Critical Analysis of Satichidanandan's Poem: The

Mad
By Bose Anand | Submitted On October 10, 2016

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The Mad can be analyzed from several points of view. Let's look at the
poem from the angle of New Criticism. New criticism focuses on the
aesthetic adornment of the poem. The poet says that their language is
not of dreams but of moonlight and it overflows on the full moon day.
The poet is adorning language with the aesthetic of a hyperbole of
imaginative literary fantasy. They see Gods which we have never heard
of. Here the poet ventures into a realm of space where the mad can see
the autochthonous deities through the workings of their inner
consciousness. Their visions are more surreal than ordinary human
beings. They are shaking their wings when they are shrugging their
shoulders. Shaking their wings is a metaphoric hyperbole. The hold to
the belief that flies have souls and the Green God of Grasshoppers
leaps upon wings. The language used here is personification. Trees
bleeding are also a personification. Heaven gleaming in Kitten's eyes
and ants singing in chorus is also the language of personification.

In the language of psychoanalysis the poet gazes upon the mad as

objects of speculation. The poet goes well to the extent of portraying
their psychotic and neurotic symptoms. They are not conscious of race,
religion, gender or ideology. Do the mad live in a subjective state of
consciousness? The mad people have an imagination that is surreal, a
consciousness that is fictional. Moonlight and its affinity becomes a
consciousness imagination soaring like a bird. The archetypal God that
they see is beyond imagination. Is the poet rendering poetic justice to
the mad? The personification of trees bleeding and flies having souls
could be a referral to the opening up of the poet's own subconscious.
Nature is humanized through the language of poetic expression. The
seeing of Heaven's in Kitten's eyes and ants singing in chorus depict the
bringing out of the poet's consciousness the language of the repressed.
Is the poet a pantheistic nihilist? While patting the air the poet mentions
that they are taming a cyclone and this suggests that the poet's own
mind in obsessed with the portrayal of language as the neurotic. Time
becomes an internal journey where a century for the normal human is a
second for the mad. Christ, Buddha and the Big Bang are all mixed up in
the mind of the mad as an eclectic syndrome of neurotic consciousness.

The poet also goes to the extent of politicizing the mad and making them
alien in the desert of consciousness. Thus the made have no race,
religion and gender. When the poet says we do not deserve their
innocence, he is being frozen to their feelings. The poet is narcissistic
and does not empathize with the mad. Why is the poet being a sadist of
words? Why can't the poet leave the mad to their independent world of
existence?

For the Philosopher Foucault there is no madness but only alienation.

Does the poet justify madness, their living existential reality through the
construction of the architecture of the language? The gaze of the poet
shifts on to the mad as the gaze of the other. The other is a stranger, an
alien and the poet is confronting him or her with semantic cruelty. The
poet is rendering the mad with the absurd and portraying words through
the lens of surreal fetishism.

How can we deconstruct the language of madness? The language of

madness is sedated with a mobile army of fiendish personifications.
Democracy is subverted to the authoritarianism of the poet who speaks
for the language of the mad. The binary divide of being mad and not
mad is so starkly depicted. The poet does not become their advocate but
poisonous devil who invokes language to deride madness and inflict its
trespasses with the consciousness of semantic adultery.
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