Conclusion: Modernist Melancholia and Its Afterlife

Abstract

What is modernist melancholia and what are its legacies? In a famous passage from Conrad’s letter to his friend Cunninghame Graham from 14 January 1898 Conrad evokes the totality of the modern melancholic experience in miniature form:

Life knows us not and we do not know life — we don’t even know our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow. (Conrad, 1969, p. 65)

The melancholic’s alienation from life emerges in the juxtaposition of ‘life’ and ‘us’: Conrad’s collective ‘we’ stands apart, watching life unfold from outside. This describes Marlow’s position as much as Dowell’s and Granger’s. Marlow observes Europeans and Africans as an outsider, Dowell is excluded from the love triangle of Edward, Leonora and Florence, and friendless Granger walks the streets of a city that has no place for him. The peculiar position of not-belonging turns the melancholic into a natural observer and narrator; he sees everything precisely because he is not a part of anything.