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Literary Theories and the Concept of Madness Robert de Beaugrande When I was a student at Heidelberg, the professor of our lecture course in "Modern Experimental Lyrics," the late Alfred Liede, sounded quite emphatic: "Mental illness cannot be an issue for literary study-it doesn't lead anywhere." No doubt such a reservation was especially strategic when dealing with the poetry of Expressionism (Georg Heym, Georg Trakl and the like), where madness was explicitly treated as a theme, often in ways that suggested disturbing parallels between psychosis and authorship. Moreover, the prospect of exploring the mental condition of literary authors must seem highly unpromising for the traditional critical profession devoted to exalting the creative act and the author as a cultural monument. This is an ironic twist, however, when we recall how "literary genius" "was, as early as the Greeks, conceived of as related to madness" (Wellek and Warren 81). "In folklore aesthetics," according to Ernst Kris, "the poet is the inspired, the possessed, the productively mad" (205). After all, does not the literary author speak of things that "aren't there" and "don't eXist," and continually overstep the bounds of reality, committing in imagination every sort of act, however, disavowed by society? Did not Plato himself want artists banned from society for doing this? And the view of authors and artists being "mad" is eVidently quite congenial to the general public, who dotes on the countless biographies and films which emphatically portray artists being "punished" for their gifts. This may in part be a special case of the general mechanism, foreseen by ancient and widespread superstition, that any exceptional person deserves retribution, ostensibly because the gods get jealous, whence the topos of "hybris" from classical tragedy onward.! Frye remarks on the topos but fails to relate it properly to his classification of genres based on the relative superiority of the "hero" versus the audience. Yet divine jealousy, apart from actual confrontations (as in the myths of Ariachne or Orpheus), can hardly apply to the mythical artist, who in some sense speaks for (interprets) the gods. So it must 17 18 Dionysus in Literature 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: Until this time of complete blast-off in seemingly every department of human life, the idea of insanity was thought of as the most dreadful thing that could happen to a person [although] little was actually known about it ... But in this era of monumental need to re-think and re-define almost every former presumption about madness-which has inspired a bombing way of looking at what once were considered the most unbudgeable rocks of reality-the locked door of insanity has been shaken loose and shall yet be hurled wide open. Until one day the prisoners of this definition will walk beside us, sharing only the insane plight of mortality, which makes quiet madmen of us all. (125) But Krim's own experience confirmed no such hope, since even his artist friends shied away from him: This struck me as...saddening, because intellectuals and especially artists should understand that insanity today is a matter of definition, not fact... An interpretation of madness is a much more real threat in a time of such infinite moon-voyaging extension to experience that the validly felt act is often fearfully jailed in a windowless cell of definition by hard-pressed authorities whose moral axis is in danger. (133) At stake ultimately is therefore not the "essence of madness," but the criteria whereby any society views departures from its standards of conception and conduct as a mental (not merely a moral) breakdown. Yet even the most complacent and compulsively normalized society cannot quite convince itself that art and literature are satisfactorily accounted for as side-products of madness, however useful such a facile defense may be against a particularly disturbing artist or...

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