In a message dated 21/12/2004 04:38:51 GMT Standard Time, chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu writes:
And yet, although I agree with Stadlen that the story ( read through the vertex
he adopted ) can offer us an example of possible wrong uses of clinical
psychiatry - of which VN was certainly aware here - I don´t think that it was
simply the "jargon of clinical psychiatric generalization" that had been "
poetically presented"!
It was VN´s brilliant rendering of the boy´s sensations in a way that allowed us
to see the proximity of a "sane" poet´s imagination and "madness".
Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello's comparison with Baudelaire is fascinating. But I think he misses my point.
VN (or rather, the narrator) does not render the boy's sensations. He speaks, as I said, poetically, presumably far more poetically than Herman Brink in his "scientific monthly", not of the boy, but of "these very rare cases" where "the patient..." [and now follows VN's poetry]. The poetical rendering of what was, if my experience of "scientific monthlies" is anything to go by, almost certainly generalised alienated psychiatric jargon, is still poetry based on the psychiatrist's attributions about these "very rare", but still generalised, "cases".
Anthony Stadlen