Abstract
The paper deals with the relation between psychosis and literary writing from the point of view of its physiognomy, approaching the act of writing as a creative movement of speech which passes freely between literature and visuality. Focusing on a textual fragment written by a French psychiatric patient Blanche T. (published as a part of the study “Psychiatry before the Surrealism” by Henri Ey in 1948), I argue that a visual and figural performance of the text is as crucial as its verbal and significative dimension and prove it by outlining a parallel between its movement and a figure of ornament.
First of all, a double reading of a schizophrenic text is introduced: one that proceeds through a genre called “écrits bruts” gathering a group of outsider authors, and the second that takes cue from the symptomatology of schizophrenic language developed by clinical psychiatry. After a critique of both methods, a new interpretation is offered, linking the main linguistic features of the fragment (frenzy syntax erasing meanings of particular words by an impetuous shifting of agents, juxtaposition of heterogeneous fragments and deviating hypotaxis) with the Arabic-Islamic sculptural technique of stone carving, typical for its negation of material and the wiping off of the contours of represented forms.
The physiognomy of writing thus shows the schizophrenic text not as a reflection of a pathological state of mind but on the contrary, as an utterly creative process – perhaps unreadable, yet tactile and visible.