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.
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.