Literature of the Solitary Kings
In the first half of the 1930s, the French writer Raymond Queneau researched and prepared a study on the forgotten literary works of those likely suffering from mental illness in Nineteenth Century France. The Literary Mad (Les fous littéraires) was primarily based on published works lost to the larger world but preserved in the National Archives, as well as studies and notes from periods the authors spent in mental hospitals and under observation.
In 1930, after his break with surrealism, Queneau felt “maladjusted, neurotic and powerless.” He found himself unable to write, so instead explored the work of those even less adapted to society than he was. His goal was modest, to get a glimpse of how these writers thought while accepting that he would likely never truly understand it. “Mental illnesses are phenomena, mysteries that the human sciences have not yet revealed; if only we were able to penetrate them; but in studying them, we must respectfully contemplate these immense misfortunes that we cannot appreciate.”
This essay sketches how he decided what to include and some implications of his choices. He did not find a publisher for The Literary Mad in the beginning, for instance, making it for a time an odd text unavailable to the larger world and written by a social outcast. Did that make it, itself, a work of literary madness? He ultimately integrated large portions of the study — along with commentary on the irony inherent to the original project — into his fifth novel, The Children of Clay, published in 1938. The novel will be the primary source here.
A note on terminology: Queneau principally used “mad” (fou/folle) and “madness” (folie) to describe the writers and the texts. I will do the same, not only to follow his lead, but also to put some distance between the study and mental illness. While Queneau’s intent was to explore the literary side of mental illness, it is not entirely clear that all the texts considered was a product of such disorders.
What is a literary mad man? Nodier limited his list “to the recognized mad who did not have the glory to create a sect.” The last point is actually an excellent criterium; someone who had disciples would not be able to be considered a literary mad man: the latter must have stayed anonymous — by definition. But how to judge the recognized madness of an author — huh? How? Where is the line between madness and eccentricity, simple eccentricity? After all, true madness, it’s what one locks up; and as it happens our authors are free because they publish their works, because they print them.
Queneau was far from the first to be interested in the writings of the mad. Charles Nodier’s Bibliography of the Mad: Some Eccentric Books (1835) served as a starting point for the development of a definition. François Lauret’s Psychological Fragments on Madness (1834) also played a role:
It was not possible for me, whatever I did, to distinguish by its nature alone an insane idea from a reasonable idea. I looked at Charenton, at Bicêtre, at the Salpêtrière [the three main asylums in and around Paris] for the idea that seemed to me the most insane; then, when I compared it to those common in the world, I was completely surprised, almost ashamed, to not see the difference between them.
The character standing in for Queneau-as-researcher dismissed the subsequent argument that science had sufficiently advanced from the 1830s to the 1930s to differentiate, based solely on content, between what was mad and what was not. He settled on the following working definition:
I am of the opinion that we need to begin our work without preconceived ideas; but we will eliminate from our list first all those who had disciples or who have been recognized as having some value by critics or the public or even a tiny part of the public, second all the mystics, visionaries, spirits, theosophists et cætera whose crazy ideas could be attached to others that are more or less accepted and that prudence tells us to not treat lightly as madness. I naturally skip foreigners and Frenchmen prior to 1800.
This seems like a different take on the journalist Albert Londres’ notion, proposed in his 1925 account of asylum life In the Madhouse (Chez les fous), that the mad were “solitary kings.” He noted that “the mad are individualists. Each acts in his own way. He does not occupy himself with his neighbour.” In this way, “there is no people of mad men, each alone forms his own people.” Literature disconnected from the public, critics, accepted ideas and all the rest could effectively be the literature of solitary kings.
This possibility must be nuanced, however, starting with Queneau’s focus on printed works. A printed text “proves that [the author] is sufficiently socially adjusted so as to not be committed and to publish a book, which is, I believe, a fairly complex activity.” Literature was broadly understood here as anything published for a broader audience, imagined or real. Also, it should be noted that many authors did in fact spend some time in mental hospitals.
For Londres, the solitary king was someone maladjusted enough to live much or all of their life in an asylum — and, presumably, someone incapable of putting out a book. There is, though, an incoherence between each patient being their own people and each being their own king. The implication of the first is a lack of community, regardless of the form the social connections may take. The second, I would argue, has two components: being convinced one is an authority figure and projecting that authority to influence others.
While Queneau’s literary mad and the patients Londres observed both exhibited the first component, only the former made a concerted effort to influence others. The literary mad had ideas they believed were important not just for themselves but for everyone, whether it was a unique solution to the relation of the circumference to the area of a circle, religious truths or evidence they were the descendant of some important historical figure. They published texts to persuade an audience, from academic mathematicians to the general public, just to discover that they were the only ones convinced of their own brilliance.
Of course, being unknown and unappreciated could not be the only criteria:
“But in the end all unknown authors are not literary mad men.”
“No, naturally; it is still necessary that they write things the average person, like me, consider excessively singular. I add that I limited myself to the Nineteenth Century because beyond that it becomes extremely delicate to judge the real singularity of the story. One must take into account the modes and mores.”
Queneau was playing with two ideas; that the researcher collecting these texts — Queneau himself — was an “average person” and that the oddness of a piece of writing was subject to the fashions of its time. Nonetheless, he recognized both the need to take content into account in his judgments and the difficulty of doing so.
He was also aware that, if his project was successful, the authors would no longer be unknown:
Beyond that, Purpulan continued, as soon as these “literary mad men” become — thanks to you — known, they will cease by that very fact to be “literary mad men”, because — still thanks to you — they will acquire the celebrity the lack of which permitted them to be included in the encyclopedia. Do you not find, Mister Chanbernac, that there is some contradiction there?
Even if the content was decidedly singular, as being unknown was still a necessary condition of being one of the literary mad, the whole enterprise would end up being paradoxical.
The key consideration, perhaps, was less whether the published ideas were known, but rather that they were “recognized as having value” in and of themselves. In other words, that they had “sincere” admirers and not just followers with ulterior motives. Queneau pointed out that this was a significant problem with the self-declared lost descendants, whose romantic stories of riches and loss were not infrequently exploited by the unscrupulous.
Ultimately, Queneau focused on the grey area of what might be termed functional madness. Most of the attention in the Nineteenth Century was given to “true madness,” “what one locks up.” The “maladjusted” who could nonetheless survive outside the asylum walls tended to be neglected, though were by no means completely ignored. It was even rarer for such material to be presented by an amateur openly dealing with his own mental health issues. To echo Robert Castel, one needs to take care not to reduce actions, including writing, to “symptoms;” a challenge for trained professionals.
Educational advances in mental hospitals near the end of the Nineteenth Century made Lauret’s problem with differentiating between the “insane” and the “common” even more difficult. It also resulted in copious examples of patients’ writing not destined for publication. This writing, such as Paul Taesch’s 1896 autobiography (presented by Anatole le Bras in A Child in the Asylum (Un enfant à l’asile)), gives a more grounded picture of life in and out of institutions than the “crazy ideas” of the literary mad.
Beyond that, patients’ writing can refine the concepts of the solitary king and the one person people. While a loss of connection with “reality and others” is typical to mental illness, isolation tended to result from a combination of the severity of the case and a lack of therapeutic and developmental support. Just as often, institutional life was organized into a prison-like community.
As for patients with elaborate and so-called important ideas, Queneau appears to have been right: the ability to more or less coherently express those ideas at length in writing coincided with a capacity to get by, even if only marginally, in society. While Londres may have come across a variety of one person peoples in the asylum, the literature of the solitary kings, and queens for that matter, was to be found elsewhere.
Note (May 29, 2019): Queneau ultimately preferred the term “The Incongruous” (“Les Hétéroclites”) to “The Literary Mad” and chose The Encyclopedia of Inexact Sciences as the title for his selection of forgotten texts. He revisited his thinking at the time in the 1963 essay collection, Bords.
