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Giving the sickness a name: Reading Timothy Findley's Headhunter and Walker Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome as diagnostic fictions
Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 1998/1999 by Jeoffrey S Bull
Findley's Headhunter and Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome use similar character types, events and symbols in their attempts at "sciencing." Given their common interest in the state of the spirit, it is not surprising that both authors locate psychiatrists and patients at the centre of each novel. Furthermore, there is an uncanny similarity between the books. Each focusses on a psychiatrist (Findley's Dr Kurtz, Percy's Dr Bob Comeaux) who uses his position of trust to take control over patients' minds. Indifferent to others' fates, these doctors use unapproved, dangerous drugs as part of thought-control experiments on unaware subjects - experiments that lead to child abuse. At the same time, each novel depicts another psychiatrist (Findley's Dr Marlow, Percy's Dr Tom More) who, instead of cloaking himself in his authority, sees himself (to use Headhunter's epigraph from Jung) "as part of the drama" of a patient's engagement with despair. Both Marlow and More draw support from marginalized witnesses against the times: Marlow has Nicholas Fagan, More has Father Smith. The priest and the critic (variations on a theme?), usually seen as irrelevant by many in modern civilization, are given opportunities in these novels to offer apocalyptic prophesies concerning the final effects of a plague fed by human vanity and dreams of power.
The psychiatrist as protagonist is an important part of both Findley's and Percy's diagnostic approach. Psychiatrists see the inner lives of others; this type of knowledge can lead to either an abuse of power or an awareness of the reach and seriousness of the plague. Findley's Kurtz and Marlow, for example, recalled from Heart of Darkness to act out again what Lorraine M. York calls the inextricable fusion of "creativity and cruelty" that runs through all of Findley's novels (116), possess entirely different visions of their profession - visions which, in turn, reveal the depths of the affliction that Findley sees spreading throughout contemporary society.
Findley's Kurtz has little time for the talking cure: his aim is direct, total intervention. He likes the control over others granted to him by the drug therapies that his protege, Dr Shelley, develops. Austere, self-absorbed - his apartment alarm password is always either "ME," "MYSELF" or "I" (Headhunter 56) - Kurtz does not see himself as part of the drama of his patients' quests for self-discovery. Instead, using his position as head of the Parkin Institute both to manipulate mental-health research and to make contacts with the elite of the city, Kurtz appoints himself the master of others' fates, free to grant permission to those whose darker dreams are useful to him. His essay on his vision of psychiatry makes his growing hubris plain. "We psychiatrists, " he writes, "must necessarily appear to the mentally ill as being in the nature of gods. We approach them with miracles up our sleeves. `Save us!' they cry - and we do ... " (Headhunter 426). Drugs allow Kurtz to control the soul. Although he does write in his first draft that "with a simple pill, we can exert a power for good that is practically unbounded," he soon tires of the piety imbedded in that phrase "for good " and crosses it out, "leaving the sentence bereft of decency" (Ibid.).
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