Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

suggests otherwise, and especially some
remarks about the intensification of consciousness
as a kind of disease by
Dostoevsky's narrator in Notes from
Underground, Sass puts forward the thesis
that madness, in some of its forms at least,
derives from 'a heightening rather than a
dimming of conscious awareness, and an
alienation not from reason but from the
emotions, instincts, and the body.' He is
careful to limit and qualify his assertion
and to say that it is schizophrenia and
related disorders which he has principally
in mind rather than 'manic psychosis' and
other 'classic organic brain disorders.'
The mad are not necessarily thrust into
darkness and torpor. Often schizophrenics
occupy a landscape of preternatural brightness,
suffused by light and knowledge in an
atmosphere of electrical revelation. Sass
quotes the French poet Gérard de Nerval,
one of the sources of twentieth-century
modernism, describing the character of his
psychoaffective episodes: 'It struck me I
knew everything; everything was revealed
to me, all the secrets of the world were
mine during those spacious hours.'
Sass contends that many classic features
of early or high modernism are analogous
to the experiences of madness, aspects such
as aesthetic self-referentiality, irony,
detachment, alienation, meaning as reticulable
structure, derealization ('the
unworlding of the world'), epiphanic
momentousness, and so on. He explores
these analogies in detail over the course of
six hundred pages, using the ideal-typical
domains of schizophrenic symptomatology
as his organizing principle. At the end of
the day the sheer volume of material seems
convincing, although I'm not sure how
convincing it might seem to a clinician bent
on mending broken minds.
Perhaps there is too much evidence here,
because it is difficult avoiding the thought
that the sort of madness Sass has in mind
may have more to do with everybody's
experience of modernity in modernized
societies than with modernist art practices.
Modernism may be simply the aesthetic
response to the more generalized schizoaffective
space we all now occupy as a matter
of course. In short, modernization makes
us all mad; as a result, some of us write The
Waste Land or Thrones, while others
become serial killers. The rest of us are
stuck somewhere in the middle, documenting,
maniacally no doubt, the various
senses of the word 'unsound.' If this is so, I
don't think any clinician can fix us.
Piercing the Real
André Breton
Arcanum 17 with Apertures Grafted to the End.
Trans. Zack Rogow. Coach House $14.95
Hal Foster
Compulsive Beauty. MIT US$30.00
Reviewed by John Xiros Cooper
With the adjournment of the European
avant-garde in the late 1930s to Manhattan
and Southern California, the surrealist
André Breton found himself in an America
that an old friend from Paris, Henry Miller,
was already busy describing as the 'air-conditioned
nightmare.' Surprising then, at
least on the evidence of Arcanum 17, the
utter banality of Breton's response; America
is simply primordial nature, pure essence
somewhere out there past the margins of
history. This excursion to the Gaspé and
Percé Rock, by way of Bonaventure Island
occurred in late 1944 after the D-Day landings
in June and the liberation of Paris in
August, events that are on his mind as he
contemplates the Gaspé. It is this journey
'back to nature' that gives rise to the meditations
on civilization, history, and values in
the text. The prize he seeks is, simply put,
metaphysical foundations, the redemptive
one or unity, that might allay the spiritual
unravelling of a 'somber Europe.'
Like most urbanized Europeans he is
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