[lit-ideas] Madness and the Creative Mind
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas " <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 09:58:32 -0800
Lionel Trilling's essay "Art and Neurosis" appears both in "The Liberal
Imagination" and "The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent." He writes, "it
was commonly said that the poet was 'mad,' but this was only a manner of
speaking, a way of saying that the mind of the poet worked in a different
fashion from the mind of the philosopher; it had no real reference to the
mental hygiene of the man who was the poet."
Trilling then refers to Charles Lamb, "someone," Trilling tells us who knew
quite a lot about madness. Lamb's essay "On the Sanity of True Genius"
which undertook to refute the idea that the "exercise of the imagination was
a kind of insanity."
In more recent times, Trilling tells us, "the connection between art and
mental illness has been formulated not only by those who were openly or
covertly hostile to art, but also and more significantly by those who are
most intensely partisan to it. The latter willingly and even eagerly accept
the idea that the artist is mentally ill and go on to make his illness a
condition of his power to tell the truth."
In regard to those "hostile to art," Trilling writes, "The excommunication
of the arts, when it was found necessary, took the form of pronouncing the
artist mentally degenerate. . . In the history of the arts this is new. The
poet was always known to belong to a touchy tribe - genus irritabile was the
tag anyone would know - and ever since Plato the process of the inspired
imagination . . . was thought to be a special one of some interest, which
the similitude of madness made somewhat intelligible . . . no one was likely
to identify the poet with the weakling. Indeed, the Renaissance ideal held
poetry to be, like arms or music, one of the signs of manly competence.
"The change from this view of things cannot be blamed wholly on the
bourgeois or philistine public. Some of the 'blame' must rest with the
poets themselves. The Romantic poets were as proud of their art as the
vaunting poets of the sixteenth century, but one of them talked with an
angel in a tree and insisted that Hell was better than Heaven and sexuality
holier than chastity; another told the world that he wanted to lie down like
a tired child and weep away this life of care; another asked so foolish a
question as 'Why did I laugh tonight?' and yet another explained that he had
written one of his best poems in a drugged sleep. The public took them at
their word - they were not as other men. Zola . . . submitted himself to
examination of fifteen psychiatrists and agreed with their conclusion that
his genius had its source in the neurotic elements of his temperament.
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine found virtue and strength in their physical
and mental illness and pain. W. H. Auden addresses his 'wound' in the
cherish language of a lover, thanking it for the gift of insight it has
bestowed. . . and Edmund Wilson, in his striking phrase 'the wound and the
bow,' has formulated for our time the idea of the characteristic sickness of
the artist, which represents by the figure of Philoctetes, the Greek warrior
who was forced to live in isolation because of the disgusting odor of a
suppurating wound and who yet had to be sought out by his countrymen because
they had need of the magically unerring bow he possessed.
"The myth of the sick artist, we may suppose, has established itself because
it is of advantage to the various groups who have one or another relation
with art. To the artist himself the myth gives some of the ancient powers
and privileges of the idiot and the fool, half-prophetic creatures, or the
mutilated priest. . . By means of his belief in his own sickness, the artist
may the more easily fulfill his chosen, and assigned, function of putting
himself into connection with the forces of spirituality and morality; the
artist sees as insane the 'normal' and the 'healthy' ways of established
society, while aberration and illness appear as spiritual and moral health
if only because they controvert the ways of respectable society."
". . . the whole economy of the neurosis is based . . . on this idea of the
quid pro quo of sacrificial pain: the neurotic person unconsciously
subscribes to a system whereby he gives up some pleasure or power, or
inflicts pain to himself in order to secure some other power or some other
pleasure."
Trilling concludes, "when we have said all this, it is still wrong, I
believe, to find the root of the artist's power and the source of his genius
in neurosis." He takes the more pragmatic view that "one cannot be and do
everything and the wholehearted absorption in any enterprise, art for
example, means that we must give up other possibilities, even parts of
ourselves." If one has a sufficient degree of creativity and is willing to
give up a sufficient number of other things then one can hope to produce art
of an adequate quality. And if one gives up everything for it perhaps one
will go mad in the process, but there is the chance that this added
intensity will result in the production of even better art.
The poetic achievements of Robert Lowell and Delmore Schwartz have never
impressed me. I wouldn't be willing to go mad in order to write the poetry
that they did. Of course if one is mad anyway and through no choice of
one's own that's another matter. Sylvia Plath was probably mad from an
early age. Perhaps Lowell was as well. Dylan Thomas and John Berryman may
have been a bit mad but they were also alcoholics. I recall the belief that
alcohol like madness could enhance your poetry. Could they have written
better poetry if they hadn't been heavy drinkers? They could certainly have
written more of it. But the post-partum depression that occurs after having
written a good poem is something like a hangover. How many of those could
Berryman experience before deciding to jump off the bridge?
Or Hart Crane off the fantail of a ship - if he jumped and was not thrown?
(He was known for not being above importuning sailors and one of them may
have been offended in the extreme).
Anne Sexton was in and out of mental institutions. She seems to have
learned to write poetry in one of them. I don't have the impression that
her madness enhanced her poetry; although it was the subject of a lot of it.
Her being impressed with the way Sylvia Plath committed suicide struck me as
more willful.
Lest the philosopher congratulate himself on not being a poet, Foucault in
Madness and Civilization, on page 217 wrote "If the progress of knowledge
dissipates error, it also has the effect of propagating a taste even a mania
for study; the life of the library, abstract speculations, the perpetual
agitation of the mind without the exercise of the body, can have the most
disastrous effects. . . The more abstract or complex knowledge becomes the
greater the risk of madness."
On page 285 Foucault writes, "The madness of Tasso, the melancholia of
Swift, the delirium of Rousseau belong to their works, just as these works
belong to their authors. Here in the texts, there in the lives of the men,
the same violence spoke, or the same bitterness; visions certainly were
exchanged; language and delirium interlaced. . . The madness of Nietzsche,
the madness of Van Gogh or Artaud, belongs to their work perhaps neither
more nor less profoundly, but in quite another way . . . from the time of
Holderlin and Nerval, the number of writers, painters, and musicians who
have 'succumbed' to madness has increased . . . but between madness and the
work of art, there has been no accommodation, no more constant exchange, no
communication of languages; their opposition is much more dangerous than
formerly . . . theirs is a game of life and death. Artaud's madness does
not slip through the fissures of the work of art; his madness is precisely
the absence of the work of art . . . Nietzsche's last cry, proclaiming
himself both Christ and Dionysos, is not on the border of reason and
unreason, in the perspective of the work of art . . . it is the very
annihilation of the work of art, the point where it becomes impossible and
where it must fall silent; the hammer has just fallen from the philosophers
hands."
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