READ / ON DELUSIONS OF SENSE ■ 135 © 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Rupert Read On Delusions of Sense: A Response to Coetzee and Sass KEYWORDS: schizophrenia, Wittgenstein, Schreber, Faulkner, Benjy, grammar, madness, Cogito T HE GREAT WRITINGS on and of severe men- tal affliction—those for instance of Schreber, ‘Renee’, Donna Williams, Ar- taud, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Coet- zee’s In the Heart of the Country, Kafka’s “De- scription of a struggle,” and even (I would add) key parts of The Lord of the Rings—present us with something deeply enigmatic. They have, we might say, a strong grammar, a grammar—a mode of hanging together, and (in this case) of linguis- tically seeming to make a sense that is not our sense and that we cannot make sense of— . . . they have a grammar all of their own, and all of its own, a grammar that resists and rejects inter- pretation even as it sometimes seems to offer interpretations. 1 It was Wittgenstein’s view that to make men- tal illness unpuzzling was a mistake, or (better, perhaps) a mythologically problematic move. Wittgenstein’s aim in his philosophizing was to understand what was enigmatic when it could be understood without unwisely turning it into some- thing altogether unpuzzling . . . and then to acknowledge that there are some things that may remain forever puzzling, without committing one- self to the metaphysically disastrous claim that the reason they are endlessly puzzling is that they lie outside the boundaries of human life, lan- guage, or reason, as though we could peek out- side those alleged boundaries to see what was there, but never truly say anything about it. There simply may be places where our under- standing—phenomenological understanding, un- derstanding of what it is like—gives out, and not because it is (or we are) merely human. For instance, perhaps one cannot capture some men- tal illness by intellection alone, or even perhaps at all. Perhaps the best understanding one can have of mental illness is purely negative (in a sense at least as strong as that involved in nega- tive theology, wherein God is only defined by what it is not). Louis Sass (2003) writes I am not sure whether or not Read would accept that a philosophical position can be understandable de- spite its containing deep, internal logical tensions (per- haps he would not). If such understanding is possible, however, it does seem to open the way for a similar understanding of conditions like that of Schreber. (p. XX)<EQ2> Unfortunately, however, it is indeed not possi- ble—that is, this notion is merely a fantasy—by my lights. Philosophical positions, all of which turn out to contain such inexorable tensions, cannot be understood: they are mirages. Solip- sism, as a position, is not any better (or worse)