Images of Idiocy

The Idiot Figure in Modern Fiction and Film

Martin Halliwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351928847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This book traces the concept of idiocy as it has developed in fiction and film in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses particularly on visual images of idiocy and argues that writers as diverse as Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, John Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor and Rohinton Mistry, and filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Werner Herzog and John Huston have all been attracted to idiot figures as a way of thinking through issues of language acquisition, intelligence, creativity, disability, religion and social identity. Martin Halliwell provides a lively and detailed discussion of the most significant literary and cinematic uses of idiocy, arguing that scientific conceptions of the term as a classifiable medical condition are much too narrow. With the explosion of interest in idiocy among American and European filmmakers in the 1990s and the growing interest in its often overlooked history, this book offers a timely reassessment of idiocy and its distinctive place at the intersection of science and culture.

PART I
Idiocy in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter One
Romantic and Victorian Idiots

Where should the cultural history of idiocy begin? How can we explain the historical transition from Macbeth’s grand philosophical meditation on ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ to Forrest Gump’s home-spun belief that life is ‘like a box of chocolates, you never know what you gonna get’?¹ How should we differentiate between idiots that have the appropriate cerebral characteristics and those who act like idiots, or those who have some classifiable traits but are otherwise far from idiotic? And on what discourse should our attention focus to understand idiocy? Of course, none of these questions have definitive answers, particularly given the social and aesthetic mutations that the concept of idiocy has undergone. If anything, though, these obligatory questions – ‘where should we begin?’ – need to be replaced by more pragmatic questions – ‘where do we begin?’ – in order to start the discussion. The difficulty in tracing the history of the concept is how to move between studies of real – that is, biological and neurological – cases of idiocy and what Roland Barthes would call ‘mythologies’ of idiocy as represented on a cultural level. Barthes’ concern is that traditional historians tend to elide reality and representation in their desire to create seamless histories. Sharing Foucault’s scepticism for upper-case ‘History’, Barthes argues in his essay ‘The Discourse of History’ (1967) that ‘in “objective” history, the “real” is never more than an unformulated signified, sheltering behind the apparently all-powerful referent’ that creates a ‘realistic effect’.² If idiocy can be seen as representing one of the seams of modernity, then it is also important to unpick the seams between its different mythologies, rather than using the truth claims of hard science to stitch them together. In line with Barthes’ warning, this chapter will approach both empirical and cultural mythologies of idiocy as equally important contributory factors to its development as a concept.

There is important research to be done on the prehistory of idiocy and its relation to madness and folly in medieval and Renaissance Europe, but the discussion begins here in the eighteenth century, which for Alan Bewell marked ‘the philosophical discovery of the idiot’ when metaphysical and scientific approaches began to complicate a more general understanding of idiocy.³ In fact, it is important to go back briefly to the late seventeenth century to consider John Locke’s influential distinction between idiocy and madness, but the focus of this chapter is on Romantic and Victorian conceptions of idiocy as a way of providing historical, cultural and scientific contexts for the discussion of literary and cinematic idiot figures.

Idiots have a long biblical and secular prehistory but most critics agree that the modern attitude to idiocy in Europe was influenced strongly by Locke’s philosophical treatise An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), particularly his attempt to establish the empirical origin of ideas as they emerge from experience.⁴ Locke claimed that he did not wish to ‘meddle with the physical considerations of the mind’, but preferred to deal with the ways in which individuals normally associate ideas.⁵ Starting from the premise that the mind is a tabula rasa at birth, Locke argued that a combination of sense impressions and self-reflection enables most individuals to arrive at a coherent picture of the world. But he also considered conditions that prevent this coherence from being established. In a passage that distinguishes idiocy from madness, Locke compares ‘the defect of Naturals’ that stems ‘from want of quickness, activity, and motion, in the intellectual Faculties’ and ‘mad Men’ who join together ‘Ideas very wrongly’ and ‘mistake them from Truths’.⁶ He asserts that the fantasies and delusions of the mad can be graded as to the degree and quality of making ‘wrong Propositions’, whereas ‘Idiots make very few or no Propositions, but argue and reason scarce at all.’ This equation of madness with extravagant activity and idiocy with docile passivity implies that madness is a temporary affliction that can be countered with good sense, while idiocy is permanent and incurable. Although Locke identifies degrees of impairment rather than absolute distinctions, this normative level of competence (involving the ability to contemplate, reason and abstract) dominated Enlightenment classifications of reason, folly, health and illness.⁷ For example, following the spirit of Locke’s Essay, the eighteenth-century medic William Battie (Governor of Bethlem Hospital in London in the 1740s) also distinguished permanent from temporary afflictions, choosing to discuss incurable deficiencies in terms of ‘original madness’ and using the phrase ‘consequential madness’ for phenomena resulting from external pressures. Battie refers to idiocy as the base level to which ‘Lunatics’ may sink, but he focuses more fully than Locke on the physical side of idiocy, using physiological language – ‘the repetition of vomits and other convulsive stimuli’ – to describe the complex physical-mental condition.⁸ The medic Thomas Arnold preferred to think in terms of ‘Ideal Insanity’ as having no external stimulus, and ‘Notional Insanity’ as linked to a particular cause, but he also referred back to idiocy as the base condition toward which extreme forms of madness tend.⁹

While eighteenth-century philosophical and medical discourses may seem the obvious place to locate idiocy (and its presumed relation to insanity),¹⁰ its role in Enlightenment culture largely corresponds to the way in which ‘Locke’s pessimism about idiots is tied to his ethical optimism about everyone else.’¹¹ In the eighteenth century, idiocy was just one manifestation on the broad spectrum of irrationality that also included eccentricity, social deviance, self-indulgence, mania, and even dandyism. For example, in his Dictionary Samuel Johnson simply characterizes ‘idiocy’ as a ‘want of understanding’, suggesting that Enlightenment attitudes to idiocy include individuals born with brain deficiencies and dullards who were deemed to be socially useless or whose work lacked value. Although idiocy was thought by some to be an aberration from a rational norm, other critics detect the condition to be more socially pervasive than Locke credited. Jonathan Andrews argues that eighteenth-century satirists:

armed themselves to stigmatise all of those members of society, from poets and literary hacks to clergymen and politicians, whom they conceived to be claiming insight and talents beyond their natural capacities, or failing to rein in their passions by exercising their judgement.¹²

Given Alexander Pope’s dictum in Essay On Man (1734) that ‘Reason’s comparing balance rules the whole’,¹³ when he satirizes hack writers in The Dunciad (1728), idiocy becomes part of the dark chaotic world presided over by the goddess Dullness, encouraging witless and stupid behaviour and banishing good sense (‘Fate in their dotage this fair Ideot gave’; ‘And with her own fools-colours gilds them all’).¹⁴ Similarly, in the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift juxtaposes the noble race of horses, the Houyhnhnms, with the dirty, half-ape and half-human Yahoos whose brutish nature needs taming. With other satirical pieces such as Daniel Defoe’s Mere Nature Delineated (1726), Swift’s ‘Dick’s Variety’ (1745) and Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), The Dunciad and Gulliver’s Travels epitomize what Andrews describes as the Enlightenment ‘campaign against the follies of humankind in order to improve the manners of the nation’.¹⁵ Although there were already a few institutions that housed idiots in the eighteenth century (such as Swift’s St Patrick Hospital in Dublin and the Hospital of St Mary Magdalen in Bath¹⁶), the Enlightenment interest in the origins of human development and the social project to improve idiots were later linked closely to the expansion of asylums in the nineteenth century, like Bethlem Hospital in London, the establishment of county provision in Britain (following the 1845 Lunatics Act), and the implementation of specialized institutions in the USA (such as the New York State Idiot Asylum, established in Albany in 1851 and moving to Syracuse in 1855) and Scotland (such as the Baldovan Institute in Dundee, established in 1852 and later becoming the Strathmartine Hospital). Whereas Europe and America witnessed a number of specific reforms in the nineteenth century that dealt with the social implications of idiocy, eighteenth-century satirical attacks tended to be of a general nature and directed towards those that Johnson describes as being deficient in the stock of ‘natural’ qualities or that ‘nature debars from understanding’.¹⁷

Enlightenment culture is commonly credited with developing Locke’s emphasis on direct experience and clear knowledge, but a sceptical current also ran through eighteenth-century epistemology. This scepticism has a precedent in Michel de Montaigne’s Essays from the late sixteenth century that cast a shadow over the metaphysical understanding of idiocy as a ‘natural’ condition. Montaigne identified a widely held assumption that ‘credulity and the readiness to be persuaded’ are the chief ‘signs of simplicity and ignorance’; the ‘softer and less resistant the mind, the easier it is to impress something on it’.¹⁸ The Renaissance understanding of natural balance that is disturbed when one of the humours imposes an unhealthy influence on the others, filtered through to Montaigne’s understanding that ‘the emptier the mind is, and the less counterpoise it has, the more easily it sinks under the weight of the first argument’.¹⁹ One need not be a clinical idiot for this argument to apply; Montaigne cites ‘children, the common people, women, and the sick’ as often lacking in good sense and susceptible to the influence of others.²⁰ However, he goes on to disavow this assumption, claiming that knowledge is always incomplete and understanding shrouded by mist: ‘it is a dangerous and serious presumption’, Montaigne argues, ‘to condemn what we do not understand’.²¹ The desire for understanding forces the inquirer to make truth claims and distinguish legitimate knowledge from delusion, but Montaigne is convinced that opinions are inherently contradictory, especially when yesterday’s ‘articles of faith’ often become today’s ‘fables’. He maintained later in the Essays that this sceptical attitude towards the distinction between goo...