Sympathies with Madness
Ana Silvera considers the relationship between ‘madness’ and ‘art’ through the writing of Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett: existential par excellence, revolutionary of the theatre, Gauloise-smoking, French-speaking Irish exile. It seems the stuff of comedy to imagine him lying on a couch at the Tavistock Clinic in London, being subjected to the scrutiny of a psychoanalyst: ‘So tell me, when did all this Godot business start?’ But it did, indeed, happen.
Dr Wilfred Bion was the analyst in question, and a highly esteemed practitioner at that. Beckett turned to Dr Bion for help during the 1930s, a time when the young writer found himself in the depths of despair. Perhaps this seems less strange when we consider that Dr Bion was an analyst very much of his time, concerned as much with the abstract, creative process as with the emotional terrain of his clients.
To put the Beckett-Bion scenario into a contemporary context, therefore, try imagining Seamus Heaney tipping his hat to the techniques of Raj Persaud, or perhaps Harold Pinter in private session with Oliver James. However, psycho-analysis had a weight, a credibility and significance during the 1930s, which is tricky to translate to the modern day, as is the symbiotic relationship between its practice and the world of the arts.
Yet literary inspiration was not Beckett’s aim for his sessions with Bion; rather, he was seeking to discover the source of the deep despair that seemed to plague him without respite.
A Damascene moment for Beckett arrived in the perhaps unlikely setting of a lecture theatre in Malet Place, near Gower Street. At the behest of Dr Bion, Beckett had come to hear Carl Jung, recently arrived from his native Germany, deliver one of a series of five lectures to London’s medical community. Jung recounted the case of a ten-year-old girl who had been haunted by dreams of an intensely mythological nature. Jung theorized that these vivid dreams reflected the child’s ‘constant yearning to remain with or return to the original vision’. But what did Jung mean by the ‘original vision’? When the little girl died of an infectious disease a year later, Jung declared that his ‘uncanny prognosis’ had come to pass. In a throwaway yet illuminating comment Jung remarked, ‘She had never been born entirely’. It was upon these words that the young Beckett seized, for they hit him with the full force of self-recognition.
In conversation with fellow poet and admirer Charles Juliet many years later, Beckett recalled Jung’s comment, citing it in direct connection with his own troubled state of being: ‘I have always had the feeling that someone inside me had been murdered. Murdered before I was born. I had to find that person and try to bring him back to life’.
In such a context, characters that are later to populate Beckett’s world, ‘the world I had to create in order to breathe’ as he once remarked, appear to be articulations of this very ontological anxiety. As Speaker opens in Beckett’s short work A Piece of Monologue:
Birth was the death of him. Again. Words are few. Dying too. Birth was the death of him.
Several years later, in precisely the same clinic that Beckett attended for his sessions with Bion, a young Scottish psychiatrist was working on a text that was to become a seminal work, and which heralded the beginning of a sea change in psychiatry. His name was RD Laing, and that work, first published in 1960, was entitled The Divided Self.
In an era in which medical explanations for madness prevailed, and standard treatments comprised of passing 400 volts through the brain (‘electro-convulsive therapy’, first devised to recondition deserting soldiers into unquestioning submission during the First World War and, shockingly, still widely practiced today) and insulin-induced comas, Laing’s reclamation of the emotional and psychological ground as a basis for ‘insanity’ was a radical move. And in a remarkable echo of Beckett’s state of being, Laing observed:
Biological birth is a definitive act whereby the infant organism is precipitated into the world [...] Within an amazingly short time the infant feels real and alive and has a sense of being an entity [...] This, however, may not be the case. The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real, more dead than alive.
Beckett’s self-described experience of being and Laing’s delineation of the ‘schizoid self’ bear a remarkable resemblance, then. Laing terms this state ‘primary ontological insecurity’, a starting point for the schizoid self as distinct from, but the point of origin for the schizophrenic self. It is this lack of ontological stability, Laing suggested, that effects a rent in the individual’s relationship to his external environment: key to this is feeling oneself to be ‘unreal’, a barely interacting ‘object’ in the world of the other. Accordingly, Beckett’s characters crave the gaze of another to qualify their existence:
Winnie: Someone is looking at me still. (Pause.) Caring for me still. (Pause.) That is what I find so wonderful [Happy Days] Or sense that the sum total of their being resides in another’s ‘looking’:
Man: Am I as much as...being seen? [Play]
Such detachment of the self from the body also precludes a psychotic episode, Laing posited. Deprived of authentic participation with the world, the body becomes an ‘onlooker’, no longer mediating directly with its owner’s feelings, perceptions and movements.
Beckett’s character, Mouth, in the monologue Not I seems to embody this very idea. Mouth is exactly what her name suggests: a mere mouth, the rest of her body trussed and obscured as she unleashes an unnerving and repetitive narrative. The disparity that Laing identified in the psychotic between the physical and mental worlds is evident here. Sensing her body to be ‘numbed’,
‘a machine ... so disconnected ... never got the message’, Mouth recollects ‘no part of her moving … that she could feel ... just the eyelids ... presumably ... on and off’. Mouth’s narrative does not contain a linear development, but rather
operates cyclically. Leitmotifs of expression recur, and the sense is of a damaged speaker and a stultified discourse.
As psychoanalyst Stella Pierides-Müller points out, whilst ‘psychotic’ narratives bear similarities to the creation of literary fictions and setting in motion the potential for expansion and growth:
[T]he relationship is either missing altogether or is attacked in the mind of the psychotic personality with the result of a story that is incomplete, unsatisfying and circular.
The theme re-occurs in Beckett’s radio play, Cascando. Like Mouth, the principal character Voice is trapped in a discourse, attempting to relate a story, which he longs to conclude: ‘if you could finish it ... you could rest ... sleep ... not before ...’. A second character, Opener may be read as the psychotic subject from which Voice and Music emanate. Significantly, Opener refers directly and repeatedly to those around him who deny that his experience has any bearing in reality:
They say he opens nothing, he has nothing to open, it’s in his head. They don’t see me, they don’t see what I do, they don’t see what I have, and they say, he opens nothing, he has nothing to open, it’s in his head.
And yet by the very placing of this self-narrative within a fictional framework, presumptions of ‘reality’ are undermined. For the listening audience, Opener and Mouth’s realities are the truth of the universe with which we engage. The primacy of narratives of madness – which in Opener’s case is specifically denounced as fictive by those around him – gives rise to the question: is self-narrative/life-narrative, in one sense, an inherently fictive process? For if fictions are what give life meaning in the face of an ultimately existential and meaningless conception of the world, how can we ascribe narratives of others as ‘true’ or ‘untrue’, and what basis have we to sanction certain narratives as ‘sane’, and denounce others ‘mad’? These narratives may not respond to ‘objective truths’, whilst still remaining valid within the internal realm of
an individual.
Again, I am reminded of the words of Laing:
A man says he is dead but he is alive. He expresses it perhaps in the only way common (ie, the communal) sense allows him [...] The price, however, to be paid for transvaluating the communal truth in this manner is to ‘be’ mad for the only real death we recognize is biological death.
So whilst Opener might well be mad according to societal values, Beckett as a playwright is accorded the designated space of ‘art’ to express and explore these central concerns, without having to revert to communal truths. As Edgar Z Friedenberg writes in his book on Laing:
Conventional psychiatry and classical psycho-analysis treat patients as persons who are hampered by defects in their perceptions of reality, which is conceived as external to them, as something they must be led to see more clearly and deal with more effectively. The seriousness of the patient’s illness is to be judged by the depth and extent of the discrepancy between his subjective view of his life situation and the objectively correct assessment.
Beckett’s work offers a site in which to explore alternative ways of perceiving ‘madness’: as a state that is not necessarily opposite to the experience of sanity, but perhaps a way of making coherent the inherently incoherent act of existence.
As Foucault recognised, it is artists who are ‘the great mediators [...] between the separated worlds of “reason” and “madness”’. Hölderlin, Nerval, Van Gogh, Artaud and, above all, the overarching figure of Nietzsche, the ‘mad philosopher’ are accorded, by Foucault, such mediator’s status; to this list, I would propose Samuel Beckett. For it could well be said of Beckett’s stage, just as Foucault writes of the creative visions of other such artists:
[B]y the madness that interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a break without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself.
Ana Silvera is the chair of Soteria Network UK, an organisation campaigning for enlightened treatments in the field of psychiatry. To find out more check out www.soterianetwork.org and also myspace.com/soterianetwork
