1 - Fearful fluidity: Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy

Summary

How many strange humours there are in men!

Democritus to the Reader, p. 39

There is an unmistakable sense in reading the Anatomy of Melancholy that Burton derived a good deal of pleasure and satisfaction not only from his own experience of melancholy but, perhaps even more, from the inscriptive act of dissecting and describing its multifarious forms of selfconsuming anxiety and suffering – after all, he wrote and re-wrote the book for over twenty years. This is especially evident in the third partition, where Burton anatomizes “love-melancholy,” the most destructive form of the disease, frequently defined elsewhere as “inordinate love.” In this lengthiest and most often expanded part of Burton's everswelling book, subject matter and textual matters are dialectically poised: either the body of the text valiantly tries to contain the over-flowing nature of the disease or, failing that, comes to resemble the psychophysiological body of the melancholic. In the following passage, we could substitute “book” for “love,” as many readers of the Anatomy would attest: “But this love of ours is immoderate, inordinate, and not to be comprehended in any bounds. It will not contain itself… or apply to one object, but is a wandering, extravagant, a domineering, a boundless, an irrefragable, a destructive passion” (655: III.2, my emphasis). The experience of love-melancholy and the inscriptive act of anatomization are linked by resemblance as well as by opposition.

This dynamic is quite apparent on the level of Burton's authorial relationship to his text. Although Burton claims, in loyal Baconian fashion, “I respect matter, not words” (in part because “[p]rettiness of style is not a manly distinction”), “words” are also the “matter” of the book if only because verbal excess is characteristic of the melancholic (25).