Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

Vulker himself wore a kimono so large that it diminished even his vast frame, completely upsetting what already distorted sense of proportion I had had on entering the room.

‘Wal,’ said Vulker, ‘I think we had better address ourselves to the implications of sanity quotient fluctuations within the context of a more collectivist, potentially static situation.’ He barely glanced at me; the comment seemed addressed rather to the morsels of fish smeared across his palm. I grunted non-committally. I knew what I really thought: namely that the size factor was going to have a far more significant and widespread influence on world society than any specific internal reaction or attitude towards mental illnesses with defined pathologies. When all those really short oriental people got right out into the West they would begin to suffer from a nagging sense of inferiority. The impact of this on world sanity quotients could be catastrophic. But why should Vulker be told?

‘See here?’ One of Vulker’s aides handed me a report bent open out of its celluloid backing. I idly scanned the columns of figures, concentrating only to relate an asterisk in the text to Harley’s name at the footer. So that was it, they had started without me. I made no excuses, but left. Fourteen hours later I was back in Darwin.

So Harley became Sanity Quotient Adviser to PiggiBank. And it was afterwards rumoured that he served some useful function for the chairman himself. I would have nothing of it. Was it pride? I think not. I think it was a growing awareness of the direction that events were taking. Just as the inception of Quantity Theory itself had a dreamlike, inspirational quality, so now I felt myself drifting into a creative kind of indolence in which I saw things for what they really were.

Denver Airport. And the mountain air pushes me naked into a white, tiled bathroom. Dagglebert struggles with the suitcases. It isn’t until two days later that standing on the campus field, looking towards the ridge of blue and white mountains, that I realise that I have never been to America before. This is unimportant — the reason for my presence here is to confirm a suspicion. They are all here as well: Hurst from Hampstead, Harley from New York, Busner from Montreux where he has been receiving a television award. I am not here to confront but to bear witness.

Cathcart, the resident purveyor of the theory, who has taken the time to organise this celebration, is a lively man in his early fifties, mysteriously kinked at the waist as if caught midway in some mysterious, lifelong act of mincing. Despite his fluting voice and preposterous clip-on sunglasses Cathcart proves amiable and, more to the point, respectful. He has allocated me a secluded but comfortable cabin in a distant corner of the university grounds. Over the last couple of days I have shown myself sufficiently around the campus concourse, in the faculty building, and on one evening in a Denver bistro frequented by visiting academics, to counter any possible charges of snobbery or stand-offishness.

When I have run into my old colleagues I have done my best to be courteous and pleasant. I know they regard me as a fearful prig, but why should I descend to embrace the pseudo-cultural fallout that has surrounded my lifetime’s work? Why should I allow my very thought to become a creature of fashion?

And so up on to the podium, and to the lectern. Introduced by Cathcart I stand looking out over the upturned faces. Now is my moment, now is my chance to ensure that posterity has some inviolate record … I hesitate and then begin to speak; the coloured lights process across my crotch. Dagglebert salivates below me.

My address is a triumph, a cause célèbre . Or so I think. At any rate I am very well received. But then I didn’t try anything fancy, I confined myself to areas that are well known. I didn’t trouble my audience with complexities, or give them any real idea of what tremendous conceptual heat is required within the crucible of creation. In a word my address — to my own mind — was anodyne.

Towards the end of the morning, as my eyes scanned still more distant prospects in an effort to avoid contemplating the crumpled, impotent visages of my colleagues, I saw a flicker of white moving in and out of the trees at the edge of the stretch of lawn that bounded the auditorium building. It came and then went, and then came again. Until it resolved itself into the figure of a young woman, perhaps in her early twenties, clad in a loose hospital gown, who ran hither and thither, arms outstretched, or in her hair. She pirouetted and thrust herself, as if brutally masturbating, against the trunks of the stately Douglas firs. In time she was joined by more figures, some similarly attired, some dressed in fragments of surgical garb, others girt with appliances for restraining the deranged, still others naked but for either torn sweaters or cast-off trousers.

While this cavalcade, this strange fiesta, made its way out of the trees and on to the lawn, I went on speaking, automatically. I knew what was happening, I had heard rumours. My suspicions were confirmed when a tall figure appeared in the wake of the dancers. He stood head and shoulders above them, naked to the waist and below that clad only in harlequin tights and an absurd, priapic codpiece. His beard jutted towards the auditorium, his eyes flashed and even from a distance of several hundred metres, seemed to search mine. I had been joined by the last of the original team. Sikorski had arrived, along with his Radical Psychic Field Disruptionists.

If Hurst represented the therapeutic corruption of Quantity Theory, Sikorski had done his best to effect a political corruption. Sikorski’s first published paper in the wake of our work together had contained a lively refutation of the idea of sanity quotients being measurable within the context of social groupings. For him the very idea of ‘society’ was a fallacy. ‘Society’ could not be quantified, but a physical area could. Sikorski proposed, therefore, what he called ‘psychic fields’ — not really a difficult concept to grasp, he simply meant ‘areas’. Within each of these psychic fields there was, of course, a given sanity quotient. It was in the interests of the establishment, he went on to say, to create a complex and sustainable pattern of such fields, which would ensure that the principal burdens of depression, schizophrenia, alcoholism, mania and depression, fell primarily on the disadvantaged: the working class, the ethnic minorities and so forth.

Clearly this fascism of the very animus had to be counteracted. Sikorski, scion of a wealthy East Anglian landowning family, at one time a brilliant clinician with a promising career in orthodox medicine ahead of him, took the plunge and followed the path dictated by his own convictions. After the initial Quantity Theory multi-disciplinary team broke up Sikorski disappeared. Later, there were rumours that he had had himself sectioned; that he had undergone more than twenty ECT treatments, that he had been overdosed with Halperidol. And later still that he had been partially leucotomised … privately … by a friend.

He emerged two years later on the fringes of the metropolis. By now he was at the head of a ragged band, which styled itself as ‘the Radical Psychic Field Disruptionists’. The aim of this collection of university dropouts, druggies, actors and other assorted social deviants was to act as a kind of emergency oil rig capping team in the context of mental health.

Like a method acting workshop they refined and perfected their assumption of symptoms of mental illness. (Occasionally members of the troupe would appear on one of the regional news-feature programmes to give the folks at home a demo.) Then, they would descend to picket day-care centres, long-term asylums, secure wards for the criminally insane and of course analysts’ and therapists’ offices. Lounging, squirming, ranting, collectively deluding, over a two- or three-year period the Radical Psychic Field Disruptionists became a familiar sight around Britain. They had the same sort of cachet — as a bizarre diversion threading their way through the conformist crowd — as the Hare Krishnas had had some ten or so years before.