Free Descent by David Guterson

writing fiction is partly psychoanalysis, a self-induced and largely unconscious version. This may be why stories threaten readers with the prospect of everything from the merest dart wound to a serious breach in the superstructure. To put it another way, a good story addresses the psyche directly, while the gatekeeper ego, aware of this trespass—of a message sent so daringly past its gate, a compelling dream insinuating inward—can only quaver through a story’sreading and hope its ploys remains unilluminated. Against a story of penetrating virtuosity— The Metamorphosis , or Lear on the heath—this gatekeeper can only futilely despair, and comes away both revealed and provoked, and even, at times, shattered.
    In lesser fiction—fiction as entertainment, narcissism, product, moral tract, or fad—there is also some element of the unconscious finding utterance, chiefly because it has the opportunity, but in these cases its clarity and force are diluted by an ill-conceived motive, and so it must yield control of the story to the transparently self-serving ego, to that ostensible self with its own small agenda in art as well as in life.
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    Like many fellow travelers who’ve crossed the Styx and returned, I view the itinerary as transformational. On the one hand, I won’t join that cohort claiming gratitude for their time in hell; on the other, I can say that in the wake of my depression, I’m pierced by other people as I wasn’t before, that I waste less time entertaining myself, and that I hear my thoughts with a useful attention to their tenor, fairness, and sanity. I feel equanimous most of the time, and have a strong impulse to give. My life has become, if you will, intentional, in a way it might not be if I hadn’t made my plummet.
    William Styron died in 2006. During the last third of his life, after the publication of Darkness Visible , he became a mental health advocate. I’m among those aided by his account, who found in it succor, but I’m also mindful of complaints such as those in Joel P. Smith’s essay “Depression: Darker Than Darkness”—that Styron was depressed for months, not years; that he was never alone; that he had the best of treatment; that he stayed in a hospital “as comfortable as they come”; and that he didn’t have to rely on radical remedies like electroshock therapy: all of this to say that Styron didn’t plumb the depths and can’t represent the depressed, and neither can I. Others have and have had it worse. For them, depression never yields or lessens. For them there’s no rising into the light of day, no edifications, and no gains, nothing but the wish to be dead, which is, after a marathon of untenable suffering, granted.
    “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle. / And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars,” with which Styron ends Darkness Visible , also ends Dante’s Inferno . In that epic account of a trip through hell, Dante, having already met the virtuous heathens, the lustful, the gluttonous, the avaricious, and the prodigal, comes on a “dreary swampland, vaporous and malignant,” where the Styx spreads out into a noxious marsh, and where the wrathful, naked in this brackish muck, assault one another viciously. Underneath them, submerged in foul water, are those who lived, on earth, in sullen despond, and who mired now in bottom mud must endlessly repeat—in John Ciardi’s translation—“Sullen were we in the air made sweet by the Sun; / in the glory of his shining our hearts poured / a bitter smoke. Sullen were we begun; / sullen we lie forever in this ditch.”
    A modern sensibility can’t countenance this torture. For us, while sullenness might be morally problematic, it’s never a sin, whereas for thirteenth-century Christians,apparently, to be sullen (tantamount to rejecting creation?) meant a one-way ticket to hell. Otherwise what are the sullen doing here, droning on in regretful chorus, drowned,