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Amid the unnecessary self-congratulation, name-dropping, and general pomposity throughout, William Styron does manage to render a moving portrayal of his experience with depression and suicidal ideation in Darkness Visible. The book begins with an epigraph from the Book of Job and concludes with a hopeful Dantean line about beholding stars. These canonic bookends signify Styron’s slow progress from the subtle onset of depression at age sixty, through the suffering of storming moods, past the turning point where a song subverted his worst suicidal desire, to the eventual return of dreams and peace.

As one curious about what depression is like, I plumbed Styron’s depths paying special attention to metaphorical descriptions of mood. Styron portrays depression most frequently as a force of nature, as weather. Depression is toxic, an “unnameable tide,” it is drowning and suffocation; it is “brown light;” it is “the color of verdigris.” Most often, Styron’s depression descends from where it was hovering above him like an ominous cloud. This representation was extremely consistent, and stronger because of that consistency. Had he likened depression to seventeen unrelated things, I would grow skeptical that Styron is just dithering about with language; when he sticks to his story—depression as weather—I doubt less that depression actually is weather.

During a visit to Paris, his depression lets up “like the change from a torrential downpour to a steady shower.” Two months later, the “storm which swept [him] into a hospital…began as a cloud no bigger than a wine goblet.” He says it is a “storm indeed, but a storm of murk.” “The gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.” He says that afternoons were the worst when he would “feel the horror, like some poisonous fogbank, roll in upon my mind, forcing me into bed.” Depression, according to Styron, is a tempest. The madness comes in on a wind and descends like rain from dark clouds.

Styron stuck to the weather imagery throughout the majority of the book. Only toward the end does the metaphor shift. Nearing the chapter in which he discusses his suicide attempt, his language for depression becomes more fantastical than natural. In the nadir of the darkest night, Styron’s imagery evokes more of the “madness” promised in the subtitle than his early inklings in Paris, or the time when alcohol lost its taste. With new language, Styron comes to suffer what he calls “crucifixion;” he acquires a “wraithful second self.” He mentions how his father also “battled the gorgon” in the “abyss.” The more fanciful the language, the more untreatable and other-worldly depression seems to be. Styron seems to have become a character in Paradise Lost, in Hell with Milton.

Had he not made a shift, I’m not sure that I as a curious, somewhat oblivious onlooker would have been convinced by Styron’s suffering (though I realize that is an arrogant, cold thing to say). As weather, even bad, bad weather, depression is still something that could, reasonably, blow over. Weather as a benign metaphor seems an extension of the spectrum of normal emotions and moods. I think I know what it is to function under a cloud, to loom beneath a gray drizzle, to endure in the midst of murk. What I cannot fathom is what it would be like to feel crucified; to be haunted by a wraith that is myself; to battle a gorgon in my spirit. Styron uses this second wave of imagery to make it clear that his non-depressed readers likely do not know, and cannot know, the full extent of his suffering—because it is the stuff of another world, the stuff of monsters and wraiths, dark, unnatural stuff that no human should suffer inside of themselves.

For as often as Styron says that he suffered the inwardness of his pain, the externalization of his pain as a thunderous storm, as a crucifixion, as an unnameable tide or a poisonous fogbank serves to characterize the pain as something observable. More than a facial expression, more than a biomarker or a brain scan, pain as object transforms the suffering into something that can be looked at and better known by both the sufferer and the observer (reader). I am of the opinion that this form of literary externalization is one of the most healthy ways of dealing with ambiguous, internal, emotional/mental pain because it allows someone to share in the gaze at it. And as we know to be true from physics, that which is observed necessarily shall change. Attention, it seems, is an energy that works things to move. When the reader or observer is given an image to know, rather than a feeling, the object becomes a totem for the condition it tries to describe. How ironic that symbols can make the signified more real—make darkness visible.