At first, Shulamith Firestone was told that her brother Danny had died in a car crash. It took her “over twenty-four hours to dig out of [her] father the bitter truth that the body had a bullet hole in the chest.” Firestone was alienated from much of her family. She and Danny had not spoken in years. Even when both attended the same college, even when she passed him on their campus, “he did not say hello.” After graduation, Firestone heard “distant reports of him” from her sisters: Danny was in therapy, Danny was in graduate school, Danny, who had once been so upset with Shulamith for breaking some “trifle” of Jewish law, was “dating ‘shiksas’” and a Zen Buddhist now; in a photo Firestone saw during those years, Danny “looked like he was medicated, with swollen fingers.”
Firestone spends the final pages of her 1998 memoir Airless Spaces tracking Danny’s collapse: from a Zen center in Ithaca, to whom he had given nearly every cent he had, to Taos, New Mexico, where it seemed “he had purposefully chosen a secluded spot on an Indian Reservation that he knew of and meditated himself into the suicide, in which he shot himself at close range with his own gun.” Or perhaps, Firestone came to suspect, he was murdered. She never found out. “In the end, theories about his death, whether murder or suicide, afterlife or no,” she wrote, only “contributed to my own growing madness—which led to my hospitalization, medication, and a shattering nervous breakdown.” These are the final words of Airless Spaces, but the book is ouroboric: only physics prevents you turning the page and finding the first again, from taking another loop through the sections “Hospital,” “Post-Hospital,” “Losers,” “Obits” and “Suicides I Have Known,” the last of whom is Danny, until the madness, institutionalization, release and the hard late life of Shulamith Firestone once again reaches the final page, and its beginning.
Airless Spaces was Firestone’s second book, published more than a quarter of a century after her first. It hadn’t been expected. In 1997, when a friend of Shulamith’s approached Semiotext(e) with the manuscript, editor Chris Kraus remembers that they “said yes right away before even reading it.” Who wouldn’t? Firestone had been a sensation. As an undergraduate studying painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she was already sufficiently compelling to play the lead in a documentary film called Shulie. In 1967, when she was only 22 years old, she had embarked on a brief but remarkable career as one of the most prolific and well-known feminist organizers and intellectuals in the United States, culminating in the 1970 publication of The Dialectic of Sex, one of the strangest and most ambitious works of feminist theory ever composed. She’d then withdrawn from political life, spent a decade working as a muralist and prison arts instructor in New York and, by the early 1980s, largely vanished. While the details were not publicized, it was well-known among political and literary types that Shulamith Firestone—the painter, the activist, the theorist, the genius—had been reduced to something terrible. By 1987, according to a 2013 New Yorker profile by Susan Faludi, “the situation had become ‘dire.’ Neighbors were complaining that Firestone was screaming in the night and that she had left the taps running until the floorboards gave way.” Firestone’s sister Laya came to New York and found Shulamith “emaciated and panhandling, carrying a bag holding a hammer and an unopened can of food.”
Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Firestone spent the next decade in and out of the psych ward at Beth Israel, sometimes stable, sometimes paranoid and screaming, sometimes lucid, sometimes terrified of poisoned food and government agents hiding behind the faces of friends, sometimes simply catatonic. When she suddenly re-emerged in 1997, not only evidently working again but having already completed an entire manuscript, the allure was obvious: yes, of course Semiotext(e) would agree to publish it before reading a word. Even the ramblings of a madwoman would make a splash with Firestone’s name on the cover. It was all the more incredible that Airless Spaces turned out to be a masterpiece.
Her second book would also be her last. Although Firestone lived another fourteen years, she never published again, much less returned to public politics. She’d only been able to write Airless Spaces with the support of a psychiatrist and network of friends who had assumed responsibility for her care. But eventually the psychiatrist moved away; the friends got sick or moved on. In August of 2012, the superintendent of Firestone’s apartment building found her body on the floor. She had been dead for a month. No autopsy was performed, but it is widely believed that she’d starved.
●
This past February, Semiotext(e) reissued Airless Spaces with a new introduction by Chris Kraus and the 2013 story by Faludi inserted as an afterword. Fascination with Firestone endures: the book has already elicited long, laudatory essays in Harper’s, the New Yorker and the Washington Post. But these essays, and several others published over the past months, were only reviews in the vague sense that they were occasioned by the (re)publication of the book. Mainly, they were iterations of a habit—common to the reception of memoirs of insanity, particularly when the insane person was famous prior to their break—to understand madness not on its own terms, but in reference to the person who came before the patient, to make what happened a consequence or continuity of what preceded it rather than a senseless interruption. These essays did not ignore Shulamith Firestone’s madness. But while they varied in the particulars of their ends and their interpretations, each of them sought—perhaps it is better to say they seemed to need, for the uniformity of this move suggests to me a kind of psychic need in how we think of the vagaries of madness—to find some way, any way, to maintain the thread between the feminist, the activist, the artist, the theorist, the brilliant author of The Dialectic of Sex and the schizophrenic who wrote her sister from the hospital to say, “Do not rest assured. Things are not O.K.,” who never really recovered, and who starved to death in paranoid refusal and stayed there until neighbors complained about the smell; in short, the Shulamith Firestone who actually wrote Airless Spaces.
Sometimes this need is explicit; other times, it appears to be reflexive, an inability to shake the belief that the old Firestone was still in there. Kraus devotes the majority of her introduction to the new edition—which also appeared online as an essay for n+1—to recounting the life and achievements of that earlier Firestone. Kraus writes that Airless Spaces isn’t “a story of [Firestone’s] mental illness” but rather a kind of exposé: “it was as if she’d embedded herself to bear witness to the secret, banal workings of the institution.” While Kraus concedes that Firestone stages no explicit arguments about psychiatry—it is only as if Firestone had embedded herself, after all—she nonetheless takes as a given that Airless Spaces should be read as a case against mental hospitals, the true cause of each patient’s “downfall.” “The facts themselves are the commentary,” Kraus insists. They are sufficient to know that “Firestone’s goal as a writer” was to show us “exactly how” patients are “set on a slow but inevitable downward trajectory” and destroyed by these impersonal systems and their “casual brutality,” which sounds suspiciously like the kind of polemical goal the sane Firestone pursued in her writing against patriarchy, a topic about which she never trusted the facts themselves to be the commentary but was always eager to tell the reader precisely what she meant to say.
This polemical reading—the notion that the Firestone of Airless Spaces was still at bottom a theorist, critic and journalist—has been taken up in many of the reissue’s high-profile reviews. In the Washington Post Becca Rothfeld identifies a “structural affinity between Airless Spaces and The Dialectic of Sex,” drawing a tidy parallel between the two books: if under patriarchy, it is the systems of control that create the “woman,” under psychiatry, it is the systems of control that create the “mental patient.” In 4Columns, Julie Phillips sees in Airless Spaces only how “Firestone’s capacity for analysis” is “diverted … from the problems of society to those of individual survival.” Here even Firestone’s death is recruited in service of her politics: it was tragic proof that “feminism still hasn’t found structural answers to the problem of lonely liberation.”
In Harper’s, meanwhile, Audrey Wollen presents a more sophisticated reading of Airless Spaces, finding her way to unity between the two Firestones by reading her earlier work as a failed “prophecy.” The Dialectic of Sex, she writes, was a “wildly flawed, and wildly far-flung” work that “verges on the silvered edge of science fiction.” But the feminist future Firestone predicted came to pass in precisely the wrong way. The second wave fell apart. The utopian technologist revolution Firestone envisioned instead produced the technology for patriarchal revanchism: where Firestone saw the technological future liberating women from the vagaries of childbearing and heterosexual subjugation, it instead delivered the secret children of Elon Musk. Firestone’s prophesy was “off by a mile, a mile as narrow as a hair’s breadth,” Wollen writes. Are “seers,” Wollen wonders, “never burdened, heartbroken by the unexpected shape of their own accuracy? Do they ever look at the world they predicted and say, That’s not what I meant?” Wollen imagines it was this very disconnect that drove her insane. “The difference “between The Dialectic of Sex and Airless Spaces,” she writes, “is not the difference … between a radical feminist and a madwoman; it’s the gulf between soothsaying and surviving the present in the very society you once dreamed of overthrowing.” Wollen does not insist that Airless Spaces is an uninterrupted continuation of Firestone’s project of social criticism, yet she still tries to impose a narrative line where none exists.
In the New Yorker, Moira Donegan comes the closest to giving up the game and seeing Airless Spaces for what it is. “It’s tempting to read Airless Spaces as an allegory for the trajectory of the second wave, with Firestone’s diminution mirroring that of the movement she was instrumental in creating,” she writes. “The actual text, though, is striking for how little it has to say about feminist politics.” While Donegan is so tempted at times—the malignant, impersonality of madness, she writes in one paragraph, “is a bit like the radical-feminist conception of gender itself”—she is willing to admit that this effort to connect the two halves of Firestone’s life is largely for our benefit, not Firestone’s. And, in an inversion of the other critical analyses, Donegan prefers to read the earlier Firestone in terms of the latter, rather than the other way around: “For Firestone, to live successfully as a woman under patriarchy—to submit to the unfairness of gender relations, to smilingly endure your subordinate status and the limits it places on your freedom and dignity—was itself a kind of well-adjusted madness.” Still, in the end, Donegan offers only two possibilities: Firestone’s downfall can either be read as “an anti-feminist cautionary tale, an object lesson in how feminist politics can estrange a woman from society,” or, no less troubling, “it raises the question of whether there is any difference between madness and being the only sane person in a sick world.” It’s clear which reading Donegan prefers, but I suppose I want to ask: What if it’s neither? What if Airless Spaces, and the life of its author, cannot be read as a story at all?
●
At the turn of the century, the critic Catherine Prendergast found schizophrenic writers trapped between two kinds of readers: the dismissive and the fawning. “Historically, the severely mentally ill have been granted either no insight or insight of an enhanced and often creative or spiritual nature,” she wrote. They are either “mad poets” or “mental patients” producing “music” or “word salad.” “I sense from reading Foucault that the position of the mad poet is to be regarded as preferable to the position of the mental patient,” Prendergast went on, but barely.
When Prendergast wrote her essay, back in 2003, it was already fairly well assimilated into our sense of decorum that it is wrong to “stigmatize” the mentally ill, to gawk, to marginalize, to treat anything they say or do as disreputable, even if what they say and write really sometimes is “word salad.” We have since developed an aversion to “romanticizing” them too. Ordinarily, romanticizing the mad is taken to be quite heavy-handed: making them out to be sages, geniuses, special insightful creatives by default, producing fiction about the mad in which the most fictional element is that the schizophrenic’s delusions are uniquely interesting rather than a pastiche of well-worn conspiratorial tropes. But there are more subtle methods of making “music” of the mad. One way is to insist that whatever they say or write after the onset of insanity somehow still sings the way they used to, still plays the old hits, even if they’re a little different now, even if the song is a requiem.
I have never spent years in an institution, like, Firestone did, but I have been inside a dozen times, for days, or weeks; voluntarily and by 72-hour hold. I have taken mood stabilizers and antipsychotic medication for over ten years now. Like many people who do recover a large part of who they were before, I have read many books about what-it’s-like to lose your mind; mainly, they are interested in “inspiring” other patients to commit to recovery by plagiarizing the narrative arc of the addiction memoir, or in advancing, as so many of these critics wish Firestone would, some theoretical critique of psychiatry as metaphor for broader systems of social control. I have read very few like Airless Spaces. I have loved it for years in large part because it does not proffer any story, does not comfort, and does not pretend to have anything at all to do with the Shulamith Firestone who came before her break.
“It would be misleading to imply that Airless Spaces is a book about Firestone’s experiences with schizophrenia,” Wollen writes. But that is precisely what Airless Spaces is about. Schizophrenia is only in small part the wild psychosis, the fantasies and voices and confusion. Most of it is small indignities and absence. You lose executive function. You lose words. You forget to shower, feel no desire to shower, even when you remember. The particular genius of Airless Spaces is just how small it is, how stark, how suffocating. It contains over fifty chapters in scarcely more than 150 small pages, most of them vignettes about other patients, all of them about precisely and nothing more than some small suffering or indignity in the course of mad life. There is no sense of time or change in Airless Spaces, no mark for when a character is real, fictional or an amalgam; no indication when Firestone herself, who is “I” in many chapters, becomes “she”, as she does in some. “She could not read. She could not write,” Firestone writes of herself in one chapter. “She couldn’t even get down a fashion rag; the words bounced off her forehead like it was steel.” She couldn’t watch anything, see anything, shop for anything; her “inability to initiate a simple motion read as extreme laziness.” Airless Spaces is a book of simple motions, its action a series of simple motions, aborted or repeated or completed by patients who cannot quite recall what they were trying to achieve.
In “Hospital,” somehow the book’s most hopeful section, we meet a sequence of patients mid-gesture: Roberta, who must have a blood test—her thirteenth in a row—and who only “hoped for a ‘nice’ orderly”; a “wild, handsome” Turkish filmmaker who Firestone advises to kill time by pacing (but who chooses to pace with a prettier, younger patient); Bettina, who commandeers the thermostat in her room and “began to concentrate on lying absolutely still as a corpse”; and Lucy, who is nearly knocked out by her medication but comes to appreciate fainting (it provided an “overwhelming relief … if only she could faint all the way, blackout, and never wake up again”).
By “Post-Hospital,” “Losers,” “Obits” and “Suicides I Have Known,” matters are even starker, even smaller. Once discharged, Firestone descends into a life even more confining than the one on the ward. And we watch others descend, predictably and inevitably, into poverty, insanity and death without even the dignity of melodrama. In the hospital, at least, there is some end: getting out, or at least making trouble. “She was involved in major resistance, refusal of medication, paperwork, hearings, from the start, and it usually took two months to break her,” Firestone writes of one of her fellow patients in “Hating the Hospital,” But once outside of it, there’s only decay, or return. “Hating the Hospital” is followed by “Loving the Hospital,” when Firestone tells of another patient who “began to long for the hospital to bottom out in. So much so that she began to find excuses to hang around in the general vicinity of Beth Abraham.” There is no plot because there is no future and no way back to who these patients were before. They can only go around and round: descent, ascent, inertia, treading water, drowning. Finally, we reach Danny, who drowned before this all began.
What is so terrifying about schizophrenia is how it annihilates even the thin veneer of Aristotelian unity we have painted over the unfolding hazards of reality. We figure the schizophrenic as a kind of artist, drawing connections no one else can see, but those connections are often terrifying and rarely interesting. What schizophrenia mainly does is sever connection where it is vital: connection to others, connection to self, connection to the plot of life, or at least the more palatable delusion that there is one. The target of the disease is subjectivity itself. Whoever they were before is lost, severed, at least for a while. Some do recover. Some seem to, and then don’t. Some never do. Even the fortunate—the medicated, the saved, like Firestone, for a while—are left with their hands shaking and their mouths twitching, struggling to eat and struggling to read. This is difficult to face.
It is not surprising that so many readers want to imagine there is something more here. In her review of Airless Spaces, Wollen writes skeptically of the way that “psychotherapy makes storytelling a kind of remedy.” But this is precisely what so many critics, and so many readers, are up to. Like psychotherapists, we are all perpetually engaged in a process of smoothing the edges of reality, sewing together a plot where there may not be one, integrating the disorderly into a story that makes sense, that satisfies, that explains. Nearly every patient, every friend, every family member struggling to make sense of a sudden psychiatric break longs for a thread to connect the person who came before and the person who comes after. We want to believe that the sane and brilliant Firestone, the one with an almost impossibly wide horizon of concern for politics, revolution, justice, art and the bounds of human possibility, endures. It is too much to face an Airless Spaces that is just about the Firestone who appeared in the actual pages of the book, the one so far from who she was, the one mainly concerned with “the constant fight to tear open plastic utensils and napkins and small packets of salt and sugar with her bare and palsied hands.”
Shulamith Firestone was a genius, once. She was a painter, an activist, the author of The Dialectic of Sex. She was all of these things and then she went crazy, not because of her brother or her father or the failures of the second wave or fate or because the hospital made her that way, but because she had the same rotten luck her brother had, that some several million of us in this country have, and while she got better for long enough to write this brilliant, little book, she struggled the whole time and eventually she could not stay better and her friends moved on and she starved to death, and it was not about anything, it didn’t mean anything at all.
Photo credit: Lindsay (Flickr / CC BY)
At first, Shulamith Firestone was told that her brother Danny had died in a car crash. It took her “over twenty-four hours to dig out of [her] father the bitter truth that the body had a bullet hole in the chest.” Firestone was alienated from much of her family. She and Danny had not spoken in years. Even when both attended the same college, even when she passed him on their campus, “he did not say hello.” After graduation, Firestone heard “distant reports of him” from her sisters: Danny was in therapy, Danny was in graduate school, Danny, who had once been so upset with Shulamith for breaking some “trifle” of Jewish law, was “dating ‘shiksas’” and a Zen Buddhist now; in a photo Firestone saw during those years, Danny “looked like he was medicated, with swollen fingers.”
Firestone spends the final pages of her 1998 memoir Airless Spaces tracking Danny’s collapse: from a Zen center in Ithaca, to whom he had given nearly every cent he had, to Taos, New Mexico, where it seemed “he had purposefully chosen a secluded spot on an Indian Reservation that he knew of and meditated himself into the suicide, in which he shot himself at close range with his own gun.” Or perhaps, Firestone came to suspect, he was murdered. She never found out. “In the end, theories about his death, whether murder or suicide, afterlife or no,” she wrote, only “contributed to my own growing madness—which led to my hospitalization, medication, and a shattering nervous breakdown.” These are the final words of Airless Spaces, but the book is ouroboric: only physics prevents you turning the page and finding the first again, from taking another loop through the sections “Hospital,” “Post-Hospital,” “Losers,” “Obits” and “Suicides I Have Known,” the last of whom is Danny, until the madness, institutionalization, release and the hard late life of Shulamith Firestone once again reaches the final page, and its beginning.
Airless Spaces was Firestone’s second book, published more than a quarter of a century after her first. It hadn’t been expected. In 1997, when a friend of Shulamith’s approached Semiotext(e) with the manuscript, editor Chris Kraus remembers that they “said yes right away before even reading it.” Who wouldn’t? Firestone had been a sensation. As an undergraduate studying painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she was already sufficiently compelling to play the lead in a documentary film called Shulie. In 1967, when she was only 22 years old, she had embarked on a brief but remarkable career as one of the most prolific and well-known feminist organizers and intellectuals in the United States, culminating in the 1970 publication of The Dialectic of Sex, one of the strangest and most ambitious works of feminist theory ever composed. She’d then withdrawn from political life, spent a decade working as a muralist and prison arts instructor in New York and, by the early 1980s, largely vanished. While the details were not publicized, it was well-known among political and literary types that Shulamith Firestone—the painter, the activist, the theorist, the genius—had been reduced to something terrible. By 1987, according to a 2013 New Yorker profile by Susan Faludi, “the situation had become ‘dire.’ Neighbors were complaining that Firestone was screaming in the night and that she had left the taps running until the floorboards gave way.” Firestone’s sister Laya came to New York and found Shulamith “emaciated and panhandling, carrying a bag holding a hammer and an unopened can of food.”
Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Firestone spent the next decade in and out of the psych ward at Beth Israel, sometimes stable, sometimes paranoid and screaming, sometimes lucid, sometimes terrified of poisoned food and government agents hiding behind the faces of friends, sometimes simply catatonic. When she suddenly re-emerged in 1997, not only evidently working again but having already completed an entire manuscript, the allure was obvious: yes, of course Semiotext(e) would agree to publish it before reading a word. Even the ramblings of a madwoman would make a splash with Firestone’s name on the cover. It was all the more incredible that Airless Spaces turned out to be a masterpiece.
Her second book would also be her last. Although Firestone lived another fourteen years, she never published again, much less returned to public politics. She’d only been able to write Airless Spaces with the support of a psychiatrist and network of friends who had assumed responsibility for her care. But eventually the psychiatrist moved away; the friends got sick or moved on. In August of 2012, the superintendent of Firestone’s apartment building found her body on the floor. She had been dead for a month. No autopsy was performed, but it is widely believed that she’d starved.
●
This past February, Semiotext(e) reissued Airless Spaces with a new introduction by Chris Kraus and the 2013 story by Faludi inserted as an afterword. Fascination with Firestone endures: the book has already elicited long, laudatory essays in Harper’s, the New Yorker and the Washington Post. But these essays, and several others published over the past months, were only reviews in the vague sense that they were occasioned by the (re)publication of the book. Mainly, they were iterations of a habit—common to the reception of memoirs of insanity, particularly when the insane person was famous prior to their break—to understand madness not on its own terms, but in reference to the person who came before the patient, to make what happened a consequence or continuity of what preceded it rather than a senseless interruption. These essays did not ignore Shulamith Firestone’s madness. But while they varied in the particulars of their ends and their interpretations, each of them sought—perhaps it is better to say they seemed to need, for the uniformity of this move suggests to me a kind of psychic need in how we think of the vagaries of madness—to find some way, any way, to maintain the thread between the feminist, the activist, the artist, the theorist, the brilliant author of The Dialectic of Sex and the schizophrenic who wrote her sister from the hospital to say, “Do not rest assured. Things are not O.K.,” who never really recovered, and who starved to death in paranoid refusal and stayed there until neighbors complained about the smell; in short, the Shulamith Firestone who actually wrote Airless Spaces.
Sometimes this need is explicit; other times, it appears to be reflexive, an inability to shake the belief that the old Firestone was still in there. Kraus devotes the majority of her introduction to the new edition—which also appeared online as an essay for n+1—to recounting the life and achievements of that earlier Firestone. Kraus writes that Airless Spaces isn’t “a story of [Firestone’s] mental illness” but rather a kind of exposé: “it was as if she’d embedded herself to bear witness to the secret, banal workings of the institution.” While Kraus concedes that Firestone stages no explicit arguments about psychiatry—it is only as if Firestone had embedded herself, after all—she nonetheless takes as a given that Airless Spaces should be read as a case against mental hospitals, the true cause of each patient’s “downfall.” “The facts themselves are the commentary,” Kraus insists. They are sufficient to know that “Firestone’s goal as a writer” was to show us “exactly how” patients are “set on a slow but inevitable downward trajectory” and destroyed by these impersonal systems and their “casual brutality,” which sounds suspiciously like the kind of polemical goal the sane Firestone pursued in her writing against patriarchy, a topic about which she never trusted the facts themselves to be the commentary but was always eager to tell the reader precisely what she meant to say.
This polemical reading—the notion that the Firestone of Airless Spaces was still at bottom a theorist, critic and journalist—has been taken up in many of the reissue’s high-profile reviews. In the Washington Post Becca Rothfeld identifies a “structural affinity between Airless Spaces and The Dialectic of Sex,” drawing a tidy parallel between the two books: if under patriarchy, it is the systems of control that create the “woman,” under psychiatry, it is the systems of control that create the “mental patient.” In 4Columns, Julie Phillips sees in Airless Spaces only how “Firestone’s capacity for analysis” is “diverted … from the problems of society to those of individual survival.” Here even Firestone’s death is recruited in service of her politics: it was tragic proof that “feminism still hasn’t found structural answers to the problem of lonely liberation.”
In Harper’s, meanwhile, Audrey Wollen presents a more sophisticated reading of Airless Spaces, finding her way to unity between the two Firestones by reading her earlier work as a failed “prophecy.” The Dialectic of Sex, she writes, was a “wildly flawed, and wildly far-flung” work that “verges on the silvered edge of science fiction.” But the feminist future Firestone predicted came to pass in precisely the wrong way. The second wave fell apart. The utopian technologist revolution Firestone envisioned instead produced the technology for patriarchal revanchism: where Firestone saw the technological future liberating women from the vagaries of childbearing and heterosexual subjugation, it instead delivered the secret children of Elon Musk. Firestone’s prophesy was “off by a mile, a mile as narrow as a hair’s breadth,” Wollen writes. Are “seers,” Wollen wonders, “never burdened, heartbroken by the unexpected shape of their own accuracy? Do they ever look at the world they predicted and say, That’s not what I meant?” Wollen imagines it was this very disconnect that drove her insane. “The difference “between The Dialectic of Sex and Airless Spaces,” she writes, “is not the difference … between a radical feminist and a madwoman; it’s the gulf between soothsaying and surviving the present in the very society you once dreamed of overthrowing.” Wollen does not insist that Airless Spaces is an uninterrupted continuation of Firestone’s project of social criticism, yet she still tries to impose a narrative line where none exists.
In the New Yorker, Moira Donegan comes the closest to giving up the game and seeing Airless Spaces for what it is. “It’s tempting to read Airless Spaces as an allegory for the trajectory of the second wave, with Firestone’s diminution mirroring that of the movement she was instrumental in creating,” she writes. “The actual text, though, is striking for how little it has to say about feminist politics.” While Donegan is so tempted at times—the malignant, impersonality of madness, she writes in one paragraph, “is a bit like the radical-feminist conception of gender itself”—she is willing to admit that this effort to connect the two halves of Firestone’s life is largely for our benefit, not Firestone’s. And, in an inversion of the other critical analyses, Donegan prefers to read the earlier Firestone in terms of the latter, rather than the other way around: “For Firestone, to live successfully as a woman under patriarchy—to submit to the unfairness of gender relations, to smilingly endure your subordinate status and the limits it places on your freedom and dignity—was itself a kind of well-adjusted madness.” Still, in the end, Donegan offers only two possibilities: Firestone’s downfall can either be read as “an anti-feminist cautionary tale, an object lesson in how feminist politics can estrange a woman from society,” or, no less troubling, “it raises the question of whether there is any difference between madness and being the only sane person in a sick world.” It’s clear which reading Donegan prefers, but I suppose I want to ask: What if it’s neither? What if Airless Spaces, and the life of its author, cannot be read as a story at all?
●
At the turn of the century, the critic Catherine Prendergast found schizophrenic writers trapped between two kinds of readers: the dismissive and the fawning. “Historically, the severely mentally ill have been granted either no insight or insight of an enhanced and often creative or spiritual nature,” she wrote. They are either “mad poets” or “mental patients” producing “music” or “word salad.” “I sense from reading Foucault that the position of the mad poet is to be regarded as preferable to the position of the mental patient,” Prendergast went on, but barely.
When Prendergast wrote her essay, back in 2003, it was already fairly well assimilated into our sense of decorum that it is wrong to “stigmatize” the mentally ill, to gawk, to marginalize, to treat anything they say or do as disreputable, even if what they say and write really sometimes is “word salad.” We have since developed an aversion to “romanticizing” them too. Ordinarily, romanticizing the mad is taken to be quite heavy-handed: making them out to be sages, geniuses, special insightful creatives by default, producing fiction about the mad in which the most fictional element is that the schizophrenic’s delusions are uniquely interesting rather than a pastiche of well-worn conspiratorial tropes. But there are more subtle methods of making “music” of the mad. One way is to insist that whatever they say or write after the onset of insanity somehow still sings the way they used to, still plays the old hits, even if they’re a little different now, even if the song is a requiem.
I have never spent years in an institution, like, Firestone did, but I have been inside a dozen times, for days, or weeks; voluntarily and by 72-hour hold. I have taken mood stabilizers and antipsychotic medication for over ten years now. Like many people who do recover a large part of who they were before, I have read many books about what-it’s-like to lose your mind; mainly, they are interested in “inspiring” other patients to commit to recovery by plagiarizing the narrative arc of the addiction memoir, or in advancing, as so many of these critics wish Firestone would, some theoretical critique of psychiatry as metaphor for broader systems of social control. I have read very few like Airless Spaces. I have loved it for years in large part because it does not proffer any story, does not comfort, and does not pretend to have anything at all to do with the Shulamith Firestone who came before her break.
“It would be misleading to imply that Airless Spaces is a book about Firestone’s experiences with schizophrenia,” Wollen writes. But that is precisely what Airless Spaces is about. Schizophrenia is only in small part the wild psychosis, the fantasies and voices and confusion. Most of it is small indignities and absence. You lose executive function. You lose words. You forget to shower, feel no desire to shower, even when you remember. The particular genius of Airless Spaces is just how small it is, how stark, how suffocating. It contains over fifty chapters in scarcely more than 150 small pages, most of them vignettes about other patients, all of them about precisely and nothing more than some small suffering or indignity in the course of mad life. There is no sense of time or change in Airless Spaces, no mark for when a character is real, fictional or an amalgam; no indication when Firestone herself, who is “I” in many chapters, becomes “she”, as she does in some. “She could not read. She could not write,” Firestone writes of herself in one chapter. “She couldn’t even get down a fashion rag; the words bounced off her forehead like it was steel.” She couldn’t watch anything, see anything, shop for anything; her “inability to initiate a simple motion read as extreme laziness.” Airless Spaces is a book of simple motions, its action a series of simple motions, aborted or repeated or completed by patients who cannot quite recall what they were trying to achieve.
In “Hospital,” somehow the book’s most hopeful section, we meet a sequence of patients mid-gesture: Roberta, who must have a blood test—her thirteenth in a row—and who only “hoped for a ‘nice’ orderly”; a “wild, handsome” Turkish filmmaker who Firestone advises to kill time by pacing (but who chooses to pace with a prettier, younger patient); Bettina, who commandeers the thermostat in her room and “began to concentrate on lying absolutely still as a corpse”; and Lucy, who is nearly knocked out by her medication but comes to appreciate fainting (it provided an “overwhelming relief … if only she could faint all the way, blackout, and never wake up again”).
By “Post-Hospital,” “Losers,” “Obits” and “Suicides I Have Known,” matters are even starker, even smaller. Once discharged, Firestone descends into a life even more confining than the one on the ward. And we watch others descend, predictably and inevitably, into poverty, insanity and death without even the dignity of melodrama. In the hospital, at least, there is some end: getting out, or at least making trouble. “She was involved in major resistance, refusal of medication, paperwork, hearings, from the start, and it usually took two months to break her,” Firestone writes of one of her fellow patients in “Hating the Hospital,” But once outside of it, there’s only decay, or return. “Hating the Hospital” is followed by “Loving the Hospital,” when Firestone tells of another patient who “began to long for the hospital to bottom out in. So much so that she began to find excuses to hang around in the general vicinity of Beth Abraham.” There is no plot because there is no future and no way back to who these patients were before. They can only go around and round: descent, ascent, inertia, treading water, drowning. Finally, we reach Danny, who drowned before this all began.
What is so terrifying about schizophrenia is how it annihilates even the thin veneer of Aristotelian unity we have painted over the unfolding hazards of reality. We figure the schizophrenic as a kind of artist, drawing connections no one else can see, but those connections are often terrifying and rarely interesting. What schizophrenia mainly does is sever connection where it is vital: connection to others, connection to self, connection to the plot of life, or at least the more palatable delusion that there is one. The target of the disease is subjectivity itself. Whoever they were before is lost, severed, at least for a while. Some do recover. Some seem to, and then don’t. Some never do. Even the fortunate—the medicated, the saved, like Firestone, for a while—are left with their hands shaking and their mouths twitching, struggling to eat and struggling to read. This is difficult to face.
It is not surprising that so many readers want to imagine there is something more here. In her review of Airless Spaces, Wollen writes skeptically of the way that “psychotherapy makes storytelling a kind of remedy.” But this is precisely what so many critics, and so many readers, are up to. Like psychotherapists, we are all perpetually engaged in a process of smoothing the edges of reality, sewing together a plot where there may not be one, integrating the disorderly into a story that makes sense, that satisfies, that explains. Nearly every patient, every friend, every family member struggling to make sense of a sudden psychiatric break longs for a thread to connect the person who came before and the person who comes after. We want to believe that the sane and brilliant Firestone, the one with an almost impossibly wide horizon of concern for politics, revolution, justice, art and the bounds of human possibility, endures. It is too much to face an Airless Spaces that is just about the Firestone who appeared in the actual pages of the book, the one so far from who she was, the one mainly concerned with “the constant fight to tear open plastic utensils and napkins and small packets of salt and sugar with her bare and palsied hands.”
Shulamith Firestone was a genius, once. She was a painter, an activist, the author of The Dialectic of Sex. She was all of these things and then she went crazy, not because of her brother or her father or the failures of the second wave or fate or because the hospital made her that way, but because she had the same rotten luck her brother had, that some several million of us in this country have, and while she got better for long enough to write this brilliant, little book, she struggled the whole time and eventually she could not stay better and her friends moved on and she starved to death, and it was not about anything, it didn’t mean anything at all.
Photo credit: Lindsay (Flickr / CC BY)
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.