A very engaging episode. I was teaching Sonny’s Blues last semester, and I had forgotten how starkly (and organically) Baldwin poses the question you and Sam seem to be digging up here. To wit: mental illness or addiction-unto-death as fated or not, as integral to personality or not, as somehow beautiful (in its way) or not, but ultimately the narrator approaches a sort of detente with the question, which at least is honest. I wonder what you’d make of this: most of the students (working class, largely immigrant) pushed back very strongly on Sonny’s contention that the heroin, the jazz, the homelessness, the fatalism, is really just a part of some greater whole (that none of the moving parts are the *cause*, precisely, of any of the others -- Sonny is quite articulate and self-aware on this point). And yet, these students are - like their more affluent, whiter American peers - just as quick to slap mental health labels on their own and others’ behaviors and sensibilities. It seemed to me a contradiction worth unpacking, and I’m not sure I was able to make them see that.
Thank you! Having encountered the same ideas among the youth, I think the idea is that labelling implies a course of treatment, whether official or of the self-care variety, whereas romantic madness, Baldwin's existential "roar rising from the void," is dangerous because inherently unable to be fully or predictably remediated. My own detente with the question, I think similar to the one arrived at in both Woolf's and Baldwin's narratives, is that art itself, putting the madness into form, can be the therapy, whereas addiction to illicit substances in particular is a counterfeit (both Emerson and Shelley say this in their Romantic manifestoes about poetry, that the poet is naturally attracted to drugs because drugs seem to allow you to cheat your way to the sublime—and for this very reason they should be strenuously avoided).
A very engaging episode. I was teaching Sonny’s Blues last semester, and I had forgotten how starkly (and organically) Baldwin poses the question you and Sam seem to be digging up here. To wit: mental illness or addiction-unto-death as fated or not, as integral to personality or not, as somehow beautiful (in its way) or not, but ultimately the narrator approaches a sort of detente with the question, which at least is honest. I wonder what you’d make of this: most of the students (working class, largely immigrant) pushed back very strongly on Sonny’s contention that the heroin, the jazz, the homelessness, the fatalism, is really just a part of some greater whole (that none of the moving parts are the *cause*, precisely, of any of the others -- Sonny is quite articulate and self-aware on this point). And yet, these students are - like their more affluent, whiter American peers - just as quick to slap mental health labels on their own and others’ behaviors and sensibilities. It seemed to me a contradiction worth unpacking, and I’m not sure I was able to make them see that.
Thank you! Having encountered the same ideas among the youth, I think the idea is that labelling implies a course of treatment, whether official or of the self-care variety, whereas romantic madness, Baldwin's existential "roar rising from the void," is dangerous because inherently unable to be fully or predictably remediated. My own detente with the question, I think similar to the one arrived at in both Woolf's and Baldwin's narratives, is that art itself, putting the madness into form, can be the therapy, whereas addiction to illicit substances in particular is a counterfeit (both Emerson and Shelley say this in their Romantic manifestoes about poetry, that the poet is naturally attracted to drugs because drugs seem to allow you to cheat your way to the sublime—and for this very reason they should be strenuously avoided).