Logo image
Back
This phantom gibbet: writing through/as melancholy
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

This phantom gibbet: writing through/as melancholy

Ross Watkins
Text, Vol.20(Special Issue 35), pp.1-12
2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.27056
pdf
PDF - Published Version193.24 kBDownloadView
Published VersionPDF - Published Version Open Access
url
https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.27056View
Published Version

Abstract

Performing Arts and Creative Writing creative writing melancholy grief
In Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989), Julia Kristeva suggests that melancholy - an experience of 'object loss' (effectively, when a sign fails to correspond to its meaning, as established by Freud) - is a language which requires learning in order for this state ofbeing (or 'nonbeing') to be understood. Melancholy affect, Kristeva argues, can thus be transposed into art where the 'symbolic' is represented through the 'sign'; she states: 'Artifice, as sublime meaning for and on behalf of the underlying, implicit nonbeing replaces the ephemeral' (Kristeva 1989: 99). In other words, in the experience of 'object loss' we look toward the imagination and the construction of signs to fill the void and make meaning - absence evoked by a presence. Accepting these ideas, this paper explores the paradoxical nature of narrative writing (via poetry by Keats, memoir by Malouf, and fiction by Banville) as a process which not only removes the melancholic from the object of their experience, but constructs a container for the melancholy object, to which the writer is inherently bound.

Details

Metrics

76 File views/ downloads
423 Record Views
Logo image