Professor Kratka                                                                                                                                                                  Aaron King

November 21, 2019

The Influence of the Melancholy

            Like a cold mist creeping in over a windswept beach, melancholy obscures the perception of its victims, confusing their vision and creating an illusion that inhibits the clarity of the truth. By definition, melancholia is a specific form of mental illness characterized by depression or indifference. Often, melancholic people believe that control of their situation is more defined by their environment than what they do about it. This paper will explore the incorporation of the melancholy in pieces of fiction, “The Pagan Rabbi,” by Cynthia Ozick, and Seize the Day, by Saul Bellow, to show how the characters’ melancholic mindsets directly influence their decisions and how the reader should respond to those melancholy characters. In “The Pagan Rabbi”, Ozick uses the melancholic ideas of the characters to give each character a distinct perspective. Through the rabbi Isaac Kornfeld who is discontent within the restrictions of Mishnaic instruction, Ozick shows that any divergence from the Law ultimately results in death. For Sheindel, Kornfeld’s wife, melancholy appears in her spiteful disdain of her husband once she learns of his pagan ideas.  In Seize the Day, the main character, Tommy Wilhelm, is subject to melancholy reasoning which results in Tommy’s disheveled physical appearance, the loss of his money, and an estranged relationship with his family. His father, however, is far removed from the suffering of his son, conceitedly, yet comfortably oblivious of his son’s misfortune. His wife, Margaret, and his business partner, Dr. Tamkin, are only interested in Wilhelm’s money. Therefore, in both stories, the characters suffer from some form of melancholy that elicits a darker, more honest side of them.

            In “The Pagan Rabbi”, melancholy serves as the catalyst that drives Isaac Kornfeld to act on his desires. Discontent within the “fence of the Law”, Kornfeld neglects his duties as a teacher to his fellow Jews and begins searching for answers outside the scope of Judaic instruction. He concludes that there are two types of souls: the free and the indwelling. The former belongs to Nature and is free to roam outside the object to which it belongs, but the human is conditioned with the indwelling soul, which is trapped within the body. However, instead of accepting his fate as a victim of the indwelling soul like most melancholic people would, Kornfeld decides to take action. He seeks to free his soul when he writes, “If only I could couple with one of the free souls, the strength of the connection would likely wrest my own soul free from my body–seize, it as if by tongs, draw it out, so to say, to its own freedom” (Ozick,28). Kornfeld believes he can release his soul through intercourse with some free soul of Nature. Because Kornfeld cannot bear the thought of his soul staying trapped in his body as it rots to nothing, he realizes that to avoid this, he must somehow liberate his soul from his body, signaling his desperation to escape the melancholy circumstances of his existence. When he eventually acts on his ideas and copulates with a tree, he is gratified by a dryad who he clings to and does not release. Consequently, his soul stays with the dryad and is finally freed from his body. However, the dryad is repulsed the sight of Kornfeld’s soul and deserts it.

When Kornfeld sees his soul, he too is distraught by its image, for it is everything that he intended to escape by freeing himself from it. The image of his soul is an old man, reading from a Tractate of the Mishnah, only caring to study the Judaic Law; “He reads the Law and breathes the dust and doesn’t see the beauty of the flowers and won’t heed the beauty of the cricket chirping in the field” (35). The very law which he attempts to flee is ironically his inmost being. The significance in the image of Isaac Kornfeld’s soul is essential to the melancholic aspects of his character. His soul appears as a decrepit, old man who breathes dust and cannot appreciate the beauty of life around him. However, the soul informs Kornfeld that everything he was chasing was deceitful, and the only true beauty lies within the scripture.  Kornfeld’s soul embodies all that he deemed as worthless within Judaic teaching. This holds significance because, no matter how far Kornfeld’s body and ideas stray from the Law, his soul remains on the path of righteousness, within the “Fence of the Law.”

In utter desperation to regain the beauty of Nature which his soul rejected, Kornfeld concludes that he will only experience full freedom by joining the dryad in killing himself. The rabbi then “…grabbed his prayer shawl by its tassels and whirled around him once or twice until I had unwrapped it from him altogether, and had wrapped it on my own neck and in one bound came to the tree” (36). Kornfeld shows common signs of depression by accepting that he can no longer control his fate and deciding that his only way out of this misery is death. By killing himself, Kornfeld is also exchanging the so-called truth of his soul for a figment of his imagination, an illusion that inhibits him from seeing the truth. Kornfeld’s ideas are preposterous. His delusional relationship with some mystical girl does not present the idea of a sound mind. However, although Kornfeld is not a relatable character, Ozick uses his melancholy aspect to express her conclusion that any distraction from the law will lead to death. The melancholy attributes of Kornfeld, although subtle, deeply influence his decisions.

After Sheindel learns of her husband’s ideas, she asserts that he was not a true rabbi, but a pagan. Sheindel, by the grace of her God, survives the concentration camp only to marry someone who rejects all that she believes in. Sheindel reveals her opinion when she says, “I don’t destroy his honor. He had none… He was a pagan” (22). Sheindel expresses her melancholy characteristics through a cold indifference to the fate of her husband, distancing herself from him and his paganism. She realizes that nothing she does can change what has happened and so accepts her unfortunate destiny. Sheindel’s reaction to Kornfeld, like most readers’ reactions, is normal because a rabbi, a leader of the Jewish people, has turned against the ways of God to explore the pagan pleasures of Nature.

In his article The Daemonic Life of Objects: Object-Oriented Criticism and Cynthia Ozick’s “The Pagan Rabbi,” Dillon Rockrohr explores how Kornfeld imposes human attributes on inanimate objects and discusses object-oriented ontology in the daemonic life of fiction. I will focus, however, on the correlation between Kornfeld stepping outside the law, and speculative realism as an abandonment of correlationism, presented in this article. Rockrohr considers the epistemological sanction that Kornfeld transgresses when he considers ideas outside the Jewish Law.

Similar to Kornfeld discarding the Law, speculative realism debates that outside the law of correlationism, there is only the objective thought of the subjective thinker, unaffected by interaction with other objects. Contrarily, since everything is interactive, Rockrohr asserts that “Correlationism does away with the idea that we can adequately represent reality apart from its relation to us, but in doing so it also makes it impossible to know ourselves as subjects apart from our relation to the objects of our knowledge” (Rockrohr, 215). In other words, since each person is part of reality, no one can fully understand anything because each subjective interpretation is affected by its interconnection with those objects or materials, creating a transformative experience, and therefore cannot be purely objective. Just as Kornfeld does with Nature, speculative realists would look into themselves to find the single distinction of the object which they are seeking to define. Kornfeld “…simply failed to reckon with the terms of his cohabitation with the daemonic life of things” (223). Thus, Kornfeld makes the dubious mistake of thinking that his single interpretation of the daemonic world is definitive when he is exposed to the world of the dryad and other free souls. It is impossible for Kornfeld to become a completely free soul when he admits that there is a distinction between the free and indwelling souls because he will always carry the traits of the indwelling. Divorced from reality, Kornfeld acts outside the law as speculative realism cannot act within the laws of correlationism because the Law sets any idea outside what it knows as occulted, but both Kornfeld and speculative realism maintain that the laws negate the ideas they confront.

            Unlike Kornfeld who arrives at the conclusion that the only escape from the melancholy is through death, Tommy Wilhelm finds another way out. However, before this happens, he must undergo many hardships. Wilhelm, the protagonist in Seize the Day, has obvious characteristics of melancholy. First of all, Wilhelm has very low self-esteem. He dresses only to pass the inspection of his father, takes medication to soothe his emotional discomfort, and rarely cleans himself, all displaying his indifference towards himself. Bellow writes, “He was beginning to lose his shape, his gut was fat, and he looked like a hippopotamus” (Bellow, 28). Wilhelm is gaining weight, smoking constantly, and overall, living an unhealthy lifestyle.  Moreover, he lives in filthy conditions. His Pontiac is grimy with ash, full of trash, and covered in grease. Wilhelm’s apartment is a veritable junkyard. These aspects portray a depressed man who cares little for himself, apathetic to his state of existence.

            In comparison, Tommy Wilhelm’s father, Dr. Adler, seems untouched by the melancholy aspects that are drowning his son. Dr. Adler is a wealthy, retired doctor who is removed from the suffering of his son. In fact, the two are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Where Wilhelm lives an unhealthy lifestyle, Dr. Adler has steam baths and massages. When Wilhelm is at his wit’s end for lack of money, his father is practically rolling in it. The only thing that can seem to bother the doctor is his son’s inability to create the same success that he did, so he lies to his friends about the welfare of his son, bragging that he makes five figures. Dr. Adler feels no sympathy for his son, and the last thing he would do is help Wilhelm.

            When it comes to money, Wilhelm is in trouble. Throughout his life, he made some bad career decisions; “After much thought and hesitation and debate, he invariably took the course he had rejected innumerable times” (23). Beginning with a man named Maurice Venice who said he could set up Wilhelm with an acting job, once Wilhelm committed money to him, Venice dropped him. Wilhelm also left his wife, Margaret, but is still paying for many of her and their children’s needs. Moreover, Wilhelm recently partnered with Dr. Tamkin, a self-acclaimed psychologist who thinks himself quite bodacious, to invest in the public market, buying stocks in lard and rye; however, Dr. Tamkin is a pathological liar, and he eventually steals what is left of Wilhelm’s money. Wilhelm realizes, “…from the moment when he tasted the peculiar flavor of fatality in Dr. Tamkin, he could no longer keep back the money” (55). In other words, Wilhelm feels that he is predestined to make every mistake, and there is little to nothing he can do to prevent it, common symptoms of a melancholic character. Wilhelm realizes his state of depression when he thinks, “In any moment of quiet when sheer fatigue prevented him from struggling, he was apt to feel this mysterious weight, this growth or collection of nameless things which it was the business of his life to carry about” (36). Not only is he aware of his own melancholy, but he accepts it as his destiny. It is aggravating to the reader to see Wilhelm’s inability to be productive, always making the wrong decisions and never accomplishing his goals.

            Finally, Tommy Wilhelm struggles with the strained relationships of his family. He wants a divorce from his wife, but she will not give it to him, and his father will not give him the money he needs to get by. Wilhelm and his father are estranged because Dr. Adler, the heartless, isolated, greedy man, terrified only by the thought of death, will not contaminate his being with the care of his failed son, the repulsive embarrassment of his life. Dr. Adler states, “I don’t understand your problems… I never had any like them” (46). Wilhelm and his father cannot see eye to eye on issues concerning Wilhelm’s wellbeing, causing Wilhelm to become further sorry for himself and Dr. Adler to despise his son, even more, thus precipitating the vicious cycle.  His wife also spites him saying, “‘Are you in misery?” she was saying. “But you have deserved it”’ (106). It often feels like Margaret is right, and many times, Wilhelm is more than deserving of this spite, but at some point, the reader must choose between the cold hand of Wilhelm’s family and a more compassionate response to a man who tries, but can never get it right.

            In her article, On Saul Bellow’s Seize The Day: “Sunk Though He Be Beneath the Wat’ry Floor”, Elizabeth Frank investigates the different characters in Seize The Day and their representations of different perspectives in the real world. When Wilhelm, in search of Dr. Tamkin, ventures into the darkness of a funeral service, he is finally able to express his anguish over his failed life. Here, Frank writes, Wilhelm comprehends “…the mortality of everything, the vanity and fragility and futility, the imperfections and failures of ourselves and our fates, the utter, terrifying fact of existence itself, the failure of life to live up” (Frank, 79). This insight clarifies the little closure that Wilhelm experiences, that others also fail, others also suffer, and he is not alone in his walk of life. Later, she asserts that Dr. Adler represents the isolationist who cuts himself off from the pain of others, neat and tidy within his business. He does not want the slovenly habits of his failed son to reflect a bad light on his image. Wilhelm, she claims, embodies the miserable, the unfortunate, who seem to only fail at what they do. Frank’s idea, however, is that everyone must choose between a Dr. Adler and a Tommy Wilhelm because if not, each is at the mercy of a character like Dr. Tamkin, someone who will exploit each one’s weaknesses and run off with the benefits.

            Just as object-oriented ontology is not a fully conclusive understanding of an object, melancholy does not give a full understanding of these novels because each book and each character can be observed from multiple perspectives. These other points of view combined with the melancholy perspective may give the reader a better insight to the character, but as speculative realism reminds us, no object, including fiction, can be fully definitive because each is constantly interacting with its environment, and even the perspective of each reader will provide a new outlook on the object. In this case, however, melancholy highlights important themes and features of specific characters in these two novels. From Isaac Kornfeld’s obsession with the daemonic world to Tommy Wilhelm’s constant failures, each character encounters melancholy aspects of themselves that inhibit them from continuing through their life without having to somehow confront these restraining features. While Kornfeld sees his only escape as death, Wilhelm is able to recognize that he fails and that others, even though they try, are also inevitably imperfect. Therefore, although melancholy tends to be a deterring attribute, the characters use their melancholy aspects to arrive at some conclusion about themselves and others who they interact with, especially for Wilhelm who feels that now he is able to recognize that which is constraining him, there is hope that he will be able to overcome his melancholy aspects, navigate those treacherous waters, and begin to make a life for himself.

Works Cited

Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1990. Print.

Frank, Elizabeth. “On Saul Bellow’s ‘Seize the Day:’ ‘Sunk Though He Be beneath the Wat’ry Floor.”(Saul Bellow at Eighty).” Salmagundi, no. 106 7, 1995, p. 74.

Ozick, Cynthia. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1983. Print.

Rockrohr, Dillon. “The Daemonic Life of Objects: Object-Oriented Criticism and Cynthia Ozick’s ‘The Pagan Rabbi.’” Symploke, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018, pp. 207–224.