The Collected Schizophrenias

Wang’s essays, “Perdition Days” and “L’Appel du Vide” share a death motif. These are the darkest of Wang’s essays, as the first one features her experiences with Cotard’s delusion and being convinced she was already dead and the second discusses Wang’s admiration for photographer Francesca Woodman, who died by suicide. In the first essay, Wang describes feeling as if she were already dead and makes a dark joke: “I was crying with joy. ‘I’m dead’” (148). In the second, she describes how she feels like she is slowly fading away and confesses feeling jealous of Francesca’s immortality and young death. She feels that Francesca is immortalized through her art and did not have to slowly watch her life slip away. Because of Wang’s mental illness and various physical ailments, she sees herself as a burning candle and wonders if she will also be immortalized. She admits that part of her fear is rooted in her need for external validation, which Francesca shared; Francesca supposedly ended her life due to a lack of recognition, and Wang regularly confesses her need for such validation (for instance, when she changed her manner of speech during her talks at the Chinatown clinic). When Wang was told that she would never recover from her disorder, she again wondered about a separate self aside from the disorder and whether it would be preserved:

The question instead became about percentages. What percentage of my life was going to be spent in psychosis? What percentage of functioning I could expect […] What percentage of insight I could expect. No one could, or can, answer these questions, of course (150).

Due to her Hope in the Face of Great Challenges, Wang persists despite this supposedly doomed diagnosis and focuses on her writing, drawing inspiration from Francesca’s drive to create art in the darkness.

Wang’s essays on death are scattered, like her symptoms of psychosis, jumping back and forth through time and between points. These disparate points are woven together through the idea of perdition, which Wang uses to describe her status as someone with a permanent mental disorder. Wang’s feelings of being dead are also symbolic, representing her belief that her life will slowly deteriorate into nothing. Inspired by Francesca Woodman’s photographs, which often symbolize her isolation and darkness, Wang took Polaroids of herself during psychosis. These photos are usually blurred as if Wang is not fully able to see herself. They show approximations of emotions—a shadow of her true self. When she looks back on these photos, she interprets them with a new perspective: “The well person has the job of translating the images that the sick person has left behind as evidence” (166). Wang’s essays on death rely primarily on pathos to access the reader’s emotions. She describes in potent detail how she feels while believing she is dead, the way she acts, and the distant self-perception that occurred in that state of mind. Wang’s Cotard’s delusion lasted for several months and remains an experience that shaped who she is, illustrating The Interweaving of Mental Illness With Identity.