524
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
an excess quite as satisfactorily symbolic to the post-Puritans-releas–
ing them from sanity to madness by destroying in them the inner
restrictive order which has somehow survived the dissolution of the
outer. It is finally insanity, then, that the futurists learn to admire
and emulate, quite as they learn to pursue vision instead of learning,
hallucination rather than logic. The schizophrenic replaces the sage as
their ideal, their new culture hero, figured forth as a giant schizoid
Indian (his madness modeled in part on the author's own experiences
with LSD) in Ken Kesey's
One Flew O ver the Cuckoo's Nest.
The hippier young are not alone, however, in their taste for the
insane; we live in a time when readers in general respond sympathet–
ically to madness in literature wherever it
is
found, in established
writers as well as in those trying to establish new modes. Surely it
is
not the lucidity and logic of Robert Lowell or Theodore Roethke or
John,Berryman which we admire, but their flirtation with incoherence
and disorder. And certainly it is Mailer at his most nearly psychotic,
Mailer the creature rather than the master of
his
fantasies who moves
us to admiration; while in the case of Saul Bellow, we endure the
theoretical optimism and acceptance for the sake of the delightful
melancholia, the fertile paranoia which he cannot disavow any more
than the talent at whose root they lie. Even essayists and analysts
recommend themselves to us these days by a certain redemptive nut–
tiness; at any rate, we do not love, say, Marshall McLuhan leSl
because he continually risks sounding like the body-fluids man
in
Dr. Strangelo ve.
We have, moreover, recently been witnessing the development
of a new form of social psychiatry2 (a psychiatry of the future already
anticipated by the literature of the future) which considers some
varieties of "schizophrenia" not diseases to be cured but forays into
an
unknown psychic world: random penetrations by bewildered internal
cosmonauts of a realm that it will be the task of the next generations
to explore. And if the accounts which the returning schizophrenics
give (the argument of the apologists runs) of the "places" they have
been are fantastic and garbled, surely they are no more so than, for
example, Columbus' reports of the world he had claimed for Spain,
2 Described in an article in the
New Left Review
of November-December,
1964, by R. D. Laing who advocates "ex-patients helping future patients go mad."
