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The creative insane have always been objects of fascination. Aristotle said that no great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness. Madness. What is it? Can it be categorized according to the DSM-IV? Is it craziness, oddness, abnormality, a loss of contact with reality, unsound, or an unhinged and darkened mind? What about when someone's a bit nutty or daft? Or is madness the same as psychosis?
We associate so many adjectives, ideas, and characters with lunacy, including brilliance, creativity, and artistic expression. There's the imago of a raving lunatic, the madwoman of Chaillot, and Marat Sade from the lunatic asylum at Charenton. Madman or genius? Sometimes a fine line separates the two, but where do we make the distinction?
In Paris a few years ago, the Jeu de Paume organized an exhibition called, L'Art des Fous, The Art of the Insane or Lunatic Art, which provided a fascinating look at original paintings and collages created by the residents of a mental hospital outside Paris.
“Is there a single individual in the whole of humanity free from some form of insanity?” asked Erasmus in the 16th century. He noted that a man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people. Mark Twain expressed a similar sentiment when he said, “Let us consider that we are all partially insane; it will unriddle many riddles.”
Does a writer aspire to madness? Am I a lunatic too? Can madness make for us, as John Milton says, a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven? Is madness a breakdown or a breakthrough? Shakespeare's eccentric King Lear, his voice raging into the wind, calls out, “O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!” And yet he is.
Many artists who have been touched by such madness have felt their minds were under attack: Lord Byron, Alfred Tennyson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anne Sexton. Nietzsche believed that mentally ill poets would have an honored shaman status in simpler times. Robert Lowell, a manic-depressive (what