Monomania: the Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art (review)

In a deceptively slight introduction to the ensuing, and seemingly random, collection of nine case-study chapters, this volume everywhere challenges the very fixity of our ideas about monomania. Rather than define it by its excessive (medical) symptoms, such as pathological obsession and compulsion, or by its (self)-destructively blind literary grotesques such as Don Quixote, Ahab or Othello, Marina van Zuylen redirects our compartmentalizing value judgements about the term to reveal monomania's uncanny proximity to the very everyday that the monomaniac variously seeks to banish. Her method in the introduction is to set out adjacent lines of enquiry from monomania's early nineteenth-century historical, medical, aesthetic and cultural classifications as exemplified in psychiatry by Esquirol and Pinel and in fiction by Balzac and Zola. With these frames in place, the more complex cures that the monomaniac (or artist) invents for suffering the everyday can then be examined. In two initial chapters about Pierre Janet and Flaubert's correspondence, the tensions between art and pathology are entwined and unravelled in the personal rituals and private idées fixes of monomaniacal patients and artistic temperaments alike in their attempt to find a raison d'être and release from the banality of everyday life. As the ensuing chapters then explore, the unreal (Nodier), the obsessive (Baudelaire), the abstract (Eliot's Middlemarch), the bodily (Mann's hypochondriac, Castorp), the intellectual (Canetti's sinologist, Peter Kien in Auto-da-fé) are all aspects of the monomaniacal imagination. It is the imperative of stoking the illness/cure as art that the final chapters on Nina Bouraoui's La Voyeuse interdite and Sophie Calle's risk-induced autoportraits investigate respectively. In van Zuylen's fascinating and capacious study, monomania is not the pathology of the aesthetically minded control freak; the rigid rituals in these monomaniacal others are but more exaggerated forms of the everyday habits humanity creates to shape the contingencies of art and life. As supremely a book that reorients demarcations of the abnormal and normal by its contrapuntal case-study chapters, this collection as a whole presents a telling argument for the monomaniacal as antidote to the grander narratives of romantic genius or postmodern différance. Van Zuylen's deft alignments and recuperations — the return of Nodier to critical debate is particularly noteworthy — mean that the protean masks of the monomaniacal can now enjoy revitalized critical interest.