In the last several instalments, I have discussed the similarities between aesthetic appreciation and, respectively, make-believe and psychosis. In make-believe, the child ‘creates’ a World the meaning of which is wholly recuperable, which gives her a feeling of control. A similar process occurs in psychosis- the psychotic forces the World to conform to his or her delusional beliefs, and so renders it wholly comprehensible. When we read fiction, likewise, we ‘create’ a World that, because it is not real, is an object over which we possess a feeling of control.
Is this conclusion tenable? To answer this question, I need to elaborate on two points. First I need to discuss further the relationship between psychosis and make-believe. Second, I need to discuss the way in which the reader can be said to ‘create’ the World about which he reads.
The notion that there is a relationship between psychosis and make-believe rests on the idea that the psychosis satisfies some kind of need, that the psychotic in some sense chooses to be delusional. This idea is contentious! The thing that makes child-play fun is that the game can be abandoned at any time; the psychotic, however, cannot simply ‘snap out of it’. Psychosis is apparently involuntary; the delusional World is, as it were, forced on the Psychotic as the only possible alternative.
I believe despite this, however, that the psychotic does indeed choose to be mad. She takes refuge in a delusional World because her real World is even more unpalatable.
Psychosis occurs when someone encounters environmental stressors in their everyday life with which they cannot cope, and devises an explanatory paradigm to at once account for and conceal the root cause of her anxiety. The stressors can be subtle, may simply take the form of perceptions, feelings, that are as repressed almost as soon as they appear. To deal with these perceptions in a way that preserves the coherence of her Ego, the Subject creates a ‘story’ to explain the world and then seeks evidence to support it. This creates a vicious circle, the subject seeking to reinforce her beliefs if necessary by creating evidence, which justifies further evidence-seeking. Soon the delusional beliefs have a life of their own and cannot be shaken. One explanation for psychosis, then, is that it arises from faulty feedback mechanism- a mechanism which instead of reducing noise so that a true signal can be heard, amplifies noise by turning passing fancies into dogma. Although this explains the somatic origins of psychosis, it does not explain the content of psychosis, This content, the delusional beliefs, are by their nature, evasive, escapist.
So psychosis is a partly volitional and can thus be compared to make-believe. Can these two aspects of human experience be compared to reading? I have argued, following Sartre, that reading is a kind of ‘directed creation’. This idea is also contentious. It might be argued that a book reveals itself to a reader the way the World does, as phenomena to be interpreted rather than created. However the book differs from the World in that it possesses an underlying order and unity. Perhaps we should say of the idea that the reader creates the work that it is partly true, or better yet, to say that it is a metaphor. The book reveals its meaning to the reader AS IF the reader were creating it himself. This explains why the reader feels that he is control of the World that is being revealed to him.
The discussion so far raises a third question – the problem of ‘the interesting’. The child when playing and the man or woman experiencing psychosis are naturally interested in the content of the make-believe Worlds. They are essential to these Worlds, are in fact the Worlds’ central characters. The same cannot be said when reading. I am currently burrowing through “Under The Volcano” by Malcolm Lowry, a novel that concerns an alcoholic ex-Consul living in Mexico; I am neither an alcoholic nor a Mexican and yet I am interested in the novel and in its protagonist. Why should I feel this interest?
The concept of the “The interesting” is a central crux my argument and I shall start discussing it in the next instalment, with respect to the short story “The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water” by David Eggers.
To conclude, I would like to draw a connection between literary appreciation and another aspect of human life ¬– dreaming. The dreamer experiences a World that is both intensely meaningful and fundamentally related to her own concerns. The psychotic can be considered to be dreaming when she is awake. One cannot underestimate the richness of a person’s dream-life as indeed one cannot underestimate the richness of a psychotic’s delusions. The relationship between dreaming and literature is complex and contentious but I hope to pursue it later in this blog.