On all sides, madness fascinates man. The fantastic images it generates are not fleeting appearances that quickly disappear from the surface of things. By a strange paradox, what is born from the strangest delirium was already hidden, like a secret, like an inaccessible truth, in the bowels of the earth. When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell's pitiless truth; the vain images of blind idiocy—such are the world's Magna Scientia; and already, in this disorder, in this mad universe, is prefigured what will be the cruelty of the finale. In such images—and this is doubtless what gives them their weight, what imposes such great coherence on their
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fantasy—the Renaissance has expressed what it apprehended of the threats and secrets of the world.
During the same period, the literary, philosophical, and moral themes of madness are in an altogether different vein.
The Middle Ages had given madness, or folly, a place in the hierarchy of vices. Beginning with the thirteenth century, it is customarily ranked among the wicked soldiers of the psychomachy. It figures, at Paris as at Amiens, among the evil soldiery, and is among the twelve dualities that dispute the sovereignty of the human soul: Faith and Idolatry, Hope and Despair, Charity and Avarice, Chastity and Lust, Prudence and Folly, Patience and Anger, Gentleness and Harshness, Concord and Discord, Obedience and Rebellion, Perseverance and Inconstancy, Fortitude and Cowardice, Humility and Pride. In the Renaissance, Folly leaves this modest place and comes to the fore. Whereas according to Hugues de Saint-Victor the genealogical tree of the Vices, that of the Old Adam, had pride as its root. Folly now leads the joyous throng of all human weaknesses. Uncontested coryphaeus, she guides them, sweeps them on, and names them: "Recognize them here, in the group of my companions.... She whose brows are drawn is Philautia (Self-Love). She whom you see laugh with her eyes and applaud with her hands is Colacia (Flattery). She who seems half asleep is Lethe (Forgetfulness). She who leans upon her elbows and folds her hands is Misoponia (Sloth). She who is crowned with roses and anointed with perfume is Hedonia (Sensuality). She whose eyes wander without seeing is Anoia (Stupidity). She whose abundant flesh has the hue of flowers is Tryphe (Indolence). And here among these young women are two gods: the god of Good Cheer and the god of Deep Sleep."5 The absolute privilege of Folly is to reign over whatever is bad in man. But does she not also reign indirectly over all the good he can do: over ambition, that makes wise politicians; over avarice, that
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makes wealth grow; over indiscreet curiosity, that inspires philosophers and men of learning? Louise Labe merely follows Erasmus when she has Mercury implore the gods:
"Do not let that beautiful Lady perish who has given you so much pleasure."
But this new royalty has little in common with the dark reign of which we were just speaking and which communicated with the great tragic powers of this world.
True, madness attracts, but it does not fascinate. It rules all that is easy, joyous, frivolous in the world. It is madness, folly, which makes men "sport and rejoice," as it has given the gods "Genius, Beauty, Bacchus, Silenus, and the gentle guardian of gardens."6 All within it is brilliant surface: no enigma is concealed.
No doubt, madness has something to do with the strange paths of knowledge. The first canto of Brant's poem is devoted to books and scholars; and in the engraving which illustrates this passage in the Latin edition of 1497, we see enthroned upon his bristling cathedra of books the Magister who wears behind his doctoral cap a fool's cap sewn with bells. Erasmus, in his dance of fools, reserves a large place for scholars: after the Grammarians, the Poets, Rhetoricians, and Writers, come the Jurists; after them, the "Philosophers respectable in beard and mantle"; finally the numberless troop of the Theologians. But if knowledge is so important in madness, it is not because the latter can control the secrets of knowledge; en the contrary, madness is the punishment of a disorderly and useless science. If madness is the truth of knowledge, it is because knowledge is absurd, and instead of addressing itself to the great book of experience, loses its way in the dust of books and in idle debate; learning becomes madness through the very excess of false learning.
O vos doctores, qui grandia nomina. fertis
Respicite antiquos patris, jurisque peritos.
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Non in candidulis pensebant dogmata libris,
Arte sed ingenua sitibundum pectus alebant.7
(O ye learned men, who bear great names,
Look back at the ancient fathers, learned in the law.
They did not weigh dogmas in shining white books,
But fed their thirsty hearts with natural skill.)
According to the theme long familiar to popular satire, madness appears here as the comic punishment of knowledge and its ignorant presumption.
In a general way, then, madness is not linked to the world and its subterranean forms, but rather to man, to his weaknesses, dreams, and illusions. Whatever obscure cosmic manifestation there was in madness as seen by Bosch is wiped out in Erasmus; madness no longer lies in wait for mankind at the four comers of the earth; it insinuates itself within man, or rather it is a subtle rapport that man maintains with himself. The mythological personification of madness in Erasmus is only a literary device. In fact, only "follies" exist—human forms of madness: "I count as many images as there are men"; one need only glance at states, even the wisest and best governed: "So many forms of madness abound there, and each day sees so many new ones born, that a thousand Democrituses would not suffice to mock them." There is no madness but that which is in every man, since it is man who constitutes madness in the attachment he bears for himself and by the illusions he entertains. Philautia is the first figure Folly leads out in her dance, but that is because they are linked by a privileged relation: self-attachment is the first sign of madness, but it is because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and justice. "This man, uglier than a monkey, imagines himself handsome as Nereus; that one thinks he is Euclid because he has traced three lines with a compass; that other
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one thinks he can sing like Hermogenes, whereas he is the ass before the lyre, and his voice sounds as false as that of the rooster pecking his hen." In this delusive attachment to himself, man generates his madness like a mirage. The symbol of madness will henceforth be that mirror which, without reflecting anything real, will secretly offer the man who observes himself in it the dream of his own presumption. Madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive.
It thus gives access to a completely moral universe. Evil is not punishment or the end of time, but only fault and flaw. A hundred and sixteen cantos of Brant's poem are devoted to portraits of the insane passengers on the Ship:
there are misers, slanderers, drunkards; there are those who indulge in disorder and debauchery; those who interpret the Scriptures falsely; those who practice adultery. Locher, Brant's translator, notes in his Latin preface the purpose and meaning of the work; it is concerned to teach "what evil there may be, what good; what vices; whither virtue, whither error may lead"; and this while castigating, according to the wickedness each man is guilty of, "the unholy, the proud, the greedy, the extravagant, the debauched, the voluptuous, the quick-tempered, the gluttonous, the voracious, the envious, the poisoners, the faith-breakers" . . . in short, all that man has been able to invent in the way of irregularities in his conduct.
In the domain of literary and philosophic expression, the experience of madness in the fifteenth century generally takes the form of moral satire. Nothing suggests those great threats of invasion that haunted the imagination of the painters. On the contrary, great pains are taken to ward it off; one does not speak of such things. Erasmus turns our gaze
from that insanity "which the Furies let slip from hell, each time they release their serpents"; it is not these insane
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forms that he has chosen to praise, but the "sweet illusion" that frees the soul from "its painful cares and returns it to the various forms of sensuality." This calm world is easily mastered; it readily yields its naive mysteries to the eyes of the wise man, and the latter, by laughter, always keeps his distance. Whereas Bosch, Brueghel, and Diirer were terribly earth-bound spectators, implicated in that madness they saw surging around them, Erasmus observes it from far enough away to be out of danger; he observes it from the heights of his Olympus, and if he sings its praises, it is because he can laugh at it with the inextinguishable laughter of the Gods. For the madness of men is a divine spectacle: "In fact, could one make observations from the Moon, as did Menippus, considering the numberless agitations of the Earth, one would think one saw a swarm of flies or gnats fighting among themselves, struggling and laying traps, stealing from one another, playing, gamboling, falling, and dying, and one would not believe the troubles, the tragedies that were produced by such a minute animalcule destined to perish so shortly." Madness is no longer the familiar foreignness of the world; it is merely a commonplace spectacle for the foreign spectator; no longer a figure of the cosmos, but a characteristic of the aevum.
But a new enterprise was being undertaken that would abolish the tragic experience of madness in a critical consciousness. Let us ignore this phenomenon for the moment and consider indiscriminately those figures to be found in Don Quixote as well as in Scudery's novels, in King Lear as well as in the theater of Jean de Rotrou or Tristan 1'Hermite.
Let us begin with the most important, and the most durable—since the eighteenth century will still recognize its only just erased forms: madness by romantic identification. Its features have been fixed once and for all by Cervantes. But the theme is tirelessly repeated: direct adaptations (the
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Don Quichotte of Guerin de Bouscal was performed in 1639; two years later, he staged Le Gouvernement de Sancho Panca), reinterpretations of a particular episode (Pichou's Les Folies de Cardenio is a variation on the theme of the "Ragged Knight" of the Sierra Morena), or, in a more indirect fashion, satire on novels of fantasy (as in Subligny's La Fausse Clelie, and within the story itself, as in the episode of Julie d'Arviane). The chimeras are transmitted from author to reader, but what was fantasy on one side becomes hallucination on the other; the writer's stratagem is quite naively accepted as an image of reality. In appearance, this is nothing but the simple-minded critique of novels of fantasy, but just under the surface lies an enormous anxiety concerning the relationships, in a work of art, between the real and the imaginary, and perhaps also concerning the confused communication between fantastic invention and the fascinations of delirium. "We owe the invention of the arts to deranged imaginations; the Caprice of Painters, Poets, and Musicians is only a name moderated in civility to express their Madness."8 Madness, in which the values of another age, another art, another morality are called into question, but which also reflects—blurred and disturbed, strangely compromised by one another in a common chimera—all the forms, even the most remote, of the human imagination.
Immediately following this first form: the madness of vain presumption. But it is not with a literary model that the madman identifies; it is with himself, and by means of a delusive attachment that enables him to grant himself all the qualities, all the virtues or powers he lacks. He inherits the old Philautia of Erasmus. Poor, he is rich; ugly, he admires himself; with chains still on his feet, he takes himself for God. Such a one was Osuma's master of arts who believed he was Neptune.9 Such is the ridiculous fate of the seven characters of Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin's Les Vision-
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naires, of Chateaufort in Cyrano de Bergerac's Le Pedant joue, of M. de Richesource in Sir Politik. Measureless madness, which has as many faces as the world has characters, ambitions, and necessary illusions. Even in its extremities, this is the least extreme of madnesses; it is, in the heart of every man, the imaginary relation he maintains with himself. It engenders the commonest of his faults. To denounce it is the first and last element of all moral criticism.
To the moral world, also, belongs the madness of just punishment, which chastises, along with the disorders of the mind, those of the heart. But it has still other powers: the punishment it inflicts multiplies by nature insofar as, by punishing itself, it unveils the truth. The justification of this madness is that it is truthful. Truthful since the sufferer already experiences, in the vain whirlwind of his hallucinations, what will for all eternity be the pain of his punishment: Eraste, in Corneille's Melite, sees himself already pursued by the Eumenides and condemned by Minos. Truthful, too, because the crime hidden from all eyes dawns like day in the night of this strange punishment;
madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth; its cries speak for its conscience. Thus Lady Macbeth's delirium reveals to those who "have known what they should not" words long uttered only to "dead pillows."
Then the last type of madness: that of desperate passion. Love disappointed in its excess, and especially love deceived by the fatality of death, has no other recourse but madness. As long as there was an object, mad love was more love than madness; left to itself, it pursues itself in the void of delirium. Punishment of a passion too abjectly abandoned to its violence? No doubt; but this punishment is also a relief; it spreads, over the irreparable absence, the mercy of imaginary presences; it recovers, in the paradox of innocent joy or in the heroism of senseless pursuits, the vanished
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form. If it leads to death, it is a death in which the lovers will never be separated again. This is Ophelia's last song, this is the delirium of Ariste in La Folie du sage. But above all, this is the bitter and sweet madness of King Lear.
In Shakespeare, madness is allied to death and murder; in Cervantes, images are controlled by the presumption and the complacencies of the imaginary. These are supreme models whose imitators deflect and disarm them. Doubtless, both testify more to a tragic experience of madness appearing in the fifteenth century, than to a critical and moral experience of Unreason developing in their own epoch. Outside of time, they establish a link with a meaning about to be lost, and whose continuity will no longer survive except in darkness. But it is by comparing their work, and what it maintains, with the meanings that develop among their contemporaries or imitators, that we may decipher what is happening, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in the literary experience of madness.
In Shakespeare or Cervantes, madness still occupies an extreme place, in that it is beyond appeal. Nothing ever restores it either to truth or to reason. It leads only to laceration and thence to death. Madness, in its vain words, is not vanity; the void that fills it is a "disease beyond my practice," as the doctor says about Lady Macbeth; it is already the plenitude of death; a madness that has no need of a physician, but only of divine mercy. The sweet joy Ophelia finally regains reconciles her with no happiness;
her mad song is as close to the essential as the "cry of women" that announces through the corridors of Macbeth's castle that "the Queen is dead." Certainly Don Quixote's death occurs in a peaceful landscape, which at the last moment has rejoined reason and truth. Suddenly the Knight's madness has grown conscious of itself, and in his own eyes trickles out in nonsense. But is this sudden wisdom of his folly anything but "a new madness that had
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just come into his head"? The equivocation is endlessly reversible and cannot be resolved, ultimately, except by death itself. Madness dissipated can be only the same thing as the imminence of the end; "and even one of the signs by which they realized that the sick man was dying, was that he had returned so easily from madness to reason." But death itself does not bring peace; madness will still triumph —a truth mockingly eternal, beyond th
e end of a life which yet had been delivered from madness by this very end. Ironically, Don Quixote's insane life pursues and immortalizes him only by his insanity; madness is still the imperishable life of death: "Here lies the famous hidalgo who carried valor to such lengths that it was said death could not triumph over life by his demise."
But very soon, madness leaves these ultimate regions where Cervantes and Shakespeare had situated it; and in the literature of the early seventeenth century it occupies, by preference, a median place; it thus constitutes the knot more than the denouement, the peripity rather than the final release. Displaced in the economy of narrative and dramatic structures, it authorizes the manifestation of truth and the return of reason.
Thus madness is no longer considered in its tragic reality, in the absolute laceration that gives it access to the other world; but only in the irony of its illusions. It is not a real punishment, but only the image of punishment, thus a pretense; it can be linked only to the appearance of a crime or to the illusion of a death. Though Ariste, in Tristan 1'Hermite's La Folie du sage, goes mad at the news of his daughter's death, the fact is that she is not really dead; when Eraste, in Melite, sees himself pursued by the Eumenides and dragged before Minos, it is for a double crime which he might have committed, which he might have wanted to commit, but which in fact has not occasioned any real death. Madness is deprived of its dramatic seriousness; it is
Madness and Civilzation ( A History of Madness) Page 4