Writers and Madness··
WILLIAM BARRETT
I
1.
The Ancients. The Power to Convince.
Au~henticity.
Swift.
s
MY TITLE
extreme? It is,
if
you will, just the same subject that
has been very much discussed recently under the titles "Art and
Neurosis," "Art and Anxiety," etc. But I choose the more ancient
and extreme term precisely to maintain continuity with all the older
instances. Is anything born
ex nihilo,
much less a phenomenon so
profound and disturbing as that estranged neurotic, the modern wri–
ter? Even when the poet existed in his most unalienated condition–
in ancient Greece-the similarity of madness and inspiration was the
common saying; and Plato did not invent but only gave literary
formulation to the belief about the poet's madness. Pause for a mo–
ment over this extraordinary paradox. They sat on sacred ground,
precinct of the god, the day and drama were surrounded by all the
occasions and overtones of religion, the myth known and on the
whole taken as true, and yet. . . . And yet this audience too must
exact a terrible price of its poet before they can take
him
seriously.
A secret guilt perhaps?
As
they sat in broad daylight indulging their
collective fantasy, pretending to believe that what was before their
eyes was in fact something else, did an uneasy stirring at this indul–
gence drive them to exact from their poet in revenge the penalty of
madness-inspiration? But what, in any case, we do know is this: that
even when dealing with myths whose form and details were completely
laid down for him, the Greek poet had to launch out into this sea
(of "madness," if we believe Plato) in order to return to pour his
own personal being into the preformed mold. Otherwise, his play
could not have convinced an audience that already assumed their
myth as a matter of fact--such is the paradox from which we start!
Everything Swift wrote, Leslie Stephen says with penetrating
good sense,
is
interesting because it is the man himself.
(If
this is true
of many other writers, there is on the other hand a special and com–
pelling sense in which it holds of Swift-another reason for my find–
ing his case so apposite.) Does it look as
if
I were only about to say,
