The Greeks and Shakespeare understood madness. Look at how Regan and Cornwall go to work on Gloucester’s eyes in III, vii of King Lear or how the maenads tear apart Pentheus in Euripides’ The Bacchae. Real madness is rage that does not diminish, one that keeps finding sources of more rage. It becomes an instrument of perpetual motion made of flesh and endlessly producing malice. It strikes out at anyone within direct or peripheral vision. The cruelty it produces is self-righteously serious, ferocious, annihilating and self annihilating.
Such rage will not respond to reason. The enraged suspects the use of reason itself as applied to his condition of being one more trap meant to deny him the integrity of his rage and thus also what is rightfully his — which is whatever he has decided should be his.
Suffering is at the core of this fury. I do not think anything else could keep the heat of it going at temperatures that melt everyone who comes in contact with this person. Some deep and abiding wrong has been done to him, but a wrong that not only can never be made right, but one whose agony cannot be soothed. This person, “at once malevolent and victimized, … [possesses] an irreducible core of pain and unreason that resists any genial assumptions about the coherence … of the world.”* This makes fury terrifying. Any calm life can be destroyed by another’s unredeemable anger that has no cause that can be discerned. It falls upon the innocent like a storm that gives no warning of its descent.
While most of us respond to suffering with compassion, that is not the case here. Such a permanently enraged person devours compassion, asks for more and more and more and always suspects the kindness shown to him to be a mask for something either selfish or outright malign.
Occasionally, for brief periods of time, he can bring his rage to bay, maybe from exhaustion, and even speak of insights as to how he might have done another harm, but these moments are only pauses. Rage is often quiet and camoflaged, but it is there, waiting, unrepentant and self-justified. Paradoxically, someone enraged is ready to do whatever is necessary for it to be lifted from him. He knows his state is doing him damage, but no matter, he must pay out its full measure. Euripides knew all about this. Medea says “I know indeed what evil I intend to do, but stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury, fury that brings upon mortals the greatest evils.”
*Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Hubris and Delusion at the End of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor Trilogy”. The New Yorker, March 16, 2020.
