"Reflection on the right to will": Auden's "Canzone" and Arendt's notes on willing

Comparative Literature, Spring 2001 by Gottlieb, Susannah Young-Ah

Melancholia "minces," but it does not mince the world; instead, it "minces through the world"; the intransitive use of mince means that it must be understood as a term not of affecting but of affectation: melancholia does not act on the world, but rather, on itself. It travels "through the world," affecting an excessively refined and delicate manner, displaying itself as decorous, elegant, and polite.

(This of course is the intransitive meaning of the word mince.) This self-affection is a sign of melancholia's indifference, not toward itself but toward the world and the possibilities it presents. As Auden writes in The Enchafed Flood, "The grand explanatory image of this condition is of course Duerer's Melancholia... What is the cause of her suffering? That, surrounded by every possibility, she cannot find within herself or without the necessity to realise one rather than another" (36). The absence of an objective world on which melancholia can act-absent because no object appeals to it-throws melancholia back on itself: its verbs are intransitive. Even its efforts at elegant self-affection, however, are ineffectual, as it reaches a point of withdrawal in which the grand image of melancholia can be replaced by a series of substitutions: "regret, cold oceans, the lymphatic will." The last of these replacements, "lymphatic will," can be described only as a failure of effectiveness, which, as a sluggish noun, does not deserve an active verb, not even an intransitive one; instead of an active verb, there is only a passive one, indeed the verb of passivity, caught: "caught in reflection on the right to will." There is so little action, much less transformation, under the sign of melancholia that Auden has the audacity to cite the principal rhyme-word in the corresponding stanza of Dante's canzone: "cold." But this cold does not have the power to change the substantial character of anything; it does not freeze, and the oceans, not transformed to crystalline stone, remain in the same state. Under the weight of the lymphatic will, the poem threatens to collapse. In the critical terms Auden develops in The Enchafed Flood the ego declines to make any decision and thus allows the self to which it is "predicated" to remain sheer potentiality without any actualization or action (117-18), and this inaction expresses itself in a verbless sentence. But the line, "Regret, cold oceans, the lymphatic will," can be read in another manner as well. For, regret, a term for melancholia, is also of course a verb: the oceans are called upon, summoned in an invocation to regret the ineffectualness of the will as it is "caught in reflection," that is, to regret the attractiveness of melancholia's passivity at a time when-or, as Auden writes, "while"-"violent dogs excite their dying day."