It’s reductive perhaps, but in a moment of idleness, I was thinking that all prose writers could be roughly categorised as sane or mad.
Jane Austen and George Eliot are sane.
Emily Bronte is mad. Charlotte and Anne Bronte are sane, despite the madwoman in the attic.
Charles Dickens is mad, or at least he has a mad imagination.
Same with Lewis Carroll.
Henry James and Edith Wharton are sane.
Melville is obviously mad.
Murasaki Shikibu is sane. Soseki and Kawabata are sane.
Akutagawa is mad.
Kafka is mad.
Chekhov is as sane as a physician can be, perhaps the sanest of writers.
Turgenev is sane.
Tolstoy, despite his idiosyncratic views on art and extreme views on religion, is sane as a novelist.
Dostoyevsky is mad.
Gogol is perhaps the maddest of them all.
Nabokov, despite often writing about madmen, is sane as he knows them to be madmen and dissects them in a calm, controlled way.
Proust, despite being a stylist, is mad. Stylistically he may be closer to Tolstoy, but like Dostoyevsky, he has strong interest in extreme and abnormal states of mind.
It’s interesting that when we look at it this way, I clearly enjoy both but personally feel closer to sane writers. What does it mean? I have no idea.
But what about you?
(By the way, I’m reading Volume 2 of Proust, Within a Budding Grove, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright).
Don't tell me you have not read The Birth of Tragedy, because otherwise you would have re-invented Nietzsche's theory of aesthetics! that would be very impressive indeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonian_and_Dionysian
ReplyDeleteHahahaha I actually have not.
DeleteIn 19th century American literature, the writers most respected at the time, like Longfellow and William Dean Howells, were generally sane, but it's the lunatics who have lasted: Poe, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Thoreau. James, as you say, is a sane exception, although he had his weird side, and Hawthorne is a curious case since he seems mad in his fiction but sane in his journals.
ReplyDeleteNow that's an interesting point.
Delete20th century American literature also has a few lunatics, right? I didn't finish Wise Blood but I imagine Flannery O'Connor is mad.
What's James's weird side?
Yes, plenty of 20th century American weirdos, disproportionately from the South.
DeleteJames could produce a strange ghost story when he wanted even if he was hardly as grotesque as Poe.
I heard that about the South, but why?
DeleteI have to read more of James's ghost stories. They tend to be from his early or middle period, right?
I have not read it but a real weird James novel is The Sacred Fount. It is a metaphorical vampirical tale with the suggestion that sex is a form of vampirism, i.e. one partner gaining in youth and vitality at the cost of another.
DeleteThe Jolly Corner is a ghost story from the late period. It is one of my favourites.
... Right.
Delete"the South, but why?" - that is itself the project of much Southern literature.
Delete"The Jolly Corner" is just what I was thinking of.
James’s is like a sane version of madness. He doesn’t get enough credit for his humor. He knows when he’s parodying himself. “The Sacred Fount” was already mentioned. But real madness lies in his autobiographies.
DeleteElaborate?
DeleteI see. I haven't found "The Jolly Corner" on Gutenberg.
ReplyDeleteThe Sacred Fount seems to be there though.
Here's "The Jolly Corner."
ReplyDeleteAh thanks.
DeleteThis is a very interesting lens through which to view writers. Now I find myself going back to other writers, and trying to pigeon hole them into sane or mad. Homer is mad, or maybe its just the time. Shakespeare is sane. Middleton is mad. Herodotus is mad; Tacitus is sane. Milton is mad. Mary Shelley is mad. Trollope is sane (very). Faulkner is mad. Hemingway is sane. James Joyce, mad I think. Very interesting.
ReplyDeleteI thought someone was going to disagree with me, especially when I called Nabokov sane and Proust mad, but nobody has said anything so far.
DeleteLewis Carroll was so desperate to be sane as a mathematician that he rejected non-Euclidean geometry.
ReplyDeleteYou probably missed it, but Raoul Ruiz's beautiful film Time Regained was on at the French Institute on Sunday. One to look out for.
Proust was writing about "emotion recollected in tranquillity" - looking back on madness from sanity - and I think his homosexuality affected his attitude when he looked back. Nabokov was determinedly sane - his madmen are rational in their madness. I think that was why he was so hostile to some writers. They found madness interesting - even wise - where Nabokov saw and feared only madness.
How do you think Proust's homosexuality affected his attitude?
DeleteRegarding Nabokov, I don't know. He loves Gogol, who is totally mad.