International Colloquium
30 Oct - 1 Nov 2009
Institute of Romance Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kate Montague (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia)
When Your Life is most Real to me you are Mad':
The Disarticulated Bodies of Patrick White's The Aunt's Story and The Twyborn Affair

This paper conceptualizes Madness in terms of the Real.   It takes as its stimulus, Julia Kristeva’s acknowledgment that a new conception of the human is needed, one that transcends the discursive practices of religion and politics, of a ‘normative consciousness’, without, in the process, reverting to a nihilism, implicit in the brutality of a fragmented body.   I locate this fragmented or exiled body as an ‘excess’ and ‘residue’ of language manifest as madness.  As a student of literary theory, I place this project of ‘coaxing a new type of knowledge to emerge progressively’, firmly within the practice of writing, of un/writing, in order to transcend the Symbolic, to open the door into the other side. 

My map, the map Kristeva gives me, charts the disarticulation of mad bodies as they transit from silence to the possibility of noise.   In doing so I follow the madmen/madwomen of Patrick White’s texts, Theodora Goodman and Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith Twyborn, as they take flight from the Symbolic. I examine the different modes by which White employs a language of embodiment to create a textual space for these characters in their respective texts, The Aunt’s Story (1948) and The Twyborn Affair (1979). The difference between the deranged and demented bodies of Theodora Goodman and ‘E’ lies in their different departures from reason, intelligibility, signification.  The discord between the flights that these bodies make constitutes the difference between silence and noise, death and un/death, a textual choice between a progressive or nihilistic linguistic transcendence.    

At first landing this paper ruminates the various ways the madman is silenced and dispatched at the hands of the Symbolic. Here, at the outskirts of the Symbolic Kristeva’s theory of the ‘abject,’ illuminates the dead corpse of ‘E’, whose experience of dying is a destruction and disconnection to the nth degree, is, exquisite pain.  So too, this experience of dying is an escape from the Symbolic that renders ‘E’s’ disarticulated body moribund and Kristeva’s description of ‘stases’ forms a theoretical mirror to the modernist conception of purgatory. Silence.   

This positing of violence is not the point at which a Kristevean framework contributes to a reading of the mad, to a reformulation of the mad body, but the point at which it may depart from a Foucauldian analysis of the mad, which erases, destroys and silences. By coaxing a new praxis of writing, artistic practice is able to provide an egress to the endless night of the mad, writing able to open the door into a new Kingdom ; a new language, a non language, a noise.  Adapting Kristeva’s theory, concerning the process of pre linguistic production as it inhabits the hysterical body, abounding in the flows and intensities of the chora, alongside Helene Cixous’ custom of writing and Michel de Certeau’s formulation of ‘mystic speech’, a progressive, linguistic transcendence is enabled.  

Here in this Kingdom, located in the surrealism of the Hotel du Midi where Theodora Goodman resides, I observe teeming movement, sounds, cries and new shoots of life.  I locate the acoustics of this new Kingdom in the murmurings of the unconscious, dreams and hallucinations. This paper posits a practice of writing that allows the mad, who exist as exiles, outcasts, refugees, and outlaws of the Symbolic to make a triumphant and thundering return in the Kingdom of the Real. Noise.

This paper radically remolds previous criticism of White, pre occupied with the mystical and religious transcendence of the human soul in its search for unity and intrinsic meaning, by advocating a pre religious, pre political, pre linguistic transcendence by an excavation of the ‘excess’ and ‘residue’ of language.  By investigating such a mysticism of language we are able to appreciate a true discovery of a ‘multiculturalism of souls’.  

By celebrating the fluidity of writing in the Aunt’s Story where the relationship of subject and object is rendered fluid and music and dance create in Theodora a linguistic movement that tears, wounds, and alters the symbolic order this paper also reshapes a nihilistic tendency in the project of analyzing the structures of hysteria to revert to a destructive death drive as exposed in ‘E’s’ demented suicidal flight. 

By presenting two mad bodies this paper seeks to articulate a new process of un/making bodies, a disarticulation of bodies, letting them escape, fall, fly, topple: ‘topple into what?  Into nothing more than the effervescence of passion and language we call style.’   I depart from Kristeva’s point that this toppling into language, into a non language, necessarily occurs as a: ‘brilliant and dangerous beauty, fragile obverse of a radical nihilism that can disappear only in those bubbling depths that cancel our existence’. While this toppling into creative suicide does occur for the body of ‘E’, more innovative and more productive than this is a new Kingdom that White creates through the evocation of the ‘chora’ in the Aunt’s Story.  Here, White allows Theodora Goodman, to escape, fall, fly, topple, into a new Kingdom, that does not cancel her existence but allows her Noise.  Kristeva poses the question at the beginning of the True Real: ‘how can the true real be made plausible?’   My answer is this paper is this: that the ‘true real’ is not bound by the language of plausibility, intelligibility or reason.  The Real exists as that which refuses containment or capture by the structures or strictures of the Symbolic and instead remains unnamed and unwritten.  Such ‘excess’ and ‘residue’ of language refuses the chains of the Symbolic and escapes into the new Kingdom on the other side of the door.  The Madness of the Real.