Review of Godhead
by Scott Zwiren
Black Ice, 1996

Fictional prose that takes the consciousness of the mentally ill as its subject matter has the task of revealing the subjective terror which occurs when a narrator cannot meet the claims of his task--narration. The author must simulate the failure of his narrator to successfully integrate this subjective terror into the narrative. In modern literature, "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is held to be a good early example of this kind of narrative. On publication, the story was relegated to the category of horror fiction and stayed there until the feminist revisionist readings of the 1970's. Then, with the aid of the author's own polemical and autobiographical writings, it became known as a narrative about a thwarted woman oppressed by patriarchy as represented by her husband, a medical professional. This has become, with many variations and developments, the politically correct reading. However, the failure of a narrator to meet the claims of the real--in other words, to narrate-- evokes reactions of horror in readers whether or not additional political appreciation is also evoked, as they simulate the experience of a mind confronted with a real situation which it is incapable of meeting. The process of metaphor making can be defined as naming or narrating the subjective experience so it can assume its place in the narrator's experience of time. In practical life terms, this will tend to take forms which are less poetic than this sounds; in fact, conventional social expressions will make up the vast majority of these instances. Someone who is confronted by an unexplainable reality will try to "figure it out" in terms of the explainable reality. The more unexplainable the initial premise is, the more satisfying the sense of resolution when it is "figured out" (hence the popularity of the mystery genre). Gilman's story proceeds in this fashion; the narrator sets up any number of realities from which the narration could proceed and resolve, leaving her intact as a narrator. She could cooperate with her husband; she could overcome opposition with sheer willpower and recover; she could move out; she could even engage another realm, a "spirit world," and recognize the woman in the wallpaper as a distinct entity from herself. She could narrate her own demise, her own deteriorating symptoms, and still remain sufficient to the demands of the narration. What occurs instead is a subtle break which provides a sense of excitement for most readers and replaces the more conventional sense of resolution.

What happens in the break? In the story, what happens is that the narrator wants certain changes made; she "pleads her case," and is refused. Her argument fails. This is followed by an increase in her obsession with the imaginary reality of the shape of a woman that she has noticed in the wallpaper. The presence of this shape is undoubtedly real. It occurs as a result of various factors including the actual physical pigment in the paper, the shadows made by moonlight, the heightened receptiveness of the narrator which may cause her to personify abstract patterns--related, perhaps, to boredom and loneliness, which leads to her subjective response to the figure as an unknown, horrifying presence in the paper. She tries to relate this revealed presence to what she already knows, and identifies it with a suicidal female prisoner. She does not further identify this woman with herself, although most readers agree that the real suicidal female prisoner is the narrator herself. Trapped inside her own subjective response to her situation, the narrator does not relate her metaphor to her own real situation. If she were to do so, a resolution would occur, and we would have a far less original and edgy narrative.

In writing which proceeds from the point of view of a mentally ill person--and Gilman's narrator is undoubtedly psychotic, which doesn't make her any less likable and perhaps even heroic--we can't be sure, at the end of the narrative, if the narrator has learned anything, made any "progress," but we can usually be sure that we have, if the writer has performed this tricky task skillfully. Scott Zwiren's God Head is a more current example, a novel which chronicles the experiences of a young man with manic depression over a nine-year period. It is written in a journal style, as a first-person narrative, nearly in chronological order, with chapter headings which designate the time--Winter 1982 through Summer 1991. The chapters are "shuffled" slightly so that the last installment chronologically, Summer 1991, is read first. Essentially, what we read at the beginning is the end. The final chapter, entitled "Summer 1990," finishes with what might, in a conventional narrative, play out as some kind of catharsis or resolution--after a tumultuous period, the protagonist makes a fresh start:

My datebook lies alongside my knee. I look at it. There are appointments and then the appointments stop. Where the appointments stop, I count three blank dates and write THE FIRST DAY.

But having read the entire book, we know that the narrator--unnamed to us, like Gilman's--has already had many similar fresh starts and breakthroughs, all of which prove to be false leads to hope in a story which is structured somewhat like a Mobius strip.

In the first chapter, beginning with the sentence, "I am waiting to know what I am because I don't know," we're led into what seems like a familiar adolescent quest for identity. We are drawn into the excitement of an emerging person, a creative and transcendent man, as he fairly flies (he is, he tells us, becoming an angel, and later he says he is Christ) through the streets of New York reading signs that will take him to his destiny. He makes many wild claims in his narrative, but at this point they are interesting and sometimes comical, as as they seem to be to those he encounters. The chapter ends with his being taken to the hospital, something which has happened "before":

In the ambulance they ask me questions about my material identity, a strain to remember, and as we go through the streets siren off I know that this is my day of ascension....They interview me and I don't talk about my coronation at all but stick to a language they understand. I say that I'm manic, and I think I'm God.

Having the presence of mind to know "I think I'm God" instead of "I am God," and especially to say "I'm manic" makes my admission debatable....I always become perilously coherent in a small room before inquiring psychiatrists. Sitting in front of them I become my own worst advocate and they're ready to release me.

I don't know where I should be. (14-15)

Later we will learn that the narrator was not always coherent before his doctors, that this is a learned skill, that he is learning to cope with the discourse of his "handlers." This seems, in the first chapter, to be a hopeful sign that he is also learning to cope with the demands of reality, and it is easy to brush off his anxiety as a lack of confidence, or to believe that his saying he is manic instead of God is a sign of his lucidity. This is confirmed when he meets up with a sympathetic doctor who, to his astonishment, does not reject the possibility that the narrator can read his mind, and, instead of telling him he is "sick," says that "they are going to try and slow me down" (15). Thus the first chapter ends on a rather positive note--the narrator has found someone in the psychiatric profession with whom he can truly communicate We are in the presence of hope for this engaging iconoclast. Despite his disengagement from mainstream society, there is the possibility that he will recover and become what he says he is, what he seems to need to be, a savior, a hero.

If this were the last chapter, it would be hard not to walk away from the novel with an upbeat feeling, despite the account of the events which preceded it. As it stands, those who are seeking a resolution will find it here, and in other places. Hope is a factor, occurring at regular intervals in the relentless, grinding cycles of elation and despair that form the narrative. But as we move through the chapters, several important factors are made apparent. One is that this person's feelings of isolation, when they occur, have nothing to do with a lack of positive social interaction; this guy has a devoted, loving (although frustrated) family and, apparently, a large group of friends that he socializes with easily during his normal moods and incessantly during his manic swings; he's also capable of forming intimate relationships, as he relates in one poignant incident. But love doesn't conquer anything for this narrator. He's the prisoner of ontological distress that all the love and concern in the universe, and even all the chemotherapy, can't seem to touch. Six months later, after what seems like a midpoint resolution, he tries to commit suicide by throwing himself at a train, but only succeeds in maiming himself. The grandiose angel of the first chapter is actually a 25-year-old amputee and two-time college dropout with, as he puts it, "a head like an LSD factory," a compulsive metaphor canon, a "God Head" that can't settle on a working definition of who he is. The questing spirit is defined only by the endless looping of the quest, like an 8-track tape played over and over, the shape of infinity crossing itself with the urge to disintegrate into the point of nothing and coming out again, reborn into the loop.

The second chapter begins nine years earlier with the narrator's first major depression, during which he is forced to leave school. Here, as in each depressive episode that follows--the chapters alternate between manic and depressive episodes--two aspects of depression are addressed, the "why" or meaning of it and the "how" or quality of time during the episode. Manic depression, unlike neurosis, is generally believed to be mainly of biological origin, rather than environmental, and it has been associated with disturbances of sleep cycles and other bodily rhythms; if one could characterize neurosis as a condition attributable to a situation and triggered by subsequent similar situations, manic depression could be more aptly described as a condition which manifests in real time as a disturbance of the subjective experience of time, less caused by situations than affecting the subjective perception of them. In neurosis, the instance is associated with a symptom which represents the person's subjective reaction to not being able to meet those demands. The symptom is clearly related to the situation. When a similar situation reveals itself, the symptom is likely to reappear. In manic depression, time as a whole, as a metasystem of the way in which reality is revealed, rather than a particular instance or situation of reality, becomes the problem. The reductivism or cathartic stripping away to find a meaningful point of origin for the feelings involved in a subjective reaction which occurs in psychoanalysis may be helpful in allowing a neurotic to deal more successfully with reality, but the problem of the manic depressive is his relationship to his place in time as an entire system. In this early chapter, we see the unusual relationship of the narrator to time:

I want things to stop. I don't want to go back to school and I don't want to go back home. I just want to stay on the route we are on stuck in the snow until we have to resort to eating each other like Andes survivors. I am thinking not only of time stopping because distance had stopped but I am hoping time will reverse. (21)

He materializes time by applying a metaphor which compares it to a road. By doing so, he can imagine ways to block it, the same way he wishes to block the flow of his thoughts, which he also perceives as impediments to his free passage through time--something which is blocked during the depressive episodes but unimpeded through mania. Also, by imagining time as a snow-blocked road, he is able to create (through narrative imagining) the idea of time-reversal as a concrete reality through consuming or erasing, an image which is underscored by another image of consummation (cannibalism). This subjective perception of time as thing allows the narrator to overcome his feeling of being blocked and to begin a new narrative entirely shaped by his subjective perception, one which does not exist in reality. To do this, he must "reverse time" in a sense by erasing his uncomfortable subjective perception of it.

The chapter ends with his looking at the readout on the digital clock. Because of his heightened awareness of time, the narrator is very aware of its measure, and clocks frequently appear in the narrative, both as a reminder that reality is revealed through time and a manifestation or materialization of time. In a sense, clocks become godlike because it is through them that time reveals itself, as God reveals Himself through Christ. (God enters time through Christ, whom the narrator often refers to as being himself.) The most memorable encounter that the narrator has with a clock occurs when he buys the "Christ-clock" as a Christmas gift for his girlfriend:

On the wall is a clock made of Christ on the cross with his right arm as an hour hand and his left as a minute hand while a thin red second hand goes around him. He is in relief with his crown of thorns and trickles of painted blood are under it and behind him is a stained glass window design in blue and gold. It has the harvest seasons delineated. It looks plastic and that's perfect (77).

This clock perfectly represents the revealing of the real through time as a sacrifice made even more complex through irony (the god-clock looks plastic, cheap, undervalued). As a manic depressive whose place in time is unstable, the narrator can identify this clock with himself and with his role as narrator through which reality is revealed, since narration itself is a kind of clock, a revelation through time. The irony is that his sacrifice is identified with the label of a disease and thus undervalued by society. He tries to explain this to Corey when he reveals his condition to her:

...I know I have to explain what I've said although I know full well that a manic-depressive is not exactly what I am, that would make everything a disease and not be a transformation which I know it has to be, proven it to be. I tell her that I have highs and lows, that I'm moody, that I've been in a hospital for it, knowing this is an old script, a script that belongs to someone else now (80).

His girlfriend then makes her own revelation by showing him that she has had a breast removed. He responds by dropping the "old script" and replacing it with truer, more inclusive narrative:

I want to run. Then she tells me about it, the surgery, every thing, and my response is to let everything go--the minutiae, it's not enough just to say the label but it's only enough to describe the whole thing, the Arts Building, the bus ride to college, the phone call from my mother, the devil in the refrigerator, the devil in the hospital, going to New Jersey, the mail room, the Born Again Christians, the trains, the miles and miles of train rides. It's like making love with grief ((81).

In a different episode, he compares himself to a part of a clock, an hour hand, and during his later suicide attempt, he'll lose his own right arm, which represents the part of the clock he identified with. The suicide attempt will underscore the prophetic quality of his earlier "revelation":

I look at the Christ on my clock. There is no Christ without a tragedy. So why does everything seem like a party to me? I look at my watch. That's one revelation. I'll time them as I come, like a woman in labor, to pass the time waiting (78).

After losing the "hour hand," his right hand which is also his "write" hand, the narrator is identified more firmly with a particular kind of clock--the Christ clock as broken clock, post-sacrificial, unable to measure time now, but simply a symbol of the trauma he has undergone. After the suicide attempt, time is divided into two distinct eras, before and after the injury. The narrator no longer reveals his pain solely through narration, but shows it in his injury at all times, like a clock which stops at a particular point and always tells the same time. The action which was meant to erase all traces of existence for the narrator becomes synonymous with the moment of Judgment Day, after which existence is revealed in the fulfillment of prophecy, all at once, in the "now." The narrator becomes a symbol of time itself, a materialization of it, echoing his earlier words, "What's a clock say? Now. Now. Again and again" (78). The fulfillment of this "eternal" nowness--eternal Being, if you will--can be held in stark contrast to the destiny that the narrator and those close to him expected him to fulfill when he was younger. His role in society is "written off," and he will need to learn to write again, in a new way, with his other, "sinister" hand:

I have to do something if I'm not going to think all the time. Then it becomes apparent that even if I don't plan on coming out of all this alive I have to fill my time while I wait. The notebook is there. I begin with the alphabet, making letters with my left hand that look like they've been written by a frightened half-literate, scribbles, shaky lines. The alphabet becomes boring and so I start a small journal whose entries are sentences that take long minutes to write out. "I hate it here...."

His first sentence written in the new way is a judgment and there is a clear delineation between the subject (I) and object (here). As broken clock, the narrator can dwell upon the "her and now" of his situation which he not only hates but finds "boring" and "banal": "Things don't look bright. In fact they make me want to die more" (102).

Yet the task of narrating continues, through the boredom and banality. The narrator no longer has to look for metaphors to express his condition, as he is his own symbol. However, his life after the suicide attempt is subject to the medium of time as it was before, with adjustments for his new debilitations. As narration, eternal now can only show up in time as repetition. The same motifs return in slightly different forms. Now that he is more or less rejected by (or has rejected) society with its endless concentration on futurity, there is little to distract the narrator from his drama of becoming, of emerging in the now as ontological horror:

There is no safe place to be except within myself and I start by identifying myself--I am Christ but it comes up I am not Christ. I run inside myself looking for Christ in me and come up empty. I'm scared. What am I? I'm no thing now. Afraid, I loiter in the vacancy. No name. No past. No mother. No father. No brother. No life. This is suicide catching up to me. This is spontaneous suicide. This is living suicide. I'm afraid. Then I look into the vacancy and answer comes back to me: if I am to be Christ, I must suffer. When everything is gone, hold on to the pain. Only the pain is left. But the vacancy is not finished, it is going to tell me truths. I do not want to know. This is rigged. This is monitored. This is conducted. This has been orchestrated. Ever since you were born. This is an experiment. This is a Christ-making experiment. THE PAST IS A LIE. THEY'VE SURGICALLY REMOVED YOUR LEG. THEY'VE REMOVED YOUR ARM. THEY'VE ALTERED YOUR SIGHT. I scream without stopping. (110-111).

The consciousness of pain, this "living suicide" seems to sync with Biblical texts which identify Christ as life-in-death and death-in-life, but it does not seem to narrator, now, that he has in any way chosen his sacrifice so much as have had it thrust upon him. Yet, according to his own account, only he can be held responsible for it. This haunts him when the nurses in the hospital refuse sympathy for his suffering, saying that "I did this to myself" (90 ). He refuses the possibility that he is not only the narrator of his story but the author of it, looking past his identification with pain to the void and moving into a new, paranoid narrative which he attributes to another, the conductor of an "experiment." He refuses the idea that "eternal life," which most Westerners still believe is a reward for leading a good life, is not linear, is not strictly analyzable in terms of causes and effects, does not emerge only in order from past to present to future from the vantage point of any subject. It is not like the clock, going forward forever revealing reality in one direction. As part of reality, the narrator is also a part of eternal being, but as long as he is narrating he will be realizing it in terms of roles and situations. If he is to proceed in time, he will not be able to assume the burden of his own distress entirely alone. This is the option that the assigning of blame to others, with reason or randomly, provides him. The idea of determinism allows him to extend the possibilities of narrative past the never-ending scream of ontological distress. The panic, rage, and horror that he is able to direct away from himself is, in fact, narrative's gift to the narrator, for it can be assigned to nothing that is real--no actual being or situation. It is the gift of the void itself, the "terrifying forms of pure subjectivity as the incapacity to meet the claims of moria [the real]" (Grassi and Lorch 48) which releases the subject back into the real, the insanity from which sanity can spring again.

God Head is a sad story of demolished dreams and expectations; it certainly is a tragic tale in many ways, despite some very funny moments. Its structure is circular rather than linear, so that the beginning is the ending and vice versa. We can choose to look at the narrative as something that is completely determined by the narrator's illness, as he sometimes does, or we can choose to see him as someone transforming into a new being, as he also does. However, what is most memorable are not the peaks and valleys of this man's journey, but the brilliance with which the writer narrates the origins of narrative. God Head is a narrative fed by myth and experience.

Works Cited

Grassi, Ernesto and Maristella Lorch. Folly and Insanity in Renaissance Literature. Binghamtom, New York: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1986.