Content area
Full text
"It's starting," he thought. "I'm going to have a breakdown ..."
- Anton Chekhov, "Pripadok" ("An Attack of Nerves"), 18881
I now finally, finally know who I am!
___: [I'm a] deeply neurotic-hypersensitive,
hysterico-hypochondriac-depressive,
ecstatic-hypomanic-prolific,
dysphoric-vulnerable psychopath!
An unstable, delirium-drenched,
carnally inhibited, ethically crippled,
simple schizophrenic misanthrope!
- It's nevertheless quite nice to have a little clarity -
- Emil Kraepelin, excerpt from "Lob der Psychoanlyse" ("In Praise of Psychoanalysis"), undated typescript2
The opening lines of the Russian writer Vsevolod Garshin's 1883 story "Krasnyi tsvetok" ("The Red Flower") begin with the unattributed declaration, "Imenem ego imperatorskogo velichestva, gosudaria imperatora Petra Pervogo, ob"iavliaiu reviziiu semu sumasshedshemu domu!" ("In the name of his imperial majesty Peter the First, I order an inspection of this asylum!"). Garshin leaves the provenance of the line unspecified. The sentence immediately following it, informing the reader that the words "were spoken in a loud, harsh, resounding voice," further defers any act of identification: rather than telling the reader who spoke the opening sentence, the third-person narrator informs the reader how it was spoken. While one can assume the words come from "the Patient" ("bol'noi") who has just been forcibly deposited at the asylum, rather than from the two exhausted orderlies accompanying him, this protracted non-naming is a prelude to the realization that the main character has been stripped of identity.3 He is referred to only as "bol'noi" throughout Garshin's story. The reader does not quite know where either the Patient, or the words opening the story, originate.
In this sense, the opening sentence, leftwithout a proper voice attached to it, mimes both the faceless authority present in a legal verdict and in the practices of assessment crucial to medical discourse. The law has no proper persona, only force. Having been brought in a straitjacket to the asylum, and still struggling with his escorts, the Patient is undoubtedly aware of the performative quality of legal utterance. His own statement draws on the same forceful, if faceless, rhetoric; he acts in Peter's name. Yet the declaration is also embedded in medical discourse, both because of where it is made (an asylum) and because it appears to encompass the same practices of surveillance and review that have presumably brought the Patient there in the first...