Madness in English-Canadian Fiction - ub-dok - Universität Trier

context for the discussion of insanity in each period and for the ways it was
experienced, diagnosed, treated and represented over two centuries. As psychiatry itself
has formed part of a common consciousness in much of 20th century imaginative
literature in particular, overt psychological and psychoanalytic allusions are thus
commonplace and the various psychiatric theories actually become part of the
symbolic structure of novels.
Particular developments imaginative literature and literary criticism, for instance, can
be traced to the influence of Freud and his various interpreters, where many western
writers assimilated the conceptual framework and the symbolic language Freud used
to describe the psychic struggle for the integration of unconscious and conscious
processes. At a later point Laing exemplified in his attitudes and in his career the
psychiatric ideologies of his generation and in this respect became a crucial figure of
orientation for many writers at the given time. If Laing helped as it were to legalise the
personal and the subjective, the theories of Lacan and others have placed pressure on
the writer to deconstruct the subject, to take it not as a starting-point and reliable
measure, but as a lumber-room of mainly and wholly false ideas stacked there by a
range of external forces.
Perhaps the most striking difference between the literary criticism influenced by or
based upon psychoanalytic theories of the pre-Second World War period, and that
based upon psychoanalytic theories of the past few decades, is that the latter is unlikely
to be built purely upon such psychoanalytic theories. Freudian literary criticism of the
1920s and 1930s, for example, generally presented a rather exclusive appearance:
distinguishing itself from other literary criticism and relying very little upon theorists
other than Freud and his followers. In contrast, the modern literary critic or theorist
relies heavily upon the writings of Lacan and, for instance, is also likely to exhibit a
more general interest in deconstructionist and (post-)structuralist theory. As it enters
into literary theory and criticism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, which has in this area been
most influential in recent years, opens new territory and affirms the structuralism
already at work. Exposing the mimetic fallacy from a new angle, Lacan assists i n
subverting any naive belief in the referential function of language and, in doing so, he
further insures the growing prominence of linguistic determinism.
What this shows is that while literary madness is to some extent modelled on actual
madness, "a mad literary character must [still] be approached on his own terms,
through the verbal, dramatic, and narrative symbols that convey the unconscious
processes he portrays and reveals" and through "the mythical or literary tradition" in
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