Lu Xun’s ‘A Madman’s Diary’, one of the set texts for week on Chinese modernism in the modernism unit, raises the interesting question of the relation of madness to modernism per se. It is already becoming clear in the course that the discourse around the limits of rationality is central to many different trends within modernism, often drawing (more or less loosely) on Freud’s topographic or structural theories of the psyche. Madness is frequently figured as a liberation from the customary constraints of productive, rational, conventional thought and, along with automatism and dreams, it can speak a truth deeper than the surface appearance of things. There are here distant resonances, perhaps, with the Shakespearean fool…
This does not mean to say, of course, that madness is never negatively connoted in modernist literature, or never presented as (also) destructive or dangerous. However, as we saw in the session on Dada and Surrealism, destruction and danger themselves are not always negatively connoted either.
It would make a fascinating research project to consider one or more of the many presentations of madness in modernist literature, with Lu Xun as a promising starting point. Louis Sass’s Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought (New York: Basic Books 1993) would also be an important starting point for research in this area (the university has a couple of copies).
The blurb for Sass’s book reads as follows:
A stunning revelation of the eerie likeness between schizophrenic insanity and the sensibility of modern art, literature, and thought, Madness and Modernism presents a vivid and highly original portrait of the world of the madman, along with a provocative commentary on modernist and postmodernist culture. Sass, a clinical psychologist, explores the bizarre experiences of schizophrenia (and related conditions) through a comparison with the works of various artists and writers, including Franz Kafka, Paul Valery, Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Giorgio de Chirico, and Marcel Duchamp, and by considering the ideas of philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. The similarities between madness and modernism are striking: defiance of authority and convention; an extreme, often dizzying relativism, which can culminate in paralysis; nihilism and all-embracing irony; a tantalizing, uncanny, but always frustrating sense of revelation; obliteration of standard forms of time and narrative; pervasive dehumanization; and disappearance of external reality in favor of the omnipotent ego or, alternatively, dissolution of all sense of selfhood. This rigorously argued, gracefully written book offers a startlingly new vision of schizophrenia, an illness long recognized as the greatest challenge to psychiatric or psychological understanding. Conventionally seen as a loss of rationality, perhaps involving a return to some infantile or bestial condition, schizophrenia, according to Sass, is better understood as, in a sense, a disease of hyperrationality, with detachment from action, emotions, and the body and entrapment in forms of acute self-consciousness and heightened awareness. Sass refuses to romanticize the schizophrenic as a heroic rebel, mystic, or passionate Wildman, arguing instead that this condition echoes many of the most alienating aspects of modern life. In an epilogue and appendix, he considers whether modern culture might actively contribute to the genesis or shaping of schizophrenic forms of pathology, and he discusses the possible role of abnormalities of the brain.
You might also be interested in the reviews in the New York Times and London Review of Books.
