The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness - Couverture souple

Caramagno, Thomas C.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0520205049 ISBN 13 : 9780520205048

Editeur : University of California Press, 1996

Synopsis

In this major new book on Virginia Woolf, Caramagno contends psychobiography has much to gain from a closer engagement with science. Literary studies of Woolf's life have been written almost exclusively from a psychoanalytic perspective. They portray Woolf as a victim of the Freudian "family romance," reducing her art to a neurotic evasion of a traumatic childhood.

But current knowledge about manic-depressive illness—its genetic transmission, its biochemistry, and its effect on brain function—reveals a new relationship between Woolf's art and her illness. Caramagno demonstrates how Woolf used her illness intelligently and creatively in her theories of fiction, of mental functioning, and of self structure. Her novels dramatize her struggle to imagine and master psychic fragmentation. They helped her restore form and value to her own sense of self and lead her readers to an enriched appreciation of the complexity of human consciousness.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Thomas C. Caramagno teaches in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska. Kay Redfield Jamison is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

À propos de la quatrième de couverture

"Most valuable, to my thinking, is Caramagno's demonstration of the interrelationship between Woolf's literary brilliance and her devastating depressions and creative highs, and his insights into the creative process itself."—Ronald R. Fieve, M.D., author of Moodswing

"This book is a knockout. After reading it, Woolf scholars (like me), and everyone else, are going to have to rethink everything we think we know about Virginia Woolf. I expected yet another predictable book on Woolf's madness . . . and instead came away thoroughly impressed."—Jane C. Marcus, Distinguished Professor of English at The City College of New York and Coordinator of Women's Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center

"Caramagno's powerfully revisionist account of Woolf's life and work traces her courageous attempt to record and understand her own mental illness. His book throws a flood of light on the relentlessly honest self-scrutiny of her autobiographical writing as well as on the deliberate discontinuities of her fiction."—Alex Zwerdling, author of Virginia Woolf and the Real World

À propos de la deuxième de couverture

"Most valuable, to my thinking, is Caramagno's demonstration of the interrelationship between Woolf's literary brilliance and her devastating depressions and creative highs, and his insights into the creative process itself." Ronald R. Fieve, M.D., author of Moodswing

"This book is a knockout. After reading it, Woolf scholars (like me), and everyone else, are going to have to rethink everything we think we know about Virginia Woolf. I expected yet another predictable book on Woolf's madness . . . and instead came away thoroughly impressed." Jane C. Marcus, Distinguished Professor of English at The City College of New York and Coordinator of Women's Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center

"Caramagno's powerfully revisionist account of Woolf's life and work traces her courageous attempt to record and understand her own mental illness. His book throws a flood of light on the relentlessly honest self-scrutiny of her autobiographical writing as well as on the deliberate discontinuities of her fiction." Alex Zwerdling, author of Virginia Woolf and the Real World

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The Flight of the Mind

By Thomas C. Caramagno

University of California Press

Copyright © 1996 Thomas C. Caramagno
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520205048


Introduction

In this interdisciplinary study of Virginia Woolf I reexamine her madness and her fiction in the light of recent discoveries about the biological basis of manic-depressive illness—findings allied with drug therapies that today help nearly one million American manic-depressives to live happier, more productive lives. In the real world of the clinic, the use of lithium, antidepressants, and antipsychotics has revolutionized psychiatric care for bipolar disorder and produced remissions in cases that thirty years ago would have been considered hopeless. In the rarefied atmosphere of academia, however, many psychoanalytically inclined literary critics cling to the outmoded, simplistic Freudian model of this disorder as a neurotic conflict that the patient is, either consciously or unconsciously, unwilling to resolve.

By integrating neuroscience, psychobiography, and literary theory, I challenge these critics' often disparaging evaluations of Woolf's life and art and argue against the arbitrary and subjective practice of reading all symptoms or texts as neurotic disguises supposedly obscuring a causative origin. Freud was a great pioneer in the study of the human psyche, but he himself, given today's knowledge about the brain, would have moved on, incorporating his most enduring insights with ongoing research in neuroscience. We literary scholars can no longer afford to remain comfortably ignorant of the mechanisms of the brain or to pretend that, in any particular biographical case (and especially that one in which we have invested so much of our self-esteem and academic destiny), biology did not affect the mind. As academics, we are in the business of proving our mastery over our material and ourselves; perhaps that is why we are ungenerous toward those artists who show less control. But when we unthinkingly blame the victim for his or her illness, we simplify our work by ignoring the mind/brain nexus from which everything most human about literature arises. Neuroscience at the least teaches literature to soften its focus on the infantile, the cowardly, and the regressive in its subjects.

The science/literature model I use silences, not Woolf's own voice, but the voices of those Freudians who pontificate upon matters that cross the line between brain and mind without first investigating where the line is drawn or what it might mean for their conclusions. The biological realities of manic-depressive illness limit the critic's freedom to tie events in Woolf's life to symptoms that seem metaphorically similar. Biology lifts from Woolf's shoulders the derogatory weight of responsibility for her illness. It allows us to see that her fiction was not necessarily produced by hypothetical unconscious conflicts, her supposed flight from sex, or her morbid preoccupation with death—all the favorite Freudian themes which, not coincidentally, sustain sexist assumptions about the nature of the creative woman. I argue that Woolf's novels were produced by a sane, responsive, insightful woman—hardly a surprise, since, like "normal" individuals, most bipolars are thoughtful, deliberate, perceptive, and responsible when they are not ill.1 Manic-depressive illness is periodic; it comes and goes, and when it is gone, individuals are not sick or insane (unlike neurotics, whose unconscious conflicts seep into and determine even "normal" behavior). By remembering this, we can hear what Woolf wants to say, or remember, or feel, without thinking it must somehow be implicated in a twisted desire to remain ill.

But can a neurobiography be written to present the psychological consequences of genetic makeup, or biological dysfunction, infection, or injury, and still hold meaning for literary readers? Must ego find only its own glittering image interesting? The biological base upon which modern psychiatric theory builds has much to teach us. Subjectivity seems so selfevident to us that we do not stop to consider how much our perceptual apparatus mediates reality and limits introspection. Neuroscience tells us some very disturbing things about how complicated and problematic it is to ascribe meaning to events. Its warnings are worth hearing. I do not mean to argue that mind (or free will or subjectivity or character) is a negligible by-product of a series of chemical and electrical switches. On the contrary, a complex and creative mind seems to be the primary purpose of neurological structure, but because this is so, studying the mind requires a much more detailed knowledge of the brain than the literary psychobiographer has heretofore thought necessary.

Virginia Woolf's symptoms fulfill the manic-depressive paradigm. Taking this premise as my basis, I apply contemporary psychiatric theory to our knowledge of her life. This approach alters our reading of Woolf, explains the therapeutic value of her bold experiments in fiction, and points

to the source of her profound insights into subject-object transactions and the pitfalls of literary interpretation. Chapter 1 places Woolf's disorder in a historical context, explicating the changes that have occurred since Woolf's time in biological and psychological models for the illness and demonstrating how outmoded attitudes have infected biographical approaches to Woolf. Chapters 2 and 4 present current knowledge about manic-depressive illness (also known as bipolar affective disorder)—its genetic transmission, symptoms, and cognitive distortions—both in general terms and in relation to Virginia Woolf. Chapter 3 discusses the implications of biology for psychoanalytic criticism, the function of bipolar cognitive style in creativity, and reader-response theory. In Chapters 5 and 6 I argue that Woolf learned important object-relations lessons from her psychotic breakdowns and from her family's related symptoms; she used this knowledge creatively in her theories about fiction, mental functioning, and self-structure. Studies of her life and work by psychoanalytically inclined literary critics have often resulted in a reduction of the surface multiplicity of her fiction. In the service of a psychological model that is no longer relevant to her illness, they have attempted to impose coherence upon what seems deliberate incoherence or disjointedness. I contend that her work is not a neurotic evasion or a loss of control, but an intelligent and sensitive exploration of certain components other mood swings that undermines our traditional approach to reading a text and invites us to question how we construct meaning from a text.

Chapters 7 through 11 deal with the epistemological difficulties of interpretation. Through analyses of five of Woolf's novels, I attempt to show how these difficulties are intimately bound up with Woolf's manic-depressive illness, with an inner world that oscillated unpredictably between moments when the self seemed magically enhanced and empowered, imposing meaning and value indiscriminately on the outside world, and other moments when the emptiness and badness of the world lay revealed, corrupting (or corrupted by) the sickening self. Woolf's inconstant perceptual relationships with objects and self became one of the models by which she shaped and understood ambiguous and disturbing fictions. Her novels dramatize her struggle to read her perceptions correctly and to establish a bipolar sense of identity. Her understanding of her disorder, though fundamentally based on her personal experience of symptoms, was also influenced by her parents' maladaptive responses to loss and by her own childhood traumas, not as "Freudian" cause but as a source for cognitive model building. Woolf's lifelong quest for a "moment of being" aimed

not only to resolve issues of subjective and objective knowledge but also to reconcile the conflicting psychological patterns rife in her family that resembled elements of manic-depressive illness. In assuming the role of mediator between fictionalized representatives of her family and of her seemingly bifurcated self, Woolf discovered the power and self-confidence that insight and creativity bring to the artist. By imagining and mastering psychic fragmentation in fiction, she restored form and value to her self. Today's research into interhemispheric processing suggests that the same benefits may be achieved by readers who respond to a text by successfully entertaining other selves and various reading strategies in order to explore and enjoy the brain's potential for multiple domains of consciousness.

I wish to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to certain members of the English department at the University of California, Los Angeles, for their guidance and support during the early stages of this project: Gwin J. Kolb, Jr., Barbara L. Packer, Michael Cohen, Fran Horn, Robert Kinsman, Susan D. Brienza, Romey T. Keys, Geraldine Moyle, Kathy Spencer, Ross Shideler, and John Espey. Help on general issues in psychiatry and on autism derived from conversations with Drs. Michael McGuire and Susan Smalley at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute. I am personally most beholden to my mentor and dissertation director, Albert D. Hutter. His sharp questioning and exploration of new and rich areas of psychoanalytic criticism provided me with a model of academic writing that was both scholarly and exciting. My thanks go also to Kay Redfield Jamison, former director of the UCLA Affective Disorders Clinic and now associate professor in the department of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, and to Dr. William Cody, chief of psychiatry at Kaiser Hospital in Honolulu, for sharing their expertise in manic-depressive illness.

I thank my former colleagues in the department of English at the University of Hawaii, particularly George Simson, editor of Biography, Cristina Bacchilega, Arnie Edelstein, Eiton Fukumoto, Robert Martin (now at Oxford), Joseph Kau, Alan Leander MacGregor, James Caron, Barbara Gottfried (now at Bentley), Val Wayne, and Stephen Canham for their interest and encouragement. Thanks also go to the industrious members of the department's Second Critical Theory Group, especially Marc Manganaro (now at Rutgers), Russell Durst (now at Ohio State), and Anne Simpson (now at California State University at Pomona).

Considerable research support for this project came from Harvard University in several forms: the award of a very timely 1989–1990 Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in the humanities; use of their extensive

libraries (Widener for literary materials, the Houghton for unpublished letters, and Countway, the Harvard Medical School Library, for psychiatric holdings); and the criticism and encouragement of the director of the Mellon Program, Richard Hunt, the chairman of the English department, Robert Kiely, Susan Lewis, and Kathryne V. Lindberg. Support also came from a National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend in 1988 for travel abroad to examine Leonard Woolf's diaries in the Monk's House Papers collection at the University of Sussex Library (special thanks go to Helen Bickerstaff, assistant librarian in manuscripts). Along the way I received insight and guidance from members of G.A.P. (Group for the Application of Psychology) and the Institute for the Psychological Study of the Arts at the University of Florida, Gainesville, particularly from its director, Norman N. Holland, and its associate director, Andrew Gordon, who provided several opportunities for me to present my research both in Europe and in America. Critical help also came from Alex Zwerdling of the University of California at Berkeley; David Willbern of the State University of New York at Buffalo; Jane Marcus at the City College of New York; Janice Rossen and Carol Hanbery MacKay at the University of Texas at Austin; Robert Silhou of the Université de Paris VII; Antal Bokay of the Janus Pannonius University in Pecs, Hungary; and Phyllis Franklin and the five members of the MLA's William Riley Parker Prize Selection Committee, Thomas W. Best, Stephen Booth, Mary Ann Caws, David J. DeLaura, and Blanche H. Gelfant. I particularly want to thank the students of my Woolf seminars, both at the University of Hawaii and at Harvard, for their lively discussions and open affection for Woolf.

I am most grateful to my parents, Joseph and Elizabeth Caramagno, my aunt, Jean Selden, and Catherine Lord, for their love of learning and respect for truth. Without them, this book would never have been written.

Finally, I thank my wife, Susan, for all her help and her love.

University of Nebraska
Lincoln

Continues...

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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of California Press
• Date d'édition: 1996
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0520205049
• ISBN 13: 9780520205048
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 374
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Wiley-VCH GmbH; product_safety@wiley.com; ; Boschstrasse 12; Weinheim; 69469; Allemagne