Ex-centric Writing Ex-centric Writing: Essays on Madness in Postcolonial Fiction Edited by Susanna Zinato and Annalisa Pes Ex-centric Writing: Essays on Madness in Postcolonial Fiction, Edited by Susanna Zinato and Annalisa Pes This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Susanna Zinato and Annalisa Pes and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4474-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4474-1 CONTENTS Introduction.................................................................................................1 Susanna Zinato and Annalisa Pes Chapter One The Shot Tower: History, Autre-biography and Madness in The Master of Petersburg......................................................................25 David Attwell Chapter Two In the Heart of the Country: From Novel to Film. An Economy of Madness................................................................................................43 Carmen Concilio Chapter Three “Dare mother, when are you coming home?”: From the Epic of Abjection to the Lyric of Ordinariness in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power.........59 Susanna Zinato Chapter Four Political Parenthood and Natural Daughterhood: Rosa Burger’s Alienation(s)..............................................................................................85 Angelo Righetti Chapter Five Becoming a Madman, Becoming a Madwoman: Ex-centricity in Caribbean Writing.................................................................................95 John Thieme Chapter Six “Step[ping] over the Threshold into Otherness”: Representations of Insanity in Roger Mais’s First Novel..................................................119 Francesca Scalinci vi Table of Contents Chapter Seven “Admirable people, though limited”: On not Submitting in Australian Literature.................................................................................................135 David Callahan Chapter Eight Damnation or Salvation? Journeys into Madness in Henry Lawson and Patrick White’s Short Stories............................................................153 Annalisa Pes Chapter Nine Psychic Unease and Unconscious Critical Agency: For an Anatomy of Postcolonial Melancholy.....................................................................177 Rossella Ciocca Contributors.............................................................................................199 INTRODUCTION SUSANNA ZINATO AND ANNALISA PES The essays collected in this volume are derived from papers delivered at an International Colloquium entitled Ex-centric Writing: Madness in Postcolonial Fiction in English that we convened in Verona on 1-2 December 2011 under the aegis of Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere of Verona University. The colloquium gave senior and junior members of our Department an important opportunityto meet internationally and nationally recognized scholars in the field of postcolonial studies and to be engaged in stimulating and critical conversations on the topics of madness, alienation, eccentricity in postcolonial literatures. By privileging the small-scale dimension of the colloquium we aimed exactly at creating the suitable conditions for an in-depth exploration and exchange of perspectives and interrogations. Whenever approached, the time-honoured theme of madness conjures up a site where the converging discourses of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, anthropology, literature, philosophy, politics, social history find a common arena. As a literary theme it is dealt with in a wide range of critical and scholarly studies1, many of them grappling with problems of definition. The nature of schizophrenia has been a particularly controversial ground of debate, especially in the 1960s and ’70s with psychiatrists and psychologists who considered it as a valid, meaningful concept and, on the opposite front of anti-psychiatry, those who stated it was a figment of psychiatric imagination, the “sacred symbol” of Western society’s guilt 1 As far as the Anglophone context is concerned, see for example L. Feder, Madness and Literature (1980), R. Porter, A Social History of Madness: The World Through the Eyes of the Insane (1996) and (ed. by) The Faber Book of Madness (1991), S. Gilbert, S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (1979), E. Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980 (1985). 2 Introduction complex.2 Actually, as pointed out, among others, by S.L. Gilman (1988), categories of insanity such as schizophrenia, or hysteria should be addressed in the full awareness of their historically- and culturally- constructed nature. But, perhaps, a most heateddebate that cannot be overlooked here, as it closely involves literary studies on the subject, is that developed more than forty years ago between Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida3. Foucault’s aim, in his epoch-making Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961), was to show how philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry, in fact the history of Western society, had proceeded on a radical méconnaissance (misreading) of the language of madness following on the Cartesian assumption of insanity’sincompatibility with thought and with truth. Being mad, i.e., not being able to think, amounts to non-being. Madness is silenced and exiled and Foucault’s archaeology of this silence cannot but encroach upon the thorny issue of whether we can ‘think’ the Other as such, i.e. as Subject, without objectifying it, of whether a discourse made by madness, not about madness, can exist at all. Derrida’s famous answer was that the “praise of folly” can only be made in the language of reason, “dans le langage de la fiction”. Soshana Felman, in her seminal La Folie et la chose littéraire rehearses the debate and in turn asks questions that are implied but not raised by the two philosophes: why is literature entrusted with the task of telling madness? What kind of relationship is there between madness and “the language of fiction”4? The answer she appears to give is 2 Cp. T.S. Szasz , Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry (1976) and the captivating The Myth of Mental Illness (1960) in which the rise of institutional psychiatry is made equal to a witch-hunt. As one of the major representatives – together with R. Laing and D. Cooper in Great Britain, and M. Foucault, F. Guattari and G. Deleuze in France – of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960’s, Szasz radically rejected the validity of the concept of mental illness, indicting ‘civilization’ itself as the precipitant of emotional instability and alienation in the most vulnerable. The consequences of extending the word ‘civilization’ to ‘colonization’ are all too evident. 3 The starting point of the debate was Michel Foucault’s Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961). Derrida developed his critique of Foucault’s enterprise in “Cogito et histoire de la folie”, included in his influential L’écriture et la différence (1967). Foucault, in turn, contested Derrida’s interpretation of Descartes’s hypothesis of madness (I Meditation) in Mon corps. Ce papier, ce feu, the second appendix to the 1972 Gallimard edition of Histoire de la folie. 4 See S. Felman’s “Madness in Philosophy or Literature’s Reason”, in Yale French Studies 52 (1975): 206-228, later included in La Folie et la chose littéraire (1978) in the chapter “Folie et philosophie”, pp. 35-55. Ex-centric Writing: Essays on Madness in Postcolonial Fiction 3 that both languages resist final interpretations, both ask us to listen to their textual modes of working. The fundamental point of divergence between the two languages, finally, lies in “the rhetorical mastery of its own fictive madness or of its own madness (in a deconstructive view) that qualifies literary discourse” (Zinato 1999, 23)5. While bearing Felman’s considerations on literary madness in mind and treasuring them as a valuable heritage of Western theory on the subject, our volume’s vocation is to gauge the difference one is faced with when a postcolonial ex-centric text is addressed. In Fanonian terms the colonial experience and its aftermath do not only interrogate the binary opposition of “sanity” and “insanity” but, above all, they confront us with the question of what happened to the very notion of the human as endorsed and advocated by Western Humanism (Butler 2006). The concern with place/dis-placement, with identity and belonging, is a major feature of postcolonial literature and the theme of alienation cannot but be ‘topical’ in the literatures of the countries that have experienced the cultural shock and bereavement, and the physical and psychic trauma of colonial invasion. While giving contextual specifics their due, one may assert that the ex-centric experience/vision of reality always distorts and makes the allegedly ‘central’ representation of reality strange/estranging. When perceived through the anamorphic lens of madness, the theme of alienation is magnified and charged with an excruciatingly questioning and destabilizing power, laying bare political, as well as existential and moral, urges. It is from the ex-centric, broadly exilic or displaced position that the ideology and practice of colonialism – as, exemplarily, in the case of Apartheid – demands to be rubricated under the sign of psychopathology. More broadly, in fiction the freak or mad character’s ex-centric vision is a continuous warning against the temptation to believe in those discourses that pass themselves off as reflecting or bearing the given, ‘natural’, order of things. Unsurprisingly, the formal ‘order’ of the ex-centric text typology is unfailingly ‘dis-ordered’. And here it is worth emphasizing that a crucial implication of the above-mentioned debate qualified “for literature” by Felman, is that, while maintaining that true madness cannot produce rhetorically cohesive texts, it urges criticism to treat literary ex-centric works as works of literature, works of art beyond any reductive application of biographical/autobiographical sources. As brilliantly put by Colm Hogan “we do not think we have explained Leopold Bloom when we 5 Cp. S. Zinato, The House is Empty (1999) where the debate here briefly outlined is expounded and contextualized. 4 Introduction identify Alfred Hunter as Joyce’s prototype. We should be as little inclined to such reductionism when interpreting the works of non-whites and women” (Hogan 1994, 98). Not incidentally the postcolonial canon comprizes outstanding lunatic texts that are quintessentially experimental, and often make a challenging use of both modernist6 and surrealist Western techniques as well as of native traditions. A good case in point is given by the motif of the female body’s fragmentation in Southern African roman fou as analysed by Flora Veit-Wild who explores elements of resistance and female unruliness in tales from African folklore originally meant to uphold the patriarchal order (Veit-Wild 2006, 108-126). The discourse on the body is actually one of the main routes through which the theme of madness is tackled in literary texts, especially in the postcolonial context over-determined by racialization. Veit-Wild herself, in her introduction to Writing Madness: Borderlines of the Body in African Literature, points out that “writing madness is, on a broader level, related to the paradigm of writing the body, to what [she] understand[s] as ‘the borderlines of the body’” (2006, 3). The large currency of the approach to literary madness through the body has been recently confirmed in Postcolonial Fiction and Disability by Clare Barker who, while acknowledging the extensive discussions of the body in the examination of (post)colonial cultural and literary texts, objects that in such discussions disabled bodies tend to be dealt with on over-generalizing grounds of race and colonization, flattening out contextual differences (Barker 2011, 16, 26). Other paths leading to the trope of madness are those concerned with gender/trans-gender or childhood in postcolonial literature. However, to date, critical contributions (mainly articles and book chapters) directly tackling the subject of madness in postcolonial fiction have tended to concentrate on individual areas (first Africa, then in a descending order of frequency, the Caribbean, Asia, the settler colonies, the Pacific) or on individual works by certain writers (Jean Rhys, Erna Brodber, Janet Frame, Bessie Head, Dambudzo Marechera, Tsitsi Dangarembga, A.A Aidoo, A.K. Armah, Buchi Emecheta, to name just a few). Understandably so, we believe, considering the difficulties in reconciling the width of scope with the depth offered by special competence. Texts like the above-mentioned Flora Veit-Wild’s Writing Madness or Letizia Gramaglia’s Represen- tations of Madness in Indo-Caribbean Literature (PhD thesis 2008, Warwick University) work towards such an aim but within the scope of a restricted area. 6 On the affinities between modernism, modernity and madness see L. Sass, Madness and Modernism (1992).