There is something about madness that is so attractive to the psyche and inspires artistes, following modernist traits, to use it to capture the social neurosis, paralysis and malaise prevalent in modern society. Madness, in its innocence, allows the individual to poke at humanity's follies and vices through sarcasm, humour and ridicule and get away with it. It is this lack of inhibitions that excites the satirist and challenges him to look at himself from another angle.
Modernism as postulated by Ellman and Fiedson (1965) is: "A distinctive mode of imagination which derives from the enlightenment ... Strongly implies some sort of historical discontinuity, either liberation from inherited patterns or, at another extreme deprivation and disinheritance."
...