Organizer: Pamela Abee-Taulli, Independent Scholar
Chair: Mary Jacob, Princeton University
Discussant: Philip F. C. Williams, Arizona State University
Societies’ responses to what is called madness have undergone radical transformations in the modern era, and at the same time demonstrated surprising continuities. This panel explores the issue from two sides, examining, on the one hand, meanings assigned to insanity, and, on the other, meanings assigned by insanity. It addresses what is called the "modern" construction of madness in post-Restoration Japan; and it explores the authority of the mad voice in twentieth-century writing in Japan and China.
Susan Burns’ paper introduces the historical context of so-called "modern" notions of insanity through her examination of transformation and continuity in the debate over proper treatment of the phenomenon known as monotsuki, or animal or spirit possession, in early-modern Japan.
It is in this era that the modern idea of mind, which privileges the heuristic unconscious as a realm of transcendent knowledge, begins to permeate the arts. Pamela Abee-Taulli reads in the writing of Akutagawa Ryunosuke, (1892–1927), a palpable tension between two images of the mad artist: as a super-sensible genius who perceives meanings beyond the ordinary, and simultaneously as someone who cannot function in normal society.
Mary Jacob examines the work of four contemporary Chinese writers in which the present is given meaning through a fictional portrayal of madness which serves to reintegrate the past into collective consciousness.
Finally, Donna Storey’s work on Yamamoto Michiko, a contemporary Japanese writer, reads female madness as a form of authorship, where the normally repressed female voice attempts to create its own, ostensibly mad, meaning.
Pamela Abee-Taulli, Independent Scholar
In this paper I examine the paradoxical, dualistic image of insanity as it relates to the idea of the artist. My subject is the writing of Akutagawa Ryunosuke (Japanese prose narrative writer, 1892–1927), in which one can read a palpable tension between the artistic insight of mental instability and the psychological blindness of outright insanity.
In both pre-modern and modern Japan, mental infirmity was constructed as a sort of genius, a super-sensibility that reaches beyond ordinary perception. In the former there was a conception of madness as divine inspiration; while the latter period saw the appropriation of the nineteenth-century western idea of mental and physical instability as a key to the realm of the unconscious.
Thus, on the one hand, we have the figure of the fool/genius, of a person with insight into an other consciousness, an essence of reality which is unspeakable (outside of art). Yet, on the other hand, this is simultaneously in contention with a quite different idea of insanity, as psychological disfunction. That is, whereas mental disorder as a rhetorical figure frees the mind to reach beyond ordinary perception, mental disorder as a functional reality confines the mind to a darkness of unknowability, forever amputated from the certainty of mundane perception by the very fact that it does not perceive itself. Whereas the rhetoric of insanity refers to a transcendent signification, the fact of madness is not, in fact, signifiable.
Mary Jacob, Princeton University
In the post-Mao period, Chinese fiction writers were enthusiastic about "breaking into new territories," experimenting with techniques and topics prohibited during the Maoist era and especially the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Madness had no place in Maoist literature with its portrayal of socialist utopia, but did appeal to post-Mao writers. Besides defying taboo, what function does madness play in contemporary Chinese fiction? How can it be read against the post-Mao zeitgeist?
This paper analyzes fiction by four writers depicting mental breakdown. A common course is identified: the protagonists cannot reconcile the past with the present and so suppress one or the other. Two stories explicitly address the abrupt Maoist/post-Mao break, while the others present a temporal break that is either personal or related to wartime.
The characters’ experience of radical temporal disjunction leads to memory disorder followed by madness. Some repress memory, living in an ahistorical present, but this makes them incomplete. The repressed material eventually erupts into consciousness as irrational behavior and disordered thinking. Others live in the past, their actions no longer appropriate, until they lose all contact with the present.
Madness in these stories is initially defined socially—an individual is "mad" if his or her actions are inexplicable according to collective norms. However, madness also serves to reintegrate the past into collective consciousness. By reminding readers that what is repressed must not, indeed cannot, ultimately be forgotten, post-Mao writers make a therapeutic move. Fictional portrayal of madness becomes the locus of memory.
Donna Storey, University of California, Berkeley
In this paper I will discuss Yamamoto Michiko’s portrayal of mental imbalance in her story "Kusa wo karu otoko" (The Man Who Cut the Grass, 1975; tr. 1982). The protagonist, Mayo, an apparently ordinary housewife, spends two days at her window watching a workman cutting the grass in a neighboring field. Each of the man’s actions takes on an increasingly sinister significance, until finally we become aware that the protagonist’s own disordered mental processes have woven a story quite separate from reality. I will first examine the means by which the author slowly and subtly reveals the nature of Mayo’s mental disorder as a blighted attempt to bring excitement into her confining existence as a housewife. Then I will discuss the relationship between Mayo’s overly sensitive way of reading her environment and the dangerous potential of female fiction-making. Indeed Mayo’s attempt to shape the raw material of her experience can be likened to a skewed form of authorship. In this section of the paper, I will draw upon Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s study of nineteenth-century women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic. In spite of the discrepancy in time and context, a close analysis of Yamamoto’s "Kusa wo karu otoko" shows that Gilbert and Gubar’s ideas can be fruitfully applied to the work of a Japanese woman writer of the late twentieth century as well, for ultimately, Yamamoto’s work reveals a deep ambivalence about the powers of female creativity.