FROM TIMES
Is art the highest form of sanity?
A clutch of new works are exploring mental illness, but do they give a deeper insight into the human condition?
A clutch of new works are exploring mental illness, but do they give a deeper insight into the human condition?
Bryan Appleyard
Does art inspire good health?
In Mark Haddon’s beautifully crafted novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a teacher shows the hero, Christopher, a boy with Asperger’s syndrome, a tube of Smarties and asks him what is inside.
“Smarties,” he says. But the teacher opens the tube and a pencil falls out. Then she asks what he thinks his mummy would say was in the tube.
“A pencil,” he replies.
Asperger’s is a form of autism. Sufferers often have high intelligence and, unlike many autistics, a desire to communicate. But all autistics have one problem — other minds. Christopher thinks his mother would say there was a pencil in the tube. This is because he does not see that she would not have the same information that he has. He knows there is a pencil, but cannot grasp that she would not know this. He cannot understand the otherness of others.
Haddon has now written a play, Polar Bears, about, among other things, bipolar disorder. This is a condition, also known as manic depression and cyclothymia, in which the sufferer’s mood swings between ecstatic highs and profound lows.
Haddon has, you might think, a special interest in mental disorder. You would be wrong.
He emails me: “The play is about many things (flapjacks, jesus, nietzsche, fairy stories, families, sex, love, train stations...), all of which came fortuitously together at the right time. Bipolar disorder was just one of them.”
So what attracted him to mental disorder? “The same as what attracts me to any subject, whether it’s Peterborough, the poetry of Horace, dogs, space travel... They’re doors to the deep stuff and the deep stuff is much more important than the doors.”
This is writerly arm-waving, a response to the fatal ease with which literature can, these days, be reduced to “issues”. Elsewhere, he has said of The Curious Incident: “It became an issue book, and I found myself repeatedly saying — it’s not really about Asperger’s, it’s about difference. It’s about acceptance of others... I slightly worry that if I say too much about Polar Bears, people will say, ‘Oh, it’s a mental-health issue play.’”
Fair enough, but, to me, he says something more interesting. “Kay Redfield Jamison’s book Touched with Fire demonstrates pretty clearly that highly successful artists of all kinds have a higher than average incidence of psychiatric illness. The mistake is to conclude that making art sends people mad, or that only mad people become artists. I think artists and people with psychiatric illness come from the same pool — those who are not at ease in the world — hence the overlap between the two groups. It’s a boring statistical fact (like many romantic misconceptions, I guess).”
Jamison is an American psychologist with bipolar disorder. In Touched with Fire, she rounds up the usual suspects — Lord Byron, Virginia Woolf, Van Gogh — and concludes that successful people are eight times more likely to suffer from serious depressive illness.
Jamison is not alone among academics in noticing this link between mental illness and creativity. Joseph Schildkraut, a Harvard psychiatrist, studied 15 abstract expressionist painters from the 1950s — more than half had psychiatric issues, mainly mood disorders. Nancy Andreasen, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, studied students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the best school of its kind in the world. Again, there was a phenomenally high percentage of mood disorders.
Asperger’s was linked to creative achievement by Michael Fitzgerald, professor of child psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin, in his book The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger’s Syndrome and the Arts. He diagnoses, among others, WB Yeats, George Orwell, Andy Warhol, Mozart, Beethoven and Michelangelo.
What does this all mean? Is Haddon right to say that it’s just a “boring statistical fact”, that artists and the mentally ill just both happen to be “not at ease in the world”? Well, up to a point, but not really.
It is an old idea that there is some inevitable link between madness and genius. Almost 2,500 years ago, Aristotle said that all the highest achievers in art, philosophy, poetry and politics suffered from melancholy. Milton celebrated melancholy as a divine gift. Dryden wrote, “Great wits are sure to madness near allied,/And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” Keats, meanwhile, thought misery essential for poetry.
Today, it is still routinely assumed that bonkers and brilliant are two sides of the same coin. Indeed, you can tell by the way people talk that they want it to be true for political and sentimental reasons. The anguish and suicide of the poet Sylvia Plath are often seen as both intrinsic to her art and a feminist statement about the oppression of women. Perhaps most famously, in Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest the “madness” of Randle McMurphy (played in the film by Jack Nicholson) is seen as an entirely rational response to oppression.
Plath is a real person and McMurphy a fictional creation, but both are assumed to be not so much mad as brilliant truth-tellers, out of step with a society of lies and oppression. The godfather of this idea is the French philosopher Michel Foucault, a sufferer from acute depression who concluded, in his History of Madness, that the diagnosis of mental illness was a tool of power designed to exclude certain people from society. Foucault presides over the imaginations of at least two generations of arts graduates and the contemporary politicisation of and sentimentality about madness.
There is one giant counterexample to all this. Geoffrey Hill is the greatest English poet since Auden. He suffered from depression, or, in his words, “undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder. I can think of no other explanation. The terror of utterance, of committing oneself to anything public... that was mainly how the disorder took shape with me”. His writing came painfully slowly. Then he was treated with antidepressants.
Suddenly, poetry started flowing out of him. Not only that, it was magnificent. He published The Triumph of Love in 1998, a work by which our nation and our age will be known long into the future. Diagnosis, in this case, did not oppress, it liberated.
Perhaps the message of Hill is that mental disorder is not the real issue. Daniel Levitin, in his book This Is Your Brain on Music, points out that it takes 10,000 hours to become a master musician, irrespective of whether you start out with a gift. Hill, I am sure, has spent many more than 10,000 hours on poetry.
Perhaps depression was simply getting in the way, it was not a part of the creative process itself. What mattered was his obsessive pursuit of poetry. It is hard work that makes great art. Or, perhaps, it is mentally disordered to spend so much time on an art, therefore madness and art are, indeed, linked. Or not. This could go on for ever.
The big problem with all these attempts to couple — or, in Hill’s case, uncouple — art and madness is that the terms are fatally unclear and, worse, catastrophically fashionable. Each age interprets the world according to its own prejudices. Our age medicalises everything and is neurotically obsessed with therapy, self-help and various pop-psychiatric explanations.
Most commonly, this manifests itself in “relationship issues”. The American television series In Treatment, for example, consisted of a series of psychiatric sessions in which the relationships within and surrounding the consultations were subject to baroque proliferation and interminable analysis. It drove me mad.
And soon to be published is a bizarre graphic novel called Couch Fiction: A Graphic Tale of Psychotherapy. This is written by Philippa Perry, the psychiatrist wife of the artist Grayson Perry. Since Grayson always appears cross-dressed as a sort of giant doll called Claire, there would seem to be much material to work on. The book is engrossing enough — like In Treatment, it simply follows a series of psychiatric sessions — but, as I say, bizarre. At the foot of each page are notes commenting on the action and explaining psychotherapeutic methods. This is a weird kind of unart in which the work itself does not seem to be enough, it requires simultaneous translation.
The fashionable temptation is to see psychotherapy and “relationship issues” as somehow fundamental and, therefore, the only real subject of art. But, as Mark Haddon said when not in arm-waving mode: “Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth... you could psychiatrically diagnose all of them, but it would miss the point.”
The missed point is that there is a mystery here far beyond the reach of therapy. Shakespeare’s genius cannot be made to lie on a couch. Lear and Macbeth are crazy guys, but do not reduce to any category. Rather, they are all categories of human folly and ambition. But it is Hamlet, as ever, who is the heart of the matter.
He is the most intelligent, literate and gifted person ever to be portrayed in literature. He is, in some interpretations, Shakespeare himself. Hamlet successfully feigns madness, convincing those around him. But his real problem is that he is terrifyingly sane. He sees through everybody and everything, but, fatally, he can neither make up his mind nor see into the future.
Apart from the fact that he does not have Asperger’s, Hamlet is a partial match for Haddon’s Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Like Hamlet, Christopher sees things too clearly. But only some things.
Christopher is a Dawkinsian observer of the human world. He thinks that mathematics is the highest truth and he is constantly trying to reduce human behaviour to a series of rational categories.
“But the mind,” he thinks at one point, “is just a complicated machine. And when we look at things we think we’re just looking out of our eyes like we’re looking out of little windows and there’s a person inside our head, but we’re not. We’re looking at a screen inside our heads, like a computer screen.”
Christopher is right up there with certain philosophers of consciousness, such as Daniel Dennett. But, like them, he only sees half the picture.
I ask Haddon where he stands on the truth, sanity or otherwise of Christopher’s attitude.
“Only a very long answer would do this question,” he replies, “but I’m taking Karen Armstrong over Richard Dawkins.”
Armstrong is a thinker on the side of religious insight and the fundamental mystery of the human condition; Dawkins and Dennett are emphatically not. Armstrong is right, she is on the side of sanity. Great art is the highest form of sanity, the highest form of insight into other minds. Unlike Christopher or his mum, the great artist sees both the pencil and the Smarties.
In Mark Haddon’s beautifully crafted novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a teacher shows the hero, Christopher, a boy with Asperger’s syndrome, a tube of Smarties and asks him what is inside.
“Smarties,” he says. But the teacher opens the tube and a pencil falls out. Then she asks what he thinks his mummy would say was in the tube.
“A pencil,” he replies.
Asperger’s is a form of autism. Sufferers often have high intelligence and, unlike many autistics, a desire to communicate. But all autistics have one problem — other minds. Christopher thinks his mother would say there was a pencil in the tube. This is because he does not see that she would not have the same information that he has. He knows there is a pencil, but cannot grasp that she would not know this. He cannot understand the otherness of others.
Haddon has now written a play, Polar Bears, about, among other things, bipolar disorder. This is a condition, also known as manic depression and cyclothymia, in which the sufferer’s mood swings between ecstatic highs and profound lows.
Haddon has, you might think, a special interest in mental disorder. You would be wrong.
He emails me: “The play is about many things (flapjacks, jesus, nietzsche, fairy stories, families, sex, love, train stations...), all of which came fortuitously together at the right time. Bipolar disorder was just one of them.”
So what attracted him to mental disorder? “The same as what attracts me to any subject, whether it’s Peterborough, the poetry of Horace, dogs, space travel... They’re doors to the deep stuff and the deep stuff is much more important than the doors.”
This is writerly arm-waving, a response to the fatal ease with which literature can, these days, be reduced to “issues”. Elsewhere, he has said of The Curious Incident: “It became an issue book, and I found myself repeatedly saying — it’s not really about Asperger’s, it’s about difference. It’s about acceptance of others... I slightly worry that if I say too much about Polar Bears, people will say, ‘Oh, it’s a mental-health issue play.’”
Fair enough, but, to me, he says something more interesting. “Kay Redfield Jamison’s book Touched with Fire demonstrates pretty clearly that highly successful artists of all kinds have a higher than average incidence of psychiatric illness. The mistake is to conclude that making art sends people mad, or that only mad people become artists. I think artists and people with psychiatric illness come from the same pool — those who are not at ease in the world — hence the overlap between the two groups. It’s a boring statistical fact (like many romantic misconceptions, I guess).”
Jamison is an American psychologist with bipolar disorder. In Touched with Fire, she rounds up the usual suspects — Lord Byron, Virginia Woolf, Van Gogh — and concludes that successful people are eight times more likely to suffer from serious depressive illness.
Jamison is not alone among academics in noticing this link between mental illness and creativity. Joseph Schildkraut, a Harvard psychiatrist, studied 15 abstract expressionist painters from the 1950s — more than half had psychiatric issues, mainly mood disorders. Nancy Andreasen, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, studied students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the best school of its kind in the world. Again, there was a phenomenally high percentage of mood disorders.
Asperger’s was linked to creative achievement by Michael Fitzgerald, professor of child psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin, in his book The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger’s Syndrome and the Arts. He diagnoses, among others, WB Yeats, George Orwell, Andy Warhol, Mozart, Beethoven and Michelangelo.
What does this all mean? Is Haddon right to say that it’s just a “boring statistical fact”, that artists and the mentally ill just both happen to be “not at ease in the world”? Well, up to a point, but not really.
It is an old idea that there is some inevitable link between madness and genius. Almost 2,500 years ago, Aristotle said that all the highest achievers in art, philosophy, poetry and politics suffered from melancholy. Milton celebrated melancholy as a divine gift. Dryden wrote, “Great wits are sure to madness near allied,/And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” Keats, meanwhile, thought misery essential for poetry.
Today, it is still routinely assumed that bonkers and brilliant are two sides of the same coin. Indeed, you can tell by the way people talk that they want it to be true for political and sentimental reasons. The anguish and suicide of the poet Sylvia Plath are often seen as both intrinsic to her art and a feminist statement about the oppression of women. Perhaps most famously, in Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest the “madness” of Randle McMurphy (played in the film by Jack Nicholson) is seen as an entirely rational response to oppression.
Plath is a real person and McMurphy a fictional creation, but both are assumed to be not so much mad as brilliant truth-tellers, out of step with a society of lies and oppression. The godfather of this idea is the French philosopher Michel Foucault, a sufferer from acute depression who concluded, in his History of Madness, that the diagnosis of mental illness was a tool of power designed to exclude certain people from society. Foucault presides over the imaginations of at least two generations of arts graduates and the contemporary politicisation of and sentimentality about madness.
There is one giant counterexample to all this. Geoffrey Hill is the greatest English poet since Auden. He suffered from depression, or, in his words, “undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder. I can think of no other explanation. The terror of utterance, of committing oneself to anything public... that was mainly how the disorder took shape with me”. His writing came painfully slowly. Then he was treated with antidepressants.
Suddenly, poetry started flowing out of him. Not only that, it was magnificent. He published The Triumph of Love in 1998, a work by which our nation and our age will be known long into the future. Diagnosis, in this case, did not oppress, it liberated.
Perhaps the message of Hill is that mental disorder is not the real issue. Daniel Levitin, in his book This Is Your Brain on Music, points out that it takes 10,000 hours to become a master musician, irrespective of whether you start out with a gift. Hill, I am sure, has spent many more than 10,000 hours on poetry.
Perhaps depression was simply getting in the way, it was not a part of the creative process itself. What mattered was his obsessive pursuit of poetry. It is hard work that makes great art. Or, perhaps, it is mentally disordered to spend so much time on an art, therefore madness and art are, indeed, linked. Or not. This could go on for ever.
The big problem with all these attempts to couple — or, in Hill’s case, uncouple — art and madness is that the terms are fatally unclear and, worse, catastrophically fashionable. Each age interprets the world according to its own prejudices. Our age medicalises everything and is neurotically obsessed with therapy, self-help and various pop-psychiatric explanations.
Most commonly, this manifests itself in “relationship issues”. The American television series In Treatment, for example, consisted of a series of psychiatric sessions in which the relationships within and surrounding the consultations were subject to baroque proliferation and interminable analysis. It drove me mad.
And soon to be published is a bizarre graphic novel called Couch Fiction: A Graphic Tale of Psychotherapy. This is written by Philippa Perry, the psychiatrist wife of the artist Grayson Perry. Since Grayson always appears cross-dressed as a sort of giant doll called Claire, there would seem to be much material to work on. The book is engrossing enough — like In Treatment, it simply follows a series of psychiatric sessions — but, as I say, bizarre. At the foot of each page are notes commenting on the action and explaining psychotherapeutic methods. This is a weird kind of unart in which the work itself does not seem to be enough, it requires simultaneous translation.
The fashionable temptation is to see psychotherapy and “relationship issues” as somehow fundamental and, therefore, the only real subject of art. But, as Mark Haddon said when not in arm-waving mode: “Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth... you could psychiatrically diagnose all of them, but it would miss the point.”
The missed point is that there is a mystery here far beyond the reach of therapy. Shakespeare’s genius cannot be made to lie on a couch. Lear and Macbeth are crazy guys, but do not reduce to any category. Rather, they are all categories of human folly and ambition. But it is Hamlet, as ever, who is the heart of the matter.
He is the most intelligent, literate and gifted person ever to be portrayed in literature. He is, in some interpretations, Shakespeare himself. Hamlet successfully feigns madness, convincing those around him. But his real problem is that he is terrifyingly sane. He sees through everybody and everything, but, fatally, he can neither make up his mind nor see into the future.
Apart from the fact that he does not have Asperger’s, Hamlet is a partial match for Haddon’s Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Like Hamlet, Christopher sees things too clearly. But only some things.
Christopher is a Dawkinsian observer of the human world. He thinks that mathematics is the highest truth and he is constantly trying to reduce human behaviour to a series of rational categories.
“But the mind,” he thinks at one point, “is just a complicated machine. And when we look at things we think we’re just looking out of our eyes like we’re looking out of little windows and there’s a person inside our head, but we’re not. We’re looking at a screen inside our heads, like a computer screen.”
Christopher is right up there with certain philosophers of consciousness, such as Daniel Dennett. But, like them, he only sees half the picture.
I ask Haddon where he stands on the truth, sanity or otherwise of Christopher’s attitude.
“Only a very long answer would do this question,” he replies, “but I’m taking Karen Armstrong over Richard Dawkins.”
Armstrong is a thinker on the side of religious insight and the fundamental mystery of the human condition; Dawkins and Dennett are emphatically not. Armstrong is right, she is on the side of sanity. Great art is the highest form of sanity, the highest form of insight into other minds. Unlike Christopher or his mum, the great artist sees both the pencil and the Smarties.
