swallow them whole.
The first thing that bothers me about this book is the constant conflation of happiness with material possessions. While I agree that so much of American consumerism is built on the premise that true happiness is only one MasterCard charge away (“Finding bliss: priceless.”), there is significantly more to our reckless pursuit of happiness than simply buying the latest and greatest thing from Hammacher Schlemmer. To be fair, Wilson does point out that we tend to think happiness is our natural default position, and it is not always tied directly to consumerism. However, he spends so much time with this aspect of happiness, and he returns to it so frequently, that it does simply overshadow but absolutely crushes any nuance.
Another problem I have is his, in my opinion, drastic oversimplification of a couple of American authors. He finds William Bradford (who, to be perfectly accurate, is not American but a British subject since America did not exist in his time) to be particularly guilty of putting happiness before all else. He also profoundly dislikes Benjamin Franklin, or more correctly, his Poor Richard persona, finding him to be blissfully blinded by the desire to acquire more and more wealth.
He says of these two authors:
In this way the capitalist of Franklin is little different from the Puritan of Bradford. Both overlook the real, the howling wilderness and the holy wood, in hopes of resting in security–in the eternal bosom of God, in the durable dirt of purchased land.
I find Wilson’s inexact and sloppy analysis here especially galling. How is it possible that Bradford overlooked the “howling wilderness,” when this phrase comes directly from Of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford’s account of the first English settlements in Massachusetts? Bradford hardly “overlooked” this howling wilderness, but was instead nearly paralyzed by terror at the thought of it. It is far too easy to dismiss him as a property-hoarding, commodity-loving Puritan if we do not take into consideration the serious deprivation the Puritans faced in North America (over half the settlers died in the first year, for example). Far from turning a blind eye to suffering, the Puritans felt that their pain and unhappiness was a fitting test from their stern God, and they sought no reward on earth but believed in an eternal recompense in heaven (see Anne Bradstreet for more on this).
And how can Benjamin Franklin, the exemplar of Baconian scientific rational thought be accused of overlooking the real? What exactly does he mean by “the real”? (His notes refer us to Jameson’s Postmodernism, but that seems a slippery sleight of hand to me.) Franklin’s scientific discoveries relied almost solely on an appreciation of the physical universe and the natural laws that appear to govern that universe. Is that not “the real”?
Another problem I have with the Franklin-bashing is that Wilson sets up a straw man that would be frowned upon in any undergraduate literature class: he conflates the author’s persona with the author himself. Franklin is most definitely not Poor Richard, though the two share an address. In focusing his reading of Franklin entirely on the Poor Richard persona, Wilson misses some crucial points to be found in the autobiography. Wilson accuses Franklin of acquisitiveness, of searching for happiness in buying more and more material possessions. Franklin, though, found frugality to be one of the highest virtues, and taught himself at an early age to eat little, and that little mostly vegetarian, to save money to buy more books for study. One could argue that in buying books he is not being very frugal, but it is significant that he chose physical privation to promote his mental stimulation; though Franklin, especially in his later years, could be quite a hedonist, in his youth, he knew happiness was not a matter of mere property.
Wilson’s heroic figure in American literature is, of course, Herman Melville, whose masterpiece, Moby-Dick, is perhaps the American epitome of melancholy (Hamlet, of course, is the British epitome). I agree with him here, though I still found his quick analysis of the novel to be just as annoying as his misrepresentations of Franklin and Bradford.
Wilson ends his second chapter this way:
The greatest tragedy is to live without tragedy. To hug happiness is to hate life. To love peace is to loathe the self. The blues are clues to the sublime. The embrace of gloom stokes the heart.
I have a lot of trouble with this. He is guilty of hyperbole, at the very least. These statements seem to be the rantings of a cranky contrarian who will say the opposite of what everyone else says just to piss people off. And then he will be happy–yes, happy–that he has succeeded in pissing everyone off. How can we take seriously the idea that peace is somehow equivalent to self-loathing? That happiness is hate? These make great, interesting, and above all controversial soundbites, but they don’t really seem to have any meaning. Yes, the self is a conflicted, tumultuous, difficult thing, but searching for and desiring peace does not lead to loathing of the self. I would say instead that one who rejects peace loathes the self and prefers to wallow in misery.
Pain is good (I tend to seek it out frequently, myself), but to say that seeking an end to pain is self-loathing is foolish. Pain may build character (a doubtful, Nietzschean position), but character can only solidify in the moments of peace between bouts of pain. I see a similarity to the common misrepresentation of Romantic inspiration. Many think of the Wordsworthian ideal that inspiration comes in a moment of divine frenzy, the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” but they forget the second half: “recollected in tranquility.” Unending pain is no more self-loving than an unending overflow of powerful feelings is endlessly creative. At some point the stimulus must stop.
So, in conclusion (as my students insist on ending their papers despite my frequent injunctions), I tried desperately to like this book. I am, as I said, sympathetic to the idea that happiness is not a commodity that everyone should have every single second of one’s life. I also find melancholy appealing. But I just couldn’t get into this book, I am sad to say. I guess Wilson succeeded at least partly, then–I was certainly not happy reading his book.
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The Hobgoblin of Little Minds 