The Harmony Of The Spheres

I have never been exposed to personal madness or mental disorders such as schizophrenia in real life.  I have seen it in movies such as A Beautiful Mind, Sybil, Fight Club, and so but I have never actually been around it so I can’t even pretend to know too much about it.  Through some basic info from a psychology class and some of the movies I have seen (though I know Hollywood isn’t completely scientifically accurate) I have taken a slight interest in mental disorders such as schizophrenia just because I think it’s pretty fascinating what the human brain can actually do.

The short story, The Harmony Of The Spheres by Salman Rushdie, is about a writer, Elliot Crane, who is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.  Just like in many cases of this illness, Elliot had inner demons that he couldn’t get away from and slowly started to become mad.  The point of my blog is not to report on the story but just to look at how Rushdie portrays madness in this story.

I don’t know if it just me but whenever I hear stories of schizophrenia, it seems like more times than not it is a writer that is dealing with it.  I don’t know if it comes from the pressure of trying to put out a book and all the mental pressure that comes with that process, but it seems like I hear about writers with this illness a lot.  In his book, Rushdie writes, “he seemed better as long as he did not try to write, he seemed worse because not writing plunged him into such deep depressions. (128)”  This quote kind of backs up my opinion on why writers might suffer from this illness more, because they want to write but sometimes having writersblock can drive them crazy by not letting them make progress on their work. 

To be honest I found this book very fun and interesting to read but at the same time it’s really hard to write about.  So what I wrote above might sound like some incoherent babble but I really did find it difficult to write about how Rushdie portrays madness.  He almost just tells a story about a small amount of time between Elliot Crane, his wife Lucy, Elliot’s friend Mr. Khan, and Mala Khan.  And intertwined in this short story is the fact that Elliot Crane is going mad (which is actually told to us and then shown through thinking his friends are martians) but I can’t find a way to tell about how the madness is actually portrayed.  To me, this story seemed more for entertainment where the last two stories I read from him, I could actually find an underlying theme.