الفهرس 
Individual and Collective MelancholyOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Throughout history, the concept of ‘Melancholia’ has been the subject of diverse analytical efforts. Melancholy was interpreted in Greek times as a bio-functional problem, a mental illness, a divine gift, or the humour of great men. It was later framed by psychologists as a gloomy depression leading to mania. In an essay titled Mourning and Melancholia (1917), Sigmund Freud gave the concept of melancholy a new dimension. He defines melancholia as one’s reaction to the loss of a valued beloved object. The lost object continues to exist in the unconsciousness and the melancholic person shows lack of interest in the outside world with a loss in his self-regard and ego (243-244).
Melancholy for Freud is the reaction to the loss of a beloved person or an abstract feeling such as “one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (243). He argues that the melancholic might be aware of the loss but cannot perceive what has been lost inside him (245). Freud further describes the series of actions, factors and settings that initiate and promote melancholy further in addition to the various melancholic reactions generated in result. It is what this dissertation refers to as the ‘melancholic process’.
Melancholy fluctuates between destructive and constructive modes. The melancholic subject experiences a profoundly painful depression, a withdrawal tendency, incapacity to love, inhibition of all activities, and a lowering self-regard. On the other hand, the melancholic subject becomes a perfectionist or an overanalytical person with a keener eye for the truth. By lowering his self-regard, he gets to better understand himself. In addition, melancholy involves the conscious practice of melancholizing by the retrieval of memories of the lost object as a source of pleasure. Moreover, the process of melancholizing includes creating new scenarios with the lost object. Burton describes such melancholic imagination as an “incomparable delight” (14).
The abstraction of Freud’s lost object has allowed for further interpretations of and applications for the melancholic process within many disciplines. Judith Butler suggests the potential appearance of culturally prevalent forms of melancholy. For Butler, the lost object could be defined within a cultural context as one’s freedom, cultural legacy, or sense of home. Butler hereby shifts the concept from individual to communal melancholy.
This dissertation is meant to use melancholy as an explanatory model to understand the individual and the collective psyche in dealing with the historical and cultural dilemmas. This dissertation presents a comparative study which aims to explore individual and collective melancholy and their effects, whether destructive or constructive within selected novels by Nuruddin Farah and Orhan Pamuk, belonging to Somali and Turkish literature respectively.
Farah novels A Naked Needle and Close Sesame are typical postcolonial texts that are mainly focused on the challenges that a nation goes through after the end of its colonized state. In A Naked Needle, the melancholic loss has been defined in this study as the loss of the dream of new Somalia after its independence from the colonialist. On the other hand, Close Sesame is centered around the loss of freedom and loss of power over destiny. The melancholic losses in both cases point out to the Western colonial project and its neocolonial extension as the main source of Somalia’s misery. Postcolonial nations suffer from inherited losses from the colonial era. Having their native cultural legacy washed-out by an alien culture, they found themselves torn between the failure to adopt the new culture and the incapacity to restore the native one. This severe loss of cultural identity casts its shadows on the individuals who experience difficulties in dealing with this new world.
Pamuk’s White Castle and Snow shed lights on two historical phases of Turkey: the bygone Ottoman empire and the cultural formation of new Turkey. Reflecting upon these different historical phases of Turkey, the conflicting sides have changed from West and East in The White Castle, to be Religion and Secularism in Snow. The cultural battle, which has been caused by the clash of civilizations, has turned to internal cultural disputes between different political and cultural groups. The type of cultural struggle has shifted, by turn, from defending superiority into acquiring recognition. In both cases, losses of superiority and losses of recognition have provided the perfect setting for cultural melancholy to take place on both the individual and the collective levels. Nation appears, in both novels, to be a perfect medium of exchange of cultural melancholy.
In conclusion, the melancholic process can serve as an explanatory frame to delve into literary texts and unfold their hidden content. There is no literary text, I assume, that is devoid of a loss. A lost object can be abstract feeling rather than a defined material object that can be identified and tracked. Abstract causes of melancholy require an interdisciplinary context whereby all kinds of analytical lenses whether psychological, cultural, social, or postcolonial are of great use.
Moreover, melancholy should not be understood as an inappropriate reaction to a loss that makes a person sinks into gloom. It is not a psychological problem that one should recover from. Melancholy is rather a significant shift in one’s perception of the world around him. It alters his/her behavior based on an enlightening awareness of the values of objects and actions. The occurrence of the loss awakes a sense of value towards the lost object in the melancholic person’s mind. It is based on this new sense of the lost object’s value that s/he starts to recognize the true values of other objects around him/her. A new prioritization of objects and actions arises, and a new wisdom sets different objectives for the melancholic’s life. His/her primal concern becomes the prevention of more losses of valuable objects. Therefore, melancholy is rather a sudden increase in the person’s maturity and his/her sense of responsibility. Alteration in the melancholic behaviour should be understood and accepted in that sense.