Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

"This is the kind of book that undermines the generic conventions that we imagine every book must possess nowadays. It’s the account of a German judge in the late 19th to early 20th century, and problems with his mental health. He developed what they thought of as paranoia in the German medical system, but which we probably think of as some form of schizophrenia now, which led to him being put into an asylum under the tutelage of the German state – which meant that he wasn’t allowed to leave. Some people were allowed to leave, but he wasn’t. He had to argue to the authorities, particularly the people who were running the asylum and his doctors, that he was capable of managing his own affairs. So he wrote a series of memoirs, almost like a diary, but revised and accompanied with legal essays that were designed to prove to the world that he was, in fact, a rational human being; and that his delusions, his hallucinations, were similar in order to anybody’s religious convictions. His delusions are written up in this very analytic, logical, distanced, objective form. Essentially, he believed that God was turning him into a woman, because God had become entangled with his nerves – because his nerves had become so agitated that God, who is essentially made of nerves, was being drawn down to earth from heaven by his attachment to Schreber’s nerves. And the only way that God could free himself from this was to send Schreber mad, and also then to scour the earth of everybody else, and impregnate Schreber so that he could then repopulate the earth. So you wouldn’t imagine it was going to be a very easy task for him to elucidate this mythology of hallucinations , this religion of hallucinations that he created, and still manage to get out of the asylum – but he did. It was so logically outlined, and clearly backed up with references – to ideas that might seem to us to be very bizarre pseudoscience, but were pretty standard dinner table ideas, like, “Where does the soul live? Well – the soul lives in nerves.” That was a pretty common understanding of neurology back in the late 19th and early 20th century, when the mystical and spiritual were normalised. The book itself then becomes this hybrid of extreme logic and bizarre metaphysics , which I think is something that fantasy as a genre shares. It takes the logic of reality, and shifts the metaphysical bases to create these fantasy reals, or these secondary worlds as someone like Tolkien would call them. I think that’s the same thing that happens in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. While it’s technically nonfiction , it would be hard to imagine a nonfiction in which we also believe that a man was actually connected to God’s nerves and was drawing him down to earth, and that the world had been scoured – and he had this idea that everybody around him was what he called “fleetingly improvised men”, with one of those German hyphenated nouns, and that they were all non-existent until he addressed them, at which point God then fleetingly improvised them to convince him that he was going mad… Those things obviously can’t be true. So what are they? They must be a form of fantasy, whether that’s a fantasy with an ‘f’ or a phantasy with a ‘ph’. I find very interesting that uncomfortable juxtaposition between things being true and things being demonstrably false. I think one of the pleasures of fantasy is that the sophisticated writer of fantasy can do that same work – can convince you that something that is demonstrably false is, in fact, true, at least at the level of your emotional engagement with it – and to a certain extent your intellectual engagement with the allegory of it. This book is a perfect example of how you can read for empathy without having to insist on the truth of a thing. Sometimes when we’re reading, we think, “This isn’t true”, or “I don’t agree”, or “I don’t believe what this person’s saying”. I think it’s a problem with realists, in general – and I have some experience of realism, so it’s not like I’m completely anti realism – but it insists on verisimilitude, or at least a relationship with the outside world that is kind of one-to-one in some way, and I just don’t think it’s possible or desirable. I think also it leads to people just reading to see themselves represented back to themselves, which I don’t think is a very healthy way of reading in the world. So with something like Memoirs of My Nervous Illness , even if you don’t want to consider it to be a fantasy novel, you should read it just as a means of understanding what fantasy really is – and the extent to which all of our realities are formed in the same manner, whether those things happen to be arguably true or seemingly false. Those contingencies around ‘arguably’ and ‘seemingly’ give you an option to have the same epistemological relationship with the text, regardless of whether you choose to believe that to be true or real or not. Yes, that’s a nice way of putting it. For me, both as a human being and a writer, that’s central: I think it is worrying, at the very least, that provisionality, that fragility of your own conception of the real. I have my own relationship with mental health issues, as we all do, but also I think the culture we live in as ill. You couldn’t really imagine it to be anything else, given the kind of things that it does in the world. And I think that too solid or transcendental a definition of the real ends up with systems which do terrible things, despite the fact that what they’re really doing is just reifying a form of aggressive, paranoid illness against the world. You’ve got to find some way to undermine that, to not get to the point where you think it’s perfectly appropriate to wreck everything or to kill indiscriminately, and imagine it’s all fine. One of the things I really like is the sense you get seeing someone trying to propagandize about something which you don’t believe, and then you realize, they’re using exactly the same techniques as the people who are saying things that you do believe… That’s right, I have supposedly taken this movement from something that deals with people with schizophrenia, into the type of writing which could be bracketed as dark fantasy. But I don’t think I’m doing anything different, right? Mordew is a book about a child who is being persecuted in a city in which God’s corpse is causing strange magical effects at the level of the street. This child has a history that gives him some kind of power. He doesn’t understand how to use it. All he knows is that it’s attracting the interest of other people. His father, the master of the city, is giving him powers that he can’t control and doesn’t know how to use. Okay, so that’s a relatively traditional magical-boy-coming-of-age type thing. But let’s imagine instead that I’d written that as a piece of realist fiction. The text then becomes a piece of schizophrenic delusion-making, right? So rather than me reading about people who already have schizophrenia and saying, “This is how we might write literary fiction about people like that”, we’ve made this switch to “This is what literary fiction would look like if you are a schizophrenic – this is what the real looks like when you have problems with understanding reality, when the real is not an obvious thing for you” – and you as a reader are invited to occupy that same world. I think that a lot of what happens in fantasy writing, particularly dark fantasy writing, is coming to terms with the fragility of reality and also the problematization of it, and the bleeding into the real of nightmares. Particularly in the next book in the series, in Malarkoi , the nightmarish quality inherent in the real is what the book is about. Now that, to me, is a kind of realism – it’s a kind of psychological realism, which borrows the systems of dark fantasy writing and fantasy writing in general, in order to trick people into coming to terms with some of the strange things that happen in the real! That was the aim for the realist fiction too, to enforce in the reader a kind of temporary schizophrenia. It’s doable in literary fiction, but I think it’s actually easier to do in fantasy fiction. People can co-opt the experience back into “Isn’t it bizarre, isn’t it weird?”, and just enjoy it on that level, which is fine; but I think also it does the same work of undermining reality, of undermining your sense of the real, at least temporarily. Because of the structure of the book and the necessities of publishing I’ve had to rein it back in again, otherwise people would hate it. But for a time at least, there are periods in which I think reality for the reader becomes destabilized and uncomfortable. That’s reconciled as you get towards the end of the series. That’s what’s interesting about dark fantasy and weird fiction in general: that sense of destabilization of the real, that can either lead to a different understanding of your own reality, or just be fun – it’s fun to be weirded out, either way. Exactly. I think that’s something the reader shares, going in; the sense of, “Okay, here we go! We’re going to see that progression from weakness to strength – from someone being bullied by the world, to someone expressing themselves forcefully against the world.” And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s real. I think you can start off with that, and you go off with that intent, but then quickly find that there isn’t a space for you to exert yourself and express yourself and make the world right. I think every time you try to do that, you just make everything worse! That’s essentially the ‘progress’ of the books’ hero, Nathan – it started out bad and then it just got worse. My background is not actually in writing; it’s as an art historian, originally, and a philosopher to a certain extent. There was a period going into early modernism, the 1920s and 1930s, where in the world of visual arts people started to think seriously about how you could disrupt people’s experience of existence. Surrealism was one of the major artistic movements that tried to do this work, to destabilize your understanding of what it was to be a human being, in exactly the same way as the existentialists did. And there are two big strands of surrealism: the dreamy, Dali-esque Breton-ish type surrealism, which is a lot about dreams, and a kind of pleasurable aesthetics. But there was another dissident side of surrealism that went off in a different direction, some of it was based around photography, other parts were around sculpture – people like Bresson and Giacometti. There were a series of photographic interventions into surrealist art that dealt with things like abattoirs, or strange sexual perversions, that kind of stuff… L’Amour Fou was a surrealist photography exhibition I went to see when I was about 16, I think, at the Hayward Gallery, and I had a cold. I always think when I’ve got a cold I have the flu, but anyway I had a fever, that was the important part. I wasn’t feeling 100% on top of things, and it’s a funny age, 16, and I was there with my dad and my stepmother which was always very fraught… And then we went to see this exhibition, which was full of this crazy material that really wired my brain weirdly. The real world suddenly seemed like an extremely frightening and uncomfortable place, full of things that look like things you recognize from the real, but weren’t quite right… This feverish state took over. And I think that’s something that surrealism does really well: it aestheticizes feverishness. I’ve always been interested in, and continue to be interested in, how the real changes depending on your psychological state. Because it oughtn’t to, it seems to me; or if it does, then what is the ‘normal’ psychological state? Because it isn’t transparent. I think the normal psychological state may be just as contingent and weird as the feverish psychological state, and I think that that’s something that surrealism and its attempt to abnormalize the normal tries to put across, particularly in photography. These are photography exhibitions, so you can’t say, “It’s just a weird painting, it’s not something that exists”. These are things that exist, and also upset your understanding of what it is to be a person in the real world. It’s these kinds of existential crises that I think contemporary culture seems to want to marginalize into complete non-existence, preferring for everybody to be extremely certain about everything that they do. Because they are right, and everything is true, and they understand everything, and they get to do whatever it is they want and say whatever it is they want aggressively in other people’s faces. I don’t think that’s the way of things. I think we’ve lost our path to a certain extent – not to say that the Surrealists were great people, or that surrealism offers a liberal utopia for us all to live in, but it does do that work of upsetting and undermining our acceptance of the real as a thing that we can rely on."

"Before his illness and incarceration in various mental institutions, Schreber trained as a lawyer and worked as a judge. The clarity and specificity of his descriptions in this book are remarkable: one modern reviewer called it “a textbook of psychiatry from the viewpoint of the patient,” and I think that sums it up well. Both Freud and Jung were compelled by Schreber’s case and analysed it extensively, and the new NYRB edition has only brought more interested people to the text. I think what I take from it, above all, is that the patient’s voice matters: we still read this book in part because of how unusual it is to hear from the person actually experiencing the delusions rather than those trying to treat them."