Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0010860, Tue, 21 Dec 2004 09:59:00 -0800

Subject
Fwd: Re: Signs and Symbols
Date
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----- Forwarded message from STADLEN@aol.com -----
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 01:18:42 EST
From: STADLEN@aol.com

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

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