Fierce Flames and the Golden Lotus: Case Studies on the Madness and Creativity Connection
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University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers Graduate School 2010 Fierce Flames and the Golden Lotus: Case Studies on the Madness and Creativity Connection Reuben Jay Swindall The University of Montana Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Swindall, Reuben Jay, "Fierce Flames and the Golden Lotus: Case Studies on the Madness and Creativity Connection" (2010). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 445. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/445 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FIERCE FLAMES AND THE GOLDEN LOTUS: CASE STUDIES ON THE MADNESS AND CREATIVITY CONNECTION By REUBEN JAY SWINDALL Bachelor of Arts, The University of Virginia‟s College at Wise, Wise, VA, 2008 Thesis Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in European History The University of Montana Missoula, MT Official Graduation Date: July 2010 Approved by: Perry Brown, Associate Provost for Graduate Education Graduate School Dr. Richard Drake, History Department Chair ii Dr. Robert H. Greene, History Department Dr. Marton Marko Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literature iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction o Pages 3-11 Chapter I: Romanticizing Madness: Gustave Flaubert and Hector Berlioz o Pages 12-34 Chapter II: ‘Sick Prophets‟ and Dionysian Man: Friedrich Nietzsche and Rainer Maria Rilke o Pages 35-69 Chapter III: Great Waves of Melancholy: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Manic Depressive Illness and the Will to Art o Pages 70-109 Conclusion o Pages 110-116 Bibliography o Pages 117-123 1 INTRODUCTION The idea that madness, genius, and art are somehow interrelated is ancient. In the Western tradition, Socrates claimed that, “Some of the highest goods have come to us by way of madness.”1 In the Phaedrus he distinguishes between four types of “divine madness.” Each of them corresponds to a god: prophetic madness to Apollo, the madness of mystery to Dionysus, furor poeticus or poetic madness to the muses, and finally the madness of love to Eros and Aphrodite.2 In ancient Greece, madness was neither a pejorative nor a positive concept; it transcended value distinctions. Everyone was thought capable of experiencing moments of madness which, for the fortunate few, might bestow upon them an extraordinary gift. Plato reinforced Socrates‟ distinction by explaining that the poet‟s genius was the product of “divine madness.”3 During the Middle Ages, madness remained, like virtually everything else, a theological issue. Scholastics continued to think of madness as a matter of divine intervention: either as God‟s way of punishing people in earthly life or blessing those who shared a mystical union with the creator; but the relative absence of madness as a topic of medieval discourse mirrors its scriptural insignificance. Romanticisms of the furor poeticus were reborn along with the Renaissance of classicism, but Apollo, Dionysus, the Muses, Eros and Aphrodite were replaced by the Holy Trinity.4 Michel Foucault argues in Madness and Civilization that the Enlightenment marked a fundamental shift in the way the Western world approached madness. 1 Socrates, The Phaedrus. 2 Ibid. 3 Arnold M. Ludwig, The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995), 1. 4 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1988). 2 Conceptually, madness became the sanctuary of irrationality, and in the Age of Reason, anything irrational had to be either explained or destroyed. As a result, a stark line developed between the sane and insane, an ideological shift ritualized in the birth of the asylum. Moreover, madness became a prime target in the Enlightenment‟s wholesale effort to organize and classify the natural world. It no longer remained unspecified, but rapidly evolved into an ever-expanding array of psychoses.5 Although the concept of madness underwent a drastic transformation between Socrates‟ writing of the Phaedrus and the nineteenth-century, the idea that madness and genius might be somehow connected has survived the test of time. Thinking dialectically, we might take this as partial proof of its validity. Indeed, the presence of mad artists and intellectuals is so prevalent, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, that a connection may be taken for granted. The goal, then, is to interpret the connection between madness and creativity and to illustrate its biographical and societal significance. While psychologists and physicians have begun to seriously examine the origins of the obvious but enigmatic connections between mental illness and the creative impulse, the treatment of the phenomenon by cultural and intellectual historians has been primarily implicit. Kay Redfield Jamison‟s Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, for example, argues that manic-depressive illness has played a role in art from Plato to Robert Lowell.6 Deborah Hayden‟s Pox: Genius Madness and the Mysteries of Syphilis examines some of history‟s most famous syphilitics through the lens of contemporary medical knowledge.7 One of the most comprehensive, however impersonal, studies was conducted by 5 Ibid. 6 Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1993). 7 Deborah Hayden, Pox: Genius Madness, and the Mysteries of syphilis, (New York: Basic Books, 2003) 3 behavioral psychologist James Kaufman. His 2001 study of 1,629 eminent creative writers concluded that writers in general, and poets specifically, suffer extraordinarily high rates of mental illness when compared with the regular population. Kaufman found that 26 percent of the sampled poets committed suicide compared with 14 percent of writers and only 1 percent of the non-literary public. Kaufman dubbed his findings, “The Plath Effect”, in honor of Sylvia Plath who committed suicide in 1963.8 While many of these studies do highlight the correlation of madness and creativity, they tend to either omit or underplay how mental illness in its myriad forms explicitly affects the creative product. It is hardly enough to assume the intellectual or artistic eminence of these disturbed cultural producers, and then to somehow prove that they are, indeed, disturbed. The problem lies in the method, which has been predominantly scientific, and has tended to gloss over valuable subtleties. Many of these empirical studies treat the relationship between madness and creativity as if it were an equation, allowing “A” to represent genius, “B” to represent madness, and then assuming that “A” plus “B” must equal “C,” or the relationship itself. What is needed, therefore, is a method whereby each figure is treated personally and organically. Science should not be discredited as a valuable starting point, but it must be treated as just that, a starting point, because the key to reaching a more penetrating understanding lies in the consummation of a tenuous marriage between contemporary medical discourses and historical analysis. Although necessary, this union is inherently uncomfortable for the historian who recognizes that medical diagnoses, like other technologies, have a relatively short “shelf-life.” Nevertheless, we cannot afford to ignore contemporary clinical and patient perspectives which are the best tool available for the retrospective reconstruction of individual encounters 8 James C. Kaufman, “The Sylvia Plath Effect: Mental Illness in Eminent Creative Writers,” in The Journal of Creative Behavior, vol.35 (2001): pg. 37-49. 4 with mental illness. In order to discover how a subject‟s psychosis affected their work, however, it is necessary to examine that person‟s own ways of thinking about madness broadly, as well as the application of these conceptions to themselves. To use the language of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, we must work from the perspective of the habitus, which he defines as a synthesis between individual experience and collective experience welded into a single world view. This effort requires the development of a familiarity with the acquired schemas, sensibilities, dispositions and tastes of the individual subject as they relate to a broader cultural and historical context. For example, whether or not we accept the primary tenets of Freudianism, we must be familiar with them in order to determine how they might have influenced a subject‟s understanding of their own mental health. Bourdieu offers the metaphor of “the game” to clarify his theory in practice. Within this metaphor, the game itself represents a given social space, either historical or contemporary. The player‟s “feel for the game,” or habitus, is the force which propels the course of the game. Just as athletes are conscious of the rules that govern the game, artists and intellectuals are conscious of the structures they employ to translate inspiration and ideas into universal forms that can be read, seen and listened to. In both cases, however, strategies for manipulating