the prescription of happiness

My friend Kostis Kourelis replied to my post about depressing literature (February 16th, Is this funny?) with a link to a Studio 360 program where NYU professor Elayne Tobin and writer Michael Cunningham discuss the diagnosing of literary characters by students of literature today.
Professor Tobin acknowledges the pharmacological and the cultural shift that could account for this tendency. Michael Cunningham defends sorrow as part of the richness of human life. They both agree that it is the job of art to show us humanity. Interestingly, in the same program, psychiatrist Peter Kramer "challenges anyone to read The Sorrows of Young Werther and not think "my goodness, somebody should take care of that. If only he had Prozac".
On February 13 i was blogging on Werther and my second reading of the book, this time as a 40-something year old. My perspective was that i had changed, as an individual and as a reader of literature, having outgrown the youthful yearning for lovesickness and any fascination i had with the Sturm und Drang movement. It never occurred to me that Werther was in need of Prozac. In fact, i felt grateful that Goethe had moved on from his attempts to depict extreme emotion as a perceived opposition to rationalism.
Peter Kramer's comment, however, made a connection with a book I finished reading shortly before i blogged on Werther, Gary Greenberg's Manufacturing Depression. Greeneberg's study does not address the issue of diagnosing literary characters, but looks, in depth and great historical detail, at the treatment of mental illness and the role of pharmacology. Naturally, such a treatment follows a certain definition of mental illness. The specifics of this definition, as well as the psychiatric jargon are plenty in the book, but the controversy that i find relevant to the depressive literary characters is how dealing with life's problems can be classified under the category/within the range of mental illness. This is huge beef in the medical profession. But the extent to which literary criticism is being drawn into it is a little concerning. While the diagnosis of depression requires the elimination of subjectivity, this is precisely what literature is about, the subjective experience, the human impulse. And the subjective experience says as much about the individual as about his/her environment.
The context in which students of literature diagnose or feel the need to diagnose literary characters has prescriptive implications. We must be happy, so must they. The aesthetic value of works of seems to be of secondary significance. While students are trying to approach the texts using the tools available to them, it is also possible that we are witnessing a case of cultural narcissism that makes interpretations outside our experience unlikely.
What remains open is the issue of romanticizing depression that Peter Kramer argues against. It will definitely be among my reading projects to come; how such a phenomenon can be measured and accounted for is really worth exploring. In the meantime, i will be reading and teaching the poetry of catastrophe and i will be wondering if we can actually diagnose non-depression as well as we can diagnose depression. The context is always available and the experience of transformation invariably relevant.
And of course, three cheers for Michael Cunningham and Elayne Tobin.