The Quantity Theory of Insanity was published by Bloomsbury in 1991 and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. The title story proposes a mathematical model of mental health: there is a fixed quantity of sanity in any given population, so that one person’s recovery necessarily produces another’s breakdown. This conceit — stated with perfect academic solemnity, complete with footnotes and statistical tables — is characteristic of Self’s method: take an absurd premise, develop it with rigorous internal logic, and use the resulting narrative to illuminate something genuine about human behavior.
The collection contains six stories, each built on a similar method of systematic extrapolation from the absurd: “Ward 9” (a psychiatric patient’s escape into an alternative reality more coherent than the ward), “Mono-Cellular” (a man who contracts a sexually-transmitted disease that makes him grow a second body), “The North London Book of the Dead” (the dead continue to live in North London, going about their business as before). Each story is written with dense, precise, allusive prose — Self’s vocabulary is enormous and deliberately deployed.
The debut established Self’s distinctive position in British fiction: intellectually ambitious, formally inventive, frequently disgusting, always funny, and completely indifferent to the conventions of literary politeness. The combination of satirical intelligence and bodily grotesquerie would define all his subsequent work.
Collecting The Quantity Theory of Insanity
First edition (Bloomsbury, London, 1991): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75
- Self’s debut — Geoffrey Faber Prize winner