Giving the Sickness a Name: Reading Timothy Findley's Headhunter and Walker Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome as Diagnostic Fictions

TLDR: The Headhunter and The Thanatos Syndrome as mentioned in this paper use the interactions of psychiatrists and their patients to illustrate how modern civilization's sickness can be spread or fought, and both authors prophesy against those who promote this sickness through their longing for power.

Abstract: As examples of what Walker Percy calls "diagnostic fiction," both Headhunter and The Thanatos Syndrome trace contemporary discontents back to a growing disconnection from purpose and justice. Both books use the interactions of psychiatrists and their patients to illustrate how modern civilization's sickness can be spread or fought, and both authors prophesy against those who promote this sickness through their longing for power. While "addicts of desire" such as Findley's Dr Kurtz and Percy's Dr Comeaux are finally defeated by true "physician[s] of the soul" such as Dr Marlow and Dr More, both novels end by reminding readers that anomie and nihilism still afflict this civilization. En tant qu'exem-ples de ce que Walker Percy qualifie de "fiction diagnostique," Le chasseur de tetes tout comme he syndrome de Thanatos font remonter l'origine des m6contentements actuels A la disjonction croissante entre intention et justice. Ces deux livres font appel h l'interaction entre les psychiatres et leurs patient/es pour illustrer la fagon dont la maladie de la civilisation moderne peut s' etendre ou etre combattue, et la faton dont les auteurs prophetisent contre ceux et celles qui cherchent a activer cette maladie afin d'obtenir plus de pouvoir. Tandis que les "accros du desir," le Dr Kurtz de Findley et le Dr. Comeaux de Percy, sont finalement mis en echec par de vrais "phsysicien[s] de ]me" tels que Dr. Marlow et Dr. More, les deux romans concluent en rappelant aux lecteurs et lectrices que I'anomie et le nihilisme continuent a affliger cette civilisation. As Kenneth Radu has noted, Headhunter (1993) is Timothy Findley's indictment of a world in which "limits have disappeared" and "perversion and insanity have changed places with humanity and reason" (40) - that is, it is Findley's indictment of much of the modern world. Although he has set his story in a dystopian Toronto of the near future, Findley clearly wants his readers to recognize that this unreal city embodies ideas and truths that can be found in all the "civilized" places of the earth. Playing his ideas out against the existing geography and culture of Toronto, Findley attempts to expose and explain what he sees as a latent strain of nihilism in modern culture, a strain that has emerged because this civilization (in his words) "has ceased to be in the hands of those of us who call ourselves civilized" (Slopen 41). In this novel, plagues afflict both the body and the spirit. "Sturnusemia," the latest pandemic illness (said to be spread by starlings and other animals), claims victims throughout the city, but so do madness and despair. Many citizens show signs of an immitigable acedia; their diminished ability to feel and pursue healthy desires leads them to seek pleasure in mastery and murder. Believing themselves free of responsibilities for others, inhabitants of a world in which values and limits are rare while lies and self-deception are common, they act as if everything that is, anything - is permitted. In fact, everything is permitted: "their" doctor, Rupert Kurtz, director of the Parkin Institute of Psychiatric Research and epitome of establishment values, grants them permission to pursue their worst impulses.' Such permissions are the basis of his successful career (Headhunter 434). Amidst the abolition of all restraint, Kurtz's eventual antagonist, the psychiatrist Charles Marlow, realizes that "Sturnusemia and AIDS were [now] not the only plagues. Civilization - sickened - had itself become a plague. And its course, in [this] world, could be followed by tracing the patterns of mental breakdown" (271). Signs and symptoms everywhere point not to contingent difficulties but to a coming end. As Marlow notes that "Psychiatric case loads, everywhere, carried alarming numbers," he finds that only one diagnosis is possible: a death-urge is winning. "Broken dreamers, their minds in ruins. This was the human race" (271). Findley's image of civilization mutating into a plague carries an echo of that "unknown and terrible plague" dreamt of by Raskolnikov at the end of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (555). …