“In my case the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance.”
This story, upon my re-reading today, is not (as I once remember quipping to someone) about a vampire with bad teeth, where the memorable joke was in the “indented” hand at the end. It is, I now see, more about an obsession with good teeth, those stolen from some exhumation of premature burial of the woman whom Egaeus loved fit to marry, despite being cousins.
My now aware idealisation of the monomania of collating things like these words, analysing them, triangulating them with other readers, chasing the noumenon of their synchronous rhythms and meanings, indeed gestalt real-time reviewing the gradual changes in them, here the changes in a particular person, often with resistant conjunctions and clauses, like the unclear half-measures of Zeno’s Paradox, all this hopefully to make bad into good by the persistence of dream reality and fiction truth. To reincarnate a rainbow arch. To clinch a preternatural vision that only such literature as this can provide, like that glimpse of truth-as-teeth by Egaeus in this work itself after his own intrepid gestalt real-time reviewing described to the reader! Using what I see as an ability like mine (some would call it a severe disability to be suffered!) of ‘attentive’ pareidolia / apophenia and synchronicity / confirmation-bias, as shown by the text of this story, viz….
“…a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form—hourly and momentarily gaining vigor—and at length obtaining over me the most singular and incomprehensible ascendancy. […] To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention rivetted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book— […] —to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind— […] —horror more horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity.”
To translate the story’s own bit of French — ‘that all her teeth were ideas’.
My previous reviews of Poe: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/04/20/tales-of-mystery-and-imagination-edgar-poe/ and https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/06/15/the-tell-tale-heart-by-edgar-allan-poe/ and https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/04/30/the-facts-in-the-case-of-m-valdemar/
PS: see first comment below
Relating to the Zeno’s Paradox point above this is the first paragraph of my story in Ghosts & Scholars in 1994 –
“I needed Time to be a moveable feast, so that I could mould it to my purpose, bend it to each and every whim. Time endured more than its intrinsic length but, otherwise, was shorter than mere moments laid end to end in widdershins motion. What is the present moment other than a series of timeless moments? The past, contrariwise, was replete with nothing but alternating longueurs. The future – what of that? It would replicate the past, no doubt, but with newer and, hence, tawdrier, more uncharacterful pauses between its own present moments. For me, the flexibility of Time was all important. Still is. I live at the corner of sight or am the very mote in the eye as it stares beyond the edge of a sunlit land-locked meadow during an endless childhood summer holiday that has yet to begin. I was, am, will be one of Pan’s creatures who outlives Pan, outlives even the memory of Pan having ever existed in or out of make-believe.”
This story is shown in full here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/shaped-like-a-snake/