Hearts and Minds: War Neurosis and the Politics of Madness in Anna Kavan's I Am Lazarus

Abstract

Anna Kavan's fictional portrayals of psychiatric breakdown and its treatment provide a unique perspective on the patient's experience of early to mid twentieth-century psychiatry. This article looks in detail at Kavan's time working with soldiers suffering from effort syndrome during the Second World War, observing how the solider-psychiatric patient becomes a figurehead for her radical politics in her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944), and a prominent protagonist in her stories. Through close reading of her correspondence, her journalism and her wartime stories collected in I Am Lazarus (1945), it examines how the intersection of psychological trauma and physiological symptoms characteristic of effort syndrome surfaces in Kavan's writing of this period and in her own psychic responses to the war. It observes the importance of figurative language to her portrayal of war trauma and psychological breakdown, as her characters embody metaphor in their psychosomatic symptoms, and explores a twisted reconception of mind–body dualism prevalent throughout her writing of this period. It goes on to examine how the peculiar interaction of the physical and the psychological extends to the relationship between Kavan's characters and their external environment in her Blitz stories. Against the backdrop of the war-torn city, mind and body engage in ongoing conflict, affect and emotion bleed into her physical landscapes, and everyday objects become animated and hostile towards her protagonists.     

Thoreau in the 21<Superscript>st</Superscript> Century

Laura Dassow Walls’s superb biography of Henry David Thoreau is the most important study of this author thus far in the twenty-first century. Beautifully written, and packed with rich detail and subtle interpretation, Walls’s book teaches us much that is new about Thoreau and, furthermore, prompts us to think more deeply about and reassess this complex person and challenging writer—a writer whose range and mass of published and unpublished work, produced during his all too brief life (he died at age 44), is astounding. Thoreau is an inspiring radical voice for personal change and social reform, yet he is, at the same time, extremely self-centered and highly skeptical about the capacity of readers and audiences to bring about the transformations that he advocates.     

On Jordan Peterson,Postmodernism, and PoMo-Bashing

Jordan Peterson says that postmodernists say no interpretation is better than another. I would no sooner identify Peterson’s adversaries as those who have been misled by “postmodernism” than I would identify them as misled by “sustainability,” “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” or “intersectionality.” Such fare is mainly symptomatic. “Postmodern” invocations are often like “sustainability” invocations: inessential. This piece is not a defense of postmodernism. It is a critique of PoMo-bashing.     

The Tradition Industry: Hofstadter and Santayana on Politics,Culture and Capitalism

Richard Hofstadter’s provocative interpretation of what he called The American Political Tradition has long interested students and scholars. Often read as a response to the crisis times of the depression 1930s and interventionist 1940s, the book’s origins are actually rooted in deeper cultural changes in the United States. This paper argues that George Santayana’s earlier essay, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” (1911), anticipated several key aspects of Hofstadter’s argument and proved to more accurately foresee the ideological course of twentieth century American politics.     

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, <Emphasis Type="Italic">March 1917, Node III,The Red Wheel</Emphasis>. Trans. Marian Schwartz

A review of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's March 1917, translated by Marian Schwartz