Mad Speculations

One of the predominant strategies in Carson’s work is irony, a strategy that raises questions for Canadian poet, Mary di Michele. In her interview with Anne Carson in 1996 for Matrix Magazine, di Michele takes issue with her irony being “unstable”: What does she mean by unstable, anyway? In what situations would you find a “stable” irony? It is only by putting pressure on what di Michele might mean by irony, that we notice that di Michele is reflecting an aesthetic prejudice for the unambiguous as opposed to the ambiguous of postmodern projects. Where di Michele prefers a modernist stable irony, Carson plays with meaning so that two truths resonate or, in fact, keep spinning. This is the kind of trouble that reviewer Adam Kirsch attributes to the senselessness of words in Carson’s work, a strategy inspired by de Saussure’s contribution to linguistics, where the word is an arbitrary sign for the thing. So if Kirsch can complain that Carson’s work is all about “sticking a monkey wrench in the gears of language” to accomplish some “heroic sabotage” (3 of 9), what are the gears and what is being sabotaged in Carson’s “Glass Essay,” for example, when she writes about a woman’s effort to seduce her husband with “the little burning red backside like a baboon”?

Carson’s “baboon” is the furthest you can get from heroic sabotage. The narrator’s desire is equated to an animal, destabilizing and so critiquing the grand narrative of human superiority over the ape (evolution), by then destabilizing that critique with a critique of a woman’s desire as “shame.” Two registers are competing for dominance and neither wins, causing this movement we might call spinning. We see this similar ironic instability in Carson’s reference to “hemorrhoids” in her homage to Samuel Becket, a detail which di Michele claimed was in “bad taste” (11). There is this push and pull of private and public registers, that arouses discomfort in the reader, but also, a little confusion about which side the text is on: is bad taste a good thing or a bad thing? Linda Hutcheon notes: “It is the function of irony in postmodern discourse to posit that critical distance and then undo it” (15). The critical distance of shame is destabilized by the baboon; the critical distance of “bad taste” is destabilized by “hemorrhoids.” The discomfort aroused by the moving lines of the border of good and bad, so to speak, raises serious questions for di Michele, perhaps more seriously so because of her feminist politics. Equating a woman’s desire with a baboon that is shameful really does pull the political floor out from under her. A woman’s desire is either animalistic, and joyful, or it is suppressed and shameful. One of these positions would make sense for di Michele: together, there is only “unstable irony.”

Irony is central to Carson’s mad messiahs: if they are mad, they are not messiahs; if they are messiahs, they are not mad. To be both means that both conditions apply at the same time, making the irony unstable. The quandary raised by this figure has a precedent in historical figures. For example, Daniel Paul Schreber was a nineteenth-century German Judge who had revelations about the end of the world and thus recognized his messianic calling. He was the first diagnosed schizophrenic because he was deluded by his messianic mission. Another nineteenth-century figure, Louis Riel, considered himself a savior of the Métis people. Some say that his lawyers only claimed he was insane to save him from execution for treason, but others contend he was just simply mad. Would Riel be considered mad, like Schreber, because he saw himself as a messiah? Was Schreber a messiah despite being mad? One could speculate, and I will speculate in the pages ahead, that the historical precedent informs not only Carson’s postmodern experiments with form, but also with character.

Her interest in mad figures nods to Jameson’s embrace of the schizophrenic as the model of the postmodern subject. In his terms, the mad figure liberates us from the status quo; brings equality where there is inequality; brings freedom where there are chains. In Carson’s hands, though, madness is the master narrative she critiques. The tendency is to think that mad people are irrational and not useful for society. Schreber was institutionalized because he was no longer fit to be a judge; Riel’s execution affirms that his mission made him a threat to the Canadian government which is why he was deemed mad. In Carson’s representation, not only is it compelling to consider psychosis as being receptive to God’s revelation, but also worthwhile seeing living and breathing messiahs as figures who have challenged the dominant culture and thereby changed the course of history for the better. Schreber established a vision of schizophrenia because of his detailed Memoirs of My Nervous Illness; Riel’s struggles eventually made possible the establishment of Métis status. If we accept Carson’s logic of the relation between psychosis and revelation, we might also consider that psychosis is not a static state, but fluid: at times there are coherent revelations, at times not. And psychosis can instigate great changes to the status quo. That is, while Carson is carrying out a postmodern objective in a Jamesonian sense, you could say that Carson may be said to support Mad Studies in critiquing the neurotypical stigma against psychosis.