Late Modernist Schizophrenia: from Phenomenology to Cultural Pathology
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LATE MODERNIST SCHIZOPHRENIA: FROM PHENOMENOLOGY TO CULTURAL PATHOLOGY A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by Jonathan Gagas May 2014 Examining Committee Members: Daniel T. O'Hara, Advisory Chair, Department of English Sheldon Brivic, Department of English Alan Singer, Department of English Robert L. Caserio, External Member, The Pennsylvania State University, Department of English © Copyright 2014 by Jonathan Gagas All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT My dissertation explains the problematic nature of using the diagnostic category schizophrenia as a cultural metaphor, whether the disorder is stigmatized or romanticized, and demonstrates how representations of schizophrenic characters in novels can combat widespread misuses of psychiatric terms and help readers empathize with mentally ill people if we read these novels with some understanding of psychiatry and the psychoanalysis that influenced them. Public understanding of psychiatry and psychology has played an increasingly important role in mentally ill people’s prospects for recovery as inpatient care has given way to outpatient care supplemented by patients’ families and communities during the past half century. Many people with severe mental illnesses end up homeless or in prison not only because of cuts to services that help them work toward autonomy and social integration, but also because of how their communities treat them, from ignorance and misunderstanding of mental health issues to the stigma that often accompanies mental illness. Contemporary scholars and artists have much to learn about changing attitudes toward mental disorder through an examination of the schizophrenia concept’s migration from the mental health professions to fiction and cultural theory. Therefore, my dissertation undertakes a critical genealogy of this migration, from the German invasion of Paris in June 1940 to the events of May 1968, with some attention to contemporary uses of the schizophrenia concept by cultural theorists. Many accounts of schizophrenia written from the 1890s to the 1930s, whether by psychoanalysts and psychiatrists or novelists, express anxieties about the increasing professionalization of intellectual labor. Experimental novelists writing during the apogee and aftermath of National Socialism iii from the 1940s to the 1970s bring this crisis to a head. These late modernist novelists represent schizophrenia as they understood it to express the painful emotions produced by World War II’s challenge to the value of experimental writing. In the postwar fiction of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and Georges Perec (1936- 1982), imitating schizophrenia results in careful disclosures of disintegrating life-worlds: in Beckett’s case, the dissolution of the James Joyce circle and the communities of modernist exiles it exemplified, which the German invasion of Paris destroyed; in Perec’s case, the deaths of his parents in the defense of France and the Holocaust, and the annihilated six million Jews including his mother. Reading Beckett and Perec’s novels, which many scholars consider cynical experiments with narrative, promotes human flourishing in a way unforeseen by these scholars: developing readers’ abilities to empathize with both schizophrenic people and the loved ones of Holocaust victims. While those who avoided the concentration camps like Perec did not experience their horrors firsthand, losing relatives and other loved ones transformed their lives, just as losing two thirds of its Jewish population devastated European culture despite reticence to acknowledge the Holocaust’s monstrous effects in the postwar years. Late modernist fiction can thus both help readers understand the Holocaust’s cultural impact and foster the skills necessary to understand experiences of severe mental disorder. Such empathic understanding is more humane than romanticizing or stigmatizing schizophrenia or other mental illnesses, and it helps us register the Holocaust’s degradation of humanity anew rather than walling off this event in the past or regarding it solely as a Jewish issue. Late modernist fiction provides a more precise, caring alternative to the romanticizing/stigmatizing binary perpetuated by postwar cultural iv theorists because, from the 1930s to the 1970s, the fiction gradually transitions from reinforcing that binary to enabling radical empathy. Radical empathy entails openness to being affected by a traumatized or mentally ill person’s transformed world: what the phenomenologist Matthew Ratcliffe calls changes in the person’s “sense of reality and belonging” to his or her culture. In fact, such fiction anticipated recent phenomenologies of schizophrenia – real experiences of distress and impairment rather than socially constructed concepts of madness – and traumatic shame, an emotional experience of oneself or one’s community as inadequate in response to failure, especially the Holocaust as a failure of European culture and modernity. Both traumatic shame and severe mental disorder can make the body conspicuous, alienate people from their cultures, and disintegrate structures of salience and belonging that make sustained relationships and projects possible. Shame makes authentic living in community difficult, and, as contemporary revivers of existential-phenomenological psychiatry have demonstrated, so does severe mental disorder. Under the right conditions, however, shame can benefit both individuals and communities, as in the collective shame about the Holocaust expressed by European governments in the last few decades. When one’s entire culture becomes the object of shame, that is, the warp and woof of the ethos that knits together a community’s institutions, rejoining the community requires its renewal since its institutions themselves, rather than their aberrant actions, cause shame. When accompanied by trust in the community’s ability to reintegrate the ashamed person, shame can promote ethical reflection conducive to transforming the person and renewing his or her community. v Recent existential-phenomenological theories of mental disorder enable reintegrating schizophrenia representation in fiction into the history of literary modernism, especially its concern with historical forces disrupting the minds of individuals. These theories explain changes in mentally ill people’s sense of possibilities for developing themselves and relating to others, from the way they experience their bodies to the way they use language. Hence my dissertation uses these theories to demonstrate how the bizarre affect, alienating psychosis and self-reflexivity, and cognitive disintegration characteristic of severe schizophrenia enabled post-Holocaust novelists to travesty and transform earlier novelists’ uses of fictional minds to interrogate cultural change. vi For my grandpa, Carl Roy Finch (1929-2002), the finest example of care I have ever met vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks to the following, in reverse chronological order with the exception of my family: My dissertation committee members Daniel T. O’Hara, my chair, for modelling a generous sensibility, inviting me to his seminars after I finished coursework, writing many recommendation letters, believing in my writing even when it was messy and inchoate, and asking tough questions; Shelly Brivic for showing me how to read twentieth-century fiction and psychoanalytic theory carefully, reading my dissertation drafts with equal care, recommending my research, and his warm presence in our department; Alan Singer for opening his home to the Graduate English Department for many years, introducing me to two Copernican turns – Immanuel Kant’s philosophy and the power of aesthetic experience in the classroom – and pushing my writing toward greater precision; and Robert L. Caserio, my external reader, for affirming my writing in Rome and Pennsylvania and inspiring me to broaden my knowledge of modern fiction Lorraine Savage for hosting writing retreats where I felt free to develop big ideas, Jennifer Follett and Lori Salem for teaching me about different learning styles, and all three for directing the Temple University Writing Center with expertise and friendliness that made them a pleasure to work for Dana Dawson and Robert Pred for their advice on postdoctoral fellowship applications, which helped me frame the boundaries of my dissertation more precisely Emma Atwood and Katie Daily-Bruckner, the organizers of Boston College’s Health, Mental Health, and Literature conference, for providing a forum for an early version of my “Samuel Beckett’s Shame” chapter viii My Temple professors Steve Newman for advising me on an early dissertation draft, modelling passionate teaching, and recommending my teaching; Peter Melville Logan for advising me about professional development, demonstrating the importance of clarifying concepts, and modelling research that combines literary history and the history of psychology; James B. Salazar for advising me about employment and publishing and supporting my Dissertation Completion Grant application; Rebecca T. Alpert for showing me how to make the humanities relevant to undergraduates, teaching me the virtues of pragmatism, and recommending my teaching; Pamela Barnett for leading Temple’s fantastic Teaching and Learning Center; Susan Wells for teaching me how to help freshmen write well and convince them that doing so matters; Shannon Miller for introducing me to graduate-level research on a major author (Milton!);