Love, Madness

Have you ever wondered what drives a person mad? Are some naturally more susceptible than others?

Salman Rushdie’s short story The Harmony of the Spheres is about a man’s loss of mental harmony and a group of friends’ loss of relational harmony. The story is told from the perspective of the friend of a man who fell victim to paranoid schizophrenia and eventually took his life in order to end the madness.

The circle of friends includes the narrator, Khan, his wife Mala, Elliot Crane, and his wife Lucy Evans. Elliot met Khan at Cambridge, and also subtly introduced Khan to his wife Mala at a wedding party. In a twist of fate, Khan previously met Elliot’s wife, Lucy, as a teenager. One night, during a two day secluded boat trip, Lucy and Khan almost had an affair. As it turns out, Elliot and Mala actually had an affair somewhere else during the same time.

Elliot Crane was driven mad by the multiple conflicting thoughts playing in concert throughout his head – harmony is lost when too many conflicting thoughts are held within a single mind. In his case, the conflicting thoughts were of the spiritual realm and passion. He was enamored by unshakable counter-cultural spiritual beliefs and a tangled web of passion. Eventually, his mind’s chemical ability to cope and rationalize simply eroded. He ended his life, to end the madness, when he sucked hot lead from the barrel of a loaded shotgun.

Khan’s harmony collapsed as well when his wife told him she was having an affair with Elliot. “It exploded in my chest with an unbearable raucous crack, a sound reminiscent of the break-up of log-jams or pack-ice” (p 146). She maintained harmony by pushing responsibility onto Elliot with an ambiguous warning to her husband that Elliot was bad for him. “He comes around too much, it’s bad for you… Get my drift, writer sahib” (p 141).

In retrospect, it appears that Lucy was the biggest victim. She adapted her entire life in hope of maintaining the sanity of her husband. Unfortunately, for those outside Elliot’s mind it was a hopeless situation. It was almost as though she was relieved when he committed suicide. When she awoke and found what had happened, “She went back to bed and slept soundly until morning” (p 125). She was thus free to pursue her own harmony once again, but this time she remarried “dully,” as though Rushdie suggests there’s more harmony around the fringes of less exciting individuals (p 145).

So what drives a person mad? Endless conflict and deception.