During my commutes over the last couple of days I have been listening to Brain on Fire, Susannah Cahalan’s popular account of her own descent into a bizarre and traumatic condition which, after much Dr. House-style diagnosis, reveals itself as a “anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis”. After laying down the baseline of her everyday life as a reporter for the New York Post, living in a broom-closet of an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and availing herself of all the din and crackle of city life, she chronicles the sudden onset of alternating and apparently senseless episodes of delusional parasitosis (making her think her body was crawling with bugs), paranoia, depression, elation, seizures, intense hostility, and bodily affliction. Her task, writing in the wake of her convalescence, is to return her madness and try to make sense of it. She uses her parents’ diaries, the doctors’ reports, interviews with all manner of people involved. The narrative that arises is gripping, portraying both her affliction from within and the dismay and confusion of those who did their best to look after her. It reads briskly, with lots of wit, in the best tradition of journalistic style.
Without diminishing the extent of her suffering, her research or her writing, I am tempted to say that in a sense it reads too well. A story of madness as told by the sane can neve r be complete. (Which is one reason I love Dostoyevsky's The Double, by the way.)
In his essay “What is Postmodernism?”, Jean-Francois Lyotard wrings his hands over of those “postavantgardists” who pursue reality—by which he means unity, simplicity and communicability—to the exclusion of the “sublime”, or that we can only conceive of but never present. The paradigm of this realism, he says, is to be found in photography and film, which “stabilize the referent, … arrange it according to a point of view which endows it with a recognizable meaning, … reproduce the syntax and vocabulary which enable the addressee to decipher images and sequences quickly and so to arrive easily at the consciousness of his own identity as well as the approval which he thereby receives from others”. Cultural artifacts, in order to answer to the demands of academia and the free market must be so made that "the public will recognize what they are about, while understand what is signified, will be able to give or refuse its approval knowingly, and if possible, even to derive from such work a certain amount of comfort.”
This in mind, we might regard Cahalan’s work, for all its merits, as the collusion of the healthy. Like Bilbo's There and Back Again, with emphasis on the last three words. She weaves a coherent image of that which could never cohere—whole weeks pass as a patchwork of delusions and otherwise lost memories. What has been distorted or lost has been corrected, filled in and harmonized by the witness of those who had been with her. Cahalan as a unified subject re-emerges on the other side of her illness intact.
Nor has her belief in the unified subject been significantly shaken. We might say: given the choice between breaking out of her language game or reinforcing it, she has chosen the latter. She might, for example, have returned to the intense conviction of her previous delusions to wonder how much of sanity is conventional, or ask why she had the specific hallucinations she did (as physical sciences only point to why an injury might cause hallucination in general), or wondered whether abnormalities in the physical substrate might be revelatory, allowing her access to rare but real psychic possibilities. Yet more fruitfully, she might wonder what it says about us that our sense of conviction can be so misaligned with what is manifestly the case.
What's more, in liberally dropping in sidebar tutorials on “catatonia”, the “amygdala” and the effects of a damaged “hippocampus” on memory, she calls on the authority of science as her witness. Neurology and psychology, as she tells us, converge to a unified, and correct, account of the human mind. And from this we are to derive, as Lyotard says, a certain amount of comfort: the statistically normal, the aesthetically normal and the ethically normal converge, and this is a fact of science.
Without diminishing the extent of her suffering, her research or her writing, I am tempted to say that in a sense it reads too well. A story of madness as told by the sane can neve r be complete. (Which is one reason I love Dostoyevsky's The Double, by the way.)
In his essay “What is Postmodernism?”, Jean-Francois Lyotard wrings his hands over of those “postavantgardists” who pursue reality—by which he means unity, simplicity and communicability—to the exclusion of the “sublime”, or that we can only conceive of but never present. The paradigm of this realism, he says, is to be found in photography and film, which “stabilize the referent, … arrange it according to a point of view which endows it with a recognizable meaning, … reproduce the syntax and vocabulary which enable the addressee to decipher images and sequences quickly and so to arrive easily at the consciousness of his own identity as well as the approval which he thereby receives from others”. Cultural artifacts, in order to answer to the demands of academia and the free market must be so made that "the public will recognize what they are about, while understand what is signified, will be able to give or refuse its approval knowingly, and if possible, even to derive from such work a certain amount of comfort.”
This in mind, we might regard Cahalan’s work, for all its merits, as the collusion of the healthy. Like Bilbo's There and Back Again, with emphasis on the last three words. She weaves a coherent image of that which could never cohere—whole weeks pass as a patchwork of delusions and otherwise lost memories. What has been distorted or lost has been corrected, filled in and harmonized by the witness of those who had been with her. Cahalan as a unified subject re-emerges on the other side of her illness intact.
Nor has her belief in the unified subject been significantly shaken. We might say: given the choice between breaking out of her language game or reinforcing it, she has chosen the latter. She might, for example, have returned to the intense conviction of her previous delusions to wonder how much of sanity is conventional, or ask why she had the specific hallucinations she did (as physical sciences only point to why an injury might cause hallucination in general), or wondered whether abnormalities in the physical substrate might be revelatory, allowing her access to rare but real psychic possibilities. Yet more fruitfully, she might wonder what it says about us that our sense of conviction can be so misaligned with what is manifestly the case.
What's more, in liberally dropping in sidebar tutorials on “catatonia”, the “amygdala” and the effects of a damaged “hippocampus” on memory, she calls on the authority of science as her witness. Neurology and psychology, as she tells us, converge to a unified, and correct, account of the human mind. And from this we are to derive, as Lyotard says, a certain amount of comfort: the statistically normal, the aesthetically normal and the ethically normal converge, and this is a fact of science.