How Can I Speak of Madness? Narrative and Identity in Memoirs of ‘Mental Illness’

Abstract

In this paper I examine some of the implications, possibilities, and dangers of addressing the experience of ‘madness’ or ‘mental illness’1 within autobiographical narrative: in particular, I ask how madness can be narrated, or spoken. I suggest that an attentive reading of narrative form, as the outworking and evidence of a way of knowing and thinking about the world, may reveal authorial attempts to manage and stretch the constraints inherent in conventional narrative’s tendency toward linearity and resolution, a tendency which is, arguably, inimical to the expression of madness. Insinuated in this process of working with form is a particular narrative mode of existence which has implications for the psychodynamics of living with mental distress. With reference to the work of Sarah Kofman, I propose the idea that a ‘writing without power’ may be a salutary way to address chronic distress, and to reformulate identity in the light of biographical disruption