Lucid Interval: Subjective Writing and Madness in History

by George MacLennan

Throughout history a number of writers have given utterance to their own extreme experiences of mental breakdown and madness. In a chronological study that ranges in time and place from medieval England and renaissance Italy to nineteenth-century France, George MacLennan examines the work of eight such writers, poets, or autobiographers, both well known and obscure: Thomas Hoccleve, Torquato Tasso, James Carkesse, John Bunyan, George Trosse, William Cowper, John Clare, and Gerard de Nerval.
Michael Foucault once asked the tantilizing (sic) question, "How can language apply a single and identical discourse to poetry and madness?" Lucid Interval concerns itself with this question, broaching it in its cultural and historical dimensions and broadening its terms of reference to include the relationship between subjective writing, literature, and madness. While it is primarily concerned with modes of literary writing, this study draws on a growing body of research into the history of madness and its treatment, addressing topics in the fields of psychoanalytic theory as well as religious, social, and medical history.
In recent years the topic of madness has received an increasing amount of attention from critics and historians. As one historian has complained, however, the experience of madness itself remains exiled to the margins of knowledge. No less importantly, no study yet seriously addressed the phenomenon to which Foucault drew attention in the early 1960s, namely the emergence in Western culture of a subjective literature of madness. This study seeks to comprehend the voices of those exponents of inner crisis and of madness who have expressed themselves in writing. It further considers the cultural conditions under which their discourses, in certain significant instances, acquire the status of "literature."
MacLennan approaches the eight writers from a broadly sociohistorical viewpoint and takes into account relevant biographical and medical evidence, where available, examining their situations as revealed or mediated by their writings. Through a series of detailed analyses, he argues that these writings bear witness to a progressively increasing degree of psychological inwardness in Western culture. This is a process that affects both how madness is experienced by the individual and how it is expressed in subjective writing. By the late eighteenth century, madness becomes, for a significant number of writers and artists, an intimately interiorized condition, one which implicates their entire affective life. It is this subjectivized and "existential" madness that, in the Romantic period and subsequently, has been taken to express an "inner truth" in an increasingly secularized and alienating state of society.
In taking these developments into account, Lucid Interval is able to arrive at a fresh understanding of the appearance in the modern period of such figures as Clare and de Nerval--writers who suffer madness as an inner, subjective catastrophe but who, in the midst of that experience, are able to explore it creatively, so producing a "literature of madness," which is a new phenomenon in itself and which sets a troubling precedent for modern culture.

Contents-
The Poet as Madman
The Madman as Poet
The Pathology of Puritanism
The Privatisation of Madness
The Poet on the Couch
Literature has destroyed my head
Romanticism Medicine
Madness tells her story
Notes
Bibliography

228 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992