Writing 125: Women and Memoir
Wellesley College
2.15.95

Parallel Universes
           - by Janet Si-Ming Lee

And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe
There are so many of them: worlds of the
insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying,
perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds
exist alongside this world and resemble it, but
are not in it... (Kaysen, 5)

Susanna Kaysen's memoir, Girl Interrupted describes Kaysen's struggle to transcend across the boundary that separates her from two parallel universes: the worlds of sanity and insanity, security and vulnerability. In this memoir, Kaysen details her existence as a psychiatric patient diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder in a mental institution where time seems circular alongside a parallel universe where time is normally linear. The hospital itself becomes a paradoxical representation of both strict confinement and ultimate personal freedom. Through Kaysen's short, blunt phrase-like sentences, she forcefully impresses the shocking conditions she endured on the memory of her readers. Writing in a subtle, almost Hemingway-stark style, she merely suggests the actual reality of her situation in her objective observations of her experiences, leaving her readers in a disturbing position of being suspended between the world that Kaysen paints and the factual reality.

Through the disclosure of Kaysen's case record files, the readers learn that Kaysen was born on November 11, 1948 to Carl and Annette Kaysen. Kaysen grew up in an intellectual, ambitious, Jewish family prominent in the academic world; her father Carl was the director for advanced studies at Princeton University. However, on April 27, 1967 at age 18, Kaysen was admitted voluntarily to the McLean Hospital because of her severe depression and suicidal tendencies. Susan Cheever writes in the New York Times that the "perforations that led Susanna Kaysen into the loony bon were her halfhearted suicide attempt with aspirin and her general inability to be the successful; well-adapted daughter she thought her parents wanted." The doctor who referred her to the mental institution based his decision on Kaysen's "chaotic unplanned life...with progressive decompensation and reversal of sleep cycle...severe depression and hopelessness and suicidal ideas, history of suicidal attempts...immersion in fantasy, progressive withdrawal and isolation".

Kaysen's Borderline Personaliy Disorder becomes a metaphor itself for how she teetered along the narrow boundary separating the parallel universe of reality from another reality magnified to the point of delusion that it becomes the seed of insanity. Ironically, the doctor who referred Kaysen to McLean seemed to act in the opposite extreme from her, immersing his attention to minute details to form a reality inflated to the point that the conclusions drawn no longer seem to be related to the observations. For example, he used little minor observations like Kaysen's pimple-picking and boyfriend problems to make very far-fetched conclusions that Kaysen, as result, must have a mental disorder and an emotional imbalance. Kaysen, on the other hand, also fascinated by the minor details did not draw any conclusions really that knit her observations to the broader picture. For example, Kaysen would become fascinated with someone's particular facial features as peculiar shapes without an understanding that the face is part of the individual.

Reality was getting too dense. Something also
was happening to my perceptions of people.
When I looked at someone's face, I often did not
maintain an unbroken connection to the concept
of a face. Once you start parsing a face, it's a
peculiar item: squishy, pointy, with lots of air
vents and wet spots...(Kaysen, 41)

In the two years that Kaysen lived in the institution, she struggled to find the link between the minute, concrete details of life to overall themes. She uses the metaphor of the optical illusion of the faces and the vase which shift back and forth from being positive to negative space to show how the two parallel universes can never intersect.

An optical illusion does contain two realities.
It's not that the vase is wrong and the faces are right;
both are right, and the brain moves between two
existing patterns that it recognizes as different...
(p 140)

This reference to the optical illusion of how one cannot see the vase and the faces simultaneously implies one of Kaysenâs central themes that one cannot focus on the minute details and still see how the minute details are tied in together as a single unifying gesture. The tendency to see one or the other determines whether one is sane or insane.

In one chapter, Kaysen discusses how hospital buildings and rooms are separated by "double-locked double doors" that make each of the hospital buildings seem to exist as almost separate entities from each other. The hospital itself was divided into different departments depending on the amount of security necessary for various patients. Therefore, within the hospital, there existed parallel universes as well that separated patients from each other.

Our double-locked doors, our steel-mesh window
screens, our kitchen stocked with plastic knives
and locked unless a nurse was with us, our bath-
room doors that didn't lock: All this was medium
security. Maximum security was another world...
(Kaysen, 47)

Kaysen draws a comparison between the separate hospital divisions and the tunnels that connect the buildings. She illustrates how the tunnels unify the various parallel universes of the hospital into one cohesive world.

There are tunnels under this entire hospital.
Everything is connected by tunnels. You could
get in them and go anywhere. It's warm and cozy
and quiet...(Kaysen, 121)

In many ways, the tunnels can be interpreted as the links between all concepts to form a unifying overall theme that composes reality. Kaysen contrasts her imprisonment in the hospital institution where the patients' movements were monitored carefully by five minute checks and almost parasitic relationships between the staff and the patients to the unrestricted freedom she experienced in the underground tunnels connecting the hospital buildings. In the underground tunnels, doors did not confine her to one world nor locked her out of another. More abstractly, her freedom in the tunnel represents her freedom to look beyond her own over-fascination with details, the threads of reality, that locked her out of her ability to discovering the unified world woven together by details.

Kaysen's insight to the tunnels as the "essence of the hospital" is related to Plato's perception of reality and her neurosis:

Plato said everything in the world is just the
shadow of some real thing we can't see. And the
real thing isn't like the shadow, it's a kind of essence-
thing...it's like a neurosis...a year after I got out
of the hospital, I quit, I'd had it, finally, with all
that messing about in the shadows...(p 122)

Kaysen makes an analogy to how she fiddled around in the shadows of insanity for awhile, only understanding the minute, concrete details, the forms of things without fully comprehending the connections between the ideas that make sense of the details into overall themes. The abstract, implicitly-known overall themes in life are the essence of reality and sanity. Kaysen implies that it is not the observations or details of life, but the connections between disparate ideas or observations that are significant in sanity. For example, Kaysen infers that it is the tunnels that represent the "essence" or reality, while the hospital departments are merely the shadows of the essence.

Kaysen draws an analogy of the mental institution as a microcosm of the real world, or magnified picture of reality. She paints a very specific description, relating the world of the hospital to an atom. She depicts the hospital as having an atomic structure with the hospital staff's lives revolving around the psychiatric patients. The nurses, burdened with the responsibility for caring for the patients, nervously guard them to the point that the "nurse and patient are bound together like Siamese twins".

The group had an atomic structure: a nucleus of
nuts surrounded by darting, nervous nurse-
electrons charged with our protection...(p 49)

Ironically, the hospital itself is the metaphor for how the minute details of reality like the details of the patients' lives were focused on so intently that the patients' lives no longer seem to be related to the overall scheme of the real world. Kaysen's definition of the hospital as an atom can be expanded to describe her view on how the hospital is the microcosm of society or perhaps, even the underlying fundamental structure of the world outside of the hospital.

Kaysen describes the hospital's paradoxical role as being both a refuge and a prison for the psychiatric patients. The hospital not only isolated the patients from the real world as if they were diseases that would contaminate the rest of society, it also protected them from the stress and many disappointments that went with struggling to meet the high expectations of life.

For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as
it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world
and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we
were also cut off from the demand and expectations that
had driven us crazy...(Kaysen, 94)

She comments on how the hospital protected the patients' sense of security yet raped them of their rights to privacy, the privileges that normal people enjoyed. By identifying themselves as psychiatric patients, they were strangely liberated from the expectations that society had of them: to conduct themselves as strong, confident individuals that never or rarely have emotional disorders.

In a strange way we were free. We'd reached the
end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our
privacy, our liberty, our dignity: All of this was gone
and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our
selves...(Kaysen, 94)

However, Kaysen admits that that type of personal freedom to behave as outcasts of society came with a price: they must remain as outcasts living in a world parallel to the world from which they originally tried to escape from. They were sentenced to live in a world without a future, exiled from the outside world. They learned that the price of freedom came with being invisible, and consequently, insignificant to the real world: "Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from...(Kaysen, 6)".

Kaysen also comments on how the passage of time was different in the hospital than it was in the world outside of the hospital. She equates time as being circular in the hospital whereas in the real world, time is linear. By the blending of chronological event randomly in a seemingly disorganized way, Kaysen depicts how time in the hospital seemed to be all-converging and disjointed whereas time outside the hospital flowed smoothly and events made sense chronologically. Time in these two parallel universes, the hospital and "real world" never really intersect as well.

In the parallel universe the laws of physics are
suspended...time, too, is different. It may run in
circles, flow backward, skip about from now to
then...(Kaysen, 6)

In the parallel universe of the hospital, time itself was magnified to the extent that the passage of time had no meaning because there the patients did not really consider their lives as having a future with aspirations and a forward direction of events. Kaysen depicts her life of in the hospital as being so carefully monitored by five-minute checks that noted her presence, her existence, that the five minute checks became the mechanism for which the passage of time could be observed.

It [five minute checks] never stopped,
even at night. It was our lullaby. It was
our metronome, our pulse. It was our lives
measured out in doses slightly larger than
those famous coffee spoons...dented tin
spoons...(Kaysen, 55)

Time in the hospital was divided into tiny increments yet the patients had no sense of time as a whole composition in terms of time being related to the passage of events. The description of time reduced to pulse-like five-minute checks becomes a metaphor for KaysenÍs mental state, because like fractured time, Kaysen was also over-fascinated in the minute like a checkered floor where the conflicts of life with "all the indecisions and opposites that were bad enough in life" were clearly spelled out for her. Kaysen explains how insanity can be defined by the way time passes for the two classic types of mental patients: viscosity and velocity.

Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast...
Viscosity and velocity are opposites, yet they can look
the same. Viscosity causes the stillness of disinclination;
velocity causes the stillness of fascination...(Kaysen, 77)

Kaysenâs definition of insanity seems to suggest that she suffered from velocity in that her mind becomes overly involved on details on life.

Kaysen also writes that the digital watches invented years later reminded her of the five-minute checks which ties back to Kaysen's comment: "In our parallel world, things happened that had not yet happened in the world we'd come from."

When digital watches were invented years later
they reminded me of five-minute checks. They
murdered time in the same way-slowly-chopping
off pieces of it and labbing them into the dustbin
with a little click to let you know how time was
gone...(Kaysen, 54)

In some ways, Kaysen implies that events are fated when she discusses certain events like the invention of digital watches followed after similar events in the hospital. In some way, she seems to be suggesting ominously that the hospital's world is the microcosm of the real world and whose events will foreshadow similar events in the real world. Another example of Kaysen's implication of a linear fate existing alongside the hospital's circular time is when Kaysen foreshadows both the violent death of her friend's brother and her rendezvous with her husband-to-be happening two years in the future

The brother of my friend who was going to die a
violent death--but we didn't know that yet; his
death was nearly two years in the future--took
me to the movies, where I met my husband-to-be.
Our marriage as well was two years in the future....
(Kaysen, 134)

Kaysen's implication of fate seems to suggest that although for her, time did not exist in the hospital, fate still prevailed and guided the direction of events nevertheless. In other words, fate or the natural linear time persisted continuously even if hospital time was circular. Also, Kaysen's use of fate shows the way she viewed herself as a passive victim of the fate that put her in the mental institution and later permitted her to leave. The use of fate indicates how Kaysen still is not completely free from outside influences.

In the conclusion of the memoir, Kaysen draws a parallel between the unhappy girl in the Vermeer painting entitled: Girl Interrupted at Her Music who looks out sadly from the painting to herself. When Kaysen first studied at the painting at the Frick museum with her professor, the girl in the painting with the "light muted, winter light, but her face is bright" seemed to be urgently warning her, "Don't!" However, Kaysen says she did not listen, kissed her teacher, and eventually went crazy. Now, Kaysen perceives more clearly that the girl in the painting is no longer urgent, rather she is sad, appearing "young and distracted" with her teacher "bearing down on her, trying to get her to pay attention. She seems to be "looking out, looking for someone who would see her."

Interrupted at her music: as my life had been,
interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as
her life had been snatched and fixed on campus:
one moment made to stand still and to stand for
other moments, whatever they would be or might
have been. What life can recover from that?
(Kaysen 167)

Kaysen interprets the girl in the painting to be a metaphor of herself, like the girl trapped forever in a painting where she can never grow older and mature, Kaysen was also suspended in time for two years at the mental institution while time continued to persist outside in the real world, a universe parallel to her's. Kaysen feels that she lost those two years, because although time continued linearly in the real world, time was circular at the hospital, therefore, she felt that the passage of events which defines time did not really occur in the hospital. Time in the hospital had no future, events occurred again and again: the past, the present and the future were merged into one. In effect, for two years, she was imprisoned in a timeless world much like the girl in the painting, longing for the freedom to mature and live in the real world.

In writing the memoir, Kaysen pieces together the fragmented time that was divided into five-minute intervals in the hospital and she knits them together into a comprehensive composition of time, a two year period in an individual's life. The act of writing about this very emotionally-charged experience, Kaysen reaches her greatest awakening because she finally evaluates and synthesizes the disparate pieces of her life into a single composition. She finally is able to let go of her over-fascination with disparate details long enough to see how the individual memories fit together to compose a life. Because Kaysen writes about her experiences in an objective, clinically detached tone, some critics claimed that by divorcing her feelings from the situation, she fails to have really healed emotionally and mentally from her experiences. However, Kaysen disagrees, saying, "If you're writing a memoir about yourself being out of control, you don't want to be out of control while you're writing it...I wanted to embody the happy ending". She infers that in being able to write objectively, not in a self-pitying tone, she shows that she is the one in control now because she can see her past clearly and not be reacting passionately in response to her situation. Paradoxically, her clinical detached tone as a technical device also conveys the very authority she didn't have over her own life during those two years she was institutionalized.

Kaysen writes in an almost blunt fashion. Her sentences are very short, phrase-like images that make her observations and comments emphatic and almost tension-arousing which certainly helps to create the mood that prevails in the hospital. For instance, she implies the anxiety-invoking, claustrophobic atmosphere of hospital when she first visited it is by writing short, emphatic phrase-like sentences:

Two locked doors with a five-foot space between
them where you had to stand while had to stand
while the nurse relocked the first door and unlocked
the second. Just inside, three phone booths. A long,
long hallway: too long. Lunatics to the left, staff to
the right..(Kaysen, 45)

Kaysen's careful, concise, word-conscious writing style is precisely the tactic she hoped to achieve. Kaysen says, "If you want to write about something terrible, you must write about it very plainly, very directly. Know what to leave out...whenever I thought there was anything extraneous. though, I was merciless in taking it out." Kaysen makes very specific detailed observations to show the extent of her familiarity with the redundancy of events in the hospital and the tedium of her existence there. In one case, she describes Mrs. McWeeny, the head nurse who had the air of an "undisguised prison matron" down to specific, concrete details like her shoes:

[Mrs. McWeeny] wore a creaky white uniform
and spongy ripple-soled nurse shoes that she
she painted white every week; we could watch
the paint cracking and peeling off between
Monday and Friday...(Kaysen, 88)

Although, Kaysen admits in the New York Times that she had to invent the dialogue in her memoir, she feels that her piece is still true: "But at the risk of ruining my new reputation as a memoirist, I now confess it: I had to invent the dialogue. My argument is that it's true even if it might not be the facts." Needless to say, Patricia Hampl says in Memory and Imagination that although a memoir may not always be factually true, it remains emotionally true. Hampl comments that memory itself is only a recreation of reality, not the reality itself so therefore, memory can only produce subjective truths.

I am forced to admit that memoir is not a matter of
transcription, that memory itself is not a warehouse of
finished stories, not a static gallery of framed
pictures. I must admit that I invented...a memoirist
must acquiesce to selectivity, like any artist. The
version we dare to write is the only truth, the only
relationship we can have with the past.

Kaysen writes with extroadinary honesty and insight on the definitions of sanity versus insanity, reality versus illusion, freedom versus imprisonment--all terms connoting parallel universes separated only by thin, porous boundaries. However, Kaysen's memoir has been accused of answering as many questions as it leaves out, putting her readers in a curious position of being suspended between the world that Kaysen paints reticently and Kaysen's full experiences. However, Kaysen points out that in life, we seldom perceive our own experiences clearly nor understand ourselves and each other completely anyway. She implies that we all live suspended between a reality we live and a reality we create in our minds like the young girl in the Vermeer painting trapped in a world of muted light,unable to perceive everything lucidly.

The girl at her music sits in another
sort of light, the fitful, overcast light
of life, by which we see ourselves
and others only imperfectly, and
seldom...(Kaysen, 168)

References:
Cheever, Susan. "A Designated Crazy." The New York Times 20 June, 1993.
Johnson, Alex, "A Conversation with Susanna Kaysen," Agni, 1994, p105
Johnson, Alex, "A Conversation with Susanna Kaysen," Agni, 1994, p105.
Sharkey, Nancy. "Two Years in the Bin". The New York Times 20, June, 1993.
Hampl, Patricia. "Memory and Imagination".