for Hauntology class, 2023
Depression as a Haunting
Depression is a haunting: a ghostly, uncanny force that bedevils and confuses the mind. George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo inspires and can clarify this metaphor – I call it a metaphor although, as we will see, there is a certain extent to which I mean it literally, not just metaphorically.
In Lincoln in the Bardo, the eponymous bardo is a sort of pre-afterlife, where ghosts dwell until they are freed of their burdens and can move on to whatever comes next[1]. In the bardo, depression is a spectre: a haunting of the mind. I argue that this is an apt metaphor (if metaphor it be), that it is true in life as well as in the bardo, and I observe that it carries through Lincoln in the Bardo in several aspects.
Depression is unheimlich – it is quite the opposite of “intimate, friendlily comfortable; the enjoyment of quiet content, etc., arousing a sense of agreeable restfulness and security” (Freud 198); there is an “uncanny effect of […] manifestations of insanity” (Freud 201-202), of which depression is a subset; “an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced […] when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes […] The infantile element in this, which also dominates the minds of neurotics, is the over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality” (Freud 221) – depression frequently whispers messages that are at odds with observable reality: most sufferers of depression are probably not unloved nor unlovable, yet this is a common delusion smuggled into the brain by depression.
The ghostly characters of Lincoln in the Bardo “narrate themselves into existence” (Vorbeck). Depression, too, narrates itself into existence – it’s a story that tells itself in the sufferer’s brain. Part of the point of cognitive behavioral therapy is to stop allowing depression to narrate itself into existence.
I’m not saying that depression tends to correlate with belief in ghosts – although that turns out to be true (Sharps) – nor that depression causes one to become haunted by literal ghosts – an assessment of stories where that occurs are beyond the scope of this paper – but that depression is a spectre.
Spending Many More Words on Tim Midden Than Saunders Does
One ghost in the bardo is described as having “always gone about dogged by a larger version of himself, that was constantly leaning over to whisper discouragement to him” (Saunders 257), until he is freed from this burden by exposure to President Lincoln’s mind. The ghost in question, Tim Midden, is himself haunted by a spectre[2]: of depression or self-doubt or self-abnegation.
Ghosts in the bardo seem to operate in accordance with the traditional conception of ghosts as possessing physical manifestations of their psychological attributes in life (and/or at their moment of death) – see, for example, A Christmas Carol’s ghost of Jacob Marley, and the ghosts on the street that he shows to Scrooge, all (literally) wearing chains that they (metaphorically?) forged in life, through such things as their greed and lack of charity (Dickens).
Bevins, for example, has slashes on each wrist representing his manner of death, and countless sensory organs (eyes, ears, noses, etc.) representing his desire to experience – which may have been a feature of his entire life, or it may be only representative of his last thoughts, as, in his last seconds, he changed his mind about killing himself, because there were so many things he still wanted to experience. Similarly, the ghost of Hans Vollman possesses a tremendous phallus, representing the fact that he died just as he and his wife were on their way to the bedroom to have sex for the first time, and thus left permanently in suspense, his final carnal desire unfulfilled.
Thus, as Tim Midden’s ghost is hounded by depression, self-doubt, and self-abnegation in death, we can safely presume that he was hounded by these same things in life, or at least at the end of his life (perhaps, like Bevins, he killed himself – but unlike Bevins, did not at any point change his mind about it).
Depression, Clinically
To get a clear definition out of the way, the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders describes depression in terms of depressive episodes (and the frequency thereof), with the symptoms of such including: feeling sad, empty, or hopeless; diminished interest or pleasure in activities; decrease or increase of appetite or weight loss or gain; insomnia or hypersomnia; uncontrolled or slow movements and thoughts, or feelings of restlessness or being slowed down; fatigue or loss of energy; feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt; diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness; recurrent thoughts of death (not just fear of dying) or of suicide (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).
Some of these symptoms describe some of the ghosts of Lincoln in the Bardo – most of the ghosts single-mindedly focus on one activity to the exclusion of all others, instead of showing diminished interest in activities – but many are negated by the staunch inability – or refusal – of the ghosts to understand their status as ghosts. Indeed, the ghosts cannot – or do not – have any thoughts of death, despite being dead. Shaimaa Gohar would argue that most of the ghosts are powered by their fear of death, their fear of moving on (Gohar) – but a fear of death, being more or less reasonable, is explicitly excluded from the DSM-5’s symptoms of depression. It is convenient that I am not claiming any of the ghosts (aside from Tim Midden) are depressed, because I would certainly not be able to defend that claim.
All we know about Tim Midden is that he had “always gone about dogged by a larger version of himself, that was constantly leaning over to whisper discouragement to him” (Saunders 257). This pretty clearly qualifies as at least one of DSM-5’s depressive symptoms – feeling sad, empty, or hopeless, or feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt – so I’m comfortable diagnosing him with depression given that the one sentence is all we learn about him, making it likely all that is important to know about him, or else the author would have told us something more important in that precious throwaway sentence about Tim Midden. This is fine; he only exemplifies my claim, he does not provide a foundation for it.
The symptoms of depression given in DSM-5 can also be symptoms of haunting by a ghost, but are not consistently so, and anyway the key similarity is the persistence. Ghosts, traditionally and in most recent spectral fiction, stick around until their unfinished business is concluded[3], or, in the case of Lincoln in the Bardo, until they have accepted their status as deceased, set aside their unfinished business, and are ready to move on; similarly, depression sticks around forever.
Depression and grief are distinct, although the two often overlap, so they need to be disentwined.
Depression involves endless feelings of, among other things, “hopelessness and helplessness which lacks a justifiable cause”, and is sometimes more severe and usually lasts longer than grief; grief, on the other hand, though its symptoms resemble depression, is seen as “a natural consequence of a loss”, and moreover does not typically last forever (Parker). In comparison to depression, grief is more literally – though not fully unmetaphorically – a haunting by a deceased person.
Many characters in Lincoln in the Bardo are haunted by grief. Bevins, for example, killed himself because (as it turns out) his lover Gilbert broke up with him, claiming it was because he wanted to live in the closet, then was seen with another man, laughing at (it seemed to Bevins) Bevins (Saunders 326) – heartbreak being more like grief than like depression.
Similarly, President Lincoln does spend the text struggling with his grief about his son’s death – “a vain and useless grief” (Saunders 308) – but also with depression. The two phenomena are so intertangled in the President’s mind in this text that it may be impractical to try to differentiate them, but an attempt will be made here nonetheless.
Scrutinizing Lincoln’s Hauntings
In the context of scrutiny of this text, President Lincoln is, of course, two distinct but related entities: the real person who presided over the actual United States, and the fictional character based on that actual President (although the fictional Lincoln is presented as real through excerpts from ostensibly historical texts, half of those texts are themselves invented by Saunders (Moseley)). Here, we are considering primarily the proposition that depression is a haunting, through the lens of Lincoln in the Bardo, so the fictional Lincoln of the text is of foremost concern. The main reason we might be inclined to consider the actual historical Lincoln here is insofar as our understanding (and Saunders’s understanding) of the actual Lincoln can inform our understanding of the fictional Lincoln.
The actual historical Lincoln is known to have had depression, and at times took pills for it that probably made it worse (Shenk). He certainly also had his share of sources of grief – sons kept dying on him, plus of course the countless dead of the Civil War.
Correspondingly, Lincoln as portrayed in the text seems to have both depression and grief. He is certainly stricken with grief at the death of his son – his choice to haul Willie’s body out of his “sick-box” (Saunders) and hug it is a pure expression of this grief. Meanwhile, the descriptions of his sadness rang true to me as descriptions of depression: “Oh, the pathos of it! – haggard, drawn into fixed lines of unutterable sadness, with a look of loneliness, as of a soul whose depth of sorrow and bitterness no human sympathy could ever reach. The impression I carried away was that I had seen, not so much the President of the United States, as the saddest man in the world.” (Saunders 201) He "did not wish to live. Not really. It was, just now, too hard. There was so much to do, he was not doing it well and, if done poorly, all would go to ruin. Perhaps, in time (he told himself) it would get better, and might even be good again. He did not really believe it. It was hard. Hard for him." (Saunders 343) Lincoln’s general sadness, as described in several places, could be equally plausibly attributed to grief or to depression.
President Lincoln’s depression originates, according to some theorists in the text, with his tremendous capacity for empathy – “Lincoln had the tenderest heart for any one in distress, whether man, beast, or bird […] He had a great kindness of heart. His mind was full of tender sensibilities; he was extremely humane […] He was certainly a very poor hater” (Saunders 284);
His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated (Saunders 303-304)
At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end. […] We must try to see each other in this way. […] As suffering, limited beings – […] Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces. […] His sympathy extended to all in this instant, blundering, in its strict logic, across all divides. (Saunders 304)
As it turns out, this allegation is plausible. Within a moderate range, depression is negatively correlated with both higher-than-average empathy (Hoffman) and lower-than-average empathy (the mechanism here is less clear) (Cui); it is, all in all, negatively correlated with moderate empathy, but positively correlated with very high and very low empathy. Depression can be caused by deeply feeling the suffering of one’s fellow persons, as in Saunders’s Lincoln; depression can also blunt and reduce capacity for empathy (Tully).
I would compare this correlation to Reverend Everly Thomas, who, though he initially fled his ultimate fate out of fear of the bad afterlife, has since dedicated his existence in the bardo to empathetically tending the flock of ghosts.
Depression as the Entanglement Phenomenon
The phenomenon that entwines the ghost of Willie Lincoln, as it previously entwined the ghost of Elise Traynor, is of note – “The roof around him had liquefied, and he appeared to be sitting in a gray-white puddle. […] From out of the puddle, a vine-like tendril emerged. […] If Miss Traynor’s case was any indication, this tendril would soon be followed by a succession of others, until the boy was fully secured (Gulliver-like) to the roof. […] Once secured, he would be rapidly overgrown by what might best be described as a placental sheen” (Saunders 110-111). The description of the next stage of the phenomenon will sound familiar to anyone who has suffered depression: “The sheen then hardening into a shell-like carapace, that carapace would begin to transition through a series of others […] the more perverse the carapace, the less ‘light’ (happiness, honesty, positive aspiration) would get in” (Saunders 111). Depression is a force that entraps the mind and prevents such ‘light’ from getting into it. This phenomenon can, therefore, be doubly likened to depression – it ensnares and prevents light from entering, even beyond the usual effects of haunting.
The phenomenon pursues Willie until he escapes it by entering the chapel – the chapel, then, is some space safe from depression (or at least from one level of depression). For some, religion can, indeed, provide relief from depression; for some, there is medication, or therapy, or both; being surrounded by friends helps some, by a natural environment helps others; the treatments available for depression are myriad, and as varied in effectiveness.
This phenomenon is initially mysterious, but is eventually explained to itself be formed of ghosts: “comprised of people. People like us. Like we had been. Former people, somehow shrunken and injected into the very fabric of that structure” (Saunders 267), “compelled” (Saunders 267) to take the form of a prison for other ghosts – some sinful people, it turns out, are relegated to this as punishment. Depression, in this analogy, is a ghostly force, insofar as it is a force made of ghosts – Willie is haunted, if ghost-on-ghost conflict can reasonably be described as one haunting the other.
Moreover, the entangling phenomenon is specifically an evil ghostly force, insofar as it is made of specifically evil ghosts. Discussion on whether evil forces can, in principle, be good if turned to good ends are beyond the scope of this paper – I am treating the entanglement phenomenon as evil because it is made of evil ghosts in the most simplistic sense, as if evil is an elemental force – so, the same sense as observing that an ice cube is wet because it is made of water. All of this simply serves the purpose to imply, transitively through the metaphor, that depression is an evil force.
How Far Does It Go?
As mentioned above, depression is unheimlich, and both depression and ghosts each narrate themselves into existence.
Depression, in a sense, is not a thing – or at least it’s more an adjective than a noun. Depression does not exist as a phenomenon per se – the term ‘depression’ describes only a nexus of symptoms (adjectives and verbs) that tend to coincide with one another and respond collectively to treatment, i.e. a category more than a thing (this does, of course, describe most diseases, especially those whose causes are unknown).
Similarly, in the case of haunting, the effects of a ghost are much more observable than the ghost itself, even setting aside the question of whether ghosts do or do not even exist in real life. In Lincoln in the Bardo, ghosts may (or may not – they may be deluding themselves) have some effect on a living person’s personality when they occupy the same physical space as that person. But certainly, they somewhat exist as entities in the text – "If what you say is true -- who is it that is saying it? […] Who is hearing it? […] Who is speaking to you now? […] To whom do we speak?" (Saunders 297). A ghost’s effects on the world constitute a haunting, while the ghost itself is only liminal, midway between existence and void (Ní Éigeartaigh). Outside of this text, ghosts are traditionally hard to perceive; a poltergeist, for example, cannot be seen, but the objects it throws across the room can be.
President Lincoln, in Lincoln in the Bardo, is haunted by depression, by grief for his son and the dead of the Civil War, by the ghost of his son, by the other ghosts of the bardo. Although we attempted to disentangle grief from depression earlier, it’s certainly easy to treat this agglomerate as one huge messy haunting by a bunch of things, indistinguishable and individually unplaceable.
So it is that haunting and depression have a great deal of similarity, ghosts/haunting are on a similar level of thing-ness to depression, and Saunders’s President Lincoln is haunted by both depression and ghosts and distinguishing the two would get messy. All of which leads to this: I don’t, in the end, mean that depression is entirely figuratively a haunting – I mean it literally (at least insofar as a haunting by anything is literal).
Works Cited
American Psychiatric Association, DSM-5 Task Force. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Fifth Edition, Text Revision. American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc., 2022.
Cui, Dan, et al. "Association Between Children’s Empathy and Depression: The Moderating Role of Social Preference." Child Psychiatry and Human Development (2023): 857–69. <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/7q3gmc/cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_2616595911>.
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. London: Chapman & Hall, 1843. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. "The 'Uncanny'." Freud, Sigmund. Writings on Art and Literature. 1919.
Gohar, Shaimaa. "Taming the Terror of Death in George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo." Alif 42 (2022): 181–206. <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/7q3gmc/cdi_gale_lrcgauss_A702239745>.
Hayes-Brady, Clare. "‘Everyone, We Are Dead!’: (Hi)story and Power in George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo." 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past. Ed. Ruth Maxley. Palgrave, 2020. 73–91.
Hoffman, Ferdinand, et al. "Empathy in Depression: Egocentric and Altercentric Biases and the Role of Alexithymia." Journal of Affective Disorders 199 (2016): 23-29. <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/7q3gmc/cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_1808705560>.
Moseley, Merritt. "Lincoln in the Bardo: ‘Uh, NOT a Historical Novel.’." Humanities 8.2 (2019): 96-. <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/7q3gmc/cdi_doaj_primary_oai_doaj_org_article_23003b63ed4b492cb388c75af080177a>.
Ní Éigeartaigh, Aoileann. "Liminal Spaces and Contested Narratives in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Parámo and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo." IJAS Online 8 (2018/19): 66-83.
Parker, Gordon, et al. "Clinical Features Distinguishing Grief from Depressive Episodes: A Qualitative Analysis." Journal of Affective Disorders (2015): 43–47. <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/1umeg80/cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_1664204362>.
Saunders, George. Lincoln in the Bardo. New York: Penguin Random House, 2017. Print.
Sharps, Matthew J., et al. "Cognition and Belief in Paranormal Phenomena: Gestalt/Feature-Intensive Processing Theory and Tendencies Toward ADHD, Depression, and Dissociation." The Journal of Psychology 140.6 (2006): 579–90. <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/1umeg80/cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_57115082 >.
Shenk, Joshua Wolf. "Lincoln’s Great Depression." The Atlantic Monthly 296.3 (2005). <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/7q3gmc/cdi_gale_infotracmisc_A136121721>.
Tully, Erin C., et al. "Quadratic Associations Between Empathy and Depression as Moderated by Emotion Dysregulation." The Journal of Psychology 150.1 (2016): 15–35. <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/7q3gmc/cdi_proquest_journals_1735896881>.
Vorbeck, Cara. "A Graveyard Smash: Analyzing Embodied Memories in Lincoln in the Bardo." Style 57.3 (2023): 350–69. <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/7q3gmc/cdi_crossref_primary_10_5325_style_57_3_0350>.
[1] Presumably permanently – although Saunders does borrow the name from a Tibetan Buddhist conception of where the spirit goes after death and before reincarnation into another temporary physical mortal form (Hayes-Brady).
[2] Haunting of a ghost by a ghost turns out to transpire a number of times in this text, some instances more literally than others.
[3] There is some irony in the modern slang term “ghosting”, meaning to disappear without a trace, as the whole deal of a ghost is that it sticks around.
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