Grotesque Motif of Madness and Feminist Critique of Enlightenment Reason

Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Bra şov Series IV: Philology and Cultural Studies • Vol. 4 (53) No.1 - 2011 GROTESQUE MOTIF OF MADNESS AND FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ENLIGHTENMENT REASON Soňa ŠNIRCOVÁ 1 Abstract: The paper discusses the motif of madness that Angela Carter employs in her novel Several Perceptions. Romantic and carnivalesque aspects of the motif are analyzed with the aim to examine its role in Carter’s feminist critique of Enlightenment reason. The author argues that the ‘official reason’ that is challenged by the grotesque behaviour of Carter’s ‘mad’ hero acquires the form of the middle-class culture of ‘normality’, rooted in the Enlightenment tradition. Undermining validity of the rationality that itself produces madness of war, Carter at the same time draws attention to its patriarchal nature. Keywords: grotesque motif of madness, Enlightenment reason, carnivalesque, M. Bakhtin, A. Carter. One of the most important grotesque seen as a simple negation of the ‘official motifs that Bakhtin discusses in Rabelais reason’ because its nature is deeply and his World is the theme of madness, ambivalent: ‘It has the negative element of which is ‘inherent to all grotesque forms, debasement and destruction (...) and the because madness makes men look at the positive element of renewal and truth. world with different eyes, not dimmed by Folly is the opposite of wisdom – inverted “normal”, that is by commonplace ideas wisdom, inverted truth’ (Bakhtin 260). In and judgments’ (Bakhtin 9). As Bakhtin the context of carnival, folly does not explains, ‘In folk (carnival) grotesque, represent just a playful escape into madness is a gay parody of official reason, irrationality, but it becomes a source of a of the narrow seriousness of the official different, not ‘normal’ perception of the “truth”. It is a “festive” madness’ (Bakhtin world that in its final effect leads to the 9).Various carnivalesque festivities, such regeneration of reason. Carnivalesque as feasts of fools or feasts of the ass, grotesque images of madness, identified by created an opportunity to experience Bakhtin in the works of great authors, such liberation from the strict rules that as Rabelais, Erasmus or Cervantes, reflect governed the everyday life of medieval the tradition of the folk culture of carnival people. Carnivalesque acts of madness in their focus on the positive, regenerating (folly, clownery) challenged the ‘official potential of unreason. ‘In Romantic reason’ (i.e. the established order and grotesque, on the other hand, madness ideology of medieval society) that could acquires a somber, tragic aspect of not be questioned beyond the limits of the individual isolation’ (Bakhtin 9). feast. Still, this festive madness cannot be 1 PhD. P.J. Šafárik University, Košice, Slovakia. 18 Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Bra şov. Series IV • Vol. 4 (53) No.1 - 2011 Bakhtin’s distinction between carnival British feminist author Angela Carter, grotesque and Romantic grotesque whose novel Several Perceptions (1968) is representations of madness points to a at the centre of my attention in this paper. significant change in the perception of The story of Several Perceptions focuses insanity in Western culture that Michel on a young man Joseph who suffers from a Foucault associates with the movement of distorted perception of reality, whose mind the Enlightenment. Thus, while carnival is tormented with horrific nightmares, and grotesque perception of madness as ‘a gay whose attempted suicide by a gas parody of official reason’ suggests a explosion appearing at the end of the first dialogical relation between reason and chapter creates the central point from unreason that, according to Foucault 1, still which the rest of the narrative develops. existed in the Middle Ages and the Influenced by the Laingian view of Renaissance, the Romantic grotesque madness (Gamble 58), Carter joins the emphasis on the isolating aspect of literary tradition of ‘presenting a mad madness corresponds with Foucault’s point epoch through the eyes of a madman’ that after the Age of Reason such a (McElroy 97), as she focuses on the mind dialogue was no longer possible (Foucault of the character whose obsession with his 5-8). Romantic grotesque presentations of own death is paralleled with his obsessive the insane as beings locked in their own preoccupation with the cruelties of the world, in a way, paralleled the real life Vietnam War. tendency to confine them in hospitals and In the following pages I argue that the emphasis on the terrifying nature of besides the presentation of the isolating madman whose soul is occupied by ‘an and alienating effect of insanity, inhuman spirit’ (Kayser 184) reproduced highlighted by the Romantic and modernist the post-Renaissance approach to madness grotesque, Carter’s image of Joseph’s that excluded it from the realm of madness includes some important humanity 2. A further historical shift from grotesque elements that resemble typical the focus on the inhuman, animal-like carnivalesque resistance to the ‘official condition of the insane to the perspective reason’. My aim is to show that Carter that stresses their alienation from the world associates this ‘official reason’ with the of Reason, introduced in the context of the normative mainstream culture’s vision of 19 th century asylum 3, found its (modified) social life, questioned by the 1960s reflection in the post-Romantic, modernist counter-cultural movements, to present a grotesque 4. The crisis of Enlightenment critique of the ‘reasonable way of life’ that reason that reached its peak in the second originated in the middle classes’ half of the 20 th century has brought another embracement of the Enlightenment change in the perception of insanity, rationality 6. At the same time I argue that reflected, for example, in the opinion that the principle of regeneration that the novel madness can be seen as a ‘normal’ reaction foregrounds appears not only in the form of the modern man to the ‘mad’ world in of a carnivalesque Christmas party, which he exists 5, or in, what Patricia focused on by such critics as Peach or Waugh sees as, ‘a dangerous tendency in Gamble, but also in the form of Joseph’s the various postmodern critiques of reason, encounter with a grotesque female body. which circulated in the 1980s, to regard Carter uses this grotesque body to alterity as a sublime space outside law, emphasize the patriarchal character of the recoverable through madness, hysteria, or ‘official reason’ that the protagonist of her some metaphorised return to the body’ novel opposes. (Waugh 350). At the moment when Joseph, after his One of the 20 th century writers who unsuccessful attempt to kill himself, finds frequently employ the theme of madness is out that ‘he (is) sick, shocked and shaken, S. ŠNIRCOVÁ: Grotesque Motif of Madness and Feminist Critique of Enlightenment Reason 19 padded out in a grotesque clown costume education, a convenient job, as well as his of bandages, but still alive’ (Carter 22), the willing acceptance of poverty (‘Joseph was gloomy tone of despair, adopted in the very poor at this time as he was giving all opening pages of the narrative, is replaced his money to beggars’(Carter 1)) are all by the sense of ridiculous, stressed by signs of that kind of irrationality, Joseph’s realization that he is ‘no tragic foolishness that Bakhtin, drawing on suicide but a furious august now done up Rabelais, sees as ‘a form of the unofficial in comic swathes like the Michelin man’ truth. By “unofficial” is meant a peculiar (Carter 26). The shift in the depiction of conception free from selfish interests, the central character from the tragic-hero- norms, and appreciations of “this world” dying-of-unhappy-love stylization (Joseph (that is, the established world, which is plans his death as a punishment of his ex- always profitable to serve)’ (Bakhtin 262). girlfriend for leaving him) to the grotesque Like the fooleries of the Rabelaisian clown image introduces the mixing of the madman that are normally believed to be Romantic and the carnivalesque that is symptoms of insanity, also Joseph’s characteristic of the novel’s presentation of ‘failure’ to adjust himself to the established the theme of madness. A similar move (middle-class) ways of living is perceived from the Romantic to the carnivalesque by society as a sign of his mental illness. appears when the imagery that pictures Thus while from the Rabelaisian Joseph’s state of mind as the cause of his (carnivalesque) perspective Joseph’s isolation from society gives way to the ‘freedom from personal material interests’ images in which his ‘irrational’ acts (Bakhtin 262) would be the expression of resemble the carnivalesque challenge to the folly understood as the ‘inverted the authority of official ideologies. While wisdom, inverted truth’ (Bakhtin 260), at the beginning Joseph’s hope that the from the perspective of ‘normality’, fixation on facts could help him ‘to shore represented in the novel by his psychiatrist, up the crumbling dome of the world’ Joseph’s ‘charities’ (his distribution of the (Carter 3) implies a rising gap between his little money he has among the ‘meths mind and reality, which suggests the drinkers and rag pickers’) are interpreted isolation of a madman, later it becomes as ‘pathological indications’ (Carter 62). clear that Joseph’s conflict with the real is Further mixing of the Romantic and not portrayed so much in terms of mental carnivalesque grotesque elements that lie illness, but more in terms of his at the heart of Carter’s treatment of the unwillingness to accept the established theme of madness in Several Perceptions truths and normalities of the 1960s society. appears in the scenes that show Joseph Aidan Day, who focuses on this historical during his compulsory sessions with dimension of the conflict, stresses that psychiatrist Ransom.

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