WRITERS AND MADNESS
9
out long ago." Does not this become his own comment on
his
eventual
madness? The man who retorted thus, it is clear, lived with his whole
being flung continuously toward the future at the end of the long
corridor of which was the placid if
disorde~ed
chamber of madness.
To have gone mad in a certain way might almost seem one mode of
living authentically: one has perhaps looked at the world without
illusion and with passion. Nothing permits us to separate this life
from this writing:
if
the extraordinary images the biography provides
us-the old man exclaiming, over and over again, "I am what I am,"
or sitting placidly for hours before his Bible open on Job's lament,
"let the day perish wherein I was born,"-if these move us as symbols
of a great human ruin, they are also the background against which
we must read the last book of
Gulliver.
The game is to go as close as
possible without crossing over: poor Gulliver the traveler has now
slipped across the border into the country of the mad, but this journey
itself was only a continuation of the Voyage among the Houyhnhnms.
A moment comes and the desire to escape takes on a definite and
terrible clothing, and the whole being is shaken by the convulsions of
what we may call the totem urge-the wish to be an animal. Rat's
foot, crow's skin, anything out of this human form! The Ainu dances
and growls and is a bear, the Bororo Indians chatter and become
parokeets; Swift wanted to be a horse, a beautiful and gentle animal
-and probably nobler on the whole than most human beings. This
is the madness already present in
Gulliver.
We do not mean to deny all the other necessary qualities that
are there: the once laughter-loving Dean, lover of
la bagatelle,
King
of Triflers, the great eighteenth-century wit, the accomplished clas–
sicist. Precisely these things give Swift the great advantage over a
writer like Celine, whose rage is, by comparison, choking and inar–
ticulate-like a man spitting and snarling in our face and in the end
only
about
himself, so that we are not always sure whether we are
being moved by literature or by a mere document of some fearful
human extremity. What for the moment I am calling "madness,"
the perhaps simpler thing the Greeks called "madness," must some–
how flow freely along the paths where all men can admire.
If
it erupts
like a dam bursting it only inundates and swamps the neighboring
fields; conducted into more indirect and elaborate paths, it irrigates
and flows almost hidden to the eye. The flow from the unconscious of
writer to reader would seem, then, to be Il}Ore effective precisely
where the circuit is longer and less direct, and capable therefore of en- .
compassing ampler territory in its sweep. Lucidity, logic, form, objec-
