404 Error

 

Alas, the page you're seeking cannot be found.


Perhaps the URL is incorrect, the link is outdated, or something is out of whack.


Please try re-entering the site through the link below.

 

 

Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off. . . .
Though much is taken, much abides, and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are—
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
from Ulysses

 
     Albert Dadas, a semiliterate gas fitter of Bordeaux, probably concerned himself very little with the soul, though there was certainly some deep malaise within his own. Hacking has retrieved Albert’s case from a book brought out by Philippe Tissié, a Bordeaux psychiatrist, in 1887: Les Aliénés voyageurs. Mad Travelers’ core is four lectures on Tissié’s case; these are supported by extensive notes and appendices. Hacking argues persuasively that dissociated wandering like Albert’s became a mental illness for a time, was found all over the place, and vanished when the intellectual climate became unsympathetic.
     Albert was born in 1860 into an impoverished artisan family in Bordeaux. By the turn of the century he had become celebrated for his extraordinary, compulsive treks from country to country, from which he would “awake” into his normal state of mind, not knowing how he had got to the German frontier, or Constantinople, or Moscow. He would have heard the name of a foreign place, become anxious and restless, and set out. When he came to himself far from home, he would find his papers missing, get sent to jail or hospital, or scrabble for a living, and after great hardships find his way back to Bordeaux.
     He became a pet project of Tissié’s, himself an unconventional young doctor, while in a Bordeaux hospital.  As was the fashion of the time, Tissie hypnotized him and was able to hear accounts of his travels, which in general could be confirmed as genuine. These are appended to the main part of the book, and make rather disappointing reading: yes, he went there, and there, and then he lost his money, then he found some work, then he lost it, then the authorities sent him home, and so on. Albert was no self-examiner: “Yet another escapade. What a calamity,” is the most vivacious of his recorded remarks. His divided life certainly tortured him (and tortured his wife, for he did find time to marry), but we hardly feel we come to know him, to understand what he was traveling from, or toward.

 
Rosemary Dinnage
review of Ian Hacking’s
Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness
in the issue of the New York Review of Books dated January 20, 2000


 

The Peronal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy


 

 

 

Copyright © 2008 by Eric Kraft. All rights reserved.