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Night Vision: Wilfred Bion's Epistemological Poetics and the Experience of the First World War

Author(s) : Dominic Angeloch

Table of Contents

About the author
Introduction

Part I - Experience, cognition, writing—and their failure: Philosophical, psychological, philological aspects
1. Night vision
2. Dangers of understanding: Virgil’s Palinurus as an allegory of cognition
Virgil’s Palinurus
Bion’s Palinurus
Eclipse of Palinurus

Part II - Wilfred Bion’s epistemological poetics
3. Wilfred Bion’s “late work”: Autobiography and “literary turn”
Biography: Childhood in India, youth in England, First World War
On the structure of Bion’s autobiographical writings
The Long Week-End 1897–1919 and War Memoirs 1917–1919
All My Sins Remembered: Another Part of a Life
The trilogy of novels: A Memoir of the Future
The presence of the past in a dream that interprets itself
Dream–dream interpretation—“construction”—dream text
“The only thing I am not quite clear about …”—Bion’s theory of the dream
A first step in a new language
Entering into the unknown

4. “Psychological impossibilities”: Childhood and child’s experience in Wilfred Bion’s The Long Week-End

5. “A sense of disaster, past and impending”: Youth and boarding school life in England before the First World War
Experiences beyond description: “Such cataclysmic disasters cannot be described”
Close reading: The Long Week-End, “England”, Chapter 1
“Misery at school had a dynamic quality”: Everyday life in the boarding school panopticon
Glory and flannel: “England at war. Myself with nothing but my tiny little public school soul”

Part III - Wilfred Bion’s epistemological poetics and the experience of the First World War
6. A sub-thalamic fear”: Wilfred Bion’s War Memoirs 1917–1919
Bion’s War Memoirs 1917–1919 and “a great unsolved puzzle”
Palimpsests
Memory is figurative communication of emotional experience
“I died there”: Life after (psychical) death
“The ghosts look in from the battle again”: The psychological catastrophe of survival
The “Amiens” report of 1958: Another attempt to describe the indescribable
Crater landscapes
How to describe the indescribable?
The silence in the combat breaks
“Cracking up”
“I shall try to give you our feelings at the time I am writing of ”: Outlook

7. Writing the ineffable: The experience of the First World War in The Long Week-End 1897–1919
Experience and narrative
Ypres: Map and territory
Amiens: August 8, 1918
Amiens: Map and territory
Thinking under fire: Measurements in the fog of fear
Sweeting’s death
Panorama of working through a catastrophic trauma
Overview of the external events
Sweeting’s death: The first text version from the war diary of 1919
Sweeting’s death: The second text version in the “Amiens” fragment of 1958
Sweeting’s death: The third text version in The Long Week-End
“We will remember them”: A tomb for Sweeting

Postscript: (Aesthetic) experience and epistemological poetics

References
Index