The World is Full of Laughter (Dolly Sen, Jason Pegler and Mad Lit...)

While Granta and London's literary media culture force a few more cubic tonnes of commentary down our throats regarding the village's next Big Things, Jason Pegler has been busy contributing to the world of Mad Lit through his DiY webpublishing effort, Chipmunka. Dolly Sen's The World is Full of Laughter, launched earlier this week, is a proud addition to the 'genre'.

With the publication of Dolly Sen's The World Is Full of Laughter, Jason Pegler has successfully transformed his career as certified lunatic (madman, drink/drugs/rave casualty, mental health user, psychotic survivor) and author (A Can of Madness, Chipmunkapublishing, 2002) into that of a publisher. In his hands, website technology becomes the cultural Colt 45 of the twenty-first century, giving every new boy in town equal weight with the best-established store-front business and star-toting sheriff. At Chipmunkapublishing, initial runs of a hundred are reprinted on demand. The paraphernalia of a 'proper' publisher are suddenly possible - book launches, ordering via bookshops, a series of tangible books, an imprint - without stock-rooms, reviewer lunch-dates and national advertising and distribution. We don't need capitalisation any more.

Pegler's intent is to give other psychiatric patients the chance to tell their story, unencumbered by censorship or political ideology. Dolly Sen's story is shocking and painful, all the more so because a keen sense of mundane reality prevents it entering the never-neverland of pulp sensationalism. Sen's Scottish mother met her Indian father in a pub in Victoria station in the summer of 1968: 'She looked a bit like Janis Joplin. My father, on the other hand, looked like an Indian Elvis Presley. If anybody ever wondered what the offspring of Janis Joplin and Elvis would look like, they just have to check out my siblings and me.' As these phrases show, Sen is a wit - able to use an undemotic term like 'siblings', able to reference pop culture whilst mocking celebrity-fixation.

But as well as smiling, the reader is wincing. Issues of low income, poor accommodation and racial abuse are never far away. Madness happens against a background of poverty and wearying insecurity. Sen's account of hearing 'voices', and of being sectioned to a mental ward, has the vividness and terror of the rawest reportage. Though the writing aims at forgiveness and reconciliation - the book is dedicated to Dad 'with lots of love, some peace, and a little pain' - the tale of conflict with her immature, alcoholic and frequently violent father spares nobody. The writing is boisterous, vulgar, post-punk, oral - typically London. In some ways, it's a version of what nineteenth-century Germans termed a Bildungsroman: a story of growing up, the author's ability to describe and make universal the silver lining on clouds of bitter experience. In the abstract, one can sneer at such a feel-good transaction, but I defy anyone to read this book and not be moved. Note, too, how an upfront account of a particular life wrecks sociological clichés about class, race and culture. Sen wields Marcel Proust, The Smiths and Lydia Lunch to make sense of her long-term battle with mania and depression.

Dolly's father was a small-time singer and actor. She worked as an extra on The Empire Strikes Back, one of the child slaves carting rocks in the mine. They were driven on by guards with whips. On set, Dolly's father was in charge of tying their turbans. When one of the guards made Dolly's brother jump with a blow of his whip, her father objected: 'Don't you fucking hurt my son!'. At home, the kids were regularly hit and punched when Dad was drunk, so Dolly thought his remark hilarious. To her surprise, she found Steven Spielberg staring at her on set. Hoping for promotion to a speaking part, she discovered that he actually wanted her sacked. Although only 12 years old, her 36-inch bust wasn't right for the part of an underfed child slave, and she was sent home (Spielberg's idea of victimhood is cartoonlike - compare the munchkin Jews, at least a foot shorter than Schindler, who thank their protector at the end of Schindler's List). Nevertheless, her brush with such a powerful legislator of mass-cultural morality left its mark: her madness, she says, 'went all the way back to when I worked on The Empire Strikes Back. It wasn't a fucking film, it was reality, and it was up to me to maintain the good and evil in the universe'.

Sen suffered from the classic symptoms: delusions, megalomania, reality critique. 'Reality is the greatest brainwashing technique ever successfully utilised and maintained. It makes the truth ludicrous and highly inconvenient to believe.' Anyone who watches Bush and Blair talk about the war on Iraq whilst trying to hold onto basic facts about economic exploitation and first-world imperialism will sympathise with her predicament. Sen didn't need to derive her insight from Philip K. Dick: she's been through the same psychological trauma, the same rift with the ideological consensus. In the book, her concluding 'answer' is moralistic rather than critical - buddhism and charity-work, 'positive thinking'. After the highs and lows which have preceded it, it feels slightly bland (a problem also encountered by Dante when he moved from Purgatorio to Paradiso). However, this ideological mopping-up comes after a package-holiday to the Grand Canyon and Mexico narrated with heartbreaking directness and lyricism (Pegler says he put down the book with a tear on his cheek; this is where I registered the same effect). In Tijuana, she was welcomed by a gang of 'crazy college kids who loved my London accent'. You immediately sense the pull the American dream exerts on the oppressed.

Pegler's publishing programme isn't simply a means of tapping mental-health funds, nor does it merely supply 'survivor therapy'. In a post-Trainspotting culture, where subaltern experience (especially concerning drugs and violence) has become a commodity, Chipmunkapublishing tackles head-on the most urgent question of cultural production: why? for whom? Pegler is clear: 'these books will save lives'. If early on he'd read something forthright and honest and true-to-experience about madness, he reckons he'd have recovered much quicker.

Recognition of the class component of 'mental' problems makes his and Sen's accounts especially telling. Oppression - alienation from the media, lack of recognition - finds a retort in bonkers megalomania. This is madness on the NHS, not privileged psychotherapy in Hampstead: 'I was getting letters threatening eviction. This caused a lot of stress for me ... As far as I can see it, society/bureaucracy, whatever you want to call it, contributes to the depression of the individual. Anyone who has been to a dole or housing benefit office will bear this out.' Of course, middle-class reviewers will find Sen's line of reasoning incomprehensible. The broadsheets prefer fictions which announce themselves as such: artificial, unaccusing pirouettes aimed at the Booker Prize.

Uniquely, Nicholas Lezard of The Guardian found a predecessor of Chipmunkapublishing worthy of attention: Mad Pride: An Anthology of Mad Culture (Small Change Books, 2000). He called this pioneering collection of mad proletariana 'compelling' (Guardian 13-May-2000). However, Lezard baulked at calling it art: 'I can't quite recommend this book as literature; for that you'd have to read Gogol's Diary of a Madman. But it does something that I have not seen literature do for a while: it gives a section of society (or rather, a sectioned society) a voice which we can hear and listen to, if we choose.' It's possible Lezard would have a different take on Pegler and Sen, though I doubt it: their expletive-rich mix of the confessional and confrontational, their disdain for literary circumlocution (or 'nuance'), is of a piece with the Mad Pride contributions. It's a shame Lezard doesn't see what a break this kind of writing is from 'survivor poetry': this new wave of Mad Lit is not simply about giving a voice to the unheard, it's about making that voice unapologetic, unashamed, unpatronisable - realistic and unassuaged.

Of course, Lezard's demur about 'literature' is understandable. An arts-page contributor must protect his demesne, or he will be in danger of blurring the Kantian distinction between the sublime and the commonplace which is his bread and butter. Pronouncing on 'real life', after all, is the role of the newspaper's editor. However, Lezard's comments do reveal a marked dissatisfaction with contemporary literature. As Iain Sinclair and Stewart Home are fond of pointing out, contemporary middle-class novels - the Booker Prize contenders - lack something (in fact, they lack most things which might make a critical mind pick up a book ...).

Walter Benjamin said the task of the critic was to 'wrest the tradition from the conformism that threatens to overwhelm it'. We need to do that to Gogol's 'Diary of a Madman' (as a very short - 24 page - story, it hardly deserves Lezard's italics). Perhaps now, ensconced as a Penguin Classic, it looks like 'literature', but was it always something so quarantined from everyday life?

Certainly, Gogol wanted to make a splash in the Petersburg literary scene of the late 1820s - but then I've not noticed Pegler and Sen refuse any bookshop launches or newspaper interviews. Nevertheless, Gogol's tale of a petty clerk who reads letters penned by a dog in order to spy on his beloved, who comes to believe he's the king of Spain, and who interprets his incarceration in a lunatic asylum as recognition by the Spanish court, was not simply 'great literature'. Its burlesque registered the trauma of landed Russians facing the rise of a new, monied class and a modern bureaucracy: the comedy and tragedy of a society fixated on status and undergoing ructions. The stakes aren't simply 'literary'. In fact, 'Diary of a Madman' eerily predicts Freud's case history of D.P. Schreber, and thus the first stirrings of scientific psychology. 'Diary of a Madman' was a text written for Gogol by the impromptu (and unresolved) goadings of a social crisis.

Unable to bear liberal compromise, Gogol offended the only audience for his outrageous texts by writing an essay in support of the Tsar. Abroad, he succumbed to religious mania. Back in Russia, he followed the instructions of a 'spiritual director' and burned his rewrite of Dead Souls. Finally, in 1852, Gogol killed himself with a penitential regime of abstinence and exaggerated fasting. Was 'Diary of a Madman' 'literary' - or actually a cry for help? We should not allow the posthumous accolade of a Penguin Classic edition to blind us to the facts of Nikolai Gogol's fucked-up existence.

Dolly Sen's book is not 'literary' in the sense of being written for people who see themselves as connoisseurs of literary marvels. The tone is urgent. It's written for those who have gone mad or may go mad or know someone who has gone mad (ie 100% of the population). Yet literary connoisseurs - i.e. people fascinated by the world/word interface (and I believe Lezard counts as one) - will not be able to ignore it. This is because our literature is actually shaped by on-the-edge writing like this, not by publications which dutifully echo canonic forms. It was for this reason that Dada declared war on 'art', reasserting the principle which motivated Dante, Milton and Blake: the realisation that symbolic manipulations concern the very stuff of social reality.

In mass society, argued Hans Richter in his polemic The Struggle For Film, documentary develops a universal significance: 'fiction' was exposed as a sentimental blind, a bourgeois straitjacket. Dolly Sen doesn't 'write better' than the Booker Prize time-wasters, any more than a photograph 'paints better' than an oil-painting. Her documentary of madness in welfare-state Britain has a scientific and political value that far outways any 'stylistic' posturing. Nevertheless, The World Is Full of Laughter contains the kind of absolute, irreducible writing (the social facts) which will be endlessly pastiched by the 'fiction' confectioners of the future (if we allow them a future). It has the clean, hard, efficient style of a writer breaking new ground.

Sen tells us that her package-holiday in America was funded by receiving a back-dated Disability Allowance cheque of £1000. Except when faced with DSS inquisitors, the poor don't need to lie about their income. That's the difference between Sen and the 'confessional' outpourings of celebrities like Tony Parsons and Tracey Emin: the Mad Pride posse don't use sentimentality about 'relationships', the myth that sex is choice rather than necessity, as a blind to conceal the financial actualities (Bill Drummond’s reputation as a 'media terorist' has much to do with his focus on money). The fact that 'our' morals and life-choices are publicly handled by individuals who conceal their economic base (and baseness) explains why the discussions are so vapid and trivial, making it tempting to dismiss the 'personal' as a veritable cul-de-sac. But if left politics is to become what the Communist Manifesto called for - a facing with sober senses our real conditions of life and our relations with our kind - then it desperately needs the stark realism of Sen’s 'mad' writing. The prol confessional brings the question of 'how we live' into the global arena, restores to collective politics its existential sting.

But then, of course, it's possible that Dolly Sen will become a 'success', perhaps even a literary confectioner herself (buddhist-flavoured). That dreary possibility is the price of anyone entering the realm of publishing. Meanwhile, read The World Is Full of Laughter and experience something first-hand - words and phrases still bloody with their birth.

Dolly Sen // The World Is Full of Laughter //Brentwood: http://www.chipmunkapublishing.com , 2002ISBN: 0-95422-181-8

Ben Watsonhttp://www.militantesthetix.co.uk