#0: A little disclaimer first
When I first started writing this piece it was all about literature, and science, and poets, bipolar poets especially. But then I felt I owe you a little disclaimer before I start talking.
- Writing is in my nature.
- I am bipolar, with a mix of obsessive-compulsive disorder thrown in and too much activity in the temporal lobe.
I’m not saying this to look for any kind of pity or attention from you - I’m telling you this to explain how I know what I’m going to talk about, and why this topic gets under my skin. That is, I know it from experience, and from my sister, who’s a psychiatrist by the way. We’ve talked for eons after I was diagnosed with OCD, and we still do.
Anyway, this post is not gonna tell you my story. Not that I’m not interested. Actually, I’m here behind a nickname and an avatar because this is the only way to tell you my story, and I need to tell my story to someone. Just not right now.
#1: The history of literature is full of bullshits
Let us call a spade a spade.
When you read in the high-school lit book that Torquato Tasso, while talking with the genie escaped from the cane of his bed in the madhouse where he was segregated for 7 years, was just fooling around, sort of a Hamlet ante litteram
That’s your reply.
But the history of literature is full of these self-styled mavericks - these so-called literary critics who invest their time crafting and spreading literary myths around poets and artists in order to get influential. They go after the wildest guesses and the most untenable positions just to make a career at the expense of the history of literature. And, as Hitler himself knew, the bigger the lie the easier it is to believe, so quite a bunch of those delusions end up infesting our books. Delusions which are being infused since the first years of high school and repeated ad libitum, like a prayer. No theory is bizarre enough not to get coverage. Shakespeare was indeed Marlow, didn’t you know? Students get educated on the world’s worst bullshits when it comes to literature. And not because literature isn’t important - literature is the world - but because there’s no scientific proof supporting these… I don’t know, should I call them “theories”?
What’s the result of this? Easy: with any kind of idea gaining traction and no eyebrow raised, the lit class soon becomes a bullshitting competition, where everybody with barely a few notions and the gift of gab can ace the oral exam. And this also infects the academia, cos the incentives that are in place go fuel the bullshitting engine of literary criticism. Just like what happened with newspapers, which have become more and more the seething cauldron of fake news, academic publications in the literary field are the modern temple of brainwanking.
I care. I know you will take this as the everyday rant of a 30-yrs old guy with nothing but a Bachelor’s degree in literature, and you know, maybe you’re right. But I really care. This idea clicked me when I was studying Against Women by Giovenale, a satire where women are depicted as greedy whores (and I’m not gonna go quote by quote just to prove I’m right - you have to take my words on this or go check Wikipedia). I remember my professor of Latin literature coming to these same conclusions about the far-fetched ideas of a critic who was cited in the book we had to study for the exam.
As an actual fact, far-fetched may be an understatement.
That critic - can’t remember the name, but it was a she - supported the idea that Against Women was not against women, but in favor of women.
How come I never thought about that?
The theory was: Giovenale was claiming that all women are greedy whores in order to expose the absurdity of this perspective. Which got me to the following bottom line: if you insult the entire womankind with great fanfare you can trust that someone will show up to yell that "you’re such a wounded heart!" and, most importantly, she will be a woman.
Something’s rotten here. You smell it? Men are Möbius strips, yet after death they suddenly become open books, and everyone feels entitled to give his 2 cents and answer the riddle.
But I’m digressing.
TL;DR: there are incentives in going after contrarian views. You may risk your career on them, but if you manage to get these contrarian views accepted by the intelligentsia of your particular field your career makes a quantum leap. That’s not a problem in subject fields such as physics and mathematics, where the truth may ultimately not be counterfeited for too long, but that doesn’t work for literature, where most of what is considered to be required knowledge is nothing but a stack of intersubjective, historically-driven opinions based on something other than mathematics, i.e. a cathedral of notions without any mathematical foundation.
I don’t know your opinion on this, but mostly, while studying literary criticism, I was feeling like the father of the protagonist of The Stranger, whose biggest expertise, if memory serves me correctly, was bus timetables. He knew bus timetables by heart. Wasn’t that area of expertise as noble as literature? After all, who are we to say that bus timetables are objectively less important than literature before death and the silent vastness of the universe?
Are they?
#2: Mad people in literature
That said, the history of arts and literature is also full of mad people. Everybody living with these men surely had a clear idea there was something off about them - this is, of course, my personal view, but when you’ll ever read their biography I bet you’ll probably end up with the same feeling, if you know something of psychiatry (and even if you don’t). But despite these men were clearly off, a few today call them mad. And an even smaller percentage of these few call them mad without bringing into play Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind or other pseudoscientific theories everybody believes to be true.
But hey - first of all, the assumptions.
What do I mean with mad people?
Let’s start with the masters.
[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww! What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany?
Besides Kerouac’s words - each time I read them it’s like
breathing a supernova
- what I mean here with the term “mad people” is people with a mental disorder. In other words, I’m using it as an umbrella term. Because you know, the spectrum of psychiatric illnesses is as wide as the range of pulmonary illnesses - that is, you may have a mental disorder as heavy as cancer or as soft as flu is for the lungs.
Now, back to our topic:
#3: Mad people in literature, Vol. 2
Byron is a blatant example of how critics fail to use Occam’s razor in their literary analysis. Byron: a man turned into something more than a man after death. An idea, I’d suggest. A myth.
https://giphy.com/gifs/cbs-mByzphwoznYS4
Byron was a passionate heart and fought for the Greek independence. But there’s a little detail you may don’t know about: Byron wasn’t Greek. Now picture for a moment your best friend - let’s call him Mark - confessing you, during a game of D&D, that he’s going to Catalonia to fight for the Catalan independence. You’d be shocked, wouldn’t you? What the fuck he’s got to do with Catalonia? Let’s be honest: that’s what you’d tell him. Despite the subjective importance of the cause you’d tell him to think twice at what he’s going to do.
It’s not that you don’t care for Catalonia. You care for Mark.
I wanna be clear: No Man’s an Island and, as Nietzsche puts it in “Thus spoke Zarathustra”, I Love the Man (and by the way, I also care for Catalan self-determinism). But you can’t help wondering what is the intersection between the Catalan independence and your best friend Mark, unemployed, exuberant, Dungeons and Dragons’ fan. You can’t because it’s not the what, but the why that smells you weird. You would ask yourself: which drugs is he on? Then you soon realize he’s clean, and your question becomes: what is happening to my friend Mark?
But the common story of Byron and Mark stops here. In Mark’s case, you’d think he’s going nuts. All of us has at least one friend gone nuts. If nothing else, it’s understandable! But none has a friend like Byron.
So ask yourself: why should I analyze the urgency to fight for the independence of another country with different metrics if the fighter is my friend rather than Lord Byron?
I’ll leave you with the question - I’ll warn you that, if you take this slippery slope, you’ll soon discover that mental disorder as a category is not applied with the same levity to everybody in history, and probably you’ll end up asking yourself if Jesus and all the other messiahs were nothing but mental cases.
But don’t think about it now: there’s more!
In fact, if you also take a look at the life of Lord Byron you will find nothing but confirms of your suspicion. Quoting Wikipedia:
“He travelled extensively across Europe, especially in Italy, where he lived for seven years in Venice, Ravenna and Pisa, where he had a chance to frequent his friend the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.[2] Later in his brief life, Byron joined the Greek War of Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero.[3] He died in 1824 at the age of 36, from a fever contracted while in Missolonghi.”
So basically,
he was a rockstar
.
Or maybe he felt the urgency and pleasure of intentional movement like most bipolars. Or both. I pick both. I don’t know you, but to me, the incapability to simultaneously keep both a scientific and a humanistic approach sounds so Middle Ages.
(no, not these Middle Ages).
When I wish on a falling star, I don’t care that it’s nothing but a rock entering the atmosphere. It is a rock and a falling star, and I fucking wish anyway.
The story doesn’t stop at Byron. You - you looking for case histories of undiagnosed bipolar diseases in the history of literature, look no further: Rimbaud is waiting for you with open arms.
Rimbaud’s entire production is the outcome of three vibrating years. From 16 to 19 years old he wrote some of the most beautiful poems in history (despite my heart is with Baudelaire - way better IMHO). Then after a brief and tormented relationship with Verlaine, he flew to Africa, became an explorer, pioneered the export of coffee from the Abyssinian city of Harar, turned himself into the most influential European businessman in the region, dealing with rifles and coffee on the same terms with kings and gunmen.
Rimbaud wasn’t just a literary genius: he also was a business genius - sort of.
Didn’t he fucking pioneer the export of coffee from Harar?
Point is: we look at Byron and Rimbaud as being the mad ones that Kerouac talks about, people who were mad enough to dream they could possibly change the world - and because of this, call it ambition call it guts, they managed to achieved their deeds, like in the Apple’s commercial - which by the way, like it was Meme Magic, talks about the crazy ones.
Put it another way: we judge acts of grandeur depending on their outcome, not on the ambition they’re based on. And while you don’t bet on your friend changing the world, you know Byron and Rimbaud already have. But Byron and Rimbaud have more in common with your friend Mark than you could possibly imagine, especially if you are not part of this broad but distinct category of mad people. That’s the irony: there’s a cognitive bias for so-called normal people. They can’t imagine the subjective experience of mad people - same as mad people can’t imagine normal people subjective experiences. Basically, no one can experience or imagine someone else’s subjective experience. It’s Kant’s noumenon.
Finally, Leopardi - I must spend at least a few words about you, you fucking depressed, you desperately amazing poet, you angel, you man watching the moon, waiting for an answer that never comes.
If you don’t live in Italy, my reader, you probably even ignore who Leopardi was - and I’m sorry for that because he’s written some of the most mind-boggling poems I can remember - but if you have, oh my! You definitely have at least a friend of yours, if not you yourself, asking the teacher provocatively: “hey, wasn’t Leopardi’s probable depression the true reason behind his poetics and the infamous cosmic pessimism?” If you have, your professor has most certainly told you that that one is a reductionist approach which doesn’t hit upon Leopardi’s depth completely (I know this is the automatic reply by experience).
And so we all fucking study and repeat, like trained monkeys, that it’s cosmic pessimism was actually a reasonable implication of Leopardi’s philosophical positions.
Yes, why not?!
But hey: come on! Leopardi got a fucking HUMP! Not to mention a multitude of problems afflicting his fragile body I don’t wish but for the worst of you. Sure, the hump is not enough to justify his depression - as they say in psychiatry, an event “administered” to a group of people always produces different outcomes. Which is to say, the short stature didn’t stop Napoleon. But all these life-wasting diseases may have triggered a latent mental disorder in Leopardi’s young mind. Or maybe, Leopardi’s depression has its roots in nothing but genetics.
After all, the worse the disease the fewer triggers it needs to manifest.
#4: Conclusions and a few ideas cast to the wind
Can then ever be conclusions to this issue? I mean, the problem with literary criticism is not just about the lack of a scientific approach. To a certain extent I also doubt we can ever come to an objective truth regarding the author’s true intention while he was writing.
So what should we learn from these examples? That bipolarity is never the usual suspect. Critics rather discount the possibility of bipolarity, even if the clues beg to be picked up, as in the case of Rimbaud. Yeah, I know there are studies here and there about bipolarity in literature - but this is not the mainstream narrative, unfortunately.
The culprit of these misdeeds is yet to be found. Should I make an educated guess, I’d point the finger towards the germs of platonism still infecting much of the ideologies and architecture of thoughts of nowadays. The idea that mind and body are two separate entities, and that the mind attains to another realm, and thus obeys a different set of laws. Sort of an anti-reductionist attitude that diminishes the reach of mathematics in its quest to unravel the mysteries of the universe, regardless if such mysteries were used to belonging to the realm of nature or to literature.
Finally, there also is a cultural bias against any analysis involving a mental disorder. There’s a lot of ignorance about psychiatry, driven by an infinite series of Hollywood blockbusters and comic books. People believe they know stuff about psychiatry because they saw a movie, yet they only know the TV-tropes about psychiatry. In this world of ignorant people who are also victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect, saying that Leopardi had a mental disorder equals to ostracizing Leopardi from the mankind. In other words, even today people with mental disorders are still viewed as freaks, so much that you cannot confess you suffer from panic attacks without someone showing up, patronizing you about your lack of self-confidence, because they know a third-hand tale about a friend of a friend of a distant cousin with not even the same problem and who just carried on.
The truth is, these people deserve a punch in the face, as well as those critics who diminish the role of a mental disorder to fabricate some sexier contrarian views while there’s a pink elephant dancing in the room.
I don’t know if they ever realize that coming out with such utter horseshit in front of your face is like yelling to a just-widow that her husband’s fresh departure is a mere pittance.
Psychiatry, I dare to say, is a Darwin-level revolution
i.e. it has the same potential of Darwinism to give us a different perspective around humans, or to put it more simply, it’s a nuke with a similar amount of megatons. Yet, it’s still a largely underestimated factor when we look at poets and storytellers. We still go after causes, believing the Aristotelian scire per causas, as if the principle of causality was depositary of some sort of platonic truth about nature and mankind. You see? I ended up wondering why Leopardi was mad too. To the core we are all sinners of the principle of causality.
But the principle of cause does not reveal anything but a relationship of cause-effect. Also, from the perspective of quantum field theory, scientific laws are to a certain extent statistical laws, and as we know today may vary in certain conditions (for example, inside black holes physics as we know it goes bananas). The same goes in psychiatry: if you are at a crossroad of a difficult, life-changing decision and you get diagnosed as Obsessive Compulsive you will ask yourself “Is the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder the cause of my burden?”
No, it is not. The Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a working description of your condition. In other words, it is not a prescription of what will happen. Yes, it is a prediction of what will happen, you’re right on that, but the prediction will work as far as the description works and as far as the circumstances fit the description. Put it another way, a prediction is not a prescription because we don’t really know the future.
What I propose is thus to look at the body of literary knowledge from new perspectives. Psychiatry is one of them, as far as it gives us the key to unlock the underlying mechanics of the human mind and behavior from a science-driven perspective. We miss this kind of perspectives because they belong to the deep subtext. That is, we still worry more about the notions than the meaning.
These strange perspectives I believe - things like re-interpreting the history of poets from a psychiatric point of view - will be the new frontier in the literary criticism in the next 20 years. Applying neuroscience, mathematical modeling and AI to literature in order to crack literature and get the deep subtext. What we learn at school is an atlas of notions attached with interpretations supported by some ipse dixit s and a few scientific principles applied to taste.
At school, we are given answers. We should be given questions and challenged to come up with new, homebrew, more interesting questions. Questions, I dare to say, are more important than answers.
Nowadays, convolutional neural networks, data mining, and reinforcement learning could be exploited in order to move Philology from a body of questionable ideas to a data-driven science based on mathematical proof, yet we are stuck with interpretations. Imagine if researchers had only focused on the ontological interpretation of quantum field theory rather than advancing the theory itself. At date, computer vision is so advanced that computers are better than humans at image recognition. You could upload all the human literature into a cloud platform (or maybe a blockchain) and train your AI to find patterns and autonomously rebuild the philologic family tree. With these new tools we finally get to ask the most interesting questions. Like
What truly lights the fuse of beauty in Leopardi’s Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell'Asia Centrale? What is the Red Thread of Fate that links Leopardi and Schopenhauer, who come to a similar philosophy without knowing each other?
And ultimately?
What truly is
beauty?