{"id":150451,"date":"2021-01-21T12:45:43","date_gmt":"2021-01-21T17:45:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=150451"},"modified":"2021-01-21T13:55:28","modified_gmt":"2021-01-21T18:55:28","slug":"insane-places","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/01\/21\/insane-places\/","title":{"rendered":"Insane Places"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Leonora Carrington\u2019s <\/em>The Hearing Trumpet.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1973, the psychologist David Rosenhan published a paper in the journal Science<\/em> called \u201cOn Being Sane in Insane Places.\u201d The paper was based on an experiment he had conducted, sometimes called the Thud Experiment, designed to interrogate how we distinguish the sane from the insane, if in fact sanity and insanity are distinguishable states. Rosenhan arranged to have eight \u201cpseudopatients\u201d seek voluntary admission to a psychiatric hospital. The instigating complaint was of auditory hallucinations: the patients claimed to hear voices saying the words empty<\/em>, hollow<\/em>, and thud<\/em>. All eight were admitted into psychiatric wards, most with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.<\/p>\n

Once in the wards, the patients experienced some initial anxiety\u2014they hadn\u2019t expected to get in so easily\u2014but then proceeded to act normally. Rosenhan writes:<\/p>\n

The pseudopatient, very much as a true psychiatric patient, entered a hospital with no foreknowledge of when he would be discharged. Each was told that he would have to get out by his own devices, essentially by convincing the staff that he was sane. The psychological stresses associated with hospitalization were considerable, and all but one of the pseudopatients desired to be discharged almost immediately after being admitted. They were, therefore, motivated not only to behave sanely, but to be paragons of cooperation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When asked how they were feeling, the patients all said they felt fine and were no longer hearing any voices. But they continued to be treated as though they were schizophrenic. They were kept in the hospital for an average of nineteen days (one for fifty-two days), and when they were eventually discharged, it was under the assumption of \u201cremission.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rosenhan (who was himself one of the pseudopatients) came to the conclusion that \u201cwe cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals.\u201d You could say that the staff were prone to overdiagnosis, that the structure of the institution creates a hammer\/nail relation between doctor and patient\u2014or you could say that the structure of the institution creates the conditions for insanity. Rosenhan claimed that, in a hospital setting, \u201cthe normal are not detectably sane.\u201d So were they all mad, as in Wonderland? (\u201c\u2009\u2018How do you know I\u2019m mad?\u2019 said Alice. \u2018You must be,\u2019 said the Cat, \u2018or you wouldn\u2019t have come here.\u2019\u2009\u201d) (It must be noted that the validity of the study, and indeed most studies, has been called into question.)<\/p>\n

The surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington was once, during World War II, institutionalized against her will. Max Ernst, her partner (if that is the right word\u2014they were living together, though he was married to someone else\u2014Wikipedia uses \u201clover,\u201d which does not sound objective), had been captured by the Nazis. His art was considered degenerate. It seems fair to say that Carrington temporarily lost her mind\u2014war is an insane place. Sickened by injustice, she drank orange blossom water to make herself vomit, to purge herself of the \u201cbrutal ineptitude of society\u201d; she saw her stomach as \u201ca mirror\u201d of the world. The sequence of events, by her own account, is confusing, but she managed to escape with two friends from France to Madrid and ended up in an asylum in Santander, a town on the northern coast of Spain.<\/p>\n

Down Below<\/em>, written in 1943, is Carrington\u2019s brief memoir of this period. The doctor was injecting her with Cardiazol, a.k.a. \u201cconvulsive therapy,\u201d a drug that induces seizures. Carrington described the occurrence of the first injection as \u201cthe most terrible and blackest day in my life\u201d\u2014 \u201cHow can I write this when I\u2019m afraid to think about it?\u201d (I\u2019m reminded of Sylvia Plath\u2019s first experience with electroshock therapy, which was so physically and psychologically painful for her that she swore to kill herself before undergoing it again.) For ten minutes, Carrington suffered \u201cthe Great Epileptic Ailment\u201d: \u201cI was convulsed, pitiably hideous, I grimaced and my grimaces were repeated all over my body.\u201d Afterward, as some kind of antidote, she asked for lemons and \u201cswallowed them with their rinds.\u201d An article on the history of Cardiazol treatment in British mental hospitals, by the researcher Niall McCrae, asks, \u201cWhat made Cardiazol work\u2014or appear to work?\u201d He suggests that \u201cthe intense fear experienced during treatment\u2014the major reason for abandoning Cardiazol in favour of electroshock\u2014was therapeutically advantageous\u201d\u2014that patients, in other words, could be scared sane, which is possibly true. But in the short term, the drug only made Carrington behave more insanely. She became convinced that these \u201cpurifying tortures\u201d would help her attain \u201cAbsolute Knowledge,\u201d which she needed to unite the cosmos and save the world. It seems the treatments for madness quite often have madness as a side effect.<\/p>\n

Carrington\u2019s biography, a friend informs me, is rife with conflicting and erroneous information\u2014perhaps inevitable for a darling of the surrealist movement. Andr\u00e9 Breton seemed almost jealous of Carrington\u2019s \u201cvoyage to the other side of reason,\u201d as Marina Warner puts it in her introduction to Down Below<\/em>\u2014as if madness were a career achievement. A version of Carrington\u2019s episode in the sanatorium also found its way into a novel, The Hearing Trumpet<\/em>, written in the fifties or early sixties. But it\u2019s not lightly fictionalized autobiography along the lines of The Bell Jar<\/em>. Here the experience is transformed into something more fabulist, and much more interesting than the memoir. In the novel, delusions of grandeur become real powers.<\/p>\n

The Hearing Trumpet<\/em>\u2019s first sentence reveals the inciting incident, or perhaps the inciting object, the magic charm that sets events in motion: \u201cWhen Carmella gave me the present of the hearing trumpet she may have foreseen some of the consequences.\u201d Carmella is Marian Leatherby\u2019s prescient, resourceful friend; Marian is a ninety-two-year-old Englishwoman living in Spain with her son Galahad and his family, who, she has noticed, have ceased to find her worthwhile. Because of her deafness, or perhaps just because she is old, they treat her like vermin or a ghost, as though she were fully insensate or already dead; she enters through the back of the house like a dog. The maid, Rosina, \u201cseems generally opposed to the rest of humanity,\u201d and yet they get along: \u201cI do not believe that she puts me in a human category so our relationship is not disagreeable.\u201d The hearing trumpet, \u201ca fine specimen of its kind,\u201d \u201cexceptionally pretty, being encrusted with silver and mother o\u2019pearl,\u201d is a bit of a monkey\u2019s-paw gift. \u201cYour life will be changed,\u201d Carmella promises\u2014but not necessarily for the better.<\/p>\n

Hearing trumpets, an early, analog form of hearing aid, can be quite effective, and Marian\u2019s is, to a frightful degree: \u201cWhat I had always heard as a thin shriek went through my head like the bellow of an angry bull.\u201d Carmella asks if Marian can hear her: \u201cIndeed I could, it was terrifying.\u201d The impairment had been, in a way, a gift of its own, shielding Marian from the worst of humanity, and her family\u2019s own cruelty. At Carmella\u2019s urging, Marian uses the instrument to spy on her family, and overhears them plotting to put her away. \u201cYour mother has been a constant anxiety to us for the past twenty years,\u201d Muriel, her daughter-in-law, says; their son Robert is less kind: \u201cShe\u2019s a drooling sack of decomposing flesh.\u201d They are sure she\u2019ll be \u201cbetter off in a home,\u201d if not \u201cbetter off dead,\u201d and in any case unlikely to \u201ceven notice the change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marian lowers the hearing trumpet and concedes, to herself, that she may be senile\u2014\u201cbut what does senile mean?\u201d The institution where they want to send her, Santa Brigida, run by \u201cthe Well of Light Brotherhood,\u201d \u201csounds more terrifying than death itself\u201d\u2014and yet she has her own ideas about her right to exist (\u201cI consider that I am still a useful member of society\u201d); she is not ready to die and in fact her own mother is still alive, in good health though \u201cgetting old\u201d! Marian dreams of going to Lapland, stopping to visit her mother on the way, then spending the rest of her days in the snow among \u201cdogs, woolly dogs.\u201d She doesn\u2019t fight her family\u2019s decision. \u201cNothing I can say will change your opinion,\u201d she says. \u201cYou are right from your own point of view.\u201d She concedes the relativity of reality. Galahad assures her this is for her own good and that she won\u2019t be lonely. \u201cI am never lonely, Galahad,\u201d she replies. \u201cOr rather I never suffer from loneliness. I suffer much from the idea that my loneliness might be taken away from me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because \u201cone has to be very careful what one takes when one goes away forever,\u201d Marian decides to pack \u201cas if I were going to Lapland.\u201d (In 1940, before leaving Saint-Martin for Spain, Carrington \u201cspent the whole night carefully sorting the things I intended taking along with me.\u201d Later, these effects took on talismanic importance: \u201cMy red-and-black refill pencil (leadless) was Intelligence \u2026 A box of Tabu powder with a lid, half grey and half black, meant eclipse, complex, vanity, taboo, love.\u201d) Marian feels \u201ctoo preoccupied\u201d to sleep, but then, \u201csleeping and waking are not quite as distinctive as they used to be.\u201d Day dreaming and night dreaming blur into each other, as in the hypnagogic visions, or near-hallucinations, some people see when they\u2019re falling asleep (Carrington was among them). The next day, Galahad and Muriel drive Marian to Santa Brigida, which is not quite the prison complex that Marian and Carmella had envisioned but \u201ca castle, surrounded by various pavilions with incongruous shapes\u201d:<\/p>\n

Pixielike dwellings shaped like toadstools, Swiss chalets, railway carriages, one or two ordinary bungalows, something shaped like a boot, another like what I took to be an outsize Egyptian mummy. It was all so very strange that I for once doubted the accuracy of my observation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That \u201cfor once\u201d is perplexing, because Marian frequently calls into question the accuracy of her observations. Not long after she overhears her daughter-in-law say \u201cshe doesn\u2019t have any idea where she is,\u201d which is plainly untrue, she goes into a waking reverie, in her own backyard while, \u201cstrangely enough,\u201d also in England, \u201cunder a lilac bush.\u201d She knows she is not in England\u2014\u201cI am inventing all this and it is about to disappear\u201d\u2014still, it is England she sees. She speaks of the \u201cfancies\u201d that keep her amused during \u201csleepless nights,\u201d since \u201cold people do not sleep much.\u201d Or is she sleeping and dreaming all the time? Her room at the institution has trompe l\u2019oeil furniture: a \u201cpainted wardrobe\u201d on the wall, \u201can open window with a curtain fluttering in the breeze, or rather it would have fluttered if it were a real curtain.\u201d Real?<\/em> All fictive furniture is fake, but this novel has real fake furniture and fake fake furniture. Here the novelist seems to be poking holes and peeking through the text. Sleeping and waking are fluid, as are reality and fiction (or reality and surreality).<\/p>\n

Can Marian be trusted? Can Carrington? I\u2019ve heard it said that \u201call narrators are unreliable,\u201d but the narrator of a memoir is unreliable in a way that the narrator of a novel never is. In Down Below<\/em>, Carrington writes, of her own behavior, \u201cI did not remember any of this.\u201d We can\u2019t know what happened, we can\u2019t distinguish between the sanity and the insanity in Santander. But in Santa Brigida? Despite her age and infirmities, her bouts of imaginative dozing, as the events of The Hearing Trumpet<\/em> get more fantastical, I choose to believe that Marian\u2019s version of events is real<\/em>. What she sees (and hears) in the world of this novel is what actually \u201chappens\u201d: she\u2019s introduced to the bizarre, cultish logic of the institution\u2019s doctrine, \u201cInner Christianity\u201d; she meets the other residents (or patients, or inmates) and gets wind of their underground schemes; she wonders after the source of a painting of a winking nun, a \u201cleering abbess,\u201d hung across from her place at the dining table; she is given, by a woman named Christabel Burns, a tract about the figure, the whole of which appears as a text within the text (from pages 90 to 126, almost twenty percent of the novel); she witnesses Natacha Gonzalez and Vera Van Tocht making a poisoned batch of fudge, which Maude Wilkins mistakenly eats, dying in the process; she climbs a ladder to peer into Maude\u2019s room through a skylight, and sees the naked corpse of not a woman but a man (cock and balls helpfully illustrated, in one of a number of drawings by Carrington\u2019s son in the book); she joins the other women, all but Natacha and Vera and Maude, in a hunger strike, since eating no longer seems safe. This is survivable only because Carmella has snuck in some port and chocolate biscuits, which the ladies ration and share at night, by the bee pond, where they meet in a sort of witches\u2019 sabbath and trance out in a \u201cweird dance\u201d that seems normal to them at the time.<\/p>\n

As Christabel beats her tom-tom and chants, a cloud rises from the pond, \u201can enormous bumble bee as big as a sheep.\u201d Marian reflects: \u201cAll this may have been a collective hallucination although nobody has yet explained to me what a collective hallucination actually means.\u201d What distinguishes hallucination from reality, the fake reality from the real reality, in a surrealist novel? If we believe anything, why not believe this? The weather turns cold, quite cold for Spain\u2014\u201cso cold that hoarfrost glittered over the garden every morning.\u201d The ag\u00e8d women are underfed and have no fur coats, yet Marian is happy. Because they\u2019re not eating, they can no longer be forced to work in the kitchen. Suddenly they are free. The earth\u2019s polarity is literally shifting. The sun stops rising; day merges into night; they stop using the word day<\/em>. Marian\u2019s life has changed, certainly. \u201cThe sparkling white frost brought a strange joy into my heart, and I thought about Lapland.\u201d Because she could not go to Lapland, Lapland came to her.<\/p>\n

On the next-to-last page of The Hearing Trumpet<\/em>, Marian says, \u201cThis is the end of my tale. I have set it all down faithfully and without exaggeration either poetic or otherwise.\u201d It reminds me of a moment in the 1810 German novella Michael Kohlhaas<\/em>, by Heinrich von Kleist, an aside from the almost invisible narrator, in preface to a strikingly unlikely coincidence: \u201cJust as verisimilitude and fact are not always perfectly aligned, something happened next that we will report, but permit readers who prefer to doubt it to doubt.\u201d We may<\/em> doubt it, but would we? And why? I love when a piece of fiction insists that it\u2019s true. Inside itself, it always is.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Elisa Gabbert is the author of five collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently\u00a0<\/em>The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>The Word Pretty.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Leonora Carrington\u2019s\u00a0\u201cThe Hearing Trumpet\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1241,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-150451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nInsane Places by Elisa Gabbert<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On Leonora Carrington's\u00a0"The Hearing Trumpet"\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/01\/21\/insane-places\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Insane Places by Elisa Gabbert\" 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