Thursday, March 28

“What we call madness is a thunderous loneliness”


Rosa Montero has just published ‘The danger of being sane’. / JJ GUILLEN / EFE

Rosa Montero faces the torments of the psyche with an exploration that has allowed her to lose her fear of death

Antonio Paniagua

Rosa Montero believes she has written the book of her life. In ‘The danger of being sane’ (Seix Barral) she investigates the tortuous paths that the mind travels to get lost, from madness to suicide. The novelist, who since she was little always believed that something was not working in her head, investigates with the tenacity of an entomologist the alienations of the psyche as if she herself were the object of study.

Convinced that her brain has not fully matured neurologically, she has gone to the psychoanalyst’s couch on three separate occasions in her life and has dealt with panic attacks. Perhaps because she feels different, she has been able to put herself in the shoes of those creators who combined genius with mental illness. Many characters appear on the pages of ‘The danger of being sane’, but three women, Emily Dickinson, Janet Frame and Sylvia Plath have dazzled the author with their vital vicissitudes. Rosa Montero’s new work goes through these disorders, psychosis and hallucinations, sometimes a breeding ground for artistic brilliance.

The writer starts from the idea, exposed by the Department of Psychology at Yale University (USA), that normality is nothing more than a statistical construction. “The normal thing is to be strange, and only assuming that strangeness is how we can get to know the bottom of what we are”, argues Rosa Montero, who after exploring the torments of the brain has lost the fear of death. «I am an existentialist writer and, in this record, I have taken another step to understand and accept death. But this is not a testimonial book, I do not have the sensation of having undressed myself».

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The history of literature offers abundant examples of how creativity is housed in extravagant intellects. Kafka chewed each bite 32 times and did gymnastics in the nude; Agatha Christie hatched her mystery plots in her bathtub and Ruyard Kipling could only write in black ink. Not to mention those phobias that led Freud to dread trains; to Napoleon, to cats; and Hitchcock, to the eggs.

Four years ago the prose writer sketched out the first idea of ​​what this book would be. After writing it, a laborious job in which she planned to talk about up to sixty different issues, Rosa Montero is no longer the same. She has undergone a healing process. «I still have pain, darkness and anguish, but I have discovered a way to live better. I have understood why I have a head the way I do and how creation is articulated».

“The normal thing is to be strange, and only assuming that strangeness is how we can get to know the bottom of what we are”, says the writer

The mathematician and Nobel Prize winner John Nash, a victim of paranoid-schizophrenic delusions, believed, among other nonsense, that he was being persecuted by communists and that he was called to be the emperor of Antarctica. He suffered through an ordeal of electroshock, psychiatric admissions, and neglect, until he reached some degree of sanity. Having already regained some of his original lucidity, he lamented that reason deprived him of a kind of visionary ability. «Not everything was profit with his recovery. The first time I went to the psychoanalyst I was scared to death of being cured, because of the ‘danger of being sane’, which is a beautiful line by Emily Dickinson».

For the author, if something defines the loss of mental health, it is isolation. “What we call madness is a thunderous loneliness. When you have a crisis it is as if a giant kicked you and took you out of his life and of the human species. You don’t even think you’re human. If to this is added the ostracism with which the mentally ill have been punished, it turns out that the patient ends up condemned to hell.

“I Conscious”

Addressing the issue of madness and its multiple bifurcations has represented a titanic task, the path had to be cleared, which has only been possible by erasing the “conscious self” and starting to write as if dancing, following the music of the story. Perhaps that is why the narration, says the writer, is endowed with a very successful internal rhythm.

Kate Millett and Doris Lessing fascinate Rosa Montero, but the one who has really fallen in love with her is Janet Frame, a New Zealand storyteller whose youth was marked by a suicide attempt. She was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, fried with electroshock when applied without anesthesia or muscle relaxants, and wandered through insane asylums into a miserable existence. She was miraculously saved from a lobotomy because the director of the psychiatric hospital read at the right time that she was the winner of a literary prize.

When she was finally able to get out of poverty thanks to the fact that she had inherited the house from her father, who had brutally mistreated her, she preferred to give it to her brother because, according to what she said, he had much less luck than her. She “she was a lovely and wonderful aunt who suffered a very difficult life, and despite this she led a self-contained, creative and positive existence.”


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