The Madman in the Looking Glass
In Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood wrote about the double lives that all writers experience. “All writers are double,” she says. (Atwood 37). As I wrote earlier, this concept reminded me of that great observation from the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Zamyatin, who wrote: “True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.”
In this post, I will explore Atwood’s meditations on double lives through the functionary-madman dichotomy, which represent antitheses of each other. We will see how Atwood views what I call the functionary aspect of writers—that which represents the real person, who lives life and dutifully fulfills responsibilities and engages in the temporal and mundane things of the world. Then, we will see how Atwood thinks about the madman, that which represents the creative, the artist. Thereafter, we will see if we can use Atwood to draw a synthesis from the two antitheses. Finally, I will explore how this dichotomy applies to my writing life.
The Functionary
Zamyatin’s “diligent and trustworthy functionaries” may seem alien to the world of “true art,” occupied as it is by noncomformists and gadflies. But Atwood recognizes them. In introducing the concept of the double life of the author, she explains that one of the two is “the person who exists when no writing is going forward—the one who walks the dog, eats bran for regularity, takes the car in to be washed, and so forth.” (Atwood 35). And in describing her own functionary persona, she says, “I am a nice, cosy sort of person, a bit absent-minded, a dab hand at cookies, beloved by domestic animals, and a knitter of sweaters with arms that are too long.” (Ibid.).
If you are thinking that this nice lady sounds very different from the terrifying and prescient mind behind The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace, you would be right. This is the functionary. Someone who gets along fairly well with the demands and strictures of normal life. As Atwood explains, “The author is the name on the books. I am the other one.” (Atwood 37). The author is the madman.
The Madman
Now let’s meet “the name on the books.” (Ibid.). Zamyatin’s “madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics” are the ones who actually create literature. Such is recognized by Atwood herself. The “cold-blooded comment[s]” that comprise the unique observations of literature are not made by a normal person, but rather a “disembodied hand or invisible monster.” (Atwood 35). This is the madman, or what Atwood characterizes as “a slippery double—or at best a mildly dysfunctional one,” which she has “stashed away somewhere” deep in her interior self. (Atwood 36).
Like Zamyatin, Atwood seems to conclude that her art is, to some degree, the product of societally rejected personality traits. But unlike Zamyatin, she seems to recognize that, just as Hyde hides in Jekyll, these rejected traits can sit submerged in an otherwise ordinary person. “[D]iligent and trustworthy functionaries” or “madmen and hermits” is a false dichotomy, in Atwood’s telling. Functionaries and madmen can coexist in one body.
The Functionary and Madman Together
So how do these two poles function together? One can catch a glimpse by examining Atwood’s description of Through the Looking Glass. Atwood uses Alice’s mirror as a metaphor to separate art and life. (Atwood 56). “Alice is a mirror-gazer: the ‘life’ side is looking in, the ‘art’ side is looking out.” (Ibid.). One could easily imagine the two destroying each other, or at least one emerging victorious from the struggle.
Alice could break her mirror, condemning herself to a life of “life,” since art cannot follow her to its “hard and bright” light. (Ibid.). This would be the life of an apparatchik. A life of untold story and unseized potential. A life of prologue. Where Bilbo never leaves the Shire.
Likewise, Alice could lose herself beyond the looking glass, condemn to roam there, detached from all sense of “life.” How easy it is for an artist to become a caricature of himself. Apparently, someone said to the outlaw country singer Waylon Jennings, “you used to sing about my life, but now you sing about your own life.”
Okay, so how do the two planes of the mirror coexist?
Alice goes through the looking glass and the two momentarily merge. But then she returns. At the moment of passage, writing occurs. “[T]ime itself stops, and also stretches out, and both writer and reader have all the time not in the world”—and when Alice the real girl returns, she has a story to tell. (Atwood 57).
We can easily substitute in our functionary-madman dichotomy. The functionary is “life.” The cosy, absent-minded baker of Atwood’s description. The madman is “art,” that disembodied hand. What Atwood seems to be intimating is that, to create art, we lean on the madman, to be sure, but both are require. The functionary (that is, yourself as a person) and the madman (your artistic sensibilities) must become one.
As I wrote earlier, “the writer romanticizes life enough to create fodder for fiction, when he encounters those beautiful poetic moments out in the world that set him on fire, and he rushes back home to set them on paper.” The functionary stumbles into situations and collects images like this. He is repeatedly “set on fire.” And the madman is the one doing the “set[ting] … on paper.”
This observation is quite in line with Atwood’s own conclusions about the occasionally cannibalistic relationship that the functionary and madman share. One often eats the other. But then one often nourishes the other too.
The Functionary and Madman in Practice
It is quite easy to see how this dichotomy applies to one’s own life. Meet my functionary. A lawyer, a son, a brother, a friend. I enjoy Indian classical music and rap, photography, open-wheel racing, weight-lifting, hiking. I read a lot. I am a career counselor of sorts, to other aspiring and young lawyers, offering resume reviews and mock interviews for even the most tangentially connected people in my life. I travel a lot, to visit friends and family. I travel a lot for work too. I am a terrible gift giver but a great card-writer; I force people to tell me what presents they want for their birthday, but then I surprise them by also including a lovely message (which never fails to make my sister to cry). In short, I am an entirely ordinary person. I follow the law and follow social norms. I uphold personal obligations and make such demand on others. A biopic about me would not be particularly interesting.
And yet I’m a fairly decent writer. That’s all the madman. That is the less ordinary part of me. I meet with a writing group for three hours a week. I lock myself away in the evenings to write. I have strange dreams, and I will wake in the middle of the night to write them in a journal before massaging them into a scene in the morning. I will go on walks with my phone recording and talk aloud. I’ll act out scenes between characters in the shower. All less socially normal and acceptable behavior.
And, as I have written, my practice also tries to emulate the instance of passage through the looking glass. Self-mesmerism. I try to keep my mind and body occupied and exhausted, expose myself to different ideas and people, and run my mental and physical life on a routine, in the vein of Murakami. That routine is the mirror, and if I run it long enough, if I am disciplined enough about it (which I only occasionally do as a very ADHD-afflicted person), I can get to that point where my brain feels like it sometimes does at two in the morning—not in a bad way, but a good way. I pass between life and art, suspended in that liminal space where the two collide and merge. I feel like oxygen is being diverted from my brain, or perhaps pumped there double time. Again, as Atwood wrote, “time itself stops, and also stretches out, and both writer and reader have all the time not in the world.” (Atwood 57). I reach a meditative state of mesmerism.
And then I write.
