"A number of modern novelists have remarked on the profound oddity – or "madness", as Henry James (among others) once described it – of the way in which a novelist becomes inhabited by persons and voices. Rather than regarding creativity as a benign or even divine form of inspiration, several have gone so far as to label this state of receptivity as a form of mitigated psychosis. Edward Albee calls it "controlled" schizophrenia, while EL Doctorow prefers the qualifier "socially acceptable". I suspect neither of them has much experience of real schizophrenia, of the relentlessness and the terror of being inhabited by voices that are neither summoned nor biddable.
But what about the experience of the reader, who is also invaded by voices? "
Rick Gekoski | guardian.co.uk / continue reading
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