Greek Deity Dionysus Greek Deity Dionysus Dionysos. Rieger, Branimir M Dionysus in Literature Essays On Literary Madness
Greek Deity Dionysus Greek Deity Dionysus Dionysos. Rieger, Branimir M Dionysus in Literature Essays On Literary Madness
Greek Deity Dionysus Greek Deity Dionysus Dionysos. Rieger, Branimir M Dionysus in Literature Essays On Literary Madness
IN
LITERATURE
DIONYSUS IN
LITERATURE:
ESSAYS ON
LITERARY MADNESS
edited by
Branimir M. Rieger
Dionysus in Literature:
Essays on Literary Madness
Branimir M. Rieger
Works Cited
Lesser, Simon O. Fiction and the Unconscious. New York: Vintage, 1957.
Lessing, Doris. Briefing for a Descent Into Hell. London: Jonathan Cape,
1971.
MacDonald, Michael. Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in
Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.
Marquez, Gabriel G. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. Gregory
Rabassa, New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd. New York: MacMillan, 1975.
O'Neill, Eugene. A Long Day's Journey into Night. New Haven: Yale UP,
1950.
Paris, Bernard. A Psychological Approach to Fiction. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana UP, 1974.
Platizky, Roger S. A Blueprint of His Dissent: Madness and Method in
Tennyson's Poetry. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1989. ,
Porter, Roy. A Social History of Madness. New York: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1987.
Rigney, Barbara H. Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel.
Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978.
Rothenberg, Albert. Creativity and Madness. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1990.
Salinger, J.D. Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951.
Simon, Bennett. Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1978.
Smith, Lee. Black Mountain Breakdown. New York: Ballantine, 1986.
Spacks, Patricia M. The Female Imagination. New York: Knopf, 1975.
Stone, Alan A., and Sue S. Stone, eds. The Abnormal Personality Through
Literature. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966.
Styron, William. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. New York:
Random House, 1990.
Szasz, Thomas. The Myth of Mental Illness. New York: Harper & Row,
1974.
Thomas, D.M. The White Hotel. New York: Viking, 1981.
Ussher, Jane M. Women's Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness? New
York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. New York: Delacorte, 1969.
Wade, Carol, and Carol Travis. Psychology. New York: Harper Collins,
1987.
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: New
Directions, 1980.
Youngquist, Paul. Madness and Blake's Myth. University Park, PA: Penn
State UP, 1989.
Literary Theories and the Concept of Madness
Robert de Beaugrande
be the society, and maybe the audience of the art work, as well,
whose jealousy is at stake. As leslie Fiedler enjoys pointing out,
society has, since the beginnings, resented the seemingly divine
inspiration or possession whereby the poet was empowered to see
and speak what is denied or forbidden to others (Love). Presumably,
this ancient response provides "normal society" a recompense and
alibi for its own failure to be creative: the price of creative vision is
the loss of sanity.
Or, the conflict runs even deeper, namely the valence of
madness as the other side, and indeed the validation, of sanity.
Writing after his own "mental breakdowns," Seymour Krim hoped
for a fundamental reestimation:
So art and insanity at least share the factor that the standards
whereby either is defined have much to do with the ways and
20 Dionysus in Literature
persistently saw the literary "work" as one that "asserts, by its very
existence, its separation from empirical reality" (Blindness 17). He
accounted for this effect in terms of "figural language," whose
"general" "description" centers on a "structure" wherein "the
relationship between sign and meaning is discontinuous, involving
an extraneous principle" (206). His chief examples are "irony and
allegory," two modes for the "demystification of an organic world
postulated in a symbolic mode of analogical correspondences or in
a mimetic mode of representation in which fiction and reality could
coincide" (222). Of the two, "irony comes closer to the pattern of
factual experience and recaptures some of the factitiousness of
human experience as a succession of isolated moments lived by a
divided self." The self undergoes "duplication" or "multiplication,"
so that "irony" is "a relationship, within consciousness, between
two selves" (212). "Ironic language splits the subject into an
empirical self that exists in a state of inauthenticity and a self that
exists only in the form of a language that asserts the knowledge of
this inauthenticity" (212). "The author" "asserts" "the ironic
necessity of not becoming the dupe of his own irony and discovers
that there is no way back from his fictional self to his actual self"
(219).
Once stated in such broad terms, "irony possesses an inherent
tendency to gather momentum"; "from the small and apparently
innocuous exposure of a small self-deception it soon reaches the
dimensions of the absolute" and becomes "the systematic undoing"
"of understanding" (De Man, Allegories 215, 301). "Irony"
"dissolves in the narrowing spiral of a linguistic sign that becomes
more and more remote from its meaning, and it can find no escape"
(Blindness 222). On the one hand, a certain "freedom" is gained
from "the unwillingness of the mind to accept any stage in its
progression as definitive" (220). On the other hand, the prospect
arises of a "dizziness to the point of madness"; "sanity can exist
only because we are willing to function within the conventions of
duplicity and dissimulation" (21St). "Once this mask is shown to be
a mask, the authentic being underneath appears necessarily as on
the verge of madness" (216).
Yet this is no ordinary madness, no insanity or neurosis that
refuses insight-exactly the opposite. This engagement with
literature constantly generates insights, even quite difficult ones,
from the difference between "literary" and "real," between
"language" and "world." If the principle of alternativity is allowed a
dominant function, the transcendence of reality through art and
Literary Theories and the Concept of Madness 29
literature is not pathogenic, but therapeutic (as even the Freudian
critics agree, more hopeful than their master). The experience
allows us to realize the irreducible multiplicity of viewpoints
involved in the constitution of any "reality," whereas insanity denies
all viewpoints but one that steadily narrows until a single idea
seems to appropriate everything.
The world of a literary work constantly solicits our active
complicity in creating it. Since the main channel of experience
passes through the work itself, the writer or reader can justly feel
that here at last the coherence of the world is partly his or her own
achievement. Literature can frame any aspect of the world,
including the very dialectic of sanity and insanity. By forcing us to
deliberate on the sanity of literary characters like the Karamazov
brothers or the narrator in Notes from Underground (who has the
additional power to decide and present what we are told), or of
literary authors themselves, like Heym and Trakl, involves us in the
harrowing problematics of defining "sane" and "insane" and lets us
alternately see each side from the vantage point of the other. Thus,
we may finally be able to foreground sanity, which, as I noted, is
usually the background and resists this treatment.
And thus our search for the relation of literature and madness
brings us to the ultimately utopian dialectic of literature: to
understand our understanding of ourselves and of our world through
the unending creation of alternative worlds. The more persuasively
and urgently this dialectic is implied, the "greater" a work will
seem. Thus, "actual madness" would be not the release from reality
through literary art, but the narrowing and closure that would
supplant the work with just one predecided, constricting response to
it (as in the "evangelical" or "fundamentalist" moves depicted
above). As Fiedler (What 39) reminds us, "literary criticism" "was
born of conflict, out of an attempt to dissuade those who would
control or ban poetry as socially and morally dangerous."
"literature asserts," if "anything," "the impossibility of unqualified
assertion, the ambiguity of all moral imperatives" (129). This
function is crucial because "the burden of any system of morality
becomes finally irksome even to its most sincere advocates, since it
necessarily denies, represses, suffocates certain undying primal
impulses" that "need somehow to be expressed" (50).
This utopian prospect comes into its own when literary theory
has now attained the consensus that "a divergence of readings is
more interesting than a convergence" (Culler 50f). We must
repudiate an "understanding" that "reduces the surplus of meaning
30 Dionysus in Literature
of the poetic text to just one" (Jauss 152). "To impose one meaning
as the right, or at least the best, interpretation" is "a fatal trap" that
obscures lithe potential of the text" (lser, Act 18). "To find
complexity and value in a variety of readings" "is more relevant to
literary study than the use of standards of interpretive accuracy"
(Bleich 104).
Perhaps some of us will still be unsettled by the vision of a
"hermeneutic 'infinitizing' that makes all rules of closure appear
arbitrary" (Hartman 244). But we must not call it "madness" in the
usual sense: it is, I have tried to show, rather one of our best
guarantees that madness, the destructive convergence of all things
on a single idea, can be counterbalanced with the freedom to make
the world new and strange once again, yet giving it more sense than
ever, not less.
Note
Works Cited
Martin S. Lindauer
33
34 Dionysus in Literature
These surveys, however, did not include living writers, and are
limited in other ways, such as depending on written accounts
whose biases are unknown. Winner has questioned the value of
these statistical counts on other grounds. For example, the figures by
Ellis, although "perhaps slightly higher than the average population
[are still] low" and well within "normal bounds" (357). Winner adds
that the clinical-type labels are rather vague, and may actually be
descriptions of eccentric behavior rather than representative of valid
diagnoses. The terms have also been questioned by Andreasen (see
her article, "Creativity and Mental Illness").
The biographical information used in these studies has other
ambiguities. Creative writers who became schizophrenic, Winner
points out, could have been affected in different ways-i.e., either
their style or the content of their work was "disturbed." Thus, it is
not clear where the "psychotic" in literature is to be found. Another
questionable strategy, used with living artists, has been to search for
parallels between psychotic artists and non-artists, and to ignore all
other differences between them (and with authors who became
schizophrenic after they became established writers).
For these and other reasons, Winner concludes that there is no
good evidence that artists become manifestly psychotic at an above
average rate. "[T)here is only meager support for the hypothesis that
schizophrenia is associated with an enhancement of artistic powers in
the artist" (362). Mental illness, if it does anything, Winner suggests,
blocks rather than facilitates writing. Wilson adds that "Writers are on
the whole as different from one another as they are from nonwriters.
There appears to be no single or simple dynamic mechanism that
drives people who create literature" (129). If mental illness is a factor
in writers' lives and works, he adds, it is one of many contributors.
In the face of these severe criticisms of the earlier work, the
studies by Andreasen stand out: She found strong evidence for a
high incidence of madness in creative writers. Her seminal studies,
beginning in 1975, have been updated and are frequently referred
to in the current literature. The work is exemplary in several
regards: It relies on scientific procedures, such as the important one
of including a control group, and it uses statistical analyses in
support of its conclusions. Hence, an in-depth review of the study is
warranted. 6 The highl ighting of her prototypical 1975 study,
including both its strengths and weaknesses, serves as a model of
how to advance the issue empirically /
Andreasen studied 30 famous writers, faculty members at a
nationally known writer's workshop. They were between 26 and 48
Are Creative Writers Mad? 39
years old, and she claims that they represented "a reasonably valid
cross-section of contemporary American writers" (1288). The writers
were subject to a structured interview on their history of mental illness.
They were asked questions such as "Have you ever had a period of
mental illness in your lifetime? .. [or] received psychiatric treatment?"
Another group of non-writers, hospital administrators, equivalent in
age, sex and educational status to the writers, were similarly
interviewed. They served as the control group. The interviews took
place over a 15-year period, from the mid-1970s to 1980s.
The writers, compared to the controls, reported a higher
incidence of affective disorders (i.e., manic-depression); 80 percent
vs. 30 percent, respectively. Andreasen suggests that the difference
between the two groups may be even greater than indicated, since
the illness rate among the control sample was "somewhat higher
than [the population norm]" (1289). Although Andreasen did not do
so, the point could also be made that the controls were not
representative of the general population. Andreasen did not find,
contrary to expectations based on the psychiatric literature, an
unusual number of self-disclosed cases of schizophrenia among the
writers. She does not make much of the fact, perhaps even more
unexpectedly, that there were few diagnoses of schizophrenia in the
control group. Thus, the question of the control group's
representativeness is again raised. Also somewhat unexpectedly,
given the image of the addictive and suicidal writer, Andreasen
found that the two groups did not differ on other pathological
measures, such as alcoholism, drug abuse or suicide. Additional
evidence, taken from the reported incidence of mental illness in
family members, suggested to Andreasen that the writers' affective
disorder was "a hereditary trait" (1292).
Andreasen's study of the mental health of writers is a solid
empirical achievement. Unresolved, though, are several important
questions. A detailed analysis of six of the study's major problems
or omissions indicates the complexities of the topic, and the
empirical efforts that remain to be undertaken.
1) The sample studied. One group of writers, especially if it is
chosen for accessibility, rather than randomly, is not representative
of writers. Consider the fact that there were only three women
among the writers. Questions about the control group as
representative of the general population have already been raised.
2) Comparability of the writers and non-writers. The
pathological profile of the writers was compared to a non-writing
group. But the basis for matching them-age, sex and education-
40 Dionysus in Literature
is probably not sufficient. In order to distinguish the two groups on
the basis of their rates of mental illness alone, both the writers and
the non-writers have to be equivalent on many other relevant
dimensions. While it is not easy to know what dimensions are most
relevant, a reasonable case can be made for matching them on such
variables as personality, e.g., introversion or extroversion, as well
as insuring their comparability on other dimensions, including such
remote but still relevant possibilities as their familiarity with or
acceptance of the "Freudian literature" on madness and creativity.
3) The measure used. The psychiatric interview is just one of
several ways of determining pathology, among several that might
have been chosen (for example, the MMPI, the Rorschach and
Cattell's "16 PF"). An interview may not be either a sufficient or
even the best measure. Self-reports can be self-serving, incomplete
and ambiguous. A battery of tests would have been corroborative,
although not necessarily sufficient either. In addition, objective
behavioral indicators would have been helpful, such as the
documented incidence of treatment by psychiatrists, or periods of
institutionalization in mental hospitals. These would have
supplemented the subjective reports, as well as any tests, had they
been given.
4) Generalizing. Consideration of the above three points leads
us closer to the goal of ascertaining the mental health of these
particular writers-but not of writers in general. What more is
needed?
In order to determine if there is in fact a higher incipence of
mental illness in writers as a group, a random sample would have to
be selected from a complete list of writers of different kinds who
make up the "population" of writers: novelists, short story writers,
poets, playwrights and others (film writers).
To insure that only first-rate professionals were included,
experts might rank the names on a list. For example, the writers'
"fame" might be judged by editors of publishing houses.
Ideally, the best writers would then be given a battery of tests,
interviewed and observed at work and in real-world settings. They
would complete a life history questionnaire. Documentation would
also be obtained from psychiatrists, other clinicians and hospitals.
Finally, some of the writers' associates, friends, family and
colleagues would be questioned.
The task is not quite finished. Converging evidence on the
writers' mental health, taken from several sources, would then be
classified by the type of pathology they demonstrated (e.g.,
Are Creative Writers Mad? 41
Conclusions
1. If there is a link between writers and pathology, it has not
been proven. And even if there were a link, it might reflect a bias
that leads people (including writers) to hold a stereotyped view of
their mental health. Expectations about writers can be either
selectively confirmed, or worse, self-fulfilled. Further, even if
madness is found among writers, it may hold only for the minority.
These exceptions, because of their dramatic and newsworthy
prominence, falsely serve as a general model.
2. Creative authors may only appear to be more abnormal-
but they are not. That is, writers show signs of madness, such as a
high degree of impulsivity, playfulness, childishness and
spontaneity. These outward signs of eccentric behavior may serve
the writers' art for reasons that are obscured by making them
synonymous with madness. Writers may indeed have a potential or
a latent capacity for psychosis. But writers may be able to better
handle malevolent tendencies because of their ego strength, an
ability reflected by extreme self-confidence and an extraordinary
sense of self-worth, qualities which may further exaggerate their
eccentric profiles.
Observers of writers, and their biographers, may therefore be
overreacting to their nonconformity, iconoclasm and other outward
signs of "madness." But unlike the truly mad, these are signs of a
freed yet constrained unconscious, one that has been harnessed and
exploited for creative ends.
3. A case can be made that the production of great works, in
any field, cannot be the result of, or accompanied by, severe
Are Creative Writers Madl 43
emotional handicaps. If writers are indeed mentally disturbed, and
they are still able to write masterpieces, then they must do so
despite, not because of their handicap. If writers were "crazy," it
hardly seems possible that they could reach, accomplish and
maintain a high creative level over a lifetime. If madness is found, it
could have occurred before such people became professional
writers, or after they had stopped writing, when they had "burned
out."
4. Why then the fascination, indeed preoccupation and strong
feelings about "the mad writer?" One can only guess. Perhaps a
"Freudian" hypothesis will suffice, useful as it may be, as a last
resort when simpler reasons are unavailable or unsatisfactory.
Extreme explanations can justifiably be called upon in accounting
for the otherwise unaccountable, the maintenance of a strong belief
in the face of contrary or a dearth of information, the acceptance of
facts which are questionable, limited or incomplete, and the neglect
of alternative accounts.
The public, of which scholars and researchers are also a part,
may be unconsciously envious and jealous of the success creative
writers and creative people of all kinds have. To attack the mental
stability of authors, in effect, is a rationalization, a way of saying,
"You may be talented, but look at the price you pay." Authors bear
the brunt of this attack, compared to other creative people in the
arts or elsewhere, because they write about themselves, and do it so
well and honestly. Hence, writers are more exposed. Writers may
also encourage and enjoy "playing" with their audience.
5. There are many connections between psychology and
literature. Both disciplines examine the mind, heart, soul and
spirit, and their translation into outward or behavioral
consequences. Consequently, psychology has studied many aspects
of literature: 1) a work's content and structure; 2) the readers'
cognitive and affective reactions; 3) the context in which writers
work, including the impact of other writers, the audience, market
forces and institutions that bring the writer and public together; and
finally, 4) the writers themselves, including their personality,
motivation, intellect, productivity and creativity. Pathological
characteristics, the "madness and literature" theme, falls within the
last of these multiple areas. Even then, pathology is only part of a
larger concern with creativity, since there there are also "normal"
processes of personality that play their part. (See, for example, the
treatments by Guilford, McCurdy, MacKinnon, and Taylor and
Getzels.)
44 Dionysus in Literature
Notes
'The term "madness" is a popular word that is more appropriately
expressed in clinical ways, where it refers to psychotic states, such as
schizophrenia, or affective disorders, like depression.
2The issue is presented from an empirical (scientific) perspective. No
attempt is made to summarize the huge literature on this subject, both
empirical and non-empirical. Greater details and additional references are
in several sources by lindauer, including The Psychological Study of
Literature (Ch. 2, 7), "Applying Empirical Research Methods to the
Psychology of literature," "Psychology and literature" and "The Short
Story." Other useful sources are in Winner (Ch. 1, 13) and the various
studies of Andreasen and her colleagues. For an update, see the
Afterword.
3For a fuller discussion of the empirical method, and its application to
literature, see Lindauer in Natoli.
'For examples of Steps (3) and (4), see footnote 3.
sFor a review, see the 1992 and later articles by Lindauer.
'Other recent studies are alluded to in Holden, but these seem to be
"works in progress," since a careful literature search failed to find them.
They are therefore not available, unlike Andreasen's, for a complete and
critical review. For an update, see the Afterword.
7Andreasen herself, to her credit, lists many of the studies'
shortcom i ngs.
aFor a history of changing views of creativity, see Porter.
Works Cited
Afterword
Film, even from its silent days in the 1920s, has proven to be
an art form particularly suitable for handling intimate psychological
subjects. It is a medium of observation, the almost clinical
recording of human behavior, with every nuance of expression and
gesture enhanced in the close-up. As a highly controlled flow of
images, film is uniquely able to reflect the flux of mental and
emotional experience. And madness, which raises basic questions
about the nature of these experiences, has been a very popular
subject for filmmakers.
For the film artist, madness is a subject that probes the darkest
and most hidden side of our being. For the psychologist, madness is
something to be understood, then treated. Although every age has
produced those who were held to be mad, there are many
conflicting theories about what madness is or what causes it. The
perception of madness has not been a single one but a combination
of perceptions overlapping past and present and reflecting both
popular and scientific views.
We have found that the images of madness presented in film
have a unique relationship to fluctuations in psychological and
psychiatric theory and practice. Particular elements of a film, such
as plot, characterization of the visual text, reflect clinical
impressions of madness in the psychological and psychiatric
literature. Broader social and cultural factors have also played a part
in this relationship.
We have selected certain films that highlight some of the more
interesting changes, as well as the continuities, in these views of
madness. There are certain themes that continue to reappear,
including society and madness; war and madness; paranoia and
madness; and madness as sanity. Here, we contrast an earlier film
with a later one that depicts the same theme, arguing that the
49
50 Dionysus in Literature
differences and similarities over a 20- to 40-year range point to the
subtle interaction between popular and clinical views.
The history of madness is tied closely to the history of the
institutions that have cared for the afflicted. At first it was the family
or village that cared for the mad individual, but by the seventeenth
century mental hospitals had become a fixed part of European
society as the mad were increasingly seen as a threat to the normal
functioning of society. By the end of the nineteenth century, large
state hospitals were built in this country but could offer little except
custodial care until the late 1940s and early 1950s.
In the late 1940s, state hospitals became the object of
professional and public concern, largely due to the prospect of
serious overcrowding by World War II veterans with various neuro-
psychiatric disorders. Up to this time, Hollywood had taken some
interest in madness but had done so primarily in mysteries,
romances and horror films that paid little attention to the plight and
symptoms of those confined in psychiatric institutions. The Snake
Pit (1948) was produced at a time when the United States first
began to recognize the serious deficiencies of these institutions. The
film, based on a popular novel, was a partly autobiographical
account of a young woman's harrowing experiences in a state
mental hospital.
When the film opens, Virginia (Olivia de Havilland), confined
in a hospital after a breakdown, is having difficulty responding to
the questions of Dr. Kik, her psychiatrist. Kik is portrayed as a
humane man who is devoted to the care of the lost souls at the
institution. Unlike the other staff psychiatrists, he believes in one-
on-one treatment, and though this treatment is never directly
labeled psychoanalytic, he constantly appears in line with a small
picture of Freud on his office wall. Kik also administers
electroconvulsive therapy and hydrotherapy, which were sometimes
used together with psychotherapy in the 1940s and reflected the
belief that madness involved problems of both mind and body.
The villains in the film are the institution and some of the
people who work in it. Overcrowding is stressed as a problem, and
two staff members are depicted as enjoying, in almost a sadistic
manner, their power over the patients.
Through flashbacks, we find that as a little girl Virginia was
angry at her father about the attention he paid to her mother. When
her father died, Virginia unconsciously associated his death with her
angry wish for his destruction. A later flashback shows that the final
cause of Virginia's nervous breakdown was the death of a suitor
Through a Lens, Darkly 51
James R. Huffman
for glory and the attempt to become his idealized self through
marrying glitter and wealth.
In the brief space that is left, let me just describe what a
Horneyan approach reveals about some of our major novels and
writers. Several novels contain characters that reveal symptoms of
personality disorder, such as Nathaniel West's The Day of the
Locust. Harry Greener, small-time vaudevillian, has a search for
glory that centers around some producer putting him "into a big
revue against a background of beautiful girls and glittering curtains."
But it never happens. Instead, as Greener himself puts it, "his life
had consisted of a lightning series of 'nip-ups,' 'high gruesomes,'
'flying-W's' and 'hundred-and-eights' done to escape a barrage of
'exploding stoves.' An 'exploding stove' was any catastrophe,
natural or human ...? At the heart of The Day of the Locust is the
threatening environment that eventually causes the eruption of
human emotions in violence which ends the novel and which is
represented by Tod Hackett's painting, "The Burning of Los
Angeles." Expansive people such as Harry and Faye Greener come
to California with impossible dreams and desperate searches for
glory, and find self-effacing people like Homer Simpson who have
never had lives and who want to live vicariously through the
dreamers. Very few achieve their dreams. Harry clowns as his "sole
method of defense" against reality. His daughter Faye wants to be a
film star, and tells Tod that she can "love" only men with money
and looks who can further her career. She has a whole pack of
dreams, some of which she realizes are absurd, such as her ideas
on writing scripts for films. She ends up in prostitution and sponging
off poor Homer, who has no looks and only enough money to help
her get by. Homer has no hope for a better life, and simply lets Faye
use him. He is one of the crowd who come to California to die,
who are desperate enough to set the city on fire if provoked, the
"pick of America's madmen" if not "typical of the rest of the land."
Hollywood is symbolized by the studio lot, a "dream dump" history
of American civilization, and California is not the paradise of
dreams but more the graveyard of them, as in Steinbeck's Of Mice
and Men. In West's short novel personality disorders define the state
of American culture.
Similarly, Hollywood novels like Budd Schulberg's What
Makes Sammy Run? center on characters like Sammy Glick,
desperately climbing from the slums of New York to the heights of
Hollywood. He is compulsive, and ruthless, but ultimately is a
victim of people just like himself:
66 Dionysus in Literature
...what was coming to him was not a sudden pay-off but a process, a
disease he had caught in the epidemic that swept over his birthplace like a
plague; a cancer that was slowly eating him away, the symptoms
developing and intensifying: success, loneliness, fear. Fear of all the bright
young men, the newer, fresh Sammy Clicks that would spring up to harass
him, to threaten him and finally to overtake him. (New York: Penguin
Books, 1978: 246)
NOTE: This essay was first presented in 1989 at the initial meeting of
members of the MLA forming a new organization of specialists in
American literature. It presumes a basic knowledge of the field and its
criticism, and so does not footnote the obvious. Further bibliographic
information on Horneyan analyses can be obtained from the International
Karen Horney Society, c/o Bernard J. Paris, English Department, University
of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32606, in the list of members, and in the
abstracts and bibliographies put out by IPSA (Institute for Psychological
Study of the Arts) at the same university.
70 Dionysus in Literature
ANXIETY NEUROSIS
Based on
Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth:
The Struggle Toward Self-Realization
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1950
Peter H. Goodrich
71
72 Dionysus in Literature
hard work and study to develop his innate talent. However, his
"madness" is socially determined because all extraordinary genius
provokes doubt in ordinary mortals-a doubt confirmed in the
literature by events. Whereas the mad scientist is Promethean or
concerned chiefly with discovery and innovation, society is
typically Epimethean or concerned with consequences after they
occur. This ambivalence is one reason why so many mad scientists
are presented as doppelgangers: Merlin and Arthur decay or split
into Merlin and Mordred, Faust and Mephistopheles, Frankenstein
and his monster, Jekyll and Hyde, Ambrose and Merdenne, Ben
Kenobi and Darth Vader, Yoda and the Emperor, Doctor Who and
the Master.
The mad scientist icon therefore depends upon a social
perspective, which is justified in two main ways. First of all, the
scientist becomes isolated from society; either he distances himself
from others in order to pursue his investigations with less chance of
interruption, or others distance themselves from him because they
perceive him as "strange" or threatening. Physical isolation
connotes mental isolation, and implies madness because it removes
the figure from the behavioral norms and consequences which
define "sanity." His isolation also encourages the scientist's
functional abuse of his abilities. Perhaps this is one reason why the
popular image of the scientist or inventor is of a person working
alone, whereas most scientific work is actually performed in social
collaboration. Zelazny'S Merlin becomes mad, for example,
because his vision of Camelot has become detached from social
realities and his idealism has become oppressive. Intellectual
isolation and detachment from society create a vicious circle that
spirals to disaster.
Second, the mad scientist is usually seen as initially rational in
respect to his discovery or creation, but subsequently irrational in
respect to its uses or consequences. His identification with it
becomes both narcissistic and atavistic. These urges may originate a
desire to protect and nurture a younger generation, as Merlin
protects and nurtures the young Arthur, but eventually they
degenerate into self-love or sexual lust and even murder or
genocide. The mad scientist compels popular imagination, then,
because despite his great abilities he comes to grief through some
transgressive act-either his own, or the savage response of a
horrified society, or both. Most of all, his narcissism and atavism
arise from the uncontrolled and jealous nature of his own ego
turned inward upon itself. This is another reason for the frequency
84 Dionysus in Literature
Notes
'This essay is a revised and expanded version of a paper initially
written for the 1983 Popular Culture Association Annual Meeting in
Toronto, Canada, and published in Extrapolation 27.2 (Summer 1986):
109-15.
2Suvin's tendency to interpret mad scientists as an elite but abstracted
product of mercantile society interestingly mirrors Walter Hirsch's earlier
description of SF scientists between 1926 and 1950. He observes that the
scientists of that period decline under the influences of the social sciences,
"magical or charismatic" mental powers, and the figure of the alien; the
real "mad scientist" of the quarter century seems to have been the narrow-
minded or manipulative businessman like Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt.
The mad scientist and the evil capitalist (as in today's junk bond wizards)
are thus analogous character types in western culture.
JThe development summarized in this paragraph and the next is
treated at greater length in my article "The Metamorphosis of a Mage" and
The Romance of Merlin.
Works Cited
Aldiss, Brian W. "A Monster for All Seasons." Science Fiction Dialogues.
Ed. Gary Wolfe. Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1982.
- - . Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. New York:
Schocken Books, 1974.
Aldiss, Brian W. with David Winfield. Trillion Year Spree: The History of
Science Fiction. New York: Atheneum, 1986.
Asimov, Isaac. Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and
Technology. Rev. ed. Garden City: Doubleday, 1972.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Trans. Alan CM. Ross.
Boston: Beacon, 1964.
Bloch, Robert. "The Strange Island of Dr. Nork." Mad Scientists: An
Anthology of Fantasy and Horror. Ed. Stuart David Schiff. Garden
City: Doubleday, 1980.
Callahan, Patrick J. "Frankenstein, Bacon, and the 'Two Truths.'"
Extrapolation 14.1 (Dec. 1972): 39-48.
Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.
Dickinson, Peter. The Weathermonger. New York: DAW, 1968.
Drake, David. The Dragon Lord. New York: TOR, 1982.
Famous Histories of Fryer Bacon. London: M. Clark, 1679.
Geoffrey of Monmouth. History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Lewis
Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.
The Lineage of Mad Scientists 87
- - - . Vita Merlini. Ed. and trans. J.J. Parry. Urbana: U of Illinois P,
1925.
Goodrich, Peter. "The Metamorphosis of a Mage." Avalon to Camelot 2.4
(1987): 4-8.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales. Ed. James Mcintosh.
New York: W.W. Norton, 1987.
Hirsch, Walter. "Image of the Scientist in Science Fiction." American
Journal of Sociology 43.3 (Mar. 1958): 506-12.
Hoffmann, E.T.A. "The Sandman." Selected Writings of Hoffmann. 2 vols.
Eds. and trans. Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1969.
jeter, K.W. Morlock Night. New York: DAW, 1979.
Kimball, Arthur Samuel. "Merlin's Miscreation and the Repetition
Compulsion in Malory's Morte d'Arthur." Literature and Psychology
25.1 (1975): 27-33.
Lawler, Donald. "Reframing Jekyll and Hyde: Robert Louis Stevenson and
the Strange Case of the Gothic Science Fiction." Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde after One Hundred Years. Eds. William Veeder and Gordon
Hirsch. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
Malory, Sir Thomas. The Works. Ed. Eugene Vinaver. 2nd ed. 3 vols.
Oxford; Clarendon, 1967; rev. 1973.
Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. Ed. John D. Jump London:
Methuen, 1965.
Nye, Robert. Merlin. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1979.
O'Riain, Padraig. "A Study of the Irish Legend of the Wild Man." Eigse
14.3 (Summer 1972).
Peters, Edward. The Magician, the Witch, and the Law. Philadelphia: U of
Philadelphia P, 1978.
Plank, Robert. The Emotional Significance of Imaginary Beings.
Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1968.
Price, Derek de Solla. Science since Babylon. Enl. ed. New Haven: Yale
UP, 1975.
The Romance of Merlin. Ed. Peter H. Goodrich. New York: Garland,
1990.
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Northrop Frye. The Riverside
Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed. james Rieger. New York: Signet, 1983.
(Since this is an article about origins, I have chosen to cite the 1818
text, although many now consider the 1831 text, Ed. M.K. joseph.
[Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971], to be definitive.)
Spargo, John Webster. Virgil the Necromancer: Studies in Virgilian
Legends. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1934.
88 Dionysus in Literature
It is now known that the Tsarist censors cut out part of the
manuscript of Notes from Underground, and, judging from
Dostoyevsky's angry denunciation of that excision, it had to do with
the Christian message he hoped to deliver. One scholar has
speculated that the novelist intended to demonstrate that his anti-
hero's "salvation would come ... through the acceptance and
appreciation of the ideal of compassion and self-sacrifice embodied
in the prostitute, Liza." This "happy" outcome, although it did not
actually occur, was implicit in "the moral dialectic of the novel"
(Rosenshield 325, 337).
It could also be argued, however, that the author initially
meant to see his despicable podpolnik undergo a conversion and
then "save" Liza. For in this first, tender scene the protagonist
conjures up an image worthy of Russia's best icon artists-though
with a modern touch: it is a picture of a mother, father and a child
suckling its mother's breast. And the anti-hero asks Liza: "Is not all
that a joy when they are all three together. ... One can forgive a
great deal for the sake of such moments. Yes, Liza, one must first
learn to live oneself before one blames others." This, I would
suggest, was the essential, Christian message Dostoyevsky hoped to
get across-forgiveness is divine, and "judge not lest you be
judged" (Dostoyevsky 86). It has been asserted that this work is
"unique ... in its consistently secular analysis of the human
situation," since it allegedly does not "raise a religious issue," nor
mention "the Deity ... not any symbols of Christian dogma" (Menut
18). Yet, during the podpolnik's preachy peroration about the evils
of prostitution, he says that a happy family life is possible "if the
blessing of God is upon it." And later he assures her: "Love is a
holy mystery" (84-85).
But this message of deliverance is destroyed when Liza later
returns to tell him that she is quitting her "profession," as he had
urged. Instead of sharing her joy, he feels shame-over his own
poverty, and because his manservant, Apollon, refuses to do as he
is told. The podpolnik denies that he really meant any of the high-
flown sentiments he had spoken before, insisting that he was just
toying with her emotions and tyrannizing her with his imperious
ethical superiority. In words which prefigure Nietzsche's insights
about the "will to power" and the tyranny of morality, he shouts:
"Power, power was what I wanted then. Sport was what I wanted, I
wanted ... your humiliation." And to himself he admits his sadism,
which Fromm and others have defined as the desire to exercise total
control over another being: "I cannot get on without domineering
Madness, Masochism and Morality 99
and tyrannizing over someone ... with me loving meant tyrannizing
and showing my moral superiority" (108, 111).
But this angry, aggressive outburst was not directed at her so
much as at himself. She, like the sledge-driver and his horse, just
happened to be at hand, a convenient object for his displaced
hostility. "I was angry at myself, but, of course, it was she who
would have to pay for it." And to her he says:
I had been insulted just before, at dinner, by the fellows .... I came to you,
meaning to thrash one of them, an officer; but didn't succeed. I didn't find
him; I had to avenge the insult on someone to get my own back again; you
turned up; I vented my spleen on you and laughed at you. I had been
humiliated, so I wanted to humiliate. I had been treated like a rag, so I
wanted to show my power. (107)
Works Cited
Breger, Louis. "Dostoyevsky and Medicine." Slavic Review 45.4 (Winter
1986): 735-37.
Cox, Gary. "Dostoyevskian Psychology and Russian Cultural and Political
Identity." Mosaic 17.3 (Summer 1984): 87-102.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground & The Grand Inquisitor.
Trans. Ralph Matlaw. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1956.
Frank, Joseph. Dostoyevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1986.
Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Avon Books, 1965.
Jackson, Robert L. The Underground Man in Russian Literature. The
Hague: Mouton, 1958.
100 Dionysus in Literature
Kabat, Geoffrey C. Ideology and Imagination: The Image of Society in
Dostoyevsky. New York: Columbia UP, 1978.
Kaufmann, Walter. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking, 1954.
Kohlberg, lawrence, "Psychological Analysis and literary Form: A Study of
the Doubles in Dostoyevsky." Daedalus 92.2 (1963): 346-62.
Kravchenko, Maria. Dostoyevsky and the Psychologists. Amsterdam:
Bibliotheca Siavonica, 1978.
Menut, A.D. Dostoyevsky and Existentialism. lawrence: Coronado, 1972.
Paris, Bernard. "Notes from Underground: A Horneyan Analysis." PMLA
1973 (May 88): 511-22.
Reik, Theodor. Masochism in Sex and Society. New York: Grove, 1941.
Rice, James l. Dostoyevsky and the Healing Art: An Essay in Literary and
Medical History. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985.
Rosenshield, Gary. "The Fate of Dostoyevsky's Underground Man: The
Case for an Open Ending." SEE} 28.3 (Fall 1985): 324-39.
Steiner, George. Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1971.
Villadsen, Preben. The Underground Man and Raskolnikov: A
Comparative Study. Odense UP, 1981.
Hamlet:
Madness and the Eye of the Reader
Michael Cohen
When Olivier made his Academy Award-winning movie of
Hamlet in 1948, he loaded the spectator's response at the beginning
by announcing in a portentous voice-over: "This is the tragedy of a
man who could not make up his mind." Stephen Booth, writing
"On the Value of Hamlet" in 1969, turns the formula around.
"Hamlet" he says, "is the tragedy of an audience that cannot make
up its mind." I want to take Booth's point of view to what you may
well think is an absurd length by insisting that the madness in
Hamlet is never really a problem about the main character, but
rather always about the audience.' In order to do that I have to
show you a way of reading the play which you may see as, if not
completely mad, at least very much like the willful adoption of a
multiple personality disorder.
Hamlet first appears in the second scene of his play, and after
several exchanges between him and Claudius, he is asked, first by
Claudius and then by Gertrude, to remain with them rather than
returning to Wittenburg. Hamlet's reply is directed to Gertrude:
How does Hamlet read this line? Does he stress the you,
implying that he is not about to obey Claudius? Does he stress the
best, implying that Gertrude is directing him to do ill? Does he
stress the obey, implying that though he will do her bidding, his
heart is not in it? Or does he stress the madam, drawing attention to
the formal address and the fact that he is not calling her mother,
with whatever that may imply about the way she is acting? All these
possibilities are there, but on the stage only one will be given voice.
101
102 Dionysus in Literature
/I
The second scene works by a series of shocks. Claudius begins
by telling us that his brother's death is so recent that he and the
whole kingdom should still be in mourning. Then he admits to a
technically incestuous marriage with his brother's wife, his
"sometime sister." This quick remarriage of Gertrude seems to be
what has enabled Claudius to climb onto the throne. But we are not
informed how the succession actually worked and whether
Claudius's marriage to the queen influenced the nobles to cast their
votes for him in the normal process of an elective monarchy or
whether his marriage short-circuited any elective process. Claudius
also confirms what has been said in 1.1 of the country's danger
from without by referring to Denmark as "this warlike state."
Why does Claudius admit these things? It should be pointed out
that he goes on to deny them, either explicitly or implicitly, by what
follows. That his brother's death is still so recent that it deserves
mourning is denied by Claudius's exhortation to Hamlet to stop
mourning, that the proper term for "obsequious sorrow" is over:
to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness. (92-94)
Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch
thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that. (180-83)
His line may also suggest that she and Claudius are treating
death as common in the sense of that which touches only the
common and will not touch them (odd, since they are talking about
the death of a king).
If Hamlet's reply is spoken kindly, Gertrude continues kindly:
If it be,
Why seems it so particular with thee? (74-75)
I shall in all my best obey you, madam. [I am not about to obey you in
what you seem to be counseling, which is anything but good.)
I shall in all my best obey you, madam. [I am certainly not going to obey
Claudius.)
I shall in all my best obey you, madam. [But my obedience does not
reflect what is in my mind. See line 159, where he says his heart is
breaking but he must hold his tongue.)
I shall in all my best obey you, madam. [What you ask of me is hardly
filial, or the asking maternal. I will not call you mother. You have made
yourself something less than either kin or kind.)
less than a month. And here we must look forward to that point
where Hamlet compresses the time to its frightful shortest:
The line has the force to jog even the most confirmed believers in
Hamlet's calculated madness to a momentary doubt.
For prissiness the speech has much to underwrite the sort of
interpretation Olivier gave to Hamlet in his film version. Hamlet
wishes to separate himself from the foulness of the world. He comes
close to imaging Gertrude and Claudius as rutting dogs in 150-51.
He fills his condemnatory phrases with hissing sibilants:
"unrighteous tears," "the flushing in her galled eyes," "most wicked
speed, to post I With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!"
1/1
Each scene of Hamlet may be looked at as a kind of complete
performance, with rising, sustained, and falling rhythms-as a whole
and finished play-but the mood and atmosphere surrounding the
protagonist are those of a rehearsal. Gielgud seized on this aspect of
the play when staging his 1963-64 "rehearsal" Hamlet with Richard
Burton in the lead; this quality of the play is also what gives it its
familiar resemblance to the sometimes dreadful improvisations of
real life. Hamlet frequently seems to be rehearsing for a possible
play while the rest of the ensemble are acting in quite another, real
one. The easiest way for them to deal with this lack of synchrony is
to call it madness. If madness is an unwillingness to choose one
arbitrary reality and exclude the rest, then Hamlet is indeed
thoroughly mad, but it is the madness of his audience as well.
Hazlitt said, "It is we who are Hamlet" (232). The prince may be
forgiven some indecision in having to take on all of our indecisions.
This is of course not the traditional humanist approach to the
question of madness in the play. That approach would first define
madness (something which I have assiduously avoided doing) and
next sketch out hypotheses as a series of answers to questions that
contextualize Hamlet: Does Shakespeare suggest in the tragedies
that sanity is so delicate a balance and so language-bound that
dwelling on a series of chaotic images is enough to upset it? Are the
romances and comedies about the restoration of this balance? Is the
question of madness unique in Hamlet because not thematic as it is
in King Lear, for example?
110 Dionysus in Literature
The urgency of the mind's theater is ignored in the humanist
approach, whatever leisurely rewards are offered by it. The play is
always going on, must go on now as we read. One consequence of
the fact that we are Hamlet is that all of the critical problems of the
play become our problems. What have traditionally been seen as
problems of the play or of the protagonist become the reader's
problems. Is Hamlet mad? For the reader, the issue of Hamlet's
madness is no academic question, but an immediate one that must
be decided again and again as the play is produced in the mind's
eye. No scholarly argument or elaborate justification of absolute
convictions is useful here; the play is waiting to go on. How can
Hamlet's madness be played? This is the question the scholarly
problem translates to-how will Hamlet read this speech if he is
mad? How will his mother react when he reads it thus? Why will
Claudius refuse to accept Hamlet's madness as real? What ironies
are possible when Claudius, refusing to see Hamlet's real madness
as other than madness in craft, yet says "Alas, alas" (4.3.26) to his
speeches, implying to those assembled that Hamlet is really mad?
I know that reading Hamlet in this way begs certain questions
about intention in literary works and outrages certain assumptions
about intention in dramatic works. I know also that it is more than a
little like juggling to hold these various interpretations in mind at
once. But I do not know of another way to read such a text that
does justice to its recognized multivalence, or what else would we
mean by the "pluralism" of the play if not that there is more than
one Hamlet in Hamlet's lines. 2 In fact there are many Hamlets,
some mad and some sane, as Hamlet is played on the stages of the
mind's eye.
Notes
lThe debate about Hamlet's madness was first set out in formal terms
in The Hamlet Controversy. Was Hamlet Mad? or, The Lucubrations of
Messrs. Smith, Brown, Jones and Robinson (Melbourne: H.T. Dwight,
1867), purporting to be the correspondence of four gentlemen responding
to a production of Hamlet with particular reference to whether the prince
is mad or not. Smith says yes; Brown and Jones say no and that his own
remark that he pretends madness to accomplish his purpose (1.5.172) is
enough to explain away whole speeches of malapropos remarks or even
gibberish. Robinson, the last correspondent, says maybe Hamlet is mad-
sometimes (Sacks and Whan 82-94). Very little has been added to the
debate since. Lily Bess Campbell insisted that Hamlet suffered from a
Hamlet 111
condition of excessive grief called "melancholy adust" (Campbell 110). For
Ernest Jones the problem was an Oedipal psychoneurosis (jones 77).
Maynard Mack decided that the prince's mental state was accurately
represented by his clothes: mourning (but sane) at the beginning; seriously
disturbed during the middle three acts; saner, wiser, and readier in the last
(Mack 511-12). There is no real agreement about what might constitute
madness (sanity may be the more problematic concept in the dramatic
world of Elsinore), let alone whether Hamlet suffers from it.
'Whether or not Hamlet's plural sides and contradictions can exist at
the same time within the character-in one stage interpretation-is a
critical question still current. See, for example, Donald Hedrick's article
which argues that the satiric and heroic aspects of Hamlet's character are
not incompatible.
Works Cited
113
114 Dionysus in Literature
attract the attention of Robert Hunt, who published its only known
review in The Examiner. Irritated by the obvious eccentricity of
what he saw, Hunt dismissed Blake as "a lunatic, whose personal
inoffensiveness secures him from confinement" (qtd. in Bentley
216).1 Hunt was not the first to call Blake a madman and certainly
not the last. Blake's notebook contains bitter jabs at friends and
philistines who harbored similar convictions. There Blake strikes a
defiant pose: "Madman I have been called Fool they Call thee I I
wonder which they Envy Thee or Me" (507). But beneath the
bravado of these lines sounds a note of real concern, for the charge
of madness posed a mortal threat to Blake's existence as an artist-
and he knew it.
It has grown conventional to assume that such a charge was
utterly without warrant. But this assumption suppresses all
awareness of Blake's strange experience of our world. For Blake was
a visionary and took his visions literally as an experience like any
other. When as a child he saw a tree whose boughs were spangled
with angels, home he ran to tell his parents, much to the
displeasure, we are told, of his pragmatic father. When choosing a
profession, he received visionary counsel: "The spirit said to him
'Blake be an artist & nothing else. In this there is felicity."'2 Such
visions were for Blake an essential fact of his experience. If reports
of his conversation are to be trusted, he had a host of familiars,
among them the Virgin Mary, the Spiritual Sun, the Angel Gabriel-
even Milton and ShakespeareP Nor was visionary experience
without its effect upon Blake's art. In his Descriptive Catalogue, a
document in part responsible for Hunt's withering review, Blake
writes of "having been taken in vision into the ancient republics,
monarchies, and patriarchies of Asia," of having "seen those
wonderful originals called in the Sacred Scriptures the Cherubim"
and of having in his own works "endeavored to emulate the
grandeur of those seen in his visions, and to apply it to modern
Heroes, on a smaller scale" (531). As visionary, Blake's experience
gave a touch of strangeness to his life and work, distinguishing both
from the common lot, stamping both as somehow different.
Thus it was vision that in large part marked Blake a madman in
his own day. If it is now routine to assert that anyone who knew
Blake well knew him to be utterly sane, that is only because the
issue of vision has long since ceased to concern his critics. But like
all blanket disclaimers, this one merits some scrutiny.4 The sculptor
Flaxman, who for a long time was very close to Blake, observed in
a letter to William Hayley that "Blake's irritability as well as the
Vision, Madness, Myth and William Blake 115
The virtues of pity and mercy are weapons in the arsenal of social
order. By attacking this order, Blake alienates himself from it and
enters that other world peopled by the economically disinherited:
the impoverished and the mad.lO
The implications of this alienation are nothing short of
metaphysical. Foucault maintains that during the Age of Reason the
madhouse gave a special kind of visibility to the metaphysics of
social power. leprosy having disappeared from its exclusive
position of the margins of Western culture, another affliction-
madness-moved in to take its place. The madhouse became the
Enlightenment avatar of the lazar-house because madness, like
Vision, Madness, Myth and William Blake 119
Madness ... ceased to be the sign of another world; ... it became the
paradoxical manifestation of non-being .... Confinement corresponds most
exactly to negativity of reason; by confinement, madness is acknowledged
to be nothing. (Foucault 115-16)
Blake was not, however, the only poet to be labeled mad in the
late eighteenth century. If the difference between madness and
sanity is in part an institutional one, then those possessing the keys
to Bedlam have the power to determine its population. In Blake's
day, the rationalist played the warden while the enthusiast often
played the prisoner. "There are states," Blake writes on the LaocoOn
engraving, "in which all Visionary Men are accounted Mad men"
(274). The poet Christopher Smart fell into such a state when his
religious fervor delivered him up to the madhouse. II No lesser
authority than Samuel Johnson endorsed the sincerity of Smart's
enthusiasm with his famous observation, "he insisted on people
praying with him; and I'd lief as pray with Kit Smart as anyone
else" (Hill 1: 397). But in society's judgment, Smart's religious
enthusiasm signified madness, even if it did make the impression of
a close proximity to the deity. This association of madness with the
poet, a notion going back to Plato's lon, for the first time takes on
personal urgency as the Age of Reason draws to a close. 12 No era in
the history of literature displays so much mental suffering among its
poets as the one Frye calls "the Age of Sensibility."I] Gray's
melancholy and Collin's depression, Smart's monomaniacal
enthusiasm and Cowper's obsessive guilt, are all symptoms of chaos
at a time when order has not bowed to originality as the standard of
value in verse.
Blake's closest literary cousins, these poets share an intensity
of vision new to eighteenth-century literature. A reckless animism
afflicts their poems, as if the world and the things in it passed
through the furnace of the poet's consciousness on their way to a
brighter vitality in verse. 14 But with this vision of vitality comes a
heightened sense of separation from others. Collins, Cowper,
Smart, and to a lesser extent Blake, all labored under the
conviction that vision was somehow hostile, alienating them from
the common lot. And indeed, the first three were, at various
times, considered mad by their contemporaries; Cowper and
Smart even saw confinement. ls Although all announced in their
poems a vision of vitality, what distinguishes the others from
Blake is their inability to interpret it by any other standard than
rei igious orthodoxy. Coli ins and Cowper pine as isolated
individuals, guiltily aware of a vitality that is not finally human
but divine. Smart soars beyond individuality to embrace that
vitality, but at the cost of all human relationships. In both cases a
religious transcendence legitimizes vision but alienates the
visionary.
Vision, Madness, Myth and William Blake 121
The madness of the Sensibility bards is thus a measure of their
originality; by devoting themselves to vision they become victims of
social exclusion. Blake shares their vision of vitality and like them
becomes susceptible to the charge of madness leveled by an ideology
of reason. But the conditions that breed real mental suffering in the
Sensibility bards bring Blake metaphors for poetry. By making
madness a central subject of his myth, Blake undertakes a therapeutic
enterprise of cultural proportions. The project of the Romantic poets
generally is to create a poetry of healing, an art that expresses a vision
of vitality while promoting the health of the human spirit. Hence the
conservatism of a poet like Wordsworth, who works devotedly to
avoid the intensities of the Sensibility bards, diffusing such a vision
over genial landscapes and childhood memories. The Age of
Sensibility awakens to a psychology that it lacks the conceptual
equipment to sustain and provokes the next generation of poets, with
Blake at their forefront, to forge an art equal to the task of life. Blake's
myth is about madness because, like the Sensibility bards, he felt its
challenge-to himself and to his culture.
Blake's early poetry shows him keenly aware of the dilemma of
the Sensibility bards. 16 If he knows the same vitality ("Every thing
that lives is holy"), he knows too the anguish of the alienation it
inflicts. In the unsettling lyric "Mad Song," he both dramatizes and
parodies the pained monomania of a Collins or a Cowper, though
probably without having either speCifically in mind. The speaker of
this poem is in love with darkness and the nightly oblivion of sleep.
He seeks to escape therein the burden of himself, which acquires
pathological proportions in the light of day. But Blake uncovers the
narcissism at the heart of this anxiety. The speaker inhabits a world
animated by his own neurosis, ruled by a sadistic God he has
created to punish himself:
Note the irony of the fourth line: the speaker acts in the passive
voice. Blake shows a mind utterly dependent upon the very forces
122 Dionysus in Literature
that persecute it. The madness of Collins and Cowper, or anyone
else so besieged, boils down to a religiously sanctioned self-love,
the passion of the sinner for the sins that give him some distinction,
however ignoble, in the face of the Almighty.
But how to avoid the fate of the Sensibility bards, balanced
precariously on the brink of madness? Blake solves this problem by
shaping their metaphysical dualism into a psychological dialectic.
His strategy for doing so appears even in as early a poem as "Mad
Song," for he introduces into his lyrics a dramatic element that
diffuses the strength of feeling. The speaker of "Mad Song" is not
Blake, but a persona created to voice certain convictions. 17 A similar
dramatic displacement characterizes his nascent myth and allows
such conviction to take the form of psychologically objective
symbols. 1B As Blake's artistic confidence grows, he elaborates
dialectical relations between these symbols (which come to be
called Urizen, los, Urthona, etc.), organizing them ultimately into a
comprehensive myth, a myth that dramatizes the dissociation of a
unified mind into constituent personae. Blake thus shapes the
metaphysical dualism of the Sensibility bards into a dialectical
psychology of dissociation and recovery that renders inappropriate
anxieties about the alienating effects of vision. The psychological
drama of Blake's myth, then, places madness thematically at its
center. 19
The Book of Urizen demonstrates the large role that madness
plays in Blake's myth. The poem is usually interpreted as an
intellectual satire of traditional accounts of creation. 20 A more
psychological reading, however, reveals The Book of Urizen to be
more than sardonic midrash. Blake wrote the poem to dramatize the
madness of the archetypal tyrant, Urizen, who separates himself
from an eternal brotherhood, the better to serve his own designs.
After his withdrawal from eternity, Urizen labors to escape its
scorching passions "In howlings, pangs, and fierce madness"
(6: 24). like Collins and Cowper, he reacts to the vitality around
him by retreating into his embattled ego.
But the madness that Blake dramatizes here goes beyond the
isolated anguish of the Sensibility bards. It embraces all humanity,
for The Book of Urizen stages the dissociation of a universal
sensibility. This psychodrama, which constitutes the poem's main
action, recapitulates in mythological terms a mental dynamic typical
of madness. For the universal sensibility Blake represents as eternity
dissociates in two ways: an ego divides from the vitality around it,
and thought separates from feeling. 21 The first of these divisions
Vision, Madness, Myth and William Blake 123
involves the fabrication of an inner reality that acquires greater
value than the outer, a process dramatized by the autistic
withdrawal of Urizen from eternity. The second involves the
splitting up of idea and emotion, a fission depicted in the
"wrenching apart" of Urizen and Los. Although we usually think of
madness as an individual problem, Blake's myth gives it collective
significance. The universal sensibility that dissociates when Urizen
retreats into himself includes all men and women as potential
victims of a maniacal self-love.
Urizen comes into being through the division of an originally
unified and homogenous consciousness that Blake describes only
obliquely in phrases like "forms of Energy" and "Flames of eternal
fury.'122 Leslie Tannenbaum accounts for this division by suggesting
that Blake noticed the self-divided character of the Biblical creator
(whose personality seems split between his Elohim and Yahweh
aspects) and transferred this division to his own myth, Elohim
becoming Urizen and Yahweh becoming Los (Tannenbaum 204).
But like most purely intertextual interpretations, this one misses
Blake's psychological point. If the Bible's creator is self-divided,
then man, his real father, must be too, since for Blake all deities
reside in the human breast. The act of creation in The Book of
Urizen represents not so much the fall of God as his birth, which
Blake presents as a species of madness, the dissociation of a unified
psyche. In the original division that separates Urizen from eternity,
a mentality is born whose individual avatar is self-consciousness
and whose collective representation is the jealous god of antiquity.
The unsettling implication of this theogony is that such a god comes
into being through a pathological division in the mind.
Blake traces this division to its logical conclusion in madness.
In the initial phase of the universal mind's dissociation,
consciousness contracts into itself. As the poem opens, the only
thing known about Urizen is that he is unknowable; his existence
begins in negation.
The sad irony of this complaint is that Urizen himself is its cause.
Self-consciousness separates joy and pain, and allows him to
believe that only joy is acceptable and good. So he retreats from the
pain of life into the autistic shell of himself.
A world arises that is the objective correlative of this
dissociated sensibility. When Urizen withdraws from eternity, he
creates not only himself, but also the natural world of suffering and
death. As consciousness contracts into self, the barren object-world
of nature appears. This is the world of Newton and Locke, a
"forsaken wilderness" of "dark deserts" inhabited by "fragments of
life," and its creation is contemporaneous with Urizen's acquisition
of self-consciousness:
Notes
the madhouse he became more and more destitute, until he was arrested
for debt and put in prison, where he died. G.B. Hill, ed. Boswell's Life of
Johnson. 6 vols. Reviewed by L.F. Power (Oxford University Press, 1934-
50: 1.397).
12For a sense of this tradition, see Plato's "Phaedrus," in Phaedrus and
Letters VII and VIII, trans. Walter Hamilton (Middlesex: Penguin, 1973),
esp. "Socrates' Second Speech: Types of Divine Madness," 46-49. For a
sweeping survey of madness as a literary theme, see Lillian Feder,
Madness and Literature (Princeton University Press, 1980).
13Frye coined this term in his article, "Toward Defining and Age of
Sensibility," ELH 22 (1955): 144-52.
14Frye emphasizes the "imaginative animism" of the Age of Sensibility,
which is characterized by "treating everything in nature as though it had
human feelings and qualities" and a "curiously intense awareness of the
animal world." See "Toward Defining an Age of Sensibility," 150.
lsFor an account of Smart's confinement, see the introduction to The
Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. Katrina Williamson, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1980); for an account of Cowper's, see Visits to
Bedlam, 150.
16For a study of Blake's juvenilia that ponders its relationship to the
poetry of the Sensibility bards, see Robert F. Gleckner, Blake's Prelude
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1982).
17The best discussion of the importance of perspective in Blake's lyrics
remains Gleckner's essay, "Point of View and Context in Blake's Songs,"
Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 11 (1957: 531-38).
18Blake's technique of "dramatic displacement" anticipates Browning
and other practitioners of the dramatic monologue. The most complete
discussion of the relation between dramatic and lyric elements in post-
enlightenment poetry is The Poetry of Experience by Robert Langbaum
(New York: Norton, 1957), especially Chapter 6 and the conclusion, 182-
235. See also David Wagenknecht's discussion of the poem "Spring" in
Blake's Night: William Blake and the Idea of Pastoral (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1973: 24-25). Wagenknecht points out the emergence of
a dramatic quality from the poem's lyrical opening.
19Brian Wilkie and Mary Lynn Johnson argue similarly in a different
context. Discussing The Four Zoas, they suggest that "the entire poem
reflects the universal, less strictly clinical, psychosis of mankind." See
Blake's Four Zoas: The Design of a Dream (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1978: 76).
2As Bloom suggests in his commentary, 906 in Erdman's edition.
Illuminating readings of The Book of Uri zen abound. See Frye, 254-59;
Bloom, 164-75; Schorer, 232-35; Paul A. Cantor, Creature and Creator
Vision, Madness, Myth and William Blake 131
(Cambridge University Press, 1983: 29-54); Clark Emery, "Introduction,"
The Book of Urizen, ed. Clark Emery (University of Miami Press, 1966: 1-
47).
21This dynamic is typical of major mental illness, in particular
schizophrenia. For a full description, see Kayla Bernheim and Richard
Lewine, Schizophrenia: Symptoms, Causes, Treatments (New York:
Norton, 1979), and Eugene Bleuler, Dementia Praecox, or the Group of
Schizophrenia, trans. Joseph Zinkin (New York: International University
Press, 1950), esp. 63-68.
22Morton Paley interprets The Book of Urizen as a history of the
individual mind, the principium individuationis that supersedes the infant's
oceanic consciousness. See Energy and the Imagination, 67.
2JFor an intelligent description of this process, see Hazard Adams,
"Blake, Jerusalem, and Symbolic Form," Blake Studies 2 (1975: 143-65).
Adams was the first to describe the dynamic of Blake's myth as a
"dissociation of sensibility." As he points out, this dissociation is identical
with the Fall.
24As Bleuler remarks, "The reality of the autistic world may ... seem
more valid than that of reality itself; the patients hold their fantasy world
for the real, reality for an illusion (66).
25 1 develop these issues at much greater length in Madness and
Blake's Myth (University Park: Penn State Press, 1989).
Works Cited
133
134 Dionysus in Literature
the child, and the doctors listened to him rather than to her
(L. Woolf, Beginning 156).
Virginia seemingly recorded in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) her own
experiences in 1913 (Poole 138-47). As in the case of Septimus
Smith, a visit with one of the doctors led her, in 1913, to attempt
suicide. Like Septimus, she was tormented by guilt over her "lack of
feeling" after a death; moreover, it was probably her preference for
a homosexual relationship that made her, like Septimus,
unresponsive to a spouse (Bazin, VWAV 109-10). Post-traumatic
stress disorder, commonly experienced by soldiers, may have been
an aspect of her problem too; for so Septimus' "shell-shock" would
probably be labeled today. Through her fiction she skillfully
analyzed the factors that provoked her own suicide attempt. She
evidently thought she understood her case better than her doctors,
for she scoffed at the doctor in the novel who offered only "a sense
of proportion": "To his patients he gave three-quarters of an hour;
and if in this exacting science which has to do with what, after all,
we know nothing about-the nervous system, the human brain-a
doctor loses his sense of proportion, as a doctor he fails" (149).
When Virginia Woolf succeeded in committing suicide in
1941, the oncoming war was undoubtedly an additional factor. In
Jacob's Room, she associated how she felt about Thoby's death with
how mothers must have felt about losing their sons in war. Is it any
wonder that both World War I and World War II would be upsetting
to someone who knew so well what those losses meant to the
families (Bazin and Lauter 15). Added to her deeper psychological
problems, the fear in 1941 that Hitler would invade England, her
plans with her Jewish husband to commit suicide should that
happen, and the presence of bombers overhead provoked in her a
sense that she was "going mad" again and that this time she might
not recover (Bell 2: 226); therefore, she ended her life in the Ouse
River.
Virginia Woolf had every reason to be "mad"-a history of
sexual abuse, lesbian yearnings frustrated by her marriage, the
trauma of the deaths of four close family members within a period
of 11 years, parents who displayed before the children their inability
to overcome grief, the haunting presence of Laura banished from
the family circle, a family history of mental disturbances, doctors
who had no understanding of the causes of her psychological stress,
and the strain of two world wars. Another piece of the puzzle is
Leonard Woolf who, however well-meaning and devoted, may have
overman aged Virginia, encouraging her to behave as an adult child.
142 Dionysus in Literature
Surprisingly few questions have been asked about the
psychology and sexuality of Leonard Woolf, a man who stayed
married to a woman from whom he could not expect much sexually
and who, before his marriage, was an ultra-efficient, ruthless ruler for
the British empire in Ceylon. In "Old Bloomsbury" Virginia reported
to their friends that one night Leonard "dreamt he was throttling a
man and he dreamt with such violence that when he woke up he
had pulled his own thumb out of joint" (Moments 166). Leonard
claimed he spent three days hitting Arabs with a walking stick
because they "treated [him) as a fellow human being." He explained:
"It was this attitude of human equality which accounted for the fact,
oddly enough, that I hit them" (Growing 94-95). In The Journey Not
the Arrival Matters (20-21), he told how surprised he was to discover
what would have been obvious to most people-that it was a terrible
experience to drown a day-old puppy. Trombley has assembled other
stories of Leonard Woolf's arrogance, insensitivity, and exactitude
(269-70; 298-99). Bond notes that Leonard compulsively kept many
detailed records, including one of how many words he wrote each
day (71). As Poole has pointed out, Virginia was living with a man
whose mind was very different from her own (39). Poole suggests
that this fact and Leonard's controlling ways may even have
contributed to her mental instability and ultimately her death. He
sees Leonard's brutality and extreme rationalism in Virginia's portrait
of Bart in her final novel Between the Acts. Yet, as Virginia once
wrote, "nothing was Simply one thing" (Lighthouse 286). Leonard
Woolf's devotion still seems commendable. His management of
Virginia Woolf's life kept her alive and well enough most of the time
to continue her writing (Bond 97).
But causes aside, what was the nature of her mental illness?
During her intermittent periods of "madness," she had many of the
symptoms listed in the American Psychiatric Association's
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, II/-R under
bipolar disorders, major depressive episode: depressed mood daily,
"significant weight loss," persistent "feelings of worthlessness or
excessive or inappropriate guilt (which may be delusional),"
insomnia, "diminished ability to think or concentrate," possible
delusions or hallucinations, "recurrent thoughts of death" and
suicide and/or "a specific plan for committing suicide" (222-23). In
manic episodes, there can be "decreased need for sleep," greater
talkativeness, a feeling that "thoughts are racing," "mood
disturbance sufficiently severe to cause marked impairment in
occupational functioning or in usual social activities or relationships
Postmortem Diagnoses of Virginia Woolf's "Madness" 143
with others, or to necessitate hospitalization to prevent harm to self
or others" (217). Psychiatrist Sherman C. Feinstein was convinced
by evidence in Woolf's letters and diaries that she had a "classical
case of manic-depressive illness which fulfills every criterion" (339).
Parallels between Virginia Woolf's periods of "madness" and the
characteristics of manic-depressives are spelled out by Thomas C.
Caramagno in "Manic-Depressive Psychosis and Critical
Approaches to Virginia Woolf." Leonard Woolf describes one of her
manic periods: "she talked almost without stopping for two or three
days, paying no attention to anyone in the room or anything said to
her. For about a day what she said was coherent; the sentences
meant something, though it was nearly all wildly insane. Then
gradually it became completely incoherent, a mere jumble of
dissociated words" (Beginning 172-73). Virginia herself reports
"hearing the voices of the dead" and being "exquisitely happy"
(Diary 2: 283). On another occasion Virginia "became violently
excited, thought her mother was in the room, and began talking to
her" (L. Woolf, Journey 79-80). Manic-depressive disorders are
usually genetic and frequently passed from father to daughter
(Caramagno 13). Today it would be controlled by prescribing
lithium (jamison 110-12).
The duality or bipolarity inherent in Virginia Woolf's illness
meshes with the bipolar personalities of her parents which, in turn,
are reinforced by their gender roles. In Woolf's best-known novel,
To the Lighthouse (1927), the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are
based upon her parents. Mrs. Ramsay's personality embodies not
only her female roles as nurturer and unifier but also elements of the
manic experience, and Mr. Ramsay's personality embodies not only
the male role of risk-taker and dauntless leader but also elements of
the depressive mode. Their visions of life parallel those of the manic
and depressive experiences (cf. Bazin, VWAV 17-19). This may be
demonstrated by John Custance's descriptions of his experiences as
a manic-depressive recorded in his book Wisdom, Madness and
Folly.
Considering differences in personalities and the limited
information we have about Virginia Woolf's experience while ill, we
cannot say that her bipolar or manic-depressive experiences were
exactly like John Custance's. Yet there are basic similarities in the
ways their minds worked: he envisioned the world in terms of the
masculine and the feminine; he associated the masculine with
depression and the feminine with mania, and he felt that individuals
and societies should be androgynous; they had gone wrong because
144 Dionysus in Literature
they were not feminine enough (d. Three Guineas). His descriptions
of depression and mania (31-81) offer parallels to her portraits of the
personalities of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay respectively.
In depression, Custance was in a universe of horror, feeling
miserable and ill. In mania, he was in a universe of bliss. In
depression, he, like Mr. Ramsay, did not notice visual detail; in
mania he had, like Mrs. Ramsay, an artist's eye. Woolf shows the
difference between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay's ways of seeing in this
passage: "And looking up, she saw above the thin trees the first
pulse of the full-throbbing star, and wanted to make her husband
look at it; for the sight gave her such keen pleasure. But she stopped
herself. He never looked at things. If he did, all he would say would
be, Poor little world, with one of his sighs" (112). In one state,
Custance withdrew like Mr. Ramsay into his own ego and felt
isolated from others and from God just as Ramsay, in the boat,
looked "as if he were saying, 'There is no God'" (318). In the other
state, Custance felt, as Mrs. Ramsay sometimes did, a "mystic sense
of unity with the All" (Wisdom 37; d. Lighthouse 100). In one
mood, he felt repulsion for the outside world and for himself; in the
opposite mood, he felt what Mrs. Ramsay often felt-a protective,
indiscriminate love for all people and a sense of godlike power over
their lives (19, 131). While depressed he felt guilty and, like Mr.
Ramsay, inadequate and dissatisfied; whereas in mania he felt, as
Mrs. Ramsay often did, proud and elated (163). Finally, when a
victim of depression, he was, like Mr. Ramsay, cut off from the
secret of the universe; metaphorically speaking, he could not reach
liZ." But as a manic, he seemed to have "some clue, some Open-
Sesame to creation" (52); so too the artist in To the Lighthouse, Lily
Briscoe, depicted Mrs. Ramsay's heart and mind as containing
"tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them
out would teach one everything" (82). These striking similarities
help to suggest what leonard Woolf meant when he wrote in
Beginning Again: "the connection between her madness and her
writing was close and complicated" (81).
Despite the ways in which Virginia's episodes of "madness"
enriched her writing, she still dreaded, of course, the suffering she
often endured in these states. Hence, with leonard's help, she
wanted to maintain her equilibrium, to avoid the swings towards
one pole or the other. Custance envisioned the problem of
equilibrium in these terms: "Normal life and consciousness of
'reality' appear to me rather like a motion along a narrow strip of
table-land at the top of a Great Divide separating two distinct
Postmortem Diagnoses of Virginia Woolf's "Madness" 145
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Bazin, Nancy Topping, and Jane Hamovit Lauter. "Virginia Woolf's Keen
Sensitivity to War: Its Roots and Its Impact on Her Novels." Virginia
Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth. Ed. Mark Hussey.
Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1991. 14-39.
Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. 2 vols. London: Hogarth,
1972.
Bond, Alma Halbert. Who Killed Virginia Woolf? A Psychobiography.
New York: Human Services, 1989.
Bryer, Jeffrey B., et al. "Childhood Sexual and Physical Abuse as Factors in
Adult Psychiatric Illness." American Journal of Psychiatry 144.11
(Nov. 1987): 1426-30.
Burnam, M. Audrey, et al. "Sexual Assault and Mental Disorders in a
Community Population." Journal of Consulting and Clinical
Psychology 56.6 (1988): 843-50.
Caramagno, Thomas C. "Manic-Depressive Psychosis and Critical
Approaches to Virginia Woolf's Life and Work." PMLA: Publications of
the Modern Language Association of America 103.1 Oan. 1988): 10-23.
Cook, Blanche Wiesen. "'Women Alone Stir My Imagination': Lesbianism
and the Cultural Tradition." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 4.4 (Summer 1979): 718-39.
Custance, John. Wisdom, Madness and Folly: The Philosophy of a Lunatic.
London: Victor Gollancz, 1951.
DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse
on Her Life and Work. Boston: Beacon, 1989.
Feinstein, Sherman C. "Why They Were Afraid of Virginia Woolf:
Perspectives on Juvenile Manic-Depressive Illness." Adolescent
Psychiatry: Developmental and Clinical Studies. Annals of the
American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry 8. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1980. 332-43.
Goldstein, Jan Ellen. "The Woolfs' Response to Freud: Waterspiders,
Singing Canaries, and the Second Apple." The Psychoanalytic
Quarterly 43.3 (1974): 438-76.
Goodwin, Jean, et al. " Letter: Reporting by Adult Psychiatric Patients of
Childhood Sexual Abuse." The American Journal of Psychiatry 145.9
(Sept. 1988): 183.
Jamison, Kay Redfield. "Psychotherapeutic Issues and Suicide Prevention
in the Treatment of Bipolar Disorders." Psychiatry Update: American
Psychiatric Association Annual Review 6 (1987): 108-24.
Kenney, Susan M., and Edwin J. Kenney, Jr. "Virginia Woolf and the Art of
Madness." Massachusetts Review 23.1 (Spring 1982): 161-85.
Love, Jean O. Virginia Woolf: Sources of Madness and Art. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1977.
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Poole, Roger. The Unknown Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1978.
Romans-Clarkson, Sarah, et al. "Letter: Long-Term Psychiatric Sequelae of
Physical and Sexual Abuse of Females." The Lancet 2.8601 (2 July
1988): 40-41.
Shearer, Steven L., and Carol A. Herbert. "Long-Term Effects of
Unresolved Sexual Trauma." American Family Physician 36.4 (Oct.
1987): 169-75.
Spater, George, and Ian Parsons. A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate
Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. New York: Harvest-Harcourt,
1977.
Spilka, Mark. Virginia Woolf's Quarrel with Grieving. Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 1980.
Stone, Evelyn M. American Psychiatric Glossary. Washington, DC:
American Psychiatric P, 1988.
Trombley, Stephen. All That Summer She Was Mad. Virginia Woolf:
Female Victim of Male Medicine. New York: Continuum, 1982.
Walker, Edward, et al. "Relationship of Chronic Pelvic Pain to Psychiatric
Diagnoses and Childhood Sexual Abuse." American Journal of
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Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language.
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_ . Downhill All the Way: Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939.
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__ . The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years
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Herman Melville
and liThe Sane Madness of Vital Truth"
Alisa von Brentano
The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all
those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them ....
That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning .... All that
most maddens and torments ... all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly
personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. (184)
ship but becomes the champion of a very special group of men with
a special, "predestined"-if not consciously perceived-mission. As
such, "now federated along one keel," they constitute an
"Anacharsis Clootz deputation from ... a" the ends of the earth,
accompanying old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world's grievances
before the bar from which not many of them ever come back"
(121 ).
So strong is Melvi"e's conception of the universal tragedy to be
acted out on the Pequod that he alludes to the "tragic graces" which
are befitting even the "meanest mariners" in this epic struggle (117).
Even Starbuck cannot ultimately withstand Ahab-whom earlier he
almost tried to kill-his soul, he concedes, being "overman ned; and
by a madman!" (169). The rest of the crew, of course, easily
succumbs to its captain's hypnotic volition: his "special lunacy." As
a harpooner himself, Ahab forges an even closer bond with his
harpooners in the "mad" and blasphemous "baptism" of their
weapons "in nomine diaboli."
The crew also provides structural balance for the work in that,
like a subplot in Elizabethan drama (which strongly influenced
Melville), it closely echoes the main events and theme. From the
beginning of the journey, for instance, the sailors' "merry" madness
(175) parallels the "wild" and "woeful" madness of their captain.
Their references to him as "crazy" or "daft," furthermore, are
consistent with the general ambiguity of this notion and never
detract from their respect and awe of Ahab's "unholy" presence.
But nowhere is the relationship between plot and subplot more
important than in the story of Pip, the little black boy who, innocent
and cheerful "but at the bottom very bright" (411), is the victim of a
set of cruel circumstances which causes him three times to jump in
terror off a whaling boat during the attack on a whale, each time
nearly to be lost at sea. The first time he gets entangled in the whale
line and is carried off by the whale's fierce run. Everyone being "in
the hands of the gods" (413), Pip jumps again, despite the warnings
of other crew members, is left in the ocean and only "by the merest
chance" rescued again. This experience leaves the boy permanently
changed: "an idiot; such, at least, they said he was" (414).
Pip jumps yet a third time, much to the wrath of his more
experienced companions. When one of them calls the boy a "crazy
loon," Ahab mutters to himself, "The greater idiot ever scolds the
lesser" (522). Regarding Pip with utmost tenderness and
compassion, he takes his hand and escorts him to his own cabin
which he will henceforth share with the unfortunate boy.
Herman Melville... 155
In this episode Ahab not only reveals his own great and
"ponderous" heart (73) but also the original cause of his own
"madness." The "Iuckless" child, abandoned by the "frozen
heavens," moves his "inmost centre" and is tied to him by "cords
woven of my heart-string." Guiding the boy to his cabin, he
exclaims: "Lo! ye believers in gods [sic] all goodness, and in man
all ill, 10 you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man;
and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of
the sweet things of love and gratitude" (522).
Pip's fate parallels Ahab's in that, like Ahab, he has repeatedly
been the victim of a senseless and cruel fate. Alone in the
fathomless sea, he has caught a glimpse of the ultimate "Truth," and
it has made him "mad." Unlike Ahab, however, he is unable to
fight back with courage and defiance: he is simply a poor,
unfortunate child who, though completely innocent, has suffered a
fate much like Ahab's. In this sense Pip's fate is also prophetic, for
he has been abandoned in the ocean three times during an attack
on a whale and has been caught in the whale line which nearly
killed him. Ahab will be thrown overboard three times during his
final battle with Moby Dick and will become enmeshed by the line
in the same manner. Like Ahab, Pip in his suffering "saw God's foot
upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore this
shipmates called him mad." And so (" reasons" Melville) "man's
insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason,
man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is
absurd and frantic" (414). Watching Ahab lead Pip away, an old
sailor comments: "Th ere go two daft ones ... One daft with strength,
the other daft with weakness" (522).
The similarity of this incident to the one in King Lear is
obvious. Like Lear's fool on the storm-whipped heath, Pip, stripped
of all "human sense" talks the insanity of "heaven's sense."
Melville's ambiguous language, like Shakespeare's, casts doubts on
the actual sanity of heaven. Both, therefore, repeatedly use a
somewhat vague reference to lithe gods." Ahab, himself "mad," like
Lear, not only understands the poor frightened boy but feels his
heart moved in a very special way by him and shares with him what
scanty shelter there is. Both Ahab and Lear, furthermore, recognize
and comment on the ultimate state of man's condition in the
universe-a condition which forges in them a profound feeling of
pity for and comradeship with the least of their fellow men. In both
cases the experience involves a recognition of a higher truth:
"wisdom ... that is a woe that is madness."
156 Dionysus in Literature
But right before Ahab's final battle with Moby Dick, Pip's
unconditional devotion to him and his own compassion and pity for
the little black boy threaten to sway Ahab from his ultimate purpose
(while on the other hand, of course, they serve to strengthen his
resolve). Ever sensitive to loyalty and love, yet he describes them at
this point in his life to be "too curing to my malady" and this
"malady" to be "for this hunt my ... desired health" (534). His hatred
of the "spirit" whom he sees personified in Moby Dick is such that
no mortal ties can bind him in acting out what he sees as his
"predestined" role. Addressing himself to the "spirit," he had
observed: "I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither
love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst
but kill; and all are killed" (507).
Ahab is well aware of the enormity of his deed. Addressing the
all-governing spirit, he declares: "No fearless fool now fronts thee. I
own thy speechless, placeless power." Yet, were it really a benign
spirit, he would relent: "Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will
kneel and kiss thee." To the seemingly merciless and "malignant"
nature of this spirit, however, he will not bow "though thou
launchest navies of full-freighted worlds" (507). Insisting on his
God-like nature he reserves for himself, as a representative of
mankind, the right or even the duty to rebel: "of thy fire thou
madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee"
(507).
"In this matter of the whale," then, one could easily declare
Ahab legitimately mad-and thereby perhaps inadvertently prove
Melville's main point in the use of this term. But however much
could be said of such an analysis, it would lead to a serious
misinterpretation and underestimation of the work, for its central
hero is an epic figure, Promethean, Faustian and magnificent in his
conception. Moby Dick, therefore, stands alone in American
literature, comparable only to Elizabethan tragedy in its global
perception and to classical literature in the configuration of its
hero.7
The meticulous artistic control exercised by Melville in Moby
Dick has often been underestimated, especially in regard to
Ishmael's rational and essentially agnostic philosophy as compared
to Ahab's "mad" defiance of a prevailing universal dictum. In
comparison to Ahab's presence, structurally and thematically,
Ishmael, despite his far more detached and sophisticated view, does
indeed tend to fade into the background. Both characters being
extensions of Melville's own consciousness, their roles in the
Herman Melville... 157
ensuing events are noticeably disproportionate, and there can be
little doubt that Melville was well aware of the inherently more
fruitful dramatic potential in Ahab's Weltanschauung as compared
to Ishmael's. The narrator, therefore, though capable of much
interesting observation and speculation, is ultimately destined to
resign himself to the "coffins of his existence" (to coin a phrase).
Trying to escape them by going to sea he actually floats back in one
to be "saved." Not so Ahab! His grave is the fathomless sea, and
with his inevitable defeat he nevertheless takes what measure of
triumph mortal man can possibly snatch from heaven.
The completion of Moby Dick (or The Whale, as it was titled in
its first, English edition) in an almost unbelievably short period of
time had brought Melville on one hand the immense euphoria
accompanying the knowledge that he had created a great work of
art, on the other the physical and mental exhaustion which must
inevitably follow such nearly superhuman accomplishment.
However, the most important cause for his emotional turmoil was
the fact that the general reaction to the book was devastating. His
reviewers took issue with everything: its "disunity," its "strange" and
"wild" language, its "worse than heathenish attitudes" and its
"thrusts against revealed religion." Worse than that, most of them
took the opportunity to insult its author as well. William Harrison
Ainsworth's attack in the New Monthly Magazine of July 1843 is
typical. The style, he wrote, "is maniacal-mad as a March hare--
mowing, gibbering, screaming, like an incurable Bedlamite,
reckless of keeper or strait waistcoat." The author, according to
Ainsworth, was "maundering, drivelling, subject to paroxisms,
cramps and total eclipse."
There can be no doubt that the obtuseness which marked the
reception of Moby Dick had deep and irreversible effects on its
author. Lewis Mumford sees this rejection as the centrally decisive
factor in Melville's development as an artist. The "flat stupidity" of
his critics, he writes, can affect an artist to the point that he
obscuring his thought was challenged more than ever. The fact that
Billy Budd is still commonly misread and that critics have not yet
come to any consensus about its true meaning attests to its author's
masterful treatment of the subject matter. For anyone familiar with
Melville's consistent bent of mind, however, Billy Budd, though
subtle and complex in its conception, should not pose any serious
problems of interpretation.
The action takes place on the sea "which is inviolate Nature
primeval" (110) and always Melville's artistically most fruitful
domain. Billy Budd, a young sailor of great innocence, "masculine
beauty" (52), and inherent nobility of heart and mind, has been
impressed by an officer of the British warship Bellipotent, from the
merchant vessel Rights-oF-Man (named by her captain after Thomas
Paine's book). Billy becomes almost immediately the unsuspecting
target of an evil master-at-arms, Claggart, who eventually falsely
accuses Billy of having attempted to start a mutiny. Confronted in
the presence of his captain ("Starry" Vere) with Claggart's
abominable lie, Billy, who at times of great emotional agitation
tends to be afflicted with a stutter, strikes Claggart in an almost
unconscious reflex to his treachery. Claggart is killed by the blow,
and Vere sees to it that Billy is sentenced by a drumhead court and
hanged the next morning.
Within this plot, partially derived from the notorious "Somers
affair," in which in 1842 Melville's cousin, Guert Gansevoort,
presided over a similar military court that decreed the hanging of
three mutinous sailors (one the son of an admiral), Melville
meticulously sets up a system of allegorical values which, though
deliberately obscured by a "naive" narrator, unequivocally
establishes the real meaning of the work. Billy clearly represents
prelapsarian man-Adam-like in his innocence-Claggart a dark
and mysterious agent of the "underground," and Captain Vere
absolute or divine authority, be it "agent" or "principal." The
Articles of War are the immutable and inhumane laws which govern
life on a man-of-war on which, according to Melville, man must
ever sail: under "martial Law" and "with sealed orders" (White-
Jacket 398).
It is interesting that in his darkest work Melville uses
Shakespeare's lago as a model for Claggart, his case study for
human depravity which to him is actual madness. Like lago, for
instance, Claggart is intelligent, seemingly reasonable and possessed
of many other attributes which are normally admirable. Also like
lago, he hides his dark purpose under the cloak of his "honesty"-
Herman Melville... 161
and hides it so well that his victim never suspects his animosity
though repeatedly warned by an old experienced sailor, the
Dankser, that: "Jemmy Legs [Claggart] is down on you." Claggart's
depravity, like lago's, stems partially from a perverse sense of pride.
Always quick to take offense, he seems almost anxious to do so
and, having persuaded himself that he has been wronged, "action is
taken upon surmise as upon certainty" (67, 71, 80). This is a verbal
parallel to lago's words:
These men are madmen, and of the most dangerous sort, for their lunacy is
not continuous, but occasional, evoked by some special object; it is
protectively secret...so that when ... most active it is to the average mind
not distinguishable from sanity .... the aim is never declared-the method
and the outward proceeding are always perfectly rational. (Billy Budd)
Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the
orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but
where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with
sanity and insanity. (102)
164 Dionysus in Literature
Having predetermined, if not to say planned, Billy's death, Vere
loses no time in convening the court, acting as its sole witness. As
such he precisely relates Claggart's accusation but mentions neither
his own disbelief regarding it nor any alleviating circumstances.
Unreceptive to the implied inclination of his officers to keep the
unfortunate incident quiet, to defer judgment or to mitigate the
sentence, he urges Billy's speedy death by hanging, overruling even
the presiding officer of the court and thus making himself both
judge and jury-all this under the "appealing glance" of the
doomed sailor, who still looks to him as "his best helper and friend"
(107). The officers, having been told that nothing can be considered
except the deed itself, grow increasingly uncomfortable about their
captain's relentlessness: "Couched in it seemed to them a meaning
unanticipated, involving a prejudgment on the speaker's part. It
served to augment a mental disturbance previously evident enough"
(108).
After Vere has effected Billy Budd's death sentence he
nevertheless visits him for a last and very private conversation. The
narrator, not being omniscient, only speculates as to what might
have transpired on that occasion: the captain probably having
discussed the sentence and his own part in it in a very blunt fashion
but Billy having accepted it-and with a certain sense of pride and
joy besides! In any case, he concludes: "holy oblivion, the sequel
to each diviner magnanimity, providentially covers all at last" (115).
The young sailor is now abandoned to die, his only visitor being the
ship's chaplain, who has "the good sense" to realize that Billy, who
listens "less out of awe or reverence ... than from a certain natural
politeness," has no need for him. It is the chaplain, in fact, who
seems in awe: "Stooping over, he kissed on the fair cheek his fellow
man, a felon in martial law, one whom though on the confines of
death he felt he could never convert to a dogma; nor for all that did
not fear for his future" (121).
Lest there be any doubt about Melville'S general method and
purpose, the following passage should make both clear:
Marvel not that having been made acquainted with the young sailor's
essential innocence the worthy man lifted not a finger to avert the doom
of such a martyr to martial discipline. So to do would not only have
been an audacious transgression of the bounds of his function, one as
exactly prescribed to him by military law as that of the boatswain or any
other naval officer. Bluntly put, a chaplain is the minister of the Prince of
Peace serving in the host of the God of War-Mars. As such, he is as
Herman Melville... 165
incongruous as a musket would be on the altar at Christmas. Why, then, is
he there? Because he indirectly subserves the purpose attested by the
cannon; because too he lends the sanction of the religion of the meek to
that which practically is the abrogation of everything but brute force. (121-
22)
wisdom born of some woe. Yet the Dankser does not get involved in
the action. Aware of all that happens around him, he confines
himself to a few oracular comments and otherwise stays on the side
lines, observing-a grim smile sometimes flickering across his face
as he rubs his god-given scar.
If Billy Budd is Melville's testament of acceptance it is certainly
as dark and grim as the Dankser's smile. In Moby Dick Melville had
written: "All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with
halters round their necks" (281). In this Ahab and Billy Budd are
indeed alike even though Billy is much closer to the innocence and
pathos of Pip than to the heaven-challenging "mania" of Ahab. It is
significant that nearly 40 years after Melville had written Moby Dick
he ended his literary career with a view essentially unchanged and
chose to use yet another life-strangling rope to seal the fate of man.
Notes
'Though the madness of Ahab and Pip in Moby Dick has often been
pointed out by critics, the only consideration of madness as a major theme
in Melville's works is that of Lawrance Thompson in Melville's Quarrel
with God.
2The chief facts about Melville's life come from Leon Howard,
Herman Melville, and Jay Leyda, The Melville Log.
lMerton M. Sealts, Jr., "Herman Melville's '1 and My Chimney,'"
discusses this episode and suggests that Oliver Wendell Holmes was one
of the physicians.
'Hawthorne's letters to Melville have not been preserved.
sQuotation marks are placed around the words "mad," "madness"
and the like when not occurring in the texts to indicate they are ironically
used.
6Henry Nash Smith, "The Madness of Ahab," makes a generally
clinical analysis.
70nly Marlowe's Dr. Faustus is consistently comparable to Moby
Dick. For a comparison of Ahab and Faustus, see my forthcoming Melville
and Marlowe: A Biographical and Critical Comparison.
Herman Melville... 167
Works Cited
has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then
make credible, much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it
infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own
meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents and
the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.
(224)
for the U S of A" (Kesey, Carage Sale 7)-included Ditran, LSD and
other hallucinogens, like mescaline and peyote. After the
experiments ended, Kesey remained among the inmates by taking a
job as a night attendant on the psychiatric ward. (According to Barry
Leeds in Kesey, it was this confluence of stimuli-the drugs and the
hospital environment-which led him to begin his first novel, still
his best-known work [7].) Working the midnight shift, during which
he "had nothing to do but a little mopping and buffing, check the
wards every forty-five minutes with a flashlight, be coherent to the
night nurse stopping by on her hourly rounds, write my novel, and
talk to the sleepless nuts," he would help himself to various drugs.
During one of these sessions, after choking down "eight of the little
[peyote] cactus plants" (Kesey, Carage Sale 7, 14), Kesey got the
inspiration for Bromden and wrote the first pages of the manuscript
which remained virtually unchanged throu-ghout the various
revisions. To lend further veracity to Chief's vision of the asylum,
Kesey even arranged to be given electroshock therapy. Himself as
rebellious and irreverent as his characters Bromden and McMurphy,
Kesey believed that authority is not always absolute, and One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest is his personal statement that the [madlmen
who challenge it can triumph; so long as they attempt change (e.g.,
McMurphy's trying to lift the pane!), even their failures are noble,
precisely because they try.
The themes of the asylum as institution and madness as a kind
of divine sense are also common in Kurt Vonnegut's novels.
Combine-like asylums appear in Vonnegut's early works,
particularly in the technological world of Ilium in Player Piano and
the mechanical system of Titan in The Sirens of Titan. And the
organized madness of government-Nazi as well as our own-
drives Howard Campbell crazy in Mother Night; the novel takes
place in a cell, where Campbell, who tried to remain patriotic to
the u.S. while serving the Nazi enemy as a double agent, finally
sees the insanity of his own actions and prepares to commit suicide.
Campbell's situation dramatizes a negative artistic conversion in
which he faces his crimes by interring the multiple pretender selves
he abuses (Giannone 50). Madness recurs in more recent works,
with the twin characters Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain and Eliza Mellon
Swain in Slapstick. Even the original ending of Breakfast of
Champions, changed at the publisher'S request, had both author
Vonnegut and his protagonist Dwayne Hoover in an asylum.
Like Kesey's novel, Vonnegut's Cod Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
is the story of another redeemer and another asylum. Eliot
176 Dionysus in Literature
that he or those who publish his essays must upon occasion remind
readers that he is not a psychiatrist. In fact, through both his articles
and his novels he has contributed a good deal to a much needed
but still incomplete social history of the feverish involvement
between America's agnostic, secularist bourgeoisie and Freud's
thinking" (xv). Each of his protagonists suffers from some sort of
confusion or loss-in Percy's words, "the malaise"; all must
confront their anxieties before they can escape the horrors of their
surroundings, through which they pass as if across a lunar
landscape (Coles 87). But they do escape, and so it appears that in
Percy's view only the insane, who confront the forces which make
them so, are sane.
A similar paradox occurs in Joseph Heller's Catch-22, which
has become not simply a cult classic but also the catchphrase for
the ruling philosophy in an absurd world. Caught in a Catch-22, the
novel's main character Yossarian is no traditional hero-he is later
pronounced clinically crazy by the army doctors and ends up in the
base hospital-yet he is one of the few men to question, much less
to confront, the military machine and its illogical logic. According
to Catch-22, any flier who asks to be grounded is sane, since only
insane men would want to fly to almost certain death in the war.
But, to be grounded, a flier must demonstrate that he is not sane;
however, by asking to be grounded, he demonstrates that he is
sane-so he cannot be grounded. Yossarian's request to be
grounded is denied because he asked in the first place, thereby
proving himself sane and depriving himself of the only acceptable
justification for not flying. An untouchable force that renders man
powerless by usurping control over his own life and handing it over
to an institution which manufactures fatal and incredible death
traps, Catch-22 is thus an abstraction which can be-and is-
evoked at any time (Olderman 99). "Catch-22 did not exist," claims
Yossarian. "He was positive of that, but it made no difference. What
did matter is that everyone thought it existed, and that was much
worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to
accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds,
trample upon or burn up" (Heller 418).
Yossarian is not only fighting the Germans in a war which can
be won: he is fighting the ultimate doublespeak which empowers
the military's abuse of power and legitimates its lunacy. Catch-22,
argues Olderman, does not really deal with the chaos of war,
though that is its persistent backdrop; Heller's topic instead is "the
one real terror that haunted the novel of the sixties-the organized
180 Dionysus in Literature
Notes
Works Cited
Gardner, John. Rev. of Lancelot. The New York Times Book Review 20
Feb. 1977: 1, 16.
Giannone, Richard. Vonnegut: A Preface to His Novels. Port Washington,
NY: Kennikat P, 1977.
Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. New York: Dell, 1969.
Hendin, Josephine. "Experimental Fiction." Harvard Guide to
Contemporary Writing. Ed. Daniel Hoffman. Cambridge: The Belknap
P, 1979.
Hicks, Jack. In the Singer's Temple: Prose Fictions of Barthelme, Gaines,
Brautigan, Piercy, Kesey, and Kosinski. Chapel Hill: The U of North
Carolina P, 1982.
Karl, Frederick K. American Fictions: 1940-1980. New York: Harper and
Row/Colophon, 1985.
Kesey, Ken. Kesey's Garage Sale. New York: Viking, 1973.
__ . One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. New York: New American
Library/Signet Book, 1962.
Kiernan, Robert F. American Writing Since 1945: A Critical Survey. New
York: Frederick Ungar, 1983.
Leeds, Barry. Ken Kesey. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981.
Mitgang, Herbert. "A Talk with Walker Percy." The New York Times Book
Review 20 Feb. 1977: 1, 20.
Nin, Anais. The Novel of the Future. New York: Collier Books, 1972.
alderman, Raymond M. Beyond the Waste Land: A Study of the American
Novel in the Nineteen Sixties. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977.
Perrucci, Robert. Circle of Madness: On Being Insane and Institutionalized
in America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974.
Roth, Philip. "Writing American Fiction." Commentary 31 (Mar. 1961):
223-33.
Schulz, Max F. Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties: A Pluralistic Definition
of Man and His World. Athens, OH: Ohio State UP, 1973.
Simpson, Lewis P. "Southern Fiction." Harvard Guide to Contemporary
Writing. Ed. Daniel Hoffman. Cambridge: The Belknap P, 1979.
Faulkner and the Furies
Kenneth L. Golden
183
184 Dionysus in Literature
healthy. Indeed, near the end of the novel, Hightower has
something like a religious vision reconciling him to the dilemmas of
his experience (465-67).
Yet Joanna Burden, another character in Light in August, has
problems that fall in the more extreme category. Miss Burden, by
the way, is not a Southerner, though she has lived in Mississippi
much of her life. She comes from a family of New England
abolitionists who instilled her with a fear of her own sexuality and
with a missionary zeal to help the Negro as one would a class of
people cursed by God (234 ff, 239-40). Her affair with Joe
Christmas, a man clearly off balance himself and harried to the
extreme by the question as to which race he belongs-represents a
swing of the pendulum in the direction of her own femininity. Yet
the compensatory swing has been too sudden, too extreme. The
affair ends when the other side, the one for so long emphasized-
the masculinized fundamentalism of her rearing-causes her to start
praying over him (265). This motherly and religious attitude she
develops toward him along with her own murderous-suicidal urges
when she discovers she is pregnant goad her erstwhile lover into
killing her (251-52, 263, 267-70).
Quentin Compson, in The Sound and the Fury, is obsessed to
the point of extreme psychological imbalance by the ideal of past
Southern nobility and respectability, especially as regards his own
formerly aristocratic Compson family. This ideal is one of masculine
control and, to some extent, of repression, certainly suppression.
His final despair leading to suicide is brought on particularly by the
realization of the sexual profligacy of his sister Candace as sign of
the degeneration of the masculine-aristocratic, "Southern" ideal (97-
98, 127-29 ff).
Thomas Sutpen, in Absalom, Absalom!, is clearly possessed to
the point of madness by the masculine desire to carry out what he
calls a "design" (263), a quest for an old style Southern dynasty
characterized by wealth and social standing. Sutpen's case is
perhaps the best example for illustrating the complexity and depth
of the Greek pattern of psychological imbalance appearing typically
in Faulkner characters. In the process of acting out his schemes, he
becomes clearly excessive, like the Greek tragic hero in the grips of
the masculine sin of hubris. In effect, he denies the feminine
qualities of love, passive intuition, and relatedness. He rejects and
represses these qualities both within himself and in others-in
women, in particular-in the name of his willful "design." Thus, in
a sense almost of destiny, as though it were the will of the gods,
Faulkner and the Furies 185
All of a sudden he found himself running .... He went into the woods. He
said he did not even tell himself where to go: that his body, his feet, just
went there ...to a kind of cave .... Because he couldn't think straight yet ...he
was seeking among that little he had to call experience for something to
measure it by, and he couldn't find anything. (232-33)
.. not what he wanted to do but what he just had to do. Because if he did
not do it he knew that he could never live with himself for the rest of his
life, never live with what all the men and women that had died to make
him had left inside of him to pass on, with all the dead ones waiting and
watching to see if he was going to do it right, fix things right so that he
would be able to look in the face not only the old dead ones but all the
living ones that would come after him when he would be one of the dead.
(220)
We can not be sure whether the above ideas come from Sutpen
himself or whether they represent Compson's interpretation, his
suggestion as to the young Sutpen's rationale. Whatever the case,
this material does represent a part of the image of Sutpen
established by the total impact of the novel. The attitude seems to
represent the belief in a kind of tribal continuity and pride in one's
place in the procession of generations. It contains the belief in some
sort of immortality in which one eventually has to face the ancestors
and learn their judgments concerning the way he has carried the
standard for the clan during the period of his life. Interestingly, no
reference is made to any aspects of the Christian cosmology. The
impression is conveyed of an ethic which emphasizes the view that
the individual shames his ancestors if he allows his own status as an
individual and (in turn) their status, to be ignored or insulted.
Nothing in the above passage indicates that the ancestors insist that
in order to "fix things right" Sutpen is to reject his own blood
descendants and family as he later does. Sutpen seems to go far
beyond the charge of the ancestors. They would seem to be telling
him not to allow his personhood to be taken away, not to forget
who he is. In fact, he eventually engages in a quest for revenge
which might heap shame on the ancestors. So, at 14, he begins to
be seized by the monomaniacal ambition to become himself that
which has injured him: "To combat them you have got to have what
they have that made them do what the man did. You got to have
land and niggers and a fine house" (238). His way of "fixing things
Faulkner and the Furies 189
right" is to adopt the tactics of the very one who has insulted him: it
is as though he tells himself to "get what he has, so you can do the
same to poor little boys like yourself."
One prototype for Sutpen's "design" is the nineteenth-century
man of wealth and respectability, the kingly, egotistical individual
who dominates nature, his social environment, even his own
emotions with a ruthless willfulness. Yet the "design," or at least the
state of mind it inspires, is also a modern embodiment of the sin of
hubris, of overweening masculine pride and monomania suffered by
Orestes and other tragic heroes.
Because of his possession by a compulsion arising from a
misapprehension of the archetypes of time and eternity, the image
of the individual's place between his ancestors and his descendants,
Sutpen is stricken with what Jung calls psychic inflation.' Thinking
the only way to revalidate his place between the past and the future
is to usurp the position of the one who injured him, so that he can
himself do the same things the injurer did, he adopts the persona or
social mask of the wealthy plantation owner. Being innocent of any
but a crude, simplistic sense of morality, Sutpen sets out to
appropriate the ideals of the plantation owner's persona. Prompted
by archetypal compulsions, he makes a kind of mad leap of faith in
the cave, undergoing his own fateful metanoia, second birth, or
conversion of character.
Sutpen's goal is to become just as powerful as the plantation
owner, to own what he owns, so that he will be eternally revenged
upon, and free from the danger of facing again, the insult he
sustained at the planter's house. This ideal, however, possesses
Sutpen. His entire ego is filled with, taken over by, his identification
with a particular persona, to the exclusion and repression of other
contents, particularly the anima and the daimonic element in the
unconscious. This commitment involves a giving over of all his
psychic energies, potentialities, and sensitivities to his concern with
the "design." He seeks to identify himself totally with a single
chosen persona, that of the plantation owner of property, family,
and at least titular social standing. Yet Sutpen is forever innocent of
any authentic meanings that such an ideal might hold. He merely
grasps at the husk and trappings of the ideal with an indiscriminate
monomania (d. 262-64) and with a greed which ignores and
represses the complementary opposites of masculinity and egotism
represented in the feminine and the daimonic.
To achieve his goal, Sutpen singlemindedly follows as best he
can the example of the wealthy and paternalistic planter, his injurer
190 Dionysus in Literature
now become his ideal. He represses the feminine side of his own
psyche and holds a negative attitude toward the feminine in regards
to social relationships. From that afternoon during his 15th year
when, in the "cave," he ponders his situation, Sutpen follows the
ideal of his surrogate father, the plantation owner. Quentin
Compson recalls what his father told him about Sutpen:
He went to the West Indies. That's how 5utpen said it: not. ..how he liked
the sea, nor about the hardships of a sailor's life and it must have been
hardship indeed for him, a boy of fourteen or fifteen who had never seen
the ocean before, going to sea in 1823. He just said, "50 I went to the
West Indies." (239)
That is, nothing matters to Sutpen but the hard fact, in the form of a
step in the direction of his power-oriented design. General
Compson's words to Quentin make clear that the style of Sutpen's
account indicated no concern with nor valuation of the emotionally
charged details of such an enterprise as a journey to the West Indies
undertaken at such an early age. With singleminded concentration
on his goal, he ignores the rest of life-especially human emotions
and, thus, the complementary feminine, feeling side of life. That is,
he himself kills the mother, the feminine, both within himself and in
his dealings with others.
Yet Sutpen undertakes heroic actions in the West Indies in the
maintenance and protection of his and his partner's property-a
sugar plantation. In time, he marries the partner's daughter. Later,
when he discovers that his wife may have Negro blood-a
possibility which, even if a mere suspicion, would not allow this
woman to fit into the masculine oriented and authoritarian Southern
design-he repudiates her and their child. 7 Here he oversteps the
measures of human decency in deserting his wife and child and
henceforth refusing to recognize them as his own. He represses the
anima, his own internal feminine self, at the same time that he
rejects the social demands of the woman and her child.
In casting out his wife and child, Sutpen places himself in a
dangerous position as regards the force psychologist Rollo May
calls the "daimonic." According to May, the daimonic encompasses
the "urge in every being to affirm itself, assert itself, perpetuate and
increase itself" (122). Thus, when Sutpen obeys the excessive and
overbearing daimonic within himself-in the form of his desire to
"fix things" and restore his standing with the ancestors-he denies
and suppresses the expression of natural daimonic energies in
Faulkner and the Furies 191
others. Further, he denies the natural expression of the daimonic
aspect of the feminine side of his own psyche, channeling those
energies for use by his egoistic masculine ideals. "We can repress
the daimonic," May warns, "but we cannot avoid the toll of apathy
and tendency toward bitter explosion which such repression brings
in its wake" (3).
Repressed feminine qualities can cluster and assume daimonic
proportions in the form of explosive emotions in compensation for
the stifling repression. Retribution of this sort can occur either in
one's own psychic reactions or in the projected form of the
reactions of others, who, consciously or unconsciously, seek
revenge on the repressing agent. Sutpen's masculine willfulness-
along with his apathy regarding the feminine-prevents his seeing
the possibility of his rejected wife's plotting revenge.
Thus, when his true first-born Charles Bon appears, Sutpen is
confused and dismayed. According to Mr. Compson, Sutpen "was
not calling it retribution, no sins of the father come home to roost:
not even calling it bad luck, but just a mistake" (276). To the
heartless, masculine Sutpen logic, a wife-in a general sense, the
feminine principle-is merely an instrument, a means to an end-
that of the masculine order, the willful "design." Sutpen cannot
conceive of a daimonic retribution from the rejected feminine
element represented in the first Mrs. Sutpen and her son Charles.
Yet the unlived life of the anima and the daimonic continues to
come back onto Sutpen through his children and, finally, through
his childlike dependent, Wash Jones. The process is in keeping with
a psychological principle elucidated by CG. Jung:
Generally speaking, all the life which the parents could have lived, but of
which they thwarted themselves for artificial motives, is passed on to the
children in substitute form. That is to say, the children are driven
unconsciously in a direction that is intended to compensate for everything
that was left unfulfilled in the lives of their parents. (Development 191)
Notes
lMay defines the daimonic as "any natural function which has 'the
power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and
the craving for power are examples .... When this power goes awry and
one element usurps control over the total personality, we have 'daimon
possession,' the traditional name through history for psychosis" (120).
Since the daimonic is associated with eros, because of Sutpen's ignorance
of and denial of the value of love, the daimonic is both that which he has
repressed in himself and what he has suppressed in others. The daimonic
is frequently associated with the feminine (see Barrett 278-80). Sutpen and
Orestes have both wronged the daimonic. Yet the matter is somewhat
complicated. Though here I usually refer to the daimonic as the repressed
element which keeps returning, in a certain sense, the masculine power
drive is also daimonic, according to May's definition. However, in that
sense, the daimonic in Sutpen has been possessed by the desire for the
artificial trappings of the rational persona, thus making the daimonic in the
other sense more appropriate in referring to that deep element which
revenges itself upon Sutpen for his denying of it both in himself and in
others.
2The anima is the feminine aspect of the male psyche. Jung also uses
the term for the archetype, or pattern in the unconscious representing the
feminine side (see Jung, Archetypes 54-74).
3According to Connolly, "Most of the 60's and 70's studies are
devoted to the two general topics of 'What went on at Sutpen's Hundred'
and 'Who is a reliable narrator and who is not?'" (255-56). Occasionally,
Faulkner critics mention Greek terms, giving no real explanation of the
matters in the novel to which they relate and putting no emphasis on a
classical Greek definition of madness. For example, Scott calls the novel
"almost Euripidean in power" with no further explanation, never even
Faulkner and the Furies 195
Works Cited
Lawrence R. Broer
197
198 Dionysus in Literature
latter seek to restore order and purpose through the affirmation of
old values or the creation of new ones. I speak, of course, of
polarities which represent reactions to a radical age whose norm is
to breed such extremes. Tags such as "affirmative" or "negative"
should be used guardedly. Personal sympathies may determine what
one finds bracing or dispiriting, and the choice of our best writers to
affirm or to deny is not always as clear-cut, as categorical, for
instance, as John Gardner would have us believe.
Though hardly unique in reading Vonnegut as a pessimistic
writer, Gardner has been more vociferous than most in accusing
Vonnegut of "cold-heartedness and trivial-mindedness." Confusing
the withdrawal of Vonnegut's often dazed and pliant hero into
narcissistic fantasies and escapist daydreams with an absence of
moral commitment on the author's part, Gardner claims that
"Vonnegut's moral energy is forever flagging, his fight forever
turning slapstick" (41-49). In this same vein, Kalidas Misra sees
Vonnegut's vision as so dark, his characters so powerless, she uses
Slaughterhouse-Five to describe a shift in the modern war novel
from "hope to final despair" (76). Critics from David Goldsmith to
Josephine Hendin have argued that the philosophic determinism of
Tralfamadore in Slaughterhouse-Five represents Vonnegut's own
sense of the futility of the human condition. It is the wisdom of
Tralfamadore, they say, based upon the belief that human events
are inevitably structured to be the way they are and hence do not
lend themselves to warnings or explanations, that allows Billy
Pilgrim and the author to adjust to their traumatic memories of
Dresden.
It is usually these same critics who, seeing Vonnegut as a
"facile fatalist," fail to understand the psychological function of
Vonnegut's exotic settings and imaginary worlds, associating such
fantasy creations as Tralfamadore, Titan, Mars, San Lorenzo or
Shangri-la with frivolity and superficiality. The fact is that these
escapist worlds warn against rather than affirm fatalist sophistries.
Such mirror reflections of our own planet enforce Vonnegut's
position that the insane world of soulless materialistic lusts for fame
and money, of suicidal wars and self-serving religions, that we
presently inhabit is a world of our own lunatic invention. The
Tralfamadorian view of reality is the very antithesis of Vonnegut's
position that artists should be treasured as alarm systems-
specialized cells for giving warning to the body politic. The
Tralfamadorians eventually blow up the universe while
experimenting with new fuels for their flying saucers. They do not
Images of the Shaman... 199
improve Billy's vision; Billy's conversion to Tralfamadorian fatalism,
OR FATAL DREAM ("Tralfamadore" by anagram), ensures his
schizophrenic descent into madness.
John Irving provides valuable counterpoint to the argument by
Hendin, Roger Sale, Jack Richardson, John Gardner, et aI., that
Vonnegut infects his readers with despair and world weariness.
Irving agrees that Vonnegut "hurts" us with visions of a ruined
planet, evaporated sunny dreams (41-49). But Vonnegut's "bleak
impoliteness" provokes us to be more thoughtful, creative and kind.
Doris Lessing, too, reminds us that Vonnegut explores "the
ambiguities of complicity," which causes the reader to think
carefully about degrees of responsibility for violence and injustice
(35).
The irony of viewing Vonnegut as a writer of "pessimistic" or
"defeatist" novels is that no writer has been more self-conscious in
serving his society as a "Shaman," a kind of spiritual medicine man
whose function is to expose these various forms of societal
madness-dispelling the evil spirits of irresponsible mechanization
and aggression while encouraging reflectiveness and the will to
positive social change. It is this almost mystical vision of himself as
spiritual medium and healer that Vonnegut intends by calling
himself a "canary bird in the coal mine"-one who provides
spiritual illumination, offering us warnings about the dehumanized
future not as it must necessarily be, but as it surely would become if
based on the runaway technology of the present. In his novel
Bluebeard, Vonnegut's artist-protagonist Rabo Karabekian describes
his part in "a peculiar membership" with ancient historical roots-
people telling stories around a campfire at night or painting pictures
on the walls of caves. Its purpose is to cheer people up, inspire
fellowship and open up minds that would go on exactly as before
"no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright
dumb .. .life may be" (75, 75, 199). The historical role of Vonnegut's
artist-Shaman is described by Mircea Eliade as someone proficient
in speculative thought-a singer, poet, musician, diviner, priest and
doctor-preserver of oral traditions in literature and of ancient
legends (30).
Both roles-Shaman and canary bird-meet Vonnegut's major
criterion for himself as artist-that writers are and biologically have
to be agents of change, specialized cells in the social organism
(Wampeters 238). Functioning as the projective imagination of the
Life Force, Vonnegut, particularly in his later novels, shapes us a
more benign and creative future-one in which human beings feel
200 Dionysus in Literature
thinks should haunt Midland City for the next few hundred years.
Rudy tells him to go ahead; then he declares, "And I, Rudy Waltz,
the William Shakespeare of Midland City, the only serious dramatist
ever to live and work there, will now make my own gift to the
future, which is a legend" (239).
In Galapagos, the work of the protagonist Shaman functions
still more purely-as the projective imagination of the Life Force, a
directing instrument of the evolutionary process that would help us
avoid the kind of sooner-or-Iater fatal technological horror that
occurs in this story. The Shaman now assumes the ultimate role of
priest and healer by guiding the destiny of the universe itself. As its
title suggests, the setting of Galapagos is that of Darwin's Origin of
Species. With the benefit of nearly a million years of hindsight, the
narrator's ghost, which has survived from the year 1986 to the year
One Million A.D., tells of "the suicidal mistakes" nations used to
make during his lifetime (140). Suggesting that nature's directions in
the year 1986 have been anything but felicitous, the end of life in its
present form begins with the introduction of an irreversible disease
in which creatures invisible to the naked eye try to eat up all the
eggs in human ovaries (162). Military scientists finish up the job by
bringing on an apocalyptic nightmare that changes forever the
course of human destiny. Yet, as a welder of human souls as well as
ships like the Behia d'Darwin, Leon's evolved will and conscience
compels him to complete his research into the human mind and
heart, joining ranks with Rudy Waltz to discourage the suicidal
impulses of a world verging on absolute sterility and annihilation.
Rejecting the fatalism of his father, the noxious Kilgore Trout, Leon
achieves the wholeness and the will to declare, "Mother was right,
even in the darkest of times, there was still hope for humankind"
(259). The mother's optimism informs Leon that mechanistic
structures-ticks of the clock such as his father's pessimism,
lovelessness and apathy, the stockpiling of weapons of destruction,
evolution itself-all are imaginative constructs open to revision.
Noting that "The Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment
and heaven in the next.. .. " (16). Leon realizes that it is we who are
responsible for our creations, that it is we, as a character says in
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, who "are right now determining
whether the space voyage for the next trillion years or so is going to
be a heaven or hell" (18).
Rabo Karabekian, the hero of Bluebeard, represents the main
regenerative force in the author's spiritual evolution and the end
product of the hero's metamorphosis into the consummate Shaman.
Images of the Shaman... 207
It is Rabo, overcoming personal fragmentation to become a healer
of others, who asks of his two schizophrenic friends, Paul Siazinger
and Circe Berman, "And which patient needed me most now in the
dead of night?" (195).
Rabo Karabekian is furthest indeed of all Vonnegut's
protagonists from belonging in a prison or asylum.4 The question of
Paul Proteus's sanity posed 50 years ago in Player Piano has been
answered with an unequivocal assertion of restored mental health.
The vigor of Rabo's narrative alone, the energy of Eros, tells us so.
But it is the amazing painting in Rabo's potato barn that climaxes
and confirms his achievement: a harmony of self and society, body
and soul, man and artist, that makes him not only sane but happy-
Vonnegut's most emotionally fulfilled hero. At age 71, high time!
Soul clap its hands and sing. Rabo subtitles his autobiography
"Confessions of an American Late Bloomer"-it might have read,
late blooming Shaman-or "Always the Last to Learn" (194).
Notes
lGary Harmon, "The Scene with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Conversation."
This is a transcript taken from conversation that took place at Stephens
College, with Jack Lazebrik as the moderator and a group of students
joining in the questioning.
2John Tilton says that to analyze the narrative mode of
Slaughterhouse-Five is to analyze its primary subject-its author. Tilton
presents a thoroughgoing argument that Vonnegut and Billy are very
different people. See Cosmic Satire in the Contemporary Novel
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1977: 78, 89, 103).
31t should be noted that the Shaman is typically a disrupter of order,
necessarily isolated from the tribe so that, paradoxically, alienation is part
of his role as a healer. The phenomenon of alienation is an inevitable part
of the Shaman's psychic life, keeping critical distance between himself and
existing social institutions and conventions.
4The protagonist of Vonnegut's 13th novel, Hocus Pocus (1990), is
literally imprisoned for alleged crimes against the State, yet judged insane
by his own attorney, he keeps faith with the Shaman's belief that the
greatest use a person can make of his or her lifetime is to "improve the
quality of life for all in his or her community" (176). As a "sort of non-
combatant wiseman" (91), Eugene Debs Hartke learns not only that such
mechanisms as Tralfamadore can be resisted, but that they can be
reconstituted through the fabulating power-the "hocus pocus"-of
creative imagination.
208 Dionysus in Literature
Works Cited
Because of his researches for Misery, he had rather more than a layman's
understanding of neurosis and psychosis, and he knew that although a
borderline psychotic might have alternating periods of deep depression and
almost aggressive cheerfulness and hilarity, the puffed and infected ego
underlay all. (50)
In an act of self-preservation, part of his imagination had, over the last few
weeks, actually become Annie, and it was now this Annie-part that spoke
up .... And while what it said was perfectly mad, it also made perfect
sense. (174)
These two brief passages would mean little by themselves, for they
serve only to reveal the rather simple psychological tendency of
captives to identify with their captors, slaves with their masters.
However, King reinforces the link between madness and
creativity by having Sheldon observe his own cycle of mania and
depression:
He laughed until his gut and stump both ached. Laughed until his mind
ached. At some point the laughter turned to horrible dry sobs that awoke
pain even in what remained of his left thumb, and when that happened he
was finally able to stop. He wondered in a dull sort of way how close he
was to going insane. (226)
If we were all insane, then all insanity becomes a matter of degree .... The
potential lyncher is in almost all of us (I exclude saints ... but then, most or
Stephen King's Misery 215
all saints have been crazy in their own ways), and every now and then he
has to be let loose to scream and roll around on the grass. (174)
You didn't know exactly where to find the gotta, but you always knew
when you did .... Even sitting in front of the typewriter slightly hung-over,
drinking cups of black coffee and crunching a Rolaid or two every couple
of hours ... months from finishing and light-years from publication, you
knew the gotta when you got it.. .. days went by and the hole in the paper
was small. ... You pushed on because that was all you could do .... And
then one day the hole widened to Vista Vision width and the light shone
through ... and you knew you had the gotta, alive and kicking. (224)
Her eyes were dull.. .. he heard the creak of her favorite chair as she sat
down. Nothing else. No TV. No singing. No click-click of silver or
crockery. No, she was sitting there. Just sitting there being not all right.
(156)
216 Dionysus in Literature
Half an hour later he was sitting in front of the blank screen, thinking he
had to be a glutton for punishment.. .. he was going to sit here for fifteen
minutes or maybe half an hour, looking at nothing but a cursor flashing in
darkness. (308)
Annie's book reveals that she killed both her father and her college
roommate as well as countless patients at hospitals where she had
worked. Through Sheldon, King reveals that artists have more
socially acceptable ways of channeling their hostility. In fact,
writers can kill off characters with impunity, and Paul is positively
gleeful at escaping from his character Misery Chastain.
What enables writers and manic depressives to feel that they
can control-even kill-other people is their egotism. Sheldon
observes that "a borderline psychotic might have alternating periods
of deep depression and almost aggressive cheerfulness and hilarity"
but that under everything else lay "the puffed and infected
ego ... positive that all eyes were upon him or her, positive that he or
she was starring in a great drama" (50). In fact, this ego makes the
manic depressive believe that he/she can make important decisions
for other people. After he observes Annie kill a rat, Sheldon
observes that manic depressives believe they can make similar
decisions for people as well:
This was how depressives got just before shooting all the members of their
family, themselves last; it was the psychotic despair of the woman who
dresses her children in their best, takes them out for ice cream, walks them
down to the nearest bridge, lifts one into the crook of each arm, and jumps
over the side. Depressives kill themselves. Psychotics, rocked in the poison
cradles of their own egos, want to do everyone handy a favor and take
them along. (160)
Notes
In most of King's fiction, the part of the mind that leads toward sanity and
integrity ... and the part of the mind that leads toward obsession and dissolution are
separate and in constant battle, but they indubitably spring from the same grounds.
Supernatural intervention may aid one side or the other-particularly malefic forces
influence the latter-but this can only occur because the character possesses these
tendencies and yields the corresponding influences. (225)
A. Euphoria or irritability.
B. At least three of the following symptom categories .... 1) Hyperactivity
(includes motor, social and sexual activity). 2) Push of speech (pressure to keep
talking). 3) Flight of ideas (racing thoughts). 4) Grandiosity .... 5) Decreased sleep.
6) Distractibility.
C. A psychiatric illness lasting at least two weeks with no preexisting
psychiatric conditions .... (200)
Works Cited
221
222 Dionysus in Literature
Conclusions
This course studies fictional characters whose distorted
perceptions, intemperate emotions or peculiar behavior can be
examined for certain "disorders." Characters like Oedipus,
Antigone, Edna, and the Underground Man, who are considered
mad by their contemporaries, are often found to be highly
intelligent individuals ahead of their times. Students become aware
of how the unreasonable constraints of restrictive societies are
sometimes to blame for characters' plights.
My theme approach on madness allows students to gain an
increased appreciation for literature. The literary works also offer
some insights on the problems of madness in its legal, medical,
moral, and social contexts. The frequent heated debates demon-
strate the thin line between sanity and madness, and are pivotal if
students are to become independent learners.
The "Madness in literature" course is a successful way of
getting students involved in the study of literature and life:
questioning, reflecting, probing, wondering, and sometimes
rebelling. This course explores psychological problems inherent in
the human condition. It has helped my students develop strategies
for defining their values and approaches to solving their problems in
a sometimes confusing world. In a world of future shock, such skills
are imperative.
Contributors
231
232 Dionysus in Literature
recently contributing a chapter on Lenin in Greenwood Press's
Statesmen Who Changed the World. He has also written a
psychological study of the Russian anarchist, Bakunin, for the
Psychohistory Review, and is working on a psychological
comparison of Hitler and Stalin.