Love + Hate by Hanif Kureishi Page B

horde of nervous women whom he inoculates with madness and shortly turns into demoniacs.’
    Sigmund Freud, studying in Paris for a few months, visited Charcot’s home three times, where he was given cocaine to ‘loosen his tongue’, and was so impressed by him that he translated some of his works, and named one of his sons after him. But Freud was to take an important step on from Charcot. Rather than looking at women, he began to listen to them. From being avant-garde, living works of art, they became human beings with histories, traumas and desires. Rather than action, it was language, with its jokes, inflections, omissions, hesitations and silence which was the telling thing here. The mad are people who don’t understand the rules, or play by the wrong rules, internal rather than official ones; they are heeding the wrong voices and following the wrong leaders. Yet the mad, of course, cannot do absolutely anything . Madness, like everything else, has to be learned, and, as with haircuts, when it comes to folly, there aredifferent styles in fashion at the time. If madness, and questions about sanity and the nature of humanity, are the subject of twentieth-century literature – what is a person; what is health; what is rationality, normalcy, happiness? – there is also a link to theatre, and to exhibitionism. As a form of self-expression, it might be important to be mad, but it might also be significant that others witness this form of isolating distress, for it to exist in the common world, for it to be a show, moving and affecting others. More questions then begin to unravel. Who is sick in this particular collaboration, the watcher or the watched, the doctor or the patient? And what exactly is sick about any of them? Isn’t the exclusive idealisation of normality and reason itself a form of madness? And if these exhibitionists wish to be seen, understood or recognised, what is it about themselves they want to be noticed?
    Jean-Martin Charcot’s ‘living sculptures’, as one might characterise them, these divas on the verge of madness – those who can only speak symptom-language – are not unlike Strindberg’s female characters: fluid, disturbing, undecipherable, indefinable, oversexualised. (Kafka loved Strindberg, and writes in his diary, ‘I don’t read him to read him, but rather to lie on his breast. He sustains me.’) Yet in their exhibitionism – the only communication they were encouraged in – these hysterics resemble the self-starver in ‘A Hunger Artist’.
    Most great writing is strange, extreme and uncanny, as bold, disturbing and other-worldly as nightmares: think of One Thousand and One Nights, Hamlet, ‘The Nose’, The Brothers Karamazov, Oedipus, Alice in Wonderland, Frankenstein or The Picture of Dorian Gray. If someone had never met any humans, but only read their novels, they’d get an odd idea of how things go here on earth: a series of overlapping madnesses, perhaps. Kafka is no exception when it comes to comic exaggeration, using the unlikely and bizarrely untrue to capture a truth about ordinary life.
    However, in most magical tales of imaginative transformation, the subject of the story becomes bigger or greater than he is already, a superhero of some sort, with extra powers: a boy wishing to be a big man. One of the puzzles, ironies and originalities of ‘The Metamorphosis’ is that the alteration is a diminishment. Kafka is canny enough to take his metaphors literally, to crash together the ordinary and the unreal, the demotic and the fantastical. He doesn’t, after all, tell us that Gregor feels like a dung beetle in his father’s house, but rather that one morning Gregor wakes up to find he has actually become a dung beetle. As with Charcot’s hysterics, Gregor had become alien to his family and the world, and the story tells us that almost any one of us could wake up in the morning