Flaubert - Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert's Madam Bovary is the sort of text we still need today. Not so much the text itself, but the way the text found the world. Written in the 1850's, the work sensationalised the Parisian public, and finally was put on trial for obscenity. The story tells of the wife of a public servant, who yearns for something more. She meets a cultured soul, who kindles in her a desire that had been safely hidden. The story is one we are very familiar with today, but have difficulty making great, in much the same way it was made great in the 19th century. We do not put books on trial anymore. We put authors on trial, in a sense, through their words. But books themselves are immune from makes them truly important.

Schizophrenia and Creativity (B)

I have decided to research an academic piece, and finally produce a paper, on the intersection between schizophrenia and creativity. My own creative inclinations, my relative success, and my continuing battle with schizophrenia, have led me to want to try and come to some sort academic conclusions about this strange partnership. I think I want, fundamentally, to know why there have been times in the history of literature, where people have suffered from schizophrenia, and been able to succeed, to a marked degree, in their endeavours. It might simply be that, given a certain proportion of sufferers, some are likely to achieve despite the overwhelming negativity of their condition. But there seems something more to it than that. As I touched on earlier in an entry below, there is a loosening of association that can occur in schizophrenia, a loosening that lends itself naturally to conceptual and linguistic unusualness. And it is this unusualness which can lead to success in things creative. But my own creativity has something more to it than that. It is a certainty, that I can't explain, but which spills from my mind like some form of automatic machine. I guess I follow my intuition, and trust it, but it is something like a store of creative material that simply is released as I write. The writing is effortless, and seems to come out pre-formed as it were. But I will leave you here to tempt you, and leave you hanging for my research paper.