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English Department at NIU

Northern Illinois University

Lars Bernaerts, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck
Narrative Threads of Madness

Alan Palmer
Attributions of Madness in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love

James Phelan
Cognitive Narratology, Rhetorical Narratology, and Interpretive Disagreement: A Response to Alan Palmer’s Analysis of Enduring Love

Benjamin Biebuyck
Acting Figuratively, Telling Tropically: Figures of Insanity in Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel

Els Jongeneel
Madness in Sartre’s “The Room”

Catherine Hoffmann
Dancing to Ollie’s Tunes: The Rhetoric of Narrative Stutter

Lars Bernaerts
Fight Club and the Embedding of Delirium in Narrative

Gunther Martens
De(ar)ranged Minds, Mindless Acts and Polemical Portrayal in Kleist and Canetti

Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck
Capturing Capgras: The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

Douwe Draaisma
Echos, Doubles and Delusions: Capgras Syndrome in Science and Literature
 

James Phelan, “Cognitive Narratology, Rhetorical Narratology, and Interpretive Disagreement: A Response to Alan Palmer’s Analysis of Enduring Love” 3
This essay uses Alan Palmer’s cognitive analysis of Enduring Love as a way to compare and contrast cognitive and rhetorical narratology. Focusing on our different interpretations and evaluations of McEwan’s handling of Clarissa Mellon—Palmer finds it deeply flawed, while I find it successful—the essay addresses two main questions: (1) What is it about the two approaches that lead Palmer and me to disagree as we do? (2) What are the particular elements in McEwan’s design of the novel that contribute to this disagreement?  In answering the first question, the essay contrasts Palmer’s concern with the novel’s representation of the intermental unit formed by Joe and Clarissa with the rhetorical approach’s concern with the novel’s progression. Palmer’s focus generates substantial insights into the novel, but it neglects an important dimension of the context within which McEwan places Clarissa’s responses: the progression’s thematic concern with the vexed relationship between love and logic.  Within this context, Clarissa’s responses become both plausible and sympathetic.  In answering the second question, the essay focuses McEwan’s difficult balancing act with Joe’s retrospective narration: McEwan wants to demonstrate both that Joe is reliable about the major issues and that Joe is privileging his perspective over Clarissa’s. Intelligent readers may focus on Joe’s reliability more than his partisanship, and, therefore, find McEwan’s handling of Clarissa to be flawed. The essay concludes by suggesting that this comparison and contrast between the approaches is implicitly an argument for the value of putting them in dialogue with each other. 
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Benjamin Biebuyck, “Acting Figuratively, Telling Tropically: Figures of Insanity in Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel” 
Figures of speech are traditionally conceived of as symptoms of the artistic mastery of a language, of originality and wit. But dealing with literary utterances challenging the very notion of “mastery” and “competence” urges us to reconsider the premises of figurative speech. In this article, several textual instances are investigated in which the mental deterioration of the speaker in moments of affective, epistemological and experiential crisis goes hand in hand with a disinhibition on the level of figurative language. At the center of the investigation stands Günter Grass’s 1959 bestselling novel Die Blechtrommel. The straightforward untruthfulness of Oskar Matzerath, the narrator-protagonist, is a unique example in post-war German fiction of how communicative success and failure operate as mutual presuppositions in the narrative representation of madness. The article shows how figurative processes are intertwined in the novel, how they are linked with the changing narrative positions, and how they indicate, exactly at the point where the protagonist’s insanity seems to peak, the emergence of interpersonal understanding.
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Els Jongeneel, “Madness in Sartre’s ‘The Room’”
In “The Room,” part of his short story collection, The Wall (1938), Jean-Paul Sartre investigates madness as an alternative way of bourgeois life and thus takes a stand in the contemporary debate on the existential status of mental illness. “The Room” is a case-study of a “limit situation,” as well as a satire of contemporary society, in which Sartre elaborates his budding views on existentialism. The cornerstone of his philosophy concerns the contingency of life and the impossibility to escape from it. The walled space, the main theme in the five short stories of The Wall, connotes this impossibility. By means of a dialectical argumentation, “The Room” falsifies the hypothesis that madness is an alternative for bourgeois complacency. Through his main character, Sartre ultimately rejects madness as an authentic way of life, because it deprives the patient of intentional and free consciousness. The patient falls victim to “matter” (i.e. material reality) and to his own hallucinations, and therefore his case is comparable to that of the bourgeois “bastard.” The discussion of the status of madness is underpinned by that of the story’s narrative structure. Variable internal focalization alternating with neutral external focalization confers “subjectivity” on the events and their interpretation. The first matter of importance is the direct confrontation with concrete reality. The documentary form of narration is combined with introspection and with the allegorical impact of the story. This reflects the direct relationship between thinking and praxis in Sartre’s fiction.
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Catherine Hoffmann, “Dancing to Ollie’s Tunes: The Rhetoric of Narrative Stutter” 
Using Dermot Healy’s Sudden Times as a case study, this article aims to explore issues concerning reception and reading conventions raised by the narratives of deranged narrators. While the narrator’s — Ollie Ewing’s — mental confusion is acknowledged by himself and others in various ways, his narrative, as rhetorical performance, operates through a tension between indeterminacy and instability on the one hand and consonance and confirmation on the other. In a narrative characterized by repetition, fragmentation, fuzzy temporality, and near absence of causality, the narrated “I” is essentially defined by the interaction between metonymy, in the form of precise geographical anchoring of the self, and metaphors of displacement and disorientation. The spatial rhetoric of Ollie’s narrative reverses the reader’s notions of center and margin, and eventually reveals the second half of the narrative to be a metaphorical journey back to the traumatic events which caused Ollie’s mental derangement. The narrative stutter characteristic of Sudden Times does not only mirror Ollie’s mental stutter: the trial section of the novel, with its verbatim repetition of previous passages of his narrative, functions paradoxically, since it emphatically confirms the narrator’s previous account of events while destabilizing our own reading and exposing the  conventions of validating devices in fiction. This long section of the novel ultimately forces us to question the ideological implications of our participation in a narrative doxa which, through the illusion of shared common sense, blinds us to the paradoxical nature of the rhetoric upon which it relies.
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Lars Bernaerts, “Fight Club and the Embedding of Delirium in Narrative” 
When a fictional character is in a state of delirium, his or her madness can coincide with an alternative architecture of the fictional world. In that case, a narrative delirium breaks into the text and narrative strategies direct present in the character’s delusional world view. In this paper, the particular interplay of mental and narrative particularities in the delirium will be discussed. First, I will suggest a definition of ‘narrative delirium’ that enables us to see the phenomenon in its full dimensions. The following ingredients are essential to the definition: alternative relation to reality, alternative coherence, psychological motivation, pathological background and the strong conviction of the subject. Also, the narrative delirium can be understood as an alternative possible world and as an embedded narrative. It challenges our cognitive abilities in a specific way, since we are encouraged to read (parts of) the fictional world as the product of a single, ‘deviant’ mind. To explore these aspects, structuralist as well as postclassical tools are required. Second, an investigation of the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic embedding of the delirium in the larger design of the narrative is very instructive for the interpretation of specific texts. The workings and the effects of the narrative delirium stem from the way it is embedded on three levels (meaning, structure and function). By investigating its embedding in the narrative I aim to clarify the rhetoric and the ideology of the delirium in narrative. 
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Gunther Martens, “De(ar)ranged Minds, Mindless Acts, and Polemical Portrayal in Kleist and Canetti”
In my paper, I aim to deal with the representation of normality and insanity in third-person narration from the point of view of rhetorical narratology. As a point of departure, I will briefly sketch the quarrel between narratology (Dorrit Cohn) and New Historicism (John Bender). From this debate, the interesting challenge can be derived to arrive at a more performative and historically sensitive notion of madness as filtered through narrative form. While recent tendencies have highlighted the experiential and mental implications of the narrative representation of deranged minds, I aim to bring into play a more external and historical dimension of the attribution of normality. In my view, this can be facilitated by means of a rhetorical approach highlighting the stylistic expressivity of a narrator’s indirectness. In order to illustrate this approach, I will discuss the role of polemical portrayal in Heinrich von Kleist’s essay On the gradual completion of thoughts (1800) and in Elias Canetti’s novel Die Blendung (1935, Engl. Auto-da-fé, 1946, with a brief glance to its remediation as a radio play in 2002). Kleist’s and Canetti’s narrators remain reticent on the condition of their protagonists’ mental well-being. The latter can be said to be mindless in the sense that their minds, rather than accessed, are circumscribed and linked to (corporeal) externalities through narratorial indirection. The broader ambition is to present a feasible framework to make compatible the rhetorical-narratological interest in formal and stylistic characteristics with the study of the interaction of various discourses, media and contexts. 
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Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck, “Capturing Capgras: The Echo Maker by Richard Powers”
This essay deals with focalization and narration as the two central means used in Richard Powers’s novel The Echo Maker to capture the ‘deranged’ mind of Mark Schluter, the central character who suffers from Capgras and paranoia. The cognitive neurologist, Dr Weber, regards his science as a form of storytelling, but as a narrator he refuses to enter the minds of his characters (i.e., patients). This turns him into an unreliable narrator and makes it impossible for his patients to become the tellers of their own life stories. They are separated from their own history, which is exactly what happens in Capgras. This condition is all about the gap between seeing (a loved one) and feeling (nothing for that person). As a focalizing subject, Mark is unable to find the right balance between, on the one hand, an exaggerated form of empathy and mindreading (paranoia) and, on the other, a total lack of empathy (Capgras). To some extent, all characters have problems with empathy and mindreading. The novel turns Capgras into a ‘contagious’ disease and a symptom of our present day condition. To illustrate the interaction between focalization and narration this essay concludes with an analysis of Mark’s initial, hallucinatory experiences, just after his fatal accident. In the beginning he identifies himself with the cranes, birds that represent history and continuity. Then he tries to free himself from that identification and gain a separate identity. But in so doing, he dissociates himself from his past, which is retold and rewritten so drastically that it can no longer be felt and relived. 
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Douwe Draaisma, “Echos, Doubles, and Delusions: Capgras Syndrome in Science and Literature” 
Mark Schluter, the main protagonist in Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006), suffers from Capgras Syndrome, a disorder characterized by the patient’s delusional belief that his near ones are replaced by doubles. Since its initial identification in 1923, Capgras Syndrome has had a two-stage history. Until the 1970s the delusion was explained in terms of psychodynamic forces, assuming, for instance, that creating a double was the patient’s subconscious way of handling mounting tensions between ambivalent feelings towards his near ones. As a rule, these explanations were based on case histories, which were dealt with as narratives. In the 1980’s, however, Capgras Syndrome came to be seen as caused by a neurological deficit, severing the connection between visual and emotional recognition of familiar faces. This explanation originated from research on the neurological representation of face recognition. In my paper I argue that by introducing two doctors for Mark – the one, Hayes, a modern, experimentally oriented neurologist; the other, Weber, an old-school neurologist versed in case studies – Powers succeeds in collapsing chronologically disparate stages in the history of Capgras Syndrome into a contemporary clash between two scientific styles. In this way Powers seems to present the best of both worlds: a narrative orientation to give a voice to the perspective of a patient struggling with his identity, and a state of the art neurological account of the organic lesion causing the loss of identity in the first place.
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