Explication of Georges Polti’s twenty second Dramatic Situation in Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam

I chose Polti’s twenty second Dramatic Situation “all sacrificed for passion” because I felt it related very well to the chapter “Winston” from Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. Originally I was going to analyze this section with Polti’s sixteenth Dramatic Situation, “madness”, but I felt that “all sacrificed for passion” was more all-encompassing. Polti also said that this situation could exemplify “ruin of mind, health and life” as well as “a future ruined by a passion”. Both of these concepts are apparent in this chapter.

Within this chapter we see a young man named Winston struggling with insomnia and as the chapter progresses we begin to realize that Winston is in fact rather insane. As the chapter continues he continually explains that he was “poisoned” by his neighbor at a Halloween party because she was secretly in love with him. Dr. Sri explains his story from an unbiased perspective in his notes after speaking with Winston at a clinic,

“Winston is a twenty-two-year-old man with no previous psychiatric history who believes that he was poisoned by his upstairs neighbor Adrienne. He believes that after secretly administering a drug to him in a blue-coloured beverage, she seduced him at a Halloween party. He is sexually and romantically obsessed with her and feels that she is secretly in love with him and that she wants to abandon her husband, Claude. Winston believes that the drug produced a temporary amnesia and also has caused his profound sleep disturbance… The patient reports multiple somatic complaints, a sense of hyper vigilance, and has paranoid ideation concerning this woman and her husband. There is a suggestion of auditory hallucination – whispers heard in the night – and perhaps of thought implantation. Winston is paranoid, with some morbid thoughts, but has no homicidal or suicidal ideation. His thought process is at times tangential, his speech borders on being pressured, and my overall impression is one of a first-break psychosis”.

(page 124)

This is the first insight we see into Winston that is not from his own perspective, but by the end we’re granted a piece of information that actually astounds the reader.

Dr. Sri goes to Winston’s apartment building to talk to both him and Adrienne, but Winston enters a fit of psychosis that is so extreme Dr. Sri has to involve the authorities. While they wait for the police, Adrienne and Sri have a conversation about Winston. Within this conversation it is revealed that Adrienne was not in town on Halloween, that she does not have a husband named Claude but instead a roommate named Claudia and that she rarely sees her roommate because she works nights. Everything we have been told through Winston’s narration throughout this chapter is proven to be false by these three facts. He has not been hearing conversation between Adrienne and her husband and she was not even in town to poison him on Halloween. This knowledge also gives the fact that he was spying on her a new realm of emotion. It’s creepy to think of a crazy man viewing Adrienne in this way, but at the same time his insanity is justification for his actions. Although one may find his actions inappropriate, Winston has no way of accounting for them and therefore cannot be blamed.

What Winston has sacrificed for his passion for Adrienne is made clear by the last few lines of this chapter. It is quite simple: Winston has sacrificed everything for her. He has sacrificed sleep, comfort, his dignity and his sanity. He has psychotic with thoughts of murder, making him a potential criminal as well. His love for Adrienne has caused him to sacrifice his life in the sense he can no longer live it, but yet he still goes on living. Adrienne has caused his complete corruption, and at the same time she doesn’t even know it. To her, Winston is just her downstairs neighbour. She doesn’t know that he listens to her take baths, or to every move that she makes. She has no idea that he has made up entire dialogues involving her and her non-existent husband – or that he “hears” her have sex with this same non-existent husband. These dialogues have no basis in real life, but Winston substitutes them for his own twisted reality.

Dr. Sri has tried to help Winston. He has given him medication to help him rest. His lack of sleep only adds to his mounting psychosis, however Winston is too far gone to help himself. He can’t think straight and has reached a point in which everyone is out to get him. He thinks thoughts that are broken and very accusatory and inquisitive. “Why should I have to eat pills? Why not an injection, a surgical procedure? This is a perfect way to make me take something, to make me look like I wanted to take it. Is that the deal?” (page 143). It’s questions like these that show us insight into his character, that demonstrate his thought process. Winston wants an alternative, but at the same time the reader knows that this alternative would in turn provoke the same questions that he has been asking at every bend in the story.

The Dramatic Situation “all sacrificed for passion” requires three things: a lover, an object the lover desires, and what the lover sacrifices for the desire. The situation itself can be summarized as “The Lover is impassioned by the Object to the point where they give up the Person or Thing, perhaps unwisely, blinded as they are their passion.” In Winston’s case this is exactly what happened. He is the lover, Adrienne is the object of his desire and his future is what he sacrifices. The word “future” is also applied loosely as he gives up his present life and part of the past for her as well. He is wholly occupied by the desire to be with her and now will spend his future in an asylum until the point where he returns to sanity. We do not know if he will ever reach this point. This Dramatic Situation truly emphasizes Winston’s individual situation and even though “madness” would be a fitting situation, Winston sacrifices a lot more than his sanity for Adrienne.

Word count: 997
(But 203 words were found in quotes)