Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Descent and Return – the katabatic imagination
- 1 Hell in Our Time
- 2 Chronotopes of Hell
- 3 Auschwitz as Hell
- 4 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust Narratives
- 5 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness
- 6 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld
- 7 Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots
- 8 East-West Descent Narratives
- Epilogue: Katabasis in the Twenty-First Century
- Appendix: Primo Levi, ‘Map of reading’
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Descent and Return – the katabatic imagination
- 1 Hell in Our Time
- 2 Chronotopes of Hell
- 3 Auschwitz as Hell
- 4 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust Narratives
- 5 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness
- 6 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld
- 7 Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots
- 8 East-West Descent Narratives
- Epilogue: Katabasis in the Twenty-First Century
- Appendix: Primo Levi, ‘Map of reading’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (1998), Marya Hornbacher writes, ‘I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed … Itis ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back’ (p. 10). This amalgam of allusions to Virgil, Dante and Lewis Carroll is a common feature of contemporary autopathographies, or memoirs of mental illness. Such narratives represent Hell as a condition of actual, contemporary Western existence, and not only a concept of the afterlife imagined by theologians, mytho-graphers or writers of fiction. Unlike the second-generation Holocaust narratives that were discussed in the preceding chapter, these personal memoirs describe infernal states of which the writers have, or claim to have, first-hand knowledge and experience. Nevertheless, it is striking how frequently these autobiographical accounts of mental disorder, addiction, neurosis and psychotic breakdown are structured and narrated as journeys of descent into the underworld and return.
Contemporary Western culture has not only been characterised as traumatic, as noted in the previous chapter; it has also been described as generally psychotic. Whereas the early twentieth-century subject was alienated, the postmodern subject is typically schizophrenic, according to such theorists as Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. As Deleuze and Guattari claim, ‘the schizophrenic deliberately seeks out the very limit of capitalism; he is its inherent tendency brought to fulfilment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel’ (Anti-Oedipus, p. 35).
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- Information
- Hell in Contemporary LiteratureWestern Descent Narratives since 1945, pp. 113 - 143Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2004