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benevolent concern.
Like Foucault, Sass goes on to delineate the contradictory views about
images of insanity, about the "madman as a kind of Blakean tiger of the
night" and the origins of such perceptions in seventeenth- and eigh–
teenth- century Enlightenment thought. Sass's erudition is impressive, as
he traces the innumerable beliefs about madness to the philosophies of,
among others, Plato, Sophocles, Hobbes, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein
and Jaspers. He then links these beliefs to the personalities and quirks of
writers and artists such as Dostoevsky, Goya, and van Gogh, whose genius
allegedly benefited from their affiictions. Although Sass stresses the in–
creasingly fragmented character of modern literature and art, he is fully
aware of the pitfalls of too close an association between madness and
modernism, and tries to anticipate all criticisms. He carefully points out
the contradictions contained within his various arguments and interpreta–
tions as he moves along. In the process of tracing and elaborating every
conceivable belief in, and manifestation of, schizophrenia, Sass provides a
fascinating history of ideas. However, the connections between madness
and modernism remain as tenuous as they always have been, ever since
Freud and his followers, and literary critics of every persuasion, have tried
to document their causal relationship.
Basically, Sass maintains that the twentieth century is "characterized
by the pursuit of extremes of exaggerated objectivist and subjectivist ten–
dencies or by unrestrained cerebralism and irrationalism ... [which are]
understood either as expressions of an extreme self-consciousness or as
rather desperate attempts to escape from alienation and hyperawareness."
Because both schizophrenics and works of art demonstrate lunges into
these extremes, and mediations between them, Sass explores the dynamics
of (ideal-typical) schizophrenic symptomalogy and ends up, each time,
with the words of a famous figure who allegedly exemplifies the "the
modern or postmodern consciousness." Thus Sass ultimately connects the
emotional experience of, for instance, the truth-taking stare (following
the surrealist painter de Chirico, he calls it
Stimmung)
to Octavio Paz's
poet who, "in a sort of fury , wants to rip the mask off existence in order
to see it as it is . . . immersed in its own clarity and brilliance, . . . directed
toward this transparent death." He relies heavily on case reports by psy–
choanalysts and psychiatrists, frequently takes issue with the diagnostic
personality categories as described in the official DSM-III and DSM-III-R
diagnostic manuals, and draws conclusions from projective tests, including
Rorschach and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) - and then
moves from a discussion of the spatial forms perceived by schizophrenic
patients to, for instance, a short story by Alain Robbe-Grillet. And he
