Madness and Irrationality in Spanish and Latin American Literature and Culture

By Lloyd Hughes Davies

This is the first monograph to consider the significance of madness and irrationality in both Spanish and Spanish American literature. It considers various definitions of ‘madness’ and explores the often contrasting responses, both positive (figural madness as stimulus for literary creativity) and negative (clinical madness representing spiritual confinement and sterility). The concept of national madness is explored with particular reference to Argentina: while, on the one hand, the country’s vast expanses have been seen as conducive to madness, the urban population of Buenos Aires, on the other, appears to be especially dependent on psychoanalytic therapy. The book considers both the work of lesser-known writers such as Nuria Amat, whose personal life is inflected by a form of literary madness, and that of larger literary figures such as José Lezama Lima, whose poetic concepts are suffused with the irrational. The conclusion draws attention to the ‘other side’ of reason as a source of possible originality in a world dominated by the tenets of logic and conventionalised thinking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781786835772

Lloyd Hughes Davies

Lloyd Hughes Davies is Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages, Translation and Interpreting, Swansea University. His main area of interest is contemporary Spanish American literature, particularly the novels of Argentina and Colombia.

Book preview

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Madness and Irrationality in Spanish and Latin American Literature and Culture

Series Editors

Professor David George (Swansea University)

Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds)

Editorial Board

Samuel Amago (University of Virginia)

Roger Bartra (Universidad Autónoma de México)

Paul Castro (University of Glasgow)

Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds)

Catherine Davies (University of London)

Luisa-Elena Delgado (University of Illinois)

Maria Delgado (Central School of Speech and Drama, London)

Will Fowler (University of St Andrews)

David Gies (University of Virginia)

Gareth Walters (Swansea University)

Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds)

Other titles in the series

Fantastic Short Stories by Women Authors from Spain and Latin America: A Critical Anthology

Patricia Gracía and Teresa López-Pellisa

Carmen Martín Gaite: Poetics, Visual Elements and Space

Ester Bautista Botello

The Spanish Anarchists of Northern Australia: Revolution in the Sugar Cane Fields

Robert Mason

Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes: On Brazil and Global Cinema

Maite Conde and Stephanie Dennison

The Tlatelolco Massacre, Mexico 1968, and the Emotional Triangle of Anger, Grief and Shame: Discourses of Truth(s)

Victoria Carpenter

The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism and Crisis in Argentina

Ignacio Aguiló

Catalan Culture: Experimentation, creative imagination and the relationship with Spain

Lloyd Hughes Davies, J. B. Hall and D. Gareth Walters

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Madness and Irrationality in Spanish and Latin American Literature and Culture

LLOYD HUGHES DAVIES

© Lloyd Hughes Davies, 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-575-8

e-ISBN 978-1-78683-577-2

The right of Lloyd Hughes Davies to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

An earlier version of chapter 7, ‘Self-Consciousness and Schizophrenia’, was published in New Readings 13 (2013), 74–92. The author is grateful to the Editor, Dr Tilmann Altenberg, for permission to republish here.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image © EyeEm / Alamy Stock Photo

Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword

Acknowledgements

1Introduction

2The Concept of National Madness: The Argentine Paradigm

3Voices in the Wilderness’: Conquest and Counter-Conquest in Abel Posse

4Morality, Madness, Memory: Royal Women in Fernando del Paso and Lourdes Ortiz

5Crime, Madness, Art: Alejandra Pizarnik and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

6Books about Books: Carlos Ruiz Zafón and Arturo Pérez-Reverte

7Self-Consciousness and Schizophrenia: The Literary World of Nuria Amat

8Joy in Paradise: José Lezama Lima

9Desert, Delirium, Digression: The Fictional Worlds of Juan José Saer

10 Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Series Editors’ Foreword

Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superseded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa.

In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies that explore all aspects of Cultural Production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research in the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies that explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the enthusiastic support of my students and colleagues at the Department of Modern Languages, Translation and Interpreting, Swansea University and the encouragement and patience of my family and friends.

I made several modifications and additions as a result of comments following presentations at a variety of recent fora including the Romance Studies International Colloquium, Society for Latin American Studies Conferences and departmental research seminars at Swansea. I would like to thank those colleagues who engaged enthusiastically in the discussions.

I am grateful to Swansea University’s College of Arts and Humanities for granting me research leave in 2017 which enabled me to complete several unfinished chapters and to bring the project to completion.

I would like to express my thanks to my former colleague and friend, the late Mr J. B. Hall, who provided unstinting support during the preparation of the current project; to Swansea University library staff, particularly Dr Ian Glen, who rarely failed to locate an elusive reference and to Document Supply colleagues who dealt promptly and efficiently with often challenging requests; and to Ms Sarah Lewis, Head of Commissioning, University of Wales Press, who provided invaluable guidance from an early stage and was consistently sympathetic and accommodating throughout.

I am especially grateful to my partner, June, for her unfailing patience and also for her curiosity, often the source of new ideas and perspectives.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents,

Mr Elwyn Evan Davies (1917–2012) and

Mrs Nesta Hughes Davies (1918–2008).

1

Introduction

While many facets of human life and history have captured the attention of the general public and given rise to specialist areas of study – such as the origins of the species, the exploration of space, the control of disease – it is arguable that one particular phenomenon exerts the most enduring fascination, partly because of its universal relevance and immediacy. Human madness has attracted the attention of writers and commentators since ancient times and drawn diverse and often conflicting perceptions and responses. A major aspect of the fascination of madness is its resistance to interpretation – appearing, in some respects, to be more inaccessible than outer space. It is this quality, perhaps more than any other, that has inspired and frustrated writers and researchers in domains such as the literary, the philosophical and the medical.

Explaining madness proved elusive in the past and remains an apparently insuperable challenge in the present. Writers have often restricted themselves to attempting some kind of minor domestication, often by way of relating madness to some overarching framework of ideas. Screech opens his analysis of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly by claiming that ‘Madness and Christianity go hand in hand’.¹ Scull makes a similar point, noting that madness surfaces repeatedly in religious texts and practices, particularly in the Bible, which is ‘replete with stories of those bereft of their wits, raving, frenzied, or thrust into the depths of melancholy’.² He also notes that madness is an essential component of Greek philosophy since Socrates and refers in particular to Platonic teaching about charismatic madness in the Phaedrus (p. 28). Madness remains a major preoccupation of modern philosophy: Nietzsche, for example, refers approvingly to Plato in the book he began in 1880, Sunrise: ‘Plato was speaking for the whole of humanity when he said: From madness Greece has derived its greatest benefits’.³ Nietzsche’s fascination with madness is also evident in Joyful Wisdom where the story of the Madman presents a parable of perspectivism.⁴ In Nietzche’s writing, Dionysus, the god in Greek mythology and literature who induces madness, passion, irrational behaviour and frenzy, stands as a symbol of psychic renewal.⁵ In fact, as Saunders and MacNaughton note, ‘madness is one of the great topoi of literature from the classical period onwards’.⁶ It is a constant theme across centuries of culture: from Homeric myth and Greek drama to the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage; from the rise of the novel with Don Quixote (published in 1506, it was seen as the most notable literary portrait of the time), to modern writing, particularly by women. Madness also features in film: as Scull notes, as early as 1919, the German director Robert Wiene had produced a classic picture of madness on the screen (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) which ‘prefigured an enduring fascination with the theme of madness among film makers’.⁷ In science, madness became the preserve of a new psychological medicine which eventually became known as ‘psychiatry’ in the early twentieth century (pp. 50–1). Madness even influences the course of history, particularly, according to the nineteenth-century Argentine writer, José Antonio Ramos Mejía, that of countries with absolutist governments. Discussing Ramos Mejía’s ‘La locura en la historia’, Paul Groussac refers to ‘el estudio de las creencias y pasiones colectivas que, salvando las vallas de la razón, han obrado a manera de delirio comunicado o epidémico e influido desastradamente en la evolución histórica de un pueblo: así, por ejemplo la Inquisición española’ (‘the study of collective beliefs and passions that, surpassing the bounds of reason, have worked in the manner of a communicable or epidemic delirium and had a disastrous influence on the history of a people, for example, the Spanish Inquisition’).⁸ Britt Arredondo refers to the ‘angry madness of violent national purification that sparked the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 and that then became the hallmark of political and intellectual culture in Spain under Franco’.⁹

Given its impact on so many fields of human activity across the centuries, it is remarkable that the notion of madness, at least as mental illness, has often been called into question, most notably in recent years by Szasz who undermines the basis of psychiatry, claiming that psychiatrists are not concerned with mental illnesses and their treatments: ‘in actual practice they deal with personal, social and ethical problems in living’.¹⁰ This may be a minority view but there is no shortage of commentators and writers who broadly align themselves with Szasz’s position by questioning any hard and fast boundary between madness and normality. For Laing, madness is not the result of inherited weakness (as evolutionists claimed) or of faulty or incomplete development (as Freud suggested) but rather a ‘special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unliveable situation’.¹¹ For him it was the social contexts that determined madness rather than any actual medical condition. Similarly, Cooper claims that madness is ‘normal’: ‘When I am using the word madman here I’m not referring to a special race of people but the madman in me is addressing the madman in you’.¹² Such attitudes have a long pedigree: Erasmus in In Praise of Folly (1511) claimed that reason and madness are not exclusive but complementary so that wisdom consists of acknowledging the madness inside everyone.¹³ Noting that madness involves an illusion of reason, Felman takes a similar stance today: ‘how can we know where reason stops and madness begins, since both involve the pursuit of some form of reason’.¹⁴ Foucault makes a similar point, noting that the ‘logic of the mad mocks that of logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness … we discover, finally, the hidden perfection of a language’.¹⁵ For him, as Rojas points out, madness lies dormant just beneath the surface of reason.¹⁶ Freud’s view is similar: the madman was not just a problem of the Other … but on the contrary, lurked to some extent within us all.¹⁷ White makes the same point, claiming that the ‘Wild Man is lurking within every man, is clamouring for release within us all’.¹⁸ Gilman points out that our need for clarity (i.e. the mad to be identifiably different from ourselves) is permanently thwarted: ‘Our shock is always that they are just like us’.¹⁹ Novelists have made similar claims, one of the most memorable and graphic put forward by the Brazilian, Machado de Assis, in El alienista (‘The Alienist’, 1882). Here Dr Simão Bacamarte devotes several years to the attempt to identify the most appropriate criteria for determining the limits between the normal and the abnormal but is thwarted by that conceptual slipperiness that fails to divide them, so preventing the psychiatric legitimation of the official existence of a community of madmen: ‘Lunacy, the object of my constant investigation, has been regarded until now as a small island in an ocean of sanity. But I am beginning to see it, rather than an island, as an entire continent’.²⁰ His initial premise is that ‘sanity is the perfect equilibrium of all the faculties, neither more nor less’ (p. 86). But so many people are sectioned within his asylum, the Casa Verde that it becomes clear that no one knew any longer who was sane and who was crazy’ (p. 95); the fact that the majority of the residents of the town of Itaguaí ended up in the Casa Verde, forced him to change his original criteria for determining sanity and madness and come to the conclusion that ‘a disequilibrium of the mental faculties is normal, a perfect equilibrium, abnormal – and hypothetically pathological’ (p. 113). The story ends with his self-internment in the Casa Verde (p.125).

Despite such questioning of limits, however, the perception of reason and madness as mutually incompatible entities has survived, partly at least, according to some commentators, because of the pressure of civilization: for Rose, ‘madness is that something that is the inescapable price that is exacted from each of us by civilization, that something from which reason has progressively alienated itself in the form of medicine and the name of a positive science, for some two hundred years’.²¹ The negative aspects of clinical madness, moreover, are difficult to dismiss: Scull refers to the ‘havoc, the disturbance and the disarray that madness produces’ (p. 2). The distinction between clinical and creative insanity is, of course, long-standing, found, for example, in Plato.²² Cooper makes the point that some languages distinguish between madness seen from a medical perspective (pazzia in Italian) and a more general sense of madness (follia) that is often regarded as creative.²³ Gilman draws attention to the fear of madness: the fact that we can disintegrate mentally by way of natural processes – as the schizophrenic does – is a monstrous, uncanny concept.²⁴ In similar vein, Nouzeilles remarks of fin-de-siècle Argentina, that ‘no había nada más aterrorizador que la mera posibilidad de pérdida de control del yo’ (‘there was nothing more terrifying than the mere possibility of loss of self-control’).²⁵ While Cervantes saw the funny side of madness, other Spanish writers of the sixteenth century, notably Gracián (El criticón, 1651–7) and Mateo Alemán (Guzman de Alfarache, 1599–1604) portrayed it in a deeply negative light²⁶ – though it should be noted that Gracián’s thesis of the ingenio hinges on the demented nature of the great thinkers.²⁷ Caminero-Santangelo interrogates ‘the value of madness itself as a metaphor for resistance’ and notes that Toni Morrison portrays madness as ‘the ultimate manifestation of cultural self-sabotage’.²⁸

But there are at least as many dissenting views, particularly amongst women writers, who portray madness positively. In such cases, the negative clinical aspects (as outlined by Scull above) are expunged: ‘madness’ is then seen from a metaphorical perspective and associated with insight, knowledge and revelation. According to Kaup, such madness ‘usurps the status of the norm, displacing existing standards of social and individual coherences’.²⁹ Sass refers to the madman as the ‘personification of the life force’³⁰ and madness is commonly seen as a rich source of literary creativity. Virginia Woolf famously stated that ‘as an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you and not to be sniffed at. In its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets as sanity does’.³¹

Rigney notes that Woolf, Lessing and Atwood see their schizophrenic characters ‘as at least quasi-religious figures, saints or savants, questing for some form of truth’.³² Cruz García shows that the Anglo-Saxon tradition is reflected in the case of Spanish American women who see madness not as a curse but rather as a path to liberation: they portray the loca ‘como una imagen de ruptura ante un patriarcado opresor que en nada tiene que ver con sus deseos’ (‘as an image of rupture in the face of an oppressive patriarchy that is wholly indifferent to their desires’).³³

Some women writers have assumed the mantle of madness by virtue of their resistance to female stereotypes. One of the best known is the seventeenth-century Mexican poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, whom Ostría-González describes as ‘un extraño oxímoron, rara conjunción de opuestos … No hay duda, Sor Juana representaba un extravío, una locura, un monstruo ultramarino’ (‘a strange oxymoron, a rare conjunction of opposites … There is no doubt that Sor Juana represented a deviation, a streak of madness, a monster from overseas’). ³⁴

In these instances, madness is associated with freedom from patriarchal tyranny and identified as an important source for artistic creativity. It has other positive aspects too. It serves to represent the irrational, the inexplicable, the ‘other of reason’, resistance to analysis and interpretation, that which cannot be comprehended or mastered by the intellect. In recent years, leading critics have reacted against interpretation, seeing it as an intrusive, reductive and even dictatorial exercise. Sontag claims that ‘to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of meanings. It is to turn the world into this world … Interpretation … violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories’.³⁵ For Lecercle, Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of Oedipus amounts to a rejection of interpretation and structure: ‘the richness of the patient’s productions (his dreams, his delirious discourse, his insights) is reduced to ready-made explanations’. ³⁶

Madness is often viewed positively precisely because it refuses to succumb to interpretive scrutiny. It remains elusive, partly because of its paradoxical aspects: it is dark and threatening on the one hand but is also associated with a deeper truth and with illumination on the other. Foucault notes that while psychoanalysis can unravel some forms of madness, ‘it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither liberate nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise’.³⁷ Harter goes further, claiming that madness resists the Symbolic, resists all interpretation … madness seems to be a condition of otherness inside the self … Madness has a way of exploding every possible unity’.³⁸ She goes on to claim that all approaches to madness fail to master it: ‘Whether considered in its thematic dimension (Tsvetan Todorov) or as an index of the spirit of the time (Tobin Siebers), as historically repressed (Foucault), linguistically mediated (Derrida), or as the distinctive privilege of literature (Shoshana Felman), madness invariably eludes our critical/theoretical grasp’ (p. 105). She sees language as offering a protective strategy against madness, a difference by which madness is deferred, put off (p. 44). If we want to avoid the temptation to exclude madness, then we must open our ears to ‘all those words deprived of language’, forgotten words on whose omission the Western world is founded’ (p. 41). She goes on to claim that madness appears in discourse as a ‘passion for the signifier, as a repetition of signs – without regard for what is signified’ (p. 108). While realism tries to hide the discursive origins of the narrative, madness is there to bring ‘the story’ back to its sole origin in discourse (p. 110).

While there may be some truth in Derrida’s claim that madness is ‘what in essence cannot be said’, that madness is essentially silence,³⁹ it is also clear that several contemporary writers have contrived to make it speak in their texts – at least after a fashion. Perhaps the most notable contemporary text that forces language to incorporate madness is William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Here Benjy’s discourse resists sense and interpretation; to turn it into sense, as Read affirms, is to violate it.⁴⁰ Notable female writers whose literary practice is comparable to Faulkner’s in this respect include Marguerite Duras and Diamela Eltit. Kristeva notes that ‘a complicity with illness emanates from Duras’s texts … It leads us to X-ray our madness, the dangerous rims where identities of meaning, personality and life collapse’.⁴¹ In Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1964), the persistence of ‘rien’, ‘ne plus’, ‘personne’, ‘aucun’, ‘ne pas’ suspends the movement of the text and creates a mood of narrative stasis. Juan José Saer’s Nadie nada nunca (1980) has a similar effect. Both texts repudiate the sense-making impulses of realism that appeal to the protective layers of conventional language. In similar vein, Eltit’s El padre mío is based on a tape-recorded interview with a schizophrenic homeless man: the fragmentary monologues ‘string together newspaper headlines, paranoid sensibility, and popular conspiracy theories which, while they cannot be put together to form a narrative, mark the fracturing of sense at the margins with paranoia as the only common denominator’.⁴²

Sontag notes that the ‘choice of insane behaviour as the subject matter of art is, by now, the virtually classic strategy of modern artists who wish to transcend traditional realism, that is, psychology’.⁴³ She also points out that such a choice has political implications: ‘there are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie’ (p. 49). In the literary arena, realism can be seen as a kind of sanity which may appear to speak common sense but is, in fact, superficial, unable to engage with the complexities of the modern world. Such a view complements the long-standing resistance to the primacy traditionally accorded to rational values. Egginton notes that the baroque is ‘the cultural expression of a deep and abiding anxiety regarding the nature and extent of human reason’.⁴⁴ Martín-Escudillo and Spadaccini make a similar point: ‘the 20th century in particular has seen extraordinary challenges to the ideals of the Enlightenment as reason became associated with coercion, violence and genocide’.⁴⁵ For his part, Dussel places the violence of ‘rationality’ within an historical, Hispanic context: ‘the conquistador was the first modern, active, practical human being to impose his violent individuality on the Other’.⁴⁶ Criticizing the Eurocentric stance of writers such as Edmundo O’Gorman (p. 32), he calls for a new approach, embodied in his concept of ‘transmodernity’ which ‘makes room for the reason of the Other’ (p. 131), the Other that had never been discovered as Other by Europe but was rather covered up as part of the Same (p. 12). Modernity, which dates from 1492, was tainted by ‘the myth of a special kind of sacrificial violence which eventually eclipsed whatever was non-European’ (p. 12).

For feminists, madness may be regarded as a means of escaping patriarchal tyranny, as we have seen, but in Spanish America, in particular, it often has less positive connotations. Rojas notes that paranoid fiction – at least as conceptualized by Ricardo Piglia – reflects the idea of a conspiracy that has become pervasive in contemporary society.⁴⁷ Moraña claims that madness informs Latin American adaptations of European cultural models: ‘la escritura del delirio, es decir la inscripción de la irracionalidad en los modelos ilustrados, inscribe a su vez la circunstancia americana en la tradición mítica y racional del occidente’ (‘the writing of madness, that is, the inscription of irrationality on the models of culture, inscribes in its turn American forms on the mythical and rational tradition of the West’).⁴⁸

Buenos Aires is, of course, the mecca of psychoanalysis in Spanish America. Here madness, which usually occupies a position of exclusion, being outside culture, has become a common place, occupying a position of inclusion, the inside of a culture.⁴⁹ Saunders and MacNaughton observe that ‘psychiatric terms are very good put-downs of people whose politics and aspirations one wishes to quash’.⁵⁰ The recent history of Argentina provides a graphic example: the military regime of the 1970s and early 1980s branded as locas the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo – women who demonstrated against the government and demanded an explanation for the disappearance of their sons, daughters and grandchildren. But, as Girona Fibla points out, madness had insinuated itself inside the political culture of the time: ‘las locas mostraron los rostros de la sinrazón del poder’ (‘the madwomen exposed the face of irrational power’). ⁵¹

Such madness, at the level of national culture, is the subject of Chapter 2, which shows how the irrational has informed politics in Argentina during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the focus is firmly on Argentina, important connections are made with the Spanish political heritage, as we shall see. Chapter 3, which examines two contrasting works, set in the period of the Conquest, by the Argentine writer, Abel Posse, highlights the sharply differing types of irrationality exhibited by his protagonists: Cabeza de Vaca (of El largo atardecer del caminante, ‘The Traveller’s Long Night’), inclines towards benevolent eccentricity and openness towards the ‘other’; by contrast, Lope de Aguirre (of Daimón)) embraces rebellion, violence and murder. Chapter 4 continues the historical theme by analysing two regal figures, Queen Urraca of Castile and León (c.1078–1126) and the Empress Carlota of Mexico (1840–1927), as reinvented by their authors, Lourdes Ortiz (Spain) and Fernando del Paso (Mexico) respectively. Stylistic experimentation is important here, particularly in the case of Del Paso, who explores the linguistic madness of his protagonist whose dementia is associated with personal psychological trauma as well as old age. Chapter 5 looks at the relationship between madness, art and crime and, in the case of Alejandra Pizarnik (Argentina), explores the principle that the protagonist, Countess Erzsébet Báthory of Hungary (1560–1614), is, to some extent at least, the author’s double. The connection between literature and madness continues in Chapter 6: here the theme of literary obsessiveness as well as criminality is treated in different ways by the Spanish writers, Carlos Ruiz Zafón and Arturo Pérez-Reverte. Both focus on madness associated with bibliomania and on the influence of literature on real life: in Ruiz Zafón, a writer assumes the identity of a monstrous character from his own novel, while in Pérez-Reverte, criminality is often informed by literary models. The notion of personal authorial complicity in the irrational is a major theme in Chapter 7, which deals with Nuria Amat (Spain): her self-confessed obsession with literature (at the expense of life) underpins her literary treatment of real-life women such as Lucia, the daughter of James Joyce. Chapters 8 and 9 deal with major writers, both obsessed in their different ways with madness. For José Lezama Lima (Cuba), madness is portrayed as a source of vitality associated with imaginative freedom (Lezama Lima has been seen as a god maddened by the fury of his creative drive) but its negative undercurrents are not overlooked: he views the baroque, for example, as a creative disease. Lezaman concepts such as the imagen are based on non-rational insights which underpin his art but such personal affinities do not prevent him from portraying madness in a tragicomic manner, as exemplified by Celita’s seduction of Juliano and its aftermath in Paradiso (‘Paradise’). In the case of Juan