Fengkuang

In 2666, madness is a recurring condition and a contested explanation rather than one settled diagnosis. It accompanies the disintegration of a German military division, unsettles the distinction between dream and waking in the critics’ hotel, enters Oscar Amalfitano’s home as a voice he cannot place, and becomes a family diagnosis attached to Ingeborg. Set beside accounts of historical violence and the ordinary workings of institutions, these episodes make madness both intimate and social: a name for suffering, a sign of disorder, and at times an uncertain description imposed on another person.

Forms of Disorientation

The novel’s episodes do not establish that all unusual experiences have the same cause. Piero Morini’s sudden blindness in Salonika, for instance, is described as a mild attack: he wakes unable to see, panics, then regains control sufficiently to get into his wheelchair and prepare for the conference. The account closely follows his practical efforts and his retreat from the window, but supplies no diagnosis linking the episode to madness. Its relevance is instead formal: an abrupt failure of perception enters a narrative that repeatedly asks how far a person can trust what is seen, heard, remembered, or named.

A different kind of uncertainty appears when Jean-Claude Pelletier and Manuel Espinoza dream after the critics arrive in Santa Teresa. Pelletier wakes from a dream of a bathroom marked by blood and filth; the scene’s apparent reality ends with his awakening. Espinoza’s dream returns to a painting of a desert, where riders seem to move with a slowness that belongs to a different world and voices send words through the scene. Neither dream is presented as a clinical diagnosis. Together, however, they show how the novel lets violence and estrangement pass into sleep, where perception is vivid but its status remains unstable.

Madness in War and Its Aftermath

In the wartime narrative, madness appears first as an image of collective military collapse. After renewed retreat, the German division has dwindled to battalion size, and many soldiers look, in the narration, like people who have escaped an asylum. The comparison registers the army’s disintegration; it does not establish that the soldiers have received a diagnosis. Hans Reiter then leaves the scattered march and continues alone, as the military structure that had organized his movement breaks apart around him.

The prisoner-of-war camp gives madness a more personal and deliberately uncertain form through Zeller, who is later revealed to be Leo Sammer. As interrogators proceed through names alphabetically, the prospect of their return unsettles him. At night he whispers rapidly, moans, and imagines disjointed scenes; by day he preserves a manner of dignity and decorum and remains respected by many of the prisoners. Reiter sees a worsening division between these outwardly different states but cannot identify the forces behind it. Sammer’s claim that his name is not Zeller, followed by his admission that some of what he has told Reiter is true and some false, makes identity and testimony part of the disturbance. The sequence shows the pressure of interrogation and the fear it produces, but does not turn Reiter’s uncertainty into a definitive medical judgment.

Ingeborg and the Family Diagnosis

Ingeborg’s story likewise separates observed distress from the language used to explain it. After she leaves for Cologne, Reiter understands her to be ill, or possibly hungry, and recognizes that she has become mentally unwell, if she was not already so when they met. She is coughing and appears to have a problem with her lungs. He takes her in, finds another place for them to live, and spends much of the following months caring for her: buying food, finding books, cooking, cleaning, and consulting medical books for possible remedies.

The diagnosis enters through her younger sister Grete, who tells Reiter that psychiatrists and neurologists had examined Ingeborg in Berlin and that the general conclusion was insanity. Grete also says that their father and Ingeborg had both been Nazis and that Ingeborg had belonged to the Hitler Youth. When Reiter asks whether Grete therefore considers her crazy, Grete answers that she is completely insane. This is the sister’s stated judgment, reported in a scene shaped by family knowledge and Reiter’s concern; the novel does not offer an independent clinical assessment. The distinction matters: care and diagnosis coexist, but they are not the same thing, and the family’s label does not erase Ingeborg’s history or the practical vulnerability Reiter responds to.

Amalfitano and the Uncertain Voice

In Santa Teresa, Oscar Amalfitano’s first unmistakable encounter with the voice begins at night, before an excursion. It addresses him by name and tells him not to be afraid. He is frightened enough to hurry to Rosa’s room, switch on the light, check the window latch, and wake her. Rather than explain what he has heard, he tells his daughter that he is nervous and thought he heard a noise. After leaving her room, he checks the yard, porch, gate, and street. No person is there; a dog is heading toward Avenida Madero. Back inside, he locks the doors and windows and places a sturdy kitchen knife beside a history of German and French philosophy.

The episode makes the voice’s status unresolved: Amalfitano experiences it as addressing him, but the scene offers no external confirmation of its source. When it returns, it taunts him with a question about his sexuality and then speaks as though it were his grandfather, calling itself nono. Amalfitano answers rather than simply fleeing or waking Rosa again, and the voice proposes that they begin a long, mutually beneficial relationship, insisting on calm. The exchange turns an unexplained auditory experience into a continuing dialogue, without supplying a medical explanation or confirming that the speaker exists outside Amalfitano’s experience. The domestic details—his daughter asleep, the checked latch, the dog in the street, the book and knife on the table—keep the uncanny intrusion anchored in ordinary space.

Madness, Violence, and Social Legibility

Elsewhere, a white-haired speaker argues that societies have long mediated death through words. He contrasts a murder that once became a widely reported story with deaths treated as if they did not count: people who died aboard slave ships and those killed during the Paris Commune. His point is not that historical cruelty was absent, but that public language made some deaths legible and left others outside the field of social concern. He also argues that the archetypes of crime and madness are old even when people’s responses to them change. In this account, madness belongs to a history of interpretation: words can register cruelty, but they can also trim it to fit fear or serve avoidance.

The Santa Teresa scenes sharpen the contrast between disorder and the institutions expected to contain or explain it. Chucho Flores describes a city with factories, maquiladoras, migration, a cocaine cartel, poverty, money, and infrastructure unable to keep pace with demographic growth; he says the city has no time. In another scene, a prison official remarks that inmates become nervous during a storm and says that the killer is being brought in. These details do not establish that madness causes the violence. Instead, they place individual disturbance within a landscape of pressure, institutional routine, and continuing killings. The novel’s varied uses of the word therefore resist a single explanation: a metaphor for a collapsing army, an uncertain experience at home, a family’s diagnosis, and a historical category all remain distinct, even as they echo one another.