Truth and Artifice: Representations of madness and the schizoid personality

Abstract

Representations of madness and the schizoid personality pose problems for the author intent on recreating a true account of lived experience. If the writer has not suffered from a mental illness personally, they are bound to be questioned on matters of authenticity. Conversely, if the author has suffered a mental illness their reliability as an eye witness then comes into focus.
How, if at all, can you separate the Truth from the Artifice? Are they codependent or does one get in the way of the other?
In 1966 Peter Kocan shot to infamy after a failed attempt on the life of then opposition leader, Arthur Calwell. During his subsequent incarceration in the maximum security criminal ward of Morrisett Mental Hospital, and in his outside life post-hospitalisation, Kocan went on to document institutional life in his poetry and his prose.
A study of Kocan’s novellas The Treatment and The Cure, shows us how he managed, through the use of a complex 2nd person (and 1st person plural) narrative structure, to use Truth and Artifice to his advantage in his portrayal of Len Tarbutt, a schizoid character based heavily on the author.