Fw: Canto One - Seizures (pt. 2)

[charles albert]

Did I mention that I cannot type for xit?


----- Original Message ----- 
From: charles albert 
To: pycnhon-l at waste.org 
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2003 10:58 AM
Subject: NPPF: Canto One - Seizures (pt. 2)


I could find no traction trying to decipher lines 147-156 in Canto One. I thought there might be some reference to Byron and Shelley, but don't know enough about either to pursue it. But I wonder if this might not shed some light (and I stipulate to Nab's apparent distaste for both Dostoevsky and Freud).

 

>From the Dalton article:

 

"Myshkin understands during the ecstatic moment the saying "there shall be no more time"; it is the moment, he says, "which was not long enough for the water to be spilt out of Mahomet's pitcher, though the epileptic prophet had time to gaze at all the inhabitants of Allah" (pt. 2, chapt. 5)

 

Thus the brilliant , unlimited, harmonious, vision that comes to Myshkin during the pre-epileptic aura is a regression to the timeless world of the primitive ego, buried in the oldest layers of the mind and illuminated during the instant of the aura like a dark landscape in a flash of lightning. The vision occurs during the moment when the structures of the differentiated personality collapse under the pressure of unconscious instinctual impulses, and the mind regresses to an earlier and simpler mode of function, which is remembered after the experience as a sort of prelapsarian paradise in contrast to the fallen world of the reality principle and the adult ego...."

 

Pg 178 of the Bloom Dostoevsky anthology





love,

cfa
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