In Praise of Madness: the Landmarks of a Cultural Pathology
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Neohelicon (2016) 43:357–370 DOI 10.1007/s11059-016-0340-2 In praise of madness: the landmarks of a cultural pathology Monica Spiridon1 Published online: 5 July 2016 Ó Akade´miai Kiado´, Budapest, Hungary 2016 Abstract This paper looks at the particular relationship between madness and sanity in a dictatorship, specifically in Soviet Russia, as analyzed in Mikhail Bul- gakov’s Master and Margarita and in Alexander Zinoviev’s The Madhouse. In both cases, albeit in different ways, madness is regarded as a form resistance to com- munism (Stalin’s and Brezhnev’s), as a particular kind of sanity, and finally as a creative vocation. The relationship between madness and sanity is seen as reversible and can change depending on different perspectives—which are mostly political in the two novels. As illustrated by the two authors, the modern literary discourse on madness can be metaphorically shaped by the writer, as a generic category which can refer to various forms of resistance and deviation from the established social, political and cultural norms. Keywords Madness Á Carnival Á Political dissidence Á Mental hospital Á Prison Á Epistemological metaphor Madness as (self) awareness What fool doesn’t want to live under communism?! Thinking about this last sentence, I was suddenly struck by the deviousness of the Russian language. From a logical point of view that sentence is equivalent in meaning to the sentence ‘All fools want to live under communism’. But don’t laugh too soon. Logically it does not follow that if you are not a fool, then you don’t want to live under communism. Nor does it follow that if you want to live under communism then you are definitely a fool. Only one thing follows: if a person & Monica Spiridon [email protected] 1 University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania 123 358 M. Spiridon is a fool then he wants to live under communism. And according to the law of contraposition in logic, it follows that if a person does not want to live under communism then he is not a fool. And that means something! And notice: the conclusion was arrived at exclusively according to the rules of logic. (Zinoviev 1986,p.8) In a nutshell, the above, from Alexander Zinoviev’s The Madhouse argues that only those who resist communism are normal, which leads to the conclusion that the communist Soviet world is insane. This study looks at the various equations between madness and sanity in a dictatorship, specifically in Soviet Russia, as illustrated by Alexander Zinoviev’s The Madhouse and by Mikhail Buklgakov’s The Master and Margarita. As I seek to demonstrate, both writers imply, albeit in different ways, that madness can be regarded as a form of resistance to communism (be it Stalin’s or Brezhnev’s), as a particular kind of sanity, and finally as a creative vocation. Consequently, the relationship between madness and sanity changes depending on perspective, which is mostly political in the two novels. Madness can only be defined and understood in relation to a specific model of Sanity. Its standards decry mental illness as peripheral, deviant, dangerous and bound to be punished. ‘‘In any case the Reason–Madness nexus constitutes for Western culture one of the dimensions of its originality—maintains Foucault; it already accompanied that culture long before Hieronymus Bosch, and will follow it long after Nietzsche and Artaud.’’ (Foucault 1998, p. XI) From a historical point of view, the clear-cut antithesis between Sanity and Madness is quite recent. It remained highly ambiguous until the end of the classical century ‘‘an epoch in which the exchange between madness and reason modifies its language, and in a radical manner.’’ (Foucault 1998, p. XII) This was the point at which madness first started to be regarded as a disease, and, later, as a punishable offence: ‘‘What is originative is the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason; reason’s subjugation of non-reason, wresting from it its truth as madness, crime, or disease, derives explicitly from this point.’’ (Foucault 1998,p. IX) Clearly the key issue here is the very definition of sanity, which can itself be regarded as a specific form of madness. The Soviet power had its own definition of sanity, which involved punishing the slightest deviation, by forcibly confining the offenders in psychiatric hospitals, known as Yellow houses. In Soviet Russia, the madhouse/the yellow house was a well-known institution, more or less explicitly mentioned by a number of writers who were able to engage in an open debate around the issue of mental hospitals and their patients. In a dictatorship Madness means first and foremost Difference. In Soviet Russia anyone who showed signs of being different in the smallest way became a lunatic, and was destined for a psychiatric institution or even imprisonment. This is precisely the fate of Zinoviev’s main character JRF (Junior Research Fellow), an independent, maybe a little bit eccentric young man, who finds himself progres- sively identified by his mates as a politically suspect. 123 In praise of madness: the landmarks of a cultural pathology 359 At the beginning of the story, JRF is an ordinary researcher, a non-conformist youngster, mocking the dress codes and the verbal patterns which are strictly observed in his academic institution—the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Humanities Institute, widely known in Moscow as the Madhouse: ‘‘The Madhouse, if you want to know, is the building which houses the humanity institutes of the Academy of Sciences. And it is called the Madhouse, not because it has just as many nutcases as Belye Stolby but because is painted in the same color—yellow.’’ (Zinoviev 1986, p. 20) From the informers’ reports submitted to the KGB on JRF we learn that: ‘‘He’s a strange lad in some ways. Even a bit touched.’’ (Zinoviev 1986, p. 156) In what way is he touched? ‘‘He reads detective novels; he gets anti-Soviet books from somewhere or other, and enemy newspapers.’’ (Zinoviev 1986, p. 141) ‘‘He’s got a beard. (…) He’s got a room to himself. He’ll be sitting in a meeting or at a seminar, but his thoughts will be somewhere else entirely. No, I wouldn’t say that he is schizophrenic. Generally speaking he is quiet, inoffensive, never quarrels with anyone. But…’’ (Zinoviev 1986, p. 142) ‘‘He is a dreamer; he’s very capable, but he doesn’t want to write his thesis; he knows two languages…’’ (Zinoviev 1986, p. 151) and so on. This is the very ordinary starting point of a process which eventually turns him into something which, according to the others, ‘‘is alien to our society’’ and subsequently which ‘‘this society needs to take prophylactic measures against’’. (Zinoviev 1986, p. 409) More specifically, ‘‘he got interested in politics and ideology—as some mate notices. He left our Department after all, and went over to the Department of struggle anti-communism. (…) He began to take an interest in sociology, the theory of socialism, in concrete facts of our life which are beyond what would be considered normal (my emphasis), such as cases of self-immolation, attempts on the lives of people, cases of people being locked up in psychiatric hospitals, etc.’’ (Zinoviev 1986, p. 158) As the story goes on, we realize that JRF is not only intelligent and intellectually sharp but also self-reflective. Unusually, his mind hosts several heteronyms, identified by nicknames such as Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Iron, Felix and Beria. Thanks to this multiple schizophrenia, JRF becomes more and more aware of the historic crimes of communism, of the hypocrisy and theatrical dimensions of the so called Bolshevik revolution, of the repressive function of the Soviet power and overall of the absurdity and madness of the very idea of a communist society. Ostracized by his fellow researchers, he is initially temporarily packed off to an academic ‘‘rest house’’ in the hope that he will calm down and to become normal again. Finally he is arrested and confined most probably to a psychiatric hospital: a Madhouse, an universe which is completely cut off from the real world: ‘‘In the serene world of mental illness—Foucault contends—modern man no longer communicates with the madman.’’ (Foucault 1998, p. 10) The yellow colour of the Academy building metaphorically suggests that madness—meaning political dissent—could potentially sprout inside. However in Zinoviev’s novel this is not the case. For all their high moral and intellectual claims, the Russian intelligentsia who work there are all but ‘‘normal’’, which—as the author emphasizes—does not mean opponents but opportunists. Only few, such as JRF’s friend The Teacher, have a certain potential for debate and riposte. In short, 123 360 M. Spiridon Zinoviev’s main character remains a loner, whose only friends are the political heteronyms which inhabit his own mind. In Bulgakov’s Stalinist Moscow, the issue of Madness and of the mental hospital promptly rears its head from the very beginning. In the first chapter the entities engaged in a turbulent and bizarre dialogue—the writers Berlioz and Bezdomnii and the Devil Woland—stake turns to see each other as lunatics. The same happens in old Yerushalaim as depicted an abyme by the Master’s novel. Yeshua is regarded as a lunatic by the criminals who condemn and murder him, who in turn see themselves as sane, and vice versa. The only one who understands that Yeshua Ha-Notsri is a ‘‘chosen one’’ is Pontius Pilate. He attempts to save him by trying to confine this alleged lunatic to a remote residence near his own palace: During the swallow’s flight, the following thought was taking shape in the procurator’s now bright and clear head: The vagrant philosopher turned out to be mentally ill.