A look at Kathmandu's
streets, and it becomes apparent that ways of treatment of
mad people are not working. For the mad are there
present in the street for years and years. Neither the criminal
system nor psychiatry has worked to treat them, nor to confine them. The state does not treat all of them well, for they could be better clothed and given other adequate and basic materials. One of the places where the failure of treatment can be located is in
the difficulty to account for the madman in normal writing. The
mad elicit an abnormality not just in their behavior, but in
the written material about them. How then does madness appear in writing? Madness is
long descriptions in biographies in historical writing, madness is
over-poetic language in the confessions and dialogue-remarks, madness
is too lengthy and complex sentences...many forms of errors in
writing are in fact also errors of madness; madness is what is "unsuitable" for serious and official writing, such as historical
writing. An understanding of madness must be concerned with the
formal writing on the mad and on those rare and special moments when
the madman is asked to fill out a form, if that happens at
all...madness, in other words, has a lot to do with writing, and this aspect of madness must be given attention. In illiterate Nepal, the madman can be considered, ironically, the hope to give Nepal the richness and substance in the written word where other normal writers may be lacking. But, on the other hand, in a place with illiteracy, including the madman's style of writing and brand of literature within the national narrative will indeed be difficult. In short, it is uncomfortable for us Nepalis not suited to the written word to digest the madman's writings.
A quality of resistance
to confinement is present in a madman's writing. It is testament to
the fact that imprisonment or confinement is evident as much in the
written word as in the confinement of the physical body. For the mad, the
confinement via the text may be more disturbing than the confinement
of the body, this may be precisely what differentiates
the mad from other criminals. A constant worrying over the written
word of a form/survey as an author would over his/her book: “How do I appear in that form I just filled?” over and
above the concern with the body now being located within a ward. The
mad does not mind surveillance of the location and distortions of the
body, but is always concerned with the archive room, that one
location in the ward which is in fact not surveyed as meticulously as
everywhere else. Today, the ward's constant and obsessive awareness of the
knowledge it produces, indeed, the very process of meticulous
archiving, folder-ing, labeling, organizing, etc is a result of the
interest shown by the potentially-dangerous madman towards the forms
he/she had to fill. The madman converted the written forms into objects of interest and objects needing protection. (And indeed, the serious consultation of such forms by a warden rely on the very important question of what exactly a madman would see in them, so that the level of security to which these forms are submitted can be judged.)
If Nepal is to treat
madness in the right way, then it should consider major revisions to
the way it writes official history, such as those found in
government textbooks for school. The writing in these textbooks is
inspired by the writing found in old encyclopedias, and this does
practice will never include the madman, whose biography is full of
minute details rather than major brush-strokes (“In 1984, the
madman broke the smallest bone in his foot when he was trampled by a
auto-rickshaw with the number 1882....”), whose social relations
are too intricate to fit one sentence ("In 1988, the madman had an
affair with a neighbor's sister, who happened to be a friend's cousin
of his sister's husband, who happened to be a.....”), whose achievements are based on
the conquest of micro-territories which are constantly in change
rather than entire states, and so on. The madman's texts are anti-encyclopedia, and they are not fictional or made for more popular and leisurely consumption, and we are not speaking of those writers who write literature experimentally or "as a madman would write it," rather, we believe that it is in those protected forms of the psychiatric wards that the madman's literature is, his 'book' his and his whole oeuvre is. What
must occur is a publication of the archives of the mad, if such
archives are indeed written in Nepali wards, and if not, then the
deliberate formalization of the ward's forms in the future, for it is in challenge of
rigid formality that the madman can express.
The Foucauldian notion of the 'death of the author' does not seem to apply to the madman, for the psychiatric forms which a madman fills out are of such a nature that they are precisely there to record the life of the author, to contain the evidence that the madman as author is alive and responsive: "What is your name?" "What is your date of birth?" "What happens to you?" and so on, the answers of all of which are signs of life. In a sense, the madman writes his autobiography through the help of the ward's form. Indeed, isn't the autobiography, that very important historical text, precisely the form of writing which would enable the madman to be most expressive in his/her own way? A study on how autobiography writing would help the mad should be conducted. And, the habit of including the madman in a biography or other types of historical texts, such as those on historical occurrences, must be discouraged.
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