“The Madman Is Not Always Wrong About Everything”

Faculty of Arts and PhilosophyErwann Hollevoet“The madman is not always wrong abouteverything”The Transitory Convention of Madness in Arthurian LiteraturePaper submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of “Master of Arts in deHistorische Taal- en Letterkunde”2015 - 2016SupervisorProf. dr. Jurgen PietersDepartment of Literature

Tout ceux dont la vie se passe à chercher la vérité, savent bien que lesimages qu’ils en saisissent sont nécessairement fugitives. Elles brillentun instant pour faire face à des clartés nouvelles et toujours pluséblouissantes. Bien différente de celle de l’artiste, l’œuvre du savant estfatalement provisoire. Il le sait et s’en réjouit, puisque la rapide vieillessede ses livres est la preuve même du progrès de la science.— HenriPirenne

ContentsPreface1Introduction5I. Theoretical Perspectives on Madness9Chapter One: Mad(wo)men: The Theoretical Intersections between Madness andGender11Chapter Two: The Foucault-Derrida Debate: Descartes, Madness, and the Language ofReason172.1 Descartes on Madness172.2 Derrida and Foucault on Descartes22Chapter Three: Madness in the Language of Fiction or the Fiction of Language29Chapter Four: The Madness of Medieval Literature33II. Madness as a Transitory Literary Convention in Medieval ArthurianLiterature39Chapter Five: Anthropological Madness41Chapter Six: The Insanity of Love45Chapter Seven: The Bestiality of Madness53Chapter Eight: The Performativity of the Transitory Period: Deconstruction,Construction, and Reconstruction57Conclusion65Works Cited69(Word count: 22 589)

1PrefaceThis paper is not a work of history, although it does take from it the perspective that allconcepts are historically determined and have to be treated as such; it is not a work ofphilosophy, even though it treats fundamental problems of existence such as reason andlanguage, of which Derrida would argue that they are constitutively intertwined; it is not awork of psychoanalysis, but I do believe that all behaviour has sense and meaning even thatof madmen; it is above all a study of literature and as such it ascribes the literary text aspecific function in history that only such a work of art could hold. I weep for the historianfor whom the literary text is nothing more than a historic artefact or source, the philosopherwho solely employs literature as metaphor, and the psychoanalyst who looks at a literarytext and seeks repression, for the literary text is never one of these conceptualisations, butall at once at the same time. Perhaps, my literary heart weeps the most for Glenn Rohrer aProfessor of Social Work at the university of West Florida. In 2005 he published a bookentitled Mental Health in Literature: Literary Lunacy and Lucidity, which is described by thepublisher as an “engaging and provocative collection of classical and contemporary workscontains poetry, plays, fiction, and autobiography. The works are excellent descriptions andexamples of different forms of mental illness and serve as fascinating alternatives to casestudies” (Back cover), but is in fact a reductive approach that tries to constrain the behaviourof literary characters within the diagnostic frame of the bible of psychiatry, the Diagnosticand Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM: an expansive collection of strictlyidentified and described symptoms according to which mental illnesses are diagnosed andsubsequently medicinally resolved. The psychoanalyst Darian Leader denounces the DSM’spredominance within psychiatry in his book What is Madness?. According to Leader the DSMdefines disorder “in terms of behaviour, so that visible, external aspects of our lives are usedto define clinical categories” with a clear emphasis on “surface and visibility” (31). As suchthe external representations become the categories according to which mental illness isdiscursively ordered: “If you’re nervous and shy, rather than seeing this as the symptoms ofan underlying clinical category to be discovered, it becomes a clinical category in itself:social phobia” (31). The DSM’s focus on the external representations of illness results in thedevaluation of individual experience: “what mattered was the symptoms they had ratherthan how they processed these symptoms, what they made of them, how they bestowedmeaning–or not–on their experience” (31). I believe that such an approach to madness is not

2only reductive for the individual experience of those who struggle with mental illness, butthat it could also problematize the way they function in the world. I see these symptoms notas external manifestations of an internal essence of illness, but as creative ways ofestablishing meaning by people who experience some kind of lack or absence withinthemselves or a discrepancy between their identity and society’s conception of normativity.“The clinician who attempts to graft his own value system and view of normality on to thepatient becomes like the colonizer who seeks to educate the natives. Whether the system issecular and educative or religious, it still bulldozes away the culture and history of theperson it purports to help” writes Leader (6); an imperialism of mental health structuringbehaviour that falls outside of socially accepted normativity. It is precisely this kind ofimperialism that is personified by professor Rohrer in Mental Health in Literature, as he affixesthe categories expressed in the DSM onto literary texts, grafting normativity andanachronistic categories onto literary characters, fashioning them into docile categorisedcase-studies rather than characters expressing identity in a sometimes peculiar but creativemanner. In Rohrer’s work Hamlet becomes a disorganized schizophrenic and Macbethsuffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Within a study of mental illness, literatureshould function as more than mere representation of symptoms, as literature in itself holds a“constitutive relation to madness” (Felman 2): there exists a specific similarity betweenmadness and literature that allows for a characteristically literary expression of madnesswithin literature that can escape categorisation into reductive discourses such as the DSM.Literature allows the often-repressed voice of madness to be heard in a specifically literaryway.Although this is an inquiry into historical literature, it is strongly grounded in thepresent and it tries to offer insights and perspectives that might potentially improve ourunderstanding of madness not as a degenerative affliction but as a creative way ofconstructing meaning. The madness found in medieval literature is certainly a historicallydetermined medieval insanity, but this historical conceptualisation could provide us withimportant insights into our modern world of psychiatry and medicine. “Criticism is aconstruction of the intelligibility of our own time”, writes Roland Barthes (260) and I agreewith his conceptualisation of the role of the critic, for literary studies should always “have avital relation to history and society” (Culler 26). Butler, Foucault, and Derrida are theprimary theoretical voices within this paper, but the underlying motivational current iscertainly influenced by Barthes, as I believe that a literary text should be more than a

3historical artefact, it should provide us with truths and questions about not only thehistorical situation in which it was conceived, but also tell us something about our modernworld and our critical place within it.A venture such as a dissertation is often a lonely struggle between an interested, butoften unstructured mind and a corpus, both theoretical and literary, that hides its substancebehind a shroud of philosophical abstraction or a barrier of historical distance. Therefore,this pursuit of madness would not have been possible without some guidance that helped mesynthesize the disorderly constellation of ideas that existed in my mind into the structuredtotality of a text. My gratitude goes out to: Professor Pieters for ensuring that I in myenthusiasm never deviated too far from my objective and assisting me in making some of myalready intricate theoretical arguments not more complicated than they had to be; ProfessorVanden Broecke for providing me with a plethora of new theoretical insights andperspectives on history and literature in his excellent Theorieën van de cultuurgeschiedeniscourse and for showing me the true meaning of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble; Eline for herceaseless support and tolerance when listening to my abstract ideas and observations onoften metaphysical topics; and my mother for reading and correcting preliminary drafts andoffering all-round guidance.“The madman is not always wrong about everything” writes Derrida. This paperexplores the things that he is not wrong about: the truths hidden behind the madness andthe creative ways of establishing these meanings by a non-normative identity in anormatively structured world.

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5IntroductionThe paradoxical nature of studying a reason opposed concept such as madness within adiscursive tradition that is inherently characterised by reason is not lost on me. However, Ido wholeheartedly believe in the functionality of a madness that escapes reductivecategorisation. The success of gender studies has certainly proven that inquiries into nonnormative and at first glance paradoxical identity configurations can provide criticism withimportant new perspectives on the construction of both identity and society. Gender is notthe natural essence that it had once been purported to be, but a highly intricate system ofperformative actions that establish a seemingly natural but certainly arbitrary andconstructed identity, and the marginalized non-normative gender identities existing outsideof the gender-binary deserve reconceptualization as valid configurations of identity. Uponattempting a similar emancipation of madness from the structures of marginalization, onestrikes upon a whole new array of complications and restraints that prevent the true voice ofmadness being heard. Whereas the gender binary is characterized by the exclusion of nonnormative genders, the opposition that exists between madness and reason could hardly bebinary conceptualised as madness becomes inherently excluded by reason, thus invalidatinga true opposition between these two concepts. The deconstruction of binary gender led tothe emancipation of non-normative gender, but how can such a deconstruction beperformed for madness when its antagonist inherently negates its very existence? Foucaultattempts to surmount this exclusion and give madness its true voice by historicallyidentifying its originator as René Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, and bydeconstructing the Cartesian structures that have discursively both constricted and excludedmadness to a marginalized position throughout history. In Cogito and the History of Madness, areaction to Foucault’s History of Madness, Derrida posits the impossibility of discussingmadness in our language, as he believes language to be constitutively characterised byreason even in pre-Cartesian times. Foucault’s conviction and Derrida’s complication arebrought together in Shoshana Felman’s Writing and Madness, wherein she asserts thatliterature is a specific type of language that escapes the constitutive predomination of reasonwithin language and allows for the expression of transgressive concepts such as madness.This paper attempts to neutralize the exclusion of madness by reason by taking atrifold approach to the study of madness. Firstly, as Foucault, I take Descartes to be the mainoriginator of exclusionary discourses on madness. He was certainly not the first to invalidate