Abstract
In the age of cognitive science, narratives are understood both as a product of and a way to cognition itself. Narratologists can now comfortably select from the toolkits of cognitive science to examine literary texts; scientists may also find narratives an ancillary testing ground of cognitive theories. This newly discovered and fostered kinship of narrative and cognitive science becomes particularly outstanding when madness literature is considered. Madness, defined in the present study either as a medical condition of mental disorders, or a social decision on an individual difference, or both, has long been in partnership with literature. Characters afflicted with mental illness, the fictional construction of which reflects the medical understanding of madness of the time, have been adored by writers throughout history. Likewise, mad characters, who are so defined for their deviancy from social norms, represent a social understanding of madness in literary works. Against such a backdrop of academic milieu, this book has it as its scope to study the narrative representation of fictional madness, aiming to decipher, through the looking glass of the abnormal mind, the mad mind in particular and the human mind in general. To reach this goal, along with a number of madness narratives, the American novelist Ken Kesey’s chef d’oeuvre One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is chosen as the primary text of investigation: it distinguishes itself with its extraordinary representation of madness from both an insider’s perspective and a social dimension. In particular, this book explores the relationship between narrative structures and fictional mad minds, the representation of intramental madness and intermental madness, and finally moves toward a social cognitive understanding of minds and madness. Set on the interface between literature and cognitive science, the present study adopts an indirect empirical approach to explore the fictional representation of mad minds in narratives by drawing on concepts and theories from both narratology and cognitive science. This book can be read as a criticism of the modern classic of madness narrative One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or (and more importantly) as a new approach to the intricate relationships between madness narratives and the human mind.
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Notes
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Kesey (1935–2001), a “West Coast hippy-goy-guru-tribal-leader and sometime-writer” (Widmer, 1975: 121), belongs to the cult writers of madness narratives of the turbulent 1960s in the West. As a writer from an age of social, political and cultural upheavals, Kesey possesses the distinctive traits of his contemporaries writing about madness. Indeed, given the individual differences in terms of the form of the fiction, the language, “the sense of personal psychology projected by fiction” and “the notion of what constitutes coherence in life and art” (Lhamon, 1975: 296), many American fictional narratives of the 1960s are strikingly accordant in thematizing social contradictions as individual mental disorders. “Through the story of mental disorientation or derangement, then, these novels transform deep social contradictions into a dynamic of personal crisis, a sense of there being no comfortable place in the world for the private self” (Ohmann, 1983: 218). In various mad stories, we may frequently find the “obscene presence of American institutions” (Lhamon, 1975: 296), the heroes breaking away from the institutions and a new emphasis on self-consciousness.
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On his list of canonical “illness story” from 1960 to 1975, Ohmann (1983) includes the following works: Catch-22 (Heller, 1961), Franny and Zooey (Salinger, 1961), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey, 1962), Ship of Fools (Porter, 1962), The Group (McCarthy, 1963), The Bell Jar (Plath, 1963), Herzog (Bellow, 1964), The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon, 1965), Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth, 1969), Breakfast of Champions (Vonnegut, 1973), Something Happened (Heller, 1974), Ragtime (Doctorow, 1975) and the Rabbit series by John Updike. To add to Ohmann’s list, we may also include V. (Pynchon, 1963), Trout Fishing in America (Brautigan, 1967) and Norman Mailer’s three narratives: An American Dream (1965), Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) and The Armies of the Night (1968). This is by no means an exhaustive list.
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Yang, X. (2023). Introduction. In: A Poetics of Minds and Madness. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5249-6_1
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