Madness, Philosophy and Literature: A Reading of Janet Frame's Faces in the Water‪.‬

Janet Frame's second novel, Faces in the Water and Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilisation were both published in the same year, 1961, albeit in two countries at opposite ends of the world (Christchurch and Paris). Both texts contain remarkably similar descriptions and analyses of how the mad are constructed as marginal in discourse and excluded from 'normal' society. Foucault provides a philosophical analysis of the history of 'madness' as discursive concept in Europe from 1500 to 1800; Frame's novel, narrated in the first person, provides a fictional account of what incarceration in a psychiatric institution in New Zealand in the 1940s and 50s might have felt like; what the experience of madness meant personally for one defined as 'mad'. (2) It is the distinction between a text defined as philosophy (though drawing on historical evidence) or a text defined as fiction (though drawing on personal experience) and their subsequent ability to analyse, define and describe madness that I explore here. Foucault describes madness as the other to reason. If madness is not reason it follows there can be no reasonable or readable text which can express madness. Jacques Derrida, in his paper 'Cogito and the History of Madness', which, as its title suggests, is in direct dialogue with Foucault, comments that :