Murray Bail's The Pages

In Murray Bail's The Pages (NYT review here), two women, one a philosopher and the other a psychoanalyst, drive into the Australian hinterland so that the former may appraise the unknown work of a reclusive self-styled philosopher who has died, leaving his work in disarray in the austere corrugated steel shed where he labored for years.

So far the story itself sounds austere, but Bail's short novel is told briefly and impressionistically. Within the framework of the mystery of Wesley Antill, of his life and his life's work, philosophy and psychology as competing ways of being and knowing are set in relief.

That Bail, previously unknown to me but clearly an assured and sophisticated writer, trots out certain well-worn stereotypes makes me wonder if he didn't do so knowingly, as if defying the stigma of stereotyping or implying that there is more truth in such than we would care to admit. For we meet the flaky psychoanalyst, who has affairs with married men (and at least once in the past, with a client) and who manages to come across as both curious and self-absorbed. Her ambivalent friend is the detached, vaguely awkward, Aspergers-ish philosopher. Both of these are juxtaposed with the tough, taciturn ways of the sheep farmers (Antill's brother and sister) whom they meet on their errand.

Of course, philosophy and psychology do not exist in simple contrast or parallel. Philosophy is seen to have crucial emotional and biographical functions, whereas psychology makes truth claims, all too often unexamined. But Bail is obviously not interested here in academic arguments, but in philosophy and psychology as differing ways of being in the world, which Bail strikingly links to the physical environment:

Hot barren countries--alive with natural hazards--discourage the formation of long sentences, and encourage instead the laconic manner. The heat and the distances between objects seem to drain the will to add words to what is already there. What exactly can be added? "Seeds falling on barren ground"--where do you think that well-polished saying came from?

It is the green smaller countries in the northern parts of the world, cold, dark complex places, local places, with settled populations, where thoughts and sentences (where the printing press was invented!) hae the hidden urge to continue, to make an addition, a correction, to take an active part in the layering. And not only producing a fertile ground for philosophical thought; it was of course an hysterical landlocked country, of just that description, where psychoanalysis itself was born and spread.

It would appear that a cold climate assists in the process. The cold sharp air and the path alongside the rushing river.

In Bail's telling, here and elsewhere, philosophy (even if it is thoroughly naturalistic) has an otherworldly aspect; that is, it can only deal with deeply human problems, yet it seeks to distance itself from its human roots, becoming suspicious of language itself and attempting to break into some situation of truth above or beyond. It thrives in barren (mental and physical) landscapes, whether everything extraneous is put aside. It is unclear whether the enterprise is heroic or pathological. Elsewhere he writes:

"Too much light is fatal for philosophical thought." But some light is necessary.

That is, philosophy is about clarity, but total illumination lays bare the questionable motives of philosophy itself. Philosophy can only seek its own justification as a cat chases its tail. Yet one comes away from the book with the impression that psychoanalysis, while stemming from an honorable impulse to know oneself, is forever losing its way in acts of self-indulgent navel-gazing in cluttered, verbose interactions. Like I said, stereotypes--there it is, that idea again.

This is an intriguing fly-by view of philosophy--see its towering peaks and desert expanses--and psychology--see the buildings crowded into the hillsides, with people busily moving to and fro. Overarching it all is a book like this, the work of the imagination.

Chekhov Revisited

I've been rereading more Chekhov--this guy was so good it's scary. In just the last two stories I've come across both ends of the affective spectrum, and both illustrate his subtle approach to the interplay of psychopathology and social context. "A Dreary Story" (you have to have literary nerve to give your stories titles like that) is about an aging professor who has become deeply embittered and alienated from his profession, his family, and indeed all that he used to hold dear. The prospect of his death, which can't be too far away, is both terrifying and eerily pleasurable. He is tired and isn't sleeping well--is this a geriatric depression? If so, it is a fascinating look at how depression drains the world of value. But we get the impression that this fellow may always have been a prickly and curmudgeonly sort--is this rather the ungraceful aging of a depressive and irritable temperament? (Where did I once come across the comment that in old age people are very much as they were when they were younger, only more so?).

"The Black Monk" features a cerebral and intellectually ambitious student who, while visiting the estate of his future father-in-law, appears to have a manic episode in which he hallucinates "the black monk." But this manic episode is subtle--he sleeps little and seems to take ecstatic pleasure in the luxuriant summer beauty of the rural estate and in the love of his future wife. It is only when he hallucinates more regularly, and becomes convinced that this madness is the mark of distinction setting him apart from "the common herd," that we realize that we have entered for sure the realm of psychopathology. He spurns his wife and father-in-law, and their reaction is interesting: they realize he is mentally ill and therefore not fully responsible for his actions, but since there is no real treatment available (this was in the 1890's), they cannot help but resent his actions. In Chekhov, as in real life, personal freedom and responsibility, versus the lack thereof, always remain murky, although ultimately we must always choose when to view ourselves and others as either agents or as victims. Most important, in his work psychopathology is never a simple natural kind, but is inextricably tied into a network of personal and social meaning. The question is always: where does the person end and the illness begin, and is it even proper to think the two can be separated?

Teachers

If a psychiatrist/therapist were to read only one poet, I would propose Dickinson, who takes in the exaltations and debasements of human experience like no other. But if one could read only one fiction writer, I can think of none better than Chekhov, who contrastingly explores the great and ordinary middle range of humanity. They complement one another well, Dickinson covering the remote ends of the bell curve and Chekhov covering the wide middle. In fact, Chekhov's persona--unpretentious, exacting, detached, unsparing yet humane--is exactly what one might hope for in a great therapist and diagnostician of the soul. "Ward 6" is a dismaying, even terrifying exhibit of the perils both of madness and of the medical profession, but I wish that every medical student and therapist in training could read it.

But there is no Chekhov story that is without its humble yet transcendent insight. This morning I reread one called "The Teacher of Literature," and at the end I had the wonderful thought that "This isn't fiction at all, this really happened just so, and I was merely a fly on the wall." It had the two necessary ingredients of great literature: strangeness (different century, alien culture) and absolute fidelity to reality.