/lit/ - Literature

Bump? Don't mind if I do.

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>>14857742
the red book not full blown crazy but jung was having a breakdown while writing that shit

>>14857742
>No recreational drug users.
So no PKD? Does Hemingway count, or no because of the alcohol?

How about Robert Shields? He wrote a really long diary, so he was probably insane.

>>14858074
I can't imagine alcohol influencing someone to write anything too mentally gone, but alright.
>PKD
Phil K Dick? Okay.
>>14857912
Thanks.

>>14857742
obligatory Nietzsche
Carlos Castenada
Artaud

>>14857742
August Strindberg while writing Inferno

>>14857742
Phenomenology of Spirit

>>14857742
Ted, although he wasn't wrong

Janet Frame was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and spent some years institutionalized. (She might have been bipolar though.)

Sylvia Plath

Anne Sexton

About 1/3 of non males are mental patients

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Schreber
The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky
Exegesis of PKD

You know, if you have clinical schizophrenia, you probably aren't writing any books you could read. I can think of several authors who went crazy later in life, though for the most part, once you're truly off the deep end, you become incoherent, and you either die in a mental hospital or you kill yourself.

Some examples:

Robert Walser (his "microscripts" is one of few published works I can think of that was written after a terminal mental breakdown)
Nikolai Gogol
Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Unica Zurn

and I'll second Artaud and Schreber's Memoirs

late Nietzsche

Jung thought that Joyce was schizophrenic. He also had some autistic tendencies

>Carl Jung, who in 1934 had ''treated'' Joyce's daughter. Lucia Joyce and her father, Jung told Ellmann, were ''like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving.''

the late Daniel Johnston's lyricism

>>14859286
a true failson.

>>14859219
What if you take medication for it

>>14859295
What does that mean

>>14857742

James Dickey was a raging alcoholic and wrote his books while drunk out of his mind. Does that count?

>>14859266
Joyce exposed his autism in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.

>>14857742
Schizophrenia you say?

>>14859885
too soon.

>>14857742
my diary desu

>>14859380
How? I read the book (though only once) and found him to be a bit of a downer-smarty-pants, at least for the most part, but I sniffed out not a hint of autism.

>>14859885
;-;

>>14857742
Aurélia by Gerard de Nerval contains a quite eloquent and vibrant description of a psychotic breakdown (not sure if that is the correct technical term).

Adventures in Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher has vivid descriptions of visions which the author attributes to fever dreams caused by tuberculosis (he died of it in his thirties); they sound more like the result of mental illness to me.

4:48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane and Suicide by Édouard Levé. I haven't read these two, but the fact that their authors took their own lives shortly after finishing them, as well as the titles of these works, lead me to suggest they might be relevant to the topic.

>>14859219
>>14858816
I second everything in these posts. Walser and Gogol are especially amazing. I haven't read Walser's Microscripts which he wrote in the mental illness sanatorium, but I read most of his other work and he is one of my favourite authors. He famously once said, when asked if he was going to write again: "I am not here to write; I am here to be mad." Well, it turns out he was there to do both. As for Gogol, who really went off the rails towards the end of his life, he has a short piece called "Diary of a Madman". This was written well before he lost it, but it's worth reading still as it's very humourous in a very Gogol way.

>>14858807
>Janet Frame was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and spent some years institutionalized. (She might have been bipolar though.)
There's a rather sad and tragic story to her mental illness. She tried to commit suicide after university and began therapy with John Money (yes, that John Money). She lived in a bunch of lunatic asylums and mental hospitals where she was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, which doctors attempted to treat with electroshock therapy. While still a patient at Seacliff (an infamous mental asylum in New Zealand), she got a book published and won a literary prize, which caused the doctors to cancel a scheduled lobotomy.

>>14859219
Schizos, in controlled environments and on medication, can be quite lucid and indeed aware of their thought delusions. Though I can't imagine a schizo that's going through an episode being able to write much intelligible.

Maupassant went partly insane due to syphilis. Most of his works were written before that took hold, but it makes reading The Horla a strange experience

Yet another reason why you should give up cooming

>>14857912
>>14858457
>>14859219
>>14859227
>>14859380
This

IME it is EXTREMELY common with scholarly types, and simply not diagnosed because people get "locked in" to their own subjective reality and never realize they're sick.

>>14857742
Gerard de Nerval.

borp

Richard Sharpe Shaver

>>14857742
Wasn’t zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance written as a sort of cathartic memoir / self treatment of the authors schizophrenia

A Danish author named Michael Strunge was diagnosed bipolar, wrote some poems that are supposedly really good

>>14859219
>Robert Walser (his "microscripts" is one of few published works I can think of that was written after a terminal mental breakdown)
This includes Der Räuber/The Robber, right? Read parts of it, really strange but without seeming like a crazy person. More like an alien if that makes sense.

>>14857742
My own writing

This year I tried to read the memoirs/diary of a general with dementia, but it's just unintelligible gibberish. In the end, I had the impression the author was semi-literate.

The Commie Strangler
how was this not posted yet?

>>14863326
literally this
i've had manic episodes where I become a graphomaniac.

>>14857742
>t. this was revealed to me in a dream

>>14859266
Lacan also thought Joyce a schizophrenic.

>>14857742
> Intense feelings of weight upon my chest like elephants stepping over me
> ass drenched in sweat
> can't help myself going to some cave lmao
> omg what's this piercing voice in my head wtf
> I bend over and am told to 'recite' by daddy Gabe, weight crushes me further with each repetition

This isn't what it sounds like!

t. 1/4 of world

>>14859266
I never realized how strange this image is. Is there any context for it?

>>14864860
joyce waiting for the minefield he set up to kill his loud neighbors

>>14857742
really only tangentially related to what you asked for and more directly about schizophrenia, i found esme weijun wang's 'the collected schizophrenias: essays' to be a valuable read.

my diary
lock me up!

THERE IS NO ESCAPE FROM THIS WORSE GANGSTER POLICE STATE, USING ALL OF THE DEADLY GANGSTER FRANKENSTEIN CONTROLS. IN 1965 C.I.A. GANGSTER POLICE BEAT ME BLOODILY, DRAGGED ME IN CHAINS from KENNEDY N.Y. AIRPORT. SINCE THEN I HIDE in FORCED JOBLESS POVERTY, ISOLATED ALONE in this LOW DEADLY NIGERTOWN OLD HOUSE.

THE BRAZEN, DEADLY GANGSTER POLICE AND NIGER PUPPET UNDERLINGS SPRAY ME WITH POISON NERVE GAS from AUTOMOBILE EXHAUSTS AND EVEN LAWN MOWERS, DEADLY ASSAULTS. EVEN IN MY YARD, WITH KNIVES, EVEN BRICKS and STONES, EVEN DEADLY TOUCH TABIN, or ELECTRIC SHOCK “FLASH LITE” EVEN REMOTE ELECTRONICALLY CONTROLLED AROUND CORNERS TRAJECTION of DEADLY TOUCH TARANTULA SPIDERS, or EVEN BLOODY MURDER “ACCIDENTS” TO SHUT ME UP FOREVER WITH A “SNEAK UNDETECTABLE EXTERMINATION”, EVEN WITH TRAINED PARROTING PUPPET ASSASSINS, IN MAXIMUM SECURITY INSANITY PRISON FOR WRITING THESE UNFORGIVABLE, TRUTHFUL LETTERS.

>>14857742
Take me seriously.

Henry Darger.

"In the realms of the unreal"

15k typewritten pages manuscript, made over his adult life, lots of illustrations

Genuine nolife basement dweller manchild autist; janitor wagecuck; so totally removed from sexual knowledge he thinks girls have peepees just like boys.

Landlord found the phatt stacc around the time he died, hawked it.

Good luck finding a transcript or scans.

It will take another manchild nolife cellar squatting autard to put it all up on b-ok.

>>14858731

>>14865293
are these all different book titles?

>>14857742
>Writes plays about spiders coming out of a womans pussy

>>14858731
eew, you fell for the system's lie

>>14861214
well yeah, but shouldn’t others pick up on the fact that they’re acting crazy?

>>14859219
I'm schizophrenic. Reading you just fine bro.

>>14865339
sounds like run-of-the-mill surrealism

>>14864923
eh, it feels contrived

Francis E. Dec

Not technically a writer, but I think his letters reach the state of literature. They certainly have more originality than almost anything in modern fiction.

>>14857912
That book almost gave me a psychotic break

Don't read this if you don't have people in your life you can talk to, but if you're reading this it's probably too late anyway. Sorry.

>>14865390
Did you try active imagination? I've been considering trying it.

If so, how did you do it? Jung makes it sound so effortless, but it must be more difficult than that or otherwise everyone would do it.

>>14865377
>>14865387
uh, this is Francis E Dec, man

>>14865332
No, man. Google "Henry Darger"

15k pages of broomcloset manchild autardism.

>>14858074
Hemingway had depression

>>14861214
What is IME again?

>>14863219
>really strange but without seeming like a crazy person. More like an alien if that makes sense.
He wasn't in the looney bin when he wrote The Robber, but yes, that makes perfect sense. It's the best one word qualifier I've been able to come up with for Walser: alien. It's like he is this candid, yet highly intelligent, benevolent, yet aloof and alien being who floats through the world trying to understand with childlike candour the peculiar ways of man.

>>14864877
kkeekk

Henry Darger.

>>14865293
>Landlord found the phatt stacc around the time he died, hawked it.

Landlord was an actual Jew too. Although he wasn't really a bad guy. The greedy one was his wife.

>In late 1977, on Hawkwind's tour of Europe, at a time when there is an ever-present threat of terrorist action, Calvert insists on travelling everywhere in combat fatigues, with a gas pistol in a holster at his side. The rest of the band decide not to complete the tour after a gig in Paris and leave Calvert behind; the ensuing scene exemplifies one of Calvert's more manic episodes:
>"I recall the image of actually chasing a silver Mercedes limousine, that had four or five long-haired individuals in it, with the windows all wound up, through the streets of Paris, wearing this uniform! This is absolutely true, all the passers-by, the people out shopping, stopped dead. It was like a scene out of a movie like Alphaville' or a New Wave French film. All these people stopped dead in their tracks with their mouths open, watching this scene take place, this silver car speeding away with this guy chasing it, wearing this uniform. When it got to the traffic lights, I was so fucking annoyed with Brock and the others that I tried to get the door open, shaking this vehicle up and down. It looked like I was single-handedly trying to turn it over and arrest those people in it. When the lights changed the car went off.... When the car drove off, I was left standing there in this uniform. Suddenly realising that on either side of this thoroughfare in Paris were all these people shopping who were used to seeing terrorism. They really panicked. I tried to say, in simple French, hey look, it's all right you know, it's OK, calm down."

>>14867645
in my experience, i think.

>>14866595
dude was pretty legit. i have a nice and large and comfy book on him. there are also two docus of him, one of which was pretty lame

Alfred Chester
Gail Chord Schuler

>>14868868
>>>/co/
should've posted Ulilililililia. he's at least written a book

>>14865390
Explain, please

>>14865390
>>14865405
Why did you get a psychotic break? I have read your posts in a couple past threads about the Red Book.

I actually try to do active imagination, which I don't know if it is half-assed. It hasn't go as far as visionary experiences, but ideas that grow and become something similar to myths.

>>14864632
Was he epiliptic?

>57 posters (not including OP)
Thank you, /lit/. You made me happy.