melancholy object

is an object in which there is a sense of uncloseable distance. Following keroac, some objects have a strange secrecy through which you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.

Throughout her essay, Sontag defines the origin of a melancholy object as that which is born of distance. or separation from reality. This distance may be temporal, spatial, political, or cultural. For example, Curtis's photographs of North American Indians provide both temporal and cultural distance that present-day viewers in mainstream North America find remote, and as such, melancholy. Regardless of the type of distance involved, the effect generated is similar. Melancholia, like comedy, is derived from the disparity between that which we know to exist and that which we perceive. Melancholia is commonly experienced as sadness, a sense of remorse, as seen in the main tradition of American photography by Jack Kerouac who speaks (in his introduction to Robert Frank's The Americans) of 'the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy. . . you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin' (p.66).

melancholy object, n.All

melancholy object