Narratives of crisis and recovery are what the US critic Louis Menand describes as constituting the basic trope of biographical writing, “in which the subject undergoes a period of disillusionment or adversity, and then has a ‘breakthrough’ or arrives at a ‘turning point’ before going on to achieve whatever sort of greatness obtains.” It’s a line quoted in the Atlantic Monthly, October 2005, in a cover story about Abraham Lincoln’s depressive illness which, the article argues, was inseparable from his determination as a leader, his lucid realism, and his insight into (unsentimental) American potential. But there was no turning point or recovery. “Lincoln’s melancholy doesn’t lend itself to such a narrative. No point exists after which the melancholy dissolved—not in January of 1841; not during his middle age; and not at his political resurgence, beginning in 1854. Whatever greatness Lincoln achieved cannot be explained as a triumph over personal suffering. Rather is must be accounted an outgrowth of the same system that produced that suffering. This is a story not of transformation, but of integration.”
This says something about the approach not just to extraordinary people with depression, but ordinary ones too. At some point it is about mastery, not escape or cure.
And it also says something about what we expect of a story. Can we only gain excitement out of a certain kind of denouement? Or is it perhaps a matter of the deeper stories of achievement such as Lincoln’s, or tragedy. I can imagine a novel in which you get two outcomes, one like Lincoln’s, the other like the typical biography Menand evokes. The reader could take pleasure in the second but, perhaps, recognise something more powerfully moving in the first. And what if they are connected?
