NPPF: Childhood epilepsy (part 1)

[cfalbert]

IF Nab was thusly afflicted, it has not been made apparent in the course of my admittedly cursory studies. Therefore, we are left to ask whence the inspiration (before we ask the even more obvious - how does it function in the novel, an issue I will try to take on later). The whence appears somewhat obvious to anyone who made it past the first couple of hundred pages of Dostoevsky's The Idiot.

PALE FIRE:
"A thread of subtle pain,
Tugged at by playful death, released again,
But always present, ran through me. One day,
When I'd just turned eleven, as I lay
Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy - 
A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy - 
Bypass chair legs and stray beneath the bed,
There was a sudden sunburst in my head."

It was the sunburst, describing an event occurring INSIDE the house, which triggered the connection.

If I still retain my copy of The Idiot, I cannot locate it, so I must rely on a proxy, specifically Elizabeth Dalton's The Epileptic Mode of Being, reproduced in Bloom's anthology on Dostoevsky. She excerpts:

"Not far off there was a church, and the gilt roof was glistening in the bright sunshine. He remembers that he stared  very persistently at that roof and at the rays of light flashing from it; he could not tear himself away from the light. It seemed to him  that htose rays were his new nature and that in three minutes he would somehow melt  into them....."

The context is Prince Myshkin's telling of the story of a friend, standing before a firing squad. For the benefit of those not familiar with Dosotevsky's bio, the incident is taken from his own life. Accused as an accomplice of a group suspected of subversion, he was sentenced to death by firing squad. At the last minute, Tsar  Nicholas I delivered a reprieve. The trauma of the event led several members of the group to suffer mental breakdowns, though Dostoevsky himself apparently weathered it.

More detail here:

http://www.abcgallery.com/list/2001august01.html

and this one from my former prof at the Middlebury Language program....

http://community.middlebury.edu/~beyer/courses/previous/ru351/bio.shtml

love,

cfa
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20030908/c9fd730d/attachment.html>