Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art [Hardcover]

Marina Van Zuylen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2005

"This book is about the obsessive strategies people use to keep the arbitrary out of their lives; it is about the fanaticism and intolerance linked to their ideas of perfection and permanence. . . . Those readers who have brushed against the dangers of the idée fixe, who have come close to surrendering to something or someone diabolically seductive or coercive, will recognize in these characters their own encounter with a dangerously systematized world."—From the introduction.

Monomania explores the cultural prominence of the idée fixe in Western Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marina van Zuylen revives the term monomania to explore the therapeutic attributes of obsession. She introduces us to artists and collectors, voyeurs and scholars, hypochondriacs and melancholics, whose lives are run by debilitating compulsions that may become powerful weapons against the tyranny of everyday life.

In van Zuylen’s view, there is a productive tension between disabling fixations and their curative powers; she argues that the idée fixe has acted as a corrective for the multiple disorders of modernity. The authors she studies—Charles Baudelaire, Sophie Calle, Elias Canetti, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann among them—embody or set in motion different manifestations of this monomaniacal imperative. Their protagonists or alter egos live more intensely, more meaningfully, because of the compulsive pressures they set up for themselves. Monomania shows that transforming life into art, or at least into the artful, drives out the anxiety of the void and puts in its place something so orderly and meaningful that it can take on the aura of a religion.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"Monomania is highly original, deeply learned, intelligent, and thoughtful. It is also engagingly and agreeably written. Marina van Zuylen fruitfully combines psychological and literary issues, achieving a balance between attention to specific authors and a strong central argument. She successfully brings together the inner problematics of literature-the act of writing, the choice of the writing life, the investment in form and style-and the literary imagination of the psychology of human thought and behavior."—William Paulson, author of Literary Culture in a World Transformed: A Future for the Humanities

"As we turn these learned pages on modernist fanaticism, obsession, compulsion, and idées fixes, we come to recognize the figure in the mirror: the monomaniac is us. Marina van Zuylen's gentle irony and dry wit make this richly written book a delight to read."—Janet Beizer, Harvard University

"This is an enthralling book—I found myself monomaniacally lecturing anyone who came near about its ideas. Marina van Zuylen revives a concept of obsession broader than that currently used in psychiatry, and in doing so makes it easier to see what the urge to create literature can have in common with such states as obsessive grief, hypochondriasis, and perfectionism. Monomania is not only a theory-rich delight for students of literature and culture, it has practical implications for clinicians—and for any general reader who has felt the seductive tug of being a jealous lover, a tchotchke collector, or a workaholic."—Alice Flaherty MD, PhD, Director, Movement Disorders Fellowship, Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, and author of The Midnight Disease : The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

"This intriguing book is finally about our relationship to time—plain time that is at once too dull and too rich for us to bear—and how it invests modern art with esthetic urgency. Marina van Zuylen’s case studies of notable modernist monomaniacs are poignant in their precise appreciation of the risks and riches of the idée fixe. We come to feel we understand these characters all too well ! A dim but haunting awareness of one’s own susceptibility to the "fear of everyday life" grows in the reader , engendering a kind of double reading that performs the very ambiguity of monomania so precisely revealed by van Zuylen’s analysis. I read this beautifully written book monomaniacally."—Suzanne Guerlac, University of California, Berkeley

"In the same way as Rene Girard analyzed the structure of mimetic desire in his groundbreaking Deceit, Desire & the Novel of 1965, Marina van Zuylen constructs the history of what seems at first an obsolete psychological affliction by ordering a series of case studies into a teleological march through time--from Flaubert's to ours. She reactivates notions that had fallen into oblivion and in so doing proposes an entirely new reading of monomania as a symptom, or rather a coherent set of symptoms, of modern life."—Yve-Alain Bois, Harvard University

About the Author

Marina van Zuylen is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Bard College. She is the author of Difficulty as an Aesthetic Principle.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Cornell University Press (May 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801442982
• ISBN-13: 978-0801442988
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,117,921 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Crossover appeal, May 7, 2005

By 

AWF (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Monomania: The Flight From Everyday Life In Literature And Art (Paperback)

It's rare that a book written by a comp. lit. professor is so riveting, and even relevant to real life. "Monomania" has changed the way I understand other people, and reinforced my faith in the importance of literature.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars truly great, July 13, 2005

By 

Phil O'Sofer "Phil O'Sopher" (Red Hook, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Monomania: The Flight From Everyday Life In Literature And Art (Paperback)

Essential reading for everyone. I came to realize that deep down inside, we are all monomaniacal.
Please, Prof. van Zuylen, write more!

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars finding a more perverse point of view, September 28, 2011

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Monomania: The Flight From Everyday Life In Literature And Art (Paperback)

Clinging to wipe out

Warning: this review contains jokes about the inner circle of literary fem joy.

As Monomania (2005) by Marina Van Zuylen is not a book in which a question about a person becoming a man could be exalted as a serious question, it still pictures a character who asserts:

You must be a doctor!

As America faces a medical surge with millions of Americans approaching retirement within the next twenty years, it faces the collapse of a system in which doctors were responsible for determining what must be done as individuals approach death. Alice James escapes from her monstrous mass of subjective sensations when a doctore discovered that she had a lump that brings about death as the "solid emblem of a perverse kind of achievement." (p. 120). Social systems cling to dramatic forms of behavior for reasons that I associate with the book Games People Play by Eric Berne, M.D. Elias Canetti is an author who is pictured as ordering his "troops" by intellectual activity. Religion has made expectation of a "new immortal self" (p. 145) establishing universal harmony such a common feature of literary life that The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann is used to illustrate:

What with Doctor-God,
Nurse-Priestess,
and the pharmaceutical Eucharist,
the hospital is organized like a church. (p. 129).

The index of Monomania does not mention John Locke, but his kind of abstraction is a basic theme of George Eliot's novel Middlemarch in which "Casaubon's flight from the world" (p. 105) is an opposite to:

Reality, to Dorothea,
is synonymous with suffocation,
so to free herself from it,
she must passionately embrace
the most abstract of ideas
and live in the most otherworldly
of environments. (p. 109).

When Dorothea is quoted:

"Celia! He is one of the most
distinguished-looking men
I ever saw. He is remarkably
like the portrait of Locke.
He has the same deep eye-sockets." (p. 117).

My own concern with rage recognition in a society filled with indignation that produces, by far, the greatest sense of monstrosity that has ever been able to picture a coming collapse of unsustainable surges, tries to read in Monomania a reflection on partisan objectives as the future shifts and shuffles continuously, and perhaps more so and faster from now on than ever before. The greatness of the vocabulary that has been produced creating our medical surge in mental maladies applies so fully to ideas like:

Just as physical beauty is trivial,
so is any type of emotion
that gives immediate sensual elation. (p. 118).

Book culture allows "an extraordinary voyage from abstraction to empathy, from the ideal to the real" (p. 119) to bring people to the polyphonic quality of life in which few things that are written down go as fast as things happen in a good Beatles song.