4 - How am I to sign myself?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
jack Personally, darling, to speak quite candidly, I don't much care about the name of Ernest … I don't think the name suits me at all.
gwendolen It suits you perfectly. It is a divine name. It has music of its own. It produces vibrations.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being EarnestI know of no more heartrending reading than Shakespeare: what must a man have suffered to need to be a buffoon to this extent! – Is Hamlet understood? It is not doubt, it is certainty which makes mad …
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (emphasis original)PATRICK W. SHAKESPEARE
Writing in 1826, Charles Lamb had objected to the correlation, supposedly brought to light by Romantic poetry, between artistic creation and madness. The ‘ground of the mistake’ involved here, Lamb thought, was a failure to draw a clear enough line between sleep and wakefulness; hence ‘men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet’. The notion – today, of course, a full-grown cliché – that genius is close to madness takes no account, Lamb insisted, of the active force of the conscious imagination, a creative activity that ‘implies shaping and consistency’.
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- James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis , pp. 75 - 103Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004