Literature needs its nut jobs. They are the prospectors who dig in the dangerous, collapsed mineshafts where the sane novelist fears to tread. Nine times out of ten, they find only fool’s gold—a 900-page screed about the gender of angels. But that tenth time? That tenth time, they bring back a piece of ore that glows with a strange, new light. They expand what a sentence can do, what a story can contain, what a mind can believe.
This author started writing a memoir. Halfway through, the “I” fragmented. Reality slipped. The Confessional Collapser cannot distinguish between what happened to them and what they dreamt happened. The result is a work like Blood and Guts in High School , where the author becomes a character who becomes a prostitute who becomes a Persian slave girl, all while rewriting Nathaniel Hawthorne. Or, more tragically, the works of John Kennedy Toole , whose A Confederacy of Dunces is so perfectly, painfully a product of its author’s isolation and paranoia that Toole killed himself before it won the Pulitzer. The nut jobbery here is not malice; it is a permeability of the skin between self and fiction.
Why do we read these people? Why does a sane person spend a rainy Sunday annotating a book that claims the moon landing was faked by lizard people who are also the Rothschilds? nut jobs author
The distinction, perhaps, lies in humor and self-awareness. The great Nut Jobs Author usually retains a sliver of the trickster. They know, on some level, that they are performing madness. Burroughs was grimly funny. Pynchon hides from cameras. Even Pound, in his later years, recanted his fascism. The dangerous nut job has no humor. The great nut job is a court jester with a knife.
Then there is the gentle giant of American letters, . A heroin addict, accidental murderer, and occultist, Burroughs believed that language itself was a virus from outer space. His cut-up technique—scissors to a newspaper, rearranged at random—wasn't a gimmick. It was a magical ritual to exorcise control. His masterpiece, Naked Lunch , is less a novel than a splatter of fever dreams, talking assholes, and bureaucratic nightmare logic. Was he a genius? Undoubtedly. Was he a nut job? He shot a glass off his wife’s head and missed, killing her. He spent decades trying to communicate with a telepathic soul-fragment of a Mayan god. The answer is yes. Literature needs its nut jobs
By J. S. Latham
But without them, we’d only have books that make sense. And who wants to live in a world that makes sense? J. S. Latham is a critic and recovering literary journalist. He owns a first edition of “The Atrocity Exhibition” and is currently 400 pages into a self-published novel about time-traveling bees. But that tenth time
This feature is not about the mentally ill writer as a tragic figure, nor about making light of genuine suffering. It is about the aesthetic of the unhinged: the moment when a writer’s personal cosmology becomes so intricate, so obsessive, and so resistant to consensus reality that the resulting text becomes something other than a novel. It becomes a revelation —or a hallucination. Sometimes, both.