KNIFEMAN IN UTOPIA
Ruminations on Madness
On
the pavement
of
my trampled soul
the
soles of madmen
stamp
the prints of crude, rude words.
(‘I’:Vladimir
Mayakovsky 1912)
At the Théâtre Récamier
in Paris, February 1959, an unusual drama was staged with considerable
success. Its author was the celebrated
dramatist of the absurd, Eugene Ionesco, and its title was Tuer Sans Gages or Killer
without Reward - indicating a gratuitous, motiveless killer. The principal
character is Bérenger, a Chaplinesque figure, well-meaning, liberal,
benevolent, dragging a slight aura of pathos in his wake. As the play opens, he is being shown around
an ambitious new housing scheme by its creator, the municipal architect. This is an especially attractive sector of
the town with gardens, ponds and fountains.
Moreover, the architect explains, the climate in this part of the city
is regulated so that, however much it rains elsewhere, the moment you cross the
boundary of the cité radieuse, you
enter a world of perpetual spring.
Hearing all this, Bérenger is immensely enthusiastic. He
praises the far-sighted housing scheme and the architect’s skill and humanity.
There is only one thing that puzzles him. Why are the streets of this beautiful
quarter completely deserted? He is shocked when the architect tells him that
the inhabitants have either left or locked themselves into their houses because
they fear a mysterious killer who stalks the streets, luring his victims to death
by showing them a photograph of a colonel. Bérenger is shocked and depressed
but the architect’s attitude is blasé, hardened, matter of fact. After all, he
argues, what is so bad about one solitary madman? Is not the world stuffed full of misery - “Children murdered,
starved old men, widows in distress, orphans, people in agony, judicial errors,
houses that collapse on their inhabitants...mountains that come down in
landslides...massacres, floods, dogs run over by cars - that’s how the
journalists earn their daily bread.”
The second act continues to explore the conflicts and
confusions that underlie this so-called ideal community. We hear various cross-sections of society
speaking, including a teacher giving a nonsensical history lesson and an
efficiency expert calculating the money to be saved by stopping employees going
to the lavatory five time a day and making them concentrate their natural
functions into one session lasting four and a half hours per month. Clearly the
gracious architecture is merely facade; for the same social evils exist,
stirring fear and unrest. At the end of
the play, while walking the streets alone, Bérenger is confronted by the
killer, a giggling dwarf in shabby clothes who carries a knife.
Trying to persuade the killer - a degenerate idiot - to discard his pointless vocation, Bérenger
embarks upon a huge speech covering ten pages, in which he outlines all the
reasons against senselessly taking the life of another: Christian, humanist,
social responsibility, the vanity and pointlessness of all human activity. But none of Bérenger’s words make any
impression on the killer who chuckles and proceeds to advance with his knife.It
is interesting that Ionesco borrowed Corbusier’s concept of the ‘radiant’ city
as the setting for an absurdist drama showing a place that is basically a sham,
a model community that is irredeemably
fouled, a ‘planned’ paradise in which everyone lives in fear of an idiotic,
compassionless murderer. The message of
the play seems to be that revolution is not accomplished through architecture
or anything else. Man is a flawed and
fallen creature, and whatever external perfection you impose on his
surroundings, the same old corruption will flower again.
Only God and a Stone are Sane
In an age of social
eruption and mass genocide, the killer-madman overshadowing Ionesco’s drama
stands as a representative image. He is an archetype who dominates much of the
20th century, for judged by humanitarian standards, so many of the
acts of those in control might be deemed evil or, more charitably,
schizophrenic. Definitions of madness have often been hazardous and relative.
Prominent liberals were designated as mentally aberrant in the Soviet Union;
passionate Communists were treated to long psychiatric sessions in the United
States, and the Jewish writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, opined, “Only God and a
stone are sane.”
The noun schizophrenia, meaning ‘split personality’ or loss of
coordination between the manifold functions of the brain, was coined just
before the First World War – a time of fragmentation, disassociation and
alienation. In art, in music, in literature, emphasis fell on splitting,
fracturing, falling apart, the centre failing to hold. “Buy, buy the damnation of your soul,” urged
the surrealist leader Louis Aragon (1924). “You will destroy yourself at last,
here is the machine for capsizing your mind. I announce to the world…a new vice
has just been born, one madness more has been given to man: surrealism, son of
frenzy and darkness, step right up, here is where the kingdoms of the
instantaneous begin.”
It was the Scottish psychologist R.D. Laign who set about elevating
the whole process of going crazy by styling schizophrenia as unconscious
rebellion – an attempt at sanity in a seriously disordered world: “If the
formation itself is off course, then the man who is really ‘on course’ must
leave the formation.” Madness was a form of involuntary opting out. Such ideas,
bolstered by Michel Foucault’s similarly radical Madness and Civilisation (1961), exerted influence for about a
decade but did little to solve the problem of those whose minds buckled beneath
the pressures of existence.
Later Laing’s idealism came to be scorned. The idea that the mad
should be entrusted to take charge of their destinies was naïve and
irresponsible. And so were the facile attacks on hospitals as places of
punishment and regulation. They gave the impression that mad people were not
the problem, only the institutions that cramped their natural expression. Films
like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
– showing patients as victims of a repressive capitalist system – spread the
misinformation further. “You can,” wrote E.F. Torrey, “psychoanalyse patients,
change the social conditions and release them all into the community but these
actions alone will produce little or no improvement in their condition. Indian
Chief [a character in Ken Kesey’s novel] will not be spearing salmon in the
Columbia River but rather will be a mentally ill, homeless person in Portland
sitting with frostbitten toes and hallucinating under a bridge.”
Nevertheless Foucault and Laing were right to point out that, just as
we store our sullied memories in the attic of the unconscious, a similar
process is enacted in our treatment of the insane. They are kept in places
where they will not be seen, save by relatives or those of a sympathetic
disposition. The bad things we are, or may become, are best relegated to
institutions that hide the flawed products, genetic rejects, of the social
processing mechanism. In his angry book The
State of Shame (1948), Albert Deutsch presented a picture of American
psychiatric hospitals that rivalled the death camps of the Nazi holocaust. He
wrote of “hundreds of naked mental patients herded into a huge, barn-like,
filth-infested wards, in all degrees of deterioration, untended and untreated,
stripped of every vestige of human decency, many in stages of semi-starvation.”
As much as in Elizabethan times, the mad continue to create a deep
dread - a desire to withdraw from their presence. They demand a feat of
imaginative sympathy few are willing to muster. People realise they have little
choice save to be nakedly and helplessly themselves. This frankness is
disconcerting. Those who do not wish to take up their burden - who do not wish
to acknowledge that destiny played them a twisted card - prefer them to be
concealed and forgotten. What can a progressive society do with those who do
not know what progress is?
Dystopian Fictions
After the humanistic
vision of Wells and Shaw, based upon the anodyne of scientific and material
progress, was rendered a mockery by the medieval barbarities of the
death-camps, madness was seen as an escape from harsh reality. It became
increasingly difficult for intellectuals to express faith in human kind’s
innate goodness. Theories of creative evolution gave way to the traditional
thesis of the latent-beast-lurking-in-man.
Dystopian fictions like Orwell’s 1984
and Golding’s Lord of the Flies prevailed
over works like Huxley's Island which
postulated a way forward. The
literature of horror lost its moral pivot (never particularly secure) and
themes of possession like Thomas Mann’s Doktor
Faustus (1947) and Malcolm Lowry’s Under
the Volcano (1947) proliferated.
Civilisation did not rest on hard foundations but on marshy ground which
at any moment might give way and engulf it:
A mad animal
Man's a mad animal
I'm a thousand years
old and in my time
I've helped commit a
million murders
The earth is spread
The earth is spread
thick
With squashed human
guts (Marat Sade - 1964)
Deaths on a vast scale
defy the conceptual reach of most human beings. How can one imagine the death
of 60 million Russians under Stalin? How can one take in the horrors of
Auschwitz or Dachau? The brain numbs under the impact of the unreality. Empathy
does not invariably ensue as, instead of bodies, they become huge abstractions
stretching over the horizon of the inner eye.
In Four Minutes to Midnight
(1981), Nicholas Humphreys noted the mental mechanism which responds to the
personal, the intimate, but stalls at vast, giddying fatalities. “In a week
when 3,000 people are killed in an earthquake, in Iran, a lone boy falls down a
well-shaft in Italy – and the whole world grieves. Six million Jews are put to
death in Hitler’s Germany, and it is Ann Frank trembling in her garret which
remains stamped on our memory.”
UnAmerican Activities
As we have seen,
xenophobia is a manifestation of fear and the threatened animal is usually the fiercest.
Patients in lunatic asylums are more dangerous frightened than angry. This
applies to the politics of fear as generated between nations. To fear one’s
neighbour is to awaken to the fact that the terrible thoughts going through
your head are also going through his. If you think of eliminating him, why then
he has probably thought of eliminating you. So whatever guns he acquires, you
had better acquire, for though you are sane, he is mad, though of course he
thinks you mad, and himself sane, but then he would because he is mad. There is
no way out of this dilemma save walking naked and shaking hands.
But how can a politician, say, walk naked if he has to operate within
a larger mechanism of subterfuges? If one wants to stay high-minded, one should
not enter politics at all. Openness and lack of suspicion will not necessarily
advance a politician’s career as speedily as blatant prejudice, singling out
scapegoats or setting fire to men of straw. “The most gifted demagogue ever
bred on these shores,” Richard Rovere wrote of the Wisconsin senator Joe
McCarthy who, to secure popularity and re-election, opted for the issue of
‘Communists in government’ as being the most topically arousing. His timing was
excellent, not long after the Alger Hiss spy scandal, when ‘Reds under the Bed’
and anti-Russian phobia was at its height.
On 9 February 1950, he asked an audience of women Republicans in West
Virginia: “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that
men high in the government are concerting
to deliver us to disaster. This must be the product of conspiracy, on a scale so immense and of an infamy so black as to
dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” He held up a sheet of
papers and flourished them. “I have here in my hand a list of 205 names that
were made known to the Secretary of State as being member of the Communist
Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State
Department.”
It was McCarthy who formed the UnAmerican activities committee, a generously
broad designation allowing the inclusion of a whole multitude of unrelated
diversions and fads. As Arthur Miller observed, “UnAmerican had numerous
meanings depending on the level of sophistication to which it was addressed.
Broadly, of course, it meant pro-Russian or pro-Communist but could also mean
opponent of big business or of big unionism or a proponent of birth control or
atheism. It was a catch-all for every kind of opinion.”
Years later, Miller wrote The
Crucible, drawing a parallel between McCarthy’s Communist witchhunt and the
persecutions at Salem in 1692. At its opening in Broadway, he recalled how “a
sheet of ice formed over the first-night audience when it sensed the theme. In
the lobby afterwards, acquaintances would pass as if I weren’t standing there
at all. It was dismissed by the critics until McCarthy and the Terror were
safely passed. One was a hunt for witches, the other for Communists, but they
involve the same function of the human mind. Once you develop a siege mentality,
anything is believable. The enemy is wily and therefore the more unlikely a
person looks, the more likely he is to be the secret enemy.”
Fortunately McCarthy’s influence could not last. Lacking integral
idealism, he had made a political crusade out of a personal phobia, and such a
posture prove inadequate in the long term. Theoretically the ‘red’ enemy could
be anywhere but was more usually found in places where McCarthy’s limited
inspiration veered: Congress, Broadway and Hollywood. His reputation collapsed
when it became obvious that none of his scapegoats were rabid Communists, and
without the presence of the hidden enemy, McCarthy deflated and shrivelled. He
had beaten his drum so brutally the skin had collapsed revealing the hollow
interior.
Why were men like McCarthy allowed to realise their ambitions in a
democratic regime? Why were they not stopped at an early stage? Aside from
apathy and indifference, many deliberately held their judgements in suspension.
Freud put his finger on the eternal struggle between the need to know and the
fear of knowing. He identified the manner in which people suppress insights in
order to conform or please others. They are, in fact, afraid of facing the
implications of what they see – frightened that in doing so they expose
themselves to attack. Suppressing fundamental insights enables them to drift
comfortably with the social current. They end up doing what they do not want to
do, being with whom they do not want to be with, supporting causes that do not
matter to them. Such strategies not only bar self-awareness, they also deter
growth and change. Psychic timidity allows the subject to hide in a shell
almost indefinitely - aware that any fundamentally honest act may force him to
hatch out. Birth is always a painful process and it may be rendered more so if
delayed to middle age.
There is yet another – far more dangerous – psychosis to which people
like McCarthy are prone. That is when a man appears utterly detached from the
havoc and despair he is generating. He is able to torture, imprison and kill
with impunity. He does not go through life absorbed in his body - his ego has
become ‘disembodied’ from the feeling part. He has opted to ‘hide’ in the
painless realm of the abstraction. Instead of treating his adversary as a vulnerable
fellow-being, he forces himself to see a label bearing the legend Communist, Jew or heretic. Hence,
without a twinge of conscience, he can send thousands to death in the service
of a theology or principle. Such types – like Hitler, Stalin, Himmler and Beria
– may prove deft at dispensing their policies. This is because ordinary
emotions drain none of their energies from the task in hand. They have achieved
something like the autonomy of machines.
The Fallen Hero
If Joe McCarthy was the
archetypal bogeyman, swollen with rancour and acrimony, incapable of presenting
a coherent policy, Jack Kennedy was
seen as the reverse. Despite rumours of his boisterous sexuality and his
father’s affiliation with Chicago mobsters, his charm and buoyancy quelled the
murmurings of reactionaries and rednecks. After his election to the presidency
in 1960, it was not long before he became transmogrified into a mythic figure.
Like Baldur or Adonis, he was touted as a symbol of hope and political
redemption, and indeed his speeches were an inspiring combination of optimism
and a restraint borne out of the granite face of the Cold War. “Mankind must
put an end to war,” he said to the United Nations General Assembly, “or war
will put an end to mankind.”
After a short period in office, in which enlightened civil reforms
were introduced and the threat of nuclear war only narrowly evaded, America was
stunned and cauterised by the news of his assassination. It took place in 1963
during an electioneering visit to Dallas, Texas. Had a lone Communist sniper,
Lee Harvey Oswald, done the deed? Or was it part of a conspiracy involving
Chicago mobsters, rogue elements in the FBI allied to Kennedy’s political
opponents? None of the public was cognisant with the infernal wheels behind wheels
that eerily turn behind the suited facades of government bodies. At the time,
the shooting of Kennedy seemed like an assault on reason, a violation of
purpose in existence. If that can happen to a president of the most powerful
nation in the world, who can deemed to be safe or special in this world? The
tragedy was Greek in its essential bloodiness and harsh swiftness.
The funeral was a monumentally solemn affair, superbly orchestrated –
a ritual bandaging of the massive wound of the nation. Only something slow,
purposeful and inordinately weighted by tradition could tell the population:
life is this, dignity, purpose and ordered ceremony and not the stark nihilism
of that rifle-shot. Seven grey horses with black-painted hooves drew the
gun-carriage with its flag-draped coffin. The mythographer, Joseph Campbell,
remarked: “I saw death before me, the seven ghostly steeds of the grey lord
Death, here come to conduct the fallen hero on his last celestial journey,
passing symbolically upward through the seven celestial spheres to the seat of
eternity, whence he had once descended…”
The
extracts have been taken from:
Paul Newman
Sutton Publishing
Phoenix Mill
Thrupp
Near Stroud
Gloucestershire
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