Images Of Idiocy: The Idiot Figure In Modern Fiction And Film 1138275824, 9781138275829, 1351928848, 9780754602651

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgements......Page 8
Illustrations......Page 10
Introduction: Idiocy and Cultural Representation......Page 12
Part I: Idiocy in the Nineteenth Century......Page 38
1 Romantic and Victorian Idiots......Page 40
2 Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert and Jean Renoir)......Page 64
3 The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoevsky and Akira Kurosawa)......Page 84
Part II: Idiocy and Modernism......Page 104
4 The Secret Agent (Joseph Conrad and Alfred Hitchcock)......Page 106
5 Kaspar Hauser (Jakob Wassermann and Werner Herzog)......Page 126
6 Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck and Lewis Milestone)......Page 146
Part III: Idiocy After World War II......Page 166
7 Wise Blood (Flannery O’Connor and John Huston)......Page 168
8 Waterland (Graham Swift and Stephen Gyllenhaal)......Page 188
9 Such a Long Journey (Rohinton Mistry and Sturla Gunnarsson)......Page 206
Conclusion: Idiocy in Contemporary Film......Page 226
Filmography......Page 246
Bibliography......Page 248
Index......Page 268

Citation preview

Idiocy Prelims

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IMAGES OF IDIOCY

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‘It would be safer to ask the judgment of young lads or Countrey idiots … [than] those lubricious wits and overworn philosophers’ Henry More, Preface to Poems (1647)

‘It will be necessary to travel through the eyes of idiots’ Federico García Lorca ‘Landscape of a Urinating Multitude’ (1940)

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Images of Idiocy The Idiot Figure in Modern Fiction and Film

Martin Halliwell

First published 2004 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an in forma business Copyright © Martin Halliwell, 2004 Martin Halliwell has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Halliwell, Martin Images of Idiocy: The Idiot Figure in Modern Fiction and Film. 1. Literature, Modern—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Motion pictures—History. 4. Stupidity in literature. 5. People with mental disabilities in literature. 6. People with disabilities in motion pictures. 7. Motion pictures—Plots, themes, etc. T. Title 809.9'3352'0826 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Halliwell, Martin Images of Idiocy: The Idiot Figure in Modern Fiction and Film / Martin Halliwell. p. cm. Filmography: p. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. People with mental disabilities in literature. 2. People with mental disabilities in motion pictures. 3. Fiction— 19th century—History and criticism. 4. Fiction—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PN3426.P46H35 2004 809'8920826-dc21 2003048918 Typeset by Bournemouth Colour Press, Parkstone, Poole, Dorset.

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-0265-1 (hbk) ISBN 13 : 978-1-138-27582-9 (pbk)

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Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Illustrations

ix

Introduction: Idiocy and Cultural Representation

1

Part I Idiocy in the Nineteenth Century

27

1

Romantic and Victorian Idiots

29

2

Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert and Jean Renoir)

53

3

The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoevsky and Akira Kurosawa)

73

Part II Idiocy and Modernism

93

4

The Secret Agent (Joseph Conrad and Alfred Hitchcock)

95

5

Kaspar Hauser (Jakob Wassermann and Werner Herzog)

115

6

Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck and Lewis Milestone)

135

Part III Idiocy After World War II

155

7

Wise Blood (Flannery O’Connor and John Huston)

157

8

Waterland (Graham Swift and Stephen Gyllenhaal)

177

9

Such a Long Journey (Rohinton Mistry and Sturla Gunnarsson)

195

Conclusion: Idiocy in Contemporary Film

215

Filmography

235

Bibliography

237

Index

257

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Acknowledgements The research for Images of Idiocy began at the University of Exeter in 1992–93, and I would like to extend my thanks to Peter Faulkner, Anthony Fothergill and Michael Wood for the initial encouragement that galvanized this project. After a number of unstructured years pestering friends about information on and cultural references concerning idiocy, I returned to the subject in the late 1990s. I would like to express my gratitude to a number of individuals who contributed to the conception and development of this book, particularly Alan Burton, Nick Cull, Susan Currell, Michael Davies, Bryony Dixon, Nick Everett, Paul Hegarty, Caroline Hennigan, Michael Hoar, Richard King, Paul Lazarus, George Lewis, Paul Marygold, Anshuman Mondal, Andy Mousley, Dave Murray, Vince Newey, Emma Parker, Phil Shaw, Paul Tipper, Greg Walker and colleagues at the University of Leicester, who generously provided me with anecdotes, comments and advice. Heartfelt thanks go to Laraine and my family for their continual love and support. Laraine helped me to widen the range of this project, and tolerated my incessant ramblings with loving humour at all hours. Warm thanks go to Erika Gaffney, Ann Donahue and Kirsten Weissenberg at Ashgate and to The Wellcome Trust in London for a generous grant that enabled me to spend dedicated time consulting the holdings at the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. Thanks also to the librarians at The British Library, The Wellcome Trust Library and The Library of Congress for helping me to track down obscure references, and to the Neue Galerie in Linz and The Wellcome Trust for permission to use their images. Sections of this book were presented at the Hitchcock Rediscovered Conference, organized by Nottingham Trent University and Broadway Media Centre, held in Nottingham in July 1999; the Fourteenth International Humor Conference held in Bertinoro, Italy, in July 2002; a seminar at the University of Nottingham in December 2002, and the British Association of American Studies Conference, held in Aberystwyth, Wales, in April 2003. I would like to dedicate Images of Idiocy to the memory of Nicholas Zurbrugg (1947–2001), with whom I taught at De Montfort University, Leicester, for four years. As a mentor, colleague and cultural agitator, NZ was beyond compare.

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Illustrations

Herbert Bayer, ‘Lonely Metropolitan’ (‘Einsamer Großstädter’, 1932). SWPhoto-Montage, Inv. Nr. G. 20 HB. Stiftung Herbert Bayer, 35, 5 x 28 cm, © VBK, Wien 2002.

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Henry Sawyer (pub.), ‘John Donaldson, A Simpleton’ (n.d.) © The Wellcome Trust Medical Photographic Library, London 2002.

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Introduction

Idiocy and Cultural Representation This book explores the cultural representation of idiocy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is concerned primarily with the ways in which writers and filmmakers have been simultaneously attracted by visual images of idiocy and drawn to the idiot figure as a symbol for that which cannot be expressed or represented through other means. The book pursues two main arguments. The first proposition is that idiocy cannot be easily defined as a specific ‘condition’; as the discussion below demonstrates, scientific attempts to do so have usually foundered. Idiocy can more accurately be said to refer to a range of human experiences and traits that are difficult to classify, ultimately deriving from neurological impairment, but often reflected in forms of asocial behaviour that can be visually mimicked. The second argument is that visual images usually precede and often complicate an understanding of idiocy, serving to stigmatize the idiot in a discrediting way, or presenting characters as idiot figures that do not have appropriate cerebral limitations.1 While it may be difficult to conceptualize literature in visual terms, the physical depiction of idiot figures in fiction and film often fixes them with a particular image or ‘look’, which writers and directors often go on to problematize in the narrative. A prime example of this position is found in David Lynch’s 1980 film The Elephant Man, which reworks the story of Joseph Merrick (played by John Hurt), the Victorian oddity who suffered from the incurable disease neurofibromatosis. On first encountering Merrick, the doctor, Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), on whose memoirs the film is largely based, coaxes him to expose his face that has been concealed by a sack. The doctor says to Merrick: ‘Now, don’t be frightened. I simply want to look at you.’2 When later the image of Merrick’s bloated and chronically distorted face is revealed to the curious spectator, two responses are provoked: the first, a cool scientific interest in Merrick’s abnormality and, second, an emotional response of pity and revulsion. Although we are soon presented with the physical form of Merrick (his body is first shown in silhouette during an elaborate medical display), we have no access to his thoughts until much later in the film; what stimulates our interest at this stage is the desire to simply look at 1 ‘Discrediting’ is a key term in Erving Goffman’s sociological study Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 13. 2 The film is based on Frederick Treves’ account The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (London: Cassel & Co., 1923) and Ashley Montagu’s The Elephant Man: A Study of Human Dignity (New York: Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1971). Merrick’s own story was published as The Life and Adventures of Joseph Carey Merrick … Half a Man and Half an Elephant in 1878 (Leicester: H. & A. Cockshaw, 1880).

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him. When the doctor comments that ‘he’s an imbecile, probably from birth. The man’s a complete idiot. I pray to God he’s an idiot,’ he shuttles between scientific and emotive perspectives. His initial confidence that Merrick is ‘a complete idiot’ is superseded by his passionate desire that this is the case so Merrick does not have to bear the emotional consequences of comprehending his condition. It actually transpires that Merrick has a very active mind and he becomes accepted as a curiosity in Victorian society. As such, the film challenges the classification of Merrick as an idiot (which is far from an accurate label), while exploring how he sees the world in relation to how the world treats him and his deformity. Portrayals of idiocy in film and fiction are rarely as dramatic as Joseph Merrick in The Elephant Man (in which his idiocy is consistently challenged3), but clashes between scientific and cultural discourses are nearly always present in narratives involving an idiot figure, as if the idiot’s image cannot be contained in a single frame of reference. Because fiction and narrative film are usually charactercentred, the idiot figure has been used widely to explore a range of personality traits that cannot be adequately portrayed by means of habitual modes of human behaviour. The difficulties in representing idiocy often revolve around how the image or physical appearance of the idiot is to be rendered and what its aesthetic implications are. Sometimes the idiot is a symbol of childlike innocence in contrast to a corrupt or overly rational adult world; at others the figure represents social malaise or family decay; at others the idiot symbolizes the artistic struggle to articulate the inexpressible, and at others idiocy is configured as ‘the recession of being’, or simply a term of social abuse for stupidity or lack of common sense.4 As demonstrated in The Elephant Man, idiocy often becomes a flexible symbolic device situated between different and sometimes competing discourses: medical, legal, religious, folkloric, educational and aesthetic. Medical and legal discourses tend to seek very precise definitions, and it is valid to argue that science has used ‘cinematic techniques … to control, discipline, and construct the human body as a technological network of dynamic systems and forces’ on Michel Foucault’s surveillance model.5 However, the representation of idiocy in narratives is rarely this negative, mainly because cultural and social uses differ widely in regard to what the idiot figure symbolizes, who is deemed to be behaving idiotically, and the context in which the term is used. This book argues that there can be no simple reading of idiocy; it is best seen as an overdetermined concept with multiple and complex causes that arise at the intersection of the various discourses. As the first section of Images of Idiocy discusses, modern literary interest in 3 In 1986 two Canadian researchers claimed Merrick was afflicted by Proteus syndrome that accounted for the profound distortions in his physiognomy. See John Tibbles & M. Michael Cohen, Jr, ‘The Proteus Syndrome: The Elephant Man Diagnosed’, British Medical Journal, 293 (13 September 1986), 683–5. 4 Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 6. 5 Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 4.

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idiocy really began in the late eighteenth century with the Romantic preoccupation with the noble savage, to which the brutish idiot was often contrasted unfavourably. Idiocy became a minor theme in nineteenth-century writing, but did not receive widespread cultural attention until the early twentieth century with modernism and the birth of cinema. Consequently, the major part of the book focuses on twentieth-century representations of idiocy when fiction and narrative film became increasingly interdependent as cultural forms. As the second and third sections discuss, in the early twentieth century the idiot featured in modernist experiments with language and narrative form, while in the middle to late twentieth century the figure reappears as a complex, but recognizable, character at the interface between literary and cinematic representation. In addition to discussing literary portrayals of idiocy, the majority of the chapters (Chapters 2–9) consider the problems of adapting these representations for film, while the Conclusion discusses late twentieth-century films many of which do not have a discernible literary source. In some cases the striking image of the idiot dominates a particular story or film, whereas in others the disjunction between the appearance and symbolic function of the idiot provides the primary focus. One way of dealing with the range of modern cultural uses of idiocy is by conducting a ‘historical semantics’ of the term and considering how idiocy has been constructed across different discourses.6 One of the major problems of approaching a term like ‘idiocy’ from a linguistic perspective is that historical, social and cultural contexts are often sidelined in favour of a universal or essentialist definition of ‘the idiot’ and ‘the idiotic’. As Patrick McDonagh argues in his doctoral thesis ‘The Image of Idiocy in Nineteenth-Century England’ (1998), idiocy should not be thought of as ‘a stable trans-historical condition’, but rather a social idea with particular purposes and functions.7 While a semantic study can deal more carefully with temporal changes to, and the social relevance of, certain concepts, there is often only a tacit sense of the extrinsic conditions that bring about a shift in meaning. Raymond Williams asserts that ‘historical semantics’ as a methodology can actually compensate for the shortcomings of these approaches. Williams argues that this methodology can function simultaneously on two levels: first, the authorized history of a concept can be traced through the development of known and ‘legitimate’ words and, second, by attending closely to neglected histories one can begin to glean the ‘implicit connections’ found within ‘particular formations of meaning’ that ground words in beliefs and values not fully articulated in official documents.8 On this account, idiocy exists both as a legitimate label of medical classification and social dysfunction, but also as a general way of describing

6 Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976), p. 23. 7 Patrick McDonagh, ‘The Image of Idiocy in Nineteenth-Century England: A History of Cultural Representations of Intellectual Disability’, unpublished PhD thesis (Concordia University, Montreal, 1998), p. 9. 8 Williams, Keywords, p. 15.

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idiosyncratic, bizarre or outlandish behaviour that defies strict categorization. Although institutional definitions can often inform colloquial uses of the term, changes in the idiom and inflection of everyday language used to describe idiocy can also influence its official usage. Edgar Miller comments that terms like ‘imbeciles’, ‘feeble-minded’, ‘solitaries’, ‘morons’, ‘aments’, ‘cretins’ and ‘those suffering from “fatuity”’ have often been used – often incorrectly – as synonyms for idiots in both medical and cultural discourses.9 As this book discusses, there are obvious dangers in confusing such terms, but moving between official and colloquial articulations does provide a way of understanding the sustained interest in idiocy by writers, filmmakers and other cultural producers.10 This approach to idiocy as both a term of social abuse and a medical category would seem to involve unearthing its linguistic origins and determining which of its ‘numberless beginnings’ (to use Foucault’s phrase) best accounts for its continued use.11 While there is value in such an approach, there is also a danger in choosing a single (or ur-) origin that accounts for the mutations of a term as it is applied in different ways and articulated in different historical phases (for example, as ‘degeneracy’ at the nineteenth century fin-de-siècle or ‘feeblemindedness’ in the early twentieth century). Foucault would argue that history does not unfold continuously with a linear trajectory, but contains ruptures that force new meanings that may not reflect earlier or conventional uses. One way of respecting Foucault’s insights without fetishizing the theory of origins, is to recognize that, to use Williams’ phrase, ‘social and historical processes occur within language, in ways which indicate how integral the problems of meanings and relationships really are’.12 This does not mean that official definitions are always challenged: at times, idiocy has been simply used as a clinical category for distinguishing a profound degree of neural and motor impairment. However, in fiction in particular, where words rather than visual images produce the impression of idiocy (even though this impression can be described in visual terms), 9 Edgar Miller, ‘Idiocy in the Nineteenth Century’, History of Psychiatry, 7(27) (September 1996), 361. 10 For example, in his satirical look at the idiocies of late twentieth-century business culture, the cartoonist Scott Adams claims that ‘no matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot’: Adams, The Dilbert Principle (London: Boxtree, 1996), p. 2. In the late 1990s, the American musician Moby constructed a cartoon-like character called ‘The Little Idiot’ as his Internet persona, while idiotic characters like the befuddled and speech-impaired Elmer Fudd appeared regularly in cartoons in midcentury. The idiot figure is also a stock character and dramatic foil in film and television comedy, from Harpo Marx in the Marx Brothers’ MGM films of the 1930s (see Conclusion) and the Abbott and Costello TV series in the 1950s, to Baldrick in Blackadder in the 1980s (BBC, GB), Alice in The Vicar of Dibley (BBC, GB) and Father Dougal in Father Ted in the 1990s (Channel 4, GB). 11 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ (1971), in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 80. 12 Williams, Keywords, p. 22.

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the idiot figure is often a symbolic repository for that which defies categorization. Similarly, while the striking visual look of the idiot is one reason why filmmakers have been drawn to the figure, it rarely remains a fixed image, shifting in terms of the mise en scène and interaction with others. The danger of separating official uses of idiocy from general cultural interest in the idiot figure is that it leads to a bipartite scheme in which the natural and social sciences are totally divorced from literary and cinematic representation. Rather than science and art always being at odds (replicating C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ thesis of the 1950s), the interplay between precision and ambiguity is a marked characteristic of many representations of idiocy. Particularly in modern fiction, the idiot figure provides a vehicle for reappraising questions of identity in relation to accelerating social change or the clash between cultures, classes and ideologies. Such is the malleability of the idiot figure that, especially in films, a character that does not fully possess the traits of an idiot often fills the role. For example, in the American film Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988), Raymond Babbitt (played by Dustin Hoffman) is institutionalized after the death of his parents because he is severely autistic and often endangers himself. Taken away from the institution by his brother Charlie (Tom Cruise) for selfish reasons, Raymond is told repeatedly to ‘stop acting like an idiot’ even though it is clear that his autistic condition cannot be classified as such.13 Although there are many such examples in which the role of the idiot figure is divorced from idiocy per se, such as cult director David Cronenberg’s film Spider (2002),14 in other cases it often connects to identifiable discourses, such as the religious idea of the ‘holy fool’ (in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, for example), or the late nineteenth-century scientific category of the idiot savant (developed through Raymond’s masterly handling of numbers in Rain Man), or it provides writers and filmmakers with an embodied image for exploring philosophical problems such as the nature of subjectivity and knowledge of other minds (see the discussion of Jakob Wassermann’s Caspar Hauser in Chapter 5), or in dramatizing moral dilemmas of carers and families. Williams and Foucault both argue that at the locus where different meanings converge, contradictions arise that cannot easily be reconciled or disambiguated. While these variations in usage may lead to a confusion of labels, it prevents any 13 This is modulated at times in Rain Man when ‘retard’ and ‘freak’ are used instead of ‘idiot’, suggesting the terms are used loosely as Charlie casts around for suitable language to describe Raymond’s behaviour. The film shows how little was known about autism until the late 1980s, implying that ignorance fuels the rhetoric Charlie uses to rebuke his brother. Noticeably, the insults disappear as Charlie bonds with Raymond on their road trip West. 14 In Patrick McGrath’s novel Spider (1990) the eponymous character is given a strong narrative voice, but in the film Spider (Ralph Fiennes) is barely articulate and writes in scrawling hieroglyphics. McGrath claims that Spider is ‘floridly psychotic – a schizophrenic man spiraling out of control after being prematurely discharged from a top-security mental hospital’ in the mid-1950s, but in the film it is not clear whether his condition is related to idiocy or insanity (even though he has evidently been interned in an asylum): Patrick McGrath, ‘Adventures in Motion Pictures’, The Guardian Review (27 July 2002), 14.

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one definition having sovereignty, particularly important as idiocy is so often used as a term of abuse or belittlement. This enables cultural producers to use the term in creative ways that question or contest received understandings, rather than simply perpetuating stereotypes of mental and physical disability. The danger is that the role of the idiot is also open to misuse or deployed as a general metaphor for lapses in common sense, implying that definitions are important to prevent ignorance fuelling false representations. While the Marxian leanings of Foucault and Williams made them very suspicious of the authorized word and both offered materialist views of language that root ideas within particular discourses of power, Williams’ work does not ignore the vital role that dictionaries have come to play since the eighteenth century in anchoring ideas. Instead of approaching dictionaries as a source of ahistorical information, or viewing them as definitive (and potentially oppressive) repositories of knowledge, Williams places them beside other texts – aesthetic, historical, scientific – as one resource among others. By exploring the nodal points where ideas cluster around the intersection between specialized and general uses, not only can attempts to restrict the referential content of the term be shown to have an ideological agenda (whether using ‘idiocy’ as a label of abuse or banning its usage in the name of political correctness), but also it enables writers and filmmakers to explore the symbolic potential of idiocy while keeping an eye on its biological and medical meanings. Just as Patrick McDonagh argues that the nineteenth century saw an ‘ideological struggle waged over the image of idiocy’, so twentieth-century representations can be seen to further complicate a straightforward understanding of the term.15 On the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin’s model, this methodology rejects a ‘monologic’ model where official categories codify and delimit language and replaces it with the theory of a ‘dialogic’ or ‘polylogic’ mesh of competing discourses that prevents any one usage from having a higher truth claim than others.16

The Semantics of Idiocy To approach the cluster of ideas surrounding idiocy and its cultural images, it is important to identify how its use within different fields of inquiry problematizes straightforward understanding of the term. There are methodological limitations to starting with dictionary definitions, but an etymology of idiocy does help to account for its shifting medical and cultural uses. The word ‘idiot’ is derived from 15 McDonagh, ‘The Image of Idiocy in Nineteenth-Century England’, p. 8. Whereas McDonagh argues that idiocy had been ‘stripped of its complexity and multivalence’ by the end of the nineteenth century, this book demonstrates that, if anything, the ambiguity of the term is amplified in twentieth-century representations. 16 See Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981).

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the Greek idiotes, denoting a private person without professional knowledge, and the Latin idiota, an ignorant person. The Latin translation of the Greek implies that anyone engaged in private practices, because they hold no public office, is ignorant of worldly affairs. One extension of this inflection is a deprecatory use of the term when applied to people who are deemed to have a low level of intelligence or lack of awareness. The Middle English Dictionary defines idiot to mean ‘(a) A simple man, an uneducated person; a layman; (b) a mentally deficient person; one who lacks sound judgment, a fool’,17 while in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the term was used variously to describe ignorance, lack of skill, and clowning, and by the eighteenth century Samuel Johnson came to define idiocy in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755) simply as a ‘want of understanding’ – a designation that bridges the early definitions of simplicity and deficiency.18 The Oxford English Dictionary is in general agreement with these definitions, although it adds the words ‘private’ and ‘peculiar’ to the first sense, and extends the definition of the second. ‘Private’ here is synonymous with secluded and enclosed, a lineage that Williams traces to the withdrawn religious hermetic orders of the fourteenth century, but which later, with the impact of René Descartes’ theories of the mind in the mid-seventeenth century, came to be associated with the mentally private individual, separated from the public world. The ‘simple man’ is thus conceived essentially as a private individual, with the prefix idio- (‘own, personal, private, peculiar, distinct’) linking it to the terms ‘idiolalia’ (Gk. laleo, ‘chatter, babble’), ‘idiosyncrasy’ (Gk. sy[n]gkrasis, ‘mixing, blending’) and ‘ideopathy’ (Gk. pathos, ‘disease’).19 However, the general usage of ‘simple’ is far from neutral, implying a moral and psychological evaluation, with both mild (foolish, jesting) and strong (stupid, dumb) connotations that accord to the two definitions in the Middle English Dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary extends the meaning of the second sense to define an ‘idiot’ as: A person so deficient in mental or intellectual faculty as to be incapable of ordinary acts of reasoning or rational conduct. Applied to one permanently so afflicted, as distinguished from one who is temporarily insane, or ‘out of his wits’, and who either has lucid intervals, or may be expected to recover his reason.20

17 Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1954), Volume 10, p. 20. Two verses referring to idiots in the Wyclifite Bible (c.1385) – Deeds IV, 13, in which Peter and John are described as ‘men withoute lettris and idiots’, and Corinthians XIV, 16: ‘who fulfillith the place of an ydiote’ – are modified in later versions to simply refer to ignorance or lack of learning: ibid., p. 20. 18 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: Longman & Co., 1827), Volume 2, n. p. 19 Oxford English Dictionary, Volume 7, p. 622. 20 Ibid., p. 625. There is an argument to suggest that Johnson sought a prescriptive approach to language (based on his comment in the Preface to The English Dictionary:

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This formal definition aligns idiocy with madness, irrationality and unreason, but as a permanent state rather than a temporary affliction. On this level, in a study of idiocy in early modern Britain, Jonathan Andrews discerns that pure idiocy (purus idiota) was seen as a ‘constant deficiency, in distinction to madness, which was viewed as a passing changeable phase, punctuated often by intervals of sanity’.21 However, Andrews indicates that there are also tensions between philosophical, legal, medical and institutional definitions of idiocy in texts like John Brydall’s Non Compos Mentis (1700) and a general ‘failure to distinguish the insane from mentally disabled … or other species of deviance’ that explains the lack of ‘distinct, specialist institutions for them’.22 What these dictionaries fail to define (or cannot detail, given their terms of reference) are the distinctive characteristics of idiocy – its personal forms and culturally specific manifestations – and how it qualitatively differs from madness. Deriving from a frequent conflation of madness and idiocy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this kind of omission indicates one of the confusions surrounding the term and why it has often been mistaken, or used as a synonym, for a type of madness: what Andrews has called ‘two relatively interchangeable sides of the same equation, sharing the same stigmata’.23 Such everyday understandings of idiocy prevailed into the nineteenth century, as evidenced in this remarkable description by the British philanthropist James Abbott in The Hand Book of Idiotcy (1857): To the traveler in France and Italy the name recalls a vacant creature all in rags, gibbering and blinking in the sun with a distorted face … In association with Switzerland, it suggests a horrible being, seated in a châlet door (perhaps possessing sense enough to lead the way to a neighbouring waterfall), of stunted and misshapen form, with a pendulous excrescence dangling from his throat … In the Highlands of Scotland, or on the roads of Ireland, he becomes a red-haired Celt, rather more unreasonable than usual, plunging ferociously out of a mud cabin, and casting stones at a stranger’s head. As a remembrance of our own childhood in an English country town, he is a shambling, knock-kneed man, who was never a child, with an eager utterance of discordant sounds, which he seemed to keep in his protruding forehead, a tongue too large for his mouth, and a dreadful pair of hands, that wanted to ramble over everything – our own face included.24

‘those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, will require that it should fix our language’), while the Oxford English Dictionary is much more descriptive in its approach. See Mona Wilson (ed.), Johnson: Prose and Poetry, 2nd edn (London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1957), p. 319 and A. D. Horgan, Johnson on Language (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994). 21 Jonathan Andrews, ‘Begging the Question of Idiocy: The Definition and Socio-cultural Meaning of Idiocy in Early Modern Britain’, History of Psychiatry, 9, 1(33) (March 1998), 66. 22 Ibid., 65. 23 Ibid., 68. 24 James Abbott, The Hand Book of Idiotcy (London: Trübner & Co., 1857), p. 6.

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As an attempt to combat these stigmatized – yet visually powerful – stereotypes of idiocy, Abbott’s tract was part of the Victorian project to distinguish idiocy from other forms of mental disorder and to provide measures to educate idiots, who should no longer be thought of as ‘hopeless, irreclaimable and unimprovable beings’.25 Only with the refinement of medical discourses in the late nineteenth century was idiocy more closely defined, with the classifications tightened up and the term idiot savant given official status.26 Until the late nineteenth century, madness and idiocy were not categorically distinct: idiocy was seen as an ill-defined area of insanity, where the sufferers were so profoundly affected that the only potential danger was to themselves. Seminal works on the subject by Franz Gall, Anatomie et physiologie du système nerveux en général, et du cerveau en particular (1810–18), Jean Esquirol, Dictionnaire des sciences medicales (1828–30) and Edouard Séguin, Traitement moral, hygiène et éducation des idiots (1846), and later AngloAmerican studies by John Connolly, ‘The Physiognomy of Insanity’ (1858), P. Martin Duncan, A Manual for the Classification, Training and Education of the Feeble-Minded, Imbecilic and Idiotic (1866) and William Ireland, On Idiocy and Imbecility (1877), led to an increased awareness of mental illness and the need for more precise definitions. For example, the Fellow for the Royal College of Physicians in Britain, Frederic Bateman, offered a standard medical definition of idiocy: An idiot is a human being who possesses the tripartite nature of man – body, soul, and spirit – … but who is the subject of an infirmity consisting, anatomically, of a defective organization and want of development of the brain, resulting in an inability, more or less complete, for the exercise of the intellectual, moral, and sensitive faculties. There are various shades and degrees of this want of development, from those whose mental and bodily deficiencies differ but slightly from the lowest of the so-called sound-minded, to those individuals who simply vegetate,

25 Ibid., p. 6. Erving Goffman describes three groups of stigma that serve to ‘discredit’ the individual: the first group, ‘abominations of the body’, is parodied in Abbott’s challenge to received wisdom; the second group, ‘blemishes of individual character’, is often associated with stupidity or mental disorder; while the third group, ‘tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion’, is often underplayed when dealing with idiocy: Goffman, Stigma, p. 14. 26 John Langdon Down coined the term ‘idiot savant’ in 1887 in relation to extraordinary powers of memory associated with individuals whose reasoning was otherwise impaired or limited: one of Down’s own patients had memorized Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. See John Langdon Down, Mental Afflictions of Childhood and Youth (1887) (Oxford: MacKeith Press, 1990). Edgar Miller discusses Down’s shifting theories of idiocy (particularly his interest in deformed palates), arguing that statistical data was often used ‘to answer scientific questions in an era that lacked appropriate statistical techniques’: Miller, ‘Idiocy in the Nineteenth Century’, 363; 371.

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IMAGES OF IDIOCY and whose deficiencies are so decided as to isolate them, as it were, from the rest of nature.27

Not all Victorian medical definitions were ideologically free. In 1866 John Langdon Down classified idiots in terms of their visual resemblance to certain ‘ethnic types’.28 The category of ‘mongolism’ that became synonymous with Down’s syndrome gave a racial inflection to one strain of congenital idiocy that prevailed until twentieth-century developments in genetic research. A number of late nineteenth-century tracts positioned idiots within the general discourse of degeneracy (given late Victorian fears of national and cultural decline), but the first comprehensive glossary of idiocy did not occur until the multi-volume Twentieth Century Practice: An International Encyclopaedia of Modern Medical Science in 1897 (the same year as the second edition of Bateman’s tract quoted above). The title of the encyclopaedia indicates an engagement with modern medicine and looks ahead to the coming century. Paul Sollier’s entry on ‘Idiocy’ traces the term through various clinical writings of the nineteenth century, but then goes on to focus on the slippery nature of the term. He claims that idiocy should not be understood as a ‘morbid entity’ because ‘there is no “idiocy” and scarcely even any “idiots”’, rather ‘idiocy is the symptom of a large number of cerebral affections, and the term means only a defect in intelligence, either congenital or dating from very early life’.29 Sollier implies that a wholesale revision of medical classifications would be needed to understand hidden ‘cerebral affections’, even to the extent that categories like ‘idiocy’ would become redundant. Despite this assertion, the term remained current in clinical practice into the twentieth century. Eighty years on from Sollier’s article an idiot had come to be defined as ‘an adult whose intellect has become arrested at a mental age of less than three years’.30 The British Medical Dictionary (1961) adds that ‘as idiocy implies arrest of development, rather than regression from a higher level (dementia), it must be due to causes genetical, traumatic, infective etc., arising either before or within two or three years after birth’.31 Within these broad definitions, idiots fall into two main categories: those congenitally affected, a complaint caused by chromosomal or genetic abnormalities 27 Frederic Bateman, The Idiot: His Place in Creation and His Claims on Society, 2nd edn (London: Jarrold & Sons, 1897), p. 16. 28 John Langdon Down, ‘Observations on the Ethnic Classification of Idiots’, Clinical Reports of the London Hospital, 3 (1866), 259–62. 29 T. L. Stedman (ed.), Twentieth Century Practice: An International Encyclopaedia of Modern Medical Science (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1897), Volume 12, p. 257. 30 William Haubrich (ed.), Medical Meanings, A Glossary of Word Origins (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 118. 31 Arthur MacNalty (ed.), The British Medical Dictionary (London: Caxton, 1961), p. 728.

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(such as Down’s syndrome), and those suffering maternal infection or a severe childhood illness (such as encephalitis or meningitis) usually before the age of two. Mental retardation in the former is often accompanied by varying degrees of physical and physiological impairment, while the latter may be detected only in a slowness to learn and deficiency in motor response. Genetic and environmental factors are still crucial in identifying degrees of retardation, but the application of ‘idiocy’ in medical terminology became obsolete for three main reasons. First, even when legitimately used as a clinical category, ‘it designated a much narrower spectrum of feeble-mindedness than is actually occupied by … mentally retarded people’.32 Following the Idiots Act of 1866, the British Mental Deficiency Act of 1927 recognized four types of mental defectives, in ascending order: idiots, imbeciles, the feeble-minded, and moral defectives. Idiots were defined as having an IQ less than 20: that is, less than a normally functioning two-year-old child. An earlier Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 had classified idiots as ‘mental defectives’, making them unable to ‘guard themselves against common physical dangers’, and as needing the care of a child suffering from arrested development.33 As Jonathan Andrews has discussed, this Act gave little thought to treatment; like the nineteenth-century reforms in Britain, it ‘was aimed at the control and segregation’ of idiots in colonies or hospitals.34 One problem with the classification of 1913 was that it judged ‘mental defectives’ solely on intellectual capability and largely ignored motor, sensory and interpersonal traits which, as Stephen Jay Gould comments, resulted in intelligence being seen as ‘a unitary thing’ with ‘standard procedures of science virtually [dictating] that a location and physical substrate be sought for it’.35 The second reason why idiocy is no longer a clinical term stems from the confusion in medical classifications, particularly when culturally specific tests for immigrants to the USA produced results that were not an accurate assessment of the subject’s intelligence.36 Increasingly, the term had come to be used as a form of social insult, used in general parlance to describe someone behaving in an outlandish, stupid or unacceptable manner to such an extent that Gould suggests the term is ‘now so entrenched in the vernacular of invectives that

32 Michael A. Howe, Fragments of Genius (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 6. 33 David Clarke, Mentally Handicapped People (London: Bailliere Tindall, 1981), p. 32. See also Herbert Davey, The Law Relating to the Mentally Defective: The Mental Deficiency Act, 1913 (New York: DaCapo Press, 1981). 34 Clarke, Mentally Handicapped People, p. 32. 35 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (1981) (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 56. Gould also provides a comprehensive discussion of the ‘hereditarian theory of IQ’ together with the mass-marketing appeal of IQ tests and their use in the US Army: pp. 176–263. 36 As Avital Ronell describes, the term ‘moron’ was used as a catch-all label for identifying immigrants deemed ‘incapable of dealing with their own affairs with ordinary intelligence or taking part in the struggle for survival’, and thus a tool to restrict immigration to the USA in the early century: Ronell, Stupidity, p. 59. The psychologist Robert Yerkes,

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few people recognize [its] technical status in an older psychology’.37 As the following chapters discuss, this derogatory tendency was also alive in eighteenthand nineteenth-century culture, as well as characterizing some recent cinematic uses of idiot figures. Despite these connections, it is clear from tracing the cultural history of idiocy that its uses are varied and often confusing. The wide usage of the term, especially in the English-speaking world (commonly heard on television shows in America, Australia and Britain), has made it increasingly difficult for idiocy to remain viable for precise medical classification. The third reason that idiocy has lost its medical status is that since the 1927 Act there have been two vital shifts in definition. The British Mental Health Act of 1959 replaced the discrete scheme of classification with a continuous scale of gradations. Although the term ‘subnormal’ (‘severely subnormal’ for idiots) continued to imply that mental defectives constituted a special subgroup, the new Act was committed to social integration. While these changes were more tolerant by admitting that those classified as idiots should be treated as sentient beings with needs and desires, there remained the feeling that little could be done in terms of medical and pastoral provision. One reason for this may be that these Acts sought both medical and legal classifications. Legal definitions tend to ignore semantic ambiguity in order to clarify identifiable categories upon which sound judgments can rest and property rights be decided. Like the British Lunacy Acts of 1845, 1853 and 1890, the new Acts sought not only to classify but also to legislate for methods of social care. In resistance to this, the National Association for Mental Health (Mind) attempted to replace the terms ‘deficiency’ and ‘subnormality’ with that of ‘mental handicap’. Instead of the category of idiot, ‘profound mental handicap’ was proposed as an alternative. This shift in definition is vital for transferring emphasis away from a sense of incompleteness and lack, to a social condition that only partially hampers a fully active life. The modulation in emphasis not only allows for improvement (however limited), but also leaves open the possibility of transforming philosophical and medical understanding of mental illness. Accordingly, the almost freakish categories of 1913 were replaced by gradations of handicap, based not only on IQ but also on other psychological and social factors that emphasized a sense of human continuity instead of radical difference. With the rise of disability studies in the early 1990s, the language of handicap was again challenged by advocacy groups promoting discourses that credit an individual’s abilities, rather than their disabilities.38 However, while political correctness has deterred the use of who invented mental testing for US Army recruits in the mid-1910s, suggested that 37 per cent of white Americans and 89 per cent of African Americans verged on ‘the moronic’ (mental age 8 to 12), but the racist implications of these tests are obvious, with Poles and Russians faring worse than West Europeans, while blacks were divided into groups ‘based upon intensity of color’ with ‘lighter groups scoring higher’: Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, p. 227. 37 Ibid., p. 188. 38 For example, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 demanded accommodation in public spaces for the largest minority group in the USA and a new

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derogatory terms like ‘cretin’ and ‘moron’, when it comes to ‘idiocy’ it seems there is no adequate alternative as a term that strikes the right balance between psychological, neurological, physiological, behavioural and social malady.

Imaging Idiocy As a study of the cultural uses and images of idiocy, this book discusses the representation of the idiot figure in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and in twentieth-century film. The first chapter provides cultural and scientific contexts for approaching representations of idiocy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which coincides with what Alan Bewell has called ‘the philosophical discovery of the idiot’.39 The interest of Romantic and Victorian writers in idiocy prefigures many of the themes arising in later representations, particularly the ‘look’ and symbolic function of the idiot. The following chapters focus on significant literary texts that represent idiocy: from Gustave Flaubert’s and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s major nineteenth-century novels Madame Bovary (1857) and The Idiot (1868), to the modernist writing of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1906), Jakob Wassermann’s Caspar Hauser (1908) and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), and on to post-World War II fiction in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952), Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey (1991). By closely reading these texts, the chapters trace the development of idiocy as a cultural concept, from Flaubert’s personal interest in stupidity (or bêtise) as one of the ‘received ideas’ (idées reçues) of the nineteenth century to Mistry’s subtle exploration of the place of the idiot in the postcolonial world.40 Because the visual appearance of idiot figures is one of the primary reasons for their inclusion in these texts, the chapters also discuss corresponding film adaptations, looking particularly at the strategies used to re-image idiocy for the screen.

concept of ‘incorporative citizenship’ for disabled people. Terms like ‘partially disabled’ or ‘alternatively abled’ have been advocated as replacements for earlier normative and derogatory labels which, as Philip Wilson argues, help to ‘stress personhood and not anomaly’: Philip K. Wilson, ‘Eighteenth-Century “Monsters” and Nineteenth-Century “Freaks”: Reading the Maternally Marked Child’, Literature and Medicine, 21(1) (Spring 2002), 18. 39 Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 57. 40 Recognizable idiot figures occur much more frequently in European and EuroAmerican writing than in other ethnic fictions. One would think with poor educational provision in, for example, Native American culture that idiocy would be more frequently represented. However, in this case, there seems less of a need for idiot figures, with visionary figures such as the shaman providing mystical insights denied to more secularized characters, and where social ills such as poverty and alcoholism take priority over mental illness.

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The focus throughout the book is on the way in which idiot figures have been constructed to propel narratives in a particular direction or to act as a counterpoint to other characters. Because idiots are usually seen as lacking the ability to act meaningfully, it would seem that a structuralist approach to characterization is most suitable for this type of study. On Vladimir Propp’s model, characters are not seen as individuals or personalities but as ‘figures’ in the text that amplify themes or carry action forward; in the case of an idiot figure that lacks agency, he or she would be propelled by the action of others.41 But this structuralist view tends to reduce character to a function of the text, and does not deal with the manner in which readers help to construct characters, to make them into what Baruch Hochman calls ‘the more or less coherent, more or less self-declaring structure of the work that generates them and that we perceive as a single thing’.42 While Hochman’s comment is useful for considering the relationship between text and reader, with idiot figures this ‘more or less’ is always under threat from an inner lack of coherence that is sometimes figured as enigmatic passivity and sometimes as mercurial restlessness. From this alternative perspective, idiot figures are often ‘open’ characters in process rather than fixed functions. Thomas Docherty argues that this openness allows ‘for the possibility of change and mobility in the meaning of character’, a view that is particularly germane to modernist and postmodernist writing in which characters are rarely stable entities: sometimes fragmentary, sometimes incomplete, and sometimes discontinuous.43 On this poststructuralist model, a study of the idiot figure helps to sharpen an understanding of character as unfinished process created through the complex interactions between reader, text and author. This theory of character is complicated even further if we throw into the mix filmic representations because, as Hochman makes clear, character is rarely just the sum total of words: ‘on the margins of literature stand ritual, silent films, pantomimes, picture books, and the like, which generate images of people by nonverbal means’.44 Fiction and film may seem ‘overtly compatible’ in their mutual reliance on narrative and their focus on characters, but they can also be seen as ‘secretly hostile’ to each other as very distinct cultural forms.45 Not only is it necessary to attend to the linguistic and visual emphases of the two media, it is also important to do justice to the artistic and commercial pressures that shape

41 See Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1977). 42 Baruch Hochman, Character in Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 64. 43 Thomas Docherty, Reading (Absent) Character: Towards a Theory of Characterisation in Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. xiv. 44 Hochman, Character in Literature, pp. 31–2. 45 Deborah Cartmell & Imelda Whelehan (eds), Adaptations (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 7.

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each one. Because fiction can, in the words of the American author John Barth, ‘render directly the universe inside our heads and under our skins: the nonphysical universe of sensibility [and] can reflect, decide, generalize, and interpret, without anyone necessarily moving or speaking aloud’ and on the whole fiction is less bound by commercial imperatives than most films, it might be true to say that literary representations of idiocy are more authentic.46 However, if by ‘authentic’ we mean ‘deeper’ or ‘fuller’, then depth psychology may seem limited when approaching the cerebral limitations and apparent existential impoverishment of idiocy. Because the two-dimensional space of film only gives the illusion of depth (visually reducing the self to a surface), it may be that visual representations of idiocy can tell us more about broader cultural stereotypes and attitudes than can the ‘nonphysical universe’ of fiction.47 Moreover, as the idiot figure is one of the major attractions that draws filmmakers to particular literary texts, images of idiocy produced on screen are often no more superficial than, and in many instances open to similar interpretative strategies as, their literary counterparts. As Images of Idiocy explores, it is important to attend not only to the modes of visualizing the idiot on screen (as distinct from the linguistic construct of literature), but also to the historical and cultural gaps between a literary work and its film adaptation. For example, even though Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1951) is faithful to the novel, it was produced virtually a century after the book was written; it shifts the cultural frame of reference from Russia to Japan, and it places the idiot figure in a very different genre. However, as Chapter 3 makes clear, an analysis of these differences can actually be productive in terms of determining the shifting configuration of idiocy. Another problem is that some of the literary texts have more than one adaptation: Madame Bovary has been adapted for cinema at least four times, while The Secret Agent has been made into a two-part BBC series in the UK, as well as two very different cinematic adaptations. In the cases where there has been more than one film version, the discussion will focus on the most distinctive in terms of the aesthetic reasons for including the idiot figure and in dealing with the problems of representing idiocy. This does not mean these versions best treat the figure as an ‘authentic’ idiot. It is precisely the uncertainty of the status of idiocy that characterizes many of the literary texts and their film versions alike. Hence, films that transmute the idiot into another form – for example, Alfred Hitchcock’s version of The Secret Agent, released as Sabotage in 1936, transforms the retarded Stevie into a willing schoolboy – often retain the shifting symbolic function of the idiot figure. Applying the insights of Foucault on surveillance and the gaze, the critic T. Hugh Crawford has argued that when dealing with visual media and medical phenomena, there is a paradox in terms of spectatorship: what is watched is both 46 John Barth, ‘The Limits of Imagination’ (1985), in Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures and Other Nonfiction 1984–1994 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1995), p. 55. 47 Docherty, Reading (Absent) Character, p. 84.

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a source of knowledge and a focus of the spectator’s voyeuristic gaze.48 If on the one hand we associate truth with clear vision, then this is problematized in cinema, in terms of both the intended audience (when even the specialized scientist or medic will become a ‘spectator’ in a wider audience of viewers) and the function of a character within a narrative framework. As Crawford claims: The notion that clear vision can produce simple knowledge of the world ignores a number of factors: the technologically mediated perspective that in part dictates how something can be observed; and the complex social relationship implied in the construction of the seeing-and-being dyad, particularly when what is being seen is not a simple object but is instead a human being.49

This relationship is further complicated when the subject under scrutiny occupies a different symbolic space from the other characters, in this case because of disability. As Martin Norden has argued in The Cinema of Isolation (1994), ‘movies have tended to isolate disabled characters from their able-bodied peers, as well as each other’.50 Given that most films intend an ‘able-bodied point of view’, the result is often the special treatment of the disabled character that enhances ‘their isolation and “Otherness” by reducing them to objectifications of pity, fear, scorn, etc. – in short, objects of spectacle’.51 However, unlike the forms of physical disability that Norden discusses, rather than the ‘simplicity’ of the idiot figure fixing them in a clearly defined role, or allowing the largely ‘ablebodied’ audience to imprison the figure with a controlling cinematic gaze, the instability of the discourse of idiocy is often used to test social relationships. 48 Sander Gilman argues that until the twentieth century medics were dependent upon ‘extra-medical features’ in the representation, imaging and diagnosis of many complaints: Gilman, ‘What Looks Crazy’, in The Turn of the Century, German Literature and Art, 1890–1915, ed. Gerald Chappel & Hans H. Schute (Bonn: McMaster, 1981), p. 86. He argues that the objectivity that medical scientists claimed was grounded in the use of these ‘extra-medical’ or aesthetic representations. Pictorial illustrations were used throughout Europe to represent the expressions of the insane until the 1850s and then slowly became outmoded by developments in photography, X-ray technology and the use of cinematography in laboratories. Lisa Cartwright claims that in the late 1890s the use of motion picture by the Scottish physician John Macintyre and the Viennese researcher Ludwig Braun (to film the rapid movement of a frog’s legs and the contractions of a dog’s heart respectively) are important examples of ‘physiological cinema’ that was soon to supplement and, at times, replace ‘sensory perception’ in the medical sciences: Cartwright, Screening the Body, p. 23. 49 T. Hugh Crawford, ‘Visual Knowledge in Medicine and Popular Film’, Literature and Medicine, 17(1) (Spring 1998), 30. 50 Martin F. Norden, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p. 1. This view is also developed with reference to visual culture at large in Jessica Evans’ essay ‘Feeble Monsters: Making Up Disabled People’, in Visual Culture: The Reader, ed. Jessica Evans & Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 2001), pp. 274–88. 51 Norden, The Cinema of Isolation, p. 1.

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Instead of simply confirming the spectator’s views in terms of ‘knowing’ the idiot, like the young and initially prejudiced narrator Scout in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) who comes to a fresh understanding of the idiot figure Arthur ‘Boo’ Radley, films can challenge the preconceived ideas that a spectator has about idiocy. In these instances, to quote Crawford, human relations may ‘seem transparent … but they are, instead, fraught with complexity and produce by their very transparency an unacknowledged and overdetermined way of viewing and acting in the world’.52 The problem that Martin Norden identifies in the judgement of physical and mental disability in terms of external characteristics and behaviour is the deeply ingrained cultural convention of associating defects with a lack of virtue or suspect morality. The theatricality of a particular body image (such as Shakespeare’s representation of Richard III’s hunchback) or the manipulation of the face in particular ways (Stan Laurel’s idiotic expression as he scratches his head) usually serve to visually fix the corruption or simplicity of a character. On Norden’s view, many cinematic representations of disability perpetuate stereotypes by commodifying familiar images for ‘able-bodied’ spectators that inhabit a fixed point in relation to the film, while it is left to fiction to metaphorically get beneath the skin of the idiot. However, with the relationship between film and fiction becoming increasingly entangled in the twentieth century, it may not be viable to separate the two media into such discrete zones. A more dynamic reading of visual culture in which the critic attends to the tonality of the filmic image would suggest that, as Josh Cohen argues, the image opens up ‘a potentially limitless range of readerly interpretations [and] produces a fluid relationship between eye and object’.53 On this model, by focusing on the enigmatic image in terms of framing, perspective and depth of field, film can bring ‘into being a new set of spectatorial relations between narrating subject and narrated object’, perhaps more intensely than a written story. In other words, rather than simply replicating what Lisa Cartwright calls ‘the physiological cinema’ used in medicine, which attempts ‘to render visible parts of the living body that were previously considered to be too interiorized, too minute, or too private to be seen by the researcher’s unaided eye’, narrative film can question (or can be used to question) the authority of framing an image or constructing a character in a particular way.54 In other words, rather than pushing the viewer into the fixed spectatorial position of Renaissance or neo-classical painting, recent theories of visual perception suggest a shifting relation between viewer and character that can awaken ‘a new and powerful acuity in the spectator’.55 This view is homologous

52 Crawford, ‘Visual Knowledge in Medicine and Popular Film’, 42. 53 Josh Cohen, Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing (London: Pluto, 1998), p. 74. 54 Cartwright, Screening the Body, p. 23. 55 Cohen, Spectacular Allegories, p. 78. The visual theorist Victor Burgin argues

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to the interpretative shift away from a structuralist understanding of character as a fixed ‘figure’ that resolves apparent contradictions to a poststructuralist position that opens up textual aporias and attends closely to the instability of representation. As such, the enigmatic presence of the idiot figure can act as a visual point of rupture in the narrative, propelling us closer to Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic engagement than to Norden’s thesis of perpetuating stereotypes. Having asserted this, the tendency for most film adaptations to be as faithful to the literary original as possible has often inhibited a more experimental approach to imaging idiocy as a unique ontological space – somewhere between adult, adolescent, child and creature – which encourages the spectator to engage with and think through problems of representation. The issue, of course, is that this ‘idiotic space’ is either wholly unrepresentable (it being impossible to get inside the mind of an idiot), or that attempts to represent it serve to isolate the character further in line with Martin Norden’s position. Most of the film adaptations discussed in this book make certain strategic changes in order to image idiocy in a particular way, sometimes altering or enhancing particular characteristics while still remaining loyal to the idiot’s symbolic role in the narrative and details of the plot. Films such as Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle, 1974) take more liberties with their literary source than others like Lewis Milestone’s Of Mice and Men (1939), but in all the adaptations considered here the striking presence of the idiot can be shown to provide a rupture in the naturalistic flow of the film. That does not mean every adaptation is successful in depicting idiocy (far from it), merely that in the attempt to embody a virtually unknowable ontological position (which must be the case if we equate idiocy with the IQ of a two-year-old child) a strain is placed on the narrative dynamic that alerts the reader to the problems of representation. As most of the examples included in this book attest, European and American cultural representations have tended to focus on male idiots. This gender imbalance is not borne out in actual cases of institutionalized idiocy in the nineteenth century, but perhaps the bias can be explained partly by the much longer tradition of male natural fools, a tradition that is often evoked in twentieth-century culture. One reason for this is that women have been traditionally associated with a different range of afflictions – depression, hysteria, erotomania, derangement and fainting – that are distanced from the semantics of idiocy. The result of this, as Philip Martin argues, is that ‘female madness becomes an “established convention”’ and its free interpretation often ‘closed down by the ubiquitous presence of hysteria’.56 While pictures like Johann Heinrich Füssli’s ‘Mad Kate’ that whereas classical theories of representation understand the image as ‘a mirror’ of ‘an ordered reality’, the fragments of modern images are ‘perpetually in motion’ and ‘reflect nothing reassuring’: Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), p. 120. 56 Philip W. Martin, Mad Women in Romantic Writing (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), p. 26; p. 15. See Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English

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(1806–7) and George Shepherd’s ‘Crazy Kate’ (1815) seem to illustrate (and influence) European views of what Denise Russell calls ‘specific female mental problems’ in the nineteenth century,57 the images and rhetoric of idiocy have been used more often in the cultural sphere (but not exclusively) to identify conditions suffered by boys and men. While this is certainly true, because male idiots are hardly ever in a position of strong masculinity they are often used to explore the seams of modernity, to test the consequences of social development, and to contest the hegemony of apparently ‘normal’ characters. As the discussion in the following chapters makes clear, the gender bias in the representation of idiots does not prevent cultural producers from exploring a range of issues such as education, family, class, sexuality and race that have all contributed to the development of idiocy as a concept.

Adapting Idiocy To illustrate the shift from static to dynamic approaches to idiocy which I have been discussing in line with recent theories of the image, it is worth looking at a classic literary attempt to represent an idiot figure and the problems that this raises for film adaptation. The example I have chosen is William Faulkner’s novel of genetic and moral decline in the American South, The Sound and the Fury (1929), which contains one of the most striking idiot figures in literary history. However, when it came to the director Martin Ritt and producer Jerry Wald to adapt the novel for Twentieth-Century Fox in 1959, Faulkner’s textual strategies proved so complex that they all but gave up on attempting to visualize idiocy, even though they retained the idiot figure in a token way. We will turn to the adaptation shortly, but it is first worth focusing on the complexities of Faulkner’s portrayal of the idiot, Benjy, based on the mentally retarded Edwin Chandler who lived close to where Faulkner grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, in the early 1900s. As an example of high modernism, The Sound and the Fury poses enough problems for the filmmaker with its use of multiple perspective and formal dislocation, techniques that can be aligned to what Myra Jehlen calls Faulkner’s ‘tensely uncertain attitude toward the South’ in terms of racial conflict and the spectres of slavery.58 Jehlen argues that these tensions were Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987) and Denise Russell, Women, Madness and Medicine (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995) for discussions of conceptions of female ‘madness’ and its cultural and medical representations. Margaret Atwood is one contemporary writer to use the imagery of idiocy to explore gender identity. For example, in Lady Oracle (1976) the overweight and pubescent Joan Foster describes her own face as ‘puffed and empty as a Mongoloid idiot’s’: Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (London: Virago, 1982), p. 91. 57 Russell, Women, Madness and Medicine, p. 18. 58 Myra Jehlen, Class and Character in Faulkner’s South (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 19.

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at their most extreme for Faulkner in the late 1920s and 1930s, stimulating him to explore ‘the limits of perception and language … to pierce false masks … which he is coming more and more to realize have distorted Southern reality’.59 The actual disintegration and moral decay of the Compson family suggests that Faulkner (at this stage in his life) viewed the white Southern landed aristocracy as genetically bankrupt. The alcoholism and invalidity of the Compson parents are signs of such decay that manifests itself in the three brothers as idiocy (Benjy), insanity (Quentin) and brutal sadism (Jason). Each brother represents the end of the dynastic line: Jason castrates Benjy; in his incestuous wanderings and eventual suicide Quentin reveals an unwillingness to look outside himself, and Jason is only interested in sexual exchange with prostitutes. Even their sister, Candace (or Caddy), is thought to be promiscuous as Jason rails against her whorish activities. Caddy’s daughter is the product of casual copulation and is described by Faulkner in his 1945 appendix as ‘nameless at birth and already doomed to be unwed from the instant the dividing egg determined its sex’.60 Although the novel treats Benjy more sympathetically than the other brothers, unlike the ‘simple’ mixed-race character Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s Light in August (1932), his idiocy is a symptom of the decline of his family and culture, rather than a moral antidote to it. The Sound and the Fury is organized in four parts, the first three offering a first-person perspective and the fourth narrated in the third person, with Dilsey the black servant and figure of ‘endurance’ being the main focus. Unlike the controlling narrator of the nineteenth-century realist novel, there is no centre of authority or moral voice that lucidly clarifies what is related. The reader has to search harder for a moral focus; the text becomes heavier, dripping with potential meaning; the textual voices become more anxious, questioning, uncertain, even noisy and belligerent. Each section of the novel illuminates, and is reflected by, the others, but here I will focus on Benjy’s narrative which represents the reader’s first impression of the Compson family and provides an introduction to the anti-mimetic qualities of the novel. The reader-response critic Wolfgang Iser claims that ‘Benjy differs from most other idiots in literature mainly because he is seen from the inside and not from outside. The reader sees the world through his eyes and depends almost exclusively on him for orientation.’61 Moving from the visual image of the idiot to Faulkner’s Benjy is a journey inwards from the interpretation of behaviour to the inscape of consciousness. Rather than the narrator sharing the same interpretative space as Benjy there is no mediating voice, him being given a muffled one of his

59 Ibid., pp. 43–4. 60 Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, ed. David Minter (New York: Norton, 1987), p. 235. 61 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 136.

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own. It can be claimed that Faulkner’s attempt to render the idiot’s consciousness is unsuccessful: although he is dumb and nearly deaf, Benjy uses correct grammar, ‘speaks’ without phonetic idiosyncrasies and identifies objects his three-year-old mind could not possibly know. But instead of making the impossible leap into another alien consciousness, Faulkner stresses the experiential nature of Benjy’s world and his unconscious language of desire. For example: In the corner it was dark, but I could see the window. I squatted there, holding the slipper. I couldn’t see it, my hands saw it, and I could hear it getting night, and my hands saw the slipper but I couldn’t see myself, but my hands could see the slipper, and I squatted there, hearing it getting dark.62

The modulation of Benjy’s phrases is similar to the interest of other modernist writers in the idea of ‘continuous present’ (as Gertrude Stein called it), but unlike Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, whose protagonists experience time flowing from past into future, Faulkner’s idiot can neither differentiate between temporal moments nor distinguish remembered experiences from actual ones. Benjy is more than the sum total of his experiences and his identification with other voices. Indeed, the voices he ‘hears’ are (more or less) internal voices, manifestations of his unconscious, even though later evidence associates them with real people. In Benjy’s narrative Faulkner seems to be questioning the binary categories of outside/inside, object/subject and, by deploying the idiot’s mind as a textual vehicle, he questions the relation between language and the world. The passage quoted above illustrates this point. While the darkness of the room obscures all sight, the window implies an outside world while firmly locating Benjy on the inside. Benjy is obsessed by his sister Caddy’s old slipper, which he ‘sees’ through his hands almost to the point where he feels it to be an extension of his own body. Because the presence of the slipper really only corresponds to Benjy’s impression of it, it becomes part of his identity just as a limb would. In the psychoanalytic language of Melanie Klein, he unconsciously introjects the slipper, and it becomes part of his identity.63 But, although he is locked inside a continuous present, he is still able to understand feelings associated with loss (the absence of Caddy and her slipper), and although he has no moral sense, his sentience can be felt in the pain of loss: the loss of his sister, and the inability to assert his struggling identity. In the first section of the novel Benjy is not introduced as a retarded mind struggling to make sense of an outside world, but as a primitive identity that cuts across the categorical distinctions of mind and matter. It is only when the reader is presented with the other stories, in particular the third-person narrative of the

62 Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (London: Picador, 1989), pp. 61–2. 63 See Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963 (London: Hogarth, 1975).

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fourth section, that Benjy can be labelled an idiot. Indeed, it is only when we step into the larger social framework of the Compsons’ world – from private to public, when he is imaged from the ‘outside’ – that the classification of ‘idiot’ becomes meaningful. Although from the outside Benjy has no real identity, the narrative insight of the first section suggests his primal, or childlike, identity is structured around his desire for Caddy. The reader is invited to engage with Benjy’s world, but Faulkner’s use of italics to characterize his sense impressions stresses the textuality of the experience and so checks our impulse to identify with him; in Iser’s words: ‘the result for the reader is that he experiences Benjy’s perspectives not only from inside – with Benjy – but also from the outside, as he tries to understand Benjy’.64 The need to question the reality of Benjy’s experiences encourages the reader to understand more about the public world that Benjy’s limited mind cannot understand. Faulkner’s acknowledgement of this need to map private and public worlds coherently may be one of the reasons he resorted to a third-person narrative in the final section. As we respond to Benjy’s sense impressions, the reader’s other position – an outsider looking into the mind of the idiot – turns the text into an aesthetic object and a threshold to a repository of meanings somewhere between reality and fiction. Because the opening section is told from Benjy’s personal perspective, his physical appearance is not described until the last section of the novel. When the reader finally encounters Benjy, it takes a moment to realize that this is the same person who has been presented with a complex psychic life: Luster entered, followed by a big man who appeared to have been shaped of some substance whose particles would not or did not cohere to one another or to the frame that supported it. His skin was dead looking and hairless; dropsical too, he moved with a shambling gait like a trained bear … His eyes were clear, of the pale sweet blue of cornflowers, his thick mouth hung open, drooling a little.65

Because the reader has prior knowledge of Benjy his appearance takes on another dimension: the particles that do not ‘cohere to one another’ are both physical and, figuratively, the mental flux of Benjy’s experiences. This image is a development from Faulkner’s earlier short story ‘The Kingdom of God’ (1925), in which the idiot figure (in many ways a prototype of Benjy) is presented as a physical oddity at the beginning of the tale.66 Moreover, the above passage implies that the outward appearance of the idiot cannot be described without recourse to traditional descriptions of idiocy. The authorial control of language reduces Benjy’s psychic complexity to his ghastly appearance as a

64 Iser, The Implied Reader, p. 140. 65 Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Picador, 1989), p. 237. 66 Faulkner, ‘The Kingdom of God’ (1925), in William Faulkner: New Orleans Sketches, ed. Carvel Collins (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958). Faulkner also includes an idiot figure in The Hamlet (1940) in the guise of Ike Snopes who falls in love with a cow.

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physical oddity, whose boundaries are artificially imposed by the long perimeter fence, the prohibitions of his guardians and, eventually, by the walls of the Jackson State Asylum. His one encounter with the Burgess girl, when he attempts to speak with a meaningful voice of his own but is construed as a physical assault, accounts for the abortion of his sexual identity.67 At the end of the novel, when Benjy’s normal experience of travelling around the Confederate statue is reversed, he begins to roar, the departure from his usual experience evoking feelings of distress and disorientation. His screams may be meaningless, but the ‘horror, shock; agony eyeless’ conveys the disorientation of a sentient being who cannot bear to experience anything out of the ordinary and who, like the post-bellum white South he inhabits, cannot grow up.68 On turning to the adaptation of The Sound and the Fury, it is obvious that the complexity of Benjy’s character is severely compromised, not least because the film eliminates Faulkner’s emphasis on the conflicting public and private experiences of idiocy. The film rights for the novel were sold to Twentieth Century Fox in 1955 along with the rights to Faulkner’s 1940 novel The Hamlet. Although Faulkner worked in Hollywood for MGM and had screenwriting credits for To Have and to Have Not (1945) and The Big Sleep (1946), he was not part of the filmmaking team for the adaptation of The Hamlet, released as The Long Hot Summer (1958), nor for The Sound and the Fury.69 Shot largely in the studio at Fox (after filming The Long Hot Summer on location it was thought to be too timeconsuming), the film is unsuccessful largely for missing out the Benjy and Quentin parts of the novel, presumably because their interiority makes them the least cinematic of the four sections. The film cuts out any direct representation of past events, dealing mostly in the present, Easter 1928, when Benjy would be 33. The screenwriters (Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr) also made significant changes to Faulkner’s text, most notably in that Quentin (played by John Beal and called Howard in the film) does not commit suicide and lives on (albeit as an alcoholic), and the sadist Jason (Yul Brynner) is granted the capacity to love. The film focuses on the present and ‘attempts to portray the characters as the embodiments of their

67 Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Picador, 1989), p. 45. The context for Benjy’s sterilization is important: although some US States were using sterilization as a form of social control earlier in the century, in 1927 a Supreme Court ruling enforced sterilization for criminals, idiots and psychotics. See Robert Whitaker, Mad in America (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002), pp. 41–72. 68 Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Picador, 1989), p. 277. 69 As Gene Phillips notes, a US television version of the fourth section of The Sound and the Fury was shown in 1955 (currently unavailable). Faulkner was more interested in the way in which this version gained ‘new significance’ by switching medium than he was with literary fidelity. Perhaps because Faulkner had a less than happy time in Hollywood, he did not read the screenplay for Martin Ritt’s 1959 version: Gene Phillips, Fiction, Film and Faulkner: The Art of Adaptation (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), p. 157.

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collective past’ by referring back to earlier events in passing. However, Gene Phillips argues that these strategies ‘simply do not work’.70 Benjy (played by Jack Warden as a mute) survives in the film, which ends, like the novel, with him about to go to the Jackson State Asylum, but the complexity of his voice in Faulkner’s fiction is entirely lost.71 Reflecting the style of acting developed by Lon Chaney, Jr in his rendering of Lennie in Lewis Milestone’s 1939 adaptation of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (see Chapter 6 for discussion), Warden’s Benjy struggles to render the psychic confusion of the character and his attachment to Caddy (Margaret Leighton). In the film Benjy is framed by the relative normality of the other characters, with Jason’s sadism toned down and Quentin quashing his suicidal impulses, only Benjy’s silence and their treatment of him marking his separation from others. Indeed, the film fixes a certain image of idiocy by resorting to Benjy wearing a placard to advertise a local freak show. Even though the texture and scope of Faulkner’s novel may be just too complex to adapt for film, Martin Ritt afterwards admitted he had made some mistakes and was disappointed with the final result.72 As the following chapters discuss, not all adaptations of literary texts featuring idiot figures squander the chance to represent idiocy like Ritt’s film, even though they may change the characteristics of the idiot figure for aesthetic, narrative or commercial reasons. In Ritt’s defence, as an example of high modernism Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is probably one of the most unfilmable texts of the twentieth century and he was hamstrung by a screenplay that strove for ‘economy’ (a favourite idea of producer Jerry Wald).73 An adaptation of Of Mice and Men, for example, is much easier to achieve since the psyche of Lennie is not explored in the same depth or using the same experimental techniques as Benjy. Indeed, Faulkner’s attempt to present the mind of an idiot by using fractured language long before the character is visually represented would be difficult to convey, even resorting to clever camera work and a first-person perspective (which is rarely successful for long periods in film). But, as Bruce Kawain argues, if we view the Benjy section of the novel as a shifting ‘visual montage’ 70 Ibid., p. 159. 71 Although the ending of both versions is similar in terms of plot, in the film the folkloric commentary of Faulkner’s figure of endurance, the black servant Dilsey (Ethel Waters), offers a more positive resolution more akin to classical Hollywood endings. 72 The critic Bruce Kawain argues that it might actually be possible to present Benjy’s perceptions more directly in film while remaining faithful to Faulkner’s themes: ‘What makes Benjy’s narrative so difficult to read … is not its montage but the fact that it is words about wordless experience. Faulkner continually provides indirect clues as to how old Benjy is in a given memory, or what he is seeing. These problems would not arise in film; the viewer could simply see that Benjy was young or old, near a pasture or outside a barn’: Bruce F. Kawain, Faulkner and Film (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977), p. 21. 73 See Jerry Wald’s essay ‘Fiction versus Film’, included in full in Gene Philips, Fiction, Film and Faulkner, pp. i–v.

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that Faulkner has himself adapted and ‘recast into language’, then the possibilities of ‘re-adapting’ in cinematic form become apparent.74 Although Ritt’s film is not alone in ‘giving up’ on the idiot figure, even film versions of Madame Bovary that exclude the opening chapters dealing with Charles Bovary’s treatment as an idiot in his early years manage to retain his symbolic role in adult life without resorting to the heavy-handedness of a figure carrying a placard advertising a freak show. More than anything, the adaptation of The Sound and the Fury indicates the difficulties filmmakers face in producing a believable character that may inhabit a different ontological space to others, but that is not stigmatized or completely isolated from them (as Martin Norden argues is often the fate of representations of physical disability in film). We will return to the difficulties of adapting texts that feature an idiot figure in the following chapters, but first it is useful to return to Romantic debates about idiocy at the turn of the nineteenth century as a way of providing an intellectual and historical context for further discussion.

74 Kawain, Faulkner and Film, p. 28.

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PART I

Idiocy in the Nineteenth Century

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Chapter One

Romantic and Victorian Idiots Where should the cultural history of idiocy begin? How can we explain the historical transition from Macbeth’s grand philosophical meditation on ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ to Forrest Gump’s home-spun belief that life is ‘like a box of chocolates, you never know what you gonna get’?1 How should we differentiate between idiots that have the appropriate cerebral characteristics and those who act like idiots, or those who have some classifiable traits but are otherwise far from idiotic? And on what discourse should our attention focus to understand idiocy? Of course, none of these questions have definitive answers, particularly given the social and aesthetic mutations that the concept of idiocy has undergone. If anything, though, these obligatory questions – ‘where should we begin?’ – need to be replaced by more pragmatic questions – ‘where do we begin?’ – in order to start the discussion. The difficulty in tracing the history of the concept is how to move between studies of real – that is, biological and neurological – cases of idiocy and what Roland Barthes would call ‘mythologies’ of idiocy as represented on a cultural level. Barthes’ concern is that traditional historians tend to elide reality and representation in their desire to create seamless histories. Sharing Foucault’s scepticism for upper-case ‘History’, Barthes argues in his essay ‘The Discourse of History’ (1967) that ‘in “objective” history, the “real” is never more than an unformulated signified, sheltering behind the apparently all-powerful referent’ that creates a ‘realistic effect’.2 If idiocy can be seen as representing one of the seams of modernity, then it is also important to unpick the seams between its different mythologies, rather than using the truth claims of hard science to stitch them together. In line with Barthes’ warning, this chapter will approach both empirical and cultural mythologies of idiocy as equally important contributory factors to its development as a concept. There is important research to be done on the prehistory of idiocy and its relation to madness and folly in medieval and Renaissance Europe, but the discussion begins here in the eighteenth century, which for Alan Bewell marked ‘the philosophical discovery of the idiot’ when metaphysical and scientific approaches began to complicate a more general understanding of idiocy.3 In fact, it is important to go back briefly to the late seventeenth century to consider John 1 William Shakespeare, Macbeth (c.1606), Act 5, Scene 5. Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, US, 1994). Shakespeare only occasionally refers to the idiot by name. One example is in Titus Andronicus (c.1600) when the Moor Aaron claims: ‘An idiot holds his bauble for a god / And keeps the oath which by that god swears’, Act 5, Scene 1. 2 Roland Barthes, ‘The Discourse of History’, in The Postmodern History Reader, ed. Keith Jenkins (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 122. 3 Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p. 57.

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Locke’s influential distinction between idiocy and madness, but the focus of this chapter is on Romantic and Victorian conceptions of idiocy as a way of providing historical, cultural and scientific contexts for the discussion of literary and cinematic idiot figures. Idiots have a long biblical and secular prehistory but most critics agree that the modern attitude to idiocy in Europe was influenced strongly by Locke’s philosophical treatise An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), particularly his attempt to establish the empirical origin of ideas as they emerge from experience.4 Locke claimed that he did not wish to ‘meddle with the physical considerations of the mind’, but preferred to deal with the ways in which individuals normally associate ideas.5 Starting from the premise that the mind is a tabula rasa at birth, Locke argued that a combination of sense impressions and self-reflection enables most individuals to arrive at a coherent picture of the world. But he also considered conditions that prevent this coherence from being established. In a passage that distinguishes idiocy from madness, Locke compares ‘the defect of Naturals’ that stems ‘from want of quickness, activity, and motion, in the intellectual Faculties’ and ‘mad Men’ who join together ‘Ideas very wrongly’ and ‘mistake them from Truths’.6 He asserts that the fantasies and delusions of the mad can be graded as to the degree and quality of making ‘wrong Propositions’, whereas ‘Idiots make very few or no Propositions, but argue and reason scarce at all.’ This equation of madness with extravagant activity and idiocy with docile passivity implies that madness is a temporary affliction that can be countered with good sense, while idiocy is permanent and incurable. Although Locke identifies degrees of impairment rather than absolute distinctions, this normative level of competence (involving the ability to contemplate, reason and abstract) dominated Enlightenment classifications of reason, folly, health and illness.7 For example, following the spirit of Locke’s Essay, the eighteenth-century medic William Battie (Governor of Bethlem Hospital in London in the 1740s) also distinguished permanent from temporary afflictions, choosing to discuss incurable deficiencies in terms of ‘original madness’ and using the phrase ‘consequential madness’ for phenomena resulting from external pressures. Battie refers to idiocy as the base level to which ‘Lunatics’ may sink, but he focuses more fully than Locke on the physical side of idiocy, using physiological language – ‘the repetition of vomits and other convulsive stimuli’

4 See, for example, Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment; McDonagh, ‘The Image of Idiocy in Nineteenth-Century England’, and C. F. Goodey, ‘John Locke’s Idiots in the Natural History of the Mind’, History of Psychiatry, 5 (1994), 215–50. 5 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), I.1.2. 6 Ibid., II.9.12–13. 7 For a fuller discussion of these capacities, see Goodey, ‘John Locke’s Idiots’, 217.

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– to describe the complex physical-mental condition.8 The medic Thomas Arnold preferred to think in terms of ‘Ideal Insanity’ as having no external stimulus, and ‘Notional Insanity’ as linked to a particular cause, but he also referred back to idiocy as the base condition toward which extreme forms of madness tend.9 While eighteenth-century philosophical and medical discourses may seem the obvious place to locate idiocy (and its presumed relation to insanity),10 its role in Enlightenment culture largely corresponds to the way in which ‘Locke’s pessimism about idiots is tied to his ethical optimism about everyone else.’11 In the eighteenth century, idiocy was just one manifestation on the broad spectrum of irrationality that also included eccentricity, social deviance, self-indulgence, mania, and even dandyism. For example, in his Dictionary Samuel Johnson simply characterizes ‘idiocy’ as a ‘want of understanding’, suggesting that Enlightenment attitudes to idiocy include individuals born with brain deficiencies and dullards who were deemed to be socially useless or whose work lacked value. Although idiocy was thought by some to be an aberration from a rational norm, other critics detect the condition to be more socially pervasive than Locke credited. Jonathan Andrews argues that eighteenth-century satirists: armed themselves to stigmatise all of those members of society, from poets and literary hacks to clergymen and politicians, whom they conceived to be claiming insight and talents beyond their natural capacities, or failing to rein in their passions by exercising their judgement.12

Given Alexander Pope’s dictum in Essay On Man (1734) that ‘Reason’s comparing balance rules the whole’,13 when he satirizes hack writers in The Dunciad (1728), idiocy becomes part of the dark chaotic world presided over by the goddess Dullness, encouraging witless and stupid behaviour and banishing good sense (‘Fate in their dotage this fair Ideot gave’; ‘And with her own foolscolours gilds them all’).14 Similarly, in the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift juxtaposes the noble race of horses, the Houyhnhnms, with the dirty, half-ape and half-human Yahoos whose brutish nature needs taming.

8 William Battie, A Treatise on Madness (1758), extracted in Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader, ed. Allan Ingram (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), p. 119. 9 Thomas Arnold, Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes, and Prevention of Insanity (1782–86, 2 volumes), extracted in Patterns of Madness, pp. 164–74. 10 For a detailed philosophical/medical study of eighteenth-century responses to mental illness in Britain, see Akhito Suzuki, ‘Mind and Its Disease in Enlightenment British Medicine’, unpublished PhD thesis (University College London, 1992). 11 Goodey, ‘John Locke’s Idiots’, 215. 12 Jonathan Andrews, ‘Begging the Question of Idiocy’, History of Psychiatry, 9, 1(33) (March 1998), 66. 13 Alexander Pope, An Essay On Man, Epistle II (l. 60), in The Poems of Alexander Pope: The Twickenham Text, ed. John Butt (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 518. 14 Pope, The Dunciad, Book I (l. 13; l. 84): ibid., p. 721; p. 724.

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With other satirical pieces such as Daniel Defoe’s Mere Nature Delineated (1726), Swift’s ‘Dick’s Variety’ (1745) and Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), The Dunciad and Gulliver’s Travels epitomize what Andrews describes as the Enlightenment ‘campaign against the follies of humankind in order to improve the manners of the nation’.15 Although there were already a few institutions that housed idiots in the eighteenth century (such as Swift’s St Patrick Hospital in Dublin and the Hospital of St Mary Magdalen in Bath16), the Enlightenment interest in the origins of human development and the social project to improve idiots were later linked closely to the expansion of asylums in the nineteenth century, like Bethlem Hospital in London, the establishment of county provision in Britain (following the 1845 Lunatics Act), and the implementation of specialized institutions in the USA (such as the New York State Idiot Asylum, established in Albany in 1851 and moving to Syracuse in 1855) and Scotland (such as the Baldovan Institute in Dundee, established in 1852 and later becoming the Strathmartine Hospital). Whereas Europe and America witnessed a number of specific reforms in the nineteenth century that dealt with the social implications of idiocy, eighteenth-century satirical attacks tended to be of a general nature and directed towards those that Johnson describes as being deficient in the stock of ‘natural’ qualities or that ‘nature debars from understanding’.17 Enlightenment culture is commonly credited with developing Locke’s emphasis on direct experience and clear knowledge, but a sceptical current also ran through eighteenth-century epistemology. This scepticism has a precedent in Michel de Montaigne’s Essays from the late sixteenth century that cast a shadow over the metaphysical understanding of idiocy as a ‘natural’ condition. Montaigne identified a widely held assumption that ‘credulity and the readiness to be persuaded’ are the chief ‘signs of simplicity and ignorance’; the ‘softer and less resistant the mind, the easier it is to impress something on it’.18 The Renaissance understanding of natural balance that is disturbed when one of the humours imposes an unhealthy influence on the others, filtered through to Montaigne’s understanding that ‘the emptier the mind is, and the less counterpoise it has, the more easily it sinks under the weight of the first argument’.19 One need not be a clinical idiot for this argument to apply; Montaigne cites ‘children, the common people, women, and the sick’ as often lacking

15 Jonathan Andrews, ‘Begging the Question of Idiocy’, 70. 16 For a discussion of changing attitudes to the status of Magdalen Hospital see Peter K. Carpenter, ‘The Georgian Idiot Hospital at Bath’, History of Psychiatry, 9 (1998), 471–89. Although the Hospital cared for mental afflictions in the seventeenth century, Carpenter notes that the architect John Wood was the first to call the inmates ‘idiots’ in a guidebook to Bath published in 1743 (presumably because it was fashionable to visit them), less than twenty years before the Hospital was rebuilt and began to employ nurses: ibid., 479. 17 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, n. p. 18 Michel de Montaigne, Essays, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), p. 86. 19 Ibid., p. 87.

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in good sense and susceptible to the influence of others.20 However, he goes on to disavow this assumption, claiming that knowledge is always incomplete and understanding shrouded by mist: ‘it is a dangerous and serious presumption’, Montaigne argues, ‘to condemn what we do not understand’.21 The desire for understanding forces the inquirer to make truth claims and distinguish legitimate knowledge from delusion, but Montaigne is convinced that opinions are inherently contradictory, especially when yesterday’s ‘articles of faith’ often become today’s ‘fables’. He maintained later in the Essays that this sceptical attitude towards the distinction between good sense and ignorance is particularly relevant when dealing with the physical appearance of others: ‘I have sometimes read between two lovely eyes menacing signs of a malign and dangerous nature.’22 Montaigne’s task was to challenge some of the high claims of Renaissance scholarship, but his Socratic faith in self-knowledge and his acceptance of the broad variety of human forms are the main reasons why he believed that one should resist making easy judgements based on appearance. Montaigne’s interest in exposing the falsity of appearances and ‘contemplating the varied pantomime of humankind’ was influential among French Enlightenment thinkers like Denis Diderot, whose work combined a keen interest in the rise of the natural sciences with a commitment to explore human potentiality.23 Throughout his work Diderot wavered between a belief in scientific materialism and the kind of moral philosophy that puts human life before abstract speculation. He explored the highest and lowest forms of human accomplishment and, like Montaigne, was very scathing of social pretence. In Rameau’s Nephew (Le Neveu de Rameau, 1762), for example, he provides a sketch of the nephew of the French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, characterizing him as a lazy, foolish, parasitic and affected socialite deserving as much satirical scorn as he could muster. In direct contrast, Diderot invented the character of Dorval in his play The Natural Son (Le fils naturel, 1757) as his better part. Dorval does not harbour any self-illusions and feels uneasy about existing social conventions but, as Carol Blum argues, his characterization is generally thought to be a failure, more ‘the pallid simulacrum of the wax museum’ than Diderot’s ‘self-idealization’ made flesh.24 In fact, Diderot’s attempts to compose the ideal form were continually frustrated as he returned to the mysteries of the human body, claiming ‘in vain 20 As C. F. Goodey discerns, Montaigne ‘allocates an inferior social-occupational role’ to phlegmatic types most closely resembling idiocy: Goodey, ‘John Locke’s Idiots’, 225. 21 Montaigne, Essays, p. 90. 22 Ibid., p. 338. 23 Quotation from Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew (1762), in Diderot’s Selected Writings, ed. Lester G. Crocker, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 141. 24 Carol Blum, Diderot: The Virtue of a Philosopher (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 47.

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has nature raised [man’s] eyes toward the heavens: this blind insistence on a category bends his body down again to earth’.25 Although his humanist impulses led to the great accomplishment of the Encyclopédie (1751–80), with Jean de Rond d’Alembert and Louis de Jaucourt, he was also drawn to more disconcerting aspects of human life, dealing with the tricky problems of perception and imagining the human hand metamorphosing into the horse’s hoof.26 But, despite such tensions, Diderot reserved a cool scientific distance from the blind, deaf and mute, dealing with these conditions ‘for the use of those who see’ and ‘those who hear and speak’. At a time when deaf-mutes were often mistaken for idiots, in his ‘Letter on the Deaf and Dumb’ (1751) Diderot proposed that the most useful case for scientific study would be a congenital or ‘real mute’ because ‘he would not be prejudiced (by language) in the formation of his ideas’.27 Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also associated with the writers of the Encyclopédie, but later attacked Diderot and d’Alembert because, as Charles Taylor describes it, he ‘was drawn to a moral view in which there was place for a real notion of depravity’.28 Rousseau entered the eighteenth-century debate about ‘human nature’ most directly in his A Discourse on Inequality (Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, 1754) in the guise of ‘the savage man’. Believing that social progress was actually the curse, rather than the saviour, of civilization, he attempted to ‘strip man’s nature naked’ by looking back to primitive cultures in order to assess the roots of inequality.29 He claimed that ‘the savage man [is] consigned by nature to instinct alone’, possessing the ‘animal functions’ of ‘perceiving and feeling’ and operating in terms of ‘willing and rejecting, desiring and fearing’: in fact, the very traits that would dominate nineteenth- and twentiethcentury representations of idiots.30 Issues of language and morality were fundamentally social questions for Rousseau, only arising as human life moved away from primitive settlements and began to develop social institutions that constrained this originary freedom. A strong current of idealism runs through the Discourse that counters Swift’s low view of humans, but Rousseau’s assertion that inequality rises out of social practices (and is not a natural state) is important for shifting the terms of debate towards what a biological ‘condition’ might mean in a material context. His hypothesis suggests that only those who are not yet corrupted 25 Diderot, ‘On the Interpretation of Nature’ (1753), in Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 77. 26 Ibid., p. 72. 27 Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p. 25. 28 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 356. 29 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, ed. B. Gagnebin et al. (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959), Volume 1, p. 389. 30 Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 89.

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by social practices – children, primitives and ‘naturals’ – can retain their purity and innocence. He claims savage man had a more ‘natural’ repertoire of capacities that enabled him to hunt and protect himself, but nevertheless deems certain social developments necessary for taming unruly instincts: ‘for want of wisdom and reason [savage man] always responds recklessly to the first promptings of human feeling’.31 Realizing that a ‘return to nature’ was impossible in the mid-eighteenth century, in The Social Contract (Le Contract social, 1762) he turned his attention to the reciprocal relations between modern citizens. Rousseau’s proto-Romantic sympathies with the sanctity of ‘natural’ life are clear, but at the end of the Discourse he argues that civil inequality should follow ‘physical inequality’, claiming ‘it is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined, that a child should govern an old man [and] that an imbecile should lead a wise man’.32 Another connection between Montaigne’s thought and Enlightenment thinkers is the pre-Darwinian understanding of the propriety and orderliness of nature, an understanding which manifested itself in Rousseau’s twin claim that humans have survived by adapting to new circumstances and that they possess the capacity for self-improvement. On this view, an idiot child is not only an ancestral throwback, but also a living embodiment of maladjustment and miscreation. In other words, any disturbance of natural order may lead to distortions and debasements in the human form on both physical and mental levels: an ‘imperfect and shapeless lump of matter’ is likely to be the miscreation of an individual whose balance had been disturbed by their own or, more likely, their parents’ bodily desires and ‘halfshaped ideas’.33 Montaigne’s view is closely linked to that of the seventeenthcentury British physiologist Thomas Willis who in Two Discourses on the Soul of Brutes (published in Latin as De anima brutorum in 1672) identified ‘stupidity, or morosis, or Foolishness’ as representing the ‘eclipse of the superior soul’, to which he unfavourably compares the brutish ‘inferior soul’ that ‘is corporeal, material, and mortal’.34 Dennis Todd explores the preoccupation with brutish miscreation by looking carefully at literary examples of ‘monstrous births’ in the eighteenth century, ranging from animals and ‘creatures resembling tailless rats’ to ‘strange beasts like harpies’.35 The contemporary understanding of the dualistic interaction between body and mind was, as Todd described in Imagining Monsters (1995), 31 Ibid., p. 101. 32 Ibid., p. 137. 33 Montaigne, Essays, p. 77. 34 Thomas Willis, De anima brutorum, quoted in Paul Cranefield, ‘A Seventeenth-Century View of Mental Deficiency and Schizophrenia: Thomas Willis on “Stupidity or Foolishness”’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 35 (1961), 292–3. 35 Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in EighteenthCentury England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 45. On the theme of miscreation, Diderot claimed that in painting ‘the head of a man on the body of a horse we find pleasing; the head of a horse on the body of a man we find displeasing’: Diderot, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. Geoffrey Bremner (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 331. For an engaging essay on the impact of the ‘maternal imagination’ on

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one of strict hierarchy running from ‘dense bones’, ‘solid muscles’ to ‘thinner fluids’, ‘more refined humors’ and ‘highly ethereal spirits’.36 While each area was thought to have an instrumental relation to the others (particularly those adjacent to each other), the faculty of imagination links body and mind, performing ‘the double task of allowing the body to impinge on the higher mental powers and of translating the incorporeal activities of the mind into bodily movements’.37 Imagination could be an ennobling force for base creatures like Shakespeare’s Caliban, but it could also be ‘hurt’ (as Willis terms it), affecting the mind adversely by laying the individual open to ‘alien energies from below, which could well up and assimilate the self’.38 On this model, rather than idiocy being seen simply as a ‘want of understanding’ (in line with Johnson’s Dictionary), it was a condition that affected the whole being from the base upwards, manifesting itself on both mental and physical levels. In extreme cases of idiocy, mental faculties are likely to be dysfunctional and bodily movements retarded, whereas in milder cases the higher faculties of reason and understanding will be impaired, but lower faculties like sensitivity and imagination remain largely intact and may even be heightened.

Romantic Idiots While eighteenth-century philosophy attempted to establish an abstract ‘science of man’ as a way of releasing human potentiality from superstition and ignorance, later Romantic thinkers argued that this kind of universal system actually imprisons the spirit rather than establishing the grounds for truth. On this counterEnlightenment model, knowledge should be sought within the self, not ‘without’ from an abstract point of reference. Nature, particularly, was too complex to be understood from an Archimedian point; for Romantic writers like William Blake, Friedrich Hölderlin and Novalis only at moments of intuitive insight could the mysteries of Nature be perceived. The distinction between a knowing self and an expressive self is a useful way of characterizing the epistemological break between Enlightenment and Romantic thought, but this opposition does not account for the new affinity between artistic and scientific experimentation (especially in Germany) that created a fertile intellectual climate for reappraising certain philosophical certainties on a grand scale.39 The Romantic emphasis on monstrous births, see Philip K. Wilson, ‘Eighteenth-Century “Monsters” and NineteenthCentury “Freaks”’, Literature and Medicine, 21(1) (Spring 2002), 1–25. 36 Todd, Imagining Monsters, p. 54. 37 Ibid., p. 56. 38 Cranefield, ‘A Seventeenth-Century View of Mental Deficiency’, 293. Todd, Imagining Monsters, p. 104. 39 For an extended discussion of the interplay between aesthetic and scientific Romanticism, see the Introduction to my book Romantic Science and the Experience of Self (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 1–25.

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imagination and idiosyncratic expression helped to galvanize an interest in idiocy as a unique ontological position that could not simply be explained in terms of a childlike state or the physical manifestation of folly. Despite the persistence of a deep-rooted ambivalence to biological idiots (reflecting Rousseau’s uncertainty about the status of ‘natural man’), a more liberal attitude towards outlandish or unusual behaviour facilitated a major reassessment of idiocy. From a scientific perspective the British medic William Pargeter commented in Maniacal Disorders (1792) that ‘when we behold the most shining characters … whose reason lies either “buried in the body’s grave”, or who linger out an hapless existence in a rueful state of idiotism or fatuity, we cannot but be affected with the most lively sensations of pity and regret’.40 This emphasis on the inquirer’s feelings towards the idiot pushes Pargeter’s comment far beyond the Enlightenment understanding of idiocy. On the cultural side, obsessive figures like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, oddities like the monstrous miscreation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and E. T. A. Hoffman’s aesthetic interest in Zerrissenheit (or personal disintegration)41 provided tools for exploring beyond the dominant literary mode of self-development. In order to assess the implications of this cultural shift which Romanticism helped bring about, it is worth focusing on William Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Idiot Boy’ (1798) as a way of exploring the new relationship that Romantic writers perceived between the enigmatic idiot figure and the reader’s sensibility. Wordsworth’s early lyric poems from the 1790s envisage an idealized rural scene unspoilt by the noise and pressures of modern urban life. The rustic folk he depicts usually have simple emotions, lead uncomplicated pastoral lives and are protected by the beneficent ‘diurnal’ spirit of Nature, where ‘essential passions of the heart [can find] better soil in which they can attain their maturity’.42 Wordsworth believed that ‘the manners of rural life germinate from these elementary feelings’ of harmony with the natural world and within self-sufficient micro-communities. With the publication of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 (with Coleridge), Wordsworth attempted a poetic-anthropological study of these natural folk in a language that evokes the simplicity of their lives, now under threat from the processes of urbanization and the commercial pressures of

40 Ingram (ed.), Patterns of Madness, p. 180. 41 See, for example, Hoffman’s Tom-Cat Murr (Kater Murr, 1820) in which the composer Johannes Kreisler experiences Zerrissenheit because he cannot reconcile the conflicting demands of his inner and outer worlds. As I discuss in Chapter 5, the fraught and self-destructive artist was a common figure in Germanic writing, emerging again in Thomas Mann’s and Herman Hesse’s modernist fables Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912) and Steppenwolf (1927). See Chapters 2 and 7 of my book Modernism and Morality (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001) for discussion of these texts. 42 Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface to William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett & A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 245.

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tourism (pressures he bemoans in ‘The Brothers’, 1800). As poetic inflections of Rousseau’s natural man, even though Wordsworth’s characters in Lyrical Ballads may be old (such as Simon Lee and Michael) or feeble (Harry Gill and Johnny Foy) they express the kind of instinctive union with Nature that would be denied to their counterparts in urban surroundings. Wordsworth evoked these characters by using plain and colloquial diction in an egalitarian attempt to represent what – echoing the spirit of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality – he described as ‘the very language of men’.43 Nevertheless, his poetic personae suggest that he was always an onlooker, even after he returned to Cumbria in 1799. His thoughts are expressed in a distinct vocal register and he tends to idealize his characters with language that consciously adheres to a Romantic vision of bucolic simplicity. Moreover, the rustic idyll is under threat in poems like ‘Simon Lee’, and the poetic voice is often characterized by loss and nostalgia, implying that this lyrical land is either a remembered, dreamt or wished-for world of ideal relationships. Cumbria was in the late eighteenth century made up of various pre-industrial communities and the contrived simplicity of Wordsworth’s early poems provides an idealistic evocation of rural life. But this idealistic picture is complicated when we consider Wordsworth’s interest in border figures living at the edge of communities, such as the female vagrant, the mad mother and the Cumberland beggar, suggesting an unresolved tension in his poems that is particularly evident in ‘The Idiot Boy’. One source for Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy’ may have been an account of a Hampshire village idiot in Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789). The village boy of Selborne is described as having ‘a strong propensity to bees’ from an early age: ‘they were his food, his amusement, his sole object’ and he ‘exerted all his few faculties on this one pursuit’.44 Not only did he play with bees and push them down his shirt, but: as he ran about he used to make a humming noise with his lips, resembling the buzzing of bees. This lad was lean and sallow, and of cadaverous complexion; and, except in his favourite pursuit, in which he was wonderfully adroit, discovered no manner of understanding.

This physical description and the buzzing noises of the Selborne idiot boy are directly reflected in Wordsworth’s poem. White suggests that had the Selborne boy’s ‘capacity been better … he had perhaps abated much of our wonder at the feats of a more modern exhibitor of bees’, as if there is a remarkable talent struggling to express itself. Johnny in ‘The Idiot Boy’ does not have the same 43 For a discussion of the problematic relationship between Rousseau and Wordsworth see Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, pp. 17–19; pp. 78–81 and James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 93–119. 44 Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), quoted in The Faber Book of Madness, ed. Roy Porter (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 99.

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depth of focus, but his gentle sensibility mirrors the Selborne boy’s kinship with Nature.45 White reports that when the boy became a ‘tall youth he was removed from hence to a distant village, where he died, as I understand, before he arrived at manhood’. The phrase ‘as I understand’ suggests that this final statement is based on hearsay. Because no information is provided as to the conditions the boy experienced in his new environment, a dark shadow looms over his final days. Nevertheless, the energy of the boy’s pursuits is far removed from the passive state Locke described in his Essay and also from the listless melancholic who has no inclination to do anything, suggesting the Romantic interest in imaginative rejuvenation underpins this account of the Selborne boy. Two other sources that may inflect Johnny’s character in ‘The Idiot Boy’ were the murder of an idiot woman in the Quantock hills in Somerset in late 1797 or early 1798 and the comic antics of a local Cumbrian attorney, John Gibson (the latter may also have been one of the inspirations behind the old shepherd Michael in Lyrical Ballads). Alan Bewell argues that the first episode, in which Thomas Poole told Wordsworth about a recent episode in which a ‘harmless idiot’ Jenny was hunted down and killed, may not have been a direct influence on the poem, but ‘its powerful apposition of idiocy and violence was not easily dismissed’.46 In ‘The Idiot Boy’ the poet criticizes the indifference and lack of sympathy that society shows to Johnny, but Wordsworth holds back from the high drama of the Somerset episode, perhaps because he wanted to explore more life-affirming characteristics. Whereas this episode may have contributed to the dark undertones of the poem, the other possible source helps to explain the poem’s comic and burlesque qualities. Kenneth Johnston describes John Gibson as ‘an avid practical joker whose antics delighted generations of Hawkshead schoolboys’.47 His favourite trick was to hide behind a scarecrow and surprise local villagers, while passers-by could not work out if he were ‘a wandering beggar, a drunk or a village idiot’. The Selborne boy is a more obvious reference for identifying the aesthetic possibilities open to Wordsworth, but the Quantock murder and Gibson’s antics imbue Johnny’s character with a tragi-comic quality, rooting him in local customs that account for Wordsworth’s belief that rural folk 45 Although White’s account seems sympathetic, his biographer Richard Mabey argues that White shows scant understanding of the Selborne boy’s condition, claiming he was more interested in what he might have learnt about bees had the boy a greater intelligence: Richard Mabey, Gilbert White (London: Century, 1986), p. 199. 46 Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p. 51. It is interesting that Wordsworth abandoned his tale of Jenny, but felt able to develop the story of Johnny. This may be linked to what Philip Martin identifies as Wordsworth’s interest in ‘deranged and deserted women [who] are allowed only a limited amount of space to recount their histories’. Martin argues that many of these ‘female’ histories ‘are almost always identical’ with bereavement and/or desertion resulting in insanity: Martin, Mad Women in Romantic Writing, p. 55. 47 Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth (1998) (London: Pimlico, 2000), p. 45.

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‘could not express themselves in [their unique] way without an almost sublime conviction of the blessings of an independent domestic life’ and a strong sense of community.48 Wordsworth wanted ‘The Idiot Boy’ to trace ‘the maternal passion through many of its more subtle windings’ by showing the intimate relationship between a mother and her son. In his reply to a letter from the seventeen-year-old John Wilson (June 1802), he commented: ‘I have … often looked upon the conduct of fathers and mothers of the lower classes of society towards idiots as the great triumph of the human heart.’49 Rather than pursuing an Enlightenment-style inquiry into the metaphysical condition of idiocy, in the poem Wordsworth explores a primitive mode of existence where maternal bonds appear entirely unconditional and even idiots are strongly loved (in the city they would simply be ‘sent to a public or private asylum’). The poverty of the idiot’s mother, Betty Foy, together with her sense of moral responsibility (‘if an idiot is born in a poor man’s house, it must be taken care of’) and her strength of feeling, provide the emotional spine of the poem and what Ross Woodman identifies as its ‘healing’ aesthetic.50 Despite the rural simplicity of the pair, John Wilson complained that he could not ‘sympathise’ with either Betty – for she ‘exhibits merely the effects of the instinctive feeling inherent in the constitution of every animal’ – or her son Johnny, for his ‘state of mind is represented as perfectly deplorable’. Here Wordsworth probably takes his lead from what Dennis Todd describes as the ‘doctrine of prenatal influence’, in which the child’s character depends largely on the mother (a theory that prevailed into the nineteenth century).51 Sudden frights, shocks and morbid longings during pregnancy can manifest themselves in the child having extra fingers, deformed limbs, harelips, or even in idiocy. With this in mind, Wilson also implied that neither the mother’s devotion nor the ‘idiotism’ of the boy were proper subjects for poetic expression. However, it is noticeable that he does not complain about the other mother figures displaying strong maternal bonds (for example, ‘The Mad Mother’ or the mother in ‘The Thorn’). The juxtaposition of ‘animal’ instinct and Johnny’s ‘deplorable’ state of mind seem to impact on Wilson’s attitude to idiots, in line with what Jonathan Andrews summarizes as the general eighteenth-century attitude to idiots ‘as a state divorced from natural law, and essentially from humankind’.52 Wilson’s feelings

48 Ernest de Selincourt (ed.), The Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), p. 314. 49 Ibid., p. 297. 50 Ross Woodman, ‘The Idiot Boy as Healer’, in Romanticism and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, ed. James Holt McGavran, Jr (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991), p. 73. 51 Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters, p. 45. 52 Andrews, ‘Begging the Question of Idiocy’, 67. For an interesting reading of ‘The Idiot Boy’ as a critique of Enlightenment philosophy see Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, pp. 64–70. Bewell also argues that Wordsworth was careful to distinguish

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of ‘inexpressible disgust’ and ‘contempt’ are not the result of Wordsworth’s ‘admirable’ delineation of idiocy, but derive from the neo-classical assumption that poetry should provide edifying instruction. There are two aspects of Wilson’s comments that need expanding: the delineation of ‘idiotism’, and the ‘disgust’ he feels when reading the poem, both of which reflect contemporary descriptions, such as The First Report from the Committee on Madhouses in England (1815), in juxtaposing ‘disgusting idiotcy’ with ‘the most terrifying distraction of the human intellect’.53 Rather than focusing on base qualities, Wordsworth echoes the account of the Selborne boy by dwelling on the sensuous ‘burring’ sound Johnny makes with his lips, implying a lack of motor control as well as the inability to master language.54 The noise is one that Johnny ‘loves’ (l.110) and that Betty is ‘glad to hear’ (l.111), signifying an emotional affinity between boy and mother. Johnny is also associated with a pony, he is as ‘meek as a lamb’ (l.109) and, in the last stanza, he imitates the noise of cocks crowing. His labial ‘burring’ represents a close primitive bond with his mother and his own body, signalling a world in which communication is instinctive. In Wordsworth’s comment to Wilson – ‘I have often applied to idiots, in my own mind, that sublime expression of Scripture, that their life is hidden with God’ – it is clear that ‘The Idiot Boy’ is a tale of humans that symbolically become animals in their proximity to Nature.55 But Wordsworth denies them the literal status of animals, for they are also capable of shared, knowable emotions. It is possibly this precarious balance between human existence and animal life that offended Wilson. Despite their collaboration on Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge published two main criticisms of Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy’ in Biographia Literaria (1817). The first criticism is that Wordsworth had not ‘taken sufficient care to preclude from the reader’s fancy the disgusting images of ordinary morbid idiocy, which yet it was by no means his intention to represent’, and the second is that ‘the idiocy of the boy is so evenly balanced by the folly of the mother, as to present to the general reader rather a laughable burlesque on the blindness of anile dotage’.56 Johnny’s idiocy from the figure of the ‘wild child’ and from the discourse of ‘miscreation’: p. 65. Bearing on these distinctions, Philip Wilson discusses the distinction between Homo sapiens and Homo monstrous. In the eighteenth century, Homo monstrous was seen as a separate species and often closely linked to the adverse affects of the maternal imagination, but was then reclassified in the nineteenth century ‘according to various states of arrested development’ (although maternal markings were still thought to be a contributory factor in the case of the Elephant Man): Wilson, ‘Eighteenth-Century “Monsters” and Nineteenth-Century “Freaks”’, 11–14. 53 Ingram (ed.), Patterns of Madness, p. 248. 54 Bewell notes that this ‘burring’ may also be a reference to the common belief that idiots did not feel the cold: Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p. 68. 55 Wordsworth, Early Letters, p. 297. 56 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. George Watson (London: Dent, 1984), p. 194. Coleridge’s rhetoric may have been inspired by the 1815

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Both points correspond to Wilson’s criticisms that the poem evokes ‘disgust’ in the depiction of the idiot qua idiot, and that Johnny infects his mother by association. From this perspective, it would seem that if the idiot were to be replaced by an innocent child, or even a lovable pet, the poem would regain its composure. In his reply to Wilson, Wordsworth suggests that perhaps it is merely the word ‘idiot’ which gives the unpleasurable impression of dull-minded stupidity, rather than the character himself. He deflects further criticism by claiming that he was attempting to depict the ‘delicate and refined feelings ascribed to men in low conditions of society’.57 Here, ‘lowness’ refers to the humility and simplicity of living close to Nature, with animal epithets (as with Blake’s poetry) verging on the holy. For Wilson and Coleridge, the passions of the characters are inappropriate only because they are ascribed to an idiot boy and his mother who, as Byron mocked in ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’, is ‘an idiot mother’ for loving her idiot boy.58 Wordsworth implies that Wilson had misconstrued these passions as ‘indelicate, or gross, or vulgar’ because he overlooks the ‘new composition of feeling’ Wordsworth sees embodied in the sensibility of these rustic creatures.59 On this view, the ‘great moving spirit’ of ‘eternal nature’ protects these ‘low’ figures more than it could with refined characters, their sensibility born out of their humble conditions.60 Despite this impassioned defence, it is interesting to note that Wordsworth admits that had he the narrative space he would have liked to separate Johnny ‘in the imagination of my readers from that class of idiots who are disgusting persons’, but the ‘rapid and impassioned’ speed of the poem would not allow it.61 His distinction is based on the difference between Johnny’s condition and idiots who are ‘disgusting in appearance’; although there is ‘vacancy in his countenance’, he has a sensitivity that is denied to those who evoke disgust.62 The voice of the poem cannot tell whether Johnny’s ‘burrs’ and laughter are ‘in cunning or in joy’ (l.388) and cannot always guess what ‘Johnny and his horse are doing’ (l.323), but is sure that the sounds he emits signify an emotion that can be understood and with which he can sympathize.63 Wordsworth seems to be Report from the Commons Madhouses Enquiry that documented the presence of ‘dreadful idiots’ and ‘poor withered old idiots’ in public asylums and workhouses: Andrews, ‘Begging the Question of Idiocy’, 78. 57 Wordsworth, Early Letters, p. 294. 58 Byron, George Gordon, Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 116. 59 Wordsworth, Early Letters, p. 294; p. 295. 60 Ibid., p. 296. 61 Ibid., p. 298. 62 Ibid., p. 297. 63 Geoffrey Hartman argues that the poetic voice in ‘The Idiot Boy’ is hesitant and slightly ‘embarrassed’, because there is a possibility that ‘what may have happened is [entirely] inward to the idiot boy’: Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 63; p. 115. Alan Bewell also

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dividing idiots into two categories – those who are ignorant and without learning, and those who are mentally impaired – a distinction that, for Wilson and Coleridge, is confused in the representation of Johnny. For them the very word ‘idiot’ is abhorrent, whereas Wordsworth sees human potentiality in the simple, but not in the disgusting, image of idiocy. The absence of any description of those idiots that evoke disgust suggests the gap between the two types was, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, blurred and very poorly understood. This representation of innocence is in direct contrast to Robert Southey’s poem ‘The Idiot’, published earlier in 1798. As Patrick McDonagh argues, even though both poems portray strong maternal bonds, the idiot in Southey’s poem combines a ‘blend of pathos and the macabre’ that attests to the poet’s ‘profound anxiety about the nature of idiocy’.64 McDonagh argues that Southey’s portrayal is more sceptical (and therefore less naïve) than Wordsworth’s poem, but it seems that only subtle differences in the interpretation of idiotic features – such as animality rather than humanity, noise over language, and vacancy instead of composure – mark the borderline between an innocent sensibility and the kind of retarded idiot that corresponds to Wordsworth’s category of ‘the disgusting’.

Victorian Idiots Patrick McDonagh argues convincingly that in the nineteenth century, ‘the idea of idiocy gained importance as a site of ideological contention’, brought about by developments in educational and biological theories, together with the impact of urbanization and mass migration to the cities.65 Romantic interest in the sensibility of idiocy did not fade away entirely,66 but the emergence of

detects this tension, arguing that Wordsworth’s seriousness of intent is ‘concealed, selfconsciously, by comedy’: Bewell, ‘Wordsworth’s Primal Scene: Retrospective Tales of Idiots, Wild Children, and Savages’, English Literary History, 5 (1983), 326. 64 McDonagh, ‘The Image of Idiocy in Nineteenth-Century England’, p. 42. In Southey’s poem (written in June 1798) the idiot boy Ned is mute and helpless and cared for by his mother. But, when his mother dies, in a state of utter confusion Ned exhumes her body, takes her home and tries to revive her. Southey’s poem is reprinted in B. R. McElderberry, Jr’s essay ‘Southey, and Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy”’, Notes and Queries, 2 (November 1955), 490–91. 65 McDonagh, ‘Image of Idiocy’, p. 8. 66 A Romantic sensibility is evident in the distinguished British physician Frederic Bateman’s late nineteenth-century description of idiocy. However, unlike Wordsworth, Bateman focuses on what the idiot cannot perceive: ‘the poor idiot … is alone in the world; isolated as it were from the rest of nature … he cares for nothing, and is alike indifferent to the grandeur as to the beauties of Nature; he stands unmoved at the thunder clap, the foam of the rushing cataract, or the roar of the mighty ocean; he heeds not the hum of the insect world or the song of the early lark, that winged chorister of the

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idiocy as a ‘social-scientific paradigm’ standardized the terms ‘idiots’ and ‘imbeciles’ as medical labels, rooting idiocy in the familial, educational, political and biological realities of living under the forces of industrialization.67 For example, in The Hand Book of Idiotcy the British philanthropist James Abbott argues that the condition arises from ‘functional deficiency, or organic derangement’, while in On the Causes of Idiocy (1858) the American medic and educator Samuel Howe argued that an idiot can rarely ‘be understood [as] a person utterly devoid of sense and understanding’.68 Even though idiots were often grouped with the infirm in workhouses for the poor,69 the growing belief that educational methods could be successfully implemented suggested that there were only rare cases of what Howe calls ‘hopeless’ or ‘entire’ idiocy.70 An 1848 report to which Howe contributed describes idiocy ‘as a disease of society’ and ‘an outward sign of an inward malady’ that derives from the social ‘violation of the natural laws’. When Howe asserts that ‘there is little doubt’ that both the ‘remote’ and the ‘proximate causes’ of idiocy ‘are to be found in the CONDITION OF THE BODILY ORGANIZATION’ he implicitly relates this form of organization to the social body as a whole.71 Just as Howe’s report recommends that ‘immediate measures’ should be taken to establish a specialist institution in Massachusetts, so James Abbott addressed his tract to the Members of the Houses of Parliament that they might see the fundamental differences between idiots and lunatics and provide funds to establish ‘a college

air; the star-bejewelled canopy of heaven … all these are nothing to him – he is a soul shut up in imperfect organs’: Bateman, The Idiot: His Place in Creation and His Claims on Society, pp. 21–2. 67 McDonagh, ‘Image of Idiocy’, p. 9. 68 James Abbott, The Hand Book of Idiotcy, p. 14. Samuel Howe, On the Causes of Idiocy (Edinburgh: MacLachlan & Stewart, 1858), p. x. While Howe suggests that the idiot’s ‘brutishness’ is largely a result of their neglect, Abbott echoes Wordsworth’s dualistic view of idiots: on the one hand, they wallow in ‘the lowest depths of degradation’ and, on the other, they share with others ‘some sympathetic key, which if we can but strike, will awaken the responsive tone of the whole’: Howe, On the Causes of Idiocy, p. viii and Abbott, The Hand Book of Idiotcy, pp. 30–31. 69 In the Southwell workhouse in Nottinghamshire, those identified as ‘lunatics’ and ‘idiots’ existed alongside the old and infirm as examples of the ‘blameless’ poor that were not expected to work, whereas violent cases were sent to the asylum in Nottingham: Susanna Smith, The Workhouse Southwell (London: The National Trust, 2002), pp. 14–15. 70 Howe, On the Causes of Idiocy, p. xii. 71 Ibid., p. ix. As a scientist Howe was interested in anatomical peculiarities in those thought to be idiots. This interest in the anatomy and physiognomy of idiots grew in the mid-nineteenth century, as evidenced in Arthur Ladbroke Wigan’s comment in A New View of Insanity (1844) that the two halves of the cranium rarely matched in cases of insanity and idiocy and in John Abercrombie’s clinical study ‘A Case of Spasmodic Muscular Rigidity with Idiocy’, Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports, Volume 13 (1877).

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for idiots’ in the Midlands.72 The early British feminist Frances Power Cobbe also implies in her powerful essay on women’s rights, ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors’ (1868), that idiocy is fundamentally a social manifestation. The four categories Cobbe identified in her title describe those groups ‘now excluded from many civil, and all political rights in England’.73 While saying very little about idiots per se, Cobbe foreshadowed Foucault’s theory of a ‘carceral society’ by focusing on the discourses of inferiority that she discerned were permeating the Victorian social and political system.74 The equation between idiocy and childhood was prevalent in mid-Victorian England when, as David Wright discerns, the ‘process of certification and institutional confinement’ to the National Asylum for Idiots forced ‘families to formulate and express ideas about idiocy which … derived from the practical aspects of household life – domestic economy, concerns over household safety, and individual responsibility and duties’.75 Wright’s study focuses on Earlswood Asylum in Surrey, which admitted idiot children between 8 and 18 ‘likely to benefit from institutional training’ from both the middle and working classes. Wright argues that this shifted the parameters from ‘older notions of the pure idiot’ to reframing idiocy within educational and institutional discourses.76 Similarly, an official survey in New York State in 1847 identified a plethora of ‘poor human creatures like idiots, who do not enjoy either the riches of the world nor the blessing of religion’.77 The survey considered 171 towns in the State and identified 543 idiots out of a population of nearly 350 000; this statistic was one of the primary stimuli behind the founding of a State Asylum in 1851. British and American asylums shared with Continental institutions, such as Edouard Séguin’s Bicêtre in Paris and Johann Jacob Guggenbühl’s Abendberg School for cretins (established in the Swiss Alps in the early 1840s), a belief that replacing the primary bond between mother and child with multiple relationships with institutional carers, medics, nurses 72 Howe, On the Causes of Idiocy, p. xiv. Abbot, The Hand Book of Idiotcy, p. 62. 73 Susan Hamilton (ed.), ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors’: Victorian Writing By Women on Women (London: Broadview Press, 1995), p. 110. 74 Cobbe’s grouping of ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors’ echoes Locke’s juxtaposition of ‘Children, Ideots, Savages, and the grosly Illiterate’, for which he wonders ‘what general Maxims are to be found?’: Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I.1.27. Cobbe’s argument that women should not be classified with these other groups suggests she believed British Common Law was correct in withholding certain rights from idiots, criminals and minors. 75 David Wright, ‘“Childlike in his Innocence”: Lay Attitudes to “Idiots” and “Imbeciles” in Victorian England’, in From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency: Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Disabilities, ed. David Wright & Anne Digby (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 119. 76 Ibid., p. 121; p. 119. 77 ‘Asylums and Schools for Idiots’ [editorial], American Journal of Insanity (July 1847), 76. Interestingly, given the gender imbalance in representations of idiocy, among these 543 idiots, 204 were male and 339 female, with 169 being less than 25 years old and the ‘proper subjects for instruction’.

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and educators was good for the patients. Rather than being defined as a metaphysical condition (as it was for Locke and Enlightenment thinkers), now idiocy was often ‘defined in an interactive context’ in terms of the relative lack of ability and of ‘natural’ development when compared to other children and measured against normative standards.78 This developmental view of idiocy derived in part from the rise of the natural sciences in reorienting nineteenth-century epistemology. For example, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) stressed both the variety of natural forms and the mysterious evolutionary processes that account for the development of certain species and the freezing or extinction of others. He claimed that ‘more individuals are born than can possibly survive. A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die, – which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.’79 While the survival of the fittest tells one story of evolutionary change, there is a shadow story in Origin in which Darwin remains unsure why and how certain oddities survive even though natural selection suggests they should have died out. Utilitarian thinkers often adopted Social Darwinist rhetoric to explain or justify social competition, but Origin is anti-utilitarian in its suggestion that the law of nature is not based upon usevalue. Darwin questioned: ‘why if man can by patience select variations most useful to himself, should nature fail in selecting variations useful, under changing conditions of life, to her living products?’80 This implies not only that ‘man’ is feeble in the face of nature, but that humans should not necessarily be seen as the pinnacle of evolution; as Gillian Beer argues, ‘even at the celebratory culmination of [Origin] man is not named, not distinguished from the other higher forms of life’.81 Not only did Darwin’s theory of natural selection displace the theological argument for celestial design, but also it jolted an understanding of historical change as human-centred. That does not mean to say that Darwin was not interested in the relation between humans and other species. Indeed, the kinship between species is one of the most striking aspects of Origin that links to the growing cultural interest in evolutionary ideas, particularly the theory that a normal functioning individual ‘climbs its own family tree’ passing through stages ‘representing adult ancestral forms in their correct order’.82 While one implication of this model suggests that idiocy is a throwback to ancestral forms (the theory of recapitulation), Gillian Beer 78 Wright & Digby, From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency, p. 122. 79 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection (1859), ed. J. W. Burrow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 442. 80 Ibid., p. 443. 81 Gillian Beer, ‘The Face of Nature: The Language of The Origin of Species’, in Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature, ed. Ludmilla Jordanova (London: Free Association Books, 1986), p. 216. 82 Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, p. 143.

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argues that Charles Dickens’ fiction helped to provide Darwin with a way of expressing the close proximity between different orders of life and ‘the theme of hidden yet all-pervading kinship’ in which objects are both classifiable in their relationship with others, but also recalcitrant and often impenetrable.83 The Victorian interest in hereditary conditions is not solely motivated by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. It began to permeate an understanding of illness earlier in the century, often fused with an educational approach to treating idiocy. This interest developed the eighteenth-century preoccupation with miscreation caused by parental disorders, but with a much stronger scientific grounding. For example, in the article ‘Idiots Again’ published in Dickens’ journal Household Words in 1854 (and generally attributed to Harriet Martineau), the author considers inbreeding as one of the major sources of idiocy, and a condition that should be prevented by law. The essay blends a scientific approach with social and pedagogic discourses, looking at the affect of an idiot child on the mother and the need to train idiots in special institutions. There is also an appeal to develop a sharper social understanding of idiocy. Given that the law declares ‘anybody an idiot “who could not count twenty pence”’, the author argues that many have an instinctive command of numbers and ‘almost every one of the idiots in England has some power that the legal definition declares him not to have’.84 In a later Darwinian study of idiocy, Body and Mind (1870), Henry Maudsley also claims that ‘marriages of consanguinity … produce degeneracy of the race, and idiocy as the extremest form of such degeneracy’.85 He viewed the development of the brain on an evolutionary scale,

83 Beer, ‘The Face of Nature’, p. 221. This notion of impenetrability can be found in the British alienist Forbes Benignus Winslow’s claim in On Obscure Diseases of the Brain, and Disorders of the Mind (1860) that the ‘mysteries of the inner mental life’ are so manifold that categorical distinctions cannot be made between normal and pathological individuals (London: John Churchill, 1868), p. 141. Peter Ackroyd notes the theme of complexity in Darwin’s and Dickens’ work, but counters the theory of impenetrability, asserting that they held ‘the belief that there were fixed laws of the universe which could be discovered and explained – there was no uncertainty, no relativity in their accounts’: Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Guild, 1990), p. 664. It is precisely this tension between impenetrability and fixity that characterizes the cultural representations of idiocy discussed in the following chapters. 84 Anon., ‘Idiots Again’, Household Words, 9 (15 April 1854), 199, reprinted in Jenny Bourne Taylor & Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830–1890 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 324. 85 Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind: An Inquiry into their Connection and Mutual Influence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders (London: Macmillan, 1870), p. 45, extracted in Taylor & Shuttleworth (eds), Embodied Selves, p. 327. Following Benedict August Morel’s work on degeneracy, Maudsley cites a case of degeneracy across four generations: from (1) ‘depravity, alcoholic excess and moral degradation’ of the greatgrandfather, (2) ‘hereditary drunkenness [and] maniacal attacks’ in the grandfather, (3) ‘hypochondrical tendencies, delusions of persecutions, and homicidal tendencies’ in the father, to (4) the son’s ‘defective intelligence’: ‘first attack of mania at sixteen; stupidity, and transition to complete idiocy’: ibid., pp. 327–8. Elaine Showalter discusses the gender

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comparing the brain-weight of idiots to distinguished men and claiming that most idiots have a primitive brain that accounts for ‘animal traits and instincts’ such as masticating ‘like a cow’.86 The tension between innocent and disgusting versions of idiocy in Romantic thought begins to unravel in Maudsley’s study in which all idiots are viewed as degenerate and without redeeming qualities, with their inferior brainweight an index of their worthlessness. Maudsley’s scientific work is certainly not ideologically free, particularly his claims that the brain becomes heavier through education and that idiots (just like ‘primitive’ races such as the ‘Australian savage’) should be civilized by ‘a gradual process of humanization’.87 As such, the kinship Darwin identified between species and his view of the ‘hybridism’ of races in The Descent of Man (1871) have no place in Maudsley’s scientific-imperialist framework. Turning our attention to Victorian cultural production, Dickens is the most obvious of nineteenth-century writers to represent odd and eccentric characters, some of whom could be deemed idiots, like Mr Dick in David Copperfield (1850) or Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend (1864).88 Hilary Dickinson discerns two broad attitudes to idiocy in nineteenth-century British literature and identifies two groups of texts in which these attitudes are expressed. In the first group, idiocy is not ‘clearly separated from madness or eccentricity’, developing the Romantic conception of the idiot’s proximity to Nature in which ‘impairment is either not referred to, or has a quasi supernatural origin’.89 Dickinson sees this attitude

implications of Maudsley’s methods in Chapter 4 of The Female Malady, arguing that his project was to control the ‘shadowy territory between sanity and madness’: Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 105. 86 Maudsley, Body and Mind, p. 328; p. 329. Maudsley justifies his assertions with reference to a scientific table published in the Journal of Medical Science in April 1866, which lists ten distinguished men whose average brain-weight was 54.7 ounces compared to the brain-weight of ‘average European men’ at 48 ounces. This is contrasted to the average brain-weights of ‘male negroes’ at 44.3 (other races fare worse), male congenital idiots at 42, female congenital idiots at 41.2, and the estimated brain-weights of male and female Microcephalic idiots at 37.5 and 32.5 ounces respectively: p. 365. Although some scientists contested the link between brain-weight and intelligence, this kind of dubious scientific affiliation between savagery and idiocy continued into the twentieth century. For example, Havelock Ellis noted in 1910 that the ‘inability to blush has always been considered the accompaniment of crime and shamelessness. Blushing is also very rare among idiots and savages’: Havelock Ellis, The Criminal (New York: Scribner’s, 1910), p. 138. 87 Maudsley, Body and Mind, p. 366. 88 Sloppy is described as a kind of miscreation, but lacks the grotesquery common in eighteenth-century descriptions of monstrous births. Dickens’ narrator describes him as there being ‘too much of him longwise, too little of him broadwise, and too many sharp angles of him angle-wise’ and he has ‘a considerable capital of knee and elbow and wrist and ankle’: Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 201. 89 Hilary Dickinson, ‘Idiocy in Nineteenth-Century Fiction compared with the

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epitomized by characters like Davie Gellatly in Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), Jenny and Meg Guffaw in John Galt’s Annals of the Parish (1821) and the eponymous protagonist of Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge (1841), a list to which one might add Tessa in George Eliot’s Romola (1863). The second group is characterized as differentiating idiocy from madness and ‘having a clear medical aetiology’. This group of idiot figures live in regular domestic and social worlds but are ‘not quite like other people’, as is the case with Smike in Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby (1838), Marie Broc in Charlotte Brönte’s Villette (1853) and Willie in Elizabeth Gaskell’s short story ‘Half a Lifetime Ago’ (1855). It is perhaps surprising that representatives of both groups are found in some writers’ work, such as Dickens, whose feeble-minded Smike has qualities of loyalty and perseverance, whereas Barnaby Rudge is a caricatured fool, participating in the Gordon Riots of 1780 only to wear the uniform and for the privilege of carrying a flag. While Dickinson identifies a shift from early nineteenth-century portrayals of the idiot figure dressed or acting extravagantly to later characters whose condition has an identifiable organic cause, this is not fully borne out in the close publication dates of Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby and Barnaby Rudge (1838 and 1841). Nevertheless, wider circulation of medical opinion after 1850 gave rise to more considered treatments of the organic and social causes of idiocy as well as its educational possibilities, with Andrew Combe’s Observations on Mental Derangement (1831) suggesting that intellectual capabilities of idiots may be restricted, but their sensibilities are often ‘well developed’.90 Another major shift in the Victorian regard for idiocy is, as Patrick McDonagh asserts, a belief that rational paternalism is needed to supplement the caring maternal bonds portrayed in Wordsworth’s and Southey’s poems.91 For example, McDonagh argues that Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge is symbolic of the ‘disruptive and rebellious mob’ involved in the Gordon Riots, his fundamental lack being ‘a strong paternal guide’ that could help him to overcome his unruliness.92 Although there is some doubt over the authenticity of his idiocy, Barnaby lives with his mother and he has no rational force to advise him when it comes to the uprising. Considering Dickens had little time for popular accounts of Rousseau’s noble savage, the presence of so many idiotic figures in his works is intriguing, especially given his scepticism regarding some aspects of social progressivism.93 In extreme cases Dickens saw institutionalization as a good thing but, as he described in the essay ‘Idiots’, he was worried that ‘the putting away of these unfortunates … may be Medical Perspectives of the Time’, History of Psychiatry, 11, 3(43) (September 2000), 292. 90 Ibid., 303. 91 McDonagh, ‘The Image of Idiocy in Nineteenth-Century England’, pp. 77–8. 92 Ibid., p. 115. 93 See Dickens, ‘The Noble Savage’, in The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 467–73.

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attributable to that same refinement which cannot endure to be told about them’.94 Natalie McKnight argues that he is much less sympathetic to idiots in his nonfiction than in his novels – in which he is ‘more romantic, more hopeful, even more spiritual’ – perhaps because the physical presence of the idiot disturbed Dickens, whereas the image of idiocy could be lightened in his fiction.95 Given this ambivalence, McDonagh rather overstates Dickens’ faith in paternal authority and he is not entirely convincing in claiming that Barnaby is ‘the perfect symbol of a people needing good government’ (as opposed to McKnight’s claim that Barnaby represents the return of the repressed). Nevertheless, McDonagh rightly identifies a tension in Dickens’ work between the need to socially care for idiots and the poor and his fears that idiocy is a sign of general decline and degeneration (as articulated in Maudsley’s Body and Mind). For example, in Dickens’ account of his visit to St Luke’s Hospital for the Insane in London, entitled ‘A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree’ (1852), he combines a critique of incarceration with a study of the patients as they dance around the Christmas tree. After describing a number of mad and idiotic patients he turns his attention to Tommy, ‘the harmless old man with a giggle and a chuckle and a nod for every one’.96 He ends the account wishing Tommy were more centred in his actions (more ‘like a Bull’ charging at the tree), instead of existing uncertainly between ontological states: ‘at once so childish and so dreadfully un-childlike’.97 This kind of Victorian ambivalence towards idiots not only mirrors the moral distinction that Wordsworth makes between the ‘ignorant’ and ‘disgusting’ forms of idiocy, but as Sandra Billington notes (and Natalie McKnight echoes), it refers back to two archaic meanings of the term: the Hebrew words tam meaning innocent fool, and ksl as the wilful or evil face of folly.98 This dichotomy is certainly prevalent in Dickens and weaves its way through nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of idiocy, with writers and filmmakers often treating idiot figures carefully in order to preserve what is seen as their ‘better’ and least degenerate side. Indeed, 94 Charles Dickens & W. H. Wills, ‘Idiots’, Household Words (4 June 1853), 316. 95 Natalie McKnight, Idiots, Madmen, and Other Prisoners in Dickens (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 17. 96 Dickens, ‘A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree’, Household Words (17 January 1852), 387–8, reprinted in Taylor & Shuttleworth (eds), Embodied Selves, p. 238. The description of Tommy suggests that, like Mr Dick in David Copperfield, he is actually suffering from senile dementia. 97 McDonagh and McKnight argue that Dickens is at his most uncomfortable with female idiot characters (like Maggy in Little Dorrit), perhaps because the condition represents an identifiable lack (Smike) or excess (Barnaby) in his male characters, whereas in women it is indivisible from female sexuality: McDonagh, ‘The Image of Idiocy in Nineteenth-Century England’, p. 114 and McKnight, Idiots, Madmen, and Other Prisoners in Dickens, p. 4. 98 Sandra Billington, A Social History of the Fool (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984), p. 45, cited in McKnight, Idiots, Madmen, and Other Prisoners in Dickens, p. 44.

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Hilary Dickinson argues that the elision of the figures of the fool and the idiot often lends special abilities to idiots in order to overcome ‘the literary inelegance’ of the condition.99 Given Wilson’s and Coleridge’s hostility to the roughness of ‘disgusting’ idiots, in Dickinson’s view the discourse of the fool smoothes the edges of idiocy, making it more palatable and granting idiots the kind of visionary insights often associated with Shakespearean fools. She identifies this hybrid figure in early nineteenth-century literature (before medical knowledge concerning idiocy had been refined and educational programmes had been introduced) as representing a form of cultural nostalgia for a time before modernity had broken up rural communities. As the following chapters demonstrate, a similar sleight of hand in conflating the two figures is also evident in post-Romantic and modernist writing, in which ‘the mad eccentric element’ that Dickinson detects is often used ‘as a device for sheltering the reader from a wholly unstylish affliction’.100 Rather than idiocy representing a blank site or the degree zero of humanity, it is often blurred with the figure of the fool as an enigmatic symbol for that which cannot be understood or fixed in a stable frame of reference. As the juxtaposed illustrations at the front of the book – Herbert Bayer’s ‘Lonely Metropolitan’ and the image of ‘John Donaldson, A Simpleton’ – suggest, representations of idiocy tend to shuttle between the extraordinary and the banal, between the transcendent and the abject. The following discussion demonstrates that Romantic debates about the cultural representation of idiocy were by no means restricted to the nineteenth century, later arising in modernist explorations into alternative modes of subjectivity and the postmodern interest in fractured discourses. The preoccupation with the physical ‘look’ of the idiot is apparent in all the literary texts considered in the following chapters and explored in a more explicit visual register in their film versions. As I suggested in the Introduction, it is the instability of idiocy as a cultural trope that characterizes the following case studies, often associated with the impossible separation of the socially acceptable and what is often deemed to be expendable: what the French theorist Julia Kristeva calls ‘the refuse’ of daily life. On this theme, in her study of abjection Powers of Horror (Pouvoirs de l’horreur, 1980), Kristeva considers the boundaries erected by individuals and societies to ward against contradictions and threats (from both within and without), concluding that these boundaries are often ‘flimsy protections against disintegration’.101 Not only does she argue that abjection is closely associated with the materiality of bodily processes (ingestion, egestion and putrefaction), but also that it represents the point where ‘meaning collapses’ and clear distinctions no longer hold.102 Because idiocy is often associated with fractured language or the pre-linguistic (corresponding to Kristeva’s 99 Dickinson, ‘Idiocy in Nineteenth-Century Fiction’, 305. 100 Ibid., 305. 101 Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-Bind (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 58. 102 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 8.

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theory of the semiotic), the ambivalence of many representations can be accounted for in terms of a double experience of an intense fascination with and revulsion toward idiots that draws the inquirer near to the point beyond which meaning and social identity collapse. We will return to Kristeva’s account of abjection later on, but it is worth concluding this chapter by linking the theory of abjection to the dream of a doctor that is recounted by the Swiss analyst Carl Jung in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963). Lost in a medieval building in the centre of a city, in his dream the doctor stumbles into a room so huge and dark he cannot see the opposite wall. All he can see is ‘something white on the floor … an idiot child of about two years old. It was sitting on a chamber pot and had smeared itself with faeces.’103 Jung explains the idiot child as an early image of the doctor himself and interprets the ‘sinister symbol’ as a sign of ‘latent psychosis’ that is ‘within a hair breadth of breaking out’ in the doctor’s waking life. On one level, the idiot child is a primitive image of the dreamer, but, from a Kristevan perspective, the dream can be interpreted as a symptom of cultural abjection. On this reading, the idiot figure is not simply the return of the repressed, but as the following chapters develop, an ambivalent image that can be used to challenge forms of social and scientific control and to contest the logic of representation.

103 C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard & Clara Winston (London: Fontana, 1995), pp. 157–8.

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Chapter Two

Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert and Jean Renoir) Gustave Flaubert was one of the most distinctive stylists in nineteenth-century literature, establishing a reputation for his uncompromising critiques of French bourgeois society and, among twentieth-century critics, for his very modern interest in irony and the problems of representation. While Flaubert could be labelled an antiRomantic for his critical treatment of idealism and his irreverence for innocence, or a naturalist for his interest in characters determined by family background and environment, he cannot easily be positioned within the broad sweep of nineteenthcentury European realism. His extensive correspondence with Ivan Turgenev and George Sand substantiates the view that Flaubert was a cynical exponent of literary conventions, reworking his major themes of nature, authority and stupidity from personal experience. Nature for Flaubert was a permanent and unsettling condition that cannot be wholly overcome by education or social custom; his dislike of authority was evident in his tense relationship with his father (a respected medic) and in the rural retreat he sought from the literary marketplace, and stupidity or bêtise is a recurrent theme that pervades his work in different guises. While there is no obvious sustained treatment of an idiot figure in his fiction (compared with, for example, Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot), there are numerous characters whose stupidity is a result of natural slowness, delusion, affectation or pomposity. Flaubert shared with Turgenev a personal and literary respect for Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605), claiming ‘I recognize all my origins in the book that I knew by heart before I could read.’1 On the model of Quixote, not only do Flaubert’s novels have a wandering quality, but his characters are far from heroic, chasing after ideals with no clear sense of direction. This is particularly apparent in the unfinished Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881), in which the two characters vainly search for universal knowledge, but also true of his major fiction, Madame Bovary (1857) and Sentimental Education (L’Éducation sentimentale, 1869), in which he portrays characters blind in their devotion to love, materialism or science. A number of critics, from Henry James and D. H. Lawrence to Jonathan Culler and Mary Orr, have closely linked Flaubert’s biographical preoccupations with the themes of his fiction. The title of Jean-Paul Sartre’s monumental study of Flaubert, The Idiot of the Family (L’idiot de la famille, 1971), deliberately 1 Cited in Barbara Beaumont (ed.), Flaubert and Turgenev: A Friendship in Letters (New York: Fromm International, 1985), p. 16.

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links the author’s complex psychology to his literary interest in stupidity, inferiority and banality. The focus of Sartre’s study derives largely from Flaubert’s early years, when his parents feared the young Gustave was an idiot: he regularly sat for hours with ‘one finger in his mouth, absorbed, looking almost stupid’ and he failed to master ‘his first human tasks’.2 Sartre’s psychobiographical account of Flaubert’s relationships with his parents and siblings supports the thesis that he ‘never left childhood behind him’.3 However, while Sartre sees evidence of Flaubert’s arrested development (including his epileptic attacks) in every ‘movement of his pen’, he asserts that Flaubert’s baseness is also ‘a chasm, and we can see only the edges of it’.4 This image of idiocy as an ontological ‘chasm’ reflects the way in which the concept has often been approached in modern writing, both as an inescapable state affecting all thoughts and actions and as a condition that defies classification. While Sartre’s study is generally sensitive to the ambiguity of Flaubert’s fiction, his approach turns him into a case study and reduces his fiction to an examination of neurosis. He claims that Flaubert ‘tortures’ the two main characters in Madame Bovary, ‘because they are himself, and also to show that other people and the world torture him. He also tortures them because they are not him and he is anyway vicious and sadistic and wants to torture others.’5 This sadomasochistic complex is complicated by Sartre’s view that Flaubert was caught between conflicting forces: Flaubert denounced stupidity but identified it in himself (he claimed ‘I find myself revoltingly banal’6), and he was torn between a religious sensibility (stemming from his mother) and the scientism of his father whom he both respected and despised. These themes are certainly evident in Flaubert’s fiction. But, while Sartre makes some perceptive insights, by searching for Flaubert’s unwavering mirror image in his fiction he cannot escape the closed circle of neurosis he sets out to identify. One of the most engaging aspects of Sartre’s study is his interest in Flaubert’s mistrust of language: from clichés (which Henry James described as ‘the horror … that haunted all his years’) and foolish language, to gibberish (which Flaubert describes as a ‘foreigner’s way of talking’) and the pretension of scientific language that often proves misleading or obscurantist.7 While Flaubert rejected the 2 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot, Volume 1: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857, trans. Carol Cosman (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 7; p. 4. 3 Ibid., p. 45. 4 Ibid., p. 45. 5 Sartre, ‘Itinerary of a Thought’, New Left Review (November–December 1969), 52–3, quoted in Hazel Barnes, Sartre and Flaubert (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 380. 6 Gustave Flaubert & George Sand, Flaubert – Sand: The Correspondence, trans. Francis Steegmuller & Barbara Bray (London: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 23. 7 Henry James, ‘Review of Correspondence de Gustave Flaubert’ (1893), in The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Roger Gard (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 310. Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet with the Dictionary of Received Ideas, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 307.

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humanistic idealism of George Sand (arguing that ‘nothing good can be done with the character of the “ideal Artist”’8) and he often adopted the objective pose of the scientist-writer, he was sensitive to the ways in which language is frequently appropriated for the wrong ends. For example, writing on the, as yet obscure, subject of genetics, he claims: ‘“heredity” is an accurate principle that has been incorrectly applied. So it is with that word as with many others. Everybody takes hold of it from a different end, and nobody understands anybody else.’9 At times he promotes scientific precision and accuracy – ‘the psychological sciences will remain … at a dim and foolish stage … as long as there is no precise nomenclature, and as long as it is conventional and permissible to use the same expression to signify the most diverse ideas’ – but at other times he deliberately disrupts fixed categories. While most of the terms in Flaubert’s The Dictionary of Received Ideas (Dictionnaire des idées reçues) are given critical or satirical definitions that expose oversimplified or lazy uses of particular words (for example, ‘immorality’ when ‘properly enunciated … confers prestige on the user’), some of the entries are more equivocal.10 Flaubert describes ‘idiots’ as ‘those who think differently from you’, almost as if idiocy is a condition to be cherished rather than scientifically circumscribed or simply open to social abuse. Compared to the word ‘stupidity’, not included in The Dictionary but which he described to Sand as a condition that is never ‘sacred’ and possesses ‘no generative power’, his view of idiocy verges on the positive.11 While Flaubert seems to treat some terms with more respect than others, as Jonathan Culler argues, the entries in the Dictionary do not represent ‘a coherent view of the world, nor are they rendered stupid by being set against another coherent ideology’ that the critic might also glimpse in his fiction.12 In his influential study Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (1974), Culler develops Sartre’s twin interest in language and characterization by viewing Flaubert’s personae of ‘the boy’ (a Rabelaisian character of excessive appetite that often appears in his letters) and ‘the family idiot’ (the role of which Flaubert played when it suited him) as manifestations of his ‘artistic posture’ to view the world ‘from the vantage point of stupidity and alienation’.13 Culler argues that these artistic masks are oddly incoherent: they may provide a stable perspective to launch satirical attacks on contemporary manners, but when probed closely they are

8 Flaubert & Sand, Flaubert – Sand: The Correspondence, p. 47. 9 Ibid., p. 26. 10 Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, p. 311. 11 Ibid., p. 362. 12 Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (London: Paul Elek, 1974), p. 160. Christopher Prendergast argues that Flaubert’s interest in bêtise is not simply ‘the mark of a particular intellectual or moral deficiency … but a matter of language as such’ and therefore more deeply embedded in his work than his representation of idiot figures: Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 193. 13 Culler, Flaubert, p. 34.

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surprisingly flimsy. Similarly, although his fiction seems to offer an unproblematic view of contemporary French bourgeois life, this is undermined by unsettling elements that disrupt the picture of reality, with characters often verging on the ridiculous. One of Flaubert’s favourite narrative techniques is to invite the reader into a fictional world which appears secure, but which soon begins to erode at the edges; this instability challenges the Romantic belief that a character’s contact with the world is a coherent way of ‘organizing and enriching it’.14 In contrast, Flaubert’s characters initially seem attractive because they are striking or unusual, but often prove to be shallow and banal. Instead of possessing exceptional Romantic qualities, very few characters actively determine their lives: they are often deluded in their beliefs or overwhelmed by the passivity which Sartre sees as a feature both of the author’s childhood and his improvised personae. Sartre and Culler both argue that, in this way, Flaubert prefigures the modernist preoccupation with the problems of aesthetic representation, and also the modern psychological interest in the interplay between the self and fiction as the intended, but unruly, fruit of imagination. While Flaubert was often accused of lacking compassion, epitomized in his satirical treatment of the two protagonists in Bouvard and Pécuchet (a book which James describes as a ‘panorama of human ineptitude’), at times he holds back from mocking all his characters.15 For example, in his late tale ‘The Simple Heart’ (‘Un coeur simple’, 1877), written in response to George Sand’s criticism that Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education were too negative, the narrative voice displays some sympathy for the central character, the servant Félicité. The story is generally sympathetic to Félicité’s uncomplicated naïveté, but the complex meaning of ‘simple’ in the title suggests an ambivalence towards the character: she seems incapable of introspection, and her lack of sophistication is mocked when she showers affection on an increasingly moribund selection of love objects, turning from her lover to two surrogate children, to an old cancerous man, and finally to the parrot, Loulou. Only with the parrot does she achieve a quasi-erotic relationship – ‘he would climb up her fingers, nibble her lips, cling to her bodice’ – and, when the parrot dies and is stuffed, he becomes Félicité’s iconic God-head, the dove of the Holy Ghost being replaced by a ‘gigantic parrot hovering over her head’.16 However, rather than pointing his finger squarely at Félicité for her idiocy, Flaubert also attacks M. Bourais, a pedantic figure who prevents Félicité from developing her knowledge. When she asks about the geography of Havana, ‘Bourais flung up his arms, sneezed, laughed uproariously, revelling in such ingeniousness; and Félicité could not understand why – her intelligence was so limited that she might even be expecting to see her nephew’s 14 Ibid., p. 129. 15 James, The Critical Muse, p. 142. 16 Flaubert, Three Tales, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 31; p. 40.

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portrait!’17 Bourais’ snorting apostrophe emphasizes Félicité’s lack of education and the reader is left to question her place in a social structure that does not offer free schooling. Here, Flaubert’s elusiveness is apparent as his narrator does not intervene in the situation, but simply leaves the characters to judge each other. As the next section discusses at length, these themes are central to Madame Bovary, filtered primarily through the character of Charles Bovary, but also played out by the other figures that populate Bovary’s world. While Henry James dismissed Madame Bovary as being ‘really too small an affair’ and Lawrence claimed that Charles and Emma Bovary ‘simply are too insignificant to carry the full weight’ of Flaubert’s ‘sense of tragedy’, these themes of smallness and insignificance are integral to its thematic scheme.18 Indeed, Flaubert’s meditation on idiocy is closely linked to what James calls the ‘epic of the usual’, in which Romantic ideas of heroism and transcendence are either abandoned or critiqued as literary spectres of the early nineteenth century.19 Charles Bovary is given the role of the idiot figure in the novel, but these Romantic spectres also delude Emma Bovary into chasing unrealizable dreams and giving others like the chemist Homais an inflated ego. So laden with idiocy is the novel that Christopher Prendergast asks the question: ‘is the text which seeks to display idiots itself idiotic by that very act?’20 A close reading of the novel helps to demonstrate the way in which Flaubert deploys idiocy as a narrative and symbolic device, rather than it representing a neurobiological condition that can be explained fully from Sartre’s psycho-biographical perspective. The last section of the chapter develops this reading by considering how Flaubert’s literary interests in nature, authority and stupidity are dramatized in the film versions of the novel, focusing particularly on the French director Jean Renoir’s 1934 adaptation.

The Unromantic Idiot As the title Madame Bovary implies, the character of Emma Bovary provides much of the narrative interest, from her casual introduction as an attractive farmer’s daughter in the second chapter through to her dramatic suicide from arsenic poisoning. While much critical attention has been given to Emma (stimulated by Flaubert’s provocative comment ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’), it is significant that she does not feature at the extremities of the novel. The description of the young Charles Bovary at the beginning and the profound effect Emma’s death has on him and the other townsfolk in the last three chapters frame her passionate life and 17 Ibid., p. 21. 18 James, ‘Gustave Flaubert’ (1902), in The Critical Muse, p. 384. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Mastro-Don Gesuldo’, in Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (London: Heinemann, 1956), p. 274. 19 James, The Critical Muse, p. 386. 20 Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis, p. 192.

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establish Charles as the important secondary focus of the novel. Critics have debated whether Charles is a personification of Flaubert himself (given his periods of self-doubt and masochism) or whether he is a version of his brother or father. Whatever his biographical provenance, Charles has a crucial narrative function and is far more than a pathological case. He appears at the beginning as a slow-witted schoolboy and inept medical student and remains the central focus up to his marriage to Emma; he then is pushed into the background for much of the narrative, re-emerging at the end as a mourning husband. One explanation for this is offered by Jonathan Culler, who argues that Charles is a vehicle for Flaubert’s interest in ‘discontinuity and incoherence’ as a reaction against the Romantic preoccupation with transcendence and harmony.21 Charles is an intriguing ‘absent presence’ in the novel: he does not actually disappear in terms of plot (except for the private romantic scenes between Emma and her two lovers, Rodolphe and Léon, and a brief period when Charles leaves Emma with Léon in Rouen), but at crucial times the narrator appears to forget him or uses him to emphasize the incoherence of the other characters’ lives. Given his limited intelligence, his lack of command over language, his passivity and Flaubert’s general interest in stupidity, it is unsurprising that Charles is assigned the role of idiot figure as a device to test the relevance of Romantic conceptions of idiocy. The novel opens with the young Charles introduced as a new boy at school in Rouen. He is placed in the class below his age group, with the headmaster’s promise that ‘if his work and conduct are satisfactory he can go up higher’.22 The opening description of Charles is not relayed from a detached third-person perspective, but apparently from the point of view of another unnamed schoolboy who judges him by the standards of the classroom. Charles is immediately depicted as docile, awkward and out of place: ‘taller than any of us, with hair cut square on his forehead like a village chorister; sensible-looking and extremely ill at ease’.23 While the scene stresses his isolation from the class (exaggerated in the longer draft chapter that Flaubert decided to cut24), there is nothing in his bodily appearance that marks him as idiotic apart from a slowness to adapt to his new environment. But, when the narrator describes his ill-fitting and mismatched clothes and provides a detailed account of his cap, the reader is encouraged to draw parallels between Charles’ general state of mind and his odd outward aspect. His cap is so outlandish and has so many facets that it becomes virtually indescribable: it is ‘one of those composite pieces of headgear in which you may trace features of bearskin, lancer-cap and bowler, night-cap and otterskin: one of those pathetic objects that are deeply expressive in their dumb ugliness, like an 21 Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, p. 54. 22 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: A Story of Provincial Life, trans. Alan Russell (London: Penguin, 1950), p. 15. 23 Ibid., p. 15. 24 See Jean Pommier and Gabrielle Leleu (eds), ‘Madame Bovary’: Nouvelle Version précédée des scénarios inédits (Paris: Corti, 1949).

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idiot’s face’ (‘le visage d’un imbécile’).25 Victor Brombert argues that the cap is a symbol of ‘the layers and monumentality of the wearer’s unintelligence’, but the second-person address (‘in which you may trace features’) and the familiarity of the repeated phrase, ‘one of those’, sit uneasily with the complex series of images and the surprising simile, ‘like an idiot’s face’, at the end of the sentence.26 If Flaubert deliberately avoided depicting Charles as an authentic idiot, the description of the cap and this carefully chosen simile are suggestive of both his character and the way in which his classmates treat him. The account of the cap increases in complexity (among other features it has a long tassel suggesting foolishness) and then ends suddenly with the blunt sentence: ‘It was a new cap, with a shiny peak.’ This moment of ironic undercutting is typically Flaubertian, as if the attempt to render the cap accurately is defeated by the language available to describe it. Tony Tanner argues that this linguistic complexity makes the cap into an ‘impossible’ object ‘that can be read and deciphered, but not seen and experienced’, while Culler sees it as a prime example of Flaubert’s stylistic shift from profundity to inanity.27 The classroom ridicule continues when Charles attempts to stand up and his cap falls off, and the mockery increases when he stammers, then shouts out his name, ‘Charbovari’, in a virtually incomprehensible way. After a bout of ‘shrieking and howling and stamping of feet from the classmates’, he is invited by the teacher to take the dunce’s seat and ‘write out twenty times the phrase ridiculus sum’.28 As Tanner suggests, in the description of the cap and Charles’ odd enunciation of his name, an ontological gap emerges between the realm of language (the cap as linguistic construct) and the actual world of experience (Charles treated as if he were an idiot). This tension becomes a major theme later in the novel as Emma flees repeatedly from the mundane provincial world for flights of romantic fantasy. Although Emma does not possess the natural stupidity of Charles, her inability to differentiate between idealistic dreams and material reality makes her almost as insensate as her husband. It can be argued that Flaubert reined back an explicit description of Charles’ idiocy to maximize the narrative possibilities by allowing him to become a doctor and marry. Nevertheless, in the long description of the cap, the ‘dumb ugliness’ of the ‘idiot’s face’ stands out as the most lasting image of Charles. 25 Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Penguin, 1950), p. 16 / Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1986), p. 62. 26 Victor Brombert, The Novels of Flaubert: A Study of Themes and Techniques (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 41. 27 Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contact and Transgression (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 238. Sartre claimed that Flaubert’s use of the sentence is a way of obscuring a clear sense of reality: ‘his sentence surrounds the object, seizes it, immobilizes it and breaks its back … a deep silence separates it from the sentence which follows; it falls into the void, eternally, and drags its prey along this infinite fall. Once described, any reality is stricken from the inventory’: Sartre, What is Literature? (Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, 1948), trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Methuen, 1950), pp. 97–8. 28 Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Penguin, 1950), p. 17.

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The involved description of the classroom scene soon switches to an adult and impartial voice recapping Charles’ experience at school and college. He is described as a conscientious and diligent pupil, always in ‘the middle of the class’, but slow, lacking finesse and possessing ‘little elegance’.29 He is introduced to school late because his lower-middle-class parents are constantly short of money; his father, a ‘handsome braggart’, had been forced to resign as assistant surgeon in the family practice and has taken to lazing around the house and squandering the little money he received as a dowry for marrying a hosier’s daughter.30 The smallmindedness of his father is contrasted to his affectionate mother, but she becomes irritable and intolerant of her husband’s debauchery when he is repeatedly sent back from the whorehouse ‘surfeited’ and ‘stinking with drink’.31 While Charles’ mother spoils him, his father has a ‘manly ideal of boyhood’, viewing him from an early age as ‘a young animal’ and possessing natural dignity.32 Despite his mother’s efforts to overcome her own educational limitations by teaching him the best she could (together with some ‘haphazard’ lessons from the priest), Charles is described as running ‘wild’ through the village and having a close relationship with the natural world, not in the Romantic sense of a nurturing communion, but on an uncultivated and base level.33 The focus on Charles’ family background helps to explain his lack of distinctive qualities, with the least virtuous traits of his parents contributing to his unremarkable personality. Charles’ parents are so out of touch with his limitations that they take him out of school, believing he could attain a degree in medicine on his own. He is diligent in attending hospital practice and struggles with medical terminology, but understands very little of what was taught him, performing his ‘daily little task like a mill-horse tramping around blindfold, grinding away at he knows not what’.34 Again, the narrator stresses ignorance, rather than naïveté, and a lack of quality that cannot be redeemed by hard work. While Charles is not an idiot in terms of cerebral ability, his slowness and animal-like behaviour (comparisons are often made to farm animals) establish him quickly as the novel’s idiot figure. The fact that he lacks enthusiasm, eventually prefers laziness to diligence, begins drinking and indulging in ‘forbidden pleasures’ and fails to achieve his medical diploma (although he later passes) reveals that his father’s influence weighs heavily on his character. Contrary to the

29 Ibid., p. 18. 30 Ibid., p. 21; p. 18. 31 Ibid., p. 19. 32 Ibid., p. 19. 33 This negative connection between immobility and the natural world is later developed through the character of Catherine Leroux at the Agricultural Fair. Diana Knight argues that in Catherine’s association with farm animals she assumes their ‘dumb placidity’, standing still and not knowing what to do: Diana Knight, Flaubert’s Characters: The Language of Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 31. 34 Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Penguin, 1950), p. 22.

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conventions of the Bildungsroman, in which the protagonist has the capacity and opportunity to develop, Charles does not have the ability to change, with his genetics, family environment and social isolation conspiring against his intellectual growth. Although the naturalist perspective prevents Charles (and later Emma) from maturing, Flaubert’s fictional world is not quite as debilitating as a fully blown naturalist novel such as Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1868), in which the characters have no chance of rising above their squalid depravity. Flaubert’s narrator stresses Charles’ unremarkable character and, while a more understanding parent or teacher might have been a positive influence, he is not given the stimulus to rise above his natural dullness. After Charles fails his exams the first time, the narrator interjects that his father ‘could never have imagined that a son of his could be a fool’, suggesting that public opinion will be suspect in the novel, with characters largely ignorant of the capabilities of each other.35 Charles’ wretched life seems to be complete when his mother finds him a bride (‘a bailiff’s widow from Dieppe’), who has a modest income but immediately imprisons him within a domestic routine. Only when he starts to visit the Rouault family to set a broken leg and is charmed by Emma does he begin to put his domestic situation into perspective. His wife, Héloise, suspects the worst and berates him for going back to the house after M. Rouault’s fracture is mended. Although Charles is too weak to defy his wife, his desire for Emma gives him a rare burst of energy and motivation: ‘the boldness of his desire protested against the servility of his conduct, and with a sort of naïve hypocrisy he reckoned that this injunction against seeing her gave him a virtual right to love her’.36 Even a character as slow as Charles can discern the difference between the living death of his marriage (his wife’s ‘bony figure … encased in dresses like sheaths’) and the charming demeanour of Emma Rouault, with her well-cleaned nails and becoming eyes. Charles’ domestic situation gradually worsens, but then reverses suddenly when his wife dies after discovering her income has disappeared along with her corrupt lawyer (the first instance in which the novel questions the integrity of professional life). Charles is relieved and liberated by his wife’s death, but worldly ignorance continues to stultify his desire for freedom: despite the negativity of the marriage he genuinely mourns Héloise and believes she ‘had loved him, after all’.37 The relationship between Emma and Charles develops quickly after the death of his first wife. Emma arouses Charles’ passion, bringing a flush to his face and giving him a ‘tight feeling in the throat’, but the reader is not told how Emma feels about him; the patriarchal arrangement between Charles and M. Rouault does not seem to take her wishes into account.38 While Charles does not appear to have grown any wiser since the death of Héloise (as Diana Knight argues he ‘can barely 35 36 37 38

Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 36.

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speak at all’39), he absorbs a lesson from his arranged marriage and is far from being a dullard in wanting to marry for love the second time around. Indeed, Mary Orr argues that Charles’ ‘free will … is his strength and his undoing, for his altruism, total trust, and generosity as regards giving [Emma] money is unprecedented in a world where wives could not have access to money without the authorization of the husband’.40 It would seem that Emma is attracted to Charles because of his status as a doctor and because he represents an escape from domesticity, while her father considers him ‘rather a wisp of a man’, but accepts him because he ‘was said to be steady and thrifty, and well-educated’.41 Public opinion and misinformation guide Rouault’s assessment of Charles’ character and Emma only slowly realizes his limitations when he reveals his lack of social skills by responding ‘feebly’ to jokes and compliments at the wedding reception. She soon realizes that his devotion to her is infantile and she pushes him ‘away with a weary half-smile, as you do a child that hangs on to you’.42 As the narrative focus shifts to Emma, Flaubert’s use of the second-person brings the reader into complicity with her attitude towards Charles, as his world contracts ‘to the silken compass’ of her ‘petticoats’.43 Finding herself married to an embodiment of William Blake’s clod, it is unsurprising that Emma hankers after the intense emotions that had fuelled her imagination from years reading romantic novels: ‘for her, life was cold as an attic facing north, and the silent spider boredom wove its web in all the shadowed corners of her heart’.44 In contrast to the romance that Emma seeks, Charles becomes so predictable and his conversation so ‘flat’ (‘provoking no emotion, no laughter, no dreams’ in Emma) that the reader is encouraged to share her frustration as she berates him for wearing worn-out boots.45 Emma’s frustration with Charles pervades the narrative as she tries to fulfill her yearnings with two lovers whom she idealizes as handsome heroes because they transcend the ‘moderate feelings’ of marriage.46 The narrator does not allow the reader to fully sympathize with Emma’s passions, by highlighting less desirable aspects of Rodolphe and Léon that she fails to detect. Flaubert’s technique of free indirect discourse, in which the narrator moves between character perspectives and periodically offers detached insights that any single character could not have, destabilizes a consistent and authoritative point of view. This instability is particu-

39 Knight, Flaubert’s Characters, p. 31. Knight observes that, although Charles ‘simply has no command over language’, after his wedding night with Emma he ‘temporarily improves his powers of speech’: p. 32. 40 Mary Orr, Flaubert: Writing the Masculine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 32. 41 Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Penguin, 1950), p. 37. 42 Ibid., p. 43; p. 47. 43 Ibid., p. 47. 44 Ibid., p. 57. 45 Ibid., p. 54. 46 Ibid., p. 96.

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larly evident as the marriage develops. Charles’ attempt to do odd jobs to make finances meet is laudable (when repairs to their house and Emma’s clothes bill start to run out of control), but his belief that he could now settle down ‘with both elbows firmly planted upon the table of life’ after Emma falls pregnant reminds the reader of his docility.47 At times the narrative voice is detached and ironic, occasionally it is sympathetic to Charles, but at other times it adopts the perspective of Emma to highlight the growing gap between the couple: Charles’ belief that he was making her happy is ‘a stupid insult’ to her and she reads his complacency as ‘ingratitude’.48 But, rather than stealing all the sympathy, Emma’s ridiculous flights of fancy – believing that her husband is ‘the pointed buckle … on the complicated strap that bound her’ – suggest that the satire is two-pronged. Only when the newly arrived Rodolphe describes Charles as ‘a stupid creature’ (‘Je le crois très bête’) with dirty nails and untidy beard is the reader given a view approximating to objectivity, and even this is coloured by Rodolphe’s aristocratic disdain for provincial bourgeois life.49 Charles is pushed into the background in the middle section of the novel, but reemerges at crucial times, most dramatically when Emma (with the help of Homais the chemist) convinces him to operate on the club-footed Hippolyte. The surgery on Hippolyte’s achilles tendon demonstrates Charles’ ineptitude as husband (he cannot refuse Emma’s dreams of greatness), as scholar (he is confused by the medical terminology) and as surgeon when he botches the operation. More importantly, the episode implies that the ‘hideous deformity’ of Hippolyte’s clubfoot cannot be cured, suggesting something intractable in the human form that medicine cannot heal, particularly when it is put into the hands of someone as naturally slow-witted as Charles.50 Flaubert shows his sceptical attitude to modern science when Charles pushes Hippolyte’s leg into a strange box-like contraption after the operation. The ‘wonderful machine’ does not facilitate the healing-process: when the leg is removed the foot swells up ‘to an unrecognizable shape’ and ‘the whole of the skin looked about to burst’.51 This horrible description is not only a counterpoint to Emma’s romantic storybook dreams, but also a distorted physical manifestation of Charles’ mental deficiency. A ‘livid tumour’ soon spreads up Hippolyte’s leg ‘with pustules here and there discharging a dark liquid’ and Charles is forced to agree that a professional surgeon, M. Canivet, should amputate the limb. Charles’ attitude is one of resignation, humiliation and despair: he recognizes the magnitude of the failure, but believes that ‘fate had a hand in it’.52 As he dwells on the possibility of disgrace and ruin, his ‘imagination’ is described as ‘an empty barrel rolling on the waves of the sea’, suggesting a vacuity in the midst of his emotional tumult and an 47 48 49 50 51 52

Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., p. 121. Ibid., p. 143 / Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Flammarion, 1986), p. 197. Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Penguin, 1950), p. 187. Ibid., p. 191. Ibid., p. 196.

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inability to arrive at practical solutions. Again, Flaubert refrains from explicitly describing Charles’ surgery as idiotic. Rather than stressing the stupidity of the attempted operation it is Emma who, wrapped up in her own humiliation, wonders ‘what lamentable idiocy had led her to abase her being in such constant sacrifice’ to the marriage (‘par quelle déplorable manie avoir ainsi abîmé son existence en sacrifices continuels’).53 Although the language of idiocy is used quite frequently in the middle section, it is never targeted directly at Charles, almost as if the author wishes to spare him the final insult.54 Most of Part Two of the novel focuses on the developments of Emma and Rodolphe’s relationship, with Charles’ ignorance of their affair taken for granted by the narrator. For example, when Rodolphe abandons Emma as she awaits their elopement to Italy she suffers a mental collapse that catches Charles completely by surprise; he simply cannot understand the conditions that caused it. Throughout the novel, his inability to interpret signs does not just apply to his medical studies and to the extent of Emma’s spending, but also to the language of love. His belief that their marriage is the beginning and end of Emma’s passion and that she is happy in her domestic routine is worse than naïve, but he is never castigated by the narrator even when he wrongly diagnoses Emma’s capricious pains and vomiting as ‘the first signs of cancer’.55 Similarly, other characters are exposed as being inept when it comes to judging each other: Emma sees herself as accomplished in the realm of love, even as Rodolphe grows tired of her and Léon becomes bored of her ‘sobbing on his chest’, while Homais considers himself an expert in reading temperaments, but actually only recycles national stereotypes, believing ‘the German woman was vapourish, the French wanton, the Italian passionate’.56 Indeed, Homais epitomizes the parochial intolerance of all the townsfolk (and acts as a conduit for the vapid definitions in The Dictionary of Received Ideas) when he dismisses a blind man who often wanders through Yonville, exclaiming that ‘poor wretches’ like him ‘ought to be shut up and forced to work’.57 The nameless blind beggar is the direct victim of Homais’ insults: he embodies the ‘barbarism’ which the chemist believes holds France back from social progress, advising him to ‘take good wine, good beer, and good roast meat’ and ‘expose the diseased parts to the smoke of juniper berries’ as if these were 53 Ibid., pp. 196–7 / Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Flammarion, 1986), p. 252. 54 Three other examples of the use of idiocy in scenes not involving Charles include: first, after Emma has bumped into Captain Binet on returning from one of her trysts with Rodolphe, ‘that idiot with the game-bag came constantly before her eyes’ (‘et ayant sans cesse devant les yeux imbécile à carnassière’, p. 179 / p. 233); second, as Rodolphe begins to cynically manipulate Emma’s emotions he considers her devotion to him as ‘a thing of idiocy’ (‘une sorte d’attachment idiot’, p. 203 / p. 259); and, third, when Rodolphe falls for Emma despite his better judgement he exclaims ‘“What an idiot I am!”’ (‘– Quel imbécile je suis!’, p. 212 / p. 268). 55 Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Penguin, 1950), p. 222. 56 Ibid., p. 301; p. 291. 57 Ibid., p. 310.

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viable cures for blindness.58 This brief scene indicates the general intolerance of the Yonville folk to anyone that appears or acts out of the ordinary; even the narrator comments that the blind man ‘seemed half-witted’ when he ‘crouched down on his haunches, threw back his head and uttered a sort of dull howl, like a famished dog’ in response to Emma’s and Homais’ patronizing charity.59 Given Flaubert’s understated irony, this scene suggests that their disdain for the blind man is also covertly directed at Charles as idiot figure.60 The pace of the narrative speeds up as Emma’s debts spiral out of control. She makes a last desperate attempt to plead with the lawyer Guillaumin, to whom the merchant Lheureux has given the deeds to the Bovarys’ house as insurance against Emma’s unpaid clothing bills. Emma’s naïveté is again exposed as the maid, Félicité, encourages her to go to Guillaumin and she is surprised and disgusted when he makes sexual advances on her. While Charles slowly becomes aware of their dire financial situation, he is not capable of doing anything about it and remains ignorant of his wife’s plight after the virtually psychotic Emma takes arsenic stolen from Homais’ shop. She ‘feels an icy coldness mounting from her feet towards her heart’ from the arsenic, she begins to sweat uncontrollably and her teeth start to chatter, while Charles can only say repeatedly: ‘That’s queer! That’s funny!’ (‘C’est extraordinaire! c’est singulier!’).61 Only when Emma permits him to read her suicide note does he comprehend the reality, stumbling around the room ‘bumping into the furniture’.62 The reader is not permitted to dwell on Charles’ emotions during Emma’s extended death scene with Homais, the surgeon Canivet and the priest demanding the reader’s attention. Charles retreats to childish passivity as he kneels crying with his arms outstretched, and later he is described as being ‘weaker than a child’.63 The collapse of Emma’s body seems to be bound up with the disintegration of Charles’ fragile character, reverberating to her shaking as if it were a ‘falling ruin’.64 The atavism of the scene is complete when, as a medieval harbinger of death, the blind man’s voice is heard again, this time outside the room chanting sabots. Just as this very modern story of provincial life, adultery and medicine reaches its apogee it descends into primitivism as Emma envisions the blind man’s ‘hideous face’ at the moment of her death.65 58 Ibid., p. 311. 59 Ibid., p. 311. 60 Homais later writes public articles railing against the blind man’s ‘scrofulous’ presence so close to Yonville, implying that he should be shut away from public view as an undesirable reminder of ‘the wilderness of the Middle Ages’: ibid., p. 355. Homais’ empty views grow in strength after Emma’s death, to such an extent that he is the subject of the final paragraph of the novel. 61 Ibid., p. 327 / Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Flammarion, 1986), p. 391. 62 Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Penguin, 1950), p. 328. 63 Ibid., p. 338. 64 Ibid., p. 337. 65 Ibid., p. 337.

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The final three chapters are very much an anti-climax after the violence of Emma’s death throes, but they re-establish Charles as the centre of narrative interest and refresh the reader’s awareness of him as hapless idiot figure. When his wife’s features start to disappear as rigor mortis sets in, Charles unconsciously takes on her romantic fancies: he asks that she be buried in her wedding attire with ‘her hair spread over her shoulders’ and, despite the expense, with a ‘large piece of green velvet’ on top.66 The comedy grows blacker as Emma disappears under her ‘shimmering’ wedding dress, except for a ‘dark liquid’ that pours out of her mouth when her body is disturbed. Charles is shocked out of his romantic reverie when he lifts the veil to see his wife’s decomposing face and the desecration of her body is complete when, on his request, Homais cuts a lock of her hair and ends up puncturing her forehead. At first Charles acts out Emma’s desires for him by dressing as a dandy (the narrator comments ‘she was corrupting him from beyond the grave’) and by showering material affection on their daughter; but he later becomes broken and ‘abject’ when he opens Rodolphe’s and Léon’s love letters to Emma.67 Afterwards he becomes a passive figure and later, when he meets Rodolphe, he can muster only a moment of ‘sombre fury’ before he becomes ‘lifeless’ again, blaming fate for his predicament.68 The next day Charles dies, probably from a heart attack (even though it is described as love sickness), but this is unconfirmed and the surgeon finds ‘nothing’ when he ‘opened up the body’ (‘Il l’ouvrit et ne trouva rien’).69 This statement links with the physical disintegration of Emma and the lifeless abjection of Charles at the end, suggesting much more than the surgeon’s lack of explanation. The ‘nothing’ of the diagnosis actually symbolizes the ‘rien’ inside Charles’ body. Rather than the natural grace and plenitude of the Romantic view of idiocy, Charles’ empty body symbolizes the vacuity of his character, as well as supporting Flaubert’s aesthetic intention to write a book about ‘nothing’.

Framing Madame Bovary Although the director Eric Rohmer has claimed that Madame Bovary ‘is one of five or six novels which most stubbornly defy adaptation to the screen’, there have been numerous film and television adaptations of the book since the early 1930s, all of which have focused on the passions and dreams of Flaubert’s heroine.70 Four major film versions have been made with the title Madame Bovary: Jean Renoir’s version (Fr, 1934), with Valentine Tessier and Pierre Renoir as Emma and Charles; 66 Ibid., p. 339. 67 Ibid., p. 353. 68 Ibid., p. 360. 69 Ibid., p. 360 / Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Flammarion, 1986), p. 424. 70 André Bazin, Jean Renoir (1971), ed. François Truffaut, trans. W. W. Halsey & William H. Simon (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), p. 236.

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a German adaptation (1937), directed by Gerhard Lamprecht and starring Pola Negri and Aribert Wäscher; Vincente Minnelli’s famous version (US, 1949), with Jennifer Jones and Van Heflin, and Charles Chabrol’s period film (Fr, 1991), with Isabelle Huppert and Jean-François Balmer.71 None of these adaptations explore Charles’ childhood, choosing instead to introduce him as an adult doctor and concentrating on his relationship with Emma. Although Emma is the primary focus of all the adaptations (as the four female stars suggest), the two most interesting versions directed by Renoir and Minnelli offer valuable insights into Charles’ character in terms of his physical appearance, his lack of intelligence and his relationship with Emma. There is much in Flaubert’s novel that lends itself to cinematic adaptation (most obviously, as Sergei Eisenstein noted, the cross-cutting between the Agricultural Fair in Yonville and Emma and Rodolphe’s passionate liaison), but there are also proto-modernist elements that defy adaptation. Flaubert’s introduction of Charles as a schoolboy does not fit easily into the framework of classical narrative, partly because the director would need to devise a strategy to switch attention to Emma after the wedding, but also because Flaubert uses the very texture of words to explore Charles’ psychology. If the language of idiocy is only an undercurrent in Flaubert’s novel, then it is in danger of disappearing in the film adaptations. However, the portrayal of Charles in Renoir’s version, in particular, suggests that Flaubert’s exploration of idiocy is not only retained, but further developed. Renoir and Minnelli offer very different stylistic interpretations of Flaubert’s novel. Renoir adopts a theatrical approach to character interaction, whereas Minnelli develops a much more dynamic style consistent with the mode of classical Hollywood narrative. The two directors accentuate the realistic elements of the novel, but they also develop cinematic techniques that gesture towards Flaubert’s more experimental features. Renoir’s theatrical mode is sometimes very stagy, particularly the lengthy ball scene at the château when Emma is introduced to high society, and, as Rohmer has argued, throughout the film the spectator is given glimpses of doors, windows and furniture in the foreground implying ‘that the heroes of the story are acting out a play’ within the frame of the film.72 Renoir commented that he wanted each scene to be ‘a little film on its own’ and the editing of the scenes with lots of lengthy tracking shots suggests a high degree of cinematic artifice.73 While Renoir relies on a theatrical aesthetic throughout, Minnelli begins his version with the dramatic and highly charged moral theatre of 71 Another film version with the title Unholy Love (Albert Ray, US, 1932), starring Lila Lee, transposes the story to 1930s New York and changes the names of all the characters. There are also Italian, German and British television adaptations of the novel. 72 Bazin, Jean Renoir, p. 236. 73 Renoir quoted in Raymond Durgnat, Jean Renoir (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974), p. 94. Interestingly, although Madame Bovary is highly theatrical, Renoir makes a direct comparison between his conception of discrete scene sequences and Chaplin’s one-reel shorts.

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the courtroom, with Flaubert (played by James Mason) presenting Emma’s story as his defence against charges of immorality. At the outset, the judge describes Emma as a ‘corrupt, loathsome, contemptible creature’, a ‘monstrous creation of a degenerate imagination’, whereas Flaubert introduces the viewer and the court (who, it is implied, have not read the novel) to an innocent young girl who is a product of her age and whose mind is warped by the romantic fiction she reads. He formally introduces Emma’s story and his voice-over periodically interrupts the narrative to switch scene or to explain Emma’s motivations, particularly early on and more sparingly later when Rodolphe abandons her. By echoing Flaubert’s shifting narrative perspective, Judith Mayne has argued that the voice-over in the film begins ‘to sound like the very books which have so polluted Emma’s imagination’, suggesting that the manipulation of tone cannot be sustained within a stable realistic frame.74 The theatricality of Renoir’s film and Minnelli’s use of storybook romance are equally successful in their own ways in adapting Flaubert’s style and artifice for a cinematic medium.75 While Minnelli’s version is very interesting as an adaptation of Madame Bovary and in the personification of Flaubert, Renoir’s film is more useful for the purposes of this chapter in developing the theme of idiocy, particularly following the dismissive view of his father, the painter Auguste Renoir, that it was simply ‘the story of an idiot whose wife wanted to become somebody’.76 The difficulty in discussing Renoir’s film is that the original production was around three and a half hours long, but, mainly because it was a commercial failure when released in 1934, it was cut to less than two hours with the additional footage lost. The preserved film still adheres closely to Flaubert’s narrative, but it is not known whether the longer version began with Charles’ childhood or whether it contained a coda following Emma’s death. Given that Renoir wrote the screenplay and he is sensitive to Flaubert’s style, it is certainly possible that the schoolroom scene preceded the extant opening, which deals with Charles’ first marriage. Unlike Minnelli’s version that places almost all the narrative interest on the figure of Emma (the 29-year-old Jennifer Jones had recently married the producer David O. Selznick), in the French adaptation, Renoir’s brother, Pierre, gives a strong performance as the heavily built and slow-witted Charles. Indeed, the ‘miscasting’ of the theatrical actress Valentine 74 Judith Mayne, Private Novels, Public Films (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 109. 75 A more critical reading of Minnelli’s film by Geoffrey Wagner suggests that it is an oversimplified interpretation of Flaubert: ‘a child’s color book of adultery, as seen through “emancipated” American eyes’: Geoffrey Wagner, The Novel and the Cinema (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1975), p. 252. 76 Quoted in Ronald Bergan, Jean Renoir: Projections of Paradise (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), p. 131. It is important to note that Madame Bovary was arguably the least successful (certainly on a commercial basis) of all the director’s literary adaptations: in France he adapted Zola’s Nana (1926) and La Bête humaine (1938) and, after fleeing to America in 1941, he made versions of Octave Mirbeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) and Rumer Godden’s The River (1951).

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Tessier as Emma, in terms of her age, imposing stature and maternal behaviour (she seems far from innocent and virginal early in the film), makes her romantic flights less credible and casts more attention on her dour and ineffectual husband.77 Pierre Renoir plays a bulky and almost bovine Charles; his receding hair and thick moustache give him a tired aspect, his movements are consistently sluggish, and his mother’s comment that he is a ‘simple country doctor’ seems to refer to Charles’ lack of intelligence and sophistication, rather than stressing his bucolic innocence. Pierre’s performance emphasizes Charles’ rough manners when eating and also his childish stubbornness in wearing the well-worn boots that Emma considers hideous, claiming that they are good enough for the country. Compared to Van Heflin’s naïve, but well-groomed, character in Minnelli’s film, the passivity of Renoir’s Charles stems from the slow movements and deliberately unwieldy performance of his brother. This style of acting is a good example of what Raymond Durgnat calls the ‘psychological negative’ that is consistent with an anti-Romantic view of idiocy and the ‘lassitude Flaubert attributes to bourgeois culture’.78 However, just as Renoir showed affection for the oaf-like and seemingly autistic protagonist Boudu (who tries to drown himself after losing his dog) in his earlier film Boudu Saved From Drowning (Boudu Sauvé des Eaux, 1932), so Charles is treated with sympathy and even gentleness in places. While Boudu possesses far more versatility than Charles, both figures are ‘not quite human’ (as Durgnat describes it) and it is this essential difference from the other bourgeois characters that makes them special cases.79 Shot on location in Normandy, the outdoor scenes in Renoir’s film have a striking verisimilitude that the use of sets would have compromised, but also possess a painterly quality, particularly the opening scenes of Emma in the farmyard and her and Rodolphe’s trysts in the woods. It is in the indoor scenes, however, where Charles displays his most idiotic moments: particularly, the ballroom episode at the Marquis’ château in La Vaubyessard and Emma’s deathbed sequence. Renoir’s and Minnelli’s adaptations take liberties with Flaubert’s description of the ball at the château: both versions omit the banquet that precedes the ball and also a brief scene the following morning. The whole episode is much shorter for Renoir than Minnelli, in which he cross-cuts the extended set piece of Emma dancing with Charles’ increasing drunkenness in the billiard room. For Minnelli, Charles is more foolish than idiotic: Emma calls him a ‘wonderful fool’ when he agrees to go to the ball, but then becomes increasingly disgusted with him as he staggers around drunkenly while she waltzes with Rodolphe. Minnelli emphasizes 77 Both Bazin and Durgnat argue that the ‘spectacular’ miscasting of Tessier is deliberate so that Renoir’s Emma ‘refuses all our preconceptions’ and therefore is given a ‘freedom to achieve moments of truth’ that might otherwise be overshadowed by Flaubert’s text: Bazin, Jean Renoir, p. 74; Durgnat, Jean Renoir, p. 95. 78 Ibid., p. 94. 79 Ibid., p. 87.

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the grandeur of the dance hall, the beautiful costumes (capturing the spirit of Flaubert’s descriptions) and the growing vanity of Emma (as she proudly sees her reflection in the mirror while surrounded by suitors80), whereas Renoir’s mise en scène is much more cluttered using pillars and furniture to convey the ‘stuffy’ ballroom, with Charles a constant presence in the background.81 The establishing shot, moving slowly from an outside balcony into the ballroom, seems to promise the viewer a revelatory experience, but Renoir replicates Flaubert’s use of bathos by immediately pushing Charles to the edge of the screen, from where he complains that his trousers are too tight and his garters and shoes pinch. Emma applauds the Marchioness (who greets her and ignores Charles) for having ‘true nobility’, but Charles sees little charm in the spectacle; not only is he a realistic foil to the affectations of the other guests, but the viewer is invited to feel sympathy for him when Emma comments that he would be a ‘laughing stock’ if he danced. Minnelli’s Bovary makes a fool of himself in the billiard room when he is unable to participate in manly pleasures, whereas Renoir’s Charles is a solitary figure as he quizzically studies a distinguished portrait (Emma admires the portraits in the novel) and then slumps on a chair at the edge of the ballroom. When Emma’s dancing partner asks her ‘who on earth is that odd character we meet in each corner?’, she denies all knowledge of him, but it is this ‘oddness’ that is emphasized in the French film rather than the foolishness of Minnelli’s Bovary. The scene ends swiftly by reversing the establishing shot, the camera pulling back from the ballroom to the outside balcony. Rather than stressing the vain dreams of Emma and her growing disgust for her husband (as in Minnelli’s version), Renoir’s scene neatly frames the isolation of Charles in the face of this complex and pretentious social ritual. The sequence focusing on Hippolyte’s leg is interesting in both film versions in stressing Charles’ lack of surgical skills and Emma’s reaction to the botched operation, but the deathbed sequence at the end is more useful for assessing Renoir’s respect for Flaubert’s novel and his attitude to Charles’ idiocy. In Minnelli’s adaptation, the images of Emma’s painful death are musically exaggerated by stirring strings, whereas Renoir’s bedroom scene is more intense for its silence, except for fractured dialogue, the Catholic consecration, and the manic chants of the blind man in the street below. In Minnelli’s film Homais tells Charles that Emma has consumed arsenic only moments after she returns to the house from the pharmacy, while Renoir’s Charles is ignorant for some time, exclaiming (as in the novel) how ‘extraordinary’ and ‘remarkable’ are Emma’s symptoms, as she moves from extreme thirst to vomiting and then to torpor. The scene focuses on the

80 Charles admires Emma in a mirror in the novel and then she pushes him off when he tries to kiss her. Minnelli uses the mirror as a symbolic motif throughout his film, whereas Renoir uses mirrors skilfully to crowd the ballroom by creating the illusion of more guests. 81 Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Penguin, 1950), p. 65.

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figure of Emma on the bed with only Charles’ clasping hands at the edge of the shot visible (eventually, his bulky head enters the frame as he pleads with her to tell him what she has eaten). There is some parity in the two versions – Minnelli’s Emma is almost loving to her husband as she clings to him and exclaims that he is ‘always trying to save me’, while Renoir’s Emma acknowledges that he is a good man (simply ‘tu es bon, toi’ in the novel) – but Renoir is more skilful in working with the dynamics of Charles’ role as idiot figure.82 First of all, the French director avoids the risk of turning the scene into a farce by having Charles stumbling around the room as he does in the novel. Instead, Charles is depicted as abject and helpless when faced with the reality of Emma’s plight (with Homais and the surgeon Canivet providing the pessimistic prognosis), and in the final scene in the overcrowded bedroom Charles stands hunched and passive as the priest performs the last rites. While Minnelli’s Bovary is alone at the open window while Emma dies tended by the priest, Renoir’s Charles seems even more helpless for being in the midst of others. The weird Gothic chants from the blind man in the street grate against the formal Catholic ritual and then the film ends suddenly in silence with Charles kneeling at the bed as Emma finally dies (the ending is almost certainly cut). By fusing the negative traits of idiocy, such as Charles’ ignorance, his incomprehension, his inability to arrive at practical solutions and his passivity, with more positive qualities, such as his commitment to and tenderness for his wife (leading to Emma’s recognition of his essential goodness), Renoir provides a much more balanced representation of idiocy than Minnelli. Indeed, because the film avoids Flaubert’s mocking narrative tone and the extant version lacks the equivalent of the novel’s last three chapters, Renoir redeems Charles from his ignominy to a greater degree than Flaubert (whilst Minnelli’s ending is emotionally overblown). However, this ambivalent portrayal of Charles is in keeping with Flaubert’s treatment of idiocy in Madame Bovary, confirming Raymond Durgnat’s comment that Renoir’s adaptation is an aesthetic ‘complement to the novel’, rather than an accurate ‘rendition of it’.83

82 Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Flammarion, 1986), p. 392. 83 Raymond Durgnat, Jean Renoir, p. 97.

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Chapter Three

The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoevsky and Akira Kurosawa) In his classic study Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism (1965), Donald Fanger places Fyodor Dostoevsky alongside Balzac, Dickens and George Sand (all of whom Dostoevsky read avidly) as realistic in their fictional approach to nineteenthcentury life, but Romantic in their interest in visions, mystery and sensations.1 As realists ‘in a higher sense’, these writers were at odds with the more cynical Flaubert, whose novels deflate Romantic expectations and explore the adverse consequences of chasing unrealizable ideals. Flaubert was much more interested in formal economy and much less charitable to human frailty than Dostoevsky, whose psychological novels reveal more compassion for his protagonists than the French writer.2 As we saw in the last chapter, Sand was critical of Flaubert’s satirical approach and his attempt to divorce personality from art, believing it could only produce a one-sided picture of reality. In their running debate as to the true purpose of the writer, Sand argued that ‘criticism and satire depict but one aspect of truth’, while the true ‘goal of art’ should be ‘to see man as he is. Not good or bad, but good and bad. But there’s something else about him too: nuance, subtlety, shade.’3 Dostoevsky also used fiction to explore moral character, which tempered the more satirical impulse he shared with Flaubert.4 Whereas moral character is nearly always suspect in Flaubert, often leading to vanity, egotism or stupidity, Sand and Dostoevsky suggest it may be possible to retain goodness despite social, environmental and hereditary pressures. As this chapter discusses, these moral possibilities are central both to Dostoevksy’s The Idiot (1868) and also to the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 adaptation of the novel. On the issue of moral character, Dostoevsky, in a letter to his niece Sonechka Ivanova on 13 January 1868, claimed that The Idiot was devised as an attempt to ‘portray the positively good’ man.5 The stress on the adjective implies that his

1 See Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). 2 Henry James called Dostoevsky’s work ‘fluid-pudding, though not tasteless’, while Flaubert was much closer to the American writer’s modernist interest in ‘economy and architecture’: James, The Critical Muse, p. 7. 3 George Sand, Letter to Flaubert (18–19 December 1875: Flaubert & Sand), Flaubert – Sand: The Correspondence, p. 379. 4 Avital Ronell argues that ‘Flaubert occupies the ambivalent space of struggle for Dostoevsky’ as a kind of anxiety of influence: Ronell, Stupidity, p. 226. 5 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky, ed. Joseph Frank

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plan is not only to portray the embodiment of goodness in its ideal form, but also to test virtue through an individual’s actions. If this is the main purpose of The Idiot then it poses an aesthetic problem: how to construct a ‘positively good’ character (who may have Christ-like and morally virtuous qualities), without giving up on reality and identifiably human characteristics.6 The phrase ‘positively good’ is curious. What would it mean to call a figure ‘negatively good’? Does ‘positively’ merely reinforce ideal goodness, or does it imply an active strain of virtue, constantly under self-scrutiny, criticism and revision? Perhaps a negatively good figure would suggest someone who appears good in contrast to the dismal and morally corrupt behaviour of peers, their depravity casting the character’s relative goodness into relief. This idea is strengthened by Dostoevsky’s comment that ‘there is nothing more difficult in the world [to achieve], and this is especially true today’.7 By referring to the ‘world today’, he implies that the experience of modernity is a central feature of his definition of positive goodness. In The Idiot Dostoevsky encounters a similar problem to Milton’s portrayal of God in Paradise Lost (1667), in which the ideal goodness of divinity strains against the language used to represent the deity. As Stanley Fish has argued, because representation is by definition a product of culture, any God-like image can only gesture inadequately towards divinity.8 Addressing these technical problems of divine representation, William Blake found the satanic characteristics of dynamism and caprice in Milton attractive because they tend to be more recognizably human. Unless Dostoevsky is willing to give all the energy to demonic characters and content to evoke only the divine aspects of Christ as the ‘eternal ideal of mankind’, then, in line with Sand’s comment that the artist should find ways to link reality with moral character, he is pushed towards a figure whose virtue cannot ultimately transcend biology. In Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (1970), the critic Ronald Hingley suggests that Dostoevsky’s intention to create positive goodness fails because the idiot figure, Myshkin, remains withdrawn and disengaged from the Petersburg world of the other characters. If positive action is equated with social engagement this appears to be a sound thesis. But, evoking one of the central paradoxes of Christianity, Myshkin’s qualities of innocence and humility suggest that his weakness may actually be a source of strength. Myshkin’s mystical insight brought on by his epileptic condition can be & David Goldstein, trans. Andrew MacAndrew (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), p. 269. 6 Robert Hollander discerns the figurative presence of Christ in Part One more strongly than the remainder of the novel and assumes that Dostoevsky shifted his focus while writing. This theory is substantiated by the knowledge that Dostoevsky did not devise an overall plan before the first part had been published in 1868. See Robert Hollander, ‘The Apocalyptic Framework of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot’, Mosaic, 7(2) (Winter 1974), 123–39. 7 Dostoevsky, Letters, p. 269. 8 Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin (1967) (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 92–157.

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traced to precise biblical sources, such as the Second Letter to the Corinthians in which Paul stresses that weakness is concomitant with an ability to see visions: ‘to keep me from being puffed up with pride because of the many wonderful things I saw, I was given a painful physical ailment’.9 This alternative view of ‘positivity’ derives from Myshkin’s constant struggle against his physical frailty and his reaction to the alien world in which he finds himself. Dostoevsky detected three precedents for his ‘good’ protagonist in ‘Christian literature’: Cervantes’ errant knight in Don Quixote, Dickens’ Pickwick in Pickwick Papers (1836) and Hugo’s Jean Valjean in Les Misérables (1862). He claims that Quixote and Pickwick are good only because they are ridiculous, their benign goodness stemming from their absurd behaviour; Valjean, by contrast, ‘engenders sympathy because of his terrible misfortune and society’s injustice to him’.10 Although Dostoevsky goes on to acknowledge the technical accomplishment it takes to create ‘good’ characters in a believable way, he claims that his own novel contains ‘nothing of the sort’, causing him to worry that it will be a ‘positive failure’. The use of ‘positive’ in this context may be as a synonym for ‘veritable’ or ‘real’, emphasizing his fear that the novel will lose its perspective on reality. But, it may be that there is a direct link between the ‘positively good’ character and his fear of ‘positive failure’. In other words, the novel will be a failure by necessity given the difficulty of the project Dostoevsky wished to undertake. The letters written during the conception of the novel reveal a troubled author who doubts that he can ever do artistic justice to his ideals of goodness and innocence. Although Dostoevsky denies any echo of these ‘good’ characters in The Idiot, Myshkin displays something of the pathos and suffering shared by his three literary precedents. Indeed, he is variously compared in the novel to Quixote and to Pushkin’s ‘poor knight’, while his Christ-like temperament is self-evidently humble and self-sacrificing.11 If Myshkin is to be portrayed as a fool in Christ (yurodivyi khrista radi), then he can be easily aligned with the quixotic equation of foolishness and goodness.12 Rather than embodying the Christ-like ideal, the ‘positively good man’ struggles towards this as-yet-to-be realized divine state; as Robert Louis Jackson comments: ‘Dostoevsky envisages not an attainment of the ideal, but a permanent tension towards it on the part of developing, transitional 9 Good News Bible (London: Collins, 1976), p. 230. 10 Dostoevsky, Letters, p. 270. 11 Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. David Magarshack (London: Penguin, 1955), p. 442. 12 Anthony Cascardi has argued that the issue of the ‘perspectivism’ in the quixotic novel links Don Quixote not only to The Idiot, but also to Madame Bovary, in exploring the complex relation between illusion and reality. Cascardi asks: ‘can we really, or simply, say that Don Quixote, Prince Myshkin, or Emma Bovary has “illusions” about “reality”?’: Anthony J. Cascardi, The Bounds of Reason: Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Flaubert (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. xiv. See also Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).

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man’.13 However, although the religious figure of the holy fool, or childlike saint, may link all these characters, the choice of an epileptic idiot as the novel’s protagonist and embodiment of positive goodness seems problematic. The biographical context of Dostoevsky’s epilepsy was an obvious influence in the conception of Myshkin, but the aesthetic reasons why he chose this particular idiot figure extend far beyond a close analysis of The Idiot. Even if the attempt to recapture the ideal of ‘positive goodness’ results in literary failure it was, for Dostoevsky, a more creditable project than to blindly embrace the atheistic and rationalist ideologies prevalent in the 1860s among many of the Russian intelligentsia in Petersburg and Moscow. Marshall Berman identifies a conflict in Petersburg between the modernization of transport systems and urban features, such as the Nevsky Project (that ‘incarnates all the most brilliant images and dynamic rhythms of modern life’), and the socio-political life of the city which remained ‘under control of a class-bound autocrat that still has the dead weight to push its modern men off the street and drive them underground’.14 Many intellectuals, either exiled or driven underground by state censorship, discovered dissident voices with which to express their discontent at the perceived mismatch between urban planning and political governance. The exiled Mikhail Bakunin, for example, argued for mental, socio-economic and political freedom – if necessary, by making a clean sweep – and provided an anarchic voice for dissatisfied Russian thinkers. While publications calling for free thinking and the wholesale uprooting of the state system were officially banned, they were nevertheless widely circulated and became influential in literary and intellectual circles. The ‘men of the 60s’ such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobrolyubov, co-editors of the Leftist journal Contemporary, abandoned idealist metaphysics in favour of scientific materialism to match the mood of accelerated modernization in Petersburg. Chernyshevsky viewed the reform of society as fundamentally a scientific problem, to be solved by adapting a version of English utilitarianism. On their account the ethos of self-interest would provide the foundations for common social good, a doctrine embodied in the character Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s influential novel Fathers and Sons (1862). Bazarov is a nihilistic character who abandons religious belief for a strictly materialist attitude towards life and refuses to ‘take any principle for granted, however much that principle may be revered’.15 Although critics from the Right tended to view Bazarov as a simplistic caricature of this ‘new man’, in his novel What is to be Done?, subtitled ‘Tales About New People’ (1863), Chernyshevsky defines these nihilistic ‘new people’ as requiring discipline, and decisive and cold-blooded strength. In order ‘that Russia could be

13 Robert Louis Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 158. 14 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (London: Verso, 1982), p. 288. 15 Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 94.

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propelled into the modern world’ they must deny themselves a belief in any form of poetic or spiritual life, as embodied by the liberal humanist generation of the 1840s in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.16 Dostoevsky’s previous membership of the radical Petrashevsky circle had led to his arrest and deportation to Siberia in 1849, but he had since made concerted efforts to distance himself ideologically from all such doctrines. However, he joined with the ‘men of the 60s’ in their hostility to the sentimental romanticism and liberal humanist beliefs of the previous generation. Echoing Flaubert’s attacks on the Parisian literary establishment, among the figures that Dostoevsky criticized were Turgenev and the polemicists Vassily Belinsky and Alexander Herzen for being ‘disgustingly vain’ and ‘shallowly proud’. He belittled Turgenev (a friend of Flaubert’s) for reviling ‘Russia and the Russians in a horrible and disgusting way’, arguing that with his respect for Western civilization he has lost ‘all feel for Russia’;17 the only real difference Dostoevsky discerned between Belinsky’s hum-anist ideology and Chernyshevsky’s nihilistic materialism is that the latter ‘simply abuse[s] Russia and frankly wish[es] it would collapse … while those offspring of Belinsky’s add to that that they love Russia’. In his letters from 1867 Dostoevsky reveals his hostility to both humanism and materialism for their pretensions to ideological supremacy. The radical anarchistic tendencies of Chernyshevsky concerned Dostoevsky for two main reasons. First, they necessitated the abandoning of Russian for Western European philosophical and political ideas and, second, in their drive to utility, Chernyshevsky and the more radical Dmitri Pisarev campaigned for the marginalization or even the destruction of art. They argued that literature is merely a sensual pleasure and therefore manifestly inferior to the lived reality which demands useful objects such as shoes. Dostoevsky’s retaliation to these ideas was both political and aesthetic, emphasizing the strength of Russia’s own spiritual and cultural traditions as superior to those of West Europe. His sympathies with the nationalistic Slavophiles can be gauged by the serialized publication of The Idiot in the Russian Herald (1868–69), whose proprietor, Mikhail Katkov, although an Anglophilic liberal in the 1850s, in the following decade became strongly Slavophile. Earlier in the 1860s, in Notes from Underground (1864), Dostoevsky had attacked Chernyshevsky’s rationalist doctrine because he believed that reason alone cannot create the conditions for moral behaviour: belief is required as a stabilizing force. He saw the ‘new men’ as a gross simplification of the psychological complexity of human beings. Consequently, the protagonist in Notes from Underground has a voice which is in turns aggressive, sceptical, equivocating and irrational; he rejects 16 Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, p. 217. Karen Carr sees nihilism and modernity as ‘coexistent phenomena’; changes in Russia’s feudal system and to educational privilege created social ruptures that gave rise to nihilism particularly among students: Karen Carr, The Banalization of Nihilism: Twentieth Century Responses to Meaninglessness (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), p. 10. 17 Dostoevsky, Letters, p. 254.

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men of action for too facilely assimilating dogma, for blindly accepting rationalism and for banishing spirituality as the only force that could lift humans above the merely animal. As a reaction to principles that tend ‘to distort the truth intentionally’, Underground Man affirms his individuality in constant revolt against the ‘calming, morally decisive and final’ stone wall that he faces as he retreats under the city.18 For Dostoevsky the tragedy of Underground Man is that of the educated man who finds himself divorced from the nurturing roots of his people and soil. But this is not the same conception of nature as that displayed by Turgenev’s Arkady in his romantic view of the ‘parti-coloured fields in the distance, beautiful in the soft light of the setting sun’; rather, it is the close affinity between the peasant and the land on which he or she works.19 The inability to reconnect with these communal roots drives underground those who resist the fashionable rationalist rhetoric to a withdrawn and solitary world of inner consciousness. The central problem of Notes from Underground is that if the alienated individual is to re-emerge in public life he must re-integrate with the world he despises and fears without renouncing personal beliefs. Underground Man worries that ‘men of action’ react blindly to their situation by relying on customary props: what is socially defined as ‘the good’ may actually prove a smoke screen behind which partisan interests are advanced. The stability of good and bad is thrown into radical doubt: ‘What if it sometimes happens that a man’s advantages not only may but must consist in desiring cases not what is good but what is bad for him? And if so, if such cases are even possible, the whole rule is utterly destroyed.’20 It is precisely the destabilization of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – a problem with which Underground Man never comes to terms – that Dostoevsky addresses in The Idiot by means of the idiotic character of Prince Myshkin and his diabolic alter ego Rogozhin. Duality is an underlying aesthetic focus in Dostoevsky’s work that derives from his inherently dialectic mode of thinking: he often depicts an ideal form in opposition to the physically determined; withdrawal in tension with activity; rationality with irrationality; innocence with stupidity. The theme of doubleness is a trademark of his fiction, the psychic complexion of his protagonists allowing competing views and ontological states to be held in tension. On this issue, in his groundbreaking study, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963), Mikhail Bakhtin reads The Idiot as a novel that allows a polyphony of voices to be heard without the domination of a single viewpoint; the implied perspective of the author is only one view among the ‘plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses’ of the novel.21 The resulting ambivalence gives Dostoevsky’s 18 Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Jessie Coulson (London: Penguin, 1972), pp. 20–21. 19 Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, p. 116. 20 Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, pp. 29–30. 21 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 6.

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writing a modern texture. Although he relies on the conventions of the nineteenthcentury realist novel, with complicated subplots, melodrama, digression and extensive incidental description, Bakhtin argues that the lack of a strong authorial and moralizing voice in The Idiot sets it apart from its European predecessors. Not only does this offer a more nuanced perspective on the idiot figure than the Romantic noble savage or Flaubertian caricature, but within the terms of Dostoevsky’s literary project (and in contrast to the confessional tone of his letters) the plurality of voices acts as a polyphonic alternative to the didacticism of Chernyshevsky’s polemic. The critic Sidney Monas interprets Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘chronotope’ of ‘the threshold’ as being the formal equivalent to the dialogue.22 Railway carriages, hallways, living rooms, streets and parks provide the textual spaces where crosscurrents of thought collide in The Idiot. The phenomena of dreams and epileptic auras can also be seen to represent liminal psychic states that are, by nature, transitory and unstable phenomena, with the mind transforming physical reality into a series of metaphorical and ambiguous images. Duality is mirrored by the pairings of characters in the novel: Myshkin and Rogozhin; Myshkin and Ippolit; Nastasya and Aglaya, and the split personality of Lebedev, both a man of intelligence and a buffoon. Often these figures appear less as realistic characters than formal elements in a pattern of oppositions and equivalences. It may seem strange that Dostoevsky chose to portray his ‘positively good’ man in such an environment, which seems more appropriate for casting a ‘negatively good’ character into relief in relation to the sensuality, pride, caprice and foolishness of the others. In order to explore why Dostoevsky devised such a structure it is necessary to consider Myshkin’s role in the narrative and the strain of idiocy he embodies.

Epilepsy and Idiocy Prince Myshkin has two main facets by which he is known as an idiot. The primary characteristic, which is the only one with any clinical authenticity, is that he is an epileptic. The other facet is Myshkin’s childlike innocence that renders him naïve to worldly customs and manners. To other characters in the text – Rogozhin, Ganya, Aglaya, Mrs Yepanchin – his absurdity derives from his ignorance of the world. One reason why his idiocy often appears oblique is that the published version of The Idiot was the outcome of several revisions, as evident from Dostoevsky’s Notebooks. The Notebooks contain at least six plans leading up to the publication of the first section of the novel. Myshkin’s 22 See Sidney Monas, ‘Across the Threshold: The Idiot as a Petersburg Tale’, in New Essays on Dostoevsky, ed. Malcolm Jones & Garth Terry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 67–93.

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personality is not consistent in the Notebooks, but is the product of much reconsideration; he is transformed from a ‘proud, demonic, and contradictory Idiot’ to the ‘positively good’ man that Dostoevsky writes about in his letters.23 Robin Feuer Miller notes that he seems to have insisted all along that ‘the Idiot was always considered an Idiot’, but in early drafts it is clear that the character is only pretending, the implication being that idiocy stems from a ‘terrible spiritual wound in childhood’, primarily because his mother hated him.24 Despite these vacillations, the Notebooks reveal Dostoevsky’s self-conscious, yet uncertain, scheme where the characteristics of the idiot strengthen his structure without, as Miller argues, providing a ‘substantial clue or formulation of what Myshkin’s idiocy means’.25 There is nothing pure about Myshkin’s idiocy in the Wordsworthian sense of the term; he is a figure artificially constructed who has undergone rigorous literary revision. The fact that Dostoevsky had not planned how the book would finish (even during the final stages of writing) suggests that Myshkin is an idiot in process, the product of an unfinished experiment. If we are trying to work out ‘what Myshkin’s idiocy means’ it is worth considering the form of the novel, mainly because the twin strains of epilepsy and innocence emerge from what Bakhtin calls its ‘threshold’ structure. When the story opens, Myshkin has recently returned from a clinic in Geneva where he has been treated for epilepsy. For much of the novel he seems to have shaken off the ‘nervous fits’ that characterize his condition, but at two crucial moments – in Part Two and towards the end – he once more experiences profound epileptic states.26 It is not surprising that Dostoevsky’s letters record the epilepsy that had plagued him during the conception and writing of The Idiot. The transient and intense outbursts of energy that temporarily disable higher brain activities (such as those controlling conduct, ideas, and feelings) during epileptic seizures characterize Myshkin’s extreme experiences. Although Freud later denied the legitimacy of Dostoevsky’s accounts of epilepsy in his essay ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’ (1928), preferring to diagnose him as an hysteric, James Rice claims that ‘Dostoevsky 23 Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for The Idiot, ed. Edward Wasiolek, trans. Katherine Strelsky (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 5. 24 Miller quotes from the Notebooks to support these claims. On 29 October 1867, Dostoevsky wrote ‘he needed from childhood more beauty, more beautiful sensations, more encompassing love, MORE BRINGING UP’ and on 2 November comments ‘he assimilated all these poisons and principles, which entered his blood and destroyed his ability to love’: Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator and Reader (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 63–4. 25 Ibid., p. 63. 26 Robert Kemp defines epilepsy as the ‘liability to fits or minor seizures, prone to recur over long periods, without any discoverable disease of the brain or any other known cause of fits’: Robert Kemp, Understanding Epilepsy (London: Tavistock, 1963), p. 16. There are two forms of epilepsy – ‘legitimate’ and ‘symptomatic’ – the latter being the epiphenomenon of another underlying illness.

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outlines a succinct model of epilepsy which conforms generally to the medicine of the day’.27 This medical model describes the fundamental traits of grand mal epilepsy as entailing a premonitory mood and aura (an erotic and/or ecstatic aura) that precede convulsive seizures, usually followed by unconsciousness. The aura, in retrospect, may seem quasi-religious because it is not clearly remembered after seizure. Rice’s book, Dostoevsky and the Healing Art, closely charts the changes in European medical thought in the nineteenth century, with the understanding of epilepsy shifting from a close association with insanity in the work of J. E. D. Esquirol, through Moritz Romberg’s consideration of the epileptic aura as an euphoric state in which one could directly experience God, to Carl Carus’ influential study Psyche (1846) in which hallucinations are interpreted as a projected fear of the self. Carus’ hypothesis is illustrated in Myshkin’s persistent sense of his own inferiority, incompetence and ineptitude: You must accept what I have to say now as coming from an invalid … my place is not in society. I’m afraid my gestures are not very graceful – I have no sense of proportion, my words don’t express my ideas, and that’s degrading to – to my ideas.28

Freud claimed that this feeling of a ruptured or incomplete identity is a manifestation of Dostoevsky’s persistent masochism. However, as evidenced in a number of literary accounts of nervous collapse (for example, accounts by John Bunyan, John Stuart Mill and William James), Tony Miksanek detects that the conception of the dissolving self is characteristic of many epileptics.29 In Psyche, Carus also discerned a constant interplay between unconscious and conscious forces, particularly between dreaming and waking states. He postulates that the excited psychological state of an epileptic seizure often creates a feeling of occult ecstasy, but he goes on to argue that this may only be a feeling rather than a truly divine experience. This ontological problem is illustrated in Part Two of the novel when Myshkin walks the streets in a delirium, increasingly convinced of the imminence of a seizure. The vision of Rogozhin with his haunting eyes and ‘frenzied’ contorted smile provides the final catalyst for the fit: ‘then suddenly some gulf seemed to open up before him: a blinding inner light flooded his soul … Then his consciousness was instantly exting27 See Sigmund Freud, ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’ (1928), in Art and Literature, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 435–60. James Rice, Dostoevsky and the Healing Art (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985), p. 44. 28 Myshkin’s admission conveys a similar tone to Underground Man’s expression of impotent frustration. This may be a covert reference to the educated ‘superfluous man’ of the 1840s unable to find a suitable cause, as represented in Turgenev’s Rudin (1846), and Radomsky who brings news of Myshkin at the end of the novel: Dostoevsky, The Idiot, p. 617. However, another reading of ‘the superfluous’ is personal inadequacy or maladjustment, an experience felt by some in the 1860s in the face of rationalist materialism. 29 Tony Miksanek, ‘Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Psychic Disorders in Epilepsy’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 25(2) (Winter 1982), 231–7.

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uished and complete darkness set in.’30 Many commentators (including Miksanek and Rice) have applauded Dostoevsky on the accuracy of the description of such seizures. But, more importantly, the temporal sequence of the fit – depression– aura–seizure–blackout – provides these moments with a dynamic pattern that mirrors (and distorts) the structure of the momentary Romantic epiphany that is followed by a sinking back into prosaic reality. Myshkin experiences an intensification of ‘all his vital forces’ in the midst of sadness and spiritual darkness, when ‘a blinding inner light flooded his soul’.31 The movement from metaphorical darkness to intense light and the return to literal darkness represents a nodal moment when Myshkin affirms his existence on a visceral level through excruciating suffering. However, the muscle spasms and blackouts are the bodily consequences of such intense moments that finally damage his brain. By the end of the book the implication is that Myshkin has lapsed into idiocy or a permanent fugue state. But, as I discuss further in the next section in relation to Kurosawa’s adaptation, even this is complicated. As Rogozhin and Myshkin lie close to each other, one begins to laugh insanely while the other ‘no longer understood the questions he was asked, and did not recognize the people who had come into the room’, suggesting in their duality a slippage between insanity and idiocy.32 Although Dostoevsky dramatically portrays the mood preceding the seizure, the experience is not described from the first-person perspective of the ‘blinding inner light’, possibly because this would be unrepresentable or too closely associated with madness. Instead, he resorts to the device of a detached narrative voice to comment on the screaming and convulsions that accompany such fits. The emphasis is placed upon how the epileptic appears to observers: ‘the sight of a man in an epileptic fit fills many others with absolute and unbearable horror, which has something mystical about it’.33 In this dramatic spectacle the convulsing man has the appearance of one undergoing, or recently having undergone, a mystical experience. By turning to the observer who cannot experience the psychic conditions of epileptic or idiot, Dostoevsky does not confirm or negate the authenticity of the experience. Instead, he implicitly questions the authority of those who label certain individuals as idiots. In Psyche, Carl Carus charts what he calls the ‘phenomena of the spirit’ by outlining three levels of affliction. On the primary level he places mania and insanity, which were thought to have no organizing factor; on the secondary level he locates monomania and melancholia, which were conceived as chronic brain infections, and on the tertiary level he situates the altered brain anatomy present in cases of imbecility, cretinism and idiocy. Carus claims that epilepsy can shift the sufferer between the primary and tertiary levels: the feeling of mania preceding a 30 31 32 33

Dostoevsky, The Idiot, p. 252. Ibid., p. 252. Ibid., p. 615. Ibid., p. 252.

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seizure has the power to cripple the brain and thereby permanently damage the neurological system. Thus the fundamentally unstable nature of epilepsy, although not directly associated on the one hand with insanity and on the other with idiocy, is shown to rest precariously between the two. There is perhaps a homology between the experience of an epileptic fit and the threshold structure that Bakhtin and Monas view as integral to Dostoevsky’s scheme. Malcolm Jones in Dostoevsky after Bakhtin (1990) reads the threshold as an interface between reality and an abyss (both neurological and textual) that threatens to annihilate the epileptic’s identity.34 For much of the novel Myshkin insists that the idiocy that accompanies his phase of sustained seizures is no longer applicable. Moreover, even in Switzerland he describes himself as only ‘almost an idiot’, rather than idiocy being an ‘authentic’ condition.35 Using the definition supplied by Carus, Myshkin cannot clinically be labelled an idiot because his brain has not suffered permanent damage, and does not until the close of the novel. Nevertheless, as Myshkin realizes, the rhetoric of idiocy continues to stigmatize him as different to the other characters: ‘For some reason everyone regards me as an idiot … and it is quite true that I was so ill at one time that I really was almost an idiot. But what sort of an idiot am I now when I know myself that people take me for an idiot?’36 On this level, Myshkin’s label of idiocy is less a medical definition than it is a social insult in the Flaubertian sense. Although it does link with his hospitalized past, the insult seems to be more clearly linked to Myshkin’s lack of worldly knowledge. But whereas Flaubert used the term in a derogatory way (to designate the stupidity of both the Parisian bourgeoisie and, in his masochistic moods, himself), the labelling of Myshkin as ‘idiot’ throws into doubt the authority of those who stigmatize him and also serves to question the knowledge which they, implicitly, claim to hold. Lebedev is the one character that embodies this mastery of worldly knowledge. In the opening scene of the novel he reveals his intimate knowledge of both public and private happenings in Petersburg. For this he earns his title ‘Mr Knowall’. Indeed, the narrator interjects that this desire to ‘know everything’ derives from an inherent lack of ‘more vital interests and opinions’.37 While Lebedev is puffed up with self-importance, like Homais in Madame Bovary he commands only knowledge of acquaintance, covering ‘rather a limited field’. His accumulation of knowledge amounts ‘almost to an exact science’, but is a shallow pursuit deserving of the narrator’s irony and Rogozhin’s disdain. Moreover, it is a ‘science’ with limitations, for although Lebedev can locate the name of Myshkin, he knows only general history and lacks personal details. Myshkin is the last of

34 Malcolm Jones, Dostoevsky after Bakhtin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 43–4. 35 Dostoevsky, The Idiot, p. 97. 36 Ibid., p. 97. 37 Ibid., p. 31.

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his kind: an oddity (by virtue of heredity, epilepsy and naïveté) who does not conform to the preconceived ideas of the knowledgeable civil servant. Myshkin himself claims he has little knowledge of worldly ways and has nothing to teach the Yepanchin daughters. But he does possess the skills of calligraphy, storytelling and personality analysis that distinguishes him from Lebedev’s superficial knowledge of facts. Myshkin’s acquisition of these skills may be in part due to the fact that he has not had a ‘regular education’. Instead he has been taught ‘all sorts of subjects’ together with a ‘spiritual development’ at the Swiss clinic.38 Myshkin claims he has ‘lived less than other people’ and so he knows ‘less of life’, but his quietism provides moral insights that enable him to understand deeper human issues than Lebedev.39 For example, in his verbal portrait of the condemned man, Myshkin describes the minutiae of details the brain experiences on the verge of death; although the man has only seconds to live, duration collapses into an atemporal space where he actually ‘knows everything’.40 This instinctual insight is expressible only through images, not concepts or words. The pattern of Myshkin’s epileptic fits parallels the progression of the condemned man’s feelings as he approaches his doom: the premonitory mood, followed by the auratic moment of blinding knowledge, and the literal blackout. If this is a form of mystical knowledge where the experiencer transcends temporality, it is not verifiable and of a manifestly different kind to Lebedev’s positivism. Throughout the novel Myshkin’s idiocy is sympathetically presented with a nobility and dignity that Lebedev’s buffoonery (another type of idiocy) lacks.41 Robert Lord argues that the momentary insight that accompanies the epileptic’s release of psychic tension is necessarily followed by unconsciousness, for otherwise ‘the epileptic would be transformed into a god, or into a superhuman monster … or simply annihilated’.42 Such a personality structure renders the novelist’s project to portray a perfectly good man impossible, for perfection implies a transcendental ideal. But the alternative model, where paradoxically Christian weakness becomes the source of strength, would mean that if Myshkin embodies this ideal then his epilepsy accounts for both his penetrating insights and his constitutional weakness as a manifestation of the quixotic alignment of absurdity with goodness and frailty with innocence. The recurrent image of spirituality in the novel is Christ as depicted in Hans Holbein’s painting of ‘Christ in the Tomb’, which Dostoevsky had seen in Basle Museum in 1867. The painting depicts Christ’s body battered, broken and dead 38 Ibid., p. 51. 39 Ibid., p. 85. 40 Ibid., p. 88. 41 In Part Two Lebedev’s personality seems to change or, at least, is rendered with greater complexity. This either exposes Dostoevsky’s lack of control over his narrative scheme, or provides another example of the polyphonic qualities of the novel. 42 Robert Lord, ‘An Epileptic Mode of Being’, Dostoevsky: Essays and Perspectives (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), p. 94.

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after the crucifixion. The intense physical aspect of the body seems to preclude the possibility of a resurrection by which the corporeal frame could be regenerated; as Rogozhin says, ‘some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture’ and Ippolit reiterates this emotion as the painting arouses in him ‘a strange feeling of uneasiness’.43 The painting depicts Christ’s body after it had ‘just been taken from the cross’, after he had ‘undergone unbearable torments’ that render the body ‘entirely subject to the laws of nature’.44 Ippolit stresses the physicality of the body: In the picture the face is terribly smashed with blows, covered with terrible, swollen, and bloodstained bruises, the eyes open and squinting … one cannot help being struck by the idea that if death is so horrible and the laws of nature are so powerful, then how can they be overcome?45

As Julia Kristeva has argued and as the narrator describes, the laws of nature seem to have ‘swallowed up’ the divinity which Christ possessed, for ‘the picture seems to give expression to the idea of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power to which everything is subordinated’.46 This is a manifestation of the deterministic law to which the ‘men of the 60s’ subscribed and against which Underground Man revolts. On another level, for Myshkin this determinism is manifest in the biological frailty and sense of abjection he vainly struggles to overcome: on this level, as Avital Ronell describes it, ‘idiocy has something to do with the nearly existential fact of being stuck with a body’.47 If the condemned man is to have his moment of divine knowledge then, unlike the Romantic poet who harnesses the epiphany to his poetry in creative ways, the moment is followed by bodily mutilation and mental retardation that have the power to consume even the spirit within. The association of Leo Myshkin and Christ is evident in his names: he is both lion (Leo) and mouse (Myshkin), both regal and weak; his features are reminiscent of certain physical aspects of Christ as depicted in Russian icons (‘his eyes were large, blue, and piercing, and there was something gentle but heavy in their look’48); he displays his Christian meekness when Ganya slaps him across the face, and reveals a spiritual purity in his childlike nature. This meekness manifests itself in both positive and negative ways in terms of Myshkin’s relation to the modern world: on the one hand, the Slavonic tradition of the sanctification of princes reinforces the status of the Prince as mediator between Christ and humans, but also Myshkin represents the end of an old aristocratic line as he struggles to preserve his innocence in the face of modernity. As such, he stands on the threshold 43 Dostoevsky, The Idiot, p. 246; p. 418. 44 Ibid., p. 418. 45 Ibid., p. 419. 46 Ibid., p. 419. See Kristeva’s discussion of Holbein in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 105–38. 47 Ronell, Stupidity, p. 180. 48 Dostoevsky, The Idiot, p. 28.

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between spiritual and secular worlds at a borderline of conflict and confusion rather than a place of reconciliation. Although his profound effect on other characters, particularly Rogozhin, Nastasya and Aglaya, shows a positive engagement with his environment, ultimately he cannot transcend his biological condition. However, instead of interpreting Myshkin as a negative character and a bogus idiot, it is more helpful to understand him as a ‘failed positive character’ (in contrast to Chernyshevsky’s ‘new man’) that confronts his environment, but is unable to overcome his epilepsy. Dostoevsky stresses that the attempt to mediate between the spiritual and the secular may be doomed and Myshkin’s final state of permanent idiocy indicates that the ideal cannot transcend the biologically determined. In this way, although Dostoevsky shares with George Sand the conviction that his novels should be ‘human’ in the widest sense of the word, he reflects closely Flaubert’s gloomy melancholia.49 Indeed, Flaubert’s words could often be those of Myshkin: ‘I, poor wretch, remained glued to the earth, as though the soles of my shoes were made of lead: everything disturbs me, everything lacerates and ravages me, though I make every effort to soar.’50

Facing the Idiot Dostoevsky’s novel is generally thought to be unfilmable. Where the irony of Flaubert’s narrator in Madame Bovary is difficult to reproduce in film, the psychological interiority of Dostoevsky’s characters poses problems for naturalistic cinema.51 Apart from a five-part BBC dramatization of The Idiot (UK, 1966), the only other adaptation of the novel is by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa as Hakuchi in 1951.52 The film is accepted as a dramatic failure by critics because, according to Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, it is ‘too superficially faithful to Dostoevsky’s original’ and because it is virtually impossible to reconcile the differences between nineteenth-century Russia and modern Japan.53 However, as I will discuss here, while the narrative is difficult to follow (especially without prior knowledge of the novel), Kurosawa develops a cinematic language that extends Dostoevsky’s exploration of idiocy as an ambiguous condition that is difficult to define. 49 Where Flaubert’s suspected epilepsy was never diagnosed, Ronell argues it became a reality for Dostoevsky: ‘it could be said Dostoevsky takes the secret upon himself … [and] inscribes Flaubert as his double’: Ronell, Stupidity, p. 228. 50 Flaubert, Letter to George Sand (6 February 1876: Flaubert & Sand), Flaubert – Sand: The Correspondence, p. 388. 51 See, for example, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 190 and Stuart Galbraith IV, The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune (New York: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 145. 52 The 1966 BBC adaptation was dramatized by Leo Lehman and directed by Alan Bridges. 53 Yoshimoto, Kurosawa, p. 190.

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Kurosawa was interested in exploiting the relationship between film and literature on a number of levels: adaptation (in Rashomon, 1951), the power of folklore (reinventing the kabuki legend in The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tale, 1945) and ‘cross-cultural translation’ (for example, in the 1957 Throne of Blood, which Easternizes Shakespeare’s Macbeth).54 He was attracted to Dostoevsky’s ‘gentleness’ toward Myshkin in The Idiot and tried to fashion a narrative style that would ‘inflict a series of psychic shocks’ upon his protagonist, who is ‘placed within a world shaken to its foundations, in a state of disintegration’.55 Stephen Prince argues that both the Japanese and Russian Myshkins have ‘apocalyptic’ sensibilities, drawing them towards the ‘traumas of historical transition’ in two very different ages, Dostoevsky tackling the shock of modernity in St Petersburg and Kurosawa addressing the shifting global status of Japan after Hiroshima.56 Prince and Donald Richie see more to admire in Kurosawa’s The Idiot than Yoshimoto, but they are also critical of the flat-footed theatricality of the film.57 Kurosawa’s respect for the literary source meant that the original version ran to virtually four and a half hours; it was cut down to two and three-quarter hours and then edited further, creating a jerky final cut that resorts to explanatory transitions to convey narrative elements. As James Goodwin suggests, this curtailed version does not fully convey Kurosawa’s intention to voice ‘multiple and often contentious perspectives on worldly and spiritual existence’.58 The released version does have its limitations (many of which Kurosawa detected), but the portrayal of Myshkin, its lack of stable moral focus, and its intense cinematography offer interesting complements to Dostoevsky’s literary work (especially as he viewed the novel as a ‘failure’). Kurosawa’s attempt to use the medium of film to combine different cultural forms – literature, painting, folklore, ritual, theatre and music – links to his love of silent films to create a powerful visual experience that deliberately overshadows the use of dialogue and formal narration. Inspired to become a filmmaker during his time as a bohemian and leftwing artist in the 1930s, Kurosawa found himself constrained in terms of what he could do with film in imperialist Japan during the early 1940s. Only after World War II when American troops occupied Japan in the late 1940s and early 1950s was Japan exposed to 54 Stephen Prince, The Warrior’s Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 127. 55 Ibid., p. 136. Kurosawa claimed of Dostoevsky in 1990 that ‘there is no other author … who is so gentle; I mean the gentleness that makes you want to avert your eyes when you see something really dreadful, really tragic. He has this power of compassion. And he refuses to turn his eyes away’: quoted in Galbraith, The Emperor and the Wolf, p. 143. 56 Prince, The Warrior’s Cinema, p. 138. 57 Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, 2nd edn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 82–3. 58 James Goodwin, Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 72.

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Western values of freedom and democracy that challenged its inward-looking autocracy. Kurosawa’s films after the war, No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) and Drunken Angel (1948), explored the promise of liberation as well as the social dangers of hedonism and indulgence associated with American values. Although he has been criticized for Westernizing Japanese film, perhaps his choice of The Idiot for his 1951 exploration of love, illness and morality was a deliberate attempt to distance his work from the conventions of the Hollywood romance. Dostoevsky’s exploration of the idiosyncrasies of psychology, the ‘new man’ and the pressures of modernity were alive to Kurosawa at this time and provided a challenge for his cinematic interest in framing facial expression and a tableau aesthetic that has invited comparison with the Scandinavian films of Ingmar Bergman and Carl Dreyer.59 Kurosawa had already used the untrained Toshiro Mifune as a young gangster dying of tuberculosis in Drunken Angel and as a bandit in Rashomon. He was drawn to him again as Rogozhin, renamed Denkichi Akama and playing opposite Masayuki Mori as Kinji Kameda (Myshkin). Stuart Galbraith argues that the characters remain ‘singularly Russian, singularly un-Japanese’ in the literal transposition of the novel to the northern Japanese island Hokkaido, a setting which Donald Richie has called a ‘compromise country’ because of its long contact with Russia.60 However, Galbraith’s assertion that Mori’s performance as Myshkin is of ‘unblinking Christlike demeanor at all times’ is limited, considering that the jarring of characters and topographies seems to be a deliberate strategy to develop Dostoevsky’s interest in border states, with Hokkaido itself a borderland between East and West.61 Moreover, as the Russian director Grigori Kozintsev has claimed, Kurosawa’s film can be seen as ‘a miraculous transformation’ in that ‘everything is different’: ‘a steamer instead of a train, a buddha instead of a cross, every custom is typical of another people, bearing no resemblance to Russia’.62 Kozintsev is intrigued by the tensions between the Japanese look of the film and the ‘inner action’ that echoes Dostoevsky’s post-Romantic interest in moral ambivalence and doubling.63 Although the complete version of the film may have amplified this shifting centre, the moral ambivalence is nonetheless conveyed by ‘indirect communication, or haragei’ that is endemic to Japanese culture, particularly in relation to gesture and ritual.64 59 It is worth comparing The Idiot with the visual style of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället, Swe, 1957) and Dreyer’s Gertrud (Den, 1964). 60 Galbraith, The Emperor and the Wolf, p. 146. Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, p. 81. Richie notes that it was common to use tables and chairs in Hokkaido and he argues that ‘the people have some of that peculiarly inward quality which one finds in snow-countries’: ibid., p. 81. 61 Galbraith, The Emperor and the Wolf, p. 146. 62 Grigori Kozintsev, King Lear: The Space of Tragedy, trans. Mary Mackintosh (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), p. 9. 63 Ibid., p. 10. 64 Goodwin, Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema, p. 75. This moral

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Due to the disjointed nature of the film, an analysis of particular scenes is more productive than narrative commentary for identifying Kurosawa’s techniques for dealing with idiocy. However, rather than dismissing the existing form as an accident of the cutting table, its rhythm seems to complement the complexion of Myshkin’s epilepsy. The film circles around a series of iconic episodes that encourage the viewer to behold Myshkin’s enigmatic identity just as others are compelled to look at him. The film has an uneven rhythm that is both static and dynamic as if Kurosawa was trying to magnify the stages of Myshkin’s epilepsy: in some scenes he has premonitions (such as the meat knife he absent-mindedly plays with in Akama’s house that is later used as a murder weapon), and other scenes frustrate or defeat him. The French theorist Gilles Deleuze likens this double pattern, at times relaxed and languorous and at others harsh and rasping, to the motion of breathing: The respiration in Kurosawa’s films does not solely consist in the alternation between epic and intimate scenes, intensity and respite, tracking-shot and close-up, realistic and unrealistic sequences, but to an even greater extent in the manner in which one is elevated from a real situation to the necessarily unreal givens of a question which haunts the situation.65

For Deleuze the ‘breath-space’ of the film suggests a concern with the existential tribulations of living with a sick body, as well as offering a social commentary on the ‘contracted, theatrical space’ of Japanese culture.66 On this reading, both novel and film interweave universal and particular themes, Kurosawa linking his interest in idiocy closely to a study of the values of Japanese culture. As such, Deleuze argues that, incrementally, ‘the space [of the film] expands and forms a great circle which joins the world of the rich and the world of the poor, the heights and the depths, heaven and hell’.67 Myshkin/Kameda is introduced in the first scene of the film set in the hold of a ship in Hokkaido in mid-Winter. Images of ice in the opening credits (that recur throughout the film) are replaced by a view of crowded bodies sleeping in the hold, but an unearthly cry wakens many of the sleepers. The camera focuses on the corner, where Kameda’s head emerges with frightened eyes and perspiring forehead, the bottom of his face below his nose concealed by a raised leg that is soon revealed to be Rogozhin/Akama. When Akama exclaims ‘what a voice’ and sits up, Kameda nervously runs his hand over his head and leans back stammering ‘Excuse me I was dreaming.’ We can now see Kameda’s whole face, but he has put both his shaking hands to his throat almost as if ambivalence is seen clearly in Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which tells the same story from numerous points of view and avoids simple moral answers to the emotive subject of rape. 65 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Figures, or the Transformation of Forms’ (1983), in Perspectives on Akira Kurosawa, ed. James Goodman (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), p. 248. 66 Ibid., p. 246. 67 Ibid., p. 246.

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trying to stop himself breathing. When Akama says ‘Dreaming? I thought you were dying’, the camera moves closer to Kameda’s still perspiring face. He explains his medical history and treatment at an American hospital in tropical Okinawa (the equivalent of the Swiss clinic of the novel) and his release ten days ago, claiming ‘I’m better now’. But, when he mentions his complaint – ‘dementia epilepsia’ leading to fits and idiocy – Akama is speechless, as if it registers as a metaphysical shock. And when, in the next scene, Akama helps Kameda on the bus out of pity and then mocks him for his condition it is clear that, like the novel, the film will not offer any stable frame of reference to explain, or contain, the experience of idiocy. Whereas Dostoevsky focuses on what Avital Ronell calls ‘the idiot body, presented as eccentric and awkward, convulsive and worn’, the face of Masayuki Mori as Kameda in the film is used primarily as the marker of his idiocy.68 Kameda has dark hair and a soft mask-like face in contrast to Myshkin’s ‘fair hair’ and ‘thin pointed and almost white beard’, but he has the same ‘large’ and ‘piercing’ eyes with ‘something gentle but heavy in their look’, and both are presented as somehow untypical of respective nationalities.69 Donald Richie argues that Mori tries to ‘play everything with his face’, while James Goodwin describes the range of Kameda’s expressions, from puzzlement to surprise and to a ‘compassionate widening of glance’.70 Goodwin’s assessment of the changeability of facial expression is crucial for understanding the film’s aesthetic, in which characters are intricately linked even though they do not understand each other. Echoing Deleuze’s theory of the ‘breath-space’, Goodwin argues that ‘under the camera’s prolonged gaze, a single face will often register multiple reactions’, with Akama, for example, shuttling between devotion to and murderous hate for Kameda.71 Many of the scenes involve prolonged shots that focus on Kameda either watching or being looked at by others: most notably when he relates his neardeath story to Taeko Nasu, holding her attention with his expressive and haunting eyes. As in the novel, Kameda is torn between two women: Taeko Nasu/Natasya (played by Setsuko Hara), whose reputation is marred by her having been the mistress of an older man, and the younger Ayako/Aglaya (Yoshiko Kuga), who Kameda courts even though he cannot give her the passion she desires. Just as Kameda and Akama are drawn to Taeko’s eyes when they see her picture in a shop window towards the beginning of the film, so Taeko and Ayako are drawn to Kameda’s purity and the mysterious depths of his eyes that they cannot find the words to describe. For example, in one scene Ayako sits at home at the piano while Kameda is in silhouette facing towards her. She plays a

68 Ronell, Stupidity, p. 184. 69 Ibid., p. 28. 70 Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, p. 82. Goodwin, Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema, p. 78. 71 Ibid., p. 78.

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few broken notes and periodically glances at Kameda while comparing his identity to the mysteries of the weather: ‘You’re certainly a strange man. All of a sudden, you paid us a call in a blizzard. And you always surprise us. In March, a blue sky shows behind the clouds. Occasionally there is thunder. That’s the way you are.’ Kameda says nothing in this short scene, remaining in silhouette as if Ayako’s words and music hold him in a trance. Indeed, the contradictory impulses that Kameda feels for Taeko, Ayako and Akama keep him in a precarious trance-like state for much of the film, spilling over into the epileptic episode at its centre.72 The six-minute Expressionistic sequence that culminates in Kameda’s seizure begins with Akama and Kameda emerging from Akama’s mother’s house, which is almost cave-like with a massive snowfall that has built up on its roof. Standing at the entrance to the house the pair seem to have reconciled their differences after exchanging charms with each other, but Akama suddenly turns on Kameda. When the latter tries to shake his hand Akama becomes angry; as he recalls their conflicting interest in Taeko his rage intensifies and he begins to laugh hysterically. Kameda is left alone, but the threatening image of Akama’s eyes looking through a spy-hole haunts him as he wanders abjectly through the snowladen streets of Hokkaido. Like Dostoevsky’s Myshkin, Kameda loses a sense of proportion as his epilepsy intensifies. Kurosawa makes use of close-ups, superimpositions and lap dissolves to create a disturbing oneiric mood that captures Kameda’s pre-seizure fever, focusing on his feelings of paranoia and hypersensitivity to street sounds. He enters a café but fears that Akama is following him and when he reaches an iron bridge, with a geometric dream-like tunnel that leads toward a threatening figure in the distance, it is impossible to tell whether we are still in the real world or inside Kameda’s fevered mind. Later in this same sequence Kameda feels a compulsion to look in a shop window full of knives that remind him of the knife he has absent-mindedly picked up at Akama’s house. Shot from inside the window, the knives are superimposed over Kameda’s whole face, with a glass shelf cutting his visage in two so that his eyes become separated from his mouth. He stares into the window and then suddenly panics, running off into the snow. Coming across a gateway in the snow Kameda enters a door only to discover the figure of Akama with glittering eyes and ‘frenzied smile’ and wielding the meat knife.73 As Akama makes to attack him with slow and assured movements, Kameda falls back in the thick snow (in the novel Myshkin falls down a stairway) and begins to fit, making the same bestial noises that had wakened Akama at the beginning of the film. Now it is Akama’s turn to panic: he cannot go through with the murder, but runs through the door 72 If, as Goodwin argues, Akama is associated with the ice of the outdoor sequence and Taeko with fire, then in the perpetual winter of the film Ayako is represented by the promise of Spring, with Kameda caught between these conflicting energies: ibid., p. 81. 73 Dostoevsky, The Idiot, p. 252.

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fleeing from the inhuman noises.74 Although Kameda later recovers from the fit, on a visual level not only does this sequence echo Dostoevsky’s interest in topographical thresholds (the entrance to the house, the iron bridge, the shop window, the gateway), but Kurosawa finds a suitable visual language for exploring Kameda’s unstable psychology, with his identity consumed by his epilepsy. The sense that Kameda’s idiocy and Akama’s madness are refracted images of each other is made clear at the end of the film after Akama, unable to control his jealousy, has killed Taeko. The Gothic darkness of the novel’s final scene is replicated in the film by the flickering candlelight and gloomy shadows of Akama’s house. We are not shown Taeko’s murder, but witness Kameda’s fear and trembling as Akama slowly leads him towards the off-screen body. The affinity between the two is stressed by the lingering image of their pale faces as they hide next to each other under blankets in the candlelight; Akama veers towards madness with his wild staring eyes, while Kameda is close to another seizure. Whereas in the novel the pair are found together the following morning and the reader is told about Rogozhin’s trial (he is sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour in Siberia), while Myshkin returns to the Swiss clinic (with the sense that he has had ‘a complete breakdown’ and that his idiocy is close to being ‘incurable’75), the scene in the film ends with the two bodies wrapped tightly and their faces almost touching as they fall unconscious to the floor moments before the candle flickers out. Rather than resorting to explanatory intertitles to recount Akama’s trial and explain the details of Myshkin’s now permanent idiocy, the scene shifts from this macabre scene to the stability of the ‘real’ world and the bright interiors of Ayako’s house, where she is brought news of Kameda. Although the social order is reestablished with the elimination of Kameda, Taeko and Akama, the final image is a close-up of Ayako’s face as she voices her regret that she never had the chance to understand the idiot.

74 Akama’s response to Kameda corresponds with the novel’s claim that ‘the sight of a man in an epileptic fit fills many others with absolute and unbearable horror, which has something mystical about it. It must be assumed that it was this impression of sudden horror, accompanied by all the other terrible impressions of the moment, that paralysed Rogozhin’: ibid., p. 252. 75 Ibid., pp. 616–17.

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PART II

Idiocy and Modernism

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Chapter Four

The Secret Agent (Joseph Conrad and Alfred Hitchcock) Flaubert and Dostoevsky shared with other nineteenth-century writers a profound interest in the social function of idiocy. However, as the last two chapters discussed, their fictional concerns also prefigured an early twentieth-century preoccupation with the aesthetic potential of idiot figures. The rise of the psychological sciences in the late nineteenth century and the growth of interest among thinkers such as Ernst Mach, Sigmund Freud, William James and Henri Bergson in alternative models of consciousness contributed to a reappraisal of identity, selfhood and illness in European and American modernist culture. Where for Dickens idiocy was very much a social problem (dealt with in a similar way to the poor and orphaned), growing tensions between public and personal identities provided a context for modernist writers to explore idiocy in their fiction. For example, once Ulrich, the protagonist of the Austrian novelist Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 1930–42), has detected the artifice and false promises at the heart of Viennese society in 1913, he stops ‘wanting to become a young man of promise’ and seeks to adopt an ‘inverted life-style’.1 From the shape-shifting Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ (Die Verwandlung, 1915) and the shell-shocked victim Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the idiotic protagonist Svejk in Jaroslav Ha˘sek’s The Good Soldier Schweik (Osudy ˘ dobrého vojáka Svejka za svetové války, 1921–23) and the aimless wandering of Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938), idiocy featured as one manifestation of for the modernist ‘inversion’ of consciousness. The Hungarian critic Georg Lukács was later to criticize this inward perspective as a distortion of the ‘normal condition of human existence’, but it was precisely this sense of normalcy that modernist thinkers and writers challenged for its tendency to overlook idiosyncratic perceptions.2 One of the first modernist texts to position an idiot figure at its symbolic centre was Joseph Conrad’s novel of political intrigue, The Secret Agent (1906), which explores tensions between the social and personal dimensions of idiocy. With the rise of public provision for idiots and the insane in late Victorian and Edwardian England and with the popular theory that ‘feeble-minded’ individuals were pathological and should be segregated in specialized institutions, it is

1 Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Volume 1, trans. Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser (London: Minerva, 1995), p. 16. 2 Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London: Merlin, 1963), p. 33.

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interesting that Conrad – a relatively new inhabitant of London after a career at sea – should choose to portray an idiot living in the midst of the Edwardian metropolis.3 In order to assess the shifting representation of idiocy in the early twentieth century, this chapter discusses the manner in which The Secret Agent linked nineteenth-century realist concerns to a modernist interest in the aesthetics of idiocy: twin issues that are developed in the next two chapters in relation to German and American culture. This chapter also considers Alfred Hitchcock’s reimaging of Conrad’s idiot figure in his masterly adaptation, Sabotage (1936), which can similarly be positioned on the fulcrum between realism and modernism. Although he made alterations to the plot and characters and generally disregarded his source texts (claiming ‘if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema’), as I argue, Hitchcock can be shown to remain reasonably faithful to Conrad’s symbolic and ironic approach.4 In his 1920 Preface to The Secret Agent, Conrad claimed famously that ‘ironic treatment alone would enable me to say all I felt I would have to say in scorn as well as pity’.5 Conrad’s Preface sets the tone for his ironic ‘treatment’, in which he directs his scorn at the anarchists and police agents that inhabit the murky and complicit underworld of Edwardian London. While the caustic tone is characteristic of the whole novel, the narrator reserves sympathy for two characters, Winnie and Stevie Verloc, the wife and brother-in-law of the anarchistcum-shopkeeper Adolf Verloc, who together form the central triumvirate of the novel. The ironic tone and the formal complexity of the narrative, in which a section in the middle is removed and only pieced together retrospectively, draw attention to the novel as a ‘told’ tale rather than one presented to the reader in terms of nineteenth-century literary realism. On one level, these stylistic and formal features invite the critic to view the novel as an example of modernist experimentation, but on another level, the novel’s subtitle, ‘A Simple Tale’, and Conrad’s ‘affectionate’ dedication to H. G. Wells (a champion of documentarystyle fiction at the time) offer ‘this simple tale of the nineteenth century’ as a straightforward account. While disarming irony lurks in the subtitle, the dedication supports the idea that behind the apparent formal intricacies is a book with a simple moral message. However, this message remains ambiguous, as the text opens up moral possibilities that it refuses to confirm. In this manner, the book 3 Mark Jackson cites an important pamphlet by the medical worker Mary Dendy, The Importance of Permanence in the Care of the Feeble-Minded (1899), in which she outlines four reasons for segregating idiots: (1) it would prevent crimes by ‘the feebleminded’; (2) it would relieve overcrowding in workhouses and asylums; (3) ‘it would prevent the feeble-minded from transmitting their conditions to future generations’, and (4) permanent care would be economically valuable for the community: Mark Jackson, ‘Institutional Provision for the Feeble-Minded in Edwardian England’, in From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency, ed. Wright & Digby, p. 161. 4 François Truffaut, Hitchcock, revised edn (London: Paladin, 1986), p. 71. 5 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 41.

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develops the strong social impetus of the nineteenth-century novel (offering a critique of the corruption at the heart of police and terrorist systems), while moving towards the intricate symbolic patterns of literary modernism. In his study of the historical and political context of The Secret Agent, Brian Spittles argues that Conrad’s interpretation of the bomb outrage, which provides the central action for the novel and shakes Verloc, the slothful agent provocateur, and the arbiters of law out of their common indolence, juxtaposes two fundamental Edwardian concerns. Conrad suggests that the codes of respectability and stability inherited from Victorian morality actually concealed corrupt social foundations: as Spittles asserts, ‘beneath the casual social and political confidence there existed a nervousness about the maintenance of order’.6 As an exploration and fictional critique of Disraeli’s conception of the ‘two nations’ that divided Victorian Britain, The Secret Agent depicts the collusive conspiracies and splintered interests of Edwardian England, where solidarity and collective sympathy cannot thrive. The web of secrecy connecting the opposing interest groups of the anarchists and the police is finally disrupted by the physical and ‘incomprehensible’ impact of the bomb.7 Spittles argues that the older generation living in Edwardian London would vividly remember the violent protests of the late 1880s and 1890s and, together with political upheavals in Ireland and on the Continent, would have feared radical demonstrations at home. On this reading, Conrad’s claim that his story belongs to the ‘nineteenth century’ provides a way of viewing the novel as the reconstruction of a late-century event with the insight of early-century fears. Conrad was fully aware of the unconventional structure of The Secret Agent, as he made clear in a 1906 letter to John Galsworthy, who had recently read the manuscript: ‘the whole thing is superficial and it is but a tale. I had no idea to consider Anarchism politically, or to treat it seriously in its philosophical aspect; as a manifestation of human nature in its discontent and imbecility.’8 This remark can be interpreted as a modest disclaimer, for Conrad goes on to presume that a polemic on anarchism ‘would be the work for a more vigorous hand and for a mind more robust, and perhaps more honest than mine’.9 His claim that honesty is linked to intellectual rigour may be disarming, but by avoiding a consistent narrative voice he reveals the intention to use irony to destabilize the trajectory of the tale. This does not mean that Conrad wished to eschew social responsibility to play a fictional 6 Brian Spittles, Joseph Conrad (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 119. Mark Jackson argues that these ‘contemporary fears about crime, poverty and racial degeneration’ were behind popular opinion to permanently segregate idiots and the feeble-minded, particularly Mary Dendy’s theory that ‘feeble-mindedness was “a problem which lies at the root of all others”’: Jackson, ‘Institutional Provision’, in From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency, ed. Wright & Digby, p. 175; p. 178. 7 Conrad, The Secret Agent, p. 67. 8 Allan Ingram (ed.), Joseph Conrad: Selected Literary Criticism and ‘The Shadow-Line’ (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 78–9. 9 Ibid., p. 79.

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game, but he hints that the ironist is less imperious than the dogmatist, by offering the reader a greater range of possible responses.10 For example, during a discussion with the unsuspecting Verloc of his plans for a bomb outrage, the Russian emissary Vladimir disdainfully claims that ‘you can’t count upon their [the middle classes] emotions either of pity or fear very long’.11 Here the echo of Conrad’s 1920 statement on ‘pity and scorn’ indicates that if no single response can be trusted, then only at the point where two emotions meet can one approximate to truth. Although it is impossible to untangle the complexities of Conrad’s irony, he seems sincere in his reluctance to treat anarchism from the perspective of politician or philosopher. Rather, he is more interested in writing a novel that seeks to transform and to synthesize a range of historical, philosophical and scientific sources. While Conrad’s comment to Galsworthy (‘the whole thing is superficial and it is but a tale’) is presented as a disclaimer, it does help to establish the central theme of the novel as a study of ‘human nature in its discontent and imbecility’. Although he expressed his dislike of Dostoevsky’s work, just as the Russian writer provided at least one other idiotic character besides Myshkin in The Idiot (in Lebedev), Conrad also depicts a city containing a variety of moral and neurological idiots. By engaging with Darwinian ideas, which had found a popular manifestation in the writings of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, Conrad exposes what he conceives as the imbecility behind many political plans. In his persistent doubts about the possibility of positive political action he shared with Dostoevsky a sceptical conservatism that finds its most striking reflection in the idiot figure. Martin Seymour-Smith argues that Thomas Mann exaggerated his claim that Stevie Verloc would have been ‘inconceivable’ without Dostoevsky’s Myshkin, but he nevertheless discerns a strong link between these characters, the Kirilov twins in The Devils (1872) and the disturbing figure of Conrad’s only true anarchist in The Secret Agent, the Professor. These two perspectives – the formal and the literary historical – indicate that Conrad, like Dostoevsky, was concerned in exploring the semantic and the symbolic dimensions of idiocy. Conrad’s use of irony, on the level of plurality, mirrors the slippery location of idiocy in the clinical rhetoric of the Edwardian period and, on the level of declamation, also indicates the currency of ‘idiot’, ‘imbecile’ and ‘degenerate’ as terms of social abuse.12 10 Dwight Purdy suggests Conrad’s narrative tone is both ironic and compassionate, combining to create a ‘third quality’ of depression that pervades the mood of the novel: Dwight H. Purdy, ‘The Secret Agent: Under Edwardian Eyes’, Conradian, 16(2) (1992), 1–17. 11 Conrad, The Secret Agent, p. 66. 12 Research on the links between cultural and scientific conceptions of degeneracy in late nineteenth-century Europe is expansive. See, for example, J. Edward Chamberlain, Images of Degeneration: Turnings and Transformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Eric T. Carlson, Medicine and Degeneration: Theory and Praxis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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In his Preface to the novel Conrad recalls the historical ‘attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory’.13 The attempt failed (as it does in the book) with the body of the anarchist, Martial Bourdin, discovered blown to pieces by the bomb. Conrad cites his friend as remarking ‘that fellow was half an idiot. His sister committed suicide afterwards.’ In this instance, the anarchist’s idiocy may derive from either actual retardation or stupidity in terms of what Conrad describes as the ‘criminal futility’ of the affair. Either way, the comment provided Conrad with his imaginative focus. In a letter to Marguerite Poradowska, he contrasted the idiot to the ‘convict’ or criminal: it is only the elect who are convicts – a glorious band which comprehends and groans but which treads the earth amidst a multitude of phantoms with maniacal gestures, with idiotic grimaces. Which would you rather be: idiot or convict?14

This passage is open to two readings: either it is better to be a criminal than an idiotic phantom ‘with maniacal gestures’, or there is no real distinction between convict and idiot, except perhaps for the criminal’s feeling of grandiose selfhood. Of course, the idea that one could choose to be an idiot is absurd, but the rhetorical ambiguity is in line with the ironic tone of The Secret Agent. Conrad’s juxtaposition of criminality and idiocy forms the scientific undercurrent of the novel and derives directly from Cesare Lombroso’s quasievolutionary ideas on idiocy, criminality and atavism. In an entry to the encyclopaedic Twentieth Century Practice of Modern Medical Science (1897), Lombroso claims both idiocy and criminality are rooted in cranial degeneracy, an idea he developed at length in Man of Genius (1891).15 His association of ‘great men’ with chaotic mental states leads Lombroso to suppose that because ‘traits of genius are so often found in mentally unsound persons’ it is not surprising that ‘lunatics have not infrequently held the destinies of nations in their hands and furthered progress by revolutionary movements’.16 The notion that ‘idiocy, epilepsy and genius, crimes and sublime deeds were forged into one single chain’ (reflected in popular medical opinion) seems to have influenced Conrad’s ambiguous association of idiocy and criminality.17 Following this model, anarchists and radical statesmen (here Lombroso cites Napoleon as an example) would be conceived as ‘lunatics’ for attempting to revolutionize social order. The 13 Conrad, The Secret Agent, p. 39. 14 J. A. Gee & J. P. Sturm (eds), Letters of Joseph Conrad to Marguerite Poradowska, 1890–1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 72. 15 It is worthwhile recalling Paul Sollier’s commentary in his article on ‘Idiocy’ in the same volume of the encyclopaedia as Lombroso’s essays. Sollier argues that the category ‘idiot’ is inadequate for describing a particular neurological condition, serving instead as an umbrella term for ‘a large number of cerebral affections’: Stedman (ed.), Twentieth Century Practice, Volume 12, p. 257 (see the Introduction for a fuller discussion). 16 Gina Lombroso Ferrero, Criminal Man (New York: Putnam’s, 1911), p. 87. 17 Stedman (ed.), Twentieth Century Practice, p. 188.

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Secret Agent suggests so many parallels and associations between police, anarchists and idiots that, on one level, Conrad can be seen to adhere to this model. Moreover, both criminal and idiot share anatomical characteristics that Lombroso interprets as a throwback to atavistic beings. But on this point the two differ fundamentally: for Lombroso, the crania of those classified as primitive savages become the cornerstone for his ideas of degeneracy, whereas in earlier stories Conrad had already shown his narrative sympathy for the ‘prehistoric’ African natives over the invading European colonists.18 In Heart of Darkness (1901), for example, the central symbol of the title suggests a primitive identity that cannot be colonized either by white traders or by scientific discourses that attempt to explain it; as Andrew Gibson states, the ‘ethical force’ of this darkness is ‘linked to what it does not or cannot say, or breaks off from saying’.19 In his sensitive reading of Heart of Darkness, Gibson extends this discussion by arguing that Kurtz’s sense of possessiveness (‘my ivory, my station, my river, my – ’) and his command of language ‘permits no encounter with the other’ because he occupies and ‘seeks to encompass the whole’.20 In contrast, Patricia Waugh suggests that the Africa encountered by the narrator, Marlow, is very different from the Kurtzian perspective as ‘a place so radically alien that his normal linguistic categories seem to dissolve as they are projected onto it in an attempt to discover significance’.21 She argues that Marlow is ‘caught between two responses’: first, ‘an impulse towards identification, the possibility that in surrendering up his language and culture … to it, he might discover some archaic form of mind or nature which would provide an alternative universal foundation’, and second, ‘an impulse towards the absolute retention of his own cultural categories’ as a ‘means of protection’.22 If Kurtz’s totalizing perspective is echoed in Lombroso’s phrenological certainties, then Marlow’s ambivalence can be detected in the exploration of The Secret Agent into the psychology of primitive instincts, without suggesting that these instincts would necessarily usher in a superior mode of being. Conrad’s ‘destructive hatred of civilization’ is evident in both novels and is only tempered in The Secret Agent by the figures of Stevie and Winnie who, although they are extinguished before the end, briefly suggest a moral life otherwise absent in the murky streets of London.23 The opposition between civilization and primitivism mirrors the tension in Lombroso’s essay ‘Atavism 18 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 68. 19 Andrew Gibson, Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 56. 20 Ibid., p. 60. 21 Patricia Waugh, Practising Postmodernism/Reading Modernism (London: Arnold, 1992), p. 94. 22 Ibid., p. 94. 23 K. K. Ruthven, ‘The Savage God: Conrad and Lawrence’, Critical Quarterly, 10 (1968), 39.

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and Evolution’ (1895), in which the Italian describes a deadlock between the forward moving forces of development and the regressive forces of biological degeneracy, with mankind evolving only fitfully, if at all.24 The Manichean polarity of light/good and darkness/bad is here given a Darwinian slant, with neither pole dominating for very long. Although Conrad can be seen to make use of this model, he not only reverses the Lombrosian polarity – now atavism is associated with light and regeneration – but also, in his ironic narrative voice, undermines the binary opposition. Instead of the nostalgic tone of Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, who tend to juxtapose a lost spiritual world with a stagnating present, Conrad positions atavism in the midst of the moral quagmire of London. If Stevie is an embodiment of lost innocence, he is more a symbolic antidote to the novel’s pessimism than a Romantic lament for a more natural civilization. For these reasons, The Secret Agent can be read as a ‘complicitous critique’ of Lombroso, relying on his typology of characters but challenging the moralistic dimension of his work and his categorical distinctions.25 While the characters in the novel tend to be two-dimensional, Conrad questions Lombroso’s idea that character (whether thief, murderer or degenerate) is wholly genetically determined. Verloc’s double or triple life (secret agent, police informer and husband) indicates that characters play roles rather than crudely representing types. Typology is crucially important in the representation of Stevie who, with his vacant stare and drooping lower lip, conforms to Lombroso’s stereotyped description of idiocy.26 But Conrad does not confine idiocy to clinical retardation, situating the ‘authentic idiot’ in a different symbolic space from the other idiotic characters (even though it is uncertain whether Stevie’s idiocy is congenital or the result of parental beating). Like Myshkin, Stevie is uniquely located in the novel, both textually and mentally, and so offers a symbolic alternative to the seedy and dismal life of the London anarchists. However, the explosion that leads to Stevie’s death and to Winnie’s suicide shatters the possibility of moral regeneration. With the literal death of these characters (and the symbolic death of hope), all that remains at the end of the novel is the bleak and disturbing scene of Ossipon ‘inclining towards the gutter’ and the ‘incorruptible’ Professor walking ‘like a pest in the street full of men’.27 24 Eugene S. Talbot, in Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs and Results (London: Walter Scott Ltd, 1898), claims that Lombroso had appropriated the idea of a deadlock between progression and degeneration from mainstream evolutionary writing. See also J. Edward Chamberlain & Sander Gilman (eds), Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 25 This is a central phrase in Linda Hutcheon’s Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 12. 26 For two interesting appraisals of nineteenth-century stereotypes of idiocy and madness see Sander Gilman, Pathology and Difference: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) and Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 27 Conrad, The Secret Agent, p. 269.

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Vocal resistance to Lombroso’s theories in the novel is limited to the decrepit anarchist Karl Yundt, who is himself described as a degenerate type and, in Winnie’s view, a ‘disgusting old man’.28 When Ossipon suggests Stevie’s drawings are ‘typical of this form of degeneracy … very characteristic, perfectly typical’, Yundt retorts ‘Lombroso is an ass.’29 In a moment of dramatic irony tinged with dark comedy, Ossipon responds to this ‘blasphemy’ with a ‘vacant stare’, one of the very characteristics that mark out Stevie as an idiot. Yundt follows his retort with a diatribe against Lombrosian criminal anthropology. For Yundt, the criminal is not determined by the genetic deformity of ears, teeth and forehead, but is a victim of social law. He turns Ossipon’s typology of idiocy against the revered master Lombroso and, in so doing, blurs the parameters of classification. However, if Ossipon and Lombroso can both be dismissed as shams then so can Yundt, for, despite his violent rhetoric, ‘he had never in his life raised personally as much as his little finger against the social edifice’.30 The possibility that Yundt speaks with an authorial voice is undermined by his physical decrepitude and indolent anarchism. Vladimir is another character who, like Yundt, uses hyperbolic and highly charged language. In his meeting with Verloc in the second chapter his spleen is vented against all sections of British liberal society. Initially, he attacks the property loving ‘imbecile bourgeoisie’ that, in their moral lethargy, are complicit with ‘the very people whose aim is to drive them out of their houses’.31 Vladimir and the Russian embassy wish to cause an event that would ‘administer a tonic’ to the Milan Conference where the European Government are to form a treaty on terrorism, because the hard-liners view the English political system as too tolerant of anarchists. In order that the Russians can deal with their own anarchists, Vladimir demands an outrage that will shake the English out of their lethargy. He aims to scare the middle classes, blinded by their ‘idiotic vanity’ over material goods, by organizing an act of terrorism that has all ‘the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy’.32 In order ‘to raise a howl of execration’ the attack must be unmotivated and purely terroristic.33 Instead of attacking a church or art gallery, an assault which could be passed off as the work of fanaticism, Vladimir orders Verloc to ‘have a go’ at astronomy. A terrorist attack on pure science in the form of the ‘first meridian’ at Greenwich would be ‘the most alarming display of ferocious imbecility’.34 Vladimir has no sympathy with the anarchists in England, but uses them to provoke the ‘intellectual idiots’ into making noises at the Conference. In fact, he rails disdainfully against the middle 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., pp. 76–7. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 68.

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classes, anarchists and politicians alike, for he sees them all to be politically stupid.35 The novel supports this view to some degree, but, later, Vladimir is thrown offguard by the efficiency of the police system, when Inspector Heat fortuitously stumbles upon evidence, promptly solving the bomb mystery and also catching the ‘dog-fish’ (Vladimir) behind the ‘sprat’ (Verloc).36 The Assistant Commissioner also detects the traces of a planned enterprise in the ‘peculiar stupidity and feebleness’ of the affair.37 Through ‘inspired inference’, his conclusion turns out to be sound, although his premise is erroneous at this stage. What is more interesting is that the ‘stupidity’ Vladimir perceives in the English police system is here turned against its grand castigator. Indeed, not only are the adjectives ‘stupid’, ‘imbecilic’ and ‘idiotic’ so prevalent in the novel that their impact is often lost, but Conrad seems to be radically testing the nature of language. Allan Hunter argues that this ‘perception of language is post-Saussurean, words are suspended in a purely relativistic framework, and can be made to mean anything, as well as disguising almost anything’.38 The dissipation of fixed meaning is illustrated in Winnie’s obsessive thoughts after she finds out that her brother-in-law has been blown up. Also, the newspaper in which Ossipon reads the news of her suicide bastardizes any sincere emotions that could be attached to the event. The newspaper Ossipon keeps in his pocket does not even carry current news; it is ten days old. Its phraseology – ‘An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair’ 39 – becomes a torturous refrain during Ossipon’s final meeting with the Professor at the end of the novel, recalling the narrative interjection a few pages earlier when the reader is told: ‘as often happens in the lament of poor humanity rich in suffering but indigent in words, the truth – the very cry of truth – was found in a worn and artificial shape picked up somewhere among the phrases of sham sentiment’.40 This sham sentiment bypasses the ‘cry of truth’ for sensationalist language and dilutes the moral tragedy of Winnie’s suicide. Moreover, the journalese of the press extinguishes the notion that words correlate with that which they ostensibly describe. The ‘impenetrable mystery’ derives more from linguistic uncertainty and the loss of stable meaning than it does from the formal complexity of the narrative. Only the Professor, as he calls ‘madness and despair to the regeneration of the world’, can be sure of the language he uses.41 For the Professor language is all sham because it belongs to social institutions that only he, in his reliance on death, and Stevie, in his idiocy, can circumnavigate. 35 Ibid., p. 67. 36 Ibid., p. 200. 37 Ibid., p. 146. 38 Allan Hunter, Joseph Conrad and the Ethics of Darwinism (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 161. 39 Conrad, The Secret Agent, p. 266. 40 Ibid., p. 260. 41 Ibid., p. 269.

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The Idiot’s Trembling Nether Lip Stevie Verloc was not the first case of idiocy that Conrad dealt with in his fiction. In an early short story ‘The Idiots’ (1898), which relates the tragic tale of a Breton family, Conrad claimed that he was drawn more to the ‘visual’ suggestion of idiocy than he was interested in it as a ‘mental’ condition.42 The story introduces four idiot children (three boys and one girl) who have been orphaned. The first child that the narrator sees has an ‘imbecile face’ with a ‘bullet head with closecropped hair [that] seemed to lie alone, its chin in the dust’ and the second child has an ‘unseeing and staring’ glance that he presumes left no ‘trace on the misshapen brain of the creature’.43 All four children are described as degenerate and with the barest human qualities as they howl at him with purple faces and with voices that ‘sounded blank and cracked like a mechanical imitation of old peoples’ voices’.44 The narrator gives slightly more attention to the girl child, almost as if her tragedy is greater than the boys. Nevertheless, she, like her brothers, ‘never smiled … never spoke … never had a glance of recognition’ and the story quickly shifts to relate the events that led up to their parents’ death from different strains of madness: a madness which, together with the presence of their ‘childish grandfather’, largely explains the children’s congenital idiocy (at least on a narrative level).45 The story lacks dramatic tension, and Conrad himself commented that it ‘is such a derivative piece of work that it is impossible for me to say anything about it’, but it does reveal a great deal about his ‘visual’ interest in idiocy that he developed and, arguably, made more palatable in the character of Stevie in The Secret Agent. Although Stevie’s basic schooling places doubts over the clinical status of his idiocy, he is presented with the conventional trappings of an idiot figure. We are encouraged to read him as a social victim: the son of an alcoholic father, and the innocent victim of a pitiless plot. Following the contemporary view that idiocy is an inherited condition, Lombroso would claim that the signs of Stevie’s degeneracy could be traced to his father’s alcoholism. But, Conrad shows vestiges of a Romantic sensibility in preserving the innocence of idiocy by situating Stevie at the sympathetic centre of the novel. Helplessness stimulates Stevie’s perception and makes him an illustration of the deprivation he laments. For example, he spends his evenings: drawing circles, circles; innumerable circles, concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form, and confusion of intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic chaos, the symbolism of mad art attempting the inconceivable.46 42 43 44 45 46

Joseph Conrad, Tales of Unrest (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 10. Ibid., pp. 57–8. Ibid., pp. 58–9. Ibid., p. 64; p. 63. Conrad, The Secret Agent, p. 76.

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In this compulsive activity (which verges on autism), Stevie seems to be attempting to symbolize the psychic chaos he perceives in and around him. While Ossipon, as a disciple of Lombroso’s Man of Genius, interprets this art as being typical of degenerates, it is noticeable that in the ‘tangled multitude of repeated curves’ and its ‘confusion of intersecting lines’ the drawings are diametrically opposite in form to Lombroso’s strictly ordered classification of degenerates. As such, Stevie represents a physical embodiment of all that he perceives to be wrong in society, as his body contorts to the violence of Karl Yundt’s rhetoric: Stevie knew very well that hot iron applied to one’s skin hurt very much. His scared eyes blazed with indignation: it would hurt terribly. His mouth drooped open … Stevie swallowed the terrifying statement with an audible gulp, and at once, as though it had been swift poison, sank limply in a sitting position.47

Because he cannot distinguish between violent language and the physical pain it describes, Yundt’s rhetoric has the virulence of real ‘hot iron’ on Stevie’s body. As he swallows the statement the moral poison of the words becomes chemical poison that debilitates him. He understands the physical sensation associated with words (rather than their precise meanings) primarily because he exists outside the received semantic order: for him violence is not encoded in rhetoric, but an intensely felt physical pain. Stevie expresses his pain only in ‘half words’ and emotive apostrophes: ‘Too heavy. Too heavy’; ‘Walk. Must walk’; ‘Bad! Bad!’; ‘Poor. Poor.’48 These words convey Stevie’s acute sensibility and a strong yet barely articulate morality, as he detects the social need to provide for the poor at a time when idiots were ‘regarded as undesirable companions even for the poor and the insane’.49 Because he cannot voice his protest verbally, Stevie physically responds to the violence he hears: ‘his vacant mouth and distressed eyes depicted the state of mind in regard to the transactions that were taking place’.50 The droop of his lower lip may be a sign of his idiocy, but also represents a simple physical response to the complicated illness he perceives in Yundt’s view of society. Conrad makes use of these stereotypical idiotic traits not to verify Stevie’s degeneracy, but to inscribe an image of a drooping society onto his body, as if his condition is a direct reflection of an idiotic social system. Stevie oscillates between feelings of indignation and rage and moments of helpless vacancy and, although the reader is informed that he is not subject to fits (and cannot be considered epileptic like Myshkin), he does have luminous mental states in which he intuits social disorder 47 Ibid., pp. 79–80. 48 Ibid., p. 168. 49 Mark Jackson, ‘Institutional Provision’, in From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency, ed. Wright & Digby, p. 163. 50 Conrad, The Secret Agent, p. 157.

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and after which he relapses into limp vacancy. Although Stevie is more capable than the children in ‘The Idiots’, he has neither the language to express his insights nor the power to carry out any act of reform. Instead, his physiognomy reflects the disorder he feels. Despite his sensitivity to other people’s misery, Stevie’s morality is incapable of being channelled into meaningful action. For example, when Winnie and Stevie’s mother leaves the Verloc household for an almshouse in order to lessen the financial burden on Verloc and to secure Stevie’s future (an act which actually creates the family conditions that lead to the bomb plot), at the sight of the cabman whipping his horse Stevie jumps out of the carriage to lighten the load. Here he mirrors his mother’s altruism in her move to the almshouse and Winnie’s selfless love for her brother. But he can do nothing for the deprivation of either horse or cabman: He could say nothing; for the tenderness to all pain and all misery, the desire to make the horse happy and the cabman happy, had reached the point of a bizarre longing to take them to bed with him. And that, he knew was impossible. For Stevie was not mad. It was, as it were, a symbolic longing.51

His only plan of action is to mirror Winnie’s tenderness, even though he knows the plan is implausible. He also realizes the cabman only maltreats the horse because he has been driven to violence through poverty and misery. Indeed, there seems to be no chance of practical reform in such a society, not even the anarchist’s clean sweep. The last resort is a pathetic childhood wish to take both cabman and horse to bed with him. Although Stevie’s sensibility gives him insights into social problems (‘bad world for poor people’), his physical meekness prevents him from acting on them.52 Stevie’s idiocy can, in part, be explained by considering his interaction with others. His degeneracy, if he is degenerate, is a result of his father’s depravity and the beatings he received as a child; his tenderness is a consequence of Winnie’s care and affection; and his violent reactions, letting fireworks off in a ‘pitch of frenzy’ and ‘futile bodily agitation’, are stimulated by the anarchistic rhetoric and activities he hears and sees around him.53 He appears as a tabula rasa onto whose body the madness of society is imprinted. However, he is more than a textual imprint, as his bodily symptoms strongly suggest a mind struggling to make sense of disorder and a moral conscience that futilely wishes to right wrongs. After the explosion, when the reader is told the bits of Stevie’s body are mixed with inorganic matter – ‘limbs, gravel, clothing, bones, splinters – all mixed together’ – the author appears to suggest that on a molecular level Stevie’s body is recycled

51 Ibid., p. 165. 52 Ibid., p. 168. 53 Ibid., p. 5; p. 167.

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into the world he has confronted but failed to change.54 But the hole created by the bomb is more than a textual hole: it represents both a gap in the temporal narrative (as the chronology shifts in the centre of the novel) and a chasm in the lives of those who have interacted with Stevie. The novel implies that the only difference between normality on the one hand and ‘madness and despair’ on the other is the depth and angle of perception. Until Winnie is forced to look into things and trouble ‘her head about’ the violence of the bomb blast, Stevie is alone in attempting to unravel the complex world of the novel.55 After Winnie discovers the fate of her brother she enters a similar psychopathological world to the one Stevie had recently inhabited. If Stevie’s degeneracy is inherited from his father, Winnie can also be seen to share in this legacy, but her symptoms are hysterical rather than idiotic. As she steels herself to murder her husband ‘the resemblance of her face with that of her brother grew at every step, even to the droop of the lower lip, even to the slight divergence of the eyes’.56 She is simultaneously Stevie’s impassioned sister and his alter ego, now given agency and the motive to seek revenge for the brutal murder. Previously, Yundt’s comment that the capitalists ‘are nourishing their greed on the quivering flesh and blood of the people’ had caused Stevie immense pain and now he literally becomes the hapless victim of this society as the joint of meat that Verloc carves.57 If Stevie lacks the capacity to act, then his ‘agent’ Winnie, with carving knife in hand, can restore a glimmer of moral justice. As soon as the murder is committed ‘her extraordinary resemblance to her late brother had faded, had become very ordinary’.58 Only at the climax of Winnie’s grief is she transfigured into her brother. But Conrad weaves intimations of this moment in the slow dramatic movement of the murder scene: Winnie speaks like a ‘corpse’ and the ‘red-hot iron’ that had pained Stevie is transformed into ‘white-hot iron drawn across’ her eyes.59 Moreover, adopting the tenor of Lombroso’s rhetoric, the narrator informs the reader: ‘into that plunging blow … Mrs Verloc had put all the inheritance of her immemorial and obscure descent, the simple ferocity of the age of caverns, and the unbalanced nervous fury of the age of bar-rooms.’60 Stevie’s atavism is mirrored by the actions of his vengeful sister as she releases immensely felt primitive emotions. As such, Lombroso’s association of atavism with degeneracy is presented in this scene as the only potent force in an otherwise limp world. When the Professor 54 Ibid., p. 196. 55 For example, the detective work of Inspector Heat and the Assistant Commissioner relies more on luck than guile, as they are complicit in maintaining the web of political secrecy. 56 Ibid., p. 234. 57 Ibid., p. 230. 58 Ibid., pp. 234–5. 59 Ibid., p. 223; p. 219. 60 Ibid., p. 234.

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claims in the last scene of the novel that ‘all passion is lost now. The world is mediocre, limp, without force’, he uncon-sciously gestures towards the forceful passion of Stevie and Winnie, as if their primitive instincts have transformed into the ‘quivering flesh’ desired by the cannibals of Yundt’s society. In the scenes following the murder Winnie becomes as obsessive in her thoughts as Stevie in his drawings. Even Ossipon’s classificatory system is overturned when he is surprised by the nature of the murder: ‘he was excessively terrified at her – the sister of a degenerate – a degenerate herself of a murdering type’.61 Ossipon classifies the sister as he had previously done the brother, but after his meeting with Winnie, he also enters the half world of psychopathology: Winnie is transformed into a snake of death in his mind; he walks mindlessly through the streets of London; he lies immobilized in a foetal position, and later ‘he was beginning to drink with pleasure, with anticipation, with hope. It was his ruin.’62 His negroid features and the hints of alcoholism render Ossipon a victim of the very system to which he subscribes, in which these ‘degenerative’ traits (on Lombroso’s model) are not categorically distinct from idiocy. Moreover, as he faces his fear – the fear that he is similar to the ‘perfect’ degenerate – he is described as being ‘half frozen’ and ‘half dead’, echoing the half-wit Stevie speaking ‘half words’.63 Ossipon’s leap from the train to escape his doom directly parallels Stevie jumping from the Cab of Death in everything but motive. Whereas Stevie’s altruistic leap is from a preindustrial horse and cab, Ossipon selfishly jumps from a railway carriage, the definitive symbol of technological modernity. If, as Conrad suggests, this is a nineteenth-century tale, then Stevie’s role as a primitive moralist is favourably contrasted to the disciple of modern systematic thinking. As the symbolic centre of the novel Stevie is the true secret agent, his shadow moving in a strange arc through the novel. He appears to be a radically unstable character, but in his simplicity and innocence, he offers a counterpoint to the dubious morality of the anarchists, politicians and police. Although he is neither wholly an incarnation of a Christ-figure nor a fully blown Romantic noble savage, there are hints of potential regeneration that can be glimpsed before chemical nihilism blows him apart. Stevie’s sacrificial death may suggest a heroic figure stripped of his strength or a noble savage deprived of his nourishing contact with Nature, but Conrad does not allow messianic analogies to permeate the novel. One reason for this can be gleaned from a letter he wrote in 1898 in which he claims in modernist mode: ‘faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore’.64 Accordingly, Stevie is an embodiment of Conrad’s shifting ironic voice and, as such, his force is both destabilizing and recuperative: he disturbs the strict classification of

61 Ibid., p. 254. 62 Ibid., p. 269. 63 Ibid., p. 254; p. 168. 64 Conrad’s letter to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, in Letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, ed. C. T. Watts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 65.

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Lombroso’s and Ossipon’s systems and recuperates some moral optimism, however short-lived, within the bleakly ‘mediocre’ modern world he inhabits.

Idiocy and Cinematic Sabotage Turning from Conrad’s The Secret Agent to Alfred Hitchcock’s Gaumont-British film Sabotage (1936; released in America as A Woman Alone) is not just a movement from novel to screen, but also from modernist complexity to the apparent stability of social realism. Hitchcock had just made a film entitled The Secret Agent earlier in 1936, when he asked the British screenwriter Charles Bennett to adapt Conrad’s novel (the major reason why he resorted to an alternative title). Starring Oscar Homolka as Verloc and Sylvia Sidney as Winnie, the film takes symbolic and narrative liberties with Conrad’s story, most notably (for the purposes of this chapter) in changing the half-witted Stevie into a naïve schoolboy played by Desmond Tester. The film also eradicates the Lombrosian subtext of the novel, instead favouring a stylized narrative in which the equivalent of the Inspector Heat character (in the film John Loder as Sergeant Ted Spenser), disguises himself as a fruit seller in order to spy on Verloc’s establishment (which is now the Bijou Cinema in South East London, not a shop in Soho) and shows his genuine affection for Winnie and Stevie. Rather than a study of primitivism and the failure of rigid categories to do justice to unruly identities, the film presents a reasonably straightforward story of love and revenge. However, Bennett’s and Hitchcock’s approach retains Conrad’s irony and develops certain stylized sequences – such as the opening, when Battersea Power Station is sabotaged and when a section of one of Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies is screened in the Verlocs’ cinema – suggesting that this is a more experimental film than is often acknowledged. When compared to the more faithful three-part BBC television production of the novel in 1992 with David Suchet as Verloc and Cheryl Campbell as Winnie, or to Christopher Hampton’s screen version starring Bob Hoskins and Patricia Arquette as the Verlocs (US/GB, 1996), Hitchcock’s film is stylistically much closer to Conrad’s ironic novel. The French directors Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol identify three aspects that underpin Hitchcock’s choice and cinematic treatment of Conrad’s story as the basis for Sabotage. These aspects are based on various criticisms of his previous films: Hitchcock’s choice of a ‘classic’ author for the first time (his decision, not the studio’s choice); an adaptation ‘with sufficient fidelity to prevent charges of betrayal, but with sufficient freedom’ to allow Hitchcock to remain ‘faithful to his own temperament’, and a treatment that evokes ‘the best of Hollywood without sacrificing a certain British chic’.65 These commitments are likely to have caused 65 Eric Rohmer & Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, trans. Stanley Hochman (Oxford: Roundhouse, 1979), p. 48.

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Hitchcock great consternation in trying to square literary fidelity, artistic freedom and market forces. Paula Cohen argues that although Conrad anticipated cinema in his ‘obsessive concern with visual and material imagery’, his attention to ‘the disparity between the surface of things and their internal mechanisms’ is a technique that strains against the language of film.66 Perhaps it is unsurprising that François Truffaut was disappointed with the final product and Hitchcock himself acknowledged he had made some tactical mistakes, but Charles Barr argues in English Hitchcock (1999) that the reconstruction of Conrad’s story is ‘exceptionally slick’ in its transformation of a complex narrative into ‘a linear, four-day framework’.67 Not only is the setting updated to roughly contemporaneous with the film’s release, but the suspense elements in Conrad’s novel (created by the dislocated narrative) are largely removed: we are aware of Verloc’s anarchistic activities from the start, we know the real identity of Ted, and we see the bomb explosion as the incident happens. Even though much of the formal innovation of the novel is replaced by a linear unfolding of events, Barr argues that the film is generically complex in trying to integrate literary adaptation, political thriller and the kind of psychodrama that was to become the director’s hallmark in his later American films. Rather than updating the plot to provide the anarchists with a German subtext (given it was the mid-1930s), the film has an uncertain relationship with history, unlike Conrad’s novel with its precise referencing of the bomb outrage. It could be argued this is just sloppiness on the director’s part, or another example of his disregard for the source texts with which he worked, but Hitchcock hints that the ironic joke of the film is that this ‘is a straightforward criminal thriller’ but ‘without a spy in it’.68 As these comments suggest, Hitchcock’s cinematic treatment of Conrad’s novel is quite complex. On the one hand, he takes a formally intricate tale and simplifies it into a conventional story of political intrigue, while the psychological idiosyncrasies of the characters are evened out by the demands of the film’s melodramatic style. However, on the other hand, Hitchcock shared with Conrad a sense of the tragi-comic possibilities of treating modern London as a space of anarchism and primitivism. The film is full of cockney humour (the cinemaworker complains she has egg in her hair during the blackout), visual gags (a lettuce on the pavement), comic references (a newspaper headline stating ‘London Laughs at Black Out’) and ironic jokes (the unknowing Winnie jokes that her 66 Paula Marantz Cohen, Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), p. 36. 67 Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 144. Charles Barr, English Hitchcock (Moffat: Cameron & Hollis, 1999), p. 169. 68 Alfred Hitchcock, ‘My Screen Memories’ (1936), in Hitchcock on Hitchcock, ed. Sidney Gottleib (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 23. As Hitchcock later said he had just found his ‘niche’ in developing ‘suspense technique’ and by the mid-1930s wanted to concentrate on this genre exclusively: Hitchcock, ‘Let ’Em Play God’ (1948), in Hitchcock on Hitchcock, p. 115.

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husband is up to ‘dark deeds’ and wears ‘false whiskers’). Paula Cohen argues that Hitchcock literalizes many of the novel’s most powerful metaphors: the power cut at the beginning of the film corresponds to Conrad’s description of London as a ‘cruel devourer of the world’s light’, while the aquarium where Verloc meets the Professor in the film seems to derive from the sliminess of the novel’s urban descriptions.69 But while Cohen is astute in her analysis of the way the film borrows creatively from Conrad, her comment that the sequence leading up to Stevie’s death – in which he carries the bomb across London – shifts away from the ‘Dostoyevskian tragedy’ of the novel towards ‘Chaplinesque comedy’ actually overlooks the ironic tone of both versions.70 A number of critics, including Paula Cohen, Susan Smith and Suzanne Speidel, have argued that Hitchcock himself is the real saboteur of the film, from the opening frame in which we are presented with the dictionary definition of sabotage as ‘wilful destruction of buildings or machinery with the object of alarming a group of persons or inspiring public unease’ to the self-reflexive moments in the film, such as when Verloc watches the aquarium tank dissolving into a cinematic image of Piccadilly Circus and the sequence when Winnie watches Disney’s Silly Symphony Who Killed Cock Robin? as she digests the news of Stevie’s death. This suggests that Hitchcock controlled the film tightly in order ‘to disrupt and disquiet its own “public” by [a] cinematic act of “wilful destruction”’, from the opening power cut through to Stevie’s tortuous ride across London with the bomb.71 Peter Conrad argues that Hitchcock did not just wish to tap into the modern usage of ‘sabotage’ (first recorded in English in 1910), but also wanted to alarm his audiences and ‘make them uneasy’ by closely linking ‘the technologies of terrorism and film’.72 The theory of Hitchcock as archsaboteur has some credibility, but it is not that easy to reconstruct his intention from the equivocal and ironic images in the film. It is also difficult to work out why Bennett and Hitchcock turned Stevie into a willing schoolboy, unless they did not want to risk offending their audience. He first appears in the film in a comic (and silent) scene in which he prepares vegetables in the kitchen, while Winnie works in the box office and Verloc returns from the initial act of sabotage. He has an ill-fitting jacket, a horizontally striped tie, schoolboy shorts, and wears a huge apron through which he clumsily puts his foot; his genial face and unkempt hair is soon shrouded by a hanging tea towel into which he walks while transferring a hot dish of vegetables from the oven to a work surface. With the towel wrapped around his head he cracks a plate with the oven 69 Paula Marantz Cohen, ‘The Ideological Transformation of Conrad’s The Secret Agent into Hitchcock’s Sabotage’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 22(3) (1994), 201. 70 Ibid., 201. 71 Susan Smith, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone (London: BFI, 2000), p. 3. 72 Peter Conrad, The Hitchcock Murders (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. 12; p. 24.

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dish (putting the broken pieces in a drawer) and then burns his mouth on a hot vegetable. Winnie praises Stevie for ‘doing all this by yourself’, but it is clear he has overcooked the cabbage when he is sent to fetch some lettuce for Verloc’s tea. Hitchcock’s Stevie is much more capable than Conrad’s character, running errands by himself (although they are not always successful) and helping out in the house and cinema. He has a reasonable grasp of language, but he is childlike (delighting in pigeons and jumping on a chair in an expensive restaurant) and gullible, becoming Ted’s unwitting accomplice when he shows him a window at the back of the cinema from where the anarchists’ conversation can be heard. The scene that best demonstrates Hitchcock’s ironic development of Conrad’s novel is Stevie’s dramatic journey across London, unwittingly carrying the bomb that Verloc has been coerced into delivering to Piccadilly Circus. This scene is preceded by the bomb arriving at the cinema in the base of a birdcage sent by the Professor, which Verloc pretends is a gift for Stevie. The boy has been charged to deliver a reel of film and Verloc convinces him that running two errands at once – delivering the film and the disguised bomb – would ‘kill two birds with one stone’. Mindful that ‘the bird will sing at 1.45’, Verloc growls at Stevie for taking so long to tidy himself, as the boy tosses a coin to decide whether he should wash, pulls up his socks and clumsily tucks in his unruly shirt. The journey across London juxtaposes the virtual silence of Stevie with the noise and bustle of the metropolis, echoing the ‘half words’ of Conrad’s character contrasted to the talk and ineffectuality of the city. Considering that ‘voice’ is such an important element in the novel’s representation of idiocy and Hitchcock always derived major pleasure from innuendo, double entendre, punning and visual language, it is highly significant that the sequence leading up to the murder is largely silent on Stevie’s part. On leaving the house with the bomb package and film reel entitled ‘Bartholomew the Strangler’, Stevie is soon enveloped by the metropolitan crowd and he stumbles on a street salesman selling toothpaste. Stevie is grabbed against his will to demonstrate the product to the crowd, with the salesman comically manipulating his face, messing his hair and accusing him of having dirty teeth (to which Stevie protests his cleanliness). At this point, as Paula Cohen argues, the spectator’s subject-position is partially determined by the crowd surrounding Stevie, who revel in the slapstick scene, but our sense of ‘moral awareness’ of the impending doom also separates the spectator from direct involvement in the scene.73 The salesman moves on to demonstrate a cream that smoothes out Stevie’s hair, only for it to turn into a grotesque oily mess with strands falling into his eyes. When he is finally permitted to leave, through a series of cuts and dissolves we are constantly reminded of the current time and when the bomb is due to detonate. Stevie soon becomes stuck in another crowd watching the Lord Mayor’s Show and by the time he finds a bus we know it is too late for him to reach Piccadilly. 73 Paula Cohen, Alfred Hitchcock, p. 40.

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The conductor is reluctant to admit him on the bus with a flammable film, but on recognizing the ‘Bartholomew the Strangler’ title he lets him on, exclaiming with dramatic irony, just ‘as long as you don’t intend to set about me or any of the passengers’. The remainder of the scene contains no speech: Stevie plays with a small puppy (to which he is nose-to-nose at one point), and the camera cuts between him, the package and public clocks indicating the approach of the allotted time. After a long delay, when the explosion finally happens we hear only a short blast and see the bus collapsing from the outside before a quick cut to the Verlocs conversing back at the cinema, as if Hitchcock does not want the spectator to indulge in mawkish sentiment. This extended scene plays on the approaching death of the innocent Stevie, using silent cinematic techniques of montage, cutting and dissolve to emphasize Stevie’s ignorance of his fate and the triviality of speech in such circumstances. Although Sabotage is not a story about strangulation, unlike Hitchcock’s films Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951) and Frenzy (1972), the visual presence of ‘Bartholomew the Strangler’ throughout the sequence is used as an ironic device. Why then does Hitchcock withhold speech for much of this sequence? One reason why language should be an important theme in Hitchcock’s strangulation stories is that, as a mode of asphyxiation, in the act of strangling the voice is muted or extinguished along with the breath. As we have seen in Kurosawa’s adaptation of The Idiot, the inability to breathe or to speak suggests a struggle to cling on to physical and spiritual life. At times, strangling is a serious theme for Hitchcock, raising questions about predatory impulses and the fragility of human life, while elsewhere it is a comic device that enables him to explore the absurdity of existence, especially as he often promoted the comic potential of the dead body. In Sabotage the ‘Bartholomew the Strangler’ motif is certainly an absurd moment of comedy: Ted and the bus conductor both call Stevie ‘Bartholomew’, and he wears a ‘B’ on his cap. Yet he is far from being a murderer, even though he unwittingly blows up the bus. Whereas strangling is a very intimate form of murder (either by ligature or by hands), with the murderer needing to stand very close to the victim for a relatively long time, the bomb explosion is a distant device aimed at ‘inspiring public unease’ (as the film’s opening caption makes clear). This combination of strangulation and explosion suggests that Hitchcock wished to combine intimate and dispassionate forms of murder to create a complex emotional affect. While he regretted showing Stevie’s death on screen (rather than the mediated scene of the explosion in the novel), the fact that Ted pulls the ‘Bartholomew the Strangler’ reel from the wreckage (instead of a scrap of clothing) and, later, Winnie imagines she can see Stevie coming towards her, suggests that Hitchcock wished to deal with his death and its effect on the other characters in purely visual terms. Hitchcock’s unease with the sequence leading up to Stevie’s death may suggest that he had failed to find a cinematic equivalent to Conrad’s tragi-comic aesthetic, or indeed he had failed to strike the right balance between sensibility and idiocy in Stevie’s character. Nevertheless, there is a real ambivalence in the

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handling of the explosion that combines the moralistic and absurdist aspects of Hitchcock’s film art. With the memory still fresh of young men dying in the Great War, Stevie’s unfortunate and meaningless death can be read as a profound eradication of innocence (an affect that the ‘emotional numbness’ of an unforewarned explosion may not have aroused).74 However, this tragic potential is undermined by Stevie’s laboured journey across London and Hitchcock’s absurdist insistence that death is always ‘a practical joke played on us by the universe, or by our booby trapped bodies’.75 Although there are no scenes of strangulation in Sabotage, the title of the reel ‘Bartholomew the Strangler’ is both a dark Hitchcockian joke and part of a cluster of metaphors that develops Conrad’s exploration of the social and psychic construction of violence. The political anarchy of Conrad’s world is thus dramatically transmuted into Hitchcock’s aesthetic and moral anarchy, resulting in the death of the idiot-cumsecret agent. But whereas the novel ends with the dangerous image of the amoral Professor walking in the gutter, in Sabotage his bomb detonates in the cinema (exploding Verloc’s already dead body), and Hitchcock suggests the possibility of moral regeneration as Winnie and Ted disappear into the crowd with their lives together laid out before them.

74 Hitchcock, Hitchcock on Hitchcock, p. 121. Hitchcock also discusses at length the moral ambiguity of Winnie’s murder of Verloc: ibid., p. 256. 75 Peter Conrad, The Hitchcock Murders, p. 25.

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Chapter Five

Kaspar Hauser (Jakob Wassermann and Werner Herzog) The post-Romantic and modernist interest in the secrets of the mind can be traced throughout early twentieth-century European culture. By the turn of the century neo-Darwinian thought was providing the dominant model of human origins, but modernists challenged behaviourism and rationalism for their tendency to overlook creative impulses that seem to derive from unknown regions of the self. For example, Freud claimed that the unconscious was a kind of negative space that can be likened to a child’s rebus, and the Russian Formalists recommended that artists should defamiliarize common objects in order to refocus the mind and ‘to increase the difficulty and length of perception’.1 These theoretical challenges to scientific orthodoxy coincided with a widespread modernist assault on accepted values: from the provocative babble of dadaist performances in the 1910s, to the Surrealist interest in the transforming power of dreams, to Symbolist experimentation that began as early as the 1850s in France with Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal, 1857) and found one of its high modernist expressions in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien, 1923).2 A growing interest in the power of automatic writing and irrational art to bypass conscious control fuelled explorations into phenomena existing outside the realm of language, particularly visions and extreme psychological states that cannot easily be rendered into art. In order to tap into the deeper recesses of human experience, writers often devised characters that could embody the liminal zone between sanity and madness, between reality and fantasy, and between conformity and rebellion. In T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), for example, Tiresias, the blind male seer of Greek mythology, ‘throbs between two lives’, linking the wisdom of the ancient past to the degradation of the ‘rat’s alley’ of the present, and in the poetic novel Nadja (1928) André Breton becomes obsessed with a French courtesan who is simultaneously both real and illusory. If, on the one hand, modernism was geared towards charting the experience of rapid social change, on the other hand, as we 1 See Freud’s ‘A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad’ (1924), in On Metapsychology, ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 427–34 and Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ (1917), in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. 219. 2 Rilke’s poem ‘Song of the Idiot’ (‘Lied der Idioten’) relishes the inertia of idiocy: ‘How good / Nothing can happen’ (‘Wie gut / Es kann nichts geschehen’): Rilke, Werke, Volume 1, ed. Manfred Engel et al. (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1966), p. 327.

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have seen with The Secret Agent, it also delved into primitive currents that prevailed in the midst of modernity. An interest in spiritual mysteries was particularly common in modern Germanic culture, linking the creative exuberance of late eighteenth-century Romanticism to the more complex meditations of modernist voices that were emerging at the turn of the twentieth century. Goethe had established the form of the Bildungsroman in his two Wilhelm Meister books (1796 and 1829), ushering in the nineteenth-century novel of self-development as a model for charting the rising expectations of the middle classes. But with an erratic economy and the tensions between artist and society heightening towards the end of the century, the 1890s saw a number of attacks on the values of Imperial Germany, with novels like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901) reversing the dynamic of the Bildungsroman. Mann’s novel explores the disintegration of a distinguished bourgeois family (in a similar vein to Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury) through the three children of the respected consul Johann Buddenbrooks, Jr. All the children rebel against his patriarchal expectations: his daughter Toni lacks consistency; his son Christian is disreputable, and Thomas represses his decadent impulses, but squanders the family fortune. The family lineage that begins with Johann’s father, the old patriarch, ends with Thomas’ son Hanno, whose decadent lifestyle is cut short by typhoid fever. Hanno is a prototype for the tortured artist that was such a central figure in modernist writing. Dostoevsky, Joyce, Woolf, Musil and Kafka all explored bodily, cerebral and neurological illnesses as disabling and often life-threatening afflictions that paradoxically enable the artist to look beyond the veneer of bourgeois values to identify social unrest beneath. As such, Hanno’s piano playing produces: a restless coming and going of syncopated sound, seeking, wandering, torn by shrieks like a soul in unrest and tormented by some knowledge it possesses and cannot conceal, but must repeat in ever different harmonies, questioning, complaining, presenting, demanding, dying away.3

As Hanno becomes lost in the obsessive musical refrain so his corporeal self is pushed into a state of abjection and towards the verge of extinction, suggesting that the artist’s tortured life derives from both social alienation and an inability to express himself with sincerity and clarity. On this level, in Mann’s novella ‘Tonio Kröger’ (1903) the artist figure stands uncomfortably between two worlds: the bourgeois and the decadent. He feels ‘at home in neither’, but as he gazes into ‘an unborn, unembodied world that demands to be ordered and shaped’ he senses both ‘extraordinary possibilities’ and ‘extraordinary dangers’.4 Similarly, in Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912), the respected German writer Gustav von Aschenbach discovers a psychic rift in his self when he is drawn away from the 3 Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (London: Minerva, 1996), pp. 595–6. 4 Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories, trans. David Luke (London: Minerva, 1996), p. 194.

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bourgeois safety of Munich towards the tempting decadence of Venice, only to be struck down with Asiatic cholera and to die abjectly with the vision of youth and beauty fading from his sight. Thomas’ elder brother Heinrich Mann linked the theme of abjection to a study of social idiocy in Professor Unrat (Professor Unrat oder Das Ende eines Tyrannen, 1905), filmed by Josef von Sternberg in the Weimar period as The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel, 1930). The novel focuses on the respected bourgeois teacher Immanuel Raat (rat meaning adviser) who is known to his pupils as Unrat (connoting garbage or refuse). After years of self-restraint and discipline as a teacher, he visits The Blue Angel club, where he is seduced by the cabaret singer Rosa Fröhlich (renamed LolaLola and played by Marlene Dietrich in Sternberg’s film). The professor’s liaison with Rosa/Lola causes a scandal that ends with him losing his job. The two marry, but she soon loses interest in an unemployed and ageing teacher and when his money runs out he is reduced to a role in the cabaret act. In Sternberg’s film, the professor’s fall from civilization (now called Immanuel Rath and played by Emil Jennings in a tour de force of physical acting) is starkly dramatized. His appearance, at first stiff and uncompromising, worsens as his financial and marital conditions slide; he becomes the magician’s assistant and a talentless clown whose routine includes him crowing like a cock (reminiscent of Wordsworth’s idiot boy). After five years assisting Lola in her cabaret work he cuts an abject figure in clown’s costume, wig and greasepaint. In one remarkable scene of visual balance, Lola nonchalantly strips a whole apple without breaking the peel while Rath loiters at the back of the dressing room: a fat, middle-aged and disreputable figure. The Expressionist mood of the film intensifies to convey the professor’s unhinged state of mind that has become a permanent affliction after years of ridicule. Back at The Blue Angel, suspecting his wife’s involvement with the travelling Strong Man, the professor fails to crow like a cock on stage and the magician threatens him with his job, rebuking him with the simple insult: ‘You idiot.’ Rath eventually completes his routine, but stumbles off-stage, continuing to crow maniacally, symbolic of his bestiality and the cuckold that Lola has made him. The transformation from respected teacher into disreputable wild man is complete when he descends into a primitive fit and attempts to strangle Lola (in the novel he leaps at Rosa’s throat, ‘gurgling as if he himself were being strangled’5). In the film he is pulled away from his wife, but he is forced into a straitjacket and dies abjectly soon afterwards in his former schoolroom, now the scene of his moral, emotional and physical demise. In direct contrast to the theme of baseness in Death in Venice and Professor Unrat we have already seen in Chapter 1 how early Romantic writers idealized and ennobled primitive modes of existence, such as Wordsworth in ‘The Idiot Boy’ and, to a certain extent, Rousseau in A Discourse on Inequality. Poets like Whitman, Blake and Novalis were particularly interested in those aspects of life that are 5

Heinrich Mann, The Blue Angel (London: Jarrolds, 1932), p. 282.

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usually overlooked, forgotten or deemed to lack value, attempting to rescue them from obscurity as vital elements in their macrocosmic visions. However, with the rise of interest in primitivism in the second half of the nineteenth century at the intersection between anthropological, medical, scientific and sociological discourses, a more sceptical cultural attitude to ‘the primitive’ was often linked to fears that European imperial strength was in decline. The rhetoric of cultural conservatism inflected imperialist attitudes to other so-called ‘primitive races’ and also infected the language of idiocy, as evidenced in Henry Maudsley’s Darwinian approach to what he calls ‘feeble and imperfect mental functions’ in the 1870s and Cesare Lombroso’s work on the cranial degeneracy of primitive types in the 1890s.6 This chapter extends the discussion of primitivism and idiocy by developing the themes of baseness and abjection in the Mann brothers’ fiction, particularly as they are manifested in the enigmatic figure of the wild child which had recurred in myth and anecdote through the nineteenth century. Maudsley had commented in 1870 that folkloric stories of ‘so-called wild men … were certainly exaggerated [but] these degraded beings were evidently idiots, who exhibited a somewhat striking aptitude for capacity for a wild animal life’.7 While Maudsley wrote from the position of a self-assured scientist, the modernist interest in the primitive child suggested a more ambivalent attitude to figures living on the fringes of language and society, with the images of the natural ‘innocent’ and the brutish creature often grating against each other. Next to Rudyard Kipling’s depiction of Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves in The Jungle Book (1894), the most famous wild child must be Kaspar Hauser, the mysterious youth who appeared in Nuremberg from nowhere in 1828. Roger Bartra has argued that the wild man can be traced ‘far back into history’ as a mythical figure that ‘possesses the key to tragedy … hides the mysteries of the cosmos [and] is able to hear silence and decipher the din of nature’.8 Bartra traces the wild man up to the end of the sixteenth century and the publication of Don Quixote, arguing that it is necessary to do so ‘to break from the imaginary webs of the wild man’s presence’ in modern culture, ‘endorsed both by colonial domination and those social sciences that specialized in its study’.9 This notion that there is a ‘wilder’ wild man lurking behind European conceptions of primitive beings is crucial for exploring the link between wildness and idiocy. In developing the modernist interest in primitivism, this chapter focuses on the German writer Jakob Wassermann’s rendering of the Kaspar Hauser myth in his 1908 novel Caspar Hauser: The Inertia of the Heart (Caspar Hauser oder Die Trägheit des Herzens; translated 1928) and the New German director Werner 6 7 8 Otherness, p. 204. 9

Maudsley, Body and Mind, p. 43. Ibid., p. 47. Roger Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass: The Mythic Origins of European trans. C. T. Berrisford (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), Ibid., p. 204.

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Herzog’s retelling of it in his 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, originally entitled Every Man For Himself and God Against All (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle). As I will go on to discuss, rather than Wassermann’s novel being seen as a literary original and Herzog’s film a strict adaptation, the novel can be read as a refashioning of a mythical source, and the film another realization of the myth. Other tellings of the story such as Paul Verlaine’s poem ‘Gaspard Hauser chante’ (1881) and Peter Handke’s Kaspar (1968) have also contributed to the general cultural curiosity that has kept alive the interest in Kaspar Hauser as the ‘Child of Europe’ and paradigmatic case of the wild boy. There have actually been forty documented cases of wild children since the seventeenth century. Another famous and well-documented case is Jean-MarcGaspard Itard’s account, Wild Boy of Aveyron (Mémoire et Rapport sur Victor de l’Aveyron, 1801, revised 1806), which focused on the treatment and care given to a feral child found in the forests of Aveyron in the South of France. When he was first sighted near Lacaune in 1798 the boy walked on all fours and grunted. He was captured, but escaped after being displayed in the village square and again from a peasant who fed and clothed him. The priest and naturalist Pierre-Joseph Bonnaterre was the first to study the boy at length, commenting that outwardly he was not unusual, except for bodily scarring, speaking in low guttural murmurs, and the tendency to spasm. After some tests Bonnaterre concluded that the boy shared characteristics with known idiots: [he] is not totally without intelligence, reflection, and reasoning power. However … in every case not concerned with his natural needs or satisfying his appetite, one can perceive in him only animal behavior. If he has any sensations, they give birth to no idea … he has no discernment, no real mind, no memory. This condition of imbecility shows itself in his eyes, which he never keeps on any one object, and in the sounds of his voice, which are inarticulate, and discordant. One can see it even in his gait – always a trot or a gallop – and in his actions, which have no purpose or explanation.10

On re-emerging in 1800 the boy was taken to L’Institution Impériale des SourdsMuets in Paris on Lucien Bonaparte’s instruction, where he was examined by the deaf-mute specialist Roch Ambroise Sicard and kept in a cage.11 He soon became a human wonder and, according to Patrick McDonagh, changed the social perception of idiocy, mainly because it tested common assumptions about what is deemed to be human in terms of speech, instinct, deportment and habits.12 The major debate 10 Quoted in Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), pp. 17–18. 11 Sicard’s book on deaf-mutes, Catéchisme de l’instruction chrétienne à l’usage des sourds-muets, was published in Paris in 1792. 12 Patrick McDonagh, ‘The Image of Idiocy in Nineteenth-Century England’, p. 34. Itard’s The Wild Boy of Aveyron was translated by Joan White & Lucien Malson as Wolf Children (London: NLB, 1972).

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concerned the nature of the boy’s idiocy: the medic Philippe Pinel argued that his wildness was a result of his idiocy (prétendu sauvage), which was more advanced than idiots already housed in institutions, whereas Itard (to whom he was later entrusted) claimed that the boy’s apparent idiocy was the consequence of intellectual deprivation (prétendu idiot).13 Itard’s theory implied that idiocy is not a permanent state for which nothing can be done and that educational means could improve posture, communication and practical skills. McDonagh argues that this was the first case of an idiot (now called Victor and thought to be around seventeen) having the capacity to learn, shifting the conception of ‘primitive’beings away from Wordsworth’s innocent image of Johnny in ‘The Idiot Boy’ towards a more rigorous study of the material conditions of idiocy. As the French physician Edouard Séguin’s description of Victor (he was as ‘nimble as a deer’, cracked nuts ‘like a monkey’ and laughed at the snow14) and François Truffaut’s 1969 film The Wild Child (L’Enfant Sauvage) attest, he remains one of the most enigmatic idiot figures, which suggests idiocy should be used as a social and educational term and not to describe a ‘natural’ and metaphysical condition.15 While Itard argued that idiots should no longer simply be seen as natural beings, his study also raised doubts about their inherent innocence; as McDonagh asks: ‘if idiocy is a state to be overcome, [then] how can the idiot be innocent?’16 Itard had five aims in his education of Victor: ‘to attach him to social life’; ‘to awaken [his] nervous sensibility’; ‘to extend the sphere of his ideas’; ‘to lead him to the use of speech’ by means of imitation, and ‘to exercise frequently the most simple operations of the mind upon objects of his physical wants’.17 Although Itard’s success was limited (especially in Victor’s language acquisition), it is clear that his vision was to transform the wild boy into a fully fledged human being by developing his intellectual and motor skills. But, whatever philosophical advances were made in the case, McDonagh argues that Itard’s account presents Victor as a ‘failed experiment’. In fact, the case marked a blow to thinkers who believed idiocy could be overcome through special educational means. Compared to the philosophical-scientific paradigm that turned Victor into a medical phenomenon, the German teacher Georg Daumer stresses moral and aesthetic sensibility as much as formal knowledge in his education of Kaspar Hauser. The difference between the two boys is not simply in their intellectual potential or the distinct social worlds to which they are introduced, but also down to their material conditions prior to discovery. Where 13 That the boy was viewed as an idiot there is no doubt: see, for example, the Victorian thinker James Abbott’s comment in The Hand Book of Idiotcy, p. 32. 14 Edouard Séguin, ‘Origin of the Treatment and Training of Idiots’ (1864), in The History of Mental Retardation, Volume 1, ed. Marvin Rosen, Gerald Clark & Marvin Kivitz (Baltimore, MD: University Park Press, 1976), p. 153. 15 McDonagh, ‘The Image of Idiocy’, p. 62. 16 Ibid., p. 77. 17 Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, Wolf Children, p. 102.

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Victor ran wild in the woods, Kaspar – if his account is to be believed – was held in enclosed captivity for thirteen years and given minimal contact with nature and other human beings. Wassermann was by no means the first writer to become interested in the case of Kaspar Hauser, a mysterious youth of around sixteen years who was first seen in May 1828 by two cobblers in Nuremberg while the rest of the town were in the country celebrating Whitsun. When he was first sighted the youth clutched a letter and repeated the sentence that, as Michael Hulse notes, has been variously reported as ‘I want to be like my father’ and ‘I want to be a rider like my father’ (‘Ich möcht’ ein solcher Reiter werden wie mein Vater’).18 The criminologist Anselm von Feuerbach initially had a very low impression of the boy – ‘I came away from Kaspar Hauser on 11 July in the firm conviction … that he would either die of brain fever or end a madman or idiot if his circumstances were not soon changed’ – but it became clear that Kaspar was not an idiot when he began to learn social skills and gain the ability to speak and write.19 Although Wassermann was sympathetic to Kaspar’s plight in his novel, the tension between primitive and civilizing forces is a distinct feature in the modernist refashioning of the myth. Indeed, Ursula Sampath detects an ambivalence towards the boy even in earlier nineteenth-century accounts: While some of his contemporaries were captivated by his innocence and gentle nature, or saw the hallmarks of a secret prince in almost everything he did, others persisted in their view of him as a crafty swindler, regardless of any evidence to the contrary … Even neutral descriptions of his characteristics and physical traits show dual aspects. We are told that in spite of his presumed earlier deprivations he was of pleasing appearance and good build, with blond curly hair and blue eyes … Yet he was often sick, and there are reports that when his mind became agitated, a nervous tic would distort his face.20

Conflicting reports suggested that the boy was, on the one hand, sensitive, thoughtful and artistic and, on the other, vain, conceited and a liar, and it can be argued that he never really assimilated fully into German society. For example, the critic Roger Shattuck suggests that the human warmth Kaspar experienced in Nuremberg certainly contributed to his own humanity, but although he ‘learned basic speech and even became curious about philosophical problems of origin and causation, he never displayed much affection or any sexual feeling’.21 Shattuck concludes that, like the Wild Boy of Aveyron, Kaspar remained ‘emotionally crippled for life’. In 18 Jakob Wassermann, Caspar Hauser: The Inertia of the Heart, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Penguin, 1992), p. vii. 19 Anselm von Feuerbach, ‘Kaspar Hauser: Beispiel eines Verbrechens am Seelenleben des Menschen’ (1832), quoted by Hulse: ibid., p. xi. 20 Ursula Sampath, Kaspar Hauser: A Modern Metaphor (Columbia, SC: Cambden House, 1991), p. 12. 21 Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment, p. 197.

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fact, it is precisely these ambiguous descriptions of Kaspar that have, to Sampath’s mind, contributed to his ‘versatility and longevity’, with the myth being pliable enough to rework for different cultural and historical contexts.22

The Resuscitation of the Heart Jakob Wassermann is not as well remembered as his literary contemporaries Arthur Schnitzler, Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse, but he was a prolific and popular writer, his novel The Enigma of Caspar Hauser inspiring Klaus Mann to rework the legend in his unpublished novella ‘Vor dem leden’ (1924). Thomas Mann thought that Wassermann was prone to ‘solemn loquacity’ in his fiction, but on his death in 1934 Mann declared that he was ‘a much greater storyteller than I’.23 Wassermann’s awkward stylistic mannerisms may be one of the reasons he had become largely forgotten by the mid-twentieth century and why little of his work has remained in circulation, but another reason is that as a German Jew living in Austria for much of his life he was outside mainstream German literary culture. Like Franz Kafka in Prague, Wassermann was a clear example of the ‘double consciousness’ that the African American thinker W. E. B. DuBois described as being endemic to the experience of ethnic and cultural alienation in the early century. Although he was proud to be both German and a Jew – claiming in 1921 ‘I am a German, and I am a Jew, the one as much and as completely as the Other, both simultaneously and irrevocably’ – as Ritchie Robertson argues ‘he tried desperately to be accepted as a German writer’ (going so far as to renounce his Jewish faith), even though ‘he always had deep doubts about whether such acceptance was possible’.24 Not surprisingly, Wassermann was drawn to tales of exile from a German society that he portrayed as mannered and respectable, but lacking in vitality and compassion. Caspar Hauser shares a critique of bourgeois culture with his other major novels The Goose Man (Das Gänsemännchen, 1915; trans. 1922) and The World’s Illusion (Christian Wahnschaffe, 1919; trans. 1920). The subtitle of the novel, ‘The Inertia [or Slothfulness] of the Heart’, suggests it should be read as an attack on the ‘torpor and indifference of German provincial society when faced with the miraculous 22 Sampath, Kaspar Hauser, p. 13. 23 Quoted in Ronald Hayman, Thomas Mann (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), p. 411. Like his French contemporary André Gide, Mann reveals conflicting feelings towards Wassermann. Early in his career, Mann had admitted being influenced by him, and he praised Caspar Hauser and his 1913 novel The Man of Forty Years (Der Mann von vierzig Jahren), but by 1925 Mann was writing in his diary that Wassermann’s ‘technique no longer interested him’: Anthony Heilbut, Thomas Mann: Eros & Literature (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 461. 24 Ritchie Robertson, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 235; p. 326. Wassermann experienced antiSemitism during his service in the German Army and then later, in 1933, had his books burnt by the Nazis.

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foundling’; in his Preface to the first English translation of 1928, Wassermann claimed that his intention was to fashion ‘a work of confirmation and legitimation’.25 Given the changing scientific and political climate of Germany, it may seem odd that Wassermann revisited a nineteenth-century myth that had always been romantic to him since childhood when his grandfather had told tales of seeing Kaspar.26 A number of German thinkers in the late nineteenth century, such as Ernst Haekel and Ludwig Büchner, championed Darwinian ideas and theories about the animal origins of human life. As Richard Weikart has discussed, Haekel and Büchner opposed traditional Christian ideas of human divinity and immortality and replaced the liberal concern for individualism with a species-centred philosophy that fed into the eugenics movement in Germany between the wars.27 In this intellectual environment the innocent idiot is replaced by the image of the irredeemably brutish creature. In contrast, Wassermann’s novel seems like a throwback to mid-nineteenth-century liberal humanist values. Although the early descriptions of the novel deal with Kaspar’s idiotic appearance and his idiosyncratic behaviour, the narrative focuses on social attitudes towards him and the intrigue leading up to his eventual murder. Not only did Wassermann wish to preserve the myth that Kaspar was essentially innocent and had a rare aesthetic sensibility, but he was critical of the adult world at large for threatening to degrade him: The idea behind Caspar Hauser was to show how people of every quality of spirit and intellect, from the coarsest to the most sophisticated … are all without exception utterly dull and utterly helpless when confronted with the phenomenon of innocence, and cannot grasp that such a thing can exist … never apprehend[ing] it as it is in itself, the sole, unique, glorious image of the Divine, and rather sully what is fair and tender and dreamlike in its nature, despoil it, take advantage of it, and finally murder it.28

Despite the social criticisms of the novel, Wassermann looked back to the 1820s as a ‘period of freedom’ in Germany, contrasting it to the ‘military obedience and timid

25 Raymond Furness, The Twentieth Century, 1890–1945 (London: Croom Helm, 1978), p. 203. Jakob Wassermann, Introduction to Caspar Hauser: Enigma of a Century, trans. Caroline Newton (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1983), p. xvi. 26 As Michael Hulse notes, ‘k’ and ‘c’ were often interchangeable in German in the early nineteenth century, with Kaspar/Caspar spelt both ways by different commentators: Wassermann, Caspar Hauser (Penguin, 1992), p. ix. I will refer to Kaspar with a ‘k’ (as the boy wrote it) unless quoting from Wassermann, who favoured the alternative spelling. 27 Richard Weikart, ‘Darwinism and Death: Devaluing Human Life in Germany 1859–1920’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 63(2) (April 2002), 323–7. Weikart also discusses the emergence of societies such as the Monist League (1906) founded by Ernst Haekel and the International Order for Ethics and Culture (1908), that replaced Christian values with alternative secularist philosophies. These societies followed in the wake of Karl Vogt, the German Professor at the University of Geneva, who argued in the first volume of Lectures on Humans (Vorlesungen über den Menschen, 1863) that idiots were closer to apes than to the ‘lowest normal humans’ and even their own parents: Weikart, ‘Darwinism and Death’, 333. 28 Quoted by Hulse: Wassermann, Caspar Hauser (Penguin, 1992), p. xxiv.

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subordination’ he saw around him in 1908.29 He was keenly aware of developments in science and was interested in Freudian psychoanalysis, but Michael Hulse argues that he is anti-modernist for underplaying such modern themes as ‘the problem of cognition’ and ‘the nature of perception’ in favour of ‘a species of psychological Gothic which reveals his debts to both Dostoevsky and Dickens’.30 In fact, Wassermann’s Romantic interests inform his assertion that materialist science is as bad as bourgeois indolence for its lack of imagination; he argued that many contemporary thinkers have ‘ceased to “wonder” at anything’, their ‘weakness of vision’ stemming from a rejection of ‘anything that resembles a miracle’.31 Although Wassermann stresses Kaspar’s innocence throughout, as we will see there are darker currents in the novel that complicate this untrammelled vision. Tensions between different modes of thought are evident in the novel, particularly as regards the speculation that surrounds Kaspar’s hidden past and the attempts to solve the enigma of the boy. The novel begins with a note of historical accuracy (‘In the early summer of 1828 …’), but immediately switches to the ‘strange rumours’ that circulate around Nuremberg regarding the appearance of an odd-looking youth.32 The initial perspective is from the point of view of ‘authorities’ and ‘private individuals’ that cannot fit the stranger into their frame of social reference. The initial description of Kaspar stresses the mystery of his provenance, his childlike speech and tentative movements: No one knew where he hailed from. He himself was unable to supply the facts of the matter since his command of the language was no better than a two-year-old’s; he could utter only a very few words with any clarity, and those few he would babble over and over, plaintively one moment and cheerfully the next, as if they contained no meaning and were merely the uncomprehended tokens of his fear and pleasure. In the way he walked too, he was like a child that has just managed to take its first steps: he did not put his heel down first, but would set down the flat of his foot with a ponderous, wary tread.33

His two-year-old speech is the clearest indication of his suspected idiocy, but unlike Victor, who showed no signs of language development, there is also a sense that his maturity has been retarded through lack of parenting and education. The inquisitive townsfolk go to the tower where the as-yet unnamed Kaspar is detained. Here they see a ‘curious creature’ fearful of his own body and crouching in the ‘semi-darkness’. The onlookers take him to be ‘some kind of cave-dweller’ whose primitive speech lacks meaning, but the narrator implies that the ‘uncomprehended tokens’ (‘unverstandene Zeichen’34) relate as much to the 29 30 31 32 33 34

Wassermann, Caspar Hauser (Floris, 1983), p. xix. Wassermann, Caspar Hauser (Penguin, 1992), p. xxiii. Wassermann, Caspar Hauser (Floris, 1983), p. xxiii. Wassermann, Caspar Hauser (Penguin, 1992), p. 3. Ibid., p. 3. Jakob Wassermann, Caspar Hauser oder Die Trägheit des Herzens (Munich:

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perspective of the onlookers as they do to Kaspar. The early description of the boy reflects the desperate attempts of the townsfolk to find an appropriate label for him, moving between primitive images of the ‘cave-dweller’ and ‘half-savage boy’ to animal similes: ‘like an obstinate calf’; ‘like a dancing bear’; ‘like the glossy coats of animals used to living in the dark’.35 The surprisingly assured report from the court doctor that emerges from these initial impressions of the boy does not call him an idiot by name, but nevertheless describes him as having ‘no conception of the way his fellow-beings live … [he] has no grasp of time, and has no real sense of his existence’.36 The townsfolk are suspicious of the boy, particularly as he seems to have no interest in them, shying away from their smell, gestures and touch. The narrator offers a sympathetic contrast to the townsfolk’s view of Kaspar and the ‘idiotic gossip’ (‘hirnlosen Geschwätzes’37) of the newspapers by detecting hidden qualities in his behaviour: his over-excitability and good memory are signs of an active inner life; his spirit is thought to be intact despite his rough exterior; he is sensitive to transitions between dark and light; he displays a refined sensibility when he reaches ‘for the radiance and colours outside as if the scene were a canvas that he could touch’, and he collapses like a tortured artist after managing to write his name.38 His awareness of subtle changes in the moon, love of flowers and fear of thunder distance him from the common assumption that idiots were insensitive to transitions in the environment and to the grandeur of Nature. The changeability of his moods and the germs of his aesthetic sensibility elevate him far beyond Victor’s brutish state, and even messianic undertones creep into Georg Daumer’s first report: This creature reeling helplessly in an alien world [Diese in einer fremden Welt hiflod schwankende Gestalt], his gaze cumbered with sleep, his gestures curbed by fear, his noble brow enthroned above a somewhat wasted face, the peace and purity of heart that appear in that brow: to my mind they are incontestable signs. If my suspicions prove correct … I shall hold up a mirror of immaculate humanity to our dull insensitive world.39

In passages such as this, the narrator appears to adopt the philanthropic perspective of Daumer and Anselm von Feuerbach, whose 1832 report on Kaspar was an important historical source for the novel. However, Wassermann stressed that despite their sympathies Daumer and Feuerbach were both neglectful of Kaspar’s wishes and ‘lost sight of the human being’ behind their idealistic conceptions of Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983), p. 11. Hereafter, where relevant, page numbers from the German edition will follow references from Michael Hulse’s translation. 35 Wassermann, Caspar Hauser (Penguin, 1992), pp. 4–5. Kaspar later reveals a kinship with a savage dog, but he is fearful of snakes and spiders: p. 43; p. 134. 36 Ibid., p. 5. 37 Ibid., p. 83 / p. 104. 38 Ibid., p. 6. 39 Ibid., p. 11 / p. 20.

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education and justice.40 Nevertheless, with the theory championed by Feuerbach that Kaspar was the lost Prince of the House of Baden, these Christ-like images of ‘immaculate humanity’ lurk in the background of the story, suggesting that Kaspar’s purity of heart and visionary insight provide him with the messianic power that could resuscitate the hearts and minds of a fallen and moribund community. An early sign that Kaspar may be an idiot is his inability to speak, except for the sentence about his wish to be a gallant rider like his father. This sentence has often been interpreted as containing a clue to his nobility and his search for paternity, but it may be nonsense or a red herring taught to him by his gaoler. Indeed, when Kaspar is able to reflect on his earlier inarticulate condition he comments that he used the same line regardless of whether he meant to say ‘where are the water and bread’, ‘where am I anyway’, or ‘give me the thing that makes that lovely sound’.41 Medical reports on the condition of aphasia began to be published in the late eighteenth century, but they were usually related to the inability to express oneself after a stroke (as Samuel Johnson, Goethe’s father and, in a different context, Baudelaire all experienced).42 Following research into the condition by Freud and Henri Bergson in the 1890s, the modern understanding of aphasia was an inability to ‘use words unless objects to which they refer are immediately present’, but in the 1830s aphasia was thought to refer to a general ‘interruption in the connections between images or ideas and their linguistic signs’.43 Wassermann would certainly have been aware of the research in the 1860s by the French scientist Paul Broca into the morphological centres of aphasia and possibly work by the likes of the American medic Hervey Wilbur, who linked speech acquisition to intellectual development. In his 1867 paper ‘Aphasia’ Wilbur sketched out a rising scale of linguistic competence, beginning from ‘purely instinctive cries, and vague purposeless motions’, through ‘expressive cries and voluntary motions’ (both of which Kaspar showed in his early state), to imitation, ‘voluntary expression’, and finally to ‘speech proper’.44 On this scale Wilbur argued that the degree of idiocy is marked by the relative inability to use language: at the base level are those who fail to understand any form of communication, to those who respond to 40 Wassermann, Caspar Hauser (Floris, 1983), p. xxiv. 41 Wassermann, Caspar Hauser (Penguin, 1992), pp. 18–19. 42 The aphasic accounts of Johnson and Goethe, Sr are outlined in Louis Costa & Otfried Spreen, Studies in Neuropsychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 31. Baudelaire’s aphasia is discussed in Walther Riese, ‘Baudelaire as a Victim of Aphasia’, Episteme, 6 (1972), 305–17. 43 Waugh, Metafiction (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 37. Costa & Spreen, Studies in Neuropsychology (1985), p. 31. See Freud’s On Aphasia (Zur Auffassung Der Aphasien, Leipzig: Deuticke, 1891), Bergson’s Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire, Paris: Alcan, 1896), and for a summary of their findings Costa & Spreen, Studies in Neuropsychology, pp. 34–41. 44 Hervey B. Wilbur, ‘Aphasia’ (1867), in The History of Mental Retardation, Volume 1, ed. Rosen, Clark & Kivitz, p. 211.

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‘the language of affection’, and upwards to those who have varying command over words and sentences.45 Based on the common understanding that the spirit ‘expresses itself through language’, Kaspar’s mute condition is a sign ‘of his barely sensate life’.46 He is quick to develop linguistic skills though, arousing the admiration of Daumer and Feuerbach who see in him an intuitive intelligence, leading his teacher to surmise that ‘the foundation of a sound education had been laid’ before his imprisonment. But Kaspar’s ongoing frustration when trying to communicate certain emotions suggests he remains fundamentally dispossessed throughout his life (not surprisingly, considering Feuerbach and Wassermann thought he had been cheated out of his royal entitlement). Daumer tries to teach Kaspar about physical growth and ageing, claiming that he has become ‘a quite different Hauser from the Hauser he had been in the tower’ and that one day he would be old and wrinkled.47 Kaspar recoils at this suggestion, as he does when he sees himself in the mirror and perceives ‘another Caspar, another I, with his eyes closed, looking as though he knew something that the Caspar who stood in the room did not’.48 When Daumer speaks to him of ‘Man’ in high humanist terms, Kaspar becomes lost in reverie. He tries to wrestle with the concept of Mensch but the word goes ‘right through’ him: he sees a vision of ‘a creature far below, bound and chained, gazing up from the depths, a stranger to himself and a stranger to the fellow-being to whom he cried that one word Man’ (‘Er sah ein Geschöpf, tief unten verstrickt und angekettet, von tief unten hinaufschauend, fremd sich selbst, fremd dem andern, dem et das Wort Mensch zuschrie’).49 Although he trusts the knowledge and good sense of his guardian, when Daumer tells him that his vivid dreams lack any grounding in reality, Wassermann uses historical hindsight to grant Kaspar an understanding of the unconscious that his teacher does not have: ‘It was the first time he had been told there might be no truth to his dreams. But it was also the first time that his own certainty on any matter was stronger than his teacher’s interpretation.’ 50 Rather than having a sense of satisfaction that he has begun to think for himself, Kaspar regrets the fact that his world-view does not tally with those around him. In fact, the tension between his own interpretations and the lessons taught to him by Daumer (who later becomes too ill to care for him) and by his future guardian Earl Stanhope (who Wassermann demonizes for treating Kaspar as a fraud) suggests that just as society chips away at his innocence, so language acquisition rends a psychic split in his self. On another level, as Ursula Sampath notes, Kaspar’s ‘physiological inability to tolerate meat’ seems to be a sign of his ‘innate sympathy with all of Nature’s creatures’ that is compromised when he eats 45 46 47 48 49 50

Ibid., p. 212. Ibid., p. 223. Wassermann, Caspar Hauser (Penguin, 1992), p. 13. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 86 / p. 107. Ibid., p. 56.

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animal matter.51 Wassermann’s narrator continues to stress his purity of heart, but there is a sense when his diet changes, when he drinks alcohol and begins to understand the ways of the world (including the concepts of lying and deceit), that his former innocence is compromised. Indeed, in the other retellings of the myth, Kaspar is more than just an innocent victim whose murder in 1833 (only months after Feuerbach’s suspicious death) may or may not be the result of a plot to prevent him reclaiming his inheritance. Wassermann’s novel can only take us so far in understanding the importance of the myth for reconfiguring idiocy, but as the next section discusses in relation to Werner Herzog’s visualization of the story, in both versions Kaspar’s dreams, visions and forebodings push him dangerously toward a state of abjection.

The Anguish of Idiocy Werner Herzog is one of the most charismatic exponents of the New German Cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s and has been called a borrower of literary and cultural materials, rather than a cinematic adapter of particular texts.52 Herzog directed and wrote the screenplay for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, which revisits the myth of Kaspar Hauser as an existential meditation on the mysterious and troubling aspects of what it is to be human (as suggested by its original title, Every Man For Himself and God Against All). The film can be read as an attempt to unveil what Roger Bartra calls the ‘presence of other voices’ that are often concealed behind ‘the Western obsession’ with a particular notion of ‘the primitive’.53 It cannot be considered an adaptation in the strictest sense as Herzog changes some elements (Kaspar is shown as an exhibit in a travelling circus and Earl Stanhope does not adopt him), using experimental visual techniques to suggest deeper layers to the myth. However, he does borrow material from Wassermann’s novel, while the film draws from similar cultural archetypes to explain Kaspar’s appearance and character. The myth provided a perfect means for Herzog to develop his interest in enigmatic heroes and dream-like visions, with Kaspar’s appearance in Nuremberg and his idiosyncratic inner life conveyed with haunting cinematography. Brigitte Peucker suggests that the director had similar motivations to Wassermann in retelling the story; for Herzog, ‘the appeal of the archetype lies partly in its 51 Sampath, Kaspar Hauser, p. 73. Daumer is afraid that meat would destroy the ‘strength he may derive from the purity of his blood’: Wassermann, Caspar Hauser (Penguin, 1992), p. 46. 52 See Dudley Andrew, ‘The Well-Worn Muse: Adaptation in Film History and Theory’, in Narrative Strategies, ed. Sydney M. Conger & Janice R. Welsch (Macomb, IL: Western Illinois University Press, 1980), p. 10: cited in Brigitte Peucker, ‘The Invalidation of Arnim: Herzog’s Signs of Life (1968)’, in German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, ed. Eric Rentschler (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 217–30. 53 Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass, p. 204.

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impersonality and partly in its availability for continuous and radical revision’.54 This notion of replaying the myth is borne out in Herzog’s 1977 film Stroszek, set in America but telling a very similar story to The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, in which a man’s release from prison sends him into a world that is more debilitating than the one he has left behind. Peucker argues convincingly that although Herzog wanted to resist slavish conformity to literary sources and to develop cinema as an independent and primarily visual art form, he has often been called ‘a poet among film-makers’.55 As such, Herzog cites the German Romantic writers Georg Büchner and Joseph Eichendorff, and his films reflect ‘the literature of visionary romanticism’ in their interest in mysticism, enigmas and the unknowable. The film features Bruno S. as Kaspar, an asylum inmate for twenty years and an unknown actor until Herzog discovered him working as a toilet attendant. The fact that Bruno was untrained lent his performances in Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek a rough naturalness that would be hard to replicate by means of actingschool techniques, especially as Bruno had earlier lost the power of speech after being beaten repeatedly by his prostitute mother.56 His ‘primordial innocence of vision’ seemed ideal to Herzog for dramatizing Kaspar’s journey from depravity to worldly engagement.57 Like Wassermann and Kafka, Herzog saw himself as an exile from certain German traditions and uses film as a vehicle for exploring broader themes of cultural and existential dispossession. But, whereas Wassermann’s novel celebrates a Romantic conception of Nature and criticizes contemporary social values, Thomas Elsaesser argues that Herzog’s film is ‘less concerned to juxtapose innocent nature … with corrupt and fallen society’ and more interested in the way in which Kaspar’s ‘non-natural as well as non-human condition challenges both society and nature’.58 The film certainly reveals a reverence for uncultivated wilderness, but it does not attempt to understand nature or frame it as either benign or malevolent. Instead of shifting focus from Kaspar’s presumed idiocy to the intrigue of the murder-plot (as does the 1993 54 Peucker, ‘The Invalidation of Arnim’, p. 217. 55 John Sandford, The New German Cinema (London: Oswald Wolff, 1980), p. 48. Peucker, ‘The Invalidation of Arnim’, p. 217. Peucker argues that Herzog was drawn to archetypal myths as his source material precisely because he was ‘not one to submit easily to the imagination of others’. 56 Bruno S. is the subject of a documentary, Bruno der Schwarze (Lutz Eisholz, Ger, 1970). As John O’Mahony notes, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser has been lauded as a ‘stunning fable’ but also heavily criticized for exploiting Bruno S.’s troublesome past: John O’Mahony, ‘The Enigma of Werner H’, The Guardian Review (30 March 2002), 7. 57 Brigitte Peucker, ‘Werner Herzog: In Quest of the Sublime’, in New German Filmmakers: From Oberhausen Through the 1970s, ed. Klaus Phillips (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984), p. 181. 58 Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 90. Elsaesser also argues that Herzog’s ‘dialectic of marginal figures and overreachers’ is indexed to the state of German cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, rather than just to German Romantic traditions.

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adaptation, Kaspar Hauser (Verbrechen am Seelenleben eines Menschens), directed by Peter Sehr and starring André Eisermann as Kaspar), Herzog retains his cinematic interest in the ‘irreducible mysteries at the dark heart of life’ in all its forms: nature, consciousness, creativity and morality.59 As such, Herzog’s film is much more unsettling to watch than Wassermann’s novel is to read, making use of surprising visual imagery and unusual framing to encourage the viewer to think through the existential implications of the story. The film begins with a puzzling montage of bucolic scenes juxtaposed with a threatening view of a Gothic tower. The camera focuses in turn on the image of a rowing boat with a hazy figure in it, a young woman’s face framed by grass, and an older woman washing at the riverbank before explanatory text establishes the back-story of the Kaspar Hauser myth and highlights his enigmatic origins (‘Das Rätsel seiner Herkunft ist bis heute nicht gelöst’). The lingering view of a ripening cornfield in fierce wind and evocative orchestral music from Johann Pachelbel provide touchstones for the twin themes of untamed nature and noise that is sometimes configured as pure sound and sometimes as words. These themes are linked by an enigmatic epigraph adapted from Georg Büchner’s fragmentary novella Lenz (1879) that appears on the screen: ‘Don’t you hear that horrible screaming all around you? That screaming men call silence?’ (‘Hören Sie denn nicht das ents etzliche Schreien ringsum, das man gewöhnlich die Stille heißt?’). The status of this seemingly arbitrary sequence is not clear until later in the film, when a similar set of hazy images signifies Kaspar’s dream vision and/or his very early childhood memory of the outside world.60 Daumer reports that Kaspar did not begin to dream until he had entered the world, but these images suggest a fragmented inner life that might provide clues to his childhood before he was imprisoned. The scene cuts to Kaspar chained in his cell and isolated from the natural world in the tower we have already glimpsed. By offering a view of Kaspar in his cell Herzog gives authenticity to his captivity narrative, but unlike Wassermann’s novel we are not told how or why he is there or anything concrete about his past. The orchestral music that accompanies the exterior shots fades and is replaced by silence as the camera lingers on the discomfort of Kaspar’s condition; he breathes heavily, grunts and scratches the insect bites on his arms and legs until they are red raw. Chained to the floor Kaspar is in constant motion as he clumsily plays with his toy horse, drinks noisily and emits primitive noises, but he lacks the range and freedom of movement of Truffaut’s Victor (Jean-Pierre Cargol) in L’Enfant Sauvage. Ursula Sampath notes that whereas Kaspar was thought to be Aryan in his looks, Bruno S.’s 59 Sandford, The New German Cinema, p. 54. In a 1975 interview for the Guardian Herzog commented that ‘walking on foot brings you down to the very stark, naked core of existence … it’s an existential quality that we are losing’: cited in Sandford, p. 49. 60 Herzog claims his intention in this opening sequence was to give the impression of a strange world seen for the first time: audio commentary to The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, DVD (Anchor Bay, US, 2001).

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pallid face and stolid body challenge the historical (and no doubt romanticized) accounts of his blue eyes and blond hair, suggesting it was the director’s intention to portray Kaspar ‘as an ordinary human being’. This theory tallies with Peucker’s assessment of Herzog as a ‘disillusioned’ Romantic who does not want to dress up idiocy to make it aesthetically appealing.61 Although Bruno S.’s face is mask-like, his eyes and rough physical movements give him an uncoordinated aspect that creates a very different effect from the soft masked face of Masayuki Mori as Myshkin in Kurosawa’s The Idiot. A dark cloaked figure enters the cell and encourages Kaspar to write his name, threatening to punish him for playing too obsessively with his toy horse. Early the following morning, with Kaspar still half asleep, the figure unchains him, binds his hands and carries him away on his shoulders. The beautiful shots of the peaceful landscape at dawn contrast starkly to the cell’s interior and dwarf the two figures that move slowly through it, a tranquillity that is barely broken when Kaspar is unceremoniously dumped to the ground. The cloaked figure encourages him to walk by kicking his heels and tries to teach him the line about wanting to be a gallant rider by repeating it over and over.62 When he leaves him in the marketplace of Nuremberg with the letter, Kaspar stands statue-like for what seems like an age as a few townsfolk stare at him blearily from their windows. The absurdist dimension of the film is conveyed by the youth’s blank and uncomprehending look and by the ludicrous diagonal angle by which he props his body against the door of the town hall when he is taken to deliver his letter. Kaspar is inspected in a cell not unlike the one he has just left, but the officials soon reach the conclusion that he is neither mad nor depraved, suggesting that ‘if he’d had parents he would have been a smart fellow’. Although some see him as a burden to the community, his harmless disposition and glimmers of intelligence lead him to be accepted by all, from the peasants that feed him and the children that try to teach him language to the Nuremberg professionals. Not only does Kaspar’s visitation cut across class distinctions in the town, but his association with animals – from a rooster that scares him, to a raven, a chicken, a monkey and a camel – position him firmly as a liminal figure between the worlds of creatures and humans.63

61 Sampath, Kaspar Hauser, p. 46. Phillips (ed.), New German Filmmakers, p. 185. 62 In her insightful Lacanian reading of the film, Kaja Silverman argues that not only does the gaoler refer to himself as ‘papa’, but the sentence about the ‘gallant rider’ is an attempt to enforce the Law of the Father and ‘to impose upon [Kaspar] that dominant and homocentric point of view which insists on the discontinuity of nature and culture, animals and men’: Kaja Silverman, ‘Kaspar Hauser’s “Terrible Fall” into Narrative’, New German Critique, 24–25 (Fall–Winter 1981), 76. 63 John Sandford argues that some of the imagery is rather heavy-handed, such as the bullfinch early on in the film, with its German name Gimpel meaning idiot or simpleton: Sandford, New German Cinema, p. 55.

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One of the strangest scenes that Herzog invented for the film features Kaspar in his statue-like pose, but this time as an exhibit in a local circus. He is exhibited alongside a midget king on a throne, an autistic Mozart who looks for dark holes in the earth and a flute-playing Native American. Together they are billed as the ‘four riddles of the spheres’ and exploited for entertainment value. The fact that the circus is outside the perimeters of Nuremberg is significant considering Herzog’s claim that ‘you learn more about the shape of a town from its outskirts than from its centre … Those who people my films are often marginal, not at the centre of things. But they are not freaks. They are aspects of ourselves.’64 Although Herzog has been accused of exploiting Bruno S. in this role (and for using dwarves in other films), unlike Martin Ritt’s adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which includes a freak show simply to emphasize Benjy’s idiocy (as discussed in the Introduction), here the circus episode is included to stress the unfeeling society into which Kaspar has been plunged. If Kaspar’s origins are no more mysterious than the other three exhibits, then as the ‘Riddle of the Continent of Europe’ (as he is billed) he defies the intentions of teachers, medics, lawyers, logicians and preachers to ‘solve’ him as they would a riddle, a theme that is stressed further when he goes missing soon afterwards and is hunted down like an animal. The narrative jumps forward two years to Kaspar’s education under the tutorship of Daumer (Walter Ladengast). Kaspar has learnt to articulate meaningful sentences, but his hands strain when he is trying to express himself and he speaks in an awkward register. When he tries to relate stories he claims he only knows the start of them, as if the continuity of a narrative is beyond his capabilities; as Kaja Silverman argues, telling a completed story would be ‘synonymous to [him] being a coherent subject’.65 Instead of the logical unfolding of stories, he perceives in sensual images and flickering visions that seem to be the after-effect of his time in captivity, and suggests that Kaspar has not entirely left what Silverman calls the ‘play-world’ with his toy horse in the cell.66 Herzog’s Kaspar remains maladjusted throughout the film: he is frustrated with the clergyman who presses on him the importance of faith 64 Interview in The Guardian (24 November 1975), quoted in Sandford, The New German Cinema, p. 49. 65 Kaja Silverman, ‘Kaspar Hauser’s “Terrible Fall” into Narrative’, 74. She goes on to say ‘the ability to tell a story “properly” implies a capacity and a willingness to construct self-contained signifying chains [and] a certain identification with the symbolic father, whose gaze takes in at once the beginning, the middle and the end, and who is a master of narrative’: ibid., 89. Although Silverman credits the film with a ‘penetrating critique of the present symbolic order in the West’, she argues that the ‘interrogation of subjectivity … is limited to the level of fiction’ with Herzog’s ‘transcendent vision’ of Kaspar as Romantic exile being emphasized throughout: ibid, 91; 93. This account is convincing (and concurs with Roger Bartra’s thesis in Wild Men in the Looking Glass of European culture’s inability to see what lies beyond its own fictions of the wild man), but Herzog is not as didactic as Wassermann by refusing to stress Kaspar’s innocence above existential mystery. 66 Ibid., 73.

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(even though his visions give him no experience of God) and the logician who values deduction over description; he feels music strongly in his heart when he hears a blind man at the piano, but he cannot master musical skills and plays in a hesitant and unaccomplished manner, and the happiness that his flower drawings bring him is transitory as they are soon trampled over. It is in these non-verbal forms of communication – visions, music and art – that Kaspar seems more likely to discover himself, than in the realm of language that conforms to standards of reason, logic, dogma and eloquence. The abjection that Kaspar feels when he is introduced to the foppish Stanhope’s aristocratic gathering leads him to exclaim that his dark cell was preferable to this pretentious world outside. The scene deliberately contrasts nonverbal forms of behaviour with the world of language: Kaspar regresses to his primitive state in a back room (whether it is a deliberate ploy is not clear), while Stanhope is forced to entertain the guests with stories of his travels in Greece. The theme of deceptive language is crucial for understanding how Kaspar’s idiocy is configured in the film. Brigitte Peucker argues that Herzog’s films are generally hostile to ‘linguistic signs and written texts’ because they can never fully unravel ‘the mysteries of existence’ although they may pretend to do so.67 Peucker looks particularly at Herzog’s early film Signs of Life (Lebenszeichen, 1968), an adaptation of the Romantic writer Achim von Arnim’s novella The Mad Invalid at the Fort of Ratonneau (Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau, 1818), in which ‘the mad invalid’ soldier Stroszek (called Francoeur in Arnim’s novella) is sent away from the battlefield to convalesce on an island. Given nothing significant to do and oppressed by boredom, Stroszek loses control over his impulses, becoming in turn excitable, aggressive and violent as he sets off fireworks at the sun. Depicted as a quixotic figure, Stroszek’s story juxtaposes tragic eloquence and vacant idiocy as the narrator both sympathizes with him and mocks him. Stroszek’s story is similar to Kaspar’s tale, with the narrator claiming that he had no chance to survive because ‘his adversary was hopelessly stronger … he had failed miserably and wretchedly like all of his kind’. Kaspar is also ill equipped to cope with the pressures of the world, claiming that ‘I am set against everything’ and ‘People are to me as wolves … I feel as if my appearance on this earth has been a hard fall.’ The lingering shot of Kaspar’s distorted image reflected in the ripples of a water butt towards the end (echoing Wassermann’s novel when Kaspar is confused by his mirror image and earlier in the film when the farmer’s daughter uses a hand-held mirror to reveal the connection between his hand and arm) conveys his fractured view of himself, which cannot be made whole by mastery over language or social acceptance.68 Like Conrad’s Stevie, Kaspar sees 67 Peucker, ‘The Invalidation of Arnim’, p. 224. 68 The mirror sequence in Truffaut’s L’Enfant Sauvage is very different from the scenes in Wassermann’s novel and Herzog’s film, as Victor does not seem to recognize himself. Itard (Truffaut) holds an apple above the head of Victor and directs him to look in the mirror. The boy chases with his hand the image of the apple as Itard moves it around his head, but after a while realizes that the real apple is behind him.

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the shallowness and inhumanity of the world but he does not have the means to express his insights: if anything, words just obscure and debase his vision. Wassermann’s novel and Herzog’s film both emphasize the waste of Kaspar’s life given his visionary insights. In both versions Kaspar dies in a state of anguish and abjection: Wassermann’s Kaspar is confused and feels disgraced on his deathbed, whereas after being stabbed the first time, Herzog’s Kaspar cannot fully express his foggy vision in which a procession of people climb a mountain while Death waits at the top.69 Wassermann is eager to retain Kaspar’s innocence, but Herzog is much more pessimistic about whether anything could be done to alleviate his suffering. The bloody footprints of the assassin in the garden suggest that even this pastoral haven is not safe; Kaspar can never reach a primordial state of unity with nature because the world was fallen long before he was locked in the tower. Like Dostoevsky’s Myshkin, the mark of Kaspar’s idiocy in the film is that he differs fundamentally from those around him, and not merely in his unkempt appearance (which does not really improve). As language and social custom do not come naturally to him they cannot cover over the anguish that he senses lies at the heart of life. One of the triumphs of the film is, as Timothy Corrigan argues, that just as truth is always out of reach for Kaspar, so Herzog holds the spectator ‘on the edge or at the brink of an acquisition of the world through images themselves’ without ever allowing them to reach a full understanding of Kaspar’s condition.70 This theme of the obfuscation of language is emphasized in the final ironic sequence of the film after Kaspar’s death, in which his feet are labelled and his brain is dissected. On examining his brain the surgeon claims triumphantly that he has an enlarged liver, an over-developed cerebellum, a deformed cerebrum and a small left hemisphere, as if these morphological secrets and the scientific language that explains them somehow solve the strange case of Kaspar Hauser.

69 Although he claims he cannot tell stories, Kaspar describes his dying vision in which a blind man can sense direction in the desert more clearly than those who have both their sight and the aid of compasses (perhaps a covert criticism of a world that puts faith in instrumental knowledge). Shot on 8 mm film, this desert sequence is much more vivid than Stanhope’s description of his Greek travels, especially as it is purely a projection of Kaspar’s imagination. 70 Timothy Corrigan (ed.), The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 16.

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Chapter Six

Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck and Lewis Milestone) In the last two chapters we have seen how discourses of primitivism infected the modernist approach to idiocy in early twentieth-century Europe. A discussion of the place of the idiot figure in American culture requires both a shift of geographical perspective and a consideration of the literary trends that contributed to the development of modernism across the Atlantic. The emergence of an experimental wave of American writing in the early twentieth century can be explained largely as a reaction to social and urban transition in the Progressive period following the Civil War. While the literary scene in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was dominated by realism and the commitment to document social life, this project started to diversify in the last decade of the century. The emergence of naturalism and the initial phase of modernism in the 1890s and early 1900s can be seen as attempts to reflect and make sense of the intensification of technological change and the rapid transition from rural to urban habitats, particularly in the North East. This division between urban and rural fiction is often used to distinguish the nativist writing of Mark Twain and Hamlin Garland from the genteel fictions of William Dean Howells and Henry James in terms of the class and ideology of their characters.1 This crude opposition holds for much writing published in the 1870s and 1880s, but versions of naturalism in which characters are determined by environment, economics or genetics began to blur the distinction in the late 1880s (with wider circulation of political, legal and medical ideas), while writers such as Stephen Crane and Edith Wharton shifted their focus between urban and rural contexts. Moreover, expatriate writers like Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller do not easily fit into either camp. Living in Paris after the Great War they appear to be what Philip Rahv called ‘paleface’ writers for their interest in European values, but the primitive exuberance of Hemingway and Miller is closer to Rahv’s ‘redskin’ tradition.2 A more useful distinction for determining the ends to which the idiot figure has been put in American writing is between Romanticism and naturalism; but where Romantic writers usually see idiots as symbols of innocence and naturalist writers use them to explore genetic determinism and social malaise, even this opposition 1 See, for example, Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (New York: Doubleday, 1957). 2 Philip Rahv, ‘Paleface and Redskins’ (1939), in Literature and Politics, 1932–1972, ed. Arabel J. Porter & Andrew J. Dvosin (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), pp. 3–7.

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is complicated if we consider some specific examples. As exponents of American Romanticism in the mid-nineteenth century Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau were sympathetic to individuals living close to and in harmony with Nature, by which they could gain the material and spiritual resources to live deeply (as Thoreau described in Walden, 1854). In his celebration of the American spirit of democracy, Whitman’s poems explored what he discerned as the correspondences between human, animal, vegetable and spiritual life. Listing was among Whitman’s strategies for including a wide variety of life in his poems. In ‘There Was A Child Went Forth’ (1855) he describes the ‘old drunkard staggering home’, ‘the schoolmistress’, ‘the friendly boys’, ‘the quarrelsome boys’ and ‘the bare-foot negro’, and in Song of Myself (1855) he includes ‘the surgeon’, ‘the machinist’, ‘the gate-keeper’ and ‘the newly-come immigrants’, among other figures.3 Even though Whitman’s youngest brother was a congenital idiot and he was interested in individuals with social roles as well as those without status, all of whom he describes as tending ‘inward’ to him as he tends ‘outward to them’, there is no mention of idiots in these poems.4 However, in ‘The Sleepers’ (also 1855), the poet wanders in a night vision ‘confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory’. He sees ‘the wretched features of ennuyés, the white features of corpses … the gashed bodies on battle-fields, the insane in their strong door’d rooms, the sacred idiots, the new-born emerging from gates, and the dying emerging from gates’.5 While the insane are securely confined, it is not clear whether the ‘sacred idiots’ suffer the same fate, or are free to wander around the dreamscape (an idiot is mentioned again later in ‘The Sleepers’, buried in a list and again without qualification). Either way, the ‘sacred idiot’ embodies the Romantic view of natural holiness, but is also associated with a dark vision of America where sanity and madness, life and death combine in menacing ways, as if Whitman realizes his poetic development will take him into disturbing regions of the soul. As a more sceptical Romantic writer, Herman Melville also drew on the figure of the visionary fool in Moby-Dick (1851) in the guise of the black shipboy Pip, who is described as going ‘about the deck an idiot – such at least they said he was’ after being caught on a harpoon line and nearly drowning.6 The crew think Pip is insane with his ‘unearthly idiotic face’ but, like Coleridge’s Mariner, he has powers of intuition and the capacity to see ‘strange shapes of the unwarped 3 Walt Whitman, Poetry (London: Dent, 1996), p. 3; p. 14. 4 Paul Zweig notes that for most of the 1850s Whitman shared an upstairs room (even a bed) in Brooklyn ‘with his retarded, probably epileptic’ and inarticulate youngest brother Ed ‘to whom he left most of his possessions when he died’, while his elder brother Jesse was committed to King’s County Lunatic Asylum in 1864 for having an uncontrollably violent temperament: Paul Zweig, Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 16; p. 40; p. 240. 5 Ibid., p. 40. 6 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harold Beaver (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 525.

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primal world’ where the ‘miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps’.7 The conflation of idiocy and insanity in Melville was not unusual in the nineteenth century, but it is noticeable that Whitman and Melville both place the idiot figure in more troubled contexts than Wordsworth does with the rural simplicity of ‘The Idiot Boy’. These Romantic currents continued into the twentieth century as evident in poems by Hart Crane and the British-born Mina Loy. Crane’s ‘The Idiot’ (1927) presents a ‘boy struggling under those mimosas, daft / With squint lanterns in his head’ flying a kite.8 The poet hurries by the first time he sees him, but cannot ignore his Latin American song and the poetic exuberance of his kite flying the second time. In contrast Mina Loy’s ‘Idiot Child on a Fire-Escape’ (1943) portrays a feminized child, ‘obedient as a bundle’ that has ‘spilled / on your way to becoming’.9 Like Crane’s idiot, there is an enigma in the ‘deep eyelids’ that is ‘almost emptied’, but clings to the ‘inverted cups / of mortal ivory’. While these examples reveal a direct lineage between Romanticism and modernist poetry, later naturalists and modernists tended to problematize or reject the creative exuberance of the Romantics in the face of more negative social attitudes to idiocy. This is certainly true for American writers that, despite the myth of American innocence, tended to situate idiot figures in bleaker social contexts than their European counterparts. While Conrad retained some vestiges of Romantic possibility in The Secret Agent, William Faulkner used the idiot Benjy in The Sound and the Fury to illustrate the fate of the Deep South in the early twentieth century (as discussed in the Introduction). Whereas Whitman focused on the idiot as a figure of potential rejuvenation, for Faulkner the idiot emerges from a world of genetic and moral bankruptcy as a symbol of hopelessness and part of a community lacking the resources to renew itself. Another example of the naturalist’s use of the idiot figure in American writing is in Frank Norris’ McTeague (1899). The novel focuses on McTeague, the witless and heavily built son of an ‘overworked drudge’ and an alcoholic father who learns his trade from a travelling dentist.10 Set in the ethnic melting pot of San Francisco in the late nineteenth century, McTeague focuses on the rise to bourgeois respectability of McTeague and his Swiss immigrant wife Trina Sieppe, followed by their demise into poverty after McTeague’s jealous friend, Marcus Shouler, informs on him for practising dentistry without a licence. The real subject of the novel is the struggle between the doltish McTeague and his nervous wife, Trina. She becomes psychotic after unexpectedly winning the lottery, hoarding the money while the couple sink into depravation. McTeague, in particular, does not 7 Ibid., p. 545; p. 525. 8 Hart Crane, ‘The Idiot’, transition, 9 (December 1927), republished in Complete Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon (New York: Liveright, 2000), p. 118. 9 Mina Loy, ‘Idiot Child on a Fire-Escape’, Partisan Review, 19(5) (September–October 1952), republished in The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger Conover (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), p. 114. 10 Frank Norris, McTeague, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 5.

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have the capacity to rationally respond to his condition; like Conrad’s Verloc, ‘he never questioned himself, never looked for motives, never went to the bottom of things’.11 It is clear early in the novel that he has no moral sense. Although he is industrious, his animalistic self is always in danger of surfacing, overwhelming him as their domestic condition worsens. Reviewers criticized Norris for being cruel to his characters, denying them higher faculties and resorting to sensationalist tricks, particularly when McTeague brutally murders his wife with ‘his enormous fists’ and is later tracked down in Death Valley where he dies ‘looking stupidly around him’.12 In Erich von Stroheim’s epic film adaptation, Greed (1923), McTeague’s brutishness is exaggerated by the physical size of the actor Gibson Gowland, and his idiocy is emphasized in the hazy long shot at the end as he stares vacantly into the intense heat of Death Valley handcuffed to his former friend, Marcus, with no water and no chance of rescue. Although Norris’ narrator hints that McTeague is a victim of circumstance (consistent with the tone of the film), when compared to the romanticized images of Stevie Verloc and Kaspar Hauser, he is too bestial to successfully transform himself. Like Faulkner’s Benjy, McTeague is an amplification of the moral ugliness and the harsh social conditions to which he is subjected. Protagonists in American naturalist novels (and in many modernist texts that display naturalist traits) often possess a greater range of attributes and capabilities than do McTeague and Benjy, but they are usually damaged or wounded in some way, either physically (like Jake Barnes in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, 1925) or emotionally (as is the case for Newland Archer in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, 1920). Richard Lehman detects two further attributes that characterize naturalist texts: the first is that the protagonist ‘is usually inarticulate, devoid of deep subjectivity and moral reflection’, and the second that an ironic narrative voice often creates a gap between ‘what the characters anticipate and what the reader/narrator anticipate’, providing insights into motivation of which characters are ignorant.13 While Lehman’s comments are directed towards naturalist writing from the turn of the century, American and European authors in the 1920s and 1930s developed these conventions, but often with a greater sense of psychological complexity than their predecessors. The renaissance of naturalist writing in America after the Stock Market Crash of 1929 enabled writers like Steinbeck and James T. Farrell to explore the effect of material pressures upon individuals and communities more attentively than modernist experiments with language and form often permitted. In The Grapes of Wrath (1939), for instance, Steinbeck focused on the poor agricultural workers in the Dust Bowl, evicted from their homes and 11 Ibid., p. 108. 12 Ibid., p. 205; p. 243. 13 Donald Pizer, American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 66.

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forced to move West seeking work. There is no distinct idiot figure in the novel, but it does include the furtive Muley Graves, who refuses to be driven off his Oklahoma farm and goes into hiding like a creature, and the earthy Tom Joad, whose family are called ‘apes’ by the California border patrol. Steinbeck’s fiction is often read as a frank naturalist study of lower-class migrancy, but he retains the kind of optimism and hope that is often missing in the bleak fictional worlds of Faulkner and Norris. As a literary descendent of Huckleberry Finn, Steinbeck’s Tom Joad can be seen to embody what Philip Melling describes as the complex mixture of ‘attractive criminality, destitution and rebellious poeticism’ that characterized much American writing of the 1930s.14 The wandering narratives of the 1930s charting mass migration and the loss of regional identification were suitable vehicles for postfrontier themes reflecting the experience of the rootless hobo or borderlander. As variants of the ‘pioneer misfit’ these figures enabled American writers to combine frontier themes – ‘the thrill of the open road, the scent of coming danger, the romance of characters who yearn to escape the limitations of the moment’15 – with a reconsideration of human ontology in a decade when the optimism of the early twentieth century had given way to profound psychological and economic pessimism. If character is no longer rooted to place, then the ‘damaged survivor’ offers an appropriately unstable notion of identity for expressing the psychology of rootlessness and loss of home.16 Melling argues that this kind of rootless individual ‘is an outgrowth of society and a victim in flight from it; a creature who justifies his peripatetic status … in terms of a native idiom of space as change’.17 Whereas modernist pícaros tend to be quick-witted and capable of rising above circumstance, idiot figures rarely have the ability to respond positively to migratory freedom or to realize its value. However, Melling’s description of ‘a blind, formless, emotionally stunted world, which moves in so many aborted directions at once that it is unable to intelligently assume control of its energies’ encapsulates the common problems faced by the idiot figure, pioneer misfit and rootless hobo.18 Steinbeck’s fiction can be read as a celebration of the wandering pícaro, but there is a darker undertow to his stories, in which he views characters that have a proximity to nature from a harsher modernist perspective. This double-sided sensibility combines Steinbeck’s biological attitude to his fictional creations and R. W. B. Lewis’ comment that he links a Romantic celebration of life to the naturalist’s ‘tragic awareness’ of modern mutilation.19 This is particularly evident in 14 Philip Melling, ‘Samples of Horizon: Picaresque Patterns in the Thirties’, in Nothing Else to Fear: New Perspectives on America in the Thirties, ed. Stephen W. Baskerville & Ralph Miller (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 112. 15 Ibid., p. 111. 16 Ibid., p. 113. 17 Ibid., p. 115. 18 Ibid., p. 120. 19 R. W. B. Lewis, ‘John Steinbeck: The Fitful Daemon’, in The Young Rebel in American Literature, ed. Carl Bode (London: Heinemann, 1959), p. 126.

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his collection of stories The Long Valley (1938) which, as one of Steinbeck’s earliest critics Harry Thornton Moore noticed, repeatedly depicts California as ‘a beautiful warm valley with disaster hanging over it’ and which is peopled with ‘shattered’ characters.20 Many of the tales in this collection focus on individuals who are unfinished, wounded or afflicted in some way, or who mimic lower-order animals in their behaviour and speech. Brian Railsback discusses one of Steinbeck’s chief literary techniques, theriomorphosis, in which he depicts humans with animal characteristics: ‘his grotesques, beasts in a human form, reflect an uncomfortable reality: it is an illusion to ignore the fact that homo sapiens is a species of animal’.21 For example, in the story ‘The Snake’, a strange woman enters a pet shop and begins to mimic the action of a caged snake as it devours a rat, while in ‘Flight’ the mixed-race character Pepé (described as more ‘a peanut’ than ‘a man’) is sent on a journey by his mother, but ends up crawling and worming his way through the Californian landscape after his horse is shot.22 Although he has always been likened to creatures, Pepé is soon reduced to the level of utter bestiality: a septic wound infects his whole body and he ends up speechless as ‘his tongue tried to make words, but only a thick hissing came from between his lips’.23 The one story in The Long Valley that deals explicitly with an idiot figure is ‘Johnny Bear’, which relates the tale of a mysterious figure who is only ever seen in the Buffalo Bar in Loma, a Californian village perpetually surrounded by fog and mist. Johnny Bear performs to the barroom drinkers for whiskey by mimicking the voice and intonation of the other villagers, only reiterating the question ‘Whiskey? Whiskey for Johnny?’ in his own voice.24 Critics have described Johnny Bear as a ‘freak’, a ‘cretin’ and the distorted image of the writer or artist, suggesting that there is something radically unstable in his representation.25 Initially, he is presented as a physical oddity: a great, stupid, smiling bear. His black matted head bobbed forward and his long arms hung out as though he should have been on all fours and was only 20 Harry Thornton Moore, The Novels of John Steinbeck: A First Critical Study (1939), 2nd edn (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1968), p. 11; p. 49. 21 Brian Railsback, ‘Uncomfortable Reflections in John Steinbeck’s Grotesques’, in Literature and the Grotesque, ed. Michael Meyer (Amsterdam: Rodolphi, 1995), p. 53; p. 64. 22 John Steinbeck, The Long Valley (1938) (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 30. 23 Ibid., p. 47. John Timmerman reads ‘Flight’ as a ‘modern crucifixion’ in which Pepé discovers his humanness and ‘spiritual consciousness’ as he faces death. This existential reading is convincing, but also suggests that the relationship between human and animal realms is unstable in Steinbeck’s work, rather than just reflecting his racial prejudices: John H. Timmerman, The Dramatic Landscape of Steinbeck’s Short Stories (London: Pinter, 1990), p. 198. 24 Steinbeck, The Long Valley, p. 118. 25 See Timmerman, The Dramatic Landscape, p. 235; Peter Lisca, The Wide World of John Steinbeck (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), p. 96, and F. W. Watt, Steinbeck (New York: Chip’s Bookshop, 1962), p. 44.

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standing upright as a trick. His legs were short and bowed, ending with strange, square feet … He stood in the doorway swinging his arms jerkily the way half-wits do. On his face there was a foolish happy smile. He moved forward and for all his bulk and clumsiness, he seemed to creep. He didn’t move like a man, but like some prowling night animal.26

Although Johnny Bear’s name reflects the animal he most closely resembles, his ‘strange, square feet’ and ability to ‘creep’ in spite of his size create an unsettling sight for the first-person narrator, the foreman of a dredger situated on a nearby swamp. Like the description of Charles Bovary’s cap and Benjy’s physical aspect in The Sound and the Fury, what begins with a simple statement (‘a great, stupid, smiling bear’) becomes increasingly complicated, to such an extent that it becomes very difficult to visually picture how Johnny would look. He seems to be little more than a recording device repeating back conversations verbatim in order to satisfy his taste for whiskey, but there are also hints he is a savant with a ‘mimetic gift’ and with the skill of the writer to record the minutiae of everyday life.27 Johnny is described as a minstrel putting on a pantomime, but he is also morally suspect with his sneaking around town listening to private conversations: ‘no one sees or hears Johnny Bear when he’s on business. He can move like no movement at all.’28 Towards the end of the story, he repeats back a garbled dialogue he has overheard between Amy Hawkins (one of two aristocratic sisters whom the villagers admire for their virtue) and her secret Chinese lover. When Johnny’s mimicry reveals that Amy has committed suicide because she is pregnant by her lover, the whole moral fabric of the place is threatened. Johnny Bear can be interpreted variously as a physical throwback, an unwanted intruder in this working environment, or the repressed conscience of Loma, but the argument that he represents ‘the writer’ is particularly convincing. As Charlotte Byrd notices, the first words that Johnny mimics are those of the narrator (‘It was my voice coming out of the throat of Johnny Bear, my words, my intonation’29), while he in turn imitates Johnny’s voice when making a joke with the barman. At the end of the story, when the narrator is asked to ensure that the story of Amy Hawkins and her pregnancy remains a secret, his recital of the whole tale for the reader’s benefit can be seen as a betrayal of trust.30 Not only does the physical description of Johnny fail to account for his skills as a recorder and replayer of

26 Steinbeck, The Long Valley, pp. 103–4. 27 See Timmerman, The Dramatic Landscape, pp. 236–44. 28 Steinbeck, The Long Valley, p. 105. 29 Ibid., p. 104. 30 See Charlotte Byrd, ‘The First-Person Narrator in “Johnny Bear”: A Writer’s Mind and Conscience’, Steinbeck Quarterly, 20(1–2) (Winter–Spring 1987), 6–12. Brian Railsback reads the tale as a naturalist attack on idealism, commenting that ‘a grotesque, an idiot savant, brutally reminds the audience at the Buffalo Bar that there are no humans “above reproach”, that the Hawkins sisters are symbols of puritanical virtues that are not real’: Meyer (ed.), Literature and the Grotesque, p. 61.

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conversations, but his symbolic role in the story remains ambiguous. If Johnny is a representation of the writer, then the tale raises questions of betrayal and responsibility; if he is simply a creature of instinct, then his role is to unearth clandestine secrets that challenge the limited perceptions of the villagers.

A Fable of Innocence? At first glance Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937) is worlds away, both literally and aesthetically, from The Secret Agent and Caspar Hauser as three modernist texts that feature a clearly defined idiot figure. Formally less challenging than the picaresque Tortilla Flat (1935) and the epic sweep of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men the same year as ‘The Ears of Johnny Bear’ (its first title), with a dramatic immediacy and in a style suitable for children. Steinbeck was never a great fictional experimenter like Faulkner, Dos Passos or Hemingway, but his interest in telling fables drew him towards stories with hidden levels of meaning that hover above the naturalist mode of representation. Originally entitled ‘Something That Happened’ and devised as a play novelette, Steinbeck was not interested in exploring the reasons why events transpired in a particular way, but tried to focus on a particular occurrence and its consequences. In 1936, during the composition of the tale, Steinbeck admitted to the writer Louis Paul that he was trying to use ‘a new set of techniques’, but felt he was ‘so illy read’ that he could not be sure if they had been used before.31 There may be modesty in this account, but he states that ‘the unexplored in method makes the job at once more difficult because I can’t tell what it will get over and more pleasant because it requires more care’. Steinbeck’s emphasis on difficulty and care becomes part of the narrative fabric of the story, as George Milton’s caring attitude to the idiot figure, Lennie Small, does not disguise the difficulties inherent in their relationship. The author claims that he is ‘not interested in method as such’, but by ‘having a vehicle exactly adequate to the theme’ suggests the qualities he practises in the book will surface on a thematic level.32 This synergy between technique and theme also manifests itself in the way natural elements are used as symbolic markers of human experience: for example, in a postcard to Louis Paul he claims that rain is a ‘deep symbol of security’ in America, while drought is a ‘symbol of evil’.33 Here, instead of the complex symbolic structure of The Secret Agent, Steinbeck appears to be using ‘symbol’ in a very deliberate way with little ambiguity between word and referent. It can be claimed that Steinbeck’s use of symbol is pre-modernist or anti31 John Steinbeck, Life in Letters, ed. Elaine Steinbeck & Robert Wallsten (London: Minerva, 1994), p. 124. 32 Ibid., p. 124. In another letter from May 1936, Steinbeck admitted to Elisabeth Otis that his dog had destroyed the manuscript and he had to start two months’ work over again. 33 Ibid., p. 130.

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modernist in terms of his rejection of ambiguity, but this argument rests on the understanding that the allegorical references are identifiable, relying on the reader’s knowledge of the known precedent to which the story obliquely refers. This conception of allegoria as a ‘combination of elusiveness and familiarity’ certainly holds for some of Steinbeck’s work – for example, Tortilla Flat, in which he openly borrowed from Arthurian legend to give significance to the bohemian lives of Californian paisanos, and The Grapes of Wrath, in which California is symbolized as the biblical promised land – but in Of Mice and Men the allegorical level does not seem to have such a direct source.34 A competing theory would suggest that there are a number of possible ways of reading allegory as diversium. This theory moves towards a mode of symbolism popular with post-Romantic writers and is supported by Steinbeck’s claim that allegory is not limited but ensures ‘a concentration, a focus of the materials’.35 Although allegory and symbolism are often seen as contrasting literary tropes, they can be compatible if allegory is deemed to be polysemous: in other words, if there is no one allegorical reading upon which the understanding of the text depends. Not only can this kind of symbolic allegory surpass the limits of didactic instruction, but it has the potential to disrupt fixed patterns of explanation. As such, Stephen Greenblatt describes the ‘deeper purpose’ of allegory is ‘to acknowledge the darkness, the arbitrariness and the void that underlie all representation of realms of light, order, and presence’.36 In this way Of Mice and Men is attractive to children in its simplicity of approach, but unsettling to adults in its refusal to lay bare the provenance of the hidden stories. Jay Parini claims it is a multi-layered book in which ‘sharp protest’, ‘mythlike simplicity’ and ‘non-teleological thinking’ combine without fully explaining events, while Howard Levant argues that the book’s success is ‘that it remains a parable, but the enveloping action is more complex than the parable form can encompass’.37 The novella begins with a pastoral description of the Salinas valley in California: a seemingly unspoiled and fecund environment for vegetation and animals that suggests, as the Mississippian short-story writer Eudora Welty later described, that ‘place’ is for Steinbeck ‘the named, identified, concrete and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering spot of all that has been felt, is about to 34 Gay Clifford, The Transformation of Allegory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 2. 35 John Steinbeck, ‘the novel might benefit by the discipline, the terseness’, Stage, 15 (January 1938), 51. 36 Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), Allegory and Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. vii. 37 Jay Parini, John Steinbeck: A Biography (London: Heinemann, 1994), p. 230. Howard Levant, The Novels of John Steinbeck: A Critical Study (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1974), p. 134. Michael Shurgot describes Steinbeck’s non-teleological technique (first identified by Lester Jay Marks) as ‘one of chance, of reversals of fortune beyond man’s comprehension or his power to control’: Michael W. Shurgot, ‘A Game of Cards in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men’, Steinbeck Quarterly, 15(1–2) (Winter–Spring 1982), 38.

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be experienced, in the [story’s] progress’.38 The first paragraph concentrates on forms of natural life, with the second paragraph introducing human subjects in the guise of ranch boys beating a ‘hard’ path through the trees and tramps ‘who come wearily down from the highway in the evening to jungle-up near water’.39 The transition from vegetable to animal to human life establishes the symbolic priorities of the tale, with the path ‘beaten hard’ by workers and tramps implying a violation of nature that foreshadows the violent denouement. At evening ‘the sound of footprints’ disturbs the tranquillity of the ‘green pool’ (Steinbeck’s ‘gathering spot’) as two figures appear. Despite their working clothes, they seem closer to the weary tramps than to the energetic ranch boys. The initial description of the pair forces a stark contrast in terms of their appearance, size and physique: The first man was small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features. Every part of him was defined: small, strong hands, slender arms, a thin and bony nose. Behind him walked his opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes, with wide, sloping shoulders; and he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws. His arms did not swing at his sides, but hung loosely and only moved because the heavy hands were pendula.40

The smaller man, George, leads his companion into the clearing, while Lennie follows him passively in a childlike manner. Lennie’s ‘shapeless’ features and ‘heavy’ walk mark him out as an idiot figure, with his large size, his proximity to animals (bear) and objects (pendulum) reinforcing his lack of freewill and rationality. Simple oppositions (quickness–slowness, definition–shapelessness, restless– dragging) distinguish the pair on physical and cerebral levels, but they both wear the same clothes and have ‘black, shapeless hats’. This contradictory coding suggests they are both opposites and doubles. Lennie imitates George exactly when they drink from the creek and he makes ‘an elaborate pantomime of innocence’ when challenged about a dead mouse he is carrying,41 suggesting that he functions as a mimetic creature like Johnny Bear (although Lennie has poor short-term memory and no ventriloquizing skills). The pair are not blood-related and George is quick to stress his independence, but he is not entirely unaffected by Lennie’s idiocy on a level that parallels the relationship between mother and son in ‘The Idiot Boy’. George and Lennie can be seen as ‘sons of Nature seeking freedom in Nature’, but the necessity of work binds them to the social world.42 Lennie has been described as a ‘huge, powerful, semi-idiot … a reduction of humanity to the lowest 38 Eudora Welty, ‘Place in Fiction’ (1956), The Eye of the Story (London: Virago, 1987), p. 116. 39 John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (London: Arrow, 1998), p. 1. 40 Ibid., p. 2. 41 Ibid., p. 9. 42 See Richard Astro & Tetsumaro Hayashi (eds), Steinbeck: The Man and His Work (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 1971), p. 18.

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common denominator’, whereas George is much more guileful, but remains tarnished by association.43 Published the same year as the Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton’s ideologically dubious jeremiad Apes, Men and Morons (1937) on the biological status of contemporary America, the characters’ proximity to Nature may be one reason why, despite its popularity, Of Mice and Men received some negative reviews (many of which echoed the responses to Wordsworth’s poem).44 For example, Mark Van Doren in The Nation claimed that ‘all but one of the persons in Mr Steinbeck’s extremely brief novel are subhuman if the range of the word human is understood to coincide with the range thus far established by fiction’.45 Whereas Tortilla Flat depicts a band of brothers whose wanderings give them a freedom from the restrictions of work and ownership, George and Lennie in Of Mice and Men pursue a dream of financial independence, but are restrained by their lack of capital and limited resources. In fact, while their dream to live ‘off the fatta’ the land’ offers a vision of self-sufficiency,46 it is much less radical than the carefree lifestyle of the paisanos in Tortilla Flat. George describes a simple vision of the future that even Lennie can understand, stressing that, although the two are among ‘the loneliest guys in the world’ with no family and no ties, their fraternal bond will help them avoid the fate of other itinerant male workers who sit in bars and usually end up in jail.47 It is clear that George has told Lennie the same story many times because he speaks ‘rhythmically’ and with fairy-tale compression, while Lennie joins in eager to reach the part of the story in which he envisions himself tending the rabbits. But, given the context of the Depression and the fact that the story breaks down at the point when George suggests that if it rains ‘we’ll just say the hell with goin’ to work’, the scene suggests they do not possess adequate knowledge about farm management or have enough common sense to turn their dream into reality. F. Scott Fitzgerald complained that Steinbeck had borrowed significant aspects of Of Mice and Men from Norris’ McTeague, especially as regards the physical size of Lennie and the pair’s dream of escaping poverty, but another reading of the story offered by Peter Lisca suggests that Lennie is a symbol of proletarian man, great in strength but helpless without leadership. George is vital to Lennie as his leader and carer, while George, as a small man, harnesses Lennie’s capacity to labour to his own ends (he lies when challenged about his ‘stake’ in Lennie at the 43 Levant, The Novels of John Steinbeck, p. 134. 44 Hooton was scathing about the parlous state of US education in the 1930s, but was sceptical about eugenics when linked to racial propaganda (although he advocated its selective use for restricting breeding ‘among the insane, diseased, and criminal’): Earnest Hooton, Apes, Men and Morons (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938), p. 154. 45 Mark Van Doren, ‘Wrong Number’, The Nation (6 March 1937), quoted in Parini, John Steinbeck, p. 228. 46 Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, p. 15. 47 Ibid., p. 14.

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ranch).48 Lennie is certainly naïve, unaware of his own power, in need of guidance to find work and to prevent his inquisitiveness and love of stroking soft creatures leading him into trouble. Some critics see Lennie as having natural nobility (which challenges the link to McTeague), while others see him as misshapen and lacking in will-power in line with the ‘idiotic’ reading of Johnny Bear’s character. However, yet other critics reject his status as ‘subhuman’, claiming like Paul McCarthy that he is simply an ‘overgrown, retarded boy capable of love and hope’.49 McCarthy argues that although Lennie’s violence is ‘instinctual’ and cannot be easily controlled, he is ‘motivated primarily by innocence and childish possessiveness’ and thus lives in a pre-moral world in which he cannot be held responsible for his own actions.50 This ‘innocent’ reading corresponds with Steinbeck’s comment that Lennie was based on ‘a real person’: ‘he’s in an insane asylum in California right now. I worked alongside him for many weeks. He didn’t kill a girl. He killed a ranch foreman. Got sore because the boss had fired his pal and stuck a pitchfork right through his stomach … We couldn’t stop him until it was too late.’ However, Steinbeck also claimed in the same 1937 interview that the characters in Of Mice and Men ‘are composites to a certain extent’, suggesting they cannot easily be pigeonholed. Rather than a purely idiotic creature embodying deficiency and vacancy, Lennie has a sensuousness and a desire to touch living creatures that mirrors the love of bees displayed by the eighteenthcentury Selborne boy (discussed in Chapter 1). As McCarthy argues, when compared to the ‘bareness of the bunkhouse’ and ‘the mechanical neatness of the bunks’ on the ranch where they go to work, Lennie has desires and yearnings that transcend the stereotyped role he appears to embody.51 Instead of an absent presence like Charles Bovary or simply representing what Warren French describes as a device ‘to which the other characters react’, Lennie is an unsettling figure: he is certainly a representative caricature, but also a figure who defies the strict classification of idiot. Where French is correct in his analysis is that Steinbeck uses Lennie as a barometer to test the intentions and morality of the other characters. Lennie has four primary relationships: with George; with Crooks, an elderly black worker on the ranch whose quarters are segregated from the other labourers; with Curley, the sadistic son of the ranch owner, and with Curley’s wife, who features in the denouement of the story. I will consider the relationships with George and Crooks 48 Astro & Hayashi (eds), Steinbeck: The Man and His Work, p. 82. Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, p. 23. 49 Paul McCarthy, John Steinbeck (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), p. 63. 50 Ibid., p. 63. As California was the most punitive of the States in administering compulsory sterilization in the early century (80 per cent of all sterilizations in the USA before the 1920s), it is significant that Steinbeck places Lennie and Johnny Bear in isolated Californian communities instead of them having to contend with ‘therapeutic’ medical practices. 51 Ibid., p. 62.

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here and the other figures in the next section with regard to Lewis Milestone’s 1939 adaptation of the story. On one level Lennie can be seen as an enigma, but on another his presence in the novella is much easier to understand than George’s role. Howard Levant argues that George is not ‘a realized man but a quality that complements Lennie’s childlike innocence … to complete a whole man’.52 Certainly the two figures are complementary, but Levant’s thesis that they are merely ‘allegorized instance[s] of the division between mind and body’ is too simplistic. It is true that Lennie needs George as his guide, manager and surrogate parent: he is always looking for George’s approval; his threat to find a cave in the opening scene is little more than child’s play, and retelling the story of the farm is a ritual to comfort Lennie when he feels vulnerable or tired. When Slim, the ranch manager, asks why ‘a smart little guy’ like George and ‘a cuckoo’ like Lennie are travelling together, George is quick to leap to Lennie’s defence: ‘He ain’t no cuckoo … He’s dumb as hell, but he ain’t crazy.’53 Although he used to feel ‘smart’ next to Lennie, George brings himself close to Lennie’s intellectual level when he claims ‘I ain’t so bright neither … if I was even a little bit smart, I’d have my own little place.’ He admits to Slim how he used to make fun of Lennie and ‘play jokes on ’im ’cause he was too dumb to take care of ’imself’, including one incident when Lennie nearly drowned in the Sacramento River because George asked him to jump in.54 After this incident George realizes that his command over Lennie is cruel and he simply says to Slim ‘I ain’t done nothing like that no more.’ While the story is believable and he speaks with a ‘tone of confession’, George’s primary motives are to explain his attachment to Lennie and to seek Slim’s approval. Maybe the story is another ruse, like the explanation that Lennie’s idiocy is the result of being ‘kicked in the head by a horse when he was a kid’.55 As such, it is uncertain whether George is an honest parent figure or whether he tells this story to mask his exploitation of Lennie. There is more evidence in the story to substantiate George’s caring attitude to Lennie than there is to support his role as manipulative exploiter. He accepts Lennie’s desire to touch ‘ever’thing he likes’ from mice and puppies to the girl in the red dress, an incident which causes them to flee their last job in Weed.56 George is convinced of Lennie’s innocence, even though he is ‘jus’ a little bit off’ when 52 Levant, The Novels of John Steinbeck, p. 135. One allegoricized reading of George is as Galahad, now a ‘knight of low estate … dismounted, armed only with a fading dream, a long way from Camelot’, while Peter Lisca interprets the world of Of Mice and Men as a ‘fallen one, inhabited by sons of Cain, forever exiled from Eden’: Warren French, John Steinbeck (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1975), p. 74 and Peter Lisca, John Steinbeck: Nature and Myth (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978), p. 82. 53 Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, p. 41. 54 Ibid., p. 42. 55 Ibid., p. 24. 56 Ibid., p. 43.

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Lennie attacks the girl, arriving to find him holding on to her ‘cause that’s the only thing he can think to do’. Lennie’s love of fur and soft material is certainly an indication of his polymorphous sexuality, even though it is uncertain whether he has the sexual capability to rape the girl. The story is told in such a way that the reader and Slim accept it as plausible, but it may be designed to justify the pair’s departure from Weed and to brush over Lennie’s more disreputable impulses. George’s ability to tell plausible stories keeps at bay further questions about his relationship with Lennie and makes it difficult to pursue a reading of Lennie as a fetishist or sexual predator. Moreover, the emphasis on George as Lennie’s brain and voice suggests a parallel to the ventriloquism of Johnny Bear. If Johnny is a mimetic artist in his abilities as a recording device, George resembles the narrator of the short story in his imaginative role as elaborator of tales. He responds wearily to Lennie’s requests to retell the farm story, but seems flattered by the interest. Although Lennie’s ‘delight’ is the primary stimulus for its retelling, George appears to be seduced by his own storytelling powers as well as by the image of independence and selfsufficiency: his voice grows ‘warmer’ and he is ‘entranced with his own picture’.57 George often speaks for Lennie and gives him orders (usually for his own good), but as the incident with the girl in Weed attests, he is not always on hand to watch over his activities. One example of Lennie’s life away from George’s care is the scene in Crooks’ quarters, which Lennie enters while the other workers are in town, implying that the black Crooks is a mediator between Lennie and the other (white) farm hands. The parallels between the two characters are explicit. Crooks has a ‘crooked back where a horse kicked him’ and George explains Lennie’s sluggishness by telling the boss he was kicked by a horse.58 Lennie is separated off from the other characters in terms of his size and intellectual abilities, while Crooks’ quarters are segregated and he is described as ‘a proud, aloof man’ who keeps ‘his distance and demanded that other people kept theirs’. Moreover, like Lennie, Crooks is an enigma with eyes that lie ‘deep in his head’ which ‘glitter with intensity’.59 For all his bulk (and with echoes of Johnny Bear) Lennie appears at Crooks’ door ‘noiselessly’ claiming he was attracted by the light; Crooks tries to send him away, but Lennie stays not comprehending why he lives apart from the others. When Crooks explains it is because he is black and the other workers say he ‘stinks’ Lennie flaps ‘his big hands helplessly’ and changes the subject, as he does again when Crooks describes his status as a ‘Californian negro’, suggesting either that he does not understand what is said or that the ranchers’ racial prejudice is of little consequence to him. The most striking similarity between the two figures is that Lennie never really understands what is said to him, while Crooks knows that whatever he says 57 Ibid., p. 66; p. 62. 58 Ibid., pp. 20–21. 59 Ibid., p. 71.

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as ‘a busted-back nigger … don’t mean nothing’.60 Their plight as misunderstood characters seeking companionship is highlighted when the old swamper Candy (another damaged character who has lost his hand working on the ranch) also enters the room.61 George has told Lennie not to discuss the dream of setting up their own farm with anyone, but the talk of rabbits leads to him telling Crooks about the plan, which ignites the black worker’s imagination just as it has done earlier with Candy. When George finally returns from town, he seems more concerned that his story of the farm has been sullied in airing it without him as chief storyteller than he is about Lennie being in Crooks’ room. Although George resumes control at the end of the scene, Lennie’s visit to and conversation with Crooks offer the small suggestion that within him is a spirit trying to break free of his restricted life. George’s treatment of Lennie as ‘an innocent’ is perhaps a way of pacifying him, to prevent him from confronting social problems such as segregation or his own hidden psychic and sexual conflicts, but whether this is for Lennie’s own good or not remains uncertain. As the next section discusses, the problem of Lennie’s innocence is bound up not only with George’s controlling relationship but also with his own bouts of violence which, following the scene in Crooks’ room, lead to three deaths in quick succession: Lennie’s puppy, Curley’s wife, and Lennie’s own.

Variations on Innocence Of Mice and Men has been adapted for film and stage on numerous occasions, suggesting that the dramatic simplicity of the story (essentially six scenes, or three acts with two scenes each) is one of its chief qualities. Around fifteen cinematic adaptations of Steinbeck stories have been made (some, like Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, 1944, involving Steinbeck as screenwriter) and they have varied in quality and reputation. Joseph Millichap argues that the most successful Steinbeck films illustrate his best qualities – ‘vital characters, strong narratives, real settings, significant themes, and a realistic style’ – while the weaker adaptations reveal his ‘over-reliance on type characters, stock plots, cardboard settings, second-rate ideas, and a sentimental style’.62 Millichap puts Lewis Milestone’s 1939 version of Of Mice and Men and John Ford’s 1940 adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath in the 60 Ibid., p. 74. Crooks comments that if George did not return Lennie would be taken to a ‘booby hatch’ and tied up like a dog. Lennie is less concerned by his fate than the thought that George might be hurt, failing to understand the difference between hypothesis and reality: ‘suddenly Lennie’s eyes centred and grew quiet and mad’, but Crooks manages to pacify him before the anger spills over too far: ibid., p. 76. 61 Curley’s wife mocks the weakness of Crooks, Lennie and Candy, calling them ‘a nigger an’ a dum-dum and a lousy ol’ sheep’: ibid., p. 83. 62 Joseph R. Millichap, Steinbeck and Film (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), p. 1.

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former category, whereas Milestone’s The Red Pony (1949) and Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1955) share some of the stylistic problems of Steinbeck’s fiction. Although his documentary mode and third-person naturalistic perspective are more amenable to screen adaptation than Faulkner’s interiorized writing, some directors have found his symbolic and allegorical material difficult to rework. Just as Steinbeck’s fame derived from his fiction written during and concerning the Depression years, so the adaptations with the highest critical reputation were made in the 1930s and 1940s. There are two American film versions of Of Mice and Men: Milestone’s 1939 version starring Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney, Jr as the pair of itinerant workers and the second made in 1992 featuring the director Gary Sinise as George and John Malkovich as Lennie.63 Together with theatrical productions of the tale, there are also two made-for-television films, as well as an opera and a musical version.64 These numerous adaptations suggest that the haunting power of the tale has continued to attract artists working in a variety of media. Millichap argues that brevity and ‘tighter accomplishment’ are the novella’s strongest qualities, asserting that Milestone’s version is the best of the cinematic adaptations of Steinbeck’s work, ‘almost perfectly’ translating ‘the characters, plot, setting, style, theme, and meaning’ of the tale.65 Whereas John Ford had a particular vision when adapting The Grapes of Wrath, Millichap claims that Milestone was much more concerned with a faithful rendering of Of Mice and Men, with Eugene Solow’s screenplay combining material deriving from the published story and the 1938 play version. The fact that Milestone’s film was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1939, coming runner-up to Gone With the Wind, suggests that, alongside The Wizard of Oz from the same year, it represents one of those archetypal films that capture the American public imagination, in the same way that Rain Man and Forrest Gump were later to do in presenting palatable versions of the idiot figure as wounded American hero (see the Conclusion for further discussion).66 63 Gary Sinise had recently played Tom Joad in the Steppenwolf Theater production of The Grapes of Wrath, and elements of this role can be seen in his portrayal of George. 64 The two televised versions were made in 1968 starring George Segal and Nicol Williamson (Previews IV, US) and in 1981 with Robert Blake and Randy Quaid (NBC Productions, US). The opera by Carlisle Floyd was performed in 1980 by Michigan Opera Theater; the musical version from 1958 made by Ira J. Bilowit and Wilson Lehr. For a review of this last adaptation see Richard A. Davison, ‘Overlooked Musical Version of Of Mice and Men’, Steinbeck Quarterly, 16(1–2) (Winter–Summer 1983), 9–15. Robert E. Morsberger argues that Willoughby the dog in Tex Avery cartoons also closely mirrors Lennie’s speech and behaviour: see Morsberger’s ‘Of Mice, Dogs, Wabbits, Ducks, and Men’, Steinbeck Quarterly, 14(3–4) (Summer–Fall 1981), 112. 65 Millichap, Steinbeck and Film, p. 13. Millichap notes that Milestone mirrors the narrator’s ‘anti-omniscient viewpoint’ by presenting camera angles at ‘eye level, thus involving the viewer in a human way’, while ‘close-ups are deft, not heavily symbolic’: p. 17. 66 Steinbeck commented that Milestone had done a ‘beautiful job’ on the film: it is ‘a curious lyrical thing. It hangs together and is underplayed’: Steinbeck, Life in Letters, p. 195.

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Milestone’s film captures the ambivalence of Steinbeck’s novella, combining lyrical and natural images (enhanced by the sepia tones of the original prints) and dark violence that erupts periodically in the tale. These tensions are particularly evident in the film’s prologue: an image of dark storm clouds is followed by a pastoral scene in which feeding chickens are disturbed by a chase sequence, thereby establishing the back-story pieced together retrospectively in the book.67 We see the pair relying on different types of locomotion before we see them conversing: running from Weed, boarding a freight train, and taking a bus on which the driver treats them with suspicion before he drops them ten miles from the ranch. When they eventually reach the creek, a combination of long shots and close-ups are used to convey their mutually dependent relationship, focusing on Lennie’s need to copy George’s actions, his childish desire to have ketchup with his beans, and his delight in George repeating the farm story. Milestone’s direction relies on a combination of dramatic action and documentary realism, while Gary Sinise’s later adaptation stresses the epic grandeur of the West (over the hardship of the Depression years) and is more ponderous in its emotional range. Both versions stress the difference in size between George and Lennie, with the sexual awkwardness of Malkovich’s portrayal contrasting with the dumb, almost cartoonlike, innocence of Lon Chaney’s Lennie. The balding Malkovich creates an odd Lennie, rubbing his groin when he is nervous, speaking in a childish way and not enunciating words properly. While Malkovich can be accused of over-theatricalizing Lennie by exaggerating his facial expressions and speech, caricaturing him as a retarded and almost grotesque idiot, Chaney portrays a simpler character as George’s dumb and over-dependent travelling companion. By concentrating on the realistic – if slightly stylized – pairing of characters, Milestone’s film is much closer to the simplicity of Steinbeck’s tale. Indeed, the apparent innocence of Chaney’s Lennie is used as a dramatic foil for his violent side that erupts twice in the film in his fight with Curley and the episode in the barn with Curley’s wife. The fight scene between Lennie and Curley (Bob Steele) begins when Curley enters the dormitory accusing Slim (Charles Bickford) of talking to his wife. Curley is well dressed and always has his hands in gloves (although there is no reference to his habit of keeping vaseline inside one glove to keep his hand soft), but he is short in stature when set against Slim. Even one of the elderly workers threatens to ‘kick [Curley’s] head off’ when he approaches. In Milestone’s film Lennie is isolated from the rest of the group, sitting on the edge of his lower bunk in the left foreground, with George temporarily out of sight on the top bunk. When Candy mocks Curley and Lennie guffaws ‘yeah I seen him’, Curley grabs him (he has kept his eye on him for some time as a potential victim), asserting ‘no big lug’s goin’ to 67 Millichap notes the inclusion of a shot of the companions walking past a Southern Pacific billboard on the highway (advertising the comforts of railroad travel) that closely mirrors one of Dorothea Lange’s photographs for the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s.

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laugh at me’. Although Lennie is physically separated off from the group he is more complicit than in the novella, in which he is ‘still smiling with delight at the memory of the ranch’ and completely divorced from the action.68 The scene cuts quickly between Curley rhythmically thumping into Lennie’s face and torso (using the mechanical ‘one-two’ technique for which his wife has mocked him) and the encouraging response of the other workers for him to fight back. Only when George has jumped from his bunk and shouts in Lennie’s ear ‘I say get him’ does Lennie grab Curley’s hand, which immediately disappears in his grasp. The camera zooms in on Lennie’s bleeding face, now a complete mask. He squeezes Curley’s hand tightly and appears mentally absent as George commands him to let go. By the time he slowly releases pressure on the hand, Curley collapses to the floor in an inconsequential heap (described by Steinbeck as ‘white and shrunken’). Lennie’s face has recovered its features and he quickly says in his defence: ‘You told me to George, I heard you tell me to.’ While he can be exonerated from this incident in terms of Curley’s provocation (the other workers convince Curley it would be better for everyone if he claims his hand has been caught in a farm machine), Lennie is speedy to excuse himself from the incident and to pass responsibility to George. Unlike Curley, his wife is much more interesting and further developed in the film version (as she was on stage) than in the novella. Not only does she have a name, Mae, but the actress Betty Field was used as the central focus of the movie poster, with George and Lennie pushed to the margins. Despite the brash voice and her sly approaches to the workers, Mae is an endearing character because of her barren marriage to Curley (which we see in detail with Curley ignoring and berating her in turn) and the simplicity of her desire for companionship. George impresses on Lennie that she will bring trouble, bearing in mind what happened in Weed. However, later, when the farm hands are taking part in a competition in the yard, Lennie and Mae find themselves alone in the barn. The scene begins in the film with Mae entering the barn, shutting the door to seal herself off symbolically from the others. She plays with the puppies for a moment and then hears a whimpering a little way off. Mae crawls on all fours towards another stall to discover Lennie crying because his pup is dead, taking the spectator into the realm of primitive creaturely feelings. Once again Lennie resorts to fuzzy logic to describe what happened: ‘he made like he’s gonna bite me … an’ I made like I was gonna smack him … an’ then he was dead’.69 Lennie shies away from Mae, remembering George’s comment that she will get them in a ‘mess’, but he soon forgets the warning. The highlight of the scene in cinematic terms is when the camera periodically switches between the two as they sit slightly apart and visually interweaves their monologues: Lennie revives his desire to find a place with rabbits and Mae voices her dream to go to Hollywood to become an actress. Given Lennie’s limited expression, it is not surprising that 68 Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, p. 66. 69 Ibid., p. 91.

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Mae has the longer monologue about her drunken father, but her dreams of stardom break down into an empty fantasy of wearing ‘all them nice clothes’. She eventually tunes into Lennie’s talk of rabbits, calling him ‘goofy’ and a ‘big baby’, to which he retorts: ‘no I ain’t, George says I ain’t. I just like to pet nice things, smooth things.’ Although Lennie has not listened to Mae’s conversation, her talk of ‘nice clothes’ seems to have aroused him. When she asks him if he likes ‘to feel velvet’, he responds eagerly, ‘you bet by golly’, and when she invites him to stroke her hair without ‘mussing it’ there is a single brief shot of Lennie shaking his head, but looking clearly lascivious (in the novella this is signified by his exclamation ‘Oh! That’s nice’70). Inevitably, as she begins to pull away Lennie panics and his face contorts as he grabs her, claiming ‘you gonna get me into trouble like George says you will’. Their humanity vanishes in this moment with the camera focusing on Mae’s legs going limp (as a sign that she has been smothered) and falling to the floor like a rag doll. Not only does Lennie excuse himself by casting blame on Mae, he quickly transforms into a furtive criminal as he stealthily leaves the barn, suggesting that while the scene begins with him as a child he is far from innocent by the end. If Milestone’s film establishes Lennie’s innocence, only to problematize it in the violent scenes with Curley and Mae, then the end of the film re-establishes the possibility that Lennie has never actually been responsible for his actions and that the community is actually to blame. As soon as George realizes what has happened in the barn, he resolves to shoot Lennie himself. Given the bloodthirsty intentions of Curley or the possibility that the hunt party will ‘lock him up an’ strap him down and put him in a cage’, George’s plan parallels the earlier mercy killing of Candy’s old dog.71 Lennie has remembered to return to the green pool where (in the novella) he has a fantasy of Aunt Clara scolding him for letting George down, implying that he is clearly aware of his wrongdoing.72 Milestone shot this fantasy sequence in which Lennie is ‘surrounded by outsize rabbits’ but chose not to include it because it ran against the tone of the film. Instead, when George and Slim arrive at the pool (suggesting a new alliance) they hear a rustling and George goes on to confront Lennie alone. Following the text closely, Lennie expects to be berated in the usual fashion, with George threatening to leave him. Lennie shows his kinship with Johnny Bear by mimicking his companion’s rhetoric (‘If I was alone I could live so easy …’), which suggests he has learnt hardly anything, leading George to exclaim: ‘You can’t remember nothing that happens, but you remember ever’ word I say.’73 George convinces Lennie to look over the river while he goes on to retell the 70 Ibid., p. 95. 71 Ibid., p. 102. 72 See William K. Everson, ‘Thoughts on a Great Adaptation’, in The Modern American Novel and the Movies, ed. Gerald Peary & Roger Shatzin (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978), p. 68. 73 Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, p. 109.

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story of the farm, but now he has little emotion as if, as Peter Lisca argues, ‘it is only through Lennie, who also makes the dream impossible, that the dream has any meaning for George’.74 In the film version with Lennie looking away, George asks ‘can’t you almost see it?’; Lennie looks eagerly and stands to exclaim, ‘Yeah I can see it, right over there. George, I can see it.’ At that moment George fires his gun at Lennie’s back from beneath his handkerchief. The most significant difference between the two versions is that, whereas in the novella Lennie’s body jars ‘and then settled slowly forward to the sand’ where he lay ‘without quivering’, in the film his body disappears out of sight, concealed by the undergrowth around the pool. Not even when the hunt party arrives is the body revealed. There may be Production Code reasons for not showing the dead body, but the empty space in the midst of the group is startling given that Lennie is such a looming presence throughout, suggesting that the death of innocence is symbolic of the whole community. Following the scenes involving Lennie, Curley and Mae, this visual absence emphasizes the fragility of innocence, as well as reminding the viewer of Lennie’s symbolic role as a ‘vacant’ idiot figure. But, rather than echoing the bleak endings of modernist texts such as The Secret Agent and The Sound and the Fury, both versions of the story suggest possible regeneration through the twin forces of comradeship and nature.75 Echoing Paul McCarthy’s reading of the tale as offering ‘something of the enduring and hopeful as well as the meaningless’, in the novella George departs with his new companion and the last image of the film shows nature returning to the pool, with Aaron Copland’s musical score shifting in tone from high drama to elegy.76

74 Lisca, The Wide World of John Steinbeck, p. 142. 75 Everson notes that the Production Code ‘demanded [the] legal as well as moral retribution’ of George in turning himself over to the sheriff. However, although George hands his gun to the sheriff it is not clear that legal punishment will follow: Everson, ‘Thoughts on a Great Adaptation’, p. 69. 76 McCarthy, John Steinbeck, p. 64.

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Idiocy After World War II

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Chapter Seven

Wise Blood (Flannery O’Connor and John Huston) If, as Lorca suggested, modernist artists would need ‘to journey through the eyes of idiots’ before dealing with the challenges to personal identity brought on by modernity, then the second half of the twentieth century can be seen to have stimulated a more diffuse set of cultural strategies for dealing with idiocy.1 Later writers and filmmakers retained a keen interest in the enigmatic appearance of idiot figures and the kind of sacrificial aesthetic that we have traced through modernist texts, but they tended to use idiocy to deal with a broader range of themes, including social issues related to education, faith, gender and race. In the years following World War II, the idiot figure appeared in numerous guises at the interface of fiction and film for testing the integrity and direction of post-war culture, particularly in America. For example, Nelson Algren’s novel The Man With the Golden Arm (1949) explores immigrant groups in the slums of Chicago, with Sparrow, the half-witted Jewish companion of the ‘golden arm’ dealer Frankie, remaining loyal to his friend while others exploit Frankie’s weakness for drugs. Otto Preminger’s 1955 adaptation of the novel features the performer Arnold Stang playing Sparrow in a quirky and comic role, but the film retains Algren’s emphasis on his unwavering friendship with Frankie (Frank Sinatra) in a world of deceit and double-dealing.2 Elsewhere, in Evan Hunter’s novel The Blackboard Jungle (1954), a new teacher at an inner-city vocational school, Richard Dadier (played by Glenn Ford in Richard Brooks’ 1955 adaptation), is faced by a ‘screaming class-load’ of students from a variety of ethnic groups. One Italian American pupil, Santini, has an IQ of 66 (described in the novel as ‘a big, fat, round, moronic 66’3) and spends all his time grinning vacantly, but when Dadier is faced with a potentially disastrous class rumble Santini is noticeably one of the boys who intervenes to help. In both cases the idiot figure acts as a barometer to test the values of others, in social contexts in which neither IQ scales nor ethnic stereotypes provide stable norms by which idiocy can be measured. Whether they are struggling to reintegrate into society after the war (as is the case 1 Federico García Lorca, ‘Landscape of a Urinating Multitude’ (‘Paisaje de la multitud que orina’), Poet in New York (Poeta in Nueva York, 1940), trans. Greg Simon & Steven F. White (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 59. 2 This Jewish archetype of the schlemiel or the comic bumbler, who retains his goodness despite his slow wits, is also explored in Bernard Malamud’s novel The Assistant (1957) and his collection of short stories Idiots First (1963). 3 Evan Hunter, The Blackboard Jungle (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), p. 161.

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for Hunter’s teacher) or living close to the street (like Algren’s dealer), many characters in post-war fiction and film are wounded and at odds with the middleclass dreams of normalcy and prosperity that characterized Dwight Eisenhower’s conservative administration in the 1950s. Both The Man With the Golden Arm and The Blackboard Jungle deal with idiocy in an urban context, but the idiot figure also featured in post-war regionalist stories that developed the themes of Steinbeck’s fiction from the 1930s. For example, in John Ford’s film Western The Searchers (1956), the homespun wisdom of the ageing idiot figure, the Indian scout Mose Harper (Hank Worden), serves as a moral counterpart to the rugged masculinity of the frontier cowboy Ethan Edwards (John Wayne); the misunderstood idiot Boo Radley in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) turns out to have hidden qualities, and in Flannery O’Connor’s Southern tale Wise Blood (1952), idiot figures are barely distinguishable from the variety of grotesque characters that populate her novel. Emerging in the early 1950s as one of the most interesting regionalist writers in America, O’Connor was a prominent figure in the second wave of the Southern cultural renaissance after the initial flowering in the late 1920s. Her two novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) and her numerous short stories echo Steinbeck’s interest in the intricate relationship between place and character and the clash between modern mercantilism and agrarian tradition, but from a different regional perspective. Both writers were naturalists in their concern with the pressures environment and genetics assert on individuals and they were both sympathetic towards poor rural folk. But, even though Steinbeck focused on social unrest and the conflicts between workers and bosses, O’Connor’s Catholic vision was much bleaker than his belief in human resilience. If Steinbeck’s humanism in Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath can be linked to the liberal left politics of Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, then O’Connor’s darker fiction can be seen as a critique of social acceleration and the consumerist aspirations of many Americans in the post-war period, particularly those values upheld by the Cold Warriors in the 1950s (many of them liberals from the 1930s) as evidence of America’s cultural supremacy over war-torn Europe and the perceived barbarism of communist Asia.4 On the surface, O’Connor’s fictions seem more concerned with Southern identity than with broader national themes, but her vitriol is often directed at establishment figures or phonies parading as evangelists for the post-war American way. Her fiction reveals a seismic fault-line in US geography between the South and the rest of the nation, in her interrogation of the myths of domestic security and social opportunity that prospered in the 1950s. But, as we shall see, while O’Connor’s Southern perspective is clearly evident in her choice of subject matter and her fictional approach, she was at odds with both her country and 4 See Jon Lance Bacon, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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significant elements of her region; as Robert Coles comments, she ‘distrusted many of her generation’s enthusiasms’.5 Regionalism flourished as a cultural and sociological movement in the 1930s when it became politicized in progressive and conservative forms as a bulwark against the kind of prejudices espoused by the Baltimore journalist H. L. Mencken in his essay ‘The Sahara of the Bozart’ (1917), in which he called the Deep South ‘crass, gross, vulgar and obnoxious’.6 Perhaps the most significant publication on Southern regionalism was I’ll Take My Stand (1930), in which ‘Twelve Southerners’ famously identified a ‘Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way’.7 By framing the debate as a conflict between ‘Agrarian versus Industrial’, they attempted to bolster Southern culture against the economic domi-nance of the North East, the forces of Americanization and what the contributors perceived to be ‘the general decay in sensibility that attends it’.8 Literary exponents of regionalism in the West and the South used fiction to work through some of the same cultural debates, but often romanticized the past in terms of Steinbeck’s ‘natural community’ or William Faulkner’s nostalgia for a mythic time before Southerners lost their ‘sense of vocation’.9 In his experimental work from the late 1920s through the 1930s, Faulkner had dealt with guilt and self-destruction as the basic ingredients of post-bellum white identity (as discussed in the Introduction), but after the war he moved towards a culturally conservative appraisal of Southern life. Indeed, by the mid-1950s Faulkner was promoting the belief that the South ‘is the only really authentic region in the United States, because a deep indestructible bond still exists between man and environment’, suggesting that rather than evincing ‘a common acceptance of the world, a common view of life and a common morality’ the rest of America (and especially the North East) had lost its moral bearings.10 This statement reflects Eudora Welty’s famous regionalist maxim from 1956 that ‘location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place’,11 suggesting that 5 Robert Coles, Flannery O’Connor’s South (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993), p. xxx. This cultural ‘distrust’ can be seen as a feature of O’Connor’s exploration of the ‘radical disunities’ between different ideologies and modes of life in post-war America: Chester E. Eisenger, Fiction of the Forties (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 14. 6 H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: Second Series (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1920), reprinted in Major Problems in the History of the American South, Volume II: The New South, ed. Paul D. Escott & David R. Goldfield (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1990), p. 326. 7 John Crowe Ransom (ed.), I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners (1930) (New York: Peter Smith, 1951), p. xi. 8 Ibid., p. xv. 9 Ibid., p. xiv. 10 Interview with William Faulkner (1956), in Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, ed. James B. Meriwether & Michael Millgate (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 72. 11 Welty, The Eye of the Story, p. 116.

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Faulkner’s relationship with the South in the 1950s can be seen as a neo-Romantic attempt to resuscitate a lost sensibility. O’Connor was deeply bound to her region and had an ear for local idioms, but she had no such illusions about the harmonious bond between Southern people and their environment. Like many post-war writers, she focused on protagonists who are outsiders or misfits often alienated from families, work and nature, as well as questioning the currency of Faulkner’s moral community. Such characters enabled her to explore peculiar states of being and the way in which personal identity is constrained by psychic and environmental pressures. In this respect, in her essay collection Mystery and Manners (1957) she argues that romantic nostalgia is often counterproductive: The present state of the South is one in which nothing can be taken for granted, one in which our identity is obscured and in doubt. In the past, the things that have seemed to many to make us ourselves have been very obvious things, but now no amount of nostalgia can make us believe they will characterize us much longer.12

Had O’Connor written fiction that simply celebrated the Southern way, she would have found it difficult to incorporate the darker impulses that often motivate human behaviour, or to deal with the economic and racial conflict that still characterized the region. Partly because she felt out of kilter with the South as a Catholic writer in a predominantly Protestant area, she resisted equating the region with communal morality and the North with amoral opportunism, establishing a more modulated position in which she explored the encroachment of post-war materialist values on the lives of all Americans. Challenging Faulkner’s notion of ‘common acceptance’ and the centripetal pull of mainstream American culture in the 1950s, she claims ‘the modern hero is the outsider. His experience is rootless. He can go anywhere. He belongs nowhere. Being alien to nothing, he ends up being alienated from any kind of community based on common tastes and interests.’13 There is something earthy, but also otherworldly, about O’Connor’s characters, as if they cannot be described using Steinbeck’s naturalistic language or the interiorized psychology of Faulkner’s Quentin and Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury. Hazel Motes in Wise Blood fits the mould of other alienated post-war protagonists like Holden Caulfield in Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951), the nameless protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Sal Paradise in Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) in terms of their unwillingness – or inability – to conform. While existentialist themes run through all these texts, O’Connor’s Catholic sensibility and her interest in spiritual absurdism push Hazel Motes into a slightly different subject-position. O’Connor’s claim on behalf of the alienated individual 12 Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (1957) (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 57. 13 Ibid., pp. 199–200.

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that ‘the borders of his country are the sides of his skull’ implies that her literary interest is in exploring the tensions between social life and ideal existence, and between secular demands and spiritual vocation. The two idiot figures in Wise Blood, the troubled Hazel Motes and the simplistic Enoch Emery, inhabit these contested spaces in the novel, as they also do in John Huston’s 1979 film adaptation that we will look at later in the chapter. Given O’Connor’s spiritual priorities it is hardly surprising that she and her fellow Georgian writer Carson McCullers were heavily influenced by Dostoevsky and nineteenth-century Russian realism, in both their fictional approach and the suffering experienced by their characters. McCullers describes her technique as the ‘bold and outwardly callous juxtaposition of the tragic and the humorous, the immense with the trivial, the sacred with the bawdy, the whole soul of a man with a materialistic detail’.14 This clash between opposites lends an ironic ambivalence to their narratives, with characters seemingly mocked for being unfinished or wounded, such as Singer, the deaf-mute in McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Joy Hopewell in O’Connor’s ‘Good Country People’ (1950), whom the narrator ridicules for having an artificial leg, and the disturbing ‘Misfit’ in ‘A Good Man is Hard To Find’ (1952). McCullers claims ‘it is not the specific “cruelty” itself that is shocking’ in these stories, ‘but the manner in which it is presented’.15 She argues that ‘shocking’ characters enable her to depict psychic tensions with greater acuity, on a similar footing to Werner Herzog (see Chapter 5). This is especially true of the way they dramatize the clash between reason and absurdity, tragedy and humour, and spirituality and profanity. Instead of classifying illness and psychic disorder in fixed categories or offering progressive solutions to social problems, the ‘cruelty’ of their fiction is complicated by what McCullers calls ‘naiveté’ and ‘an acceptance of spiritual inconsistencies without asking the reasons why, without attempting to propose an answer’.16 Critics have made parallels between the tone, themes and anti-intellectual stance of the two writers, but whereas McCullers described her fiction as a version of Southern Gothic, O’Connor preferred to characterize her fictions as ‘grotesque’. From the Renaissance paintings and engravings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breugel to the modernist dreamscapes of Salvador Dalí and George Grosz, grotesquerie has been visually encoded in terms of the fantastically distorted, the bizarre and the incongruous. In Bosch’s late fifteenth-century triptych ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ the human, animal and vegetable worlds are not only juxtaposed, but are distorted and mixed together phantasmagorically in places. On one level, the sexual cavorting of the figures in the painted garden suggests a world of carnal pleasure, but on another level, he seems to be pointing out the folly of 14 Carson McCullers, ‘The Russian Realists and Southern Literature’, in The Mortgaged Heart (1963) (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 252–3. 15 Ibid., p. 252. 16 Ibid., p. 258.

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humankind which has no higher calling (lust, gluttony and sloth are all punished in the triptych). The theme of folly runs through early European Renaissance culture, from Bosch’s ‘Ship of Fools’, in which the figure of a guzzling fool lurks in the rigging and casts doubts over the spiritual credentials of the ship’s crew, to Montaigne’s Essays and Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly (1509), in which the figure of Folly, Stultitia, promises freedom and joyful exuberance but also attracts a band of grotesque followers including idiots, fools, nitwits and simpletons that ‘scarcely still look human’ and fail to realize ‘anything is wrong’ with their lives.17 For Erasmus, this juxtaposition of opposites is symbolized in the Silenus figure. In Greek myth, Silenus was the chief of the satyrs and foster father of Dionysus; often depicted riding drunkenly on a donkey, Silenus is thought to conceal the ‘mysteries of the cosmos’ and have ‘two completely opposite faces, so that what is death at first sight … is life if you look within, and vice versa, life is death’.18 The associated image of the Silenus box that reverses everything when opened is evoked in François Rabelais’ Prologue to Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534) in relation to Socrates, whose external appearance belies his inner character: so ugly was his body and so absurd his appearance, with his pointed nose, his bovine expression, and his idiotic face … but had you opened that box, you would have found inside a heavenly and priceless drug: a superhuman understanding, miraculous virtue, invincible courage …19

This reversal of values symbolized by the Silenus box and the description of Socrates as a wise fool, or morosopher, are explored in O’Connor’s fiction, merging with her portrayal of idiots, grotesques and the variety of animals that literally and metaphorically populate Wise Blood. If, as Thomas Mann asserted, modern art ‘has ceased to recognize the categories of tragic and comic … with the result that the grotesque is the most genuine style’, then O’Connor can be seen to link the Renaissance obsession with grotesquerie with a modern sensitivity to tragi-comedy.20 Aside from these general contexts that partly explain O’Connor’s interest in the grotesque, there is also a particular American literary influence in the figure of the Mid-Western writer Sherwood Anderson. In his sequence of stories Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Anderson relates a variety of tales featuring bizarre and eccentric individuals in the town of Winesburg; they can barely articulate their feelings and 17 Erasmus, Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 109. 18 Roger Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass, p. 204. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, p. 103. 19 François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1955), p. 38. David Lynch has used the Silenus figure in his contemporary visual fable of grotesquerie Mulholland Drive (US, 2001). When the mysterious Silenus box is opened, the last third of the film reverses the values of the first two-thirds. 20 Thomas Mann, ‘Past Masters’ (1933), quoted in William Van O’Connor, The Grotesque: An American Genre (Carbondale, IL: South Illinois University Press, 1962), p. 5.

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are often wholly reliant on the narrator to tell their stories for them. The tone of the book is friendly and conversational, but the subtitle ‘The Book of Grotesques’ suggests that all the stories convey a darkness and misery that lies buried in the lives of characters, who are all deeply frustrated and lacking the human warmth that might bolster their identity. The narrator recalls having ‘a dream that was not a dream’ in which grotesque figures ‘appear before his eyes … some were amusing, some almost beautiful and one, a woman drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness’.21 While some of the characters are ‘drawn out of shape’, the narrator stresses that their grotesque nature derives not so much from their outward appearance, but from their inability to express themselves. As a result, isolated characters, like Elmer Cowley in ‘Queer’, are not just physical oddities but also emotional cripples. At the end of the story Elmer repeats the phrase ‘I ain’t so queer’, as if he cannot convince himself that this is not the case.22 Anderson discerns this kind of grotesque quality in everyone and sees the antidote to it in communal compassion and sympathy, whereas O’Connor (again like Herzog) is more cynical about whether this existential condition can be overcome. She appropriates Anderson’s interest in the grotesque, but her tone is more caustic and her theological interests give her fiction an acute depth of vision. As she says in ‘The Fiction Writer and His Country’ (1957): The sharper the light of faith, the more glaring are apt to be the distortions the writer sees in the life around him … Writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable.23

Like Anderson’s grotesques, Hazel Motes in Wise Blood has moments of insight into his condition, but these moments are often followed by a fading awareness or an inability to act with purpose. On this level, O’Connor’s spiritual vision combines with moral, psychological and existential elements to create a brooding tone that reflects her theory of fiction as an ‘incarnational art’.24 But, rather than being tragic in its seriousness, the comic and absurdist dimensions of her writing position her idiot figures less as freaks of nature, and more as distorted images of daily life. While Bakhtin viewed medieval and Renaissance carnivals as transgressive communal experiences, O’Connor’s sceptical view is more in line with Umberto Eco’s argument that often grotesquerie helps to reinforce the rules that carnivalesque misbehaviour temporarily flouts.25 Eco’s ‘cold carnival’ mirrors O’Connor’s low view of humanity and her awareness that communities are often fragmentary,

21 Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 22. 22 Ibid., p. 201. 23 O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 33. 24 Ibid., p. 68. 25 See Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 303–67 and Umberto Eco, ‘Frames of Comic Freedom’, in Umberto Eco, V. V. Ivanov and Monica Rector, Carnival! (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), pp. 7–8.

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compared to the unified community central to Bakhtin’s understanding of carnival. However, she retains something of Bakhtin’s notion of symbolic reversal and the possibility of transfiguring the everyday.26 By combining comic and serious perspectives, collapsing distinctions between the sacred and the profane, and shifting between rural and urban locations, O’Connor uses the idiot (or ‘freak’ as she describes it 27) as the only figure who ‘could become an appropriate vessel for the infusion of divine grace’.28

Grotesque Southerners In the Author’s Note to the second edition of Wise Blood (1962), O’Connor claims it is ‘a comic novel about a Christian malgré lui’, but also ‘very serious’ in its dealing with ‘matters of life and death’.29 She suggests that not only should the novel be read as a tragi-comedy, but that readers who do not think ‘belief in Christ’ is a matter of consequence should still consider the inability of Hazel Motes to rid himself of religious feelings as a sign of his integrity. As a meditation on the problem of freedom, Wise Blood relates the story of Hazel’s arrival in Taulkinham, a Southern city full of empty talk, determined to rid himself of the spectre of his dead preacher grandfather from his childhood in Tennessee and the kind of sham religion that reduces itself to gimmicks to make money. O’Connor portrays Hazel as attempting to erase ‘the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind’, suggesting he is in religious denial, with the image of Jesus motioning him ‘to turn around’ into the darkness where he would not be sure of his footing.30 Hazel wishes to keep ‘his feet on the known track’, but this ‘ragged figure’ is also his own reflection, dressed in second-hand clothes, giving 26 The animal references throughout Wise Blood suggest that, for O’Connor, a ‘world turned upside down’ (to use a carnivalesque expression) is one in which human beings are usurped by creatures. However, although she admires the mythic Southern hero Br’er Rabbit ‘who can always hold up his end of the stick’, many of the animal references in the novel are negative or muted: O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 56. 27 O’Connor makes the link between ‘the freak’ and the contemporary world explicit in her claim that ‘we are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value … When such a writer has a freak for his hero, he is not simply showing us what we are, but what we have been and what he could become. His prophet-freak is an image of himself’: O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 117. 28 Paul Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 359–60. While some critics like Daphne Athas argue that O’Connor’s Gothic interests are ‘transmuted with rowdy, grotesque humor to serve with frightening economy the harsh, religious view’, it is perhaps better to see the sacred and the profane in continual tension in her fiction: Daphne Athas, ‘Why There Are No Southern Writers’, in Women Writers of the Contemporary South, ed. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), p. 304. 29 Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p. xii. 30 Ibid., p. 16.

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him the appearance of a preacher against his intention, and making it difficult to establish a role in the city. Hazel puts his lack of belief in God down to an incident in his boyhood when, after seeing a fat woman with a grotesque grin in a casket at a travelling carnival, as penance he fills his shoes with rocks and walks a mile to the creek and halfway back. When God does not send him a sign – ‘if a stone had fallen he would have taken it as a sign’ – he takes off his shoes in symbolic defiance of his grandfather’s revivalist religion, foreshadowing his fully blown religious atheism in which he claims that humans have not fallen into sin, nor do they need redeeming. While it is clear that the narrator mocks Hazel for his notion of a ‘Church Without Christ’ and the fierceness of his convictions, there is also a secret respect for him in his attempt to work through spiritual impulses without giving in to social trends or easy answers. As John Burt summarizes, ‘it is the strenuousness of Hazel’s rejections which most characterize him, bestowing upon him … an integrity which survives, and is meant to survive, his author’s continual ridicule of him’.31 Having been discharged from the army at the beginning of the story (from a shrapnel injury which, even after an operation, he still feels inside ‘poisoning him’32), Hazel’s first appearance on a train going South is marked by the rigidity of his posture – he sits ‘at a forward angle’ in his train seat – and the jerky awkwardness of his actions: he looks ‘one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car’.33 Rather than the narrator providing the reader with a neutral portrait of Hazel, he is described from the point of view of Mrs Hitchcock, a fat charmless middle-aged woman who speaks only in platitudes. She is particularly intrigued by Hazel’s odd appearance and his eyes which are ‘the color of pecan shells and set in deep sockets’, so deep that ‘they seemed, to her, almost like passages leading somewhere’.34 While Hazel’s peculiar appearance (he has a nose like ‘a shrike’s bill’) is a sign of his grotesquerie, Mrs Hitchcock’s corpulence, ‘game-hen expression’ and vapidity – together with the porter’s ‘fine controlled lurch’ and the greasy waiter ‘darting from table to table’ like a crow – establishes Hazel’s character in a confined social space in which no figure is odder than any other.35 In fact, Hazel seems too aggressive to be an idiot figure when he challenges Mrs Hitchcock’s religious beliefs and insults the porter.36 31 John Burt, ‘What You Can’t Talk About’, in Flannery O’Connor, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), p. 135. 32 O’Connor, Wise Blood, p. 18. 33 Ibid., p. 3. William Allen interprets Hazel’s movements on the train as a ‘Chaplinesque series of slapstick maneuvers’ and there is certainly something idiotic in a Chaplinesque manner about Enoch’s antics later in the novel: William Rodney Allen, ‘The Cage of Matter: The World as Zoo in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood’, American Literature, 58(2) (May 1986), 263. 34 O’Connor, Wise Blood, p. 4. 35 Ibid., p. 10; p. 6; p. 9. 36 Here, O’Connor seems to be equating Hazel with the shrike or ‘butcherbird’ that preys on smaller animals.

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Instead, he appears as a social misfit who has neither family nor friends, just disturbing memories that sharpen his resolve to believe in nothing and to trust in no one. Hazel can be cast as an anti-hero, whose isolation and misanthropy position him against social norms, but this typology does not mean he is any easier to understand. While O’Connor can be criticized for dealing in caricatures, in her essay ‘The Regional Writer’ in Mystery and Manners she states ‘an identity is not to be found on the surface … it is not made from the mean average or the typical, but from the hidden and often the most extreme’.37 By having Mrs Hitchcock describe Hazel’s appearance and by dramatizing his awkward interaction with others, O’Connor distances herself from branding him as odd or idiotic. In fact, rather than being a discontented nihilist, Hazel is full of contradictions: when he first arrives in Taulkinham at night his shadow is described as being ‘now behind him and now before him and now and then broken up by other people’s shadows’ and later he looks like he is ‘trying to move forward and backward at the same time’, as if his body movements betray his determination.38 His sight is often impeded or restricted: his name suggests a clouding of vision (Haze) and that he has something in his eye (Motes); his mother’s glasses strain his eyes, and he is always trying to look intently at things to work out their meaning and value. When he confronts the blind preacher, Asa Hawks (who the reader soon discovers is faking his condition), and is taunted for having no inner sight, Hazel furiously pronounces his new doctrine on the basis of his own perceptions: ‘Don’t I have eyes in my head? Am I a blind man?’39 While we may credit him with integrity when faced with preachers acting like shabby salesmen, there is something idiotic in his zealous public posture as anti-preacher. As he pushes his way through the crowd ‘with his elbows out like sharp wings’ a voice shouts ‘make room for this idiot!’40 The other idiot figure in the novel, Enoch Emery, contrasts with Hazel in his 37 O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 58. Richard Giannone reads Hazel as ‘a youthful yet depleted Southern Tiresias’ (himself a grotesque figure in Eliot’s The Waste Land) and Lewis Lawson sees him as a St Anthony figure who is eventually forced to ‘use self-abasement to express [his] realization of the gulf which separates the human from the spiritual’: Richard Giannone, ‘Flannery O’Connor’s Consecration of the End’, in Since Flannery O’Connor: Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story, ed. Loron Longsden & Charles W. Mayer (Macomb, IL: Yeast Printing, 1987), p. 9 and Lewis A. Lawson, ‘The Perfect Deformity: Wise Blood’ (1965), reprinted in Flannery O’Connor, ed. Harold Bloom, p. 39. 38 O’Connor, Wise Blood, p. 31; p. 37. 39 Ibid., p. 49. Guy Reynolds develops the optical metaphors by claiming that O’Connor demands an ‘astigmatic reader’ who must keep one eye on her Catholic declarations and the other on the social and cultural contexts that shaped Southern identity in the 1950s: Guy Reynolds, Twentieth-Century American Women’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 139. 40 O’Connor, Wise Blood, p. 48.

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more obvious cerebral limitations, his garish comic clothing (‘a yellowish white suit and a pinkish white shirt and his tie was the colour of green peas’) and his fascination with animals.41 When the two first meet Enoch is described as ‘a friendly hound dog with light mange’, he sits on a lion statue when they catch up with Asa Hawks and he pulls faces at the apes in the zoo where he works.42 His foolishness manifests itself in his childlike love of hotdogs, his gullibility when it comes to reading advertisements, and his habit of watching women bathing in the park’s swimming pool. But, rather than merely being a fool or a lower-order creature, Enoch believes he has ‘wise blood’ which gives him intuitive insight into spiritual mysteries that completely bypass intelligence. In a 1954 letter O’Connor claims that she has a kinship with Enoch, particularly the ‘terrible knowledge’ he has ‘without any words to it’ which grows ‘like a big nerve’ inside him.43 The reader is told that his brain is ‘divided into two parts’: the speaking part is limited and very possibly retarded, while ‘the part in communication with his blood’ is silent but possessing a ‘secret knowledge’ that cannot easily be expressed.44 Hazel seems to deny his true calling, whereas Enoch is sure that his ‘secret blood’ is closely linked to the gnostic mystery he senses at the heart of the city.45 His fascination with a shrunken mummy in the town museum (where he takes Hazel) suggests that he is also looking for an alternative religion: rather than his saviour being a crucified Christ, his ‘new Jesus’ is a three-foot dried and yellowing Arabian mummy. Hazel treats Enoch with disdain, but they are both self-reliant (although they crave human warmth) and both reject religious creed for their own convictions. The problem with this, as John Burt comments, is that the characters can never be sure whether what they intuitively feel ‘is the misery of original sin or simply the vapors’.46 Burt reads Enoch as a straightforward parody of Hazel, but the odd mixture of ‘indeterminacy’ and what O’Connor calls ‘inner coherence’ makes their kinship much more complex than this.47 Certainly, the narrator mocks them in places for their strange convictions, but rather than simply seeing Hazel’s ‘do-it-yourself religion’ as the central problem with Protestantism (as O’Connor suggests in her correspondence), the reversal of opposites is far too unstable in the novel to recoup

41 Ibid., p. 37. 42 Ibid., p. 38. 43 Letter of 13 February 1954 in Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, 1979), p. 68. O’Connor, Wise Blood, p. 75. O’Connor’s interest in ‘wise blood’ may be, in part, a response to Mencken’s scathing critique of the South (and particularly Georgia) as ‘drained of all its best blood’ in the Civil War, leaving it in a state of ‘torpor and doltishness’ in which ‘it is impossible for intelligence to flourish’: Mencken, ‘The Sahara of the Bozart’, pp. 326–7. 44 O’Connor, Wise Blood, p. 81; p. 83. 45 Ibid., p. 94. 46 Burt, ‘What You Can’t Talk About’, p. 139. 47 O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 40.

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itself as untrammelled faith.48 There is no obvious Silenus box that symbolizes the reversal of values, but the grotesquerie of Hazel and Enoch is marked by the opposing forces that tug at them: Hazel tries to go both forwards and backwards, when he buys a car he gets nowhere (‘once he had gone a few miles, he had the sense that he was not gaining ground’)49 and, although he has the calling of his wise blood, Enoch is reduced to donning a gorilla costume in his attempt to make friends. This, together with Sherwood Anderson’s interest in grotesque characters that cannot articulate their beliefs and frustrations, pushes O’Connor’s novel beyond a conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism into a much more interesting fictional zone in which contested identity is linked to a search for community. As Marshall Gentry discerns (via Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais), on the one hand ‘the grotesque character is displaced, isolated, necessarily an individual in a hostile society’, but on the other hand, grotesquerie ‘is a sign of that character’s participation of his community’.50 While the true community the pair seeks is never established – Hazel in his alternative church and Enoch through human fellowship – their grotesquerie pushes them beyond the introspective individualism often associated with Protestant belief. There is little to distinguish Taulkinham from other Southern cities in which commercial imperatives have destroyed the possibility of community. Both Enoch and Hazel are new to the city. Their anonymity and rural background is important in establishing them as outsiders confronting the system, only to become victims of it. The commercial signs ‘PEANUTS, WESTERN UNION, AJAX, TAXI, HOTEL, CANDY’ are described as blinking ‘frantically’ when Hazel arrives in Taulkinham, idiotic in their elision of the distinctions between snacks, cleaning products and public services.51 While Hazel remains suspicious of the commercial world, as Jon Lance Bacon argues, Enoch ‘exemplifies the “public helplessness”’ of a young adult who ‘cannot fight the impulse to watch something he is afraid to watch’ after a mysterious force has propelled him into the cinema.52 The novel questions these mysterious urges: the impulse of the helpless consumer and the spiritual conviction that Enoch has ‘wise blood’ and is marked out from others as the champion of a new jesus. The description of the shrunken Arab in the museum, ‘naked and a dried yellow color and his eyes were drawn almost shut as if a giant block of steel were falling down on top of him’, is interesting in terms of sightlessness (echoing Hazel’s lack of foresight), as well as embodying the tensions between primitive (the pagan figure) and modern (the 48 In her letter of 3 March 1954 she sees Hazel as ‘a kind of Protestant saint’ whose nihilism leads ‘back to the fact of his Redemption … which is what he would have liked so much to get away from’: O’Connor, The Habit of Being, p. 70. 49 O’Connor, Wise Blood, p. 201. 50 Marshall Bruce Gentry, ‘The Eye vs. the Body: Individual and Communal Grotesquerie in Wise Blood’, Modern Fiction Studies, 28(3) (Autumn 1982), 489. 51 O’Connor, Wise Blood, p. 29. 52 Bacon, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture, p. 118.

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steel block).53 The description of the mummy is not very encouraging as a sign of messianism, but there is always the chance of it being a Silenus figure whose secret powers are hidden within this shrunken body.54 When Enoch (disguised in blackface) steals the relic from the museum he initially pictures himself ‘as an entirely new man’, but soon realizes when nothing miraculous happens that the ‘dead shriveledup part-nigger dwarf’ was never likely to fulfill his ambition for it.55 The figure’s physical condition worsens over the next couple of days as Enoch transports it around the city and when Sabbath Hawks treats the ‘new jesus’ as a newly born baby Hazel violently smashes it in disgust. If the narrative hints that the mummy might be an appropriate icon for Hazel’s new church, the idiotic activities of Enoch and the grotesque scene between Sabbath (as mother) and Hazel (as assassin) confirm that in this bleak world the figure is a false icon of spiritual renewal. O’Connor’s interest in exploring the disjunction between outward appearance and inner significance is developed later in the novel when Enoch encounters the gorilla Gonga. Finding an advertisement for Gonga’s tour of the city, Enoch aspires to the celebrity status he believes will bring him the friendship he lacks. Based on the publicity campaign for the film Mighty Joe Young (Ernest Schoedsack, US, 1949) featuring a man in an ape suit, Jon Lance Bacon reads the whole episode as being less concerned with ‘animal nature’ than as a critique of the ‘commercial imagery’ that awakens Enoch’s desire to be someone else.56 Undeterred by the initial rebukes of Gonga when he queues to see him, Enoch arrives at the idiotic plan of accosting the gorilla and stealing the costume. Enoch accomplishes his plan, but instead of transforming into a higher state of being, when he buries his own clothes and dons the costume, ‘a black heavier shaggier figure replaced his. For an instant, it had two heads, one light and one dark, but after a second, it pulled the dark black head over the other and corrected this.’ Although the racial implications of this transformation are problematic (particularly given his earlier blackface disguise), the ironic narrator comments that ‘no gorilla in existence … was happier at that moment than this one, whose god had finally rewarded it’.57 Enoch is no

53 O’Connor, Wise Blood, p. 92. 54 Susan Pearce argues that ‘the early modern consumption of mummies … as representatives of arcane wisdom and as semi-magical medicine’ declined in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they became museum pieces, but the vogue for public unwrapping of Egyptian mummies in the nineteenth century suggests that they continued to be invested with magical powers: Susan Pearce, ‘Bodies in Exile: Egyptian Mummies in the Early Nineteenth Century and their Cultural Implications’, in Displaced Persons, ed. Sharon Ouditt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 56. 55 O’Connor, Wise Blood, p. 170. William Allen reads Enoch’s encounter with the shrunken figure as an example of O’Connor’s interest in the story of Pandora’s box: Allen, ‘The Zoo in O’Connor’s Wise Blood’, 262. However, the myth of the Silenus figure seems more appropriate given the grotesque context of the novel. 56 Bacon, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture, p. 123. 57 O’Connor, Wise Blood, p. 191; pp. 191–2.

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longer referred to by name: his identity is subsumed by the gorilla costume and he ends up frightening passers-by rather than befriending them. In fact, he no longer has thoughts and desires, simply behaving like ‘the shaggy creature’ he has become. It is not clear whether the urban conditions or Enoch’s idiocy are responsible for this state of affairs, but the final image of alienation reveals the creature sitting down to contemplate ‘the valley and the uneven skyline of the city’. Whereas Enoch’s second skin is overtly grotesque, Hazel pins his hopes on his car as a symbol of post-war mobility for achieving a more purposeful identity. The car does give him some protection and enables him to chase the false preacher Solace Layfield, but it is always on the verge of breaking down and does not take him away from religious concerns, the windscreen wipers making ‘a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church’.58 When Hazel drives away from Taulkinham late in the novel, he only travels five miles before a patrolman challenges him to explain where he is going and then without justification pushes the car off an embankment. Hazel is left to trudge back to the city with the suggestion that he has finally realized that material things like cars and secular churches are not enough to sustain faith. Turning his attention inwards, he blinds himself with lime (as a direct challenge to the phony claims of Asa Hawks) and walks with stones in his shoes. Just as Enoch’s last episode with the gorilla costume is narrated from the outside, so Hazel’s final actions are related from the unknowing perspective of his landlady. Like Mrs Hitchcock in the opening scene, she is small-minded and manipulative and, recalling Conrad’s Verloc, she likes ‘the clear light of day’.59 However, she is drawn to Hazel, who at last looks like he is ‘going forward’ and ‘straining toward something’ (even though he spends his days ‘motionless in a chair’), but later she cannot make up her mind if he is going forwards or backwards.60 Now locked inside his self, Hazel seems to have given up his search for community and entered a fugue state reminiscent of the post-epileptic phases of Dostoevsky’s Myshkin. Because the reader is denied access to Hazel’s thoughts, he becomes the same distant and enigmatic image that troubles the landlady, particu-larly when later he is found in a ditch murmuring ‘I want to go on where I’m going’ moments before dying in a police car. O’Connor provides no satisfactory explanation for Hazel’s death (although he has contracted influenza and he tortures himself), the novel closing with a brief coda in which the landlady talks glibly at the dead body.61 Whereas Enoch’s story ends in farce, Hazel’s demise is much more poignant but equally idiotic in its extremism and incomprehensibility, although it is difficult not to admire his single-mindedness. It is possible to give a theological spin to Hazel’s final days,62 but his inner 58 Ibid., p. 68. 59 Ibid., p. 212. 60 Ibid., p. 208. 61 Ibid., p. 224. 62 For example, John Burt argues that Hazel’s ‘recognition is not that he was wrong about God but that his very repudiation of God was a way of testifying to his mystery’,

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alienation and withdrawal from the city are at the heart of his grotesquerie: an individual who cannot reconcile the worldly and spiritual aspects in himself, or eradicate the phoniness he sees around him in post-war America.

Idiotic Signs in the City John Huston’s 1979 film adaptation of Wise Blood is remarkably close to O’Connor’s narrative structure, attenuating her themes of alienation and homelessness, despite Joy Gould Boyum’s argument that her grotesque style is unfilmable.63 Huston always wanted to adapt Dostoevsky’s The Idiot for screen and his interest in solitary and flawed characters on uncertain quests featured in his 1940s films The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), as well as his other work as literary adapter in Moby Dick (1956) and The Man Who Would Be King (1975).64 Noted for his interest in bizarre figures and overreachers, in Wise Blood Huston deals with characters in a similar way to O’Connor, oscillating between sympathy for and mockery of Hazel and Enoch and focusing on the drama that stems from the uncontrollable forces that propel them. Made late in his career, Wise Blood contains many of the qualities of Huston’s other films, but develops a visual style that conveys the novel’s tragi-comic elements, reflecting what James Agee described in 1950 as Huston’s ‘simple feeling for space relationships’ (that echoes Dostoevsky’s interest in spatial chronotopes).65 The milky light and open spaces confound clear vision, while the sepia colours in the opening sequence are perfect for suggesting an old-time Southern town usurped by the garish signs of modernity. Given that Wise Blood seems to have been a personal project and not made for commercial reasons, it is perhaps unsurprising that Huston appears in the film as the preacher-grandfather (seen early on through flashbacks), with the cult actor Brad Dourif as the enigmatic Hazel, a strange mixture of naïveté and disdain blending in his facial expressions and jerky movements.66 while Tony Hilfer reads the ending as demonstrating O’Connor’s contempt for ‘secular humanism’ with Hazel moving back to the faith he earlier denied: Burt, ‘What You Can’t Talk About’, p. 143 and Tony Hilfer, American Fiction Since 1940 (London: Longman, 1992), p. 69. 63 Boyum argues that O’Connor’s hybrid approach ‘is certainly enough to defy a medium such as film, with its affinity for the real and its difficulty in distancing us from the dreadful’: Joy Gould Boyum, Double Exposure: Fiction into Film (New York: Universe Books, 1985), p. 175. 64 See James Agee, Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies (New York: Modern Library, 2000), p. 427. 65 Ibid., p. 424. In 1945 Agee praised Huston’s direction for being ‘beautifully toned and subtly parodistic … spoken with finely shaded irony, equally free of pompousness … mawkish generalizations and cheap bitterness’, a description that could equally apply to O’Connor’s fiction: ibid., p. 152. 66 Brad Dourif had already played a sacrificial idiot figure in the didactic film adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, US, 1975).

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Made seven years after John Boorman’s 1972 adaptation of James Dickey’s novel Deliverance (1970) that portrays idiocy as part of the malaise and violence of the rural South, Huston’s film retains O’Connor’s fable-like quality without indulging in any overt moralizing. It can be argued that the film is stylistically inconsistent with its visual, musical and narrative elements sitting uneasily with each other.67 For example, the nostalgic sentimentality of ‘The Tennessee Waltz’ which is used as the major musical theme clashes with the dark comedy of Hazel’s sink into spiritual purgatory and the slapstick idiocy of Enoch’s (Daniel Shor’s) scenes in the gorilla costume. However, this pastiche of styles actually mirrors O’Connor’s ambivalent tone; as she acknowledged about the novel: ‘The effort to maintain a tone is a considerable strain, particularly as I never know exactly what tone I am maintaining.’68 As such, like the novel, the film is very suggestive of issues it does not deal with directly. For example, the setting is updated to the 1970s (an early shot shows a grave with July 1974 etched on it), suggesting that Hazel has returned from service during the Vietnam conflict. While no direct mention is made of this, like Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), who has returned to civilian life after Vietnam, Hazel can be seen as an avenging angel born out of frustrations and (very possibly) warfare. Travis directs his anger outwards by trying to clean up the moral filth of New York and attempting to expose the corrupt political system, whereas, except for his direct challenge to the false preachers, Hazel finds his urban experience too overwhelming to sustain a positive programme of action. After his plans to promote his own secular church fail to override Taulkinham’s phony evangelists, he directs his frustration inwards to emerge in the spiritual masochism of the final scenes. The opening of the film, in which the first narrative shot shows Hazel standing on a crossroads waiting for a lift (O’Connor’s opening train sequence is shown a little later), is marked by a lack of speech but an intense interest in writing. The opening credits over sepia shots of the rural South look like the scrawls of a child or the malformed letters of a poorly educated writer (‘Jhon Huston’ is billed as director). The credits are juxtaposed with a variety of signs – religious and commercial intermingling with road directions – and the title sequence closes with the ludicrous image of a grave with a telephone above it and the inscription ‘Jesus Called’. When Hazel visits his deserted family house he attaches an inelegant scribble to the wardrobe threatening anyone who steals it with their life, while the inscription on his father’s grave reads ‘Gone to Become an Angle’. This illiteracy is confirmed not only by Enoch’s lack of schooling, but by the fact that no one reads the Bible in Taulkinham, instead listening to the diluted messages of the 67 Huston’s mise en scène has been described as a ‘decorative flourish rather than a consistent artistic statement’, but it has also been argued that as a metteur en scène Huston (like Lewis Milestone) is perhaps more interesting than an auteur because the critic is less likely to search for authorial intention in his films: Pam Cook (ed.), The Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 1985), p. 130. 68 O’Connor, The Habit of Being, pp. 68–9.

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preachers. The only written signs in the city that carry weight are billboards which, although they are not as idiotic in their elision between different products as in the novel, suggest that an advertisement for ‘Pepsi Cola’ has the same status as ‘Jesus Saves’. These two signs are used prominently as the backdrop to the false preacher Solace Layfield (‘Pepsi Cola’) and Hazel (‘Jesus Saves’), which Pamela Demory interprets as indications of the respective phoniness and authenticity of the two preachers.69 However, the signs also suggest that religion has become another commercial product, with the visual impact of the letters taking priority over meaning. This reading is substantiated when Enoch, inspired by the garish graphics advertising Gonga’s tour on the publicity van, follows his gut response to meet and then become the gorilla. If literacy skills are indications of selfknowledge, then the absence of a reading culture implies that in Taulkinham characters respond as myopically to graphic signs as to the sight of Asa Hawks’ blindness or to the sounds of Hoover Shoats’ guitar. This culture of gullibility substantiates Jon Lance Bacon’s argument that in O’Connor’s fiction ‘consumers who identify themselves with products, or with the imagery used to advertise these products, will be disappointed and betrayed in their search for self-realization’.70 O’Connor and Huston are both very interested in the way in which scenes promising revelatory experiences can be undercut to leave the character (and viewer) frustrated. For example, when the shrunken mummy is introduced as a potential icon for Hazel’s new church, Enoch expects it to contain magical powers, but by the time dust has begun to seep out of its head he has already started to lose faith. Later, Sabbath presents it to Hazel as her new baby (in the film as a parody of the immaculate conception) but when he smashes it to pieces with absolute venom any potency it may have possessed is dispersed. Instead of being a Silenus figure who reverses values and the fortunes of those who encounter it, the mummy works to reinforce the characters’ alienation and despair. Indeed, if the mummy does stimulate change, it is in the reorientation of the quests of the two idiot figures after they have recognized its lack of worth. Enoch turns his attention to Gonga and Hazel begins to look inward when he realizes the futility of putting faith in material objects. Hazel and Enoch are not the only characters on a quest in Wise Blood; Sabbath Hawks (Amy Wright) also has a mission to seduce Hazel. Early in the film Hazel is shown visiting the fat prostitute Leona Watts, whose eroticism amounts to her lying in grotesque fashion on her bed and offering Hazel vodka. We only see him with Leona twice, the corporeality of her fat body when he wakes from a dream of his grandfather seems to be enough for him, and Sabbath is soon established as the most significant female character when she gives Hazel ‘the fast eye’. Later she appears in the back of his car with ‘a bunch of dandelions in her hair and a wide 69 Pamela Demory, ‘Faithfulness vs. Faith: John Huston’s Version of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood’, , p. 1. 70 Bacon, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture, p. 125.

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red mouth on her pale face’, crawling over to the front seat in the film while the camera focuses tightly on the rigid figure of Hazel perched over the steering wheel.71 The claustrophobia inside the car is compounded as the two talk at crosspurposes: Hazel becomes obsessed with Sabbath’s claim that she is a bastard (given that Asa is a preacher), while she relates her exchange of letters with the agony aunt Mary Brittle.72 Evoking Nathanael West’s advice-column story Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), Sabbath is concerned about how far she can go sexually without compromising her religious values. Hazel is like West’s Miss Lonelyhearts in terms of his ‘Christ complex’ and his difficulty in coping with reality, while Sabbath thinks she is adjusted well to the modern world, but wants to know if she can go the ‘whole hog’ sexually.73 The desolate view of the road (to which the film cuts) gives a clear indication of Hazel’s state of mind and how little he is interested in her. After driving down a side road, Sabbath kneels down and starts to undress while Hazel stands awkwardly, still preoccupied with her status as a bastard. Sabbath speaks suggestively to him (as she relates the story of a woman with welts who hangs herself), but Hazel ignores her, lying down some distance away with his hat firmly over his face. The expectation that the scene will end with a revelation (whether sexual or spiritual) is heightened when Sabbath crawls over to him and lifts the hat to repeat the line ‘I see you’ that she had used in their first encounter. But this simply breaks Hazel out of his trance and he marches back to the car. The moment of reversal in the scene occurs when Sabbath lifts Hazel’s hat, as if his vulnerability lies not in nakedness but in exposing his face and seeing him close up. He is either incapable of reading her sexual signals, or he ignores them in order to focus on the meaning of the words ‘bastard’ and ‘preacher’. Huston’s approach to the theme of exposure is also explored in Hazel’s encounter with the false preacher, Solace Layfield. The corrupt evangelist Hoover Shoats (Ned Beatty) uses Layfield as his religious stooge, dressing him in the same suit as Hazel and paying him a meagre fee to imitate Hazel’s doctrine of the Church without Christ.74 Layfield is decrepit, he cannot stand upright and is a dreadful orator, the exact opposite of Hazel with his rigid posture and sense of purpose. It is almost as if Layfield is a split version of Hazel: an image of how easily conviction can be bastardized and copied for unworthy causes. Incensed by the crowd’s attentiveness to the false preacher (even though Layfield messes up his lines), Hazel follows him in his car, the night shots and country music giving the sequence a 71 O’Connor, Wise Blood, p. 111. In the film Sabbath hovers between a figure of the May Queen with flowers in her hair and an inept temptress wearing black and red. 72 In the novel Sabbath asks Hazel if he reads the newspaper, to which he answers negatively: ibid., p. 113. 73 Nathanael West, Complete Works (London: Picador, 1988), p. 81. O’Connor, Wise Blood, p. 114. 74 In the film Layfield is paid $4 by Shoats, the same fee that Hazel pays the prostitute.

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surreal feel. Eventually, Hazel starts bumping into Layfield’s car, forcing him to stop and running his car off the road. The music ceases suddenly to suggest that this encounter will be of real significance, especially as in the darkened road the two figures visually mirror each other. But the seriousness is undercut when Layfield speaks; his voice has degenerated further and he speaks with an idiotic slur: ‘How come you done that? Quit just looking at me … say what you want.’ Hazel aggressively asks him why he is preaching a doctrine in which he has no belief and then forces him to take off his hat and suit, as if he wishes to enforce a visual contrast between the two. Layfield staggers away from the car, throwing off his clothes in a manner halfway between desperation and slapstick, while Hazel starts up his car and drives intently towards the abject figure. Hazel runs the car over him in a matter-of-fact way and even the close-up of the two in the road lacks pathos as Layfield murmurs about his mother and father and dies crying ‘Jesus, Jesus, help me.’ When Hazel drives off and we cut to Enoch in the gorilla costume, the viewer is left frustrated and ignorant of how to interpret a scene that promises revelation – the true Hazel confronting his false image – but ends unsatisfactorily and veering towards farce. As these two scenes demonstrate, apart from a few changes in detail, Huston’s film closely echoes the themes and tone of the novel, particularly the way that serious expectations are undercut by bathos and comic humour. This technique is a key element in the idiocy that is embedded in the texture of the story. Both versions of Wise Blood promise revelation, but enlightenment is continually frustrated even in scenes in which characters are exposed, whether it is Hazel’s face or Layfield’s naked body. When later we see barbed wire wrapped around Hazel’s torso, the written signs of the city have been replaced with somatic signs, as if this is the only materiality that can be trusted. Hazel’s abject torturing of his own body – blinding himself, the barbed wire and the stones in his shoes – cannot be misinterpreted, even though by this point we have no access to his thoughts or motivations. It is almost as if Hazel (and Enoch) cannot cope with the uncertainty and ambiguity of life in Taulkinham, where there is no plain speaking and everything is duplicit, when signs cannot be taken for wonders and revelations do not occur (whether they are in reference to Christ or Silenus). In their final acts, Enoch appears to accept the mantle of idiocy and Hazel’s story shifts towards tragedy, but the two can be seen as inverse images of each other, their convictions – together with the lack of community in Taulkinham – leading them to isolation and bizarre extremes. As Pamela Demory argues, because ‘Christianity offers only lies, manipulation, commercial exploitation and violence’, the demise of Enoch and Hazel is pictured in the film ‘as a loss in human, worldly terms: family, home, community, human love’ and emotional connectedness.75 If the purpose of O’Connor’s and Huston’s versions of Wise Blood is to indicate that Faulkner’s Southern notion of a ‘deep indestructible bond between man and 75 Demory, ‘Faithfulness vs. Faith’, p. 6.

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environment’ is a mirage, then the idiot figure provides the perfect vehicle for this. At times, the spirit of the wise fool hovers over Enoch and Hazel, but at the end of the story it is replaced with the image of the vacant idiot when Enoch loses his identity inside the body of Gonga and the landlady is left speaking to the broken body of Hazel as he moves ‘farther and farther into the darkness’.76

76 O’Connor, Wise Blood, p. 226.

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Waterland (Graham Swift and Stephen Gyllenhaal) Cultural representations of idiocy in the 1960s and the early 1970s were fairly rare in Europe and America, a fact that can largely be explained by the widespread interest in the creative potential of madness in literary and intellectual circles. Rather than madness being purely a clinical condition that in its extreme forms should be treated in secure units or total institutions, as the poets Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath explored madness can sometimes take the form of personal expression as a defence against intrusive and debilitating social pressures.1 The vogue for anti-psychiatry in America from the mid- to late 1960s (and to a lesser extent in Britain and Holland), championed by R. D. Laing in The Divided Self (1960) and Thomas Szasz in The Myth of Mental Illness (1962), treated clinical psychosis as a myth invented as a means to control deviance, anti-social behaviour and delinquency, especially in the young. Perhaps because idiocy has rarely been seen as potentially dangerous or as a direct threat to social values, it was overlooked in the 1960s and 1970s for more exuberant forms of psychic disturbance. Laing’s work championed existential rebellion against passive conformity and he combatted ‘the fibrillating heartland of senescent capitalism’ that he believed was eroding the individual’s inner life.2 His emphasis on the transcendent potential of human experience reflected the counter-cultural ideals of the 1960s and the hostility to the normative demands of scientific, medical, military and religious institutions. For example, in The Politics of Experience (1967) Laing claims: there is no such ‘condition’ as ‘schizophrenia’, but the label is a social fact … the person labelled is inaugurated not only into a role, but into a career of patient, by the concerted action of a coalition (a ‘conspiracy’) of family, G.P., mental health officer, psychiatrists, nurses, psychiatric social workers, and often fellow mental patients.3

Here, madness is either the negative product of institutional regulations that 1 Ginsberg notes that one of his early influences was Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. He admits he was attracted by the title, claiming it was ‘the single most soul-manifesting book’ he found in Paterson Public Library, New Jersey: Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952–1995, ed. Bill Morgan (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 208. 2 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience & The Bird of Paradise (London: Penguin, 1967), p. 11. Erving Goffman’s sociological tract Stigma (1963) was also influential in the 1960s for challenging stereotypes surrounding physical and mental illness. 3 Laing, The Politics of Experience, p. 100.

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brand the individual, or a personal reaction to the pressures of social conformity and to normative ‘labels’ like schizophrenia.4 This widespread interest in resistance to social and clinical labels (and general mistrust of institutions) can be seen in many post-war cultural products such as William Burroughs’ satires on the relationship between medicine and the military (in Naked Lunch, 1959, for example) and in Nicholas Ray’s film Bigger Than Life (1956), in which a high school teacher, Ed Avery (played by James Mason), develops wildly extravagant behaviour after being given cortisone by medics to combat his heart disorder. Based on a 1955 article by Brenton Roueché, ‘Ten Feet Tall’, in the New Yorker about a real case of cortisone prescription, Bigger Than Life is shot in vivid De Luxe Color and uses CinemaScope to emphasize the extravagance of Ed’s mind as the drug intensifies the distortions in his otherwise normal family life. While it can be argued that Ed’s madness is directly stimulated by the untested side-effects of cortisone and his subsequent addiction (in which he takes more than prescribed), an alternative reading of the film would be that the drug actually aids him in expressing unhappiness with the blandness of his shallow marriage and his lack of satisfaction in juggling two jobs of teacher and taxi telephonist to keep his family secure. Although writers and directors were not always so explicitly concerned with critiquing the profession of medicine as Ray in Bigger Than Life or Ken Kesey in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), in which a mental institution becomes an extended metaphor for a contained and oppressive society,5 the therapeutic culture that emerged as part of the liberationist movement in the 1960s created a widespread interest in alternative ‘modalities of experience’ as Laing called them: ‘imagination, dreams, phantasy, and beyond that to ever further reaches of experience’.6 What links film auteurs like Nicholas Ray with writers such as John Barth, Ursula LeGuin and E. L. Doctorow in America and John Fowles, Günter Grass and Doris Lessing in Europe is the possibility of telling alternative stories as an expression of creativity and a means for escaping deterministic forces, be they historical, biological, institutional or psychic.7 The direct link between a post-Freudian therapeutic culture and the fabulist dimension of fiction and film oversimplifies the complex intersection of American and 4 Elaine Showalter discusses the gender implications of schizophrenia and what she calls Laing’s ‘radical humanism’: Showalter, The Female Malady, pp. 220–47. 5 Showalter contrasts the inclusion of electro-convulsive shock treatment in Sylvia Plath’s pseudo-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1963) with Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, concluding that, although Kesey has intense sympathy for the underdog, his violent scorn for oppressive regimes is also directed against women: ibid., pp. 216–19. 6 Laing, The Politics of Experience, p. 18. 7 Other American independent directors such as Samuel Fuller and John Cassavetes were much less optimistic that such external forces could be overcome, as displayed in films dealing with mental breakdown such as Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963) and Cassavetes’ Faces (1968).

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European culture since the 1960s, but it does provide a useful perspective for discussing Graham Swift, who is among the most interesting postmodern writers to emerge in the 1980s. This chapter focuses on his third novel, Waterland (1983), in which Swift explores alternative stories of national, regional and personal identity by situating idiocy at the centre of the story. By the end of the 1980s Swift was widely acclaimed as one of the most distinctive practitioners in the new wave of literary experimentation in Britain, which (unlike America) had largely been dominated by social realism since the late 1940s. Swift shared with the likes of Julian Barnes, Alaisdair Gray, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson and Kazuo Ishiguro a highly self-conscious fictional technique resting midway between imaginative exploration and theoretical interr-ogation of the themes of identity, community, history, sexuality and regionality.8 This group of writers shared a broad metafictional approach to their subject matter and a keen interest in storytelling, enabling them to interweave multiple stories that expose tensions in explanatory discourses that purport to explain human behaviour in terms of historical, demographic, clinical or sexual certainties. The postmodern distrust of ‘metanarratives’ echoed the anti-authoritarian stance of cultural prac-titioners of the 1960s and nourished an eagerness to create fragmented, oppositional and often magical tales. While it can be argued that this challenge to authority and emphasis on storytelling simply harks back to the modernist interest in narrativity of Flaubert, Conrad and Faulkner, Waterland is often treated as a metafictional text that contains its own self-conscious commentary. As Linda Hutcheon asserts, in such texts the link between ‘life’ and ‘art’ is ‘reforged, on a new level – on that of the imaginative process (of storytelling), instead of on that of the product (the story told)’.9 Not only does Swift explore the therapeutic potential of storytelling in Waterland, he uses the literary device of the idiot figure to reveal elements of ‘real’ history that cannot be accommodated through such creative means. Whereas the popular liberationist philosophy of the 1960s promoted an optimistic pushing back of psychic boundaries, Swift’s novel is more sceptical, implying that certain histor-ical, environmental and biological forces cannot be overcome by storytelling. As such, the formal complexity of the story is a celebration of imaginative ‘inner’ history (as opposed to formal ‘outer’ history), but also makes it difficult to pin down Swift’s lyrically haunting exploration of human frailty and the inability to overcome brute nature. As this chapter explores, this formal complexity is largely duplicated in the American director Stephen Gyllenhaal’s 1992 film adaptation of Waterland that, in its exploration of the visual and verbal discourses of idiocy, develops Swift’s reservations about the possibility of overcoming biological and psychological forces. Neurosis and madness both feature in Waterland, but Swift’s interest in idiocy as a biological state suggests a shift away from Laing’s work on mental illness and 8 For a discussion of these themes see, for example, Alison Lee, Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1990). 9 Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 3.

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schizophrenia as psychological conditions, towards a late twentieth-century interest in neurological disturbance. In its most popular form this interest is evident in the case studies of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose work reveals a keener interest in the patient’s experience of illness than in developing the ‘hard’ scientific project to map neural circuits for its own sake. In an attempt to fashion a discourse that would enable him to do this, Sacks makes use of techniques of storytelling to fashion what he calls ‘clinical tales’, which are more like short stories than prescriptive medical reports. This hybrid discourse enables him to go some way towards portraying his patients in their own unique world and conveying the idiosyncratic impressions of their particular disorder, whether it be severe migraine, Parkinsonism or Tourette’s syndrome. Sacks’ interest in storytelling links with the concerns of contemporary writers such as Swift in exploring the complex relationship between biography and history based on the (now orthodox) postmodern understanding that the self is actively made through language as an assemblage of stories. For example, the American historian Robert Jay Lifton writes of the ‘protean self’ that is mercurial, ever-changing, but resilient in ‘an age of fragmentation’,10 while the sociologist Nikolas Rose comments that: we use the stories of the self that our culture makes available to us, with their scenarios of emotions, their repertoires of motives, their cast-list of characters, to plan out our lives, to account for events and give them significance, to accord ourselves an identity as hero or victim, survivor or casualty within the plot of our own life.11

In line with these descriptions, in his most popular book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1984), Sacks claims: ‘if we wish to know about a man, we ask “what is his story – his real inmost story?” … for each of us is a biography, a story … to be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be repossess, our life-stories’.12 To reconstruct identity on this model, an individual must be capable of telling, or participate in telling, his or her own more or less coherent story as a means of recentring the self. Sacks’ work has focused on individuals whose neurological conditions have radically affected or diminished their lives (usually involving identifiable damage to the right or left cerebral hemisphere), but for an idiot this ‘life-story’ is unlikely ever to be told in a coherent way, and the conception of ‘the protean self’ is a largely unusable myth. As we have seen with Stevie Verloc and Kaspar Hauser, the inability to express the self in language or in drawing characterizes idiot

10 See Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (New York: Basic Books, 1993). 11 Nikolas Rose, ‘Assembling the Modern Self’, in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 227. 12 Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (London: Picador, 1986), p. 106. For a much fuller description of Sacks, see Chapter 5 of my book Romantic Science and the Experience of Self, pp. 197–253.

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figures as those dispossessed of the stories of which they are a part, usually leaving them in a creaturely state characterized by disorder or habitual repetition. Sacks is very interested in fragmentary, hesitant and uncertain stories over which the individual only ever has partial control, but the idea of constructing a narrative (either told or written) implies a certain level of cognitive and linguistic competence lacking in characters like Dick Crick in Waterland and June in Swift’s later novel Last Orders (1996). As a consequence, in Waterland it is his brother Tom – an educated history teacher – who must tell Dick’s story for him (although this is not Tom’s primary motive), positioning him in the context of family drama and regional saga in which he plays a small but very significant role, while in Last Orders June’s story is limited by her muteness and the institution where she has been incarcerated for fifty years. Waterland and Last Orders both explore the therapeutic nature of storytelling, in which events can make more sense when placed in a narrative framework. But, Swift also exposes the limitations of stories when faced with such characters that, like Kaspar Hauser, remain enigmatic and largely detached from the realm of language. Furthermore, Dick and June are not the only individuals at risk in Swift’s fiction; as Waterland reveals, identity is in danger even in the realm of language. On this issue, the Native American writer N. Scott Momaday writes: ‘our stories explain us, justify us, sustain us, humble us, and forgive us. And sometimes they injure and destroy us. Make no mistake, we are at risk in the presence of words.’13 Swift’s interest in the scope and limits of storytelling connects with the recent literary interest in the medical sciences,14 and also with the sceptical attitude of many contemporary writers (compared to the liberationist philosophy of the 1960s) towards what Patricia Waugh calls ‘the capacity of aesthetic and postmodern language games to undo authoritarian state politics or gross economic inequalities’, as well as historical and biological forces.15

Idiocy and the Force of History Depicting working-class life in the East Anglian Fens at key moments in the twentieth century, Waterland is a topographical novel, but one concerned with the theme of temporality as much as a region dominated by reclaimed land. The narrative interweaves the story of Tom Crick’s boyhood as he grows up in the Fens 13 N. Scott Momaday, The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 169. 14 This interest is best exemplified in figures like Sacks, the British child psychiatrist Adam Phillips and by the journal Literature and Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press) that has run since 1982 and draws together cultural critics and medical practitioners. 15 Patricia Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and its Background 1960 to 1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 212.

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with a portrayal of his adult life as a history teacher, who spends his classes telling tales to his pupils in an attempt to arouse their interest in history, giving them an imaginative alternative to textbook History that ‘only wants to know facts’.16 The narrative juxtaposes Tom’s professional life as a teacher with stories of the different generations of his family, from his grandparents, the Atkinsons, on the eve of the Great War, to his parents and his own boyhood during World War II, and back to the present with his relationship to his wife Mary, who is beginning to lose touch with reality. As a backdrop to these mini-narratives, the Fens provide a perfect metaphor for stories being dragged to life out of silt ‘which demolishes as it builds; which is simultaneously accretion and erosion; neither progress nor decay’.17 The ‘arduous process’ of land reclamation (or ‘human siltation’, as Swift’s narrator calls it) is valuable in creating a habitus for the Fenlanders, in terms of a fertile environment for growing crops, but also problematic in impeding the ‘flow of rivers’ and blocking drainage.18 This equivocal environment – both fertile and barren – provides an extended metaphor for what storytelling can and cannot achieve: an ‘interminable and ambiguous process’ of reclaiming, and then losing, the past. The Fens also represent a closed environment not dissimilar to the isolated community of O’Connor’s South as depicted in Wise Blood, but whereas the town that Hazel Motes tries to escape is restrictive, the Fenlanders are plagued with too strong a dose of reality: ‘the great, flat monotony of reality; the wide, empty space of reality’.19 This monotony may suggest the characters Tom presents to his pupils will be similarly uninteresting, but he insists it is precisely from this ‘realism; fatalism; phlegm’ that his family’s storytelling emerges, with tales populated by ‘marsh-sprites’ and ‘will o’ the wisps’ far removed from the world of war, rebellion and social unrest.20 As Del Ivan Janik argues, Swift’s landscape creates a ‘fictional superreality’ which ‘gains in intensity from its very ordinariness’, while his characters spring to life out of their dull existence.21 Tom’s stories are presented as rational intellectual exercises designed to stimulate his pupils’ interest in history, but the characters and events he narrates are far from ordinary, as they constantly return to darker themes of madness, drunkenness, incest, murder and idiocy. Madness is linked to the strong ale the Atkinsons brew to combat the ‘superreality’ of their Fenland lives and to the 16 Graham Swift, Waterland (London: Picador, 1984), p. 74. 17 Ibid., p. 7. It is interesting to compare the unstable environments of Steinbeck’s ‘Johnny Bear’ and Waterland, the authors making close connections between the swamps/fens and the idiot figures in both stories. As John Timmerman notes ‘it is not an accident that the narrator [of ‘Johnny Bear’] is by profession the crew foreman of a dredger, draining the swamp, beating back the fog’: Timmerman, The Dramatic Landscape of Steinbeck’s Short Stories, p. 240. 18 Swift, Waterland, p. 8. 19 Ibid., p. 15. 20 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 21 Del Ivan Janik, ‘History and the “Here and Now”: The Novels of Graham Swift’, Twentieth Century Literature, 35(1) (Spring 1989), 74.

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‘stark-raving’ mad Sarah Atkinson who is kept ‘confined to her bed’,22 as well as being dramatized in the present-day conflict between Tom and Mary, who kidnaps a baby from a supermarket trolley convinced it is a gift from God. As such, madness seems to be stimulated by circumstance (and not by institutional pressures on Laing’s anti-psychiatry model); we learn Sarah has had a bang on the head and Mary a ghastly abortion when she was a teenager that makes her sterile. Madness and idiocy are once more apportioned down gender lines: for Sarah and Mary, ‘madness’ gives them the gift to see mystical visions (perhaps a delusory, rather than a positive, liberation), whereas idiocy represents the brute reality of the environment as embodied in Tom’s elder brother, the ‘potato-head’ Dick, who has the mental capacity and emotional limitations of a young child inside the body of an able adult. Dick does not play a major role in the story in terms of the narrative attention given to him, but he is crucial to the novel’s symbolic range and Swift’s interest in exploring the intersection between biology, geography, history and sexuality: Dick is both the unnatural result of an incestuous relationship in the family (kept secret for most of the narrative), but also the natural outgrowth of this closed environment, a reminder of the ‘old, watery phlegm which cooled and made sluggish their spirits’, of the family’s ‘swampy origins’ and of what Pamela Cooper calls the ‘blunt facticity’ of the Fens.23 Tom’s early description of Dick is significant: He turned his face to me; a long, potato-coloured face, with a heavy jaw and a slack mouth which hung invariably open, emitting a thin, unconscious wheeze. His eyelids flickered. When Dick moved, only his eyelids showed it. The muddy complexion neither flushed nor paled; the mouth remained limp; the eyes themselves stared. The eyelids alone registered emotion. But although they registered emotion it was impossible to tell merely from their movement what emotion was being signalled.24

As a heavy and dull-witted character, Dick is the central symbol of inertia: the still point linking the generations of the Crick family. But the description also hints at a secret emotion that cannot be articulated or clearly glimpsed behind Dick’s eyelids. As Patricia Waugh suggests, when filtered through the perspective of Dick’s idiocy and Mary’s madness, the dry land of truth and sanity that Tom ostensibly inhabits is constantly being eroded by the ‘muddy’ stories he tells: the waterland of the fens is also an image of the fragility of our conscious 22 Swift, Waterland, p. 71; p. 82. Although Dick is not institutionalized (because, until the death of Freddie Parr, he is not seen as a danger), Tom recounts the story of the Atkinsons that marked Sarah’s ninety-second birthday by having Wetherfield asylum built for her and ‘those poor Fenland madmen and melancholics, who in a less enlightened age would have been pilloried, burnt or whipped to the next parish’. For Tom, the asylum is ‘a cage for cretins’ for ‘our saintly, blameless Sarah’: p. 82. 23 Ibid., p. 14. Pamela Cooper, ‘Imperial Topographies: The Spaces of History in Waterland’, Modern Fiction Studies, 42(2) (Summer 1996), 377. 24 Swift, Waterland, p. 23.

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Swift uses idiocy to represent the dead end of history when time, knowledge and generativity cease, but he also suggests that stories, however exuberant, melodramatic or insistent, cannot always mould the past into something palatable. Although Tom is desperate to reclaim the past and preserve the topography of the Fens in living memory, his attempts prove increasingly feeble in the face of forces outside his control. Tom actually loses his job because of his irregular mode of teaching (and, Swift seems to imply, the trivialization of History as a subject in the 1980s), but the novel can be categorized loosely as a Bildungsroman, in which Tom educates himself (as well as his pupils and readers) and matures through the act of storytelling. If he learns anything from his narration, as Janik argues in relation to Swift’s first two novels The Sweet-Shop Owner (1980) and Shuttlecock (1981), it is ‘the acceptance of uncertainty’ as a ‘humanizing’ lesson that enables him to live in the present.26 The emphasis throughout the novel on the Crick family’s ‘phlegmatic’ propensity harks back to the medieval notion of bodily humours and is also an admission that the watery landscape is largely responsible for shaping their psychological temperament. Unlike the exuberance of 1960s artistic creativity, which revelled in some aspects of modernity while it rejected others, the reader is told early on that the Cricks have not embraced modern life at all, rising only from steampump worker to lock keeper and failing to produce a ‘renowned engineer, or turning to farming that rich soil they themselves had helped to form’.27 This poverty of ambition may explain why Tom feels the need to engage his pupils with lived history, but it also suggests that stories are more a modus operandi for the Cricks than a therapeutic coming to terms with the past or as a means to better themselves. Tom himself intimates that his ambition as a scholar (writing ‘highflown essays’ on the Jacobite Rebellions) has led him to the point where he realizes that swotting is not the solution for understanding what history actually is: ‘a thin garment, easily punctured by a knife-blade called Now’.28 To use another of the book’s metaphors, history is continually being eroded by the present and in risk of disappearing; it is not etched indelibly ‘on solid ground’ and is in danger of turning into ‘idle gossip’.29 But, in other passages, Tom does want to distinguish history from fairy tale, noting that ‘there are times … when good, dry, textbook history takes a plunge into the old swamps of myth and has to be retrieved with empirical fishing lines’. This attempt to balance human-centred

25 26 27 28 29

Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties, p. 182. Janik, ‘History and the “Here and Now”’, 82. Swift, Waterland, p. 14. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid, p. 74.

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history with the sometimes irreconcilable tensions between past and present reveal Tom as an earnest teacher and an old-fashioned humanist, despite the headmaster’s disapproval of his unconventional techniques and Linda Hutcheon’s reading of him as an ‘allegorical representative of the postmodern historian’, more concerned with the art of storytelling than in unearthing historical truth.30 However, this aside, there are other motives to be considered for him relating these histories, particularly as concerns his troubled relationship with Dick. Tom admits early on that Dick is skilful in dealing with ‘things mechanical’, whether it is his old motorcycle or the Ouse dredger; he speaks of it as ‘less a skill than a sort of kinship’ with objects, a kinship that Tom himself does not possess. Dick cannot read or write and, like Conrad’s Stevie, he finds it difficult to speak in sentences after receiving only a ‘rudimentary schooling’ in the village.31 However, the status of his idiocy is dubious, as he claims that Dick’s schooling was ‘curtailed, even, one might say, deliberately abandoned by the parents’ in order to give Tom the ‘privileged role of the bright schoolboy’.32 Tom wonders whether it is because his parents thought Dick ‘irreclaimable’, but he now realizes why his attempts to privately tutor Dick were met with disapproval by his father (to prevent him learning about the incestuous circumstances of his conception). Like George and Lennie in Of Mice and Men, the novel suggests that Tom and Dick may be two parts of a whole: one part commands language and controls stories and the other is dispossessed of both. If Tom is the intellectual part, then Dick is the mechanical part divorced from higher thought and giving him a ‘deceptive air of ineptitude’. Tom does not disparage Dick, commenting that he is often misunderstood and suspecting that he ‘knows something we don’t’. He wonders if Dick is actually a savant who ‘looks down from his lofty and lucid mindlessness … at a world blinded by its own glut of imagination’. But, given that Tom’s childhood sweetheart Mary is interested in the size of Dick’s penis, his comments barely disguise his troubled and almost envious feelings toward Dick, who others see as having ‘a certain rugged pathos’, as if he can perceive the problems around him even if he cannot articulate or resolve them.33 While Tom may just romanticize his brother, or mistake Dick’s look of ‘suffering’ for something more profound, this description suggests that Dick is not only the story’s ‘secret’ but is an ‘irreclaimable’ manifestation of the Fens. In Kristevan discourse, this would position Dick in the semiotic realm before language delimits what is knowable, substantiating Tom’s fear that by aborting or finishing his story he would issue in the primordial chaos he sees embodied in his brother and the waterland itself.

30 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 56. 31 Swift, Waterland, p. 31. 32 Ibid., p. 32. 33 Ibid., p. 33.

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Like many of the idiot figures already discussed, Dick is a paradox. On the one hand he is uneducated and simplistic (speaking in a ‘baby language’), but he is essential to working the dredger on the river.34 Although he is a machine of sorts, Dick is close to nature (he rides his bike to secluded spots) and has the sexual characteristics that far outstretch his mental age; he is a ‘dick-head’ in both the idiotic and sexual senses of the phrase. However, it is likely he is impotent and, as the incestuous offspring of his mother and grandfather, he is redundant in the cycle of generativity. He is a ‘potato-head’ and ‘heavy-footed’ but can swim like an eel; and he is passive but can be roused to violence, as he is when he murders Freddie Parr (after Tom lies and tells him that Freddie is behind Mary’s pregnancy). Like the marshy Fens, Dick is an almost amphibious character, representing both earth and water; like the family phlegm, he is made of ‘ambiguous substance. Neither liquid, nor solid … benign … yet disagreeable.’35 More than that, in a novel obsessed with the possibility that history and humanity may end, Dick may be seen to represent what in the context of late twentieth-century political theory Francis Fukuyama has called ‘the last man’.36 When Dick disappears into the Ouse at the end of Tom’s story, as John Schad notes, the dredger is described as ‘unmanned’ and we are left with a dehumanized and demasculinized world in which objects such as the abandoned motorcycle (the final image in the novel) are all that remain.37 As adult storyteller Tom later realizes that Dick is neither a mistake nor an irrelevance; rather than calling his ‘final gesture’ of diving into the river an act of madness, like Dick’s father (his grandfather), Tom now sees him as the saviour (‘our last, thin hope’) who has unsel-fish-ly sacrificed himself to reinstate natural order.38 We will return to Dick in a moment, but first it is worth considering the role of Mary, in terms of both her abortion (which the novel suggests is an intervention in the natural order and one of the possible causes of idiocy) and her obsession with messianism (when she believes God sends her a baby). As teenagers Tom is drawn to Mary partly because their mothers have died (Mary’s in childbirth), suggesting that, as in Wise Blood, the loss of maternal order will be a major theme. But, despite Mary’s affection for Tom, in his mind she becomes almost untouchable. Mary’s father tries to mould her into the Catholic image of her dead mother (‘an untouchable madonna’), but she emerges as a lively and uninhibited teenager who makes use of the train journeys to and from school to be intimate with Tom.39 The 34 Ibid., p. 23. Tom wonders whether Dick himself is ‘a sort of machine – in so far as a machine is something which has no mind of its own’, while he can perform ‘remarkable feats of dexterity and strength’: p. 32. 35 Ibid., p. 298. 36 See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992). 37 John Schad, ‘The End of the End of History: Graham Swift’s Waterland’, Modern Fiction Studies, 38(4) (Winter 1992), 916. 38 Swift, Waterland, p. 304; p. 310. 39 Ibid., p. 40.

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reader is told with a touch of paranoia that both Freddie Parr (who is despised for his ‘crude tongue’) and Dick also have ‘designs’ on Mary, but it is Tom who is permitted to explore her vagina while she fingers his penis. Tom is less interested in the excitement of her touch than he is in exploring the ‘folds and protuberances’ of Mary’s vagina, with its ‘false and genuine entrances’ and ‘moist labyrinth of inwardly twisting, secret passages’.40 As another liminal interzone, it is neither dry nor aqueous, neither fully inside nor outside the body, both a ‘hole’ and a ‘labyrinth’. There is no sexual act described (hinting at Tom’s inhibitions), and the passage soon switches to Mary’s ‘itch of curiosity’ that leads her to explore Dick’s genitals as well.41 News of her pregnancy not only leads to murder (when Dick is told that Freddie is the father), but also creates a rift between her and Tom as he jealously questions her about her exploits with Dick. The scene breaks off with Mary confessing to Tom: ‘It was too big. It wouldn’t – But that’s not the main thing any more now, is it?’42 This unfinished statement may be an overt reference to the size of Dick’s penis, but given her later breakdown and the twin messianic roles the adult Tom grants to Dick and Mary gives to the child she believes God has sent her, in this unspoken union lies another secret: ‘it’ is much more than Dick’s penis and ‘it’ is also ‘too big’ – and too chaotic – to be expressed in language. Pamela Cooper approaches the description of Mary’s internal ‘moist labyrinth’ as a metaphor for the ‘feminized geography’ of the Fenland mud (another articulation of Kristeva’s semiotic realm) and a link to the discourses of history and theology that underpin Tom’s reading of his childhood.43 His understanding of history as a process that ‘goes in two directions at once. It goes backwards as it goes forwards. It loops. It takes detours’ can also be seen as a feminized approach to the past when compared to the ‘hard’, linear and teleological ‘March of History’.44 The novel shows the way in which different types of history intersect and throw each other into relief, just as the French Revolution that Tom is supposed to be teaching his class is constantly interrupted by his own past. On this level of ‘soft’ history, Tom concentrates on the cyclical nature of revolutions, stressing a ‘return’ and ‘restoration’ of order over ‘transformation’ and ‘categorical change’.45 His constant breaking off from classes on the French Revolution may simply serve to focus his pupils’ understanding of historical change, or it could represent his inability to come to terms with his own past and the disturbance of the natural order represented by Dick’s birth and Mary’s abortion. Tom defuses the questions of his unruly pupil, Price, concerning potential apocalypse, nuclear annihilation and the end of history with his notion of cyclical 40 41 42 43 44 45

Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 50. Cooper, ‘Imperial Topographies’, 372; 388. Swift, Waterland, p. 117. Ibid., p. 119.

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return. He has come to learn that stories create reality and, as they are a vital resource in constructing identity, he wants to pass on this lesson to his pupils. However, by insisting that ‘man … is a storytelling animal … he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories’, Tom implies that what he cannot cope with is this ‘empty space’, whether it is symbolized by Mary’s vaginal opening, the flatness of the Fens, or Dick’s idiocy.46 Curiosity leads him towards emptiness, but he cannot comprehend or fully admit his fear. At times Tom over-intellectualizes or persists with his narration when perhaps silent reflection would be more profitable. Indeed, if, as Tom asserts, ‘only animals live entirely in the Here and Now’ he does not realize that so do the ‘children’ he is addressing to some extent, as well as Dick (who has limited memory and restricted language) and Mary (whose abortion has traumatized her). While it is valid to interpret Tom’s ambivalence to stories as a sign of good sense – at times they are ‘a wonderful and necessary enterprise’ and at others ‘as inauthentic and destructive as the watery chaos it intends to order’47 – his fears of emptiness and of ‘the Here and Now’ reveal a neurotic storyteller hiding behind the veneer of versatile teacher. On this view, Tom is trapped by the same logic of doubling he identifies in the landscape of the Fens (land–water, tangible–intangible) and the characters of Dick (idiot–savant, man–fish, saviour–throwback) and Mary (mad–visionary, madonna– Eve). On the one hand Tom is the consummate storyteller, making jumps and creating allusive parallels between national, local and personal perspectives, but on the other hand the contradictions of history (fact–fiction, explanatory–fanciful, realistic–idealistic) make his story an impossible one to tell within a stable frame of reference, or truly therapeutic as a talking cure. As he tries to make sense of the past by giving it a shape and pattern, so the past leaves him floundering when it comes to the question ‘Why?’: what does this question Why imply? … dissatisfaction, disquiet, a sense that all is not well … History begins only at the point where things go wrong; history is born only with trouble, with perplexity, with regret. So that hard on the heels of the word Why comes the sly and wistful word If. If it had not been for … If only … Were it not … Those useless Ifs of history.48

Here Tom seems nostalgic for a lost ‘natural’ past that never existed as whole and indivisible (the semiotic realm of the lost mother, the lost baby and the lost brother), while the fantasy of such a past stimulates his stories as if they are a neurotic attempt to ward off his fear of emptiness that is variously symbolized by

46 Ibid., p. 53. See Robert K. Irish, ‘“Let Me Tell You”: About Desire and Narrativity in Graham Swift’s Waterland’, Modern Fiction Studies, 44(4) (Winter 1998), 921. 47 Ronald McKinney, ‘The Greening of Postmodernism: Graham Swift’s Waterland’, New Literary History, 28(4) (Autumn 1997), 826. 48 Swift, Waterland, p. 92.

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Dick’s idiocy, the aborted foetus he is instructed to throw into the river, and by his father’s anguish as ‘his lips tremble [and] form a quivering circle’ when Dick disappears into the Ouse towards the end of the novel.49 ‘Those useless Ifs’, as Tom calls them, encapsulate both his nostalgic yearning for wholeness and his admission of responsibility for the death of Dick: in other words, the clash between what he remembers and the reality of the past. While Mary’s madness disturbs Tom’s composure, Dick’s idiocy structures his obsession with stories and memory. On debating when historical explanation should cease and whether amnesia would actually be a blessing, Tom wonders: ‘would not this gift of amnesia only release us from the trap of the question why into the prison of idiocy’.50 Here idiocy represents silence, when history cannot stick and stories begin to lose their meaning. As Oliver Sacks has explored with his neurological patients, profound loss of memory and falling ‘radically into sickness’ often throws an individual into an ontological state of non-being,51 but in darker moments Tom wonders whether living in such a pure present without memory is desirable when the alternative is to be shackled by the past: ‘he’s here, he’s now. Not there or then. No past, no future.’52 In this sense, idiocy is a refuge from the torments of history. But Tom’s fantasies do not override his reliance on reason and his need to tell stories as a way of making sense. His comment in the final pages that ‘the smell of silt is the smell of sanctuary, is the smell of amnesia’ suggests that, as Cooper argues, in Tom’s mind Dick is ‘liminal and enigmatic’, oscillating between ‘visibility and disappearance, corporeality and transfiguration’ like the Fens of which he is a creature.53 If the image of Dick diving into the Ouse transfigures him and makes the future possible, he is also a figure of brute stoppage, a ghostly revenant of things past forced unwittingly into the present.

Nostalgia and Suffering The film version of Waterland directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal in 1992 manages to capture the haunting lyricism of Swift’s prose, while retaining much of his narrative complexity and the pivotal role of the idiot figure. The risk in adapting Waterland for an Anglo-American arthouse audience would be to produce a heritage film that indulges in nostalgia for a lost era of innocence, where the delights of the past overshadow the troubled emotions narrated by Tom (played by Jeremy Irons) and his ambivalent fraternal relationship with Dick (David Morrissey). While there is some unevenness to the presentation, perhaps inevita49 Ibid., p. 297. 50 Ibid., p. 93. 51 Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, p. xi. For a clinical tale dealing with radical memory loss see, for example, ‘A Matter of Identity’, ibid., pp. 103–10. 52 Swift, Waterland, p. 308. 53 Cooper, ‘Imperial Topographies’, 381.

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ble given the dense narrative structure, Gyllenhaal and screenwriter Peter Prince convey Swift’s ‘langorous rhythms’ and the layering of stories, without losing the dramatic immediacy of Tom’s boyhood.54 The film shuttles between past and present, periodically using Tom’s voice-over, while in other places it presents the Fenland scenes with no intervention; we hear voices from the past, the classroom scenes often dissolve into the Fens, and at one point Tom actually takes his class on an imaginative (but visually real) journey back to the Atkinsons’ estate in 1911. Jeremy Irons is very skilful at portraying characters bound to their past (for example, in Nicholas Lyne’s adaptation of Nabokov’s Lolita, 1997) and he successfully conveys the neurotic ambivalence of Swift’s Tom. By using the character actress and Irons’ wife, Sinead Cusack, to portray the adult Mary, Gyllenhaal gives the film a domestic poignancy (although her Celtic accent jars) and the poetic cinematography of Robert Elswit attenuates the enigmatic flatness of the Fens. As a director interested in misfits and madness in small-town communities (as evidenced in his other films, Paris Trout, 1991, and A Dangerous Woman, 1993), in Waterland Gyllenhaal focuses closely on the misfortunes the Fens induce in the characters. The most noticeable changes Gyllenhaal and Prince make to the novel are to shift the setting of the adult story from London to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and to push back the present from 1980 to 1974. The reason for changing the setting was probably dictated by the need to appeal to an American audience (even though it is a British film), but there is no particular reason for choosing Pittsburgh as the setting, unless it is to force a contrast between, on the one hand, a modern industrialized port (one of the richest coal fields in the nineteenth century) and, on the other, the premodern Fens and Tom’s memory of Dick, neither of which have grown up. It is certainly more of a challenge for Tom to interest his American high-school pupils in his family stories now they are divorced in terms of time, geography and culture: for example, when one of his pupils claims World War I began in 1917, as a British teacher Tom is quick to put her right. This Americanized view of history and obsession with stories of apocalypse, played out mainly through the character of Price (Ethan Hawke), is one of the most interesting strands developed from the rich network of Swiftian themes and, to some extent, overshadows the novel’s alternative discourse of idiocy. A case could be mounted to argue that ‘official’ stories were not to be trusted in 1974 with the recent impeachment of Richard Nixon (there is no direct mention of this in the film), but the period detail is not entirely convincing and 54 One of the best journalistic appraisals of the film is Rita Kempley’s review in the Washington Post (7 November 1992). Most reviewers had reservations about the film: for example, Chris Hicks calls it a ‘perverse take’ on Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989) and argues it is ‘overly impressed with its own devices’ (Deseret News, 8 January 1993). In its cinematography it is also reminiscent of period dramas from the late 1960s and 1970s, such as David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (1970), with its inclusion of an idiot, Michael (played by John Mills), and John Schlesinger’s adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), with its bucolic setting and theme of unrequited love.

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there is a strong case to have set the present in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan’s reignition of Cold War politics gave new currency to fears of historical closure and a general disregard for the deprived and the voiceless. The film begins with Tom’s voice-over and a melancholy image of him walking along a busy Pittsburgh road: ‘Once upon a time children there was a history teacher who came home one day …’ Later, when he is faced with trying to explain the ‘point’ of historical study to his pupils, he recalls his boyhood in an attempt to interest them in lived history, although it is quite evident from the early scenes that the past haunts him. It is not clear how much of the lesson is given over to these stories: time seems to stand still; Tom cannot always remember what he has told the pupils; he calls one of them Freddie by mistake; he imagines another without her clothes on, and the convoluted stories seem almost to own him at times. The notion of the self trapped in narrative reflects the postmodern conception of rhizomatic stories that grow out of each other: as Trinh Minh-ha has commented, ‘once the forces have been aroused and set into motion, they can’t simply be stopped at someone’s request. Once told, the story is bound to circulate; humanized it may have a temporary end, but its effect lingers and its end is never truly an end.’55 While Swift’s Tom over-intellectualizes to hold off his deep-rooted anguish, the mustached and pipe-smoking Irons just about manages to avoid becoming a parody of a British teacher abroad with his soulful and, at times, tragic melancholia (evident even in comic scenes when he gets drunk with Price). With his job about to end and his wife’s ‘madness’ leading to the collapse of their marriage, only when he is telling stories does he regain some control, as if they represent a lifeline in his emotional waterlands. While film and novel both imply that history cannot be contained within classroom walls (and there does seem to be a subtle critique of institutionalization), the power of the stories plays havoc with Tom’s emotions as he tries to make lessons out of past burdens. Only when the classroom dissolves into a scene in which a van carries both teacher and pupils back to 1911 does Tom become the assured leader, giving them an hour to explore the Atkinsons’ estate. But when they are back in the classroom and he tries to explain the conditions of Dick’s birth, his sentences break up as he struggles to contain his emotions and to explain events coherently. The film also plays around with the sequencing of the Fenland story: rather than beginning and ending with Dick’s dive into the Ouse, initially to impress Mary and then again in the aftermath of discovering the truth of his conception, his role is squeezed between Mary’s present-day story. She is introduced in the first line of voice-over (‘a teacher … came home one day after giving a class on the French Revolution to find that his wife, a woman that he’d loved since they were children, had herself committed a revolutionary, a miraculous act’) and the abortion is the missing piece of the family story Tom relates in his retirement speech given during 55 Trinh Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 133.

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school assembly. Gyllenhaal plays down the messianic theme of the novel, implying that Mary has little foresight in the emotional cauldron that leads to her stealing the baby. The film also brushes over the theme of the maternal void: Tom mentions the death of his own mother briefly and the adult relationship between Tom and Mary is not given much psychological depth.56 However, we are given clues as to Tom’s problematic relationship with women, from the jealousy of his younger self (Grant Warnock) when the teenage Mary (Lena Heady) describes the size of Dick’s penis, to their inability to communicate in the present, and his curt treatment of her during a dinner party at the headmaster’s house (when she claims she is having a baby and he insists to the hosts that she is referring to a puppy). The way in which Tom claims the storytelling ‘disease’ has been inherited from his father and grandfather suggests that the procreativity of his stories stands in for the child that Mary cannot have. After the stolen baby has been returned to its mother and Mary has an emotional tantrum, Tom keeps repeating the words ‘just talk to me’ (to which she eventually responds ‘talk about what?’), as if ‘talk’ is the only way he knows of coping. Although the scene closes with them embracing, Mary leaves him a week later and we hear her voice-over for the first time admitting they have both been imprisoned ‘for so long’. Tom only sees Mary once more, when in the closing sequence he follows her back to East Anglia and, one suspects, to the Fens of his imagination. The reorganization of the narrative may suggest that the idiot figure’s symbolic role is not as important in the film, but the acting of David Morrissey makes Dick the most memorable of the Fenland characters, especially when he is set alongside the young Tom and Mary (whom it is difficult to match up to their adult versions). When we first see Dick he is much older and bigger than Tom, Mary and Freddie and is dressed in labouring clothes, at work on his eel boat while the others play in their undergarments on the bridge. Dick’s Norfolk accent is much stronger than the children (emphasizing his lack of education) and when he takes his clothes off his broad physique, the engorged swelling in his long johns, and his lengthy underwater swim down the Ouse stress not only his bodily maturity, but the mismatch between Dick’s physical and mental life. This is very different to the portrayal of June (Laura Morelli) in Fred Schepisi’s film version of Last Orders (2001), in which her large body and vegetative state reflect the emptiness of her mind and inability to acknowledge her mother (Helen Mirren).57 Dick’s face is round and lacks Tom’s range of expressions (for example, when he laughs Dick’s 56 John Schad discusses this void in terms of Mary’s ‘hole’ and how her phantom pregnancy ‘constitutes a parodic version of the “immaculate conception”’ in the novel, but it is difficult to sustain this reading of the film version: Schad, ‘The End of the End of History’, 919. 57 The obvious difference between Dick and June, apart from the degree of their cerebral impairment, is that June has been institutionalized from a young age and is in need of constant care, whereas Dick has worked and lived freely with his father and brother in the Fens.

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mouth widens as he inhales), but it is certainly not featureless (unlike June’s face) and he easily conveys anger, frustration and desire. When it comes to language, Dick finds it difficult to emit more than single words (‘Freddie’, ‘Hello’, ‘Some’, ‘No’) or to form questions (‘Many?’, ‘You want?’), but later, when he asks his father (Pete Postlethwaite) about conception (‘Where do babies come from?’) and demands his brother read the letter (‘You read it Tom!’), we see glimpses of an intelligence that has been arrested primarily due to lack of education. The age difference between the brothers explains why they are not close, but Tom reveres Dick despite his limitations – at least, he does now retrospectively – ‘he was simple, but I didn’t care. In fact, I think it made me love him even more.’ Perhaps the most significant scene between the brothers begins with Tom’s enraged admission that he is the father of Mary’s baby when he realizes that Dick has killed Freddie Parr. His own anger enflamed, Dick threatens Tom with an empty bottle, then runs outside the house distraught and lost in himself. We barely see his face until he has dragged Tom upstairs to force him to read the letter his grandfather left explaining his birth. The shot/counter-shot of their faces in the loft conveys Tom’s indignation and fear and Dick’s ignorance, the light source illuminating Tom’s fine and pale features, while Dick’s larger, ruddier face nestles in darkness. When Tom refuses to relay the contents of the letter Dick is angry and insistent, grabbing him by the throat and demanding ‘You tell me Tom!’ Tom could lie, but he self-righteously shouts out the message as Dick’s face gradually registers the truth of his conception. The scene immediately cuts to a long shot of Dick leaving the house on his motorcycle, with Tom and their father following. They eventually find him aboard his other ‘machine comfort’, the dredger, by which time he has drunk more of Atkinsons’ ale and is lurching about the deck. Before anyone can reach the dredger Dick has stripped off his clothes (there is no shot of his face, but the jerky camera movements exaggerate his distress) and he stands erect, nude and pale with his arms outstretched against the dark hull of the dredger with the flat Fens in the distance, before plunging into the Ouse with Tom and his father looking on aghast. It is clear throughout this sequence that Dick suffers immensely and that his emotional response is little different (and certainly no less irrational) than Mary’s theft years later. While the film finds it difficult to portray the slipperiness of Dick’s physical image suggested in the novel (part-fish, part-machine, part-human), by shrouding his face for much of the sequence and using his body to convey his emotional state, it reveals that even a character controlled by physicality can give creative vent to intense feeling. The film and novel focus primarily on Tom’s grief and guilt (and to a certain extent, Mary’s too), yet hidden behind Tom’s rumination that amnesia and the ‘Here and Now’ offer escapes from history is the very real suffering of his brother – suffering which, like Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser, gives Dick’s body image definition and coherence. Julia Kristeva claims that suffering forms the ‘place of the subject. Where it emerges, where it is differentiated from [the] chaos’ of the semiotic realm,

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while the ‘narrative web’ that tries to contain it ‘is a thin film constantly threatened with bursting’.58 Kristeva’s description directly recalls Tom’s own theorization of history as ‘a thin garment, easily punctured by a knife-blade called Now’, emitting pain that ‘cries out’ from the prison of narrative.59 Just as the ‘Here and Now’ cannot be fully expressed in language, so Dick’s fragile identity escapes the net of Tom’s stories. And, just as Tom tries to reclaim the past and make sense of it in the present, so he indulges in nostalgia for a moment of innocence before death and abortion marred his sheltered childhood world. While stories seem to be all Tom has (especially after losing his job and wife), the paradox of storytelling in which, as Ronald McKinney describes, ‘every fiction contains the possibility for both illumination and obfuscation’, does not help him resolve his emotions and he cannot finally talk himself into a cure.60 Furthermore, although Dick’s suffering is (particularly in the film) partially obliterated by the virtuosity of Tom’s storytelling and present-day worries, in his last moments his pain ‘cries out’ from his body as he dives into the watery depths of his brother’s narrative.

58 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, pp. 140–41. 59 Ibid., p. 141. 60 McKinney, ‘The Greening of Postmodernism’, 828.

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Chapter Nine

Such a Long Journey (Rohinton Mistry and Sturla Gunnarsson) The Toronto-based writer Rohinton Mistry emigrated from India to Canada in the mid-1970s, but from his first collection of stories Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987) to his latest novel Family Matters (2002) he has continued to focus his literary attention on the Parsi community in Bombay. Like other Asian writers living outside the subcontinent, Salman Rushdie, Romesh Gunesekera and Vikram Seth, Mistry uses the geographical distance between Toronto and Bombay to explore both his own past and the tensions between the colonial and postcolonial history of India. Following the footsteps of Indian writers like Bharati Mukherjee, who emigrated from Bengal to Toronto in the 1960s (and then later to America), as part of the second wave of South Asian emigrants Mistry moved to Canada in 1975 to work in a bank and study at the University of Toronto. Mukherjee’s fiction focuses centrally on themes of assimilation and the difficulties of fashioning a hybrid identity in North America, and Mistry also directly explores the tensions between East and West in some of the stories in Tales from Firozsha Baag.1 However, while Jaydipsinh Dodiya claims that South Asian literature written in English in the 1970s often reflected ‘the reactionary opposition of the indigenous people’ and the ‘suffering, indignity and injustice undergone by the immigrants’, Mistry’s first two novels, Such a Long Journey (1991) and A Fine Balance (1995), are set back in India in the 1970s and do not engage directly with the Asian diaspora.2 Having said this, as Nilufer Bharucha argues, although the Parsis are among the most Westernized group in India, Mistry is likely to have experienced a kind of ancestral diaspora even in India (his Persian ancestors being exiled from Iran), together with the general feeling that the Parsis had become ‘downgraded’ in the economic upheaval following the retreat of British colonial forces in the 1940s.3 Even though Mistry has not written about cultural flight to the same extent as Rushdie and Mukherjee, on this broader level the theme of displacement creeps into his fiction, 1 For example, in ‘Squatter’ the storyteller Nariman relates the tale of Sarosh, who finds that his inability to use Western toilets in Toronto is one of the factors for him deciding to return to India: ‘there had been a time when it was perfectly natural to squat. Now it seemed a grotesquely aberrant thing to do’: Rohinton Mistry, Tales from Firozsha Baag (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 162. 2 Jaydipsinh Dodiya (ed.), The Fiction of Rohinton Mistry (New Delhi: Prestige, 1998), p. 12. It is important to note that many writers including R. K. Narayan and Anita Desai continued to set their fictions in India. 3 Ibid., p. 24.

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particularly his double view of Bombay as both ‘insider’ (Bombay Parsi) and ‘outsider’ (Canadian citizen) and what Angela Lambert describes as a common theme in exilic fiction: the ‘re-invention of the past, seen with the sharp eyes of a child and then filtered through veils of nostalgia’.4 In his fascinating book The Good Parsi (1996) on the changing fortunes of the Parsis, T. M. Luhrmann argues that at the beginning of the twentieth century they were ‘at the height of their remarkable economic, political, and cultural achievements, [and] represented themselves as manly and rational and progressive like the British’, but now, fifty years after the liberation of India, ‘many Parsis seem to condemn themselves as effeminate, irrational, and backward’.5 Luhrmann divides Parsis living elsewhere (particularly in North America) from Bombay Parsis, who collectively see themselves in a condition of ‘decay’ with a marginalized culture, falling birthrate, and shrinking housing market, both ‘inadequate as Englishmen [and] inadequate as Indians’.6 While Luhrmann may be criticized for constructing an oversimplified narrative, the distance between North American and Bombay Parsis provides Mistry with the kind of critical perspective to reflect on the contemporary challenges of his people from the margins.7 Rather than buying into the colonial narrative of rise and fall that Luhrmann identifies, Mistry uses a range of familiar literary elements – including the isolated protagonist, the hesitant journey, the protective ritual, and the enigmatic character – to bring nuance to the stories of the Bombay Parsis. Whereas Rushdie’s and Mukherjee’s postcolonial fiction are marked by energy and excessive characters, the mood that pervades Mistry’s writing is one of disappointment, in which his characters attempt to come to terms with their changing economic, spiritual and topographical conditions. Luhrmann describes Mistry’s literary tone as conveying a ‘deep ambivalence about Parsi life in India, which [he presents] as warm endearing, communal, but also as aging into dilapidated eccentricity’.8 On this issue of ambivalence, it is useful to contrast

4 Ibid., p. 28. Angela Lambert, ‘Touched With Fire’, The Guardian Review (27 April 2002), 6. 5 T. M. Luhrmann, The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. viii. 6 Ibid., p. 14. 7 In Family Matters the struggling Bombay Parsi Yezad tells his sons about his application to the Canadian immigration office. The episode sketches out the best and worst of Canadian culture: it is described as having much higher multicultural ideals than the USA (although Bharati Mukherjee has argued otherwise), but the slovenly immigration official rejects the application based on Yezad’s lack of knowledge of the rules of ice hockey, echoing the cultural bias of early US intelligence testing for immigrant children in which they were asked to identify a tennis court: Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), pp. 240–47. 8 Luhrmann, The Good Parsi, p. 57. Like Rushdie, Mistry has his detractors: for example, Roshan Shahni has argued that Mistry is a ‘delinquent’ artist and not representative of Parsi culture: cited in A. G. Khan, Canadian Literature and Indian Literature (New Delhi: Creative Books, 1995), p. 24.

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Rushdie’s and Mistry’s very different fictional techniques: they both write about India from a Westernized perspective, yet they are anxious to remain true to their past by working through the tangled histories of the Asian subcontinent. This comparison is particularly fruitful for discussing the theme of idiocy, with both Rushdie in Shame (1983) and Mistry in Such a Long Journey using idiot figures to explore the unsettling conditions of exile. Edward Said claims that cultural exile is a permanent state for many displaced writers because ‘you cannot go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home’ and nor can you ‘never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation’.9 On this reading, the status of Mistry’s and Rushdie’s fiction as Asian writers currently living in North America will always be uncertain. For example, although Aijaz Ahmad notes that some features of Rushdie’s novels seem non-Western, particularly his ‘non-mimetic narration’, the fusion of high literary themes with a popular Bollywood aesthetic and the ‘characteristically Indian penchant for obsessive digressions and the telling of an interminable tale’, Ahmad is uncertain about the cultural status of his fiction.10 Given Rushdie’s many statements on the condition of the migrant – ‘our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools’11 – Ahmad suggests that he entertains two rival views of migrancy: the first in which the migrant suffers a loss (or deficit) of roots, and the second in which there is ‘an excess of belongings: not that [the migrant] belongs nowhere, but that he belongs to too many places’.12 Ahmad is critical of Rushdie’s fictional excess as an echo both of the high modernist approach to identity (‘the condition of exile as the basic metaphor for modernity’13) and of poststructuralist theory in its interest in the margins of representation. Ahmad is also sceptical about the virtues of the insider-outsider position that Rushdie shares with Mistry, seeing it as a central feature of metropolitan modernism and the attempts of Joyce, Stein and Beckett to distance themselves from fixed national identities. While Rushdie can be criticized for being too vigorous in his celebration of hybridity and migrancy, Ahmad’s critique cannot be applied carte blanche to postcolonial writers like Mistry, who does not flaunt these conditions, preferring characters that are neither fully rooted nor obviously migrants. Indeed, Mistry is a much more realistic

9 Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 3. 10 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1994), p. 126. A version of Ahmad’s argument could also apply to Mistry. Although he has discussed his preoccupation with Bombay as ‘unfinished business’, while learning his craft he was drawn to accomplished European and American authors such as Joyce, Chekhov, Malamud, Bellow and Turgenev: Stephen Mithe, ‘There From Here’, Quill & Quire, 61(9) (September 1995), 65. 11 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta, 1991), p. 15. 12 Ahmad, In Theory, p. 127. 13 Ibid., p. 134.

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storyteller than Rushdie, creating more or less stable characters and resisting the self-reflective, frame-breaking and parodic techniques that Rushdie shares with European postmodern writers like Günter Grass and Graham Swift.14 Where Mistry does show an interest in the insider-outsider perspective and the tensions between deficiency and excess that Ahmad identifies is in his subtle rendering of characters and the domestic tribulations they endure. Mistry uses the family as a conduit to channel his exploration of displacement and migrancy, particularly as they are pertinent for Parsi culture in India. As the next section discusses, this is particularly true of the two central characters in Such a Long Journey, the earnest protagonist Gustad Noble and the idiot Tehmul-Lungraa, whose lives are marked by the kind of ‘unsettling’ quality that Said identifies as a key feature of cultural exile. By way of framing the discussion of Such a Long Journey, it is worth comparing the excessive and fabulous idiot figure, Sufiya Zinobia, from Rushdie’s ‘modern cartoon’ Shame and the much more limited idiot in Mistry’s story ‘One Sunday’, both written in the early 1980s.15 Where Rushdie favours an allegorical technique and his characters are often larger-than-life grotesques with extraordinary qualities, Mistry is interested in characters that are much more earthbound. If Rushdie explores the imaginative possibilities of ‘anti-gravity’ and ‘anti-belonging’, Mistry portrays characters weighed down by forces of gravity that are rarely of their own choosing.16 In this manner, Mistry develops what the Czech novelist Milan Kundera describes in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Nesnesitelná lehkost byti, 1984) as the difficult and often ‘unbearable’ conditions of being, which cannot always be expressed in the language of roots or belonging. The following discussion reveals a marked contrast between Rushdie’s and Mistry’s aesthetic priorities, but the two writers are similar in turning to idiot figures for testing what Timothy Brennan calls ‘such old-fashioned things as morality and “humanity” on values which have not been totally destroyed’ by the upheavals of family, nation and history.17 Sufiya Zinobia is the most vibrant character in Rushdie’s ‘political and moral fable’ Shame.18 She is the second child of Bilquis and Raza Hyder (the latter a personification of the military dictator General Zia ul-Haq19), born after their first 14 Rather grandly, the Rushdie-like narrator in Shame claims ‘I, too, like all migrants, am a fantasist. I build imaginary countries and try to impose them on the ones that exist’: Rushdie, Shame (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 87. Compare Rushdie’s certainty to Mistry’s coded and more troubled statement in the story ‘Lend Me Your Light’: ‘Gradually, I discovered that I’d brought back with me my entire burden of riddles and puzzles, unsolved … I, Tiresias, throbbing between two lives, humbled by the ambiguities and dichotomies confronting me’: Mistry, Tales from Firozsha Baag, p. 191. 15 Ahmad, In Theory, p. 141. 16 Rushdie, Shame, p. 86. 17 Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 125. 18 D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke, Salman Rushdie (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p. 56. 19 It is worth comparing Rushdie’s use of extended political allegory with

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male child was stillborn. Sufiya is ‘as small a baby as anyone had ever seen’ and described as ‘the miracle that went wrong’ because her parents anticipated another son.20 Not only does Sufiya defy her parents’ expectations but, like Saleem in Midnight’s Children (1981), many suspect she is not entirely of this world when she is said to have blushed at birth (given the myth that idiots are incapable of blushing).21 In fact, Sufiya’s idiocy derives from later in childhood when she contracts brain fever, after which her cerebral development slows down: her mental age is three when she is twelve and she does not progress much beyond a mental age of seven. The cause of her idiocy stems from the medicine she is given when Bilquis rejects a civilian doctor and turns to: a local Hakim who prepared an expensive liquid distilled from cactus roots, ivory dust and parrot feathers, … [which] had the effect of slowing her down for the rest of her years, because the unfortunate side-effect of a potion so filled with elements of longevity was to retard the progress of time inside the body of anyone to whom it was given.22

There is a suggestion here that conventional medicine would not have afflicted Sufiya in the same way; but, as Mistry implies in Such a Long Journey, Western cures may not have worked at all. Rushdie transfers the description from a medical to an ontological level, suggesting that Sufiya’s condition loosens her from time and she becomes more-than-human (a superior being) just as she becomes lessthan-human (an idiot). The narrator is keen to stress that Sufiya’s idiocy makes her innocent and ‘clean (pak) in the midst of a dirty world’. Although he expresses concern that he might be perpetuating a Romantic myth, Rushdie develops the modernist interest in the natural morality of the idiot that we have seen in Dostoevsky, Conrad and Wassermann, using Sufiya as an index of the shame of a nation that has strayed so far from its founding ideals.23 Sufiya may be ‘pure’in the sense that she is unsullied by the corruption of the adult world, but as the narrative develops, she becomes a figure of shame and retribution. Shame is a complex emotion for an idiot to experience, suggesting both an ability to perceive wrongdoing and an acute awareness of others. Sufiya’s propensity to blush from an early age suggests that her body represents a somatic marker of morality, even though her parents are happy to dismiss the habit as attention seeking:

Mistry’s more specific attacks on Indira Gandhi in Such a Long Journey, particularly her manipulation of public opinion for her own political gains and her nationalization of the banks. Mistry does not allegorize to the extent of Rushdie, but he does use the dirt of Bombay to symbolize political and national decay. 20 Rushdie, Shame, p. 89; p. 87. 21 In Book 3 of Midnight’s Children it is suspected that Saleem has become an idiot, although this later proves to be false. 22 Rushdie, Shame, p. 100. 23 Sufiya is described as a symbol of ‘purity in what is supposed to be the Land of the Pure’, which is a literal translation of ‘Pakistan’: ibid., pp. 120–21.

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Although the narrator is at times patronizing towards Sufiya, he respects her ability to hold up a moral mirror to other characters, suggesting that she exists on the same saintly level as Dostoevsky’s Myshkin as ‘a person who suffers in our stead’.25 Where Myshkin is largely passive in his saint-like role, Sufiya has moments of intense rage that result in destruction or murder. The intense shame she feels for others causes her to act instinctively, conflicting with her purity and creating what the narrator calls ‘something more like a principle, the embodiment of violence, the pure malevolent strength of the Beast’.26 Aijaz Ahmad accuses Rushdie of misogyny in creating this Manichean split in Sufiya’s personality, but the narrator actually admits that he finds it difficult to place her into a stable category: she is described as ‘one of those supernatural beings, those exterminating or avenging angels, or werewolves, or vampires, about whom we are happy to read in stories’ and she later becomes a panther and a cloud.27 In interview Rushdie has commented that he was ‘worried about what she meant’, she was a disturbing character to write because ‘there is a dark area at the center of her’ that cannot be easily explained.28 Ahmad’s comments on misogyny in Shame may be overstated, but one of his more incisive criticisms of Rushdie is that moral and social regeneration rarely stem from the deeds of ordinary people, but from superhuman beings like Sufiya.29 However, Rushdie’s main point (which may or may not allow him to sidestep the charges of misogyny) is that Sufiya’s character continually defies the expectations of others: she escapes the frame of submissive wife to become a rapist and the frame of passive idiot to become a figure of retribution. Compared to Rushdie, Mistry’s portrayal of an idiot figure in ‘One Sunday’, one of the best stories from Tales from Firozsha Baag, is much more restrained. The tales collectively focus on a group of Parsis living in an apartment complex in 24 Ibid., p. 123. 25 Ibid., p. 141. 26 Ibid., p. 242. Roger Clark describes Sufiya as a morally ambiguous character: she is ‘empathetic and compassionate to those around her, yet she unknowingly pollutes her soul, imbibing the dirty water of military, political, ethnic, sexual and religious repression. These waters constitute the ocean from which the satanic Leviathan rises’: Roger Y. Clark, Stranger Gods: Salman Rushdie’s Other Worlds (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), p. 122. 27 Rushdie, Shame, p. 197. 28 John Haffenden, ‘Salman Rushdie’, Novelists in Interview (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 254–5. Jaina Sanga argues that Sufiya represents the repressed condition of women, now seeking vengeance against the agents of patriarchal power: Jaina C. Sanga, Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), p. 60. 29 See Goonetilleke, Salman Rushdie, p. 67.

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Bombay, with some characters, like the sensitive boy Kersi, appearing more than once. There is a Dickensian quality in the vivid immediacy of Mistry’s characters (although he resists Dickens’ fondness for caricature), while his evocation of place and slow build-up of suspense is intensely cinematic. Mistry has been described as a calm writer, particularly for his ability to simultaneously entertain and trouble the reader, exposing the frailties of characters with ‘gentle humour and an eye for the comic’. While he is certainly a humane writer, ‘One Sunday’ has a darker and more unsettling side in which bewildering and potentially violent emotions are exposed.30 At the beginning of ‘One Sunday’ an ailing woman Tehmina living in Firozsha Baag is surprised on her regular visit to her neighbour’s refrigerator by the oddjob man Francis, who lives under the awning of a furniture shop (where he used to work) across the road from the apartments. The reader is not told Francis’ age, but he is described as a little over five foot and ‘possessed strength which was out of all proportion to his light build’.31 He appears at the door ‘grinning away as usual’ and the first words that Tehmina utters are ‘Stop staring, you idiot.’ His command of language is adequate, but Tehmina criticizes him for not listening properly when he insists that the owner of the fridge, Najamai, has promised him work. Francis follows the dictates of his hunger and skulks back to ‘the shade of the furniture store awning’, while Tehmina surmises ‘he must be built like a bull’ with his massive strength. On encountering Francis later in the dark corridor, Tehmina is nervous of his strength and thinks that ‘one never knew when this type of person would turn vicious’.32 But he is not without intelligence, realizing that he must humour his neighbours if he is to continue doing jobs for them. Francis also possesses basic motor and co-ordination skills: he has the capacity to teach the young boy Kersi how to fly a kite and they play together at ‘spinning tops and shooting marbles’.33 Kersi’s parents also treat Francis with suspicion, largely on class grounds, believing it was not right for ‘a Parsi boy to consort in this way with a man who was really no better than a homeless beggar’. When the middle-aged Najamai returns from her trip, she is surprised to find a thief in her flat and Kersi arrives just in time to see Francis disappear in the neighbouring non-Parsi district. Kersi had been spending time carefully putting a new rubber on the handle of his cricket bat, and he feels ‘angry and betrayed at the thought of Francis vanishing into Tar Gully’.34 Initially reluctant to follow Francis, Kersi is overcome with the ‘flush of heroics’ as he and his brother Percy venture into Tar Gully armed with cricket bats. During their search Kersi becomes lost in erotic thoughts, while Percy causes a scene that leads to Francis being beaten in public. Kersi is horrified as Francis is ‘abused and spat upon’; feeling intense

30 31 32 33 34

Dodiya (ed.), The Fiction of Rohinton Mistry, p. 22. Mistry, Tales from Firozsha Baag, p. 27. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 34.

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shame he can no longer look his former friend in the face.35 On his return to Firozsha Baag, Francis is forced to confront Najamai; he can only answer her questions with tears, pleading for her not to allow the crowd to give him another beating. Before she can act, a Muslim servant kicks Francis in the ribs, causing him to ‘yelp like a dog’ and keel over.36 Kersi and Percy are seen as heroes and Tehmina ‘the minor villain of the piece’, but Najamai simply wonders what the police will do with Francis. On returning to her flat she mops up Francis’ urine in the corner of the room (where, she surmises, he must have lost control of his bladder when she screamed) and wonders about hiring help to bring her food and look after the flat now that Francis has been exposed as a thief. Kersi feels sick in his heart as he rips off the rubber grip on his bat and unwinds the cord as a kind of penance for his hand in capturing Francis. The last image of the story is of Kersi looking at the bat handle, now ‘bald, exposed, defenceless’, and then smashing the bat with his foot as his repressed emotions flood out. There is no full explanation of how Kersi and Najamai feel about the incident, nor does the narrator intervene (as Rushdie’s often does in Shame) to tell the reader what happens to Francis; the story closes simply with the image of the idiot as pariah and with the old and young left to deal with betrayal and shame in their own ways.

Of Journeys and Idiots Many of the themes present in germinal form in ‘One Sunday’ are developed in the ‘cautionary tale’ Such a Long Journey through an elaborate narrative of subterfuge, betrayal and friendship in the Parsi district of Bombay.37 Set in 1971 when India and Pakistan went to war over East Pakistan (soon to become Bangladesh), the story focuses on the middle-aged Parsi bank clerk Gustad Noble, whose domestic and public lives are driven into conflict when he is asked by his friend Jimmy Bilimoria (who works for the secret service RAW) to look after some dubiously gained money. Gustad is a pillar of the Parsi community and constantly tries to do the right thing for his friends and family, but often with adverse consequences, such as asking the butcher to kill a chicken he had bought for his daughter Roshan’s birthday meal after she had grown fond of it, and forcing his reluctant nineteen-year-old son Sohrab to study at the India Institute of Technology because he believes that a scientific education would be best for him.38 Gustad is portrayed as a dignified and devout 35 Ibid., p. 36. 36 Ibid., p. 37. 37 Mithe, ‘There From Here’, 65. 38 Like many Parsis, Gustad places great emphasis on scientific education for his eldest son and he is dismissive of the liberal arts education Sohrab chooses for himself: IIT was Gustad’s ‘El Dorado and Shangri-La, it was Atlantis and Camelot, it was Xanadu and Oz. It was the home of the Holy Grail’: Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 66.

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Zoroastrian Parsi, saying his prayers at dawn and seeing himself as a moral agent: a kind of heroic ‘Parsi Saint George, cleaving dragons with his trusty kusti’.39 It is noticeable that Gustad’s cultural reference points are often British and American (he listens to Nat King Cole, sings ‘The Donkey Serenade’ and ‘I Love a Lassie’, and buys European books), and he fondly remembers the paternal care he was given by the British as a boy before Indian independence and his father lost his bookselling business. Gustad remains dignified and noble (as his name attests) and maintains ‘the admiration of friends’ throughout, despite his glowing memories of the colonial past and his anxiety about the decline of his city.40 However, he is often in conflict with Sohrab and his wife Dilvanez, he is uncomfortable with some aspects of Bombay, and he is sometimes dismissive of others’ views, resorting to his catchphrase: ‘What idiotic-lunatic thing are you saying?’41 As an English-speaking Parsi, Gustad does not understand the ancient language of his Zoroastrian faith, but he looks forward to his early morning prayers that represent the still point in the midst of his increasingly chaotic life. Later, at the funeral of his friend Dinshawji, prayers give him spiritual balm and consolation: He listened to the music, the song in a language which he did not understand, but which was wondrously soothing. All his life he had uttered by rote the words of this dead language, comprehending not one of them while mouthing his prayers. But tonight … the words were alive; tonight he came closer than he ever had to understanding the ancient meanings.42

Gustad is tolerant of other religions (such as his friend Malcolm’s Catholicism) and he sends his daughter Roshan to a convent school, but he relies on the rituals and ceremonies of Zoroastrianism as a source of morality and anchor for his wellbeing. Even if the ancient language is beyond his understanding, the prayers provide a subterranean link to his Persian ancestry and offer a counterpoint to the civic and political turbulence of India in the 1970s. The complexities surrounding the war with Pakistan over Bangladesh make it difficult for Gustad to follow the national news, even though he has two radios, one tuned to a Hindi broadcast and the other to BBC World Service. Indeed, throughout Gustad’s ‘long journey’ in search of personal, spiritual and political knowledge (a phrase that Mistry takes from Eliot’s poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’), the novel suggests that language is both necessary for enlightenment, but can also obscure the revelation of the truth.43 39 Ibid., p. 5. 40 Ibid., p. 1. 41 Ibid., p. 166. Gustad’s use of ‘idiotic-lunatic’ seems to be more a Parsi figure of speech than a venomous invective. When the good-natured Roxana in Family Matters calls her husband Yezad stupid, her father comments that ‘my daughter calls everyone stupid … including me’: Mistry, Family Matters, p. 163. 42 Mistry, Such a Long Journey, pp. 247–8. 43 Mistry’s use of language in the novel is itself interesting in its mixture of Indian English, Gujarati and familiar Hindi words and phrases.

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Gustad’s emphasis on learning and knowledge (played out through the Oedipal struggle with Sohrab) is contrasted with other characters such as an illiterate old lady he meets at Victoria Station and the idiot Tehmul who, like Francis in ‘One Sunday’ and the buffoon Edul Munshi in Family Matters, does odd jobs in the apartment complex. Now in his mid-thirties, Tehmul’s most striking characteristic is that he speaks so fast that it is difficult to follow what he is saying (this ‘verbal velocity’ is more incomprehensible in Sturla Gunnarsson’s film version, as discussed below).44 The narrator explains that Tehmul’s condition resulted from falling out of a tree as a small child: ‘the fall from the neem had broken his hip. And although he had not landed on his head something went wrong inside due to the jolt of the accident, perhaps in the same way that earthquakes will crack houses far from the epicentre’.45 Tehmul’s hip fracture is treated at the time by conventional medical means (he has crutches for many years), but his internal affliction is given little treatment. Although Tehmul’s characteristics are unlikely to be informed by the portrayal of the mentally afflicted character Appu-Kili in the Indian writer O. V. Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak (1969; translated 1994), there are striking parallels between the two figures. Tehmul’s portrayal echoes Kili’s description as a ‘cretin who was neither man nor child’; they both have uncertain positions within their communities; when Kili tries to talk he speaks with ‘an eerie mixture of lisps and gutturals’; and he is depicted as a liminal and almost mystical figure ‘standing in the twilight of births and deaths’.46 However, whereas Kili and Rushdie’s Sufiya are stunted – ‘when he was ten his arms and legs gave up growing, and stayed on in their grotesque childhood’47 – Tehmul is much more capable despite his limp and his intellectual limitations. Like many of the literary idiot figures already discussed, Tehmul’s idiotic traits are partly the result of his inadequate schooling. His parents had tried to ensure he had a regular education, but eventually the school refuses to accept their payments and releases him. With his parents’ death, Tehmul is looked after by his elder brother and becomes rat-catcher for the Khodadad building. His habit of speaking in run-on words ‘at breakneck speed’ that went ‘whizzing incomprehensibly’ past the listener’s ear’ – ‘GustadGustadrunningrace’ and ‘Gustadbigbigfatrats’ – convey an active mind that does not have the proper outlet to express itself: ‘it was as if some internal adjustment had been made to make up for the slowness of his legs with the velocity of his tongue’.48 This form of expression is not unusual in Asian writing (including Rushdie’s fiction), probably deriving from what Timothy Brennan notes as ‘the practice of Arabic calligraphers, who often connected adjacent letters when copying 44 Ibid., p. 32. 45 Ibid., p. 30. 46 O. V. Vijayan, The Legends of Khasak, trans. O. V. Vijayan (New Delhi: Penguin, 1994), p. 57; p. 72; p. 85. 47 Ibid., p. 79. 48 Mistry, Such a Long Journey, p. 32; p. 31.

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the Arabic in order to create a pleasing visual effect from the continuously patterned line’.49 But Tehmul’s mode of communication is no artistic or stylistic flourish: it is both a sign of his mental limitations and an indication of his Otherness. The reader is told that only Gustad can easily ‘decipher’ his language and the narrator wonders ‘if he understood more than people assumed’ in spite of his speech impediment.50 Tehmul is childlike in his love of toys and flying objects: ‘things that travelled through the air enchanted him … things flying and fluttering in freedom. Whether it be bird or butterfly, a paper dart or a falling leaf, he never tired of trying to possess it.’ This love of flight implies that he is a restless character denied the kind of inner coherence that would give structure to his thoughts and sense impressions. But, like Sufiya in Shame, Tehmul’s innocence as idiot figure is only partial. Children get along with him in the compound, but ‘it was the grown-ups who ran out of patience with some of his annoying habits’ particularly his public displays of strong sexual desire: He scratched with a circular movement, a churning, scrambling, stirring motion of his hand, and those who sought more subtlety in a nickname than Tehmul-Lungraa called him Scrambled Egg. Women claimed he did it deliberately to annoy them. They said that his hand regularly moved downward in their presence, and it was rubbing and caressing himself that he did, more than scratching … [he] knew perfectly well what all his parts were for, never mind if his head was not right – what with a big packet like that, and no underwear even to keep it all in place, it was shameful to have him wandering around dingle-dangle.51

As this passage demonstrates, Tehmul’s excessiveness is present on all levels – cerebral, physical, verbal and sexual – as if his idiocy has ‘scrambled’ him and overtaken his whole being. Tehmul’s behaviour is excessive, he is treated with some suspicion, and Dilvanez reluctantly exploits him as she tries to break the destructive spell that has taken hold of her family, but neither the narrator nor Gustad turn him into a grotesque, with Mistry treating him with a gentleness of touch rarely found in Dickens or Rushdie. Whereas Sufiya in Shame propels the narrative in the latter stages, Tehmul hovers around the action of Such a Long Journey without contributing centrally to it. His brother as primary carer is a notable absence in the novel and his two primary relationships are with Gustad and Miss Kutpitia, the local crank and herbalist. She shouts at him but seems to sense Tehmul’s mystical ability ‘to understand the hidden meaning of mundane events and chance occurrences’, while he and Gustad both have limps (Gustad received his hip fracture in a traffic accident and was treated by a Bombay Bonesetter instead of the conventional means used to treat Tehmul’s injury).52 In fact, Tehmul’s association with Gustad begins to develop 49 50 51 52

Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World, p. 125. Mistry, Such a Long Journey, p. 33; p. 31. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 4.

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when Sohrab moves out of the family home after their relationship has soured, as if Tehmul is a distorted image of his son. Whereas Gustad invests in Sohrab, buying almonds to make him brainy, he does nothing for Tehmul except for treating him with patience and tolerating his odd behaviour. In response, Tehmul is childlike in the pleasure he gains from showing Gustad things, such as the chicken that he waves ‘with frantic glee as it screeched and flapped desperately’.53 Because the reader has no direct access to Tehmul’s thoughts, his fondness for Gustad is not explained but, like Kersi’s relationship to Francis in ‘One Sunday’, their affinity seems to be down to Gustad’s recognition of his basic humanity. Considering Gustad uses the word ‘idiot’ a great deal as an insult – ‘What idiotic-lunatic thing are you saying?’ and ‘that idiot’s ugly little fatty’54 – he does not label Tehmul in such terms (even though Miss Kutpitia and Dilvanez do). Indeed, Tehmul’s perpetual state of excitement is in direct contrast to the heaviness that Gustad feels inside due to his faltering relationships with Sohrab and Jimmy and his unhappiness with the state of Bombay, a heaviness exacerbated by his need to remain in control of his emotions. As I discuss in the next section, just as Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being suggests that the traditional alignment of ‘lightness’ with positive qualities and ‘weight’ with negative traits is too simple, so Mistry problematizes the distinction in Such a Long Journey. One of the most important scenes in the book for understanding Tehmul’s role involves the casting of the spell by Miss Kutpitia and Dilvanez that is intended to remove the destructive spirits in the Noble household. From early on the reader is told that Miss Kutpitia knows ‘about curses and spells: both to cast and remove; about magic: black and white; about omens and auguries; about dreams and their interpretation’, and she suggests to Dilvanez that Tehmul could be used to redirect the destructive spirit that has caused Sohrab to leave home and Roshan to fall sick (it is significant that Gustad is ignorant of the ritual by which Dilvanez puts her children’s safety above her pity for Tehmul).55 To Miss Kutpitia’s mind, giving Tehmul the potion ‘would open wide [his] channels … through which his spirit would reach and yank the evil out of Sohrab’s brain’.56 Initially Dilvanez is reluctant to exploit Tehmul and suggests that she perform the ritual on herself, but Miss Kutpitia steals the moral high ground by asking: ‘How much brains does he have to begin with? … So what difference will it make? Tehmul himself will not notice anything. What I say is, we should be happy that for the first time he will do something good for another person.’57 Tehmul relishes the lime juice concoctions that Dilvanez prepares for him and she studies him to ‘see if he was behaving more brainlessly than usual … she both dreaded and wished Tehmul’s deterioration: the

53 54 55 56 57

Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 166; p. 77. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 110.

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erosion without which it would be impossible to redeem Sohrab’.58 The combination of the narrator’s neutrality, Tehmul’s naïve willingness to drink the juice and Miss Kutpitia’s restraint in refusing to prepare a more potent remedy that might result in Tehmul becoming ‘a madhouse case’ make it easy to accept these scenes of exploitation and the reader is never given a hint as to whether the ritual is working.59 In fact, the plan seems to backfire when events overtake the family with greater speed as Roshan’s illness worsens, Gustad receives threats over the money, and the clouds of war darken over the country. The nature of Gustad’s journey becomes clear as the narrative unfolds, but it is uncertain whether Tehmul’s arrested development removes him from the larger cycle of events of which he is ignorant or, at best, only dimly aware. He is certainly inquisitive and cannot control his sexual desires, but also possesses a moral sensibility that is expressed in his eagerness for the inhabitants of the Khodadad building to petition against the destruction of the communal wall. Not long after Tehmul has persuaded Gustad to sign the petition (he thinks that if Gustad signs first then everyone else will follow suit), the Parsi suggests to a local street artist that he should decorate the wall in order that it becomes a holy site and counteract the ‘shamelessness’ of the passers-by that urinate and defecate on it. Tehmul’s emotional and moral investment in the wall is never explained, but its solidity (like Gustad’s reliability) may represent the kind of structure that he lacks in his own mind and body. Perhaps because he has no other artistic outlet for his ideas, Tehmul is intrigued by the transformation of the wall and the artist’s depiction of deities of many religions, ‘some grim and vengeful, some jovial, yet others kind and avuncular’.60 The shamelessness of the defecators is in direct contrast to the spiritual tolerance that the artist tries to foster by refusing to depict the images of a single religion in favour of multiform pictures. This may appeal to Tehmul, who, like Kaspar Hauser, seems to have images in his head but no way of giving them form (see Chapter 5). Indeed, as the pictures on the wall start to proliferate in number, so the scale of the project makes the artist ‘restless’, almost as if the spirit within Tehmul emanates from the religious images. It is significant that Tehmul’s death at the end of the novel results directly from the destruction of the wall by the municipal officials; while trying to catch a flying rock in the ensuing demonstration, he is hit on the head and ‘as always, his twisted body let him down’.61 As I discuss in the next section in relation to the film adaptation of 58 Ibid., p. 147. 59 Ibid., p. 150. 60 Ibid., p. 184. That Gustad underestimates the power of art is clear in his educational plans for his son. Sohrab’s protests: ‘Daddy never made pronouncements or dreamed dreams of an artist-son. It was never: my son will paint, my son will act, he will write poetry. No, it was always: my son will be a doctor, he will be an engineer, he will be a research scientist’: p. 66. One element of Gustad’s journey is to appreciate the transforming power of art. 61 Ibid., p. 333.

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Such a Long Journey, the connection between Gustad, Tehmul and the wall runs deeper than a first reading of the novel may suggest.

The Heaviness of Being The Canadian director Sturla Gunnarsson’s 1998 adaptation of Such a Long Journey is remarkably faithful to Mistry’s story and characters, only omitting details and secondary figures to maintain its focus on Gustad’s journey.62 Made with both Canadian and British money and shot on location in Bombay, the film translates Mistry’s poetic realism into a cinematic language that gives life to the tensions between the Western and Eastern elements in Gustad’s life. Because of its faithful rendering, Nina Caplan compares the film to ‘a work of art that has been painted over’ in which ‘you can just see the outlines underneath’ of the novel.63 This palimpsestic image is particularly appropriate given that the street painter’s transformation of the Khodadad wall is one of Mistry’s central symbols. Gunnarsson felt it necessary to provide some details of Parsi history and signal contemporary events in the opening titles, but the film uses Gustad’s own confusion about the truth of national and political affairs as an index for the assumed ignorance of most contemporary viewers about the details of the Bangladeshi war in the early 1970s. Like the novel, the film subtly interweaves personal and public stories, offering contrasts and counterpoints without allegorizing or at the expense of conveying a sense of Parsi culture.64 Caplan argues that ‘it is in the details rather than in the more melodramatic events that this film excels … the dirt, smells and bureaucracy all appear equally and instantly present’.65 As such, the film depicts Zoroastrian customs (such as Gustad’s prayers and his visits to the fire-temple) without succeeding in exoticizing the city or homogenizing Indian culture. As an Icelandic immigrant raised in Vancouver, Gunnarsson has stated he feels an affinity with the displaced and reserved Gustad (played by Roshan Seth) which is evident in the sympathetic portrayal and tight focus on Gustad’s emotional education. The film makes much of the novel’s themes of heaviness and lightness, playing on the visual contrast between light and dark: from the beginning, when the first image we see is of Gustad peeling back one of the blackouts to let a chink of light enter his dark room, to the power cut at Roshan’s 62 For example, Gustad’s second son, Darius, receives little attention and his friend Malcolm is omitted from the adaptation. 63 Nina Caplan, ‘Review of Such a Long Journey’, Sight and Sound, 9(11) (November 1999), 57. 64 A. G. Khan interprets the novel as an extended allegory, with the Khodadad building as a microcosm of India in the present, Tehmul as the India of the Nehru era, and Miss Kutpitia as Indira Gandhi, but this reading is difficult to sustain: Khan, Canadian Literature and Indian Literature, p. 21. 65 Caplan, ‘Review of Such a Long Journey’, 57.

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birthday meal, Gustad reading Jimmy’s letter in virtual darkness, the enforced darkness of the air raid as the war starts with Pakistan, to the end, when he finally lets the light flood into the room. Gustad’s flashbacks to his comfortable boyhood are bathed in a nostalgic golden glow that starkly contrasts with the dusty, noisy and cramped streets of Bombay and the dirty wall outside the Khodadad building; only at the end do the burnished tones of his memories fuse with the present. The film retains some of Mistry’s humour on a number of levels: slapstick in the episode with the escaped chicken; character humour with Tehmul’s antics and the bawdy clowning of Gustad’s colleague Dinshawji (Sam Dastor), and verbal humour when Gustad claims his son is grinning ‘like a donkey’ and Sohrab (Vrajesh Hirjee) complains to his mother (Soni Razdan) that ‘daddy gets dramatic and you get necromantic’. Like the novel, many of these incidents combine humour with pathos (such as Gustad’s inept attempts to beat his son) and the film grows darker as the intrigue deepens over the provenance of the money and Jimmy’s dubious role in RAW, with illness, threats, death and misgivings placing an increasing weight on Gustad’s shoulders. One of the key aspects of the film is that it uses these shifts of mood to develop Mistry’s interest in Gustad’s burdens and his heaviness of being, focusing closely on the drama that unfolds between him and Tehmul. We are introduced to Tehmul (Kurush Deboo) fifteen minutes into the film (after establishing the relationships in the Noble family), when Miss Kutpitia calls to him in the compound by his nickname ‘Scrambled Egg’ to take a rat to the municipality. We are given no explanation as to his character except for visual and behavioural clues. The first brief shot of Tehmul is taken from below, focusing briefly on his bearded face, large eyes and gangling body; although he cannot keep still he manages to carefully fold a butterfly inside his shirt. We then see him running wildly up the stairs babbling and waving his arms in excitement. Children follow him into Miss Kutpitia’s flat where he sits near the cage and appears to talk to the rat, chattering in delight and tormenting it with two long sticks. Tehmul seems to relish these moments (as he does in the novel when he teaches the rats ‘to swim and dive’), but the bizarre scene darkens when he turns towards the boiling kettle, before the camera quickly cuts to the compound outside where he is berated by an official for torturing the rat rather than depositing it as he is paid to do.66 Like Francis in ‘One Sunday’, the film stresses that Tehmul does not have a space of his own, spending time in the compound or lurking around the Nobles’ apartment to catch glimpses of the doll that Roshan wins from school. When Roshan brings home an oversize doll with blue eyes, ‘fair skin so pink’ and wearing a white wedding dress, Tehmul is overcome with excitement and wants to touch her.67 He shows Gustad his clean hands and is permitted to touch 66 Mistry, Such a Long Journey, p. 33. 67 Ibid., p. 88.

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once: ‘his eyes shining, he gazed upon the doll’s face and gently stroked the little fingers’. But he wants to pet it again and tears fill his eyes as he hobbles away.68 Gustad is critical of the doll not because of its North European looks but because it is too big for Roshan to play with. However, Tehmul is taken with it and he is later allowed to touch it again: ‘he looked into the doll’s blue eyes, petted the cheek, stroked the red lipsticked lips and laughed gleefully’.69 A combination of childlike curiosity and adolescent libido characterizes Tehmul’s emotions, which become almost too intense for him to bear. When he sees Dilvanez undressing the doll to put it away in the cupboard ‘a trickle of saliva started its descent from one corner of his mouth’, his nostrils flare and he cannot help but reach out again. With the doll put away in the cupboard nothing is mentioned of it again until much later in the narrative after Gustad has found Tehmul in the local whorehouse having his money refused, presumably because of his idiocy. Gustad has gone to find the taxi driver Ghulam (Om Puri), who is involved in RAW and lives in a flat at the back of a whorehouse, but he is surprised to find Tehmul trying to pay for sex. The film depicts a darkly comic scene as the prostitutes make fun of Tehmul and he runs around like a bemused child. Later, during the air raid, Gustad is drawn by the light in Tehmul’s room and finds him naked on his bed dry humping the doll that he has removed from Dilvanez’s cupboard. The curtain that Gustad pulls aside in the film reveals Tehmul’s long brown sweating body, as he lies face down with the doll’s legs sticking out between his thighs. When he is disturbed Tehmul leaps up and shivers in a corner trying to say sorry. Rather than berating him or displaying shock at the grotesque scene he has witnessed, Gustad is firm with Tehmul, telling him to wash his hands and asking him if he feels ashamed for ‘stealing Roshan’s doll and doing such dirty things to it’. Whether Tehmul feels shame is not clear given his barely comprehensible stammering, but when he kneels to Gustad to ask him if he can keep the doll the Parsi acquiesces and takes Tehmul’s head in his hands as a sign of forgiveness. This tragi-comic scene plays with ideas of lightness and heaviness, with Tehmul’s lean body stretched out on top of the inanimate doll contrasting with the emotional heaviness of the exchange that follows, which Gustad’s act of forgiveness helps to ease. Kundera’s notion of the lightness of being can be applied directly to idiocy in general and Tehmul in particular. John Bayley describes lightness as ‘a perpetual state of “once only”, from which no story can develop and no identity be shaped, no happening acquire significance’.70 Like Kundera’s novel, Mistry contrasts Gustad’s heaviness and ‘ever-increasing self-consciousness’ with Tehmul’s lightness as ‘its

68 For some reason Tehmul’s and, to a certain extent, Gustad’s limps are underplayed in the film version. 69 Ibid., p. 89. 70 John Bayley, ‘Fictive Lightness, Fictive Weight’, Salmagundi, 73 (Winter 1987), 85.

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antithesis or antidote’.71 But rather than a simple opposition between the two states, Tehmul’s idiocy is simultaneously light in the sense that he has no selfconsciousness and heavy as the condition weighs him down to earth (his idiocy brought about by falling from a tree and his death the result of being felled by a brick): in other words, he embodies ‘a lightness too heavy to be borne’.72 The purpose of Gustad’s journey (on both spiritual and worldly levels) is to realize that although life can be unbearably light ‘when it has no purpose to it’, similarly ‘a life entirely bound to purpose’ can be unbearably heavy.73 He learns from the street artist and Tehmul that the key to a balanced existence would be, as the critic Jon Simons describes, ‘to fashion a purpose so that being would be [both] bearably light and heavy’ and, in the words of Kundera, to realize that ‘the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all’.74 Before he gains this understanding Gustad must undergo the journey to Delhi to see Jimmy (Naseeruddin Shah) to clear up the matter of the smuggled money that has soured their friendship. Gustad’s memories of Jimmy are of a strong and physically capable man who used to beat him at arm-wrestling and carried him to hospital after the traffic accident: in fact, the exact opposite to Tehmul with all his limitations. But when he arrives in Delhi he barely recognizes the figure that remains: On the bed lay nothing more than a shadow. The shadow of the powerfulbuilt army man … His hairline had receded, and sunken cheeks made the bones jut sharp and grotesque. The regal handlebar moustache was no more. The eyes had disappeared within their sockets … His lips produced a weak, croaking sound: ‘Gus …’75

Not only are Gustad’s expectations frustrated, but in this condition, Jimmy has become less of a human being than Tehmul with his sexual desires and excitement for life. As ‘nothing more than a shadow’ Jimmy is neither heavy nor light, but exists in a twilight land where differences of weight and shade no longer register (he is almost without colour at this stage in the film). Jimmy speaks in broken sentences that are barely articulate for very different reasons to Tehmul’s speech, but Gustad nevertheless manages to rearrange his words and ‘understand his slow, disconnected, rambling fragments’.76 Jimmy tells Gustad about his rebellious actions against Indira Gandhi’s government, but the story is never entirely clear, although we know that he impersonated the Prime Minister to extort money from the bank. This act of impersonation seems to be partly responsible for his inability to speak: when he has his next injection his ‘mouth 71 Ibid., 91. 72 Calvin Bedient, ‘On Milan Kundera’, Salmagundi, 73 (Winter 1987), 100. 73 Jon Simons, Foucault and the Political (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 3. 74 Ibid., p. 3. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 6. 75 Mistry, Such a Long Journey, pp. 267–8. 76 Ibid., p. 269.

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continued to make small movements but no sounds emerged’ and he falls into ‘an unquiet state resembling sleep’.77 The two do manage to ‘finish what they were talking about’ and ‘say goodbye’, but it is not long before Gustad is attending Jimmy’s funeral after the taxi driver (and non-Parsi) Ghulam has the body sent to Bombay. The meeting with Jimmy is an epiphany of sorts for Gustad when he kisses his friend ‘lightly on the forehead’ in farewell. But his true moment of epiphany occurs toward the end of the story following his long vigil with the body of Tehmul, killed by the flying brick in the street demonstration. Gustad places the fully dressed doll next to Tehmul in a bizarre pseudo-wedding ritual with the brown and white figures lying side-by-side and stays by the bed emotionally distraught at this third and needless death. With his head covered and deep in prayer Gustad spiritually seems to leave the world for a time. But when Sohrab enters the room, he is suddenly released from his torment, turning to his son, hugging him with tears in his eyes and repeating the Joycean affirmation ‘yes’. He realizes that by imposing his world-view on Sohrab and demanding respect from him (when he himself does not show it to his son), he has let the unhandsome part of himself triumph.78 Gustad learns that only by allowing the world ‘to be’ can he be both resolute and caring, both a moral and an emotional being. This existential recognition seems to derive from the parting comment by the street painter after the holy wall has been demolished. For the street painter it does not matter from where faith derives, whether ‘miracle, magic, mechanical trick, coincidence … looking too closely is destructive, makes everything disintegrate’.79 Gustad interprets the wall as ‘a kind of miracle’, transforming a ‘stinking, filthy disgrace into a beautiful, fragrant place’, but he does not understand its full significance until death has taken away his three pillars of stability: Dinshawji, Jimmy and Tehmul. If Gustad’s journey has been multidirectional – through Parsi and non-Parsi Bombay, to Delhi to see the dying Jimmy, within his emotional self, and into the spiritual world of prayer – then the street artist reminds him that his journey, ‘chanced, unplanned, solitary’, is ongoing and exile a permanent state of being.80 When Gustad asks the artist where he intends to go, he replies ‘where does not matter … in a world where roadside latrines become temples and shrines, and temples and shrines become dust and ruin, does it matter where?’81 Right at the end of the story, the artist leaves his paints and takes only his crayons with him. Saying farewell, he tosses Gustad his prayer cap that has been trampled and soiled during the demonstration. Rather than putting the cap on again 77 Ibid., p. 272. 78 Ibid., p. 337. This idea of ‘the unhandsome’ is developed from Stanley Cavell’s philosophical discussion in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 79 Mistry, Such a Long Journey, p. 289. 80 Ibid., p. 184. 81 Ibid., p. 338.

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and seeking solace in prayer (he does wear the cap again in the film),82 Gustad acts positively by tearing down the blackout sheets in the apartment that have metaphorically kept him cocooned within himself. The last sentence (and last image in the film) is beautifully poised between an expression of Gustad’s acceptance of his dislocated life as a permanent condition and an image of the reincarnation of one of his dead friends: ‘as the first sheet tore away, a frightened moth flew out and circled the room’.83 Although Anita Myles suggests that Tehmul’s noble death means that, following Hindu mythology, he is likely to be ‘reborn as a normal human being’, the frightened moth that Gustad unintentionally sets free from the ventilators may provide Tehmul’s passage back into the world, the lightness of the creature contrasting with the heaviness of the now-destroyed wall.84 Indeed, this image of the moth disturbed by the light is a direct echo of the end of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which Kundera’s narrator describes ‘a large nocturnal butterfly’ that ‘began circling the room’ after being ‘startled by the overhead light’.85 Whereas the transformations that the idiot Sufiya Zinobia undergoes in Rushdie’s Shame turn her into a grotesque god-like figure of retribution, on this reading Mistry’s idiot figure finds his way back into the world in a lighter and perhaps more bearable form than he had ever experienced in his own life.

82 While Gustad manages to reconcile his faith and worldly responsibilities, Yezad in Family Matters uses prayer and ‘the abyss of religion’ as an escape from reality: Mistry, Family Matters, p. 479. 83 Mistry, Such a Long Journey, p. 339. 84 Dodiya (ed.), The Fiction of Rohinton Mistry, p. 89. Mistry, Such a Long Journey, p. 339. 85 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 314.

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Conclusion

Idiocy in Contemporary Film In tracing the cultural history of idiocy, the preceding chapters have focused on the ways in which film adaptations visually transform and reconfigure idiot figures. My approach has been to follow the historical trajectory of literary culture from Romantic versions of the innocent idiot figure, through modernist experiments with language and hidden areas of the self, to more diffuse postmodern concerns, relating the film adaptations to these issues in turn. It is very interesting to reflect on the way in which idiot figures have been reshaped across film genres and in different cultural contexts (French, Japanese, British, German, American, Canadian), particularly as regards the techniques used to visualize idiocy. However, with the wave of cinematic representations of mental and neurological conditions in the 1990s (in both mainstream and independent film), the screen-life of idiocy has taken on a life of its own. Two explanations may account for this phenomenon: first, the heightened public awareness in disability issues and, second, millennial preoccupations with seismic change, with the idiot figure often representing a throwback to a previous era or a simpler way of life. While disability groups would find many cinematic representations of idiocy problematic, the millennial theory does account for the apocalyptic subject matter of a range of North American films in the late 1990s, although it is of course too easy to explain all contemporary cinematic uses of idiocy as part of this Zeitgeist. The preoccupation with idiocy in American film culture goes back much further than an awakening interest in certain medical conditions in the late twentieth century, although it is much easier to identify its performance style since the late 1980s with Dustin Hoffman’s defining role as the autistic Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man. The recurrent focus of Hollywood movies on the wounded or damaged protagonist has taken on different guises since World War II: including the war veteran, the workingclass underdog, the socially disaffected anti-hero, and the justified psychopath. This kind of mythic heroism is often linked to the longstanding anti-intellectual tradition in America that Richard Hofstadter identified particularly in the 1950s as ‘a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind’.1 Hofstadter links antiintellectualism not only to a general wariness of specialists, but also to the championing of populist heroes who rely more on their wits than their intelligence, as embodied by Frank Capra’s John Doe (Gary Cooper in Meet John Doe, 1941), the lovable dolt Homer Simpson, or the folksy persona ‘adopted’ by George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign (as opposed to what many perceived as 1 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), p. 7.

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Al Gore’s over-reliance on cold intellect).2 When it comes to stories dealing with idiocy, anti-intellectualism is often linked to resilience or the power of emotions to overcome either the diminishment or absence of intelligence. The central characters of films such as Rain Man (1988), Forrest Gump (1994), A Beautiful Mind (2001) and I Am Sam (2002) can be clearly placed in this tradition in which emotional contact wins over more functional, institutional and potentially divisive social forces. Other films with medical subject matter, like Penny Marshall’s Awakenings (1990), the adaptation of Oliver Sacks’ account of the remarkable awakening of post-encephalitic patients in the 1960s, and Tom Shadyac’s Patch Adams (1998), which focuses on the curative qualities of laughter therapy, do not address idiocy per se but deal with themes of overcoming disability through companionship, humane therapy and the kind of directed care that is often muted by institutional pressures. But the interest in idiocy goes far beyond the humanist sentiments of American mainstream social and medical drama, with independent filmmakers in the 1980s and 1990s drawn to odd and idiosyncratic characters, particularly Joel and Ethan Coen and David Lynch in their cynical look at the underside of American culture (one might also add Mike Leigh in Britain), as well as films like Miguel Arteta’s sexually charged Chuck and Buck (2000).3 The explosion of interest in idiocy among European filmmakers since the launch of the Dogme movement in Scandinavia in 1995 has led to some fascinating alternative accounts of idiocy, particularly Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996) and The Idiots (1998) and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen’s Mifune (1999), together with interesting West European films such as Le Dîner du Cons (1998) and Pauline & Paulette (2001). This Conclusion does not attempt a grand synthesis of idiocy in contemporary film in which idiot types are codified depending on their ‘look’ or their narrative function. Nor do I wish to mount the argument that independent and/or European directors offer more considered portrayals of idiots than Hollywood filmmakers – a polemical and potentially hazardous exercise. Instead, the discussion here surveys the variety of guises in which idiocy has appeared on screen. In order to provide an overview of late twentieth-century films that have treated idiocy as a 2 For a discussion of anti-intellectualism in The Simpsons see Aeon Skoble’s essay ‘Lisa and Anti-intellectualism’, in The Simpsons and Philosophy, ed. William Irwin et al. (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2001), pp. 25–33, and for a satirical take on George W. Bush’s idiotic persona see Mark Crispin Miller, The Bush Dyslexicon (London: Bantam Books, 2001) and David Horsey’s political cartoons of George Bush in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Goldie Hawn’s character Sunny in Protocol (Herbert Ross, US, 1984) plays out the American fantasy of anti-intellectualism. A Capraesque ‘innocent’, Sunny becomes embroiled in Washington politics as a brainless dupe, only to overcome her naïveté by reading and absorbing the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. 3 For example, the tragic Henry (Jack Nance), who finds himself thrown into the post-industrial wasteland of David Lynch’s first feature Eraserhead (1976), and the buffoon Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson), one of three escaped convicts in Joel Coen’s O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), are two very different types of idiot figure.

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medical and cultural problematic, the Conclusion considers American (both mainstream and independent) and European films in turn, before returning to some of the key themes discussed in previous chapters. There is not the space here to consider all recent films that feature an idiot figure, so I have reserved my discussion for those that explore idiocy in distinctive or visually challenging ways. As I discussed in the Introduction, despite the diagnostic hazards of categorizing ‘films about idiocy’, an extensive (but not exhaustive) filmography follows the Conclusion that details the range of cinematic releases that feature a clearly defined idiot figure (silent shorts and made-fortelevision products are not included). The major methodological problem is how to differentiate films that deal with ‘legitimate’ cases of idiocy from others that include figures with loosely defined idiotic traits. However, as I have argued, because the visual representation of idiocy is usually ambiguous and rarely codified precisely, it becomes less a cultural issue – and more of a medical problem – to separate authentic from inauthentic versions.

The Cinematic Language of Idiocy One place to start when exploring the acting styles associated with idiocy in contemporary American film is to look back to the histrionic comedy of early cinema, particularly the stars of silent comedy: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Stan Laurel (even though two of these are British-born).4 The kinetic mania associated with Keaton’s personae, the disorientation of Chaplin’s tramp getting caught in the revolving door of a health spa in The Cure (1916), Lloyd’s genteel character attempting to scale a skyscraper in Safety Last (1923), and the futile repetition of Laurel and Hardy trying to push a piano up a steep flight of stairs in The Music Box (1932) visually encode idiocy on a physical level particularly suited for one-reel films. Needless to say, what David Mayer calls the ‘extravagant and excessive’ acting of early film comedy derives not from the rigorous study of idiocy, but from nineteenth-century theatrical styles that stemmed largely from the vaudeville circuits in America (Keaton and Hardy) and music hall and pantomime in Britain (Chaplin and Laurel), as well as from the need to create incongruous situations that could feed comic narratives.5 Although the roles played by exponents of silent comedy can be labelled idiotic in terms of their demonstrative mannerisms (with the composition, framing and music establishing a particular ‘look’), the idiot 4 Roberta Pearson contrasts ‘histrionic’ acting of early film with the ‘verisimilar’ code that established realistic acting styles as the dominant form from the late 1910s. See Roberta Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). Although comedy became domesticated in the 1940s and 1950s, it is the one film form that resists verisimilitude in favour of incongruous and bizarre situations. 5 Alan Lovell & Peter Krämer, Screen Acting (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 11.

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persona is often fused with characteristics of the fool, trickster or social ingénue. In fact, the protagonist is usually placed in relation to a comic stooge: in a double act like Laurel and Hardy, it is usually Laurel’s feeble-minded or playful interventions that frustrate the desires of Hardy, whereas stock characters like policemen, inept store keepers, or heavies such as Eric Campbell in Chaplin’s films from the 1910s, often play social fools whom the comic hero usually outwits. Indeed, traits of idiocy are so embedded in the acting styles of early film comedians that references to medical conditions were rarely made, as they would otherwise detract from the comic trajectory of the narrative.6 Because comedy rarely explores the consequences of mental disability in realistic ways, it is ripe for exploiting idiotic modes of behaviour without recourse to clinical categories. With the reliance on close-ups for conveying emotion, the use of idiosyncratic facial gestures was also a central feature of comic acting in silent film. From the gurning face of Frank Hayes to the corpulent laughter of John Bunny and the clownlike grin of Larry Semon (in, for example, Dummies, 1928), facial exaggeration was indexed to odd behaviour and strange states of mind. One really interesting, but largely forgotten, example of idiotic face-making (especially given the marginal position of women performers in the history of comedy) is the American ‘Vitagraph Girl’, Florence Turner, whose short films made in Britain in the mid-1910s transformed the physical acting of vaudeville into visually distinctive filmed sketches. Turner was renowned for her impersonations, and in Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914) she holds together a series of loosely connected scenes by pulling a series of bizarre faces – from the deranged, the manic and the trance-like to the grotesque and the idiotic – that override any real sense of narrative development. Turner’s performance in Daisy Doodad’s Dial suggests that idiocy is often used as a means for halting the narrative and providing distraction for the spectator. As Ann-Marie Cook comments: ‘while Daisy Doodad’s Dial attempts to integrate the actress’ facepulling prowess into the framework of a plot, Turner ultimately breaks free of the confines of the narrative by mugging directly to the camera without any apparent narrative motivation’.7 This notion of idiocy as a cinematic distraction from narrative progression reflects the theory that early film was primarily a cinema of attractions 6 Glenn Mitchell lists the following as silent films dealing with insanity: His Day Out (1916) starring Billy West; When Cupid Slipped (1917) in which two escaped lunatics meet an eloping couple; It’s Great to Be Crazy (1918) with Stan Laurel; Crazy Like a Fox (1926) with Charley Chase; Call of the Cuckoos (1927) in which Laurel and Hardy are part of a mentally challenged group living next door to the Jewish comedian Max Davidson, and Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). See Glenn Mitchell, A–Z of Silent Film Comedy (London: Batsford, 1998), p. 124. Germane to screen representations of idiocy, James Agee argued that Chaplin and Keaton ‘discovered beauties of comic motion which are hopelessly beyond the reach of words’: James Agee, ‘Comedy’s Greatest Era’ (1949), in Agee on Film, p. 394. 7 Ann-Marie Cook, ‘The Adventures of the “Vitagraph Girl” in England’, in Pimple, Pranks & Pratfalls: British Film Comedy Before 1930, ed. Alan Burton & Laraine Porter (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2000), p. 34.

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that invited the viewer to take pleasure in looking, seeking to arrest the gaze rather than constructing a seamless storyline. To a certain degree, these comic conventions continued into sound film of the 1930s, with actors often relying on physical routines and facial expressions to establish the role of the idiot figure as a complement (and sometimes in preference) to verbal articulation. For example, in Walt Disney’s first feature-length animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the idiotic traits of the last of the dwarves, Dopey, are conveyed by appropriating the physical acting styles from silent films. Not only is Dopey the seventh and, by implication, the least capable of the dwarves, but he is the only one without facial hair, he wears oversized clothes that trip him up, his face possesses a kind of amorphous plasticity, and he is mute while the other dwarves speak. Dopey is given the fairy-tale role of the ‘youngest brother’, as is made clear in the preliminary list of characters from 1934: the other dwarves are named but the last dwarf is just called ‘Seventh’ and described as ‘deaf, always listening intently – happy – quick movements – spry’.8 In the dwarves’ first scene in the diamond mine, Dopey is the last to be introduced in his menial job of sweeping up; he has a parental figure, Doc, supervising him in his task, and when he decides playfully to put diamonds in his eyes and pull a goofy expression he is admonished for it. Invariably, when he is in frame the narrative flow is halted to focus on his comic activity. Dopey’s childlike nature is evident throughout the film: he lags behind the others on their way home, pulls facial gestures, and is treated as the most pliable of the dwarves. For example, when they return to their cottage, he is sent to discover the identity of the intruder sleeping in the bedroom, leading to a scene of comic fright as he tumbles down the stairs. Occasionally, though, Dopey is pushed beyond the role of comic foil. During a musical festivity at the cottage, he is transformed by standing on Sneezy’s shoulders and wearing a long coat so he is tall enough to dance with Snow White (becoming the king of the carnival in the Bakhtinian sense by combining grotesquerie and dignity) and when she sees them off to the mine Dopey returns twice for extra kisses. In fact, ‘Dopey’ is Snow White’s last word in the film (apart from ‘Goodbye’) just before she disappears with the prince after waking from her poison apple-induced sleep, suggesting that Dopey’s role is ambiguous and far from easy to classify. The other classic idiot figure in 1930s American comedy is the mute character created by Harpo Marx. Deprived of a voice in his screen and stage persona, Harpo relied entirely on the kind of physical acting and facial comedy that he learnt while touring with his brothers in their vaudeville act. Whereas Dopey is an idiot, Harpo acts up the role by adopting the mannerisms of silent film comedy, becoming the idiot as arch-bluffer. Each of the four Marx brothers in the act fills a particular comic role: Groucho the eccentric authority-figure; Chico the punning street 8 Martin Krause & Linda Witkowski, Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: An Art in Its Making (New York: Hyperion, 1995), p. 38.

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immigrant; Harpo the pantomimic prankster, and Zeppo the romantic hero. Wearing a red wig, striped shirt and torn raincoat and remaining silent but for his musical skills, Harpo developed a character halfway between childlike idiot and talented virtuoso. Well-respected by Antonin Artaud and Salvador Dalí for his surreal and improvised comedy style, Harpo was the most international of the Marx Brothers because his physical pranks needed no interpretation (as his favourable reception in Russia suggested). The cabin room episode in A Night at the Opera (1935) and the manic ostrich ride in At the Circus (1939) seem to confirm Harpo’s role as idiot figure. Raymond Durgnat compares Harpo with Chaplin’s little man in Modern Times (1936), overcoming difficulties with ingenuity: [he is] the dregs of society, the dumb tramp-cum-ragpicker, a character quite as handicapped as one of Samuel Beckett’s, but happy with it, because not impotent. He’s the St Francis of the Rabelaisian hagiography, a moon-calf on roller-skates, the most aggressive of dreamers.9

In this account Harpo hovers between social misfit, existential anti-hero, folkloric trickster, saint, grotesque, otherworldly oddity and visionary, as if Durgnat cannot find the precise language to pin him down. Neither truly innocent (with his red hair, wicked scissors and lascivious intentions) nor a wise fool (Chico usually provides folk wisdom), in his ‘deliriously inarticulate’ way Harpo fills the complex symbolic space that we have traced through its various cultural manifestations.10 However, despite Durgnat’s comments and strong evidence to suggest that Harpo is an idiot figure, Bill Marx (Harpo’s son) interpreted his father’s and Chico’s roles in a slightly different way. Relating the Brothers’ act to the sixteenthcentury tradition of Italian commedia dell’arte, he commented: ‘you had the authoritarian figure, you had the idiot and you had the mime … The Marx Brothers … accidentally came upon it, with Groucho being the authoritarian figure, Chico being the idiot, and Harpo being the mime.’11 In the commedia the stock roles of the ensemble characters are defined quite differently to the parent–child roles that dominate Anglo-American culture. As a version of Arlecchino (or Harlequin), Harpo, like Chaplin, exists in a more enigmatic realm than the dialect-speaking street character Chico in his resemblance to the commedia figure Pulcinella. However, despite Bill Marx’s comment, David Madden discerns a complex reshuffling of the commedia roles in early comedy, seeing as much of Pedrolino (or Pierrot) in Harpo (as well as in Lloyd, Chaplin and Harry Langdon) as any other commedia figure.12

9 Raymond Durgnat, The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American Image (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 154. 10 Ibid., p. 153. 11 Cited by Simon Louvish, Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers (New York: Thomas Dunne, 1999), p. 95. 12 David Madden, Harlequin’s Stick, Charlie’s Cane (Bowling Green, OH:

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In fact, instead of relying on stock roles the Marx Brothers all engage with different comic strains of idiocy, using eccentric gestures, (un)intended puns, physical humour and the ingenious use of objects to blur boundaries between types of comedy. Whatever the provenance of the Brothers’ individual roles, their comic world provided a safe space for idiotic behaviour, inviting laughter from the spectator without stigmatizing idiocy as a discrediting condition.

Acting Up in American Film If we project our attention forward to late twentieth-century film, this safe space for idiocy has become increasingly problematic, particularly as regards the stigma attached to idiocy in regard to remedial treatment and social inferiority. Many actors continue to rely on physical forms of performance, but with disability groups lobbying for accurate filmic representations of specific conditions, it is often difficult to strike the right balance between accuracy and idiosyncrasy. For example, Bobby and Peter Farrelly’s comedies Dumb & Dumber (1994), in which two idiotic no-hopers (Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels) drive across America in a car caper, and Me, Myself & Irene (2000), in which Jim Carrey plays a schizophrenic policeman in a throwaway road movie, play for cheap laughs and can easily be accused of exploiting disability. At least earlier films like Carl Reiner’s The Jerk (1979) and Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979), adapted from Jerzy Kosinski’s 1971 novel, attempt to give a social context (however vague) for the idiotic adventures of their protagonists. Steve Martin in The Jerk is the white ‘son’ of a Southern black family who cannot understand why he has no rhythm, and Peter Sellers in Being There is the naïve and reclusive gardener, Chance, who is addicted to television and can only relate to others on a very basic level. Kosinski’s narrator describes Chance’s brain as made of ‘soft soil’ and suggests that ‘the ground from which all his thoughts shot up [was] ruined forever’.13 Chance is elevated to social importance by an idiotic social system that gives significance to his vacuous comments about gardening, interpreting them as profound meditations on the national condition.14 The humour does not always work in these two films – the Popular Press, 1975), p. 20. Madden describes the character of Harlequin as himself difficult to pin down: ‘a grotesque tatterdemalion of vices and virtues … a shrewd but ignorant valet, who serves lovers, and cheats old men. A capering, clumsy, credulous clown, a rogue, a rake, a blundering, inept fool’: p. 26. 13 Jerzy Kosinski, Being There (London: Black Swan, 1983), p. 12. Peter Sellers’ interest in idiocy goes back to his The Goon Show radio performances and a sixweek live comedy series Idiot Weekly, Price 2d in 1956 (ITV, London broadcast). Throughout the 1970s, Sellers desperately wanted to play Chance in Being There, a role which Ed Sikov describes as ‘a nobody who became a somebody nobody could really know’ with ‘a kind of vestigial reasoning that leads nowhere. He is a mental earlobe trying to be a fin’: Ed Sikov, Mr Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (New York: Hyperion, 2002), p. 356; p. 360.

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first degenerates into slapstick and the second is often too cynical for its own good – but at least the directors attempt to link Martin’s manic and Sellers’ eerily laconic performances to race relations in The Jerk (although this fades from focus) and American politics and mass media in Being There.15 Perhaps a more interesting example that can be aligned with the Depression-era comedy of The Jerk is the Coen Brothers’ homage to Frank Capra’s 1930s films, The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), in which the idiotic country boy fresh in the city, Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins), is propelled from obscurity to company boss, but only to further the machinations of vice-chairman Sidney Mussburger (Paul Newman). Linking physical comedy to character development, The Hudsucker Proxy makes comic use of Robbins’ folksy dumb-boy role to address the business ethics of large corporations and advertising gimmickry, but without adopting the mantle of serious social drama. Forrest Gump is the most famous cinematic example of the idiot figure in the 1990s, a character that makes good through his own pliability and by forces of chance in a high-budget film that treads a careful line between comic adventure and historical drama. Winston Groom’s 1986 novel, on which the film is loosely based, introduces the Southern boy Forrest from a first-person perspective. Forrest has a limited vocabulary and speaks in dialect, but he is able to question the clinical categories of idiocy: I been a idiot since I was born. My IQ is near 70, which qualifies me, so they say. Probly, tho, I’m closer to bein a imbecile or maybe even a moron, but personally, I’d rather think of myself as like a halfwit or something – an not no idiot – cause when people think of a idiot, more’n likely they be thinking of one of them Mongolian idiots – the ones with they eyes too close together what look like Chinamen an drool a lot an play with theyselfs … I can think things pretty good, but when I got to try sayin or writin them, it kinda comes out like jello or somethin.16

Groom’s novel comprises a picaresque series of adventures in which Forrest repeatedly gets into trouble (his racism does not make him an altogether sympathetic 14 Another comic character worth noting is the idiot figure Eddie Murphy plays in the Hollywood spoof Bowfinger (Franz Oz, 1999), who stands in for his filmstar brother Kit Ramsay (also Murphy) when Bobby Bowfinger (Steve Martin) tries to make a lowbudget movie to re-rail his career. With his nerdy clothes, goofy grin and teeth braces Murphy exploits the look of idiocy for comic ends, but manages to avoid the dumbing down of the role evident in Jim Carrey’s films. The film does not engage with social history or racial politics, but in this role Murphy can be seen to play off the stereotype of the comical idiotic ‘coon’ from black minstrel shows: subservient, shuffling and dim-witted. 15 The critique of visual media runs throughout Being There in terms of Chance’s idiocy being as flat and surface-like as the television he watches. Thomas Docherty argues that Chance’s character offers a useful way to think about postmodern characterization, in which the ‘visual body replete with meaning and implied volume or depth’ is replaced by ‘the surface self of character’: Docherty, Reading (Absent) Character, p. 86. 16 Winston Groom, Forrest Gump (London: Black Swan, 1994), p. 9.

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character17), although it is doubtful whether he can be held wholly responsible for his mishaps. He has many of the characteristics of literary idiots: he is very large (6 foot 6 inches and 240 pounds), has a strong sexual appetite, lacks a decent education, and with his father dying at a very early age, misses the strong parental guidance that might have made a difference. However, Groom’s Forrest is very much a fictional creation: he claims he knows ‘somethin bout idiots’ – from ‘Doychee-eveskie guy’s idiot, to King Lear’s fool, an Faulkner’s idiot, Benjie’ – literature which, given his IQ, he would do well to even locate.18 His selfknowledge belies his dumb social persona, and comments like ‘them writer fellas got it straight – cause their idiots always smarter than people given em credit for’ reveal an intellectual awareness and a mode of speech that far outstrips the possibility that he can read and write to this level. By contrast, Robert Zemeckis’ film does not portray Forrest (Tom Hanks) in the first person and, although he lacks natural intelligence and has an IQ that would place him above the clinical label of idiocy (only slightly below the Alabama state minimum for being ‘normal’), he is without the self-reflection of Groom’s character. Where the literary Forrest claims ‘bein a idiot is no box of chocolates’ (an adage he has arrived at through experience), Hanks’ character can only utter Southern homilies his mother has told him, particularly that life is ‘like a box of chocolates, you never know what you gonna get’.19 Some of Forrest’s adventures are taken from the novel – his proficiency at football and his service in Vietnam – but other scenes are omitted for being too bizarre or lacking in relevance, such as his classes at Harvard University, his powwow with Chairman Mao, and his wrestling bouts as ‘The Dunce’. Hanks’ Forrest is ridiculed as a young boy and lacks common sense, but he is strangely inert and more self-contained than his literary counterpart, even in action sequences. Forrest’s story follows the major events in post-war American history, surviving against the odds while his Vietnam commander Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise) is paralysed and loses his legs and his sometime girlfriend, Jenny (Robin Wright), becomes a casualty of the (rather stereotyped) excesses of the 1960s counter-culture and later dies of AIDS. In fact, because Forrest is not an active protagonist as such, but simply reacts to situations with a kind of survival instinct, the film has been criticized for its deep conservatism as well as its sentimentality.20 Forrest is by no means a revolutionary character, but rather a blank slate onto which 17 Comments such as ‘I can see he is a real Mongolian idiot – eyes all crossed, tongue hanging out, droolin an babbling like them kinds of idiot do’ suggest that Forrest does not have sympathy with others, or that he feels superior to those who have severe conditions: ibid., p. 92. 18 Ibid., p. 10. 19 Ibid., p. 9. 20 Jude Davies and Carol Smith argue convincingly that Forrest Gump legitimates ‘white patriarchal histories of America’, albeit in ‘innovative fashion’, with the romance between Forrest and Jenny organizing post-war American history into a prelude to marriage. More scathingly, they argue that ‘this marriage triumphantly stands as the sign of

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experience marks its imprint: like the commedia fool, the potentially radical character can easily turn into an establishment figure. The fact that he and Jenny give birth to a son who is as ‘smart as a whip’ suggests that Forrest’s impairment can be overcome through perseverance and gumption (as his name implies). Another contemporary film that explores the tension between the idiot figure as both radical and conformist is Chuck and Buck, an offbeat black comedy that follows two boyhood friends as they tackle the adult world. Now in his late twenties Chuck, or Charlie (Chris Weitz), is a successful record executive in a regular heterosexual relationship, while Buck (Mike White) remains in a childhood world of lollypops and intense emotions, particularly as regards his feelings toward Chuck. A lighthearted and whimsical soundtrack masks much darker emotions that lurk in Buck’s fantasyland, which is characterized by brightly lit flashbacks and lingering closeups. When Buck’s mother dies (following his father) he is thrown into a bewildering world where his meagre social skills are redundant and friendship is scarce. After his mother’s funeral, in which he hugs and then gropes Chuck, his homoerotic feelings intensify: he is manipulative in conversation and invasive with his bodily contact, his behaviour veering between needy child and jealous lover. Taking his childhood objects with him, Buck follows Chuck and Carlyn (Beth Colt) to Los Angeles and stalks Chuck in an attempt to restore their friendship. He refuses to accept the adult world, asking Chuck whether what he does is ‘real now, or is it still a game?’ When his attempts to woo Chuck prove futile, Buck decides to stage a play in a local theatre (a cross between ‘Babes in the Wood’ and The Wizard of Oz) to persuade his childhood friend that he has succumbed to Carlyn’s spells. Buck produces the thinlydisguised play ‘Hank and Frank’ with the box office manager (and later surrogate mother figure) Beverley (Lupe Ontiveros), in a vain attempt to persuade Chuck that he has sacrificed his true self by growing up (the witch-like Carlyn in the play makes Hank stupid and Frank into a cripple).21 Although the performance fails to impress Chuck, two events help Buck the condition of America, unproblematically excluding the civil rights struggles of African Americans, feminists and homosexuals and thereby excluding them from American national identity’: Jude Davies and Carol R. Smith, Gender, Ethnicity and Sexuality in Contemporary American Film (Keele: Keele University Press, 1997). This argument could also be applied to Being There (in both novel and film form), which appears to dismiss or eliminate black involvement in Chance’s life. However, given the satirical nature of Kosinski’s novel the white elite society into which Chance is introduced is shown to be shallow and vapid; because Chance’s past cannot be documented and his ethnicity cannot be determined (enhanced by Sellers’ deadpan delivery in the film) the President’s aides fear that he is unAmerican. However, it is exactly this lack of background that convinces some that he ‘cannot be objectionable to anyone. He’s personable, well-spoken, and he comes across well on TV! And, as far as his thinking goes, he appears to be one of us’: Kosinski, Being There, p. 104. 21 When the boy actor who plays the young Frank drops out of the play (after a firecracker has burnt his hand when ‘playing’ with Buck), Sam is asked to take both child and adult roles. When he starts to make idiotic gestures, Beverley retorts ‘you wouldn’t be playing it like a little retarded kid’ and she earlier calls Sam a ‘moron’ for his inability to act.

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reconcile himself to the changing world. He fixates on Sam (Paul Weitz), the amateur (and heterosexual) actor he casts as Frank, and he strikes a successful deal with Chuck to have ‘one night with him’ in return for leaving him alone (the viewer is given the impression that this is real and not make-believe). The unsatisfactory ending, in which Buck realizes that his life can move on and that his new friendships with Sam and Beverley provide him with enough sustenance to survive without Chuck, almost verges on fantasy, considering he has shown throughout that he is unable (and unwilling) to leave the garden of his childhood. While the film tackles serious issues of care and emotional support without resorting to heavy social commentary, it focuses on a potentially radical idiot figure to question the values of a shallow adult world, only for Buck to eventually succumb to some of its pressures. I Am Sam is the clearest contemporary example of mainstream Hollywood trying to tackle the difficult issues surrounding representations of idiocy and its place within a more or less realistic social structure. Sean Penn plays Sam, a single parent with a mental age of seven (and therefore not strictly an idiot), burdened with the task of bringing up his daughter Lucy (Dakota Fanning) when her mother leaves days after her birth. Penn plays Sam with similar method-acting techniques to Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, adopting a style that combines cheap and nondescript clothing (and the odd idiosyncrasy such as wearing two shirts at the same time and wearing trousers too short) with an emotionally intense demeanour that swings between pure joy, bewilderment and over-exuberance. Sam works in Starbucks: a company that director and producer Jessie Nelson claims she chose because it has a liberal policy towards employing disabled staff. He is largely reliant on his agoraphobic next-door neighbour (Dianne Wiest) and his four friends (all of whom have a degree of mental impairment, ranging from attention deficiency disorder and clinical paranoia to Down’s syndrome) to care for his daughter. Among these characters, Nelson integrated two actors – Brad Silverman and Joseph Rosenberg – from LA Goal in Los Angeles (a centre for adults with ‘developmental difficulties’ that opened in 1969 and pioneered acting therapy in the 1990s), where she and Sean Penn spent time researching the film.22 The verisimilitude of the film and its attempt to catch the confused and fractured perceptions of Sam as he is forced into bewildering situations (conveyed by a disorientating camera) works in places, but breaks down into over-sentimental melodrama as he attempts to retain custody of his daughter when social security determines to separate them. Sam manages to convince ruthless lawyer, Rita Harrison (Michelle Pfeiffer), to represent him in the custody case and she gradually warms to his human sincerity and obvious love for his daughter. In fact, the film once again affirms the transcendent power of love over intellect. Because she has sacrificed her own marriage and relationship with her son for her career, Rita claims late on in the film (after Lucy has been fostered but then returned to Sam) that Sam 22 Nelson comments that ‘it wasn’t as if we had disabled people who were acting, we had actors that happened to be disabled’: I Am Sam DVD (New Line, US, 2002).

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has taught her more than she could ever learn at law school or in court. Although the film represents a worthy attempt to deal with issues surrounding custody, care and the workplace, its Beatles-esque tagline, ‘love is all you need’, is an index of where it looks for answers to tricky social and familial problems.

Acting Down in European Film The most interesting film movement in the 1990s to have explored the symbolic and social dimensions of idiocy is the group of mainly Danish filmmakers that have worked under the guidelines of Dogme. In 1995 in Copenhagen, Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg composed ten rules that comprise the ‘Dogme95 Manifesto’ by which filmmakers should abide in order to reject the stylization and technical artifice of more elaborate European, and especially Hollywood, films. Combining ‘austerity and tomfoolery’, they viewed the project as a ‘rescue action’ for realistic filmmaking.23 Among the ten rules are that films must be shot on location (only using props found there), without extraneous music, shot with a hand-held camera, and without special lighting or optical work that might enhance the production of the film but would detract from its raw realism. Proposing that directors should stick to the classical unities of place, time and action, von Trier and Vinterberg also wanted to make films that did not fall into specific genres that would encourage a formulaic approach to the subject matter. Their ‘Vow of Chastity’ states: I swear to refrain from creating a ‘work’, as I regard the instant more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of good taste and any aesthetic considerations.24

This emphasis on ‘process’ (over completed ‘work’) is central to their exploration of the interaction between unfinished and, often, damaged characters.25 Although the rules of Dogme have not always been kept, the refinement of a cinéma vérité style and their search to ‘force the truth’ out of characters has led von Trier, Vinterberg and fellow travellers such as Søren Kragh-Jacobsen in Denmark and Harmony Korine in America to portray bizarre and outlandish figures in a way that 23 Ryan Gilbey, ‘Dogme is Dead. Long Live Dogme’, The Guardian Review (19 April 2002), 2. Richard Kelly, The Name of this Book is Dogme95 (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. 226. Tabish Kahir argues that although the Dogme directors seem to be ‘innocent of theory’, their films can actually be seen to adhere to the kind of aesthetic play that is common with other cultural strains of postmodernism: Tabish Kahir, ‘The Ideology of Play’, New Left Review, 2 (March–April 2000), 125. 24 Kelly, The Name of this Book is Dogme95, p. 228. 25 Dogme filmmakers argue that the energy of their film derives not from the movement of the hand-held cameras, but from the dynamic interaction between characters: see The Name of this Film is Dogma95 (Saul Metzskin, Channel 4, 2000).

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breaks the fixity of representations in many mainstream American films. It can be argued that the films actually debase characters who cannot conform to ‘normal’ social roles (given the idealistic depiction of Danish communes in Mifune and The Idiots), but perhaps a better reading of the films would interpret their rough edges and apparent lack of stylization as concerted attempts on behalf of the directors to address the complex ‘reality’ of idiocy: part biological, part social, part mythic. In their refusal to use star actors and to spotlight the familiar exaggerations in the idiotic performance styles of American actors like Dustin Hoffman, Jim Carrey and Steve Martin, idiot figures in Dogme productions are more tightly woven into the fabric of the film. Even European films not associated with Dogme, such as the satirical and at times cruel Le Dîner du Cons, the wry and sensitive Pauline & Paulette and Pedro Almodovar’s lyrical Talk to Her (Hable con Ella, 2002), provide greater range than their American counterparts. Kragh-Jacobsen’s film Mifune is set in Lolland in the rural South of Denmark. It follows the aspiring urbanite and newly married Kresten (Anders Berthelsen), who returns from Copenhagen to the family house when he hears that his father has died. The family house forms the dramatic microcosm for the film, with Kresten encountering his idiot brother, Rud (Jesper Asholt), and unintentionally hiring an ex-hooker for a housekeeper, Liva (Iben Hjele). Kresten’s familial and sexual life grow ever more complicated as he renews his relationship with Rud and tries to keep his wife happy on the phone, while falling for the charms of Liva. Although the film does not exaggerate the Gothic elements of the rural setting and large empty house, it has a deliberate fable-like quality, which contrasts to the phone conversations that fail to keep Kresten and Liva in touch with the outside world. Kragh-Jacobsen wanted the spectator to believe the ‘truth’ of the story, setting it in the country because he thought that there would be less social stigma attached to Rud’s condition. He was attracted to Lolland because no feature films had been made there, mainly due to its flat topography – ‘two-thirds sky, one third land’ – but also because of its economic problems: ‘things really ground to a halt out there in the 1960s and 1970s … it looks a bit like my childhood in the country’.26 The use of enlarged 16 mm film, hand-held cameras and saturated red tones give the film a rough unfinished feel that complements the odd behaviour of the characters. Although Berthelsen was well known on Danish television, KraghJacobsen chose the unknown Jesper Asholt for similar reasons to Herzog’s use of Bruno S. in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Asholt conveys Rud’s idiocy by fashioning an acting style that combines engaging eyes, childish voice, open mouth, slight spasticity in his hands and fondness for wearing ill-fitting (and very possibly secondhand) clothes, particularly a red balaclava. The fable-like quality of the film derives from the mythic character of Mifune that figured largely in Kresten’s and Rud’s boyhood. Based on Toshiro Mifune’s role in Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, Jap, 1954), Mifune is a trickster who 26 Ibid., p. 156.

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creates havoc in the midst of calm. Kragh-Jacobsen became interested in the Japanese actor because ‘he looked different, spoke another language, but he was funny, moving, handsome. And everybody understands him.’27 This combination of speaking a foreign language and yet being universally understood provides a context for understanding how Rud’s idiocy is configured: he is both a primitive enigma and someone whose emotional needs are clearly evident. For example, when Liva arrives at the house Rud is attracted to her but also convinced that she is the embodiment of Linda, a curvaceous comic book superhero. He follows her around the house making alien signs with his hands above his head, convinced that her arrival is associated with the landing of spaceships. Kresten tells him to stop behaving like an idiot, but Rud is not acting as such. For him this alien landing is a reality in terms of Liva’s sudden appearance in the family home and Rud’s fantasies are given some justification when Kresten later stumbles on a mysterious corn circle. When Liva’s brother, Bjarke (Emil Tarding), arrives from the city he initially insults Rud, calling him a ‘pansy … faggot … moron … wanker … arsehole’, but the two become firm friends, while a slow-burning romance develops between Kresten and Liva.28 Although the film resists offering a moral perspective on the actions of the central characters, it portrays the outside world as an unfeeling, mercenary and exploitative place compared to the old house in Lolland, which represents a safe, if idealistic, haven for this new family of social misfits. The most controversial European film of the 1990s dealing with representations of idiocy is Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (Idioterne, 1998), which focuses on a group of young adults that adopt the behavioural traits of mental and physical illness as an escape from and, to their mind, a critique of mainstream social values. Like Mifune, von Trier’s film uses an ensemble cast to explore the group dynamics of a community of middle-class dropouts that live in a house ‘borrowed’ from the uncle of the self-styled leader, Stoffer (Jens Albinus). The members of the group attempt to unlock their physical selves by losing control in demonstrative public displays: what they describe as ‘spassing’. Xan Brooks argues that the film adopts a ‘guerrilla aesthetic’, with the characters challenging what society thinks of as ‘good behaviour’, particularly waiters in expensive restaurants, unfeeling councilors that try to move the group on by offering financial incentives, and homebuyers ‘who feign “concern” but want no such nonsense in their back yard’.29 Bodil Jorgenson plays Karen, a nervous outsider to the group and the moral conscience of the film (prefiguring the role of Grace [Nicole Kidman] in von 27 Ibid., p. 156. 28 Liva is essentially a ‘good’ character, only becoming a prostitute to support Bjarke. Mark Sinker and Tabish Kahir argue that this stereotype of the ‘whore-with-aheart-of-gold’ pushes the film not only towards sentimental cliché but also close to the kind of genre film that the Dogme Manifesto warns against: Mark Sinker, ‘Review of Mifune’, Sight and Sound, 9(10) (October 1999), 53 and Kahir, ‘The Ideology of Play’, 125. 29 Xan Brooks, ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’, Sight and Sound, 9(5) (May 1999), 34. Gilbey, ‘Dogme is Dead. Long Live Dogme’, 4. Kelly, The Name of this Book is Dogme95, p. 20.

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Trier’s most recent film Dogville, 2003). Jorgenson’s underplayed performance is juxtaposed with the group’s over-wrought activities, and also contrasts markedly with Emily Watson’s role as the lovelorn and hysterical Bess in von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, in which her husband Jan (Stellan Skarsgård) returns home from an oilrig off the coast of Scotland paralysed and very possibly with brain damage.30 Karen in The Idiots is initially sceptical and questioning of the group’s ethics, but she later sees some virtue in their activity as a release from conformist pressures, with Jorgenson commenting that ‘“spassing” is a lovely metaphor for people who don’t fit into society. It’s a sign, a way for them to pass on the message that they’re in pain.’31 There is certainly a playful and tongue-in-cheek aspect that can be glimpsed through the film’s mask of seriousness, but von Trier treads a fine line between an exploration of social expectations and inciting the spectator to reject the group’s behaviour as indulgent and morally unacceptable. The Idiots is much looser in structure than Mifune, mainly because von Trier did not re-edit the script, using the jerky motion of the hand-held camera to greater effect and encouraging the actors to improvise their roles. He was impressed by their commitment to what he calls ‘the idiot cause’, commenting that ‘the days when they weren’t supposed to [spass], they were really pissed off’ and recommending it as ‘a wonderful thing [that] everyone should try … like a shower – an emotion shower’.32 While the film seems to advocate idiotic behaviour, it is also critical of the philosophy and implicit superiority of the group, particularly Stoffer, who describes his central philosophy as a search for self-acceptance: ‘Being an idiot is a luxury, but it is also a step forward. Idiots are people of the future. If one can find the one idiot that happens to be one’s own idiot …’ However, despite this credo (‘a blend of druggy transcendence and primal-scream therapy’33) Stoffer wants to remain in control of the group, whereas the ingénue Karen risks her identity as she tries to deal with her inhibitions and neuroses.34 The film ends with Karen agreeing to ‘spass’ in front of her family (the others are reluctant to do so in the company of people who ‘really matter’). In Karen’s earnest search for selfhood this final scene is intended to expose the falseness of the group, as Jorgenson makes clear: for a film to end this way, with a woman ‘spassing’ and spitting out cake

30 One reading of Breaking the Waves would be to argue that the two main characters experience stereotypically gendered conditions (Jan suffers ‘hard’ cerebral ˇ zek is that Bess damage and Bess ‘soft’ hysteria), but another reading proposed by Slavoj Ziˇ is one of those characters (like Betty in Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy’) who loves ˇ zek, unconditionally and so intensely that she becomes the dominant force in the film: Ziˇ ‘Femininity Between Goodness and Act’, Lacanian Ink, 14 (Spring 1999), 28–35. 31 Kelly, The Name of this Book is Dogme95, p. 59. 32 Ibid., p. 139. 33 Brooks, ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’, 34. 34 The director identifies this critique of Stoffer’s leadership in the documentary The Humiliated (Jesper Jergil, Den, 1999) that charts the making of The Idiots.

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IMAGES OF IDIOCY in front of her family – I mean, if that can be a release for her, then you know things are really black! Also, I liked the idea that these young people could ‘spass’ from here to eternity, and it wouldn’t do them a bit of good. It’s their invention, and yet they don’t know how to use it. But Karen does, and for her it’s revelatory. She couldn’t explain it in words, as I’m doing now, but she knows what it’s for.35

The Idiots raises problems in respect to the group’s idiosyncratic moral code and their disregard for disability issues that, along with episodes like the orgy sequence during a party for Stoffer, tend to blur this critical edge.36 In fact, the film’s selfcontained critique is in danger of collapsing altogether if we read Karen’s ‘spassing’ at the end as conformity to the group’s ideology. However, it may be the risks von Trier takes are precisely to explore these tricky social issues without moralizing or seeking easy Hollywood-style answers. In contrast to The Idiots, the bittersweet Belgian comedy Pauline & Paulette (Lieven Debrauwer, 2001) returns us to a world of innocence, playing on the familiar traits of idiocy through its sixty-something central character Pauline (Dora van der Groer). Although Pauline is dowdy and has a comic running walk, van der Groer does not rely on the stock-in-trade look of Dustin Hoffman and Sean Penn, partly due to her gender and partly down to the modest ambitions of a film that does not seek high drama at the expense of a realistic character study. The film is as much about family and female carers as it is about idiocy. At the beginning Pauline is totally dependent on her sister Martha for food and for basic activities like tying her shoelaces, but she has some command over language and is able to run errands to the butchers so long as a shopping list is written down. There is no back-story concerning Pauline’s parents and the provenance of her condition; she is simply presented with a short attention span, a love of bright colours and the sensuality of flowers (that contrasts with her own drab clothing), reliant on routine, and childlike in her rhyming of words. Her sister Martha is her primary carer, but Pauline is obsessed by her other sister, Paulette (Ann Peterson), who runs a boutique in Lochristi and who, to begin with, is mildly irritated by her sister’s simple-minded attentiveness. When Martha suddenly dies, the responsibility for Pauline falls to Paulette and her other sister Cécile, who lives in a flat in Brussels with her boyfriend Albert. Martha’s will prevents Pauline being put into an institution, so first Paulette and – when Pauline spoils one of her amateur operatic performances – then Cécile take it in turns to look after their sister. The film focuses on the central relationship between Pauline and Paulette, with Albert having little compassion and no understanding of her needs. So that she can retire on the coast, Paulette 35 Kelly, The Name of this Book is Dogme95, p. 174. 36 Xan Brooks argues that ‘ultimately, The Idiots emerges as a truly fascinating folly, an all-but-impenetrable muddle with glimmers of genius running from top to tail … a film of crazy-paved surfaces and deep puddles of ambiguity’: Brooks, ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’, 35.

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eventually puts Pauline in a home (where she strikes up a childlike friendship with a man who collects stamps), but Paulette cannot forget the mutual affection that has built up between them, the film ending with the two reunited in the coastal resort. Although the small-town environment of Lochristi enables Pauline to enter public spaces without endangering herself (compared to the urban dangers faced by Conrad’s Stevie and Mistry’s Tehmul, see Chapters 4 and 9) and the film is fairytale-like in the stylized bright colours that radiate out from Paulette’s boutique, the relationship between Pauline and her three sisters conveys an emotional realism unsurpassed in many other American and European films dealing with idiocy. Where Pauline & Paulette works with gentle humour, the French film Le Dîner du Cons (developed from Francis Veber’s stage play) is crudely comic in its exploration of the social face of idiocy. The story revolves around a dinner for idiots that the publisher Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte) and his professional friends organize for the social misfits they find on their travels around Paris. Anyone with unusual looks, habits, hobbies or collections is ripe to be an unwitting victim of a dinner invitation. When Brochant’s colleague finds the small, fat and balding François Pignon (Jacques Villeret), who works for the Ministry of Finance and makes elaborate matchstick models of the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge, they think he will be one of their best finds. However, Pierre strains his back on the golf course and he is forced to share an evening with his ‘dinner idiot’ in his luxurious Parisian flat, with disastrous consequences. He finds out his wife has left him and reluctantly uses François as a means to locate her whereabouts. Although François adopts a number of valiant disguises on the telephone – pretending to be a Belgian film director and a respected surgeon – to discover information about Pierre’s wife and then to control the chaos that ensues, the comic situation becomes increasingly farcical, with a girlfriend, a novelist and a tax inspector all becoming embroiled. The film uses a wide variety of words to describe social idiocy including ‘idiot’, ‘crétin’ and ‘imbécile’, but most often ‘con’, which is the most offensive French invective in this range of terms. With his idiotic look and fuzzy logic François is a clear figure of fun and buffoonery, but the spectator feels relatively comfortable in laughing at him because he also mocks others. The farcical tone is threatened when François becomes aware that his initial invitation is due to his idiocy, but when he manages to persuade his host’s wife to return, Pierre admits that François should take him to the next dinner as the idiot (only for one further telephone mishap to reverse the polarity again).

The Future of Idiocy It remains to be seen whether the revival of interest in idiocy among filmmakers in the 1990s will continue, with certain performance styles (in both Europe and America) becoming rather tired. However, as I have argued throughout the book,

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images of idiocy are usually unstable and not easy to codify, particularly given the range of physical acting styles that have survived from early film and that are likely to develop further. Recent films like David Cronenberg’s Spider (2002) and Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) deal with schizophrenic characters, but do not diagnose the condition, it seems, so that they can explore the cinematic language of idiocy. For example, the scene where Julien (Ewen Bremner) visits a doctor was cut from the final edit of Julien Donkey-Boy in order that his idiosyncrasies could be ‘placed’ in familial and social situations without being delimited by the doctor’s diagnosis. Other stories about idiocy have not yet been told and there is important cultural ground to break as regards the relation of idiocy to gender, race and biotechnology. It would also be interesting, as Umberto Eco implies, to portray idiocy in a digital environment in which the speed of information received is too fast for any individual to comprehend and in which normative categories could no longer apply. But whether idiocy would be radically transformed in such an environment remains to be seen; while one image of idiocy is of a biological prison from which the world is viewed from behind bars, another suggests it is a discourse always enmeshed with forms of knowledge, language and power.37 It is clear that idiocy cannot simply be defined in terms of intelligence, but much recent debate has revived the spectre of the ‘g factor’ that was introduced in the early twentieth century by the British scientist Charles Spearman as a means to calibrate ‘general intelligence’.38 For Spearman, ‘g’ was a precise mathematical quotient that defined intelligence by correlating the results of different kinds of tests to determine mental ability (including understanding, relatedness and the ability to predict a sequence). Because the ‘g factor’, like IQ tests that followed in its wake, was devised to define intelligence precisely, the publication of Richard Herrnstein’s and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994) and Christopher Brand’s The G Factor (1996) has provoked heated discussion about the fresh claims (based on rather dubious statistical data) that particular social groups and races have innately superior intelligence 39 and that IQ is the dominant factor for determining social status. Along with the charges of scientific racism against Herrnstein, Murray and Brand have 37 These two views were put forward by Malcolm Bowie and Umberto Eco in a BBC Radio 3 broadcast A Short History of Stupidity (Paul Quinn, 29 December 2002). This radio broadcast is interesting for considering the history and semantics of stupidity, but it often elides stupidity with idiocy (perhaps rightly so in relation to Flaubert) and has little to say about either medicine or modernity, attending carefully to historical changes up to the late eighteenth century and then leaping from Karl Marx to George W. Bush. 38 See Charles Spearman, ‘General Intelligence: Objectively Determined and Measured’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 15 (1904), 201–9 and The Abilities of Man: Their Nature and Their Measurement (New York: Macmillan, 1927). 39 See Richard J. Herrnstein & Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994) and Christopher Brand, The G Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications (London: John Wiley, 1996). See also Stephen Jay Gould’s retort to Herrnstein & Murray in the updated version of The Mismeasure of Man (1997), pp. 367–90 and Herrnstein’s & Murray’s response to Gould in the Afterword

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been counter-arguments claiming that intelligence is never a wholly inherited phenomenon and it cannot be understood as a unitary thing. Against the notion of the ‘g factor’ many thinkers, including David Botstein at Stanford University and Bryan Appleyard in Britain, argue that intelligence is a ‘broad variant’ and cannot be reduced to a number or a specific faulty gene, even if its advocates claim that IQ tests are the best we have for gauging ‘general intelligence’.40 On this model, perhaps a better way of thinking about idiocy is with reference to what we might call an ‘i factor’ that defines intelligence and ability in even more general terms, paying equal attention to hereditary, environmental, institutional and social pressures in forming identity, and also considering cultural representations that shape, influence and modify the way in which idiocy is constructed and perceived.41 Many of the films considered here clearly challenge common perceptions of idiocy, but it is arguably the performances in which idiocy is ‘acted down’ that explore its symbolic and social dynamics more successfully than those that stigmatize the idiot with a particular visual look. In all the cultural case studies discussed in Images of Idiocy we can see recurrent patterns which suggest that if idiocy is a seam of modernity, it also opens seams in contemporary understandings of identity, disability, intelligence, competence and social care. Even if they are not always positive, many of the literary and cinematic representations discussed in this book explore tensions and contradictions in the multiple discourses that contribute to the mythology of idiocy. On this level, the French theorist Clément Rosset suggests in his poetic-philosophical work Le Reél: traité de l’idiotie (1977) that idiocy is perhaps the only – usually overlooked – condition that can help us confront the more chaotic and disorderly aspects of existence. If idiocy is often imaged as a kind of empty subjectivity or barren selfhood, it can also be an experience of plenitude, replacing strict identity boundaries with an unruly existence that cannot be delimited by social stigma or reduced to a medical label.42 Rosset actually argues that

to the 1996 version of The Bell Curve, pp. 558–60. For recent commentary on the intelligence debates and their relevance to biotechnology see Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (London: Profile, 2002), Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans: Choosing Our Children’s Genes (London: Profile, 2002) and Bill McKibben, Enough: Genetic Engineering and the End of Human Nature (London: Bloomsbury, 2003). 40 Bryan Appleyard cites David Botstein’s argument that there are always ‘too many factors – too much noise – involved’ when determining intelligence and ‘you cannot leap from the statistics to an individual’: Bryan Appleyard, Brave New Worlds: Genetics and the Human Experience (London: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 109. This theory justifies Harmony Korine’s decision to resist diagnosing Julien’s schizophrenia in Julien DonkeyBoy, especially as Julien displays a poetic intelligence (along with more disreputable characteristics) that medical science tends to ignore. 41 While Gregory Stock sees a bright biotechnological future in terms of improving quality of life, he claims that intelligence is by no means the primary factor for survival in such a world: ‘we may need to possess a kind of savvy rather than the specialized cognitive abilities or general intelligence that IQ tests try to measure’: Stock, Redesigning Humans, p. 119.

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representations can be part of the problem, preventing us from confronting ‘the real’ by diluting it through words and images. However, as this book has demonstrated, it is precisely by exploring these varied and often troubling cultural mediations that we can start to differentiate between disabling and enabling images of idiocy.

42 Clément Rosset, Le Reél: traité de l’idiotie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1977), pp. 41–6. For an insightful summary of Rosset’s philosophical position see David Bell’s introduction to Rosset’s Joyful Cruelty: Toward a Philosophy of the Real, trans. David F. Bell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. vii–xvi.

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Filmography Greed (Eric von Stroheim, US, 1923) Der blaue Engel / The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, Ger & US, 1930) Boudu Sauvé des Eaux / Boudu Saved From Drowning (Jean Renoir, Fr, 1932) Madame Bovary (Jean Renoir, Fr, 1934) Sabotage / A Woman Alone (Alfred Hitchcock, GB, 1936) Of Mice and Men (Lewis Milestone, US, 1939) A Canterbury Tale (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, GB, 1944) Nicholas Nickleby (Alberto Cavalcanti, GB, 1947) Madame Bovary (Vincente Minnelli, US, 1949) Hakuchi / The Idiot (Akira Kurosawa, Jap, 1951) The Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, US, 1955) The Man With the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger, US, 1955) The Sound and the Fury (Martin Ritt, US, 1959) To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, US, 1962) Lebenszeichen / Signs of Life (Werner Herzog, WGer, 1968) L’Enfant Sauvage / The Wild Child (François Truffaut, Fr, 1969) Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean, GB, 1970) The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, US, 1971) Deliverance (John Boorman, US, 1972) Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle / The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (or Every Man For Himself and God Against All) (Werner Herzog, WGer, 1974) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, US, 1975) Being There (Hal Ashby, US, 1979) The Jerk (Carl Reiner, US, 1979) Wise Blood (John Huston, US, 1979) The Elephant Man (David Lynch, US, 1980) Rain Man (Barry Levinson, US, 1988) The Lawnmower Man (Brett Leonard, GB/US, 1992) Of Mice and Men (Gary Sinise, US, 1992) Waterland (Stephen Gyllenhaal, GB, 1992) What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (Lasse Hallström, 1993) Dumb & Dumber (Peter Farrelly, US, 1994) Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, US, 1994) Funny Bones (Peter Chelsom, GB/US, 1994) The Hudsucker Proxy (Joel Coen, US, 1994) Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, Den/Swe/Fr/Neth/Nor, 1996) Le Huitième Jour / The Eighth Day (Jaco Van Dormael, Fr/Bel/GB, 1996)

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The Secret Agent (Christopher Hampton, GB/US, 1996) Sling Blade (Billy Bob Thornton, US, 1996) Le Dîner du Cons (Francis Veber, Fr, 1998) Idioterne / The Idiots (Lars von Trier, Den, 1998) Such a Long Journey (Sturla Gunnarsson, Can/GB, 1998) Julien Donkey-Boy (Harmony Korine, US, 1999) Mifune sidste sang / Mifune (Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, Den/Swe, 1999) The Million Dollar Hotel (Wim Wenders, Ger/US, 1999) Chuck and Buck (Miguel Arteta, US, 2000) Last Orders (Fred Schepisi, GB, 2001) Pauline & Paulette (Lieven Debrauwer, Bel, 2001) I Am Sam (Jessie Nelson, US, 2002) Spider (David Cronenberg, Can/UK/Jap/Fr, 2002) Talk to Her / Hable con Ella (Pedro Almodovar, US, 2002) Dumb & Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd (Troy Miller, US, 2003)

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Bibliography Abbott, James, The Hand Book of Idiotcy (London: Trübner & Co., 1857). Abercrombie, John, ‘A Case of Spasmodic Muscular Rigidity with Idiocy’, Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports, 13 (1877), 275–7. Achenbach, Patrick, ‘Mental Subnormality: 1324–1961’, unpublished PhD thesis (Queens University, Belfast, 1967). Ackroyd, Peter, Dickens (London: Guild, 1990). Adams, Scott, The Dilbert Principle (London: Boxtree, 1996). Agee, James, Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies (New York: Modern Library, 2000). Ahmad, Aijaz, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1994). Allen, William Rodney, ‘The Cage of Matter: The World as Zoo in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood’, American Literature, 58(2) (May 1986), 256–70. Anderson, Sherwood, Winesburg, Ohio (London: Penguin, 1992). Andrews, Jonathan, ‘Begging the Question of Idiocy: The Definition and Sociocultural Meaning of Idiocy in Early Modern Britain’, History of Psychiatry, 9, 1(33) (March 1998), 65–95 & 9, 2(34) (June 1998), 179–200. Appleyard, Bryan, Brave New Worlds: Genetics and the Human Experience (London: HarperCollins, 2000). A Short History of Stupidity, producer Paul Quinn, BBC Radio 3 (29 December 2002). Astro, Richard & Tetsumaro Hayashi (eds), Steinbeck: The Man and His Work (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 1971). ‘Asylums and Schools for Idiots’, American Journal of Insanity (July 1847), 76–9. Atwood, Margaret, Lady Oracle (London: Virago, 1982). Bacon, Jon Lance, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981). ––––, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). ––––, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984). Barker, D., ‘How to Curb the Fertility of the Unfit: The Feebleminded in Edwardian Britain’, Oxford Review of Education, 9 (1983), 197–211. Barnes, B. & S. Shapin (eds), Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture (London: Sage, 1979).

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Richet, Charles, Idiot Man, or the Follies of Mankind, trans. Norah Forsythe & Lloyd Harvey (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1925). Richie, Donald, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, 2nd edn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970). Riese, Walther, ‘Baudelaire as a Victim of Aphasia’, Episteme, 6 (1972), 305–17. Rilke, Rainer Maria, Werke, 4 Volumes, ed. Manfred Engel et al. (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1966). Roberts, John, ‘Dogme 95’, New Left Review, 1(238) (November–December 1999), 141–9. Robertson, Ritchie, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Rohmer, Eric & Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, trans. Stanley Hochman (Oxford: Roundhouse, 1979). Ronell, Avital, Stupidity (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002). Rosen, Marvin, Gerald Clark & Marvin Kivitz (eds), The History of Mental Retardation, 2 volumes (Baltimore, MD: University Park Press, 1976). Rosset, Clément, Le Reél: traité de l’idiotie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1977). ––––, Joyful Cruelty: Toward a Philosophy of the Real, trans. David F. Bell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Oeuvres completes, ed. B. Gagnebin et al. (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959). ––––, A Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, 1984). Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children (London: Picador, 1984). ––––, Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta, 1991). ––––, Shame (London: Vintage, 1995). Russell, Denise, Women, Madness and Medicine (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). Ruthven, K. K., ‘Conrad, Blackwood’s and Lombroso’, Conradiana, 6(1) (1974), 57–62. Sacks, Oliver, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (London: Picador, 1986). Said, Edward, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (London: Vintage, 1994). Sampath, Ursula, Kaspar Hauser: A Modern Metaphor (Columbia, SC: Cambden House, 1991). Sandford, John, The New German Cinema (London: Oswald Wolff, 1980). Sanga, Jaina C., Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001). Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Family Idiot, Volume 1: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857, trans. Carol Cosman (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981). ––––, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Methuen, 1950). Schad, John, ‘The End of the End of History: Graham Swift’s Waterland’, Modern Fiction Studies, 38(4) (Winter 1992), 911–25.

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––––, Victorian Thinking: From Derrida to Browning (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Scull, Andrew, Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). Séguin, Edouard, Idiocy: and its Treatment by the Physiological Method (Albany, NY: Press of Brandow Printing Co., 1907). Selincourt, Ernest de (ed.), The Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935). Shattuck, Roger, The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980). Shaw, George Bernard, ‘The Sanity of Art’, The Works of Bernard Shaw, Volume 19 (London: Constable & Co., 1930), pp. 303–46. Sherlock, E. B., The Feeble Minded (London: Macmillan, 1911). Sherry, Norman, Conrad’s Western World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). Showalter, Elaine, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987). Shurgot, Michael W., ‘A Game of Cards in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men’, Steinbeck Quarterly, 15(1–2) (Winter–Spring 1982), 38–43. Shuttleworth, George E., ‘Some of the Cranial Characteristics of Idiocy’, The History of Mental Retardation (Baltimore, MD: University Park Press, 1976), 237–45. Sikov, Ed, Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (New York: Hyperion, 2002). Silverman, Kaja, ‘Kaspar Hauser’s “Terrible Fall” into Narrative’, New German Critique, 24–25 (Fall–Winter 1981), 73–93. Simons, Jon, Foucault and the Political (London: Routledge, 1995). Sinker, Mark, ‘Review of Mifune’, Sight and Sound, 9(10) (October 1999), 53. Slattery, Dennis Patrick, ‘Seized By the Muse: Dostoevsky’s Compulsive Poetics in The Idiot’, Literature and Medicine, 18(1) (Spring 1999), 60–81. Smail, David, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety (London: Dent, 1984). Smith, Susan, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone (London: BFI, 2000). Smith, Susanna, The Workhouse Southwell (London: The National Trust, 2002). Spittles, Brian, Joseph Conrad (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). Stedman, T. L. (ed.), Twentieth Century Practice: An International Encyclopaedia of Modern Medical Science (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1897). Steinbeck, John, ‘the novel might benefit by the discipline, the terseness’, Stage, 15 (January 1938), 51. ––––, Life in Letters, ed. Elaine Steinbeck & Robert Wallsten (London: Minerva, 1994). ––––, Of Mice and Men (London: Arrow, 1998). ––––, The Long Valley (London: Penguin, 2000).

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Index Abbott, Samuel, 8, 44–5, 120n The Hand Book of Idiotcy, 8, 44, 44n, 120n Abbott and Costello, 4n A Beautiful Mind (Howard), 216 Abendberg School, Switzerland, 45 Abercrombie, John, 44n abjection, 51–2, 66, 71, 85, 116–18, 128, 133–4, 175 Ackroyd, Peter, 47n acting, 5, 217–31 Adams, Scott, 4n adaptation (for film), 13, 15, 18, 67, 87, 109–10, 138, 147, 149–50, 150n, 154, 161, 171–2, 179, 189–91, 193, 208–9, 215–16 Agee, James, 171, 171n, 218n agency, 14, 107, 114, 203 Ahmad, Aijaz, 197–8, 200 Albinus, Jens, 229 Alembert, Jean de Rond d’, 34 Algren, Nelson, 157–8 The Man With the Golden Arm, 157–8 allegory, 142–3, 147, 147n, 185, 198, 198–9n, 208, 208n Allen, William Rodney, 165n, 169n Almodovar, Pedro, 227 Americans with Disability Act (1990), 13n anarchism, 97–100, 102, 106, 110 Anderson, Sherwood, 162–3, 168 ‘Queer’, 163 Winesburg, Ohio, 162–3 Andrews, Jonathan, 8, 11, 31–2 A Night At the Opera (Wood), 220 anti-intellectualism, 161, 215–16, 216n aphasia, 126, 126n Appleyard, Bryan, 233, 233n Areta, Miguel, 216 Army, German, 112n Army, US, 11n, 165 Arnim, Achim von, 133 The Mad Invalid at the Fort of Ratonneau, 133

Arquette, Patricia, 109 arrested development, 11, 54 Artaud, Antonin, 220 Ashby, Hal, 221 A Short History of Stupidity (BBC), 132n Athas, Daphne, 164n Asholt, Jesper, 227 asylums, see mental hospitals and asylums At the Circus (Buzzell), 220 Atwood, Margaret, 19n Lady Oracle, 19n authority, 17, 20, 50, 53, 57, 83, 102, 179, 220 autism, 5, 69, 105 Avery, Tex, 150n Awakenings (Marshall), 216 Bacon, Jon Lance, 168, 169, 173 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 6, 18, 78–9, 163–4, 168, 219 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 78 Bakunin, Mikhail, 76 Baldovan Institute, Dundee, 32 (see Strathmartine Hospital) Balmer, Jean-François, 67 Balzac, Honoré de, 73 Barnes, Julian, 179 Barr, Charles, 110 English Hitchcock, 110 Barth, John, 15, 178 Barthes, Roland, 29 ‘The Discourse of History’, 29 Bartra, Roger, 118, 128, 132n Bateman, Frederic, 9–10, 43n The Idiot: His Place in Creation and His Claims on Society, 9–10, 43n Battie, William, 30–31 Baudelaire, Charles, 115, 126, 126n The Flowers of Evil, 115 Bayley, John, 210 Bazin, André, 66n, 69n Beal, John, 23 Beatles, the, 226

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Beckett, Samuel, 95, 220 Murphy, 95 Beer, Gillian, 46 Being There (Ashby), 221–2, 222n, 224n Belinsky, Vassily, 77 Bell, David, 234n Bellow, Saul, 197n Bennett, Charles, 109, 111 Bergman, Ingmar, 88 Bergson, Henri, 95 Berman, Marshall, 76 Berthelsen, Anders, 227 Bête humaine, La (Renoir), 68 Bethlem Hospital, London, 32 Bewell, Alan, 13, 29, 38n, 40 Bharucha, Nilufer, 195 Bicêtre Hospital, Paris, 45 Bickford, Charles, 151 Bigger Than Life (Ray), 178 Big Sleep, The (Hawks), 23 Bildungsroman, 61, 116, 184 Billington, Sandra, 50 biology, 6, 29, 37, 57, 85–6, 139, 145, 178, 179, 181, 183, 227, 232 Blackadder (BBC), 4n Blackboard Jungle, The, 157–8 Blake, William, 36, 42, 62, 74, 117 Blue Angel, The (von Sternberg), 117 Blum, Carol, 33 body, the, 2, 9n, 33, 36, 44, 51, 63, 66, 85, 90, 92, 105, 106, 119, 124, 130, 141, 144, 154, 162, 166, 173, 175, 187, 192–4, 209–10, 219 Bonaparte, Lucien, 119 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 99 Bonnaterre, Pierre-Joseph, 119 Boorman, John, 172 Bosch, Hieronymus, 161–2 ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, 161 ‘Ship of Fools’, 162 Botstein, David, 233, 233n Boudu Saved From Drowning (Renoir), 69 Bourdin, Martial, 99 Bowfinger (Oz), 222n Bowie, Malcolm, 232n Boyum, Joy Gould, 171, 171n Brand, Christopher, 232–3 The G Factor, 232 Braun, Ludwig, 16 Breaking the Waves (von Trier), 216, 229, 229n

Bremner, Ewen, 232 Brennan, Timothy, 198, 204–5 Breton, André, 115 Nadja, 115 Breugel, Pieter, 161 Broca, Paul, 126 Brook, Richard, 157 Brooks, Xan, 228, 230n Brombert, Victor, 59 Brontë, Charlotte, 49 Villette, 49 Bruno S., 129–31, 132, 227 Bryden, John, 8 Non Compos Mentis, 8 Brynner, Yul, 23 Büchner, Georg, 129, 130 Lenz, 130 Büchner, Ludwig, 123 buffoon, 79, 84, 204, 216, 231 Bunny, John, 218 Bunyan, John, 81 Burgin, Victor, 18 Burroughs, William, 178 Naked Lunch, 178 Burt, John, 165, 167, 170n Bush, George W., 215–16, 232n Byrd, Charlotte, 141 Byron, George Gordon, 42 ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’, 42 Campbell, Cheryl, 109 Campbell, Eric, 218 Caplan, Nina, 208 Capra, Frank, 215, 222 Carrey, Jim, 221, 222n, 227 Cartwright, Lisa, 2n, 16n, 17 Carus, Carl, 81, 82–3 Psyche, 81, 82–3 Cascardi, Anthony J., 75n Cassavetes, John, 178 Catholicism, 70–71, 160, 166n, 168, 186, 203 Cavell, Stanley, 212n Cervantes, Miguel de, 53 Don Quixote, 53, 118 Chabrol, Claude, 109 Chandler, Edwin, 19 Chaney, Lon, Jr, 24, 150, 151 Chaplin, Charles, 67, 111, 165, 217, 218n, 220

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INDEX Chase, Charley, 218n Chekhov, Anton, 197n Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 76–7, 79, 86 What is to be Done?, 76 children and childhood, 2, 8, 11, 18, 22, 32, 35, 37, 40, 42, 45–7, 50, 52, 54, 46, 62, 68n, 104, 106, 112, 119–22, 124, 130, 131, 137, 144, 146, 147, 151, 167, 183, 188, 190–92, 204–6, 209–10, 219–20, 224–5, 227, 230–31 (see also wild child) Christianity, 74–5, 84–5, 123, 126, 164, 167, 175 Chuck and Buck (Areta), 216, 224–5 Clark, Roger Y., 200n classification (see medical classification) clowns and clowning, 7, 117, 217, 221n Cobbe, Frances Power, 45, 45n ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors’, 45 Coen Brothers, the, 216, 216n, 222 Cohen, Josh, 17 Cohen, Paula Marantz, 110–12 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 37, 41–2, 51, 136 Biographia Literaria, 41–2 ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, 37, 136 Coles, Robert, 159 Colt, Beth, 224 Combe, Andrew, 49 Observations on Mental Derangement, 49 commedia dell’arte, 220, 224 community, 40, 96n, 126, 131, 137, 153–4, 159–60, 164, 168–70, 175, 178, 182, 195, 202, 228 Connolly, John, 9 Conrad, Joseph, 13, 95–114, 133, 137, 138, 170, 179, 185, 199, 231 Heart of Darkness, 100 ‘The Idiots’, 104, 106 The Secret Agent, 13, 15, 95–114, 115, 137, 138, 142, 154, 170, 180, 185, 231 Conrad, Peter, 111 Contemporary (journal), 76 Cook, Ann-Marie, 218 Cooper, Gary, 215 Cooper, Pamela, 183, 187, 189 Copland, Aaron, 154

259

Corrigan, Timothy, 134 Crane, Hart, 137 ‘The Idiot’, 137 Crane, Stephen, 135 Crawford, T. Hugh, 16, 17 ‘Crazy Kate’ (Shepherd), 19 cretin, 4, 13, 45, 82, 140, 183n, 204, 231 criminology, 98–9, 121 Cronenberg, David, 5, 232 Cruise, Tom, 5 Culler, Jonathan, 53, 55–6, 58 Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, 55–6 Cure, The (Chaplin), 217 Cusack, Sinead, 190 Dalí, Salvador, 161, 220 Dangerous Woman, A (Gyllenhaal), 190 Darwin, Charles, 46–8 The Origin of the Species, 46 The Descent of Man, 48 dadaism, 115 Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner), 218–19 Daniels, Jeff, 221 Darwinism, 98, 101, 115, 118, 123 Dastor, Sam, 209 Daumer, Georg, 120, 125, 127, 128n, 130, 132 Davidson, Max, 218n Davies, Jude, 223n Dead Poets Society (Weir), 190n Deboo, Kurush, 209 Debrauwer, Lieven, 230 decay, 2, 20 (see also degeneration and degeneracy) defectives, 11–12, 47 Defoe, Daniel, 31 ‘Mere Nature Delineated’, 31 degeneration and degeneracy, 4, 10, 47–8, 50, 68, 97, 98–102, 104–8, 118 (see also decay) Deleuze, Gilles, 89, 90 Deliverance (Boorman), 171 Dendy, Mary, 96n, 97n derangement, see madness Desai, Anita, 195 Descartes, René, 7 Diary of a Chambermaid, The (Renoir), 68n Dickens, Charles, 47–50, 73, 75, 95, 124, 201, 205

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‘A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree’, 50 Barnaby Rudge, 49–50 David Copperfield, 48 ‘Idiots’, 49 Nicholas Nickleby, 49 Our Mutual Friend, 48 Pickwick Papers, 75 Dickey, James, 172 Dickinson, Hilary, 48–51 Diderot, Denis, 33–4, 35 ‘Letter on the Deaf and Dumb’, 34 ‘Natural Son’, 33 Rameau’s Nephew, 33 Dietrich, Marlene, 117 Dîner du cons, Le (Veber), 216, 227, 231 disability and disabled, 8, 12, 16, 17, 25, 215–16, 218, 221, 230, 233–4 Disney, Walt, 109, 111, 219 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 219 Who Killed Cock Robin?, 111 Disraeli, Benjamin, 97 Dobrolyubov, Nikolai, 76 Docherty, Thomas, 14, 22n Doctorow, E. L., 178 Dodiya, Jaydipsinh, 195 Dogme films, 216, 226–30 Dogville (von Trier), 229 Dos Passos, John, 142 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 5, 13, 15, 53, 73–92, 95, 98, 111, 116, 124, 134, 161, 170, 171, 177n, 199, 200, 223 The Devils, 98 The Idiot, 5, 13, 15, 53, 73, 77, 78–92, 98, 111, 170, 171, 177n, 200 The Notebooks for The Idiot, 79–80, 80n Notes from Underground, 77–8, 81n, 85 Dourif, Brad, 171, 171n Down, John Langdon, 9n, 10 Down’s syndrome, 10, 11, 225 Dreyer, Carl, 88 Drunken Angel (Kurosawa), 88 DuBois, W. E. B., 122 Dumb & Dumber (Farrelly), 221 Dummies (Semon), 218 Duncan, P. Martin, 9 Durgnat, Raymond, 69, 71, 220 Earlswood Asylum, Surrey, 45

East of Eden (Kazan), 150 Eco, Umberto, 163–4, 232, 232n education, 19, 45–8, 51, 53, 57, 84, 120, 124, 128–30, 132, 157, 184–8, 190–93, 201, 202n, 204, 207n, 208, 223, 225–6 Eichendorff, Joseph, 129 Eisenhower, Dwight, 158 Eisenstein, Sergei, 67 Eisermann, André, 130 Elephant Man, The (Lynch), 1–2 Eliot, George, 49 Romola, 49 Eliot, T. S., 101, 166 ‘The Journey of the Magi’, 203 The Waste Land, 166 Ellis, Havelock, 48n Ellison, Ralph, 160 Invisible Man, 160 Elswit, Robert, 190 encephalitis, 11, 216 Encyclopédie (Diderot and d’Alembert), 34 Enfant Sauvage, L’ (Truffaut), 120, 130, 133 enigma and the enigmatic, 17, 37, 51, 89, 120, 124, 128–30, 132, 147, 148, 157, 170, 171, 181, 189, 190, 196, 220, 228 Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, The (Herzog), 18, 119, 128–34, 193, 227 Enlightenment, the, 30–33, 35, 36–7, 40, 46 epilepsy, 54, 76, 79–86, 89–92, 92n, 99, 105 Eraserhead (Lynch), 216n Erasmus, Desiderius, 162 In Praise of Folly, 162 Esquirol, Jean, 9, 81 ethnicity, 9n, 10, 13n, 122, 157, 200, 223n (see also race) eugenics, 123, 145n Everson, William K., 153n, 154n evolutionary theory, 46–7, 99, 101 existentialism and the existential, 15, 89, 129, 130n, 132n, 160, 163, 177, 212, 220 Expressionism, 91, 117 Faces (Cassavetes), 178n family, 2, 19–20, 46, 53–4, 60–61, 104–5,

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INDEX 116, 195, 198–207, 221, 227–30, 232 Fanger, Donald, 73 Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 73 Far From the Madding Crowd (Schlesinger), 190n Farrell, James T., 138 Farrelly, Bobby and Peter, 221 Father Ted (Channel 4), 4n Faulkner, William, 19–24, 116, 132, 137, 138, 141, 142, 150, 159–60, 223 The Hamlet, 23 The Sound and the Fury, 19–25, 116, 132, 137, 138, 141, 154, 160 ‘The Kingdom of God’, 22 Light in August, 20 feeble-mindedness, 4, 11, 49, 95, 96n, 97n Feuerbach, Anselm von, 121, 125, 127 Field, Betty, 152 Fiennes, Ralph, 5n film adaptation, see adaptation (for film) First Report from the Committee on Madhouses in England, The, 41 Fish, Stanley, 74 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 145 Flaubert, Gustave, 13, 53–71, 73, 79, 83, 86, 86n, 95, 232n Bouvard and Pécuchet, 53, 56 The Dictionary of Received Ideas, 55, 64 Madame Bovary, 13, 15, 25, 53–4, 56, 57–71, 75n, 83, 141, 146 Sentimental Education, 53, 56 ‘The Simple Heart’, 56–7 Fleming, Dakota, 225 fool, the, 7, 18, 31, 35, 50–51, 59, 61, 69, 70, 162, 167, 176, 218, 221n, 224 (see also holy fool and natural fool) Ford, John, 149, 150, 158 Forman, Milos, 171n Forrest Gump (Zemeckis), 29, 150, 216, 222–4 Foucault, Michel, 2, 4, 6, 15, 45 Fowles, John, 78 freak, 5n, 24, 25, 132, 140, 164n French, Warren, 146 Frenzy (Hitchcock), 113 Freud, Sigmund, 80–81, 95, 115, 124, 126, 178 ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’, 80 Fukuyama, Francis, 186, 233n

261

Fuller, Samuel, 178n Füssli, Johann Heinrich, 18 Galbraith, Stuart, IV, 88 Gall, Franz, 9 Galt, John, 49 Annals of the Parish, 49 Galsworthy, John, 97, 98 Gandhi, Indira, 198n, 208n, 211 Garland, Hamlin, 135 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 49 ‘Half a Lifetime Ago’, 49 gaze, the, 15, 16, 90, 219 gender, 18–19, 50n, 137, 157, 158, 178, 183, 186–7, 199–200, 224n, 229n, 232 genetics, 10–11, 20, 55, 61, 101, 102, 135, 137 Gentry, Marshall, 168 Giannone, Richard, 166n Gibbon, Edward, 9n Gibson, Andrew, 100 Gide, André, 122n Gilman, Sander, 16n, 101n Ginsberg, Allen, 177, 177n Godden, Romer, 68n The River, 68n Goethe, Johann Caspar, 126, 126n Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 116 Wilhelm Meister books, 116 Gone With the Wind (Fleming), 150 Goffman, Erving, 1n, 9n, 177n Stigma, 1n, 177n Goodwin, James, 87, 90 Gore, Albert, Jr, 215–16 Gould, Stephen Jay, 11, 232n, The Mismeasure of Man, 11, 232n Gowland, Gibson, 138 Grapes of Wrath, The (Ford), 149, 150 Grass, Günter, 178, 198 Gray, Alaisdair, 179 Greed (von Stroheim), 138 Greenblatt, Stephen, 143 Groer, Dora van der, 230 Grosz, George, 161 grotesque, 48n, 140, 161–4, 165, 168–9, 171, 173, 195n, 205, 210–11, 213, 218, 219 Guggenbühl, Johann Jacob, 45 Gunesekera, Romesh, 195 Gunnarsson, Sturla, 204, 208–13

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Gyllenhaal, Stephen, 179, 189–94 Haekel, Ernst, 123 Halliwell, Martin, 36n, 37n, 180n Hampton, Christopher, 109 Handke, Peter, 119 Kaspar, 119 Hanks, Tom, 223–4 Hara, Setsuko, 90 Hartman, Geoffrey, 42n Ha˘sek, Jaroslav, 95 The Good Soldier Schweik, 95 Hawke, Ethan, 190 Hawn, Goldie, 216n Hayes, Frank, 218 Heady, Lena, 192 Heflin, Van, 67, 69 Hemingway, Ernest, 135, 138, 142 The Sun Also Rises, 138 Herrnstein, Richard, 232 The Bell Curve (with Murray), 232 Herzen, Alexander, 77 Herzog, Werner, 18, 119, 128–34, 161, 163, 193, 227 Hesse, Herman, 37n, 122 Hicks, Chris, 190n Hilfer, Tony, 170–71n Hingley, Ronald, 74 Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, 74 Hirjee, Vrajesh, 209 history, 3–4, 29, 179, 180–89, 191, 194, 298, 223, 232n Hitchcock, Alfred, 15, 96, 109–14 Hjele, Iben, 227 Hochman, Baruch, 14 Hoffman, Dustin, 5, 215, 225, 227, 230 Hoffman, E. T. A., 37 Tom-Cat Murr, 37n Hofstadter, Richard, 215 Holbein, Hans, 84–5, 85n ‘Christ in the Tomb’, 84–5 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 36 Hollander, Robert, 74n holy fool, 5, 76, 136 Homolka, Oscar, 109 Hooton, Earnest, 145, 145n Apes, Men and Morons, 145, 145n Hopkins, Anthony, 1 Horsey, David, 216n Hoskins, Bob, 109 Howe, Samuel, 44, 44n

On the Causes of Idiocy, 44, 44n Howells, William Dean, 135 Hudsucker Proxy, The (Coen), 222 Hugo, Victor, 75 Les Misérables 75 Hulse, Michael, 121, 123n, 124, 125 humanism, 54, 77, 123, 127, 158, 171, 177n, 185, 216 Humiliated, The (Jergil), 229n Hunter, Allan, 103 Hunter, Evan, 157–8 Blackboard Jungle, The, 157–8 Huppert, Isabelle, 67 Hurt, John, 1 Huston, John, 161, 171–6 Hutcheon, Linda, 101n, 179, 185 hysteria, 18, 80, 91, 229n I Am Sam (Nelson), 216, 225–6 identity and selfhood, 5, 21–3, 52, 95, 99, 110, 116, 127, 132, 133, 138, 157, 166n, 168, 170, 179–81, 188, 193–4, 212–13, 215, 222n, 224, 229, 233–4 idiocy and idiots, passim congenital idiocy, 10–11, 48, 101, 104, 136 pure idiocy, 8, 45, 80, 146 idiot savant, 5, 9, 9n, 141, 141n, 185, 188 Idiot, The (BBC), 86 Idiot, The / Hakuchi (Kurosawa), 15, 73, 86–92, 113, 131 Idiots, The / Idioterne (von Trier), 216, 227–30, 230n Idiots Act (1866), 11 ‘Idiots Again’ (anon.), 47 I’ll Take My Stand (Twelve Southerners) 159 images (visual and cinematic), 1, 4, 13, 15–17, 19, 24, 84, 89, 92, 130, 133, 151, 154, 207–9, 213, 217, 232 imbecility, 1, 4, 11, 98, 102, 103, 104, 119, 231 immigration, 11, 195, 196n innocence, 2, 35, 42–3, 48, 50, 53, 74, 75, 80, 84, 85, 101, 104, 108, 113, 114, 118, 120–24, 128–9, 132n, 134, 135, 137, 144, 146, 149, 151, 153–4, 199, 205, 215, 216n, 220, 226n, 230 insanity, see madness and insanity Institution Impériale des Sourds-Muets, Paris, 119

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INDEX institutionalization, 18, 49, 181, 183, 191, 192n intelligence, 7, 10, 11–12, 39n, 47n, 56, 67, 69, 79, 119, 123, 131, 196n, 201, 204, 216, 223, 232–3, 233n (see also IQ) International Order for Ethics and Culture, 123n invalid and invalidity, 20, 81 IQ, 11, 12, 18, 157, 223, 232–3 (see also intelligence) Ireland, William, 9 Irons, Jeremy, 189, 191 irony, 53, 59, 63, 85, 83, 86, 96–8, 101, 102, 109–13, 134, 138, 161 Iser, Wolgang, 20, 22 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 179 Itard, Jean-Marc-Gaspard, 119–20, 119, 133 Wild Boy of Aveyron, 119 Ivanova, Sonechka, 73 Jackson, Mark, 96n, 97n Jackson, Robert Louis, 75 James, Henry, 53, 54, 56, 57, 73n, 135 James, William, 81, 95 Janik, Del Ivan, 182, 184 Jaucourt, Louis de, 34 Jehlen, Myra, 19–20 Jennings, Emil, 117 Jerk, The (Reiner), 221–2 ‘John Donaldson’ (Sawyer), x, 51 Johnson, Samuel, 7, 8n, 31, 32, 36, 126, 126n Dictionary of the English Language, 7, 8n, 31, 36 Rasselas, 32 Johnston, Kenneth, 39 Jones, Jennifer, 57, 68 Jones, Malcolm, 83 Dostoevsky After Bakhtin, 83 Jorgenson, Bodil, 228 Joyce, James, 116, 197, 197n, 212 Julien Donkey-Boy (Korine), 232, 232n, 233n Jung, Carl, 52 Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 52 Kafka, Franz, 95, 116, 122, 129 ‘Metamorphosis’, 95 Kahir, Tabish, 226, 228n

263

Kaspar Hauser (Sehr), 130 Katkov, Mikhail, 77 Kawain, Bruce, 24 Kazan, Elia, 150 Keaton, Buster, 217, 218n Kempley, Rita, 190 Kerouac, Jack, 160 On the Road, 160 Kesey, Ken, 171n, 178, 178n One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, 171n, 178, 178n Khan, A. G., 208 Kidman, Nicole, 228 Kipling, Rudyard, 118 The Jungle Book, 118 Klein, Melanie, 21 Knight, Diana, 60n, 61–2 Korine, Harmony, 226, 232, 233n Kosinski, Jerzy, 221 Being There, 221–2 Kozintsev, Grigori, 88 Kragh-Jacobsen, Søren, 216, 226–8 Kristeva, Julia, 51–2, 85, 85n, 185–6, 193–4 Black Sun, 85n Powers of Horror, 51–2 Kuga, Yoshiko, 90 Kundera, Milan, 198, 206, 210–11, 213 The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 198, 206, 213 Kurosawa, Akira, 15, 73, 86–92, 113, 131 Lacan, Jacques, 131n Ladengast, Walter, 132 LA Goal, Los Angeles, 225 Laing, R. D., 177–80, 183 The Divided Self, 177 The Politics of Experience, 177 Lambert, Angela, 195–6 Lamprecht, Gerhard, 67 Langdon, Harry, 220 Lange, Dorothea, 151n language, 3–5, 21, 24, 43, 51, 54, 55, 58, 59, 84, 86, 92, 100, 103, 105, 110, 112, 113, 115, 118, 120, 124, 126–7, 132–4, 180–81, 185–7, 191, 198, 201, 203–5, 215, 228, 230, 232 Last Orders (Schepisi), 192 Laurel, Stan, 17, 217–18, 218n Laurel and Hardy, 217–18, 218n Lawrence, D. H., 53, 57

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Lawson, Lewis, 166n Lean, David, 190n Lee, Alison, 179n Lee, Harper, 17, 158 To Kill a Mockingbird, 17, 158 LeGuin, Ursula, 178 Lehan, Richard, 138 Leigh, Mike, 216 Leighton, Margaret, 24 Lessing, Doris, 178 Levant, Howard, 143, 147 Lewis, R. W. B., 139 Lhermitte, Thierry, 231 Lifeboat (Hitchcock), 149 Lifton, Robert Jay, 180 Lisca, Peter, 145, 147n, 154 Literature and Medicine (journal), 181n Lloyd, Harold, 217, 220 Locke, John, 30, 38, 45n, 46 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 30, 38 Loder, John, 109 Lolita (Lyne), 190 Lombroso, Cesare, 98, 99–102, 105, 109, 118 ‘Atavism and Evolution’, 100–1 Man of Genius, 99, 105 ‘Lonely Metropolitan’ (Bayer), ix, 51 Long Hot Summer, The (Ritt), 23 Lorca, Federico García, 157 Lord, Robert, 84 Loy, Mina, 137 ‘Idiot Child on a Fire-Escape’, 137 Luhrmann, T. M., 196 The Good Parsi, 196 Lukács, Georg, 95 Lunacy Acts, 12 Lynch, David, 1, 162n, 216, 216n Lyne, Nicholas, 190 McCarthy, Paul, 146, 154 McCullers, Carson, 161 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, 161 ‘The Russian Realists and Southern Literature’, 161 McDonagh, Patrick, 3, 6, 43, 119, 120 McGrath, Patrick, 5n Spider, 5n McKibben, Bill, 233n McKinney, Ronald, 194 McKnight, Natalie, 50

Mach, Ernst, 95 Macintyre, John, 16n Madame Bovary (Chabrol), 67 Madame Bovary (Lamprecht), 67 Madame Bovary (Minnelli), 67–71 Madame Bovary (Renoir), 57, 66–71 Madden, David, 220, 220n ‘Mad Kate’ (Füssli), 18–19 madness and insanity, 5n, 7–9, 16n, 18, 19n, 20, 48, 49, 82, 92, 95, 101n, 103, 104, 106, 107, 115, 133, 136–7, 145n, 146, 147, 177, 179, 182–3, 186, 188–90, 218, 218n Malamud, Bernard, 157n, 197n The Assistant, 157n Idiot’s First, 157n Malkovich, John, 150, 151 Maltese Falcon, The (Huston), 171 Mann, Heinrich, 117 Professor Unrat, 117 Mann, Klaus, 122 ‘Vor dem leden’, 122 Mann, Thomas, 37n, 98, 116, 122, 162 Buddenbrooks, 116 Death in Venice, 37n, 116–17 ‘Tonio Kröger’, 116 Man Who Would Be King, The (Huston), 171 Man With the Golden Arm, The (Preminger), 157–8 Marshall, Penny, 216 Martin, Philip, 39 Martin, Steve, 221–2, 222n, 227 Marx, Bill, 220 Marx Brothers, the, 4n, 219–21 Marx, Harpo, 219–20 Marx, Karl, 132n masochism, 58, 81, 83, 172 (see also sado-masochism) Mason, James, 178 Maudsley, Henry, 47–8, 48n, 50, 118 Body and Mind, 47–8, 50 Mayer, David, 217 medicine, 2, 6, 10, 17, 51, 60, 63–4, 65, 90, 126, 146n, 178, 181, 199, 204, 216–18, 232n medical classification, 3, 4, 10–12, 22, 54, 83, 101, 108, 134, 178, 222, 232–3 Meet John Doe (Capra), 215 melancholia, 82, 86, 183n Melville, Herman, 136–7

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INDEX Moby-Dick, 136 memory, 9n, 24n, 119, 125, 141–2, 144, 148, 189, 189n, 190, 192, 230 Me, Myself & Irene (Farrelly), 221 Mencken, H. L., 159, 167n ‘The Sahara of the Bozart’, 159 meningitis, 11 Mental Deficiency Acts, 11 Mental Health Act (1959), 11 mental age, 10, 199, 225 mental hospitals and asylums, 5, 11, 23, 24, 32, 45, 48, 50, 129, 136n, 178, 183n mental illness, 9, 12, 13n, 31n, 147, 177–9 Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tale, The (Kurosawa), 87 Meredith, Burgess, 150 Merrick, Joseph, 1–2 Mifune, Tishiro, 88, 227 Mifune (Kragh-Jacobsen), 216, 227–9 Mighty Joe Young (Schoedsack), 169 Miksanek, Tony, 81, 82 Milestone, Lewis, 18, 24, 147, 149–54, 172n Mill, John Stuart, 81 Miller, Edgar, 9n Miller, Henry, 135 Miller, Mark Crispin, 216n The Bush Dyslexicon, 216n Miller, Robin Feuer, 80, 80n Millichap, Joseph, 149–50, 150n, 151 Mills, John, 190n Milton, John, 74 Paradise Lost, 74 Mind (association), 12 Minh-ha, Trinh, 191 Minnelli, Vincente, 67–71 Mirbaeu, Octave, 68n The Diary of a Chambermaid, 68n Mirren, Helen, 192 miscreation, 35, 40, 47, 48n misfit, 139, 160, 161, 190, 220, 228–31 Mistry, Rohinton, 13, 195–213, 231 Family Matters, 195, 196n, 204, 213n A Fine Balance, 195 ‘Lend Me Your Light’, 198n ‘One Sunday’, 198, 200–202, 204, 206, 209 ‘Squatter’, 195n Such a Long Journey, 13, 195, 197–8, 202–13, 231

265

Tales from Firozsha Baag, 195, 195n Mitchell, Glenn, 218n Moby, 4n Moby Dick (Huston), 171 modernism, 3, 14, 21, 24, 51, 56, 67, 95, 96, 97, 108, 109, 115, 116, 118, 121, 135, 137–9, 142–3, 154, 197, 199, 215 modernity, 19, 29, 51, 74, 85, 87, 88, 108, 115, 157, 184, 197, 232n, 233 Modern Times (Chaplin), 218n, 220 Momaday, N. Scott, 181 Monas, Sidney, 79 mongolism, 19n, 222, 223n Montaigne, Michel de, 32–3, 35, 162 Essays, 32–3, 162 Moore, Henry Thornton, 140 morality, 11, 17, 20–21, 33, 55, 68, 73–5, 78, 84, 88, 96, 97, 100–101, 105–9, 114, 130, 137, 141, 146, 153, 157, 158, 159–60, 163, 172, 199–200, 203, 207, 212, 228–30 Morel, Benedict August, 47n Morelli, Laura, 192 Mori, Masayuki, 88–90, 131 moron, 4, 11, 13, 145, 157, 200, 220, 228 Morrissey, David, 189, 192 Morsberger, Robert E., 150n Mukherjee, Bharati, 195–6, 196n Murphy, Eddie, 222 Murray, Charles, 232–3 (see also Richard Herrnstein) Music Box, The (Parrott), 217 Musil, Robert, 95, 116 The Man Without Qualities, 95 Myles, Anita, 213 mysticism, 74, 82, 84, 92n, 129, 183, 204–5 myth and mythology, 29, 108, 115, 119, 121, 123, 128, 137, 143, 158, 159, 177, 299, 213, 215, 227, 233 Nabokov, Vladimir, 190 Lolita, 190 Nance, Jack, 216n Narayan, R. K., 195n Native American culture, 13n, 132 natural fool, 18 natural sciences, the, 5, 33, 46 nature, 9–10, 30–43, 46, 48, 53, 57, 60, 101, 108, 118–21, 125, 127, 129–30,

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131n, 134, 136, 140, 144–5, 151–4, 161, 169, 179, 186, 188 naturalism, 18, 61, 135–9, 141n, 142, 158, 160 Negri, Pola, 67 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 208n Nelson, Jessie, 225, 225n Nelson, Tim Blake, 216n neo-classical, 17, 41 neurology, 1, 13, 29, 57, 83, 98, 99n, 116, 180, 215 Newman, Paul, 222 New York State Idiot Asylum, 32, 45 nihilism, 76–7, 108, 166, 168n Nixon, Richard, 190 noble savage, 2, 34–5, 49, 79, 108, 146 Norden, Martin, 16–18, 25 The Cinema of Isolation, 16–18 No Regrets for Our Youth (Kurosawa), 88 Norris, Frank, 137–8, 145 McTeague, 137–8, 145, 146 Novalis, 36, 117 O Brother Where Art Thou? (Coen), 216n O’Connor, Flannery, 13, 158–76, 182 ‘The Fiction Writer and His Country’, 163 ‘Good Country People’, 161 ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’, 161 Mystery and Manners, 160, 166 ‘The Regional Writer’, 166 The Violent Bear It Away, 158 Wise Blood, 13, 158, 160, 162–76, 182 Of Mice and Men (Milestone), 18, 24, 147, 149–54 Of Mice and Men (Sinise), 150, 151 One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Forman), 171n Ontiveros, Lupe, 224 ontology, 18, 25, 37, 50, 54, 59, 81, 189, 199, 209 Orr, Mary, 53, 62 Otherness, 12, 16, 100, 205 Pargeter, William, 37 Maniacal Disorders, 37 Parini, Jay, 143 Parsi culture, 195–8, 200–13 Paris Trout (Gyllenhaal), 190 Parkinson’s disease, 180 Patch Adams (Shadyac), 216

Paul, Louis, 142 Pauline & Paulette (Debrauwer), 216, 227, 230–31 Pearce, Susan, 169n Pearson, Roberta, 217n Penn, Sean, 225, 230 Peterson, Ann, 230 Peucker, Brigitte, 128–9, 129n, 131, 133 Pfeiffer, Michelle, 225 Philips, Gene, 24 Phillips, Adam, 181 phrenology, 100, 118 physiological cinema, 16n, 17 Pinel, Philippe, 120 Pisarev, Dmitri, 77 Plath, Sylvia, 177, 178n The Bell Jar, 178n Pope, Alexander, 31–2 The Dunciad, 31–2 ‘Essay on Man’, 31 Poradowska, Marguerite, 99 postcolonial, 13, 196–7 Postlethwaite, Pete, 193 postmodernism, 14, 51, 178–81, 185, 191, 215, 222n, 226n post-Romantic, 51, 88, 115, 143 poststructuralism, 14, 18, 197 Preminger, Otto, 157 Prendergast, Christopher, 55, 57 primitive and primitivism, 21, 34–5, 40, 41, 48, 52, 65, 100–101, 107–10, 115, 118, 120, 121, 124–5, 128, 130, 133, 135, 152, 168, 228 Prince, Peter, 190 Prince, Stephen, 87 Propp, Vladimir, 14 Protestantism, 160, 167–8, 168n Proteus syndrome, 2n Protocol (Ross), 216n Proust, Marcel, 21 psychosis and psychopathology, 5n, 52, 107–8, 137, 177, 215 Purdy, Dwight, 98 Puri, Om, 210 Pushkin, Aleksander, 75 quietism, 84 Rabelais, François, 55, 162, 168, 220 Gargantua and Pantagruel, 162 race, 9n, 19, 20, 48, 48n, 97n, 108, 136,

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INDEX 140, 140n, 145n, 148–9, 157, 159, 160, 169, 222, 222n, 224n, 232 (see also ethnicity) Rahv, Philip, 135 Railsback, Brian, 141n Rain Man (Levinson), 5, 150 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 33 Rashomon (Kurosawa), 87, 88, 88n Ray, Nicholas, 178 Razdan, Soni, 209 Reagan, Ronald, 191 realism, 20, 53, 79, 96, 109, 135, 151, 161, 182, 208, 226, 231 reason and rationalism, 7–8, 30–31, 35, 36, 49, 76, 77–8, 81n, 115, 119, 133, 144, 182 Red Pony, The (Milestone), 150 regionalism, 158–60 Reiner, Carl, 221 Renaissance, the, 17, 29, 32, 33, 161, 163 Renoir, Auguste, 68 Renoir, Jean, 57, 67–71 Renoir, Pierre, 66, 68–70 representation, 1, 15–18, 23–4, 47n, 50, 51–2, 227, 233–4 Reynolds, Guy, 166n Rice, James, 80–82 Dostevsky and the Healing Art, 81 Richie, Donald, 87, 88, 90 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 115, 115n Duino Elegies, 115, 115n ‘Song of the Idiot’, 115n Ritt, Martin, 19, 23–4, 132 River, The (Renoir), 68n Robbins, Tim, 222 Robertson, Ritchie, 122 Rohmer, Eric, 66, 109 Romanticism and Romantic, 2, 13, 25, 35–43, 48, 51, 56, 57, 58, 66, 73, 79, 82, 85, 101, 104, 108, 116, 117, 124, 129, 129n, 131, 132n, 133, 135–7, 139, 159, 199, 215 Romberg, Moritz, 81 Ronell, Avital, 2n, 11n, 73n, 85, 86n, 90 Stupidity, 11n, 73n, 86n Roosevelt, F. D., 158 Rope (Hitchcock), 113 Rose, Nikolas, 180 Rosenberg, Joseph, 225 Rosset, Clément, 233–4, 234n Le Reél: traité de l’idiote, 233–4, 234n

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Roueché, Brenton, 178 ‘Ten Feet Tall’, 178 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 34–5, 49, 117 A Disourse on Inequality, 34, 38, 117 The Social Contract, 35 Rushdie, Salman, 179, 195–200, 202, 204–5, 213 Midnight’s Children, 199, 199n Shame, 197–200, 202, 205, 213 Russell, Denise, 19 Ryan’s Daughter (Lean), 190n Sabotage (Hitchcock), 15, 96, 109–14 Sacks, Oliver, 180–81, 181n, 189n The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 180, 189n sadism, 20, 23–4, 146 sadomasochism, 54 (see also masochism) Safety Last (Roach), 217 Said, Edward, 197–8 Salinger, J. D., 160 The Catcher in the Rye, 160 Sand, George, 53, 54, 73, 74, 86 Sandford, John, 131 Sanga, Jaina C., 200 St Luke’s Hospital for the Insane, London, 50 St Mary Magdalen Hospital, Bath, 32, 32n St Patrick Hospital, Dublin, 32 Sampath, Ursula, 121–2, 127 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 53–4, 59n The Idiot of the Family, 53 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 103 Schad, John, 186, 192n Schepisi, Fred, 192 schizophrenia, 5n, 177, 177n, 179, 221, 232, 233n Schlesinger, John, 190 Schoedsack, Ernest, 169 Schnitzler, Arthur, 122 Scorsese, Martin, 172 Scott, Walter, 49 Waverley, 49 Searchers, The (Ford), 158 Secret Agent, The (BBC), 109 Secret Agent, The (Hampton), 109 segregation, 11, 97n, 146, 148–9 Séguin, Edouard, 9, 45, 120 Traitment moral, hygiene et education des idiots, 9 Sehr, Peter, 130

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selfhood (see identity) Sellers, Peter, 221–2, 224n Selznick, David O., 68 Semon, Larry, 218 Seth, Roshan, 208 Seth, Vikram, 195 Seven Samurai (Kurosawa), 227 sexuality, 19, 23, 50n, 148, 151, 153, 161, 174, 179, 183, 185–7, 192, 192n, 200, 200n, 205, 207, 210–11, 223–5 Seymour-Smith, Martin, 98 Shadyac, Tom, 216 Shah, Naseeruddin, 211 Shahni, Roshan, 196n Shakespeare, William, 17, 29, 36, 51, 87 Macbeth, 87 Shattuck, Roger, 121 Shelley, Mary, 37 Frankenstein, 37 Shepherd, George, 19 Shock Corridor (Fuller), 178n Showalter, Elaine, 47n, 177n, 178n Shurgot, Michael W., 143 Sicard, Roch Ambroise, 119 Sidney, Sylvia, 109 Signs of Life (Herzog), 133 Sikov, Ed, 221n Silverman, Brad, 225 Silverman, Kaja, 131, 132, 132n Simons, Jon, 211 simple and simplicity, 7, 16, 42, 108, 186 simpleton, x, 51, 131n, 162 Simpsons, The (Fox), 215, 216n Sinatra, Frank, 157 Sinise, Gary, 150, 151, 223 Sinker, Mark, 228n Skarsgård, Stellan, 229 Smith, Susan, 111 Snow, C. P., 5 social sciences, the, 5, 118 Sollier, Paul, 10, 99n Solow, Eugene, 150 Southwell Workhouse, Nottinghamshire, 44 Sound and the Fury, The (Ritt), 19, 23, 132 Southey, Robert, 43, 43n, 49 ‘The Idiot’, 43, 43n speech (see voice and speech) Speidel, Suzanne, 111 Spider (Cronenberg), 5, 5n, 232

spirit and spirituality, 9, 36–7, 42, 50, 77–8, 80, 82, 84–7, 116, 123, 126–7, 140n, 160–61, 165–8, 172, 203, 207, 211–13 Spittles, Brian, 97 Stanhope, Earl, 127, 133 Steele, Bob, 151 Stein, Gertrude, 21, 135, 197 Steinbeck, John, 13, 24, 138–54, 159, 182n ‘Flight’, 140 The Grapes of Wrath, 138–9, 142, 149, 158 ‘Johnny Bear’, 140–42, 146, 146n, 148, 153, 182n The Long Valley, 140–42 Of Mice and Men, 13, 24, 142–54, 158, 185 ‘The Snake’, 140 Tortilla Flat, 142–3, 145 stereotypes, 7–8, 15, 17, 64, 101, 105, 177n, 229n sterilization, 23n, 146n, 157 Sternberg, Josef von, 117 stigma, 1, 9n, 31, 221, 233 Stock, Gregory, 233n Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock), 113 Strathmartine Hospital, Dundee, 32 (see Baldovan Institute) Stroheim, Erich von, 138 Stroszek (Herzog), 129 structuralism, 14, 18 stupidity, 2, 7, 9n, 11, 13, 31, 35, 42, 47, 53–5, 57–9, 63–4, 73, 83, 99, 103 subjectivity, 5, 51, 132n, 138, 233 Such a Long Journey (Gunnarsson), 204, 208–13 Suchet, David, 109 Surrealism, 115 surveillance (see the gaze) Swift, Graham, 13, 178–94, 198 Last Orders, 181, 192, 192n Shuttlecock, 184 The Sweet-Shop Owner, 184 Waterland, 13, 179, 181–94 Swift, Jonathan, 31–2 ‘Dick’s Variety’, 32 Gullivers Travels, 31–2 symbolic space, 16, 18, 25, 79, 101, 108, 142–3, 152, 154 Symbolism, 115, 142–3

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INDEX Szasz, Thomas, 177 The Myth of Mental Illness, 177 Talbot, Eugene S., 101n Talk to Her (Almodovar), 227 Tanner, Tony, 59 Tarding, Emil, 228 Taxi Driver (Scorsese), 172 Taylor, Charles, 34 technology, 2, 16, 108, 111, 232 Tessier, Valentine, 66, 68–9 Tester, Desmond, 109 therapy, 146n, 178–81, 184, 188, 216, 225, 229 Thoreau, Henry David, 136 Walden, 136 Throne of Blood (Kurosawa), 87 throwback, 35, 46, 100, 123, 141 Timmerman, John, 140n Todd, Dennis, 35–6, 40 Imagining Monsters, 35–6 To Have and Have Not (Hawks), 23 Tourette’s syndrome, 180 Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The (Huston), 171 Truffaut, François, 110, 120, 133 Treves, Frederick, 1–2 trickster, 218–20, 227–8 Trier, Lars von, 216, 226, 228–30 Turgenev, Ivan, 53, 76–7, 78, 81n, 197n Fathers and Sons, 76–7 Rudin, 81n Turner, Florence, 218–19 Twain, Mark, 135 Twentieth Century Practice of Modern Medical Science (Stedman), 10, 99 ul-Haq, Zia, 198 unconscious, the, 21, 81, 115, 127 Unholy Love (Ray), 67n Van Doren, Mark, 145 Veber, Francis, 231 Verlaine, Paul, 119 ‘Gaspard Hauser chante’, 119 Vicar of Dibley, The, (BBC), 4n Vijayan, O. V., 204 The Legends of Khasak, 204 Villeret, Jacques, 231 Vinterberg, Thomas, 226

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violence, 39, 44, 102, 105–7, 113–14, 149, 151–4, 186, 200–202 visual theory, 17, 18n, 104 Vogt, Karl, 123n Lectures on Humans, 123n voice and speech, 20–21, 102, 104, 112, 113, 119, 126, 129, 132, 138, 140–42, 144, 148, 204–5, 211–12, 219–20, 223 Wald, Jerry, 19, 24 Warden, Jack, 24 Warnock, Grant, 192 Wäscher, Aribert, 67 Wassermann, Jakob, 5, 13, 118, 121–8, 129, 132n, 133–4, 199 Caspar Hauser, 5, 13, 118, 121–8, 129, 132n, 133–4, 142, 180–81, 207 The Goose Man, 122 The World’s Illusion, 122 Waterland (Gyllenhaal), 179, 189–94 Watson, Emily, 229 Waugh, Patricia, 100, 181, 183 Wayne, John, 158 Weikart, Richard, 123, 123n Weir, Peter, 190n Weitz, Chris, 224 Weitz, Paul, 225 Wells, H. G., 96 Welty, Eudora, 143, 159 West, Billy, 218n West, Nathanael, 174 Miss Lonelyhearts, 174 Wharton, Edith, 135, 138 The Age of Innocence, 138 White, Gilbert, 38–9 The Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne, 38 White, Mike, 224 Whitman, Walt, 117, 135–7 ‘The Sleepers’, 136 Song of Myself, 136 ‘There Was A Child Went Forth’, 136 Wiest, Diane, 225 Wigan, Arthur Ladbroke, 44n Wilbur, Hervey, 126 ‘Aphasia’, 126 wild child, 34–5, 41n, 60, 118, 119–22 Wild Child, The (Truffaut) (see Enfant Sauvage, L’) Williams, Raymond, 3–6

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Willis, Thomas, 35–6 Two Discourses on the Souls of Brutes, 35 Wilson, John, 40–43, 51 Wilson, Philip K., 13n, 35n, 41n Winslow, Forbes Benignus, 47n Winterson, Jeanette, 179 Wise Blood (Huston), 161, 171–6 Wizard of Oz, The (Fleming), 150, 224 Woodman, Ross, 40 Woolf, Virginia, 21, 95, 116 Mrs Dalloway, 95 Worden, Frank, 158 Wordsworth, William, 37–43, 49, 50, 80, 117, 120, 229n ‘The Brothers’, 38 ‘The Idiot Boy’, 37–43, 117, 120, 144, 229n Lyrical Ballads (with Coleridge), 37–43

‘The Mad Mother’, 38 ‘Michael’, 39 ‘Simon Lee’, 38 ‘The Thorn’, 40 Wright, David, 45 Wright, Robin, 223 Yerkes, Robert, 11n Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro, 86, 87 Zemeckis, Robert, 29, 223 ˇ zek, Slavoj, 229n Ziˇ Zola, Émile, 61 La Bête humaine, 68n Nana, 68n Thérèse Raquin, 61 Zoroastrianism, 203, 208 Zweig, Paul, 136n