Melancholia, Mammon, and Magic

Abstract

always night, or wouldn't need light.-Thelonious Monk1LIKE 'ROUND MIDNIGHT, his best known composition, Thelonious Monk's dictum speaks to a cross-cultural basis for complex emotions called melancholia and deep involvement of those emotions with creativity. With Monk's words in mind, I will turn toward some landmarks in Renaissance culture in which dynamic interplay of night and light is explored.This essay offers a wide-ranging discussion of melancholia in The Faerie Queene. By a circuitous route, it will arrive at a focus on Sir Guy on in his encounter with Mammon and narrative's descent into Mammon's underworld. My argument proceeds first through Marsilio Ficino's Three Books on Life, placing Ficino's diagnosis of consequences of being born under Saturn within framework of a treatise that covers several other topics, all of which offer ways to counter ill effects of severe melancholia. I will argue that Ficino's treatise helps us to understand The Faerie Queene, and that his rationale for therapeutic magic should be taken seriously by readers of Spenser. I remain committed to proposition, advanced tentatively in Spenser's Supreme Fiction, that the poet's worldmaking and procedures of a magician whose power comes from daemon Love may be much alike.' I will say at outset, however, that anyone who embraces possibility of therapeutic magic, along with any poet who aims to move readers toward virtuous action, must also confront possibility of failure and a return of melancholy theme, It's always night.1Most readers of The Faerie Queene are acquainted with melancholia and recognize traits of that distemper in several of poem's characters, but subject has not received a deep treatment specific to Spenser/' As an obvious trait in major and minor characters on dark side of poem (Night, Aesculapius, Despair, Mammon, Huddibras, Maleger, and Malbecco), melancholia is presented to us as something to be feared, and to be avoided if possible. The poem's melancholy lovers (Timias, Marinell, Amoret, Florimell, and Priscilla) receive sympathy in their predicaments, but they are somewhat culpable, never glamorous in their suffering. Redcrosse, Una, Arthur, and Britomart experience melancholy at times, but they are not overcome by it. And last but not least, since Merlin's role in poem resembles poet's own, when great seer looks into future with Britomart and Glauce his spirite is first enabled, then in end overcome in a halfe extatick stoure, by a prophetic furor that is akin to melancholia (IH.iii.21 and 50).The figure of Phantastes, one of honorable (II.ix.47) lodged in turret of Alma's castle, is full of melancholy, and a special case. He occupies a position of prestige, yet his appearance-Bent hollow beetle browes, sharpe staring eyes,/That or seemd-is as grotesque as Mammon's, indicating that he was borne with ill disposed skyes,/When oblique Saturne sate in house of agonyes (52). Fowler observes that while Saturn's influence is to be expected in a book dominated by Aquarius, we are hardly prepared to find it exerted in Castle of Alma itself (Numbers of Time 101). I follow Hamilton's commentary in correlating three sages and their rooms with three higher faculties of soul (fantasy or foresight, judgment or understanding, and memory), and also with future, present, and past, all constituting an allegory of Prudence, intellectual virtue most closely allied with moral virtue of Temperance.4What is melancholia, as manifested in a figure so mad or foolish as Phantastes seems to be, doing in an allegory of Prudence, and what could wild energy in his chamber possibly contribute to future-oriented education of Guyon and Arthur? Melancholia typically afflicts older people, and it is surprising to find it embodied in a young man with a hyperactive imagination. …