Week of June 30, 2005, Issue #506
FRONT
Insane in the memoir-brane
By PAUL MATWYCHUK
Jan Lars Jensen’s Nervous System or, Losing
My Mind in Literature is a memoir written by a sane man who recalls, with startling
clarity, what it felt like to be a crazy person. Jensen wasn’t always
nuts; back in 1998, he was a happily married man with a steady (if low-paying)
job at a small library in Fraser Valley. What’s more, his dreams of becoming
a published author had finally been realized—his novel Shiva 3000 had
just been purchased by a prestigious American publisher and was set to arrive
in bookstores the following summer.
That’s when everything started to unravel for him, though. Shiva 3000,
you see, was a futuristic fantasy inspired by Hindu mythology, with Hindu gods
and goddesses serving as some of Jensen’s characters. And as the date
of publication approached, Jensen became more and more terrified about the possibility
that his novel would spark a huge controversy in the Hindu world. After a certain
point, Jensen’s fears became completely irrational—he didn’t
just imagine himself the victim of some kind of Salman Rushdie-style death decree;
he literally became convinced that his book would touch off an international
incident that would eventually lead to nuclear warfare and the end of human
life on this planet as we know it. It takes a while for Jensen’s friends
and colleagues to figure out that he’s completely flipped—his publisher
attributes Jensen’s peculiar behaviour to the jitters of a first-time
author, and it’s only after an unsuccessful suicide attempt that his perplexed
wife finally realizes that her husband needs to go to a mental hospital.
That’s where Nervous System begins, and the first section of the book
is the most compelling part of Jensen’s story. What’s so fascinating
about Jensen’s account of his madness is the utterly calm, matter-of-fact
way in which he explains everything he did. In his mind, everything he did had
a completely rational explanation: in one memorable sequence, for instance,
he explains that the reason he spent the night sleeping on the floor in a pool
of moonlight by the window was because he knew that there were gunmen looking
for him outside the building, and so to make sure they didn’t shoot any
innocent people, he decided to give them a clear shot at him. To the outside
world, he looked crazy; inside his mind, he was bravely risking his life to
save the other patients.
There’s certainly a messianic streak to Jensen’s delusions, but
isn’t an inability to put your own fears and neuroses in the proper perspective
one of the definitions of insanity? Jensen brings a droll sense of humour to
this aspect of his story—the grim joke that he truly believed the world
was about to end because of his book, which hardly anybody even bothered to
buy. (Forget about the Hindus; even the reviewers were largely indifferent to
it.) There’s a frightening yet undeniably comical scene where Jensen sends
his wife an e-mail containing instructions for containing the damage he believes
his novel will cause—only to worry that the people of the future would
see him as the Devil and do precisely the opposite of what he wants them to.
“I didn’t dare delete the e-mail,” he writes. “I decided
the most honest option was to state my lack of certainty in a second e-mail....
But maybe this would cause a rift between two rival camps that arose in the
new civilization, each side disputing the validity of the other’s sacred
e-mail, and a horrible conflict would arise out of that, too! I didn’t
know!”
Now, I don’t want to cause a similarly apocalyptic conflict between rival
book reviewers, but I feel I have to address the bizarre pan of Nervous System
in last week’s issue of SEE Magazine by Dana McNairn, whose hostile attitude
toward Jensen’s description of his recovery from mental illness can only
be described as Scientological in its fury. (McNairn seems outraged by the very
notion that Jensen credits the drug Xanax with correcting the chemical imbalance
that sent him off his rocker—as if a real man should have been able simply
to will himself sane again.)
McNairn regards the book as nothing but an ego trip, a ploy from a desperate
writer to get back in print after the commercial failure of his debut novel.
But I don’t see anything calculated or self-aggrandizing about this book
at all—when a writer undergoes a fascinating, dramatic, emotional experience
like the one Jensen did, isn’t it natural for him to want to write about
it? And isn’t it lucky that Jensen was able to capture the whole ludicrous,
scary story as lucidly and honestly has he has here? And who cares if Shiva
3000 didn’t sell well? Most midlist literary novels don’t! Is that
any reason to question Jensen’s motives for writing his second book?
Call me crazy, but I think Nervous System is a terrific, compelling memoir that
brought me as close to mental illness as I ever hope to get. V
Nervous System or, Losing My Mind in Literature
By Jan Lars Jensen • Raincoast Books • 273 pp. • $34.95