De la rațiune la nebunie și invers în Năpasta de I. L. Caragiale

Abstract

This article debates the problematic of madness in the case of I.L. Caragiale’s Năpasta. The starting point to our discussion is the definition of the term in relation with reason, the logos and the world. Literature has always shared a fascination with the dialectic of reason and madness. Numerous critics have put the language of madness in relation with that of literature. They share the idea of deviance from the common language. Literature allows us to have a close-up on madness, a look from within, based on the fact that it gives insanity a voice. The topos of madness has a long tradition in Romanian literature also. Every literary epoch offers us a representation of madness. That is why, in the text we analyse, our interpretation focuses on the characters considered to be mad, the spaces relegated to the insane, the language of madness, its forms of manifestation or the solutions of healing, as the drama may be read as a meditation on the relationship between madness and freedom. Thus, Caragiale uses this literary topos in order to undermine the conceptual clarity of some terms that madness enters a dialectic relationship with: reason, liberty, morality.