In Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (1998), Marya Hornbacher writes, ‘I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed … Itis ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back’ (p. 10). This amalgam of allusions to Virgil, Dante and Lewis Carroll is a common feature of contemporary autopathographies, or memoirs of mental illness. Such narratives represent Hell as a condition of actual, contemporary Western existence, and not only a concept of the afterlife imagined by theologians, mytho-graphers or writers of fiction. Unlike the second-generation Holocaust narratives that were discussed in the preceding chapter, these personal memoirs describe infernal states of which the writers have, or claim to have, first-hand knowledge and experience. Nevertheless, it is striking how frequently these autobiographical accounts of mental disorder, addiction, neurosis and psychotic breakdown are structured and narrated as journeys of descent into the underworld and return.

Contemporary Western culture has not only been characterised as traumatic, as noted in the previous chapter; it has also been described as generally psychotic. Whereas the early twentieth-century subject was alienated, the postmodern subject is typically schizophrenic, according to such theorists as Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. As Deleuze and Guattari claim, ‘the schizophrenic deliberately seeks out the very limit of capitalism; he is its inherent tendency brought to fulfilment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel’ (Anti-Oedipus, p. 35).