광기와 치유: 도리스 레싱의 『지옥으로의 하강에 관한 브리핑』

According to Michel Foucault, madness is something to be feared and ignored in the Western world, and so a madman, as the other, is excluded from ordinary society. However, in Briefing for a Descent Into Hell Doris Lessing shows madness is not a disease to be avoided, and rather it connects to another reality or another view of life. For Lessing, madness can be therapeutic rather than destructive. Unlike the female protagonists in other novels, Briefing for a Descent Into Hell begins with the story of a madman who is hospitalized at the Central Intake Hospital in London. The doctors attend this man, later identified as Charles Watkins with two sons, with conventional treatments and medicine, and regards him as a patient not a human being. Others including his wife, Felicity, think of him as the other, mentioning that he has shown something strange or inappropriate in daily life. This otherness might be caused with the matter of the lack of mutual understanding between individuals, which drives him into an inner-space journey. In his dream, he confronts and experiences incomprehensible accidents, such as a fantastic and genocidal war which may be occurring in our civilization. This dream makes him realize the difference between madness and sanity, dream and reality. Coming out of his dream, he gains the vision of unity in which one can embrace each other’s otherness and promote harmony in them. Like this, in Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, through madness Charles Watkins’s urge to heal the schism of his self-division is well represented by Lessing who emphasizes that madness is a cultural label that permits the potential for vision or self-healing to be nullified by the very institutions that ostensibly promote recovery. (Chungwoon University)