Esmé Weijun Wang: The Collected Schizophrenias

Graywolf Press, 2019

The Collected Schizophrenias is American writer Esmé Weijun Wang’s first book of non-fiction. Written in the first person, the work moves between the present day and Wang’s past experiences as a woman living with what has been diagnosed as schizoaffective disorder, bipolar I. Wang’s book is at home in the oeuvre of its Minnesota-based indie press, which often publishes books that are genre-ambiguous and autofictionally or autotheoretically inclined (most famously Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts [2016]).

Schizophrenia, as Wang puts it in the opening pages, “shirks reality in favor of its own internal logic.” The reality established in the world of Wang’s book, in contrast, exists somewhere between the destabilizing logic of schizophrenia and the more mainstream logic of neurotypical reality in ways that are coherent and cogent. journal) to the mythic automatic writings of artist Unica Zürn. Of course, the politics of “coherence” are the crux of Wang’s book, which re-energizes questions of intelligibility and legibility—questions long tied to feminism, race, madness, institutionality and power—in the context of 2019. As the book progresses, it becomes clear that the logic of so-called “reality,” with its leftover Enlightenment values, is itself internally conflicted. Schizophrenia, for Wang, becomes a ripe, equivocal counterpoint for starting to think through the limits of, and possible alliances within, our varied systems of knowledge.