The Literary Madness: Language as an Indicator of Insanity in the Fiction of the 20th Century (1920s)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of insanity in the artistic discourse of the 1920s. Such a literary reception is interesting because, on the one hand, it goes against the dominant clinical approaches at that time, which emphasized the medical aspect of the problem, and on the other hand, it anticipates the antipsychiatric philoophical theories, whereby the marginal figure of the madman was gradually included in the social space. Using the example of three iconic works of modernist literature, the article demonstrates how innovative techniques of working with language make the speech of a mentally ill person distinctly audible. Virginia Woolf in “Mrs Dalloway” conveys the disastrous experience of the First World War through the stream of consciousness of the mentally traumatized character Septimus Smith. Woolf puts an anti-militaristic appeal into the mouth of a madman and thus makes him the herald of a simple truth that reasonable people, however, prefer not to notice. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s short story “Cogwheels” reproduces the experiences of the author, who feels the approach of insanity. Madness opens up as a borderline case that reveals its deep kinship with the source of writing, understood as a lack of form, lack of meaning, lack of creation. William Faulkner in the novel “The Sound and the Fury” gives the gift of speech to the weak-minded Benji, who doesn’t talk. His im-possible narrative offers an alternative to the linear logic, which clarify Benji’s confusing narration but fail to rival it in conveying the directness of human suffering or happiness.