Mental Decadence in "Facing the Forests" and "A Madman's Diary"

Introduction: Sanity's Dissolution in Two Literary Works

A number of striking similarities exist in the short stories composed by A.B. Yehoshua, "Facing the Forests," and Lu Xun, "A Madman's Diary." The most significant of these pertains to the thematic issues that both authors choose to address within these works: the degeneration of or loss of sanity incurred by the central protagonists. Stylistically, the authors take two different paths to illustrate this common theme. Xun employs the first-person narrative of a diary written by a young man, whereas Yehoshua adopts a more conventional third-person narrative that is every bit as impersonal as the former is intimate.

In this way, both works painstakingly portray the inexorable process of a loss of center—the gradual dissolution of mental coherence that is at once inescapable and terrifying. The two narratives share a fundamental concern with documenting how a person, initially stable or at least functional, deteriorates into full-fledged madness. Yet the authors differ profoundly in how they explain this deterioration and in the narrative techniques they employ to convey it to the reader.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the dissolution of sanity demonstrated within both works is that each author indicates a natural, progressive movement toward what may be termed insanity. Stylistically, both short stories are written without names for their central characters, which emphasizes the fact that such mental instability can happen to virtually anyone. This choice of anonymity transforms individual cases into universal warnings about human vulnerability.

The Progression of Unnamed Madness

Xun begins her work from a framing perspective in which a reader encounters the diary of a man who was once mentally ill but is now recovered. However, the author illustrates the mental progression of a nameless protagonist's bout with insanity by initially characterizing his symptoms as unfounded fear and paranoia directed toward others. The opening passage readily demonstrates this:

"Tonight the moon is very bright. I have not seen it for over thirty years, so today when I saw it I felt unusually high spirits. I begin to realize that during the past thirty-odd years I have been in the dark; but now I must be extremely careful. Otherwise why should that dog at the Chao house have looked at me twice? I have reason for my fear."

This quotation shows that the narrator is irrationally fearful—counting the times a neighbor's dog "looked" at him and openly admitting to possessing "fear." While the reference to a prolonged time without seeing the moon is improbable, it is not impossible and therefore does not by itself suggest innate lunacy. Instead, the passage exemplifies the kind of paranoia that can develop into various forms of insanity, including the persecution complex that the protagonist is diagnosed as having when he wrote these diary entries. The loss of center and dissolution of sanity in this young man is slowly unveiled to the reader throughout the narrative, which emphasizes the potency of such a condition.

The full loss of intellectual coherence that overtakes the nameless protagonist in Xun's tale dominates the bulk of the text. What is most significant about this story is that there is no explanation for the descent into madness that characterizes this person, and even less explanation for how he is eventually cured and able to take an official post. Instead, the reader is left with a growing sense of delusion that gains control of its victim and eventually deteriorates into a madness in which he becomes convinced that his surrounding community consists of cannibals who desire to eat him in particular.

The following quotation, in which he is visited by a doctor, demonstrates this delusional conviction:

Paranoia and Delusion in Lu Xun's Narrative

"I knew quite well that this old man was the executioner in disguise! He simply used the pretext of feeling my pulse to see how fat I was; for doing so he would receive a share of my flesh. Still, I was not afraid. Although I do not eat men, my courage is greater than theirs."

The protagonist's descent into madness must be pronounced if he even suspects a physician of being part of a conspiracy to cannibalize him. Moreover, the delusion that the doctor takes the patient's pulse merely to assess his suitability for human consumption certainly attests to the character's loss of his ability to perceive reality as it truly appears. In this respect, there is little doubt that such a person has lost his grip upon sanity, the details of which are chronicled with great care by the author. What is truly interesting about how Xun chooses to illustrate this process is that she does so in a way that allows the reader to know what is actually occurring, whereas the protagonist has entirely skewed interpretations of the same events. In such a way, the author convincingly denotes the character's loss of sanity.

In contrast to Xun, Yehoshua provides a fairly thorough explanation for the loss of mental stability that eventually grips his central character. A college student takes a post as a firewatcher in Israel shortly after the nation's war of independence in 1948, initially sound in mind if not fully certain in purpose. He has sought such a position for the solitude it affords, hoping to use this isolation to focus on his schoolwork and studying. However, the intensity of that solitude eventually leads him to forsake both his academic pursuits and his duties as a firewatcher. The following quotation sufficiently demonstrates this trajectory:

"The heavy responsibility that has fallen upon his shoulders bewilders him. Hardest of all is the silence. Even with himself he hardly manages to say a word. Will he be able to open a book here?"

Isolation as a Path to Insanity in Yehoshua's Work

What is most significant about this quotation is not only that the solitude and its accompanying "silence" eventually lead the student to become a relatively savage madman by the story's end, but that at the story's onset, the student is anything but someone out of his wits. His preoccupation with his studies and his ability to engage with "a book" indicate that he is someone of marked intelligence, not merely sane. In this respect, Yehoshua makes clear that the loss of center for this student is solely attributed to the extenuating circumstances and "heavy responsibilities" incurred by living in isolation, and is a gradual process that may possess anyone in similar circumstances.

Generally speaking, the student's progression into an insane state is accompanied by a growing sense of awareness—ironic awareness—on his part. The solitude of the forest that the student inhabits with just a couple of companions, namely a mute Arab man and his very young daughter, inevitably contributes to his loss of mental center, especially once he discovers that the woodland area contains the ruins of an Arab village destroyed when Israel claimed the territory. Still, the student's mental acuity and regard for his job as a firewatcher were slipping even before he fully recognized this fact. Whereas once this character was a college student with the capacity for understanding lofty and advanced ideas and ideologies, his time in isolation has drained him of this capacity. The following quotation demonstrates this decline, in which the narrator considers whether he has experienced any sort of academic ideas that he originally believed such isolation would produce:

"Novel ideas? Maybe, though not what they imagine…not exactly scientific… Rather, human…Trees have taken the place of words for me, forests the place of books."

This quotation reveals that the narrator's mind has definitely declined from that of an intellectual student to a mere fire watcher who has replaced trees for "words." Words, of course, reflect intellectual capacity. By substituting scenery such as trees for the clarity and precision of words, the narrator certainly indicates a loss of his mental center. The fact that he chooses to stand aside and do nothing as the Arab burns down the forest—thereby resurrecting the spirit of the Arab village—indicates that he no longer cares about his duty. Finally, his consummation as a madman is complete at the story's close, when he "paces the streets, bearded, dirty, sunburned—a savage."