The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Reissued

by Will Self

  As for me, I went on teaching, playing volleyball and asking recalcitrant pupils the names of power stations. The lagging which had for a brief period been removed from my mind came back – together with new, improved, cavity-wall insulation.

  The Quantity Theory of Insanity

  Denver, Colorado

  A depressing day here at the special interdisciplinary conference. I suppose that as the author of the theory that has generated so much academic activity I should feel a certain proprietorial glee at the sight of hundreds of psychologists, sociologists, social scientists and other less mainstream academics running hither and thither, talking, disputing, gesturing, debating and conferring. Instead I feel only depressed and alienated from the great industry of thought I myself have engineered. And added to that I think the low quality of the celluloid they’ve used for the name badges betrays the fact that the department simply hasn’t allocated a big enough budget.

  I spent the morning in the main auditorium of the university giving my address to the assembled conferees. Dagglebert, against my expressed wishes, had put together some kind of video display or slide show to accompany my introductory lecture, ‘Some Aspects of the Quantity Theory of Insanity’. Sadly, even though Dagglebert has irrepressible faith in visual aids, he has absolutely no spatial awareness whatsoever. I kept looking up and realising that flow charts were running over my face, and at one stage I looked down to discover that my stomach was neatly encompassed by a Venn diagram section tagged ‘Manic Depressives in Coventry 1977–79’.

  Despite these and other drawbacks, it went well. Several hundred hirsute men and women sat on the edge of their seats for a full three hours while I went over the principal aspects of the theory. If the truth be told I could have gargled and they would have been just as attentive. I’ve now reached that rarefied position in academia where I have the cachet of a lecturing Miles Davis. I could have allowed Dagglebert to project slides for three hours and then sauntered on for five minutes of disjointed and facile muttering – and still I would have been vigorously applauded.

  As it was I declined to cash in on the credulousness of my audience. For once I would attempt the truth. I would take a serious stab at stopping the feverish growth of an industry I myself was responsible for helping to create. I would demystify the Quantity Theory myth, and in the process take a few clay idols down with me.

  Accordingly, I dealt with the subject personally as well as historically. As with all great theories I felt that it was especially important for an academic audience to understand the personal dimension, the essential humanity of the origin of such an idea. But it didn’t work. Once one has a certain kind of academic status, any statement that you make, if it is couched in the language of your discipline, no matter how critical, how searching, is seen only as an embellishment, another layer of crystalline accretion to the stalactite. To break it off at the root, one’s language would have to be brutal, uncompromising, emotional, non-technical.

  So I began by telling them of the grey cold afternoon in suburban Birmingham, when, labouring to complete the index to an American college press’s edition of my doctoral thesis, ‘Some Social Aspects of Academic Grant Application in 1970s Britain’, I was visited in one pure thought bite with the main constituents of the theory as we know it today.

  At least that would be one way of looking at the experience. Seen from another angle the Quantity Theory was merely the logical conclusion of years of frustrated thinking, the butter that eventually formed after the long rhythm of churning. I have often had occasion to observe – and indeed Stacking has recently and belatedly stated the observation as a tentative syndrome which he expresses: (Á → Å). Where Å = a subsequent state of affairs– that events are reconstructed more than they are ever constructed.

  Once you have published, grown old and then died, the events surrounding the original theoretical discovery with which you have been associated take on an impossible causal direction and momentum. One which certainly wasn’t apparent at the time. Scientists are particularly prone to this syndrome. For example, take Gödel and his Incompleteness. Once he had made the proposition, everything in his life had necessarily led up to that moment, that piece of work. Thus, when the infant Gödel cried in his cot, the particular twist of phlegm striations, wafted in his gullet by his bawling, implied that no logical symbolic system can construct full grounds for its own proof. Poor Gödel, his breakdowns, his anorexia, all of them inextricably bound up with his fifteen minutes of academic fame. Why?

  Well, put simply, when aberrant events occur they become subject to the same principle – at the level of human, social observation – as particles do to instrumental observation at the sub-atomic level. The effect of observation has a direct impact on the nature of the event, altering its coordinates as it were, although not in any simple dimension. I mean, if an aberrant event occurs it doesn’t then occur in another place or time because of the attention it subsequently attracts. It doesn’t retroactively take up that other position or time, or even rate of occurrence before it has in fact taken place. That would be absurd.

  Rather all of these: the effect of observation on aberrant events tends to be the reversal of their causality, their causal direction. However, there is no reversal of necessity as far as the occurrence of P is concerned – and I think this is something that has been ignored.

  So when I ‘thought up’ the Quantity Theory of Insanity, I was in fact being caused to think it up by the subsequent fact of the general reaction that occurred: public commotion, academic furore, even a front-page paragraph in the quality press. Let me make this clearer by means of an example: with murders, to take a commonplace aberrant event, this syndrome is so obvious that it hardly arouses any comment. X commits a murder, or he apparently commits a murder. Perhaps it was a very unfortunate accident? Maybe he was arguing with Y and pushed her rather too vigorously and she tripped on the lino and dashed her brains out on the edge of the gas cooker, just like that. Furthermore, perhaps X, crazed with grief, went mad, cut up Y and buried her in the garden. Subsequently caught, X was then retrospectively branded ‘psychopathic’, by anyone and everyone who had any connection with him. ‘Oooh, yairs,’ says a neighbour, ‘the way he rattled those empty milk bottles together when he put them out on the front step, there was something demonic about it.’ X, once upstanding, loyal, prone, perhaps, to the same slight eccentricities as anyone – G, for example, although let us not bandy capitals – has been ruined, now and in the past, by the observation factor.

  None of this, you can now appreciate (and perhaps always have), is by way of digression. If we are to talk meaningfully of my life, and of the part that I played in the origination of Quantity Theory, we must be able to account for observational factors – and then be able to ignore them. Ironically, given the tendency to subordinate the individual consciousness to some creative zeitgeist, I turn out to be the best possible Quantity Theory historian. After all, I was there. Which is more than can be said for Musselborough, Nantwich and the rest of those twerps.

  Well, then. My own early life was fraught with neurotic illness. The debacle surrounding my analysis by Alkan is well known to the public, so there’s no point in trying to hide it. The received understanding about my background, my early life, my schooling, and indeed my undergraduate studies with Müller, is that they were all spectacularly mundane. My circumstances and character – if you listen to these biographers – had the absolute banality of a Hitler. They were so ordinary, that reading the facts on paper one could only conclude that they had been recorded as the prelude to some cautionary tale.

  In this respect the ‘official version’ is wholly correct. Mine was a childhood of Terylene sheets, bunion plasters and Sunday afternoon excursions to witness the construction of Heathrow Airport. My parents were quiet people, who conspired together gently to live in a world where no one shitted, ejaculated, or killed one another violently. This upbringing left me morbidly incapable of dealing with the real world
. I was appalled by my own body. The obsession I developed in my teens with the theoretical aspects of psychology was a logical path to take, it offered me a liberation from the nauseating, cloacal confines of my own skin.

  I had no sense of being singled out as unique, or blessed. I had no suspicion that I might be the übermensch. Quite the reverse. It was painfully clear to me that I was destined to become like my father, constantly striving to stave off chaos through rigorous application to detail. My father was an actuary, but he never regarded the calculations he made all day as relating to real risks, or real people. Indeed, when asked by people what he did for a living he would invariably say that he was a mathematician.

  You can see, therefore, that meeting Alkan was a godsend; his impact on me was enormous. He really had his breakdown for me insofar as it actually propelled me further into the awful mundanity I was prey to, so far and so fast that I could not help but emerge. Without Alkan’s influence I might have remained eking out my feeble studies over decades.

  A bleak flatland day, that’s how I remember it. At the time I had received the first of many postgraduate grants. This one was to enable me to do some work on phrenological and physiognomic theories of the nineteenth century. I was particularly taken by the work of Gruton, an English near-contemporary and sometime collaborator with Fleiss. Gruton maintained (and it was his only real gift to posterity) that the visible nose represented only 1/8 of the ‘real’ nose. The nose we see rising above the surface of our faces was, according to Gruton, literally the tip of the psychological iceberg of hereditary predisposition. The ‘shape’ of the real, internal nose is the true indicator of character, proclivities and so forth.

  In the 1880s Gruton developed a system of measuring the internal nose using very bright spotlights inserted into ears, eyes and indeed the nose itself. The patient’s head was shaved and when the light was switched on, the shadow area defined on the scalp was traced on to paper. Using a complex topological equation Gruton would then cross-reference all the different projections to produce what he called a ‘nasoscope’. This then was an accurate representation of the shape of the internal nose.

  The morning I met Alkan I was crossing the campus on my way back from the library to my bed-sitting-room. I had a sheaf of nasoscopes, which I’d received that morning by rail from the archivist at the Gruton Clinic, tucked under my arm.

  I must explain at this juncture that at this time Alkan was nearing the height of his celebrity. Predictably, I eschewed attending his seminars which he held regularly in the squat, twenty-two-storey psychology faculty building. These were clearly for sychopants and groupies – besides which Alkan himself, although he had trained first as a medical doctor and then as a psychiatrist, was nonetheless sympathetic to the psychotherapeutic movement. I, on the other hand, made empirical testability the benchmark of all theory and could not abide the woolly fantasising that seemed to dominate couch-pushing.

  Alkan was an imposing figure. In appearance somewhat like Le Corbusier, but much taller and thinner. Entirely bald, he affected a manner of almost complete naturalness, which was difficult to fault. Undoubtedly it was this that had given him his tremendous reputation as a clinician. When Alkan said, ‘How are you?’ the question had total nuance: he really wanted to know how you were, although at the same time he was asking the question purely for the sake of social form. Yet he managed simultaneously to acknowledge both of these conflicting messages and still reformulated the question so that it incorporated them and yet was devoid of all assumptions. Furthermore none of the above seemed to be implied.

  Alkan, then. Striding across the concrete agora at Chelmsford, his form complementing the anthropomorphic brutalism of the campus architecture. Shoulders twisted – arbitrarily, like the sprigs of steel that protrude from reinforced concrete. And I, wholly anonymous, at that time consciously cultivating a social apathy and lack of character which was beginning to border on the pathological. We collided in the very centre of the agora, because I was not looking at where I was going. The impact knocked the loose bundle of nasoscopes from under my arm and they fell about us, lapping the paving slabs. The two of us then ducked and dove, until they were all gathered up again, smiling all the while.

  Before handing them back to me Alkan paused and examined one of the nasoscopes. I was impressed, he clearly knew what it was. He was following its shape to see if it conformed with the ‘character equation’ Gruton had inked in below.

  ‘Fascinating, a nasoscope. I haven’t seen one for years. I did some work on Gruton once …’

  ‘Oh, er … Oh. I didn’t know, at least I haven’t read it.’ I felt absolutely at a loss. I was meant to have the licence to hate the playboy Alkan and here he was professing detailed knowledge of the obscure corner of the field to which I had staked my own claim.

  ‘No reason why you should have. It was never published.’ He fell to examining the plasticised sheet again. As he scanned the meticulously shaded areas that formed the character map, he pursed his lips and blew through them, making an odd whiffling noise. This was just one of Alkan’s numerous idiosyncrasies which I later made my own.

  ‘D’you see there.’ He pointed at a long, lacy blob, not dissimilar to the north island of New Zealand. ‘Gruton would have said that that indicated heimic tendencies.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Heimic tendencies. Gruton believed that masturbation could not only cause moral degeneration in terms of the individual psyche, he also thought that it could influence people politically. He developed a whole vocabulary of terms to describe these different forms of degeneration, one of which was heimic. If you care to come to my rooms I’ll show you a little dictionary of these terms that Gruton put together and had printed at his own expense.’

  Alkan’s rooms were in the Monoplex, the tower built in 1951 for the Festival of Britain, which dominated the Chelmsford campus. A weird, cantilevered construction shaped like a cigar, it zoomed up into the flat Essex sky. The lift, as ever, was out of order and Alkan attacked the staircase with great gusto. I remember that he seemed entirely unaffected by the climb when I staggered into a seat in his rooms some five minutes later, a hundred and fifty feet higher up.

  We spent the rest of that morning together. Alkan was an amazing teacher and as we looked at his cache of Gruton papers and then moved on to broader subjects he amazed me by the way he illuminated grey area after grey area. His dialectical method was bizarre to say the least. It took the form of antithesis succeeding antithesis. Alkan would guide the student into acknowledging that he found a theory, or even a body of fact, untenable but that he could not supply an alternative; and then he would admit that he couldn’t either. His favourite expression was ‘I don’t know’. Area after area of the most complex thought was illuminated for me by those ‘I don’t knows’.

  At that time Alkan was still practising as an analyst and it was his contention that no educative relationship could proceed without a simultaneous therapeutic relationship. Alkan’s student/analysands were a raucous bunch. Zack Busner, Simon Gurney, Adam Sikorski, Phillip Hurst and the other Adam, Adam Harley. Now of course these are virtually household names, but at that time they were like any other group of young bloods – doing their doctoral work, affecting a particular dress style and swaggering about the campus as if they owned it.

  Alkan’s bloods delighted in playing elaborate psychological tricks on one another – the aim of which was to convince the victim that he was psychotic. They went to great lengths to perpetrate these. Spiking each others’ breakfast cereals with peyote, constructing elaborate trompe l’oeil effects – false landscapes glued to the outside of the window – and insinuating bugging equipment into rooms so that they could then ‘unconsciously’ voice their comrades’ private ejaculations. These high jinks were looked down on benignly by Alkan, who viewed them as the necessary flexing of the muscles of the psyche. As for other members of the faculty, academics and students alike viewed Alkan’s bloods with undisguised suspicion
, bordering on loathing.

  I was totally disarmed by the interest that Alkan had taken in my Gruton work. He seemed genuinely impressed by the research that I had done – and he put my lack of conviction easily on a par with his own. I would say that that morning in his eyrie-office I was as near to knowing the real Alkan as I ever would be. His subsequent behaviour ran back into his early work after he was dead and formed a composite view of a man who was much more than the sum of his parts – and I suppose there is a certain justice in the judgement of posterity – he had, after all, incorporated parts of other people as well as his own.

  Nonetheless, I was genuinely astonished when I realised the next month that Alkan had, without in any way consulting or warning me, arranged to take over the role of my supervisor Dr Katell. The first I knew of this was a handwritten list on a noticeboard which stated quite clearly that I was due to see Dr Alkan for my monthly meeting. I hurried along to see Dr Katell. He was sitting in his blond wood office by the rectangular lily pond. The place stank of furniture polish, a bright bunch of dahlias stood squeaking in a cut-glass vase.

  ‘My dear boy …’ he said, squeaking forward his little ovoid body on the synthetic leather seat of his synthetic leather armchair. I made my goodbyes and left.

  When I appeared for my first supervisory session Alkan was all smiles. He took the bundle of manuscript and nasoscopes out from under my arm and ushered me to a seat.

  ‘My dear boy,’ he said, hunching his lanky body in the leather sling that stretched between the two stainless steel handlebars which constituted the arms of his chair. ‘My dear boy. You realise of course that as your thesis supervisor I feel it my duty, my obligation, to undertake an analysis with you …’