Three Cheers for Madness :: Nabokov Heller Montaigne Essays

Three Cheers for Madness Three of Psychology’s Least Wanted sit next to my desk and beckon me closer: A graying Humbert licks the corner of my eye and throws me a pitifully seductive glance; an anxiety-ridden Yossarian repeats over and over that the whole world is trying to kill him, and an almost robotic Montaigne sits as a kind of mediating force between the others, his head snapping back and forth from Humbert to Yossarian while his hands open and close books so quickly one might imagine his purpose is only to get a whiff of each cover’s staling odor. I need no special degree to deem them all nutcases. What I know of Humbert and Yossarian comes by way of Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Heller, respectively, as they are the creators, surveyors, and closest contacts of the deceivingly fictional characters. Brilliant in their ability to characterize—to sculpt flat words into the kind of real live, dynamic human beings one might well share a cab with—Nabokov and Heller steal a rousing glimpse into the minds of two intensely confusing personalities and succeed in making us forget that the characters are only the brainchildren of the writers, and not the writers themselves. Oddball Michel de Montaigne seems to look on from afar, speculating in an essay entitled â€Å"On Books† about his impatience for a number of acclaimed writers and their works, while confessing his â€Å"particular curiosity to know the mind and natural opinions of [writers].† Knowing well that Nabokov is not the sex offender he appears to have studied so intimately, and that Heller is not the soldier living amidst the confusion he so thoroughly seems to understand, Montaigne would understand that â€Å"from the display of their writings that they make on the world-stage, we may indeed judge their talents, but not their character or themselves† (167). But this is more than I can handle, as my conceptions of these characters as well as the writers who shaped them seem altogether disturbing. While writing out their prescriptions for shock therapy (the paranoid soldier’s frustratingly ambiguous remarks have earned him a bit more of it than the others), Humbert nudges forward his notebook of scattered words and doodles—a notebook containing his deepest thoughts about Dolores Haze (or ‘Lolita’), the twelve-year old girl with whom he has been completely infatuated his entire middle-aged life. I expect to run my eyes over vile passages—perverse diagrams, even—reflecting his disconcertingly base attraction to the pre-teen.