Epilogue: Beyond pathology

Summary

In heaven, too

You'd be institutionalized.

But that's all right…

Theodore Roethke “Heard in a Violent Ward,” from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke

Mania and Literary Style has shown the historical frequency with which a vocabulary of psychomedical pathologization serves the interests of the political status quo: the normalizing, disciplining mechanisms, that is to say, of cultural subjection. The clearest implication of this book is that literary and cultural criticism, far too often an anti-enthusiastic enterprise, should not use the vocabulary of individual pathology without full awareness of its historical resonance. In the case of enthusiasm, at any rate, the “pathological” is precisely that collective and oppositional phenomenon which, though surprisingly influential in literary history, has barely begun to be integrated, as a significant and enduring mode, into our shared narrative of literary history.

Mania and Literary Style should thus serve to foreground the unhistorical assumptions that frequently license psychiatric diagnoses of literary figures working in this style. A historical reckoning with “mania” as a rhetorical mode brings into view, for example, the homogenizing and reductive force of the “private” model of mania used in Kay Redfield Jamison's Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. The book's biological essentialism – its reduction of all causality to the single level of genetic inheritance – is foretold by the emblem on its title page: a double helix, signifier of “the genetic,” adjacent to a sketch of Byron.