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Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off. . . .
Though much is taken, much abides, and
though
We are not now that strength which in
old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we
are, we are—
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong
in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to
yield.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
from Ulysses
Albert Dadas, a semiliterate gas fitter
of Bordeaux, probably concerned himself very little with the soul, though
there was certainly some deep malaise within his own. Hacking has retrieved
Albert’s case from a book brought out by Philippe Tissié, a Bordeaux
psychiatrist, in 1887: Les Aliénés voyageurs. Mad Travelers’ core is four lectures on Tissié’s case; these are supported by extensive
notes and appendices. Hacking argues persuasively that dissociated wandering
like Albert’s became a mental illness for a time, was found all over the
place, and vanished when the intellectual climate became unsympathetic.
Albert was born
in 1860 into an impoverished artisan family in Bordeaux. By the turn of
the century he had become celebrated for his extraordinary, compulsive
treks from country to country, from which he would “awake” into his normal
state of mind, not knowing how he had got to the German frontier, or Constantinople,
or Moscow. He would have heard the name of a foreign place, become anxious
and restless, and set out. When he came to himself far from home, he would
find his papers missing, get sent to jail or hospital, or scrabble for
a living, and after great hardships find his way back to Bordeaux.
He became a pet
project of Tissié’s, himself an unconventional young doctor, while
in a Bordeaux hospital. As was the fashion of the time, Tissie hypnotized
him and was able to hear accounts of his travels, which in general could
be confirmed as genuine. These are appended to the main part of the book,
and make rather disappointing reading: yes, he went there, and there, and
then he lost his money, then he found some work, then he lost it, then
the authorities sent him home, and so on. Albert was no self-examiner:
“Yet another escapade. What a calamity,” is the most vivacious of his recorded
remarks. His divided life certainly tortured him (and tortured his wife,
for he did find time to marry), but we hardly feel we come to know him,
to understand what he was traveling from, or toward.
Rosemary Dinnage
review
of Ian Hacking’s
Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient
Mental Illness
in the issue of the New York Review of Books dated
January 20, 2000 |
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