Scanning the Hypnoglyph : Sleep in Modernist and Postmodern Representation [1 ed.] 9789004316218, 9789004316188

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Scanning the Hypnoglyph

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts General Editor Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe (University of Lincoln, uk) Editorial Board Anna Bonshek (Prana World Group, Australia) Per Brask (University of Winnipeg, Canada) John Danvers (University of Plymouth, uk) Amy Ione (Diatrope Institute, Berkeley, usa) Michael Mangan (Loughborough University, uk) Jade Rosina McCutcheon (Melbourne University, Australia) Gregory Tague (St Francis College, New York, usa) Arthur Versluis (Michigan State University, usa) Christopher Webster (Aberystwyth University, uk) Ralph Yarrow (University of East Anglia, uk)

VOLUME 46

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cla

Scanning the Hypnoglyph Sleep in Modernist and Postmodern Representation By

Nathaniel Wallace

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover Image: Janet Kozachek, Hypnos (2005). Mixed media mosaic mask (ceramic, glass, fused glass, polyvinyl resin), 22.9 cm x 33 cm. Private collection. Image © Janet Kozachek. Photo Credit: Rachel Ficek. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wallace, Nathaniel Owen, 1948- author. Title: Scanning the hypnoglyph : sleep in modernist and postmodern representation / by Nathaniel Wallace. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2016] | Series: Consciousness, literature and the arts | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016024326 (print) | lccn 2016039212 (ebook) | isbn 9789004316188 (hardback : acid-free paper) | isbn 9789004316218 (E-book) Subjects: lcsh: Sleep in literature. | Sleep in art. | Dreams in literature. | Dreams in art. Classification: lcc PN56.S577 W35 2016 (print) | lcc pn56.S577 (ebook) | ddc 809/.93353--dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016024326

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For Sammy

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Contents Preface ix Acknowledgements xx List of Figures xxiii 1 Introduction: From Hypnos to the Hypnoglyph 1 Formatting the Hypnoglyph 2 Sleep and Narrative Resistance 11 Sleep and Cognitive Study 21 The Dream, Textual Servant 35 Fighting Sleep: Christian Directory X2 (Persons and Baxter), Descartes’s Cogito, and Pascal 41 Baudelairean and Other Beginnings 59 Sleep amid Mid-nineteenth Century Migrations of Religious Discourse 78 2 A Life in the Day of a Hypnoglyph: Vertical Slumber and Other Typicalities 92 Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sleeping Standing Up” 100 Robert Lowell’s “Man and Wife” 113 Vincent Desiderio’s The Sleeping Family 119 Vincent Desiderio’s The Intepretation of Color 131 3 The Size of Sleep, Sizing the Self 144 Richard Wilbur’s “Walking to Sleep” 153 Anselm Kiefer’s The Rose Gives Honey to the Bees (Dat Rosa Mel Apibus) 177 Fran Gardner’s No Need for Wings 184 Fran Gardner’s Orienting the Self 189 David Yaghjian’s Sleep 192 4 Latter-Day Ariadnes: From Hypnoglyph to Somnoscript 197 Anne Sexton’s “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)” 207 Marguerite Duras’s The Malady of Death (La maladie de la mort) 215 Yasunari Kawabata’s “House of the Sleeping Beauties” 228 Anselm Kiefer’s Brunnhilde Sleeps 232

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5 Alternate Endymions, Other Ariadnes 237 Gustav Courbet’s Sleep (The Two Friends) 244 The Plurisexual Marcel Proust 253 The Queer Schlaraffenland of Paul Cadmus 256 Signorelli’s Afterlife: Freud to Lacan 268 Andy Warhol’s Sleep 272 Marguerite Duras’s Blue Eyes Black Hair (Les yeux bleus cheveux noirs) 283 Mark Tansey’s Utopic 295 Vincent Desiderio’s Couple 300 6 Conclusion: The Hypnoglyph and the Misclosure of the Postmodern 304 Bibliography 313 Index 338

Preface Now leaden slumber with life’s strength doth fight, And everyone to rest himself betakes, Save thieves and cares and troubled minds that wakes. shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, lines 124–261

…

… people who have difficulty in going to sleep seek first of all to escape from the waking world. After having desperately, for hours on end, with their eyes closed, revolved in their minds thoughts similar to those which they would have had with their eyes open, they take heart again on noticing that the preceding minute has been weighed down by a line of reasoning in strict contradiction to the laws of logic and the reality of the present, this brief “absence” signifying that the door is now open through which they may perhaps presently be able to escape from the perception of the real, to advance to a resting-place more or less remote from it, which will mean their having a more or less “good” night. marcel proust2

∵ It was not an occasion for sleep. I was driving from central South Carolina ­toward Charleston and had accelerated to the excessive velocity that has become the de facto limit on Interstate 26, an east–west artery stretching from the Appalachians to the Atlantic. It was an entropic afternoon in late November or early December, the genre of dull chilly day that qualifies for winter in few locales other than almost flat and nearly winterless eastern South Carolina. Shortly before, I had exited a typically raucous composition class and now was driving to a retinal examination that, requested on short notice because

1 The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 7th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2014), 1676. 2 Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu), trans. Scott Moncrieff and ­Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, 1981) 2:84.

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of some visual disturbances, was in fact one of several preludes to an eventual detachment. Turning on the radio with much in mind, I happened to tune in to the l­ ocal npr affiliate, just in time to hear a scholarly-sounding rendition of some exquisite verses: I woke in the night to see your diminished bulk lying beside me– you on your back, like a sarcophagus as your feet held up the covers … . (ll. 16–19)3 As the program continued and then closed, it became clear that the reader to whom I had listened was the poet Donald Hall, who alternately was interviewed and was reading selections from the poetry of his late wife, Jane Kenyon. Not having caught the title of the poem from which such intriguing lines had been drawn, I later spent a busy hour or so browsing through Kenyon’s work before I located the full text of “Pharaoh” (1993), a brilliant and ­confessional-sounding piece depicting a woman’s difficult experiences during her companion’s recuperation after surgery. Strange yet also typical that this brief masterpiece of sleep-poetry was previously unknown to me. Nor was I then at all familiar with Kenyon – even though I had at that point already researched the topic of sleep for a decade or more with abundant accumulations of source material. (And during her tragically curtailed career, Kenyon engaged the topic of sleep with stellar results on several occasions.) Reflecting on this poem and the incident that introduced me to it, I have come to perceive the whole episode as nearly emblematic of the placement and experience of sleep in postmodern culture (or in contemporary culture if one shies away from that so frequently invoked term, the postmodern, the “p” word). Ubiquitous as well as elusive, sleep may not be attainable when longed for, may be excluded by crowded agendas or impinged upon by insomnia, or can be heavily tinged with such unfavorable insinuations as those of illness, anaesthesia, mortality, or neglect of duty. This is not to deny that the entire gamut of sleep-experiences (e.g., dreams included) has been imbued with these and similar associations during other eras. Yet there seems to be a heightening, an accentuation of such aspects – at least in the realms of visual 3 Jane Kenyon, “Pharaoh,” Collected Poems (St. Paul: Graywolf, 2005), 265. Excerpts from this work are copyright © 2005 by The Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

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and verbal representation – in a world that is both sleep-deprived and increasingly sensitive to the attributes of sleep, its physiological as well as psychic dimensions. Germane here also is the factor of narrative resistance, a nearly inseparable accompaniment of sleep yet, again, often particularly detectable during the postmodern era. This phenomenon is discussed in detail below. But for now, it may suffice to point out that unmistakably resonant in these verses from “­Pharaoh” is the insinuation that this sleeper’s dormancy retards and ­thickens – and could well entail an indefinite postponement of – awakening. It is also relevant to call attention to the poem’s seemingly innocuous opening line, a quotation culled from the so often apt solipsisms of Yogi Berra: “The future ain’t what it used to be,” said the sage of the New York Yankees … . (ll. 1–2) As a naive paradox, the assertion amuses and is non-threatening. But in a complex literary context such as “Pharaoh,” there may be something to worry about. If the future has deteriorated, the past may have done so as well, and likewise for the present. And with no past, present, or future, there is little likelihood that any sort of narrative can develop. Hence this carefree opening ties in with the ominous scenario depicted in the final lines. Kenyon’s already lowkeyed narrative is stymied, is sluggish, yet without depicting a state of easeful repose at the same time. How different from the anxious watching of Kenyon’s speaker and her ­sleeper’s leaden quiescence is the implied wholesomeness of sleep in the ­otherwise atrocious situation that unfolds in the closing moments of Richard Connell’s intense short story, “The Most Dangerous Game” (1924). A noted hunter, traversing the Caribbean on a ship, falls off and then swims to a nearly deserted island. Barely escaping a briny grave, he reclines at the edge of a ­jungle and tumbles “headlong into the deepest sleep of his life.”4 The worst is to come, however, for the island is controlled by a demented Russian general, Zaroff. The latter insists that, as in the case of all previous individuals stranded on the island, Rainsford must submit to being hunted for a three-day period (or being murdered by the general’s enormous henchman). At the conclusion of this interval, if the hunted one has not been slain, the survivor will have won the contest. It seems a foregone conclusion that Rainsford will succumb as well, yet he somehow evades the various ruses and snares 4 Richard Connell, “The Most Dangerous Game,” 101 Years’ Entertainment: the Great Detective Stories 1841–1941, ed. Ellery Queen (New York: Modern Library, 1946), 819.

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that have customarily enabled Zaroff to finish off his victims. In the end, it is Rainsford who triumphs and, having killed his tormenters, he slumbers deliciously – after three nearly sleepless days – in the luxurious bed that Zaroff has unwillingly left at his disposal. “The Most Dangerous Game” is emphatically modernist in its portrayal of sleep though clearly without the subtlety of, say, Proust or the provocations of (for instance) Baudelaire or Mann (whose relevant works are examined in the discussions that follow). Yet for Connell as for so many modernist verbal and visual artists, there are appropriate intervals and locales for restorative repose as determined by events, well-ordered time-schemes, and natural or architectural settings. Sleep under the wrong circumstances can indeed be dangerous or even lethal, but in this absorbing tale, sleep is relatively unproblematic and unambiguous throughout. Thus Connell and his protagonist manage to stave off and manipulate its resistances so that this steadily unfolding narrative can prance masterfully to its close. Whatever else this study undertakes to demonstrate and clarify, it begins with the observation that the representation of sleep, even in its elemental dreamless form, performs aesthetic functions, delineates the individual psyche, and reveals cultural values. Such representations, in addition, often indicate a discursive ground via the linear posture of a reclining figure or figures. For modernism, sleep indeed tends to establish an existential baseline, a lower threshold of lived human experience. With the ambience of fragmentation often apparent during the postmodern era, however, the dorsal line harboring the central nervous system is frequently restive as depicted individuals imply desire for–rather than acquisition of – equilibrium in dormancy. While dreams, sleeping nudes, and other facets of dormancy were very popular among modernist writers and visual artists, sleep-phenomena of every type have given rise to an even greater abundance and range of postmodern artwork. Indeed, there are grounds for detecting a postmodern quasi-genre, the hypnoglyph, that exploits the many enigmatic and evocative qualities of dormancy. Quite diverse in its manifestations, this representational type is widespread in contemporary verbal and visual culture. A starting point for this project is found in the existence of shared views, across time-periods and cultures, regarding the characteristics and the value (or lack thereof) of a fundamental human experience. The argument is also made that likenesses and trends in the representation of sleep are tied to recurring cultural and ideological factors as well as to cognitive processes held to be universal. With a vast range of material and approaches available, a degree of proportion is sought via an Aristotelian perspective. In his treatise on the subject, “On Sleep and Waking” (a segment of the Parva naturalia), Aristotle

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defines sleep as a state experienced by all intelligent life and characterized by inactivity of the senses as well as by potential for awakening. And in contrast to later commentators who emphasize dreaming as the only significant stage of dormancy, Aristotle has presented sleep (through contrasted throughout with the waking state) as a distinct corporeal experience in its own right (453b–458a:33).5 Following the Aristotelian avenue further and adapting the notion of plot (muthos) set forth in the Poetics, this project argues for a four-phase sequence involved, in a variety of ways, in visual art and literature. To be sure, the sleepwaking cycle here at issue invokes a coherence at variance with the traditional notion of plot as a synthesis of all that is done or a “construction of events” (“synthesin ton pragmaton” [Poetics 1450a:3–4]).6 The overarching theater that encloses both sleep and the waking state is physiological as well as cognitive. Intentions, agency, and performative capacities are often mediated and, above all, in flux within an inclusive, corporeal matrix. In addition, the circadian cycle, if apprehended as a plot-like sequence, is hardly an imitation or representation (mimesis) although it has given rise to an immense representational outgrowth – and continues to do so. Despite the discrepancies between Aristotelian muthos and the circadian cycle, something resembling peripeteia is surely often found in the latter. And there are experiences resembling anagnorisis as well, at awakening if not at other times. Christopher Dewdney has eloquently commented that “it is always night inside the body. Bright sunlight passes through the skin and on into deeper tissues to a depth of approximately three centimeters, but past that it is pitch dark.”7 Yet it can also be argued that somehow within, amid synapses, neurons, enzymes, and the mechanisms of memory, there is twilight as well, in addition to nightfall, dawn, even arrant daylight. In the context of this discussion, it may be best to conceive of the circadian or sleep-waking cycle as beginning with an initiatory phase that often entails an appreciation of sleep’s qualities or a succession of images that mimics a process of artistic creation. The second stage, sleep itself, can provide narrative transition, an opportunity for depiction – or surveillance – of the sleeper, or an occasion for intervention 5 Aristotle devotes a section as well to the study of dreams (458a:34–462b:12). References to Aristotle’s Parva naturalia are based on the Loeb Classical Library edition with translation by W.S. Hett (On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath [Cambridge: Harvard up, 1995]). 6 Stephen Halliwell, trans., in Aristotle, Poetics; Longinus: On the Sublime; Demetrius: On Style, trans. Halliwell, W.H. Fyfe, and Doreen C. Innes (Cambridge: Harvard up, 2005), 49. 7 Christopher Dewdney, Acquainted with the Night: Excursions Through the World After Dark (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 138.

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by an adversary or abuser. Third is dream, and, if it occurs, it may reveal the life trajectory or other basic traits of a sleeper; dream can also fashion a layer of narrative that interacts with the main narrative of a text. The final phase, awakening, often presents a new world characterized by immediate contact with an individual’s destiny or inner nature.8 In its most evolved form, awakening is depicted as a resurrection or final judgment. In conjunction with this framework that, broadly speaking, is narratival, it should also be pointed out that – very often and for a very long period of time–, the sleep segment of the cycle has been apprehended as a form of resistance to narrative. Building on a hypnophobic trend in Greek culture that dates from the Iliad, Plato forges a strong case against slumber in Book 7 of the Laws, where sleep’s incompatibility with the constructive activities of the polis is brought to the fore. While such reservations have alternated with a longing for and, indeed, a love of sleep in many social and historical contexts, negative views have tended to predominate. Also, between Plato and the present day, a theological dimension is often implicated in these denigrating assessments. Way-stations in this regard can be located in René Descartes’s concept of a vigilant cogito and in a widely read pair of works entitled Christian Directory, one by Robert Persons (1582, 1622) and the other by Richard Baxter (1678), wherein sleep is sharply censured. These discursive sites are among those that have contributed substantially to a “cognitive ethic” that is, along with the work ethic, much a part of Euro-American culture. I should also make clear that this book is not exclusively a foray into the interpretation of dreams in the arts. The approach here is somno- and somatocentric as well. Dreams are of course grounded in the body, but scholarly discussions have tended to examine oneiric experiences from the standpoints of symbolism and of narrative. Dreams are analyzed in the present study to insure that the commentary deals adequately with the facets of sleep that each work brings into play. For the most part, however, attention is slanted toward what the presence – or absence – of dreams may imply about the overall sleep situation conveyed in a given work of visual art or literature. Sleep experiences may facilitate hermeneutic narratives in instances when, in addition to the content of a certain dream, the posture of the dreamer and related details may be primary contributors to whatever resistances are communicated by an artwork. There is debate as to whether postmodernism has concluded, but in any case, the new sleep-centered work embraces such postmodern goals as endeavoring 8 For overviews of circadianism that are informative and even entertaining as well, see ­Dewdney, 136–41, and J. Allan Hobson, The Dreaming Brain (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 109–33.

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to portray what is unpresentable and problematizing prior genres. Accepted literary forms (especially allegory or the diary), if detected in these ambiguous works, are likely to appear residual. The hypnoglyph is, moreover, often characterized by a general flattening traceable to visual techniques of the ­nineteenth-century. But probably the most significant trait is the foregrounding of narrative resistance, usually in tandem with a frustrated diaristic ­impulse. The diary with its recording of circadian transactions is the main prior genre that the hypnoglyph complicates. Scanning the Hypnoglyph examines in detail the modernist paradigm, within which sleep-states, typically, are serenely aestheticized. The work identifies and interprets, also, key monuments in a chronicle of a postmodern representational “kind.” Interrogating paintings as well as poetry and other texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and onward to the turn of a millennium, Scanning the Hypnoglyph assembles a wide-ranging exhibition-withoutwalls. Along the way, ideological and aesthetic contexts are sought out for a varied group of restive sleepers as the artworks that house them are scrutinized and critiqued. In the substantial first chapter, “From Hypnos to the Hypnoglyph,” I ­address theoretical concerns and provide historical background. Among other ­issues, the involvement of the diaristic model is charted in relation to H ­ eidegger’s concept of an idealized “everydayness” that “is not to be understood calendrically.”9 In the arts, key passages in Proust are found to reveal a similar perspective. Proust is especially relevant because of his frequent employment of sleep-states in constructing a privileged temporality. However, with the passage into late modernism and beyond, Heidegger’s remarks (with Proust as literary counterpart) are found to indicate an edifying moment i­mpossible to maintain. As the hypnoglyph begins to emerge, the calendrical dimension (held by Heidegger to be of minor importance) is rather salient. But soon this ancillary temporal mode becomes difficult to detect. Thus the second chapter begins with observation that, when modernism wanes, the diary manages on many literary occasions to alleviate some of the era’s perceived defects, such as over-optimism regarding the possibilities of individual subjectivity. For poet ­Elizabeth Bishop, the diary as implied pre-text helps reconfigure the self by calling forth a basic, circadian paradigm. Even when the usual alternation of activity and rest is disrupted – as in her somewhat bizarre “Sleeping Standing Up”–, diaristic overtones point in the direction of a stabilizing “log” of 9 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), trans. John Macquarrie and Edward ­Robinson (London: scm Press, 1962), 422.

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immediate sensations. For further focus on the factor of temporal compromise discovered in Bishop, discussion turns to Robert Lowell’s “Man and Wife,” a confessional text in which time is seemingly transcendent. But while Lowell indeed evokes an idealized or Heideggerian everydayness, his poem also leaves ample room for slippage that frustrates the emergence of an adequate or authentic present. As the chapter continues, the discussion assesses the phenomenon of v­ ertical slumber as a seeming representational aberration that becomes nearly emblematic, during the postmodern era, of the hypnoglyph’s tendency to encapsulate a fascination with sleep together with an implicit awareness of the resistances that the condition of human dormancy entails. Two substantial paintings by contemporary New York artist Vincent Desiderio are examined as characteristic visual texts. Chapter 3 of this study of the hypnoglyph looks further at sleeping postures and at what the material and other contexts of sleep may reveal about the individual who slumbers (or wishes to do so). Assessed here are correlations between – on the one hand – the details of varied representations and–on the other–what is implied in each case regarding the size of the dormant ego. The centerpiece of the chapter is Richard Wilbur’s “Walking to Sleep” (1969), an impressive poem that ostensibly offers remedies for insomnia resulting from conflict between the body’s claim for deep repose on the one hand and pressing agendas on the other. Two alternative “therapies” are set forth, both requiring the prospective sleeper – in lieu of simply counting sheep – to engage in image-forming processes that resemble aesthetic programs. The first major section of the poem advances a cure for insomnia that fails because the mode of image-formation recommended to the would-be sleeper is controlled and ratiocinative. Scrutiny of this ill-conceived “treatment” reveals a number of parallels with postmodernism, which was unfolding during this time-period. The second therapy, on the other hand, culminates in the dormant figure of the Hindu god, Vishnu, who contentedly dreams in a cosmic setting. Wilbur’s interjection of this exotic image is ingeniously apt as “Walking to Sleep” closes. For the apparition of Vishnu tends to revitalize a decaying modernist poetics in which sleep is valuable as a purveyor of dreams. Wilbur’s artistically recuperative innovation is striking, with both sleep and a global cartography constrained to serve a modernist poetics. He was not, however, a pioneer in attempting such an inclusive construct. More than thirty years previously, in an extraordinary essay, “Sleep, Sweet Sleep” (“Süßer Schlaf”), the master modernist Thomas Mann conjured up a similar confederation of apparently incompatible elements. Mann is on this occasion not involved in a polemics within the arts, or at least less clearly subscribed to one than is the case for Wilbur. Mann’s interest is exploring the capacities of sleep,

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which is for Mann both a mysterious and rejuvenating physiological process. In “Sleep, Sweet Sleep” Mann also reveals links between sleep and artistic capacities. Filling out this chapter, there are assessments of significant visual works by two mixed-media artists – one German (Anselm Kiefer) and the other American (Fran Gardner) – and by an American painter, David Yaghjian. Chapter 4, entitled “Latter-Day Ariadnes: From Hypnoglyph to Somnoscript,” is centered on Marguerite Duras’s The Malady of Death (La maladie de la mort). A mere fifty-odd pages of large print, The Malady of Death manages to blur distinctions between poetry and prose, book and pamphlet, novella and tale, fantasy and reality, pornography and “high” art. Beyond the typical resistance to narrative, there is an ambience of resistance to representation as well. Duras splices the imprecisions of sleep into her textual program with mischievous deftness. The focal point for the varied concerns of this ambivalently narrational document is the recurrent image of a sleeping female nude. The author exploits this historically well-endowed image within a critique of the conventions of gender domination. The Malady of Death tells of a sexual encounter of several days between a nameless young man of ambiguous sexuality, who is referred to only as “vous,” and an anonymous woman who has allowed herself to be hired. The two individuals remain pronouns without antecedent, characters desirous of self-authorship. Whether the relationship even transpires as fictional actuality is never totally clear. Also examined in this chapter is Duras’s adept incorporation of a pre-text originating in a non-European narrative tradition. At issue is the “House of the Sleeping Beauties” by Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata, a work with its own sense of the impasses inherent in a dialectic of desire. So subtly effected is the intertextual absorption of this Japanese text that the term “somnoscript” is an appropriate designation for the resultant text. At the same time, it is reasonable to propose that a similar, subdued borrowing has contributed to ­Kawabata’s narrative. His comely women, confined to slumber for a contracted period of time, can be assumed to have their source in European folklore. “House of the Sleeping Beauties” takes place in an unusual bordello, a haven for old men where intercourse is prohibited. Here senescent clientele (who are presumably past the age of virility) pay for the privilege of passing the night in the company of a young and beautiful nude woman who has been submerged for the occasion in a drug-induced slumber. Striking similarities of “action” and of splintered, refracted libido establish an intertextual link between the decayed psychic landscapes of Kawabata and those of Duras. Chapter 5 is a necessarily lengthy one that treats of the abundant modernist and postmodern representations of sleep in gay, lesbian, and androgynous

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contexts. Discussion begins with Courbet’s arresting Sleep (The Two Friends); this provocative rendition of a somnolent nude female (and presumably lesbian) couple is a landmark in the representation of gender. An inquiry into the nexus of sleep and homoeroticism – so intriguingly depicted by C ­ ourbet – leads to consideration of a motif of late-classical sculpture, the sleeping hermaphrodite. Lost in general oblivion after the collapse of ancient Rome, the sleeping hermaphrodite as artistic – and cultural – dynamism underwent a virtual resurrection during the mid-1400s when an example of this type of statuary was unearthed in Rome. From the rear, the statue ostensibly represents a nude female figure that is reclining in calm repose on the right side, but tilted toward the abdomen. Frontal inspection reveals an unlikely combination – and confrontation – of male genitalia and enticingly conical female breasts. With the rediscovery of classical statuary during the mid-fifteenth century, the term “hermaphrodite” in its various forms becomes a signifier of erotic attraction and behavior involving individuals of the same gender. At the same time, the variant eroticism now tied to this figure in her/his dormant condition establishes a secondary or “satellite” connection with the condition of sleep. Hence from the mid-1400s onward, representational sites are evident in which homoeroticism and somnolence co-exist. With Courbet’s Sleep established as a connector to an Early Modern representational trend tying together sleep and the homoerotic, focus turns to a series of verbal and visual texts of the twentieth century in which this linkage is significant. As varied examples are considered, it turns out that there is no ­single pattern of rebellious or odd “queerness” that authors and visual artists have pursued. Included in this examination of alternative pathways – through sleep – to the erotic are some problematic attempts at androgyny, representational efforts to coordinate and blend gender-based determinations and alterities. Scanning the Hypnoglyph closes with an overview of the status of sleep at a millennial divide. A broad cultural dynamics is implicated, a perilous junction of work and leisure, agendas and repose. What persists is the observation that sleep, more often than not, is fraught with negative associations, whatever the context. Yet the cultural status of dormancy has also risen during the postmodern era, due in part to advances in sleep research. This reassessment has helped launch a new cult of dreams. Empirical studies, also, have documented the ill-effects of insomnia and have resulted in more lenient protocols regarding indulgence in sleep. urls for internet pages are valid as of the time of final editing (August 2016). And a general comment on the translations: Those of literary texts and critical commentaries in languages other than English of course have varied origins.

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A number are my own. In every case, my intent has been to provide an Englishing that captures the basic significations of the source text. The nuances and ­elegance of the results at times may be subject to question. With regard to works of art known by more than one title – and where more than one ­language may be involved –, I have tended to use only the most widely circulated English title. The works by Anselm Kiefer are an exception since the artist, in the pieces discussed in this study, has inscribed each with a title.

Acknowledgements About midway through Rabelais’s extended comic novel, one of the world’s key picaresque characters – Panurge – exclaims with his usual hyperbole that mankind was created solely for the sake of generating debts. That this statement may contain some truth is reflected in the fact that this project is indebted for its completion to numerous individuals, funding agencies, and institutions. To select one or even a few as preeminent out of many is a challenge, but I should probably begin with mention of the late Phyllis Bober of Bryn Mawr College and her encouragement of this undertaking when it was in its early stages. The period was the early 1990s; the setting was a Summer Seminar (of which Professor Bober was one of the directors) sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and held at the American Academy at Rome. It was a time when I was persuaded that the discourse of sleep in visual art in literature, as I then referred to my topic, could be adequately dealt with in a single volume. That view changed as the project advanced and as the manuscript grew substantially during a year-long fellowship funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and later during a half-year residency fellowship at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. (A companion volume on the representational role of sleep in Early Modern Europe awaits completion.) Michael Pretina, then-Director of the Camargo, deserves a special acknowledgment for his mentoring of my project and for his able management. Final writing was carried out at the University of Bergen in Norway during the course of a Fulbright lectureship while I was also pursuing another research agenda. I am very grateful to Aleida Assmann for having invited me to teach a prosem­inar on the literature of sleep and dreams at the University of Konstanz. ­Miriam Frendo, Bettina Hahn, and other students made this experience a particularly worthwhile one as I sifted through major texts and sought engagement with the theoretical problems that my topic raised. Valuable, too, was an opportunity to present my findings at a joint Konstanz-Hebrew University of Jerusalem conference in Israel. I was also a participant in the Konstanz English ­Section’s ongoing lecture series. Christopher Norris kindly invited me to give two ­lectures on the modern and postmodern dimensions of sleep at the University of Cardiff. Chris’s comments as well as those offered by other attendees were insightful and helpful. Similarly useful lecture opportunities materialized at the University of Antwerp and the University of South Carolina. At the University of Bergen, Erik Tonning was supportive of the project and had me give a lecture as part of his Modernism and Christianity Lecture Series. The

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library resources at Bergen were distinctly useful as revisions neared conclusion. I also wish to thank Dr. Christa Stevens and Gert Jager, Editors at Rodopi/ Brill, who took an interest in the manuscript and have been attentive to its progress toward publication. Professor Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Editor of the Series Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, has been similarly helpful in ensuring that the results of the project are optimal. I am quite grateful to him for providing his own translation of a small but difficult and crucial passage from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. And certainly, I am thankful that an anonymous outside reader at Rodopi/Brill responded favorably to my work. At South Carolina State University, three successive Chairs – Don Powell, Calvin Hutson, and Ghussan Greene – assisted with lightening my teaching load at key points. And certainly, all of my colleagues in the English Department of scsu deserve my gratitude for having shouldered additional instruction at those times. Administrators Barbara Hatton, Leroy Davis, James Arrington, John Simpson, Learie Luke, Joyce Blackwell, and George Cooper provided encouragement and helped with academic leaves and travel ­money. Enda Wade, inter-library loan specialist extraordinaire, strove indefatigably to fill each of my requests for source materials, no matter how obscure. Westinghouse/scsu Faculty Development grants over two successive summers enabled me to move the project forward when much of the basic work was still underway. Also valuable were grants provided by Beth Thomas and the Orangeburg (South Carolina) Arts Council that supplemented the travel money awarded by my university. Among colleagues at scsu, Stan Harrold gave invaluable advice early on with regard to structuring the inquiry and ­organizing my earliest findings. Frank Martin was helpful in commenting on the visual sector of the project; Al Fleming was unflagging in his interest and support. Photographer Susan J. Smith helped with images. Heather Hahn of Columbia College assisted with my readings of texts in German. Very deserving of mention are some of the many colleagues at other institutions who were met at conferences and elsewhere and who expressed – in a ­generally favorable way – curiosity about this rather non-conforming undertaking and who offered insights. Larry Rhu of the University of South Carolina called my attention to Richard Wilbur’s “Walking to Sleep.” Janet and Steven Walker of Rutgers University have long offered their support. I am s­ imilarly grateful to Dudley Marchi (North Carolina State University), Daniel Russell (Pittsburgh), Wendy Faris (ut-Arlington), Endi Poskovic (Whittier) – whom I met at the Camargo –, and Wenying Xu (Jacksonville U), a long-ago seniorthesis advisee turned advisor. To be mentioned as well – and perhaps of greatest import – are the contemporary artists who consented to interviewing and hence advanced invaluable

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insights with regard to just what is signified when there are representations of sleep. It was thus of much benefit for this project that I was able to meet and briefly interview the poet Richard Wilbur at a reception sponsored by the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (samla) on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday. Among the visual artists, my communication and friendship with the painter Vincent Desiderio has been inestimable. Beyond the considerable space devoted to this artist’s work in this volume, something of Vincent’s comments on the significations of sleep are reflected on nearly every page. Other relevant discussions have transpired between the author and painters David Nevins and David Yaghjian, ceramicists Jeri Burdick and Sara Legvoldt, fiber-artists Fran Gardner and Jon Eric Riis, and especially Janet Kozachek, painter, mosaicist, and this writer’s conjugal sleeping partner. In addition to the lectures already mentioned, portions of this book were presented as conference papers at the annual meetings of the American Comparative Literature Association (acla), the Modern Language Association (mla), and samla. Parts of the second chapter appeared in my article, “Vertical Slumber, the Hypnoglyph, and the Outs and Ins of the Postmodern” in Comparative Literature 53.3 (Summer 2001): 233–61. Though then published at the University of Oregon, the journal is currently a Duke University Press publication. Comparative Literature as well as the Marlborough Gallery in New York were generous in their subvention of the color illustrations accompanying the article.

List of Figures 1 Oskar Kokoschka, The Tempest (1913). Oil on canvas, 181 cm × 220 cm. Basel, Kunstmuseum 27 2 Jon Eric Riis, Icarus #3 (2002). Silk and metallic thread with crystal beads, 160 cm × 264 cm. Private Collection 32 3 Anonymous illustrator of Pierio Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica. Endymion. ­Frankfurt:  Sumptibus A. Hierati, Excudebat E. Kempffer, 1614. Page 739. ­Woodcut, 4.75 cm × 4.75 cm 34 4 Henry Fuseli, Nightmare (1781). Oil on canvas, 101.6 cm × 126.7 cm. Detroit, ­Institute of Arts 62 5 Joseph-Marie Vien, Sleeping Hermit (1750). Oil on canvas, 223 cm × 148 cm. Paris, Louvre. Inv. 8437 63 6 Nicolas Poussin, Rinaldo and Armida (1625–’26). Oil on canvas, 95.25 cm × 133 cm. Moscow, Pushkin Museum 64 7 Gustave Courbet, Hammock (1844). Oil on canvas, 70.5 cm × 97 cm. Winterthur, Collection Oskar Reinhart “Am Römerholz” 68 8 Gustave Courbet, The Bacchante (1844–’45). Oil on canvas, 76.2 cm × 63.5 cm. Remagen, Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck 74 9 Giovanni Bellini, Drunkenness of Noah (ca. 1513–’14). Oil on canvas, 103 cm × 157 cm. Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie 75 10 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters (1565). Oil on wood, 116.5 cm × 159.5 cm. New York, Metropolitan 81 11 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Schlaraffenland (1567). Oil on wood, 52 cm × 78.1 cm. Munich, Alte Pinakothek 81 12 Jan Vermeer, A Maid Asleep (1656–’57). Oil on canvas, 87.6 cm × 76.5 cm. New York, Metropolitan 82 13 Claude Donat Jardinier after Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Sleeping Knitter (1765). Engraving, 34.25 cm × 25.4 cm. Washington, National Gallery of Art 83 14 Gustave Courbet, Sleeping Spinner (1853). Oil on canvas, 91 cm × 115 cm. ­Montpellier, Musée Fabre 84 15 Jean-François Millet, Noonday Rest (1866). Pastel & black conté crayon on buff wove paper, 29.2 cm × 41.9 cm. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 87 16 Vincent van Gogh, Siesta at Noon (1889–’90). Oil on canvas, 73 cm × 91 cm. Paris, Musée d’Orsay 87 17 Fritz Behn, Masai (1908–1909). Bronze, 66 cm. Munich, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus 93

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18 Edme Bouchardon, Sleeping Faun or The Barberini Faun (1726–’30) (copy of a Greek original [3rd–2nd century bce]). Marble, 184 cm × 142 cm × 119 cm. Paris: Louvre. MR1921 94 19 Anonymous, Black Boy Asleep (350–325 bce). Terracotta, 6.35 cm. Oxford, Ashmolean 96 20 Anonymous illustrator of Les images ou tableaux de platte peinture: des deux Philostrates sophists grecs, trans. Blaise de Vigenère. Comus. Paris: A. L’Angelier, 1614. Page 9. Woodcut, 23 cm × 19 cm 98 21 Robert Rauschenberg, Bed (1955). Combine painting: Oil and pencil on ­pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports, 191.1 cm × 80 cm × 20.3 cm. New York, Museum of Modern Art 118 22 Vincent Desiderio, The Sleeping Family (1990). Oil on canvas, 163.8 cm × 213.4 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum 120 23 Sandro Botticelli, Mars and Venus (c. 1485). Tempera and oil on poplar, 69.2 cm × 173.4 cm. London, National Gallery 124 24 Gustave Courbet, Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer) (1856). Oil on canvas, 174 cm × 206 cm. Paris, Musée du Petit Palais 126 25 Vincent Desiderio, The Interpretation of Color (1997). Oil on canvas, 208 cm × 180 cm. Private collection 132 26 Eric Marrion, Relaxing Nude (1994). Plaster of Paris with patina, 66 cm. ­Durham, England, Collection of the Artist. 139 27 Jeri Burdick, Power Nap (1998). Ceramic sculpture with wood, 17.75 cm × 28.5 cm × 15.25 cm. Private collection 140 28 Walker Evans, Subway Passengers, New York City Lexington Avenue Subway (1938–’41). Gelatin silver print, 12.1 × 17.1 cm. New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery 142 29 Attr. Master at the Court of Mankot, probably Meju, Vishnu Resting on Sesha (circa 1700–’25). Pigments and gold on paper, 25.3 cm × 19.3 cm (painting and borders). Zürich, Museum Rietberg, permanent loan from the Collection Barbara and Eberhard Fischer 174 30 Euphronius, Thanatos and Hypnos with the Corpse of Sarpedon (6th–5th century bce). Detail from an Attic Red-Figure Calyx-Krater (“Euphronius Vase”). ­Terracotta, 45.7 cm × 55.1 cm × 29.5 cm. Rome, Museo Nazionale di Villa Giulia 179 31 Anselm Kiefer, The Rose Gives Honey to the Bees (Dat Rosa Mel Apibus) (1996). Mixed media on canvas, 280 cm × 380 cm. Private Collection 180 32 Anonymous illustrator (design attr. Robert Fludd) of Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia … (Tractatus secundus de naturae simia seu technica macrocosmi historia). ­Oppenheim: Aere J. T. de Bry, typ. H. Galleri, 1617-18. F­ rontispiece. Engraving, 29.4 cm × 17.9 cm 182

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33 Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii (c. 1784). Oil on canvas, 330 cm × 425 cm. Paris, Louvre. Inv. 3692 184 34 Fran Gardner, No Need for Wings (2004). Mixed media (including acrylic, fabric, and found objects) on wood panel. 35.5 cm × 25.4 cm × 2.54 cm. Private Collection 185 35 Fran Gardner, Orienting the Self (2004). Mixed media (including acrylic, ­fabric, and found objects) on wood panel. 35.5 cm × 25.4 cm × 2.54 cm. Private Collection 190 36 David Yaghjian, Sleep (2009). Oil on canvas, 152.4 cm × 106.7. Private Collection 195 37 Makron, Satyrs and Maenad (c. 490 bce). Detail from an Attic Red-Figure Drinking Cup (kylix). Ceramic, 8.9 × 21.8 cm. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. Henry Lillie Pierce Fund, 01.8072 200 38 Giorgione, The Sleeping Venus (1508–’10). Oil on canvas, 108 × 175 cm. Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister 200 39 Giorgio de Chirico, The Joys and Enigmas of a Strange Hour (1913). Oil on canvas, 83.7 × 129.5 cm. Private Collection 201 40 Anonymous, Sleeping Ariadne (Roman copy of a Greek original [c. 240 bce]). Marble, 162 cm × 195 cm. Vatican City, Museo Pio Clementino, Musei Vaticani 205 41 Anselm Kiefer, Brunnhilde Sleeps (1987). Mixed media, 71.1 cm × 100.3 cm. From Brünnhilde Schläft, book with seven double lead pages with clay, acrylic, and photographs, mounted on board with canvas, and steel stand. Pages 7–8. Atlanta, High Museum of Art 233 42 Anselm Kiefer, Brunnhilde Sleeps (Brünnhilde Schläft) (1980). Acrylic and gouache on photograph, 58.4 cm × 83.5 cm. New York, Metropolitan 233 43 Gustave Courbet, Sleep (The Two Friends) (1866). Oil on canvas, 135 cm × 200 cm. Paris, Musée du Petit Palais 239 44 Anonymous, Sleeping Hermaphrodite (Roman copy [2nd century ce] of a Greek original [2nd century bce]). Marble, 169 cm × 89 cm. Paris, Louvre. ma 231 241 45 Giotto di Bondone, Envy (c. 1306). Grisaille fresco, 120 cm × 55 cm. Padua, ­Cappella degli Scrovegni 255 46 Paul Cadmus, Sunday Sun (1958–’59). Egg tempera on pressed wood panel, 77.5 cm × 26 cm. Private collection 257 47 Paul Cadmus, What I Believe (1947–’48). Tempera on panel, 41.3 cm × 68.6 cm. San Antonio, McNay Art Museum. Gift of Robert L. B. Tobin (1996.86) 259 48 Paul Cadmus, Subway Symphony (1975–’76). Acrylic on canvas, 116.8 cm × 233.7 cm. Private collection 261 49 Luca Signorelli, Resurrection of the Flesh (1499 – c. 1504). Fresco. Orvieto, ­Cappella di San Brizio 265

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50 Andy Warhol, Sleep (1963). 16 mm film, black and white, silent, 5 hours 21 ­minutes at 16 frames per second. Reel 1 (c)awm (1) 273 51 Andy Warhol, Sleep (1963). 16 mm film, black and white, silent, 5 hours 21 ­minutes at 16 frames per second. Reel 1 (c)awm (6) 274 52 Andy Warhol, Sleep (1963). 16 mm film, black and white, silent, 5 hours 21 ­minutes at 16 frames per second. Reel 2 (c)awm (2) 277 53 Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Moonlight or the Sleep of Endymion (1791). Oil on canvas, 198 cm × 261 cm. Paris, Louvre. Inv. 4935 278 54 Mark Tansey, Utopic (1987). Oil on canvas, 172.7 cm × 177.8 cm. Private collection 295 55 Vincent Desiderio, Couple (1997). Oil on canvas, 35.6 cm × 27.9 cm. Private collection 300 56 Janet Kozachek, After Antonio Bolfo (2015). Pencil on rag paper, 10.2 cm × 10.1 cm. Private collection 311

chapter 1

Introduction: From Hypnos to the Hypnoglyph … slouthe doeth bryng drowsines. For which cause, S. Paul sayeth: surge qui dormis, arise thou which art a sleepe: and Christ crieth owt so often, videte, vigilate, looke about you, and wache. robert persons1

…

§0.12. Labour hard in your Callings that your sleep may be sweet while you are in it; or else you will lye in bed on pretence of necessity, because you cannot sleep well when you are there. … Weary your bodies in your daily labours: For the sleep of the labouring man is sweet, Eccles. 5.12 §0.18. Remember how many are attending thee while thou sleepest. If it be Summer, the Sun is up before thee that hath gone so many thousand miles while thou wast asleep: It hath given a dayes light to the other half of the world since thou laidst down, and is come again to light thee to thy work, and wilt thou let it shine in vain? All the creatures are ready in their places to assist thee, and art thou asleep? richard baxter2

…

1 The Christian Directory (1582): The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, Appertayning to Resolution, ed. Victor Houliston (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 305–06. 2 A Christian Directory: Or, A Summ of Practical Theologie, and Cases of Conscience, 2nd edition (London: Robert White, 1678), 340, 341. Baxter loosely quotes Eccles. 5.12 from the King James Version of the Old Testament.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004316218_002

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I divide my time as follows: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep, for that would be a pity, for sleeping is the highest accomplishment of genius. søren kierkegaard3

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Formatting the Hypnoglyph

There are few notable denials of the essential role of sleep in personal wellbeing. Caligula and Andy Warhol are among the exceptions. Caligula was a notorious insomniac who slept for about three hours nightly and would wander through spacious porticos invoking the day.4 As an artist, Warhol was fascinated with the muted consciousness evident during sleep, yet he also desired to reduce his own dormancy to a bare minimum and took amphetamines to lengthen his workday.5 Such exceptions to the general acceptance of sleep constitute rather extreme examples, but at the same time, unequivocal eulogies of the dormant state are also infrequent. Until rather recently, of all the universal elements of human life – such as death, love, violence, or sex –, sleep as a spacious discursive rubric (of which the dream is only one aspect) has been less likely than any other to become a topic of extended commentary. Sleep is indeed a recognized specialty of scientific research, and medical advice disseminated via the internet and other media affirms that adequate sleep is indispensable. At the same time, apart from the critique and interpretation of dreams, this physiological sine qua non has tended to receive little direct attention in the reflective discourse of such fields as psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary criticism. Hence while the dominion of sleep is obvious in that a third or more of the typical human life is consumed in what is basically a 3 Either/Or (1843), Vol. 1, trans. David F. and Lillian Marvin Swenson (Garden City: Anchor, 1959), 27. 4 “Gaius Caligula,” Suetonius, trans. J.C. Rolfe (Cambridge: Harvard up, 1998), 1:490–93. Suetonius characterizes the tyrannical Caligula as a mentally deranged insomniac, but there is also a manifestly hypnophobic sentiment in the emperor’s “crying out from time to time for daylight and longing for its coming” (1:493). 5 David Bourdon, Warhol biographer and critic, records that the artist “speculated that he and his friends were more productive during the 1960s because … amphetamines provided them more ‘awake time.’ Warhol claimed to need only two or three hours of sleep a night during the mid-1960s … . Warhol liked to think that sleep was becoming obsolete … ” (Warhol [New York: Abrams, 1989], 166).

Introduction: From Hypnos to the Hypnoglyph

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non-activity, this ever-recurrent phenomenon has often endured low prestige (again, until recently) in academic discussions and other cultural arenas.6 Yet it is hardly the case that sleep never qualified as a topic of reflective consideration at variance with the diatribic pronouncements of hypnophic preachers, rulers, and philosophers as well. In the wake of Plato’s cogent articulation of a pejorative outlook on sleep (to be examined below), Aristotle’s relatively benign view in the Parva naturalia very early on established an alternative precedent that, if sometimes overlooked, also spawned thoughtful responses. Hegel’s Anthropology, for instance, contains an infrequently read yet provocative sub-treatise on the condition of dormancy. Human consciousness is therein framed as a product of the proddings brought by the awakened senses and reason upon the ongoing données and habits of the unactuated, dormant self. Freud’s “Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams” (1916) and Ferenczi’s “Sleep and Coitus” (a chapter in Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality [1924]) are necessary inclusions in any conceivable reading list on the subject of sleep. Portions of Emmanuel Levinas’s Existence and Existents (De l’existence à l’existent [1947]) are similarly essential along with a succinct sequel by Maurice Blanchot in L’espace littéraire (1955). The lucid and penetrating commentaries of Millard Meiss (“Sleep in Venice” [1966]) and Leo Steinberg (“Picasso’s Sleepwatchers” [1968]) are distinguished early breakthroughs during an era of widespread scholarly myopia regarding the aesthetic capacities of the dormant state.7 6 Exemplary instances of what is now a flourishing trend are cited below, but it is also worth pointing out that it is not unusual for major scholarly assessments of visual art or literature to sidestep core issues of sleep (and dream as well) almost entirely. This observation applies to W.J.T. Mitchell’s splendid What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005) even as Mitchell briefly refers to a suggestively multi-layered sculpture by Andrew Gormley, entitled Bed (259–60). Mitchell also looks at the tale of the Maid of Corinth, who – in fable at least – invented drawing when she sketched the shadow of her beloved’s visage on a wall, shortly before he embarked on a journey. In Wright of Derby’s pictorial rendition of the legend, the beloved has lapsed into sleep, providing the young woman an occasion  – while the man is temporarily reduced to a shadowy, cognitive outline – to record his profile and hence preserve it during his absence. Yet Mitchell bypasses this stellar depiction of sleep to discuss a lesser-known engraving of the incident, a work in which the young man remains awake (60–68). Similarly illustrative of this trend are the infrequent if cogent references (190–95, 682, 683) to the intersections of dream and representation in art since 1900: modernism antimodernism postmodernism, a vast, encyclopedic chronicle authored by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, YveAlain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004). 7 To a degree, Aristotle’s theory of sleep preserves the negative Platonic perspective to be explored below. Aristotle defines sleep as first of all a “privation of waking” (453b:27–28). ­(Citations of the Parva naturalia are drawn from the Loeb text with translation by W.S. Hett

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chapter 1 [Cambridge: Harvard up, 1995].) While Aristotle thus perceives dormancy as not simply an absence of the conscious state but as a deprivation of that state, his position is also a primary source for the “rest” theory, a view that welcomes sleep because of its putative powers to restore and revitalize both physical and mental capacities. To the extent that sleep is an intermission of the ongoing labors of existence (and preeminently those of a presumed higher or “common” faculty of perception [455a:13–28]), Aristotle contends that sleep is “necessary and beneficial” (455b: 20) and that its object is “to preserve animal life” (455b: 22–23). But along with the relative approbation conveyed in the term anapausis or “letting up” of daily narratives, a less sanguine view emerges as well: Aristotle comments that “in a sense sleep is an epileptic fit” (457a: 9–10); such a seizure could hardly be welcome relief from life’s labors. For Aristotle and his tradition, sleep is also tightly linked to the processes of digestion, during the course of which “sleep is a sort of concentration (sunodos) or natural recession (antiperistasis) inwards of … hot matter” (457b: 1–3). Awakening takes place as the conclusion of the digestive sequence. Aristotle thus construes the sleep-cycle as in toto a salubrious one (458a:30–33). But there are also insinuations of undesirability not only in the parallel drawn with the disease of epilepsy, but also in the use of the term antiperistasis, which implies a regression, a going backwards, a vague sense of contrarian circumstances. The “rest” theory eventually receives very favorable treatment in Hegel’s Anthropology. Hegel reworks and synthesizes Aristotle’s notions of anapausis, sunodos, and antiperistasis with notable ingenuity in order to stage sleep as an “undifferentiated universality” (127) (“ununterschiedenen Allgemeinheit,” [104]; “unterschiedslose Einheit,” [107]) of the self out of which the being-for-itself (Fürsichsein [104]) of conscious life can derive distinctiveness and vitality. Hegel observes with approbation that dormancy allows a “withdrawal from the world of determinateness” and “into the universal essence of subjectivity” (127). (Citations are drawn from the German edition with English translation by M.J. Petry, Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, Vol. 2 [Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978].) Examining passages in the Parva naturalia and elsewhere in Aristotle, Alfredo Ferrarin concludes that Hegel “shares with Aristotle a teleological interpretation of sleep” (Hegel and Aristotle [Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2001], 267). Hegel in any case locates in sleep an abiding background for reflective consciousness, arguing that it is ultimately in itself that “the waking soul finds the content-determinateness of its dormant nature … ” (Subjective Spirit, 147). The senses, according to Hegel, form a bridge between the “organic” or vegetative mode of life associated with the dormant state and the “animal” mode evident when an organism is awake. What the entity senses, internally or externally, is in some sense dormant because it is divorced from the appropriating, reflecting, and deciding processes of the optimized waking self. Perpetually acting upon the dormant side of the self and offering it up to the intentional operations of the awake soul, the sentient system synthesizes the two sides of the self and prompts the waking consciousness or “being-for-itself” to advance in its individuation. The Hegelian view dovetails with the notion (explained below, note 18) that the experience of sleep can be regarded as a cognitive horizon. While a fuller exposé of the central commentaries on sleep is at this point not feasible, it may suffice for now to consider, along with Aristotle and Hegel, Freud’s “Metapsychological Supplement,” in which the notion of sleep as rest again receives endorsement – or at least apparently so, with rather strongly implied reservations. Together with love and grief, sleep

Introduction: From Hypnos to the Hypnoglyph

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Given a record of criticism and commentary that is relatively thin in comparison with the amount of writing devoted to – for instance – dreams, death, or sex, it is not without paradox that the postmodern era (which begins at least by the 1960s and has perhaps not yet concluded) becomes the age of the hypnoglyph.8 For sleep becomes implicated – if not always acknowledged – in virtually every form of discourse: in advertising, in the sober commentary of scholars, in news stories of sleep cafés and of drowsy personnel in nuclear power plants, is for Freud among the “normal prototypes of morbid affections” (Collected Papers, trans. Joan Riviere [New York: Basic Books, 1959], 4:137). Freud then famously proceeds to assert that “somatically, sleep is an act which reproduces intra-uterine existence, fulfilling the conditions of repose, warmth and absence of stimulus; indeed, in sleeping, many people resume the foetal position” (137–38). Yes, this is rest that may be indispensable for the survival of the human organism, but it is also a condition typified by “an almost complete withdrawal from the surrounding world” and by regression of the libido or pleasure principle “to the point of restoring the primitive narcissism” (138). Sleep is thus for Freud, it seems, a pause or pausis that, if inevitable, has gone kata instead of ana. Yet it is anything but devoid of clinical interest because of the intervention of iridescent dreams prompted by submerged psychic encumbrances that intriguingly frustrate the ego’s desire to temporarily obtain “an absolute narcissism” (141) during episodes of dormancy. 8 The temporal boundaries of postmodernism are subject to much debate. The present study is in overall agreement with the view of Charles Jencks and others that the postmodern is “in its infancy in the 1960s” (What is Post-Modernism?, 2nd edition [New York: St. Martin’s, 1987], 9). Data relevant for this study suggest that it is reasonable to push the first promptings of the postmodern back a little further, into the ’50s and to concur with John Storey’s assessment that “it is in the late 1950s and early 1960s that we see the beginnings of what is now understood as postmodernism” (“Postmodernism and Popular Culture,” Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Stuart Sim, 2nd ed. [London: Routledge, 2004], 133). This perspective can be said to correlate with Fredric Jameson’s pronouncement that “the postmodern begins to make its appearance wherever the modernization process no longer has archaic features and obstacles to overcome and has triumphantly implanted its own autonomous logic” (Postmodernism, or, the Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham: Duke up, 1991], 366). The notion that modernism can almost mysteriously outdo itself is illustrated, for instance, in the case of the 1957 Sputnik launch, an event also quite suggestive of the surveillance and enhanced watchfulness that have become deeply embedded in the comings and goings of contemporary life – and that ultimately affect the sleep situations of most global citizens. As for the conclusion of postmodernism, the question is once more a challenging one. Steven Connor finds the postmodern continuing through the 1990s, its “rate of expansion” slowing, and the movement becoming more associated with academic discourse than a “condition of things in the world, whether the world of art, culture, economics,” etc. (“Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Steven Connor [Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2004], 4). And as for the post-’90s scenario, Connor also proposes that “postmodern discourse may now be entering a new phase of productive dissipation, in which some of the very cultural themes and phenomena that it has made its concern are now themselves achieving a kind of autonomy” (11–12).

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in studies of fatigue experienced by commercial airline pilots, in reports of crime as well as in the alibis of the accused, in political campaigns when there is concern over which candidate can best handle 3 a.m. crises, in film and other art forms, in tales of insomnia, and in an array of sleeping paraphernalia. One such accessory is the eye pillow, available from an internet merchandiser, the Barefoot Yoga Company.9 And when one wishes to awake, the alternatives are numerous, with varied devices rendering natural sounds and sunlight simulations instead of the predictable buzzers, bells, and melodies. Then there are the “bio-alarm” devices engineered to monitor the sleeper’s movements or even cerebral electrical discharges with the aim of arousing the user during light sleep; that is, when the individual can be awakened – presumably – with minimal stress or aggravation.10 The critical, theoretical accompaniment of the exploding representational interest in sleep during postmodernism has been relatively tardy in developing. The thoughtful commentaries cited above by Meiss and Steinberg in fact evoke a fully intact modernism even as its premises are eroding. A special issue of the Jungian journal Parabola: Myth and the Quest for Meaning, published in 1982 and entitled Sleep, is groundbreaking yet is a compendium of traditional religious and other statements about sleep-states and eschews provocative critique in the areas of, for instance, sexuality or ideology. An analogous yet, overall, a more venturesome selection of critical and literary texts is found in Le sommeil, (1983) a special issue (edited by Béatrice Didier) of the French journal Corps Écrits. The next year, postmodern sleep-theory indisputably emerges with Visages du sommeil, an anthology of essays edited by Michel Covin for another French journal, Revue des Sciences Humaines. Covin and his collaborators detect, delineate, and inhabit a multi-purviewed sleep-cosmos; herein the discourses of philosophy, the novel, poetry, Christian iconography, autobiography, railway travel, monastic life, and military combat are all brought into play.11 9

Information is provided by the company at http://www.barefootyoga.com/meditation/ eye-pillows. For a brief discussion, see the Wall Street Journal, “A Silky Pillow for Slipping into Sleep,” 3 Feb. 1995, B1. 10 The “Travel Sleep Sound Machine,” for instance, offers several natural sounds for awakening–or as an aid to falling asleep (www.sharperimage.com). The bio-alarm is handled by Sleep Cycle (http://www.sleepcycle.com). At least one literate user, however, found the latter device unworthy of the expense. See Dean Skylar’s “Apptitude: Sleep Cycle didn’t help him wake refreshed – or at all” (Washington Post, 17 July 2014 https://www .washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/apptitude-sleep-cycle-didnt-help-him-wake -refreshed--or-at-all/2014/07/14/daf2ba22-faed-11e3-8176-f2c941cf35f1_story.html. 11 The Corps écrit collection is attention-worthy especially because of its inclusion of an astute essay by Jean Starobinski, “Rêve et immortalité chez Baudelaire” (45–56), and even more so

Introduction: From Hypnos to the Hypnoglyph

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Closer to the present, the trickle of monographs on sleep has become a r­ivulet, some of them popularized medical studies of sleep and dreams.12 Along with works on the physiology of sleep and related topics, a modest number have engaged issues of significance for visual art and literature. Among the most notable, Paul Martin’s Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of

12

due to a wide-ranging phenomenological foray by Louis Marin, “À l’éveil des métamorphoses: Poussin (1625–1635)” (31–43). (The essay eventually became a chapter in Marin’s monograph, Sublime Poussin, trans. Catherine Porter [Stanford: Stanford up, 1999].) Marin here gives himself up to “a vagabondage of thought and imagination on the motif of the sleeping body” (Porter, trans., 165) (“ … un vagabondage de la penseé et de l’imagination sur le motif du corps endormi” [39]). Depictions of sleep in several of Poussin’s paintings lead Marin to conclusions that cut across the full spectrum of artistic discourses. With painting seen as the premier art form, he discovers that representation typically accomplishes “the transmutation of the flesh of things into the fragile surface of colors and the fiction of their presence … : an awakening of the thing from the sleep of being where it burrows down” (Porter, trans. 168) (“ … la transmutation de la chair des choses dans la fragile surface des couleurs et la fiction de leur présence … : éveil de la chose du sommeil de l’être où elle s’enfouit … ” [41]). With regard to the Revue des sciences humaines collection, editor Michel Covin’s opening essay, “Un moment difficile à passer, mais vite oublié” (7–30), is particularly incisive and farreaching. A problem is identified and pursued with energy, if at times with a tinge of overstatement. Covin takes issue with the “hypnophobic drift of civilisation” (“la tendance hypnophobe de notre civilization” [8]), a phenomenon tied to “the multiform applications of a moral code of vigilance” (“les applications multiformes d’un code moral de la vigilance” [29]). Covin finds that the code is apparently universal; “there is no civilization where sleep is cultivated as a strength, nor sought after as an end in itself”; (“ … il n’est aucune civilisation où le sommeil soit cultivé comme valeur, ni recherché comme fin en soi” [29–30]). The root of this troubling dynamic, argues Covin, is Christianity, for “in its representational system … one will find the concrete doctrines that this denial of sleep has instigated and those which are its more or less deformed reflection in the field of philosophy.” (nw, trans.) (“C’est donc dans son système de représentations qu’on trouvera les doctrines concrètes que ce déni du sommeil a suscitées et celles qui en sont le reflect, plus ou moins déformé, dans le champ philosophique” [30].) Covin’s insights and arguments often overlap, if they do not coincide, with those of this study, especially with regard to the religious dimension in general and Descartes in particular. (For an expanded exposition of Covin’s perspective, see Une esthétique du sommeil [Paris: Beauchesne, 1990].) Benjamin Reiss brings forward the valuable point that the expanded interest in sleep as a subject of scientific research does not directly correlate with enhanced cultural understanding and/or tolerance of sleep experiences. Reiss comments as follows: The factory bells and moral reformers of the nineteenth century positioned sleep as a vehicle for or an obstacle toward productivity, alienable from the social life of the sleeper. In the twenty-first century, the sleep clinician hovering over the electroencephalograph monitor studies not the person but the isolated “sleep-as-thing,” concretized by a set of waving lines. See “Sleeping at Waldern Pond: Thoreau, Abnormal Temporality, and the Modern Body,” American Literature 85.1 [March 2013], 20.

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Sleep and Dreams (2002) is a wide-ranging and informally written examination of sleep pathology and the cultural locus of sleep, a project in the course of which the author frequently calls attention to literary anecdotes and parallels. A. Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (2005) is a meaningful and astute historical consideration of sleep and nighttime behavior, mostly prior to 1900. In another thoughtful study, Sleep and Society: Sociological Ventures into the (Un)known (2005), Simon J. Williams admirably mediates and qualifies the perception that “sleep, by and large, was something of a blind spot as far as sociologists were concerned.”13 The French philosopher JeanLuc Nancy’s Tombe de sommeil (2007) is a witty and often convoluted inquest into some of the most basic issues awakened by this recurring, ubiquitous experience.14 In the visual arts, dormir/sleep (edited by Alexis Fabry et al., 2000) is extraordinary, and though subtitled photography literature design, it is primarily a cascade of photographic images chronicling the nuances, données, and elusive coordinates of sleep in a global context. Inter-art criticism on the resources of sleep has been minimal, a lack that the current study aims to alleviate.15 13 14

15

S.J. Williams, Sleep and Society: Sociological Ventures into the (Un)known (London: Routledge, 2005), 2. Thus Nancy writes with an eloquence that is both cryptic and insightful – and as if in response to Louis Marin’s apprehension (see above, note 11) that sleep so often entails metamorphosis: … sleep is not a metamorphosis. At most, it can be understood as an endomorphosis, as internal formation or as the formation of an interiority where the interior, sealed up, might appear entirely projected within the intentions and extensions of waking existence … . This endomorphosis is provisional and always suspended at the limits of form, the formation of a substance that is amorphous and poorly identified and of which the most common and best conceived of onset is nothing other than one of falling, collapse, and disconnecting … . (nw, trans.) ( … le sommeil n’est pas métamorphose. Tout au plus pourrait-il être compris comme une endomorphose, comme la formation interne ou comme la formation d’une ­intériorité là où l’intérieur, scellé, paraissait tout entier projeté dans les intentions et dans les e­ xtensions de l’existence vigile … Endomorphose provisoire et toujours suspendue aux limites de la forme même, formation d’une substance amorphe et mal identifiable dont l’allure la plus commune et la mieux dessinée n’est autre précisément que celle de la chute, de l’affaissement et de la déliaison … ” Tombe de sommeil [Paris: Galilée, 2007], 16–17). Among the varied antecedents for this project, to be noted also are the intriguing rapprochements of sleep-related visual art and literature scattered throughout Jacqueline Risset’s Puissances de sommeil (Paris: Seuil, 1997) and Jacqueline Kelen’s Les barques du sommeil (Coursegoules: Reyne de Coupe, 1997).

Introduction: From Hypnos to the Hypnoglyph

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During postmodernism and the early third millennium ce as well (again, arguably an era marked by a continuing postmodern aesthetics), verbal and visual texts featuring sleep form, if not a genre in the usual sense, at least a semiotic alliance. In any case, works of the sort here considered – that is, hypnoglyphs – reveal traits that Marjorie Perloff has cogently argued are relevant in identifying postmodern genres.16 The sleep-centered work of art or hypnoglyph undertakes to present the unpresentable and problematizes prior genre distinctions; a traditional genre suggested in such a work may acquire a residual or even simulacral aura. A literary or visual text of this type usually portrays a confrontation with the other as sleep, an unsayable dimension of psychic life. And in nearly every instance, there is a blurring of boundaries, not only between visual and written representational modes, but between such areas as “high” and popular art forms, sleep and its psychic antonym (wakefulness), and sleep and its cultural antonym (work). In addition to such features that are unmistakably postmodern, several other common elements are nearly pandemic in these highly diverse contemporary verbal and visual texts. The sleep-centered work usually exhibits a representational pattern of disguise or camouflage that covers complex significations beneath a seemingly unproblematic exterior. Beneath an apparently placid surface, tokens of deception or illusion may lurk, or perhaps memoirs of sacred narrative (mythic or religious), or a mélange of allegoresque tracings, or there may be a confirmation of a transdiscursive flattening derived primarily from modernist visual techniques. Gender polemics are frequently intense, and in all cases, desire, especially erotic desire, is ambiguously projected or implicitly thwarted. Such works, in the act of invoking one or more pre-texts, tend to exploit a passé and clearly modernist context in which sleep assists in developing a stable configuration of meaning. Especially at issue is the modernist conception of time as a relatively unified, predictable, and ultimately fulfilling phenomenon, now disunified or “multi-perspectival” and susceptible to troubling dislocation within the contemporary framework of the hypnoglyph.17 16

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Generic possibilities for postmodernism are explored in Postmodern Genres, edited by Marjorie Perloff (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1989), who outlines the possible coordinates of such genres (most notably on pages 7–8). The term “multi-perspectival” has been usefully employed to describe postmodern temporality by Peter Carravetta, Prefaces to the Diaspora: Rhetorics, Allegory, and the Interpretation of Postmodernity (West Lafayette: Purdue up, 1991), 158. In Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1997), Ursula K. Heise invaluably anatomizes the splintering of a transcendent durée during the postmodern era. Among other points, Heise remarks that “the simultaneity of disparate geographical spaces and historical periods in the virtual space of the tv screen has been accompanied

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In many of the examples discussed below, a discursive ground can be located in the linearity of a reclining figure or figures. For the postmodern, this horizontal line is no longer an implicitly apprehended horizon as it was for modernism, when it often indicated a baseline, the bottom threshold of human experience. It is relevant to recall Heraclitus’s view that breathing was the sole observable phenomenon that distinguished the dormant individual from the corpse. And without much risk of overstatement, it can be argued that depictions of sleep from antiquity through modernism tended to exploit this singular condition – along with its neighbor, awakening – as alternate horizons in the sense of vantage points or expansions of representational space, hence also discursive gambits or openers for exploration of one or more aspects of lived experience. (Death is here included, for in the wake of Plutarch, it has been often held that sleep is best understand as a prefiguring of death, of whatever lies on the other side of life.) In the era of the hypnoglyph considerably more so than previously, the reclining and somnolent human figure is a locale of unrest at a time when the notion of an horizon – a set of premises or the presumed space of discourse – has receded from traditional (e.g., circadian) rhythms of life and reappeared, very broadly, in the mechanisms of sign-production as well as in the ebulliencies of capital. Or it could also be said that, instead of either sleep with its languors or awakening with its quickenings as possible foci for perusing the life and times of the highest of primates, postmodernism has adopted a distinctive mentational stance, a sense of having always already awakened.18

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by another and closely related feature of the postmodern experience of temporality: the expectation of and desire for instant availability” (25). Also worth endorsing is Heise’s perspective on computerized communication in such forms as email and bulletin boards. Heise comments that, bringing about an “acceleration of normal temporality, computer use immerses the individual in a ‘hyper-present’ of sorts, a hyper-intensified immediacy that focuses the user’s attention on a rapid succession of micro-events and thereby makes it more difficult to envision even the short-term past or future” (26). According to Sextus Empiricus – an ancient polemicist on behalf of scepticism–, Heraclitus believed that during sleep, “when the channels of perception are shut, our mind is sundered from its kinship with the surrounding, and breathing is the only point of attachment to be preserved, like a kind of root” (G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield, eds. and trans., The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2002], 205). Plutarch’s frequently cited and modified comments are found in a treatise entitled the “Consolation to Apollonius”: “Neither hath [anyone] spoken much amiss who calls sleep the lesser mysteries of death; for sleep is ­really the first initiation into the mysteries of death” (Plutarch’s Morals Translated by Several Hands, ed. William W. Goodwin [Boston: Little, Brown, 1870], 1:311). The notion of “horizon” here entertained is mostly Heideggerean. John D. Caputo points out that, for Heidegger, “horizon” indicates “the ‘look’ or the ‘sight’ (Aussehen) in terms of which we line up or sight objects, thereby making the objectivity of things possible.” At the same time, as Caputo points out, “Beyond the object-with-horizon, there

Introduction: From Hypnos to the Hypnoglyph

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It is in any case likely that the most significant trait of the hypnoglyph is that narrative resistance is here foregrounded, typically vis-à-vis a frustrated or at least mediated diaristic impulse. The diary, a recording of internal and external circadian transactions, is the counter-text that the hypnoglyph wishes to write, the primary prior genre that it problematizes. Prior to hermeneutic inspection of the hypnoglyph, however, it is necessary to consider the notion of narrative resistance and its relation to the phenomenon of sleep.19 And certainly, other topics require consideration as well, including the bedrock of modernist representation of sleep and dream, a matrix offering numerous precedents that the postmodern era has frequently violated as well as reflected upon with seeming regret.

Sleep and Narrative Resistance

A full history and exposition of the notion of narrative resistance have yet to be written. A provocative preliminary sketch has been rendered by S­ vetlana

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is the open itself of which the horizonal view or circle of vision is but a perspectival or partial view. If the horizon lets the object be … it remains true that something lets the horizon be, and that is the ‘open’” (Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project [Bloomington: Indiana up, 1988], 99. It is thus not unreasonable to claim that modernist verbal and visual arts typically construe sites of dormancy as horizonal, perspective-granting scenarios within a larger cognitive expanse. See also, for well-framed and lucid comments on Heidegger’s horizonal thinking, Søren Overgaard, Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), 126–130. The hypnoglyph as here described neither coincides with nor is totally disconnected from an object of the same name that is the focal point of John Ciardi’s science fiction fable, “The Hypnoglyph” (1953) (published under the pseudonym, John Anthony, in Portals of Tomorrow: The Best Tales of Science Fiction and Other Fantasy, ed. August Derleth [New York: Rinehart, 1954], 1–9). In Ciardi’s narrative, the hypnoglyph is a large extraterrestrial seed – similar to an avocado’s – in which a slight depression or groove has been carved. A character in the story begins rubbing the hypnoglyph, cannot extricate himself from doing so, and is eventually hypnotized. At this point the narrator’s plump wife prepares to enter. She has been imported from the distant planet that has engendered the hypnoglyph and which is a pays de cockaigne where most of the women “lounge about on delicately arranged hill terraces and just lie motionless soaking up sun energy or working up a little voodoo mostly based on hypnotism and tactile gratification” (Ciardi, 7). It seems certain that the narrator’s wife will slaughter the victim and harvest his flesh, which will apparently serve as her food. Ciardi does not here inaugurate a postmodern genre or sub-genre, but “The Hypnoglyph” as cautionary narrative harbors some of the negative associations, traditionally tied to sleep, that continue in the hypnoglyph as representational kind. Hypnotism in Ciardi’s tale – not at all a vehicle for amelioration and truth – simply leads to a sleep-state that is shot through with lassitude, peril, and resistance to wholesome narratives.

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­ lpers and Michael Baxandall, who, in a study of the eighteenth-century A ­Venetian painter Tiepolo, observe that “some artists can be described as resisting narrative. The stilled, muted figures staring out of Manet’s pictures stop our conversation and make it difficult for us to tell their tale.”20 Narrative resistance is thus not a factor inherent in all visual art; instead, this resistance is tied to how a representation is conceived and executed. In tandem with narrative resistance in pictorial formats, a related version – and one that emerges from what is arguably a more basic, less premeditated cognitive stratum – is found in the discourse of resistance to psychoanalytic processes. Resistance to the analyst’s efforts to induce self-insight is a foundational concept in Freudian theory, and Roy Schafer reminds us that inescapable blockage in the narrative of a psychoanalytic treatment “is often sly, hidden, secretive, obdurate … .”21 Schafer discovers a factor of poorly articulated selfhood or disclaimed agency at the heart of the resistance dynamism.22 He calls attention to the high degree of vigilance of which the analyst must be capable if the resistance dynamism is to be effectively confronted and countered.23 The emergent hermeneutic topic of narrative resistance also has an intriguing precedent in the theory of electrical resistance, first enunciated by Georg Ohm. The flow of electricity is retarded in varying degrees by virtually all substances that can serve as conductors.24 From here, no great hermeneutic audacity is required to inquire or search after an analogy between a general theory of electricity and one of the human psyche. Indeed, it is worth recalling that in his early Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), Freud posited two kinds of nerve cells: perception-consciousness neurons that offer no resistance to stimuli, and less excitable cells susceptible to memory inscription.25 And 20

Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale up, 1994), 41–42. Alpers and Baxandall also note “an alternative to narrative intelligibility” in ancient Assyrian reliefs of battle scenes. 21 “Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue” in On Narrative, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981), 40–41. 22 Ibid., 43–44. 23 Schafer, A New Language for Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale up, 1981), 212 ff. 24 For a sketch of Ohm’s research on electrical currents, see Elizabeth Garber, The Language of Physics: The Calculus and the Development of Theoretical Physics in Europe, 1750–1870 (Cambridge, ma: Birkhäuser, 1999), 155–59, 297. 25 Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 1, trans. James Strachey et. al (London: Hogarth, 1953), 298–300. See also Appendix C, 392–97, in the same volume. Also worth recalling are Jacques Derrida’s comments on this Freudian aperçu in one of this wizard of French philosophy’s most respected and seminal essays, “Freud and the

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just as resistance is a key component in Freud’s pioneering hypothesis of the flow of neuronal energy, it can be suggested that this broad and widely applicable notion of resistance undergoes substantial revision – in effect, a metamorphosis – to account for a significant amount of the psychic energy expended during the psychoanalytic transaction.26

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Scene of Writing” (Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass [U of Chicago P, 1978], ­196–231). Endorsing Freud’s claim that there could be a very basic neuronal foundation for the resources of memory, Derrida submits that “memory, thus, is not a psychical property among others; it is the very essence of the psyche: resistance, and precisely, thereby, an opening to the effraction of the trace” (201). From resistance to memory and back again – and with resistance for the moment a psychic sine qua non –, it may well be relevant to correlate the resistance of sleep with that of memory. These two manifestations of resistance can surely be apprehended, in divergent ways, as indispensable cognitive functions. It can also be argued that memory is a bivalent dynamism: it is both active and passive, both process and archived psychic fact. Along with whatever else is involved in memory, it requires an energy that inscribes information, residua of perception and other experiences that resist removal; whatever is remembered remains embedded and dormant until suitable circumstances intervene and activate or awaken it. Freud’s thoughts on the nature of nerve cells were likely contemporaneous with his formulation of the notion of resistance. Kenneth Levin notes that “Freud’s earliest published comments on resistance appear in Studies on Hysteria (1895), but it seems that he first recognized the phenomenon about two years earlier” (Freud’s Early Psychology of the Neuroses: A Historical Perspective [Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1978], 101). Levin also refers (103) to patients “first seen by Freud late in 1892, and it seems certain that his observations of resistance in the ensuing months were a major stimulus to his shift to the defense concept and to his preparation of ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ (1894).” It should be pointed out, of course, that the dynamism of resistance that Freud theorizes differs in key dimensions from the notion of resistance as a factor in the formation and retention of specific memories. Resistance for Freud becomes a psychic capacity (usually unacknowledged by the analysand who demonstrates it) to oppose the raising to consciousness of “pathogenic” material (Freud, quoted by Levin, 102). For a representative discussion of resistance in the context of present-day psychotherapeutic practice, see Jerrold R. Brandell, Psychodynamic Social Work (New York: Columbia up, 2004), especially 187–88, 190–91, 197–98, and 205–19. Brandell frames resistance as a manifestation of psychic concerns seemingly removed from neurological determinations. At times, however, intimations of an underlying or “archaic” model of nerve-based resistance creep through. Brandell specifies, for instance, that “excessive compliance, emotionality, undue emphasis on reality considerations, somatization, and dreams and fantasies used in the service of resistance are among … clinical manifestations reported in the literature” (190). Brandell also refers to the client’s “habitual mode of relating” to others as a factor in the dynamics of resistance (213). On such occasions, the distressed

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The view that sleep is distinguished by its resistance to narrative is of impressive antiquity. The Old Testament Book of Proverbs, for instance, contains an injunction indicating an antinomy (to be discussed below) between sleep and narratives of economic advancement: Do not love sleep, or else you will come to poverty; open your eyes, and you will have plenty of bread. (20: 13)27 The second book of the Iliad opens with another terse but foundational example. Zeus maintains a vigil while Agamemnon sleeps, and the king of the gods sends a dream in the form of Nestor to the king of men. The venerable Nestor speaks as follows: Son of wise Atreus breaker of horses, are you sleeping? He should not sleep night long who is a man burdened with counsels and responsibility for a people and cares so many. (2: 23–25)28 The relaxation and retreat of sleep are set against a compelling agenda of cultural goals epitomized in the apparent opportunity presented to the Achaeans to effect the destruction of Troy. The dream is in fact misleading and provokes the demise of many of the Greeks, but the basic values it utilizes are not questioned; the dream is plausible precisely because its format and its assumptions are unimpeachable. The issue receives elaboration in Book 7 of Plato’s Laws, where the incompatibility of sleep with the ongoing, constructive activities of the polis is brought to the fore. The capacity to reject sleep is here by no means a virtue particularly expected of rulers; vigilance is now everyone’s concern. Drawing perhaps upon the exhortation to martial alertness sounded in the Iliad, the Athenian stranger who dominates the dialogue argues that: … everyone should be up during the night performing a good part of the business of politics as well as of the household … . A great deal of sleep

27 28

individual would appear to have become “hard-wired” – conditioned by long-dormant stimuli – in a way or ways that unpleasantly complicate his or her daily life. This and subsequent Biblical references and citations are drawn from The New Oxford A ­ nnotated Bible, ed. Michael D. Coogan, et al., 4th ed. (Oxford & New York: Oxford up, 2010). The translation is by Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961), 76.

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does not by nature harmonize with our bodies or souls, or with the activities pertaining to all these things. For while a person sleeps he is worth nothing – no more than one who isn’t living. But whoever among us cares for living and thinking to a special degree stays up the longest time, reserving only so much time as is useful for his health, and that isn’t much, once a fine habit has been established. (808b: 1-c: 3)29 The sagacious Athenian thus discovers a dissonance in dormancy that excludes it from the intrinsic harmonies that establish the excellence of the individual, the family, and the polis. Unlike the many activities that can be incorporated into subtly nuanced cultural narratives, sleep resists any overall social coordination. Also, in interrupting consciousness, sleep undermines the intellective processes of – and perhaps even the very concept of – an independent, thinking subject. Alongside these objections to sleep on the basis of its resistance to narrative, countless narratives can be cited in which sleep is significant or salient. The passage from the Iliad in which Nestor chides the sleep of Agamemnon is, certainly, one such example. Also to be acknowledged are the very numerous occasions, obvious or not, when sleep is condoned or even appreciated. For instance, sleep has been referred to as “sweet” with cloying frequency, and it is pertinent that the practice is already evident, again in Homer (e.g., Iliad 1.610, where “hupnos” is accompanied by the epithet “glukus,” hence seems to be of equal standing with nectar [gluku nectar, 1.598]).30 Yet despite an attendant ameliorative trend, it is a central tenet of this study that a depreciation of sleep has generally had the upper hand in a spectrum of discourses, across cultures and periods of history. For now, it is quite relevant to consider how an element apparently incompatible with narrative can contribute to its strength. And aspects of sleep that constitute its quarrel with narrative should be isolated. But to begin with, what are some of the basic requirements for the forward march of narrative to which dormancy fails to conform? How is sleep diegetically deficient? In the interests of locating a focal point amid a welter of narrative theories, it is useful to revisit the familiar and often contested distinction b­ etween ­description 29 30

Thomas L. Prangle, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 198. John Miles Foley presents an astute analysis of the Homeric phrase “glukus hupnos” within a broader discussion of sleep as a double-pronged sign in both the Iliad and the Odyssey (Homer’s Traditional Art [University Park: Pennsylvania State up, 1999], 229–35). Among points, he underscores “the double reality of sleep as both welcome release and problematic vulnerability” (231).

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and narration. W.J.T. Mitchell has maintained that “it is really a phantom distinction, with no really clear boundary between narrative and description.”31 Yet a difference between the two is generally salient when sleep is involved. In literature, depictions of dormant individuals can be readily linked to description, which can be defined as a necessary aspect of verbal representation that focuses on details and parts of objects at the expense of their wholeness.32 The writer who energetically describes must also take measures to shore up his text’s illusion of integrality. Amid the welter of narrative theories, it is helpful to briefly revisit Lessing’s familiar argument in the Laocoön (as conveniently phrased by Alexander Gelley): “ … succession of time is the province of the poet just as space is that of the painter.”33 This dichotomy apparently makes depictions of sleeping individuals more appropriate for visual than for verbal art. At the same time, in visual art, especially in classical Greece, there may well be a narrative drift; “still-life” painting is a specific genre that occurs rather late in the history of Western art. Thus in painting and sculpture – yet not as much, it would seem, as in the more temporally-dependent verbal text–, the immobile body of the sleeper tends to retard the flow if not the rush of temporal progression. For the present discussion, what is perhaps the central significance of narrative discourse emerges in a comment on Lessing by David Wellbery: “Narrative alleviates the problem of dissolution that confronts us in description … . Narrative fulfills the aesthetic function because it maintains the structure of perception, the totalizing regard within the present instant.”34 The suspended consciousness and perception of the sleeper in the verbal or visual text are thus in conflict with the totalizing drift of the narrative elements. A temporal element is detectable in Wellbery’s argument when he implies that there is an optimal present moment, an altogether coherent and cohesive “now.” And among the many narrative theorists who address the question of time, Paul Ricoeur with particular directness develops as his central position the view that “narrative composition, taken in its broadest sense, constitutes

31 32 33 34

Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994), 191. On this debate, see also Gérard Genette, “The Frontiers of Narrative,” Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia up, 198), 127–44. Narrative Crossings: Theory and Pragmatics of Prose Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 1987), 11. Lessing’s Laocoön: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (New York: Cambridge up, 1984), 212.

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a riposte to the aporetic character of speculation on time.”35 Yet while Ricoeur is concerned with vacancies that narrative should fill in, a related position is taken by Wendy Steiner, who maintains that narrative requires the “representation of an event in terms of its narrative unfolding.”36 Continuing a critique that Lessing advanced in the Laocoön, Steiner argues that visual depictions of events usually contain little narrative, in contrast to verbal accounts, which can far more readily depict a series of actions and offer some form of commentary on them. Her assertion is based on what Lessing called the “pregnant moment.” This phrase refers to the key instant on which the visual rendition of an action-sequence typically focuses, and which, Steiner explains, is – in its temporal and spatial isolation – all but static. These suggestive moments, instead of furthering narrative, attenuate but do not eliminate it, Steiner concludes.37 Lessing’s concept of the “pregnant moment” no doubt deserves to be considered further in the present context.38 Perhaps what most stands out is the view (shared by Lessing and Steiner) that the aura of a decisive juncture, of an essential moment that the visual artist attempts to recreate, tends to be minimally narrational. It is appropriate, therefore, to find another locution that might more reliably convey (given what typically amounts to a demand, on the part of narrative, for a fulfilled or complete temporality) the impression of what narrative is and what it entails. An adequate term is perhaps “parturitional,” which apprehends and carries through Lessing’s trope. What “parturitional” implies is that, if the representation of a single instant (however momentous or “pregnant”) restricts narrative, then a full-blown narrative segment must convey temporal articulation. Just as parturition in the ordinary sense signifies the total emergence of progeny from parent, so narrative – as parturitional – requires not simply an instant but an incident, or in other words, at least two discreet but causally related ensembles of time and space. Otherwise, with a single crucial or “pregnant” moment, the

35

Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984–’85), 3:11. A similar understanding of narrative is conveyed in Earl Miner’s idea of “fulfilled continuity” (Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature [Princeton: Princeton up, 1990], 140). Miner argues that even in texts that actively work to frustrate narrative conventions, the assumption remains implicit that a narrative should proceed toward some form of resolution or completeness. 36 Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), 13. 37 Ibid., 14. 38 Lessing’s adjective is actually “prägnantesten” or “most pregnant” (Dorothly Reich, ed., Laokoon [Oxford: Oxford up, 1965], 158).

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sense of sequence, so necessary for narrative, must subsist allusively, at a distance from what is represented.39 As a narrative representation confirms the realization of temporal plenitude, the sleeper’s motionless and horizontal body is horizonal and retards temporal progression – at least until the first hints of a postmodern aesthetics. At the same time, it should be clear that the resistance posed by sleep in visual art and literature does not erase narrative but may promote its unfolding. Rather often, this factor is localized within a representation; what is resistance in one area is frequently opportunity in another. While one individual sleeps, another may innocently gaze at the sleeper or prepare to act aggressively. The latter is the case, for instance, in Tintoretto’s Judith and Holofernes, which Steiner discusses as an example of the “antinarrative” dimension of visual art.40 In many other cases, more text (verbal or visual) is generated, and new narrative devices are implemented, to compensate for the resistance that depictions of sleep engender. Thus in general, sleep’s resistance to narrative tends not to thwart n ­ arrative – at least in the case of fictive rather than real-life narratives. Resistance in various forms may promote rather than stunt the development of such discourse. And to better understand how resistance to narrative can in fact function as an amplifier of narrative discourse, it may be relevant to draw an analogy with 39

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It is helpful at this juncture to consider a point raised by Susan Winnett in “Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure” (pmla 105: 3 [1990]: 505–18). Winnett critiques Robert Scholes’s formulation of an arch-narrative by pointing out that, in utilizing a sexual model, Scholes universalizes the male erotic perspective. According to Scholes, “The archetype of all fiction is the sexual act … . What connects fiction – and music – with sex is the fundamental orgiastic rhythm of tumescence and detumescence, of tension and resolution, of intensification to the point of climax and consummation” (Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction [Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979], 20). Winnett observes that, on the other hand, female sexual pleasure can proceed “according to a logic of fantasy and arousal that is totally unrelated to the functioning and representation of the ‘conventional’ heterosexual sex act” (507). Winnett maintains that traditional narrative (or at least conventional narrative theory) is male-centered, and she proposes to develop a counter-model that proceeds from the distinctly female experiences of giving birth and nurturing an infant. Winnett’s approach overlaps with that of the current discussion vis-à-vis the ­shared interest in parturition. Yet instead of apprehending parturition as a primal physiological ­process with very broad narratival implications, Winnett focuses on specific transpositions of childbirth as disclosed in given narratives, especially Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which the “orgasmic” paradigm of narrative is critiqued (508–10). Pictures of Romance, 12–14.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein’s well-known pronouncement on the meritoriousness of the seemingly bothersome phenomenon of friction: We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!41 Thus the duration of a psychoanalytic treatment could prove inconceivably brief if some degree of cognitive friction or resistance did not defer the realization of psychic insight the analyst has endeavored to elicit. Any electrical circuit functions effectively because the factor of resistance has been dealt with in the selection of both a minimally resistant conductor and a highly resistant insulation.42 One hardly wishes to drive an automobile without brakes. And not surprisingly, one the longest of novels, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu), is also one of the most exemplary for its persistent use of sleep.43 41

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(Wir sind aufs Glatteis geraten, wo die Reibung fehlt, also die Bedingungen in gewissem Sinne ideal sind, aber wir eben deshalb auch nicht gehen können. Wir wollen gehen; dann brauchen wir die Reibung. Zurück auf den rauhen Boden! [Philosophical Investigations, German text with translation by G.E.M. Anscombe, 3rd ed. {Oxford: Blackwell, 2001}, § 107; 40e, 40.]) It is surely here reasonable to recall for a moment the physiological milieu of sleep and to suggest that our nightly interruptions and curtailments of life’s narratives can indeed be viewed as an efficacious insulator of psychic energy, a deterrent with respect to the dissipation or depletion of that energy. For well-taken remarks on the obviously broad topic of sleep in the work of Marcel Proust, see Paul Renard,“Périls du sommeil romanesque,” in Visages du sommeil, ed. M. Covin, ­especially 46–48; Dominique Mabin, Le sommeil de Marcel Proust (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 160–82 and throughout; Anne Simon, “The Formalist, the Spider, and the Phenomenologist: Proust in the Magic Mirror of the Twentieth Century,” in The Strange M. Proust, ed. André Benhaïm (Oxford: Legenda, 2009), 31–32. Renard suggests that sleep for Proust is above all a stimulus or “lever for literary creation, for it favors the activity of memory.” (“Mais surtout le sommeil est un levier de la création littéraire, car il favorise l’activité de la mémoire.”) Subjectivity must recover itself upon each awakening, and “ultimately, it is the body which has written the work: it has brought forth the memory which has engendered the writing” (nw, trans.) (“À la limite, c’est le corps qui a écrit l’oeuvre: il a fait nâitre la mémoire qui a engendré l’écriture” [Renard, 48].) Among other points, Dominique Mabin, a neurologist by training, details imbrications between Proust’s chronic insomnia, his use of sleep-medications, and his literary preoccupation with the sleep-world (179). Anne Simon offers the complex and provocative observation that, at least within Proust’s massive novel, “Sleep, in bringing the individual to a

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A discussion of narrative by Hillis Miller proceeds to unpack still another narratival dimension that has considerable bearing on the question of sleep. Miller addresses narrative’s capacity to harbor an authoritative function. Fictions can be regarded “not as the accurate reflectors of a culture but as the makers of that culture and as the unostentatious, but therefore all the more effective, policemen of that culture. Fictions keep us in line and tend to make us more like our neighbors.”44 It is of course possible to cite numerous fictional narratives (e.g., those of Kafka, Duras, Kerouac) in which the authority codes therein conveyed are critiqued. Yet Miller’s observation has bearing on a poetics of dormancy, which emerges partly in relation to the issue of authority. The individual who sleeps is temporarily removed from the admonitions and agendas of authority. The power-determinations that govern diurnal life are suspended although they have the capacity to weave themselves symbolically into dreams. And with a finesse and exactness that require little explanation or commentary in the present discussion, French essayist Jacqueline Kelen happens to have addressed this very point: Libertarian and Dionysian, Sleep distances himself from all vigilant activities and institutions of watchfulness represented by the army, police, religion, and all those who “watch” over us, over our well-being and our security. Sleep is in fact a pacifist rebel, a non-violent dissident who, in imitation of Chuang Tzu’s tree, seeks to have himself forgotten instead of laying claim to his position, his rights. That is why he loves shadow, the night where he blends in and disappears, where he can live in peace.45

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­ erception of him- or herself that is pre-individual, prehistoric, even animal, but also to p an androgenous corporal perception, leads to a relationship/experience that is pre-thetic to the self – anterior to all categorization of identity by judgement” (31). J. Hillis Miller, “Narrative,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 2nd ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995), 69. nw, trans. (Libertaire, dionysiaque, le sommeil s’éloigne de toutes ces activités vigilantes et institutions de guet que représentent l’armée, la police, la religion, de tous ces gens qui “veillent” sur nous, sur notre bien-être et notre sécurité. En fait, le sommeil est un rebelle pacifique, un dissident non-violent qui à l’instar de l’arbre de Tchouang-tseu cherche à se faire oublier au lieu de revendiquer sa place, ses droits. C’est pourquoi il aime bien l’ombre, la nuit où il se fond et disparaît, où il peut vivre en paix [Jacqueline Kelen, Les barques du sommeil: essai {Coursegoules: Reyne de Coupe, 1997}, 100].)

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Sleep and Cognitive Study

Now that something has been said about how sleep both resists and assists narrative, it is appropriate to seek a relatively complete explanation of the paradox. Indeed, some answers emerge through recourse to cognitive theory, devoted as it is to the discovery of links between intentional or consciously motivated thought-processes, on the one hand, and innate or passively acquired conceptions and modes of thought, on the other. The cognitive approach undertakes to deproblematize the fluctuations of meaning inherent in even the most ordinary forms of language by grounding them in the predictable and, to a large ­extent, quantifiable workings of the central nervous system. The relevance of this perspective is considerable here even if the strong sense of connectedness that many cognitive theorists discover between the aesthetic and non-­ rhetorical dimensions of language can tend to downplay cultural, class, and gender mediations by assuming that these latter factors are more or less neutral and do not significantly qualify the integrity of presumed bonds between ordinary and highly figured language. Mark Turner, Patrick Colm Hogan, and other major figures recognized for having successfully applied cognitive theory to the humanities have focused on verbal discourse. Cognitive elements of the type they typically seek to isolate, such as symmetry, are often applicable in visual contexts as well. Semir Zeki is among the most significant investigators of linkages between the processes of vision and the production of visual artwork. And to summarize some of the fundamental concepts of these key figures: Mark Turner’s early work in cognitive studies proceeds from the broad – and highly suggestive – premise that “most of the tools of poetic thought not only exist in everyday thought but are indispensable and irreducible there. Reason and poetic thought are not mutually exclusive; they are rather hypertrophies of a common nucleus of human imaginative capabilities.”46 Continuing in this vein, Patrick Colm Hogan contends that, on the basis of the cross-cultural study of literature, it becomes obvious that there is “uniformity of narrative

46

The Daoist Chuang Tzu discusses two “useless” trees whose unserviceable wood has rendered them immune to the woodcutter’s axe and hence has insured their longevity. Chuang Tzu makes clear that whatever – or whoever – is weak in terms of ordinary economic values can also serve larger economies of individual survival and community wellbeing (The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans. Burton Watson [New York: Columbia up, 1968], 63–65). It is not difficult to discover, as Kelen has, ameliorative analogies between anomalous Daoist trees and dilatory, “unproductive” sleep. For Chuang Tzu on sleep and dreams, see 49 (the “Butterfly Dream”), 77, and 356 of Watson’s translation. Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (Princeton: Princeton up, 1991), 20.

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structures and of the emotions and emotion ideas that are inseparable from these structures.”47 Hogan proceeds to sift out “literary universals” held to be primarily “the direct outcome of specifiable cognitive structures and processes applied in particular domains and with particular purposes.” He thus concludes that “the study of literary universals is largely a subfield of cognitive research.”48 On the visual side of the cognitive spectrum, Semir Zeki discovers a point of departure in an epistemological agenda shared by both art and brain: extracting the “essential” and persisting characteristics of what is observed despite the “ever-changing information” that the “visual world” constantly provides.49 Among other avenues explored, Zeki reviews Plato’s theory of ideal forms and offers a neurological explanation thereof. And very conveniently for this discussion, Zeki has selected for his focal text Plato’s well-known critique of the couch as both ideal and painted image. Summarizing Plato’s argument in Book 10 of The Republic, Zeki points out that “to [Plato] there was the general ideal, the ideal couch in this instance, the one created by God. One could therefore only obtain knowledge about this one (Ideal) couch, which was the embodiment of all couches. Then there was a particular couch which was but one example of the more general, ‘universal,’ couch; and, finally, there was painting, which captured but one facet, one image, of one particular couch.”50 Moving forward to connect philosophy – and especially aesthetics – with neurology, Zeki maintains that “the brain is interested in particularities, but only with the broader aim of categorising a particularity into a more general scheme. For the brain, a couch is categorised immediately as something that you lie down on or sleep (italics mine) in, provided it is given a sufficient amount of information to identify it as such.”51 Zeki concludes that, from a neurological standpoint, the Platonic Ideal is simply “the brain’s stored representation of the essential features of all the couches that it has seen and from which, in its search for constancies, it has already selected those features that are common to all couches.”52 Zeki’s comments on Plato constitute a highly useful illustration of the cognitive approach to the visual arts.53 It is also the case that Zeki helps foster an 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2003), 2. Ibid., 4. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford up, 1999), 11–12. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 40. Anyone investigating this branch of aesthetics should also consider the work of Chicagobased critic and theorist Barbara Maria Stafford. Building on the work of Zeki and other predecessors, Stafford correlates the complexities of the brain-mind and the ultimately

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understanding of what it means to look at sleep from a cognitive perspective. For it just so happens that this neurological reading of a philosophical text illustrates, as well, a recurring particularity in serious discourse of many kinds ranging from the dialogues of an Athenian hypnophobe to the studious commentary of a foremost British researcher. That is, the implicitly understood – and recurrently experienced – material as well as physiological phenomena of the sleep world rather frequently work their way into seemingly divergent discursive contexts. For Plato as for Zeki, there was something about beds, something in turn tied to sleep, that was so well known and apprehended that this something could easily become a building block for reflective and complex propositions – without the possible involvement of sleep herein ever needing to be explored or identified. Sleep all but becomes a platform for (if not alimentation of) thought. Certainly this is a situation where familiarity bred what might be termed discursive contempt even when that same implicit familiarity served as a justification for embedding validity in an argument and perhaps truth at the same time.54 What is meant by a cognitive approach to the factor of dormancy becomes clearer through consideration of theorist Mark Johnson, who has demonstrated a special concern for the ways in which bodily experiences from infancy onward have worked their way as natural metaphors into our rational processes. Johnson’s discussion of “balance” is of particular interest. In The Body in the Mind, he maintains that “balancing is an activity we learn with our bodies and not by grasping a set of rules or concepts. First and foremost, balancing is something we do. The baby stands, wobbles, and drops to the floor. It tries again, and again, and again, until a new world opens up – the world of balanced erect posture. There are those few days when the synapse connections are being established and then, fairly suddenly, the baby becomes a little homo erectus.”55

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coordinated disjunctions of its varied aesthetic productions. It is as if the cerebrum harbors an entire postmodern metropolis that has been ingeniously synchronized (or almost so). According to Stafford, “The brain is simultaneously an externally directed, selectionist mechanism – dynamically framing its environment through variance in the populations of neurons and an internally organizing system – solipsistically occupied with itself in the regulation of its diverging and overlapping dendritic arbors” (Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007], 35). For a related discussion, see Simon Morgan Wortham’s detailed treatment of philosophy’s overt antipathy toward and covert recourse to sleep in The Poetics of Sleep: From Aristotle to Nancy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987), 74.

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Johnson’s line of argument proceeds from the toddler’s pre-verbal acquisition of a sense of balance to the adult’s intuitive application of the principle of balance within a spectrum of contexts ranging from equilibrium of the bodily organs to emotional balance, the accumulation of rhetorical evidence, and beyond.56 In The Body in the Mind, Johnson foregrounds the development of clarifying principles and internal schemata out of the infant’s interaction with caretakers and other daily experiences. A prominent philosopher who is also attuned to the traditional wisdom of discounting dormancy, Johnson nowhere addresses sleep as he diagrams in detail the conceptualizing machinery of the human mind. From a traditional philosophic point of view – that developed from Plato onward –, it is indeed reasonable that only cognitive processes clearly relating to the mind’s intellective functions are justified in attracting philosophic scrutiny. It is also worth noting that Johnson at one point proposes, “Whatever human rationality consists in, it is certainly tied up with narrative structure and the quest for narrative unity.”57 Yet surely, early experiences such as sleep have an impact on the development of our cognitive structures. After all, newborn infants sleep almost constantly; individual consciousness emerges only gradually over a period of several months. Children sleep more than adolescents or adults; the “normal” duration of nocturnal dormancy is the result of several years of maturation.58 All of this sleep – especially during the era of pre-verbal experience – no doubt affects the unacknowledged and perhaps unacknowledgeable ways we look at ourselves and the world. Just as the toddling infant learns intuitively about balance, the somnolent child undoubtedly also absorbs some intuition of the incompleteness and discontinuities, along with the persistences, inherent in human existence.59 56 57 58

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Ibid., 75–96. Ibid., 172. On sleep during infancy, see Burton White, First Three Years of Life, 2nd ed. (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1990), 15–16, 32, 56, as well as Gregory Moffat, The Parenting Journey: From Conception through the Teen Years (New York: Praeger, 2004), 84–85. Moffat also calls attention to the gradual reduction in the hours needed for sleep “throughout the life span” (85). It is once more helpful to consider the work of Mark Johnson, especially some of his more recent comments – two decades after his pioneering study, The Body in the Mind – on types and phases of experiential learning that infants are claimed to inevitably encounter as they gradually mature. Johnson maintains that such … ways of learning the meaning of the world all involve the body – its perceptual capacities, motor functions, posture, expressions, and ability to experience emotions and

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There are at least two key modes in which dormancy, as experienced in the pre-verbal situation of the first years of life, enters into the cognitive domain of more or less autonomous and automatic processes of the mind. Each mode correlates with a stage of early childhood experience. The first mode roughly parallels the state of primary narcissism delineated by Freud, a temporally primitive “phase in which the external world is indifferent and the subject the sole source of pleasure.”60 From Freud’s point of view, dormancy marks a nightly retreat into such a state: “Somatically, sleep is an act which reproduces intrauterine existence, fulfilling the conditions of repose, warmth and absence of stimulus; indeed, in sleeping, many people resume the foetal position.”61 Whether or not one subscribes to the radically regressive portrait of sleep rendered by Freud, it is – at the very least – plausible to maintain that a portion of our cognitive assimilation of dormancy relates to the beginning months of life, including the early phases of post-uterine existence, a period when the mother is “not fully identifiable as an other,” to borrow a phrase from Christopher Bollas, a psychoanalyst who has investigated how pre-verbal experiences lead to the development of the “unthought known.”62 Bollas explores how the individual’s most basic assumptions and expectations about life develop out of a “reciprocally enhancing stillness” in which mother and child “continuously negotiate intersubjective experience that coheres around the rituals of psychosomatic need: feeding, diapering, soothing, playing and sleeping.”63 desires. Such capacities are at once bodily, affective, and social. They do not require language in any full-blown sense, and yet they are the very means for making meaning and for encountering anything that can be understood and made sense of (Italics Johnson’s). … when we grow up, we do not somehow magically cast off these modes of meaning-­ making; rather, these body-based meaning structures underlie our conceptualization and reasoning, including even our most abstract modes of thought (The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007], 36). As before, Johnson emphasizes experiential dimensions that indisputably entail consciousness and volition to the extent – and in the manner – that the infant mind attains to such cognitive purviews. Just as learning is implicated (it may be, in indirect ways) in the developing child’s “ability to experience emotions and desires,” not to be discounted is the learning that must also occur in some form as the infant becomes gradually more cognizant of such corporeal interventions as hunger, the need for sleep, and varied sleep states. 60 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale up, 1970), 125. 61 Freud, Collected Papers, 4:137–38. See also above, note 7, for discussion of this point. 62 Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia up, 1996), 14, 32. 63 Ibid., 13.

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As an elemental psycho-physiological process, the pervasive condition of infantile dormancy no doubt contributes appreciably to a template such as the unthought known. It can thus be proposed that a number of verbal and visual representations involving sleep gesture toward replicating a primal scenario. Sleep-centered artworks of this type tend in the direction of all-encompassing counter-texts that resist outside narrative by including it or by implying that there are no notable narratives not already anticipated by the work itself. It is now useful to locate an example of this mode of sleep-centered representation – one of two held to reflect early childhood experiences and perceptions – with a reminder, on the basis of what has just been pointed out, that subjectivity during the earliest phases of life is mediated, qualified, and fragmentary in numerous ways. After years of interaction with the social and other environments, and given maturation or a failure thereof, the childhood weltanschauung is not likely to be replicated with obviousness in the adult world. And still less can early influences and determinants be presumed to emerge in heavily deliberated artworks (whether visual or verbal) via direct correspondences and parallels. Certainly the phenomenon of representational refraction or metamorphosis should be factored in as Oskar Kokoschka’s monumental painting, The Tempest (1914) (fig. 1), comes under scrutiny as a distinguished example of how the echoes of primary narcissism can permeate a work of art in which sleep is a prominent factor. This extraordinary painting features, first of all, what might be termed a Joycean pile-up of illusion and allusion. Who and what are depicted? What is the setting? What are the visual antecedents and textual bases? Ostensibly, a reclining couple are asleep within a dreamlike scenario of swirling clouds, yet if this whirlwind of blues and grays can be construed as cause for much concern, the recumbent figures at first appear oblivious to the turmoil, as if transfixed in a halcyonic moment. Despite the aerial ambience, Kokoschka maintains that the scenario is oceanic, in fact “a ship-wreck in mid-ocean” that harbors (so to speak) the artist himself and the woman, Alma Mahler, that he “once loved so intensely.”64 Closer inspection reveals, however, that while the female figure is indeed dormant, the supine man is actually awake, his open eyes barely distinguishable from the ambient blue-greys that engulf the entire canvas. Thus from the particular perspective being developed here, this can be taken as a painting about her sleep, or at the very least, it can be said that the 64

Oskar Kokoschka, My Life, trans. David Britt (London: Macmillan, 1974), 78. On Kokoscha’s propensity for self-portraiture in a range of contexts, see Claude Cernuschi, Re/ Casting Kokoschka: Ethics and Aesthetics, Epistemology and Politics in Fin-de-Siécle Vienna (London: Associated up, 2002), 56.

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Figure 1

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Oskar Kokoschka, The Tempest (1913). Oil on canvas, 181 cm × 220 cm. Basel, Kunstmuseum. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource. © ars, ny.

woman’s sleep, rather than the man’s subdued yet riveted, trance-like stare, is the cohering factor that links the varied significatory strata of this fascinating representational octopus. The layers of meaning are indeed abundant, beginning with reminiscences of a particularly celebrated instance of amorous entanglement, Dante’s account of Paolo and Francesca, who reside in the second circle of Hell, a region wherein lustful sinners are condemned to be endlessly blown about by violently revolving winds (Inferno 5:29–43, 73–87).65 Kokoschka’s painting thus carries forward iconographical details associated with the 65

The literary allusion is traced by Patrick Bridgwater, “Some Early Twentieth-Century Bildgedichte,” Text Into Image: Image Into Text, ed. Jeff Morrison and Florian Krobb ­(Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997), 70. For the latent narrative and the accompanying unfurling of images, see The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Italian text with translation by John D. Sinclair (New York: Oxford up, 1969), 74–77. Subsequent references to the Inferno are based on this edition unless otherwise indicated.

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rather extensive catalogue of visual depictions of that notorious, wind-tossed couple. In a specifically German context, the woman can be apprehended as the “bride of the wind” – or in German, “die Windsbraut,” a folkloric locution that denotes a storm or whirlwind and is the painting’s alternate title.66 Yet clearly, with this correspondence in mind, it would be inaccurate to view the work simply as the curious realization of a dossier from a folkloric archive. For with the addition of the male figure – who only seems to sleep but must remain awake, while she is dormant–, the work has become a psychic allegory, a double portrait suggesting that their “union” is in fact a disjunctive coupling. That is, although he is an element of her expansive and eddying cosmos of sleep (or – to refer to the basics of this type of sleep-tableau–, an appendage of her narcissism), it is likely that she is his storm as she leads a life that allows quiescence and repose. They co-exist at best, it seems, or rather para-exist. And specifically in the case of the artist/self-chronicler whose supine but taut form serves as a structural feature – almost as a keel – as this barque-like enclosure of dreams and desires is suspended amid the storm, there is hardly a sense of contentment that might be expected as a spin-off of intimacy. Instead, it can be argued that his strained demeanor articulates an ingrained “extimacy,” to use a term developed by Jacques-Alain Miller. Not quite the antonym of intimacy, extimacy is indicative of certain irreconcilable alienation within the self, a particle of the real (discussed below) derived from the subject’s very early experiences and ever resistant to the assimilating energies of the ego as it otherwise develops in a progressive fashion. “Extimacy” is thus a given from which no one can be immune, but Kokoschka’s reclining male figure is redolent of an intriguing strangeness to himself, a division within.67 Then there are the decidedly resonant Wagnerian overtones, which lead in a different direction hermeneutically. As Kokoschka reports in his ­autobiograpy, Alma Mahler sang, on the occasion of their first encounter, the closing, L­ iebestod aria from Wagner’s opera, Tristan and Isolde.68 And indeed, the sublime, lugubrious aura of the entire painting – with an eros-charged couple as the central focus – correlates with the evocation of rapturous dissolution brought forth in

66 67

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Bridgwater, 70–71. The term, coined by Lacan, was developed by his collaborator, Jacques-Alain Miller. The tortuous logic of “extimacy” is lucidly set forth by Adrian Johnston, Time-Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston: Northwestern up, 2005), 114–15, and by Jerry Aline Flieger, Is Oedipus Online? Siting Freud after Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2005), 237–39. Kokoschka, 72–73.

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the concluding lines of that aria. This observation obtains despite clear differences between the scenario of the painting and that of the opera’s finale; that is, when Isolde enunciates an eloquent death-wish in response to the passing of hapless Tristan: In the undulant surge, in the sonorous sound, in the wafting universe Of the world-breath—to drown, to sink, ingenuous—highest69 Kokoschka’s captivating canvas does not quite contain or evoke all things – or more specifically, all narratives–, yet certainly, the drift is totalizing. With narrative snippets ranging from Dante to Wagner, from poetic text to music to visual setting, from sleep as corporeal accident to a metaphor or “stand-in” for death and dying, from folklore to autobiography and erotic crisis – the sweep is impressive.70 Given the diversity of diegetic pathways, including the interpretive narratives thereby called forth, The Tempest does not encourage forays into ancillary or external narratives. The inclusiveness of the representation may indeed be said to deflect the very notion of externality. And now for the second phase of childhood subjectivity – and the attendant artistic mode within an aesthetic of sleep: Soon after the phase that has been referred to as primary narcissism, a discrete personal consciousness begins to gel, and the child takes his or her first steps “by approximately the end of the first year.”71 Presumably, this is also the period when unspoken realizations of the nature of mental constructs such as balance begin to form. Shortly thereafter, usually during the period between fourteen and twenty-four months, a distinct phase of “rapprochement” transpires that has been carefully studied by child psychologist Margaret Mahler. Having become increasingly comfortable with his or her growing physical motility and a general sense of independence, 69

70 71

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, trans. (“In dem wogenden Schwall, in dem tönenden Schall, in des Welt-Atems wehendem All, − ertrinken, versinken, − unbewußt, − höchste Lust!” Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde: Textbuch, Einführung und Kommentar, ed. Kurt Pahlen with Rosmarie König [Mainz: Schott, 2010], 231) Bridgwater, 69–71, has in effect compiled an inventory of the varied verbal and visual materials with which Kokoschka worked. Philippe Rochat, The Infant’s World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard up, 2001), 18.

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the child begins to discover the mother as a person in her own right. The toddler also manifests a degree of discomfort with the growing understanding of the henceforth separate course of his or her own existence. Mahler applies the term “rapprochement” to this phase during which the child seeks to reduce the distance he or she has been establishing between self and primary caretaker. The term is deceptively tranquil, for the phase is characterized by a certain amount of anxiety and irritable protest over any separation, however brief, from the mother. A “rapprochement crisis” of perhaps only mild intensity transpires during which the child manifests a degree of resistance to the narrative of his or her own life. As Mahler explains, “The toddler’s belief in his omnipotence is severely threatened … as he tries to restore the status quo, which is impossible. Ambitendency, which develops into ambivalence, is often intense … .”72 The infant expresses irritability in a variety of ways, and sleeping patterns, which tend to be uneven during the second year of life, may become erratic.73 The cognitive mechanisms related to sleep may well assume much of their final form during this period of life. The young child experiences a previously unknown sense of personal separateness that is intensifed at the prospect of the onset of sleep. Dormancy underscores to the infant the fact that a rupture has occurred so that s/he is less and less involved in a familiar, totalizing envelope of early life. A preferred life-scenario breaks up that was based on a routine pattern of observable actions, neuro-muscular experiences, and inner psychic transactions. A new cognitive reality begins to take its place. The mutual exclusivity of sleep and narrative that becomes accentuated for the infant during “rapprochement” is illustrated in an example drawn from an ­earlier-­than-usual point in the life of the child in question (at least vis-à-vis Mahler’s time frame). Child psychologist Burton L. White reports receiving “a long-­distance emergency call from a dentist in Georgia who was mildly embarrassed to describe the lengths to which he and his wife were going to stop the nighttime crying of their ten-month-old child. They had reached a point where they were taking the child on a minimum of two automobile rides, after

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Margaret S. Mahler, Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 292. Ibid., 89. For a review of perspectives on the rapprochement crisis in varied studies following the research of Mahler and colleagues, see Allan N. Schore, Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 169–74. Schore endorses the view that the infant’s progress out of the “early state of infantile narcissism is marked by considerable resistance, evasion, and a sense of injury” (169).

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midnight and before six in the morning.”74 This unwillingness to sleep becomes common during the rapprochement period, a time when the child is also advancing in the acquisition of language. It is at least quite plausible that some of the ambivalences related to psychic growth during this phase of early childhood should become invested in the cognitive dynamisms of sleep. In this transitional context, complacent dormancy may suggest to the child the acceptance of a developmental family n ­ arrative – and the rejection of a desired, more enveloping narrative (one less event-filled, less evidently narratival). An ­aversion to sleep, then, signifies a resistance to his or her progressing life-­narrative, which is now acquiring a distinct texture. At the same time, physiological needs will dictate that intervals of dormancy – whether deep and tranquil or restive – will continually, periodically occur. In artistic representations, it is in any case true that sleep frequently becomes an occasion for negotiation of or challenge to the self. Hence it may well be reasonable to argue for a correlation between a child’s pre-discursive experiences during the “rapprochement” phase and often unrecognized assumptions, within representational purviews, that foreground the dormant state as a domain of isolation, ambivalence, and self-demarcation. In illustration of this second category of artistic works corresponding to a phase of the infantile sleep-world, it is relevant to consider an innovative contemporary treatment of an ancient myth by a leading American fiber artist, Jon Eric Riis. Drawn from his Icarus series of tapestries, the example in question – Icarus #3 (2002) – seems at first quite out of place in a discussion of sleepers (fig. 2). However much Icarus may have miscalculated, he was never said to have fallen asleep during flight. Close inspection of Riis’s nimble fingerwork in Icarus #3 nonetheless makes clear that, despite the discrepancies between flying and sleeping, a way has been found to stage this postmodern Icarus almost as a surrogate Endymion, a perpetually dormant Greek shepherd beloved of 74

Burton White, First Three Years, 243. Gregory Stores sets the time frame more loosely than does Margaret Mahler vis-à-vis the separation-rapprochement conflict she specifies. Stores comments, “Especially in their early years, most children need their parents’ help in coping with night-time separation and the potentially frightening experience of the dark or their own thoughts and fantasies” (Sleep Problems in Children and Adolescents [Oxford: Oxford up, 2009], 34). Elsewhere, Stores writes that “Bedtime struggles … are commonplace especially when the child moves from cot to bed and is no longer easily constrained. Many parents are familiar with bedtime delaying tactics in which their child asks for drinks, more stories or cuddles, expresses fear at the prospect of bed, or steadfastly refuses to go to bed, perhaps with tantrums or other forms of difficult behavior” (Clinical guide to sleep disorders in children and adolescents [Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2004], 76).

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Figure 2  Jon Eric Riis, Icarus #3 (2002). Silk and metallic thread with crystal beads, 160 cm × 264 cm. Private collection. Image courtesy of the artist.

Selene, goddess of the moon – and hence as a refusnik vis-à-vis the narrative the son of Daedalus is traditionally held to inhabit.75 The demise of Icarus has been well publicized through Ovid’s account in the Metamorphoses (8.183–235), via Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, and through modern retellings – based on Bruegel’s painting – by poets William Carlos Williams and W.H. Auden. In “Musée des Beaux Arts,” Auden emphasizes the manifest indifference with which the tragedy is visually recorded. The plower, inattentive, continues his work while the sun provides its customary illumination. Light fills the center of the canvas and highlights the legs of the inverted Icarus as he drowns at the edge of an area given over to shadows (ll. 14–19).76 The uniqueness of Riis’s approach is evident not only in that the fallen Icarus is now himself indifferent, but also on account of the removal of most of the ambient scenery from the ensemble so that only the 75

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For a gathering of Greek sources and variants of the Endymion myth, see Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 1993), 35–36. Still to be consulted is Edward LeComte’s Endymion in England: The Literary History of a Greek Myth (New York: Columbia up, 1944). W.H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 529–30. Ovid’s Latin text and translations are readily accessible via the Perseus Digital Library. For the Latin original (ed. Hugo Magnus [1892]), see http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0029. Arthur Golding’s inimitable Elizabethan translation (1567) is available at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999 .02.0074.

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failed flyer, a scattering of feathers, and a rectangular expanse of the sea – just larger than the human subject about to disappear therein – remain. The new Icarus is nude, exposed, only a few inches away from an annihilating “landing.” A substantial zone of cerulean blue occupies the upper three-quarters of the tapestry. An undulating frothy fringe is situated atop the lower quarter of the work, the nether regions of which are of successively deeper blues. Droplets of spume are already visible on the right foot and shin of woeful Icarus. It is illuminating to compare Riis’s effort with the corresponding segment of Bruegel’s canvas. In the lower left corner of the latter, between a man seated securely on an embankment and a ship majestically sailing out of a harbor, only the legs of Icarus are still visible. The plunge is clearly still in progress but has almost concluded; amid splashing surf, much of the right leg is viewable while the left, crooked at the knee, has mostly disappeared. Bruegel has also included several whitish brushstrokes that could indicate either ocean spray or stray feathers from the disintegrated wings of Icarus. In the tapestry version, however, in tandem with an Alfred Hitchcock intensity of suspense and apprehension, Riis has rendered a consummate example of arrested narrative. This Icarus may be about to die – could possibly have already died–, but he seems quite tranquil and accepting of his fate. His eyes are closed; his facial expression is relaxed. His limbs are distributed across the cerulean sky – not far from the sea’s deadly deep indigoes – as if he slumbers on luxurious bedding in pleasant oblivion and benign solitude. Within a postmodern context, this Icarus may have flown little if at all. But if so, like the Endymion he has almost become, he might attain some higher mode of death, just as Pierio Valeriano, an Early Modern érudit formidable and master of obscurity, claimed of Endymion as he lapsed into the deepest of sleeps (“somno altissimo”), which is in fact the death of the body (“morte huius corporis”) (fig. 3). Now free of corporeal impediment, he enters a new life among the gods.77 It is also conceivable that this postmodern (and post9/11) Everyman dreamed his way upward within the intoxicating vortices of cybernetic innovation or in the conference chambers of corporate endeavor, only to succumb to downsizing or outsourcing. If he has crashed emotionally, it is now as if, at this representational juncture, he is well-primed with Prozak; he is docile, quiescent, dormant.78

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Pierio Valeriano, Hieroglyphica (Frankfurt: Sumptibus A. Hierati, Excudebat E. Kempffer, 1614), 739. For an overview of Riis’s work, see Rebecca A.T. Stevens, “Riis’s Powerful Pieces,” Fiberarts: The Magazine of Textiles 30.1 (Summer 2003): 32–38. “Icarus #3” is included in Stevens’s discussion (37).

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Figure 3 Anonymous illustrator of Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica. Endymion. Woodcut, 4.75 cm × 4.75 cm. Frankfurt: Sumptibus A. Hierati, Excudebat E. Kempffer, 1614. Page 739. Image courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book AND Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Amid the enticements to interpretation afforded by Riis’s Icarus #3 as a sleepcentered work of art, it is necessary to locate this work within a special category of such art and to specify the key differences that distinguish it from ­Kokoschka’s The Tempest and other instances of the all-inclusive category. Most obvious is a veering off from the dimension of inclusiveness. Although Riis’s work is a tapestry of the mind that includes much, there is also a trend toward delimitation rather than toward universality and the dragging in of varied concepts and narratives. It is difficult to argue that this rectangular space – which is also the well-demarcated existential space allotted to a specific postmodernized subject – is concerned with anything beyond Icarus’s immediate – yet certainly substantial – exigencies. Then there is the question of Icarus’s unhappy career (and the term is here used in both its usual and its etymological sense of a course, a running – or in this case a flight) in relation to Margaret Mahler’s intriguing notion of an early-­ childhood “rapprochement” phase. Clearly, the traditional Icarus of Ovidian myth – in the company of and under the tutelage of his father – was on a direct track leading to autonomy and freedom, away from the authoritarian rule of Minos, king of Crete. Advised to avoid extremes while flying away from Crete, the Icarus of Ovid and Bruegel fails in a paroxysm of over-achievement, is a high flyer in every sense as the wings, bound together with wax, fall apart through fictive proximity to the torrid sun. Such zealousness hardly seems possible in the case of his postmodern successor, who appears content to have dropped out, to have conceded defeat amid crisis and conflict. Certainly, his easeful inactivity is viewable as a retrogressive journey toward some prior, more basic plane of existence. Detectable as well is a parallel with Riis’s selection of a subject tightly tied to its “home” in Bruegel’s familiar canvas. A constructive performer of postmodern anachronism, Riis is a meticulous weaver of threads and has snatched Icarus out of the sky of canonic Netherlandish

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painting to represent him in a medium – traditional tapestry-making – native to the mythical epoch of Daedalus and son.

The Dream, Textual Servant

As mentioned earlier, this book is not a study of oneiric processes, their psychology and physiology, nor is it primarily an examination of the tie-ins of dreams and aesthetics. It is of course inevitable in a discussion of the varied involvements of sleep in the arts that the topic of dreams will emerge on multiple occasions. At the same time, it should be pointed out that, in interpretive discussions, sleep is often staged solely as a conduit into dream. Indeed, one must first sleep in order to dream, and sleep research has shown that the typical episode of dormancy entails an intermittent flow of dreams and random thoughts mostly forgotten upon awakening.79 Verbal and visual artists have tended to recognize the distinctly vacant dimensions of sleep and often depict dreamless dormancy as a discrete state. Hermeneutically, there are obvious advantages to foregrounding the representation of dream at the expense of sleep that is anoneiric. The dream provides interpretive discourse a refuge against the insistent indeterminacy of sleep. In the case of verbal art especially, the literary dream offers such familiar Aristotelian rubrics as agon, climax, and dénouement. In short, the dream, while providing an escape from culturally prioritized narratives, also provides a re-entry into narrative in the form of an internal text that, as Freud makes clear, cannot escape censorship within the unconscious. However imitative of the discontinuities of actual dreams that, 79 In The Dreaming Brain (New York: Basic Books, 1988), J. Allan Hobson presents a valuable synopsis of research on the sleep-dream cycle, with snippets of the fragmentary recollections that subjects could provide of their oneiric experiences upon being aroused at various intervals (142–46). As Hobson also notes, “A conservative estimate has it that more than 95 percent of all dream mentation is completely unremembered” (7). Paul Martin reports a striking example of an attempt at dream-recall that took place under circumstances considerably less favorable than those of a sleep laboratory: “In December 2000, Tony Blair was asked, during an Internet chat forum with members of the public, what he remembered dreaming about on the night after his first general election victory in 1997, and what was the last dream he remembered . … ‘I don’t remember getting much sleep at all that night … . As for dreams, I have not had much chance for sleep over the past few days, let alone dreams’” (Paul Martin, Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams [New York: St. Martin’s, 2004], 46). Most individuals presumably score greater success at remembering dreams than did Tony Blair – if less than is the case for the average subject in a sleep lab.

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undeniably, possess narrative attributes, the literary dream tends to break rank with its ­experiential antecedents by becoming eminently susceptible to conventional hermeneutic operations.80 Within the literary text, the dream thus signals not an exit from narrative but a shift from inter- to intra-personal space, a domain to which such narrative discourses as interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness have easy access. Literary dreams often qualify the primary plot to which they belong by requiring of the reader continuous interpretation with the presentation of every new image or episodic turn. Use of the dream thus brings into play a hermeneutic dialectic between the oneiric and primary narrative. If a particular literary dream is heavily symbolic – and it is hardly true that all dreams in literature are–, then the dream also retards the main narrative and temporarily moves it in the direction of stasis. However, narrative movement overall is not disrupted but can be intensified by dream. It is also very much the case that, if the significance of each literary dream-episode is to be adequately apprehended, the textual occasion – the ambient details – should be considered, including the depiction of the specific envelope of sleep within which the dream-narrative transpires.

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Some of the boundaries between the typical dream and most literary narratives are clearly drawn by Bert O. States, who remarks that “most dreams are pedestrian affairs, hardly the stuff of good fiction … . We can see just how ‘artless’ dreams are if we put them against a fairly simple definition of narrative like Tzvetan Todorov’s: ‘ the shift from one equilibrium to another … , separated by a period of imbalance.’ … The narrative of the dream is concerned with ramifications of a tension … not with getting me into trouble (or pleasure) and out of it, but with extending the trouble (or pleasure) to the boundaries of the feeling that produced the dream” (Bert O. States, The Rhetoric of Dreams [Ithaca: Cornell up, 1988], 152). If the average dream does not qualify as literary, it is a rather obvious corollary that the dream in literature – no doubt with some exceptions – is not to be taken as an effort to represent convincingly the visions, the disconnections, the intensifications and fade-outs of actual dreams. Yet if there are definite boundaries between oneiric and literary discourses, there are countless imbrications as well. For instance, Bert States cites a seemingly unremarkable dream that proves to be an apt illustration of irony as a polymorphous phenomenon across categories of cognition (Ibid., 157–58). Giorgio de Chirico’s surrealist novella, Hebdomeros (1929), is an example of a carefully deliberated verbal composition where the illusion of a continued – and continuously shifting – oneiric discourse has been handled with unusual success. See also Bert States’s essay entitled, “The Death of the Finch,” which treats of two of the author’s own puzzling, provocative dreams that were experienced in the wake of his sister’s death (Seeing in the Dark: Reflections on Dreams and Dreaming [New Haven: Yale up, 1997], 234–50).

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It is at this point helpful to look carefully, if rather briefly, at Ivan Goncharov’s divertingly sluggish novel, Oblomov, and specifically at Chapter 9 (entitled “Oblomov’s Dream”). Here Goncharov’s slothful eponymous hero, the epitome of petty, decadent Russian aristocracy of the mid-nineteenth century, collapses into a protracted Madeira-assisted slumber that is saturated with oneiric replays of his early years on a remote Russian manor and in its dependent villages. Not a symbolic odyssey, this dream-sequence is instead a crowded portfolio of sadly amusing episodes from the seriously over-indulged, undemanding childhood of a lower-level aristocrat. It is hardly possible to read the chapter without acquiring an understanding of how a particular butterfly of a child has proven – metaphorically – to be the father of a certain disillusioned and unproductive Byronic “hero.” Yet while much of the textual power of “Oblomov’s Dream” proceeds from its blithesome and profusely episodic nature, appreciable semiotic impact also results from the intriguingly redundant somnolence of the ensemble. It is significant, therefore, that not only does the lethargic Oblomov lapse into dreams when “sleep stopped the slow and lazy flow of his thoughts,” but also that, once he has entered an oneiric utopia, sluggishness, drowsiness, and sleep are descriptively prominent.81 Especially germane is Goncharov’s acerbic sketch, worthy of Daumier or Hogarth, of Oblomov’s paternal seat on a torrid summer afternoon. The scene is happily ruled by “a sort of all-absorbing and invincible sleep, a true semblance of death. Everything was dead, except for the snoring that came in all sorts of tones and variations from every corner of the house.”82 Such is Goncharov’s vignette of a culturally dormant “élite” in love with a pathetic status quo and given over to a hypnophilia redolent of that social clique’s resistances to individual as well as collective revision and amelioration. Oblomov’s dream, it thus turns out, diegetically complements a hesitant and meandering larger narrative. An ample digression heavily larded with psychic regression, the dream is basically a menagerie of false starts and bona fide failures with little dependence on the sort of curious, complex, or ambiguous images typically referred to in studies of literature – and of dreams as well – as 81

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Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov, trans. David Magarshack (London: Penguin, 1954), 102. Faith Wigzell’s treatment of the dream-state in this novel is competent but rather conventional (“Dream and Fantasy in Goncharov’s Oblomov” in From Pushkin to Palisandriia: Essays on the Russian Novel in Honor of Richard Freeborn, ed. Arnold McMillin [New York: St. Martin’s, 1990], 96–111). Also perceptive but subject to similar limitations is Amy C. Singleton’s discussion in No Place Like Home: The Literary Artist and Russia’s Search for Cultural Identity (Albany: State U of New York Press, 1997), 76–79. Ibid., 115.

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symbols. Yet there is at least one recurrent (and pertinent) verbal construct, almost an anti-image, that Goncharov presents to his readers first as a textual event that is “actual” within his fictional account and later enmeshed in the stuff of dreams. The pattern in question is that of a hole, a simple (yet also puzzling) terrestrial depression, presented first as a ditch, later as a ravine. It was in a ditch near Oblomov’s home that an unidentified, itinerant workman was once discovered reclining, no doubt sleeping as well, by the boys of a village. For whatever reason (or lack thereof), the man – who never speaks – is regarded as a total enigma, an alien, an insidious threat, a being beyond signification. It is to this dubious locale that Oblomov finds himself transported at one point in his dream. Such is the lowly yet paradoxically meaningful hole, a lapsus of ground that can suggest additional forms of lapse or falling away. During a subsequent oneiric episode, the ebullient young Oblomov escapes from his governess – who has fallen asleep – to run to a ravine that fascinates him but which he is forbidden to visit: … he ran to the very edge of it, to peer into it as into the crater of a volcano, when suddenly all the stories and legends about the ravine rose before his mind’s eye; he was thrown into a panic, and rushed more dead than alive back to his nurse trembling with fear, and woke the old woman.83 Whatever this chasm signifies – or declines to signify – along with its predecessor (the ditch with its anonymous laborer), something is also indicated about Oblomov and very likely about sleep as well. Goncharov’s holes harbor much semiotic tracklessness. Yet along with a general fear of indeterminacy, there is a more focused fear of the identity-loss that is a consequence of becoming declassé, a fate that appears to have already befallen the anonymous worker who is bereft of companions and has fallen asleep in a ditch. Facing the ravine, Oblomov may well be looking into himself as into a volcanic crater; such is the abyss of lost sense of identity or self into which he may already be plunging. And in the stratified society of which he is a member, he can become identityless only if he falls out of his class as well – and he is far along in the process of so doing. Additional words should be advanced about the general fear that so often inhabits sleep and about which more commentary will be offered in the next section when a parallel text, Baudelaire’s “Le gouffre,” is considered. Readers with an affinity for Lacan may at this point (and later when Baudelaire is 83 Ibid., 116.

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a­ ddressed) apprehend Goncharov’s terrifying ravine as a manifestation of the real, a nearly unspecifiable cognitive region (mentioned above). The real has been described about as articulately as it can be by Alan Sheridan, in a brief account of its use in Lacan’s work, as … that before which the imaginary faltered, that over which the symbolic stumbles, that which is refractory, resistant. Hence the formula: ‘the real is the impossible’. It is in this sense that the term begins to appear regularly, as an adjective, to describe that which is lacking in the symbolic order, the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped … .84 As one of Lacan’s three interlocking “orders” of discourse, the real coexists with the imaginary (preeminently the sphere of the ego, of self-images) and the symbolic (the inclusive realm of everyday language, discourse, and ­communication – rather than conventionally defined as the realm of symbols in an aesthetic or psychological sense). The real is never definable since it eludes language. At the same time, it is one of the manifestations of the real that it always accompanies verbal expression, which is in every case never quite adequate. In a pot pourri of contexts, the real emits clues as to its imminence and its involvements; it has been linked to the inexpressible paroxysms of trauma and has been apprehended as a hole in the symbolic.85 It thus seems clear (at least as clear as is possible with Lacanian discourse) that the 84 85

Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), x. A convenient introduction to Lacan’s real and its function as semiotic hole is offered by Daniel Beaumont in Slave of Desire: Sex, Love, and Death in the 1001 Nights (Fairleigh Dickinson up, 2002), 38–40. Bruce Fink clarifies some of the tangles regarding the Lacanian real by proposing two reals, one that is basically the infant’s world prior to the intrusions of the symbolic order, the other a product of the lapses and incoherences inherent in the symbolic. According to Fink, “The real is, for example, an infant’s body ‘before’ it comes under the sway of the symbolic order, before it is subject to toilet training and instructed in the ways of the world. In the course of socialization, the body is progressively written or overwritten with signifiers … ” (The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance [Princeton: Princeton up, 1995], 24). This view of a first real, conceived of as “that which has not yet been symbolized or even resists symbolization” (25), is ultimately – argues Fink – best seen as “a real before the letter, that is, a presymbolic real … (R1).” For it becomes, in the course of the development of the individual psyche, accompanied by “a real after the letter which is characterized by impasses and impossibilities due to the relations among the elements of the symbolic order itself (R2) … ” (27). With this distinction in mind, it is plausible to apprehend Oblomov at the ravine as a gentleman very much in extremis, inclined to cling to the illusory, no-longer-accessible

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real is also i­ mplicated in the varied transactions of sleep, in the discontinuities it imposes upon the mind of the rational subject, in the myriad evanescences of dream, hypnagogia, and nightmare – e.g., their tendency to teasingly disappear into forgetfulness upon full awakening and the uncertain forays into interpretation that they elicit. It can be claimed that thanks to the real, attendant bugbear of the symbolic, sleep is familiar and tame enough to offer bases for the pondered conclusions of the learned, yet often imbued with chaos and troubling images so as to insinuate the symbolic order’s impending collapse. Goncharov’s masterful staging of Oblomov’s aborted visit to a ravine, then, does not constitute an instance of conventional symbolism but rather a facing down of the symbolic. The frightful hole that greets Oblomov awakens to his memory “all the stories and legends about the ravine” – fables, it may be, of anomie, of challenges to conventional mores, or of what happens when feudal ideology undergoes decay. And amid the confusion, it should not escape the reader’s notice that the ravine caper also nicely illustrates, along with Riis’s Icarus #3, how the infantile separation crisis can work its way into a sleep-­ centered work of art. The trip to the chasm was after all a determined effort on the part of the dreaming subject to achieve distance and autonomy, to scoff at parental surveillance and policing. The escapade was unnerving, and a fearful boy returns to the tutelage of a surrogate mother, his aging nurse. An itinerary to freedom has failed, and not without serious irony, for this is not after all the tale of a gallivanting boy but rather of a languid adult unable to break free of a passel of dependencies. Along with the previously discussed qualities that sleep reveals as an element of narrative resistance, the enigma of dormancy can be further clarified in the context of a generalized need or desire for narrative. For just as sleep tends to resist narrative, the latter tends to confront dormancy not simply at random. If there is a totalizing trend within epic and novel – and perhaps all narrative modes–, then all aspects and particles of the mimesis that the work seeks to enact need to be somehow coordinated, coercively if necessary, within the overall spatial-temporal progression.86 In addition, personal, institutional,

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comforts of that passé, first-stage real and dismayed by the contradictions and multiplicities of its “mature” successor: the real, stage two. At least in a project of constructing autobiographical narrative, the recurrences of dormancy can be understood as a direct contributor rather than a constrained or “conscripted” component. The processes of sleep include nightly self-prunings that help eliminate memories of marginal and trivial experiences of the previous day. On constructive forgetting (or “reverse-learning”) that may occur during REM-sleep, see George Christos, ­Memory and Dreams: The Creative Human Mind (New Brunswick: Rutgers up, 2003), 126–27.

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social, and no doubt other agendas require that a vigorous effort be made to bring any resistant element into the overall structure.87

Fighting Sleep: Christian Directory X2 (Persons and Baxter), Descartes’s Cogito, and Pascal

Narrative resistance and related issues have now been investigated in relation to how sleep is generally perceived in daily life and represented in the arts. There is no doubt, of course, that the basic characteristics of the dormant state are among the realities on which such perceptions are founded. Physiological, psychological, and broadly cultural concerns all contribute to the argument developed above, and especially to the notion that sleep is resistant to a range of constructive narratives – and to some not-so-constructive ones as well. With narrative resistance thus implicated in the postmodern hypnoglyph as in the representation of sleep during any and every time period, attention now turns to the historical background – and more specifically, to a certain nexus of philosophical and theological thinking prominent in the Early Modern era. From around the second quarter of the sixteenth century and continuing into the first decades of the seventeenth, a new struggle against sleep is initiated, an ideological campaign that has yet to conclude even with the onset of another millennium. The developments here under scrutiny fall roughly into two phases that are quite intertwined. The first is more directly concerned with labor and sleep-management while the second is more clearly philosophical or cognitive. The latter phase is easier to generalize about, occurs under the aegis of French classicism, and is dominated by the figure of Descartes and to a lesser extent Pascal. It would be an oversimplification to maintain that the first phase simply relates to Protestantism and the rise of capitalism, the connection having been 87

Jacques Derrida appears to have anticipated, to an extent, the point that I wish to demonstrate at this juncture. Derrida has suggested … that we replace what might be called the question of narrative … with the demand for narrative. When I say demande I mean something closer to the English “demand” than to a mere request: inquisitorial insistence, an order, a petition. To know (before we know) what narrative is, the narrativity of narrative, we should perhaps first … return to the scene of one origin of narrative … to that scene that mobilizes various forces, or if you prefer various agencies or “subjects,” some of which demand the narrative of the other, seek to extort it from him … : “Tell us exactly what happened.” The narrative must have begun with this demand … (Jacques Derrida, “Living On Border Lines,” trans. James Hulbert, Deconstruction and Criticism [New York: Continuum], 87).

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explored and set forth in Max Weber’s indispensable study over three-quarters of a century ago. Weber’s thesis has been often examined and confirmed, and commentators such as Simon J. Williams are correct in stating that “wasting time, Weber notes, is deemed the first, and in principle, the deadliest of sins within this puritan doctrine.”88 And as Weber observed regarding the emergent ethos, eternal repose is part of the guerdon of the blessed in the afterlife, but until then, sleep is to be confined to the minimum necessary for preserving corporeal health. Nor is the assurance of salvation so simple as to depend upon wakefulness alone as a certificate of piety and, much less, of election. Indeed, “in order to become certain of one’s state of grace,” there is no value in “inactive contemplation … , at least if it occurs at the expense of work in a calling, for it pleases God less than the active implementation of His will in a calling.”89 Weber discovers in the writings of Richard Baxter the exemplary enunciation of this ethos, and such an impression is almost certainly confirmed by anyone who reads a segment of Baxter’s Christian Directory entitled “Directions against sinful Excess of Sleep.” Two excerpts from this section have been cited at the opening of this chapter, and the second of these, referring to the sun’s supply of work-conducive light to a good half of the planet at any given moment, can be viewed as hinting beyond Baxter’s era to global markets and supply-side economics. Yet the antimony between labor and sleep is perhaps expressed nowhere with more vehemence than in another subsection from Baxter’s “Directions … ,” in an exhortation to his readers to “consider whether thou wilt allow thy servants to do the like” (i.e., sleep while others work): They must be up and at work, or you will be offended and tell them that they are no servants for you, and that you hire them not to sleep. And do you not owe God more service than they owe you? Doth God hire you to sleep? Is it any lawfuller for you than them to sleep one minute more than is needful to your health?90 And just how much dormant time can be conceded for the purposes of health during a twenty-four hour period? Perhaps surprisingly, Baxter displays some leniency on this point, asserting that “to some five hours is enough: To the ordinary sort of healthful persons six hours is enough: To many weak valetudinary 88 Williams, Sleep and Society: Sociological Ventures into the (Un)known, 50. 89 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Stephen Kalberg (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), 105. 90 Baxter, A Christian Directory: Or, A Summ of Practical Theologie, and Cases of Conscience, 2nd ed. (London: Robert White, 1678), 341.

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persons seven hours is needful.” Yet for the genuinely sick, Baxter refrains from setting a figure.91 Despite the deference to individual variations in constitution or stamina, the general tenor of the comments above advances a negative perspective on sleep that can be understood as inherent in the protestant ethic, can be tied to the rise of capitalism, and foreshadows a later epoch – our own – when the status of sleep is similarly compromised. To clarify the record, the point should be made that Baxter’s position, while it contributes to a burgeoning ideology, is hardly new or original. Or to phrase the issue in another way, the nascent ethic – with respect to the quandary here under review – is at least as much Catholic or even pagan as it is specifically Protestant. Yes, it should be acknowledged that John Calvin himself, a founder of Protestantism and a primary promulgator of Early Modern hypnophobia – and ergomania – authored a bedtime prayer containing the following request: “ … do not let my sleep be excessive, to gratify beyond measure the ease of my flesh, but only to satisfy the frailness of my nature, so that I may be disposed to Your service.”92 Yet a major transition had begun approximately two full centuries before Baxter and several decades before Calvin’s prayer as well. For with the translation into Latin of Plato’s Laws during the second half of the fifteenth century, an “advanced” perspective on the management of sleep and on many other topics with a political dimension was at the disposal of Early Modern Europe.93 A key excerpt from this dialogue, advancing a depreciation of the dormant state and presented above, 91 92

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Ibid., 339. John Calvin, Writings on Pastoral Piety, ed. and trans. Elsie Anne McKee (New York: Paulist, 2001), 214. William J. Bouwsma finds that sleep is “one of Calvin’s favorite metaphors for acquiescence to sin” – and a general signifier of spiritual indolence (John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait [New York: Oxford up, 1988], 174–75). George of Trebizond’s mid-fifteenth-century translation into Latin of the Laws was of disputed accuracy and was mired in a polemic between the translator, who tended toward Aristotelianism, and Cardinal Bessarion, an early Platonist (Anthony Levi, Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis [New Haven: Yale up, 2004], 104–05). Marsilio Ficino’s translation a few decades later was better received, but as James Hankins points out, there are “extensive borrowings from George of Trebizond’s translation of the Laws and the Epinomis. Apparently Ficino was willing to distinguish between the philosophical and the philological value of George’s work on Plato, despite Bessarion’s devastating critique in Book V of the Calumniator. But it is clear that Ficino also collated Bessarion’s criticisms of George’s Laws and Epinomis and adjusted his own version accordingly” (James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance [Leiden: Brill, 1990], 1.310). The burgeoning scrutiny of Plato during this period proceeds in tandem with an overall debate regarding the interrelations (including the wisest prioritizations) of corporeal and cognitive faculties and functions.

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surely ­became rather well disseminated among intellectually advanced Europeans from the late fifteenth century onward. The notion that sleep should be limited to the minimal duration that the body requires (in order that the intellectual and related capacities of each individual can be furthered) is already presented here, to be eventually transmitted to – and by – Calvin as well as Baxter. It is thus worth noting that, even if Baxter might not himself have been a reader of the Laws, he quotes in the margin of his “Directions against sinful Excess of Sleep” a statement from the passage in question, with an attribution not to Plato and his dialogue itself but rather to Diogenes Laertius, an indefatigable late-classical compiler of maxims and anecdotes.94 The new – and less accommodating – cultural bedroom occupied by sleep at this historical juncture is hardly explained in toto by the fact that a particular work by a Greek author is now accessible to anyone who can read Latin. Obviously, there is a larger cultural envelope, and among its many components, the popularity of Plato’s Laws is symptomatic of a conflict between the traditional medical perspective on sleep and a burgeoning rationalizing trend that put sleep under continuous review along with virtually all other aspects of everyday Early Modern existence – for instance, housing, educational curricula, warfare, the arts, the state, and the management of money. The most trusted of medieval medical handbooks, the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, advised six hours of sleep per night but included substantial allowances for individual differences, up to nine hours if necessary.95 Baxter and his predecessors, however, were convinced that adhering to the low end of the scale provided amply for the body and created optimal conditions for the health of the soul. A concurrent and closely related trend entailed a conflict between a feudal-era, shared temporality based on the ringing of bells in communal domains such as churches and monasteries, on the one hand, and on the other, a more precisely partitioned time-scheme, more in congruence with (and regulatory of) the daily life of families and individuals, and made possible through engineering advances that led to the development and dispersal of an array of clocks (including alarm clocks!) in a range of social milieux.96 A widespread 94 Baxter, Christian Directory, 339. The phrase that Baxter cites (in Latin translation) is “Dormiens nemo ullius pretii est”; “No one who is asleep is of any value.” For the source, see Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks (London: William Heinemann, 1972), 1.312–13. 95 L’école de Salerne et les médecins salernitains, trans. Charles Meaux Saint-Marc (Paris: J.B. Baillière et Fils, 1861), 70. 96 A. Roger Ekirch cautions against overstating the extent to which Early Modern perspectives on – and techniques of – time-measurement replaced traditional schemes and attitudes. “Despite the growing regimentation of time by the seventeenth century into hours

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rise in the standard of living meant a decline in the need for shared sleeping areas (especially beds shared by entire families) and a corresponding increase in individual beds and sleeping chambers occupied by one or a few individuals.97

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and minutes, traditional intervals afforded members of all ranks a frame of reference for calibrating the darkness. Even men and women able to afford clocks or other timepieces found these temporal categories convenient” (At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past [New York: W.W. Norton, 2005], 138). All the same, Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum’s extensive and detailed study of time-measurement and management makes clear that, from the late medieval era through the Early Modern period, a “transformation of time-consciousness” is underway, with augmented emphasis on ergonomics as opposed to leisure (History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996], 3. Dorhn-van Rossum affirms that “time pressure became a perennial topic among humanist authors from the end of the fourteenth century on.” Especially among educational writers, how to best use one’s limited lifetime becomes a question of key import. “The suggested solutions frequently amount to arrangements resembling hourly schedules: the hours of work and reading should be carefully allotted, gaps of time should be avoided or made use of,” and so on (253). While the sandglass rather than the clock appears to have been the device commonly used in academic settings during that period, the era of public clocks was already at hand in most cities, to be followed by “the widespread private ownership of clocks in the seventeenth century among the burgher class and from the eighteenth century also among the middle and lower classes.” The spread of clocks was not always a guarantee of the ­enforcement of ever-increasing levels of productivity. On occasion, when manorial or other employers removed sundials or tampered with clocks, workers sought redress with reference to their own hour-glasses or other “private timepieces” (Dohrn-van Rossum, 316). The transition in sleeping patterns and attendant implications received their first notable assessment in Norbert Elias’s The History of Manners (Volume 1 of The Civilizing Process [Oxford: Blackwell, 1978]), 162–68. For a comic representation of the Ancien Régime of sleeping customs, see Boccaccio’s Decameron, Day 9, Tale 6, wherein two young men, one of whom is in love with the daughter of an innkeeper, pretend to be travelers and spend the night at the inn owned by the young woman’s father. The innkeeper’s family as well as the “travellers” must make do with three beds and a cradle. Predictable as well as unexpected sexual comedy is the result of this arrangement (Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G.H. McWilliam [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973], 709–14). Williams notes that a general insouciance with regard to sleeping behavior “disappears, slowly in the sixteenth century and more rapidly in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteen centuries; first in the upper classes and much more slowly in the lower classes” (Sleep and Society, 40). In his classic study (1962) of the material culture associated with sleep, Lawrence Wright notes that in Britain well into the seventeenth century, “The relations between the householder, the family and the servants were still so intimate, that much coming and going through bedrooms that would today be intolerable intrusion, was then a matter of course … .There is a foretaste of better domestic planning to come, in the house at Coleshill built in 1662 by Sir Roger Pratt, a friend of Inigo Jones … .The two bedrooms on the ground floor, and

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A greater awareness of sleep proceeds along with a greater desire to sleep comfortably and with an enhanced sense of a need for the surveillance of sleep. During the same era, there is a greater availability of means to address these varied concerns. For the present discussion, a crucial year is 1529, the publication date of An Essay on Study (De ratione studii), a widely read educational treatise composed by a lesser-known humanist (an associate of Erasmus) with the imposing Latinized name of Joachimus Fortius Ringelbergius. In chapters entitled “We must not suffer a moment to escape us without profit” and “We must not waste too much time in sleep,” the worthy Ringelbergius helps establish an ideological kernel, a perspective on labor and the life of the mind (and the limited role to be conceded to sleep). His views appear to have been recreated – if not directly inherited – by managerial communities of the late-twentieth century and later.98 In the first of the two relevant chapters in An Essay on Study, Ringelbergius advises his presumed readers – primarily students of his era – that “the life of man is made up of moments, and the fruit thus momentarily gathered, will, in the lapse of years, amount to a noble and imperishable possession. I would even recommend the improvement of the hours usually devoted to sleep. I need not inform him who is alive to the fascinations of study, that there are hours when the activity of the mind renders slumber impossible.”99 The message of encouragement to maximize productivity throughout one’s entire life at the expense of sleep is unmistakable. Ringelbergius seeks to reinforce the impact of his recommendation in the second of the two chapters through

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the four above, all have separate access from a corridor, with dressing-rooms, fire-places, and good light” (Warm & Snug: The History of the Bed [Stroud: Sutton, 2004], 80). Citations below refer to the translation of G.B. Earp, An Essay on Study (De ratione studii [1529]) (Philadelphia: Carey andHart, 1847). With regard to ideological carry-over into present-day societies, it is germane to consider the viewpoint of Charles Leadbeater, who critiques the apparent epidemic of sleep-deprivation in London and throughout southeastern England. Leadbeater comments, The picture that emerges is one in which managers sleep too little, work too long, endure too much stress and, as a result, are far more likely to feel irritable and to express negative feelings at home and at work. It’s difficult to conclude that this does not have a significant impact on the quality of working life of those for whom these managers are responsible … Moreover, managers who believe that they should work harder rather than sleep well are likely to pass on that value to the people they manage. Their extended work hours and sleep deprivation set the tone for everyone else (Dream on: Sleep in the 24/7 society, [London: Demos, 2004], 25–26). An extended exploration of this topic is presented by Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013). Ringelbergius, 50–51.

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­emphasis on what happens to aspiring humanists – or to anyone – who appears committed to the opposite course: Too much sleep, more than too little, renders both the corporeal and mental faculties drowsy and languid during the whole of the day … . If he possess any abilities, he is in danger of losing them—If he have any ideas, they are as confused, and consequently as useless and as unmeaning as his dreams—In short he most resembles his kinsman the dormouse—a creature entirely useless to society, and born only to sleep and to devour the goods of the more industrious part of the community.100 Thus the “Prostestant ethic” is already issuing forth in the exhortations of Ringelbergius, even before they heyday of Calvin. The religious – and more specifically, the teleological – dimension is not yet explicit, but the notion of accumulating the fruits of productivity over a lifetime anticipates the vigorous homiletics of Ringelbergius’s more theology-minded successors. At the same time, it should be noted his admonitions harbor a reminiscence of New Testament hortatory rhetoric (especially Matthew 7:16-17, 13:24-30). This investigation into anticipators of the Protestant work ethic (as framed by Weber) next turns to the writings of Robert Persons, a Catholic – in fact a Jesuit–, whose seminal work, also called The Christian Directory, was first published in 1582, roughly a full century before Baxter’s. The latter polemicist claimed that he “found his vocation by reading Persons” (probably in a bowdlerized Puritan version).101 Demonstrating the extent to which Early Modern Catholic and Puritan inclinations could intermingle and blend, especially on the topic of the stringent management of sleep, Persons inveighs mightily against overindulgence in that state in a chapter that includes an anatomization of the ill-effects of sloth. Sloth’s noxiousness begins, asserts Persons, with “a certain heavynesse, and sleepie drowsienes towardes all goodnes, according as the Scripture sayeth: pigredo immitit soporem: slouthe doeth bryng drowsines. For which cause S. Paule sayeth: surge qui dormis; arise thou which art a sleepe: and Christ crieth owt so often: videte, vigilate; looke about you, and wache.” In decrying the slothful, Persons is especially concerned about individuals who 100 Ibid., 54–55. 101 Victor Houliston, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580–1610 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 44. For the influence on Baxter, see also Persons’s Christian Directory, ed. Houliston (cited above), xiii. Regarding the tumultuous biographical and historical background of Persons’s Directory, see Houliston, Catholic Resistance, 32–37.

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readily discuss cattle and other matters of everyday concern, but “yf yow reason with them of their salvation, and their inheritance in the kyngdome of heaven,” they are nonplussed, “as yf they were in a dreame.” He concludes with recourse to the Old Testament Book of Proverbs (6:9–11 and 24:33–34) and the monition that, in the case of the persistent sleeper, “povertie shall hasten upon thee as a running poste, and beggarye as an armed man shall take and possesse thee.”102 Antagonisms between sleep, on the one hand, and work and salvation, on the other, are evident here. It should be pointed out, however, that the slothful slumber that Persons refers to has at its root an inertia of the soul; that is, the deadly sin of acedia, a sluggish turning away of the mind from communion with God.103 Hence a barrier to salvation. And the sleep that Persons calls attention to in Proverbs is more specifically corporeal and will lead to earthly poverty and discomfort. Persons is after all a staunch Catholic; intense vocationalism/aversion to sleep are not yet signatures of membership in the elect. Persons thus does not pursue and develop the innuendos that Calvinist eyes might well detect in his examples and antecedents. And sleep has yet to incur the deeper demotion that will befall it as a specifically Puritan ethos solidifies in the coming decades. The Bible has been mentioned several times in this inspection of the evolving ethic toward the close of the Early Modern period. Before proceeding, therefore, to the second major component of the new cognitive regime, it is worth asking whether the Bible is inherently anti-sleep, as the references of the Persons and Baxter would indicate. Simon J. Williams pointedly so concludes, following review of the crisis at Gethsemane, when the disciples of Jesus fall asleep and thus unwillingly facilitate his arrest (Matthew 26:40–45): “The implications of this passage hardly need spelling out … it does tell us much about biblical attitudes to sleep: the spirit … may be willing, but the flesh indeed is 102 Persons, ed. Houliston, 305–06. 103 A spiritual torpor often accompanied by dormancy of the body, the cardinal sin of acedia was industriously defined and illustrated by Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1967). In a more recent study, William Harmless investigates (as did Wenzel) the writings of Evagrius, a fourth-century Greek-speaking founder of monasticism who spent much of his life in Egypt. Evagrius frames acedia as a “demon of boredom” that “attacks not under the cover of darkness, the way the demon of fornication does. Instead it attacks in broad daylight, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., when the sun is at its peak and the midday heat saps one’s best energy and robs one’s concentration” (William Harmless, Mystics [New York: Oxford up, 2008], 144). The distracted monk is likely to be attentive to anything except his spiritual vocation, according to Evagrius. “When he reads, the one afflicted with acedia yawns a lot and readily drifts off to sleep … ” (Evagrius, quoted by Harmless, 145).

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weak!”104 The Gethsemane episode and passages from Proverbs and elsewhere in both Old and New Testaments are indeed congruent with this outlook. Yet it should be recognized that, as in ancient Greek literature and culture, there are also recognitions – if at times less than explicit – of the necessity and even the virtues of sleep. Certainly when God “caused a deep sleep to fall” over Adam, so that the former could remove a rib from the latter and create Eve (Genesis 2:21), somnolence is ameliorative even as it can also be perceived as inherently a hindrance, a barrier between the sleeper and purviews of thought and action. At another point (Exodus 22:25–26), sleep is referred to as a fundamental human right: If a lender of money has received a cloak from a poor person as a pledge for a loan, the garment must be restored to its owner by the end of the day, “for it may be your neighbor’s only clothing to use as cover; in what else shall that person sleep?” (Exodus 22:27) Then there is the matter of the fourth commandment (Exodus 34:21) in the Decalogue, one of the most generous – and stringent. One day of “solemn rest” out of every seven is hereby ordained; it is inconceivable that license to sleep is not provided herein. At the same time, the requirement becomes an item of cultic observance, and violation thereof is termed a capital offense (Exodus 35:2). Last to be mentioned in this necessarily brief catalogue is what may be the Bible’s strongest (though implied) endorsement of sleep. Of interest here is one of the most familiar of all written texts, Psalm 23, and specifically the second verse, in which God as shepherd is credited with providing the faithful with restorative repose in the proverbial “green pastures.” It is at least reasonable to apprehend sleep as an example of whatever might be available when one reclines in a protected pastoral setting.105 S­ ubsequently, God “restores my soul” or effects a process of revitalization frequently acknowledged in appreciative discussions of sleep across 104 Sleep and Society, 39. 105 David Noel Freedman calls attention to the Hebrew verb “yarbiseni, ‘he makes me lie down’: The verb is used with animals, both wild and domestic, literally and in figures of speech for human beings … . In several instances [in the Old Testament] the act of lying down is a symbol of peace and tranquillity… ” (“The Twenty-Third Psalm,” Michigan Oriental Studies in honor of George G. Cameron, ed. Louis L. Orlin, E.T. Abdel-Massih, A.S. Ehrenkreutz, and G.L. Windfuhr [Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Dept. of Near Eastern Studies, 1976], 150). For a well-articulated version of this point in a popularized devotional source, see Glandion Carney and William Long, Longing for God: Prayer and the Rhythms of Life (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1994), 162–63. According to Carney and Long, the beginning verses of Psalm 23 refer to the restoration of the “natural rhythms of sleep and work” (163). Similarly, Devorah Jacobson writes of “restorative moments” in her comments on this psalm (“Psalm 23” in The Women’s Haftarah Commentary: New Insights from Women

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c­ ultures. The point being developed here is reinforced if Psalm 23 is viewed as in part a riposte to the corresponding verse in the preceding psalm, wherein the speaker laments, in contradistinction to his successor, O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest. psalm 22:2

It is thus inaccurate to categorize the Bible, such a crucial subtext for many aspects of late-second- and early-third-millennium ce civilization, as fundamentally hypnophobic although many references are accompanied by “multiple and contradictory signification” as commentator David Roberts does well to observe.106 In such cases, the direction of the spin that a reader perceives is linked to whatever passages are prioritized while others are downplayed. Laying groundwork for a sleep-related ideology of their own era as well as for the work ethos of late capitalism, Persons and like-thinking individuals of his time were convinced that Biblical passages in which sleep is depreciated were the essential ones. It is thus not surprising that, as Simon J. Williams very relevantly remarks, “the seventh day of ‘rest’ is now very much under attack.”107 Central also in the construction of a regime of cognition is the status of the dream as it evolves in the writing of the French philosopher, René Descartes, for with the gradual dissemination of what can be termed a Cartesian oneirology, the dream becomes, in at least some quarters, a dormant issue – in contrast to the situation during most of the sixteenth century and earlier. If the era just prior to that of Descartes is considered once more – what is often referred to as the “high” Renaissance –, then a fascination with virtually any permutation of sleep quickly becomes evident. This is the epoch of Shakespeare and Montaigne, of the glorious Neoplatonism of Ficino and of the enigmatic dream romance, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Across varied discursive contexts, sleep is delightfully dream-filled or agonizingly nightmarish, insouciantly insensate, or somberly monitory.108 Rabbis on the 54 Weekly Haftarah Portions, the 5 Migillot & Special Shabbatot, ed. Elyse Goldstein [Woodstock: Jewish Lights, 2004], 427). 106 “Sleeping Beauties: Shakespeare, Sleep and the Stage,” Cambridge Quarterly 35.3 (2006): 240n31. 107 Sleep and Society, 38. 108 Drenched in Neoplatonic and related hermeneutics, the foundational study of the dreamculture of Early Modern Europe is surely Francesco Gandolfo’s Il “Dolce Tempo”: Mistica,

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The new paradigm of sleep that emerges around the beginning of the seventeenth century preserves but dilutes a long-standing theological bias according to which dreamless sleep is inconceivable, for the soul must always, in some way or ways, provide evidence of its incessant viability and, ultimately, its immortality. Anoneiric slumber, according to this perspective, is simply impossible. For Descartes, it is implicit – and indisputable – that dreams are continuous during sleep, and they assure the vitality as well as the immortality ofthe dormant psyche. The dream, however, becomes virtually devoid of content that merits consideration. Along with the new work ethic, a “think-ethic” is ascendent, and the latter requires as a counterpoint the empty mimesis of our dreams. A decline in the overall fortunes of sleep thus accompanies Descartes and his cogito. Of particular note in defining this transition are Descartes’s own enigmatic dreams, or more precisely, the puzzling record that has survived of these dreams. At issue are a young philosopher’s sleep-experiences on a November evening in 1619; this is a key scenario, at the advent of European Ermetismo e Sogno nel Cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1978). An updated investigation of much merit is Maria Ruvoldt’s The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep, and Dreams (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2004). Of similar interest and distinction is Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr.’s Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment: Vitality from Spenser to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2012). The Early Modern perception that sleep was at times anoneiric is perhaps epitomized in Montaigne’s comment that “sleep in its depth sometimes puts dreams to sleep”; (“ … le sommeil en sa profondeur endort par fois les songes”). The translation is Donald M. Frame’s, The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford up, 1976), 451. For the French text, see Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 581. Also notable is Thomas Hill’s rambling late-sixteenth century treatise, The Moste pleasaunte Arte of the Interpretacion of Dreames (London: Thomas Marsh, 1576). Addressing the question of “why men commonly are not wont to dream in the beginning of the night,” Hill draws on long-standing medical theory in his assertion that “the firste digestion is then ocupyed, in which the fumes of the meate muche ingrossed are sent … and so cause the person that he cannot then dreame” (Ci, recto). David Roberts does well to point out that, at least in dramatic contexts, the question of dream is often sidestepped. The sleeping subject is often represented as “purely asleep, with no consciousness we can access” … (235). Roberts also distances his interpretation from the perspective of one of his predecessors (David Bevington) when it becomes evident that the latter’s “unease with these sleep scenes is doubtless a symptom of his postChristian narrative, which requires, with its basis in epiphany, an account based on sleep as a dreaming state, not an unconscious one” (Roberts, “Sleeping Beauties,” 244). It is clear that, due to the dissemination of an advanced and nuanced Aristotelian naturalism in tandem with the growth of Platonism, Early Modern artists and audiences were sensitive to a spectrum of sleep-states, dream-dominated or otherwise.

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c­ lassicism, that turns out to be meaningful for modernism’s eventual founding. There are obvious ironies, often noted and commented upon, in that a founder of neoclassical intellectualism bequeathed to philosophical posterity a muddled assortment of oneiric fragments. What is known of this strange incident, which took the form of a three-dream sequence, survives in a summary written by Adrien Baillet, first biographer of Descartes, of a detailed account made by the thinker himself and recorded in a now-lost holograph. The last installment of the episode crystallizes, for the present discussion, the dynamics of the series. Jacques Maritain’s summary of this final portion is worth quoting on this topic: In a third and final dream [Descartes] sees upon his table a Dictionary and a Corpus poetarum, open at a passage of Ausonius: quid vitae sectabor iter? (What path shall I follow in life?) An unknown man hands him a bit of verse – the words Est et Non catch his eye. After several disconnected incidents too unimportant to relate, Descartes decides in his sleep that it is a dream, and interprets it. The interpretation obviously merits much greater attention than the dream itself … . We gather that the Dictionary signifies “all the various sciences grouped together,” and that the Corpus poetarum “marks particularly and in a very distinct manner, Philosophy and Wisdom linked together.” The words Est et Non, which are the “Yes and No of Pythagoras,” represent “Truth and Falsity in human attainment and in secular sciences”; the section beginning with Quod vitae sectabor iter? “marks the good advice of a wise person, or even moral theology.”109 Even filtered by Maritain’s matter-of-fact prose, how distant Descartes’s dream appears from the detached and seemingly invincible rationalism of the master of the cogito! Yet Maritain is eager to salute Descartes because, whatever his subsequent cognitive investments, he “saw then, in the enthusiasm and inspiration of the poets, a means of discovery incomparably more powerful than reason heavily armed and the logic of the philosophers.”110 Such is Descartes’s oblique encounter with an oneiric sublime, an intrusion into his somnolent mind by a burst of keen consciousness of unclear origin. Some order or plan appears operative that comes from beyond or above the frontiers of the dreamer’s psyche. And although an independent, reflective 109 Jacques Maritain, The Dream of Descartes together with Some Other Essays, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944), 14–15. 110 Ibid., 24.

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cogito is evident as the dreamer undertakes – in mid-dream – to decipher his own oneiric visions, there is still mediation (via sleep) that this sterling mental capacity endures. If such an event had transpired at a later point, it would seem to interrogate the autonomous rationalism articulated by Descartes in the Discourse on Method. At this tantalizing juncture, a fascinating and developing narrative of a philosopher’s nocturnal life breaks off and withers in manuscript. Its implications remain unpursued in his later, most representative work. At a key moment, Descartes has endeavored, in effect, to put sleep to sleep and has virtually succeeded. At the end of the process, the new consciousness is no longer challenged (and not until the emergence of efforts to revise the Cartesian regime of cognition) by a supra-personal vigilance that can invade the demesne of somnolence in the form of a prophetic dream. What’s worse, such oneiric grandeur can even overshadow the luminescence of waking cognition. Yet despite the mangled record of these dreams, they at least serve as a reminder of the “truth” (from a Cartesian perspective) that sleep is always accompanied by dreams of some sort. And therefore, those adhering to the new cognitive order can be comfortable with the tenet that sleep, however valueless overall, is free of the threat of intervals of soul-annihilating or cogitodisrupting anoneiricity. With the latter mode of somnolence dismissed, so it seems, Descartes is later able to proclaim, with apparent confidence, toward the end of the “Sixth Meditation” (1641): I should not have any further fears about the falsity of what my senses tell me every day … . This applies especially to the principal reason for doubt, namely my inability to distinguish between asleep and being awake. For I now notice that there is a vast difference between the two, in that dreams are never linked by memory with all the other actions of life as waking experiences are.111

111 René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1984), 61. (… non amplius vereri debeo ne illa, quae mihi quotidie a sensibus exhibentur, sint ­falsa … . Praesertim summa illa de somno, quem a vigilia non distinguebam; nunc enim adverto permagnum inter utrumque esse discrimen, in eo quod nunquam insomnia cum reliquis omnibus actionibus vitae a memoria conjungantur, ut ea quae vigilanti occurrunt … [Descartes, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery {Paris: J. Vrin, 1996}, 89].)

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Thus, Descartes has manifestly completed the installation of a new paradigm of cognition. Implicitly, periods of dormancy are also periods of dream. The philosopher advertises, at the same time, a cognitive legerdemain, a memory-­ test that calibrates questionable phenomena against an inventory of life-­ experiences and hence punctures the verisimilitude of dreams. In the “Sixth Meditation,” Descartes is quite some distance from the overpowering dreams of 1619. And in declaring a victory for the intellective transactions of the waking psyche, Descartes has also canceled out entirely a powerful hazard: sleep without dreams, an awful and perhaps unbridgeable synapse in the symbolic, and surely in the cogito as well. Putting (dreamless) sleep to sleep, in the process creating a “safe” sleep that assures continuation of psychic/rational activity at every instant – this is not an urgent project in the era before Descartes’s philosophical “maturity,” with some parties quite at ease with the perception that there are periods of anoneiric somnolence. As the seventeenth century moves forward, the sleep-­ problem is more precisely that, a problem, and the desire for a solution grows more intense. Descartes surfaces, ostensibly, as arch-problem-solver. A similarly significant instance of quick cognitive footwork that contributed to the founding of a new regime of cognition appears in the writings of the ­philosopher-mathematician Blaise Pascal when he recoils from the scepticism of a predecessor, Montaigne, regarding the integrity and reliability of the mind’s ongoing processes. In an account of a conversation said to have taken place between Pascal and a certain Monsieur de Sacy, Pascal protests that, for Montaigne, our thinking proceeds – at any given moment – with no greater pretensions to accuracy than in the midst of “natural sleep” (“le sommeil naturel”);112 that is – ostensibly, implicitly –, during a state of incessant dream. In so stating, and without a trace of disingenuousness, Pascal sidesteps as did Descartes that more serious philosophical quandary: the prospect of anoneiric sleep. Indeed, however overwhelmed the cerebrum might be by spectral images, sensations, and thought-like mentations that could belong either to dream or waking life, at least the ongoing subsistence of the mind is evident, even unquestionable. Elsewhere, in the Pensées, Pascal is apparently attuned to the dual nature of sleep that Montaigne and his century were often ready to acknowledge. Referring to the essayist, Pascal on this occasion asserts, “Sleep is the image of death, you say, and I say that, instead, it is the image of life.” (“Le sommeil est l’image de la mort, dites-vous; et moi je dis qu’il est plutôt l’image de la vie.”) 112 Blaise Pascal, “Entretien avec M. de Saci” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jacques Chevalier (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 567.

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What Pascal alludes to is surely a passage in “Of Practice” (“De l’exercitation”) (Essais 2.6), where Montaigne conjoins sleep and death.113 Montaigne here allows ample space for the notion that sleep can well be a mentally vacuous condition. He thus begins, “It is not without reason that we are taught to study even our sleep for the resemblance it has with death.” (“Ce n’est pas sans raison qu’on nous fait regarder à nostre sommeil mesme, pour la ressemblance qu’il a de la mort.”) And he adds, “How easily we pass from waking to sleeping! With how little sense of loss we lose consciousness of the light and of ourselves!” (“Combien facilement nous passons du veiller au dormir! Avec combien d’interest nous perdons la connoissance de la lumiere et nous!”)114 And so on. This obscure slumber is no doubt devoid of the unique fire, the illumination of dreams, that, from the archaic aphorisms of Heraclitus onward, philosophers have typically had in mind for each of us during periods of deep quiescence. Since the sleep that Montaigne indicates here is blank and dreamless, Pascal appears to do well – as co-founder with Descartes (and others) of a new era during which an ever-vigilant intellect is virtually axiomatic – not to trouble himself with consideration of a “deviant” mode of somnolence – the dreamless sort. He appears content to let matters rest with little more than a nod in the direction of Montaigne’s parallel between sleep and death. Pascal simply counters with the observation that he considers sleep “the image of life” (“l’image de la vie”). Yet there is a vital difference herein, for the image of life that Pascal has in mind surely consists of the kaleidoscopic representations of dreams; however outlandish or fragmentary they might be, they can in any case be seen as a reassuring demonstration that the psyche is ever active.115

113 nw, trans. Pascal, Pensées, ed. Philippe Sellier (Paris: Mercure de France, 1976), 462, 462 n79. 114 Donald M. Frame, trans., The Complete Essays of Montaigne, 268; Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Thibaudet and Rat, 351. 115 However debatable the view that dreamless sleep never occurs – and ultimately, however loaded with ideological freight that position might be –, it continues to garner subscribers and supporters. Owen Flanagan, for instance, argues as follows: I want to reject the assumption that … dreaming occurs during only some of the time we are asleep. This is the ‘common sense’ view, and it is widely held by many, if not most, sleep scientists. The view I am going to assume is that we are always, while alive, conscious. If it is true that while alive we are always conscious to some degree, and if it is true that we are always alive and not dead when we are asleep, then it is true that we are always conscious while asleep. We are always dreaming while we are asleep (Dreaming Souls: Sleep, Dreams, and the Evolution of the Conscious Mind [New York: Oxford up, 2000], 68).

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Whatever the degree of validity of this critique of Montaigne,116 the fervor of Pascal’s assessment helps institute a new cognition. Put simply, the master schema now established posits that consciousness is dominated by clear, rational thinking during waking hours and given over to dreams during periods of sleep. It can be argued that this cognitive order has yet to be overthrown or discarded despite attenuations, modifications, and protests. And aside from alternatives offered by some Asian thinkers (e.g., the Daoist Chuang Tzu), Kierkegaard’s panegyric (seen at the start of this chapter) to anoneiric slumber is perhaps without parallel. A less dramatic (and more practicable) affirmation of sleep is offered in the work of Emmanuel Levinas; his outlook is taken up in the next chapter. To continue more specifically with Pascal: absorbed and insistent in his reaction to a threat to the emerging rationality of his era, he managed to attract the notice of at least one prominent (and pungent) opponent when credence in the Cartesian regime eventually entered a period of deep though not permanent decline. The dissenter in question is Charles Baudelaire, and in “The Chasm” (“Le gouffre”), an exuberantly decadent sonnet, the poet of spleen and abandonment ridicules Pascal’s apprehensions of unchartable terrains outside the pale of numbers and essences (“Nombres et des Étres,” l. 14). Baudelaire, it can be argued, flourishes during a period of détente regarding the drawbacks of sleep. Accordingly, it is not surprising that, in “The Chasm,” he renders Pascal’s fear of sleep as singularly keen: Sleep frightens me, as one feels loathing at A great hole leading who knows where … .117

116 Worth consulting on this topic is an essay by Henry Phillips, “Pascal’s reading and the inheritance of Montaigne and Descartes,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pascal, ed. Nicholas Hammond (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2003), 20–39. As Phillips astutely comments, “Pascal confronts Montaigne as an adversary of the way of thinking and way of life he finds embedded in the Essays, and which are contrary to the true Christian religion” (24). Phillips cogently concludes that “Montaigne, without Pascal’s argumentative framework, is dangerous, not because Montaigne is irreligious, but precisely because he claims to profess Christian belief. Pascal therefore maintains a deliberate distance from Montaigne, despite their seeming convergence on many issues” (30). 117 Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford up, 1993), 343. (J’ai peur du sommeil comme on a peur d’un grand trou, Tout plein de vague horreur, menant on ne sait où … . [Les fleurs du mal {1861}, ed. Claude Pichois {Paris: Gallimard, 1996}, 233])

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It turns out that Baudelaire’s nightmare-harassed Pascal bears a resemblance to Pascal’s dream-ridden Montaigne. At the center of both representations is a spectral site that harbors the seat of cognition under siege. The “focal point” of this quandary is in each instance a radically unfocussed sleep-mode characterized by an effaced boundary between sleep and waking. Hence, there is an incompatibility with any attempt to distinguish between oneiric and “real” experiences. While Pascal’s Montaigne is embedded in doubt, this same Pascal, as framed by Baudelaire, is dismayed at pondering the prospect that “all is abyss” (tout est abîme) including “action, desire, dream, speech” (action, désire, rêve, parole). Overall, as if to spite Pascal’s glum mood, there is a tinge of celebration in the representational chaos that Baudelaire here renders. “The Chasm” is all but a Walpurgisnacht of glaring images, cognitive lapses, and blaring rhetoric. Yet if Baudelaire’s assessment of Pascal is hyperbolic, there may be a rightness in the similitude found to exist between sleep and a hole or pit. Whether dreamless pit or oneiric labyrinth without exit, sleep is recurrently apprehended as a gap in the capacities of rational discourse.118 Equally germane is a resonant aphorism in Nietzsche’s Dawn of Day (Morgenröte), a mid-career work (1881) in which a rebellious philologist continues an agenda of constructively contaminating long-unquestioned assumptions about how truth is partitioned from error. As in Baudelaire’s “The Chasm,” ­Nietzsche manages to inject insight into a tenebrous topic of inquiry. He 118 It is worth pointing out that Baudelaire’s phraseology curiously anticipates the view of Lacanian critic Hal Foster that such a hole or “trou” can fuse with the experience of trauma so to render a sense of the troumatic. Referring to surrealism, Foster submits that “sometimes its illusionism is so excessive as to appear anxious – anxious to cover up a troumatic real – but this anxiety cannot help but indicate this real as well” (The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century [Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1996], 138). The frantic illusionism that Foster specifies is congruent with the tenor of Baudelaire’s parody of Pascal’s worry. See also the article cited above (note 11) by Jean Starobinski, “Rêve et immortalité chez Baudelaire,” wherein sleep and dream are tied to fears that are existential and, potentially, everyone’s: “… the chasm is also the indefinite lapse which opens between the life that is struck with death – and eventual death; it is the interval between whatever announces to a life its condemnation, and actual death.” (“ … le gouffre est aussi le laps indéfini qui s’ouvre entre la vie frappée à mort – et la mort définitive; c’est l’intervalle entre ce qui annonce à la vie sa condamnation, et la véritable mort” [50].) Or as Jean-Luc Nancy poses the problem and implies – as a solution – a perhaps never-quite-attainable equanimity, “Whoever does not know how not to awaken himself, who remains on the look-out while in the trough of sleep … lodges there with his fear.” (“Qui ne sait pas ne pas se réveiller, qui demeure aux aguets dans le creux de sommeil … en reste à sa peur” [Tombe de sommeil, 83].) (Translations mine)

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s­ ummarizes Pascal’s quarrel with Montaigne under the rubric of “Doubt about Doubt”: Doubt about doubt. —‘What a good pillow doubt is for a well-balanced head!’—this saying of Montaigne’s always provoked Pascal, for no one longed for a good pillow as much as he did. Whatever was wrong? —119 Quoting an aphorism that Montaigne did not transmit in quite this way, the German enfant terrible of philosophy unmistakably implies that there is a special variety of beneficial metaphorical or philosophical sleep that is doubtdependent. The point of departure is, clearly, a passage where Pascal, in his conversation with Monsieur de Sacy, laments of Montaigne as follows: … ignorance and lack of curiosity are two sweet pillows for a well-made head, as he himself says.120 Pascal’s words as here recorded – there is no doubt – are derived from Montaigne’s essay, “Of experience” (“De l’experience”), where one of the exemplars of Early Modern sleep-discourse asserts as follows: “Oh, what a sweet and soft and healthy pillow is ignorance and incuriosity, to rest a well-made head!” (“O que c’est un doux et mol chevet, et sain, que l’ignorance et l’incuriosité, à reposer une test bien faicte!”)121 Whether Pascal rails against Montaigne’s proclivity for doubt or for ignorance and lack of curiosity, it is evident that the former views the latter’s preoccupation as anything but a pathway to repose. And in responding to Pascal as he has, Nietzsche appears to have delved beyond the rhetoric of a Gallic mathematician to revel in the relaxed tone of Montaigne’s pronouncement. 119 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the prejudices of morality, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1997), 31. (Zweifel am Zeifel. — „Welch’ gutes Kopfkissen ist der Zweifel für einen wohlgebauten Kopf!” — diess Wort Montaigne’s hat Pascal immer erbittert, denn es verlangte Niemanden gerade so stark nach einem guten Kopfkissen, als ihn. Woran fehlte es doch? — [Morgenröthe, Nachgelassene Fragmente Anfang 1880 bis Frühjahr 1881 {Kritische G ­ esamtausgabe, Vol. 5.1}, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari {Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971}, 49.]) 120 nw, trans. (“… l’ignorance et l’incuriosité sont deux doux oreillers pour une tête bien faite, comme il dit lui-même” [Blaise Pascal, “Entretien avec M. de Sacy,” ed. Jacques Chevalier, 570–71].) 121 Frame, trans., 822; Thibaudet and Rat, eds., 1050–51.

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The maxim that Nietzsche ascribes to Montaigne via Pascal has in any case textual bases in the discourse of the two Frenchmen.122 If only Pascal had developed a tolerance for incomplete mental narratives as Montaigne obviously did, or could have somehow welcomed rather than combatted the phenomenon of doubt, or had concluded that conclusions do not always need to be reached or certainties identified! Pascal might then have arrived at a suspension of judgment, an easeful repose – in the face of jarring propositions and perceptions – that might also be seen as a sleep of the psyche if not of soma. It follows that such a suspension (a concomitant of the doubt/ignorance Montaigne so willingly espoused) would have encouraged Pascal (and Descartes with him) to abandon that lively brooding over whether they were asleep or awake, were acting in a way that could not be objectively verified, or were only a characters in their own dreams. Such a benign falling off of cognition is ­compatible with a genial bodily somnolence.

Baudelairean and Other Beginnings

With the above comments on Baudelaire and Nietzsche, this study has already begun the task of providing historical and theoretical exposition of the modernist framework, in reaction to which the postmodern emerges and, among 122 Also worth keeping in mind is another passage in Pascal’s “Entretien” that likely served as an antecedent for Nietzsche but which lacks an exact grounding in Montaigne: He casts all things into a doubt that is universal and so general that this doubt turns on itself – that is to say, whether he doubts. And doubting even this last supposition, his incertitude rolls over itself in a circle that is perpetual and without repose. He takes issue equally with those who affirm that all is uncertain and those who affirm all is not, for he wishes to affirm nothing. (nw, trans.) (Il met toutes choses dans un doute universel et si général, que ce doute s’emporte soi-même, c’est-à-dire s’il doute, et doutant même de cette dernière supposition, son incertitude roule sur elle-même dans un cercle perpétuel et sans repos; s’opposant également à ceux qui assurent que tout est incertain et à ceux qui assurent que tout ne l’est pas, parce qu’il ne veut rien assurer [Chevalier, ed., 564].) Yet a close parallel is discoverable between what Montaigne asserted and what Pascal attributed to him since the former elsewhere confesses an absence of hesitation with regard to “giving myself up to doubt and uncertainty and my ruling quality, which is ignorance” (Frame, trans., 219) (“… me rendre au doubte et incertitude, et à ma maitresse forme, qui est l’ignorance” [Thibaudet and Rat, eds., 291–92]). It is in any case unmistakable that Pascal sees Montaigne’s doubt as unfurling itself quite energetically (“sans repos”), even continuously. Also, Nietzsche responds felicitously to the tinge of overstatement in Pascal’s comments.

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its many manifestations, provides an occasion, even a “housing,” for a polydiscursive, genre-like group of artworks, the hypnoglyph. Sleep-phenomena undoubtedly assume positions of importance within modernist aesthetics. The assumptions and conventions that emerge and congeal within a modernist purview can be regarded as a stratum of representational bedrock within the fissures of which the hypnoglyph, a postmodern “form,” discovers opportunities for innovation, reconstitution, and subversion as well. If modernist practices pertaining to the representation of sleep are taken as a whole, then Proust’s mega- (and meta-) novel is of unsurpassed importance. Located here is virtually every conceivable nuance or variation germane to the artistic depiction of sleep during the first decades of the twentieth century. Proustian somnology, though a recurrent concern for this study, cannot be examined exhaustively herein. And prior to an encounter with Proust, this discussion takes on the task of identifying pivotal instances that help establish what becomes a decades-long project, the modernist representation of sleep. Various historical and artistic events can be argued for as starting points for a new “macro-” trend, at some interval during the nineteenth century, with ramifications for practically every sort of human endeavor, with consequences in the areas of economics (e.g., the development of centralized banking), government (i.e., the “modern” state), and technology (e.g., the mechanized and gas- or electrically-illuminated metropolis).123 If modernity does not indisputably mushroom until early in the twentieth-century, it is nonetheless relevant – in the search for a “paradigm” shift in the representation of sleep – to discover an insurgence of incipient modernism during a period extending from around 1855 to about 1865. This is an era shared by Baudelaire, Courbet, Charles Darwin, and Walt Whitman. Readers familiar with the cultural output 123 Schematic outlines of the transition are numerous. It is useful to call attention to Nicholas Mirzoeff’s synopsis of the installation of modernist time – and with the establishment of modernism as an historical epoch. To begin with, the rise of the railroad as a means of transportation resulted in an advance in standardized time-measurement. “As a result, all clocks in England were calibrated to the same time whereas they had previously respected the actual variation of time created by geography so that a clock in London would be a few minutes ahead of one in Bristol.” Also notable is the rather substantial demolition of mature urban areas and the emergence of “a new, modern society” in their place. Such was the fate of Paris during the mid-nineteenth century as Baron Haussmann constructed “broad new boulevards through the narrow maze of early modern streets in the center of the city. In so doing, he at once destroyed many working-class districts of the city, provided the means to move troops into Paris in the event of an insurrection and created the cityscape that was to be celebrated by the Impressionists” (An Introduction to Visual Culture [London: Routledge, 1999], 67).

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of these individuals will note a common interest in the discourses of sleep in the case of three of the four.124 The advent of a new epoch in depictions of sleep is perhaps most clearly signaled by Baudelaire. At the same time, it is not that sleep and dreams were avoided by his predecessors and merited fresh attention. Eminent Romantics such as Keats and Shelley were entranced by, for instance, the capacity of the individual psyche to supply – via dreams and the hypnagogic state – pyrotechnic displays of imagery. To be expected was a terrifying nightmare or two – but even these intervals of psychic mayhem could prove to be occasions for the demonstration of genuine beauty. Witness, to cite one of the best known instances, Fuseli’s grim Nightmare where, accompanying the horror, there is adeptness and elegance in the general scene in addition to idealization in the portrayal of the feminine image (fig. 4). And conveniently for the present discussion, this assertion finds support in a contemporaneous assessment delivered in the poetry of Erasmus Darwin, a friend of the artist. Darwin comments on a newly-rendered painting of a “love-wilder’d Maid with sleep oppress’d” (l. 53) on whose torso a grinning fiend is sitting. It was a scene … mark’d by fuseli’s poetic eye; Whose daring tints, with shakespear’s happiest grace, Gave to the airy phantom form and place. – Back o’er her pillow sits her blushing head, Her snow-white limbs hang helpless form the bed … . (ll. 56–60)125 124 In the interests of briefly explaining why Charles Darwin is included in a group of figures who helped generate new approaches to the depiction of sleep, an observation recorded by Peter Childs (among others) regarding Darwin’s impact is worth mentioning: “Humans were closer to animals than to a God, and nature was evolving not static. This suggested different narratives of human history: not one of a single progression towards a final judgement day; but a cyclical movement within nature, in which reproduction and survival of the fittest increasingly became recognized as the forces behind human endeavour, not rational thought or spiritual belief” (Modernism, 2nd ed. [London: Routledge, 2008], 47). It is thus the case that the erosion of the traditional view of creation entailed the break-up of the established eschatology as well. Severely challenged at this point is the longstanding Christian view of death as a profound and lengthy slumber that will conclude with a grand awakening at the end of human history. The crisis of belief leads to a representational vacuum that reflective modernists will seek to populate with depictions of sleepers undergoing enhanced, evocative awakenings in a variety of contexts. 125 Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden. Vol. ii. The Loves of the Plants (London: T. Bensley, 1806), 126. Jennifer Ford calls attention to the friendship of Darwin and Henry Fuseli as well as to the former’s ekphrastic response to the latter’s artwork (Coleridge on ­Dreaming:

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Figure 4  Henry Fuseli, Nightmare (1781). Oil on canvas, 101.6 cm × 126.7 cm. Detroit, Institute of Arts. Photo Credit: hip/Art Resource, ny.

Most definitely, the representation of sleep was not a Romantic innovation. From Poussin onward (indeed, long before), sleeping figures had served the aesthetic goal, among many others, of providing human dimensions on the basis of which the material items within a painting could be measured and apprehended. Sleep, as stated earlier, had long been viewed as a terrain of personal danger, resistance to narrative, erotic interventions, or the slothful bending of the human mind away from God. The experience of dormancy for centuries was also regarded as a necessary interval for the mundane but indispensable breakdown and absorption of ingested foodstuffs – a holdover concept from classical and medieval medicine whose credence was diminishing but had anything but disappeared even as late as the eighteenth century. In tandem with that view was the notion of sleep as a deserved anapausis or disengagement after labor, as an occasion for a general regathering of energies and stamina.126 Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination [Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1998], 25–26). 126 Thus George Cheyne affirms that is just as unreasonable “to disturb the animal Functions in the time of Sleep, by any other Employment, than that of the secondary Concoctions … i.e. the applying the Nourishment to the decayed Parts” … , as “it would be (were it p ­ ossible) to eat or drink, or make provision for the Necessities of Life, in the time of S­ leeping” (An Essay of Health and Long Life, 7th ed. [London, n.p, 1725], 78). James MacKenzie

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Figure 5 Joseph-Marie Vien, Sleeping Hermit (1750). Oil on canvas, 223 cm × 148 cm. Paris, Louvre. Inv. 8437. Photo Credit: JeanGilles Berizzi. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art ­R esource, ny.

This last somnological sector is particularly well illustrated by Joseph-Marie Vien’s Sleeping Hermit (fig.  5). In this large and impressive canvas of 1753, a poly-talented recluse slumbers contentedly amid the varied materials and symbols of his vocation. A violin is loosely supported on one knee, and a bow, lightly held by a drooping hand, rests on the other. This amicable sage has apparently lullabied himself to sleep. The painting makes clear that Enlightenment reflections on the condition of sleep have effected a recuperation of this often denigrated experience. Michael Fried astutely argues that the Sleeping Hermit discloses “an attempt to evoke, as if from within, the actual experience of sleep in a situation wholly devoid of erotic overtones; and that attempt, although not absolutely without prior example, decidedly strikes a new, nonvoyeuristic, intensely empathic note in eighteenth-century French painting.” Fried also discovers, in comments on this work by Laugier (one of Vien’s contemporaries) evidence of “a new or heightened concern with the internal experience of sleep, with its character as a lived condition or mode of being.”127 advises that “moderate sleep increases the perspiration, promotes digestion, cherishes the body and exhilarates the mind” (The History of Health and the Art of Preserving It, 3rd ed. {1760} [New York: Arno, 1979], 384). Even Immanuel Kant, with a tinge of disdain worthy of an eminent philosopher, finds it “advisable to set aside completely this third (of life) that is empty of enjoyment and activity, and relinquish it to the necessary restoration of nature” (or in German, the unentbehrlichen Naturrestauration) (The Conflict of the Faculties/Der Streit der Fakultäten, German text with English translation by Mary J. Gregor [New York: Abaris, 1979], 190–191). For additional review of the medical tradition, see A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 263–65. 127 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980), 31–32; Fried’s substantial note on the status of sleep in the

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The sharpness of the transition is especially evident when the relaxed ambience of Vien’s canvas is contrasted with a traditional representation of sleep such as – for instance – the monumental solemnity of Poussin’s Pushkin Museum Rinaldo and Armida (fig.  6). Along with Descartes, Vien and Poussin ­assumed – almost certainly – that cognition is uninterrupted during periods of dormancy. In the case of Vien, a subtle (and paradoxical) alertness, in the sleeper’s pose and in his facial expression, intimates that this is so. The “dreaminess” of Poussin’s Rinaldo may be less obvious, particularly because Tasso depicts his protagonist as so immobilized that Not thunders loud from this slumber deep Of quiet death true image, make him rise.128 If only because of the sumptuousness of Poussin’s setting, it seems ­evident that the artist has carefully taken a stance in relation to the poet’s

Figure 6  Nicolas Poussin, Rinaldo and Armida (1625–’26). Oil on canvas, 95.25 cm × 133 cm. Moscow, Pushkin Museum. Photo Credit: Scala/ Art Resource, ny. French Enlightenment also merits careful reading (189–90 n58). Kant’s limited approval again deserves consulting, this time as an accompaniment – a subdued one to be sure – of the new tolerance. He concurs with Voltaire “that Heaven has given us two things as a counterweight against the many burdens of life: hope and sleep. He could also have added laughter, if only the means for provoking it in rational people were so readily available” (Critique of the power of judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. P. Guyer and Eric Matthews [Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2000], 210). 128 Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, trans. Edward Fairfax (New York: Capricorn, 1963), 298.

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c­ haracterization (which has made use of the association of sleep and death seen previously in Montaigne).129 Despite the supine state, Rinaldo’s pose suggests that he is well-defended; the crooked left arm and knee, the muscular and slightly flexed right arm imply a tautness, a potentiality to reassume erect posture. Poussin has rendered him respectably strong-looking, and it is improbable – given the oneirocentric drift of the era – that the artist has left his dormant hero undefended from a cognitive standpoint; i.e., bereft of dreams. The aura of defense is accentuated because the prow of Armida’s imposing chariot echoes the attitude of the slumbering hero’s arm. Yet this is also the vehicle that will transport him to his captor’s enchanted island. Thus while the upward-arched elbow implies guardedness, it also points to where the knight will soon go, immersed as he is – no doubt – in erotic dreams spurred on by the incantatory singing of a nude spirit-nymph, which lulled him into this deep slumber. Charlotte Eyerman has noted that “putti cavort around the couple, symbols of Armida’s amorous intentions.”130 At the same time, Rinaldo’s face is prominently flushed, and the putti can also be seen as externalized imaginings, end-products of the erotic endeavors of which he dreams. She intended to kill him, but his handsome demeanor has become his ultimate defense, and she finds herself in love with him instead. Could she have found him so attractive if he were wan, unenlivened by his dreams? Despite the benign denouement, however, Poussin’s Rinaldo and Armida is also a brilliant adaptation of the centuries-old perception of sleep as a perilous, even a lethal purview, to be entered only at one’s own risk. Such was the undoing of Samson, of hapless Polyphemus, of Trojan warriors slain by marauding Odysseus.131 In contrast,

129 Jonathan Unglaub’s and other discussions of Poussin’s renderings of Rinaldo and Armida call attention to the independent representational course charted by the artist in the face of rather salient verbal as well as visual precedents. In addition to Tasso’s romantic epic, it is clear that Poussin drew upon relief depictions of Endymion and Selene on Roman sarcophagi. See Jonathan Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2006), 83–84. The involvement of dream-drenched Endymion in Poussin’s visual discourse is another reason for identifying Rinaldo as a dreamer as well. 130 Irina Antonova, Charlotte Eyerman, Eugenya Georgievskaya, and Elena Sharnova, Old Master, Impressionists, and Moderns: French Masterworks from the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow (New Haven: Yale up, 2002), 14. 131 The sources of the examples referred to are Judges 16:4–22, the Odyssey 8, and the Iliad 10 respectively. In a foundational essay on the iconography of sleep, Sheila McNally discusses (and provides illustrations of) a number of instances in which sleep affords an occasion for sexually charged or other deception and treachery. See “Ariadne and Others: Images of Sleep in Greek and Early Roman Art,” Classical Antiquity 4.2 (1985): 152–92.

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the arcadian siesta – considered above – of Vien’s hermit is as far from such a scenario as it is distant from the imprecations of a Persons or Baxter. Now for Baudelaire, regarded as marking the advent of modernism because, among other factors, he “first recognized the dissolution of experience that characterizes modern existence.”132 This criterion – however arguable or subject to qualification – nonetheless conveniently accords with the perception that Baudelaire interjects a distinctively new element into the patterns of sleep-representation that held the attention of European writers and visual artists until around 1850. Particularly notable with regard to Baudelaire’s depiction of sleep is his rejection of the many accommodations, a gradual and incomplete tolerance, offered to sleep over a period of about three centuries. Poussin has for instance staged sleep as an occasion of mortal danger, but Rinaldo’s moment of dire crisis is considerably moderated by the alchemy of love that Armida experiences as she contemplates the supine Rinaldo, whom she only an instant before had intended to kill. Similarly, the late-eighteenth century, haven of Enlightenment thought, found it appealing to regard sleep as an opportunity for the constructive retrieval of spent energies. And subsequently, the Romantic age was saturated with an appreciation of oneiric phenomena as conveyors of imaginative presence and of narrative constructiveness. Enter Charles Baudelaire, eschewing alliance with the innocuous somnolence that had interested writers and visual artists for several decades prior to the mid-nineteenth century. This trend had lost its vibrance by the time Baudelaire began addressing the topic of sleep in The Flowers of Evil (Les fleurs du mal). Indeed, well before then, Wordsworth’s three sonnets entitled “To Sleep” are symptomatic of a tradition wearing thin. Only a few years after having written that powerful line, “A slumber did my spirit seal” (1800), Wordsworth rather lamely addresses the god of somnolence, Without Thee what is all the morning’s wealth? Come, blessed barrier between day and day, Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health! (ll. 12–14) (1807)133

132 Ulrich Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan (Palo Alto: Stanford up, 2000), 5. On Baudelaire as modernist initiator, see also Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 15, 26, and 50. 133 The Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Nowell Charles Smith, Vol. 1 (London: Methuen, 1908), 437. Smith’s edition is outmoded overall but does the service of at least p ­ reserving

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The exhaustion of this aesthetic sub-trend was not without fits and starts, and Keats’s celebrated “Sonnet to Sleep” (1819) recaptures the poetic possibilities of sleep’s salubrious effects. Yet this tour de force also blends in a certain well-controlled Angst and deftly includes traditional tinctures of death and dying. It can be added that, here, this metaphorical dying has become mediated and is a kindly process in the service of sleep, the “soft embalmer” (l. 1). It is also the case that, “burrowing like a mole” (l. 12), remnants of daytime concerns (“curious conscience” [l. 11]) can spoil a would-be sleeper’s nocturnal agenda. In any case, the speaker of the poem seems implicitly trustful that sleep (especially its onset) is ultimately linked to deeply-seated cognitive mechanisms – even if the laments of generations of insomniac poets testify to its often sluggish gait. Hence the presumptive god of sleep is asked to Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards, And seal the hushed Casket of my soul. (ll. 13–14)134 The breakup of the ameliorative view is rather salient in Courbet’s attractive Hammock canvas of 1844. This rendition of a fashionably attired young woman is ambidirectional. On the one hand, the painting may seem unoriginal, even unenergetic in its implied acceptance of a “leisurenomics” that accommodates indulgence in deep daytime repose (fig. 7). Inescapable at the same time is the notion of innocence recently or about to be lost. For while the sanguine visage may only tell of the effervescence of youth, the gauzed-over but exposed bosom – with nipples revealed – emanates an exquisite sensuality. Otherwise, the sylvan setting, sturdy hammock, and abundance of clothing speak of a siesta that is peaceful and unimpeachable. Wordsworth’s three infrequently reprinted sonnets. The dates are according to Smith (lvi, lx). 134 The Poetical Words and Other Writings of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Vol. 4 (New York: Phaeton, 1970), 183–85. For a foray into sources that goes beyond an exposé and exposition of antecedents, see Rodney Stenning Edgecombe’s “Keats’s Sonnet ‘To Sleep,’ Sidney, Drummond, Daniel, and Beaumont and Fletcher,” English Language Notes 36.3 (March 1999): 61–67. Edgecombe links Keats’s sonnet to a group of poems about sleep that are “cletic prayers – prayers of invitation” (64). Edgecombe also argues (61–62) that the patent freshness of the sonnet has tended to deflect scholarly attention away from its ties to its likely sources. To be mentioned here – and discussed further below – is the possibility that while some works of literature (and of visual art as well) rather openly declare their pre-texts, other works tend to shroud them in a sleep-like quiescence. Hence in the case of works of art exemplary for a thematics of sleep, it may be reasonable to look for a correlative dormancy in the utilization of prior texts.

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Figure 7  Gustave Courbet, Hammock (1844). Oil on canvas, 70.5 cm × 97 cm. Winterthur, Collection Oskar Reinhart “Am Römerholz.” Image courtesy of the museum.

Baudelaire constructs a harsher sleep, rejecting an ameliorative discourse that was becoming emptied of representational vitality. Rather aggressively, Baudelaire evokes on a number of occasions a profound, obtuse somnolence that is alternatively expressive of psychic squalor, of the intriguing messiness of Parisian sprawl, of death, or of an emerging poetics that prioritizes novelty, shock, and surprise. Proceeding as a member of an artistic avant-garde in the etymological (i.e., military, strategic) sense, Baudelaire bursts through, as it were, the barrier of a decaying aesthetics of sleep.135 This anything-but-wholesome sleep is variously “a mindless sleep” (“un sommeil stupide”), the “sleep of an animal” (“sommeil de brute”). Or it is “like a dog” (“comme un chien”); that is – in 135 Although Baudelaire does not belong under the rubric of the avant-garde as typically conceived – that is, an artistic movement of the early twentieth century–, Hal Foster does well to discover parallels. It should be added that Foster also finds that Baudelaire reflects the dual status of avant-garde figures as both betrayers and less obviously as supporters of bourgeois artistic and economic dynamisms (The Return of the Real, 8–9, 121).

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c­ ontext – subject to the fatal hazards of the Paris streets. Or again, it is “a sleep as sweet as death” (“un sommeil aussi doux que la mort”). But here “sweet” harbors a cynicism and shares little or no common ground with Keats’s “soft.”136 The dull, leaden sleep that Baudelaire foregrounds in these instances parallels the inert torpor associated with the aforementioned sin of acedia or spiritual sloth; on various occasions, this somnolence was specifically likened to – or symbolized as – the obtuse slumber of pigs or other animals.137 These passages thus disclose a certain anachronicity, a curious “leapfrogging” backward into the theology-saturated medieval world of cardinal virtues and perverse, deadening sins. But at least aesthetically, the semiotic realm that Baudelaire hereby renders is paradoxically more vibrant than the anodynic artistic territories charted near the very end of what has been termed the “ameliorative” tradition of sleep-representation. And Baudelaire has at the same time created (not without paradox) a textual climate of a decadence or falling-off, and to do so, he has sought a partial re-engagement with a prior, starker historical and religious ethos. This is a quasi-medieval environment of failed chivalry and unchanneled courtly love, of arrant individual desire ostensibly in need of redemption, and of ungiving material conditions. Yet gone is the old moralism that would associate contemporary spiritual and material squalor with an archived ontology of sin. The detection here of an errant, perhaps quixotic medievalism is hardly a hermeneutic excess. For the sensualism of Baudelaire’s texts – and the special sleep-world that he conveys – is in some cases almost explicitly tied to an awareness of the visual and other discourses of the Middle Ages. In “A Martyr” (“Une martyr”) for instance, a poetic “inquest” into the murder of an adulterous woman by her husband is presented basically as a bold parody of sacred iconography. The arresting sequence of garish images is also reminiscent of a flamboyant Rococo depiction of martyrdom, a visual “house of horrors” dependent in turn for its source on some medieval tale of unquestioning piety and intense suffering. Such disjointed connections are particularly clear and strong in the case of “From the Depths I Have Called Out” (“De profundis clamavi”), wherein Baudelaire bowdlerizes one of the most widely circulated psalms (number 129) of the Latin Vulgate. 136 nw, trans. The topic of Baudelaire’s representation of sleep was explored early on in Pierre Pachet’s “Le sommeil du requin (Baudelaire),” La Nouvelle Revue Française 348 (1 January 1982):79–91. Pertinent for the present discussion are pages 80–81, 86. 137 On the spiritually abhorrent associations of suine somnolence, see Siegfried Wenzel, Sin of Sloth, 106.

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Instead of a penitent supplication for individual – and by implication, ­collective – redemption, Baudelaire here stages a somber cadenza of u ­ nabashed, egoistic agony. This piteous love-lyric is not the tale of a mind longing for God, but rather the sensualized Jeremiad of a lover in despair. And while the Vulgate version of the psalm concludes with a plea, on behalf of the souls of the dead, for eternal rest and perpetual access to heavenly illumination, Baudelaire’s speaker concludes, in quite a different way, his despondent plea for the mercy – and amorous attentions – of the loved one who has spurned him. Any hope of success has been abandoned; the desolate speaker of the poem is now envious of that insensate “sommeil stupide” (l. 13) that is the s­ pecial portion not of heavenly beings but of the most diminutive intellects found at the lowest tiers of the zoological phyla.138 Baudelaire’s aesthetic newness, in many ways a vigorous attack on an aging value-system, is also apparent in his aggressive treatment of oneiricity. Within this very spacious sector of somnology, Baudelaire effects – and strikes at – the dovetailing of two quite well-established traditions. On the one hand, the gamut of dream-experiences (nightmare included) was of keen fascination to artists and audiences of all types during the Romantic era.139 Since Romantic poetics and ideology were intense in the valorization of imagination, it is expected that the innate and routinely occurring imagery of dreams would garner interest and esteem. Yet Baudelaire also reveals affinities with the naturalist/medical tradition (eschewed by Descartes) that was unperturbed by the prospect of intervals of dreamless sleep. The moments of abject slumber that Baudelaire evokes can be regarded as a hyperbolic outgrowth of this 138 For the text, see McGowan, trans., 63, and Pichois, ed., 65. The contrarian tenor of Baudelaire’s parodic discourse is particularly intense in view of the traditional inclusion of “De profundis clamavi” among the widely circulated “Seven Penitential Psalms.” For some of the background, see Charles A. Huttar, “Frail Grass and Firm Tree: David as a Model of Repentance in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, ” in The David Myth in Western Literature, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1979), 51–53. 139 Jennifer Ford points out, for instance, that “dreams and dreaming were topics which attracted intense scrutiny and endless conversational exchange; the subject was a frequent topic at dinner parties. At one such gathering in 1812, Coleridge lectured guests ‘for some time’ on the reasons why distressing circumstances always seem doubly afflicting at night, when the body is in a horizontal position” (Coleridge on Dreaming … , 5). Looking at nineteenth-century France, Tony James has very admirably examined the range and intensity of scholarly inquiries focusing on – and literary output deriving from – oneiric experience (Dream, Creativity, and Madness in Nineteenth-Century France [Oxford: Clarendon, 1995]).

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­sub-category of the discourse of sleep. But clearly, also feeding into these portraits of mute somnolence is the archaic tradition that specifically connects sleep and death, that categorizes death as the sleep of the corpse. (Indeed, as already seen, Baudelaire’s “martyr” falls under this rubric.) In a few instances, Baudelaire’s dreamers show a “vitality” scarcely more vibrant and convincing than the supine stupor that, in “From the Depths I Have Called Out,” links man and the vilest of animals. This is a strange ­version – or re-“visioning” – of Cartesian oneiricity, the paradoxical doctrine that posits dreams as necessary to prove the effervescence and perpetual movement of the mind, yet useless as far as truth and practical value are concerned. Thus in “Dawn” (“Le crépuscle du matin”), Baudelaire writes of “the time when dreams of lust and swarming heat/Set brown young adolescents twisting in their sheets” (“l’heure où l’essaim des rêves malfaisants/Tord sur leurs oreillers les bruns adolescents”).140 The image is almost macabre, speaks of nightmarish intrusions (or perhaps more likely, of erotic dreams), but offers little else. This is not a salute to the dream-splendors of “high” romanticism, the radiant cascades of (for instance) Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn” or Hugo’s depiction of the dormant patriarch, Booz. Similarly significant is the decayed view of oneiric experience obliquely indicated in an outlandish quatrain in “Voyaging” (“Le voyage”): Our actions are grotesque – in leaps and bounds We waltz like balls or tops; when day is done Our curiosity rolls us around As if a cruel Angel lashed the sun. (ll.25–28)141 The lines become explicable if – and it may be, only if–“dans nos sommeils” in the French (which has been translated above as “when day is done”) is taken to signify oneiric sleep or simply “dreams.” If this reading is valid, then it becomes apparent that, in this passage, Baudelaire’s apprehension of dreams (as well as of human life overall) is intriguingly reductive. Instead of expatiating with the egoistic expansiveness typical of the preceding decades, Baudelaire once more 140 McGowan, trans., 211; Pichois, ed., 146. 141 McGowan, trans., 285. (Nous imitons, horreur! la toupie et la boule Dans leur valse et leurs bonds; même dans nos sommeils La Curiosité nous tourmente et nous roule, Comme un Ange cruel qui fouette des soleils. [ll.25–28] [Pichois, ed., 178])

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minimizes the usual glories of the dream-state. Whatever goes on during these periods of stimulation from somewhere deep within, the process borders on the mechanical, its significance sardonically trivial. The poet’s image-forging wizardry is notable in his structuring of the notion that, during dream as during waking hours, we may imitate playthings (“la toupie et la boule”) in our movements, whether physical or mental – the former preponderant during the day, the latter as we sleep. These phenomena move figuratively in a direction that is the opposite of individuation, of any form of self-realization. That is to say, the human psyche is diminished, rendered toylike – whether dreaming or awake. In the second pair of lines, the factor of desire (curiosité) is personified, is virtually allegorized, presented as a figure snatched out of some dank medieval codex. “Curiosité” is essentially “rooted” in illusion, is divorced from any possibility of ever being satisfied.142 If in the first two lines just quoted, Baudelaire has blatantly miniaturized the self, the poet now inexplicably seems to expand it as he resorts to the phantasmagoric image of a fallen or devilish angel somehow capable of whipping stars; that is, our dilated, irrationally inflated egos. Baudelaire has proposed that all people are desire-driven in their diurnal lives as during oneiric episodes (même dans nos sommeils); that is, “même” or even as we dream, and clearly, when we are awake as well. Cravings and wishes, then, inevitably assume (for ourselves alone) importance disproportionate, Baudelaire implies, to any reasonable assessment. At this early stage in the establishment of modernist strategies, themes, and concerns in the depiction of sleep-states, at least one other Baudelairean passage merits a close look and, in turn, assists with adumbrating a representational pattern. At issue here is an ambiguous dormant state that is, on the one hand, indicative of an abandonment to pleasure, hence often post-coital, but also oblivious to danger, suggestive of psychic or other depletion as well as of surfeit. In historical perspective, this is the slumber of both the unforeseeing Samson along with that of the Bacchante ordained to collapse in exquisite exhaustion. This sleep tends to be transgressive and redolent of a lack of innocence. Baudelaire’s hook-up, in “Morning Twilight” (“La crépuscule du matin”), 142 In a study of Baudelaire, Eugene W. Holland links such language with desire as a Lacanian ­locution. Holland explains as follows: “… substitution is required by the symbolic, inasmuch as the ‘original’ object of desire (the mother, real sense-experience unmediated by language and culture) is now irretrievably ‘lost.’ So upon separation from the mother and the real as erstwhile unmediated objects, desire becomes mobile, and now moves from one object to another in endless pursuit of satisfactory substitutes …” (Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Socio-Poetics of Modernism [Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1993], 125).

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with this thematics entails a description of prostitutes given over, at daybreak, to lethargic somnolence: This house and that began to send their smoke above. With ghastly painted eyes, the women of the streets, Mouths gaping open, lay within their stupid sleep. (ll. 12–14)143 Thus having inscribed an innocuous scene with mention of families beginning to resume their diurnal routines, Baudelaire immediately conjures up a scandalous counter-scene consisting of an indeterminate number of prostitutes slumbering at unspecified locations, their bodies reeking of ill-health and excess sexual activity. Along with the author’s assertive diction, the general laxness of their slumber is emphasized via the backdrop of domestic routine and respectability. In the visual arts, a nearly contemporary work that serves as a companionpiece for this scene is another painting by Courbet, one that appears to renounce any notion of innocence detectable in the canvas considered above. The subject of The Bacchante (1844–’45) (fig. 8) is a reclining female nude. Relevant at this point is Courbet’s status as a modernist, a designation he has been found to resist.144 But in juxtaposition to Baudelaire – and vis-à-vis the representation of sleep –, there are substantial parallels. In this instance, the correspondence is problematized by the partially opened right eye of the reclining figure. Yet partially opened eyes are recurrent in both depicted – and actual – sleep, and overall, the scene is one of sleep. As Michael Fried has argued, there is an “unmistakable aura of sexual aftermath.” Fried argues, in addition, for a specific moment, “the mutual falling back of both partners,”145 but it is also reasonable to argue for a point in time that is somewhat later; i.e., the onset of post-coital somnolence. Whatever the nature of Courbet’s modernism in this canvas – and whatever the exact moment in the workings of sleep that the canvas represents–, there are notable iconographical associations with the sleep-world from the era of Poussin and even before. There is first of all the context of vegetative and 143 McGowan, trans., 211. (Les maisons çà et là commençaient à fumer. Les femmes de plaisir, la paupière livide, Bouche ouverte, dormaient de leur sommeil stupide. [ll. 12–14] [Pichois, ed., 147]) 144 On this point, see Michael Fried’s detailed comments in Courbet’s Realism, 284–87. 145 Ibid., 220.

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Figure 8  Gustave Courbet, The Bacchante (1844–’45). Oil on canvas, 76.2 cm × 63.5 cm. Remagen, Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck. Photo Credit: P. Schälchli, Zurich. © Collection Rau for unicef.

mineral materiality with which the supine figure appears to merge. Also relevant is the ambience of arrant, absorbing sensuality to the point of surfeit, an impression rendered emphatic via the artist’s location of the focal point of the work in the upturned left breast of the somnolescent figure. This locale within the painting is accented, furthermore, because of the emptied wine goblet in the lower left foreground. Worth considering here is a parallel with another errant object, the overturned drinking vessel in the foreground of Bellini’s Drunkenness of Noah (fig. 9). In this case, the central figure is unambiguously asleep, and the skewed wine goblet is redolent of impropriety, indulgence, and a lack of cognitive balance. In Courbet’s case, a key visual connection is established by the mutual echoing of the circular rim of the goblet and the rounded breast. An imaginary line drawn from one object to the other (and across the navel) leads the viewer into a darkened orifice – one that can be apprehended as sexually symbolic – in the central background.146 146 Fried maintains that, ultimately, what is central here is not the factor of sexual titillation but rather the artist’s decisive distancing of the image from any possible, realizable erotic

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Giovanni Bellini, Drunkenness of Noah (ca. 1513–’14). Oil on canvas, 103 cm × 157 cm. Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie. Photo Credit: Hervé Lewandowski. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, ny.

Whether she is viewed as unquestionably asleep or not, this bacchante’s languor is not that of Baudelaire’s washed-out sex-workers with their graceless display of sexual hyper-satiety. Yet the difference is more one of degree than of substance. Within the subgenre of sleep art here at issue, there is space both for Courbet’s Dionysiac figure and Baudelaire’s ladies of the night. Post-coital, transgressive, lacking innocence, an end-result of pleasurable surfeit (sexual, prandial, alcoholic, or drug-induced), decadent, often hazardous, perhaps deep and non-oneiric – these are all qualifiers delimiting a particular purview of somnolence. This species of sleep is detectable at the opening of the modern era, is quite in evidence during the era of early twentieth-century “high” modernism, and is relevant for postmodernism as well. For an example of this sleep-type at a more recent stage in the unfolding of modernist sleep-representation, it is useful to look at a brief yet complex poem by W.B. Yeats, the title and opening lines of which are deceptively simple in light of what transpires immediately thereafter. Entitled “Lullaby” (1929), the poem begins with a wish for the pleasant sleep of the speaker’s beloved – for experience. Thus, “… the foreshortening of the trunk and upper body that makes the bacchante so tangible-seeming a presence is less a provocation to possession than the form of a memory, while representability is thematized as deriving from the inevitable failure of a project of merger” (Courbet’s Realism, 220–21). Also, the figure’s trance-like, drowzy visage can be said to heighten the sense of pictorial detachment.

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you “that have found it where you fed.”147 At this point, all is innocence, but so quickly, it becomes clear that the somnolence toward which this poem beckons is not just another harmless post-prandial, or rather post-intercourse, snooze. This problematic sleep turns out to be the signature of a dangerous consummation that guarantees lengthy consequences of strife and suffering. As Yeats’s speaker makes clear, such was the ominous slumber of Paris, of “that wild Tristram,” as well as of Zeus when he – in the guise of a swan–“from the limbs of Leda sank” (l. 18). This is an ironic lullaby indeed – more a fable of the acquisition of a grim maturity – that concerns itself with a specific type of dangerous repose.148 As discussion returns to Baudelaire and sums up his contributions to the representation of sleep, certain observations are worth keeping in mind: First, Baudelaire has turned away from the oneiric sublime as intrinsically the most worthy of the discourses of sleep. While his “Parisian Dream” (“Rêve Parisien”) in fact taps into what had become a Romantic tradition (“Sleep is full of miracles!” [“Le sommeil est plein de miracles!” {l. 5}]), there is quickly a detachment from – a limiting of enthusiasm for – the iridescent showiness of dream imagery. The closing two quatrains (ll. 53–60), especially, make clear – as they demonstrate the nightmares of ordinary waking life in contemporary Paris – that

147 For the full text, see W.B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 264–65. The poem is also available online at http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ lullaby-5/. 148 Yeats’s text suggests discursive ground shared with his contemporary, Sandor Ferenczi, whose discussion of correspondences between the phenomena of sleep and coitus has been referred to above. As did his teacher, Sigmund Freud, Ferenczi conceptualizes sleep as a regression, a stepping backwards that simulates a return to life within the womb. For Freud’s view, see note 7 above. And according to Ferenczi, “The sleeper is an autoerotic; he represents in toto a child who is enjoying repose inside his mother’s body and who in his absolutely narcissistic absorption is altogether indifferent to the environment” (Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, trans. Henry Alden Bunker [New York: W.W. Norton, 1968], 74). Especially relevant for a rapprochement with Yeats is Ferenczi’s comment that “the mental state in sleep, which we have compared with that of orgasm, … corresponds to that condition of complete gratification, free from all desire, which a higher state of organization is able to reproduce in no other way than by the reëstablishment of the intrauterine state of repose” (Ferenczi, 78). It is clear that, from the perspective of Yeats and of Ferenczi, the domains of sleep, sexuality, and nutrition (both psychic and physiologic) share cognitive space. Detectable also is the ameliorative view (more so than that of his precursor, Freud) that Ferenczi adopts under the banner of an up-to-date science. Yeats, surely less trusting of Janus-faced sleep, here retains ties with a specific strand of negativity within modernism.

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Baudelaire’s program here was something other than to articulate dream-time pleasures. Indeed, the penultimate quatrain proclaims, Open, my ardent eyes could see The horror of my wretched hole; I felt my cursed cares to be A needle entering my soul … . (ll. 53–56)149 Baudelaire’s scintillating urban dream thus becomes a foil, not a substitute, for the undesirable realities of his Paris. Baudelaire has also been found notable because of his rather aggressive displays of a profound, even deadened sleep that is anoneiric and is the lot of a range of unfortunate people, such as fatigued sex-workers or individuals in abject emotional states. Prominently depicting these anoneiric states toward the end of an era of “high” dreams, visions, and hypnogogic illuminations, Baudelaire seems not simply to spite poetic motifs as they plod into obsolescence. He does so with an intensity, even with a vehemence, that his successors in the emerging modernist tradition will seek to mitigate. Representations of sleep of the next decade will tend to stress novelty and salubrious surprise – as opposed to the traumatic effect toward which Baudelaire often leans. And in the ensuing regime of modernist representation, sleeping subjects are – more often than not – nicely balanced with their often distinctive contexts.150 149 McGowan, trans., 209. (En rouvrant mes yeux pleins de flamme J’ai vu l’horreur de mon taudis, Et senti, rentrant dans mon âme, La pointe des soucis maudits… . [ll. 53–56] [Pichois, ed., 146]) 150 Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn: Or, a Vision in a Dream,” Théophile Gautier’s “Le Club des hachichins,” and Victor Hugo’s Promontorium somnii are texts in which oneiric experience is a key participant in the rendering of a literary sublime. (For discussions of the works by Gautier and Hugo, see Tony James, op. cit., 98, 114–18 and 198–99, 206–09, respectively.) The artistic and historical parameters within which such works find a home appear to evaporate near the close of Baudelaire’s poetic career. A Baudelairean attack on the aesthetic edifice of sleep is continued in Mallarmé’s imitative and vigorously decadent “Anguish” (“Angoisse”) (1864), which is addressed to a prostitute and requests “dull dreamless sleep” (“le lourd sommeil sans songes”) (Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems, French text with translation by Henry Weinfield [Berkeley: U of California P, 1994], 15). Indicative of new trends is Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s exuberantly erotic “Nuptial Sleep,” dating from the close of the 1860s. (See Celia Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship [Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2006], 28–30.) Also to be factored in is Leconte de Lisle’s Parnassian perspective, beautifully insinuated in “The Condor’s Sleep” (“Le sommeil du

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Paradoxically, with his usage of sleep as a tool of resistance in the context of a passé Romanticism, the disjunctive effects that result at times put his poetry closer in spirit to certain postmodern artworks (hypnoglyphs) that feature sleep (e.g., Duras’s The Malady of Death [La maladie de la mort]) than to somewhat more even-tempered treatments of dormancy (including Mallarmé’s “Afternoon of a Faun” [“L’après-midi d’un faune”], a number of poems by Leconte de Lisle, and Yeats’s “Lullaby”) nearer to his own historical moment. This phenomenon of postmodern foreshadowing is also apparent in Baudelaire’s parodic treatment of genre, and specifically of the sonnet, which he stands on end in “The Chasm,” burlesquing the well-established ad somnum or “invocation-to-sleep” motif, twisting his contribution to that minor genre into an episode from a recondite and sardonic philosophical comedy.151 If not in quite as emphatic a way as in “The Chasm,” similar processes can be pointed to in “From the Depths … ,” which has been shown to be both tortured sonnet and parodic reworking of Old Testament psalmodic discourse.

Sleep amid Mid-nineteenth Century Migrations of Religious Discourse

The above comments mark a suitable point for pushing away from Baudelaire as a key aesthetic somnologist at the initiation of modernism. Among condor”) (circa 1862), wherein “far from the dark globe, far from the living star,/[the condor] sleeps in the glacial air, his vast wings outspread” (“… loin du globe noir, loin de l’astre vivant,/Il dort dans l’air glacé, les ailes toutes grandes” [Leconte de Lisle, Oeuvres, ed. Edgard Pich, 4 vols. {Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1976–78}, 2:167, translation mine]). In “Afternoon of a Faun” (“L’après-midi d’un faune”), Mallarmé will write elegantly of “leafy slumbers” (“sommeils touffus” [Weinfield, 38]). At the close of this pastoral cadenza, the poet yields his faun to a fructifying modernist sleep that is not sordid yet not quite sublime, a blend of corporeality and a certain cognitive élan: And so, let me sleep, oblivious of sin, Stretched out on the thirsty sand, drinking in The bountiful rays of the wine-growing star! (Sans plus il faut dormir en l’oubli du blasphème, Sur le sable altéré gisant et comme j’aime Ouvrir ma bouche à l’astre efficace des vins!) Weinfield, 41. 151 The distinctive subgenre of the ad somnum is well defined and is explored nearly exhaustively, at least with regard to its Latin, Neo-Latin, and Italian components, in Stefano Carrai’s Ad Somnum: L’invocazione al Sonno nella Lirica Italiana (Padua: Antenore, 1990). Carrai does well to explicitly connect Keats’s ‘To Sleep’ and its antecedents to this minor yet captivating literary tradition (131–32).

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other factors, Baudelaire thrived when scientific rationalism burgeons at the expense of religious thought, and institutionalized religion in general is challenged and fragmenting. His rejection of bourgeois culture in its various forms intermingles with a general interrogation and dismantling, during the 1850s and after, of centuries-old assumptions and doctrines. This is also the era of the problematic revolution of 1848 and of Charles Darwin. The illuminated modern city, center of rail traffic and trafficking of every sort, has emerged. If Darwin’s theory of evolution is true, then how many well-tempered , well-­received theological insights and revelations are likely to be false? From original sin to eschatology, from Eden to the Flood, to Babel, Gethsemane, and Judgment Day, Judaeo-Christian explanations of history, the cosmos, and man as microcosm are all transmogrified into hypotheses.152 As is common knowledge, the “death of God” did not take place until approximately one century later, during the mid-twentieth century. While modern approaches to archaeology, warfare, and philosophy did much to effect this de facto demise of the sacred under existentialism, the modernist movement as a whole also bolstered/compensated for religious sentiment and commitment in varied ways. Quite notable for the present discussion is a grand forum of verbal and visual representations featuring, in manners and modes seemingly as varied as the bolgie of Dante’s Inferno, the shards of a challenged and decayed discourse. Religious art has long existed in a multitude of forms, but what is distinctive as modernism develops is a tendency, around the middle of the nineteenth century, to play down explicit references to any form of religious icon. Together with a recognition of the fissuring of religious foundations, there is widespread dislocation, displacement, and re-placement of religious sentiment, desire, information, images, and motifs. Included in this trend is the sort of emphatic twisting of religious tales exercised by Baudelaire. The mushrooming sense of a vacuum at the center of such doxological constants as original sin, redemption, and biblical narrative in general gives rise to an array of artistic substitutes. Hence the almost piously humble peasants of Millet (a modernist painter in this respect if not in others), Manet’s 152 The work of Peter Childs, mentioned above (note 124) with specific reference to Darwin, is again worth considering with regard to the larger historical context. Childs points out that “the word ‘agnostic’ was … only coined in 1870 to express the new-found conviction that to the empirical mind, belief and unbelief were equally impossible. However, the important seeds of doubt were sown soon after the mid-century … . This was not just precipitated by Darwinian evolution but by other theories, such as the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism … ” (Modernism, 55–56).

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f­oreshortened dead Christ (a testament of painterly intelligence rather than of faith or belief), the importation of motifs from Asian and other religions by Whitman, the recreated and revitalized myth-narratives of Wagner, the eclectic adaptation of religious images and ideas by T.S. Eliot, and Kandinsky’s arrant spiritualism. Among the transmutations of religious signifiers as modernist art emerges, there is a new, expanded tolerance for the often constrained role of sleep as a biblically sanctioned form of relief and restoration after labor. (See such relevant passages as Psalm 127:2 and Ecclesiastes 5:12 along with the discussion above.) Certainly people have napped or slept profoundly after working since the evolution of the opposable thumb. But in at least some juxtapositions of texts and images, a telling distinction is to be drawn between portrayals of the slumber of ordinary laboring people before the mid-nineteenth century and after. Useful at this point is a passage in Victor Hugo’s rambling and melodramatic epic of human history, The Legend of the Ages (La légende des siècles). At issue is the depiction of sleep in Hugo’s refashioning of the experiences of Boaz and Ruth. Quite simply: Boaz lay down, overcome with fatigue. He had worked all day at threshing, Then had found a bed in the usual place. Boaz slept near the baskets filled with wheat. (ll. 1–4) And later: Boaz then slept into the night among his people. Near the millstones, which one might have taken for debris, The sleeping harvesters formed somber groups … . (ll. 25–27)153 153 nw, trans. (Booz s’était couché, de fatigue accablé. Il avait tout le jour travaillé dans son aire, Puis avait fait son lit à sa place ordinaire, Booz dormait auprès des boisseaux pleins de blé. [ll. 1–4] Donc, Booz dans la nuit dormait parmi les siens. Près des meules, qu’on eût prises pour des décombres, Les moissonneurs couchés faisaient des groups sombres … . [ll. 25–27] [La légende des siècles/La fin de Satan/Dieu, ed. Jacques Truchet {Paris: Gallimard, 1950}, 33, 34])

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An unexceptionable scenario, it may seem. Yet not only does Hugo rely on the Old Testament as a foundational text to cushion the integrity of his weary sleepers; it is also a challenge to locate antecedents where laborers slumber so unproblematically. The dormant harvester at the center of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Corn Harvest (fig. 10) is probably such an example, but at least one able commentator has argued that, like the sleepers in the same painter’s Schlaraffenland (fig.  11), this somnolent individual is simply indolent while others work.154 Such is also the verdict levied against one of the best known and most carefully discussed sleepers of the classical age, Vermeer’s sleeping maid (fig. 12). She sits with her head supported by her right hand and arm, the latter crooked at the elbow, which in turn is propped on the table. She is almost voluptuously attired for her era and dozes within affluent surroundings. Servant or mistress of the household (her status is not fully clear), she in any case attends to no chores or to the broader task of engaging in some mode of constructive

Figure 10 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters (1565). Oil on wood, 116.5 cm × 159.5 cm. New York, Metropolitan. Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum.

Figure 11 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Schlaraffenland (1567). Oil on wood, 52 cm × 78.1 cm. Munich, Alte Pinakothek. Photo credit: bpk, Berlin/ Bayerische Staatsge­ mäldesammlungen/Art Resource, ny. 154 See Walter S. Gibson, “In Detail: Pieter Bruegel’s The Harvesters,” Portfolio: The Magazine of the Visual Arts 3 (May/June 1981), 44–45.

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Figure 12  Jan Vermeer, A Maid Asleep (1656–’57). Oil on canvas, 87.6 cm × 76.5 cm. New York, Metropolitan. Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum.

activity, an imperative (discussed above) that the classical age inherited from humanism. She has not “earned” her repose, and it is difficult to dismiss Madlyn Kahr’s thorough and well-documented discussion which argues that “the young woman personifies Sloth, the vice that opens the gate to all other vices, symbols of which surround her.”155 A similar “dynamics” of indolence appears to operate, with less severity, in Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s The Sleeping Knitter (fig. 13). Michael Fried has argued that the girl’s sleep is depicted as innocuous at worst, or more precisely, “as an absorptive condition, almost an absorptive activity, in its own right.”156 Yet on close inspection, the details suggest otherwise, and not that this innocentlooking young lady – who, more truthfully, is simply a large child – has been mentally involved in her work to some point of cognitive exhaustion and hence 155 “Vermeer’s Girl Asleep: A Moral Emblem,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal 6 (1972), 127. 156 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 35.

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Figure 13 Claude Donat Jardinier after Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Sleeping Knitter (1765). Engraving, 34.25 cm × 25.4 cm. Washington, National Gallery of Art. ­I mage courtesy of the National Gallery.

has fallen asleep. It seems more likely that her mind lacks the endurance or stamina necessary for the rigors of her tedious and exacting work. The angular crook of each arm is in accord with the perpendicular pattern of her knitting instruments. But she is no match for this regime of linearity, which is reinforced by the vertical shafts of the back of her chair and echoed by the osier yarn-basket to her left. Her adorable but faltering cranium is, in turn, echoed by a soft-looking ball of yarn and by the rounded mass of knitting-in-progress that is about to slip out of her hands, perhaps to lie irremediably disassembled on the floor. Even if the implied commentary is not harsh or trenchant, there is moralism in this depiction, nonetheless. Surely, it should not prove difficult to identify depictions of laborers who deserve their sleep, prior to the mid-1800s. But at the same time, it is necessary to keep in mind the extent to which the era of Descartes and Baxter – an age imbued with theology-tinged valorizations regarding labor, productivity, and cognition – established an agenda that has affected and helped determine conceptions of exertion and repose, basically until the present. Yes, Vien’s genial hermit sleeps amid materials that testify to ongoing involvement with varied intellectual pursuits. Some emanation of a musical sublime (tied, no doubt, to his recent rehearsal of a pleasant and edifying aria) radiates from his countenance. His is a complicated and clearly merited anapausis, not a retreat into the weary vacancy experienced – perhaps even enjoyed – by Greuze’s underage maid. Hers are the cognitive and ergonomic burdens that, more than the hermit’s, will sift into the postmodern domain. Quite different conclusions emerge from a viewing of a thematically similar painting, Courbet’s Sleeping Spinner (1853) (fig. 14). Courbet indeed was a

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Figure 14  Courbet, Sleeping Spinner (1853). Oil on canvas, 91 cm × 115 cm. Montpellier, Musée Fabre. Photo credit: Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, ny.

­ averick vis-à-vis religion as in other respects, hence likely to turn away from m any form of puritanical ethos. But this rebelliousness does not preclude a possible rapprochement with some basic aspects of biblical discourse, for the anti-­ clerical Courbet also rendered a depiction of Lot and his daughters (circa 1840) in addition to his large and intricate Burial at Ornans (1849), a work that accommodates numerous allusions to matters religious and more specifically ecclesiastical, including mourning, ritual, community, hierarchy, and sacred symbolism. In any case, Courbet’s rendition of the dormant-worker motif blends a matter-of-factness typical of realism with a serene simplicity. Although this young woman has dozed off in the midst of her toils – and not clearly a­ fter  –, any insinuation of sin is absent. The answer may be in her wheel, indicating an ongoing cycle of activity and pause that is never quite completed, hence never inappropriately interrupted. This is a scene of softness, circles, and ovals. The roundness of the wheel dominates with the help of the strategic placement and sturdy structure of the entire mechanism. There are echoes of the wheel as geometric “capstone” in the skein of loose woolen fibers, the spool of finished yarn, the sleeper’s cranium, and a curving line

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e­ xtending from the top of her forehead to the tip of her left forefinger. There is, in addition, a rounded gathering of fabric in her shawl so that the circularity of the spinning wheel is reduplicated by a moon-like curvature running from the tip of the nose of this comely, Rubenesque young woman to her waist. Straightness is limited in this painting, in contrast to the Greuze depiction, where strong verticals and other lines suggest that his flagging young textileworker has failed to measure up. Also notable in Courbet’s updating is a long diagonal formed by a piece of wood at the base of the wheel, a line that is continued by the right forearm of the somnolent spinner. It thus appears that labor and leisure have in this instance been reconciled. This conclusion is perhaps confirmed by Courbet’s placement of the subject’s right hand nearly at the center so that there is a nice juxtaposition with the other major elements of the painting: Work and rest (including the rest of the work that needs to be done), the wool and the wheel, the spinning apparatus, and the dormant, attractive mass of the feminine subject – all of these elements (including potential oppositions and antagonisms) coexist peaceably, or so it seems.157 The assertion that Courbet’s representation of a sleeping worker resembles Hugo’s depiction of Boaz – is in some sense biblical – is hardly unimpeachable. Yet a connection – even if not a direct one – may well subsist between Courbet and Old Testament discourse. In this context, it is also relevant to submit that 157 Fried’s reading of The Sleeping Spinner deserves comment though ostensibly tangential to the concerns of the current discussion. Fried is struck by the phallic overtones of the prominent distaff and the accompanying mass of wool. Fried discovers “an analogy with the painter-beholder’s brush” as well as an embodiment of “the aggressive maleness of the painting’s maker”; hence there is an equating of “the act of painting with the sexual possession of the young woman.” Fried concludes with the recognition that the distaff or quenouille in French “connotes femaleness as such; and this suggests that what we find in the treatment of the distaff in The Sleeping Spinner is a fantasmatic conflation of masculine and feminine, a conflation that comes close to thematizing the activity of painting as simultaneously man’s and woman’s work” (Courbet’s Realism, 192–93). What is a bit surprising is that Fried, often attentive to the thematics of sleep (66–67 and elsewhere), does not here tie his insights to the woman’s dormancy. For it is apparent that the “phallus” is pointed away from the subject’s somnolent torso, with the metallic, prickly shaft of the distaff nearly reaching the edge of the painting, hence implying a connection with the hard, material world that fails to intrude upon this idyllic scene. The phallus/paintbrush has perhaps produced this work of art, but its ergonomic capacities have succeeded only to the extent that they dissolve into the tranquil demesne of sleep at the edge of their influence, precisely where one “couche” or layer of paint is placed adjacent to or atop another. Also indebted to a dynamics of sleep are the spokes of the spinning wheel. Their shape roughly echoes that of the substantial “brush”; their depiction is enabled since they are motionless due to the sleep of the spinner.

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Keats presents a analogous image in a patently pagan context in his ode, “To Autumn.” Keats records that the goddess of harvests conspires with “the maturing sun” so as to “load and bless/With fruit the vines that round the thatcheves run” … (ll. 2–3) (italics mine). Thereafter, she is often glimpsed “on a halfreap’d furrow sound asleep,/Drows’d with the fume of poppies … ” (ll. 16–17). It can be argued that here as well a residue of biblical sentiment peeks through, a possibility that this pagan scene has been staged – to a modest extent – from a Judaeo-Christian perspective. For in a letter of 21 September 1819, around the time of the composition of this grandly impressive ode, Keats writes of his temperate but profound enjoyment of the autumn countryside, an experience prompted during a period of sabbatical recreation, his “Sunday’s walk,” a reflective interval that was also a provocation for poetic composition.158 The notion here identified is a broad yet persistent one: the perception that the resistances of sleep include a license for rest at intervals dictated by the temporary subsiding of expenditures of energy within mind and body. Thus Keats’s promenade on a day ordained for relaxation and repose, Autumn’s sleep, the slumber of an otherwise diligent spinning girl – all of these incidents accord with a biblical precedent rather downplayed during eras when the engine of cognition has real clout: the neoclassical age, the Enlightenment, the late-twentieth century and early twenty-first. This notion emerges with greater salience in a well-known painting by Millet, Noonday Rest (1866) (fig. 15), and in its rehandling by van Gogh (1889–’90) (fig. 16). In these depictions of agricultural accumulation, which are apprehensible as distant echoes of the kind of arduous activity that occupied Ruth and Boaz, a peasant couple is somnolent – and justifiably so – amid obvious displays of their industriousness. Thus sickles lie to one side almost as tokens of admission to a deserved respite from toil, or perhaps as currency tendered for a space and duration of repose. The evidence of productivity is imposing: huge haystacks behind a large number of sheaves of grain that serve the 158 For the poem, see The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, 3:181–83. For the relevant portion of the letter, see the same edition, 8:49. Assertions regarding the religious dimension of Keats’s thought are eminently debatable; J. Robert Barth comments that critics have for the most part seen “him as a kind of modern skeptic, fully in tune with the values of a ‘post-Christian era.’” Commenting on Robert M. Ryan’s groundbreaking study, Keats: The Religious Sense (Princeton: Princeton up, 1976), Barth concurs with Ryan’s “middle course, taking very much into account both Keats’s innate skepticism and suspicion of institutional Christianity, and his unceasing search for a broader religious meaning in his life and in his poetry” (“Keats’s Way of Salvation,” Studies in Romanticism 45.2 [Summer 2006]: 285, 86). Ryan had argued (209) for a connection between Keats’s religious views and his apparent possession of “a measure of spiritual serenity” during the period when “To Autumn” was composed.

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Figure 15 Jean-François Millet, Noonday Rest (1866). Pastel & black conté crayon on buff wove paper, 29.2 cm × 41.9 cm. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. Photo credit: Boston, mfa.

Figure 16 Vincent van Gogh, Siesta at Noon (1889–’90). Oil on canvas, 73 cm × 91 cm. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. Photo credit: Alfredo Dagli Orti/The Art ­A rchive at Art Resource, ny.

­ ard-working couple as an ersatz mattress. But certainly, van Gogh’s version h of the scene is something other than a direct replay of the visual text Millet has provided. It is not only a matter of van Gogh having reversed the orientation of the scene as set forth by Millet. Nor are the differences accounted for as the viewer notes that van Gogh is less literal than his predecessor and has interjected characteristic undulations in his rendering of the sheaves and the sky. For the present study, the key distinction may be that van Gogh has eschewed the darker tones rather prominent in Millet’s rendition. With van Gogh’s brighter color spectrum, shadows are much diminished. A quarter-­ century after M ­ illet – and further into the industrial era–, van Gogh’s sleepers are “lifted” into the light yet presumably are content to partake of what may be a shallower sleep. In any case, the biblical connection is only one possible component among many in the depiction of sleep. And the issue here is not so much one of ordinary aesthetic influence, but of displacement, of dislocation, and – in some cases – of efforts to reinstall or re-place sacred discourse set adrift during the mid-nineteenth century as established religious institutions and their messages become subject to decay and attack. Among other consequences, ritual and

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belief are tossed to the whims of artists of every type, who now propose substitutions. In the area of sleep, the notion of an uncomplicated and restorative anapausis, with precedents in Old Testament discourse, clearly gains favor. An imprint of anapausis was of course already rather obvious in the case of Vien’s sagacious hermit, yet there is a difference in these post-Enlightenment examples. Intellectualization is now downplayed in contrast to Vien’s strategy of providing his portrait of somnolence with numerous signals indicating that the mind has done its work – and is even inclined to continue its efforts during an intermission. The new trend merges nicely with the processes and ideology of a strengthening supply of modernist capital. That is to say, unless otherwise advised, the modern subject is allowed to nap, even in mid-afternoon, as long as productivity is maintained. The dispensation of slumber is granted in conjunction with an implied commitment to an economy that is rapidly and decisively expanding. Hence another partial explanation for the gigantic number of sleepers residing in works of modernist verbal and visual art. In other words, where overall production is or is believed to be ample (or when it is ideologically desirable to insist that it is ample), then opportunities for recuperative repose should be plentiful as well (even if, as in the van Gogh work just discussed, limits may be implied as to the degree of restfulness). This inquiry into the mutual involvement of the modernist representation of sleep and religious discourse concludes with consideration of dreams. Of specific interest here is the modernist dream vis-à-vis its accommodations of displaced religious energy from the mid-nineteenth-century onward. Relevant conclusions are sought through consideration of a pair of key examples. Again useful is Victor Hugo’s representation of Boaz in The Legend of the Ages. In the interests of resuscitating further the corpus of Old Testament narrative, Hugo complicates and enriches Boaz’s nocturnal experiences by interpolating into his dreams the luminous symbolism of the Tree of Jesse, a popular medieval motif derived not from the Boaz narrative in the Book of Ruth but rather from the Book of Isaiah (11.1): And this dream was such, that Boaz saw an oak Which, rising from his gut, went high into the blue; A race of men stretched up there like a long chain; A king sang below; above, a god died. (ll. 37–40)159 159 nw, trans. (Et ce songe était tel, que Booz vit un chêne Qui, sorti de son ventre, allait jusqu’au ciel bleu;

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Hugo’s retelling of biblical narrative is to some extent a revival or re-enlivening thereof, but it is also clear that he has rendered a “synthetic” text that emends and amplifies his main antecedent, the Book of Ruth. The result of Hugo’s intervention is a prosthesis for the sacred, but he also succeeds in foregrounding a distinctive version of dream-enriched discourse. Hugo’s project thus entails both innovation and preservation. It can be argued, in addition, that the tinge of authority that accrues to this text because of the image of the Tree of Jesse is at the same time aesthetic and pietistic. In the end, Boaz’s dream – as “realized” by Hugo – foreshadows certain later, more clearly modernist, and more explicit claims for prioritizing the discourses of the arts. A distinguished example of this special category of dream-representation (and a worthy successor to Hugo) was composed by Marcel Proust and is found in the first part of The Guermantes Way (Le côté de Guermantes). Marcel at this point has just reminisced regarding certain experiences in Venice, and the oneiric tableau that ensues is patently Venetian: … One of my dreams was the synthesis of what my imagination had often sought to depict, in my waking hours, of a certain seagirt place and its mediaeval past. In my sleep I saw a gothic city rising from a sea whose waves were stilled as in a stained-glass window. An arm of the sea divided the town in two; the green water stretched to my feet; on the opposite shore it washed round the base of an oriental church, and beyond it houses which existed already in the fourteenth century, so that to go across to them would have been to ascend the stream of time. This dream in which nature had learned from art, in which the sea had turned Gothic, this dream in which I longed to attain, in which believed that I was attaining the impossible, was one that I felt I had often dreamed before.160 Une race y montait comme une longue chaîne; Un roi chantait en bas, en haut mourait un Dieu. [ll. 37–40] [La légende, ed. J. Truchet, 35]) 160 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, 3 vols. (New York: Vintage, 1982), 2.147–48. ( … Un de mes rêves était la synthèse de ce que mon imagination avait souvent cherché à se représenter, pendant la veille, d’un certain paysage marin et de son passé médiéval. Dans mon sommeil je voyais une cité gothique au milieu d’une mer aux flots immobilisés comme sur un vitrail. Un bras de mer divisait en deux la ville; l’eau verte s’étendait à mes pieds; elle baignait sur la rive opposée une église orientale, puis des maisons qui existaient encore dans le XIVe siècle, si bien qu’aller vers elles, c’eût été remonter le cours des âges. Ce rêve où la nature avait appris l’art, où la mer était devenue gothique, ce rêve où je désirais, où je croyais aborder à l’impossible, il me

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Hermeneutic efforts to unravel this passage from Proust can proceed rather rapidly, in view of what has already been argued. The key term here is no doubt “gothic” (“gothique”), a locution that effectively bridges secular and sacred registers of discourse. In any case, the various components of Marcel’s “synthesis” have not been presented with equal emphasis. Proust inscribes an aesthetically unified vision of culture in which religion has found a place, not a religiously unified vision in which art has its niche. Such is the implicit message borne by this luminous city with its oriental church and medieval houses, an ensemble surrounded by “a sea whose waves were stilled as in a stained-glass window.” Certainly the references to religious architecture are meaningful and imposing, but this is more a statement about sleep and its resistances, as an irrepressible conveyor of dreams, especially recurrent dreams. Yet at the same time, Proust’s gothic vision should not be mistaken for a replay of Romantic “high” oneiricity, which is only one of Proust’s varied antecedents and which tends to be specifically tilted toward foregrounding aspects of the imagination’s exuberance and puissance. “A sea whose waves were stilled” (“une mer aux flots immobilisés”): in context, this descriptive phrase is almost a naming of sleep, an evocation of resistance. Paradoxically, that resistance of sleep also contributes to an idealized, more complete representation of time than is normally the case; that is, in ordinary sequential narratives. In this particular oneiric compartment, events do not follow one another in rapid succession. Basically a transposition of the idea of a sacred eternity, this Proustian aesthetic wholeness recesses the notions of beginning, middle, and/or end. For within this arresting idealization of the gothic, the distant past is also contemporary. In addition, an intriguing corollary is identified, dream’s capacity to effect a kind of false memory, a sense that one has been here before, an oneiric version of the daytime phenomenon of déjà-vu. This observation may hold true alongside Descartes’s claim that accurate recollection is not possible when one dreams. Proust comments in this regard, “ … it is the nature of what we imagine in sleep to multiply itself in the past, and to appear, even when new, to be familiar … ”; (“ … c’est le propre de ce qu’on imagine en dormant de se multiplier dans le passé, et de paraître, bien qu’étant nouveau, familier …”).161 Yet all of this is not narrative despite the illusion of multiple frames of temporal reference. As indicated earlier, narrative requires a parturitional dimension, the sense of a bringing forth, along with clear articulation of time-segments. Lessing was fascinated with “pregnant” semblait l’avoir déjà fait souvent [À la recherche du temps perdu, Vol. 2, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, Dharntipaya Kaotipaya, et al. {Paris: Gallimard, 1988}, 444].) 161 Proust, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, 2.148; ed. Tadié et al., 2.444.

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moments, which are essential as bases for narrative, and Proust reveals a similar interest. The passage in question, however, remains exemplarily on the side of ekphrasis and distinct from diegesis. This dream-excerpt remains enceinte while conveying a sense of ancientness, history, and personal memory. However notable the penumbra of religious thought and sentiment emitted by Marcel’s dream, the category of the sacred here remains precisely that, penumbral – an after-glow, a deceptive luminescence, and not a voicing of reverence. This is truly a dislocation of religious energy and images, and not a re-placement of vagrant piety within an oneiric context, the likes of which have long served as suitable enclosures for representations of the divine. The Proustian agenda at this point, it appears, is of a different type, an installation and burnishing of the aesthetic. The timelessness involved – and dreamed of – is not godly but is rather the instrument of representational desire; that is, of desire for a perfected mode of picturing and depicting. As so often in dream, a wish has been fulfilled. A splendid synthesis of images and form, space and time, a representational harmony not quite imaginable by the narrator during waking hours, has at last solidified. Thus the reference to an interior tableau of arrested “waves” that are “stilled as in a stained-glass window” – seen above as suggestive of sleep’s counter-narrativity – also evokes the construction of an artistic program. If this dream offers an epiphany of the sublime, it is an aesthetic one; the patina of sacredness is here an ornament. Proustian medievalism at its lambent best, this scene has played itself out on representational terrain that is secularized – and epicurean as well; that is, accommodating sagacious enjoyment of the civilized pleasures elicited by an exquisite dreamscape. Looking forward, however, toward the hypnoglyph and, more generally, the postmodern experience of sleep, this study will advance the argument that, beyond allusions to or a simple tie-in with religious discourse, a theocratic trend (in relation to which Proust’s sleep-world can be taken as a counter-statement) is often to be reckoned with, an ergonomic ideal that has tended to vilify cognitive disengagement and the deeper levels of repose.

chapter 2

A Life in the Day of a Hypnoglyph: Vertical Slumber and Other Typicalities K. was asleep, impervious to all that was happening. His head, which had at first been lying on his left arm on top of the bedpost, had slid down as he slept and now hung unsupported, slowly dropping lower; the support of the arm above was no longer sufficient; involuntarily K. provided himself with new support by planting his right hand firmly against the quilt, whereby he accidentally took hold of Bürgel’s foot, which happened to be sticking up under the quilt. Bürgel looked down and abandoned the foot to him, tiresome though this might be. franz kafka 1

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A woman who resisted sexual relations with her husband slept in the Calisthenic position – as though her body in the dark were doing sit-ups. She placed pillows behind her back, and slept more or less sitting up, making it impossible for her husband, who slept in a semi-fetal position, to engage her in physical intimacy. Over a number of years she sat up in her sleep farther and farther, withdrawing more and more from her husband. Eventually, she purchased a hassock to support her now fully erect, stiff-backed, defensive sleep posture. samuel dunkell 2

∵ 1 The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir with Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (London: Minerva, 1992), 254. “Mehr hörte K. nicht, er schlief, abgeschlossen gegen alles was geschah. Sein Kopf, der zuerst auf dem linken Arm oben auf dem Bettpfosten gelegen war, war im Schlaf abgeglitten und hing nun frei, langsam tiefer sinkend, die Stütze des Armes oben genügte nicht mehr, unwillkürlich verschaffte sich K. eine neue dadurch, daß er die rechte Hand gegen die Bettdecke stemmte, wobei er zufällig gerade den unter der Decke aufragenden Fuß Bürgels ergriff. Bürgel sah hin und überließ ihm den Fuß, so lästing das sein mochte [Das Schloß, ed. Malcolm Pasley {Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994}, 326].” 2 Sleep Positions: The Night Language of the Body (London: Heinemann, 1977), 114–15. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004316218_003

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Figure 17 Fritz Behn, Masai (1908–1909). Bronze, 66 cm. Munich, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus. Image courtesy of the Lenbachhaus.

Wandering through Munich’s Lenbachhaus, which is a mustard-toned Ital­ ianate villa remodeled into a museum of modern art, a spectator passes through a bewildering series of cubicles and other chambers whose varying dimensions are crammed with one of Europe’s premier collections of latenineteenth- and twentieth-century painting and sculpture. In one of the larger galleries, which is crowded with viewers and artworks, an eccentric piece of statuary stands virtually unnoticed. A bronze casting by photographer-sculptor Fritz Behn, it is dated 1908 or ’09 and depicts a nude African boy standing gracefully on his right leg, almost in a ballet pose, with his left leg cocked upward, the left foot resting above the right knee. His head is tilted back; his eyes closed, he is ostensibly asleep (fig. 17). The statue is labeled Masai, and at least the title reveals something about this otherwise enigmatic work, for it alters a resting pose – not a sleeping posture – perfected by the Masai tribesmen of present-day Kenya. Behn may not have known when he made the statue that the Masai rested and reflected rather than slept, in a distinctive pose. In 1910, a photograph showing the true state of affairs – a tribesman standing on one foot with head erect and eyes clearly open – appears in an ethnological study of the Masai of German East

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Figure 18 Edme Bouchardon, Sleeping Faun or The Barberini Faun (1726–’30) (copy after a Greek original, 3rd–2nd century BCE). Marble, 184 cm × 142 cm × 119 cm. Paris, Louvre. MR1921. Photo Credit: Archive Timothy McCarthy/Art Resource, ny.

Africa.3 Behn has in any case sculpted a cultural hybrid, for the attitude of the boy’s cranium echoes the position of a Greek – not an African – model. At issue is the head of the celebrated Barberini faun, a statue that depicts a handsome creature of myth who sleeps in a seated, not a standing pose; his torso is tilted backward in drowsy elegance4 (fig. 18). The Masai’s physiognomy as well seems modeled on that of the Greek statue. Whether one is fascinated or nonplussed by Behn’s singular statue, some significance resides in the fact that Masai is one of the first in a series of ver­ tical figures who sleep in modern and postmodern visual art and literature. A handle on the oddness of Behn’s image and its variants in succeeding decades is suggested by an observation of Michael North on how colonial-era

3 M. Merker, Die Masai: Ethnographische Monographie eines ostafrikanischen Semitenvolkes (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1910; rpt. 1968), 98. 4 There is a further suggestion of influence in that the Greek statue is housed in Munich’s Glyptothek, not far from the Lenbachhaus.

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Europeans perceived cultural alterity: “The colonial subject is either a part of nature, utterly literal and therefore soothingly simple, or menacingly unreadable, mysterious, and suggestive of some vast unknown.”5 In Masai, Behn has attempted to combine the two alternatives. He has first taken a close-to-nature custom of the colonized subject, but then, instead of transmitting it as inherently readable in its actual state, the sculptor has rendered this “found” cultural art-form in combination with a European representational gesture. The result is all but unreadable, and this outlandish visual amalgam points forward, beyond modernism, to the oxymoronic art – to the wholesale and often startling appropriations – of a later movement. Much of the significance of Behn’s Masai turns out to be that it records a colonizing of the mind. Capturing an exotic posture, the artist has implanted a phenomenology of sleep, thereby creating a representation of vertical slumber. This peculiar and virtually putative state – rather like the unicorn – has intermittently intrigued the European mind for many centuries, especially the twentieth. Perhaps the earliest mention of sleeping while standing is an obscure observation by the Hellenic medical patriarch, Hippocrates (460?–377? bce) to the effect that such slumber is the most profound. This gnomic comment is located in the sixth book of Epidemics in a section usually considered spurious. The text in any case advances the point that, while standing, one can sleep only if one does so profoundly.6 Hippocrates’s late-classical successor, Galen (129–199? ce), was intrigued by this bizarre pronouncement and surmised that those who have difficulty going to sleep will achieve soothing slumber if they remain erect and vigilant until they begin to nod and wink. He professes that he has cured numerous cases of insomnia through this innovative therapy.7 Harbored in the oddball maxim ascribed to Hippocrates as in Galen’s commentary is the almost ubiquitous human assumption that sleep is opposed – is inherently resistant – to narrative and will all too readily extricate itself from pervasive cultural and other narratival needs. Sleep’s narrative resistance, as well as the need to combat it, is also evident in Galen’s reminiscence of an incident that 5 “Modernism’s African Mask,” Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, ed. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Stanford: Stanford up, 1995), 276. 6 “hupnos hedraios, orthoi nustagmos,” Epidemics 6.4.15 in É. Littré, ed. and trans., Oeuvres complètes d’ Hippocrate, Vol. 5 (1839) (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1978), 310. 7 Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, ed. C.G. Kühn, Vol. 17, Part 2 (1829) (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1965), 175–77.

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Figure 19 Anonymous, Black Boy Asleep (350–325 bce). Terracotta, 6.35 cm. Oxford, Ashmolean. Photo Credit: Ashmolean Museum/The Art Archive AT Art Resource, ny.

occurred when he was constrained to march during an entire night. Although he fell asleep, he continued to walk, awakening only when he stumbled on a stone.8 Other references to vertical slumber are infrequent prior to the twentieth century. However, an ancient cognate example that deserves mention is a curious clay sculptural work in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. Referred to as Black Boy Asleep and dating from the fourth century bce, it depicts a juvenile male with pronounced African features, evidently asleep, “crouching at the base of a wine-jar and resting the upper part of his body against the vase’s belly. He is curled up like a snail, with his arms clasped round his chest, happily asleep, perhaps either from exhaustion or the effects of the jar’s contents.”9 (fig. 19). It is difficult not to conclude that the youth is a slave, far from home and now moored in the distant Hellenic world. If there is a comic turn in the unexpected conjunction of the broad-nosed boy and amphora, there is also a sense of a temporary release from labor amid enforced indigence. Surely, he is propped up in his sleep on the vessel that, filled with refreshment for those who control him, he is typically required to carry. If he has on this occasion indulged in the wine that he must transport and has succumbed to inebriation, the

8 Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, ed. C.G. Kühn, Vol. 4 (1822) (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964), 436. 9 C.E. Vafopoulou-Richardson, Ancient Greek Terracottas (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1991), 33.

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representation reveals no hint of censure. Without doubt, his is a slumber that could terminate at any instant and give way to the agenda of labor that, patently, determines the boy’s existence. The unusual posture, while not vertical, is representative of the strained, even eccentric sleep-positions assumed by an array of overworked or otherwise distressed subjects. There is much cultural and historical distance between this subservient alien and the exotic – yet Hellenized – figure rendered by Behn. The exigencies of labor have been refined out of the latter figure even if such a dimension is often apparent in depictions of vertical and other atypical somnolence. One of the few clear precedents is found in the iconography relating to Comus, the Hellenic deity of revelry, whom the Greek writer Philostratus the Elder (3rd century ce) observed painted in a distinctly upright stance, fast asleep. The god rests propped against a spear held in his left hand. Apparently, he has anticipated his lapse into dormancy, for while a torch held in his right hand tilts downward and seems ready to fall, he manages to hold the flame away from his body and has crossed the left leg over the right. So states a late-sixteenth-century French translation,10 which presents the ekphrasis obscurely at times, and which an illustrator has realized in an intriguing but somewhat inaccurate pose, with the right leg crossed over the left (fig. 20). In this odd example and in view of the figure’s identity, maintaining perpendicular slumber is not necessarily the same as being asleep at the switch. Translator Blaise de Vigenère moralizes Philostratus’s text by affirming that Comus was to be perceived, whatever the circumstances, as the protector of young people in their debaucheries and carousals. Thus compliant or not, resistant sleep will either somehow conform to an agenda or at least be called into account. Recognition of a fundamental antagonism between sleep and narrative helps explain the unquestioned acceptance of early twentieth-century accounts of the existence of successful and “normal” vertical slumber among the Masai. The respected anthropological commentator, Marcel Mauss, took as valuable information the reports that the Masai were able to “sleep on their feet,” an achievement at which Mauss himself claims to have had a certain knack.11 And significantly, the writer of a widely acclaimed scholarly monograph heralds

10 Philostratus, Les images ou tableaux de platte peinture: des deux Philostrates sophists grecs (1614), trans. Blaise de Vigenère (New York: Garland, 1976), 10–11. Most of this work – including the section on Comus – is generally held to have been written by the Elder Philostratus. 11 “Techniques of the Body,” trans. Ben Brewster, Economy and Society 2.1 (February 1973):73.

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Figure 20  Anonymous illustrator of Les images ou tableaux de platte peinture: des deux Philostrates sophists grecs, trans. Blaise de Vigenère. Comus. Woodcut, 23 cm × 19 cm. Paris: A. L’Angelier, 1614. Page 9. Image courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Mauss’s mention of the Masai custom as an “unforgettable” instance of human adaptability to the exigencies of acculturation.12 Behn’s Masai is an eccentric work typical of the primitive longings and aesthetic innovations of early twentieth-century modernism. In addition, the oddness of its portrayal of sleep points to trends well beyond the sculptor’s immediate era. The excerpt from Kafka that opens this chapter fits in nicely here as well. Indeed, vignettes of the dormant state ranging from expected to eccentric (if more often the former) are frequent among the varied practition­ ers of modernism. Yet the attributes of sleep have led to a still larger census of 12

Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 3. The image is unforgettable perhaps because it brings a vague but shared, cultural fantasy into sharp focus.

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aesthetic outcomes during the postmodern era. It is in fact possible to detect a postmodern near-genre, the hypnoglyph, that exploits the varied dimensions of the dormant state.13 Extremely diverse in its styles and instantiations, this representational type becomes widespread in postmodern verbal and visual culture. The persistence of the hypnoglyph, including the strange subtype that Masai helped initiate, suggests something about the longevity of postmodernism as well. Perhaps the most noticeable trait is that narrative resistance is brought to the fore in the hypnoglyph, usually in relation to a mediated or stymied diaristic ­impulse. The diary, a chronicle of internal and external circadian events, is seemingly the text that the hypnoglyph would like to write but is, instead, the main prior genre whose norms are herein challenged. In postmodern contexts, so often given to displays of intense paradox, narrative resistance may be linked to an exhibition of and implied protest against too much narrative. The salient features of this representational kind, along with the semiotic implications of dormancy, are illustrated below with reference to one of the hypnoglyph’s most distinctive subpatterns, the depiction of vertical slumber.14 An early example of this motif is located in Elizabeth Bishop’s anomalous poem, “Sleeping Standing Up,” which is also a work that generally anticipates the postmodern. Two paintings by contemporary New York artist Vincent Desiderio are then considered as characteristic visual texts. As set forth in the previous chapter, however much a narrative text may confirm – even indirectly through parody – the realization of temporal and thus narrative plenitude, the stationary and (usually) horizontal body of 13

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Generic possibilities during postmodernism are explored in Postmodern Genres, ed. Marjorie G. Perloff (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989). Perloff outlines the possible coordinates of such genres in her introduction to the volume (most notably, 7–8). But the amorphous qualities of sleep limit its adaptability to the strictures and expectations inherent in a representational form. Such a mode of somnolence is to be distinguished from somnambulism, or episodes of psychic excitation during which an internal imperative disrupts and informs the normal physiological processes of sleep. At the same time, there are some recent poems in which a representation of somnambulism seems fused with the image of vertical slumber. “The Sleeping Preacher” by Julia Kasdorf, for instance, tells of fundamentalist ministers who uttered authoritarian statements while walking in a trance-like state (Sleeping Preacher [Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1991], 6). See also the title poem in Edward Hirsch’s For the Sleepwalkers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 34. The title poem in Bei Dao’s The August Sleepwalker, trans. Bonnie S. McDougall, is similarly relevant ([New York: New Directions, 1990], 103). Bei Dao cryptically declares that his August sleepwalker “has seen the sun in the night” of post-Mao Chinese history.

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the sleeper is horizonal (at least until the first hints of the postmodern) and tends to decelerate time’s advances and its attendant transformations.15 Hence the subtle, implicit appeal of the notion of vertical slumber, a phenomenon attesting that sleep can be aesthetically manipulated so that it blends into the texture of an artistic work. And with regard to postmodernism, it is helpful to recall Fredric Jameson’s locution, “late-phase capitalism,” which he employs to define this period. Of particular relevance is his often cited arch-criterion, that the postmodern era is characterized by the intrusion of capital and its manifestations into areas of human life previously unaffected.16 If only indirectly, vertical slumber can be viewed as reflecting the dynamisms, intrusions, and antagonisms of a highly leveraged capitalist economy. Within a highly evolved entrepreneurial matrix, even the unproductive “downtime” of sleep finds its way into a cultural grid.

Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sleeping Standing Up”

As already noted, strategic moments demarcating an historical divide between modernism and the postmodern are troublesome to identify.17 The quest for a “beginning” of the hypnoglyph therefore proceeds with allowance for a margin of error. As suitable a point of departure as any is offered in an ambiguously modernist site, Elizabeth Bishop’s twenty-four-line lyric, “Sleeping Standing Up,” first published in 1938 but begun during a sojourn in Paris a few years earlier.18 With its aggressive display of dream-imagery, the poem is patently an exercise in blending the raw material of psychoanalytic discourse with an aesthetics of modernity. Yet embedded in this phalanx of avant-gardish images is an undercoding that bristles with statements on the topics of the diary, narrative resistance, and the significances of sleep:

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The term “horizonal” as it relates to a discourse of sleep has been commented on in the previous chapter, note 18. 16 Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke up, 1991), 36. 17 Also worth consulting is Jameson’s “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” where evidence of “this new moment of capitalism” is found as early as the close of the 1940s, with the’60s clearly “the key transitional period” (3). For the full essay, see The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 1–20. 18 The period during which Bishop composed and published “Sleeping Standing Up” is ably discussed by Brett C. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993), 86-92 and 144.

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“Sleeping Standing Up” As we lie down to sleep the world turns half away Through ninety dark degrees; the bureau lies on the wall and thoughts that were recumbent in the day rise as the others fall, stand up and make a forest of thick-set trees. The armored cars of dreams, contrived to let us do so many a dangerous thing, are chugging at its edge all camouflaged, and ready to go through the swiftest streams, or up a ledge of crumbling shale, while plates and trappings ring. – Through turret-slits we saw the crumbs or pebbles that lay below the riveted flanks on the green forest floor, like those the clever children placed by day and followed to their door one night, at least; and in the ugly tanks we tracked them all the night. Sometimes they disappeared, dissolving in the moss, sometimes we went too fast and ground them underneath. How stupidly we steered until the night was past and never found out where the cottage was.19

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The poem turns out to be notable as much for its spirited adoption of the early twentieth-century’s fascination with somnolent states as for a subtle differentiation from the era’s norms. As for Proust and other giants of the period, sleep for Bishop is often a fortuitous occasion for a shift of consciousness from absorption in diurnal routines into a private world that confirms, through dreams, a self-reflexive subjectivity. “Sleeping Standing Up,” however, turns out not to be the usual artist’s version of Freudianesque flight into an inscape structured according to the imperatives of desire. 19

Elizabeth Bishop, North & South (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), 30. (Included in Poems [2011], 31, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. US/Canada/Open Market permissions from fsg; uk and Commonwealth permissions granted by Chatto and Windus/ Random House Group Ltd.)

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Here as in The Captive (La prisonnière) and elsewhere in Proust, the circadian paradigm – the bodily cycle of sleep and waking induced by the alternation of night and day – provides a primary narrative substratum.20 But for Bishop, the vociferousness of the sleeper’s dreams blurs the usually durable circadian boundaries. Instead of an easeful release into the happy play of internal narratives, the sleeper somehow fails to fall into an horizontal position and remains standing: “… the world turns half away/through ninety dark degrees;/the bureau lies on the wall” (1–3). Diurnal agendas are replaced by a mare’s nest of aggressive and hostile visions that, however cryptic, might yield a novel meaning within a conventional modernist context. Here we only learn that the “armored cars of dreams” (l. 7) never reach the cottage they sought to destroy. The lack of narrative and rhetorical closure with which the poem trails off makes it difficult for an interpretation to go anywhere.21 In this instance at least, Bishop’s representational strategies are contraProustian. Especially illustrative of the difference is a celebrated dream (introduced above) that Marcel remembers as “the synthesis of what my imagination had often sought to depict, in my waking hours, of a certain seagirt place and its mediaeval past” (… “la synthèse de ce que mon imagination avait souvent cherché à se représenter, pendant la veille, d’un certain paysage marin et de son passé médiéval”). Central to the dream is the blazoning of “a gothic city rising from a sea whose waves were stilled as in a stained-glass window” (“… une cité gothique au milieu d’une mer aux flots immobilisés comme sur un vitrail”).22 Marcel’s sleep is rendered luminous because, volitionally directed, 20

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In his exhaustive study, Circadian Physiology, 2nd ed., Roberto Refinetti looks at circadianism as “an endogenous clock” broadly conceived; it is “a process that takes place inside the organism and persists in the absence of daily environmental cycles” (Boca Raton: crc Press, 2006), 4. From this empirical perspective, circadianism is intertwined with yet hardly identical to the sleep-cycle; sleep is “a restorative process gated by the circadian system” (Refinetti, 406). With regard to representation, the notion of a specifically physiological “two-process regulation of sleep” (406) acquires relevance as the empirical dimension interacts with culture, society, diachronic resonances, and individual subjective concerns. See also Simon J. Williams’s related comments, op. cit., 18–19. For an early application of the circadian concept within a literary context, see Robert S. Levine, “Circadian Rhythms and Rebellion in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening,” Studies in American Fiction 10 (1982): 71–81. Lorrie Goldensohn presents a related view on the interpretive muddle that Bishop engenders in “Sleeping Standing Up” and other poems dating to the interval in Paris (Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry [New York: Columbia up, 1992], 110–11). Proust, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, 2.147; ed. Tadié et al., 2.444. The “flots immobilisés” convey a sense of “arrested narrative,” discussed elsewhere in this study as an analogue (but not the equivalent) of narrative resistance.

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it realizes his representational impulses. This narrative site, culminating in a pause on an emblem-like image, signals the capacity of a sublimated dormancy to bestow upon the sleeper a meaningful continuation or refraction of the intentional and other narratives of waking life. “Sleeping Standing Up,” on the other hand, conveys a disavowal of iconicity.23 From a “high” modernist perspective, the rough surfaces of this imagery tilt, not toward an aestheticized subjectivity that evokes some version of the sublime, but toward the pressing concerns of individual existences, as well as toward hostile or other unpleasant impulses that, difficult to articulate, seek release from the unconscious. This oneiric apparition discloses more common ground with Freudian encumbrances such as regression or cathexis (a submerged nodule of discontent), than with the collective unconscious, the genial archetypes of Jung.24 From a very early point in her career, Bishop was cognizant of a prevailing literary trend that did not relate to her emergent values as a writer. In an undergraduate essay on narrative, Bishop refers to “the kind of novel (Proust, for example) that picks one moment of observation and shows the whole past in the terminology of that particular moment.” Bishop finds herself more interested in “the ever-changing expression” of the interface between old and new experience.25 Bishop’s doubts about a textual approach that is too easily universalizing are expressed with signal clarity in a notebook entry of 1934. “Immediate, intense physical reactions” and an indebtedness to “the material eaten out with 23

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“Iconicity,” it is worth recalling, is preeminently a term derived from the linguistic theories of Charles Sanders Peirce. In Limiting the Iconic: from the metatheoretical foundations to the creative possibilities of iconicity in language (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008), Ludovic de Cuypere ties iconicity to the selection of signs that are “iconically motivated” (69), given that the “icon” is a sign “said to refer to an object based on similarity” (62). Thus in contrast to the Proustian example just presented, a poem such as Bishop’s plays down apparent similarities between images and the meanings they might convey. There is, as well, a trend toward the creative disruption of expected links between verbal stimuli and their significations. For a locus classicus in the delineation of iconicity in the context of literary hermeneutics, see William K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1982), 115–16. On regression as a psychoanalytic concept and its tie-ins with dreams, see Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965), 571–88. On “cathexis,” see ibid., 209–10 and 592–96. Lynn Gamwell presents a brief but valuable sketch of the Jungian outlook (Dreams 1900–200: Science, Art, and the Unconscious Mind, ed. L. Gamwell [Ithaca: Cornell up, 2000], 41–45). For an extended setting forth of Jung’s oneirology, see the selection of texts in Dreams ( from Volumes 4, 8, 12 and 16 of the Collected Works), trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton up, 2010). Quoted by Goldensohn, 88.

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acid, pulled down from underneath” are far preferable to an outdated Romanticism’s confidence in “the beautiful, the nostalgic, the ideal.”26 This counterweighting of critical values (along with a hefty amount of her actual writing as well) makes it convenient to view “Sleeping Standing Up” in light of the diary as a narrative paradigm. It is relevant that Bishop was an indefatigable keeper of notebooks, a fact that implies approval of diaristic discourse. In addition, she eventually published, with a lengthy introduction, her own translation of the diary of a young Brazilian woman.27 The diary was not a focus of modernist energies but is relevant in tracing a modernist/postmodern watershed. Though heralded as “the lowest form of literature” by no less a writer than Nabokov,28 this narrative type manages to mitigate some of modernism’s perceived drawbacks, such as overconfidence in the iconic nature of the work of art. Utilization of the diary also offers a way to combat, by subsuming it, a discourse that could compete with modernism. The matter-of-factness and relative spontaneity of the diary also seem leveraged against the intensities of confession, especially in formalist contexts where the genuineness of a confessional voice is difficult to demonstrate. For Bishop, as opposed to Proust, the representation of individual consciousness as a path to idealized subjectivity is a questionable project. The diary as ­backdrop assists in recasting the coordinates of the individual psyche by relating them to a basic, circadian framework. Even as the latter narrative model deteriorates – as in “Sleeping Standing Up” –, when the “natural” alternation of activity and rest is fractured, the diaristic strategy renders a stabilizing “readout” of immediate sensations. Specific personal details have a claim of validity in contexts where it is difficult to view the construction of a general or abstract truth as a valid operation. The diaristic format also allows for the accumulation of the minute details (the tiny “truths”) of a day’s experience that will be swept into forgetfulness by the passage of merely one night of sleep. Hence such diarists as Anne Frank and Anais Nin are clearly relevant for late-modernism. 26 27

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Quoted by Victoria Harrison, Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Intimacy (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1993), 3. In her introduction, Bishop exclaims of the life portrayed in the diary that “it really happened; everything did take place, day by day, minute by minute, once and only once, just the way Helena says it did” (The Diary of “Helena Morley,” in The Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984], 100). Despair (New York: Perigree, 1979), 218. Nabokov’s assessment is also cited by H. Porter Abbott in the course of astute commentary on the uses of the diary format in fictional contexts (Diary Fiction: Writing as Action [Ithaca: Cornell up, 1984], 44).

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Nin in particular strove to elevate the diary to the status of “a tale without beginning or end which encloses all things” and “a strong antidote to the unrelatedness, incoherence and disintegration of the modern man.”29 And not least, this often scorned genre offers an avenue of accommodation with regard to the narrative resistance – the threat of temporal aporia – posed by the nightly intercessions of sleep. On the road to the hypnoglyph, the diaristic paradigm becomes spectral with the deterioration of a circadian model subject to centrifugal effects such as nuclear technology, global capitalism, and the endless work-week.30 Especially with the references to mechanized warfare, undesirable outcomes of the sort in question are already visible in “Sleeping Standing Up.” Yet Bishop does not entirely relinquish the dimension of the diary that allows it to recuperate a modicum – or even more – of the illusion of a permanent subjectivity. In the Brazilian diary, she finds experiences that are “odd, remote, and long ago, and yet fresh, sad, funny, and eternally true. … Certain pages reminded me of more famous and ‘literary’ ones: Nausicaa doing her laundry on the beach ... .”31 Here one discovers more than a trace of the notion once considered by Bishop to be an objectionable facet of Proust; that is, a very broadly representative temporal inset, a certain exemplarity in a casual diurnal gesture. The distinctive crux illustrated by Bishop’s approach to the diary finds an intriguing parallel in Heidegger’s commentary on time. In a circadian meditation in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), the philosopher notes that the day, demarcated by the recurrent passage of the sun, is the “‘most natural’ measure of time.”32 This unexceptionable observation on the coherence of the day as a cognitive unit readdresses an issue as old as Plato. Maintaining the integrity of the day as a structured unit of time is a concern enunciated in Book 7 of the Laws (Nomoi) (807D:8–807E:2) at the beginning of the passage (cited in the

29 30

On Writing (Yonkers: O. Baradinsky, 1947), 21–22; quoted by Abbot, 108. Cf. Ursula K. Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1997), 33–38. Looking for distinctions between modernist and postmodern views of time, Heise holds that “although both modernism and postmodernism foreground breaks or schisms in time, high modernism questions mainly the relevance and accessibility of the past, whereas postmodernism challenges the notion of time as such; and high modernism emphasizes the difference between private and public temporality, whereas both become precarious categories in postmodernist awareness” (37–38). 31 Bishop, “Helena Morley,” 82. 32 Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: scm Press, 1962), 465.

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previous chapter) detailing the perils of sleep. Heidegger finds that temporal segmentation is based on “the journeying sun. … Its regularly recurring passage is something which Dasein, as thrown into the world and giving itself time temporalizingly, takes into its reckoning. Dasein historizes from day to day by reason of its way of interpreting time by dating it… .”33 Despite the circadian tenor of these remarks, Heidegger has already articulated his intention to insulate his conceptualization of time from the trivial or mundane involvements, the highly specific interpersonal transactions, that form the core of the diary. Dasein is also distanced from the neither-here-nor-thereness of sleep. Heidegger postulates a transcendent “everydayness” that “is not to be understood calendrically”; yet “there is still an overtone of some such temporal character in the signification of the ‘everyday.’”34 Whatever else can be said, a lot is happening in Bishop’s text, and its illusions of activity need to be coordinated with the notion of narrative resistance. For in terms of the two basic modes of the representation of sleep outlined above in the previous chapter, the poem’s numerous flurries of activity conjure up an inclusiveness distinctly reminiscent of Freud’s notion of primary narcissism. The poem’s private world, defined by the self-containment and impenetrable defenses of its armored cars, and so preoccupied with its own narrative impulses, harbors the implication that no significant actions transpire beyond its nonetheless porous boundaries. Similarly inclusive is the vague plurality of narrational voice, a rhetorical “we” oneirically reconstituted out of a forgotten era of infantile intersubjectivity, before the crises of separation-individuation and language-acquisition, when a fragile psyche has yet to distinguish self from surroundings or others.35 33 34

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Ibid., 466. Ibid., 422. Theodore Kisiel notes that the thrust of Heidegger’s argument shifts attention from “the surface time suggested by ‘chronology,’ the ordinary (vulgär!) conception of time of everyday life, to a more central structure of time” (The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time [Berkeley: U of California P, 1993], 421). Kisiel employs the term “kairology” (421–24, 435–39) to designate the favored status that Heidegger confers upon the idea of an existentially resonant present instant. In the context of the development of the hypnoglyph, Heidegger’s remarks constitute a “high” modernist moment impossible to maintain. In the passage into late modernism and beyond, the calendrical overtones ­deprioritized by Heidegger echo with a degree of persistence but can be difficult to detect. An alternate view of the subjective world of Bishop’s poetry is offered by Victoria Harrison, who draws on Daniel Stern’s notion of the “we self” and related theories of early c­ hildhood experience. See Harrison, 44 and 213n12, and Stern, Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

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The sleep-centered work of art shies away from simple reduplication, however, and typically only evokes or reflects (sometimes sharply and poignantly) rather than recreates an early-childhood state. In addition, since the hypnoglyph and its predecessors are poly-textured, more than one kind of determination often obtains. It is thus appropriate to consider the question of narrative resistance from another relevant perspective, that of the notion of existential hypostasis proposed by Emmanuel Levinas. Accessing a minor tradition conveyed in Hegel’s anthropology and traceable to Aristotle’s discussion of sleep and waking,36 Levinas points out that there can be too much narrative. An “anonymous vigilance” leads to insomnia and is, for Levinas, associated with the condition of inadequately realized individual subjectivity. Saluting the restorative agency of sleep, Levinas argues for a need to withdraw from “corybantic necessity, to take refuge in oneself so as to withdraw from being to, like Penelope, have a night to oneself to undo the work looked after and supervised during the day.”37 This stage of the argument preserves a narrative tinge, for Levinas implies that sleep is almost a diegesis in reverse. He proceeds to denarratize consciousness further while presenting a de facto eulogy of sleep, finding that it gives ­consciousness a habitation and a name. Consciousness requires “a commitment to being which consists in maintaining itself in the uncommittedness of sleep.”38 Comparing ordinary consciousness to Jonah who sleeps in the hold of a ship during the middle of a storm, Levinas proposes that “unconsciousness as sleep is not a new life which is enacted beneath life; it is a participation in life by non-participation ... .”39 Nor is sleep for Levinas only a simple, usually nocturnal, alternation that provides a shelter for the faculties of the waking

36 37 38 39

From this perspective, there is an oversimplification in the claim that the developing self proceeds “from an unbounded merging toward greater ego differentiation from the mother” (Harrison, 213 n13). Stern (101) writes of a “commingling of behaviors” and advocates thinking “from the infant’s viewpoint, in terms of a merged ‘self/other’ or of a ‘we self’ in addition to the solitary self and other.” It can in any case be argued that, in “Sleeping Standing Up,” neither the hypothetical children of the poem (i.e., those of the Hansel and Gretel tale, ll. 16–18) nor the rather childlike speaker(s) can discern caretakers with whom they might subjectively merge. The conceptualization of sleep as anapausis or indispensable repose – a perspective to an extent shared by Aristotle and Hegel – has been reviewed in the previous chapter, note 7. Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 65–66. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 68–69.

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mind. Instead, consciousness is a “scintillation” in which sleep and waking are simultaneously involved.40 From the theoretical vantage point offered by Levinas, the narrative dimension of Bishop’s poem swings, perhaps, into clear view: “Sleeping Standing Up” can now be understood as harboring a stratum of diegetical parody. This is a tale in verse about what happens (or cannot) when there is superfluous narrative, the infiltration of a narrative imperative into too many facets of human existence. Even one’s sleep may become informed with the need to maintain the posture of waking life. It should also be kept in mind that a fascination with the figure of the standing sleeper is recurrent, whether in the form of a Masai warrior or a trope of poetic voice. The image is but one manifestation of a persistent and even universal cultural desire to sweep the state of dormancy into a narrative configuration.41 In a European context, this need (though foregrounded in the late-twentieth century) is most readily traced to Early Modern educational and religious views on the value of individual industriousness and, correspondingly, on the unimportance of sleep. This “hypnophobic” attitude, in turn, developed out of Christian asceticism of the Middle Ages, a moral outlook that ultimately owes much (as previously argued) to Book 7 of Plato’s Laws.42 40

41 42

Ibid., 69. Levinas’s perspective can be regarded as anti-kairological, for it qualifies the exemplarity or existential resonance of a prioritized “now.” A related view is brought forward by Simon Morgan Wortham in his comments on Nicolas de Warren’s analysis of Husserl’s work on time-consciousness. This discussion makes use of the musical phrase or melody as an example. The melody is here foregrounded as a sequence requiring an ever-changing level of attention to tonal details, each of which becomes the center of focus and then is gradually released from consciousness so that the melody as a whole can retain coherence. This process of a continuous attentiveness to a given detail and then relaxing therefrom can be apprehended as an ongoing passage into sleep. And hence, whether with respect to a melody or everyday events, “the living present is just a feature of the basic time-consciousness that is itself constituted by an originary difference between a certain wakefulnesss and a certain falling asleep” (Morgan Wortham, Poetics of Sleep, 58). Yet the paradigm here so well defined as regards conventional music – and presumably some of the realities of Husserl’s era as well – suffers disruption as the modernist framework erodes. A new “awakenedness” is at hand. This point has been advanced in the previous chapter together with a parallel in the work of Jacques Derrida; see above, note 87. Again, these statements recap discussion developed in some detail in the first chapter of this study; see the commentary above including notes 92–94 and 103.

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In the case of Bishop’s proto-hypnoglyph, the narrative imperative that has permeated virtually every psychic crevice has taken over the land of dreams. This is hardly a mindscape characterized by a simple alternation of the oneiric state and periods of vacant slumber. In the objects that “clever children placed by day” to augment their chances of survival, there is a reminder that the Freudian “day-residue” may not be an innocuous oneiric building-block, but an interpolation of narrative into psychic relaxation.43 The “dream-work” here is precisely that, a night-long episode of forced labor without temporal gaps during which sleep can fully assume its status as a psychic insulator, as an existential matrix for the relocation of dispersed or displaced subjectivity. This placid, restorative dimension is often represented in both visual art and literature by means of vegetative imagery. Here, that easeful function has been taken over by unconscious thoughts that, “recumbent in the day” (l. 4), emerge somewhat ominously as “a forest of thick-set trees” (l. 6). On a narrative plane that is still more recessed, a tale of lesbian love is suggested in the unfocussed “we” that courses through the poem. Such a reading is supported perhaps most strongly through an analogous wording in the opening line of a long-unknown erotic lyric that Bishop probably composed during the early 1940’s, or shortly after the publication of “Sleeping Standing Up.” “It is marvellous to wake up together,” the poem begins,44 mirroring semiotically the scenario with which the earlier poem opens. Also relevant is the tropology of inversion that haunts “Sleeping Standing Up” via the depiction of a reversal of diurnal and nocturnal roles. A widespread designation for homosexuality during much of the twentieth century, inversion has been identified as a representational veil favored by Bishop in rendering a discourse of lesbian erotics.45 Especially significant for the present study is the co-involvement of facets of the sleep-cycle – sleeping, dream, waking up – in Bishop’s same-sex lyrics.46 43

44 45 46

Freud writes of “the resistance of the day-residues,” commenting that even trivial fragments of diurnal experience may become either laden with a cathexis of “unconscious tendencies” or tied to “repressed material” during the somnolent state (“Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams” [1916], 141). The more complete the subject’s withdrawal of psychic energy from daytime concerns, the deeper and more peaceful the sleep, Freud maintains. Goldensohn, 27–28. Goldensohn, 30–31; Marilyn May Lombardi, The Body and the Song: Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois up, 1995), 48–49. Cf. David R. Jarraway’s remarks concerning the outlandish posture of a mariner who sleeps atop a mast in “The Unbeliever.” Jarraway associates the seafarer’s “tightly closed eyes” with a resistance to narratives that tend to disparage nonconformist

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Bishop was consistent in distancing her sexual orientation from her public life. The “required and hovering silence”47 that encircled her publishing career is no doubt related to the interest of this poet and numerous other homosexual writers and visual artists in the phenomena of sleep. In any culture dominated by sexual binarism, dormancy often conveys an epistemology of the closet. In fact, so abundant is the representational evidence for this general statement that a subsequent chapter of this study deals with some of the ramifications and variants.48 subjectivity – and by implication, nonconforming sexuality as well. See “‘O Canada!’: The Spectral Lesbian Poetics of Elizabeth Bishop,” pmla 113.2 (March 1998), 251 and throughout. The overarching point may be that sexual conformity can become part of the excessive work that a culture demands; hence a resistance to this excess may be expressed via the resources of sleep. 47 The phrase is Harrison’s, 69. 48 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990) is a seminal study for an understanding of culturally required secrecy within gay/lesbian communities. Sedgwick does not access the figure of the sleeping hermaphrodite (to be discussed later) as an aesthetic and, indeed, a philosophical dynamism. Yet a discourse of somnolence is often detectable within her wide-ranging, foundational discussion, which focuses on the semiotic density of “the relations of the closet – the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit around homo/heterosexual definition” (3). In a brief lexicological history of this word (drawn from the oed), the closet is first presented as “a room for privacy or retirement”: “A slepe hym toke In hys closet”; so the term was used in the year 1370. Sedgwick then opens a major section of her exposition with a quotation from Proust concerned with “the perfect lie”–with exquisite secrecies that may subsist within close, even intimate relationships. Such a lie, explains Proust, “can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known” (Sedgwick, 67; the quotation is drawn from the Moncrieff/ Kilmartin translation, 3:213). Sedgwick proceeds to argue astutely that “the deadly elasticity of heterosexist presumption means that, like Wendy in Peter Pan, people find new walls springing up around them even as they drowse: every encounter with a new classful of students, to say nothing of a new boss, social worker, loan officer, landlord, doctor, erects new closets whose… laws…exact from at least gay people new surveys, new calculations…” (68). (The allusion to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921] refers to an episode in which a house is constructed around the dormant Wendy [72–78].) The point that should emerge here is not simply that a distinctly resourceful critic has made clever incidental use of source material involving sleep. To be ferreted out is the rhetoric within as well as the significations latent in the examples. As indicated and implied often in this study, sleep is a non-rational, universal experience that tends to be apprehended in ways that are often consistent across varied disciplines and cultures. As here in the case of Sedgwick, the seemingly embedded and stable

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For Bishop and the hypnoglyphic artists who follow her, the discourse of dormancy is in part the rayonnement of a Proustian dynamism. Yet “high” modernism crumbles along with the deterioration of the ensemble that the precedent of Proust supports; i.e. the illusion of a fully “inflated,” live consciousness momentarily diverted into dreamy sleep. Already in “Sleeping Standing Up,” the secret life of the psyche fails to glisten. The exaggerated and often inexplicable juxtapositions of postmodernism are foreshadowed.49 Narrative has monopolized dormancy, and the innocence of children (ll. 16–19) is intermingled with the machinery of war. Yet the mood of the hypnoglyph will turn out to be at times euphoric as well as grim. Reports of Fritz Behn’s statue or other accounts of the supposed Masai custom may have reached Elizabeth Bishop prior to her writing “Sleeping Standing Up.” A precedent more in keeping, however, with the tensions of her poem is found in Chekhov’s pungent tale, “Let Me Sleep.” Here a peasant girl in early adolescence is saddled by nearly incessant duties that deplete her physically and psychically. Yet her job as a “live-in” domestic servant permits almost no time for ordinary sleep. Foremost among her work obligations is the care of her employers’ cantankerous infant. She drifts in and out of slumber while rocking the cradle. There is a pronounced cultural irony in her inability to secure the child’s dormancy while she is forced to neglect her own. In the midst of her dreams, she distantly hears a baby crying, and somewhere, someone is singing to the child in her own voice. Eventually, she kills the child and can at last sleep profoundly.50

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significations of sleep often infiltrate the foundations of academic arguments, can “partner” in their rationality. Sleep in fact does double-duty in the context of Sedgwick’s disquisitions on sexuality. It is not difficult to detect the appropriateness of sleep as a metaphor to be applied to the exigencies to which a non-“normal” sexuality might be subject. There is already an antecedent in the writings of Proust, though tied there to a certain dialectic of gender not apparent in the case of Bishop. To be discussed in Chapter 4, the ebullient dreaminess of Marcel contrasts with and considerably “outshines” the blank lapses of his companion, Albertine. In the context of Proust’s novel, the contrast ties in with a dynamics of gender-dominance that Marcel perpetrates and of which he seems to be nearly oblivious. In the two anti-narratives of Duras discussed below, this blank “feminine” slumber is brought to the fore. A special link with gender is unapparent, however, in much postmodern representation of sleep. The hypnoglyph may feature sleep that immerses yet does not satisfy, is barely distinguishable from insomnia, or terminates with a sense of depletion rather than restoration at awakening. Anton Chekhov, “Let Me Sleep” in Early Stories, trans. Patrick Miles and Harvey Pitcher (Oxford: Oxford up, 1994), 191–96.

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Bishop may have encountered Chekhov’s depiction of vertical slumber via Constance Garnett, who by 1922 had published English translations of virtually all of Chekhov’s short fiction. Garnett entitled the tale “Sleepy.” Just as likely, the poet was familiar with Katherine Mansfield’s caustic adaptation of this Chekhovian scenario in her short-story collection, In a German Pension. A suggestive similarity is that Mansfield begins “The-Child-Who-Was-Tired” with her overworked and underaged governess slipping into slumber in the midst of an imaginary forest, “just beginning to walk along a little white road with tall black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all, when a hand gripped her shoulder, shook her, slapped her ear.”51 As does Chekhov, Mansfield renders a fatal dialectic that engulfs servant and employer, subject and authority, caretaker and ward. Somewhere behind both stories is another key document that, in prefiguring Bishop’s text, also helps demarcate a worrisome semiotic and existential sector where sleep and ordinary consciousness, work and recreation, present and past, dread and desire all intersect with abruptness and lack of resolution. To be focused on briefly at this juncture is the fictional account of a nocturnal journey undertaken by a befuddled physician, Charles Bovary. He rides from the modest comfort of his home in a provincial town near Rouen to a distressed patient on an outlying farm: At around four in the morning, Charles, well wrapped in his mantle, set off for the Bertaux’s. Still anesthetized by the warmth of his sleep, he was now rocked by the peaceful trot of his horse…From time to time, Charles opened his eyes; then, his mind becoming weary and sleep returning, he soon entered into a sort of somnolence wherein, his recent sensations conflating with memories, he saw himself double, at the same time student and married man, supine in his bed as just now, traversing the surgery ward as some time ago. The warm fragrance of poultices mingled in his mind with the grassy odor of the dew; he heard the iron rings roll along the curtain rods of the hospital beds, as well as his wife as she slept ... .52 51 52

Katherine Mansfield, “The Child-Who-Was-Tired” in In a German Pension (London: Penguin, 1964), 77. nw, trans. (Vers quatre heures du matin, Charles, bien enveloppé dans son manteau, se mit en route pour les Bertaux. Encore endormi par la chaleur du sommeil, il se laissait bercer au trot pacifique de sa bête. …Charles, de temps à autre, ouvrait les yeux; puis, son esprit se fatiguant et le sommeil revenant de soi-même, bientôt il entrait dans une sorte

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As was the case for the protagonists of Chekhov and Mansfield, Flaubert depicts Bovary as not fully vertical; the latter instead sits on a horse during his intermittent immersions into a dormant state. Yet there is a shared rendition of acute paradox, the fashioning of a sharp cognitive edge where two opposing mental modes – urgent attentiveness and self-indulgent relaxation – meet for an instant but hardly attain resolution or balance. Such provocative literary moments foreshadow – as strongly as Fritz Behn’s engaging statue – the fate of vertical slumber in Bishop’s poem and, in fact, in comparable representations during the postmodern era and after – if indeed there is such an “after.”

Robert Lowell’s “Man and Wife” Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed; the rising sun in war paint dyes us red; in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine, abandoned, almost dionysian. At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street, blossoms on our magnolia ignite the morning with their murderous five days’ white. All night I’ve held your hand, as if you had a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad – its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye – and dragged me home alive…. Oh my Petite, clearest of all God’s creatures, still all air and nerve: you were in your twenties, and I, once hand on glass and heart in mouth, outdrank the Rahvs in the heat of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet – too boiled and shy

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d’assoupissement où, ses sensations récentes se confondant avec des souvenirs, lui-même se percevait double, à la fois étudiant et marié, couché dans son lit comme tout à l’heure, traversant une salle d’opérés comme autrefois. L’odeur chaude des cataplasmes se mêlait dans sa tête à la verte odeur de la rosée; il entendait rouler sur leur tringle les anneaux de fer des lits et sa femme dormir…[Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, ed. Maurice Bardèche {Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1972}, 14–15].)

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and poker-faced to make a pass, while the shrill verve of your invective scorched the traditional South. Now twelve years later, you turn your back. Sleepless, you hold your pillow to your hollows like a child; your old-fashioned tirade – loving, rapid, merciless – breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.53

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A coda for this exposition of Bishop’s precocious sortie into the postmodern is provided by Robert Lowell’s “Man and Wife,” a provocative lyric selection from the deeply reflective, autobiographical volume, Life Studies (1959). Like “Sleeping Standing Up,” this twenty-eight-line poem records a moment of rupture within the modernist tradition. The text similarly serves as a bridge into more obviously postmodern scenarios. Not so firmly embedded in the emphatic imagery of mid-1950s poetic practices, “Man and Wife” is typical of Lowell’s break with formalist habits and of the subsequent autobiographical turn executed in Life Studies.54 That Lowell should follow Bishop in a sketch of the development of the hypnoglyph is hardly a coincidence. The friendship of the two poets is well documented.55 But more significant for the present context is Lowell’s early review of Bishop’s North & South.56 While he was apparently unimpressed by “Sleeping Standing Up” (a work he does not mention), he notes her recurrent interest in sleep, especially as part of a semiotic balancing act between a sense of motion and one of terminus.57 The fascination that the sleep-cycle holds for both Lowell and for Bishop is indicative first of the divergent contexts in which dormancy can assume a strategic position. Sleep is as equally meaningful within a lesbian erotics as in one of runaway heterosexuality. The unifying factor is the special liminality of sleep, its vague and often-interrogated in-betweenness displayed in ­relation to virtually any other state or condition. If Lowell as a giant of postWorld War ii American poetry comes across as central rather than liminal, it is helpful to recall, above all, the liminal negotiations obligatory in most forms of 53 54 55 56 57

Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 189. Permissions have been granted by fsg. Marjorie Perloff, The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell (Ithaca: Cornell up, 1973), 83. Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Faber & Faber, 1988), 134–35, 235–38. Sewanee Review 55.3 (1947): 496–98. Ibid., 497.

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a­ esthetic production. In Lowell’s case, a complex life context is also relevant. A recusant, Catholicized Puritan, as well as a long-term victim of psychiatric disorders, Lowell vigorously pursued a significant portion of his synthesizing textual project in a stagnant milieu (the 1950s) plagued by its own version of cultural dormancy. This seemingly stable period also marks a prelude into the postmodern. The confessional turn in Life Studies is no doubt symptomatic of a cultural tension generated by the start of the break-up of a “monolithic” modernism according to which aesthetics always manages somehow to wag the dog of history. Hence Lowell’s status carries with it distinct liminal negotiations that share semiotic space with his recurrent references to and artistic utilizations of sleep. Although any reading of “Man and Wife” transpires under the sign of sleep, the night that vanishes as the poem begins is revealed to have been both sleepless and loveless. An atmosphere of illusoriness and contradiction is evoked at the outset, when Lowell announces that only with the aid of Miltown, a recent pharmaceutical intervention, can he and his wife seek repose “on Mother’s bed.” The phrase hints that, for Lowell, questions of primal separation and subject formation have never been adequately resolved. It may be useful at this point to implicate Mary Jacobus’s discussion of the “maternal imaginary,” which refers to “the fantasmatic mother…who exists chiefly in the realm of images and imagos (whether perceived or imagined), mirroring and identifications, icons and figures ... .”58 The sleep-world at the edge of which the poem subsists can also be viewed in the context of the early childhood “separation crisis” detailed above as the tale of an incomplete struggle of self-fashioning. This process, obviously self-divisive for Lowell, is discernible as a carry-over from some early but not fully elapsed era, that of “an emerging, chaotic not-yet subject.”59 The psychic seascape of early childhood returns to the speaker, ironically and menacingly as his spouse clasps her pillow “like a child” (l. 25), and as uxorial recriminations break like the Atlantic Ocean on his head (l. 28). Although Lowell does not include in this bedroom melodrama an enactment of the phenomenon of vertical slumber, his text resembles Bishop’s in that he posits a scenario in which there is too much narrative – marital ­conflicts, family chronicles, and an ongoing psychiatric case history. Also recalled is Levinas’s “insomnia of anonymous being.”60 In “Man and Wife,” this

58 59 60

Mary Jacobus, First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1995), iii. Ibid., iv. Existence and Existents, trans. A. Lingis, 65.

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hyper-vigilance is textually realized; the artifact not only represents but in a sense is the evaporation of individual psychic wholeness into a taut but polysignificant poetic idiom. Inseparable from any question of narrative is one of time. Lowell’s is in part a Proustian temporality, which is, according to Julia Kristeva, an offshoot of the bildungsroman. From this perspective, the Proustian éducation sentimentale entails “a return journey from the past to the present and back again. This new form of temporality ... gives an X-ray image of memory, bringing to light its painful yet rapturous dependence on the senses.”61 This photographically structured model of interiorized evolution has obvious bearing on Lowell’s sense of personal history. Yet the concept as set forth by Kristeva is inadequately realized in “Man and Wife,” for it is a lyric notable for a sense of failed heuristic process. A more adequate reading of Lowell’s temporality in “Man and Wife” emphasizes its aporetics. Attention to Helen Vendler’s eloquent comment on a later Lowell work is beneficial. “Only in Day by Day (1977) … does Lowell agree to chronicle the events of life seriatim, day by day, not agglutinatively through a space-time totalization.”62 Clearly, “Man and Wife” qualifies the agglutinative properties that Vendler associates with Lowell’s pre-’70s poetry. While the “rising sun in war paint” (l. 2) might suggest an Heideggerian “ecstatical unity of temporality,”63 there is also slippage undercutting the totalizing drift toward a crystallized or emblematic “now.” Lowell projects, instead, a temporal matrix subject to the dislocations of an impending past, an imploding present, and a vacant future. From the standpoint of the history of the hypnoglyph, the implied elision of a framework for diaristic inscription is more meaningful than the notion of temporal inclusiveness. Under attack is the calendrical overtone that Heidegger admits into the conceptual space of his kairological “everydayness” and which here survives only as the glissando of “murderous five days’ white” (l. 7) of magnolia blossoms set aglow by the returning sun. Otherwise, the circadian paradigm does not obtain. On the one hand, the poem’s repeated insinuations of sleep become the index of a concern with maintaining a sense of diurnal/ nocturnal rhythms. On the other, the poem’s representational details imply

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Julia Kristeva, Proust and the Sense of Time, trans. Stephen Bann (New York: Columbia up, 1993), 3. 62 Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition (Cambridge: Harvard up, 1995), 23. 63 Heidegger, Being and Time, 416.

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that individual reality stands in a disjunctive (and not simply conflictual) ­relation to the rhythms of days, seasons, and tides. “Man and Wife” is constructed in some evident ways according to modernist imperatives. A troubled spring evokes the topos of a cruelest month and thus an Eliotesque wasteland that is replete with sterility “realized” in the pillow his wife holds as if it were a child (l. 25). An enlarged, mythic locus for spiritual desolation and struggle is thus evoked. There is also a modernist concern with the revivification of literary forms, especially the aubade. Yet this aborted dawnsong is perhaps dominated by its briefest line, “as if you had ...” (l. 9). There is no farewell to nocturnal joy, and the poet’s spouse has failed to provide psychic strength in the face of Lowell’s encroaching madness.64 With its implications of false intimacy expressed as inconsequential hand-holding (l. 8), along with false awakening and false insight, “Man and Wife” anticipates the simulacral representations of a more recent aesthetics. The introductory reference to Miltown, a synthetic compound designed to reduce anxiety and facilitate dormancy, deserves special comment in this regard. Gone are poppies and sleeping-potions, the traditional soporifics. Technologically-assisted dormancy arrives along with the sleep laboratory, electroshock therapy, and the frontal lobotomy, all harbingers of an array of technologies – and commodities as well – that have become determinants of consciousness in a post-industrial age. Relevant here as elsewhere is Fredric Jameson’s observation that postmodernism is characterized by “a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas”;65 Jameson similarly laments that contemporary “market theorists” rush to the defense “of a 64

Common discursive strands connect the taut marital – and therapeutic – dynamics of Lowell’s lyric with the concerns of a text that is more factually autobiographical (and biographical as well), John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). Bayley recounts the inexorable descent of his wife, author Iris Murdoch, into dementia and general invalidism because of Alzheimer’s. Amid the augmenting symptoms, Bayley tells of Murdoch’s growing somnolence and of her abnormal pre-sleep behavior. He observes, as the disease becomes more entrenched: “Every evening, we have the battle of the trousers. She wants to go to bed in them, and in everything else she is wearing, too. My resistance to this is halfhearted, compared with the determination she shows on the issue. Sometimes I win, more or less dragging them off. Iris gives up the struggle, but she produces a frightful grimace ... ” (242). Murdoch thus demonstrates an unsettling resistance to what has become the nosological narrative of her own life. Bayley loosely adapts elements of the diary while conveying the steady breakdown of his wife’s customary, day-to-day existence. The narrator, revealing himself as a caretaker and a sharer in the suffering of the disease, can only testify to the deterioration of his marriage as well. 65 Jameson, Postmodernism, 36.

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Figure 21 Robert Rauschenberg, Bed (1955). Combine painting: Oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports, 191.1 cm × 80 cm × 20.3 cm. New York, Museum of Modern Art. © VAGA, ny – Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, ny.

­ arket society now supposed itself to be somehow ‘natural’ and deeply rooted m in human nature.”66 Thus the hypnoglyph often renders an account of tranquillity or other inner states that have become commercialized or somehow technologized. As this section closes, it should also be made clear that, despite the incipient postmodernism evident in Lowell’s “Man and Wife,” the work does not quite qualify as the first hypnoglyph, nor can Bishop’s “Sleeping Standing Up” be said to decisively set itself apart from the modernist matrix. That “honor” may be assignable to a visual text now nearly iconic despite itself, Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (fig.  21). Dating from 1955, the work chronologically precedes the Lowell poem, which perhaps appears almost reactionary vis-à-vis one of the earliest examples of a Rauschenberg “combine”; that is, an amalgam of collected everyday items within a blended pictorial and sculptural program.67 In creating Bed, Rauschenberg attached a patchwork quilt to a frame, along with a sheet and a pillow; streaks of color were applied – dripped on, smeared – with an ingenious sense of haphazardness. The postmodern aroma of the ensemble is unmistakable – the almost flippant conjunction of widely varied discursive registers – even if a blossoming of postmodernism is still some years in the future. And with the artwork affixed to a gallery wall, the association of dormancy that is inseparable from the display of a bed evokes also the notion of vertical slumber with which this chapter is especially concerned. 66

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“The Antinomies of Postmodernity” (1989) in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 71. The full essay, 50–72, is valuable for its exposition – and exposé – of the postmodern condition as characterized by both exuberance and miasma. For discussion of the nature and development of the combine, see Calvin Tompkins, Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Picador, 2005), 123–26.

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Or as Leo Steinberg points out in his commentary on this hypnoglyphic work, “… a bed vertical is a contradiction in terms. Contradictory too is the conflation of private and public, for what is more private than your sleeping retreat, or more public than your place on a gallery wall? Rauschenberg is coaxing opposites to cohabit.” Steinberg also does well to notice that, in the case of Bed, the artist is “collapsing a notorious oscillation, i.e., the periodicity of our circadian round.”68 It might thus be claimed that whatever one is looking for with respect to the postmodern, it is discoverable in Rauschenberg’s Bed. Not least significant is the disruption of any illusion of overarching, unifying modernist time, here replaced with a clang of surprise and the tracings of sleep’s nightly passages – sleep (yours, mine, ours) that has now evaporated.

Vincent Desiderio’s The Sleeping Family

This cartography of the hypnoglyph proceeds to examine The Sleeping Family and The Interpretation of Color, canvasses by Vincent Desiderio, a contemporary American painter (born 1955) with a longstanding interest in the representation of sleep, who is currently active in New York. Interviews conducted between the artist and the author of this study provide additional insight on the aesthetics of dormancy at the turn of a millennium. The first of these paintings was completed in 1990 and is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The Sleeping Family features a diapered child (in actuality, Desiderio’s invalid son, Sammy) asleep in the middle of a large bed between his dormant parents (the artist’s wife and brother) (fig. 22). This canvas also provides a postmodern version (replete with pronounced ambiguities) of the totalizing tendencies often evident in representations of sleep. In The Interpretation of Color, Desiderio implements a number of pictorial strategies designed to foreshadow – and to some extent actualize – an exit from p ­ revailing premises relating to visual representation, textuality, and signification. The artist has emerged as a major figure in the “new history painting,” a movement that to a degree signals a “new historicism” in the visual arts, a 68

Encounters with Rauschenberg (A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture), (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000), 50–51. Also germane is Howard Risatti’s observation that the work is a “visual conundrum” because viewers are “encouraged to see an actual bed function as a sign of itself – an actual bed representing a bed” (A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression [Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007], 132). Bed thus complicates by, in effect, canceling out any “iconic” dimension that the factor of resemblance (essential for conveying of a sense of iconicity) might intimate.

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Figure 22  Vincent Desiderio, The Sleeping Family (1990). Oil on canvas, 163.8 cm × 213.4 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum. Image © V. Desiderio, courtesy of the Marlborough Gallery, New York.

critique of forms and values that requires rigorous attention to methodology, on the one hand, and to the details of material culture, on the other. Art critic Sam Hunter has described the movement as “the bearer of an intricate pictorial and philosophical argument, whereby ‘representation’ translates into a fresh and effective allegorical device, bringing relevant contemporary issues into sharper focus.”69 The key term in Hunter’s taxonomic sketch is undoubtedly 69

Sam Hunter, Vincent Desiderio: Recent Paintings (Exhibition Catalog), (New York: Marlborough Gallery, 1993), 3. Relevant as well for an understanding of this painter is Donald Kuspit’s alternate concept, “modern American history painting.” Kuspit maintains that painting of this type “deals with technological necessity and its dehumanizing effect” and “conveys the idea that technology, no matter how domesticated and everyday, is ingeniously self-alienating” (The Rebirth of Painting in the Late Twentieth Century [Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2000], 118). As my discussion endeavors to make clear, reservations about the benefits of technology are indeed an ingredient of Desiderio’s work. But it should be added that Kuspit prefers to classify Desiderio not as a history painter but as a “Neo-Intimatist.” That is, “he pictures privacy, with great sensibility and masterful craft. We eavesdrop, as it were, on secluded situations.” And for such artists, “outer reality becomes emblematic of inner reality”

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“allegory,” a word entrenched in both traditional and postmodern aesthetic discussions as well as a recurrent locution in the accumulating corpus of commentary on Desiderio’s paintings. It is a term that its users have applied to the artist’s “predilection toward appropriation (of a historicizing variety), episodic fragmentation, and arrested narrative.”70 An articulate individual who prefers to discuss his own work with reference to metaphor rather than allegory and who is conversant with the nuances of much contemporary theory, Desiderio has also been perceived as occupying a “neoconservative position within postmodernism,” one based not on a working through of modernist premises but on a loose alliance of assumptions predating or simply opposed to modernism.71 The artist’s self-perception is that of a rebel against modernism’s formal emphases and consequent loss of content and signification, as opposed to any intended espousal of a new conservatism.72 If either or both of the above assessments should fail to convince, it is in any case helpful for hermeneutic scrutiny of these paintings to address a specific corner of the controversy over allegory, a discursive mode that has set off a firestorm in poststructuralist and other more recent debates. As soon becomes evident, much of the difficulty incurred in classifying Desiderio’s work as allegorical is the consequence of the conflation of and competition between two models of allegory. In an influential two-part exposition of the “allegorical impulse” written at the beginning of the 1980s, Craig Owens first identifies allegory as “the epitome of counter-narrative, for it arrests narrative in place, substituting a principle of syntagmatic disjunction for one of diegetic combination. In this way allegory superinduces a vertical or paradigmatic reading of correspondences upon a horizontal or syntagmatic chain of events.”73 As Owens dissects and critiques (Kuspit, 139). It should soon be evident that this painter’s repertoire of techniques (whether seen as “intimatist” or “historical”) is unusually extensive and accommodates more than one categorization. 70 Evan R. Firestone, “The Death of Moby Dick: Vincent Desiderio’s The Progress of Self Love,” American Art 10.2 (1996), 12. The term “arrested narrative” can be traced to Craig Owens’s two-part investigation of allegory and specifically to a seminal passage in the first installment (Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture [Berkeley: U of California P, 1992], 57). As noted again below, the concept of arrested narrative resembles that of narrative resistance, but narrative that has been arrested promptly progresses at the earliest opportunity. Also germane is Wendy Steiner’s discussion of “stopped-action scenes” (Pictures of Romance, 3). 71 The quotation is from Firestone, 12, who here draws on a point raised by art critic Hal Foster. See Firestone, 12–13 and 25n4. 72 Telephone interview, 24 November 1992. 73 Owens, Beyond Recognition, 57.

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the discourse of allegory with distinguished ingenuity, the assumption is implicit that whatever the convolutions of allegory – and Owens discerns that there are many –, its characteristics are more or less uniform amid varying verbal and visual realizations. Thus, though tolerant of semiotic meandering, this model of allegory presupposes a viable semiotic matrix within which interpretative efforts can secure a closure of correspondences brought into play by textual signifiers, whether visual or verbal.74 In his second foray into the subject, Owens is captivated with Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading (1979), in which the Belgian-American patriarch of poststructuralism delineates critical narratives that “cannot be closed off by a final reading” and instead engender “a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration.” De Man would “call such narratives … second (or the third) degree allegories.”75 Such untraditional, theory-laden allegories, argues Owens, are redolent of unreadability and revelatory of “the distance which separates signifier from signified, sign from meaning.”76 To sum up: as explained in note 74 below, Owens ­acknowledges a subspecies of postmodern allegory that is content with some ­eccentric substitutions and/or the evocation of a peculiar or absent meaning. Yet he also perceives an “advanced” (de Manian) allegorical mode that is, semiotically, quite a bit more destabilized. While Owen’s taxonomy of allegory elicits resemblances with the theory of narrative resistance advanced above, there are also differences. The notion of allegory as “arrested narrative” seemingly overlaps with that of narrative resistance, but narrative under arrest remains resilient and eager to leap forward at the slightest signal of release. In point of practice, sites of vertical, allegorical intensity alternate readily with those of narrative progression. Sleep, on the other hand, is equivocal even though – usually – horizontally configured; it

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Conceding stability to allegory at a basic stage, as “traditional” allegory from the perspective of Northrop Frye, Owens remarks that “the paradigm for the allegorical work is…the palimpsest.” That is, it is possible to detect one text beneath or in the midst of another, if only intermittently. In the context of postmodern art, the allegorist is pre-eminently an appropriator of images; he “does not invent images but confiscates them.” Nor does he seek to preserve or “restore an original meaning” for which an image may have been recognized. Instead, “he adds another meaning to the image” but “does so only to replace: the allegorical meaning supplants the previous one” (Owens, 54). The point remains that some clear remnant of meaning inevitably persists, may even to an extent manifest itself, at this stage of allegorical figuration. Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale up, 1979), 205. Owens, 73.

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typically frustrates the unfolding of sequences and requires various makeshift remedies and repairs in order to conform to narrative. Whatever the type, whether – for instance – pre-modernist or blatantly postmodern, allegory is apprehensible through interpretive processes that disassemble a given textual site as allegory. There are indeed scenarios in which sleep encourages the extraction of several or many significations, but some of these may resist verbalization as carry-overs from a pre-Oedipal, non-verbal arena of cognition. Also, while allegory is inherently ratiocinative in a way reminiscent of the inner, visual language of dreams, scenes of dormancy often tend to defuse hermeneutic cerebration. Yet at the same time, along with such axes of differentiation, sleep very early became in both visual and verbal discourses a signature of duplicity and mortality, and consequently, dormancy has tended to lend itself to appropriation within allegorical programs. With these permeable frontiers in mind, the allegorical codings in The Sleeping Family become part of a representational tropology tied to broad, cultural assumptions about sleep. Not a neoconservatist product, the painting is rather typical of a galaxy of contemporary works in which aesthetic strategies are camouflaged and insidious. Like antecedents such as Bishop’s “Sleeping Standing Up” or Lowell’s “Man and Wife,” The Sleeping Family can at first be experienced as a demonstration of formal and technical proficiency resting snugly in the folds of modernist premises. Yet once the viewer moves beyond the coagulatory fabric of the foreground and inquires into particularized or overarching concerns, then any interpretative initiative assumes its own vitality and threatens to become interminable. Images begin to generate explanations at an alarming pace without an accompanying sense of explicatory adequacy or closure. Here as for Bishop, the resistance of sleep is at odds with therapeutic and other narratives. Not only are stubborn day-residues generating troublesome dreams for these sleepers, but also, as a result of the “almost aerial view” from which they have been portrayed,77 it seems that they sleep standing up. 77

The illusion of verticality manifested here is obviously of a different tenor than in the case of the Masai figure or Comus. While these earlier figures are quite literally portrayed as dozing on their feet, perceiving the ambiguous postures of Sammy and his guardians as vertical requires some interpretive pressure. At the same time, construing Desiderio’s three sleepers in this way can hardly be considered a hermeneutic excess. The notion of erect slumber is already a metaphor in the case of Bishop; it is only because of cultural and psychic tensions that her sleepers seem to enter a state of vertical “repose.” Also pertinent is Mr. Desiderio’s view that detecting such an unusual posture in The Sleeping Family (and in The Interpretation of Color as well) is in keeping with the aesthetic and cultural signs these canvases convey (telephone interview, 4 August 2000).

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Figure 23  Sandro Botticelli, Mars and Venus (c. 1485). Tempera and oil on poplar, 69.2 cm × 173.4 cm. London, National Gallery. © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, ny.

The impression of vertical slumber is strongest in the case of the child; his posture is closer to that of a runner than a sleeper, as he engages in an uphill struggle to regain his health.78 Comparison between The Sleeping Family and a foundational – and analogous – Early Modern painting, Botticelli’s Mars and Venus, reveals a more denotatively focussed mode of representation in the prior work (fig. 23). Similarities between the two paintings are evident with respect to the location of female and male figures, the intervening placement of children, a clothed female and semi-nude male, and internal framing elements such as a spear, column, and bedstead. Not at all a simplistic or transparent representation, Mars and Venus has been subjected to varying accounts of its mythological symbols. Yet there is critical consensus that whatever the ambiguities, a particularized residue of meaning is recoverable. The visual closure effected by the ambient arrangement of reclining deities, spear, and childlike satyrs correlates with a sense of interpretive closure. Hermeneutic narratives relating to discrete elements, or the painting as a whole, can be trusted to reinforce the congealed effect of the visual ensemble. A tale is in the midst of being told, and a specific case of narrative resistance (that of the dormant Mars) is about to be resolved by the blowing of a Tritonesque horn in the sleeper’s ear. Some kind of heuristic statement is imminent, frustrated no doubt by the portrayal of sleep, but the aporetic aspect of this representation is rather well contained.79 78 79

The observation is Ellen Pall’s (“Painting Life into Sammy,” New York Times Magazine, 29 January 1995: 37). Charles Dempsey’s extended interpretation of Botticelli’s Mars and Venus is particularly lucid and well-informed. Dempsey argues that Mars simply dreams of Venus and the

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If the semiotic engagements of Mars and Venus can be regarded as centripetal or tending toward coherent statement, then Desiderio’s canvas is centrifugal. And whereas the Botticelli painting depicts an act of vandalism that will likely clarify itself as innocent mischief, The Sleeping Family is imbued with a thematics of deceptive tranquillity.80 Addressing his own treatment of the issue of dormancy, the artist has referred to sleep as “a vehicle that connects people” in spite of divergent conditions, capacities, and implied agendas. The connecting arc of sleep rises above this mother, child, and father who are “lost to each other, but united in sleep.”81 At the same time, the harplike bedstead is resonant with dubious harmonies. A questionable quiescence is crosshatched by encroaching daylight and vagrant tensions. Although this theater of dormancy with its prominent pillows boasts every provision for secure repose, slanting illumination exposes a schema of intrusion, compromised subjectivity, and abrasive gender dialectic. An overall organizational flow from left to right and light to dark also activates a pictorial reading – at first orderly but ever more tortuous – from nervous complexity to a not-quite-comforting simplicity. A telephone that connects a safe domestic haven with the surrounding world is also poised to interrupt slumber decisively. The mother’s partially opened eyes imply shallow

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entourage of dwarfish figures, one of whom is actively infecting the sleep of Mars with the blaring tones of the conch shell, a makeshift trumpet symbolic of “terrified rout and tumultuous confusion.” Dempsey concludes that the painting is hardly “concerned with merely straightforward or harmless erotic titillation but with unfulfilled desire, a desire that returns to torment its author [that is, Mars {NW}] with turbulent and threatening phantasms, and it is an invention that treats of moral, spiritual, and psychological disaster” (Inventing the Renaissance Putto [Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001], 145). Probing classical texts and contemporary humanist commentary as the basis of Botticelli’s representation, Dempsey may have foregrounded hermeneutic exertion and seriousness at the expense of the largely jocund ambience of this field of representational play. If an eminent art critic has misread somewhat in identifying the artwork as essentially somber and monitory, it is clear as well that Dempsey assumes that a fixed meaning – waiting to be discerned and unearthed – is harbored within this puzzling depiction of the deities of war and love. A less bold but equally well-considered view of the painting is presented by Liana de Girolami Cheney in Botticelli’s Neoplatonic Images (Potomac, Maryland: Scripta Humanistica, 1993), 56–59 and 106–13. While the present reading takes exception to Dempsey’s view as just sketched, it is indeed worth pointing out that Dempsey – postmodern interpreter of an Early Modern visual text – nudges the semiotic cosmos of Botticelli’s Mars and Venus toward near alignment with the world of a late-twentieth-century example of half-concealed malaise. Telephone interview, 23 November 1992.

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Figure 24  Gustave Courbet, Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer) (1856). Oil on canvas, 174 cm × 206 cm. Paris, Musée du Petit Palais. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, ny.

or even feigned sleep. Her strained posture, that of a contemporized Ariadne, reflects inner distress.82 The pose may also invite comparison with the problematic recliner in Gustave Courbet’s somewhat Baudelairean Young Women on the Banks of the Seine (Summer) (1856–’57), in which two prostitutes recline near the river. The woman in the foreground is supine and elicits queries as to whether she possibly sleeps, pretends to doze, or surreptitiously inspects the viewer (fig. 24). A rapprochement with Charles Baudelaire is here put forward with recognition of debate regarding the contrarian nature of a poet-critic’s relationship with and perspective on Courbet. A stand-off between an aestheticist and a realist is often detected. T.J. Clark, discussing Courbet’s portrait of his thencomrade Baudelaire, finds that “Courbet was a pragmatic painter.” Clark calls the portrait “a plain image, but one where our attention wanders; an image where the details do not quite harmonize; a record of a strange and short-lived 82

“Deep slumber permeated with deep unease” is the phrase Sheila McNally uses to describe Ariadne’s appearance in her best known depiction, a reclining statue in the Vatican Museum (a statue alternately identified as a representation of Cleopatra). McNally perceives a similar if less obvious discomfort in other examples of Ariadne statuary (“Ariadne and Others: Images of Sleep in Greek and Early Roman Art,” Classical Antiquity 4.2 [1985], 172). Forsaken by Theseus and claimed by Dionysus, the somnolent Ariadne has become all but emblematic of a feminine crisis of displacement and reorientation. The sleeping Ariadne theme receives detailed treatment in Chapter 4, below.

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friendship.” Michael Fried looks for an underlying complicity and discovers in this painter an eminent sense of the imaginative, along with other artistic qualities Baudelaire was wont to insist upon yet ironically failed to discern in his contemporary, Courbet.83 From the standpoint of the current discussion, focus is drawn to the blank, indiscernible eyes of the foreground figure, a realistic element that, though of central interest in the image, also thwarts realism and problematizes an apparent program of representing a complete record of a scene of women in a landscape. Also of note is the attenuated, curving branch that gives forth a sizable tuft of foliage in the lower right corner. Fried perceives this element as a metaphor of the painter’s brush (196), but this arboreal component – which the foreground figure seems to indicate with an extended finger – also suggests an almost archetypal signification, the blending of sleepers into natural, vegetative surroundings. The small, atypical branch – recumbent on the ground – is directed toward the base of the scene and even appears rootlike, implying the temporary retreat of the supine figure to a level of mere subsistence, both as a subject and from the standpoint of physiological processes. In the Desiderio painting, the mother’s clothed figure, raised hands, and protruding shoulder (along with the open drawer and readily available spectacles) imply that a number of peremptory daily narratives are held uneasily at bay. The world of labor stretches far into this bedroom – as so frequently in contemporary culture. A postmodern mother is prepared to answer the telephone instantaneously or tend to her amply diapered, ailing son.84 The father appears to recline comfortably in a darker, more restful, eroticized context. The simpler disposition of hands and mouth imply that he, at least, indulges in mental vacancy. Yet this side of the bed as well is not immune to impediments. The father’s somnolence is suspiciously profound, more suggestive of anesthe-

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T.J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Berkeley: U of California P, 1999), 76; Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990), 4–5. On the topic of Baudelaire vis-à-vis Courbet, see also Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture (Princeton up, 2007), 15–16 and 41–42. The factor of workload inflation is articulately discussed in Juliet B. Schor’s The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1991), especially 11, 18, 20. For a perceptive overview of the impact of technological advancements on sleeping patterns in the nineteenth century and later, see A. Roger Ekirch’s chapter entitled “Sleep We Have Lost: Rhythms and Revelations” in At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 300–23. Among other valuable discussions, see Charles Leadbetter, Dream On : Sleep in the 24/7 society (London: Demos, 2004), especially 9–14 and 22–32.

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tization or coma than restorative repose. Suspended in slumber, he oneirically continues some diurnal conflict, for his raised right hand is perhaps on the verge of throwing a rock while the left may cover a wound. Even worse, while this warrior on the battlefield of life preserves the respirational continuance that is a semiotic marker of sleepers, he is only a torso that terminates at the navel, for the mound in the bedding to his anatomical right is too remote to shelter his leg. (As in scenarios – to be considered later – that are located in the works of Marguerite Duras, the corporeal deconstruction can insinuate the inauthenticity of a gender idealization.) The huge blanket with its nightmarish folds is as much engulfing as comforting. A domain of the unconscious, the region is inhabited by unresolved humanoid shapes. A proto-woman reclines below the mother’s hips. An even more shapeless (perhaps male) figure is caught in the inverted “V” of the father’s “leg.” The effect is that of a Rorschach test, not of Courbet’s or Cézanne’s sculpturesque textiles. As in other Desiderian paintings of the early to mid-1990s, there is an ample supply of wordish painterliness with a pronounced psychoanalytic aroma. Just as the paternal inset turns out to be an apt rendering of disjunction or fragmented identity, the son endures a loss of face, is exposed and hence vulnerable, can discover only false support or leverage in the ledge-like fold beneath his left foot. During the same period and later, the artist compounds opportunities for interpretive gymnastics through his fondness for the triptych format, here evident in an implied partitioning of the canvas into separate regions of mother/infant/father. Viewing the triptych as the painter’s optimum vehicle for “presentation of an argument,” Desiderio associates the single pictorial enclosure with a statement of ideology. The juxtaposition of a second canvas or visual ensemble (i.e., there may be, in effect, two distinct paintings within a single frame) sets up a dialogue. The addition of a third region allows for discourse that is still more complex.85 Such structural appropriation facilitates an “heuristic choreography” expressed as a “dance between images.”86 Many interpreters would surely consider such representational choices as a “smoking gun” of allegory, but Desiderio consistently rejects this nomen­ clature, which he identifies with programs of meaning dependent on “heavyhandedness in the selection of symbols.” Instead, the artist regards his work as an exercise in visual metaphor, an effort to enact personal and cultural meanings with “an abundance of associations.” Desiderio also explains visual

85 86

Telephone interview, 24 November 1992. Telephone interview, 22 May 1993.

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metaphor as “more highly evolved” than allegory yet “more deeply rooted in the subconscious” and requiring “not as much editing after intuition.” Such effects are “breathed” rather than “sweated” onto the canvas.87 It is difficult not to see in this self-explication a degree of desire to retreat from ratiocinative mentation. In Lacanian terms, this wish is to be viewed as an impulse to shy away from the significative interferences and redundancies inherent in the fully unfurled symbolic order, the sector of language, of discourses clearly designated and intended as such. Desiderio has opted to counteract what he perceives as a loss of investment in the capacities ascribed to the imaginary order (the arena of visual cerebration, of self-images, and of determinants of the self prior to their articulation in language).88 At this juncture, however, Desiderio’s painterly strategies seem quite entangled in the operations of verbal discourse. The resources of “visual metaphor” can scarcely be distinguished from those of Craig Owens’s “phase ii” (indeterminate) allegory. At the same time, there are rather evident differences between Desiderio’s virtuosic renderings of metaphor (a type of representational “engineering” that encourages the kind of hermeneutic unrest regarded by de Man as allegorical) and Owens’s “phase i” or paradigmatic allegory; that is, where a relatively stable manifestation of the genre (whether in verbal or visual format) obtains.89 87 88

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Telephone interview, 24 November 1992. As indicated in the previous chapter, note 142, translator Alan Sheridan usefully schematizes the Lacanian “orders” in Écrits: A Selection, ix–x. For succinct clarity that is difficult to improve upon, see also the summary of the three orders in the “General Introduction,” Jacques Lacan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, ed. Slavoj Žižek, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2002), 2. With reference to elemental, “baseline” allegory, it is relevant to cite such Early Modern sites as Botticelli’s Mars and Venus, Durer’s Dream of the Doctor, and the description of Melancholy in Milton’s “Il Penseroso” (ll. 11–44). (For online access to the full poem, see https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/penseroso/text.shtml.) In the case of each example, there is a piling up of symbolic details at the base of which – so the textual cues suggest – a crystalline message awaits extraction. Sleep is prominent in two of these works, but as argued above, the factor of sleep is Janus-like or bi-directional, a long-established element of allegory because of its multiple significations, but also resistant to allegory due to its non- or pre-verbal aspects and dimensions. It is also worth recalling that de Man proposed ultimately to demolish the boundary between metaphor and allegory. He wrote that “primary deconstructive narratives” took aim at metaphor, but ultimately, “the difference is only a difference of degree,” with even the most tangled and multi-level interpretive narratives always dependent on metaphor. Thus such “allegories are always allegories of metaphor and, as such, they are always

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The Sleeping Family, then, eminently sums up many of the representational configurations typical of the hypnoglyph and does so with an eloquence, a readiness for linguistic transcription, that has prompted the artist to maintain that the work is not simply a rebus-like or visualized compendium of prevailing critical discourses. As is axiomatic for much postmodern literary and other art, however, The Sleeping Family does not escape the implications and entanglements of the various discourses with which it works. Thus, this  painting, though “not intended to be diaristic,”90 evokes a keen sense of diurnal conflicts resulting in part from a basic instability in the area of circadian rhythms. Along with the ambiance of totalization – of containment of or invasion by almost any conceivable kind of narrative – that is frequent in the hypnoglyph, The Sleeping Family encloses a reminder of the absence of any clear demarcation between aesthetic totalizing and other forms of totality, including the totalitarian drift that a number of commentators claim is a primary condition of the postmodern or “late-phase” capitalism.91 According to such an outlook, the contemporary global economy is one within which, oxymoronically, ­everything (including, presumably, everyone) is continuously in motion, yet nothing happens that is not already projected, predicted, statistically anticipated, absorbed into ideology, or otherwise known about. This sense of cosmic anti-climax is consistent with the slightly celluloid and seemingly universal dis­cursive inclusion of The Sleeping Family. As Desiderio acknowledges, dormancy can readily serve as “a mega-metaphor for daily activities which have become habitual.”92 Julia Kristeva similarly describes a “generalized somnambulism” that infects and inflects social bonds and beliefs whether they relate to the arts or to other forms of activity and production. Kristeva’s remarks are widely applicable though aimed at a specific context: Proust and a modernist investment in art as “the most ‘natural’ form of sleep-walking to offer an abiding guarantee of the life of the psyche.”93 Within the postmodern quandary,

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allegories of the impossibility of reading – a sentence in which the genitive ‘of’ has itself to be ‘read’ as a metaphor” (Allegories of Reading, 205). Telephone interview, 24 November 1992. See for instance Clint Burnham, Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory, (Durham: Duke up, 1995), 192–93, and Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 1976), 68–70. Personal interview, New York, 2 August 1995. Proust and the Sense of Time, 94. Another approach to the idea of psycho-cultural dormancy is implied in a brief case history recounted by Christopher Bollas. Discussing the situation of “Peter,” Bollas analyzes the influence on the patient of his childhood role as a “mythic object” shaped by his mother’s expectations. According to Bollas, “Inner space

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cultural dormancy/fatigue must somehow accommodate such requirements as an habitually high level of attentiveness, in tandem with an ever-expanding lexicon of occupational and other competencies. Not surprisingly, shortly after speaking of the mega-metaphor of sleep, Mr. Desiderio also observed of the current era that “we are too savvy; knowledge impedes immediate existence.”94

Vincent Desiderio’s The Intepretation of Color

A subsequent Desiderio painting, The Interpretation of Color (1997), demonstrates evolution in the artist’s visual poetics. With retention, however, of the singular phenomenon of vertical slumber, a continuation of postmodern coordinates is implied (fig. 25). This persistance is of special significance in a work designed, like several other Desiderio paintings, to mark an exit from an aesthetics of postmodernism (or late-phase modernism, as the artist views the period).95 Desiderio’s perspective is that The Interpretation of Color belongs to a transitional era characterized by a re-recognition of the capacities of a specifically visual discourse.96

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exists for the other, so that in reporting inner states of being, Peter does so through a depersonalized narrative as this region is not the ‘from me’ but the ‘for her.’ There is a notable absence in Peter of any sense of self, no quality of an ‘I,’ nor even of a ‘me.’ Instead, his self representation bears more the nature of an ‘it’ on an existential plane. Being an ‘it’ means for him being dormant, suspended, inert” (The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known [London: Free Association Books, 1987], 19–20). It is possible to extrapolate from Peter’s case-history and to see in postmodern society a range of familial and other cultural expectations that require ego-dormancy in the interests of actualizing a demanded mode or modes of psychic enunciation. Personal interview, 2 August 1995. Desiderio is consistent in his use of “late-phase modernism” instead of “postmodernism” or the “postmodern.” Evan Firestone notes that the artist was intrigued by “Marxist texts referring to ‘late-phase capitalism’” (“The Death of Moby Dick…,” 26n2). Also relevant is Suzi Gablik’s spirited monograph, Has Modernism Failed?, which engaged the artist’s attention. Perusal of the Gablik work suggests a number of parallels with the artist’s critical stance, e.g., her perception of the postmodern as “late modernism,” a permutation of and not a divorce from the modern. Desiderio’s updated aesthetic program parallels the “pictorial turn” that W.J.T. Mitchell has described as “a postlinguistic postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality” (Picture Theory, 16). The “pictorial turn” clearly relates to the illusionism and subdued verbal resonances of The Interpretation of Color.

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Figure 25  Vincent Desiderio, The Interpretation of Color (1997). Oil on canvas, 208 cm × 180 cm. Private collection. Image © V. Desiderio, courtesy of the Marlborough Gallery, New York.

Recasting thoughts on visual art already evident in Lessing’s Laocoön, Desiderio perceives in painting a faculty of spatial placement that can map out individual subjectivity, both in oneself and in one’s relation to others. The artist’s concern with redefining aesthetic space is central in a program of revolt against representational conventions of the 1990s. His position is that the agenda of modernism, early on, focused on the flatness of the picture plane as the primary arena for the display of painterly expertise. And as has often been observed, flatness evolves into a value apparent in many forms during

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postmodernism. One of the era’s transmogrifications of flatness has turned out to be a depthlessness evident in modes of late-twentieth art ranging from architecture and painting to the literary text.97 As regards portrayals of sleep in the postmodern era, the modernist fascination with flatness leads to an emphasis on depicting dormancy as a mode of subjective flattening or – to use another phrase – flattening of consciousness. Desiderio clearly rebels against the regime of flatness in The Interpretation of Color. The curvature of a table juts out dramatically in the upper left quadrant of the canvas; a stack of books establishes depth in the lower right, and the sleeper himself adheres to a complex posture – half frontal and half lateral – that heightens the illusion of solidness and depth. Ideally, according to the artist, such paintings assist in establishing a new cultural matrix. Without providing full details, Desiderio has proposed that optimal works of contemporary art can foster a regeneration of humane values. A moral transformation is possible if aesthetic ordering can proceed in tandem with other forms of ordering or prioritizing.98 However, the artist has been wary of advocating an inclusive program of cultural reform that might, in turn, suggest endorsement of a dubious political agenda. He has maintained that his paintings succeed if they at least promote the “navigation of psychological space” and, hence, an enhanced subjectivity.99 Indeed, the dormant figure asserts the possibility of a subjective depth at variance with the norms of postmodernism. In this context, it is plausible that the sleeper is an individual who has become satiated to the point of stupor with the visual poetics of the 1980s and’90s. As is typical of the hypnoglyph, he faces a world of problematized diurnity, symbolized here by a dining room table devoid of nutriments except for a cup of coffee that has no doubt lost its warmth and is now undrinkable. The table-top is – almost

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The postmodern problem of a lack of depth, in literature and elsewhere, is cogently presented by David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry in the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), especially 58–59 and 350. The anti-category of depthlessness gained theoretical popularity in part because of Fredric Jameson’s critique in a seminal essay of the mid-1980s, “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984):58. Jameson pursues a somewhat different tact several years later (1991) in Postmodernism, focusing on this occasion on the indeterminacy (especially in painting) of spatial gradations, “that extraordinary space through which all the images and icons of the culture spill and float, haphazard, like a logjam of the visual…” (175). Telephone interview, 6 May 1998. Telephone interview, 23 September 1999.

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certainly – an experiential domain that has gone flat, is stale, and as lacking in color as the empty paint-tray at its center. It also conveys the sense of a diminished inventory or perhaps an emporium of habitual techniques where almost everything has “sold out.” Just over the sleeper’s shoulder, Manet’s fifer, axiomatic for flatness, threatens to awaken him with a shrill blast of sound. Not far away lurk the strategies of minimalism and abstraction. But with his left hand, which is poised in an oratorical gesture, the figure points to a forthcoming era of art, a new “alignment of the spoken and textual, not a bias in favor of text,” as was the postmodern norm, nor a cleaning out of verbal resonance, as was the modernist trend.100 Thus this painting, with its involvement in historical process, evokes an eloquent narrative, is intriguingly parturitional, in contrast to the jumbled busy-ness of Bishop’s poem and The Sleeping Family. Yet though intended to be post-postmodern, this ideologically wholesome program is also reminiscent of the utopian values of a “high” modernist agenda of the early twentieth century. The postmodern, conceived of as late-phase modernism, cannot conclude while the values of its parent movement retain vitality. Nor can postmodernism conclude (if we accept Jameson’s criterion) while the dynamics of late-capitalism continue to encroach upon hitherto undisturbed regions of human life.101 A noticeable narrativity has energized this sleeper’s repose. He has a lot to achieve in his slumber, and the posture of his feet suggests that he hurries to complete a task before awakening. Only the forest green textures of the flooring preserve the ancient association of somnolence with an abandonment to deep relaxation and vegetative replenishment.

100 Telephone interview, 21 February 1998. Clearly relevant for this designation of an optimal structure of visual space is W.J.T. Mitchell’s locution, the “imagetext,” which refers to “composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text” (Picture Theory 89n9). Desiderio recharts this conceptual space; obviously, what he has in mind is a discursive arena that is solely visual, without the inclusion of actual words or letters-hence, not a “free-trade” zone that accommodates both word and image. But paradoxically, within the desired universe, Desiderio would like to see a particular “mix” of verbal-visual worldmaking – with language implied and visuality clearly having the upper hand. 101 Or as Jameson refers to the postmodern in “Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity” (1998), “… the very sphere of culture itself has expanded, becoming coterminous with market society in such a way that the cultural…is consumed throughout daily life itself, in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often televisual forms of leisure, in production for the market and in the consumption of those market products, indeed in the most secret folds and corners of the quotidian” (The Cultural Turn, 111).

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The vertically-oriented sleeper thus signals adherence to some implicit job description requiring alertness and productivity. Also indicative of postmodern continuation is the encyclopedic montage of images out of the history of western visual culture – from the medieval language of gesture and Brueghel’s Schlaraffenland to the illusionism of Velázquez, to Manet, and perhaps beyond to last week’s studio sale of ceramic sculpture.102 In addition, only moderate hermeneutic exertion is required to correlate Desiderio’s aptitude for appropriation (a widely evident postmodernist trait) and the sleeper’s “well-heeled” appearance with a material context of affluence. The readiness with which so many visual signs can be rearranged and reconfigured can be taken to reflect a lively economic theater, an arena of consumerist and entrepreneurial fancies within which the various processes of exchange (in every sense of the word) have become awesomely strong and efficacious. Is The Interpretation of Color, then, an allegory, a term often applied to Desiderio’s paintings, and a representational type that, according to Craig Owens’s criteria at least, is often characterized by maximum use of the resources of appropriation, exchange, and accumulation?103 The only possible answer would seem to be “yes” simply because the apprehension of allegory all but monopolized some sectors of poststructuralist criticism. Along the same lines, Jameson has remarked that “the newer allegorical structures are postmodern and cannot be articulated without the allegory of postmodernism itself.”104 The definitions of the genre have become numerous and highly flexible. While Desiderio maintains that his representational values are metaphorical and tend to generate significations according to specific sites and structures within his canvasses, his version of polysemy can be accommodated within the capacious conceptions of indeterminate allegory advanced by de Man and Owens. Within an expansive interpretive horizon, the escape from allegory that Desiderio desires is also an escape from late-phase modernism (i.e., postmodernism itself) and from exchange as a culturally universal phenomenon. The tendency toward inclusiveness in the prevailing definitions is clear, and they perhaps 102 The issue of medieval gestures is particularly well covered by Moshe Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1987), 1–5 and throughout. On the appropriation of images, see again, “Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity,” where Jameson comments that wholesale visual arrogation, a condition in which “aesthetic attention finds itself transferred to the life of perception as such,” is conspicuously postmodern (112). 103 Beyond Recognition, 56, 72. 104 Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 169.

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admit detection of allegorical intent (e.g., investments in appropriation, exchange, accumulation) even – or especially – in the refrain of a popular Country and Western song: There’s a little bit of everything in Texas, but there’s a whole lot of Texas in me. A more applicable criterion for allegory in the present case is provided in Evan Firestone’s commentary on Desiderio’s 1990 triptych, The Progress of Self Love. Firestone argues that the painting conforms with Benjamin’s classic discussion, in which allegory is “inextricably connected to time and the sorrowful passing of history.” As Firestone maintains, “The allegorist, in this case Vincent Desiderio, dwells on death and fills it with significance. His image of Moby Dick, imbued with melancholy and a sense of loss, aligns with Benjamin’s analysis of allegory … .”105 However relevant these comments might be for an understanding of the earlier canvas, they mark a breach between allegory and Desiderio’s representational program as executed in The Interpretation of Color. Here the sense of loss over the ravages of history is virtually absent. While preserving numerous vignettes of the history of European painting, the work points, via the sleeper, not to an exhausted past but toward a pregnant future (if only with such likelihood of fulfillment as might be expected of an oneiric wish). An interest in disconnecting from aspects of the past that are truly passé and unusable is also evident in the painting’s title, which the artist explains as in part a tribute to Joseph Albers’s work The Interaction of Color, a detailed study of how varying color-combinations reveal compatibility in pictorial space. Des­iderio concludes that Albers’s approach results in “a reduced analysis of color.” In his paintings of the mid-1990s, the artist wishes to emphasize not “a measurable relation between colors, but an immeasurable one”; the selection of color tones is held to be “not scientific but interpreted.”106 He finds precedent for his program in the way Delacroix handled the same colors in light and shade.107 Certainly this is the past, but the artist has apprehended it via a working through of techniques and options, without the elegaic or lamentative tone held to be inherent in allegory.

105 Firestone, 19. 106 Telephone interview, 21 February 1998. 107 Telephone interview, 6 May 1997.

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The allegorical associations that, for many viewers, inhabit Desiderio’s paintings can also be coordinated with the outline of the hypnoglyph presented earlier in this study. That is, generic boundaries, whatever the genre, become problematic or tenuous in postmodern representations of sleep. The relatively decipherable signifiers evident in some of the purist examples of traditional allegory have decayed into the spectral in the era of de Man, Owens, and Jameson. This opacity thrives in depictions of the liminal consciousness that transpires during sleep. The veil of allegory, if indeed there still is one, no longer facilitates a particular mode of plodding yet refined reading, has become disconcertingly thickened, engendering what Evan Firestone, among others, regards as a cultural crisis of readability.108 At the same time, precisely because of a general decomposition of the readable sign in the postindustrial era, a compensatory impulse – a desire to “hard-wire” significatory programs that will not simply fizzle – is likely to lead to discursive results that resemble allegory. Also not easily dismissed is the early adoption (already referred to) of sleep in both visual art and literature as indicator of duplicity and mortality. The dormant state has in fact traditionally lent itself to allegorical schemes. Thus while endeavoring to fabricate metaphoric visual structures having a freshness that evades the perceived “heaviness” of allegory, Desiderio has inevitably contended with images whose prior meanings intrude as well as fade.109 108 Firestone, 25–26. 109 The passage of a few years finds this painter, ever evolving and a continuous examiner of his own work, less up in arms about the allegations of allegory. A large canvas entitled An Allegory of Painting dates from 2003. A postmodern pietà, the work depicts the artist supporting a nude and drowsy Sammy. The elder Desiderio maintains that the painting is less an allegory in the usual sense of a manipulation of symbols than it is a rethinking of representational issues – e.g., the handling of perspective – taken up in Vermeer’s Art of Painting. Desiderio also explains that he has acquired an interest in the “allegorization of method.” This process is conceived of as a painterly one, a series of critical re-enactments of technical narratives perceived as having been executed by artists in the past in response to specific representational scenarios and their challenges (Vincent Desiderio, Telephone interview, 28 May 2009). Allegorization as process, understood in this fashion, entails reflection and revision, in addition to the retracing of a previous painter’s artistic steps (or to be more exact, the premeditated motions of the precursor’s hand). Desiderio’s comments notwithstanding, the average viewer may be challenged not to detect allegory – in some ordinary sense – in Desiderio’s imposing and rather mournful Allegory of Painting, a work suggestive of retrospection, image-filled, and it seems, symbol-crammed as well. Discussion of the issue of perspective in Vermeer’s Art of Painting, is provided by Jørgen Wadum, “Vermeer in Perspective,” Johannes Vermeer (Exhibition Catalogue), ed. Ben Broos and Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1995), 67–68. For evidence of the continuing view that Desiderio’s work often embraces allegory, see Stephen

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This discussion of The Interpretation of Color closes with the suggestion that there is value in regarding the painting, rather than as an allegory, as a transformational object. This distinctive phrase, as defined by psychologist Christopher Bollas (already referred to above), indicates “an object that is identified with the metamorphosis of the self.”110 Bollas argues that such objects, if successful in effecting psychic growth, are inextricably tied to the nutritive and transformational aspects of preverbal experience. More specifically, Bollas focuses on the “unthought known,” a cognitive purview/dynamism that – so Bollas argues – arises out of this early phase of life. The Interpretation of Color with some justification can be viewed as a potential subjective pivot away from the habitudes of the postmodern toward some “transformational experience.”111 Such an event – writ large – could prove to be the beginning of a regenerative approach to art if not life, generally, as well. At the same time, the impact of this canvas – in its nuanced, evolved significations – can be viewed as reflecting some primordial process. That is, with the sleeper’s turn toward a new epoch, there is likely to be resolution of a separation crisis that refracts or distantly echoes such an issue in early childhood. The ambiguous relaxation of vertical sleepers recurs with enough frequency in postmodern art to warrant the sense that the image relates to a spacious but hazardous intersection of work and diversion, praxis and repose. Such a cognitive crossroads may well lie at the basis of an intriguing statue, Relaxing Nude, which is perceivable as a vertical variation of the sleeping Ariadne motif (fig. 26). It is by Eric Marrion, an occasional sculptor in Durham, England, and a full-time restauranteur when the artwork was created. This proficiently rendered Ariadne was for a time on display on a wall in the artist’s place of business near the Durham Cathedral. With her unobtrusive antique patina, she managed to harmonize with her surroundings in a small health-food cafeteria. Bereft of a Theseus and without anticipation of rescue by a Dionysus, the ­image retained a residue of mythic inheritance – and despite a context of May, “Vincent Desiderio: Painting with His Head and Heart,” American Arts Quarlerly 24.4 (Fall 2007):31–37. In addition, see Edward Leffingwell, “Allegories of Painting,” Art in America 93.2 (February 2005): 98–103. Leffingwell’s article is mainly concerned with Desiderio’s output, including An Allegory of Painting (103), during the period 2002–’03. 110 The Shadow of the Object, 16–17. It should be added that, in his recourse to early psychic history, Bollas has tended to sidestep its usual hazards. 111 Bollas, 16. Yet the “transformational object” as a concept or remedy is hardly without its own special pitfalls. Bollas acknowledges that “the advertising world makes its living on the trace of [the transformational] object; the advertised product usually promises to alter the subject’s external environment and hence change internal mood” (ibid.). As cultural commodity, the work of art cannot be exempted from spectral or specious contingencies within a dynamics of the transformational object.

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Figure 26 Eric Marrion, Relaxing Nude (1994). Plaster of Paris with patina, 66 cm. Durham, England, Collection of the artist. Reproduced with permission.

ongoing consumption. This plaster lady merged with her environment to emanate a strange amalgam of the divine and the diurnal. Almost certainly, there is a message of resistance here, perhaps reluctance to participate in a narrative of commercialization, a process in which this dozing Ariadne is involved nonetheless.112 The statue, particularly when considered together with its setting, is a memorable example of the often complex depictions of somnolence – that is, hypnoglyphs – currently evident in virtually every kind of cultural context. Only a rather small portion of these postmodern artifacts display vertical slumber, either explicitly or through hermeneutic examination. Such examples may be among the most pungent and memorable of the type, but they exist alongside a plethora of others that portray sleepers in varied postures. And they do so in predictably postmodern ways… through prose or verse that evokes visual conundrums, or through actual images that call forth abundant commentary – or through a text-image mix.113 112 Worth referencing here is Jonathan Crary’s observation that “paradoxically, sleep is a figure for a subjectivity on which power can operate with the least political resistance and a condition that finally cannot be instrumentalized or controlled externally – that evades or frustrates the demands of global consumer society” (24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, 24). The emphasis of the present discussion, in contrast, has been that, in the arenas of representation at least, sleep has become a “controlled substance.” Indeed, the cleverly illustrated dustjacket of Crary’s monograph – orange numerals against a nocturnal and sporadically illuminated high-rise – suggest that sleep is no longer a barrier to commercial processes. 113 On types of text-image interaction, see W.J.T. Mitchell, op. cit., 89n9 and throughout.

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Figure 27  Jeri Burdick, Power Nap (1998). Ceramic sculpture with wood, 17.75 cm × 28.5 cm × 15.25 cm. Private collection. Reproduced with permission.

These representations are hardly the exclusive output of writers or painters committed to lofty aesthetic principles. The rendering of hypnoglyphs is also the province of film-makers, advertisers, journalists, and designers of internet webpages, along with part-time or intermittent artists.114 Deserving mention in this context is Power Nap by multi-media artist Jeri Burdick (fig. 27). A clown-like ceramic figure is stiffly supine on a bare, couchlike bed. The cranium juts over the protruding top or “pillow” end of the unlikely sleeping platform. The subject’s arms are extended straight, flat along the torso. The posture is so rigid that what appears to be a mat or bedding could also be partly a gap between the “bed” and the recliner’s dorsal region. The subject is perhaps a toyish object placed for ­display on a piece of doll’s furniture not quite suitable for this purpose. Yet the dormant figure – she or perhaps he – also appears to calmly, indeed smilingly, relax. And the strong colors and asymmetrical forms – e.g., the oversized shoes – breathe humor. Burdick views her artwork as a visualization of a phrase and advice promulgated by sleep-researcher James B. Maas. Like Maas, Burdick takes an upbeat approach to the quandaries of crowded agendas and multiple

114 Jennifer Hom’s Little Nemo in Google-Land (15 October 2012) is an impressive example of the possibilities of the hypnoglyph in the arena of internet design. See http://www.google .com/doodles/107th-anniversary-of-little-nemo-in-slumberland.

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responsibilities. Maas “coined the term ‘power nap’ to encourage institutionalization of naps at work. A recent survey indicated that many executives take brief naps in the office to recharge their batteries. Why not allow all workers to have the same privilege? ... it’s working wonders.”115 Maas also argues that “napping should not be frowned upon at the office or make you feel guilty at home. It should have the status of daily exercise.”116 Intrigued by Maas’s viewpoint, Burdick found herself subscribing to the idea that a nearly unmanageable workload and an unpredictable schedule could be felicitously dealt with via the scattering of naps, as opportunities presented themselves, throughout the day. The artist was drawn to the notion of the “power nap” – and created a series of such works – during a period when she was tending to an invalid in-law whose discomforts disrupted her sleep as many as four times per night.117 Artist, care-giver, and postmodern subject, Burdick for a time sought refuge – a bit like the tired clown in her sculpture – in a program of alternately napping, juggling a professional agenda, and carrying out domestic duties. The precarious status of sleep continues to be evident as a millennial divide is crossed. Worth reflecting on here is a poem by J.D. McClatchy, “Lexington Avenue Subway, 1941” (2001), an ekphastic response to a photograph taken by Walker Evans of subway riders in the early 1940s (fig. 28). As stated earlier, travelers have tended to drift into sleep – in positions other than supine – from the era of Charles Bovary onward as well as long before. Such depictions tend to evoke work and other societal pressures and to anticipate the embattled circumstances of the postmodern subject. In his poem, McClatchy exploits the dramatic “freezing” of these two uncomprehending actors on the stage of sleep and implies that, fast-forwarded by his text, they now subsist within the matrices of late capitalism. The transposition is not due simply to the poet making use of the dialogic opportunity offered by the double portrait so that each figure mirrors and critiques the other. What is strikingly contemporary is the interpolation of animated, assertive narratives of introspection into the blank visages of the subway riders. Visually, the faces emanate disengagement, with an aura of glum dissatisfaction haunting the mien of the older indi­vidual. ­McClatchy posits that the younger man has entered a subterranean level of consciousness–a purview of cognition well beyond any way-station between sleep

115 Power Sleep: The Revolutionary Program That Prepares Your Mind for Peak Performance (New York: Quill, 2001), 129–30. 116 Ibid., 132. 117 Telephone interview, 15 June 2010.

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Figure 28  Walker Evans, Subway Passengers, New York City Lexington Avenue Subway (1938–’41). Gelatin silver print, 12.1 × 17.1 cm. New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery. Director’s Purchase Fund. Image © and courtesy of the Yale U Art Gallery.

and waking. That is, if McClatchy is taken literally, for he writes of “the dream’s/ train of thought pulling the figure forward/from all the disappointments” (ll. 12–14) (my italics).118 The younger man, hypothesizing in his dream, projects himself into the existence of the older passenger, who may have gained insight – if not serenity – over many years of labor and of riding the subways. Subsequently in the poem, the senior figure is credited with formulating – mentally, within – a brooding response. Thus while the reader is free to understand that both men have entered into slumber, their sleep – with whatever resistance it could offer to the ongoing tribulations of menial work – has been narrativized and brought aboard the “train of thought.” 118 J.D. McClatchy, “Lexington Avenue Subway, 1941, after Walker Evans,” in Words for Images: A Gallery of Poems, ed. John Hollander and Joanna Weber (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2001), 54. See also Hollander’s comments, 57. The concept of a specific psychic zone between wakefulness and sleep (that is, hypnagogia) is discussed in the next chapter.

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It cannot be concluded – with the examples above barely reaching into the 2000s – that the contrarian dynamism delineated in this chapter is now passé and everything postmodern along with it. Enter (for instance) Ophadell Williams, Bronx bus driver tried in 2012 for dozing at the wheel, crashing his vehicle, and incurring the negligent homicide of fifteen passengers. Williams was exonerated, but the toxic version of vertical sleep publicized during his trial sparked widespread reflection on the perils of operating a vehicle when one is drowsy or fatigued. A consensus regarding “responsible” sleep quickly spun off from the Ophadell Williams case, yet without a full probing of the constraints and contingencies that can turn a driver’s seat into a momentary site of slumber.119

119 For an account of the bus tragedy and the judicial ordeal of Ophadell Williams, see Winnie Hu, “Push to Prosecute Drowsy Driving May Hinge on Its Definition,” New York Times, 1 December 2012, A19, and Winnie Hu and Nate Schweber, “Bus Driver Found Not Guilty of Manslaughter in I-95 Crash,” New York Times, 8 December 2012, A15.

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The Size of Sleep, Sizing the Self The name of Narcissus, which his father gave to him, signifies somnolence and sloth. And in fact, as soon as the bulb of the narcissus begins to take nourishment, the flower does not emerge promptly. But it remains for some time within as if asleep – until the arrival of its season, when [the flower] awakens and begins little by little to show itself and to push itself out of its stem. And because this flower ordinarily grew near tombs, the ancients were accustomed to sacrifice it, along with saffron, to the Eumenides. They maintained also that the flower was very pleasing to Bacchus, without a doubt because wine induces drowsiness and brings sleep. michel de marolles 1

…

The condition of sleep … resembles illness in implying a narcissistic withdrawal of the positions of the libido on to the subject’s own self, or, more precisely, on to the single wish to sleep. The egoism of dreams fits in very well into this context. In both states we have, if nothing else, examples of changes in the distribution of libido that are consequent upon a change in the ego. sigmund freud 2

⸪ 1 (Le nom de Narcisse que son pere luy donna, signifie endormissement & paresse: & de fait, dès que la graine du Narcisse commence à prendre nourriture, elle ne sort pas si tost dehors; mais elle demeure quelque temps au dedans comme endormie, iusques à ce que la saison estant venue, elle se réveille, & vient peu à peu à se montrer & à se pousser hors de sa tige: & parce que cette fleur croissoit d’ordinaire aupres des tombeaux, les Anciens auoient accoustumé de la sacrifier auec du saphran, aux Eumenides. Ils tenoient aussi qu’elle estoit fort agreable à Bacchus, à cause sans doute des fumées du vin qui endorment & qui enuoyent l’assoupissement.) N.W., trans., from Michel de Marolles, Tableaux du temple des muses (1655) (New York: Garland, 1976), 285. 2 “On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914),” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth, 1986), 14: 83.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004316218_004

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The previous chapter considered the prevalence of atypical sleeping postures as an expression of the constraints placed on the modern and postmodern subject. The current portion of this study of the hypnoglyph looks further at postures and at what the material and other contexts of sleep may reveal about the one who slumbers (or wishes to do so). Assessed below, among other factors, are correlations between the details of selected representations, on the one hand, and what is implied in each case regarding the size of the dormant ego, on the other. In other words, what are the implied perimeters of the psychic territory within the sleeper’s cognitive embrace as he or she is held in sleep’s embrace? What are the topographies of the aesthetic and other conceptual spaces that may be manifested within the passing purviews of sleep? The centerpiece at this juncture is Richard Wilbur’s “Walking to Sleep” (1969), which closes with an evocation of the dreamer Vishnu. Among other points, the poem’s final scene is described as an ingenious modernist restoration. What is reaffirmed in a grand climactic gesture is the sense, in decline during the 1960s, that a masterfully structured work of visual art or literature can assume – almost if not entirely – the awesome status of an icon. Thereby shored up at the same time is the progressive modernist view, within the persisting spiritual wasteland of twentieth-century civilization, that some acknowledgment of the sacred can reasonably obtain. This updated theological outlook is an ecumenical and ethical hybrid that is both aesthetically satisfying and cosmopolitan, hence without burdensome demands for piety or even credence, and much less for unconditional commitment. As striking as Wilbur’s artistically recuperative innovation will be seen to be, with both sleep and a global cartography constrained to serve a modernist poetics, he was not the first to attempt such an inclusive construct. More than three decades previously, the German novelist Thomas Mann conjured up a rather similar confederation of seemingly incompatible elements. The text in question is an extraordinary essay entitled, “Sleep, Sweet Sleep” (“Süßer Schlaf.”) Herein, Mann is not caught up in a polemics within the arts, or he has at least less clearly subscribed to one than is the case for Wilbur. Mann’s interest in “Sleep, Sweet Sleep” is exploring the capacities of a favored experience; that is, sleep – for Mann a mysterious, benign, and rejuvenating physiological process. Along with other points, Mann establishes enlivening links between sleep and artistic capabilities. In a key passage, Mann’s writing is considerably more elegant than cogent. For with a distinct finesse germane only to those at the forefront of artistry, he ties together the lowly bed (here transformed into “metaphysical

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chattel”),3 sleep, infinity, the ocean, and Indic philosophy. Among other assertions, Mann claims that the bed is a “magic cockle-shell, standing covered and unheeded by day in its corner, wherein by night we rock out upon the sea of forgetfulness and infinity.”4 Having thus intimated (among a number of implications) that sleep can be appreciated, even esteemed, as a zone of anoneiric vacuity (a position only a minority of artists have adopted), Mann proceeds rhapsodically, and it is at times a challenge to specify whether he is at least rhetorically cohesive while, apparently, logically adrift. According to Mann: Infinity ... the sea ... Old as my love of sleep is my love of the sea, whose vast simplicity I have always preferred to the exacting many-sidedness of mountain scenery. And these two loves have a common source. I have in me much of the Hindu, much heavy and sluggish craving after that form or no-form of consummation which is called Nirvana, or nothingness.5 What is particularly problematic about these remarks is Mann’s nonchalant bundling of such imposing and disparate semiotic enclosures as those of “Unbewußtsein,” “Unendlichkeit,” “Nirvana,” and “Nichts.” Mann’s translator (H.T. Lowe-Porter) renders “Unbewußtsein” as “forgetfulness” although “unconsciousness” would be more accurate. There is surely a difference between the two and a markedly greater one between “Nirvana” and “nothingness,” viewed by Mann as synonymous. The notion of “Nirvana” is in any case elusive and multi-faceted. Mann’s comments are more suggestive of insight when he writes of the sublime and “vast simplicity” of the sea (“ungeheure Einfachheit”) – or even when he refers to a “form or no-form of consummation” (“Form oder Unform des Vollkommenen”) – than when he equates “Nirvana”

3 “Sleep, Sweet Sleep,” Past Masters and Other Papers, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (Freeport, ny: Books for Libraries, 1968), 272. (The German phrase is “dies metaphysische Möbelstück” [“Süßer Schlaf,” Reden und Aufsätze 3 {Oldenburg: S. Fischer, 1960}, 336].) 4 “Sleep, Sweet Sleep,” 272. (“Ist es nicht wie ein Zaubernachen, der über Tag verdeckt und unscheinbar seinen Winkel einnimmt und in dem wir jeden Abend hisausschaukeln auf das Meer des Unbewußtseins und der Unendlichkeit?” [“Süßer Schlaf,” 336].) 5 “Sleep, Sweet Sleep,” 273. (“Das Meer! Die Unendlichkeit! Meine Liebe zum Meer, dessen ungeheure Einfachheit ich der anspruchsvollen Vielgestalt des Gebirges immer vorgezogen habe, ist so alt wie meine Liebe zum Schlaf, und ich weiß wohl, worin diese beiden Sympathien ihre gemeinsame Wurzel haben. Ich habe in mir viel Indertum, viel schweres und träges Verlangen nach jener Form oder Unform des Vollkommenen, welche ‘Nirvana’ oder das Nichts benannt ist … ” [“Süßer Schlaf,” 336].)

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and “nothingness” (“das Nichts”).6 There is a relevant parallel between Mann’s evocation of the sea and the Buddhist view that “the enlightened person” – the individual who has entered Nirvana – “is deep, immeasurable, unfathomable like the great ocean.”7 But unlike Mann, who would languorously dissolve into a pleasantly numbing, dreamless intermission from cognitive fretfulness, the authentic attainee of Nirvana – according to the final exhortation of the Heart Sutra – has spiritually traveled in quite another direction, to a demesne of intense wakefulness beyond all concept of psychic restraints or boundaries.8 If Mann manifestly errs as he interjects a particular item of religious ideation into a discourse of sleep – conjuring up signifiers of expansiveness at one instant and reducing them to nil at the next – the mistake is not uniquely his. Students of religious history have carefully documented the misprision of Buddhist and Hindu ideas in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Thus the Universal History of Travels on Water on Land (Allgemeine Historie der Reisen zu Wasser und Lande), a widely-read eighteenth-century work that was trusted by Hegel, professes to record a Buddhist claim that the universe has its basis in Nothingness; all things originate in nothing and return to this nonstate as well.9 And hardly unique is the misconception that, among the Asians, “the one idea of the highest happiness they possess is of rest – absolute, immovable rest. Let a Hindu lie as a log and sleep, he is then deliciously, intensely, happy.” So wrote Graham Sandberg, a late-nineteenth-century commentator.10 Mann has evidently absorbed some portion of the then-prevailing ­oversimplifications of Asian theology. At the same time, a concern with cosmic transcendence, with the apprehension of ultimate truths and realities – a likely carry-over from contact with commentaries on Asian thought and cultures – is 6 7

8 9

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“Sleep, Sweet Sleep,” 273; “Süßer Schlaf,” 336. Quoted by Stephen Collins from the “Discourse to Vacchagotta on Fire” (Nirvana and other Buddhist felicities: Utopias of the Pali imaginaire [Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1998], 163). Collins provides a valuable discussion of Nirvana as a state that is hardly equal to the word “nothing” yet challenges efforts as conceptualization. “Nirvana” is apprehensible in part via metaphor and careful periphrasis. See Collins, 191–233. Buddhist Wisdom: The Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra, trans. Edward Conze (New York: Vintage, 2001), xxi, 106. See G.W.F. Hegel, Determinate Religion (Volume 2 of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion), ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R.F. Brown, P.C. Hodgson, and J.M. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), 565. See also Timothy Morton’s online essay, “Hegel on Buddhism,” Romanticism and Buddhism, Sp. Issue of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series, ed. Mark Lussier (February 2007); http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/buddhism/morton/morton.html. Graham Sandberg, “Philosophical Buddhism in Tibet,” The Contemporary Review 57 (February 1890): 263. Sandberg’s perspective is reviewed by Collins, Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities, 100–01.

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intermittently detectable in Mann’s digressions.11 For the present inquiry, Mann’s key utterance is his claim that he harbors “much of the Hindu” (in German, “viel Indertum”). And more important than whether the provenance of Mann’s perspective is Indic in general or is more specifically Hindu is his inclination to periodically dissolve the individual ego into some vastly larger semiotic territory with the nightly advent of the dormant state. The discreet, barriered self vanishes into a quasi-paradise with the repeated accessions of sleep – or does it? For a few lines later, Mann’s position is stolidly occidental, and not that of an advocate of Indic metaphysics. He finds that the artistic self and – at the same time – the quotidian self of the typical inhabitant of Europe during the early to mid-twentieth-century heyday of modernism is ever eager or at least compelled “to assemble out of nothingness” (a “nothingness” that is perhaps also an “all”) so as “to renounce freedom and infinity and all slumbering and weaving in spaceless and timeless night: an ethical resolve to be and to suffer.”12 Mann’s divagations indeed fascinate, yet he appears to settle on advocating a dialectic of cognition. At the basis of everyday reality there is a stolid moralism that drags/propels the modern subject down the obstacle course of diurnal existence. At the same time, the mental matrix of mundaneness and responsibility (so concerned with everything that is finite) corrects – as it is in turn corrected by – an impulse toward relief, release, the infinite, and ­dissolution. 11

12

Certainly the writings of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer are at least partly at the root of Mann’s Indic trend. Mann apparently immersed himself in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea several years prior to the essay on sleep (Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art, trans. Leslie Willson [Princeton: Princeton up, 2002] 60–61). On Schopenhauer’s absorption and adaptations of Indian and other Asian ideas, see Moira Nicholls, “The Influences of Eastern Thought on Schopenhauer’s Doctrine of the Thing-in-Itself,” The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, ed. Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1999), 171–212. Nicholls points to a strong parallel, for instance, between the Advaita school of traditional Indian philosophy and Schopenhauer’s “doctrine that the will as thing-in-itself is the sustainer of the world” (183). Nicholls also argues (192–93) that Schopenhauer, though at times seen by critics as equating Nirvana with nihilism, held a more nuanced and complex view on this topic. Yet Schopenhauer’s apparent identification of Nirvana with “extinction” would seem to have facilitated such misreadings in his own era and subsequently (The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3, 5th ed., trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp [London: Kegan Paul, 1906], 308). Christopher Ryan devotes a chapter to Schopenhauer’s India in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Religion: The Death of God and the Oriental Renaissance (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 44–58. “Sleep, Sweet Sleep,” 274. (“… zur Sammlung aus dem Nichts, zur Absage an die Freiheit, die Unendlichkeit, an das Schlummern und Weben in raum- und zeitloser Nacht, −eines sittlichen Entschlusses zum Sein und zum Leiden” [“Süßer Schlaf,” 337].)

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To be eschewed, then, is the spurious wisdom of the individual who spurns sleep in favor of unending time-keeping and compunction. Mann’s rhetoric is more agile than his logic, however, for just at that precise textual instant when his emphases are translucent, an alternate purview of discourse appears or rather re-appears. At issue is Mann’s re-summoning of totality, this time in the guise of Buddha, advocate of a renunciation of “clinging” (“Anhangen”) or the slavish involvement in “the hour and the act” (“an Tag und Tun”) that leaves us sleep-deprived. Yes, Gautama could well agree that, in such cases, “the soul has lost its home” – which was not to be apprehended (as for Mann) as an abandonment into sleep, a lapsing of cranium on pillow.13 There is also room for disagreement over whether a true return to “home” and an escape from “clinging” (for Buddha a categorical awakening of the mind from hindering desires and its incorporation into an ultimate consciousness) are likely to be casually and repetitively reversed in favor of continuing entanglements in the illusions and disappointments typically experienced by the embodied mind. What Mann’s highly intriguing “Sleep, Sweet Sleep” does, then, is to depict a certain model of subjectivity, within which profound relaxation is a privileged refuge. The modern subject is virtually a cognitive commuter orbiting across well-partitioned zones of temporality, experience, and mentation. S/he is a traveler across an emerging grid of global time-zones, renewable and exchangeable lifestyles, shifts of occupation and citizenship, and other retoolings; sleep is depended upon for nocturnal rechargings. Yet at times, this model of subjectivity seems almost to merge with another paradigm, one that is psychoanalytic rather than philosophical and ergonomic. Also global, this alternate model is narcissistic and was widely circulated and evident in the early-to-mid-twentieth century world of Mann, which was also the world of Proust, Freud, Jung, Joyce, Kandinsky, Nietzsche, and others. These seminal fabricators of modernist discourse were enriched and enlightened, as was Mann, by contact with Asian, African, and other colonized and appropriated subjectivities. These masterful figures evoke a near complicity in subtly promulgating the notion of a universalized self that is on the one hand cosmopolitan yet – on the other – insidiously self-involved.14 Somewhere in this expansive subjective 13 14

“Sleep, Sweet Sleep,” 275–76. (“… daß unsere Seele die Heimat verloren hat” [“Süßer Schlaf,” 338–39].) On the intersection of modernism and cosmopolitanism, see Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s introductory chapter in Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia up, 2006), 1–32. Among numerous insights, Walkowitz maintains that modernist authors frequently bring to light “the often-invisible connections between personal

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model there is room – it may be, surprisingly – for the psychoanalytic notion of a primary narcissism, an infantile phase during which the individual self appears to serve as the origin – the illusory “prime mover” – of all pleasure. Commentator Yvonne Sherratt describes this early psychic phase as dominated by “a sense of unboundedness ... . At such a stage the ‘self’ has no sense of the internal and the external. As such, it cannot distinguish between sensations arising from itself and those arising from the external world.” And as a consequence, “primary narcissism is a condition of complete and undifferentiated unity.”15 Mann parallels this notion when he finds a rudimentary analogy to the creative process in “the image of the foetus as it grows in the womb.” Relatively formless in the early stages, the cranial area in particular, argues Mann, is quite generalized and offers “a world of possibilities” that will gradually be superseded by a “symmetrical, seeing, willing, individually concentrated countenance” that is “the expression of the ego.”16 Hence the wide liberties of sleep, hypothesizing, and/or “weaving” that must taper off into self-articulation as well as artistic products. Mann’s intimations of a primary narcissism are nicely paralleled in Sandor Ferenczi’s psychoanalytic classic, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, and specifically in a provocative chapter entitled, “Coitus and Sleep.” Ferenczi attributes to Freud the gnomic and slightly fanciful comment that the individual is never fully born, “but through going nightly to bed he spends half his life in, as it were, the mother’s womb.”17 Pushing this putative connection for all it is

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and international experiences.”6 Also relevant in this context is Mitchell Aboulafia’s The Cosmopolitan Self: George Herbert Mead and Continental Philosophy (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001), especially 19–20, 46–47, 62–63; 73–74. Along with other points, Aboulafia makes clear that, from the pragmatist perspective of Mead (active during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), technical advances in such fields as transportation (e.g., the railway) and communication (e.g., the telegraph) tend to promote interdependence between people and societies and to enlarge the world outlook of every individual. Yvonne Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2002), 97–98. Or as Sigmund Freud remarks in a highly readable passage, The charm of a child lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his self-contentment and inaccessibility, just as does the charm of certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats and the large beasts of prey. Indeed, even great criminals and humorists, as they are represented in literature, compel our interest by the narcissistic consistency with which they manage to keep away from their ego anything that would diminish it (“On Narcissism: An Introduction” [1914], 89). “Sleep, Sweet Sleep,” 273. (“… die Vorstellung nämlich von dem Zustandekommen des ­Fötus im Leibe der Mutter”; “Welt der Möglichkeiten”; “symmetrischen, schauenden, wollenden, individuell-konzentrierten Ich-Gesicht ... ” [“Süßer Schlaf,” 337].) Thalassa, trans. Henry Alden Bunker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 74.

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worth, Ferenczi conceptualizes the dormant individual as “an autoerotic: he represents in toto a child who is enjoying repose inside his mother’s body and who in his absolutely narcissistic absorption is altogether indifferent to the environment.”18 Hence for Freud, Ferenczi, and various modernist representationalists and their successors, the primary narcissism is not at all a passing infantile state, but a recurrently transient one to be recalled or “realized” in everyday life as well as in elaborately combinatory depictions of sleepers and their immediate surroundings.19

18 19

Ibid., 74. Thus Freud, Ferenczi’s antecedent, has claimed that “somatically, sleep is an act which reproduces intrauterine existence ... .” Freud also finds that psychoneuroses are characterized by a “temporal regression” of the ego as well as of the libido. “In sleep, the latter is carried to the point of restoring the primitive narcissism … .” Along with connecting sleep and narcissism, Freud appears to imply that sleep is to some extent a “normal” as well as a universally inevitable neurosis. He also presents as incontrovertible the assertion that “we know that dreams are absolutely egoistic and that the person who plays the chief part in their scenes is always to be recognized as the dreamer. We now readily understand that this is due to the narcissism of sleep” (“Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams,” 137–38). Worth noting in the case of both Freud and his disciple Ferenczi is a degree of ­unconcerned conflation in designating whatever is meant by the narcissism of sleep. On the one hand, sleep constitutes a zone of numb enjoyment – a pleasure perhaps due in part to the simulations of dreams. On the other hand, the sleeper is said to replay the i­ntrauterine phase a life, a time-period wherein it is rather generous to assume that cognition has begun. Does the prenatal subject dream? Freud and company cannot be blamed if they have failed to raise – much less answer – the question. What trickles through their discourse is the Cartesian trend discussed above, the view that the psyche – if indeed immortal – is ever active, is at every instant engaged in demonstrating its aliveness in some way, even in the womb, if only in the midst of some bare and incommunicable joie de vivre. For an updated rendition of this perspective – an argument at times ingenious though speculative as well – see Jean-Luc Nancy’s Tombe de sommeil, 67–74. Among other intriguing points, Nancy remarks of his incarnate version of the soul that it: … is what incessantly sleeps during the waking state; it is what stays awake and observes during sleep. At one place and another, at each moment it is that which, giving form and tone to presence, holds itself on the sidelines, along the contours. Certainly not like a pilot in his ship, but … like a sentinel atop a great mast or, indeed, a wellnourished gull, languid on the railing. (nw, trans.) (… elle est dans la veille ce qui sans cesse somnole, elle est dans le sommeil ce qui veille et surveille: elle est de part et d’autre chaque fois cela qui, donnant à une présence forme et tonalité, se tient sur les bords, sur les contours. Certes pas comme un pilote

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Mann has located, it should be clear, the sleeping self within a matrix of internationalized, colonial-era, global experiences. The Asian references, then, are to some extent simply indicators of the modernist psyche’s apparent wide-as-the-world boundaries. An underlying dynamics can be detected, however, that allows the dormant self to be almost apprehended as something more than a globe. Thus one of the key distinctions of Mann’s discourse lies in his insinuation (rather than a clear affirmation) of a more-than-all self that subsists in a highly expansive realm of its own rendering – yet may return to the m ­ erely all-inclusive with a flick of the appropriate cognitive switch. (E.g., Mann’s ego accommodates “viel Indertum” and much besides.) This “morethan-all” n ­ otion of the self is subtly communicated via his shifting discussion of the somnolent psyche. There is perhaps not a large inventory of instances, even within the discursive rubric, primary narcissism, that imply a more-than-global self by discovering – for instance – an archive of the infinities of ancient India and elsewhere among the self’s expansive resources. In contra-distinction to this notion, Immanuel Levinas (almost certainly a reader of Mann’s “Sleep, Sweet Sleep”) avoids its excesses by constructing a less psycho-imperialist yet widely applicable model. Levinas emphasizes the capacity of a highly integrated subject to disperse and re-gather conventions, agendas, protocols, aspirations, and resources across sleep’s interruptions. These interruptions are in fact welcomed and enhance the effervescence of non-dormant periods. Without this sense of surety of psychic re-integration, the subject would not be inclined to permit those requisite dissolutions into sleep. The holocaust survivor Levinas, as already noted, has offered a formula for psychic survival amid the strictures of life during latemodernism and later. Yes, affirms Levinas, with sufficient agility and resilience, even the death-camp inmate and the post-industrial subject as well are likely to survive – and catch forty winks when the opportunity presents itself. dans son navire, mais … comme une vigie en haut du grand mât ou bien comme un goéland repu engourdi sur le bastingage [68–69].) In the arena of literary representation, a tie-in between sleep and primary narcissism is well conveyed in a passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses. The occasion is Bloom’s deferred return to the matrimonial bed, a scenario thronging with associations: “[Bloom] removed a pillow from the head to the foot of the bed, prepared the bedlinen accordingly and entered the bed ... . How? With circumspection as invariably when entering an abode. ... reverently, the bed of conception and of birth, of consummation of marriage and of breach of marriage, of sleep and of death” (Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. [New York: Vintage, 1993], 601). As he reclines, Bloom’s inverted posture is an anomaly – and foetal as well, that of “the manchild in the womb” (606). Joyce’s sleep-world is all-containing as is Mann’s, yet Bloom’s quirky position implies a continuing separateness, a ­resistance to his having returned.

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Richard Wilbur’s “Walking to Sleep” Perhaps Rauschenberg’s profoundest symbolic gesture came in 1955 when he seized his own bed, smeared paint on its pillow and quilt coverlet, and uprighted it against the wall. There, in the vertical posture of “art,” it continues to work in the imagination as the eternal companion of our other resource, our horizontality, the flat bedding in which we do our begetting, conceiving, and dreaming. leo steinberg 20

I bow to Vishnu, who is peace incarnate, who lies on a snaky bed, from whose navel grows the lotus, who is the supreme lord of the gods, who sustains the universe ... mahatma gandhi 21

With examination of Lowell’s “Man and Wife” and Rauschenberg’s Bed, this study has already made clear that a modern/postmodern divide is apparent in the mid- to late-1950s. Among the spin-offs of a fundamental shift in aesthetics, in the media, and in ideology is a shift in the representation of sleep in textual sites that ostensibly preserve modernist premises.22 This paradox of 20 21

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Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 89–90. Collected Works 44 (July-December 1930) (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1971), 388. The quotation is excerpted from the “Ashram Bhajanavali,” a compilation of devotional writings, from varied languages, incorporated into daily worship at Gandhi’s ashrams. Gandhi’s original interest in translating the passages into English is said to have been to assist his British cohort, Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade) (ibid.). For extended discussion of the passage from modernism to the postmodern, see Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays, ed. Paul A. Bové (Durham: Duke up, 1995). Particularly relevant for the current inquiry is the contribution by Charles Altieri, “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern American Poetics” (100–39). Especially worth considering are Altieri’s comments on the differing approaches to value during the two eras. With the onset of postmodernism, the modernist view of “the creative imagination as form-giver and as creator of ethical principles” collapses along the by-ways of the new textuality. Henceforth, Value is a way of being informed, not of informing. Primary in the reaction against humanism is the model of ecological thinking. It is not enough for man to assume he can determine the measure of things; rather he must try to discover how he himself is an object given his “orders” by the general schemes of creative nature in which he is only another participant. “Decreation” then is a basic process for the postmodern arts: human forms must first be destroyed, if we are to be open to the true sources of value manifest in the natural processes which create forms (Altieri, 108).

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early ­postmodernism becomes salient in Richard Wilbur’s “Walking to Sleep” once the poem’s intricate wordscape is surveyed, and more so once its awesome modernist façade is inspected for fissures and cracks. Ostensibly, the poem offers remedies for insomnia resulting from conflict between the body’s claim for downtime on the one hand and voluminous daytime agendas on the other. Two alternative “therapies” are set forth, both requiring the prospective sleeper – instead of simply counting sheep – to engage in image-forming processes that resemble programs of aesthetic representation. “Walking to Sleep” is fundamentally an ars poetica even if difficult to recognize as such, a disquisition about poetry that displays a number of modernism’s canonical assumptions with acute adeptness. Wilbur’s poem also participates in the tensions and contradictions evident in the peculiar images of vertical slumber awkwardly at home in sleep-centered works of the postmodern era. No longer do we simply fall asleep; the ergonomically enlightened citizen will no doubt contemplate walking to sleep. But instead of cramming sleep into a matrix of kineticity, of persistent agendas, Wilbur in the end permits sleep to have its due as an anapausis or letting up of diurnal concerns. This release entails a residual responsibility at the same time: sleep is a vehicle of dreams. For Wilbur, oneiricity is an index of free mental play that in turn glissandos into aesthetic creativity. The author thus shares a segment of the Cartesian mental theater together with numerous others who have an investment in the With Altieri’s comments in mind, it is useful to regard the notion of “decreation” as a marker of the postmodern, as a certain dynamics of disorder that may be quite evident throughout a given work composed at some point along the temporal borderlands between two broad movements. It may also be reasonable to apply “decreation” more selectively, within a segment of a perplexing work – e.g., Wilbur’s “Walking to Sleep” – wherein divergent markers (e.g., indicators of two opposing discursive camps) may have taken up textual residence. (The term, “decreation,” and its application will reappear in the conclusion of this study.) See, in addition, Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry: O’Hara, Bishop, Ashbery & Merrill (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1995). Somewhat in the footsteps of Altieri, Blasing designates as postmodern “poetry that breaks with the modernist faith in the truth-value of poetic techniques and registers the intervention of rhetoric in any such connection between forms and values” (2–3). Yet Blasing recognizes that the postmodern work of art, unsuspected, can intermingle with artwork that is less antagonistic toward tradition and more reasonably is filed under the rubric “modernist.” Blasing avoids, then, linking the postmodern to a strict historical schema, noting that “what used to be called ‘contemporary poetry’ – open-poetry that ... sets out to reclaim the avant-garde strategies of early modernism – might be termed more properly ‘late modern’” (3). Hence, for instance, it turns out that Charles Olson is clearly postmodern for Altieri but late modern for Blasing while Bishop and Merrill are – if precociously or anomalously – postmodern.

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the human mind’s perpetual cerebration. The condition of dreamless sleep, it has seemed to some reflective observers, does not exist – or if it does, alternate modes of ongoing mentation are to be assumed while the body slumbers.23 “Walking to Sleep,” like a number of notable instances in an account of the representation of sleep, is a text in which actual somnolence occupies little space. But, again like other key works, “Walking” requires location within a cartography of dormancy if anything like an adequate reading is to be attained. With its cornucopia of nuances and obscurities, the poem has been underinterpreted within the Wilbur corpus and to an extent has enacted its own marmoreal slumber.24 23

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This outlook has already been examined more than once in this study. It is worth mentioning again here that, for any theorist or observer of sleep who insists on the unstinting activity of the mind during the dormancy, there is a definite appeal in adherence to the Cartesian tenet that sleep is always dream-accompanied. It is an easy jump from the fact that dreams occur during sleep to the claim that they do so incessantly – only that they may not be remembered upon awakening. More or less in tandem with research in sleep clinics demonstrating that dreams are in fact intermittent, various commentators have countered that mentation must in some form continue. Eloquently illustrative of this trend is the work of Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese, who argue for a rubric, non-waking creature consciousness: “Dreamless sleep is a particularly interesting case of consciousness, in which there is a forwardflowing temporal conscious intentionality without any determinate objects of intentionality. It is often held that dreamless sleep is non-conscious ... . We hold that dreamless sleep is just an affectively and emotively serene, very low-intensity, non-focused form of consciousness. It is not as though one’s mental life stops during dreamless sleep ... ” (­Embodied Minds in Action, [Oxford: Oxford up, 2009], 63–64). To be kept in mind as the niceties of such positions are pondered – whether Cartesian oneiricsim or a broader notion of cerebration – is their longevity, both having been entertained long before Descartes or his successors. Michel Covin records the recommendation of William of Saint Thierry, a twelfth-century-ce religious figure, who wrote of the “good accompanying thought” (“bonne pensée accompagnatrice”), to be focused on at sleep onset. Such cogitation could accompany the sleeper until awakening and could ward off nightmares (Une esthéthque du sommeil, 10). Also notable is the theologian Hugh of Saint Victor (also twelfth-century ce), who divided sleep into three levels (supra-human, human, and sub-human). Sleep “secundum hominem” (“in accordance with the human”) is distinguished by its enveloping dreams (ibid., 87). In either case – and whether now or in eras long defunct –, the trend has been to view sleep as a zone of resistance and remiss cognition. (See also Covin, Une esthétique, 88–91.) It is also evident that, throughout human history, sleep’s varied aesthetic capacities and opportunities for psychic release (with good use made of attendant negativities) have been well attended to. Bruce Michelson comments that the poem “has caused critics to hang fire. It seems ungainly, blurry; it does not seem to arrive anywhere ... ” (Wilbur’s Poetry: Music in a ­Scattering

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A pivotal spot on a timeline in a chronicle of the hypnoglyph is detectable in the fact that “Walking” accommodates two divergent interpretations. While the more salient one is an affirmation of a modernist poetics, there is a postmodern counter-reading as well. This hermeneutic dilemma can be compared to the “dialectical images” discussed by W.J.T. Mitchell in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. These images, such as “My Wife and my Mother-in-Law” or the “Duck-Rabbit,” flicker back and forth between two possible identifications.25 In the case of “Walking to Sleep,” Wilbur manifestly depicts a passage from a miniature inferno of doubt, negativity, and elusive political allegory to a paradisiacal resolution. This final moment of textual repose is embodied in the arresting image of the Hindu god, Vishnu, who serenely dreams and seemingly insures a modernist version of aesthetic unity at the same time. Yet ultimately, it is also possible to apprehend this vision of progress as a kind of regress. If the Lacanian orders of psychic organization are recalled, the first major section of the poem (lines 1–99, the unit which is also by far the longest) is eminently symbolic and accommodates with particular readiness the values of subjective detachment and distance, of the verbal sign in various modalities. This portion also correlates with the early childhood separation crisis, which typically entails indecision regarding a growing psycho-motor autonomy. As already noted, this period of life – which peaks when the child is in its second to third year – is often characterized by irregularities in sleeping and is reflected in an entire group of representations of dormancy. The latter section of “Walking” (ll. 99–140), in contrast, to an extent resembles a palliative retreat into a Narcissus-like self-satisfaction. The problematic final scene, especially, conjures up associations of infantile contentedness and a­ ll-inclusiveness, or in other words, psychic coordinates manifested at a very early stage of human life, when the child presumably has no sense of self as opposed to other. As already made clear in this chapter, many depictions of sleep reflect this ­primitive

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Time [Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1991], 83). Michelson’s observation is hardly recent yet retains merit, as does his entire discussion of the poem (83–89). He also calls attention to the most insightful (as of 1991) of the rather small number of scholarly commentaries on “Walking to Sleep” (231n1). Worth consulting as well is Philip White’s “‘Walking to Sleep’ and Richard Wilbur’s Quest for a Rational Imagination,” Twentieth Century Literature 41.4 (Winter 1995): 249–65. Michelson discusses “Walking to Sleep” once again in Literary Wit (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2000), 120–21, 142. The dialectical image is admirably set forth by W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 45–57. Among other points in his discussion of “Walking to Sleep,” Philip White correctly discerns (252) a postmodern stratum in the first major section of the poem.

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era, a period of subjective history largely given over to dormant states and nurturing interactions between mother and infant. Since this chapter is a study of how an early twentieth-century poetics of dormancy deteriorates (with a certain irridescence), discussion here focuses on the protracted and gaunt first part of the poem – but can hardly ignore the reassurances of Part ii. (The two sections are hereafter referred to as “Walking” i and “Walking” ii.) The first section advances a cure for dormancy that fails because the image-forming program recommended to the would-be sleeper is controlled and ratiocinative. It produces a vacuous accumulation of architectural structures and skeleton-like configurations, without well-­founded soporific inducements to relinquish whatever constitutes a customary, “daylight” mindset. Despite dubious prospects for success, the “sleep-­counselor,” the psychopompic narrator of the poem, advises: … what you project Is what you will perceive; what you perceive With any passion, be it love or terror, May take on whims and powers of its own. Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection Will serve you best … . (ll. 20–25)26 The ineptness of the “counseling” is also manifested as Wilbur’s “client” is advised to studiously avoid amatory fantasies that might lead to coitus or other sexual behavior. Do not let The thought of her in yellow, lithe and sleek As lemonwood, mislead you … . (79–81) Yet erotic release has long been among the standard remedies for insomnia. Sleep-counselor James B. Maas, for instance, advises that “satisfying sexual activity (either through sexual relations or masturbation) can promote sleep onset and induce deep and restful sleep. Endorphins are released by sexual 26

Citations from “Walking to Sleep” are drawn from New and Collected Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 158–61. The numbering of lines has been added. “Walking to Sleep” was first published in the New Yorker and appeared in book form in Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translations by Richard Wilbur. Copyright © 1968 and renewed 1996 by Richard Wilbur. Excerpts are reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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stimulation and can enhance the peaceful nature of sleep.”27 Witty and equally notable, if less empirical, is the version of this advice articulated by a minor Victorian writer, Elspeth Marr: … if you are married, have intercourse; if you are not married, this is your choice. Intercourse works wonders for men, who will be snoring three seconds after, but not always for women. In the arms of the right man you will quickly fall into the arms of Morpheus. And it is so much better than counting sheep.28 And specifically in a poetic context – without the dangers that blight sexually induced slumber in Yeats’s “Lullaby”–, erotic experience as an exit to the waking state is staged perhaps nowhere more successfully than in Langston Hughes’s “Sleep” (1947). Without delay or dreams, sleep is here an inevitable sequel to intercourse.29 But such a strategy is oddly excluded from the “program” of insomnia therary that takes shape in “Walking” i. Overall, this section of Wilbur’s poem is well apprehended in terms of its intertextual relations with an acknowledged source, Shelley’s rambling Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude, and an interpretive essay, “The House of Poe,” that Wilbur published a decade prior to “Walking to Sleep.”30 The spectral quality of the resulting allusions and the haunting brittleness of much of the imagery contribute to the incipiently postmodern atmosphere of this section of the poem. There is an overall impression of indeterminacy, or even of semiotic inflation – that is, of too many signifiers or possible meanings chasing too few signifieds or ascertainable meanings.31 27 28 29 30

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Power Sleep, 92. Aunt Epp’s Guide for Life: Miscellaneous Musings of a Victorian Lady, ed. Christopher Rush (New York: Atria, 2010), 119. Collected Poems, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 332. At a reception held by samla (9 November 1996) in Savannah, Georgia, in honor of Richard Wilbur’s 75th birthday, I was pointed in the direction of “The House of Poe” by Bruce Michelson and advised by Wilbur himself to read Shelley’s Alastor. Michelson’s Wilbur’s Poetry contains a full chapter on Wilbur’s varied responses to the writings of Edgar Allan Poe (61–81). There are frequent references in discussions of the postmodern to a surplus and/or surfeit of phenomena that give the impression that some form of meaning could possibly be emitted. In “Un-Scriptible,” Arkady Plotnitsky calls attention to “the intellectual and cultural landscape of the last two decades, a landscape often defined by the signifier post – poststructuralist, postmodern, postmodernist, and so forth. This landscape itself … is also, and perhaps primarily, a landscape of signifiers, and of an overabundance of signifiers”

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From Alastor, Wilbur apparently derives 1) the recitation of fruitless wandering that occupies most of the first part of “Walking” and 2) the overall problem that the poem seeks to solve. Like “Walking” i, Alastor is a chronicle of a quest that fails because of a flawed agenda or prospectus. While Wilbur’s “patient” would lapse into slumber despite a refusal to release the reins of reason, Shelley’s Alastor concerns a brilliant and poetic young man of Faustian insatiability who searches for “a single image” that will unite “all of the wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture.” Disappointed in his pursuit of “a prototype of his conception,” he perishes in a state of isolation and disillusionment.32 Shelley ascribes the poet’s demise to his “self-centered seclusion” and refers to an unspecified “power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction… .”33 In “Walking to Sleep,” solitary meanderings add much to the desolate and ruminative nature of the aspiring sleeper’s process of imaging.34 The general sense of alienation that has migrated from Shelley’s text to Wilbur’s is notable with mention of a desolate mine shaft that is “peppered with hacks and drill-holes, which acquire/Insensibly the look of ­hieroglyphics” (ll. 70–71).

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(Writing the Image after Roland Barthes, ed., Jean-Michel Rabaté [Philadephia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997], 243). A founding text for this quadrant of the postmodern scenario – a demesne that Wilbur explores with scepticism in “Walking to Sleep” – is Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (“Le structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines” [1966], an essay included in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978], 278–93). Derrida here insists on the inherent “overabundance of the signifier” (290). Bouncing off Nietzsche, Derrida rejoices in rather than mourns a loss of stable meanings and advocates “the affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation” (292). Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poems and Prose, ed. Timothy Webb and George E. Donaldson (London: J.M. Dent, 1995), 15. Ibid., 16. The young man’s quixotic and lonely ramblings over an array of wild terrains, which include architectural ruins, are also reminiscent of another frustrating quest, that of Poliphilo for his oneiric idea, Polia, in the Hypnerotomachia, a virtuosic but obscure and tangled Renaissance work that is the epitome of architectural romances. Also mentioned above (p. 50), this work is rather widely known as the pre-text of the collegiate novel of suspense, Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason’s The Rule of Four: A Novel (New York: Dial, 2004). A distinguished scholarly study is Liane Lefaivre’s Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: mit Press, 1997). This seminal dream-text has been translated into modern English by Joscelyn Godwin (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005).

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Though clearly indebted to his own essay on Poe as well, these lines echo a portion of an itinerary in Alastor through ancient Egypt and the near East, where Shelley’s poet gazes on “speechless shapes” (l. 123) for endless hours in order to decipher their meaning. In “Walking” i, the reference to hieroglyphics is not simply a reminder that this is indeed a poem about poetics and not about insomnia. In this particular context, that esteemed form of ancient writing has acquired the aura of an alien textuality that fails to communicate and, instead, suggests a barrier to both inter- and intrapersonal recognition. Shelley’s intertextual presence is also eminently evident in the alarming outcome of the insomniac’s advisement. The abrupt annihilation that Shelley believes is axiomatic for the overly endowed is transmogrified into the troublesome closure of “Walking” i: … when you least expect it, Right in the middle of your stride, like that, So neatly that you never feel a thing, The kind assassin Sleep will draw a bead And blow your brains out. (ll. 95–99) Obviously not a beneficent metamorphosis of the kindly Roman deity Somnus, this updated representation has incorporated several centuries of depreciative significations. Sleep is here quite conflated with his brother, Death. This is the sleep of the dead letter, the vacant word, of dreamless dullness, or at best of a name selected, according to Immanuel Kant, for its innocuousness and turned over and over in the mind by the insomniac who desires relief.35 35

For Kant’s “recipe” against sleeplessness, see The Conflict of Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor and Robert Anchor, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2001), 320. For a response to Kant that contrasts with mine, see Lewis S. Feuer, Varieties of Scientific Experience: Emotive Aims in Scientific Hypotheses (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1995), 224. “The numerous associations which the name of Cicero brought to mind” were presumably characterized for Kant by a dry and dispassionate rationality. Feuer proposes, on the other hand, that the “very sound” (of the word “Cicero”) “would have suggested directly his mother’s breasts which the anxietyridden old man still cherished in his unconscious. The word, Cicero, as pronounced in German, is similar to the word Zitze (teat). His associations to the first two syllables would have carried Kant to the memory of his mother’s softness, and brought him sleep, as his mother did when he was an infant” (224). The explanation is resourceful if not quite persuasive, especially since Kant may have been more familiar with the usual classicist (“k”) or Roman Catholic (“ch”) pronunciation of the “c” consonant.

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Additional focus on Wilbur’s poetic worldcrafting is attained through consultation of “The House of Poe,” an interpretive essay in which Wilbur is found addressing virtually the same compositional issues taken up in the first part of “Walking to Sleep.” What becomes clear is that in “Walking” i, Wilbur has subjected the representational program promulgated in the essay to careful review. Also, the revisionist poetics unveiled in “Walking” ii continues the conversation with that earlier view of Poe and considers the factor of solitude evident in Alastor. But at the time of the essay, Wilbur is fascinated by Poe’s architectonic imagination and correlates the architectural and other geometrical structurings of the latter’s verse and prose with various psychic states, especially in relation to a process of somnolescence that runs from the waking state to deep submersion in dreams. Wilbur finds, for instance, that “the spiral invariably represents in any tale of Poe’s…the loss of consciousness, and the descent of the mind into sleep.”36 Maintaining that “the scenes and situations of Poe’s tales are always concrete representations of states of mind,”37 Wilbur takes an ameliorative view even of the many delapidations and other gloomy scenarios of Poe’s gothic fiction. Thus when that architectural monstrosity, the House of Usher, disintegrates and collapses in a lake, Wilbur is comfortable with the position that Roderick Usher’s mind has simply “plunged into the darkness of sleep.”38 This loss of consciousness is hardly to be regretted, for the poetic individual – of whom Usher is taken to be somewhat representative – is basically “at war with the material world, and with the material or physical aspects of himself.”39 To escape the restrictions of this world, the imaginative mind must first “exclude them from consciousness and so subjectively destroy them.”40 For Poe, Wilbur argues, this escape is signified by a passage from the ordinary waking state into intense somnolence, into a paradoxical mental darkness that is oneirically illuminated. As defined by Wilbur, this psychic itinerary falls into several phases, beginning with simple drowsiness or gradual mental retreat from the ordinary ­sector of diurnal consciousness. This is followed by reverie, “a state in which reality and dream exist in a kind of equilibrium.” Next there is “the free fantasy of the hypnagogic state,”41 which is a fragile liminal zone between waking 36 “The House of Poe,” Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953–1976 (Ashland: Story Line, 2000), 314. 37 “The House of Poe,” 318. 38 Ibid., 327. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 318.

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and full dormancy. Hypnagogia is characterized by spontaneous and varied psychic imaging without the full loss of ordinary consciousness or the sense of narrative sequence typical of dreams.42 And then there is the final or “reward” phase, which occurs when subjectivity “has gone over the brink of sleep and descended into dreams.”43 Thus Wilbur hales Poe’s “realm of unfettered vision,” a purview that may be filled with architectural rubble but is governed 42

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On hypnagogia, see “The House of Poe,” 325–26, and Andreas Mavromatis, Hypnagogia: The unique state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep (London: Routledge, 1991), 9–13, 25–27, 270–71, and throughout. Mavromatis points out that a basic definition limits hypnagogia “to a particular context, viz. that of leading into and coming out of sleep” (270). Along with the abundant production of a wide assortment of images, hypnagogia entails “a loosening of ego boundaries (lebs) typified by openness, sensitivity, internalization-subjectification of the physical and mental environment (empathy), and diffuse-absorbed [sic] attention” (82). Hence it is evident that hypnagogia is a primal, creative state of mind that can easily overlap with (and can obviously foster) more clearly intention-driven programs of aesthetic production. Mavromatis also maintains that – while an inclination to sleep tends “to induce the type of psychophysical relaxation which promotes the occurrence of hypnagogia” – this distinctive condition can occur during other periods of restfulness temporarily interrupting and qualifying the waking state (270–71). For statements by Edgar Allan Poe referencing inner experiences quite reasonably categorized as hypnagogic, see his Marginalia in the Complete Works, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902), 16: 88–89. “The House of Poe,” 318. A decided enthusiast of the play of images in any available form (verbal, hypnagogic, or oneiric), Wilbur is overly proactive in indicating that sleep reveals itself as a wellspring of dreams just as soon as the crossover from drowsiness, pre-sleep, and/or hygpnagogia has been effected. There is debate over how much dreaming occurs during the early portions of a typical night’s sleep. Paul Martin refers to no dreaming until the onset of rem or “paradoxical” sleep; that is, over an hour or well into the usual period of nocturnal dormancy (Counting Sheep, 97–103). J. Allan Hobson comments that subjects awakened at the beginning of stage I sleep – that is at sleep onset – “often report dream-like mental activity. There may be visual imagery, and one may imagine oneself to be engaged in an act. But there is not a well-sustained episodic story, and the degree of bizarreness associated with such mentation is considerably less impressive than what later develops in the emergent, or ascending, stage i-rem sleep phases” (The Dreaming Brain, 145). See also Mavromatis, 289. It is when the somnolent individual has neurologically plunged into the deeper portions of the sleep-cycle – and then partially resurfaced – that significant dreaming takes place. For an intriguing anticipation of twentieth-century sleep research, see Plato’s Timaeus, 45E:5-46A:3. The speaker – Timaeus – here comments that once the drowziness stage has passed and slumber has begun in earnest, dreams are brief or otherwise scanty (“brachuoneiros hupnos,” 45E:6). It is only later that potent dream-images (“phantasmata,” 46A:2) emerge that may be remembered by the sleeper during the waking state (Plato, Vol. 9, ed. and trans. R.G. Bury [Cambridge: Harvard up, 1999], 102–03).

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by the “changeableness and spatial freedom of the dreaming mind.”44 This intriguing scenario is a justification of sleep through dream, a rationale for dormancy that is hardly the invention of Poe or Wilbur. The Neoplatonic flavor is unmistakable, especially when Wilbur remarks that for Poe, “the dreaming psyche separates itself wholly from the bodily senses.”45 The Neoplatonic term is “vacatio,” a process that transpires when the soul temporarily vacates the body to contemplate intellective ideals.46 Whatever the edification – and the delights as well – inherent in a vacation in dreamland, some cataclysm has apparently rocked the house of sleep quite dramatically between “The House of Poe” and “Walking to Sleep.” Here it can be suggested that the shadowy enclosures and passages of Poe’s architectonic fantasies are reminiscent of Ovid’s many-chambered Cave of Somnus 44 45 46

“The House of Poe,” 328, 332. Ibid., 337. It should be taken into account that Wilbur ties this idea – that the dreaming mind severs all dependence on the corporeal senses – to Leibniz as explicated by Santayana (337–38), rather than to Early Modern Neoplatonism and its foremost representative, Marsilio Ficino. Leibniz is credited with devising a model of the psyche as a free-standing entity without windows and doors, so to speak, “with a universe painted on its impenetrable walls” (Santayana, quoted by Wilbur, 338). Hence there is a lead-in to Poe, who finds that “the sensuous life of dream is self-sufficient and immaterial, and consists in the imagination’s God-like enjoyment of its own creations” (337). It can also be argued that Leibniz’s position is, in turn, an offshoot of the discourse of Ficino, who posited a category of sublime dream beyond rather than merely cordoned off from sensual determinations. The soul’s temporary abandonment of its linkages with the body, as formulated by Ficino, allowed  – in exceptional instances – the communication of divine messages. See the Platonic Theology, Vol. 4, ed. James Hankins and William Bowen, trans. Michael J. Allen (Cambridge: Harvard up, 2004), 150–61. Thus according to Ficino, in the case of unusually pious individuals, it is possible – while they are asleep – “that their mind, desirous as it is of divine majesty, is vehemently struck by that divinity ... . An infinite and invisible light floods into the quiescent reason; and this light is everywhere whole and integral …” (159). (“… mens eorum divinae cupida maiestatis pulsetur numine vehementer … . Quiescenti rationi lux infinita invisibilisque occurrit, quae ubique tota et in se ipsa sit ... ” [158].) A series of prophetic images may greet the mind at this juncture. For relevant commentary, see Maria Ruvoldt, The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration, 13–16. If familiarity with the Early Modern concept of “high” dream is not required for a reading of Wilbur’s “The House of Poe,” detection of a thread of continuity (extending from the loftiness of Ficino’s dream theory toward the late twentieth century) is useful when “Walking to Sleep” is considered (particularly the second section). The varied idealistic allusions and especially the closing image of Vishnu qualify (if they do not nullify) any notion that the solipsistic enjoyment of dreams is here endorsed as an acceptable end in itself.

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(­Metamorphoses 11.592-649).47 This primal scene of sleep is ambiguously architectural; an extended, mine-like cave (“longo spelunca recessu,” l. 592) is located within a hollow mountain (“mons cavus”). There are no doors that might creak on hinges (“ianua, ne verso stridores cardine reddat,/nulla,” ll. 608–09) and annoy this groggy god. Yet this is undeniably his home and is apparently comprised of numerous recesses or chambers (“ignavi domus et penetralia Somni,” l. 593). In the center of it all is a lofty bed crafted of ebony, on which Somnus conspicuously sleeps (“at medio torus est ebeno sublimis in antro…quo cubat ipse deus ... ,” ll. 610–12).48 But while Morpheus and other sons, the perpetrators of dreams, were ever at hand to follow the behests of their father, Sleep, it is apparently the case that, at the end of “Walking” i (ll.95–99), dreams have vacated the textual premises, with the sleeper in the least inspired of slumbers. Since dreams are from Wilbur’s perspective a virtual stand-in for the optimal mode of poetic discourse (characterized by the free play of a creative imagination), the failure to arrive at the dream-stage in “Walking” i undoubtedly signals a representational flaw. If there is a pathway to identifying the dysfunctional dynamics that here obtains, the factor of an insistent, faulty solitude is certainly involved. Implied once more in this regard is Wilbur’s absorption of Alastor wherein, at one point, Shelley’s perigrinative protagonist engages – in the midst of a dream – in ecstatic union with an idealized feminine figure. But soon the oneiric ­image dissolves, and the man relapses into a weighty and joyless slumber – which is surely dreamless as well: Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep, Like a dark flood suspended in its course, Rolled back its impulse on its vacant brain. (ll. 188–91) In “The House of Poe,” architectural decomposition and collapse are c­ omfortably at home with the plunge taken by the solitary creative subject into the discursive universe of dreams. Oneiricity is, after all, a way for the creative mind at war with the material world to recover a “serene solipsism,”

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The ambiguities inherent in “architecture,” a term that is only seemingly transparent, are intelligently explored by Bernard Tschumi in Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge: mit, 1999), especially in the chapter entitled “The Architectural Paradox” (27–52). For a translation of the “Cave of Somnus” episode with accompanying text in Latin, see Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books ix–xv, 2nd ed., ed. G.P. Goold, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge: Harvard up, 1999), 162–167.

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that ­primitive condition when the infant mind experienced an “imaginative harmony” and could view the world “with a tyrannical and unchallenged subjectivity.”49 Consistent with this acceptance of the poet as a cultural loner – if not an arrant misfit – is Wilbur’s view that the road to dream (i.e., authentic creativity) is likely to entail “the growing solitude of reverie” or in other words, “the isolation of the poetic soul in visionary reverie or trance.”50 In “Walking” i, however, the solitary reverie is no longer dream-inducing. The oneiric sublime will be deferred until the very end of the poem, when Wilbur completes the installation of another representational model. “Walking” i closes with a strange, blank sleep that constitutes a resistance to dream and its narratives. Thus while in “The House of Poe,” crumbling architecture is compatible with the collapse into dream experienced by a solipsistic genius, the “rotten trestle” (l. 30), “rubbly tunnels” (l. 67) and other architectonic structures of “Walking” i do not lead to the desired result. This gathering of verses is, in short, a chronicle of a failed strategy, a blueprint and roadmap of how not to fall asleep. That Wilbur has not entirely cast out the structures of “The House of Poe” is evident in his retooling of the spiral configuration, found in the case of Poe to represent a descent into slumber.51 In “Walking” i, this aperçu seems reflected in the advice of the “counselor” to the effect that the insomniac, during his peripatetic progression into dormancy, will find himself “rounding/A newel post, and starting up the stairs” (ll. 49–50). Clearly, there is a crucial directional differentiation between the two spiralings: down vs. up. A similar insinuation of misdirection or misguidedness is contained in a passage through a mineshaft, past the hieroglyphic markings already mentioned, upward, “ascending toward the pit-head” (l. 68). That the poet was attuned to the difference is implied in lines from an earlier work, “Marginalia,” in which the mind is depicted: Descending into sleep (as when the night-lift Falls past a brilliant floor) ... . (ll. 7–8)52

49 50 51 52

“The House of Poe,” 323. Ibid., 318–19. Ibid., 314. New and Collected Poems, 266. “Marginalia” is included in the 1956 collection, Things of This World. While on one occasion in “The House of Poe” (336–37), Wilbur does record a journey upward into dream, this exceptional passage is effected by the bizarre dwarf, Hop-Frog, and his grotesque adventure has no clear tie-in with the directional valences of “Walking to Sleep.”

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Wilbur thus stages a negative representation of the “therapy” of imagining that one is walking to sleep, although in fact a literal version of this formula was adhered to by Galen. As already noted, the latter had claimed that insomnia could be cured if the patient would only remain standing, however long it might take, for sleep to overwhelm and hence relieve vigilant consciousness. Instead, like Bishop in “Sleeping Standing Up,” Wilbur encodes into the prospect of vertical slumber a series of undesirable associations. At the same time, “Walking” i shows itself fraught with the striations of postmodern encroachment. The extreme paradoxes, fragmentation, and disjunctions of the new movement become prevalent until Wilbur presents – at the close of “Walking” ii – a restoration of horizontality, and of the horizonal values evident in modernist representations of dormancy. Thus making clear eventually that falling asleep (and not walking) is quite a good enough way to proceed, Wilbur – in a long preamble – has depicted his advisee as engrossed in a series of solitary promenades and reveries in an early postmodern “sleep clinic.” The walker is all the while discouraged from determining upon some destination for his “pointless journey” (l. 94). Instead, he is fixated in a particular stratum of liminality, pursuing “an ever-dimming course/Of pure transition” (ll. 88–89) – yet has been unable to proceed to the psychic sanctuary of liminal play that, for Wilbur, is axiomatic in the realm of dreams. The extent of the debt of “Walking” i to Wilbur’s discussion of Poe comes into more complete focus when an additional comment is taken into account. Wilbur equates Poe’s representation of “cellars or catacombs, whenever they appear” with “the irrational part of the mind.”53 In light of this formula, it is evident that a fair section of “Walking” i is an excavation of the psyche’s submerged and irrational impulses. A catalogue of hazardous mental structures emerges, and it includes “gritty cellar steps” (l. 63), a “cathedral’s pillared crypt” (l. 65), “rubbly tunnels” (l. 67) and the “cloacal halls/Of boarded-up hotels” (ll. 90–91). This is all unattractive subterrain within the human mind. And when these details are collated with another group of images, which relate to warfare and military life in general, a sinister mindset has been sketched, what is termed, in everyday language, a “bunker” mentality. Paradoxically paired with reason, this irrational portion of the psyche engenders a deliberating mind that is overly vigilant, too absorbed in its own ratiocinative powers. This portrait of sleeplessness is paralleled in Levinas’s existential nosology, which discovers an excessive and “anonymous vigilance” at the root of insomnia. It might be added that the cerebral orientation in ­“Walking” i recalls the chief character in The Misanthrope by Molière, 53

“The House of Poe,” 329.

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a d­ ramatic writer dear to Wilbur. It becomes a mode of irrationality to be so insistently rational.54 Overall, the cognitive faculties depicted in “Walking” i form a peculiar ensemble – coldly logical yet unreasonable at the same time, solitary and denying of others yet strangely imitative. Yes, imitative because Wilbur has fashioned a textual network determined by imitative readings: of Shelley’s Alastor, of Poe, and of his own commentary on Poe. Solipsism and overly close or “slavish” imitation are in fact quite compatible because together they can be seen as permitting insufficient distance between the imitative and imitated text. No process of mirroring – of texts, of self – can occur via which the imitator works in accordance with such modernist criteria as the novelty, authority, and the “presence” of his own text. In such a case, the would-be writer could be left with nothing more (or less) than “attics full/Of glassy taxidermy” (ll. 91–92) – a figure that, surely, is suggestive of appropriation, of a representational dragging in (and together) of divergent images and texts. After all, the era of this text is a productive period for Rauschenberg, Warhol, and Kiefer even if the effects of the postmodern are more slowly, less readily apparent in “mainstream” writers such as Wilbur. An assessment of the convoluted message of “Walking” i would be incomplete without calling attention to the general historical milieu, beyond the artistic context, to which Wilbur (if obliquely) makes reference. It is difficult to consider a major American poem about failed strategy and published in 1969 without looking for references to the prevailing political reality of the moment, the military incursion into Indochina. While the general in line two who simply gestures and is handed binoculars blends into any number of contexts, a more specific historicism is conjured up in the following lines: Revoke all trees and other cover; blast The upstart boulder which a flicking shape Has stepped behind; above all, put a stop To the known stranger up ahead, whose face Half turns to mark you with a creased expression. (ll. 41–45) Such military strategies as the spoliation of the Vietnamese countryside, the sustained bombing of mountainous and other areas thought to harbor 54

Wilbur’s translation of The Misanthrope (Le misanthrope) was first published in 1954 (New York: Dramatists Play Service). There was thus an ample temporal interval that could favor semiotic fermentation and hence a spill-over from the concerns of Molière’s mordant Alceste to the dubious advice offered in “Walking” i.

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­insurgent troops, and the annihilation of ordinary villagers all find accommodation within these lines. In verbal form, this is documentary footage from a guerilla war.55 The solitude that haunts “Walking” i is at least as much the loneliness of a soldier on patrol near rice patties as it is the isolation of an introspective writer in his study. And the solipsism depicted here may be as readily apprehended as that of some powerful governmental figure or “taskforce” without vision as that of an eccentric poet engrossed in his own visions. “Walking” i, then, is about passage, about an unsuccessful journey into autonomy, about an unresolved crisis of separation. Without a trace of celebration, this section helps inaugurate a new era, a period certainly initiated by the time that the victoryless war to which it alludes has escalated. The abiding sense of anxious liminality cultivated in this section, it can be argued, is equally about an historical shift and an imminent lapse into corporeal somnolence. With the Indochina conflict well underway, the colonial world is 55

Wilbur toward the close of the 1960s was known more as a liberalish upholder of institutions than as an opponent (as indeed he was) of the Viet Nam war. In a 1968 interview, Wilbur takes exception to an informal poll taken by Allen Ginsburg, who asked an audience whether “the United States, in its foreign policy, is psychotic.” One third of those present supposedly responded in the affirmative. Wilbur comments that such individuals style themselves as prophets railing “against a sick society less divinely sick than they are. ... many people who take that position are prophesying not merely against the faults of our institutions, but against institutions themselves ... . Though I can share all their objections to our Viet Nam policy, I’m all for institutions, for working in and through ­institutions ... ” (Joan Hutton, “Richard Wilbur,” in Conversations with Richard Wilbur, ed. William Butts [Jackson: up of Mississippi, 1990], 49). James Longenbach does well to collate and foreground the objections to the campaign in Indochina that are embedded in the Walking to Sleep volume, especially in the section entitled “In the Field,” and most saliently in “A Miltonic Sonnet,” where Wilbur castigates lbj’s critique of a portrait rendered by the painter Peter Hurd. Although Longenbach does not specifically mention “Walking to Sleep,” he remarks that the parent volume in toto has the cast of “a book provoked by wartime visions of carnage and wartime lapses of conscience” (Modern Poetry after Modernism [New York: Oxford UP, 1997], 80). Longenbach also sees Wilbur as “reinvigorated by the 1960s in general and by his opposition to the Vietnam War in particular” (79). For a contrasting view, see the chapter entitled “The Notorious Example of Richard Wilbur” in Edward Brunner’s Cold War Poetry: The Social Text in the Fifties Poem (­Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001), 15–38. Brunner’s position is vigorously argued yet overstated. He finds that Wilbur’s poetry is encased in the restrictive dimensions of 1950s poetics. Furthermore, the “fifties” Wilbur whose literary portrait Brunner delineates is taken as a summation of this poet. That the ingenious execution of much of Wilbur’s work during the 1950s might also suggest that this is a poetry that would evolve – as it clearly did in the case of “Walking to Sleep” – is a perspective not adequately entertained in Brunner’s discussion.

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much in d­ ecline, together with the modernist ideal of the assimilation of every ­conceivable culture within a matrix of progressive Euro-American values. What persists within this quagmire of incipient postcolonialism (and postmodernism as well) is a colonization of the mind, an insistence that the psyche conform to unyielding standards of protocol and civility.56 Hence vertical slumber, the soldier in an incessant state of alert, a fresh surge in the primacy of the symbolic order with its strictures and structures. Hence also a superfluity of signifiers at the expense of determinate or “groundable” meaning. The postmodern scene with which “Walking” i is queasy may be indicated obliquely in the command to “slough all memories at every threshold” (l. 56). This shedding of the past is in keeping with the historical flattening often detected within the postmodern movement. This tendency is often expressed in the practice of arbitrarily regathering the myriad particulars – of history, of individual and cultural memory – that may have been recently discarded or sloughed off from their contexts. Thus, artifacts (e.g., “glassy taxidermy,” l. 92) and other discursive units are appropriated from varied historical contexts for the purpose of assignment to a single setting or framework. “­Walking” i distinctively illustrates this practice with its montage within a 56

The extent to which the two “posts” merge or diverge has been amply debated. The intent here is to point to a sector of overlapping valuation with regard to the decided precedence of labor over leisure – in the world of everyday activities as well as within the internal, psychic economy of individual subjects. Imbrications and divergences are engagingly set forth by Kwame Anthony Appiah in “Is the ‘Post-’ in ‘Postcolonial’ the ‘Post-’ in ‘Postmodern’?” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002), 420–44. Among other points, Appiah argues that the “post” of the postcolonial, “like post-modernism’s, is also a ‘post’ that challenges earlier legitimating narratives. And it challenges them in the name of the suffering victims of ‘more than thirty [African] republics.’ But it also challenges them in the name of the ethical universal; in the name of humanism, ‘le gloire pour l’homme.’ And on that ground it is not an ally for Western postmodernism but an agonist ... .” Appiah also concedes that “what I am calling humanism can be provisional, historically contingent, and antiessentialist (in other words, postmodern) and still be demanding.” (438) Valuable as well is Linda Hutcheon’s essay, “‘Circling the Downspout of Empire,’” in Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, ed. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (Calgary: U of Calgary P, 1990), 167–89. Among other remarks, Hutcheon comments that “the post-colonial, like the feminist, is a dismantling but also constructive political enterprise insofar as it implies a theory of agency and social change that the post-modern deconstructive impulse lacks. While both ‘post-’s use irony, the post-colonial cannot stop at irony ... ” (183). For the present discussion, what is perhaps most pertinent is that neither the typical postmodern nor postcolonial subject (and especially the agenda-laden careerist) is likely to get sufficient sleep while inhabiting his or her particular ideological and cultural grid.

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few lines of archival snippets extracted from ancient Egypt, Europe of the medieval ­cathedral, and America of the mid-twentieth century and later (ll. 63–75). There is also a certain amount of historical irony in the context of effete authoritarianism which permits the Egyptian pharoah to recline eternally in his “vast/Stone tent” (l. 72–73) next to a “shed of corrugated iron” (l. 74) undoubtedly erected for no wholesome purpose. The elaborate and beneficent Egyptian funereal mythology is among the sources of a long tradition of commentary on sleep. Yet the benignant and revivifying slumber (however imaginary) of the corpses of wealthy – and especially kingly – Egyptians has quite evaporated in this hybrid, contemporized context.57 A pyramid, a shed, a barracks, a mine-shaft – this weird accumulation of architectural and other structures is a nearly unmistakable signal of the postmodern orientation of “Walking” i. In addition, the gothic tale of Poe has here been strangely grafted onto the Horatian verse epistle. It is perhaps difficult to recognize the latter form, but Wilbur’s poem is after all an ars poetica, and “Walking to Sleep” retains some of the temperance and conversational tone of its Roman predecessor.58 Like Cheops’s stone tent or the vacant casern, the containers and passages listed above have been divested of their usual associations, removed from what might have been their contexts. Hammered together into a grotesque if faintly mosaic-like ensemble, this menagerie of shapes no doubt makes some kind of statement about literary and other forms. To an extent, this is surely an allegory of formalism, an exposure of forms virtually empty at the end of a tradition. These vacant containers may be cultural forms as well – mechanical rituals devoid of faith or strategies without purpose. But 57

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In the context of Egyptian thanatology, perforated partitions between sleep and death are particularly evident in certain visual depictions of the supine corpse in the papyri of Ani and of Nakht. See the illustrations in Raymond O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, ed. Carol Andrews (New York: Macmillian, 1985), pages 46 and 85. A presentday continuation of this perspective is presented in the title poem of Donald Hall’s The Painted Bed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), xv. Also highly pertinent is Jane Kenyon’s “Pharaoh,” discussed below. Yet it is not too much of a surprise that a stratum of Horatian conversation and counsel is one of the discursive layers of “Walking to Sleep.” Again, as an active reader and translator of French classicism, Wilbur is decidedly familiar with the literary culture exemplified by Molière as well as by Boileau, revivified Horace in Gallic guise. Nor is the persona that inhabits Wilbur’s text far from the goldenly-moderate invocations of a character such as Arnolphe, insistent conciliator in The School for Wives. Edward Brunner is at least correct in his assessment that “Wilbur’s poetry is an art of negotiating among divergent perspectives” (Cold War Poetry, 24). For reflections on Wilbur’s contact with seventeenth-century classicism, see Albert Waldinger, “A Certain Slant of Light: Richard Wilbur as Translator of French,” Meta 44.2 (1999): 295–311.

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whatever the significations of this allegory, they are emitted on an abstract level, in an indeterminate way, in a fashion that assists in announcing a new cultural epoch.59 If “Walking” i is perplexing calligraphy that can scarcely be deciphered, “Walking” ii is by comparison an incipit from an illuminated manuscript and is characterized by optimism and relative lucidity. It might also be observed that “Walking” i includes every conceivable architectural image except a window. Part ii is the window, and to metaphorize further, it is a grand cathedral window leading the inner eye of the reader upward. Yet Wilbur puts forward no facile affirmation, and it is not until the last several lines that the ascendent movement of the section becomes unmistakable. The moment of resolution is clear enough: the insomniac, having undergone a second mode of “sleeptherapy,” can now proceed to fall into a deep, dream-laden slumber. Imbued with the values of modernism, this final inset restores the traditional, horizontal and horizonal status of sleep, which is emblematically represented by the sacred somnolence of Vishnu, who calmly dreams, accompanied by (if not oneirically generating) the immense abundance of the world’s phenomena.60 Leading up to and accompanying this sense of resolution is a series of representational and other valences that contrast with those of “Walking” i. The prior section, as has been argued, discloses an oxymoronic poetics that is one of both imitation and isolation, one in which the imitator attains an inauthentic 59

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Recent allegory has been reviewed in the previous chapter, with particular reference to the perspectives of Paul de Man and Craig Owens. For further commentary, see Zhang Longxi, “Historicizing the Postmodern Allegory,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 36.2 (1994): 212–31. Zhang revisits Romantic poetics in the process of examining the postmodern outlook. He concludes by seeking to narrow the conceptual gap ­generally perceived to obtain between allegory and symbol. The rapprochement that Zhang argues for may simply break down or prove difficult to pursue in complex works at the end of modernism where images are particularly copious and their possible significations are especially numerous. As indicated to this author by Richard Wilbur (personal interview, 9 November 1996), the main source for the latter’s apprehension of the Hindu deity Vishnu was The King and the Corpse: Tales of the Soul’s Conquest of Evil (1948), a digest of global mythology with a focus on the interiorization of moral conflict. Written by Heinrich Zimmer, the study was edited by Joseph Campbell (Princeton: Princeton up, 1993). A long chapter entitled “Four Episodes from the Romance of the Goddess” (239–306) frequently refers to Vishnu. Wilbur registers a general endorsement of Zimmer’s The King and the Corpse in Writer’s Choice: A Library of Rediscoveries, edited by Linda Sternberg Katz and Bill Katz (Reston : Reston Publishing, 1983), 229. Zimmer delineates Vishnu – if not quite as world-poet – as a sustainer of the grand text of the world, for the deity “embraces the totality, tranquilly sustaining everything within himself, as a peaceful slumberer sustains the breathtaking incidents of a dream” (King and the Corpse, 240).

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autonomy because of a full-scale invasion by informing, prior texts. “Walking” ii, however, harbors a domain of allusion, a poetics founded on a loose alliance of fellow craftsmen whose identities are detectable – sometimes faintly – amid a sequence of textual encounters. Sites of effervescence in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins are the likely basis of “the moiled flocking/Of startled rookeries” (110–11) that the still ambulatory but now more hopeful aspirant sleeper may witness. With a less gloomy or anxious attitude, the insomniac is able to commend “the barren bark of winter” (l. 120). Surely, there is a trace of Robert Frost, a recognized Wilbur forebear, in this detail.61 But beware of Baudelaire, mon semblable, mon frère, who is no doubt a stand-in for pessimist Poe and who is depicted via a gallows burdened with a corpse (ll. 122–26). With sleep now imminent, Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” ode is visible in Wilbur’s observation that “inland, one can sometimes smell the sea” (ll. 133). And overall, the scenario is akin to that envisioned in T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”; Wilbur is at this point, it seems, engaged both in sanctioning a canon and carving a niche therein.62 61 Michelson, Scattering Time, 28–31, explores Wilbur’s literary indebtedness to – and subtle but insistent demonstrations of independence from – the poetry of Robert Frost. Philip White examines “Walking to Sleep” as a ruminative response to one of Frost’s most accomplished works, “Directive” (251–52 and 261n7). 62 The relevant lines from Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” are as follows: Hence in a season of calm weather Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither … . (ll. 162–65) (William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Charles Gill [New York: Oxford up, 2008], 301) The distinct echo of this radiant passage in “Walking to Sleep” has also been noted by White, 257. Interviewed by Joan Hutton, Wilbur acknowledges an affinity with the Eliot essay. In response to Hutton’s perception that Wilbur’s verse reveals “the presence of a poet who rarely speaks directly of himself,” Wilbur speaks favorably of a literary “conversancy with other people.” He describes himself as “both a balked scholar and a poet; I have done a lot of reading, and I am likely to be conscious of where I derive from and border on other poetry of this and earlier times” (Joan Hutton, “Richard Wilbur,” 48–49). Such excerpts as the following from Eliot’s essay may seem quite pertinent as the reader unpacks the plentiful allusions of the final thirty or so lines of “Walking” ii: The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same (“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode [New York: Harcourt, 1975], 39).

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With the subtle yet distinct evocation of Wordsworth’s transcendent optimism, it can be argued that this is finally a poem that speaks of religious belief (however tamed or generalized) in addition to many other issues. “Walking to Sleep” may ultimately hint that affirming faith can quell to a truce both the ordinary conflicts that disrupt hours set aside for sleep and the war entered into by the imaginative mind against the world at large. Wilbur may thus evoke a community of poet-priests, in this way hinting at a utopian scheme with a modernist aura that is more or less prelapsarian. This thematics reaches a kind of climax in a hypothetical instance of grace (“if you are in luck” [l. 132]) that bestows a deep psychic peace (“a moment’s perfect carelessness” [l. 134]) that in turn permits sleep. But again, this is an idealized dormancy, one both irenic and thoroughly imbued with the poetry of dreams. The ex-insomniac turned poet will perhaps enter somnolence “in the same clearing” (l. 136) – within the same dynamics of insight – … where, in the old story, A holy man discovered Vishnu sleeping, Wrapped in his maya, dreaming by a pool On whose calm face all images whatever Lay clear, unfathomed, taken as they came. (ll. 136–40) This is a brilliant and complex image culled from Hindu iconography. While subsisting in a dormant state – which is actually one of Vishnu’s several avatarships – , the deity sleeps atop the serpent Ananta, an essential attendant in such a context.63 Wilbur has elided this extraordinary reptile from a version tailored for a non-Asian audience. The representation of Vishnu in this particular format is well known from the sculptural depiction at the Vishnu Temple at Deo­ garh, India (sixth century ce). Deeply pigmented miniatures are also common (fig. 29). A lush coloric effect is implied that stands in sharp contrast with the bland, almost monochromatic spectrum of “Walking” i. Indeed, while the first part of the poem is analogous to a portfolio of black-and-white photographs or an early, silent film, “Walking” ii is redolent of an advanced cinematography, the “technicolor” of a sophisticated modernist cinema. This differentiation is tied to contrasting treatment, in the two sections, of the relationship between signifiers (especially verbal images) and their signifieds. Wilbur has proceeded from an ambiance of disconnection in “Walking” i to smooth tie-ins or sutures in “Walking” ii. In the end, Wilbur prioritizes a literariness leveraged toward visual values but inhabited by a sense of poetic tradition that, in turn, conveys 63

For a fine summary of Hindu belief regarding Vishnu’s sleep and other aspects of the deity, see Diana L. Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (New York: Three Rivers, 2012), 305–08.

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Figure 29  Attr. Master at the Court of Mankot, probably Meju, Vishnu Resting on Sesha (c. 1700-’25). Pigments and gold on paper, 25.3 cm × 19.3 cm (painting and borders). Zürich, Museum Rietberg, permanent loan from the Collection Barbara and Eberhard Fischer. © Photo: Rainer Wolfsberger. ­R eproduced with permission.

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a sense of historical depth. In addition, it is reasonable to submit that Wilbur has anticipated Vincent Desiderio’s later project of verbal / visual mediation. Wilbur has executed a tour de force of representational resolution. The staging is complex and, indeed, totalizing as the deity’s unspecified dreams are paralleled by an infinitude of illusory images in the waters beside which he lies recumbent. This conglomeration of whelming simulacra constitutes, ostensibly, his maya, phantasms endowed with a quality that typically convinces the human mind of their authenticity.64 If Vishnu is not exactly depicted as dreaming the world, this elaborate scenario at least hints at the possibility of a figure who does or could. Hence the implied notion of a world-poet suggests a culminating link in the creative community sketched in “Walking” ii. There is a parallel, then, with Coleridge’s wish, at the close of “Kubla Kahn,” to utter verses that cross the boundary from the representational to the veracious. The alluring imagery on the water is also optimally modern, for it is “clear, unfathomed” (l. 140). Such a condition privileges the notion of stable or “manifest” meanings at an historical juncture when mid-’60s structuralism, in advance of a deluge of deconstructive and other theoretical works, challenged virtually all that was generally accepted as true regarding literary texts, their images, how meanings are produced, and authorship. The subdued war-commentary undertaken in “Walking” i (ll. 2, 41–45, 98– 99), possibly alluding to a war fought in jungles and villages, is attenuated but not abandoned in the second section of the poem. This discursive stratum is evident in the “flak in air” (l. 111) directed at armed combatants – or at committed writers who must cope with acerbic reviewers. Blithely indifferent to whatever transpires around him, however, Vishnu maintains a tranquil visage (l. 139) and, if so confronted, could presumably survive the harshest of criticisms. At the same time, in America of the 1960s, reference to a Hindu deity is likely to carry a message of non-violence. Within this historical and cultural context, the aura of India can suggest pacifism and an alternate approach to the military intervention in Indochina – even if the political overtones in this final image are scarcely detectable. As already noted, Wilbur has been viewed as apolitical or even regressive.65 The presence of Vishnu may not alter that 64

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More or less in sync with Heinrich Zimmer (see above note 60), Wilbur here appears to stage maya as “the world illusion that is operative in all creatures, prisoning them in their flesh and binding them by the shackles of birth and death to the wheel of agony and delight – the enchantment that compasses the ‘continuous creation’ of the world” (Zimmer, King and the Corpse, 264). Wilbur’s tendency toward reticence on political questions is also addressed by Bruce Michelson, Scattering Time, 144–47. Endeavoring to mediate the relative tepidness of

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perception although – in the encircling cultural and historical contexts – there are clear associations of this deity with Gandhi, with peace, with a firm idealism.66 But somewhat ironically, the tranquillity of the conclusion tones down any ideological message, whether dealing with peace or some other topic. Whatever the depiction of Vishnu effects, it is totalizing as well, and it tends to enact what might be termed a discursive defibrillation, a laying to rest of significations that might compete with the powerful impression of aesthetic resolution. This all-inclusive setting can also be viewed as a falling back or regression from the agenda of autonomy unsuccessfully embarked upon in “Walking” i. It is no doubt easier to imagine that one has absorbed the world than, as does the “protagaonist” of “Walking” i, to persist in waging war against it. The spectacular vision of Vishnu is also reminiscent of a key comment in “The House of Poe”: “… the sensuous life of dream is self-sufficient and immaterial, and consists in the imagination’s Godlike enjoyment of its own creations.”67 The poem’s concluding lines in any case constitute an ingenious end to the search for a single configuration that incorporates and unites all ideals. Such a quest was the undoing of the protagonist of Alastor. Vishnu, sleeping within the grand purview of his dreams, endows this elusive ideal with a kind of virtual reality.68

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Wilbur’s critique of the Viet Nam War, Michelson comments, “Watching the mayhem of the sixties, Wilbur’s political worries seem to have centered on the saturation bombings of the English language. Anyone who remembers that time in detail recalls incredible linguistic excesses on all sides, the sickening euphemisms of the Pentagon and the State Department, the numbing hyperbole of the resistance movements.” (145). On the image and strategies of Gandhi as an abiding component of non-violent resistance to the Vietnam conflict, see Clyde Brown and Gayle Brown, “Moo U and the Cambodian Invasion: Nonviolent Anti-Vietnam War Protest at Iowa State University” in Marc Jason Gilbert, ed., The Vietnam War on Campus: Other Voices, More Distant Drums (Westport: Praeger, 2000), 122–23. For Spiro Agnew’s sardonic observation on Gandhi’s persisting presence in the antiwar movement, see Gilbert’s introduction in the same volume, xi. A link between this Indian pacifist and the deity Vishnu has been indicated in a quotation at the beginning of this section. That an obeisance to the supine Vishnu was a fixture at Gandhi’s worship convocations is made clear by Ved Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (New Haven: Yale up, 1993), 8. On Vishnu’s traditional role as mediator of conflicts, see Ariel Glucklich, The Strides of Vishnu: Hindu Culture in Historical Perspective (New York: Oxford up, 2008), 95–97. “The House of Poe,” 337. Along the lines of Wilbur, hesitance to spin beyond a more-than-all perspective on sleep-mediated subjectivity is identifiable in “Pharaoh,” a suggestively titled confessional poem by the American writer Joan Kenyon. (The work has been cited at the beginning of this volume.) Here the global model is accessed and cleverly exploited – but not quite

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Anselm Kiefer’s The Rose Gives Honey to the Bees (Dat Rosa Mel Apibus)

However extensive the conceptual territory indicated by Wilbur, it seems evident that, in depicting totality, the poet has cast his conceptual net no further and rests content with having represented everything – if indirectly, with Vishnu as mediating figure. Presumably, once the entire cosmos has been called into play, nothing larger needs to be accounted for. Yet an even fuller subjective and representational galaxy was hinted at by Mann earlier in this chapter and was tied to a greater-than-infinite self revealed via sleep. This alternative has not been left unexplored, at least by visual artists. Brilliantly illustrative of Mann’s notion of a dormant but world-swallowing ego is a stark and primitivelooking yet refined painting by Anselm Kiefer, de facto hierophant of German postmodern visual representation. Long a virtuoso in the depiction of gaunt



o­ verstepped. The speaker’s companion has succumbed to deep, docile slumber. He lies complacently within the womb of sleep, a figurative if not quite a psychoanalytic reality for Kenyon. By a common enough if extraordinary metaphor, this sleep-womb has at this juncture become a womb/tomb, a site of cognitive regeneration that will culminate in a minor resurrection that is a psychic rebirth as well. The dormant self that Kenyon inscribes is emphatically a global one even if nominally Egyptian. As did care-laden families and attendants of dynastic Egypt, Kenyon’s speaker has made sure that the writing instruments and the spectacles of her beloved are at hand in expectation of his return to and resumption of terrestrial life: I woke in the night to see your diminished bulk lying beside me – you on your back, like a sarcophagus as your feet held up the covers…. The things you might need in the next life surrounded you – your comb and glasses, water, a book and a pen. (ll. 16–22) (Otherwise: New and Selected Poems [Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1996], 213) For Kenyon, the dormant presence of a subject has suggested a totality, has conjured up an historical sublime – and a primal zone of sleep as well – the thanatological cosmos of ancient Egypt. This exquisite territory of somnolence is already alluded to by her predecessor, Richard Wilbur. But Kenyon’s umbrella of metaphor ceases its unfurling here, is content with having summoned up an “all” without reducing it to a mere component, a representational segment within some still larger subjective universe. Thus in relation to the hyperbolized global subjectivity pointed to by Mann, Kenyon, even while drawing a parallel between a bed-partner’s post-surgery somnolence and the opulent slumber of a defunct – but soon to be reborn – ruler of Egypt, keeps the analogy within ample limits. It is enough to have here evoked, via her sleeper, a single discursive world fraught with a refulgent ambience of majesty and opulence.

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landscapes and desolate, earth-toned abstractions, Kiefer executed a number of problematic sleep-related works as early as 1980 and into the mid-1990s. Included in this trend are his sardonic depictions of Jacob’s dream and the sleep of Brunnhilde – anti-climactic, haunting, and monitory works tinged with unhappy allusions to Germany’s infatuation with fascism. Of specific interest in the present context is a work redolent of the artist’s involvement with an Asian mode of spiritual and physical cultivation, Yoga, during the mid-1990s. Commentator Daniel Arasse calls attention to numerous instances in which the artist sets out to depict the human body in provocative, spiritualized positions and contexts. In doing so, Kiefer crosses over into the visual discourse of selfportraiture and “depicts himself lying on the ground in the Hatha Yoga position called savasana, the posture of the corpse.”69 Savasana is by definition not a sleep pose but rather a meditation pose, yet there is undoubtedly a parallel. Savasana is typically assumed by adept practitioners of Yoga at the close of a series of exercises. Its import is the achieving of a deep relaxation, one that is meditative as well. Yoga instructional m ­ aterial emphasizes that the savasana posture should not be perceived as a sleep-state – an exhortation that suggests rather clearly that, yes, this indicator of enlightenment can in fact be mistaken for a version of sleep by all save Yoga initiates and others suitably informed.70 This misprision is all the more likely during the postmodern era when a promptness to conflate discourses already obtains, a readiness to dissolve boundaries as well as execute appropriations to any given semiotic quadrant from almost any other. And currently at the disposal of anyone wishing to investigate or validate the specific confusion here under review (that regarding savasana) are the image-treasuries accessible via the internet. On a floor, on a bed, in a hammock – the postmodern Yoga-ite indulges in savasana only to purify the soul yet ostensibly soothes the body first and foremost. Also loosening the already porous boundaries between savasana and sleep is the dovetailing of a key aspect of this Asian meditative mode – the temporary resemblance of the practitioner to a corpse – and the traditional occidental iconology of death. In the Iliad, sleep and death are twin brothers, charged with bearing the corpse of the slain Trojan warrior Sarpedon from the battlefield to his native 69 70

Anselm Kiefer, trans. Mary Whittall (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 251. The practice of savasana is concisely explained by B.K.S. Iyengar in Light on Yoga: Yoga Dipika (New York: Schocken, 1995), 422–24. For discussion of how savasana can be interwoven into contemporary cultural contexts, see Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010), 104–05, 108–09.

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Figure 30  Euphronius, Thanatos and Hypnos with the Corpse of Sarpedon (6th–5th century bce). Detail from an Attic Red-Figure Calyx-Krater (“Euphronius Vase”). Terracotta, 45.7 cm × 55.1 cm × 29.5 cm. Rome, Museo Nazionale di Villa Giulia. Photo Credit: Scala/ Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, ny.

Lykia, where he can be buried (fig. 30). The archaic Greek mythographer Hesiod specifies that the morbid twins – Hypnos and Thanatos – are the children of Mother Night. These and related fables have long impacted the European perspective on sleep. Such established tie-ins are difficult to discard, and they continue to resonate in artistic renderings of both sleep and death. On the positive side, if death is a version of sleep, the corpse may well at length reawaken. And if sleep is akin to death, slumber is ever to be approached and assessed with worried circumspection.71 71

The relevant passages from Homer and Hesiod are the Iliad 16:667–83 (Lattimore, trans., 348) and Theogony 211–12, 756–61 respectively (Lattimore, trans., Hesiod: The Works and Days, Theogony, The Shield of Herakles [Anne Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1978], 135–36, 168–69). Jonathan Unglaub usefully summarizes the discursive tradition that pairs sleep and death. See Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2006), 125–29. Unglaub’s focus in the pages cited is a statement in Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (ix.18.8), the assertion – uttered by

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Hence if the relevant figure rendered by Kiefer (which happens to be an effigy of himself) appears corpse-like, it can signify sleep as well. Yet what is relevant in this particular example of Kiefer’s works is not simply the evocation of significations of sleep that are multiple, divergent, and coalescing. What here overshadows the rather obvious phenomenon of proliferating meanings is the fact that, in this savasana painting, Kiefer brings into play multiple selves as well, or as indicated above, some works hint of a “more-than-all” dynamism activated at times in postmodern depictions of sleep. In Kiefer’s case, this ­distinctive representational effect is rather salient in The Rose Gives Honey to the Bees (fig. 31). The work is exemplarily hypnoglyphic and postmodern at the same time. A largish work of roughly four by six feet, this painting is confined to a narrow color range of ink, chalk, and earth tones; of these, the brownish tints are mainly due to the raw burlap on which oil and acrylic pigments have been layered. The designations “design” and “sketch” are as ­likely to come to

Figure 31  Anselm Kiefer, The Rose Gives Honey to the Bees (1996). Mixed media on canvas, 280 cm × 380 cm. Private collection. Reproduced with permission of Anselm Kiefer and the Gagosian Gallery. Image © Anselm Kiefer. S­ olimano, a Turkish general – that “there is a short passage between sleep and death” (“dal sonno a la morte è un picciol varco”) (126).

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mind as “painting” as one inspects this striking work, at the center of which Kiefer has positioned an image of himself in corpse-like repose and in rudimentary but recognizable form. The title has been inscribed in Latin (Dat Rosa Mel Apibus) between two of the concentric circles that both surround and seem to suspend the artist’s body in its supine posture. The statement originates as an epigram in the writings of Robert Fludd, an Early Modern writer of esoteric texts who strongly influenced the ameliorative (and obscurantist) Rosicrucian movement.72 Quite rightly, Daniel Arasse points out that “this is rather a surprising new iconographic source to find alongside yoga, because Robert Fludd is a single individual, historically determined and with a specific context.”73 In any case, the thrust of the maxim can be taken as an emphasis on process, as the assumption of a progressive approach to human existence, within and despite the thorn-ridden matrix that constitutes an inescapable factor of human life and is an essential component of the vast “rose of the world.” This floral dynamism yields sweetness, but only to the persistent and focused individual intent on gathering, culling, and cognitively processing amid the virtually infinite shards, fragments, narratives, and episodes strewn across the pathways of ordinary existence. Thus this painting deals with the interactions and engagements between the microcosm (the sphere of the individual subject) and the macrocosm (the larger ordered world or cosmos which is the “home” of humanity of general). Along with the Latin phrase, the borrowing from Robert Fludd is evident also because this ambitious synthesizer included in his magnum opus, The History of Each Cosmos (Utriusque cosmi … historia), a number of “diagrams illustrating the relationship between the microcosm … and the macrocosm … .”74 Quite suggestive in this regard is the ornate title page of Utriusque cosmi … , the lower half of which features a series of concentric circles representing the two “-cosms,” with a standing, nude (as opposed to Kiefer’s supine, semiclothed) male figure dominating the area designated as “microcosm” (fig. 32). In the aggregate, Kiefer partially harmonizes the divergent discourses that he appropriates. The “Yoga-sphere” of this artwork is the realm of reflection, of summing up, of retrospection on and recovery from the achievements, failures, and conflicts of a day, a year, or of some less definite period of time (e.g., a generation, a lifetime). The occidental dynamism of individual and shared universes, infused into this painting via the philosophy of Robert Fludd, has 72

On the maxim “Dat rosa mel apibus,” see J.B. Craven, Doctor Robert Fludd (1902) (Whitefish, mt: Kessinger, 1992), 134 and 147. 73 Arasse, Anselm Kiefer, 256. 74 Ibid.

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Figure 32  Anonymous illustrator (design attr. Robert Fludd) of Robert Fludd’s U ­ triusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica ­historia … ­(Tractatus secundus de naturae simia seu technica macrocosmi ­historia). ­Frontispiece. Engraving, 29.4 cm × 17.9 cm. Oppenheim: ‘Aere J.T. de Bry, typ. H. Galleri,’ 1617–18. (Ex) 6552.352, vol. 1. Princeton, Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University Library. Image credit: P­ rinceton University Library.

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gathered as its purview the ongoing quandaries of existence, the daily deluges of human experience. Whatever the overlappings, parallels, and complementarities that this extraordinary work harbors, the result is not a synthesis; the discursive contrarieties persist and are pervasive. The caked, plaster-like patches of ­pigment, the holographic lines and script, and the overall parched appearance of The Rose ... : all insinuate some troubled and internally dissonant interpretive narrative. “Surprising” indeed, to utilize once more an observation offered by Daniel Arasse: from self-portraiture to a paradoxical, regenerative ­abandonment of the self within a yoga-induced infinity – and then a cartography of the subject within a synergistic opposition, that of micro- and macrocosm. The result is not the synthesis of a Fludd or a Jung. Kiefer’s The Rose … is neither mandala nor a representation in miniature of the collective unconscious. What it is, is a barely controlled cognitive circus of several selves, or it could be termed a psychic pluri-cosmos, a moment of conglomerative cognition managing to entertain a superfluity of discourses. And certainly it is a stellar instance of that uncanny or peculiar “more-than-all” version of individual subjectivity situated at times in postmodern depictions of sleep. Derived from modernist premises yet clearly exceeding the widely circulated Freudian notion of a primary narcissism, the dynamism that Kiefer has put into play can be viewed as representational pleonasm. Such may be the result when a visual or verbal artist seeks out, then re-accesses or reinforces a given motif, trope, or image. Dante’s use of terza rima in the Commedia to recurrently insinuate the trinity as an ideal of piety is a foundational example of this type of pleonasm. In painting of the medieval era onward, architectonic structures frequently echo and reinforce depictions of human figures. To focus briefly on another instance out of a very large number, Oath of the Horatii (1784) by the painter Jacques-Louis David may be as distinguished an example as any. Here the inter-locking arrangement – the mutual echoing of arches, crested helmets, and archi-form postures – is salient (fig. 33). The repetition of formal elements implicitly underscores the weightiness of the course of martial action urged by the father, accepted by the sons, and bemoaned by the women and children in the right foreground and mid-ground.75 In Kiefer’s 75

For an extended investigation of the Oath of the Horatii and its complex representational dynamics, see Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1984), 63–80. Bryson would have it that the multiple structures inherent in the canvas lead ultimately not to semiotic reinforcement but, instead, to dilution. “… the compression of the male figures into a single plane is uncanny because this is at the same time an intensely volumetric painting. The plane of the frieze cuts across the Roman

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Figure 33 Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii (c.1784). Oil on canvas, 330 cm × 425 cm. Paris, Louvre. Inv. 3692. Photo: Gérard Blot/Christian Jean. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, ny.

case, the depictional replication or echoing is, it appears, concerned with the self in its entirety, and not with some quadrant or sector thereof. On the other hand, David has strongly underscored the unbreakable will and commitment of ancient patriots via their placement before a series of sturdy arches. In The Rose ... , Kiefer’s intriguing self-layering or superimposing of one discourse of the self upon another has been shown to draw upon – intentionally or not – the resources and strategies of the representation of sleep. He has here provided (again, by design or not) a complex ensemble that offers parallels and correspondences to any number of other distinguished and varied postmodern depictions of sleep, categorized in the present study as “hypnoglyphs” or sleep-centered artworks. In The Rose ... as in many other examples of the hypnoglyph, customary, clock-measured, calendrical time has been suspended, or at least its phases are barely distinguishable from one another. Also typically evident in these artworks is an interplay or dialectic (rather than a quiescent or reassuring interweaving) between verbal and visual components or strata.

Fran Gardner’s No Need for Wings

A few years later and on the other side of a millennial threshold, an American fiber-based artist, Fran Gardner, offers an exquisite pair of works that can be taken, like at least one of Kiefer’s, to explore what can be called a psychic pluri-cosmos. In contrast to Kiefer’s apparent search for a route to ecstasy in interior like a blade. … its effect is to force on the viewer two competing systems for scanning or interpreting the painting’s spaces: that of the veduta and that of the frieze” (80). Yet along with a deconstructive take such as Bryson’s, an alternate scenario continues to be apprehensible, at least the impression of a carefully and highly wrought structural ensemble.

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Figure 34  Fran Gardner, No Need for Wings (2004). Mixed media (including acrylic, fabric, and found objects) on wood panel. 35.5 cm × 25.4 cm × 2.54 cm. Private collection. Image © Fran Gardner. Photo Credit: Susan J. Smith.

a context that is troubling yet rather monochromatic and includes whatever monochromaticity implies, Gardner’s fields of play are tint-rich. No Need for Wings, for instance, exudes swaths of indigo, vermillion, and deep green at the same time that this multi-media piece reveals (as in Kiefer’s case) multiple wholes and, by implication, a self that has been compounded, has become more than itself (fig. 34). At the base of the rectangular space of No Need for Wings, a rather corpulent figure reclines in an anomalous posture, not a normal waking pose, nor one that appears intended for rest either. The figure has balanced much of her torso on the left hip, one foot extended back and the

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other forward as if to stabilize the position. The shoulders, however, are both in contact with the surface upon which the woman lies, as if she had found herself in a dilemma over whether to recline on the stomach or the left side and had attempted a compromise. Surely there is an uncomfortable twist in the torso in the region of the abdomen and thorax, but the artist has not rendered this inflection in a way that is salient or clear. The posture is in any case ill-suited for relaxation, and as did Kiefer, the artist conceives of it as meditational. It should be added that Gardner professes little familiarity with the German artist and no recognition of him as an influence.76 Yet in any case, as for her predecessor, the iconographical motifs of occidental representation make it likely that almost any supine figure – unless obviously dead (e.g., Mantegna’s of Jesus, post-crucifixion) – will be regarded as asleep. Also to be kept in mind is the prevalence of stilted, atypical, or even outlandish sleep-poses during the postmodern era – for instance the quasi-erect posture of a disillusioned housewife whose seemingly impossible slumbers no doubt presume to articulate a persistent malaise, a resistance to the constraints and unpalatable aspects of her marriage.77 To be entertained, in addition, is the factor of fatigue. Relevant here is the distinct possibility that, while hardly anyone would intentionally select the complicated posture of Gardner’s figure as a vehicle for indulgence in the quiet delights of sleep, an odd pose could result from unqualified exhaustion. Here implied, among various interpretive options, is the abject tiredness of a postmodern subject who so slumbers simply because an occasion for somnolence has presented itself at the close of a protracted episode of tedious labor. She sleeps – it may be – where she has happened to recline and in accordance with the awkward placement of her limbs at a random moment. Artist Gardner, on the other hand, asserts that the figure is not “fallen or defeated but rather suspended in a liminal space.”78 Thus whatever the visual record seems inclined to affirm, the posture may result from something other than an infernal exhaustion. A state of “high” dream, a luminous fantasy-filled hypnagogia, or a meditative quasi-trance – such is the cognitive quadrant (amid effulgent coloration) that the artist has undertaken to construct for her not so relaxed-looking subject. There is thus “no need for wings” or an escape route because this prostrate woman has already achieved a cognitive sublime as suggested by a tarot text, that of the “star” card, which is inscribed in the lower left corner of this artwork. Yet it should be clear that the seemingly c­ ollapsed 76 Telephone interview by author, 10 December 2005. 77 Dunkell, Sleep Positions, 114–115. 78 Written response to inquiry by author, 5 January 2006.

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recliner is hardly to be taken for or identified as the dynamic feminine Star of tarot-lore, pourer of the water of life and giver of inner illumination.79 As for the captivating, undulating orange/yellow/blue line that snakes over the rectangular woven area at the left of No Need for Wings, the artist cautions against regarding this as the after-glow of a wing, or as the recollection of an aborted experiential journey or psycho-sexual quest. Gardner asserts that the entire textile sector and its patterns are “totally abstract,” although the “line” structure can be apprehended “as a path through space, like the path a bird might make as it flies.”80 Hence the area suggests an arena for divagations, but not the itinerary of a disaster-bound feminine Icarus. This intriguing, paradoxical work has been included in this study as an instance of the “more-than-all” type of hypnoglyph more than rarely found among postmodern renditions of the sleeping subject. Several frames of reference are in fact here perceptible. Yet is it in the end something beyond an impressive example of the inclusive narcissism previously considered? That is, does No Need for Wings swallow up and restrain, if only temporarily, all narratives evident within the work, as well as those at its boundaries – thereby bringing into play a resistance to narrative by insinuating that no narratives of significance are found exterior to the work in question? Or on the other hand, has No Need for Wings set out to accomplish something even more ambitious? Is, indeed, a superfluity of discursive universes – all tied to a single, somnolent subject – detectable herein, with multiple purviews of reference warehoused within a single representational corral (or superimposed one over another)? The question is difficult, but for a start, the woman’s strange – and strained – posture helps suggest an answer: there is a certain doubleness; a diploid dimension is implied by the protruding elbows and feet. This figure could be on the verge of being divided down the middle as hinted by the column of vertebralike black squares that juts upward (or downward) at the base of the spine. It may be more likely that this woman is about to expand and separate, by a mitosis-like process, into two complete feminine entities. Hence the cognitive regime of this work, as for several of Kiefer’s, could be determined by the notion that “totality” may be found to be only part of an even larger psychic whole. With regard to the other sectors of No Need for Wings, the semiotic implications (or dilemmas) are similarly subtle. A chunk of computer circuitry, a table of moon phases, a mini-tapestry with a “wing,” a tarot text – interpretation is at a cross79

80

The most widely circulated commentary in English on the tarot deck is Arthur Edward Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911) (New York: Cosimo, 2007). Explanation of the “star” card is included (136–37). Telephone interview by author, 10 December 2005.

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roads here. For these four elements can be apprehended as discreet components of a single and complex yet synthesized psychic unit. In this case, the artwork can be viewed – overall – as a Neo-Jungian mandala, a ­symbolic site of integration and wholeness. It is conceivable as well that these four ­rectangular constituents fail to coagulate into some enigmatic unit or tolerate coordination with one another. In the latter case, subtle antagonisms would be detected between the various elements, each constituting a mini-world unto itself. The entire work will therefore be graspable as an ensemble of entireties, with the rectangular areas and their significations loosely coordinated by the somnolescent figure they crowd around. The latter perspective tends to be confirmed via a closer look at the work’s diverse portions. To be addressed once more is the supine figure, tilting t­ oward the feminine yet minimally giving forth details that would definitely confirm gender. This personnage may be best apprehensible not as a certain individual who remains anonymous but rather as a generalized or abstract rendition of beleaguered – it may be, overly tasked – female subjectivity. Next is the magenta-­tinted grid of moon-phases in the background, which is likely a purview of time in the abstract, with a contextual residue that may connect the grid to feminine perspectives and issues (e.g., menstrual cycles) that relate to time. Also to be entertained is the notion that the grid is a wilted carry-over of the circadian paradigm, a mainstay of modernism that nearly evaporates during the postmodern era, as argued earlier in this study. The computer fragment is surely a noetic component, a field of analysis, calculation, reflection. Now for the highly ambiguous textile sector once again. It is manifestly spatial in its significations, an area where the psyche attempts to soar, fashion itself, or rehearse agendas and ambitions. The textile region can be appreciated as an arena for the unfolding of affective and other inner processes; here the self may be provided with room to play out perceived options and projects. The textual sector serves, basically, as the origin and end of the full assemblage. The challenge of reading its message hinders that role as the viewer temporarily departs from the ensemble to decipher the separate tinted world of the text. The prior tarot episodes of the devil and tower are now proclaimed to be over with. Wings are no longer an advantage. A rationale is thus given for the wing-like non-wing that hovers above – inhabiting and celebrating, in its own realm, its freedom from rules obtaining in any other realm. The text, again, points to the star as, surely, a seat of idealism while its traditional tarot embodiment as a nude water-pourer implies a concept of integrated female selfhood. A guarantor of life and giver of insight, the star-woman emblematizes psychic and other wholeness. She may supply sapience beneficial for the woman who reclines and who is, no doubt, existentially and spiritually dormant even if otherwise awake. The woman of the star, referent of No Need

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for Wings’s textual sector, is the likely target of the “fallen” woman’s eventual growth. In the meantime, they subsist in separate purviews. So much for the multiple self-worlds of No Need for Wings. The assessments may convince or half-succeed. Impressive in the end is the extent to which No Need for Wings elicits hermeneutic efforts. In an analogous way, this representational scenario provides to its reclining personage – amid ambiguities – multiple occasions and formats for self-tryouts and self-renderings. Thus while the work clogs, with a superfluity of clues and hints, any interpretive channel that would definitively organize its signifiers, the supine centerpiece of this artwork is entirely at her leisure to construct, review, disassemble, and recompose any number of discrete and complete selves. Less titillatingly indeterminate than No Need for Wings is a more complicated work overall, Gardner’s Orienting the Self (fig. 35). In the latter piece, whose dimensions and materials are similar to those of its predecessor, it is more clearly evident that the work contains more than one “all”; that is, multiple totalities are here accommodated. The figure in the lower right quadrant is a familiar one, for this ­peculiarly positioned prostrate nude has been relocated via a transfer technique.81 Also more saliently than in her previous habitat, this anonymous if not identityless woman is surrounded by signifiers of wholeness that are of a cosmic stamp.

Fran Gardner’s Orienting the Self

Two representational companions with many similarities, the works are differentiated in that, while No Need for Wings depicts the recliner as awaiting psychic renewal amid abstracted indicators of time and space, the reclining figure in Orienting the Self has seemingly reached a more advanced phase of inner alchemy. The sectors of her surroundings, if bordering on the bizarre, are now less abstract, more terrestrial in appearance than before, more suggestive of approaching opportunities or predicaments wherein self-betterment can be negotiated or strength must be demonstrated. Especially indicative of a trend in Orienting the Self is the tarot text, a feature this work shares with its predecessor, No Need for Wings. But here the scope is even broader; Gardner has interpolated the “world” card (middle right), an undeniable signifier of wholeness, of inclusive entirety. What’s more, the text even asserts (beyond its already audacious claim that the card is a stand-in for a spatial purview of truly global proportions) that “the macrocosm and the microcosm, even right and left, have now become one.” The ­parallel with Kiefer is salient at this point. For fusing, as did Kiefer, both 81

Written response to inquiry by author, 5 January 2006.

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Figure 35  Fran Gardner, Orienting the Self (2004). Mixed media (including acrylic, fabric, and found objects) on wood panel. 35.5 cm × 25.4 cm × 2.54 cm. Private collection. Image © Fran Gardner. Photo Credit: Susan J. Smith.

geographic and human worlds, Gardner purports to construct – in the midst of inexhaustible cognitive space – an arena of awesome grandeur to be given over to enunciating, delimiting, and situating a discourse of self. Nor does the chalking up, the accumulation of worlds conclude here. For Gardner has also ingeniously incorporated a celestial map crowded with zodiacal symbols, certainly a very ample enclosure for unfurling a ­self-cartography that is usable and complete. Particularly intriguing is a textile insert that, with its egg-like moon, verdant landscape-like quadrant, and suggestive red rods, is

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provocatively psycho-sexual, is perhaps a mental locale where erotic chronicles and self-mappings can transpire if only symbolically as dreams or as other interior narratives. Also to be tallied in this census of totalities is the substantial section of a map of Alaska that fills (and indeed overflows) the lower left ­quadrant of the artwork. Surely something ameliorative is hereby implied with regard to empirical experiences, e.g., orienting oneself in the “real” world or testing out one’s competencies and responses amid life’s varied situations, amid its crises. And certainly messages regarding attainment, goals, reaching higher levels are implied as well since this map-fragment features the topography near Mt. McKinley, a region of exquisite elevations. An arresting cornucopia of “alls” has been deftly assembled herein. To be reckoned with, in addition, is the fragment of computer circuitry, another parallel with the prior work, No Need for Wings. There the import of the cybernetic component seemed compromised, perhaps indicative of mundanely rational, calculator-like skills because of its placement along the left edge of the panel. Not so in Orienting the Self, for on this occasion the cybernetic element’s location is more central, almost that of a navel. Hence if it does not quite garner the significance of a prophetic omphalos – or show itself ready to emit helpful forecasts of some sort – this cryptic green rectangle suggests wholeness or integration and may allude to r­ atiocinative skills useful in mediating life’s dilemmas, in alleviating its tensions. Opportunities for confusion and misguided actions are abundant as well, however, in Orienting the Self. It may be unsettling, for instance, to note that amid a plethora of opportunities for self-orientation, there is only one self in need of directional fix or repair. Another matter of concern is the dubious likelihood that the archaic petroglyphs viewed by Gardner in New Mexico and now swathed across the woman’s buttocks (and construed “as guides, like road signs” by this artist)82 will offer utilizable messages in a post-9/11 world. Nor can a conscientious review of the work’s representational paradoxes ignore the fact that, in an artwork preoccupied with self- and other cartographies, a key component – a section of a map of Alaska – is in fact upside-down as certified by a directional indicator for “north” that points southward instead. A final notable detail of this almost mesmerizing artwork resides in the disposition of the reclining figure’s legs. For while the left leg is apparently inclined backward and the right one forward, the specifics cannot be determined. Hence this densely coded and pluri-dimensional fable of self-location also turns out to be a haven of dislocation. Some confusion notwithstanding, Orienting the Self is in any case saturated with the notion of multiple totalities. Subtly emanated, at the same 82

Telephone interview by author, 12 January 2006.

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time, in conjunction with this representational saturation or pleonasm, is a distinct euphoria, a quiet joyousness in the presence of auspicious accumulations. This facet of the artwork is evocative of the postmodern, at least from the ­perspective of such cultural theorists as Fredric Jamison, who detects a euphoric strand in postmodernism. Effervescent if not simply illusional, this experience of a psychic “high” parallels a recognition of immense amassings of capital, a sense of infinite occasions for material increase, economic and other exchange, alliances, and realignments.83

David Yaghjian’s Sleep

This chapter has examined several artistic contexts in which sleep displays an oceanic dimension that is ameliorative and which present parallels with 83

For Jameson’s main commentary on postmodern euphoria, see Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Captialism, 34–39. Early on in this monumental study of the era, Jameson finds that the dynamism of euphoria is a dubious phenomenon. It seems that the demise of the “centered subject” of the industrial age has entailed “not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling.” The consequence is not that there is no affect at all in the postmodern world, argues Jameson, but rather that the feelings that persist “are now free-floating and impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria” (Postmodernism, 15–16). In the case of Gardner’s work, in contrast, it can be maintained that the artist has proceeded beyond a flight from self, has endeavored to recuperate subjectivity by multiplying the options – if only illusory – for selecting and charting whatever elements or opportunities for selfhood continue to subsist during the postmodern. Insinuating a “new” subjectivity amid an almost unnerving plethora of ­possibilities, Gardner can be said to offer a certain resistance to the postmodern, to express an interest in maneuvering around it. The recourse to the representation of sleep and its inherent resistances here ties in with a degree of resistance to the postmodern. At the same time, it should be suggested that a parallel emerges between Gardner’s artwork and Jameson’s subsequent claim that “much of the euphoria of postmodernism derives from this celebration of the very process of high-tech informatization (the prevalence of current theories of communication, language, or signs being an ideological spinoff of this more general ‘worldview’” (Postmodernism, 276). In light of this pronouncement, Gardner’s representational axis begins to tilt back toward long-standing postmodern trends. There is an implied rejoicing in the opulence and variety of discourses, especially quantitative ones that can only arguably be harmonized with a program of self-discovery and realization. Gardner’s “super-store” of the self is problematic to the extent that a viewer may detect an unmediated fascination with cartographic, cybernetic, or even aerodynamic registers of discourse. For more recent comments by Jameson on this topic, see Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), 371, 408.

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the psychoanalytic rubric, primary narcissism. A dynamics of ego expansion – indeed, of distension – has often been found to obtain with regard to the sleeping self during modernism and postmodernism. A sense of “high” fullness or even an illusory multiplying of the self has been evident. Worth considering as well is the existence of a contrarian counterpart to such aesthetic sites. At various points in this study, the negative associations of sleep have been explored: the tie-ins with castration, depletion, and death manifested – for instance – in the Iliad, in the chronicle of Samson, in the dozing off of Jesus’s disciples prior to his arrest at Gethsemane, in the first section of Wilbur’s “Walking to Sleep.” Helpful in this regard is the work of André Green, who proposes that what is commonly referred to as primary narcissism should be broken down or subdivided into additional categories. Especially worth discerning is the state of “negative narcissism, the dark double of the unitary Eros of positive narcissism; all object or ego-cathexis containing within it its inverted double which aims at slipping back regressively towards the point zero.” Thus while what is typically termed “primary narcissism” pure and simple tends to designate an expansive zone that is pleasurable in toto and where the self is all, the cognitive purview so indicated is actually the positive sort, is only one side of the coin. Green argues that, in distinct contrast, “negative narcissism tends towards non-existence, anaesthesia, emptiness, the blanc (from the English ‘blank’ …).” This blankness may in effect draw the sap out of an individual’s affective responses or the mind’s representational capacities or out of other forms of cognition.84 Green’s provocative exposition of a negatively nuanced narcissism correlates with his comments on the narcissism of sleep as opposed to that of dreams. Once more, as an alternative to defining primary narcissism as a single state or condition that is ever consistent, Green resourcefully identifies fissures and sub-categories within that perplexing conceptual sector. Green proceeds with a reminder of the Freudian perspective that sees the dream “as the expression of that which refuses to be silenced, and which sleep has to integrate if it is not to be interrupted (a breach of narcissism).”85 Dreams thus transpire within the larger narcissism of sleep that seeks to maintain its placid, stimulifree continuation. Green argues that oneiric episodes tend to reinforce “the narcissism of the dreamer” who is inevitably “the principal dream character who, as it were, always glorifies the dreamer – a point of view which is by no 84

André Green, Life Narcissism Death Narcissism, trans. Andrew Weller (London: Free Association, 2001), 10. For astute discussion of Green’s ideas and those of other commentators on this topic, see Rosine Jozef Perelberg, “On Narcissism,” Freud: A Modern Reader, ed. R.J. Perelberg (London: Routledge, 2005), 72–90. 85 Green, Life Narcissism Death Narcissism, 51.

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means undermined by dreams of self-punishment or nightmares.” The more basic narcissism of sleep, however, exercises a certain one-upmanship ­vis-à-vis the self-fascination of dreams. Whereas the dreamer consistently has the ­ulterior motive of wishing not to wake up, sleep-narcissism is already there; “it supports the movement of the dream and withdraws from it into a region that is out of reach, in which the dreamer himself vanishes.”86 Thus sleep turns out to be a desirably depicted variant of what has been just categorized as the “negative” type of narcissism. What’s more, Green’s discussion involves sleep in what he refers to as “absolute primary narcissism,” which is a desire to proceed beyond all desires that both buoy and constrain the ego. Seeking “the mimetic sleep of death,” this version of narcissism, perhaps the “purest” of all, “is the quest of non-desire for the Other, of non-existence, non-being ... .”87 Green’s portrayal of a negative narcissism with sub-variants seems pessimistic, but overall, his exposition – originally published in France near or at the apex of the postmodern (1983) – is also suggestive of a possible exit (if only of a wish to exit) from the postmodern as a very broadly inclusive, conglomerate movement. Among the bases of the postmodern condition are processes of aggressive accumulation (that is, filling something – an emporium, an artwork, a personal supply of capital – to capacity and beyond) and of vigorous appropriation (that is, the seizing of things that are external, on the other side of a barrier, so that they fall under the aegis of a corporate entity or become part of one’s own holdings, or indeed, of oneself). In contrast to such trends that hint of affinities with the category, primary narcissism, the prospect of a negative counterpart evokes modalities of deflation, emptying, detumescence, of subjective or other impoverishment. Certainly, given the gamut of possible outcomes that could emerge from this distinctive corral of cognition and affect, instances of a paradoxically constructive, negative narcissism should be locatable within the arts, especially if a waning of the postmodern is taking place. Such a phenomenon might be identified in the endeavors of the few individuals who have elected, amid affluence, to pursue a lifestyle that entails the consumption of minimal resources and deposits a negligible carbon residue or trace. No doubt also suggestive of a “positive” negative narcissism are the actions of an American soldier, Salvatore Giunta, recipient of a presidential award for having rescued several of his cohorts in the midst of a tumultuous combat. On this occasion, the awardee himself was indisputably among the targets, and it is only reasonable for him

86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 222; cf. 51.

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to have been primarily concerned with saving himself.88 Such instances of ­apparent disregard for or effacement of the self can be viewed as dovetailing or merging with traditional notions of altruism and heroism. Well beyond the current project, detailed familiarity with the psychic workings of (and with what is valued as knowledge by) individuals such as Giunta and members of the “carbon-free” crowd would make possible a determination as to whether a negatively nuanced narcissism is involved in their actions. Given the above considerations, it is à propos to close this chapter with the “interview” of a contemporary visual text that relates to this type of ­narcissism – even if the inquiry only points to an empty interior, toward absent cognition. Indeed, an outcome of this sort should not be unexpected. Worth assessing in this context is a painting by David Yaghjian (b. 1948) entitled Sleep (2009), a sizable canvas featuring a reclining, semi-clad male figure of rather advanced years if not decisively in a state of old age (fig. 36). And it could be argued that

Figure 36 David Yaghjian, Sleep (2009). Oil on canvas, 152.4 cm × 106.7. Private Collection. Image courtesy of the artist. © David Yaghjian.

88

Craig Whitlock and Greg Jaffe, “Obama awards living soldier Salvatore Giunta the Medal of Honor,” Washington Post, September 10, 2010 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp -dyn/content/article/2010/09/10/AR2010091002712.html).

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nothing in the work is decisive, beginning with the fact that the figure, while male, is by no means vigorously masculine. Hardly well-muscled in the chest, this gentleman is a bit pear-shaped around the waist and is “clothed” only with a towel-like piece of fabric – not quite a garment – wrapped around the hips, leaving the navel and a slightly bulging belly almost embarrassingly exposed. Suggestive of wounds are a number of reddish tints and markings – below and to the anatomical right of the navel, on the subject’s right hand, on the exterior of the upper left arm, just below the folded hands. The sanguine areas could possibly be considered a decorative facet of the painting’s overall color scheme, as echoes of the dusky vermilion background; a more persuasive reading is that the suspected areas are wounds – psychic, corporeal, or both. Here may lie the victim of a foreclosed mortgage or of an abhorred pink slip. In any case, this damaged and seemingly identity-less figure comes across as a candidate for – or has already undergone – an autopsy, for his slumber evokes that “mimetic sleep of death,” to borrow a phrase from André Green. Yet the morbid dimension of the painting is best understood as an intimation and not a keen signifier of the actual death of the depictee. According to the artist, the work is partly heautoscopic, a registering of Yaghjian’s concerns regarding aging and eventual demise.89 An unmistakable foreshadowing, if not a certification, of “the end” is in any case conveyed by this canvas. The sense of terminus communicated by the blank visage of the sleeper has been reinforced through certain toyings with perspective. As a result, along with the sleeper’s unrestful posture that is neither vertical nor horizontal, there are prominent oblique angles at the base of the window, where the base of the wall meets the left and right boundaries, and in the stark framing of the sleeper’s bed. Clearly, more than just the geometry is here askew. The strong tilting lines, the juncture of vegetative green and a profusion of red insinuate, it may be, a sloping toward a sunset, a close of life’s day. During whatever interim remains for this sleeper, it seems that the ego has already exited the representational arena. Subdued signs of life, of élan, are emitted only by the tensed fingers, by the slightly elevated right hand. Here at the waning of the postmodern, it is worth recognizing that this latter element can be apprehended as the grasper of a brush, as the organ of a painter’s agency, as potentially the fabricator of some small sector of an improved reality.

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Personal interview by author, 24 May 2010.

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Latter-Day Ariadnes: From Hypnoglyph to Somnoscript … she does not yet believe that she has indeed seen what she has seen, since it is only just then, roused from deceptive sleep, that she can discern that she is deserted and miserable in the lonely sand. … departing with heedless heart, her husband left her – her eyes enthralled to sleep. catullus 64.55–57, 122–231

…

The bark of Theseus grew smaller against the horizon as the Cnossian maid lay languid on desolate shores … . So Cynthia appeared to me to breathe soft repose, her head cushioned on listless hands when I staggered in on footsteps heavy with much of Bacchus’s gift. propertius 1.3.1–2, 7–92

…

Ariadne Reclines Ariadne reclines, sleeps, declines to weep 1   (… necdum etiam sese quae uisit uisere credit, utpote fallaci quae tunc primum excita somno desertam in sola miseram se cernat herena. ... eam devinctam lumina somno liquerit immemori discedens pectore coniunx. [nw, trans., from C. Valerii Catulli Carmina, ed. R.A.B. Mynors {Oxford: Clarendon, 1989}]) 2   (Qualis Thesea iacuit cedente carina languida desertis Cnosia litoribus … . talis uisa mihi mollem spirare quietem Cynthia non certis nixa caput manibus, ebria cum multo traherem uestigia Baccho ... . [nw, trans., from Sexti Properti Elegos, ed. S. J. Heyworth {Oxford: Clarendon, 2007}]) © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004316218_005

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though fraught with the freight of Theseus’s desertion and caught in the sweep of Bacchus’s carousal. An arm is curved – upward, back, over the head; it is as if she bears an enormous ear. She is supine, just so, all but naked in ancient lingerie … and in illo tempore, the panty was not yet invented! Already taken for a ride, ready to be taken, she – a sculpted dream – is now desire’s glyph. nathaniel wallace

∵ The female figure that is the focus of this chapter was previously introduced, as an illustration of the phenomenon of vertical slumber, via Eric Marrion’s ingenious statue, Relaxing Nude. This plebeianized rendition in plaster of Paris with an antiqued finish was put on display in an ambience of casual dining, of ordinary consumption. An unsuspecting transplant – indeed, a refugee – from a mythic age of migrating heroes and wandering gods, this nude female sleeper with her cheap veneer both reduced and amiably translated a golden fable into contemporary visual discourse. The sleeping girl or woman, often nude or revealingly semi-dressed, is a widely evident figure in literature, painting, and other visual art. A bit like Joseph Campbell’s proverbial hero, she wears a thousand visages, or nearly so, but there the resemblance ends. She may awaken at some point but is often depicted only in the dormant state; in some representations, there is an indication that her passage into normal consciousness will be indefinitely deferred. She is an emblem of transition, of passage into – if not successfully through and beyond – a liminal phase. An optimistic rendition of a contemporized

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­Ariadne has just been assessed in Fran Gardner’s No Need for Wings and Orienting the Self, works heavily endowed – it may be, overly so – with semiotic possibilities and experiential options.3 Not so in the case of the typical sleep-doused female. She is already subject to sexual appropriation in Greek vase depictions of the classical period as ithyphallic satyrs grasp the arms and legs of a somnolent maenad, obviously preparing to forcibly penetrate (fig. 37). Thus she is not always called Ariadne; it is enough that she has alluring legs and a comely torso.4 She could also transmogrify into the long-slumbering princess of fairy tales or into Venus, as in Giorgione’s early cinquecento painting (1508), which mothered the depiction of a host of naked and napping nymphs and other women during the Early 3 The ameliorative possibilities attachable to representations of Ariadne are eloquently emphasized by Matthew Gale in a discussion of de Chirico’s revivification of this classical figure. Focusing on the painter’s study of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gale maintains that de Chirico highlights the static element of the classical Ariadne as she lies in repose in the interval between her two liaisons, “but the moment he depicts is nevertheless one of transformation. Ariadne’s sleep is the moment in which abandonment and discovery touch, in which mortal and immortal, Apollonian and Dionysian worlds meet. She is the conduit” (“Rewinding Ariadne’s Thread: De Chirico and Greece, Past and Present” in Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne, Exhibition Catalogue, ed. Michael R. Taylor [London: Merrell/Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002], 56). For an astute look at the classical Ariadne as rendered by Catullus, see Hunter H. Gardner, “Ariadne’s Lament: The Semiotic Impulse of Catullus 64,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 137.1 (Spring 2007): 147–179. Gardner finds that, in the case of Catullus, Ariadne retards rather than facilitates the succession of masculine agendas and orderings. “Though the heroine initially appears vulnerable within the socio-symbolic contract, she eventually reacts against it and disturbs the heroic progress of Theseus and the paternal order he supports …” (160). Also useful are Rebecca Armstrong’s reflections on the sleeping Ariadne of Ovid’s Heroides 10 (Cretan Women: Pasiphae, Ariadne, and Phaedra in Latin Poetry [Oxford: Oxford up, 2006], 225–28). More so than in the case of Catullus, Ovid’s heroine is “aware of the part sleep plays in her desertion, accusing Somnus ... ” (226). 4 Shiela McNally’s pioneering work on depictions of sleep in antiquity remains essential (cited earlier). Also quite relevant are Barbara Goff’s remarks on molesting satyr-sleeping maenad encounters shown on Greek ceramic vessels (Citizen Bacchae: Women’s Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece [Berkeley: U of California P, 2004], 266–70). Referring to depictions on ceramic vessels, Goff comments, “A significant characteristic of these scenes is their momentary quality; given that they cannot tell a complete narrative … , the viewer is emphatically drawn into supplying the discursive content of the scene” (267). This statement provides evidence of how, once again, the factor of sleep both resists and assists narrative processes. The sense of incompleteness linked to the dormancy of the represented subject stimulates interpretive activity on the part of the viewer/audience.

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Figure 37  Makron, Satyrs and Maenad (c. 490 bce). Detail from an Attic Red-Figure Drinking Cup (kylix). Ceramic, 8.9 × 21.8 cm. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. Henry Lillie Pierce Fund, 01. 8072. Photograph © 2015 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Figure 38  Giorgione, The Sleeping Venus (1508 – ’10). Oil on canvas, 108 × 175 cm. Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. Photo Credit: hip/Art Resource, ny.

Modern period (fig. 38). It is reasonable to propose that the divinity of Venus can be apprehended as a type of prophylaxis, even during a post-classical era. For it can be argued that no one would dare molest a goddess – as opposed to a quotidian maiden – however voluptuous, while she slumbers on tangled

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bedding that has inexplicably found its way into the midst of a landscape notable for its refined luxuriance and for its measured dispersal of vegetation, of architectural and other forms. If Giorgione’s Venus as ersatz Ariadne is exempt from the genital meddling, from the transpositions of spousal ties to which her less-than-divine “descendants” are susceptible, she exhibits the usual traits of this representational type in other respects. Immune to intrusive physical touch within her pictorial domain, she is, at the same time, unquestionably posed, placed at the viewer’s disposal, subject to the gaze, to the optical “embraces” of onlookers. Moreover, in visual contexts other than the earliest depictions on Greek vases, a subdued but titillating eroticism is typically the order of the day in the liminal territories that Ariadne occupies. The viewer’s surveying of the dormant nude or demi-nude is de rigueur, is an implied or expected complement of the pictorial givens. Ariadne, however named, usually reclines within elegant and complex ensembles that can tend to scatter, to dissipate somewhat, the gazer’s erotic intent. Her full or partial nakedness may be exhibited in broad daylight. Or as in the case of de Chirico’s Ariadnes, she may be a piece of sculpture to begin with, ­displayed amid shadowy but exposed, public spaces. And even if the statue were somehow “real” – a living, vulnerable figure –, passersby are frequently present in de Chirico’s canvasses. Such figures, conceivably, could defuse an erotic foray or intrusion (fig. 39). The Latin renditions of Ariadne’s tale similarly keep the erotic dimension on a rather tight leash. The speaker of Propertius 1.3, to give an example, declines to disturb his somnolent mistress (although he wishes to do so) as he drunkenly returns home. It is among the Ariadne figure’s distant literary progeny of the Early Modern era and later that what had been left to the imagination of the audience (again, Greek visual antecedents excepted) now attains “reality” through representation. This point is memorably made in Thomas Campion’s rather

Figure 39 Giorgio de Chirico, The Joys and Enigmas of a Strange Hour (1913). Oil on canvas, 83.7 × 129.5 cm. Private Collection. Image © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ars), New York/SIAE, Rome.

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well-known air, “It fell on a Sommer’s day.” Campion herein treats of the fictive but consistently feigned sleep of a certain Bessie who is approached – and delightedly acquiesces to penetration – by a lubricious young man, Jamy. She thereafter “sleepes ev’rie afternoone” so as to enjoy the repeated visitations of her amorous Jamy.5 A key juncture for the status of sleep as a zone of sexual exploitation is evident in Giambattista Basile’s founding version of the “Sleeping Beauty” theme, “The Sun, Moon and Talia” (“Sola, Luna e Talia”). In contrast to the heroine of the more widely disseminated rendering by Charles Perrault, Basile’s young woman is incapacitated not by the prick of a needle but through contact with a strand of flax which became caught beneath a finger nail (“dintro l’ogna” [443]).6 And instead of lapsing into a state of profound somnolence that tolerates life, the hapless Talia is said to have simply “dropped dead” (“… cadette morta ’n terra” [443]). In what may be better termed a deathlike coma, she is placed by her grieving father in a luxurious setting within his palace. This Early Modern Ariadne is then abandoned (and the palace as well) to the hazards of fortune. Talia is at length discovered by a meandering king who, “supposing that she was sleeping” (“credennose che dormese” [444]), is inflamed by her voluptuousness. He must have her and cannot leave until he has partaken of “love’s fruits” (“li frutte d’ammore” [444]). With the narrative robustness typical of fairy tales, the unresponsive Talia is not just impregnated but gives birth to twins, one of whom at length dislodges the pernicious flax from her finger. The reader is at this point led to infer that she has been a “sleeping beauty,” for then she seemingly “was released from a great sleep” (“… se scetasse da no gran suonno” [444]). It should also be acknowledged that, in the case of both Campion and Basile – two texts that helped establish the “sleeping beauty” paradigm –, the slumber of the heroine is never defined with full clarity. Yet representationally, her sleep is in each instance real though at the same time a construct of the desiring male gaze. This perceptual outcome is said to be encouraged (or hoped for) by Campion’s Bessie but is “true” only when taken as such and acted upon by the aroused Jamy. In Basile’s tale, it is no less than a king who apprehends the maiden’s stupor as a consequence of the dormant state. To be recognized as 5 Thomas Campion, Ayres & Observations, ed. Joan Hart (Manchester: Carcanet, 1981), 29–30. 6 Citations of “Sole, Luna e Talia” are intext and are drawn from Michel Rak’s edition of Il Cunto de li Cunti (Milan: Garzanti, 1995), 443–48 (http://www.letteraturaitaliana.net/pdf/ Volume_6/t133.pdf). Translations of the excerpts are mine. For a full translation preceded by a useful introduction on “fruitful sleep,” see Jack Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 684–88.

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well in each text is the role of the synthesizing narratival voice that, though anonymous, coordinates all details and tilts them in the direction of male interests and values. It is implicitly true (so it seems) that it is acceptable to corporeally invade feminine territory – to take sexual possession – if the owner or source of that pleasurable ground is asleep. Thus Talia becomes retrospectively somnolent rather than comatose at the close of the tale – after the impregnating king has married her – with Basilio’s comment that, “even when one is asleep, something good may rain down.” (“Quanno dorme perzí chiove lo bene” [448].) Now that she is assimilated into a patriarchal matrix, there is a sense of fit in her having passed through a liminal phase as a sleeping beauty, a phase that certified both her sensual attractions and an egregious acquiescence held desirable in domestic contexts. Prior to proceeding to an assessment of the texts and images that are the primary focus of this chapter, it is helpful to revisit Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus. The subject of this artwork has been identified as an erotic focal point though unviolated in her slumber. Hence, she links up with the unmolested young woman of Perrault’s “La belle au bois dormant” (the tale that is the font for the most familiar – the “G” or “family” – version of the “Sleeping Beauty” narrative). This depiction of Venus – even as it helps adumbrate an overarching theme – thus differs in a key aspect from Basile’s earthier or “adult” rendition. This latter variant inches its way into prominence, if not surprisingly, as postmodernism advances.7 Attention should also be called to an aspect of Giorgione’s Venus that she shares with a cornucopia of other sleepers. At issue is the right arm encircling the cranium, a gesture highly prevalent among visual depictions of dormant figures and often commented on by historians of classical and Early Modern art even if it is rarely referred to in literature. It is the conventional sign of the 7 Anticipating this trend is Italian postmodernist Italo Calvino’s inclusion of an arrant, bawdy version of the narrative in an early work, his capacious anthology, Italian Folktales (trans. George Martin [New York: Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, 1980]; Fiabe Italiane, Vol. 1 [Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1956]). Relevant here is the “The Sleeping Queen” (207–13); (“La Regina Marmotta,” 1:241–47). In this variant, a certain Andrew (Andreino) enters a deserted palace where, conveniently at bedtime, he discovers a large chamber “containing a large bed, in which a maiden of angelic beauty lay sleeping.” Not surprisingly, she has been enchanted by an envious fairy, Morgan le Fay (Fata Morgana). “After a little reflection, he undressed and slipped into bed beside her passing a delightful night without her giving any sign she knew he was there” (210). (“ … un gran letto e dentro una fanciulla di bellezza angelica . … Andreino, dopo aver un po’riflettuto, si spogliò e s’infilò nel letto accanto a lei, e cosí passò con lei una dolcissima notte, senza ch’ella mostrasse in alcun modo d’accorgersi della sua presenza” [1:244].)

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sleeper as opposed to the corpse even if, as Brunilde Ridgway has argued, the gesture is first evident in depictions of the dead in Greek art of the archaic period. New values and interests are apparent during the Hellenistic era, Ridgway continues. At least in the realm of visual representation, “The sleep of death was replaced by true sleep, induced by natural causes or by drunkenness, fatigue or sorrow … .” Hence the head-encircling arm, as artistic signifier, was transformed during an era of general cultural relaxation.8 Another commentator, John R. Clarke, extends the interpretation substantially, arguing that the gesture is sexual, an invitation originating in funereal relief sculpture depicting Endymion and Ariadne, who innocently – perhaps unconsciously – invite a divine lover to inspect, indeed touch the semi-clothed body of the mortal beloved who has lapsed (if only temporarily) into the deepest of all slumbers.9 Clarke’s position is appealing, especially since fully accepting it would clarify the meaning of every representation of a sleeper where the gesture in question is displayed. Yet it is possible that this line of argument mistakes a large subcategory for an even larger one in which the former is included. Sexual innuendo is difficult to exclude from any depiction of a nude or scantily-clad figure, whether in verbal or visual discourse, whether the cranium-encircling arm is represented or not. Yet as already seen, Giorgione’s magisterial Venus in a landscape denies a sexual invitation as much as she may extend one. The curving arm in this case could well be a gesture of readiness to protect the self, to ward off harm of some sort. Sexuality was a universal concern in antiquity as in every time period. Yet a more basic concern that cuts across – and beyond – the erotic dimension of the sleeper has been an anxiety about what happens to the psyche, the self, when the body is dormant. Beyond the persistence of respiration, does the subject – centered in the individual mind – maintain a subsistence level of integrity? Does Ariadne (or any woman or any man) as human entity still exist beyond value as a sexual commodity? Does the dormant psyche preserve at least some coherence and vitality through dreams? As already argued in this discussion, the view that sleep is never – or very ­rarely – devoid of dreams has been widely and boldly enunciated from antiquity onward. To many (but hardly all) who have reflected on this topic, the putative ubiquity of oneiric ­experience during 8 Brunile Sismondo Ridgway, “A Story of Five Amazons,” American Journal of Archaeology 78.1 (January 1974): 11. 9 John R. Clarke, Looking at Love-Making: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art, 100 b.c. – a.d. 250 (Berkeley: U of California P, 2001), 68–70. Clarke here follows the lead of an esteemed German predecessor, Hellmut Sichtermann. See Die mythologischen Sarkophage, vol. 12, Part 2 of Die antiken Sarkophagreliefs (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1992), 33–35.

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periods of corporeal dormancy is comforting. The inevitability of dreams hence defends against a general néant that would negate the concept that the soul is immortal and would significantly compromise the notion that the distinctive stamp of each individual has a certain realness though it is intangible. Each person’s wishes, phobias, and unique matrix of experiences can be said to manifest themselves, via the refractions of day-residue, in the dormant brain whenever dreams occur. And the greater their frequency, the more substantial the reassurances (of a very basic sort) provided to the self or ego. Rather than erotic assent, the cranium-encircling arm may well signify something different, whether the sleeper is the renowned Sleeping Ariadne of the Vatican Museum (fig. 40), Venus, Endymion, or a Bruegelian peasant who takes a break from harvesting. The arm insulates the cranium and at the same time that it suggests its outline. Yet the curving arm also insinuates another organ, the ear, that receiver of messages – assertions, commands, exhortations.10

Figure 40  Anonymous, Sleeping Ariadne (Roman copy of a Greek original [c. 240 bce]). Marble, 162 cm × 195 cm. Vatican City, Museo Pio Clementino, Musei Vaticani. Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, ny. 10

Assessing the implications of the ear in conceptual as well as corporeal space, Jacques Derrida provides comments that remain relevant: “The ear is uncanny. Uncanny is what it is; double is what it can become; large or small is what it can make or let happen (as in laisser-faire, since the ear is the most open and tendered organ, the one, as Freud reminds us, the infant cannot close); large or small as well the manner in which one may offer or lend an ear” (The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamouf and Avital Ronell, ed. Christie McDonald [Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988], 33).

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In the manner of a prosthesis, the posed arm exaggerates what it purports to substitute for.11 The arm in a cup-like arc delineates, in effect, the borders of a corporeal hearing horn, inviting semiosis, awaiting or in the act of receiving a dream, a divine message if the sleeper is sufficiently fortunate. It is of course the right arm that typically performs this function, the one that is dextrous and trusted. Not to be applied to this task is the left arm, which is so sinister – a mechanism of suspicion tapering into the hand that is never to be thrust forward for another to clasp.12 The validity of this interpretation – that the arching arm of the sleeper, a common gesture in visual art, is also an ear – is “confirmed” by a poem, “Ariadne Reclines,” placed at the beginning this chapter, where this view is explicitly expressed. The poem is in part a distillation of images and texts examined studiously as well as half-attentively, systematically and at random, as the manuscript of this book has taken shape. “Ariadne Reclines,” in addition, stands in place of a poem or a swatch of prose that I somewhere read and noted, photocopied or committed to memory, or have misremembered. This text of origin might have been written by Proust or Swinburne or Baudelaire. It regrettably remains dormant, but its indeterminacy also serves as an introduction to the somnoscript, a variant of the hypnoglyph, discussed below with focus on Marguerite Duras’s novella, The Malady of Death (La maladie de la mort). Manifesting the intertextual dynamics of the hypnoglyph, the somnoscript is a sleep-imbued work dependent on a prior text in which sleep was also a prime component. In keeping with the context or “spin” that sleep confers as an energizing element within a textual corpus, the forerunner’s role is downplayed. That is, despite its resuscitation within the postmodern text, the earlier work is dormant, its presence tending to escape notice. So often, the hypnoglyph (verbal or visual) is a somnoscript as well, housing more pre-texts than it can readily display.

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For a coherent overview of the varied meanings and fortunes of the term, “prosthesis,” see pages 91–93 of Lennard J. Davis’s essay, “Stumped by Genes: Lingua Gataca, dna, and Prosthesis” in The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Bicultural Future, ed. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (Cambridge: mit Press, 2006). The classic study of cross-cultural prioritization of the right hand at the expense of the left is Robert Hertz’s “The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious Polarity” (1909) in Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney and Claudia Needham (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 89–115.

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Anne Sexton’s “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)”

Anne Sexton was not the first writer to produce a poetry version of the Sleeping Beauty folk narrative. Her fairy tale in verse, “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)” (1971), has a significant though infrequently read forerunner, Edith Sitwell’s The Sleeping Beauty (1924). Elegant and slow-moving, Sitwell’s effort is a pavane that, at a crucial point, explicitly ties an unlucky princess to her predecessor of Greco-Roman myth: She picks up the spindle. ‘Oh, the curious bliss! … It pricks my finger now. How strange this is – For I am like that lovely fawn-queen dead Long since – pierced through the pool-clear heart,’ she said.13 It is apparent that the situation of Sitwell’s pubescent young woman is pathetic, but she is precocious in her understanding of what is happening to her. The “fawn-queen” can only be Ariadne, “dead”–it may be – because of the decline of classical pagan belief in the era of Sleeping Beauty, a beloved medieval princess invented by writers of the Early Modern – an era also intent on revivifying myth. In any case, neither Ariadne nor the princess endures a coronary injury. The latter, however, perceives a linkage in the abstract; though of blameless intentions (or whatever is seated within a “pool-clear heart”), each is victimized by duplicitous sleep. Sitwell spins out her story of slumber gone awry via a dignified modernism with abundant descriptions in which pastel tones predominate. Her heroine remains asleep through the conclusion of the work; a suitable prince has failed to appear. Yet time within this account is a stable diegetic element and appears beyond reproach. It seems a surety that her rescuer will presently arrive, just beyond the poem’s close. At sharp variance with Sitwell’s version is Anne Sexton’s “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty).” Although Sexton is not considered a prime enunciator of the postmodern, her rendition is notable for its display of artistic and cultural trends burgeoning at the close of the 1960s. The concept of “double coding,” for instance, often cited as a principal postmodern trait, is in this case eminently applicable.14 Opposing systems of meaning and value, varying registers of 13 14

Edith Sitwell, The Sleeping Beauty in The Collected Poems of Edith Sitwell (New York: Vanguard, 1954), 78. In a discussion with applications well beyond his primary discipline, architect Charles Jencks has memorably defined the postmodern as synonymous with “double coding.” See

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discourse, are herein compelled to combine. In addition, the temporal dimension is shown capable of enduring great elasticity. Sexton’s passage into the postmodern is incomplete, and it is helpful to consider this work with a glance in the direction of her contact with Robert Lowell, in whose creative writing seminar she had been a student.15 Sexton’s project in “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)” and her teacher’s undertaking in “Man and Wife” can be seen as, together, generating a chiasmatic effect. For Lowell, though tiring of formalism, maintains modernist affinities for grandeur and intensity, trends that he succeeds in combining with confession and the everyday. Over a decade later, Sexton has grown tired of poetry that was unambiguously confessional; she proceeds to unite self-revelation with fantasy in the modest form of Grimm’s fairy tales. Hence Transformations, a sardonic passel of revisions of seventeen tales.16 In “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty),” the encounter between a universal and individual frame of reference is clearly unhampered by determined seriousness such as is seen in Lowell’s work. There is much “Pop”-era levity in Sexton’s retelling of a venerated narrative. Yet Sexton seems to have succeeded in raising the content-level while at the same time rejoicing in the informal elements inherent in fairy-tale diegesis. Thus, a pleasant dissonance is generated by conflicting textual registers; the language of the poem is by turns cynically clichéd, psychoanalytic, or straightforwardly colloquial. Controlling the flow of meaning as well as of time in the poem is the imminence of sleep. At various points, sleep is manifested as the “hypnotist’s trance” (l. 4), the princess’s “hundred-year sleep” (l. 50), and the desired yet nearly unattainable and terrifying nightly repose of the revivified Briar Rose, now an insomniac. Sleep is by turns associated with aging and sterility or with feminine dependency enforced by an analyst, rescuing lover, spouse, or father – all of whom play a part in retaining the princess in a state of child-like helplessness. Sleep is appropriately the central issue of the final installment in Sexton’s Transformations since that usually nocturnal and regularly repeated condition may ease the individual subject into generalizing – if only while half-aware of doing so – about transitions as a type of experience. As cognitive processes

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Jencks’s “Postmodern vs. Late-Modern,” in Zeitgeist in Babel: The Postmodernist Controversy, ed. Ingeborg Hoesterey (Bloomington: Indiana up, 1991), 4–21 inclusive. Among other points, Jencks argues that “double coding to simplify means both elite/popular and new/ old …” (19). Diane Wood Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 91–94. Diana Hume George, Oedipus Anne: The Poetry of Anne Sexton (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987), 37.

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steadily feed on data drawn from sleep and the body, a sense of what a transition is may well advance and gel into some understanding of transformation as a completed passage – an emergence (or a descent) into a new existential enclosure. Transformation as a concept is something that can emerge later with input from varied sources within a culture. In any case, over a lifetime, the experience of entering and exiting sleep can plausibly be said to confront the discrete individual with the phenomenon of transformation twice daily.17 One never knows with absolute certainty whether and to what one will awaken. For Briar Rose, the moment of arousal from long slumber only marks the onset of a more articulated mode of dependency, signaled by her waking cry, “Daddy! Daddy!” (l. 96)18 Sexton depicts a hierarchy of gender relations that erases any notion of a satisfying everydayness, of engagement with the modest joys and drawbacks of quotidian existence – at least for women such as Briar Rose who are involved in a protracted drama of ambivalent interaction with a 17

18

The point to be made here both ties in and contrasts with one of Victor Turner’s particularly keen insights on the topic of liminal experiences. In the passage in question, Turner observes, “It is interesting to note how, by the principle of the economy (or parsimony) of symbolic reference, logically antithetical processes of death and growth may be represented by the same tokens, for example, by huts and tunnels that are at once tombs and wombs, by lunar symbolism (for the same moon waxes and wanes) …” (The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual [Ithaca: Cornell up, 1967], 99). The figure of the sleeping Ariadne has already been indicated as an emblem-like image of transformation (see above, note 3). To be apprehended here (especially in the case of the hapless Briar Rose) is the extent to which her entrances to and exits from sleep agglutinate into a single corporeal trope. That is, processes of transformation are implied at each flip of an internal switch (from waking to sleep and back again). Focusing on the liminal, Turner is struck by the bi-directionality of symbols gleaned during the course of everyday experiences. On the other hand, variants on a corporeal theme can lead to the same cognitive endpoint. For the text of Sexton’s “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty),” see The Complete Poems (New York: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 290–294; I have supplied the line numbers. As stated above, the poem originates in Transformations (copyright © 1971 by Anne Sexton, renewed 1989 by Linda G. Sexton). Excerpts are reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company (United States, Canada, and Open Market) and sll / Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. (United Kingdom, Commonwealth, and ebook). All rights reserved. Translations of the main sources of the modern Sleeping Beauty narrative have been conveniently anthologized by Jack Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm. See also above, note 6. As stated earlier, the key texts are Charles Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty” (688–95) and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s “Brier Rose” (696–98). As also mentioned, Zipes includes Basile’s lusty forerunner, “The Sun, Moon, and Talia” (685–88).

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paternal figure. And it is probably not a matter of controversy to add that, however complex the troubles of the princess turn out to be, her malaise can be also viewed as an amplified or “matured” version of the early-childhood “separation crisis” discussed previously in this study. For Sexton proceeds according to a general framework within which closeness to key family members is incompatible with a sense of personal autonomy (or closeness to self). The experience of sleep within such scenarios is likely to display aberrations amid the tensions.19 After a brief introductory section (ll. 1-24) setting forth a contemporary analogue of the princess in the form of a regressive analysand, Sexton proceeds with a decisive “once” (l. 25) that is one of the poem’s few clear settings of being and time. Otherwise, there is no steady alternation of waking, dormant, and dreaming states, no engagement with and resolution of daily issues. While the young analysand seems “stuck in the time machine” (l. 7) and displays infantile behavior, the life of the young princess is haunted by the curse of the thirteenth fairy, who incarnates old age and sterility (ll. 31-34). Sexton briefly reintroduces temporal specificity with mention of the girl’s fifteenth birthday, but the issue is promptly dropped. For the onset of a century-long sleep abruptly halts the palace clocks and any other symptoms of ordinary life. Sleep becomes an extended trope signifying feminine disempowerment. The postmodern condition here seems precisely a condition: an entropic and continuous status quo rather than a disease with a possible cure. The peak of intensity in this text is no doubt the moment of “rescue” from a sleep that was scheduled to conclude anyway – just prior, as it turns out, to her lapse into another form of malaise. Sexton at this point sums up the poem’s gender antagonisms with an exquisite modernist inset: The briars parted as if for Moses and the prince found the tableau intact. (ll. 92–93) Beneath the obvious Freudian symbolism of these lines, there lurks a critique of the – primarily pictorial – tradition of the sleeping female nude, so considerable an object of male fascination. Sexton is among those who have tilted 19

While Mahler associates separation anxiety with a specific juncture within early childhood, psychologists Andrew R. Eisen and Charles E. Schaefer define and examine this condition as a disorder that can manifest itself across a rather wide range of years. The latter researchers find that dysfunctional sleeping patterns frequently characterize and complicate this disorder. See Separation Anxiety in Children and Adolescents (New York: Guilford, 2005), especially 4–5.

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that tradition into reverse perspective and have pointed to the feminine entrapment it entails. Recalling the mythical Ariadne once more is at this point helpful. Abandoned by Theseus and later appropriated by Dionysus, the somnolent nymph is knocked about by male impulses. So, too, Briar Rose reclines as part of a tableau that ensures she is an aesthetic object, a focus of the masterful male gaze as long as she remains receptive and quiescent. This reading of Sexton proceeds to consider the issue of sexual abuse (incestuous and other), deservedly discussed by several critics as a foundational component of the tangled poem, “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty).” Is sexual contact between father and daughter here indicated as narratival fact because numerous suggestive images and phrasings (e.g., “I will give you a root” [l. 22] or “That kind of voyage/rank as a honeysuckle” [ll. 23–24])? Or are such charged wordings indicative of erotic desire only (but not behavior) that is inherently incestuous? Cassie Premo Steele affirms “that there is ample evidence that Sexton was a survivor of traumatic childhood sexual abuse.”20 Steele finds that in Transformations, the experience of “nightmarish dreams” establishes a grounding for psychic reconstruction. For the dreaming subject, e.g., Briar Rose, “is forced to feel the physical panic of the traumatic experience for the first time, as the dreams reveal scenes of women condemned to death or married off without consent ... .”21 Philip McGowan argues that incest as egregious sexual abuse constitutes a definite stratum of this final segment of Transformations. But he is also careful to point out that some of the poem’s strongest insinuations of incest are applicable to the poem’s twenty-four-line introduction or prologue rather than to the ensuing body of the recast fairy tale. That is, Sexton “previews the events” of her retelling “with a warning concerning the arrested development of a girl-child due to her overtly physical relationship with her father. Such a transgression of the incest taboo can only result in dire consequences … .”22 McGowan maintains that the quandary identified in the monitory introduction resurfaces to infect the life and times of the awakened princess, who – overly protected when a child by her father – now labors under the psychic weight of an “unresolved Oedipal conflict.” Though wed to her rescuing prince, she is also now “entranced by the difficult legacy left by her father ... . She is the female subject regressed, the result of a recessed love that is unnameable within 20 21 22

We Heal From Memory: Sexton, Lorde, Anzaldúa, and the Poetry of Witness (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 15. Ibid., 61–62. Anne Sexton and Middle Generation Poetry: The Geography of Grief (Westport: Praeger, 2004), 85.

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standard social conventions.”23 The princess’s insomnia (which is acute as well as chronic), then, is the primary observable effect of a seemingly irremediable imbalance within. An alternate reading of the references to incest/sexual abuse should be entertained as well, a response that takes as its incipit the psychoanalytic discourse embedded in Sexton’s anxiety-ridden tale, a sick comedy that also captivates. Steele and McGowan have already invoked and dextrously brought into play such pregnant themes as “trauma” (Steele) and “Oedipal conflict” (McGowan). To be foregrounded here is the extent to which Sexton’s lamentful lyric does not simply accommodate a psychoanalytic approach, but even appears to reach out to engage the language of the couch. Sexton enables such discourse (explicit as well as implied) to serve as an engine for structuring the entrapment of both the girl of the prelude and of the unlucky princess. Thus the “girl” who continually lapses “into the hypnotist’s trance” (l. 4) has already been referred to as an analysand. Her psyche is in a state of active regression while her analyst (it may be) hunts her thoughts “like an emerald” (l. 20). During the princess’s sleep, the denizens of the castle are “catatonic” (l. 77), immobilized within a sleep-like paralysis. Then there is the princess’s ensuing insomnia, which is treated – with some success – by means of a high-potency tranquillizer (“knock-out drops,” l. 107). (It is worth noting that she at this point resembles another dysfunctional postmodern sleeper, the individual in Wilbur’s “Walking to Sleep” who is advised to allow the “kind assassin” to send him into slumber.) Sexton’s heroine is understandably hypnophobic because of her trauma but is apparently the victim of another phobia as well. While asleep, she is sexually at risk; it may be that she will be involuntarily penetrated by her husband or – who can say? – by some other man (ll. 109–114). It is clear that she is pathologically dependent on her father, calling out “Daddy” when awakened from one of her heavy (perhaps drug-induced) sleeps. Yet there is also a marked ambivalence in addition, even a delusion as she fancies that he is among her potential violators, ready to pounce as her eyelids fall. Such is the copious pathology of “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty),” a compendium of Freudian topoi indicating considerable psychic depth and certifying the disabled princess as the vehicle of an angst-filled modernist subjectivity. Herself an analysand with much time spent in therapy, Sexton cannot be 23

Ibid., 87. The psycho-sexual quandary in “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)” is also insightfully discussed by Vanessa Joosen, Creative and Critical Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings (Detroit: Wayne State up, 2011), 170–73.

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s­ upposed to have fully detached herself from the pathos of either the girl of the prologue or of her textual “sister,” the unfortunate princess. Nor it is reasonable to deprioritize the play of fabulation (as opposed to refraction of the author’s autobiography) in an assessment of this disjointed tale. It is relevant to regard “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)” as in part a parody of a case history, a fictional archive from the cabinet of the father of psychoanalysis or of a lesser therapeutic luminary. “Papa” Freud or a practitioner somewhere in greater Boston, a commute from Sexton’s home – this may be the needle of reality behind the sexual trauma, the insinuations of incest disclosed in a number of this poem’s rancid yet entertaining and re-readable lines.24 Thoughts hunted “like an emerald” (l. 20)–that figurative gesture is reasonably taken as a revelatory clue that this is not pre-eminently a fable of incest but primarily a therapeutic tale allegorized, thrown against a distorting textual mirror. If ostensibly concerned with a father’s incursion into a daughter’s psycho-sexual space, this poem also hauntingly – and metaphorically – depicts a harried client at odds with the inquiries and interventions of her therapist, who circles the abyss of her anguish “like a shark” (l. 151). Not of least significance in this unhappy dialectic is the extent to which therapy in the Freudian tradition, during Sexton’s era, can be perceived as accommodating – even enforcing – patriarchal values, at the expense of female empowerment. It is thus not a challenge to apprehend incestuous implications – as metaphor – in a father (analyst)-daughter (analysand) relationship. Herein, the “fatherly” assumptions of the therapeutic discourse, from the outset, may render inevitable a sense that the patient’s subjective boundaries are being compromised. Certainly to be considered as well in this context is the well-documented sexual relationship (the target of varying comments) that Sexton maintained with one of her therapists. The inherently “incestuous” nature of such a liaison – and its possible reflection in “Briar Rose” – can be readily perceived.25 24 25

On Sexton’s background in psychotherapy, see Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography, especially 3–4 and 41–42. Regarding Sexton’s sexual relationship with psychiatrist Ollie Zweizung during sessions, see Middlebrook, 258–60, 265–66, and 313–16. Also of value is Edmund D. Pellegrino’s “Secrets of the Couch and the Grave: The Anne Sexton Case” in On Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics, ed. Stephen E. Lammers and Allen Verhey, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1998): 866–78, esp. 866–67. Susan Kavaler-Adler explores the aura of incest detectable in Sexton’s liaison with Zweizung (The Creative Mystique: From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity [New York: Routledge, 1996], 218–21). The affair (and the therapy) with Zweizung transpired during the mid-1960s; i.e., early enough for her experiences to impact her work on “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty).” Middlebrook comments on a locution the poet used during this period: “Sexton’s coy phrase

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The psychoanalytic dimension of this quirky tale-in-verse is substantial. An adequate measuring of its parameters also requires a look at its dovetailing with Lacan’s delineation of the split subject, an often confusing “construct” that nonetheless provides much clarification of the subjective dissonance so evident in this text. According to Edward Casey and Melvin Woody, a precedent for the notion of the “split subject” can be located in Heidegger’s “conception of the subject as subordinate to language, as a bespoken subject who is in the end more the creature than the creator of language.” Lacan intensifies the paradox, in effect arguing “that being bespoken is being broken – broken apart by the signifiers whose proper locus is to be found in the Other. The ‘eclipse of the subject’ is in fact ‘closely bound up with the Spaltung or splitting that [the subject] suffers from its subordination to the signifier.’”26 With this Lacanian schema as lens, a young lady’s psychic life splinters with the prick of a spindle, while her diagnosis comes into focus almost as smoothly as Cinderalla’s foot glides into a slipper. The prologue (ll. 1–24) has been referred to earlier as a unit with problematic connections to all that follows. As the reading currently underway develops, the prologue can be seen to resemble an anamnesis, a synoptic case history. Thus the patient has shown that she can regress, adopting the cognition (or lack thereof) of a two-year-old (l. 8) or even of a neonate (l. 14). “… as inward as a snail/learning to talk again” (ll. 9–10), she is placid, content with her “self,” yet virtually mindless. Otherwise, she must take on the “root” (l. 22) of all cognitive evil, that questionable gift, initiation into the labyrinth of signification. Thus when the princess is pierced by the spindle, her response is in effect a denial of the “birth” of the split subject; she recoils into vapid quietude as Sleeping Beauty. She inevitably awakens as the harried Briar Rose, a woman who can no longer sleep. Ostensibly, she is overwhelmed by fears of sexual exploitation (ll. 112–14) and of aging (ll.120–22). The underlying dynamism, however, is that she must now continuously contend with the phallus, the prime signifier, and its attendant domain of language, the mediator of apprehensions, of worrisome afterthoughts and regrets, of verbal discourse of every type. ... if only she could return to her old pre-self, Sleeping Beauty, encased in her former, blissfully ignorant somnolence. Her new slumber, to the contrary, is nightmarefilled, an allegorical picture of a cognitive moment just prior to the onset of

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‘doctor-daddy’ conveys how conscious she was of her own transgression in this relationship” (259). Casey and Woody, “Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan: The Dialectic of Desire” in Interpreting Lacan, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (New Haven: Yale up, 1983), 110. The quotation from Lacan is found in “Subversion of the subject and dialectic of desire” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), 313.

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the language-dynamism that empowers, speaks through, and subordinates the nascent subject. That is, her father seems to “drunkenly” (l. 150) bend over her bed: … circling the abyss like a shark, my father thick upon me like some sleeping jelly fish. (ll. 151–53) The scenario is dazzling: her father, the shark, the eager phallus – emblem of the sema or semiotic potence – about to penetrate and endow her cognitive engine with discursive maturity that will also nullify the pristine pre-self. She may not resist at this already-too-late point. Nonetheless, she conceives of herself via a figure of resistance, a “sleeping jellyfish,” innocently thoughtless at that dreamed instant though already debased within the matrix of signification. That is, Briar Rose, having awakened into her mature, split self, experiences a nightmare that is also a wish-fulfillment, a scene of as-of-yet inviolate selfhood. She is a mindless but stinging organism, formats herself so very aptly in this context; it follows that her “alienation within language” has already occurred.27 Thus Sexton’s “Ariadne” tumbles out of bed into the postmodern, manifesting a subjectivity that is simulacral. Overshadowed, invalidated during the course of her tale is a sub-narrative of therapeutic treatment. This drowsy figure also reclines somewhat apart from the traditional sleeper of Roman lyric, of Giorgione’s canvas, or of “Ariadne Reclines.” With the representation of sleep customarily harboring a message of resistance, Sexton’s figure becomes obtusely resistant as her tale moves onward. She manages to demonstrate that she is unprepared and unwilling – in contrast to at least some of her slumbering “sisters” – to welcome a patriarchal signal or message.

Marguerite Duras’s The Malady of Death (La maladie de la mort)

The hypnoglyph attains particularly elegant and complex expression in Marguerite Duras’s The Malady of Death (1982).28 Beyond the exploitation of sleep 27

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The phrase is Bruce Fink’s (The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance [Princeton: Princeton up, 1995], 46). Fink’s exposition of the split subject (especially ­42–48) is quite lucid. Marjorie Perloff’s general comments on genres in postmodern contexts continue to be useful. Genres of the era tend to access a rhetoric of “decentering,” “contradiction,” “multiplicity,” and “indeterminacy.” Also, Perloff observes that “postmodern texts are regularly

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expected in the hypnoglyph, The Malady … is typically postmodern, for it manages in its fifty-odd pages of large print to blur and frustrate distinctions between poetry and prose, book and pamphlet, novella and tale, fantasy and reality, pornography and “high” art. Consistent with the work’s conflation of representational modes is the prospect of a theatrical in addition to a “read” version; Duras also refers to a possible filming.29 Beyond the typical resistance to narrative, there is an ambience of resistance to representation as well, for Duras splices the imprecisions of sleep into her textual program with unusual deftness.30 And as will be seen, apprehending Duras’s quiescent use of an Asian tradition of negativity requires an expansion of the usual inventory of intertextual techniques. With somnolence virtually transformed into a trope of intertextuality, it is possible to apply the term “somnoscript” to Duras’s puzzling anti-narrative. That is, to be sought herein are the traces of a latent forerunner, a palimpsest that has drawn upon sleep’s representational capacities. The recurrent image of a sleeping female nude is the focal point for the divergent and converging concerns of this ambivalently narrational document. Duras engages this diachronically well-endowed image in the interests of critiquing patterns of gender subjugation. The Malady … tells of a sexual encounter over a number of nights between a nameless young man of ambiguous sexuality who is referred to only as “vous” and an anonymous woman who has consented to be hired. The two individuals remain pronouns without antecedent, characters in search of self-authorship. Whether the relationship even transpires on the level of fictional actuality is never totally clear. When the young man’s affair later becomes a barroom recitation, he speaks as if this histoire could be either veracious or absurd. Duras thus approaches narrative resistance by, in addition to other avenues, habitually using conditional verbs so to effect a dearth of retrievable, authentic action. This deficiency is explored within a fictional universe defined by an intimacy that is without rapport or commitment.31

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seen as problematizing prior forms, as installing one mode only to contest it” (Postmodern Genres, 7–8). La maladie de la mort (Paris: Minuit, 1982), 61. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated; subsequent page references are intext. As Leslie Hill suggests, Duras cultivates a “written text that aims – impossibly – to dispense with … representation … , to arrive at a mode of textuality that is pure affirmation or event, shunning all ready-made, prior narrative space or temporality, reliant only on its own sublime virtuosity” (Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires [London: Routledge, 1993)], 151. Gabriele Schwab refers to the dysfunctional relationship here brought into play by Duras as one of “extimacy.” Schwab builds on remarks by Herman Rapaport that are linked in

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The terms of the contract are all specified according to the male’s wishes; the sole exception is that the woman retains the option of setting her price. Expertly manipulating the medium of sleep, Duras synthesizes her own mode of discursive negativity. Within a faintly illuminated bedroom, there is a glissando of nocturnal scenes resembling a loosely connected sequence of photographic negatives – dully suggestive and teasing in varying shades of black, grey, and silver. These images of disengaged personages can hardly be said emit an “aura,” a residue of subjective engagement that could come into play between the viewer and the individual depicted, an attribute Walter ­Benjamin claimed to be typical of early portrait photographs.32 Instead, the characterizations often resonate with a subdued melancholy suggestive of psychic lack. With distinctive representational strategies, Duras projects conventional assertions of male authority in a patently depreciatory way. Among her duties, the woman must let herself be taken while asleep in the manner of medieval peasants who, after a day of exhausting work, submitted in slumber to their husbands. The marital enclosure is prominent among the zones of ­gender

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turn to Lacan’s/Jacques-Alain Miller’s notion of “extimité” (previously discussed in Chapter 1; see page 28 and note 67 in that chapter). Schwab affirms that “extimacy … pertains to the fragile boundaries, the fundamental ambivalence of intimate spaces: what is closest is, at the same time, that which is radically Other.” See The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language (Bloomington: Indiana up, 1996), 173. Schwab also comments that, while the man is anxious when the woman simply looks at or watches him, his discomfort abates when she sleeps. It then seems to him that the parts of her body have the effect of emitting “a holograph of her spirit” (176). For Rapaport’s remarks, see Between the Sign and the Gaze (Ithaca: Cornell up, 1994), 257–58. Among Benjamin’s remarks concerning the “aura,” one of the most relevant in the context of Duras is his claim that “… reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction” (Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken, 1969], 223). It would seem that Duras’s text all but revels in the transitory dimensions of the depictions. There is a happy distancing from physical and other details that could contribute to a sense of textual anchorage within the subjectivity of a specific individual. For a response to the “aura” that is valuable if overly attentive to perceived defects in Benjamin’s argumentation, see Klaus Weimar, “Text-Critical Remarks et Alia,” in Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age, ed. Hans Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan (Palo Alto: Stanford up, 2003), 188–194.

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i­nteraction called into question by the degrading specifics of this unlikely contract. The element of intrusion is further accentuated by the woman’s unresisting acquiescence to the man’s desire to sleep within her so as to more conveniently exercise his will (18). The factor of virtually incessant phallic intromission as well as the explicit financial aspect of the liaison make it clear that labor and capital have found their way into the realms of intimacy, repose, and pleasure. It seems that the feudal has met up with the postmodern.33 Also, as this ever-recumbent female figure illustrates a subservient status, she at the same time subtly implies that all activities and conditions associated with the reclining subject are culturally secondary. Included in this category are sleep, the erotic in general, parturition, illness, the body undergoing medical intervention, and no doubt any form of writing not requiring a more or less erect posture in combination with such designated places as the stonecutter’s studio, the scriptorium, the desk, or the office work station.34 Duras thus indicates how prostitution (at least a conventional or even Victorianized version of that vocation), a type of work primarily engaged in while the laborer is supine and within the confines of what is nominally a space for sleeping, is transgressive of cultural assumptions that vigilance and the purposive expenditure of inner resources are requisites for any form of work.35 33

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On imbrications between the medieval, the feudal, and the postmodern (with cautionary remarks identifying overly simplified parallels), see Bruce Holsinger’s essay “Empire, Apocalypse, and the 9/11 Premodern,” in The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory, ed. Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith (Durham: Duke up, 2010), 94–117. See also Fredric Jameson’s “On the Medieval” in the same volume (243–46). Proust and his cork-lined bedroom offer a scenario wherein it is easy to view fictionwriting as an activity tending toward decadence. To be similarly regarded is the career of Balzac, his slender bed, and his celebrated coffee-pot. Indeed, the life histories of the two authors provide examples of muddled boundaries between sleep and aesthetic production. Leo Steinberg’s commentary on Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed, referred to earlier in this study, is worth consulting further. Steinberg here finds an effort at mediation, a blend of work and leisure. This avant-garde assemblage, at the limen of the postmodern, “abrogates the distinction between work and non-work, between work and whatever stoppage or dalliance a bed may be host to. The artist has crunched what custom and discipline keep apart. Life and art abed in shocking cohabitation” (Encounters with Rauschenberg [A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture] [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000], 50). Elements of novelty or surprise are strong in each of the above instances and should not lead to a playing down of tensions inescapable in any meeting up of work and repose. That Duras’s portrait of prostitution in The Malady … is rendered with some degree of tempering is clear from Audrey Ecstavasia’s provocative account of a postmodern approach to an ancient profession. In “Fucking (with Theory) for Money: Toward an Introduction/Interrogation of Escort Prostitution,” Ecstavasia exposes how job performance in

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Whatever the purported shortcomings of sleep, it nonetheless often appears to strive to project a truthfulness, an irreducible core of self. Such is at least what one expects to periodically uncover while perusing scenes of sleep in Proust or other writers of “high” modernism. In Duras’s twisted tale, “vous” sleeps within his lady in case an indisputable prompting – an involuntary movement (“mouvement involontaire” [18])–that could be grounded within some sector of an authentic, foundational self, should awaken him to renewed enjoyment. Similarly suggestive (and indeterminate) is the woman’s pronouncement, while she is barely awake (and with “a voice still asleep” [“une voix encore endormie”]) that the man suffers from “the sickness of death” (“la maladie de la mort” [23]). This sickness could well proceed from an existential vacuum, an incapacity to relate intersubjectively (23–24, 34–35). A truth may reside here, even if it is a diluted one, and even if one finds that the novella concerns only a “malady of love” similarly pronounced in French (maladie de l’amour), a disengaged lovesickness or fascination with the romantic. Astute commentators on The Malady of Death have correlated its skewed, almost phantasmagoric sexual depictions with the homosexuality of the male “protagonist,” a recurrent performer of erotic drama who seeks initiation in the realm of experiencing sex with a woman.36 That this is not simply the case of a young man who is a virgin is evident in his assertion that he wishes to penetrate “as violently as I am used to” (“aussi violemment que j’ai l’habitude” [10]). Yet the relatively few sure indicators of his sexual orientation are liminal, and one of them almost escapes translation. After vocalizing pleasure experienced through orgasm, the woman is silenced by her companion, and she asks the man “if they talk about it.”37 In Barbara Bray’s widely used English translation, the third-person plural pronoun is inherently vague, and its significance can easily slip by. In the French text, the two masculine pronouns are free of ambiguity (“… si eux ils en parlent” [16]).38 accordance with the concept of the “escort service” led to a professionalized prostitution reflective of a number of late-capitalist assumptions. See Essays in Postmodern Culture, ed. Eyal Amiran and John Unsworth (New York: Oxford up, 1993): 173–98. For additional observations, compiled in the wake of the advent of the internet, see Sarah Earle and Keith Sharpe, Sex in Cyberspace: Men Who Pay for Sex (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), 52–54, 66–68. 36 Attention is called to the factor of male homosexuality by Leslie Hill, Apocalyptic Desires, 138; George Moskos, “Odd Coupling: Duras Reflects (on) Balzac,” Contemporary Literature 32.4 (1991): 525, and Marilyn R. Schuster, Marguerite Duras Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1993), 112 ff. 37 Duras, The Malady of Death, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1986), 10. 38 On this point, see Maryiln Schuster, Revisited, 113–14.

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The liaison is a failure, though not exclusively because the young man is gay. The factor of sleep, often apparent in homosexual contexts, here appears only tangentially related to the issue of same-sex eroticism. Duras explores that connection more fully in a later work, Blue Eyes Black Hair (Les yeux bleus cheveux noirs [1986]), which receives detailed treatment below. Certainly, Duras could have fashioned a tale of an inevitable impasse tied to a negative dynamics of male homoerotic desire. Instead, playing down the question of man’s desire for man, Duras has adroitly twisted this fable of a gay male’s inability to relate to feminine sexuality and difference. What emerges is a general critique of male sexual desire for woman via the recurrent projection of self-absorbed masculine priorites and agendas, of stilted directives handed down by an imperious male ego-ideal. Such a scenario will not lead to a sense of fulfillment for either participant.39 Duras here treats of an ideology of the masculine so universalized that it has led to acute gender myopia. The result happens to accord well with Lacan’s views on gender dissonance. “Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel,” claimed Lacan in his Seminaire XX, a controversial statement perhaps best understood as, “There is no congruity in sexual congress.” Or as Bruce Fink puts it, “… instead of being a genuine action or an action in the ‘full’ sense of the term, the sexual act is always a bungled action, an acte manqué.”40 Sexual desire thus is problematic in part simply because it is, from the outset, one manifestation of desire in general, desire being a seemingly translucent term that, like many others, Lacan complicates. Desire is longing that persists whether or not the need to which it 39

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Thus borrowing a phrase from Irigary, George Moskos writes of a “‘hommo-sexual’ desire to eliminate feminine Difference,” an attitude that reflects and entrenches male social order (524 and n3). Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 193, note 17. The indefinite, spectral nature of the sexual activity in The Malady … can also be viewed as distantly paralleling Freud’s perspective on masturbation and its fantasies. More than once, Freud pointed to the “unsatisfying nature” of masturbation as in the following intriguing (and oft-quoted) passage: “There is always something lacking for complete discharge and satisfaction … and this missing part, the reaction of orgasm, manifests itself in equivalents in other spheres, in absences, outbreaks of laughing, weeping …” (“Findings, Ideas, Problems” [1941 {1938}], Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey et al., Vol. 23. [London: Hogarth, 1973], 300). Freud thus surmises that the prosopopoeic dimension of masturbatory experience (the impossibility of observing an orgasmic response in an actual sexual partner) determines its failure to satisfy. Such a version of unsuccessful sexual rapport is in keeping with a Lacanian scheme as well as with Durasian erotic representation – for instance, in the nameless man’s frequent sobbing and his apparent failure to detect the climax of his lady (15).

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is tied has been met, and indeed, claims Lacan, desire heightens to the extent that needs are manifestly satisfied.41 The Lacanian paradoxes of gender misapprehension and desire have obvious bearing on erotic intimacy in The Malady … (as elsewhere in the hypnoglyph). The viewpoint that a complex sexual imaginary determines and frazzles the discharge of erotic longings seems well supported by Duras’s numerous renditions of never-quite-satisfactory, vaguely delineated sexual encounters. And as if to frustrate interpretive efforts to explain the muddled cruxes of this text, Duras’s narrator unexpectedly comments – near the end of the tale – when the “protagonist” has given himself up to lamentation: “When you cried, it was only for yourself and not because of the admirable impossibility of rejoining her across the difference that separates you.” (“Quand vous avez pleuré, c’était sur vous seul et non sur l’admirable impossibilité de la rejoindre à travers la différence qui vous sépare” [56].) Thus at a key point, the reader is offered only a limited awakening, an awareness of concerns that might never be clarified or resolved – and which, it may be, cannot be traced solely to the sexual inversion of the male figure. A dynamics of gender frustration remains multi-dimensional in The M ­ alady … as elsewhere in Duras. Intimations of self-determination and constructive agency emerge in some contexts only to vanish in others. It is also relevant to consider this impasse with regard to the factor of infantile sexuality dear to Freud. For the latter, the symptoms of an autoerotic infantilism are filtered through a maternal imaginary, a nostalgia for a mother instantaneously available to quench any desire or need. Again, the patriarch of psychoanalysis records a provocative observation: “No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.”42 The foreshadowing of adult 41

Écrits, trans. Sheridan, 263–65, 286. Gender malaise in The Malady … also correlates with Leo Bersani’s observations on an inherent textual antagonism between desire and realism. According to Bersani, “Desire is a threat to the form of realistic fiction. Desire can subvert social order; it can also disrupt novelistic order …” (A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature [Boston: Little, Brown, 1976], 66). In addition, “As desire becomes more radically disruptive of established orders, the novel tends to become less realistic, more allegorical …” (67). It should be added that for Bersani, “desire” is a more general term than it is for Lacan. In any case, Bersani’s comments seem well illustrated by the minimally realistic episodes of Duras’s “narrative.” 42 Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in the Standard Edition, Vol. 7 (London: Hogarth, 1973), 182. The classic elaboration of the libidinal/nutritional dynamics adumbrated by Freud is found in Sandor Ferenczi’s chapter, “Coitus and Sleep,” in Thalassa:

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sexuality in infantile nutrition is mirrored obliquely in The Malady … , which somewhere harbors a submerged memory of a “Ma” lady ever attentive and compliant though clearly absent from the varied textual immediacies and mediations that Duras offers.43 The work of Mary Jacobus on early childhood theory provides a relevant sequel to the quotation from Freud and suggests a still deeper cognitive stratum of the dys-contents of this “narrative.” Working with mammary theory proposed by Wilfred Bion, Jacobus discovers the psychogenesis of thought in the infant’s adequate tolerance of frustration posed by the mother’s absent breast. The infant may perceive and accept that this is a “no-breast” situation. Conversely, high frustration correlates with nutritional deprivation and a sense of cerebral starvation, hence an absence of progress toward mature cognition.44 Adult thought can thus be seen as developing out of childhood

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A Theory of Genitality, 73–80. Pertinent reflection on the issues raised by Freud is presented by Noelle Oxenhandler, “The Eros of Parenthood,” New Yorker, 19 February 1996, 47–49. For a psychotherapeutic perspective, see Deirdre Johnson, Love: Bondage or Liberation? A Psychological Exploration of the Meaning, Values, and Dangers of Falling in Love (London: Karnac, 2010), 47–50. Worth calling into play here as well is Lacan’s notion of lalangue, another of his predictably oblique yet relevant locutions. Lalangue refers to “non-communicative aspects of language which, by playing on ambiguity and homophony, give rise to a kind of jouissance” (Dylan Evans, An introductory dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis [London: Routledge, 1996], 100). Lacan defines lalangue as an underpinning of the unconscious and of language, a superfluity of textual and phonic indicators that tend to sidetrack communication – or subsist in a vaguely semiotic stratum that is an antecedent to communication. According to Lacan, lalangue (translated as “llanguage”) “presents all sorts of affects that remain enigmatic. Those affects are what result from the presence of llanguage insofar as it articulates things by way of knowledge (de savoir) that go much further than what the speaking subject sustains (supporte) by way of enunciated knowledge.” Lacan also comments that “llanguage affects us first of all by everything it brings with it by way of effects that are affects” (On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1972: Encore [Seminar Book XX], ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink [New York: W.W. Norton, 1998], 139). According to Michael Lewis, “Lalangue is for Lacan a symptomatic moment in the use of language where its real lettricity or trace structure comes to the fore. It comes to the fore in repetition or similar phenomena in which language is evacuated of meaning” (Lacan and Derrida: Another Writing [Edinburgh: Edinburgh up, 2008], 207). In The Malady … and elsewhere in Duras, lalangue is a sleep of the feminine and an awakening as well, a residuum of subjectivity washed across Duras’s minimalist lexicon, across inflections of the body and of the ambient natural scene. Mary Jacobus, First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1995), 289–90.

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cerebration within which expectations were in accordance with varying realities; hence, “a successfully achieved correlation, or fit, between sense-data and their representation might feel like a good feed.”45 Obviously, only a very limited amount of cognitive feeding transpires in this novella. This circumstance is suggestive in turn of anterior scenes of frustration, of inadequate emotional or other n ­ utrition, the details of which are not included in the novella’s rather sparse census of graspable specifics regarding anything relating to a personal or general past. It is evident, however, that the nameless woman is in part a cultural symbol who must recline because of “a fatigue beyond memory” (“une fatigue immémoriale” [24]). The nameless woman is also a fantasy figure, a postmodern Ariadne retrieved from the history of aesthetics and reconfigured. Supine amid a “pallid pool of white sheets” (“… flaque blanche des draps blancs” [30]), she resembles (yet is seen to differ from) dozens of representations of somnolent feminine figures from the Sleeping Venus of Giorgione to the dormant young ladies of Balthus, who are carefully and skilfully blended into an aesthetic ensemble of woodwork, furnishings, and fabric. Among numerous antecedents (in both visual and verbal discourses), one figure can be identified with relative ease. This is Albertine, Marcel’s harried lover in Proust’s The Captive (La prisonnière). One of her salient traits is that – along with being a woman who plummets into slumber with unusual ease – she typically loses all trace of assertiveness of character (or deceptiveness, as Marcel terms it) when she sleeps and as he gazes at or touches her, uninhibitedly if not invasively. Thus he remarks, “By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different human personalities with which she had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance. ” Marcel rejoices during these encounters or oneway “interviews” with the now defenseless Albertine as she emanates a presence that – to him – has become more alluring in that it is non-threatening and implies a very basic, a somehow truer subjectivity. Manifold opportunities are afforded, for “so long as [her sleep] lasted, I was free to dream about her and yet at the same time to look at her, and, when that sleep grew deeper, to touch, to kiss her.” Marcel anticipates a number of postmodern exploiters of a woman’s sleep. Usually, he is more deferential than his successors are with regard to corporeal and subjective boundaries. But with the aid of a thin veil of figurative language, he concedes that “sometimes [her sleep] afforded me a pleasure that was less pure. For this I had no need to make any movement, but allowed my 45

Ibid., 290.

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leg to dangle against hers, like an oar which one trails in the water, imparting to it now and again a gentle oscillation ... .”46 Albertine asleep prefigures the role and reduced personhood of Duras’s anti-­heroine. An anticipation of the postmodern is capitalized upon via Duras’s appropriation of the last of a series of depictions in The Captive of the dormant Albertine. Nearing the collapse of her liaison with Marcel, she is at this point flattened, textualized, objectified, and in the deepest of her slumbers. She is here also quite removed from the ultimately heliocentric values of a Proustian poetics of consciousness within which sleep, dream, and hypnagogia tend to be foils for displaying the mercurial vitality of persistent psychic energies. Thus Marcel recounts that on this occasion, Albertine had asked him to visit her room soon, prior to a slumber that she felt was imminent (for she felt acutely tired [“comme une morte”]): It was indeed a dead woman that I saw when, presently, I entered her room. She had fallen asleep as soon as she lay down; her sheets, wrapped around her body like a shroud, had assumed, with their elegant folds, the rigidity of stone. It was as though, reminiscent of certain mediaeval Last Judgments, the head alone was emerging from the tomb, awaiting in its sleep the Archangel’s trumpet. This head had been surprised by sleep almost upside down, the hair disheveled.47 46

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Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, 1982), 3:64, 66. (En fermant les yeux, en perdant la conscience, Albertine avait dépouillé, l’un après l’autre, ces différents caractères d’humanité qui m’avaient déçu depuis le jour où j’avais fait sa connaissance. Tant qu[e son sommeil] persistait, je pouvais rêver à elle et pourtant la regarder, et quand ce sommeil devenait plus profond, la toucher, l’embrasser. Parfois, [son sommeil] me faisait goûter un plaisir moins pur. Je n’avais besoin pour cela de nul mouvement, je faisais pendre ma jambe contre la sienne, comme une rame qu’on laisse traîner et à laquelle on imprime de temps à autre une oscillation légère... [La prisonnière, ed. Pierre-Edmond Robert, Vol. 3 of À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, Antoine Compagnon, and Pierre-Edmond Robert {Paris: Gallimard, 1988}, 578, 580].) The erotic dimension of the last of the above passages is discussed with wit and discernment by Malcolm Bowie in Proust Among the Stars (New York: Columbia up, 1998), 244–45. Remembrance of Things Past, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, 3:366. (Ce fut une morte en effet que je vis quand j’entrai ensuite dans sa chambre. Elle s’était endormie aussitôt couchée; ses draps, roulés comme un suaire autour de son corps, avaient pris, avec leurs beaux plis, une rigidité de pierre. On eût dit, comme dans certains

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Thus the only detectable link between this final image of Albertine asleep and the jubilant Proustian demesnes of dream and awakening, is a filament of aesthetic memory, an eccentric or fancied resemblance between a fatigued woman and a medieval image en route to resurrection. As in the narrative of Albertine, her successor is frequently dispatched to the confines of sleep. Otherwise, the latter tends to be fragmented within Duras’s postmodern labyrinth. She is anonymous, of unstable weight, appearance, and size, and her seemingly always parted legs possess a beauty separate from that of the rest of her body. Without anchorage in the torso (“sans implantation dans le reste du corps” [21]), these graceful legs are a sexual metonymy surviving from the archives of cubist imagery. In a suggestive “v,” they await the approaches of a “vous” who fails to articulate himself with any sense of historical or personal depth.48 The account of Ariadne is also persistently echoed in the powerful analogy that Duras sets in motion between the sea and sleep. While the primal Ariadne endures a change of male ownership on Naxos, the young man of Duras’s text is neither a valiant Theseus nor a triumphant Dionysos. Nonetheless, he frequently steps outside of his chamber to scrutinize the ocean. Here the incipient parallel between Theseus and his “successor” comes to an end, for the latter cannot fathom the sea’s contents any more than he can know what is contained in the sleep of the woman who reclines on his bed (16). Similarly, the dormancy of her sexual zone confounds him. Making contact with associations already implicit in Giorgione’s painting (with Venus covering her pudenda in a way that also elicits attention), Duras writes that this enigmatic region of the body assumes its own dormancy as the woman sleeps (29).49 Like Jugements derniers du Moyen Âge, que la tête seule surgissait hors de la tombe, attendant dans son sommeil la trompette de l’Archange. Cette tête avait été surprise par le sommeil presque renversée, les cheveux hirsutes [La prisonnière, ed. Pierre-Edmond Robert, 862].) Herman Rapaport’s examination of The Malady … is worthwhile (Between the Sign and the Gaze, 250–57). Among other insights, Rapaport observes Duras’s overall distancing from Proust’s practices in describing the dormant Albertine (255). Rapaport does not, however, indicate a tie-in (a common straining, a muted laboredness) between Duras and this twisting of Albertine’s portrait in the last installment of a grand series. 48 In The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), Lynda Nead comments on the mutilation of idealized feminine images as a variety of feminist protest against male voyeurism and other forms of patriarchy (34–43, especially 39). Such a motivation is implicit in Duras’s use of a fractured icon. 49 Mary Pardo’s astute comments on Giorgione are broadly applicable to an understanding of the semiotics of the reclining female nude, whether asleep or awake. See her essay, “Artifice as Seduction in Titian” in Sexuality and gender in early modern Europe, ed. James

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sleep, it is a site of intimations and latent energy; it engulfs and retains without the appearance of doing so, and it becomes a nocturnal pathway that the man travels almost without awareness (18). It should also be pointed out that Duras disrupts, dexterously, the modernist conception of duration. For Proust, sleep is as closely tied to circadian rhythms as it is to the arts. In music as among the many kinds of sleep, beauty is rendered by varying the length of intervals. Marcel is concerned because the irregularities of his sleep have lessened his familiarity with the distinctive early morning cries of Parisian vendors; their wandering habits convey a stable sense of everyday life.50 In The Malady … , such “natural laws” of sleep have been annulled; there is no longer any correlation between diurnal revolutions and the intermittent slumber of the woman. The demise of a customary, “clockwork” temporality is explicit when Duras announces, Always, it is almost dawn. These hours are as vast as the expanses of the sky. It is too much; time finds no place where it can pass. Time no longer passes. (Toujours c’est presque l’aube. Ce sont des heures aussi vastes que des espaces de ciel. C’est trop, le temps ne trouve plus par où passer. Le temps ne passe plus [30].) With temporal partitions collapsing to disclose hours as vast as stretches of sky, the category of time nearly dissolves into that of space. The effacement of diurnal boundaries also entails that the most basic of scripts for recording lived experience, the diary (lowest form of literature) can scarcely participate as a viable element of Duras’s confabulation. Particles of the diarist paradigm recur, however, with references to the lady’s repeated nightly visits – the temporal parameters of which are otherwise indistinguishable – and the eventual arrival of day (50). The man’s stipulation of the season at the beginning of the contract (13) combines with the subsequent dissolution of the diary to establish circumstances consistent with a Durassian anti-kairology that requires the destruction of the calendar, a temporal “overtone” that Heidegger belittles but cannot dispense with in positing a transcendental dimension for Dasein.51 Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1993): 55–89, especially 68. Representational recourse to the compromising condition of dormancy (a kind of psychic “pudendum”) tends to compound the effect of sexually equivocal signals. 50 Proust, Remembrance, 3.121–22; La prisonnière, 632–33. 51 On this point, see Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), H. 370-H. 377. (The “H.” refers to page-numbering in the German edition.) Heidegger at one point concedes, “… factical Dasein needs and uses a calendar

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Circadian and diaristic deterioration do not occur in The Malady … without misgivings. Any other temporally dependent structure is crippled at the same time. Thus the entire “histoire” is questionable along with any articulation of subjective history, which can no longer be distinguished from a mere story. The man is dissociated from the narrative of his own life as he tells of a child who might be himself, a possibly self-authenticating narrative that he knows only from what others have said (51). Yet precisely from this perspective, with any traditional sense of historical consciousness in postmodern disarray, Duras exemplarily illustrates a fondness for promiscuous historical quotation, a contemporary practice that David Harvey defines as “an incredible ability to plunder history and absorb whatever it finds there as some aspect of the present.”52 In The Malady … , such a practice obviously centers on an Ariadne who has been contemporized together with the entire archive of the dormant female nude. Yet in the abstract, Duras’s destabilized historicity can be viewed as displaying an intriguing classical dimension. Together with an habitual reliance on conditional verbs, her postmodern edition of temporality emits – to an extent – an Aristotelian aroma. The motivation for this statement is that the author of the Poetics firmly distinguishes between the what-has-happened of the historian and the what-might-happen of the poet, the latter rendering a discourse of conditionality laden with universal implications.53 Not unexpectedly, along with a departure from recognizable matrices of time and history, Duras’s “universality” is postmodern. For it is preoccupied not with exemplars or distinct characters but rather with representing, by means of a verbal palette of tenebrous tones, dysfunctional gender relations presumed to be pandemic in contemporary societies. The most broadly significant element in The Malady … , sleep conveys associations ranging from leisure to intrusive capitalism, from aesthetics to hypersexuality. As a consequence, the factor of narrative resistance is realized on more than one level. Thus, as the woman is claimed in her sleep, some inviolable residue of self-presence remains absent from the possessor. In addition, she is temporarily imprisoned within a narrational setting askew in part

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and a clock. Whatever may happen ‘to Dasein,’ it experiences it as happening ‘in time.’ In the same way, the processes of Nature, whether living or lifeless, they are encountered ‘in time’” (H. 376-H. 377). (Heidegger later claims that reference to dates on a calendar should “be completely disregarded” with respect to the existential process of “datability” [H. 407].) The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 54. Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell, in Aristotle: Poetics; Longinus: On the Sublime; Demetrius: On Style, trans. Halliwell, W.H. Fyfe, and Doreen C. Innes (Cambridge: Harvard up, 2005), 58–61.

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because there is – or there at least seems to be – too much sexual activity at the expense of narrative requirements for well- “orchestrated” tumescence and detumescence of action. Blending in with the factor of narrative resistance in The Malady … is an abiding sense of cognitive gap. With respect to the latter, Duras has seemingly adhered to an unwritten and unwritable poetics of the Lacanian real, that almost inexplicable psychic order or sub-system that tinges every other and involves carry-overs of pre-verbal experience, sought-after repetitions that do not satisfy, and gaps between experience and perceptions. Lacan may have been at his most explicit in defining the real when he remarked, “The real is beyond the automaton [i.e., the network of signifiers], the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle.”54 Because of such commonalities as repetitiveness and a drift away from pleasure, it can be said that there is often a family resemblance between the real, desire, and sleep as depicted in postmodern contexts.

Yasunari Kawabata’s “House of the Sleeping Beauties”

Duras is in any case no copyist of Lacan. She has represented a sexual morass with recourse to – along with Proust – a quiescent pre-text from another narrative tradition, one with its own sense of the impasses inherent in any dialectic of desire. Here under scrutiny is “ House of the Sleeping Beauties” (“Nemureru 54

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: w.w. Norton, 1981), 53–4. For a detailed and lucid discussion of Lacan’s “concept” of the real, see Andrea Hurst, Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis (New York: Fordham up, 2008), 213–36. As Hurst notes among other points, “Persistent and consistent reality testing would oblige one to admit that all coherent systems (ideologies, institutions, etc.) are further away from what is Real than their proponents desire them to be, for honest reality testing would demonstrate that the Real is split, ambivalent, and paradoxical. Coherence is in fact fabricated as a defense …” (215). Cf. Bruce Fink’s explanation of the real, page 39n85, above. The enigmas of the real seem particularly implicated in Lacan’s discussion of desire when he comments that, ironically, need-satisfaction tends to crush a demand for love and to dispatch the self into “sleep” that is also a limbo where desire speaks in the guise of subjectivity (Écrits, trans. Sheridan, 263). (“Bien plus, la satisfaction du besoin n’apparaît là que comme le leurre où la demande d’amour s’écrase, en renvoyant le sujet au sommeil où il hante les limbes de l’être, en ... laissant [le désir] en lui parler” [Écrits {Paris: du Seuil, 1966}, 627].) Although Lacan’s point is discursively tangled, it carries within it a traditional perception of sleep as an area of phantasms and tracklessness that dismayed – among others – Pascal, whose fear Baudelaire (as previously mentioned) satirized with acid wit in “The Abyss” (“Le Gouffre”).

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bijo” [1961]) by Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata. So subtly handled is Duras’s intertextual blending of an Asian text with her own discourse that the term “somnoscript” may be a useful designation for the result. Kawabata’s novellalength narrative was published in English translation in 1969,55 providing ample years for Marguerite Duras, Asiaphile, to reconnoiter its textual contours and crevices. Perceived similarities between works of literature are legion and often misleading, but this is an instance where the force of the resemblances may well erase scepticism as to whether Duras knew Kawabata’s text. “House of the Sleeping Beauties” is about an unusual establishment of prostitution, a haven for old men where actual intercourse is prohibited. Instead, the senescent clientele, who are presumed to have passed the age of virility, pay for the privilege of passing the night in the company of a young and beautiful nude woman who has been submerged for the occasion in a drug-induced slumber. There the client is free to kiss and fondle and become immersed in dreams, fantasies, and memories of sexual enjoyment. As in the case of Duras’s homosexual who aspired to love women, the prospects for joyous eroticism are minimized. Discernible in both texts is an ambience of affective and other impasse. Yet in each work, there is also the aura of a carefully staged melancholy – as opposed to gloom –, and readers are likely to find themselves engaged throughout. Toward the end of Kawabata’s tale, the protagonist, Eguchi, reclines with not one but a pair of somnolent beauties. He becomes briefly engrossed in a trifling memory of an insignificant kiss of several decades in the past. Eventually he sleeps, but the narrative traumatically concludes with the apparent death of one of the ladies. This occurrence is the presumed result of the old man having strangled her. Such was the impulse over which he had ruminated following the sleeping woman’s seeming rejection of him by thrusting his body away from her in her sleep (89–90). This incident knocks him into keen awarenesss of the factor of feminine difference that has accompanied his purchase of the muted presence of the two nude ladies. He can also no longer ignore his own burned-out virility and approaching death. He slips into a tranquillizerinduced slumber amid reflections that he could well expire in the brothel in his sleep (93). This veiled representation of violence has been reconfigured in Duras’s text as a pair of statements uttered by the woman. At one point toward the end of The Malady … , she informs the young man that he remains ingorant of what it means to love so possessively as to think of killing the beloved in order to 55 In House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories, trans. Edward Seidensticker (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1969), 13–102. Page references are intext.

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maintain possession (45). (And in accordance with a homoerotic coding, Duras has subtly referred to a male, not a female lover.) A bit later, she claims that she has perceived in her dormancy the man’s wish to kill her, a volition that he admits but cannot explain (47). As in the case of Eguchi, the impulse is tied to an implied recognition of the failure of a project of invalidating feminine integrity and difference. While striking similarities of action and of splintered, refracted libido tend to establish an intertextual link between Kawabata’s decayed psychic landscape and Duras’s, the shared backdrop of the sea, already seen to be significant in The Malady … , strengthens the evidence. As for Duras, Kawabata’s little drama of a singular sexual contract transpires at ocean’s edge: “… the sound of the waves was violent. It was as if they were beating against a high cliff, and as if this little house were at its very edge. The wind carried the sound of approaching winter …” (16). In similar fashion, the bedchamber depicted by Duras is in close proximity to its own sea of passions: “It happens that he awakens without reason – except to ask you if it is the sound of the wind or of the high ocean.” (“Il lui arrive…de se réveiller sans raison, sauf pour vous demander si c’est le bruit du vent ou celui de la marée haute” [17].) Or again: “the sea is still black beneath a sky drained of light. You hear its sound. The black water contiues to rise ... .” (“… la mer est encore noire sous le ciel décoloré de lumière. Vous entendez son bruit. L’eau noire continue de monter…” [31].) And so on. In her absorption of numerous elements of Kawabata’s “House of the Sleeping Beauties,” Duras has steered away from the usual intertextualities. However these are described or categorized, the general trend is that each type or variety is regarded as harboring a certain indicative dimension. That is, the imitative, emulating codings of the latter-day-text tend to emit allusions – which may range from subtle to explicit – that signal the continuation of an anterior verbal document, and perhaps visual ones as well. The palimpsestic model assumes a shared cultural lexicon from which a competent reader will extract telling resemblances of nomenclature, sequence, or phrasing.56 In ­Duras’s 56

See Gérard Genette’s Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997). For careful analysis of Genette’s key concept, see Marko Juvan, History and Poetics of Intertextuality, trans. Timothy Pogačar (West Lafayette: Purdue up, 2008). Juvan notes that the palimpsest, as structured by Genette, is concerned with how a work of literature – both when it is composed and later when read – … is superimposed … on a previous literary work without overwriting it completely; a textual palimpsest, with its dual composition permits the original basis to shine through its texture … . Literary palimpsests’ translucence is not, however, accidental, as might be concluded from the palimpsest metaphor taken literally. ... it is foremost

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clandestine borrowings from Japanese narrative, such intertextuality is largely inevident even though the shadowy illusions of her text often coincide with those of Kawabata, whose tale “might be likened to a film negative.” So states Yukio Mishima in an introductory comment on “House of the Sleeping Beauties” (8), a comment equally valid for The Malady … . It is not a passing or fanciful resemblance that lies behind this rapprochement of the two texts with reference to the medium of photography. Especially relevant here is the film negative, a currently obsolescent item of the photographic cosmos that, paradoxically, appears so flimsily connected to the print (the seemingly “true” photograph). Yet the resultant artifact – the print –, which may appear unerringly affixed to some segment of physical reality, is dependent on the foundational status of the negative with its relatively obscure display of details. It is also the latter, and not the print, that more directly bears an inscription of “light-writing.” Figuratively applied to the discourse of literary texts, the notion of a negative (especially in the case of black-and-white film) evokes a distinct ontology. Illusions verbally rendered, purporting to convey imprints of specific instances or junctures of reality, now begin to intermingle with seemingly ghostlike apparitions that contain a marking, a residue that, undeniably, reflects a truth of physicality and can never be termed simply an

the strategy of the secondary texts’ author and the structure of transformations of the pre-text that decide what of the source the reader will recognize, from what perspective, and how (126–27). The self-announcing nature of prior texts is also interestingly addressed by Paul de Man, who discusses Michael Riffaterre’s hypogram, a concept that should be considered in relation to the discourse of the somnoscript. De Man regards the hypogram as “an underlying key-text, which is not a word, still less an inscription, but a ‘donnée sémantique,’ a unit of readable meaning susceptible of grammatical predication, but not privileged in any way as to its semantic value.” Even in the case of this micro-unit of the intertextual, “although the hypogram behaves coyly enough, it will eventually be unveiled since this is, in fact, its raison d’être; the form is encoded in such a way as to reveal its own principle of determination” (The Resistance to Theory [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], 38). The somnoscript, as over-text, shares only a dimension of quiescence with the hypogram, a minimal text or modest phrasing that, while it may only be implied in a literary work, assists in giving rise to the elaborated and finished verbal product. If the hypogram is inclined to subtly signal its presence beneath a full-blown textual canvas, the somnoscript moves in almost the opposite direction. For the latter appears inclined to hold in place a semiotic quietus or sleep, a state of non-recognition, with respect to a text that has offered thematic and narratival elements.

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illusion.57 Thus in literary contexts such as Duras’s and Kawabata’s, which are so structured that much appears insubstantial, depictions of sleep plausibly emerge as traces – or flashes – of subjective “matter” formatted as (or eased into) verbal text.

Anselm Kiefer’s Brunnhilde Sleeps

The representational theater common to Duras and Kawabata seems glum because of the shared presence of a murkiness suggesting kinship with the vestigial delineations evident in a diminutive patch of film, in a photographic negative. Yet this rapprochement of literary works that emit muffled significations with a type of visual artifact (or sub-artifact) can lead audiences along a certain via negativa. This semiotic pathway provides space that can be shared both by shreds or imprints of the real physical world and by THE real as described earlier, a potent bundle of all-but-unviewable ego concerns and psychic connections. Just as likely as anything in either text to elicit apprehensiveness is a distinguished and – despite its abjectness – brilliant version of the sleeping Ariadne theme by Anselm Kiefer. This rendition is offered in one of the artist’s labored, medieval-looking “books,” a series of bound, codex-like assemblages.58 At issue is Brunnhilde Sleeps (1987), which contains a two-page spread that is in effect a double “portrait” of Brunnhilde and Siegfried. Predictably, the latter would here rescue the former as she sleeps within a ring of fire (fig. 41). The “book” Brunnhilde is not to be conflated with a giddy, gouached photograph of Catherine Deneuve, an image that Kiefer snapped while watching François Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid. The German master-postmodernist inserted a caption within the photo, “Brunnhilde Sleeps” (“Brünnhilde schläft”) as if a penned-in label could turn a French cult-actress into a stout Valkyrie (1980)59 (fig. 42). Emanating levity, this burlesquing of an inset drawn from Wagnerian 57

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For a succinct and useful setting forth of the ontology of the photograph in general, see Hilde van Gelder and Helen Westgeest, Photography Theory in Historical Perspective (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 19–21. An indispensable reference point is André Bazin’s “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” trans. Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly 13.4 (Summer 1960): 4–9. For a bountifully illustrated study of Kiefer’s tilting of the sketchbook or painter’s album in the direction of the traditional book – conceived of as word-centered –, see Götz Adriani, ed., The Books of Anselm Kiefer, 1969–1990, trans. Bruni Mayor (New York: George Braziller, 1988). Nan Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer: Works on Paper in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropoitan Museum/Abrams, 1998), 76–78.

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Figure 41  Anselm Kiefer, Brunnhilde Sleeps (1987). Mixed media, 71.1 cm × 100.3 cm. From Brünnhilde Schläft, book with seven double lead pages with clay, acrylic, and photographs, mounted on board with canvas, and steel stand. Pages 7–8. Atlanta, High Museum of Art. Image courtesy of the High. Reproduced with permission of Anselm Kiefer and the Gagosian Gallery. Image © Anselm Kiefer. Photo Credit: Jon Abbott.

Figure 42  Anselm Kiefer, Brunnhilde Sleeps (1980). Acrylic and gouache on photograph, 58.4 cm × 83.5 cm. New York, Metropolitan. Reproduced with permission of Anselm Kiefer and the Gagosian Gallery. Image © Anselm Kiefer.

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sublimity is not likely to suggest parallels with the dimly illuminated chambers and skewed eroticism of Duras and Kawabata. Kiefer’s “book” version lacks the humor of the New York depiction featuring Deneuve, and the image is somber in a way that the nocturnes of Duras and Kawabata are not. The erotic dimension is absent here. Indeed, the substantial woman of heroic fable has faded into a shadowy background in this image, the only segment of the entire assemblage where Brunnhilde appears at all. And though shown in the presence of her desiring Siegfried, “Brunnhilde” is barely visible; she is a cartoon-like doll in muddy wash. In Wagner’s operatic version of the narrative, she is awakened when Siegfried kisses her “long and ardently” (lange und inbrünstig).60 Yet here it seems that she exhibits bug-like eyes that could be already wide open. Or do they simply bulge and remain closed? Her Siegfried faces her; only the rear of his cranium is seen as he towers in front of her. It is as if he is frozen despite the ambient combustion, unable to approach for the crucial kiss although he appears to have crossed the fiery barrier. The flames, visible only as vague reddish tintings, are probably behind him at this juncture. Flickering flames could have induced the silvery highlightings that dominate the thick, medallion-like head of hair that occupies a fair portion of the full image. Is he a young man whose hair is whitish amid the fire – or an old man who inappropriately slouches toward the nearly amorphous figure of a defenseless and diminutive woman? Clearly, Teutonic myth has lost its grandeur in this post-Holocaust, postmodern variation of the Ariadne/Sleeping Beauty story. Evident all the same in the depiction of the hulking Siegfried is a burgeoning will-to-power. The blatant apparition of this medieval personage amid a pastiche of pigments and materials is, to be sure, an anticlimax. But somewhere within the clever decompositions of the ensemble, there is a warning about decaying ideology, about the unhealthy carry-over of obsolescent habits of thought into contemporary culture. Along with Kiefer, Duras has proceeded in postmodern fashion, allowing long-standing protocols concerning the authority of texts (verbal or visual) to fall dormant – and reconfiguring usable antecedents within an all-devouring “now” bereft of any sense of transcendence. Among the possible outcomes is the somnoscript (applicable in the case of Duras if not of Kiefer), a literary work tacitly inhabited by a dormant prior text. It is tempting, also, to regard as oneiric the relation between the somnoscript and its precursor. The notion of oneiricity may well be in keeping with postmodern perceptions of the demise of a veritable authorial subject, who has been replaced by a spectral “agent” 60

Richard Wagner, Siegfried: Libretto, German and English, trans. anonymous (Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1880), 52.

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e­ ngaged in recycling and rearranging discursive archives. And in addition, analogous to Freudian day-residues, literary fragments may seem to work out their own configurations within a new textual environment. If The Malady … is in some sense the “dream” of Kawabata’s narrative, there may be other predecessors for Duras’s somnoscript, relevant forebears lying in discursive oblivion. Balzac’s “The Girl with Golden Eyes” (“La fille aux yeux d’or”) was, one commentator believes, similarly inspirational for Duras though never alluded to.61 And no doubt, Kawabata’s text as well falls under the rubric, “somnoscript,” harboring pre-texts embedded beyond allusion, non-Asian sources possibly unfamiliar to many of his readers.62 His sleeping beauties – confined to a slumber from which they cannot emerge during the contracted period of time – are no doubt a carryover from European folklore. However, as ersatz Prince Charmings, Eguchi and other elderly clients are egregiously unqualified to fulfill the role of their folkloric progenitor. Neither their presence nor their kisses are endowed with the essential, princely potency to awaken a dormant “princess.”63 A student of western literature, Kawabata also hints at familiarity with Proust’s Albertine, a figure so well understood by Duras.64 Kawabata’s depictions of somnolence are in any case compatible with the notion of narrative resistance that seems everywhere implicit in occidental ­perspectives on slumber. As much as or even more so than in the case of A ­ lbertine, his depictions of the sleeping nude are notable for disclosing b­ reakdowns in efforts to decipher, a representational turn that affirms f­eminine alterity. With further transfer and intermingling of discourses, the somnolent object .

61 62

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See Moskos, “Odd Coupling,” 520 ff. Mieke Bal has used the term “embedded” in a sense rather different from that implied here. Bal identifies ways in which one text can be embedded into another much as a second or third bunk bed might be stacked on top of a first. The process of embedding for Bal requires conspicuous diegetic skill as one narrative sequence is positioned upon another (Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd ed., trans. Christine van Boheemen [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997], 142–49). As used here, an embedded text tends to evade rather than court attention. Reviewing versions of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, Jack Zipes points out that in the Perrault account (1697), the mere presence of the prince was enough to rouse the lady at the close of the required period of dormancy. In their reworking (1812), the Brothers Grimm introduced a kiss as the indispensable detail that triggers revival (The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World [London: Routledge, 1988], 150–51). For some general remarks confirming Kawabata’s knowledge of Proust, see J. Martin Holman, “Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari” in the Encyclopedia of the Novel, Vol. 2, ed. Paul Schellinger (London: Routledge, 1998), 1231.

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of ­desire – redesigned by Kawabata – returns to western contexts. In addition to its significance for Duras’s work, “House of the Sleeping Beauties” helps in the shaping of Julia Leigh’s film, Sleeping Beauty (2011). Here a restrained erotic decadence holds sway as an elegant young woman finds employment as a sexworker, her job description requiring her to acquiesce to fondling by impotent elderly men as she wilts in a drugged state.65 Duras’s exquisite negativity in critiquing gender relations and images is no doubt mainly of the writer’s own making. But as for any portion derived from Kawabata, there is – with little doubt – a segment that, in turn, is a refraction of Buddhist perspectives on the human condition in general and eroticism in particular. Eguchi is from this perspective a tragicomic bumbler, virtually an escapee from a somberly abstract noh drama who persists in linkages with ordinary existence despite a transcendental imperative to achieve a higher consciousness in the form of spiritual detachment. The shadowy, ash-toned encounters of the brothel and the unlikely alignment of aged clients and virginal courtesans are quite in keeping with a Zen outlook on mundane life as a snare, as entrapment, and above all, as an illusion. This metaphysical crisis becomes especially apparent when Eguchi begins to repent for a fugitive moment – “but it was the women in his past that floated into his mind” (68). The absurdity of his senescent desire is accentuated when, reclining next to a somnolent “prostitute,” he finds it “strange that the small girl tonight seemed to bring sex back from the past. He touched his lips gently to her closed lips. There was no taste. They were dry. The fact that there was no taste seemed to improve them.” (68–69) Such renditions by Kawabata of a libidinal absurd could have been found particularly promising for Duras’s somnoscript. It thus turns out that her mis-en-scène of an impasse of desire bears resemblance to a Buddhist critique of affective engagement. This special overlay (or rather, substratum) within Duras’s somnoscript – her world of textual sleep – is worth recognizing.66 65

66

See Dennis Lim, “Cannes Q. and A.: Julia Leigh on a Modern-Day ‘Sleeping Beauty,’” New York Times, 15 May 2011 (http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/cannes-qa-julia -leigh-on-a-modern-day-sleeping-beauty/?_r=0). If Duras was not openly an adherent of Buddhist thought, it is plausible that – both through her readings (e.g., Kawabata) and her early life in French Indochina – she assimilated some understanding of Buddhism’s esteem for disengagement. In an interview, recalling childhood vacations in the southeast of Asia, Duras refers to “Buddhist monasteries, small isolated pagodas, the calm there; the men there had this exceptional calm, this absence from themselves (italics mine) ... .” See Marguerite Duras and Xavière Gauthier, Woman to Woman, trans. Katherine A. Jensen (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004), 103. On Kawabata’s Buddhist ties, see Nina Cornyetz, The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature: Polygraphic Desire (London: Routledge, 2008), 16, 19–22.

chapter 5

Alternate Endymions, Other Ariadnes Two elderly American women were vacationing in Scotland and chanced upon a sleeping Scotsman dressed in a traditional kilt. The women ­speculated as to whether or not he was wearing an undergarment beneath the kilt. Since the Scotsman was sleeping in a secluded area in the countryside with no one else around, the women decided to look under his kilt to see for themselves. The braver of the two sauntered over to the sleeping man, quietly lifted his kilt, and peeped under. Giggling contentedly, she reported to her friend that the Scotsman wore no underwear. Not to be outdone by her friend’s audacity, the second woman told her friend that not only would she, too, take a look, but she would tie a blue ribbon onto his appendage. She did so, and the two of them laughed and went on their way. Some time later, the Scotsman awoke and felt the urge to relieve himself. As he did so, he noticed the blue ribbon and commented to himself: “I don’t know where you were while I was asleep, but you won first prize.” urban folklore

…

The soul, to fulfill the functions which Plato’s metaphors have imagined for it, must be hermaphroditic. It is phallic in its responses to beauty, ­becoming engorged, rising, pursuing its object; and in its failures, too, flaccidly falling. But it is female at that point when the Forms fertilize the soul. What is brought to birth in Meno or in Theaetetus, later, is the Ideas which have been laid there by their earlier intercourse with a b­ eauty ­beyond the stars. The black horse – the dark unruly phallus – desires, if we may so speak, to unite with the body, to enter it and there to realize its seedful dreams; whereas the pale phallus seeks to reproduce creatively, by bringing the Forms into their full fruition in the mind. william h. gass1

∵ 1 Habitations of the Word: Essays (New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1985), 251–52. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004316218_006

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This discussion of sleep’s presence in modern and postmodern art could easily become endless, especially since the terminus of the postmodern – or is it late capitalism? – continues to be debated. People, in addition, continue to sleep, and painters, journalists, cinematographers, poets, and writers of prose fiction continue to demonstrate concern, fascination, or both, with the dormant state. Given an array of possible directions, the current study turns to (and concludes with) consideration of a certain discursive territory, the evaluation of which can say much not only about sleeping subjects but also about the forced sleep of subjectivities during the twentieth century. Here under scrutiny are depictions of sleep notable for their display of gender inflections that are gay, lesbian, or androgynous. Also taken up in this chapter is a perplexing category, the hermaphroditic, referred to above by William Gass and many other commentators on issues of gender. This rubric is sometimes seen as overlapping with the notion of androgyny, but more often as divergent. As José Estaban Muñoz remarks, “Sleep, like sex and alongside sex, gives us a sense of the world which potentially interrupts practices of thought that reify a kind of ontological totality – a totality that boxes us into an intractable and stalled version of the world.”2 Muñoz further proposes that depictions of sleep can convey “an androgynous or perhaps even a transgender presence.” Indeed, such representations can at times even impart “a dreamy and sleepy queer sense.”3 Queer or merely androgynous – the latter term, less of a challenge to long-standing norms, indicates “a movement away from sexual p ­ olarization and the prison of gender toward a world in which individual roles and the modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen.”4 Yet even a modest deviation from heteronormative demeanor may be regarded as simply deviant, hence may entail discouragement or other countering. This sort of quandary rather easily becomes a suitable subject for staging within an aesthetics of sleep. As throughout this investigation, an understanding of recent dynamisms – and antagonisms – requires that antecedents receive attention. A distinguished representational site within which to begin charting the current topic is Sleep (also known as The Two Friends) by the nineteenth-century proto-realist painter, Gustave Courbet (fig. 43). This provocative rendition of a somnolent nude female (and patently lesbian) couple is a landmark in the ­representation of gender. An arresting vision of lesbian sexuality, it is also one of the most outstanding depictions of multiple orgasm in all of art history. 2 “The Sense of Watching Tony Sleep” in After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker (Durham: Duke up, 2011), 142. 3 Ibid., 146, 147. 4 Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), ix–x.

Figure 43 Gustave Courbet, Sleep (The Two Friends) (1866). Oil on canvas, 135 cm × 200 cm. Paris, Musée du Petit Palais. Photo Credit: eric lessing/Art Resource, ny.

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­Admittedly, the archive is decidedly small and may include only Barbara Hammer’s brief cinematographical self-chronicle, Multiple Orgasm, along with Courbet’s Sleep.5 It is even possible that the latter work qualifies as the only non-cinematic or “still” representation of repeating or continuous orgasm (at least until competitors are identified and/or created). How it happens that a single image can successfully depict a repeating action will soon be explained. More immediately, it is worth asking how it is that the phenomenon of multiple orgasm could be intermingled with sleep’s involvement in depicting same-sex eroticism; that is, with the declared topic of this chapter. Answers to such questions are forthcoming, but while Sleep serves as a valuable historical marker for depictions of sleep involving gays and lesbians during the modernist and postmodern eras, there is a protracted and tortuous representational development that precedes Courbet’s monument to an alternate ­sexuality. It is a chronicle also in need of exposition. A foray into the historical background of this impressive painting begins with a motif of late-classical sculpture, the sleeping hermaphrodite. Lost in general oblivion after the collapse of ancient Rome, the sleeping hermaphrodite as artistic – and cultural – dynamism underwent a quasi-resurrection ­during the mid-1400s when an example of this type of statuary was unearthed in Rome6 (fig. 44). From the rear, the statue ostensibly represents a nude f­ emale figure ­reclining in calm repose on the right side, but tilted toward the abdomen. James Saslow, a founder of Early Modern gay and lesbian studies, notes that the buttocks are “full and globular.”7 The torso is curvaceous; the coiffure and visage are distinctly feminized. The legs are well-formed but not assertively muscular. The left leg is bent at the knee, and the lower portion or “calf” rests comfortably on its shapely counterpart, the lower portion of the right leg. There is a hint of winsomeness in the pose and more than a little womanly grace. While the scenario from the rear is surely feminine, frontal inspection is likely to incur bemusement, perhaps an element of shock as well. From this 5 The topic of multiple orgasm, or repeated climax without a pause in sexual arousal, is ­usefully delimited by Anne Bolin and Patricia Whelehan, Human Sexuality: Biological, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2009), 62, 272–73. On Barbara Hammer’s film, Multiple Orgasm (1977), see Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, “Hammer, Barbara,” Women Film ­Directors: An International Bio-Critical Dictionary (Westport: Greenwood, 1995), 170. An ­archival copy of the six-minute film is owned by the Brooklyn Museum. 6 The circumstances of the discovery are nicely set forth by Preston W. Bautista, “Manifesting Masculinities in Central Italian Renaissance Art” (Diss.: City U of ny, 2008), 146–47. See also Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale up, 1999), 55–56. 7 Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven: Yale up, 1988), 75.

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Figure 44 Anonymous, Sleeping Hermaphrodite (Roman copy [2nd century ce] of a Greek original [2nd century bce]). Marble, 169 cm × 89 cm. Paris, Louvre. ma 231. Photo Credit: hervé lewandowski. © rmn – Grand Palais/Art ­R esource, ny.

perspective, the viewer will descry an improbable combination – and confrontation – of male genitalia and enticingly conical female breasts. The m ­ inor ­deity Hermaphroditus is the locus classicus, the origin in myth of this anomalous figure. Hermaphroditus is born as a male, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, hence the distinctive name. His sexual identity becomes blended following his refusal of the sexual advances of Salmacis, nymph of a spring. As she clings to him and prays that the two will be forever united, her wish is granted, but only through the creation of a new person that is both male and female. ­Erotic and of ambiguous gender, this lesser deity is especially remembered for ­visual ­representations in which an eager satyr approaches from the rear and is ­unaware that he desires intercourse with an individual of dual sexuality. The viewer of the artwork, if not the satyr, can detect the barrier. Erotic teasing, humor, and surprise are all inherent in such depictions.8 In her/his post-classical afterlife, the hermaphrodite loses the associations of exuberant sexual play and acquires instead those of sexual deviance. Thus when the Christian apologist Clement of Alexandria referred to hermaphroditism in attacking sodomy, he was apparently “using genital physiology as a metaphor for the anomalous behavior of sodomites, who seemed to him to exhibit functions or attributes normally belonging to the other sex.”9 And with the rediscovery of pertinent statuary during the mid-fifteenth century, the term “hermaphrodite” in its various forms becomes a signifier of erotic attraction 8

9

John R. Clarke provides a comprehensive “biography” of Hermaphroditus in Looking at L­ ovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art, 100 b.c. – a.d. 250 (Berkeley: U of ­California P, 2001). See especially 49–54. Saslow, 79.

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and behavior involving individuals of the same gender. At the same time, the variant eroticism now tied to this figure in his/her dormant condition establishes a secondary or “satellite” connection with the condition of sleep. Hence, as the fifteenth century gives way to the sixteenth, representational sites begin to appear in which homoeroticism and somnolence co-exist. There is a lack of scholarly consensus regarding the extent to which samesex love was an acceptable mode of affect and behavior during the ­Early ­Modern era.10 It can be argued that there is a similar lack of consensus regarding the reception of lesbianism, homosexuality, and bisexuality across cultures, social classes, and religious audiences at the beginning of the third millennium ce What is certain is that, in literature and visual art, Early Modern Europe was crowded with delicate-looking, sexually ambiguous young men, and anomalously assertive women. It is also clear that a faint or a strong aura of opprobrium, in daily life as in representation, could adhere to expressions of non-procreative sexuality. And in verbal and visual depictions, it is evident in addition that, intermingled with this mild or pronounced opprobrium, interspersed with surprise or with casual jocularity because of a violation of gender expectations, the condition of sleep could intrude. In view of the transgressive tinge of a considerable amount of homoerotic discourse during the Early Modern era, and given the relative prominence of the image of the hermaphrodite within this discourse, it is useful to begin to apprehend this historical trend in terms of the contrast between the oddball hermaphrodite and its seeming near-opposite, the genial androgyne. As Early Modernist Carla Freccero puts it, “… a great distance lies between the spiritualized concept androgyne and its physical realization (or description) as the monstrous hermaphrodite.”11 Freccero here follows the thinking of historian 10

11

The issue of tolerance remains relevant along with questions regarding barriers to which non-conforming individuals were subject under the regime of Early Modern heteronormativity. In her distinguished study, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham: Duke up, 2006), Carla Freccero proceeds from a different standpoint, arguing “against a certain doing of the history of homosexuality that either taxonomizes identities…or wants to account for a preemptively defined category of the present (‘modern homosexuality’) by developing progressive historical accounts of the evolution of that category” (31). Freccero has at this point in her argument already maintained, for instance, “that the Western love song is always already queer and that we only have to deconstruct heteronormative culture for these differences within to appear to displace and estrange the subject of heteronormativity from itself” (29). A weakness of this approach is that significant instances of ­discursive dissonance may pass unnoticed, aesthetic contexts wherein much depends on the subtle foregrounding of dissent from prevailing sexual values. “The Other and the Same: The Image of the Hermaphrodite in Rabelais” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed.

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of religions Mircea Eliade, who identifies the androgyne as an idealization ­revealing “the union of the magicoreligious powers belonging to both sexes,” as opposed to the ignoble “augmentation of anatomical organs” evident in the hermaphrodite.12 With the hermaphrodite having become a signifier of homoerotic subjectivity, this mythical figure also becomes associated with attributes and behaviors linked to this subjectivity – at least as viewed from the outside, from the perspective of the Early Modern institutions and individuals expected to observe and police manifestations of sexual deviance. The key attribute of the “hermaphrodites” – an atypicality in amorous preferences – was often seen as a resistance to naturalness. This resistance could also be termed a crossing or going against nature that may in turn disclose a queerness (from the root, quer-, across or against) in relation to received, socio-cultural discourses in general. Understandably, this variant, “hermaphroditic” consciousness could be expected to give rise to numerous innovations, new perspectives on man, woman, and culture, to creativity in many forms. Yet at the center of the phenomenon, something that is permanently unfamiliar or alien remains and which is likely to include a disavowal of (or at least a distancing from) reproductive capacities. As for the numerous instances in which the phenomena of sleep and samesex eroticism are concurrent, a mutual buttressing of meanings and implications may obtain. The claim of a “buttress” effect rests on the fact that the condition of human dormancy has often been apprehended as possessing a certain otherness or even queerness within the customary or “natural” order of life in general. On the one hand, there has been a nearly universal recognition that labor and waking can continue only for limited periods of time without the placid interruption of restorative slumber. On the other, a worrisome feigning, a resemblance to death (almost a queering of life) has been apprehended as a major attribute of sleep by a number of its moralizing observers. The debate over the terms “androgyne” and “hermaphrodite” is animated and complex; attempting to register a definitive statement regarding the distinction is not an intent of the current discussion. It is at the same time relevant that, despite marked variations in describing and assessing the terms “hermaphrodite” and “androgyne,” the commentators often appear to agree on basic valuations: Within a gender-defying gender space that could be referred to as “plurisexualities,” there is a sub-section characterized by a trend in the direction of idealization, unification, synthesis. There is also

12

Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987), 151. Mephistopheles and the Androgyne: Studies in Religious Myth and Symbol, trans. J.M. ­Cohen (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965), 100, quoted by Freccero, 349n18.

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a plurisexual quadrant that is home to and often emphasizes – along with pleasure resulting from tactile stimulation between individuals of the same gender – dissent or resistance regarding the codings of a dominating (“normative”) sexual agenda.13 The locutions “hermaphrodite” and “androgyne” (and their derivative forms) are retained as useful and insight-inducing. Often distinct and separate, their territories can overlap within a single work of art, and as this discussion turns to Courbet’s Sleep and its successors, historical and cultural markers are to be teased out and observed. From Sleep onward through “high” modernism and beyond, such representations reveal much about homoerotic and other slumbers.

Gustave Courbet’s Sleep (The Two Friends)

Sleep is an intricate painting of such explosive sensuality that viewers generally at home with mid-nineteenth visual art may find themselves hesitating to search out and interrogate the work’s abundant subtleties. Not-quite-realist and not-yet-modernist, Sleep is historically liminal. And it might be regarded by some viewers as an ebullient dream-vision that survived the crash of ­European ­Romanticism. The complexity of the painting is such that it is both ­hermaphroditic and androgynous, hence harbors trends that will help define the tenor of homoerotic representation during modernism and postmodernism, respectively. In the present context, entry into the overriding problem that the painting poses is best afforded via examination of Michael Fried’s discussion of the work in Courbet’s Realism. Fried pushes off from prior commentary on the canvas by noting that his predecessors “have tended to dwell on its l­esbian theme.” Enlightened as well as androgynous in his approach to this cornucopian, quasi-operatic display of a lesbian sublime, Fried thus refuses to break under the near-overload of sensory stimuli offered via the painting’s “stunning assertion of the two women’s nakedness.”14 13

14

While discussing Hermaphrodito (1918), a prose work by Alberto Savinio (Giorgio de ­ hirico’s younger brother), Kealla Jewell offers keen insight into the varied discursive C ­disruptions easily brought into play by the figure of the hermaphrodite: “Gender categories are…building blocks of metaphysical systems. Fixed, stable gender can be equated with both ontological and social stability. To invoke a hermaphrodite is to draw attention to how an author might break philosophical, social, stylistic, or linguistic rules” (The Art of Enigma: The de Chirico Brothers and the Politics of Modernism [University Park: ­Pennsylvania State up, 2004], 164). Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), 206–07.

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An impeccable scholar, Fried can also tend to bypass liberalish, feminist, or other forms of cultural critique. He has sidestepped Sleep – in its historical context – as a representational fleshpot of forbidden womanly pleasure, a scene depicted in encyclopedic detail. Fried has declined to do more than obliquely identify the gender provincialism of Courbet’s era, observing that associates of the artist regarded lesbianism as an offshoot, a symptom of political ill-health. Yet if Fried has steered clear of the Scylla of homophobia, it is less certain that he has also avoided an alternate méconnaissance or false recognition of the feminine. At issue here is Fried’s ingenious exposition of Courbet’s implied eulogy of that gender via representational practices that deactivate masculine dominance, promote “femininity as implicitly active after all,” and at the same time, suggest “the merging of painter, model, and painting in a single pictorial-­ ontological entity.”15 Such is Fried’s pictorial paradigm for Courbet. In the specific context of Sleep, the requisite personnel and paraphernalia of the painting are discovered in : (1) the posterior view of the darker-complexioned lesbian, who may be perceived as a “stand-in” for the artist as “painter-­beholder”; (2) the coiffure of both ladies, which in each case can be seen as an emergent paintbrush; (3) the seemingly legless table in the lower left, with variegated coloration, viewable as an ersatz palette – and so on.16 The interpretation is compelling, especially if the bed on which the lovers recline is apprehended as a figuration of the painter’s canvas. Hence Fried’s contention is a reasonable one: that, for Courbet, the phenomenological structure of “the painter-beholder – or his desire – ” is conveyed as “metaphorically feminine (or at least as bigendered).” And the lesbian world of Sleep may well constitute “a transposition into an entirely feminine and manifestly erotic register of the aspiration toward merger,” a wish detected and claimed by Fried to have recurrently found a place in Courbet’s pictorial endeavors.17 A reasonable argument, so lucidly advanced that its postmodern dimensions may almost escape notice. The point here is not that a postmodern aesthetics is inherently defective, only that, in the process of Fried’s rendering of an all-inclusive “global” theory of Courbet’s rarefied “femininity,” the assertive voices of some “actual” women, of self-enunciating lesbian subjectivities (however filtered through the subjectivity of a male artist) have vanished. Fried adheres to a rhetoric of clarity that many postmodern commentators rushed to discard. His postmodernism is, however, noticeable first of all in the 15 Ibid., 192. 16 Ibid., 208–09. 17 Ibid., 206.

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attentiveness accorded to the gaze and its paradoxes, a trend traceable to Lacan but perhaps more directly – in this case – to Michel Foucault. In his ­seminal discussion of The Ladies-in-Waiting by Velázquez, Foucault helped found a new visual rhetoric, a destabilizing of conventional perspective and pictorial space as received in the 1960s. Focusing on the paradox that the viewer of the canvas and the royal individuals whose portraits are being rendered occupy the same locale at the same instant, Foucault via Velázquez calls ­attention to a certain “deregulation” or expansion, during the mid-seventeenth century, of the painterly maneuvers that a visual artist would recognize. That is, operations until then seen as acceptable-without-discussion (often even without recognition).18 It is thus not difficult to accept the notion that, two centuries after Velázquez, Courbet has instigated a process of representational updating by manipulating the pictorial arena in a new way. The artist can now be apprehended as throwing himself into the canvas to the extent possible, in a form and manner found convenient and supportive of a regime or dynamics of the self. Also useful at this point is a probing of correlations between Fried’s hermeneutics and the tantalizing, perplexing discourse of neo-Freudian Jacques Lacan. As in the case of Foucault, the gaze is here notable. For Lacan, the gaze is a key notion indicating an optic dynamism that is active, assertive (as ­opposed to the “look”), and appropriative. The gaze is especially significant during a specific phase of late-infancy, the “mirror-stage.” During this foundational era, the conglomerating, agglutinative capacity of the gaze is said to come decisively to the fore. Lacan posits that the infant enters the mirror-stage with a loose, incompletely structured sense of self, a state of psychic deficit that ­correlates with the fact that the infant’s self-knowledge has been hitherto derived, primarily, from seeing only parts of its own body – e.g., hands, feet, thighs, legs, torso. Other individuals have been frequently viewed of course, but especially the visage and upper torso of the mother and other care-takers. Then at some point, the infant is suddenly blessed (so it might seem) with what might be termed a self-epiphany, a glimpse, then a coagulating apprehension of the at least frontally complete and coherent spectacle of his or her body in a mirror. In a virtual flash, a self, an ego is born, or almost so, for psychic processes never quite congeal, never in fact reach their apparent goal, nor can they even 18

Foucault’s renowned commentary on The Ladies-in-Waiting is found in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 3–16. Gary ­Shapiro’s commentary on Velázquez in conjunction with Foucault is detailed and l­ucid (Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying [Chicago: U of ­Chicago P, 2003], 225–29, 234–64). Shapiro takes up the “strategies of transformation, identification, and reversal at work in the rhetoric of Foucault’s ekphrasis of this painting that in part echo and in part contrast with what we see there under his guidance” (249).

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be adequately transcribed into the everyday explicatory language by means of which humans habitually presume to communicate.19 Thus the Lacanian ego is in a sense stillborn – or still being born, never fully on its feet, always somnolescent but ever in process, dormant yet c­ ontinually unfurling. Lacan commentator Bruce Fink has written cogently regarding the “formation” of the self, noting first of all that “the ego is an imaginary production.”20 It should be recalled that the “imaginary” is one of Lacan’s three “orders” or registers of the psychic cosmos, not indicating something aesthetic or mendacious, but referring instead to a zone of psychic images, especially self-images, and including all efforts and enterprises of self-imaging. As Fink’s analysis proceeds, he structures the Lacanian ego as a crystallization or sedimentation of images of an individual’s own body and of self-images reflected back to him or her by others. In contradistinction to Freud, Lacan maintains that this crystallization does not constitute an agency, but rather an object. That object is cathected or invested with libido like other objects, and thus the infant’s “own” ego is not necessarily cathected any more than other objects (or egos) in the infant’s environment.21 Detectably, perhaps even saliently, there is thus rapport, a family resemblance linking the ego-psychology of Lacan (via Professor Fink) and Courbet’s pictorial self as schematized by Michael Fried. Like a pliable clay vessel freshly placed on a plank to dry after being shaped on a potter’s wheel, Courbet’s ­artistic self has been projected onto a canvas. Yet for readers/viewers of both Courbet and Fried, that psychic assemblage may remain somewhat inchoate, and the various segments – no longer simply objects in a painting – may not have clicked comfortably into place, each to each. And as in other canvases, Fried descries in Sleep a blending of genders indicative of that “aspiration toward merger.” Yet this aspiration or desire will always entail an unfinishable blending process wherein gaps between informing mind, painter’s brush, and inanimate pigment deter the work from ever arriving at psychic completeness or consummation even as it begins to spring into life via interpretive programs. The overall trend in Fried’s commentary is in any case toward unification rather than fragmentation. And within Sleep, Fried shores up this trend with his observation of the interlocking posture of 19

See Lacan’s “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, 1–7. 20 The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, 84. 21 Ibid.

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the sleepers’ bodies, a structuring that conveys the impression that the ­women have become “virtually a single (bigendered) female body, embraced by a ­single pair of arms.”22 Sleep dates from 1866, approximately a century too soon to be classified as a hypnoglyph, that curious postmodern form entailing a highlighting of sleep, a combining of text and image, interruption or blockage of circadian rhythms, and especially a resistance to and/or of narratives. Yet if this marvelously engaging painting is assessed in tandem with Fried’s high-powered, transformative reading of it, the conceptual distance and chronological discrepancy are much reduced. And particularly with regard to the factor of narrative resistance, the Courbet/Fried hybrid is now a trans-visual and trans-textual work redolent of the high degree of inclusivity frequent in many hypnoglyphs of the postmodern era: That is, pulling in, appropriating, assimilating a gamut of narratives so that little narrative interest can subsist outside of the represented sleeper(s) and the immediate context in which the depiction of sleep is transpiring. In such instances, a nexus or nesting of diegetical process and structures is ­effected, with the artwork often as a result constituting its own sleep, becoming almost a testament to its own recumbency. While Fried’s discourse tilts Sleep in the direction of an idealized androgyny, a visual reading that aspires toward realism may in fact wish to proceed in a somewhat different direction and attempt to touch the “naked” truth of this depiction of lesbianism. Such a reading may rightly insist that the hermaphroditic paradigm also exhibits a strong presence in the complex pictorial ­artifact that Courbet has rendered. The sleeping hermaphrodite as a standard statuary motif was well disseminated in Courbet’s era. In 1839 – long before Sleep was undertaken –, the artist first took up residence in Paris, site of the Louvre and of the most famous surviving example of this image.23 Certainly, there are differences between the reclining figure in the foreground (the more clearly “hermaphroditic” of the two slumbering women), who sleeps dorsally while the traditional hermaphrodite is posed obliquely, not quite supported on the left side but not lying on the stomach either. Yet in tandem with the 22 23

Courbet’s Realism, 207. On Courbet’s arrival in Paris from Ornans, see Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, ed. and trans., Letters of Gustave Courbet (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), 29–30. Dorothy Johnson discusses the hermaphrodite myth as represented in French mid-nineteenth-century visual art (especially Ingres), referring to the Louvre statue as a well-known artwork during this era (David to Delacroix: The Rise of Romantic Mythology [Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2011], 145–46). See also Mechthild Fend, Grenzen der Männlichkeit: Der Androgyn in der französischen Kunst und Kunstheorie 1750–1830 (Berlin: Reimer, 2003), 121–22.

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statue, the buttocks of Courbet’s foregrounded woman are prominent, almost protuberantly erotic, while the legs and feet (one of which in each case extends upward, as if in movement) are arranged in a paradoxical manner that is both reposeful and kinetic. Most problematic, most suggestive of a riddle, are the darker figure’s highly muscular legs, the right one raised upward in a pose that emphasizes the appreciable ergonomic capacity with which the legs are surely endowed. Fully concealed is the genital area of the nearer sleeper. This postural detail strengthens what was already a strong visual allusion to that well-known sculptural image and its significations. The present reading does not claim that, with a certain classical element brought into play, Courbet implies that, like her ancient “sire,” the genital anatomy of this sleeping lady is masculine while all the rest is feminine. What is emphasized is that, yes, this is a painting about a sexuality staged as aberrant, about erotic engagement between women, about lust and release that rupture the received values of the era with regard to the erotic behavior of “ordinary” men and women, of “good citizens” and their differently-genitaled sleeping partners. Courbet is to be credited with creating a visual forum for the display of any form of same-sex love during a reactionary period in French history. The years following the political crisis of 1848 witnessed the installment of a “conservative, censorious imperial regime” that encouraged the social construction of a “stage of rigidification” whereupon conformity with respect to gender and sexual mores was a dominant concern.24 The year 1857, for instance, saw the banning of Baudelaire’s “Damned Women: Delphine and Hippolita” (“Femmes damnées: Delphine et Hippolyte”), a poem that highlights lesbianism as a tabooed, sexual paradise open to initiates. The work concludes with Baudelaire’s ghastly depiction (ll. 85–104) of the infernal fate into which practitioners of lesbianism plunge themselves.25 Their torment amid parching winds is reminiscent of the punishment Dante accords the lustful (Inferno 5). By implication, the final segment of the poem also indicates the abhorrence with which lesbianism was viewed during Baudelaire’s era. Courbet depicts the purview of exile of his lesbians with a visual rhetoric that lacks the luridness and verbal wrenching in which Baudelaire indulges. Yet there are some parallels with the account of a lesbian sexual encounter and restful aftermath in the main segment of “Damned Women: Delphine and Hippolyta” (ll. 1–84). Courbet has in any case elected to assume the role of “spokesperson” for an implicit or hypothesized same-sex alliance during an 24 25

Naomi Schor, “Male Lesbianism,” glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.3 (2001), 391. Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 152–55.

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ideologically unsympathetic era.26 Also like Baudelaire to an extent, Courbet has assimilated this triumph of lesbian survivalism – this resistance of an erotic narrative via the significations of sleep – to an ideology that would render it dormant. Hence the latter presents his chosen episode in phallic guise, within a power-dynamics of “butch-femme” that would install and perpetuate a paradigm of male heterosexual dominance within an exclusively female context. The notion of a “butch-femme” hierarchy as the “natural” norm in a lesbian relationship has understandably evoked a response among commentators on female homoerotic relationships.27 A skewed interpersonal power model of this type brings lesbian relationships “in line” with traditional, male-dominant heterosexual relationships. In Courbet’s context, the use of a series of codings that are basically heterosexual accentuates the impression that, yes, illicit ­sexual contact between women has recently transpired here. Almost in the same breath, the presence of such coding muffles female concerns and intentions that this canvas would seem designed to enunciate and amplify. 26

27

The most salient parallels between painting and poem are the setting of a first encounter between lesbian lovers and the contrast between an assertive and submissive ­partner. Also significant is line 82: “… may lassitude (after sex) bring on repose” (“… que la lassitude amène le repos”). Pichois (Baudelaire, Vol. 1,1127) refers to the argument – a questionable one – that an alternate poem by Baudelaire on lesbianism, simply entitled “Damned Women” (“Femmes damnées”) (1861) was the direct source of Courbet’s Sleep. For further discussion, see Dorothy M. Kosinski, “Gustave Courbet’s The Sleepers: The Lesbian I­ mage in Nineteenth-Century French Art and Literature,” Artibus et Historiae 9.18 (1988): 187–99. Also worth consulting is Sharon Marcus’s “Comparative Sapphism” in The Literary Channel: The Inter-national Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and C ­ arolyn ­Dever (Princeton: Princeton up, 2002), 251–85. Marcus notes a widespread representational interest in lesbianism, not an endorsement, among nineteenth-century French authors. Under the broad rubric of realism, there was “a commitment to detailed portraits of a full range of social types, to representing what existed regardless of its social value” (275). At the same time, “French sapphism was fully compatible with anti-­lesbian sentiment” (276). In aids in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures (Madison: U of ­Wisconsin P, 2001), David Caron explores a complementary line of inquiry involving a never-erased intolerance of male same-sex eroticism during this era, the development of the term “­homosexuality,” and its association with the idea of degeneracy (24–27). Lillian Faderman writes of “the tyranny of ‘appropriate’ butch and femme dress in ­working-class bars” during the 1950s (Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America [New York: Columbia up, 2012], 164). For a succinct but nuanced discussion of the varying perceptions and evaluations of these two lesbian types during different periods, see Sherry Breyette’s article, “Butch/Femme” in the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women: Global Women’s Issues and Knowledge, ed. Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender, Vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 131–33.

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Neither a male painter nor a male commentator such as the present one can presume to formulate an unimpeachable articulation of a feminine – indeed, feminine homoerotic – message. Yet a careful survey of relevant details in Sleep makes clear that something basic is omitted when an hermaphroditic – or ­perhaps more properly – a phallic “strategy” is representationally played to the hilt. Thus – in expanding upon an observation already made – the legs of the dark-haired woman are emphatically muscular, sinuous, athletic, as if her amatory labors could be expected to have been quite strenuous and demanding; that is, involving an extended series of rhythmic vaginal penetrations by the male genital organ or a “strap-on” prosthesis. (The phallus/vagina opposition is already apparent in the peculiar stoppered vial that Courbet has placed on a side table next to a suspiciously [that is, vaginally] contoured crystal pitcher.) An ambiguous statement about penetration is also offered as the darker ­lesbian places her fingers on the labia-like folds of the bedding. Less ambiguously, the symbolism is in any case highly sexual, and clearly, the sleeper closest to the viewer has been the more active participant. Distinctly suggestive as well is the broken string of pearls that implies a loss of innocence, hence a hint that this lesbian encounter, with its not necessary accomplishment of penetration, has entailed a defloration. Similarly of interest is the two-pronged brooch or hair-pin at the lower end of the mattress, dangerously phalliclooking and adorned with vaguely testicular-shaped lumps. Thus whatever it was that – ­sexually – very recently transpired on this disheveled bedding, the sleeper in the foreground was the more kinetic lover, a male-like dominator. And no doubt, her fair-complexioned companion, with her ample but softer Rubenesque corporeality, assumed a role that was receptive, was passive in comparison to the role of her better-muscled bed-partner. Courbet’s representational “cross-dressing” masks what might have been depicted as uniquely modulated lesbian voices. The masking would of course continue – even if ameliorated – as long as these voices are articulated, fictionalized by a male artist. All the same, the schema here presented goes only so far in imposing a heterosexual model on the abundant erotic energy that the depiction of these two ladies discharges. For the artist also appears to impose a nearly invisible limit on his own masculinizing pictorial intrusions. Here at issue are some telling details of the depiction of the sable-haired woman, of this slightly olive-skinned lady whose overall appearance is Mediterranean (in contrast to her nordic-looking companion). The lady of the foreground is perhaps Greek, is redolent of the traditions of Sappho or of Artemis, is in any case “Greek” in her amours. Though asleep, she retains signatures of acute sexual arousal. Her breasts have remained somewhat protruding, rounded, manifestly firm, with the nipples tight and erect, in subtle but definite contrast to

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the ­relaxed bosom of her recent conquest. Almost undeniably, hers are the erotically aroused breasts of a woman in the joyous throes of love-making, and the skin of her neck and especially of her cheeks is flushed with sexual heat. Her “real” erotic encounter has apparently failed to deplete her. She remains passionate, it seems, in her post-orgasmic dreams, manifests a continuing pursuit of climax, perhaps experiences orgasm again and again oneirically. The capacity of woman to maintain sexual arousal – and to continue or resume intercourse – after male orgasm and detumescence has been traditionally noted.28 Hence the locution, “multiple orgasm,” denoting a sexual response long regarded as almost exclusively female but now subject to the intervention of climax-gurus in hot pursuit of male clientele. And of course, women as well as men have enjoyed oneiric intercourse for uncountable millennia (e.g., ­Penelope [Odyssey 20:87–90]; held to be sinful in the Old Testament [Leviticus 15:16–18, Deuteronomy 23:9–11], hence presumably frequent among men).29 “Sommeil paradoxal” or “paradoxical sleep” – the term does not appear until the 1960s, coined by the neurophysiologist Michel Jouvet, and it alludes to the occurrence of eye-movements – an indication of an interior dream-state while the body is otherwise immobilized.30 Over numerous centuries, sleep-­ commentators (as previously set forth) have debated the nature and significance of dreams and whether or not dreamless sleep can occur. In the ­mid-nineteenth century, hard on the heels of Descartes, dream-proponents had the upper hand, aided by Xavier Bichat and other pioneering contribu­ tors to sleep-­theory who were averse to the notion of a total – if quite temporary – shutdown of cognitive processes. Courbet appears to have absorbed 28

29

30

On this topic, see the findings of William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, Human S­ exual Response (1966), Foreword by Sam Sloan (Bronx: Ishi, 2010), especially 283–84. Sloan’s flippant remarks in the Foreword (n.p.) are also relevant. Helpful in addition are the comments of Roy J. Levin, “The Human Sexual Response – Similarities and Differences in the Anatomy and Function of the Male and Female Genitalia: Are They a Trivial Pursuit or a Treasure Trove?” in The Psychophysiology of Sex, ed. Erick Janssen (Bloomington: Indiana up, 2007), 42–43. The subject of several pulp-paper publications, the topic of “multiorgasmic males” is taken up in an academic context in a “General Discussion” in The Psychophysiology of Sex, 312. For the passage from the Odyssey, see the translation of Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper Colophon, 1975), 300. Penelope refers to her experience of Odysseus lying beside her at night as “evil,” presumably because she awoke and found the apparition untrue. In an historical review of research on sleep and dreams, J. Allan Hobson observes that “Jouvet used the term paradoxical sleep to emphasize his surprise that an apparently sleeping animal could have an activated brain” (The Dreaming Brain [New York: Basic, 1988], 150). For description of sommeil paradoxal, see also Denise Glück, Dormir: les 1001 rituels du dormir (Paris: Christine Bonneton, 1997), 218.

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something of this ambience of oneiricity or “dreaminess” at mid-century. All sleepers are presumed to dream (or otherwise manifest consciousness, in some schemas) at every instant, if only glimmeringly, throughout each episode of somnolence.31 Courbet has accentuated this putative phenomenon to a point – almost certainly – beyond dispute in the case of the dormant figure depicted as the nearer of the two to the viewer. His strategy heightens the overall impression of homoerotic passion that the canvas conveys. And paradoxically, while structuring the scene as a transmogrified encounter between dominating male and receptive woman, Courbet has also elicited – via the sanguine complexion and the intimation of continuing arousal – a resonance that tells of a resisting feminine (more specifically, lesbian) subjectivity amid cultural constraints. It is clear in addition that Sleep is indispensable for any understanding of linkages between sleep and alternate gender orientations during Courbet’s era and after.

The Plurisexual Marcel Proust

Not always clear – that much is safely claimed regarding the cognitive ­boundary between the dormant yet somehow argumentative hermaphrodite and the conciliatory androgyne. A particularly difficult nut to crack is found, not ­surprisingly, in Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps p­ erdu) by Marcel Proust, arch-archivalist and fictionalizer of sleep-states. The passage in question is as follows: So, my eyes blinded, my lips sealed, my limbs fettered, my body naked, the image of sleep which my sleep itself projected had the appearance of those great allegorical figures (in one of which Giotto has ­portrayed 31

The point is made particularly well by Michel Covin in “Un moment difficile à passer, mais vite oublié,” Visages du sommeil, ed., M. Covin, special issue of Revue des sciences humaines 194 (1984): 20–26. Covin returns to this topic in Une esthéthique du sommeil (Paris: Beauchesnes, 1990), where he contends that philosophy is averse to sleep but condones dream, “for the dream is the pursuit of awakened life by other means, a substitute for consciousness, a form of degraded thought, but a thought all the same.” (“… car le rêve est la poursuite de la vie éveillée sous d’autres moyens, un substitut de la conscience, une forme de pensée degradée, mais une pensée quand même” [2].) Covin also comments on Xavier Bichat’s theory of partial sleep, according to which “all of the organs are never asleep at the same time, but are awake in turns, or are the object of unequal sleeps, more or less profound. ‘I am asleep, but my heart is awake,’ says the wife of the Song of Songs. And Bichat, ‘My belly as well.’” (nw, trans.) (“… tous les organes ne sont jamais endormis en même temps, mais veillent à tour de rôle, ou sont l’objet de sommeils inégaux, plus ou moins profonds. ‘Je dors, mais mon coeur veille,’ dit l’Epouse du Cantique. Et Bichat: mon estomac aussi” [10].)

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Envy with a serpent in her mouth) of which Swann had given me photographs.32 (Telle, les yeux aveugles, les lèvres scellées, les jambes liées, le corps nu, la figure du sommeil que projetait mon sommeil lui-même avait l’air de ces grandes figures allégoriques où Giotto a représenté l’Envie avec un serpent dans la bouche, et que Swann m’avait données.)33 This excerpt has been extracted from a longer sub-episode in which the fictive narrator (also named Marcel) recalls occasions when, so concerned that he might not be able to fall asleep, some onion-skin of consciousness persisted when at last he did. At such times, almost inapprehensible layers of dream, hypnagogia, and ideation, would ripple over one another. On one or several occasions, Marcel imagined that several friends entered his room. His mind was then in some liminal enclosure situated beneath the level of arousal that typifies “normal” everyday consciousness. Still tenuously anchored in sleep, he wished to inform his friends that he had just experienced an interval of sleep during which he believed that he was awake. It is to a juncture of this sort that the lines quoted above refer. What might be denoted as well as implied by this rather peculiar concurrence of images: nudity, a body in bondage, a group of spectators whose interest – if any – is ambiguously motivated, and an archaic figure of uncertain gender, whose mouth is stuffed with a phallic-like snake? Is there something queer in this text? Or is it otherwise – i.e., not within some mischievous homoerotic economy that this naked young man has somehow found himself in bed with an insignium of the phallus? So is there an innocent, even idealized discursive matrix wherein all falls into androgynous place at the hands of a sober and clear-eyed interpreter? The milder, less confrontational reading is helped along by the English translation of Moncrieff and Kilmartin. The standard version of Proust in English, the rendering attenuates some of the relative audacity implicit in Proust’s own wording in this passage. The simple insertion of a set of parentheses around the offending portion of Marcel’s statement does the trick. In the E ­ nglish version, Giotto’s Envy could be simply an example of the general type of emblem-like, allegorical image that Marcel has in mind (fig. 45). The area of contact ­between the two scenarios (the naked sleeper as ­opposed to the serpent-emitting embodiment of vice) is perhaps only rhetorical, offering ekphrastic language that describes: (1) an abstract image that Marcel derives from the experience of his own tortuous sleep, and (2) Giotto’s visual construction of one allegorical personage among several. 32 Proust, Remembrance, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, 2.148. 33 Proust, À la recherche, 2.444–45.

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Figure 45 Giotto di Bondone, Envy (c. 1306). Grisaille fresco, 120 cm × 55 cm. Padua, Cappella degli Scrovegni. Photo Credit: alfredo dagli orti/Art ­R esource, ny.

Proust’s French, however, endows the hermaphroditic Envy with privileged placement. The allegorical depictions of Giotto that here preoccupy Marcel now, surely, have reached a culmination in the snake-in-mouth image of Envy. It seems almost impossible – given this less restrained, more explicit wording – not to perceive some kind of parallel between the nude sleeper and the eccentric picture of an ancient vice. Proust in fact appears to have queered his own text, opening a subtle inquiry on the topic of his narrator’s gender sensitivities, but ushering in broader discursive issues as well. The reference to Giotto also intimates such medieval dynamisms as piety, aesthetics, and community that modernists such as Proust, Eliot, and Yeats perceived as forming a synthesis and generating the splendor of a cultural sublime. Having only a few lines before evoked this vision of cultural excellence in a lofty dream of a Gothic palace at sea, Proust now pursues a different cognitive pathway. As Marcel begins the passage in which he refers to Giotto, the focus is suddenly “diminutions” (“amoindrissements”); that is, the reversible deteriorations to which the dormant state is so often subject, and not the intermittent oneiric climaxes. Abruptly, spirituality has been elided; a gentle hedonism is now the focal point. Sleep is after all a phenomenon long associated with the body, its pleasures, its care and maintenance.34 And aside from the occasional 34

It is a point worth adding that sleep, insisted upon by the body as a significant portion of its care, is outside of the rubric “care of the self” as defined and developed by ­Michel ­Foucault. A process detected by Foucault within the cultural dynamics of classical ­antiquity, care of the self is basically an heuristic operation. “It is clearly as a master of the care of the self that Socrates presents himself to his judges. The god has sent him to remind men that they need to concern themselves … with themselves and their souls. Now

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interventions of edifying dreams, sleep is likely to prove indecorous. For this bodily condition can give the lie to – can perhaps queer or unpredictably ­alter – some of the “givens” assumed to have a quasi-permanence in the human condition: for example, reason, social status, or gender (including such qualities as male fortitude and dominance as traditionally received). Thus by the time Proust closes this pleasant and clever digression with evocation of Giotto’s Envy, the pious ambience that had gone before has all but has evaporated. The blossom-like cushion of fire on which Envy stands can only with difficulty be viewed as infernal punishment or the psychic destructiveness that Envy inflicts upon itself at this Proustian juncture. The multiple tongues of flame that appear to lick the hem of Envy’s mantle may now, to the contrary, signify some illicit longing or impulse. In any case, this scenario remains notable for its ­indirection, its hints, its resistance to interpretive closure.

The Queer Schlaraffenland of Paul Cadmus

Different circumstances are evident in the case of Paul Cadmus, an American visual modernist. Cadmus’s paintings and drawings tend to prove less puzzling than Proust’s prose and to disclose provocative messages within American ­cultural landscapes that were uncomprehending, often intolerant of homosexuality during the 1930s,’40s, and later. At the same time, Cadmus did not shy away from ambiguity, nor was his artistry simplistic. Cadmus’s contribution to it was this theme of the care of oneself, consecrated by Socrates, that later ­philosophy… ultimately placed at the center of that ‘art of existence’ which philosophy claimed to be” (The Care of the Self [The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3], trans. Robert Hurley [New York: Vintage, 1988], 44). For an extended analysis of care of the self as conceived of by ­Foucault, see Paul Allen Miller, Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault (Columbus: Ohio State up, 2007), 178–226. Miller comments, in the course of his discussion, that, “in particular, Foucault saw in the work of such philosophers as Seneca, Epictetus, and Plutarch a turn to the self that, through various practices of examination and study, sought to fashion a beautiful existence in which the subject attained perfect mastery over itself” (213). The interest and relevance of such thinking for the present study – and for Proust’s Marcel as for other individuals modern and postmodern – is clearly that the notion “care of the self,” lodged in rationalist tradition early in its development, can easily be seen as applicable to (in a sense, as speaking for) the best interests of the entire self, of both psyche and soma. It can be argued that at least some of the sleep-centered art discussed in this study constitutes a riposte to what became, in effect, a cautionary philosophy. If this statement is valid, it may be particularly so with respect to certain postmodern works herein examined (e.g., Gardner, Tansey).

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Figure 46 Paul Cadmus, Sunday Sun (1958-’59). Egg tempera on pressed wood panel, 77.5 cm × 26 cm. Private collection. Art © jon f. anderson, Estate of Paul Cadmus/Licensed by VAGA, New York, ny.

queer representation is substantial, not least with regard to a curious sub-portfolio wherein sleep and homoerotic desire discreetly mesh. Review of sleeping figures in Cadmus’s work reveals him to have been a cautious yet determined portrayer of gayness amid societal demands for sexual conformity. Cadmus’s “hermaphroditism” is first of all a discursive one, a subtly coded but corrosive stream of dissent that chastises – and chafes under – embodied authority as vehicle of heterosexual norms. Cadmus’s Sunday Sun (1958-’59) is as good a painting to begin with as any. (fig. 46). According to Lincoln Kirstein, a long-term associate of Cadmus – also a collector of his art –, this painting depicts “a metropolitan martyr of a week’s anonymous work, his pedestal the shattered skylight of an old tenement,” who “enjoys or endures a brief holiday’s resurrection ... .”35 The standing male ­figure at the center of this painting is obviously wilting as he perhaps considers, with manifest frustration and disappointment, better circumstances than his blighted, confining environment renders possible. Within the lower left quadrant of the painting, his female companion reclines in a semi-­somnolent state. Her posture is that of the classical pose of sleepers, an arm encircling 35

Lincoln Kirstein, Paul Cadmus (New York: Imago, 1984), 92.

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her cranium. That she is not simply asleep is evident from the fact that she continues to grip a newspaper in her right hand, and a pair of tinted glasses in her left. Kirstein is certainly correct in his perception of the deleterious effects of a deteriorated urban environment on the lives of this relatively young, attractive couple. At the same time, a homosexual dynamism within the painting is nearly obvious, and this component surely interacts with and augments whatever dissatisfactions that the woman and man may experience and display because of other determinants. Sunday Sun is in fact crowded with gay notes and q­ ueries, beginning with the observation that what this work reveals, just as much as the hemmed-in lives of its two occupants, is the standing figure’s d­ eclination of an open invitation to sexual activity as offered by the stark nakedness and lubricity of his classically voluptuous fellow “sun-bather.” This implicitly consenting Ariadne has already been abandoned, it seems, by her recusant Theseus. The posture of the male figure suggests that he balks from lowering himself to the level of customary marital relations. Martyred by the norms of fifties sexuality, he yearns, it seems, for a higher erotic truth as he basks in a sunlight that is more intense than what falls on his supine consort. The male figure is also posed in a way that, iconographically, is almost appropriate for the blasphemous execution of a saint. However, in this context, the crook at the knee may well imply a crossing or queering, a resistance to heterosexual behavior – and not a certifying of piety in some traditional sense. There are also representational parallels with that anomalous work, Sleeping Masai (discussed earlier) by German sculptor Fritz Behn. Cadmus appears to visually quote this work with its aboriginal, frontal male nudity and to reconstitute it within the highly urban context of post-war New York. Playing upon the dislocation, Cadmus has – it can be argued – tinged this palimpsest of ­African ­nudity with homoerotic overtones. In any case, the companion of this minimally clad Caucasian male must somehow tolerate a “stand-up” on a torrid ­afternoon. The latter figure prefers to touch himself – his heel and his groin, the latter in a way that, if covertly, calls attention to the male genital area. Only at one point, where his toes are in contact with her shin, does he deign to “touch” her – yet this is an illusion, an optical effect of the placement of the two “lovers.” Beyond the aesthetic merits of Sunday Sun and a number of other works by Cadmus with an intriguing, insidious “queerness,” the artist’s hermaphroditic themes are without doubt most brilliantly displayed in What I Believe, an American masterpiece of the late 1940s (fig.  47). Within this panel-painting of modest dimensions, Cadmus activates queer visual culture via a dormant nude figure that, though ostensibly male, is viewed from a dorsal/lateral perspective that prohibits confirmation of primary sexual characteristics. In fact,

Figure 47 Paul Cadmus, What I Believe (1947–’48). Tempera on panel, 41.3 cm × 68.6 cm. San Antonio, McNay Art Museum. Gift of Robert L.B. Tobin (1999.86). Art © jon f. anderson, Estate of Paul Cadmus/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, ny. © McNay Art Museum/Art Resource, ny.

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in a possible concession to representational mores of the locale and the era, Cadmus has managed – with the exception of an infant at the far right – not to depict any groinscapes. The painter has, instead, relied almost exclusively on skilled and detailed portrayal of skin, musculature, and overall physique to indicate gender identity. In his valuable discussion of this painting, Lincoln Kirstein (already mentioned as a Cadmus associate) points out and reviews the extent to which an essay by E.M. Forster, entitled “What I Believe” (1938), influenced Cadmus as he undertook to produce an identically-titled painting. Cadmus himself records that “when [Forster] believed, I believed. And I included him in the painting, I included my friends in the painting.”36 What was it then, that these shared beliefs consisted of? What did Forster write that Cadmus painted? Kirstein defines these common values, first of all, as “a liberal morality of personal ­responsibility and humane interdependence … .” This ethical substratum supports, in turn, the factor of “life as communion,” a program that was not – as for Dante and some of his medievally-minded modernist followers – tilted “toward immanent deity or transcendent intercessor.” More important, according to Kirstein, “was rather the brave, simple, questioning affection and/or understanding of ordinary men and women by other women and men. Such a promising paradise is neither here nor beyond. Mortality, not resurrection, is the actual condition awaiting creatures of this earth.”37 Kirstein’s commentary thus far is patently immune to exception or contradiction. Nor are conscientious viewers of What I Believe likely to disagree with Kirstein’s observations as follows: At the center of a formal composition, free-standing male and female figures state the norm of mutual trust. These divide types of well-being (left) and distress (right). Ideal humane love is established as an upright optimum of attraction, intimacy, and loyalty.38 The aptness and validity of these remarks is initially beyond question; such words seem to provide an ample and well-structured “corral” for the gamut of significations generated via the myriad images within this intricate artwork.

36

Quoted by Kirstein, 75. It is worth noting that Cadmus was not simply an appreciative reader of Forster’s writing. The two corresponded, met in 1947, and were eventually close friends. See David Leddick, Intimate Companions: A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and Their Circle (New York: Stonewall Inn, 2000), 218, 241. 37 Kirstein, 75. 38 Ibid.

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Figure 48 Paul Cadmus, Subway Symphony (1975-’76). Acrylic on canvas, 116.8 cm × 233.7 cm. Private collection. Art © jon f. anderson, Estate of paul cadmus/Licensed by VAGA, New York, ny. Image courtesy of the D C Moore Gallery.

Yet questions should be raised about Kirstein’s innocuous interpretation. ­Reflective readers of this visual text might ask, for instance, why there is so much nudity in a painting designed only to state a position on personal and social ethics. And although Cadmus loved crowds – or at least packed large numbers of people into many of his paintings –, why he unfolds such a divergent demographic spectrum on this occasion is a conundrum. For example, even within the circus-like staging of Subway Symphony and its motley hoard, a pervasive transientness and unrestrainedness, leaning toward both decadence and kitsch, tend to unite that assemblage of disparate individuals (fig. 48). To present the problem that arises here in different terms, in what kind of artwork, with what theme or themes, is it relevant to depict so much nudity – and so many categories of people? Or to fine-tune the phrasing a bit further, is there a representational pattern that might require an artist to depict an excep­tion­ ally varied group of subjects – e.g., young, old, fortunate, fallen, pallid, rubious, beautiful, ugly, authoritarian, passive, intelligent, imbecilic, artistic, callous? Answers are forthcoming in a moment, but it is first of all relevant to look again at the dormant male figure in the foreground whose outstretched body extends across more than half of the width of the painting. His sensuously muscular nakedness connects him with a group of similarly posed figures in other works by Cadmus – and ultimately with the sleeping hermaphrodite ­topos of classical antiquity. It is not outrageous to argue that this somnolent figure helps establish a mode of visual rhetoric, a threshold of entry into a type of gender dialectic (i.e., homoerotic) that will permeate the complex landscape – and peoplescape as well – that unfolds just beyond his elegant torso.

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That a utopian homoeroticism could serve as the basis of Cadmus’s What I Believe is also strongly hinted at via the artist’s self-imaging at the center of the painting, where he is comforted by the fraternal arm of a companion. In a subtly revelatory way, Cadmus explains that the left half of the painting deals with himself and his friends and the larger social world with which he is familiar. The remaining, right side of What I Believe, however, concerns – says Cadmus – “more or less what I observed rather than what I really knew, knew within me.”39 Rather clearly – almost blatantly –, what Cadmus observes that is outside of his subjective universe is a carnival of heterosexual pairings and groupings – and a rather shabby sideshow at that, even if it is a large and well-populated one. The burlesque world of male–female bonding is in general not the place to be, compared with the civilized combination of gay epicureanism and industry that dominates the left half of What I Believe. There are indeed exceptions. An idealized “straight” couple stands to the right of the seated artist and his male consort. This blond-haired woman and dark-haired man and their intimate posture affiliate them with the apex of traditional male–female bonding, physical attractiveness, and sexuality. To the artist’s left, another man and woman stand next to one another, somewhat more quotidian and seemingly realistic with regard to the particulars of their physique and their demeanor. The male is E.M. Forster himself, gesticulating toward Cadmus in a sociable way and affirming the validity of the principles in which he believes. The female figure has been tentatively identified as Margaret French, married to Cadmus’s former lover, Jared, who is probably the man shown seated just to the left of the artist, with his right arm on Cadmus’s shoulder. Thus as Jared caresses Cadmus and his wife bends forward in a pose of interest and concern, the Frenches show “how much they cared for the painter.”40 According to this reading of the central scene, it only seems that Forster is Margaret’s companion, for she is actually paired with the seated Jared. Thus Forster can be suitably seen as on his own, assuming a more or less prophetic role with his stylized, rhetorical pose and, over his shoulder, a thin ribbon that bears the inscription, “Love, the Beloved Republic.”41 It may be only a simple coincidence that Forster’s hair is tousled toward the forehead, giving the 39 Quoted by Kirstein, 75. 40 Leddick, Intimate Companions, 218. 41 The painting is nicely commented on by Robert K. Martin and George Piggford in their “Introduction: Queer, Forster?” (Queer Forster, ed. Martin and Piggford, [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997], 2–3).

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impression of a pair of devilish “horns.” Yet if Forster can here be tagged as an advocate of homoerotic love in this painting (a role that Kirstein’s staid reading has shied away from), it should be acknowledged that such advocacy is difficult to pin down in “What I Believe” (1938), Forster’s essay on love, tolerance, and openness to creativity and critique that ostensibly informs Cadmus’s engrossing painting of the same title. One passage in the essay, however, merits scrutiny, where Forster professes a belief in aristocracy. He has in mind “not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human condition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos.”42 Even here, a specifically homoerotic element cannot be clearly identified although ­Forster’s mention of a “permanent victory of our queer race” may go beyond whatever is coincidental. A more relevant reference may reside in the “secret understanding” that subsists between members of the “aristocracy of the ­sensitive” when there are in one another’s company. It is reasonable to deduce that gay proponents of sensitivity would be well represented among the aristocratic ­community envisioned by Forster during an era of fascist aggression abroad and an abiding component of homophobia in British culture.43 The assertion has been made that the synergies of What I Believe are l­ argely homoerotic, and they subsist in conjunction with a visual sleep-language brought into play by the dormant “hermaphrodite” in the foreground. Yet as of this juncture, the identifying and assessment of evidence remain incomplete. An additional – and substantial – aesthetic crossroads requires investigation: the intersection of (1) Cadmus’s panoply of gender relations – although lesbianism appears to have been omitted – and (2) a heavily accessed formal precedent, a specific genre of visual document. There may at first seem to be a hermeneutic error in claiming that Cadmus’s What I Believe is a replay and re-envisioning of a favored medieval and Early Modern iconographical cornucopia: the eschatological scenes of Resurrection and Last Judgment. Yet a comparison of What I Believe and examples of its alleged representational “­parentage” may persuade even a sceptical audience that Cadmus has taken

42 43

E.M. Forster, “What I Believe,” in Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), 70. On the climate of homophobia that Forster had to deal with, see Martin and Piggford, 15–16, and – in the same volume – Gregory W. Bredbeck, “‘Queer Superstitions’: Forster, Carpenter, and the Illusion of (Sexual) Identity,” 29–58.

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local control of a venerable religious setting, twisted (or queered) its varied tales, and rechristened it as a homoerotic apologia. The major clue likely to reorient viewers having familiarity with European religious art of the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries is the bony, bleached figure – a rather clear personification of death – who is half-submerged in a grave-like pit in the lower right corner of the painting. He could be a warning of the dangers (unwanted procreation?) of heterosexuality (as viewed from a gay perspective). But also, he closely resembles the skeletal figures who reacquire their flesh and vitality as they emerge from a profound eons-long soul-sleep, in response to stentorian blasts issuing from angelic trumpets at the end of time. Thus while it appears that this morbid figure is taking a break from the gruesome enterprise of digging a grave, a glance at a certain archive of representational history should suggest that it is more likely that he emerges – awakens – as the result of a reprieve from the protracted slumber of entombment.44 Similarly depicted – and reinforcing the perception that this is indeed a resurrected Resurrection-and-Last-Judgment painting – are the two ivory-toned female ­figures closest to the pallid gentleman who rises out of his grave. One of the two remains deeply dormant in death along with two of her three children who also sleep but who, apparently, have at least regained normal blood flow and complexion. And a bit more to the left of the grave-figure is the second woman at issue. She is in a stooping position and may appear intent on entering an invigorated coital or other clutch with the dark-haired gentleman who clasps her (as she him). Inspection of one of the major Resurrection scenes (Luca Signorelli’s in Orvieto) discloses a parallel tale. For here are found two discrete visual episodes (center, near the bottom of the fresco) featuring one individual – who is for a second duration fully among the living – grasping and elevating another who struggles, with much of the body still below the surface of earth, to complete the resurrection process (fig. 49). Along with such details, the overall structure of What I Believe declares an indebtedness to eschatological representation. Cadmus’s approach is highly compressed and schematic, working onto a modest wood panel hints of a cosmos of possibilities that fresco and other painters under ecclesiastical contracts distributed across entire walls or ceilings. Despite the reduced scale and the maverick agenda that Cadmus executes, much is achieved; indeed, he proves himself a consummate visual parodist. For along with the resurrection 44

Leddick, 219, and Martin and Piggford, 3, present the view (an incomplete one) that this pallid figure is only a grave-digger. Yet Martin and Piggford offer the perceptive comment that the partially submerged figure appears to recoil on account of “a vision of horror that seems to owe much to Bosch-like depictions of the damned” (3).

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Figure 49 Luca Signorelli, Resurrection of the Flesh (1499 – c. 1504). Fresco. Orvieto, Cappella di San Brizio. Photo Credit: scala/Art Resource, ny.

inset just indicated, he adapts the traditional iconography of hell. An updated inferno can be recognized on account of a bunker-like fortress atop which nondescript sexual fascists launch a flock of odious missiles sure to inflict massive pain and suffering. Unsuspecting, the heterosexual damned form a procession of comically mismatched couples as they march to their pitiful fates, ignorant to the end, ungainly, and harnessed to petty interests and desires. To the left of this fallen group is a fanciful gay paradise. Gloriously and ­innocently naked, the well-proportioned and gay redeemed contrast sharply with the flabby and convention-bound damned. Here included may be some who are simply homoerotically well-disposed – i.e., those with “homosexual ­tendencies,” if not today’s vaguely defined “metrosexuals.”45 Clearly, there is 45

Michael Flocker comments that sharp distinctions between heterosexual and gay men have subsided somewhat in the new millennium. “It’s been slowly realized by both sides that there is a certain power and mystery in ambiguity, and that confidence, security and a sense of style are the defining factors of the modern man” (The Metrosexual Guide to Style: A Handbook for the Modern Man [Cambridge: Da Capo, 2003], xi–xii). According to David

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again a debt to the visual traditions of late-Medieval and Early Modern eschatological depiction. The overhaul of sexual values evident here is subversive, for sodomy was indisputably a sin serious enough – forever non-procreational among other factors – to serve as grounds for irreversible damnation. Anyone mildly familiar with Dante knows as much from reading Canto 15 of the Inferno where Dante, however regretful he may appear because of the punishing heat his mentor Brunetto Latini must endure, does not question its appropriateness.46 Cadmus alters all of that, inverting the opprobrium and condemnation to which sexual “inversion” has for centuries been doctrinally subject – even if sub rosa, via the back door, Christian clergy and ordinary congregants for just as long a period have acknowledged, often covertly, the homoerotic dimensions of their subjectivity.47 Thus Cadmus’s damned are ostensibly heterosexual while paradise is pervaded by a same-sex ambience. Especially notable as the ideal of a caring and intimate relationship is the affectionate male couple standing just behind the figure of Forster. They embrace with a warmth that is lacking in display or self-consciousness. The pair is quite in keeping with a protocol of traditional resurrectional iconography, wherein some of the newlyawakened dead seek solace – and presumably rejoice as well – in embracing other resurrectees of the same or different gender. The embracing individuals are likely to be persons long separated by death, now reunited at the conclusion of time. A predecessor of special relevance for Cadmus is once again Signorelli. His Orvieto resurrection contains two distinct trios of same-sexed persons (midground, toward the left and right) who embrace, touch, or clasp one another, apparently out of a spontaneous invigoration following their emergence from death. Their nakedness is only in part the manifestation of a return to

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Coad, the rubric “metrosexuality” is typified by “nonnormative guidelines” with respect to gender (The Metrosexual: Gender, Sexuality, and Sport [Albany: suny Press, 2008], 4). Brunetto concedes that his companions (and by implication himself as well) were “soiled with the same earthly sin” during their natural lives (“d’un peccato medesmo al mondo lerci” [Inferno 15.108 {nw, trans.}]). For well-considered remarks on the issue of samesex ­eroticism in the Inferno, see The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling, commentary by Ronald L. Martinez and R.M. Durling (New York: Oxford up, 1996), 557–60. Durling notes that “while Dante subjects the homosexuals in Hell to a particularly savage punishment (based, of course, on the biblical one), he grants those he meets there high status as benefactors of the city and, in the case of Brunetto, of himself personally” (559). The work of historian John Boswell is particularly notable regarding this topic. See ­Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York: Vintage, 1994), especially the chapter entitled, “The History of Same-Sex Unions in Medieval Europe” (218–61).

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a prelapsarian innocence. It also suggests a complicity with the imminent processes of judgment, a confrontation with the “naked truth.” A resurrection scene typically shows a cross-section of souls – about to be damned or saved – as they await their final assessment. As is common during the mid-twentieth century and later, Lincoln K ­ irstein disclosed a waning investiture in belief and argued (as noted above) that death plain and simple rather than resurrection is the human allotment. His observation has turned out to be far more relevant in the case of What I Believe than Kirstein might ever have imagined – yet paradoxically so. For the resurrectional awakening that Cadmus has depicted is not a theological but a sexual one, a wished-for renewal of an Hellenic acceptance of homoerotic behavior and interiority. Hence the erotic awakening requires a cultural one as well. Submerged yet active mutations of Christian eschatological depiction in any case subsist as a major presence in What I Believe. Among the offshoots of that centuries-old representational archive is the strange paradise, a fascinatingly queer one, that Cadmus has contrived. A series of homoerotic scenarios culminates in the incipient construction of a new Jerusalem as three nude males (two of whom manipulate a long pole) undertake the erection of a vaguely tabernacle-looking edifice. Among the heterodox elements permitted in this “Greek” version of a place of final guerdon, sleep – biblical signifier of both physical and spiritual sloth – has found a home here. The case of the trend-setting hermaphroditic figure in the foreground has been discussed above. Also relevant is the obliquely-disposed black youth who reclines his head against the bare thigh of the satyr-like Kirstein, who is occupied with blowing on a long phallus-like flute. The black figure is tilted away from the viewer so that the placement of his forearm – curved upward, over the head, in the classical pose of dormancy – may at first escape detection. (To add to the complexity, Cadmus embellishes the figure with a protruding forefinger, a puzzling and recurrent gesture in his work; the “grave-digger” is similarly depicted.) What I Believe offers, in a book about sleep, an energized blend of sleep and waking. So involved are the painting’s varied interchanges, the tossing and turning between two complementary states, that it is useful to recall art historian Louis Marin’s delineation, in a discussion of Poussin, of basic representational processes comprised of “the sleep of things awakened to their metamorphoses in art, the lulling to sleep of painted figures awakened to their metaphors in language, the secret ecstasy of the nascent I, through words and gazes, of a body at rest ... .”48 Marin’s schema of representational phases 48

Sublime Poussin, trans. Catherine Porter (Palo Alto: Stanford up, 1999), 170.

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that are sleep-informed is relevant here even if Cadmus’s rowdy visual c­ ircus – with its contemporized Brueghelian crowd scenes – is pictorially rather distant from the typical Poussin tableau that is harmoniously structured and so discursively unified. While Marin’s Poussin is a sagacious chronicler of wellordered metamorphoses that are also sleep-related, Cadmus is clearly a seeker of a contestatory gender dialectic via a visual poetics of dormancy. What I Believe is in any case a fine launching pad for study of later sleep-based representations of gender interactions that challenge norms and/or disrupt expectations. Cadmus has included much – a sleep of death that has awakened either into a sonambulistic heterosexuality, or into a dreamlike homoerotic utopia…and at the same time, the archival sleep and revival of both an ancient sculptural motif and of an eschatological theme perfected in medieval and Early Modern frescos and altar-pieces. Such bidirectional representational processes elicit interpretive workouts and will likely lead, among other points, to a recognition of the involuntary dormancy to which non-conforming gender subjectivities were subject in post-World War ii America. That is, during the era of a “baby boom,” of a massive explosion of traditional gender partnerships, a mushrooming in the incidence of nuclear families at the beginning of the nuclear age.

Signorelli’s Afterlife: Freud to Lacan

What I Believe should be considered a major development – a marker of a s­ trategic point – in any chronicle of the representation of modernist and postmodern alternative sexualities. Such recognition is deserved not only ­because of the overall excellence of the painting or because it is redolent of the close of the interval when modernist aesthetic values were clearly dominant. The appropriateness of such a designation requires, of course, ­acknowledgment of Cadmus’s skills in manipulating eschatological imagery. To be noted as well is the adroitness with which Cadmus utilized the thematics and details of ­Signorelli’s Last Judgment frescos. What I Believe acquires additional impact because of the discursive engagement of this same Renaissance masterpiece by two major definers of sexuality, one modernist (Sigmund Freud) and the other postmodern (Jacques Lacan). The parallels and divergences are intriguing and instructive. It is here proposed that Freud makes what is in effect a strong case for the inclusion of Signorelli in any list – however abbreviated – of cultural icons with which any adequately educated person should have familiarity. The reason for this strong assertion lies in the context in which Freud’s suggestive comments on Signorelli are lodged. The site in question is found near the

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beginning of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), where Freud, discussing the temporary forgetting of proper names, illustrates this rubric of everyday psychopathology by recalling an occasion when it was the cognomen “Signorelli” that he could not remember.49 Freud is at that moment indulging in desultory conversation with a stranger in whose company he happens to be traveling. The Signorelli at issue happens to be Luca, the executor of the Orvieto frescoes, and this memorable forgetfulness occurs just as Freud has broached the topic of precisely these images. There may be something notable beyond the apparently ­coincidental overlapping of Freud’s experience of dysfunctional memory and the focus of the present discussion. The details should be sifted through further: Freud is next found tending to think that he could not recall “Signorelli” because of seemingly inconsequential associations of that name with two mini-narratives that he did not wish to disclose while conversing with a stranger. The first concerned an ethnic stereotype, specifically a perception of Turkish people as having an extreme fondness for sexual enjoyment. The second mini-narrative concerned the suicide of a patient because of “an incurable sexual disorder.”50 Freud ­peremptorily concludes that the place names – Bosnia, Herzegovina, Trafoi – associated with these dormant tales (the first of which Signor Freud hesitates to tell and the second of which he had rather problematically forgotten) subconsciously prompted him to think of the painters Botticelli and Boltraffio, instead of the correct name, Signorelli. Freud first published his discussion of the Signorelli incident in 1898, convinced that only the random resemblance of the three place names with the names of alternate artists was the cause of his forgetfulness. In 1901, he is less certain and acknowledges in a footnote that, indeed, his “repressed thoughts on the topic of death and sexual life” may in fact lie at no great cognitive distance from the subject matter of the magnificent Orvieto frescoes – where, amid so much nakedness, so much truth is bared, brought to light, awakened.51 The case for connectedness between Freud’s sleeping narratives and Signorelli’s eschatology is taken much further by Jacques Lacan, strong advocate of a “return to Freud,” who on this occasion proposes what is almost as much a retort to as the revisiting of a Freudian scenario. In a passage that can be appre­hended almost as a turnstile demarcating modernist and postmodern perceptions of non-standard sexualities, Lacan reads Freud’s forgetfulness as a psychic – and indeed, a psychoanalytic – allegory. Freud’s account is transformed into 49 50 51

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. ­Norton, 1989), 10–11. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 24, note 8.

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a constellation of signs, Lacan taking the forgetting of “Signorelli” as a cognitive picturing, a representation of the suppression or “passing beneath” of the Signor; that is, the signorial indicator, death, the “absolute master.” And hence, with this “death” – of death as sign –, Lacan discerns the initiation of a compensatory need, a requirement for the elaboration of “myths of the death of the father” – i.e., the Oedipal “complex” – that will authorize a means of arguing for the existence of processes of regulation of desire, and beyond that, some form of psychic system.52 Lacan discovers, in the end, a not-so-veiled “threat of castration” in Signorelli’s apocalyptic artistry at Orvieto. This can be understood as a threat that is mediated if one accepts the psychic installment of and governance by the superego; that is, the father’s or Signor’s presumed wishes. And conflating distinct strands of Freud’s account, Lacan finds a correlation with this point as he mistakenly recalls that Freud is at that key moment ­focused on the remarks of his interlocutor – who is himself a physician (or so Lacan wrongly remembers) – who discusses the immense impact that a “loss of potency has for his patients.”53 (Freud actually states that he calls to mind the comments of a colleague who is not present.) In the end, only somewhat less so than for Freud, Lacan has failed to let the apocalypse take its course, has declined to let the sexual energy that is retained by Freud (and implicit in Signorelli’s frescoes) become awakened, become clarified and defined. Impotence is thus implicated in Freud’s discussion via the remembered ­remarks of the absent colleague. Also referred to is a certain “incurable sexual disorder”54 that led to the suicide of a patient. A case of impotence is perhaps at the root of this self-inflicted death. Yet there are numerous other sexual maladies – and malaises – that could have precipitated this piteous closure of a human life – for instance, a homosexual subjectivity found unbearably problematic in the restrictive sexual culture of Vienna at the end of the nineteenth

52 Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 27. 53 Ibid. 54 Freud, Psychopathology, 12. Adrian Johnston presents a fine review of Freud’s forgetting of “Signorelli,” with discussion of relevant comments by Lacan included, in “Sextimacy – Freud, Mortality, and a Reconsideration of the Role of Sexuality in Psychoanalysis” in Sexuality and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Criticisms, ed. Jens De Vleminck and Eran Dorfman (Leuven: Leuven up, 2010), 38–49. Johnston rightfully speculates as to “just how much of a counter-transferential bond was operative” between Freud and his sexually troubled patient either during analysis or retrospectively following the suicide (47). Yet Johnston sees the Signorelli episode as, ultimately, more concerned with Freud’s ­repressed worries about death than with sexual abnormalities or ambiguities.

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century.55 Freud at all events does not specify, just as he reports that he has refrained from broaching any kind of sexual topic in the company of a stranger. Enacted within a Freudian theater at this juncture is not so much the “fear of castration” that Lacan has foregrounded, but instead, a fear of the phallus (however the term is understood), perhaps of sexuality in general. And without a great amount of innovation or of stretching of the text, it is a reasonable claim that an hermaphroditic strand both inhabits and threatens Freud’s discourse. Sexuality of almost any sort is for this Freudian moment an unwelcome intrusion, a penetration into discursive space that must remain sexually unsullied because of a broader cultural nervousness. Yet it will become the undertaking of a number of subsequent modernists – including Freud himself as he elaborates his findings in the area of sexuality – to promote the burgeoning and awakening of a certain phallus, of a policed and restrained discourse. Lacan at the same time participates in the performance of a massive cultural castration with the certification that a regime of the “fear of castration” has been established (even if, as he remarks, the “God-is-dead” myth is a “shelter” against this phobia).56 Implicated here is an exiting of a protuberant and contrarian sexual discourse that could lead to the embarrassment or irritation of a large spectrum of people – but to a more relaxed consciousness regarding sexualities as well. Lacan concludes his fascinating if somewhat frustrating commentary on Freud’s Signorelli with the conjuring up of a psychically-castrated psychoanalytic Signor, a Freud discomfitted and 55

The miasma of repressiveness indicated here is particularly evident in the suicide of a ­ ioneering gay sex-theorist, Otto Weininger of Vienna (1880–1903), author of Sex and p Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles (Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung [1903]). Weininger’s life and ideas amid – and as contributions to – a cultural maelstrom are illuminated at length in Chandak Sengoopta’s Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000). As Sengoopta makes clear, for instance: It is almost redundant to emphasize that many (perhaps most) of the ideas galvanizing the Viennese intelligentsia were half-baked, wrong, repellent, or downright ­inhumane by the criteria of today’s liberal scholars. Nevertheless, some of those repugnant preoccupations were more characteristic of Weininger and his era than the comic operettas of Lehar or the lilting strains of the Blue Danube Waltz (2). Ian Marsh comments that homosexuality and suicide were typically disassociated in the writings of Sigmund Freud, even in the case of a Viennese lesbian who killed herself in ­response to her father’s disapproval (“Queering Suicide: The Problematic Figure of the ‘Suicidal Homosexual’ in Psychiatric Discourse” in Queering Paradigms, ed. Burkhard Scherer and Matthew Ball [New York: Peter Lang, 2010], 146). Even so, Marsh’s insight leaves open to surmise the exact cause of Freud’s reticence during a casual conversation. 56 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 27.

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mystified by women. Consequently, he appears to Lacan to have resorted to an uxoriousness that only served to veil a broad zone of gender naiveté and ­indecision.57 What may persist in the wake of this not-so-surprising act of a successor upbraiding his predecessor is a perception (mentioned above) that Lacan, like Freud, has fallen short of identifying a dynamics of sleep and ­awakening that cuts across Freud’s episode of forgetfulness and the frescoes whose creator he imperfectly remembered.

Andy Warhol’s Sleep

A decade and a half after What I Believe, the hypnoglyph grows to full proportions with the appearance of Andy Warhol’s film, Sleep (1963). An initiator (and instigator) of the aesthetics of de-iconicity,58 Warhol produced a six-hour micro-chronicle documenting, with nearly inconceivable abundance of detail, the nocturnal repose of a nude male sleeper. The film retains and illustrates some of the most basic traits of the involvement in the arts of the dormant state, along with obvious innovations. The liminality of sleep, so often apparent when somnolence and the aesthetic overlap, is especially at issue here, for the film was also Warhol’s initiation into the intricacies of cinematography. A cognitive signifier of resistance, sleep plays various roles within narrative; as a device of transition, sleep may simply close out one diegetic segment so that another can begin. More generally, dormancy can serve as a fulcrum that promotes the audience’s psychic passage from the semiotic configurations of ­everyday life into those of the literary or visual artifact. Within the larger framework of Warhol’s life and work, the motion-picture Sleep forms a pathway out of the silkscreen and other genres of his earlier work and into the fractured plots of his subsequent films. Exemplary in its exploitation of narrative resistance, Sleep provides a ­cornucopia of de-activization. Especially salient is the fact that narrative ­expectations are frustrated by the minimalist plot of a dormant male nude filmed from varying angles and distances. Warhol has, also, manipulated 57 58

Ibid., 28. On Warhol as formative postmodernist, see Jameson, Postmodernism, 8–10; Mario ­Perniola, Art and Its Shadow, trans. Massimo Verdicchio (London: Continuum, 2004), 26–33, and George Hagman, The Artist’s Mind: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Creativity, Modern Art and Modern Artists (New York: Routledge, 2010), 142–60. With regard to Warhol’s trashing of the iconic aspects of modernist art, Hagman comments, “He was an enormous promoter of art as available and relevant to daily life while at the same time he undermined the idealization that characterized the modern view of art. For Warhol art was simultaneously all important, and a sham” (149).

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Figure 50 Andy Warhol, Sleep (1963). 16 mm film, black and white, silent, 5 hours 21 minutes at 16 frames per second. Reel 1 (c)awm (1). © 2015 The andy warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, pa, a museum of the Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

temporal dynamics by retarding projection speed from twenty-four to sixteen frames per second and then projecting each sequence twice.59 Developing out of a visual poetics of sleep, a tour de force of minimalist cinematography is executed in the opening “episode.” Here the viewer confronts a lengthy series of full-screen images consisting solely of varying, roughly triangular shapes located along a shaded axis running diagonally from upper left toward midright. The upper triangle, more whitish in color, can eventually be recognized as a sheet under which a corporeal mass of some sort is recumbent. The lower region of the screen is eventually discernible as the minimally rising and falling abdomen of the slumbering “actor,” John Giorno (fig.  50). With seeming ­ingenuity and aesthetic acuity (yet it may be, coincidentally), Warhol has called into play an especially basic percept (long ago attributed to the gnomic Greek philosopher Heraclitus) that has recurrently haunted the cognitive discourse of dormancy: that breathing is the only visually detectable process

59

Peter Gidal, Andy Warhol Films and Paintings: The Factory Years (Cambridge: Da Capo, 1991), 80–84. For extended examination of the technical aspects of Warhol’s Sleep and their implications, see Brandon W. Joseph, “Andy Warhol’s Sleep: The Play of Repetition” in Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema, ed. Ted Perry (Bloomington: Indiana up, 2006), 179–207.

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Figure 51 Andy Warhol, Sleep (1963). 16 mm film, black and white, silent, 5 hours 21 minutes at 16 frames per second. Reel 1 (c)awm (6). © 2015 The andy warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, pa, a museum of the Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

distinguishing the corpse from the sleeper.60 Hence, the implicit recognition of sleep as the incontestably lowest common denominator of the human ­condition. Warhol manages, in any case, to effect a union of physiological and ­narrational minimalism (fig. 51). Helping make the intersecting of representational modes a standard practice in postmodern art, Warhol here forges a restless union of static and faintly kinetic images that may almost be taken for an extended series of photographs. There is an oblique parallel with the innovations of Edward Muybridge, the late-nineteenth-century British photographer. Muybridge overturned prevailing assumptions concerning the mechanics of visual perception by pinning down, via the camera, distinct details of the seemingly continuous motion of a galloping horse, which were previously uncaptured through ordinary observation. Warhol, on the other hand, discloses the ongoing micro-motions of Giorno’s body as he steadily sleeps. Movement is manifested where seeming stasis reigns. The effect contrasts with “the freezing of evanescence,” to use a phrase that Martin Jay applies to Muybridge’s photographic innovations.61 Warhol has staged a representational paradox. And it is one rather easily correlated with the status of same-sex eroticism during the 1960s (and before and after as well). For within sleep’s overall resistance to narrative, there is also a resistance of narrative.62 As already noted, the narrative resistance of sleep 60 61

62

G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield, eds. and trans., The Presocratic Philosophers: A ­ ritical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2002), 205. C “Photo-unrealism: The Contribution of the Camera to the Crisis of Ocularcentrism” in V ­ ision and Textuality, ed. Stephan Melville and Bill Readings (Durham: Duke up, 1995), 349. Cf. Brandon Joseph’s comments on the frequency with which critics of Sleep have been struck by its reliance on what would ordinarily be considered narratival minutiae (“Andy Warhol’s Sleep,” 182). He sees this recurrent observation as the most salient element of the film’s reception among interpreters. Joseph’s argument is not aimed at considering

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easily becomes a veil for homoerotic desire inasmuch as gay and lesbian lives have traditionally transpired within covert strata of heteronormative societies. Worth recalling in this regard are the praises of sleep offered by John Giorno, who was romantically involved with Warhol during the period of the filming: I love to sleep to this day. I want to stay asleep for as long as I can. I go down deep and stay there. Down deep into the underworld relishing the opiates of delusion. Of my many luxuries, sleep is the luxury I love best. The most rewarding! The ignorance of the god worlds, resting in the lower realms.63 Only minimal hermeneutic effort is required to gloss Giorno’s naming of “god” as a reference to gender and sexual norms – and other insinuations of ­authority – that obtain during waking hours yet are escaped during intervals of sleep and soothing dreams. The contrarian “queerness” of Sleep must also accommodate an ambivalent counter-cultural sexuality that was central to the project of Pop art of which Warhol was a principal engenderer (as well as a de-genderer). At least partly relevant here is Michael Moon’s argument that the 1960s fascination with the locution “Pop” is … a sign both of a hypervaluation, on Warhol’s part as well as of his culture as a whole of the climactic character of adult sexuality, especially the specifically erectile and ejaculatory character of phallic sexuality, as well as of desires for and knowledge of ways to escape or “pop out” of the culture’s relentless production of heterosexual desire focused around straight men and their phallic possession of the female.64 That the fundamental sexuality of Sleep is gayness is in keeping with the a­ pparent fact that Giorno and Warhol were intimates during the period when the film was produced. Yet ideological and specifically aesthetic concerns

63 64

how reduced narrative elements might be regarded or classified in relation to an overall theory or typology of narrative. Yet a resistance of narrative seems implicit in this context. Also, Joseph appears incognizant of the homoerotic “reading” that Sleep would here seem to welcome – given the keen attentiveness showered on the slightest movements of the nude male body. You Got to Burn to Shine: New and Selected Writings (New York: High Risk Books, 1994), 162–63. “Screen Memories, or, Pop Comes from the Outside: Warhol and Queer Childhood” in Pop Out: Queer Warhol, ed. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz (Durham: Duke up, 1996), 85–86.

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also prompted Warhol to deprioritize its same-sex eroticism in relation to a broader enfranchisement of nudity. Warhol reveals Giorno in dermatological abundance; there is, hence, an element of rebellion against the intermittently graphic “skin flick” of the era. While there is a countering the latter’s sparsity of actual nakedness, there is also dilution of its scattered display of sexual messages.65 For Warhol aestheticizes – and reduces the shock-effect of – the nudity issue via a fondness for the “freeze frame,” a technique that heightens the viewer’s perception of the representational illusion of cinema by foregrounding the graininess of images while flattening them.66 This monumental depiction of human somnolence can thus be viewed as homo-, hetero-, or non-erotic, a fact disturbing to some writers of queer commentary, who object that Warhol’s sexuality was “degayed” by himself and others in the interests of rendering his art accessible to as wide an audience as possible.67 According to Giorno, “Andy got around homophobia by making the movie Sleep into an abstract painting: the body of a man as a field of light and shadow.”68 Thus from one perspective within a homoerotic polemics, Sleep is the rendition of its own sleep, of its own playing down of a non-standard gender discourse. Yet the formalist components Giorno identifies are undeniably modified in the process of constructing a new visual poetics. The illusion of touchable skin, the all-but-palpable body – these are at war with the filtered, aestheticized ­image of the sleeper. The resulting, popularized, “Pop”- art, wiggling version of a formalist motif may delight or repel the reader. The conventions of aesthetic distance have been downplayed, and this sleeping flesh may seem 65 In The History of Sex in American Film (Westport: Praeger, 2007), Jody W. Pennington makes clear how even limited nakedness and/or explicit sexual imagery sufficed for a film of this era to be regarded as pornographic or at least as displaying questionable morality. Taboos were rather firmly in place for mainline cinema in part because of an instrument of self-censorship, the Production Code (5–14). The relatively tepid sexuality of 1960s erotic films is also laid bare in comments by the protagonist of an autobiographical novel by Andrew G. Hollinger: “Back then, if you saw a decent looking girl with no shirt on, it could be considered a skin flick. It was a different era; like considering freshman girls virgins; these skins flicks were tame enough to be shown on cable tv today” (Reminiscences of a Late 60’s Student [Lincoln: Writers Club/iUniverse, 2002], 157). Although Warhol provided explicit sexual content in a number of subsequent films (Pennington, 32), Giorno’s somnolence is recorded with sufficient ambiguity so as to sidestep (if not directly resist) narratives of prudish reaction and reprimand. 66 David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton up, 1989), 65. 67 Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz, “Introduction” in Pop Out, 1–9; 17n4. 68 You Got to Burn to Shine, 133.

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Figure 52 Andy Warhol, Sleep (1963). 16 mm film, black and white, silent, 5 hours 21 minutes at 16 frames per second. Reel 2 (c)awm (2). © 2015 The andy warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, pa, a museum of the Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

r­efreshingly accessible or uncomfortably close. It is relevant, also, to reflect upon the a­ ncient myth of Endymion – and especially the lunar imagery at its core – as segments of the film focusing on Giorno’s bare buttocks are considered. In view of Warhol’s demonstrated fondness for visual punning, it is plausible to identify in these frames a play on the word “moon.” This “movie” moons us, however amenable or averse we may be to such a gesture (fig. 52). Worth recalling at this point is an alternate, homoerotic version of the ­Endymion myth. In this lesser known context, Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep – and not the nubile Selene –, becomes enamored of the young man and consequently lulls him into dormancy.69 The interpolation of a homoerotic fable into a seemingly “straight” narrative inset is rather evident in Girodet’s celebrated late-eighteenth-century canvas, Moonlight or the Sleep of Endymion (fig. 53). Thomas Crow, among other scholars, has pointed out the ambiguities with which Girodet’s representation is laden. Selene is expressed only as moonlight directed onto Endymion’s torso by a male eros. The absence of the goddess tends to displace “the privileged phallic location of male desire, allowing the question of Endymion’s sexual identity to be suspended. The sharp line of shadow cuts in a horizontal line directly across the swelling curve of the hip and just above the genital zone.”70 The structural and 69 70

Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 1993), 36. “Observations on Style and History in French Painting of the Male Nude, 1785–1794” in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Hanover: Wesleyan up/up of New England, 1994), 154. Also relevant and in the same volume is Whitney Davis’s essay, “The Renunciation of Reaction in Girodet’s Sleep of Endymion”; see especially 182–90. Davis argues that “the Endymion acknowledges that it was possible to renounce the Davidian ‘pre-revolutionary’ image of active ­masculinity – or, more exactly, to renounce its supposed incompatibility with male

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Figure 53 Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Moonlight or the Sleep of Endymion (1791). Oil on canvas, 198 cm × 261 cm. Paris, Louvre. Inv. 4935. Photo Credit: rené-gabriel ojéda. © rmn – Grand Palais/Art Resource, ny.

thematic ­similarities (a shadowy axis, ambiguous sexuality) of both Girodet’s and Warhol’s reconstitution of the Endymion myth are readily detectable, indicate shared mimetic concerns, and suggest that Warhol’s film is apprehensible as at least parallel to – if not as in part a re-envisioning of – a noted predecessor’s remodeling of ostensibly heterosexual discourse. Sleep is, in sum, a compendium of the representational resources of the hypnoglyph, making a major contribution to its treatment of time as in ­other respects. In addition to frustrating typical narration, Warhol transposes ­customary temporality. Especially evident is the metamorphosis of sleep from an interval in everyday life into a seeming “global” non-activity within at least one individual’s experience. It is also clear that Sleep egregiously fractures the prevailing circadian/diaristic model of the mid-1960s. Paradoxically, ­Warhol was an avid diarist, pursuing a vigorous campaign of diary writing but diluting some of its already untraditional late-modernist currents, especially the view beauty, sensuality, and homoeroticism” (190). Davis also discovers in Girodet’s painting a “bracketing of narrative resolution” (180) not at all inconsistent with the idea of ­narrative resistance advanced in the present discussion. Davis concludes that “the painter’s own politics of autonomous self-possession and effective public presence, of ‘opposition to despotic ­authority,’ must require resistance to itself; and so, The Sleep of Endymion is ­created” (195). That such positions of disengagement are facilitated by the horizonality/ in-betweenness of dormancy needs to be emphasized.

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that keenly experienced interactions between the body and its s­ urroundings testify to the integrity of a persistent and durable self. Warhol began his plenteous diaries in the mid-1970s, well after he had assisted in destroying the genre’s foundations. The entry from September 4, 1977 (Paris), is typical: Got up late and went back to sleep and I still wasn’t ready when Fred was ready to go at 1:00. Taxi to ysl’s for lunch. Fred had to lie and say that I was a cripple so that the driver would take us such a short distance. The driver looked me over and said, “Yes, I can see that” ($2).71 This is clearly a mutated edition of the modernist diary, in view of the twisting of circadian “order” and its parodic re-entry into a primal modernist scene, that of the American in Paris, the ingénu/artist catapulted into fruitful confrontation with an enriching other. Warhol’s, then, is largely an example of the “new” diary, a revisionist instrument for self-actualization held to have “little to do with outdated notions and misconceptions of diary keeping as a self-discipline, a dutiful record of events, a narcissistic self-absorption ... .”72 Yet for Warhol, even the updated paradigm is under review. And although a blatant narcissism is here eschewed, his writing has been pressed into the service of micro-tooling an evanescent but credible personal imaginary. His rambling, jocular, and extended verbal self-portrait of over one thousand pages is compatible with a then-circulating, public, and consumable conception of Pop’s para-patriarch.73 Warhol celebrated rather than regretted the gradual deletion of diurnal rhythms as the postmodern era began and advanced. Like Robert Lowell, he used medications to mediate the somatic process of sleep, but unlike L­ owell, he relied on amphetamines to gain additional working hours and a sense of euphoria. He also remained fascinated by the muted consciousness of the somnolent state, especially in the case of the hypnophiliac John Giorno. Sleep 71 72 73



The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett (New York: Warner, 1989), 66. Tristine Rainer, The New Diary: How to Use a Journal for Self-Guidance and Expanded C ­ reativity (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2004), 3. The emergence of a Warhol imaginary with overlapping media, interpersonal, and commercial dimensions is chronicled in Victor Bockris’s Warhol: The Biography (Cambridge: DaCapo, 2003). Bockris writes, for instance, that in May of 1970, Andy attended the opening of the Warhol Retrospective in Pasadena along with a bevy of superstars, one of whom cooed earnestly when she saw the show, ‘Gee, Andy, you really are an artist!’ This was dramatically underscored the following day, 13 May 1970, when one of Andy’s soup-can paintings was auctioned at the Parke Bernet ­Gallery for $60,000, the highest price ever paid at an auction for a work by a living American artist (335).

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in any case offers a challenge if one should wish to detect herein Warhol’s investment in a work-ethic, a value-scheme based on wakefulness and purposeful activity. Both of these states of charged consciousness are ostensibly cast aside in Sleep. But along with the abundant drowsiness, and somewhere within Warhol’s emergent postmodern cultural poetics, Sleep is concerned with representing the most resistant of lived experiences, human dormancy, in an almost prophetic way. Through cinematographic ingenuity, somnolence has in a sense been vaporized and then projected onto a screen in conformity with a futuristic, Pop program of continuous and seemingly spontaneous production. And with further inquest into Warhol’s view of sleep, an item of rather direct evidence of a hypnophobic turn emerges. For according to Giorno, Warhol feared nothing so much as dying in his sleep, an event that nearly transpired just prior to his actual death from complications in the wake of gall bladder surgery in 1987.74 In any case, meticulous documentation of Giorno’s breathing and rapideye movements—indicating the interventions of dreams – 75 demonstrates a ­concern on Warhol’s part with latent energies. This cinematographic program recalls a recurrent thematics (already seen in Proust and echoed by Duras) of the representation of dormancy: Given the performative self synthesized ­within any advanced culture under the influences of the media, employers, and institutions, the varied modes of the dormant state can be thought to h ­ arbor – precisely in their minimalized consciousness – a more veridical ­articulation of the most basic aspects of selfhood than does wakefulness. If such a statement is accepted as valid for Proust, it may be less so for ­Warhol – and still less as the postmodern or late capitalism continues. And if there is an overarching significance, a kind of “allegory” within Sleep, such a meaning may rest in the putting forward of a seeming universe of dormancy during an historical interval (the start of the 1960s) when customary sleepwaking cycles, together with long-accepted habits of mental activity and labor, begin to be subjected to new imperatives. There are insidious and troubling implications. To identify them, it may be helpful to entertain the nearly indisputable ­proposition – mentioned earlier – that no one would want to endure the burden of simultaneous recollection of his or her entire mental content. 74 Giorno, You Got to Burn to Shine, 162; Warhol Diaries, 806–07. See also The Life and Death of Andy Warhol by Victor Bockris (New York: Bantam, 1989), 101, 104. 75 The high correlation between the experience of dreaming and rapid-eye-movements ­during sleep is ably addressed by Edward F. Pace-Schott, “REM sleep and dreaming” in Rapid Eye Movement Sleep: Regulation and Function, ed. Birendra N. Mallick et al. (­Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2011), 8–20.

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A liveable existence assumes that only a small portion of one’s memories and competencies press upon consciousness at a given point. All else typically ­remains quietly asleep in the memory.76 Postmodern life has for most individuals, however, “overawakened” the mind, has required the constant acquisition of new social and other competencies along with the continuous activation of many previously learned ones. The cutting back of (1) ordinary, chronological dormancy and (2) daytime mental “sleep” of information and competencies unneeded at a given moment has created a non-specific urgency that has in turn contributed to the emergence of the decentered or disoriented postmodern subject.77 Covered with the blanket of a corporational authoritarianism, and less and less able to rely on customary behaviors and mental habits that might have proven useful and relevant at earlier points in one’s life, the postmodern subject is constantly learning and performing new tricks. There is no doubt a voucher attesting to the unstable status of sleep in contemporary 76

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A parallel point is developed by Daniel C. Dennett in Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (Cambridge: mit, 2005), 130–35. Dennett looks at the “global neuronal workspace model” (132) of consciousness as a means of explaining why the mind is typically focused on a specific cognitive item on any given occasion although a number of neural networks are presumably processing various types of data – during that same moment. However, as opposed to the notion of a dynamics of dormancy as a pathway toward understanding what consciousness means, Dennett here uses the metaphors “competition” and “fame” (140–43) to indicate how one mental concern elbows its way to center stage while all others disappear into cognitive shadows. The metaphor “laying to rest” could also have explanatory value in this context. Among the “attributes” of the postmodern subject, Fredric Jameson points to the diminution of a sense of one’s own body (except to the extent that the body experiences pain), a sharp lessening of spatial orientation, and a loss of a sense of one’s social status or ­membership in a social class. See Postmodernism, 127, 154–80, and “Reflections on the Brecht-Lukács Debate” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays (London: Verso, 2008), 447. ­Jonathan Crary similarly comments “that the elaboration, the modeling of one’s personal and social identity, has been reorganized to conform to the uninterrupted operation of markets, information networks, and other systems. A 24/7 environment has the semblance of a social world, but it is actually a non-social model of machinic performance and a suspension of living that does not disclose the human cost required to sustain its effectiveness” (24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, 9). For a contrasting approach, see Paul Allen Miller, Postmodern Spiritual Practices, especially 42–43 and 60. Among other positions, Miller argues for a resistance of the individual’s capacity to work toward self-fashioning. Miller finds that postmodern and modern thinkers share a concern with how the individual can “fashion a relation of the self to itself, and so to others, that” is not “a mere repetition of the dominant ideology and, hence, an act of bad faith” ... (60).

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culture in that this lengthy film featuring the nocturnal repose of a certain Mr. Day is infrequently screened in its entirety.78 Despite the precarious circumstances of Sleep and of repose in general in the wake of Warhol, viewers of the film are more likely to focus on the uniqueness of its cinematography than on its ominous contexts. Mr. Giorno’s slumber is after all somehow innocuous though totalizing. As often in the hypnoglyph, the format recalls a primary narcissism, a cosmos defined only by vague and imperceptible boundaries surrounding a not-yet-self. Associations of innocence and infancy are inevitable as Giorno dozes, unsuspecting, recumbent, and clad only in his “birthday suit.” Given the Gargantuan grandeur of the ­image of the sleeper, narratives outside of his immediate context are likely to be discounted. Within this matrix of quiescent subjectivity and a material world restricted to bedding and nothing more, only subsistence-level narratives transpire. The sleeper reclines in a nutritive state, totally involved in selfenriching dreams, respiration, the digestion of food, a regathering of muscular and psychic strength, and the re-establishment of existential coordinates. The narrative resistance of Giorno’s condition lies to a considerable extent in its redolence of a pristine era, too early for speech or “mature” narratives involving a discrete self and well-demarcated others. Thus, Sleep can be said to transpire under the sign of a nurturing Mother Time, an idealized and self-sacrificing maternal figure whose only agenda is an endless caring for primordial needs. And as a corollary, despite Warhol’s kinetomania elsewhere evident, the world of Sleep is outside the domain of an aboriginal Father Chronos, that pancratic setter of schedules, voracious devourer of his own children, and bringer of all narratives to timely completion.79

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Douglas Crimp notes that while teaching a course on Warhol at the University of ­ ochester, he borrowed the whole film from the Museum of Modern Art and made R ­arrangements for its showing. Only he and a couple of students saw all of it (“Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol [Cambridge: mit, 2012], xi). In 2011, Sleep was shown twice at the ­Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the exhibition, Andy Warhol: ­Motion Pictures (19 December 2010–21 March 2011) (http://www.moma.org/visit/ calendar/exhibitions/1099). Cf. Valerie Bryson, Gender and the Politics of Time: Feminist Theory and Contemporary D ­ ebates (Bristol: Policy: 2007), esp. 130–40. In light of Bryson’s findings, it is evident that the distinction drawn here, with its basis in myth, can break down beyond the mediated vision of a work of art. Within the inclusive matrix that a contemporary market-based society sets up, economic processes create a ripple-effect of work-demands that are often incompatible with the subsistence of insulated purviews wherein maternal caring can proceed, unimpeded by distractions.

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Marguerite Duras’s Blue Eyes Black Hair (Les yeux bleus cheveux noirs)

In a second novella of sexual wilderness, Marguerite Duras again certifies ­ erself as an expert in the area of erotic paradox. Duras here blends such b­ asic h categories as masculine/feminine, nocturnal/diurnal, and queer/straight in the process of rendering a discordant version of androgyny. What could turn out to be a utopia of sexual candor and tolerance of difference is found to be dystopic after all. This is a twisted tale of ambiguous attraction: of an absent, erotically charged male who is the beloved of a sexually active “straight” female and the prospective match of a frustrated gay male. And rather than an salutary blending of genders, this engaging text – androgynous in its apparent program – is a clever failure and may be best apprehended as a study in anti-androgyny, if such a construct can be said to exist. Yet whatever the narratival falterings of this contrarian tale, which with the aid of sleep eats at its own progress, a hermeneutic reward is lodged within, an anti-climax not expected to appeal to or titillate every reader. It is especially to readers interested in quagmires of signification that a striking instance of absence can appear relevant. At issue is the notion of the absent phallus – in any sense in which the phrase might be understood. Whether viewed as erotically aroused male anatomy or as a symbol of ­sexuality in classical visual art (meanings often seen as reductive and to be shied away from) or, more abstractly, as a signifier of the processes of signification in general,80 the phallus is difficult to grasp in this barren postmodern ­novella. Rather conspicuous herein, instead, is the notion of phallic absence, 80

Discussing the phallus as a key Lacanian term, Kaja Silverman does well to expose flaws in the notion that the phallus, as signifier, cannot correspond to a segment of masculine anatomy (“The Lacanian Phallus” in The Phallus Issue, spec. issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4.1 [Spring 1992]: 84–115). On this topic, see also Keith Reader, The Abject Object: Avatars of the Phallus in Contemporary French Theory, Literature and Film (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 17–38. Lacan’s view is enunciated, among other passages, in his comments on Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Lacan’s critical gaze is here focused on “this strange, suspended, oblique object in the foreground in front of these two figures” (i.e., the young ambassadors). An ethereal, distorted skull, this phallic semblance is for Lacan a visualization of “the subject as annihilated – annihilated in the form that is, strictly speaking, the imaged embodiment of the minus-phi [(−Φ)] of castration, which for us centres the whole organization of the desires through the framework of the fundamental drives” (Four Fundamental Concepts, 88–89). In this way, Lacan would seem to summarize – if still not precisely the phallus per se – the “reality” or Realness of the effects of the phallus in forming the subject.

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as even brief consideration of the diegetic data of Blue Eyes Black Hair (Les yeux bleus cheveux noirs) will make clear. This equivocatingly erotic novella, published in 1986, will remind its readers of its predecessor, The Malady of Death (La maladie de la mort [1982]), discussed in the previous chapter. ­Beginning with abundant sleep, the similarities are numerous and salient.81 At the center of each text is an isolated couple, a heterosexual woman and a man who is more at home with homoerotic experiences than with the conventional sexuality with which he is now confronted. Then there is the question of locale, in both instances an anonymous setting on the coast of France. In each case, the presence of the sea is never entirely eliminated from a sparsely furnished, amphitheatre-like apartment in which two alienated individuals temporarily cohabit yet detect little mutual, affective benefit in their shared situation. While the factor of “extimacy” or imploded closeness is blatant in both texts,82 Duras establishes a substantial difference between them with respect 81



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In commentary reminiscent of the insights of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Tombe de sommeil, ­ artine L. Jacquot eloquently sums up Durassian sleep as follows: M Sleep, whether real or metaphorical, is in either case a mirage, a search for forgetfulness behind the screen of the eyelids. It is not necessarily a recuperative sleep, but an  intermediary state, an abstraction in relation to the world. It is also protection, isolation before awakening to surrounding life. It is often a type of fainting, a semblance of continuity within discontinuous life, a symbolic death that can be followed by a rebirth, even if it is ephemeral. But it is especially a shrinkage of vision and an acceptance of the exclusion – definitive or temporary – of one’s ego. (nw, trans.) (Le sommeil, qu’il soit réel ou métaphorique, est également un mirage, une recherche de l’oubli derrière l’écran des paupières. Ce n’est pas nécessairement un sommeil récupérateur, mais un état intermédiaire, une abstraction au monde. Il est aussi protection, isolement avant le réveil à la vie qui entoure. C’est souvent une sorte d’évanouissement, de semblant de continuité dans une vie discontinue, une mort symbolique qui pourra être suivie d’une renaissance, même éphémère. Mais c’est surtout un rétrécissement de la vision et une acceptation de l’exclusion définitive ou temporaire de son moi [Duras ou le regard absolu {Paris: Midi, 2009}, 325].) The work of Jerry Aline Flieger, along with that of Herman Rapaport referred to in the ­previous chapter, is particularly useful for an understanding of the concept of extimacy (Is Oedipus Online? Siting Freud after Freud [Cambridge: mit Press, 2005], 222–47). Flieger maintains that Oedipus (who perhaps parallels Duras’s absent Canadian) “assumes the mantle of extimacy…he seems to be an outsider, but this all-too-familiar alien has always been one of the family” (238). Having explained extimacy as both inter- and introsubjective (237), Fleiger remarks that it “complicates our relation with other subjects, by undoing the clear distinction between what is subject and what is object, and focusing on the emergence of the subject in a field of Others” (242).

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to the depiction of erotic behavior. The homoerotic stratum in The Malady…is basically a submerged one; to the limited extent that it is evident, Duras has staged it as a means of foregrounding dysfunctional male psychology within a failed – and ultimately tradition-bound – heterosexual liaison. Thus as already noted, coitus is frequent in The Malady ... , and the male participant’s gayness is simply one component among many in the rendering of a male–female erotic tangle that discloses a number of the entropies and impasses that can impoverish heterosexual relationships. The intercourse-crammed The Malady ... has been superseded by the abstemious Blue Eyes ... . The protagonist of the earlier novella wished to explore ­heterosexual behavior and, hence, secured a short-term relationship with a woman. His narrational replacement in Blue Eyes ... pursues a different agenda. At a chance meeting, he informs his nubile, prospective apartment-mate simply “that he was looking for a young woman to sleep near him for a while, that he was afraid of madness (italics mine). He wished to pay this woman; it was his understanding that it was necessary to pay women so that they could hinder men from dying, from going insane.” (“… qu’il cherchait une jeune femme pour dormir auprès de lui pendant quelque temps, qu’il avait peur de la folie. Qu’il voulait payer cette femme, c’était son ideé, qu’il fallait payer les femmes pour qu’elles empêchent les hommes de mourir, de devinir fous.”)83 The reasoning appears flimsy or stilted, but as a very general explanation, the statement may be difficult to reject. Indeed, a gravitational pull toward the society of others is universal. And opposites attract. Also, relatively few people enjoy their own company to the exclusion of all others. At the same time, whatever the residue of veracity lodged in this declaration, the context of the utterance may bring attention to a central concern of this novella. That is: the drift ­toward a flattening or erasure of signifiers. For here as elsewhere in Blue Eyes…, seemingly ordinary statements or concepts (e.g., man’s need for woman) fail to connect, in a cogent way, with specific individuals and situations. This novella proceeds almost as a long, answerless riddle. But it is soon ­apparent that this homoerotically active gentleman, who professes n ­ ever to have had intercourse with (28) – or sexual desire for (30) – a woman, has ­enunciated a need (that of sleeping with a woman nearby) that is only ­tangential to some more authentic exegesis of his basic wants. Also, it gradually becomes clear that much of the representational program of Blue Eyes … is simply a staging of differences that are irreconcilable. There are, for instance, 83

Marguerite Duras, Les yeux bleus cheveux noirs (Paris: Minuit, 1986), 24. Translations are mine. Subsequent page references are in-text (including paraphrases of and comments on Duras’s discourse, when the text is not quoted.)

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persistent conflicts in this work between whatever can be filed under the rubric “blue eyes” (les yeux bleus), on the one hand, and whatever belongs to the category “black hair” (cheveux noirs) on the other. Thus the Durassian world of blue eyes (les yeux bleus) is likely to include the brightness of day, the joyousness of smiles and animated conversation, pleasant if superficial rapport between individuals, the liquid articulations of speech in general, and the undulating sheen of the ocean beneath the benign bombardment of maritime sunlight. And as for black hair (cheveux noirs), this would seem to indicate first of all the heavy discourse of night and of sleep with which this novella is ­imbued, the leaden nocturnal ocean with its litany of somber sounds, alienation (including sexual alienation) involving individuals who find themselves in close physical proximity to one another, negative psychic states such as abjection and anomie, and finally, the mysterious black veil with which the woman habitually covers her visage while sleeping.84 The impasses that make this novella both alluring and frustrating attenuate toward the end of the work. Corresponding to the relative peacefulness of the conclusion is a brief period of happiness early in the text, but that pleasant epoch is already terminating within the first few pages. Sparing of specifics, Duras conjures up and then discards a brief fermata of idealization, an androgynous inset. For prior to entanglement with a gay man, this attractive blue-eyed, sable-haired woman, dressed in casual white clothing, is very much within her own element. For a curtailed duration, she is in the company of a lover, a man identified as, physically, a rather close match for her. Her body is “long and supple” (“long et souple” [10]) while he is as “large as she is” or simply “big like her” (“grand comme elle” [11]). In addition, they both wear casual white clothing suitable for the summer. But what is crucial is that it is a matter of “blue eyes, black hair” (“les yeux bleus cheveux noirs”) in both cases. Beyond these few particulars, little is manifested, except that, near the beginning of this “tale,” he is very pleased to meet up with her in the entry area of a hotel near a beach in the 84

Cf. Martine Jacquot’s claim that the room where the couple takes up residence becomes a laboratory where the man begins a process of self-exploration. “This slow exploration takes place to the rhythm of tides, of tears, of nights. The liquid element (the sea, tears, blood, the symbol of the sun setting on the sea) reflects his questioning of his sexuality, of the feminine element which is in him and dominates his sleeping masculinity.” (nw, trans.) (Cette exploration lente se fait au rythme des marées, des larmes, des nuits. L’élément liquide [la mer, les larmes, le sang, le symbole du soleil couchant sur la mer] reflète son questionnement sur sa sexualité, sur l’élément féminin qui est en lui et domine sa masculinité endormie [Duras ou le regard absolu, 332].)

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north of France. Also, he weeps (12), apparently because – as is later indicated – his departure for home in Vancouver is imminent. It is evident, in addition, that the two will almost certainly never encounter one another again. Of similar and distinctive physical features, of similarly casual habits of attire, emotionally and sexually compatible – this androgynous couple is s­tylish, up-to-date, is inconspicuously postmodern. Their portrait, their balance of interests and drives, and their happiness are all complete in a few strokes that might qualify them for some widely circulated and viewed ­advertisement for sportswear. Almost in the same breath, however, the matrix of globalization that has facilitated their exquisite union effects as well their manifestly permanent separation. The young woman soon after recognizes that, almost tragically, she is “riveted to her desire for him alone” (“rivée au désir de lui seul” [27]). “Riveted” – the term is an admonition within the weakly evident diegetic program of this text. At length, there is a new bonding between two individuals. But as long as she is affixed to a desire that, from the start, blocks out connection with whatever psychic reality might have been presumed to satisfy it, the woman may not experience an existence beyond alienation and indifference. At the same time, the a-worldliness or disconnect of desire is a stratum of the desirer’s existence. It is worthwhile to correlate these particulars with Emmanuel Levinas’s comments on attempts at self-evasion that are countered because of “the fact of being riveted to oneself, the radical ­impossibility of fleeing oneself in order to hide one’s self from oneself, the undiscardable presence of the ego to itself” (italics mine), (“… le fait d’être rivé à soi-même, l’impossibilité radicale de se fuir pour se cacher à soi-même, la présence irrémissible du moi à soi-même”).85 The woman, then, is at this juncture riveted in the wrong direction; that is, away from oneself. She thus enters a period of collapse expressed in part by a propensity to slump into long intervals of sleep. Her perplexity and the aporias of her existence are compounded as the nature of her new, homosexual companion’s attraction to her becomes clarified. Neither for herself, nor for the voluptuousness of her physique is 85

De l’évasion (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1982), 113. (nw, trans.) Richard A. Cohen explains, “Levinas speaks of the existent’s embodiment in terms of the unity of a dual movement or restlessness, at once, on the one hand, entrapment, enclosure, and self-compression, freighted with its own materiality and backed up against being, and, on the other hand, rebellion, a desire to escape, an urge to get out of this circuit of its own immanence” (“Levinas, Spinozism, Nietzsche, and the Body” in Nietzsche and Levinas: “After the Death of a Certain God,” ed. Jill Stauffer and Bettina G. Bergo [New York: Columbia up, 2009], 168).

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she found appealing. Yet the basis for the interest is corporeal, and it resides in that distinctly fetching combination, “blue eyes black hair.” The eyes and hair that he craves are not her own, but those of the absent lover that she as well as he impetuously desires, in both cases without prospect of fulfillment. For a fleeting moment only had this homosexual onlooker gazed at a handsome traveler traversing the foyer of a hotel as he attended to the requisite details of his departure – including a cordial but not an overly regretful good-bye (some obligatory tears thrown in) delivered to his summer sleeping partner. This homoerotic gazer could not at that moment view the Canadian’s female companion, hence was unaware of the male–female match-up of blue eyes and black hair. The gay man has undergone an erotic transfixion, however, and when he encounters the desolate woman a brief interval later, she instantly becomes a surrogate signifier of his desire (26). He must now arrange to acquire her as a somehow real component of an erotic imaginary he can hardly abandon. Hence the indispensible dormancy that encases her labored existence (and often his as well) as snugly – if not as conveniently – as a glove of the correct size encloses the hand of a perpetrator of some despicable crime. The trauma of separation has left her psycho-sexually asleep; her impromptu “marriage” to the gay man is on some level a very suitable textualization of her quandary. And subtly but emphatically, Duras introduces a de facto veil, “a square of black silk” (“un carré de soie noire” [26]), with which she typically covers her visage as she readies herself for sleep – ostensibly for the purpose of sheltering her eyes from the interventions of luminosity from a chandelier that remains radiant during the night (26). Duras in this way conjures up the veil as a traditional indicator of subjugation of women, at the same time amplifying other resonances arising from the context (e.g., a sleep or abasement of subjectivity).86 An arresting tableau is thus laid before the reader when, at bedtime, she covers her face with the black silk. On these recurrent occasions, her “companion” reclines beside her, but their two bodies are completely without contact (34). Eventually in this anti-narratival tale, there is an ambiguous unfolding of erotic intrigue. Some mode of amorousness is certified in her recognition that “she loves him beyond himself” (“elle l’aime au-delà de lui-même” [125]), perhaps with reference to, in conjunction with some remote, unexplored region of his selfhood. By degrees, the partitions mutually erected between their 86

The diverse significations of the veiling of women are well presented by Madeleine Dobie, Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism (Palo Alto: Stanford up, 2004), 25–32.

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two bodies and psyches as they sleep are dismantled. She removes the veil (“l’echarpe noir” [130]); their bodies are in close proximity – but still untouching – as they slumber (130). At length, their bodies connect during sleep, and at last, “without perhaps having decided it, distracted from himself” (“sans peutêtre l’avoir decidé, distrait de lui-même” [132]), he interrupts her slumber with a foray into intercourse that – without her consent – fails blatantly and concludes with her cry of agony and anger (132). Yet there is, finally, an occurrence of mutually-assented-to erotic contact between the two “cohabitants,” a single enactment of coitus (baiser) that ­culminates in orgasm. In its aftermath, as they are lost in sleep, their psychic energies – and frenzies as well – have dissipated even as simply the memory of this erotic experience “burns their blood.” (“Le souvenir du baiser est ­alors trés fort, il brûle leur sang ... ” [135].) Despite this eruption of passionate intimacy, the psycho-sexual impasses between the man and woman tend to persist. The gradual diminution of affective distance between the two remains a compromised process. What seems to be approached – and what never quite arrives in Blue Eyes Black Hair – is a state of androgyny or a balancing and intermingling of male and female existences and qualities. Instead, the reader is faced with the recognition of a cluster of stalemates as this extended confrontation of genders becomes ambiguously resolved. That is to say: it is at length somehow resolved. A vague, generalized commonality emerges between the two and is summed up in the woman’s perception – while he is asleep, of course – that his visage is bound for a destination that differs from that of the rest of the universe – hence his enduring distress. At the same time, a similar fate is in store for the two of them; they are simply “carried along together” and are subject to being “similarly bruised by the movement of time.” (“… l’autre nuit, pendant qu’il dormait, elle avait perçu – en même temps que cette différence de destination entre ce visage et le tout de l’univers – l’identité du sort qui leur était réservé, à savoir qu’ils étaient emportés ensemble et broyés de la même façon par le mouvement du temps ... ” [138–39].)87 87

A parallel emerges at this point between the woman’s “insight” and an observation by Simon Morgan Wortham – who is at that point responding to Jean-Luc Nancy – regarding the condition of shared sleep. Nancy had compared the bodies of a sleeping couple to a pair of boats afloat and drifting in tandem. Morgan Wortham comments that, “paradoxically, [sleep’s] profound unshareability provides an image of strange and unworldly commonality beyond, for instance, all forms of secular assembly or religious congregation” (The Poetics of Sleep, 133). A rapprochement is implied, then, between the vague destiny of Duras’s nameless couple and the condition of sleepers generally. In the end, it may well be that a dynamics of sleep – however defined, perhaps as a submersion in the rituals of instinct and culture – is what governs the lives of the nameless man and woman.

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Their malaise is an intensely real but inaccessible presence that is both coagulating and traumatic for the two individuals. At issue is the incendiary memory of an absent beloved – in one case lost, never possessed in the other. As the psyches of the woman and gay man edge toward coalescence, processes of semiosis are attenuated; a trauma begins to be unraveled. She can no longer certify that the man she loved was the same as the blue-eyed, blackhaired man lusted after by her gay companion. What happened on that ­painful ­evening could only have been specified if the latter had clearly observed her in the company of the man of his dreams and memories – in which case the birth of their relationship, in a maritime café, may not have been found i­ntriguing, might not have occurred at all (147). Thus a swollen cathexis of concern is ­de-­dramatized, becomes detumescent. And similarly, the man reflects on the sight – and the sound – of a large white boat that had cruised along the shore, an image-node that elicited anxious recollection of the mournful night of the Canadian’s ­departure. The diminishing drone of the craft’s engine – though now a memory – has provoked in him a renewed sadness concerning the handsome lover he will never have. The woman recalls that such a vessel did recently cruise in the area. It was simply a yacht with a mooring in the harbor nearby, and the boat’s passage close to the beach was a matter of minimal import (147–148). Hence again, a potentially explosive sign is defused, and ­another barrier to the longevity of their relationship has been removed. At the conclusion of a subdued but meaningful consultation over unsettling aspects of their peculiar cohabitation, a threshold has apparently been traversed. A peacefulness previously alien to their relationship is manifested, and as he reclines beside her, they experience a new happiness so profound that, ironically, it frightens them (“… un bonheur qu’ils n’ont jamais connu, si profond, ils en sont effrayés” [148]). The words and the situation are enigmatic, suggestive of deep repose, if not sleep, after intercourse. Yet as before, so much remains indefinite. Has the couple awakened to a happiness that is existential? Or could it be a Zennish one connected to a detachment from cognitive entanglements? The phallus is in any case absent, whether taken as a powerful vehicle of semiotic freight or in some other way. Only a feeble version of androgyny is evident at this tale’s fascinating ­closing juncture. Nor has some aggressive statement, some manifest protest, been delivered regarding contrarian, embattled sexualities.88 In a postmodern 88

Martin Crowley draws a somewhat different conclusion while aiming to come to terms with the recurrent paradoxes and uncertainties in Duras’s treatment of sexuality in her novels. He submits that “Les yeux bleus cheveux noirs ... provides a critical frame which makes it both an undecidable disruption of heterosexual gender relations and, at the

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cosmos wherein virtually all erotic phenomena have become nearly mundane, it is difficult to produce momentous surprises. A sense of queering, of challenging what is routine and expected, of constructively disruptive discourse – all of this is attenuated not only in Duras’s novella but within the larger ­postmodern gender theater as well. Within this expansive “walk-in” closet for non-conforming sexualities, the notion of deviance has, bit by bit, diminished even if its demise has been delayed by the complexities of the aids epidemic and even if the advance of a genuine broadening of perspectives on gender issues has occurred slowly.89 Hence Duras, unlike Cadmus, cannot so easily stage a sexuality that shocks, that subverts convention and provokes cultural critique. What is distinctive, then, about Blue Eyes Black Hair is its adroit layering, its intermingling of divergent erotic orientations. There remains a sense of a broadening of norms at an historical juncture – the roaringly postmodern mid-1980s – when much loosening vis-à-vis sexuality was already evident. This was, after all, the beginning of a still-continuing era that has had to grapple with, among other factors, the aids phenomenon and an acceptance that ­alternative sexualities have always been widespread. While Blue Eyes Black Hair eschews determinacy in many forms, it is also clear that Duras displays an interest in an oft-visited postmodern intersection, that of work and sleep. Much of the world’s population would no doubt prefer that these seeming opposites could remain forever asunder. Yet as in so many everyday episodes of contemporary life, labor often manages to work its way across the boundaries of sleep in this novella. It is worth recalling that this somehow successful relationship began as sleep-undercontract, an agreement that an almost anonymous woman would sleep near an equally anonymous man for an unspecified period of time (“pendant quelque temps” [24]).

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same time, their ultimate, naturalizing glorification” (Duras, Writing, and the Ethical [­Oxford: Clarendon, 2000], 231). Comments by Lee Edelman are germane in the search for an explanation as to why fundamental attitudes about gender atypicality can be said to change sluggishly – even while, at the same time, progress is apparent. According to Edelman, Sex, as the limitless array of privatized libidinal experiences and affects, at once underspecified and overdetermined, must submit to the law of culture, to the discipline of sociality, for which it can then come to figure self-indulgent resistance to communal imperatives – a resistance that, in our heteronormative and social dispensation, allows for the wholesale embodiment of the antisocial by nonreproductive sexualities (italics mine) (“Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social” in After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory, ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker [Durham: Duke up, 2011], 110–11).

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Well before the tale is over, however, the notion of a sleep-contract is almost a pleasant one, at least for the woman – for it enables her to maintain a physical location adjacent the man whom, for whatever reason, she is beginning to love. She awakens in the middle of the night – while he sleeps – and comments aloud (while he remains incognizant) that “one day, the number of nights arranged for will have passed – and they will not know it.” (“… elle dit qu’un jour le nombre des nuits prévues sera dépassé et qu’ils ne le sauront pas” [68]). Her presumed meaning is that the temporal terminus of this illusory contract can slip by, yet she is content to ignore its passing; her opportunity to remain in a locale of interest to herself will continue. This attractive young heterosexual woman can hardly find it a joy-ride to work a job so tantalizing and frustrating, so filled with a sleep of the postmodern subject. The indices of her isolation and inner constraint are evident in a passage strongly reminiscent of Anton Chekhov’s worrisome tale, “Let Me Sleep” (also referred to in a previous chapter). At the point in question, Duras’s blue-eyed, black-haired woman asks her sharer of floor-space what she might have said while she was half-asleep (74). The declamation was important though largely forgotten. Among the points retained, she recalls a woman’s voice that resembled her own and the fact that the message was “complicated, dolorous, and snatched from her own flesh…” (“compliquée, douloureuse, arrachée de sa propre chair ... ” [75]). A reader of “Let Me Sleep” will detect a resemblance between Duras’s restless sleeper and the pathetic Varka. This young nursemaid tends to an infant whose irritability renders it impossible for the immature caretaker to indulge in wholesome sleep. During an interval of fitful half-sleep, notes Chekhov, “Somewhere a baby’s crying, and Varka can hear someone with her voice singing.”90 The parallel is obvious although the toil and unenjoyed sleep of Duras’s lady are not quite those of miserable Varka, whose malaise is tied to active exertions that are endlessly repetitive. The agenda of Duras’s nameless “heroine” is less strenuous yet more daunting. The exact requirements of her work are unspecifiable, and at this juncture, she struggles for language that is ungraspable. Though unaided by her companion in her effort to recall, she proceeds to retrieve the details: During that interval of shallow dormancy, she wanted to know how to speak of, to articulate a certain longing to retain time that passes and (so Duras’s words imply) creates forgetfulness of – and can effect the loss of – faces, bodies, lovers. (“Elle aimerait bien savoir comment dire cette envie de retenir contre soi ce temps 90

Anton Chekhov, Early Stories, trans. Patrick Miles and Harvey Pitcher (Oxford: Oxford up, 1994), 193.

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qui passe, visage contre visage, corps contre corps, serrés…” [75].) It seems that her goal is to transform into language private emotions that, at the same time, entail an abstract, reflective dimension. To do so, a first step is to access, to utilize the resources of the phallus as exemplum of signifers, as the arch-bearer and -barer of meaning in language. Clearly, engaging in the amatory “research project” here defined is taxing, but it will assist her in defining and actualizing her subjectivity. Such an agenda, however, is unfinishable due to unstable paradigms of time, of global geography, of architectural space, of transport, of commitment between individuals, during the postmodern era. There is also a Proustian echo when her parlous sleep indicates concern with the passage of time: “She finds again what she said while asleep. She spoke about the passing of time in the chamber.” (“Elle retrouve ce qu’elle a dit en dormant. Elle a parlé de temps qui passe dans la chambre” [75].) Postmodern temporality, however, tends to be deceptive, multi-dimensional. There is no longer an essentialist time that can be restored or found again; what the lady has found is simply the rubric, “time,” rather than the process or phenomenon referred to. Her quandary entails an inability to even define her longing to retain time as it passes. At the same time, her “envie” may include an enviousness of the capacity of time to move ever forward amid ruptures that impact not just the chronicles of individual lives, but recent history as well. And should it turn out that there is a genus of stable time that has survived, gaining that privileged temporality might require that one refrain from trying to put it into language. Such is, alas, the operation that she has just attempted to perform (75). Pertinent for further recognition of the alluring impasses of Blue Eyes Black Hair is one of several puzzling intervals wherein Duras brings into play the notion that her “novella” is also (or can be apprehended as) a dramatic work. With tantalizing representational equivocation worthy of a noh play, Duras intermittently notifies her readers that this series of disjunctive interpersonal encounters is declaimed by an actor – and yet the gay man, the woman, and others may also have acted out (again, in a theatrical sense) roles ascribed to them in the text. In addition, it is probable that these roles were being fictionally lived by the characters from one end of the text to the other. The passage that especially invites attention begins with the apparent call for a single intermission, to take place at some point: “During the spectacle, the actor would say, once, that slowly the light would lower, and the recitation would cease.” (“Pendant le spectacle, dirait l’acteur, une fois, lentement la lumière baisserait et la lecture cesserait” [112].) The enigmatic intermission, not to be announced as such, is signaled via the adverbial “une fois” and the conditional verbs: “dirait,” “baisserait,” “cesserait.” A break would presumably occur

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once in this “drama” – if there were indeed such an actor and such a drama. The intermission likely begins as soon as it is alluded to. The man and woman are then rejoicing in a certain sleep, in the fact that a tempest has fallen dormant along with its gusts of wind. (“La tempête s’est endormie avec le vent” [111].) On this occasion, the various actors would indulge in a respite from their dramatic efforts. Their number is indeterminate, but it is evident that the gay man and his lady would be prominent as all present relax and taper off any kind of action. Duras makes rather clear that they would now become, unexpectedly, “the two heroes” (“les deux héros”), to be distinguished from the mere rank and file “actors” (“les acteurs” [113]). Having already slept through many of the previous pages of Les yeux bleus cheveux noirs, this distinctive twosome nonetheless would promptly slumber, together with a sizable troupe of weary performers. Soon all would be fast asleep (“Très vite une immobilité totale s’emparerait d’eux” ... [113]) – whoever and however many “they” (“eux”) might be. This would be a traditional repose from eras past, Duras proposes, “a regathering of forces across the plunge into silence” (“une reprise de forces à travers la plongée dans le silence” [113]). With all persons (however many or few) somnolent, so striking is the scenario that the phenomenon of sleep would take center stage, if only this intermission could ever proceed beyond a provisional, conditional existence: “And it is sleep itself that would become the spectacle.” (“Et c’est ce sommeil lui-même qui deviendrait le spectacle” [113–14].) At this juncture, it should be the case that complete physiological relaxation and refreshment would reign. However, something would clearly be amiss as music would commence and finish, as the lights would go on, and as – last of all – the actors would return to their work and their roles: “they would be slow to do it” (“… ils seraient lents à le faire” [114]). The man and woman now seem to be part of the group, “acteurs”; they are not otherwise mentioned. In any case, the performers would not have found their nap adequate or enlivening. Such is the aftermath of many disappointing and anti-climactic postmodern awakenings. Thus the personnel of Duras’s “script” are all in some or many ways representative of postmodern subjectivity, its attendant duties, its disconnects. The notion of a sleeping actor unable to bounce back after repose becomes broadly relevant. Mired in an overplus of required competencies and protocols tied to gender and other roles, the postmodern subject is in some sense at almost every moment a preoccupied actor in some global sideshow, burlesque, or perhaps a grievous tragi-comedy. Hence the postmodern citizen may at times wonder what happened to unencumbered leisure and relaxation, or if there are still times and places for Angst-free sleep and authentic awakenings.

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Mark Tansey’s Utopic

In a clever and antinomian way, a solution to the harriedness of human existence in the era of globalization is provided by New York artist Mark Tansey. His frequently reproduced painting, Utopic, features a by-now familiar figure, the dormant hermaphrodite (fig. 54). The work dates from 1987, merely a year after the release of Duras’s Blue Eyes ... . However one perceives this painting, the viewer’s gaze will likely oscillate between the substantial depiction of the genderically heretical hermaphrodite and the three portraits suspended on the wall of this attractive chamber that looks suspiciously like a psychoanalyst’s studio. And indeed it is, so Arthur Danto maintains in an explanatory key.91

Figure 54 Mark Tansey, Utopic (1987). Oil on canvas, 172.7 cm × 177.8 cm. Private collection. Image courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery, ny. © mark tansey. 91

Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions (New York: Abrams, 1992), 137.

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This is Anna Freud’s chamber, strangely visited by a “client” who, from a therapeutic perspective, is obviously headed in the wrong direction – literally and figuratively. For not only does he slumber instead of recline in an awakened state while waiting to be hypnotized or signaled to embark upon a stream of self-revelatory discourse; even more basically, his/her feet are where the pate should be. At least metaphorically, the statue’s feet (which are mysteriously veiled) soil a pillow that could be expected to cushion a languid but cognitively vibrant cranium. Whatever else is tied up in the conundrum that the feet place before the viewer, it can be argued that they do not parallel the veiled female visage ­indicative of subjugation in Duras – one of a rather small number of readily ­interpretable images in Blue Eyes ... . Utopic emanates an aura of eccentricity and conveys, as well, the impression that this is a painting concerned with escape from rather than submission to a state or position of subservience. If gender or other inequality is not the arena where an answer to the riddle of the veiled feet is to be found, a solution might if, once more, a Lacanian perspective is entertained. The intention here is not to utilize French analytic theory simply out of convenience or habit. Tansey was familiar enough with Jacques Lacan – at least as a noted contemporary thinker – to include him in a 1987 painting, The Bathers. Although Mark C. Taylor observes that Tansey and Lacan voice similar concerns and inquiries regarding visual representation, Taylor is also of the opinion that “Tansey does not engage [Lacan’s] writings.”92 Yet in the present context, the tie-in between visual art and psychoanalysis seems closer than what is possible on the basis of coincidence alone. Tansey appears on this occasion to have tweaked one of Lacan’s most widely disseminated percepts, the claim that the phallus, primal presenter of whatever is meant by “meaning,” is to be regarded as inherently veiled. Hence as ersatz or ­parodic phallus, this detail – even as it frustrates a clear message – can still suggest the notion of a muted signifier of signifiers.93 The hermaphrodite’s veiled feet can also be apprehended as a “stand-in” for (or a reminder of) that other anomalous region, the unseen groin of the statue, that area known by ­cognoscenti of art history to harbor a site of maleness rather than 92 93

Mark C. Taylor, The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation (­Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999), 35, 91. The discussions of Silverman and Reader, cited above (note 80), are once more useful. Silverman strives to demonstrate Lacan’s contradictions in – or shifts from – his view that the phallus of ancient visual art achieves its crucial status – that is, as a signifier – only when it is veiled (88–89). For Lacan’s comments that set the debate in motion, see the essay, “The Signification of the Phallus” in Écrits, trans. Sheridan, 281–91 and especially 287–88.

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of femininity. And amid a scene of sleep, the not-quite-interpretable image of veiled feet – where the head should be – more than likely indicates deferral though not a full blockage of signification. There is certainly a parallel between Tansey’s downplaying of significatory capacities in Utopic and Duras’s staging of a flight from determinate meanings at key points in Blue Eyes ... . Both semiotic scenarios can be assessed in ­relation to a de-emphasizing or effacement of the phallus of Lacanian fame or ignominy. Yet otherwise, the two strategies diverge. Duras’s “heroine” and the vague authorial voice conveying the text (not a narrator in the usual sense) seem, at some key junctures, to strive for a falling off, a trailing off of clear significations. A lapse into discursive néant is found to be restful, tranquilizing, or even liberating. Tansey’s canvas, on the other hand, appears disinclined to fully disengage from semiosis. The rather somber, narrow color spectrum and odd details such as the shrouded feet tend to induce a sleep of interpretation – yet may also provoke inquisitiveness on the part of the viewer. Utopic is in any case a scene of resistance – and rife with the typical traits of the hypnoglyph. Certainly, there is a resistance to narratives – ­especially to trains of thought or mental agendas imposed in accordance with society, communities, received methodologies – that run counter to the desires and preferences of discrete individuals striving for (if not attaining) self-­determination. For an indefinite interval, in any case, the hermaphrodite’s sleep prevails in a pleasant dimming (rather than a dearth) of discourse, within a limited purview softly lit and suggestive of a relaxing, continuing twilight.94 Thus there is a lack of any confirmation, saving the lower left quadrant of Utopic (with its vase of fresh flowers), that ordinary circadian rhythms are continuing as the hermaphrodite sleeps. Above this somnolent figure a jagged barrier is suspended, formed by three framed portraits, each depicting a virtual dynamo of the discursive heritage of modernism. Freud, Marx, Nietzsche – certainly the cognitive record of any of the three is far more than adequate to fragment and exhaust any of the ­undisclosed subjectivity implied by the image of the hermaphrodite, dorsally 94

Kenneth Gross’s comments on statues that depict a sleeping (female) nymph are largely applicable in the current context, wherein a statue of a male “nymph” has been reconstituted pictorially. According to Gross, the nymph – transmogrified into statuary and posed in sleep – manages to appropriate “the stillness of the stone and to trope that stillness according to the lineaments of a particular human stillness, one belonging to a living body rather than to a corpse. The statue type holds onto and yet transfigures the ambiguous grace of the carved stone by means of a posture at once seductive, vulnerable, mournful, and curiously innocent or private” (The Dream of the Moving Statue [Ithaca: Cornell up, 1992], 172).

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feminine but masculine in the groin. Yet this odd entity may safely slumber on, his/her perhaps dreamless mind undisturbed by a barrage of interrogation or explication of the psyche and/or soma, of her/his productive capacities or relation to capital (even though, obviously, s/he is at the same time indisputably an asset harboring much cultural capital). The hermaphrodite’s prophylaxis is simple but efficacious: The reclining posture places it at a safe distance below the elevated and possibly vaporizing gaze (and the penetrating interpretive narratives as well) of Freud, of Marx, and/or of Nietzsche. The formatting of space within the canvas suggests that a ­cognitive barrier is established by the expanse of blank wall surrounding the portraits. This vacancy can be construed as an impasse that renders unavailing the intervention of whatever discourse the three imposing images would seem to bring into play. To be noted as well within this theater of analytic practices is the massive bookshelf along the left margin of the painting. The tomes with which it is crammed are – can there be any doubt? – instructive and authoritative. Yet the assemblage is, again, such that this additional threat of a discursive invasion is held at bay, is blocked by the strong vertical gesture that results from the illusion of a column, effected by the placement of an especially large book at the right edge of each shelf. A partition is thereby rendered to the left of the stature, and a separate, disencumbered space has thus been structured within the canvas as a whole. Within this zone, an hermaphroditic subjectivity is in some way free to discover and locate itself while submerged in the numb pleasures of sleep. Along with the sector of non-intervention brought about by Tansey’s ­arrangement of the painting’s components, a complex though silent dialogue is there for the taking. These comments on Utopic would remain incomplete if the aesthetic facets of this conversation were not considered. In addition to the broad division Tansey sets up between verbal (books, discursive patriarchs) and visual (statue) sectors, there are components of Utopic that ­appear to convey affiliations with certain periods and ideas in Western art history. Thus the hermaphrodite, clearly, is Greco-Roman while the still-life inset (vase, tulips, and table) is Dutch and Neo-classical. The segment is brilliantly illuminated, reminding viewers of diurnal, everyday issues and concerns that fade out ­elsewhere in the canvas. Taken together, the still-life ensemble and the hermaphrodite provide a sense of depth and perspective (optical as well as historical). This perspectival dimension might be allegorized to indicate a purview of enfranchisement of individual (including idiosyncratic) affect and cognition. Beyond the still-life/statue sector, perspective is lost, and the viewer is lost in space as the line of vision careens into the three portraits. Their combined

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format is somehow medieval or feudal, is reminiscent of the triptych. The medieval dimension is reinforced by the varying magnitude of the visages. As in much medieval pictorial representation, the importance of a personage is tied primarily to grandeur, not necessarily to position and not to vanishingpoint perspective, a strategy lacking in the technical arsenal of that art. In this case, the figure of Freud is preeminent, with Marx and Nietzsche successively granted less importance. At once Greco-Roman, neoclassical, and feudal or authoritarian, Utopic is visually hermaphroditic. The central figure escapes the surveillance of those on high, of the masterful personages suspended in their unspecifiable heaven. The gaze and august outlook of each visage fail to confront or be disturbed by the male genitalia and female breasts positioned toward the background of the painting; that is, the realm of the portraits. The hermaphrodite, meanwhile, occupies a private utopia, is serene in his/her quiescent enjoyment of a distinct libidinal economy apparently insulated from intrusions.95 And in the midst of profound somnolence, with the vase as a fulcrum, the horizontal body of the hermaphrodite can almost be apprehended as a lever bringing about cognitive vibrancy and eliciting debate. Tansey thus seems to demonstrate an interest in charting an uneven psychic and cultural topography, one situated along the shared frontier of the two rubrics, sleep and alternative sexualities. 95

The phrase “libidinal economy” is traceable to the writings of Jean-François Lyotard and his scepticism regarding any possibility of objective reasoning detached from the impulses and inclinations, the imminence of the body. As much in the writings of Karl Marx as anywhere else, Lyotard claims to be struck by a dearth of disinterested analysis: “We must come to take Marx as if he were a writer, an author full of affects, take his text as a madness and not as a theory, we must succeed in pushing aside his theoretical barrier and stroking his beard without contempt and without devotion…stroke his beard as a complex libidinal volume, reawakening his hidden desire and ours along with it” (Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant [London: Continuum, 2004], 94). Brian P. Cooper and Margueritte S. Murphy emphasize the ubiquity (according to Lyotard) of a libidinous turn in discursive programs, for instance in semiotics. Lyotard finds that the semioticist evokes an erotic dimension while describing the play of verbal signs. Yet ostensibly, the semiotic argument being made was for a dry and protracted deferral of signification (“‘Libidinal Economics’: Lyotard and accounting for the unaccountable” in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the intersection of literature and economics, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen [London: Routledge, 1999], 230–31). The relevance of the phrase “libidinal economy” for Tansey’s Utopic resides in the hermaphrodite’s rather translucent indulgence in its sensual world – its implied acceptance of an economy of the libido, of pleasure, while amid its sleep. Despite the enigmatic aspects of the hermaphrodite, there is an abiding contrast with the constrained dignity of Marx and his pictorial companions, their formality simply a cover-up for their own prejudices, delights, or agendas.

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Vincent Desiderio’s Couple

As this chapter arrives at its close, the final work under review is ostensibly t­ hematized under the rubric, “androgyny” (fig. 55). With the transparent title, Couple (1997), clues as to the painting’s significance and direction are embedded in the sedate-but-sensual, lady-on-top format of the ensemble, the woman’s tactfully assertive facial expression, the provocative yet studied gesture of her left hand, the man’s somnolence, and his atypical, curvaceous (if mildly so) figure. New York “intimist” painter Vincent Desiderio acknowledges that there is a calculated balancing and intermingling of masculine and feminine

Figure 55 Vincent Desiderio, Couple (1997). Oil on canvas, 35.6 cm × 27.9 cm. Private collection. Image © v. desiderio, courtesy of the Marlborough Gallery, ny.

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dimensions in Couple. And at least during an initial inspection of the work, the reader/viewer may detect that the details emit idealism and resolution. A sensitive, somewhat vulnerable-looking young man is asleep and constructs an oneiric ideal. For surely the woman is a dream; her legs taper into a stovepipe-like vacuum. And no doubt, the ideal is both an amatory and an aesthetic dream that the sleeping gentleman would like to realize or ­concretize. Though less than conspicuous, the indications within the painting of the sleeper’s involvement in visual representation are noticeable enough: a partially completed canvas at the lower margin, a bowl filled with what might be kneaded-rubber erasers and other art supplies, and artist’s paintbox or ­carrying case (upper right). With some additional hermeneutic assistance from the artist himself,96 it becomes evident that the painting portrays a contrast between two kinds of visual narrative. The lower, male figure is for painter Desiderio indicative of what he calls “emblematic” narrative. Narratives of this type are akin to what is commonly called “symbolism,” and this is a stopped-action technique ­dependent upon a series of image-units or configurations, each enunciating its own arrested and quiescent tale. Preferable to this artist – and on a higher level – is the “sequential” narrative represented by the awakened and very mildly ­ecstatic woman poised diagonally above her male companion, whose posture is a bit strained-looking and who almost seems to hold in an elevated position the body of his eroticized, narratival “higher-up.” And on her part, she comes across as quite willing (if not able) to advance the cause of the “sequential” ­narrative, an edifying visual strategy that requires a group of inter-related image-units or configurations that present a “continuous, unfolding” diegetic ­progression.97 The potential for optimal outcomes offered by such narrative is no doubt best signified by the distinctive and complex gesture of the woman’s left hand. Desiderio describes this as a hybrid gesture, a blending of Buddhist and medieval Christian iconographical elements, designed to convey an initimation of enlightened and instructive discourse that is surely forthcoming. Thus far, a redemptive message may well lie dormant in this androgynous double portrait. And for a less inquiry-minded painter than Desiderio, the significations just indicated could solidify as interpretation proceeds. Desiderio, however, an enthusiast of review and interrogation, tends to apply his scrutinizing powers to movements within art history, concepts of representation, ideological perspectives, cultural dynamisms, and his own work. Hence, for 96 97

Personal interview by author, 24 July 2005. Telephone interview by author, 4 January 2006.

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instance, the notion of aesthetic ideals tends both to encourage and confound this highly talented painter. And in Couple as several other of his paintings, simply the phenomenon of reaching for an ideal may be a symptom of a shallow innocence or naiveté, hence can constitute grounds for tearing apart that enterprise of securing an exalted position. This effort to define and pictorially realize an aesthetic sublime is structured, then, so as to begin to fall short even as the project begins to emerge. Brought into play at the same time is an erotic or relationship “high” encapsulated in the n ­ otion of androgyny. The intermingled programs – artistic and sexual – are likely to succeed or fail in tandem. At all events, the aesthetic ideal that is implied appears to be concerned with emerging from a narrow modernist enclosure or prison (a representational desire often enunciated in Desiderio’s work). The factor of incarceration is signaled, according to this painter, by the dormant artist’s striped pajamas, which bear at least some resemblance to a traditional prisoner’s uniform.98 Desiderio recurrently links objects with stripped or bar-like patterns to modernist conventions or agendas. Such details may suggest a restrictive minimalism or the shortcomings of abstraction in general. In view of the limitations that this thus-far optimistic oeuvre aspires to ­transcend, just what is the agenda of renewal referred to by this lady’s ­pleasant visage, outstretched arm, and other physical or psychic traits? What is the ­embodied dream that this drowsy postmodern Endymion discovers in his ­kindly Selene? Certainly the configuration of the hand implies new directions, no doubt including a coherent and satisfying fusion of verbal and visual ­elements within a pictorial format (a goal frequently mentioned by Desiderio in interviews and often intimated in his paintings). From here onward, it is a ­challenge to specify details of the incipient aesthetic regime, but the feminine depiction may hint at such Desiderian desiderata as (1) a refined understanding of what constitutes excellence in the portrayal of subjectivity, (2) a re-recognition of the strategies and capacities of perspective as a painterly resource, and (3) a renewed accessing of the potentialities unleashed via expert handling of light and shadow. The aspirations are commendable, but along with the dynamisms of androgynous and aesthetic constructivism with which Desiderio has devilishly packed the details of the painting, Couple also encourages the perception that multiple realities – not all of them pleasant – inhabit the work. A thinker and critiquer in paint, Desiderio seems to endow each image with a sanguine aura with one stroke of his brush, and then injects an element of 98 Ibid.

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doubt or apprehension with the next. Thus this emissary and personification of a new art, this sophisticated but still worrisome woman has bags under her eyes, cannot hide her fatigue as a postmodern subject or aesthetic construct. ­Accompanying the aura of intimate familiarity that she emanates is a patina of charming fin-de-siècle decadence, a representational residue surviving from the neurasthenic women of Burne-Jones or Lord Leighton. Born phantasmagorically out of an imaginative man’s sleep, she is not a new art, only an incomplete reconstitution of an old one. Her gentleman companion fares little better. His renderer regards him as a problem in search of location. This sleeping artist is genuinely an idealist but is also a man “at the end of his rope” – as an emotional entity, as a painter, as an enthusiast of late-twentieth-century aesthetic theory. Hence the ropelike structure that borders a piece of curtain or something similar – this “rope” seems to extend from his posterior like a tail. Or perhaps the item penetrates inward and is a component of some censured fantasy. Thus, much depicted in this arresting canvas is hampered in the course of proceeding upward, for just as much pulls downward, is headed toward chaos, trauma, or disruption. And something rather tawdry, merely lustful, may reside in the long sinuous curve that courses snake-like from the woman’s cranium all the way down, across garments and torsos, to the man’s toes. Nor can a careful viewer of Couple remain inattentive to or unperturbed by the almost psychotic piling up and disarray of not-quite-matching textiles, cushions, and planes upon which the man and woman recline. If there is a method in this stylish near-madness of clothing and bedding, it likely escapes most viewers. The notion of a balanced, harmonious androgyny is in distress at this point or only prefigures a grander depiction left somewhere unfinished. Confusion is ultimately evident here, together with a proliferation of hermeneutic possibilities. Among them, before an astute visual reading of Couple has concluded, the viewer will have almost certainly apprehended that troubling pentagonal hole (though hardly a salient feature in this painting) beneath the sleeper. Mysteriously membraned, it has a vaginal dimension together with, due to some queer metal fragments, a trap-like appearance. Thus this apparent program for harmonizing genders – and perfecting art at the same time – elicits misgivings, but all concludes happily if the viewer has been awakened to a titillating tracklessness.

chapter 6

Conclusion: The Hypnoglyph and the Misclosure of the Postmodern At the close of this study of sleep-centered art, it is helpful to consider Proust’s concluding, resonant comment on sleep and dreams toward the end of his epitomic modernist actualization of an aesthetics of dormancy: “And after so many centuries, we do not know much about this subject.” (“Et depuis tant de siècles nous ne savons pas grand-chose là-dessus.”)1 Or as poet Philip Larkin phrased it, There is more Knowledge of sleep than death, and yet Who knows the nature of our casting there, Trawled inaccessible pool, or set A line to haul its logic into speech?2 Larkin’s implied definition of sleep as a “trawled inaccessible pool” includes a degree of anti-climax and suggests a semiotic terrain repetitively visited, packed with cryptic data, and yielding half-remembered experiences that cannot be adequately assimilated or fully understood by the wakened sleeper. Such attributes tied – so often and for so long – to the experience of dormancy became modernist topoi ripe for reuse and revision in postmodern works of art. In illustration of this trend, Anthony Burgess remarks near the close of On Going to Bed (an essay both entertaining and unsettling of the early 1980s), “In sleep we all become the same, and where we sleep is a profound irrelevancy. I still do not know why we sleep. It cannot be to rest the mind and the body, since the body is far more exhausted on waking than on lying down, and the mind whirls madly in sleep in extravagant but quite useless phantasmagorias.”3 Thus with humor and weariness that are quite contemporary, Burgess has added to the argument that, more frequently than not, sleep is beset with a negative aura in narrative contexts (whether aesthetic, philosophical, or religious) from Homer to Plato and far beyond. In keeping with this trend, intimations of malaise, mortality, 1 nw, trans. À la recherche du temps perdu, Vol. 4, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, Yves Baudelle, et al. (­Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 295. 2 “Many famous feet have trod,” Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989), 16. 3 On Going to Bed (London: André Deutsch, 1982), 93. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004316218_007

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and moribundity – often (as chez Burgess) conveyed in an off-hand or facetious ­manner – attend depictions of dormancy in postmodern visual art and literature. The “glyph” in the hypnoglyph signals a via negativa that can lead to unpleasant (or at times reassuring) self-knowledge or to cultural critique or nowhere at all. In order to fine-tune this statement, it is first of all instructive to re-visit Vincent Desiderio’s The Interpretation of Color (fig. 25), focusing this time on the design of his subject’s sleepwear. Barring patterns are recurrent in Desiderio’s paintings and are derived in part from Manet’s The Railway (La gare St. Lazare).4 For Desiderio, the bars (seen here and in Couple) have become more or less shorthand for the narrowness of formalism. Particularly in the case of The Railway, they suggest to Desiderio the sleep of modernism, the aesthetic constraints from which the subject would like to escape.5 Thus an undesirable element or uncanny dimension tends to accompany the artist’s keen interest in representing sleep. And like many others, the slumber depicted in The I­ nterpretation of Color is tinged with resistance, here to a narrative of ­aesthetic recuperation that may be chased by the sleeper in his dreams. During a kinetocentric epoch officially tolerant of a huge inventory of cultural and psychic diversities, the delayed acceptance of sleep is sometimes enunciated with particular firmness and decorum in academic discussions. Fascinated with J.G. Ballard’s apocalypse of temporal and genetic entropy in “Voices of Time,” Fredric Jameson foregrounds the specter of a pandemic narcolepsy that effects the extinction of humanity.6 And in Picture Theory, W.J.T. Mitchell expresses relief that the “dogmatic slumber” of art history has ended.7 In advertising, representations of dormancy are carefree, nutritive, and pleasant, and even hygienically or ergonomically correct. These consumeristic idealizations are conspicuously aided by the intercession of a commodity or service that ensures the enjoyment of anxiety- and injury-free slumber. Such sleep may even facilitate the uninterrupted continuation of some questionably devised but cleverly marketed program of instruction. The underlying assumption is not that somnolence is wholesome but that one product or another has contemporized Schlaraffenland, which is no longer a remote but a universalized utopia. In reflection of seemingly omnipotent narratives of exchange, purchase of the advertised item can control that most uncooperative of human conditions: sleep. Characteristic of this tendency is an airline 4 Personal interview by author, 2 August 1995. 5 It is perhaps a coincidence – but a relevant one – that Desiderio, in representing the narrative resistance of sleep, references Manet in a way reminiscent of Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall. See above, page 12. 6 Postmodernism, 155. 7 Picture Theory, 14.

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commercial in which a balding executive slumbers like an infant in the maternal arms of a shapely stewardess. Even more eccentric is a pharmaceutical advertisement in which an elderly prostate sufferer is enabled to sleep like a neonate. Often viewed dismissively or ranked low according to cultural or other ­criteria, sleep has nonetheless turned out to be aesthetically invaluable. Sleep accommodates a “dormitory” of divergent meanings and associations, including sin, death, dreams, a comic nonchalance or indifference, isolation, personal or cultural exhaustion, repressed or marginalized subjectivity, “normal” or “deviant” sexuality – in addition to the innocence of early childhood. It has been argued that the all-embracing inclusivity associated with infantile sleep became a basis or template for some of the most exemplary representations in which the dormant state has been implicated. Courbet’s Sleep, numerous passages in Proust, and Mann’s “Sleep, Sweet Sleep” fall under this rubric. With the development of the hypnoglyph or sleep-centered works during the era of globalization, it is not surprising that the pattern of inclusivity is often called into play – in varying ways by Warhol, Kiefer, Duras, Desiderio, and others. More so than during the modernist era, the postmodern sleep-dependent work – in instances when the factor of all-inclusiveness is implicated – is ­overhung with constraints to which the dormant subject may be ungratifyingly subjected. Yet it is hardly true that such artworks can only convey an ambience of indentureship or other discomfort. The affirmative dimensions of Kiefer’s The Rose Gives Honey to the Bees and Gardner’s Orienting the Self say otherwise. As previously made clear, there is a second primary type of sleep-depiction, which can be rather broadly coordinated with the stage of “separation anxiety” of advanced infancy. In representations of this group, the discrete situation of the individual sleeper – his or her isolation or sequestration – is particularly evident. The sleeper’s vulnerability, exposed circumstances, or a desire for ­either independence or renewed dependence may be foregrounded in such ­instances. Thus Endymion awaits his moon-goddess but may be visited by Hypnos instead. Scantily clad women, abandoned or simply sleeping alone, may be either raped or rescued. In a tapestry by Jon Riis, a dormant Icarus plunges seaward, displaying a sovereign isolation in his final moment. During the postmodern era, depictions in this group may suggest varied challenges faced by the subject. The porousness of postmodern subjectivity and of sleep itself may be implicated. The two representational approaches can be combined. For as seen in Desiderio’s The Sleeping Family, each somnolent individual ­appears impinged upon by a distinct set of difficulties; at the same time, the canvas in its entirety conveys an impression of wholeness, of a total view.

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Earlier in this study, the argument was made that, at least in Desiderio’s The Interpretation of Color, a sleep-depiction of the second type provided an attempt to resist the aesthetic narratives of modernism (including late-­ modernism or the postmodern) and to suggest a program for initiating a new artistic order. Implied at the same time was the possibility of a new matrix of subjectivity beyond the constraints of any and all modernisms. The point was also made that, among other factors, the vertical posture of the sleeper indicated a continuation rather than an end of whatever is meant by the designation, “postmodern.” As this study closes, such considerations should be entertained once again. That is, if a resistance to narrative can be more salient in the case of sleepers of the second type, is it likely that – in his or her separateness – a sleeper could hint at an exit from the postmodern condition, could figuratively “walk” to an awakening in some new cultural and historical domain? If Desiderio’s sleeper has almost done so, are there others who can help demonstrate a closure of the postmodern – an event that the prevalence of the hypnoglyph appears to defer? It is difficult to locate a site of inquiry more pertinent in this regard than Anne Carson’s thoughtful and tortuous essay, “Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep),” which appropriately closes with an “Ode to Sleep.”8 Manifestly un-postmodern, there is a dearth of some of the most typical elements of artwork of that type: flippancy, cynicism, smug savviness, irony, and flagrant game-playing with signs. Carson is wide-ranging without indulging in clever pastiche. Preeminently notable is Carson’s program of engaging in a full-blown eulogy of sleep, a condition ambivalently treated in postmodern contexts even when there is undeniable acceptance – as in Tansey’s Utopic or Duras’s Blue Eyes Black Hair. Carson’s text recalls a prior era in sleep-representation and discloses an affinity with the declarations of sleep’s powers enunciated by Mann and Proust. It is a coincidence worth mentioning that Carson locates – as did the author of this study early on – a key statement in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. In Carson’s case, it is “The Man-Moth” rather than “Sleeping Standing Up” that is found keenly suggestive of sleep’s capacities. Commenting astutely on literary and other texts from Homer onward and demanding the reader’s unremitting attentiveness, Carson’s text nicely illustrates Marjorie Perloff’s perception that an updated modernism has developed during the current century. Perloff’s insights were accessed toward the beginning of this study in order to establish what belongs under the rubric, “postmodern genre.” In a subsequent theoretical discussion, Perloff assumes a new stance and argues that “as we move into the twenty-first century, the modern/postmodern divide 8 See Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (New York: Vintage, 2005), 17–42.

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has emerged as more apparent than real. ‘Prufrock’ [and other works] oddly strike us as more immediate and ‘contemporary’ than the fabled postmodern ‘breakthrough’ of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies ... .” Perloff also detects a “special relationship between the early twentieth century and the early twenty-first.”9 Perloff looks at such dynamisms as textual complexity, subjective depth, ­allusiveness, historical layering, the interplay of cultural and other values, and measured, reflective wordplay as modernist mainstays that the early twentyfirst century has re-embraced. Carson’s literary practices generally merge with those indicated by Perloff. In depicting sleep, however, Carson follows a special pathway that, though intriguing, tends to leave to one side key facets of sleep-representation as developed by Proust, Bishop, and others of their time. In brief, sleep is mostly visible via its narrative tie-ins, chez Carson. It is particularly notable for a propensity to serve as a vehicle for transformational dreams. Also, the dormant state is esteemed because it offers opportunities for organizing and developing impressive plots. Thus she discovers “a master sleep plan” that assists in making Homer’s Odyssey a great epic (27): “Sleep works for Penelope” is the comment as her interpretation is unfurled (29). Turning to a pre- or incipiently postmodern moment in order to recapture poetic excellence, Carson is drawn to Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Man-Moth.” The point was put forth near the start of this study that Bishop’s “Sleeping Standing Up” evinces a resistance to narrative by implying protest against too much narrative. A similar argument is not brought forward in the case of “The ManMoth.” Seeking to praise sleep, Carson first defines it as “something incognito” (20), then proceeds to examine a passage in which the Man-Moth “attempts to scale…buildings and reach the moon, for he understands the moon to be a hole at the top of the sky through which he may escape.” Carson concludes that this eccentric entity “may represent sleep itself – an action of sleep, sliding up the facades of the world at night on his weird quest” (21). Some of the ingenuity of Carson’s argument resides in merging Bishop’s odd little beast with the mythic winged figure of Somnus (Latin) or Hypnos (Greek), god of sleep. But much of Carson’s subsequent commentary suggests that the figure might be better as identified as Morpheus, son of Hypnos and god of dreams – for the oneiric processes that both roil sleep and render it pleasant are here especially germane. Carson appears to salute rather than reveal reservations regarding the possible narrativization of sleep. Instead of disclosing concern about intruding narratives that might compromise sleep as a ­domain of bodily release and indulgence, “Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)” seems to support the notion that the more narrative, the better. Nor 9 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 164.

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is there here a tie-in with the view – as Levinas might have phrased it – that dormancy constitutes a blank interval of non-commitment during which individual existential space can be relocated, reclaimed. Carson’s little treatise discloses a penetrating intellect, but this statement is not a declaration issued after the postmodern. On the one hand, the postmodern variety of constructive vacancy represented by Levinas has not entered Carson’s discourse. On the other, the kineticity of the global era – beginning, among other markers, with the close-to-incessant busyness Warhol wished to bring to reality in his “factory” – seems rather comfortably at home here. Sleep is praiseworthy, then, for having been optimally narrativized, especially as dream and as broker of literary plots. Also to be reckoned with and properly acknowledged is the momentous close of “Ode to Sleep.” It is at this point evident that Carson sees the dormant state as not merely a cordoned-off playing field for the literary or other artist. Indeed, it is a refuge or preserve where representational activity flourishes, in contradistinction to – and despite – the dominant, mainstream narratives of a society. Thus Carson recalls a note by Bishop clarifying the term “man-moth”; it was detected in a newspaper as “a misprint for mammoth.” Carson concludes, It hurts me to know this. Exit wound, as they say. (40) “As a matter of fact” – so Carson fictively amplifies Bishop’s note. The world of grimy fact is now at issue, as opposed to the idealistic, upward climbing of the ethereal man-moth. Such is an unwanted portion of the verbal artist’s vocation – to periodically disengage from a desired, productive “sleep,” to recurrently exit into the dull reality of journalism, of mundane, recycled discourses, of bland everyday living. Carson has struck out against the usual postmodernism, rejecting its ­propensities for flippancy, pastiche, and the emptying out of signs in favor of textual play. As is typical in the work of Vincent Desiderio, there is strong ­interest in rendering passages of text (verbal or visual) in which there is a strong sense of something signified beyond the dextrous rearrangement of a predecessor’s well-tooled phrase or image. Carson’s accommodation of narrative within a discourse of sleep is subtle and deft. While the resistances of narrative are thus evident, the non-narratival aspects of sleep, its resistances to narrative, defy discernment here. Stronger evidence of a desire to break out of postmodernism could have been provided via attention to sensual, bodily sleep – its vacant pleasure, its persistence amid virtually endless workdays, commutes, and domestic duties, all impinged upon by the dynamisms of a

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global economy.10 Such depictions might also have appeared to compromise the intellectual rigor of Carson’s prose. In any case, her essay bypasses something well expressed – for instance – in Antonio Bolfo’s ingenious illustrations accompanying Maggie Jones’s well­researched New York Times article, “How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With?”11 A grid of twenty-four thumbnail photographs, all felicitously captured, reveals nearly thirty sleepers (actual or aspirant) desiring relief from laborious, contemporary agendas aboard trains, airplanes, subway cars, and in waiting areas. Almost without exception, they are slouching, leaning, or attempting to lie flat. Despite much ambient illumination, each person demarcates a micro-zone of distress or attempted retreat. In several instances, there are easily detected parallels with Walker Evans’s duo of drowsing passengers on the Lexington ­Avenue subway (discussed above). To be sure, various levels of comfort and ­annoyance are exhibited by Bolfo’s subjects. Manifestly at ease, an elderly couple lean again one another, a pillow in between. An anesthetized-looking woman is propped up next to a large sunny window on a train. A dignified ­African American gentleman is stretched out on a waiting-room chair. His posture approaches horizontal so that he almost appears – in a fine suit of clothes and with a facial expression emanating what may be chagrin – laid out for a funeral viewing. It should be conceded that one of the dormant figures may be fully in sync – or nearly so – with his surroundings. At the right edge of this “polyptych” – and near the bottom –, a dark-complexioned man fills most of the thumbnail (fig. 56). Possibly, he is seated, but with the emphatic cropping effect to which Bolfo has recourse in this image, the individual could be standing as well. In 10

For a more vigorous riposte to the postmodern than Carson’s, consider Jonathan Crary’s assertion (among other comments) that: Shelley and Courbet … understood that sleep was another form of historical time – that its withdrawal and apparent passivity also encompassed the unrest and inquietude that was essential to the nascence of a more just and egalitarian future. Now, in the twenty-first century, the disquiet of sleep has a more troubling relation to the future. … sleep ensures the presence in the world of the phasic and cyclical patterns essential to life and incompatible with capitalism (24/7, 127–28). It should of course be recognized that Crary’s approach is from the outset explicitly ideological, in contrast to Carson’s. To an extent, the difference accounts for the relatively lower intensity of Carson’s response. It can also be argued that, beneath the brilliant rhetoric, there is some assimilation of the ideological current that Crary is combating. For another well-taken perspective, see Siobhan Phillips, “Sleep as Resistance: Hejinian, Whitman, and more on the politics of sleep” (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/247490). 11 15 April 2011 (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.html?_r =2&hp).

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Figure 56 Janet Kozachek, After Antonio Bolfo (2015). Pencil on paper, 10.2 cm × 10.1 cm. Private collection. Image © Janet Kozachek and Antonio Bolfo.

any case, music – or something else audible (a lesson or newscast) – very likely journeys toward (if not into) his mind via the microphone in his right ear. He is perhaps a new arrival in North America and could be just the type of person needed to respond with endless cooperation, energy, and compliance in a work environment found chafing to most. Overall, his tiny quadrant is suggestive of vertical slumber, that fictive blending or harmonizing of the dormant state with narrative. Yet across this gathering of weary passengers, there are intimations of ­subdued protest. There almost seems to have been a complicity if not quite a collaboration between Bolfo and his subjects as they embody and reveal the dubious status of sleep during the early twenty-first century. Such efforts as those of Jones and Bolfo – of Kiefer, Desiderio, and many others – are suggestive of a future where the dormant state will have found a larger niche than it currently must put up with. Thus at some point, sleep and all it represents, all representations of it, may yet win out, closing out the postmodern.

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Index acedia 48n103, 69 ad somnum 78n151 Albers, Joseph 136 allegory xv, 28, 121n70, 122n74, 123, 128– 29n89, 135–37n109, 138, 156, 170–71n59, 269, 280 Alpers, Svetlana 12n20, 305n5 anapausis 4, 62, 83, 88, 107n36, 154 androgyny xviii, 238, 248, 283, 289–90, 300, 302–03 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 169n56 Ariadne 126n82, 138–39, 197, 199n3, 201–02, 204–07, 209n17, 211, 215, 223, 225, 227, 232, 234, 258 Aristotle xii, xiiin5, 3n7, 107n36 ars poetica 154, 170 Asia 56, 80, 147, 148n11, 149, 152, 173, 178, 216, 229, 235, 236n66 Auden, W. H. 32 Barasch, Moshe 135n102 Barberini Faun 94 Basile, Giambattista 202–03 Baudelaire, Charles xii, 38, 56n117, 57n118, 59–61, 66n132, 68n135, 69n136, 70n138, 71, 72n142, 73, 75–76, 77n150, 78–79, 126, 127n83, 172, 206, 228n52, 249, 250n26 Baxandall, Michael 12n20, 305n5 Baxter, Richard xiv, 1, 42–43, 44n94, 47n101, 48, 66, 83 Behn, Fritz Masai 93–95, 97–98, 111, 113, 258 Bei Dao (Zhao Zhenkai) 99n14 Bellini, Giovanni 74–75 Benjamin, Walter 136, 217n32 Bible, New Testament 1, 14, 47–49, 79–80, 193 Bible, Old Testament 1, 14, 48–50, 69–70, 78–81, 84–86, 88–89, 252 Bichat, Xavier 252, 253n31 Bishop, Elizabeth The Diary of “Helena Morley” 104–05 “The Man-Moth” 307–09 “Sleeping Standing Up” xv–xvi, 99–113 Black Boy Asleep 96 Boccaccio, Giovanni 45n97

Bolfo, Antonio 310–11 Bollas, Christopher 25, 130n93, 138n111 Botticelli, Sandro Mars and Venus 124n79, 125, 129n89, 269 Brandell, Jerrold R. 13n26 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder Corn Harvest 81, 205 Landscape with Fall of Icarus 32–34 Schlaraffenland 81 Brunner, Edward 168n55, 170n58 Bryson, Norman 183n75 Bryson, Valerie 282n79 Buddhism 147, 236n66, 301 Burdick, Jeri Power Nap 140–41 Burgess, Anthony 304–05 Cadmus, Paul 256, 291 Subway Symphony 261 Sunday Sun 257–58 What I Believe 258–68 Caligula 2 Calvin, John 43n92, 44, 47–48 Calvino, Italo 203n7 Campion, Thomas 201–02 Carson, Anne 307–10 Chekhov, Anton “Let Me Sleep” 111–13, 292 Chuang Tzu 20n45, 56 Childs, Peter 61n124, 79n152 Ciardi, John “The Hypnoglyph” 11n19 Cicero 160n35 circadianism xiii, xv, 10–11, 99, 101, 102n20, 104–06, 116, 119, 130, 188, 226–27, 248, 278–79, 297 clocks, sleep 6n10, 44n96, 60n123, 102n20, 184, 210, 226n51 cognitive study, sleep 21–35 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 70n139, 71, 77n150, 175 Comus 97 Comus 98 Connell, Richard “The Most Dangerous Game” xi–xii

339

Index Courbet, Gustave The Bacchante 73–75 Hammock 67–68 Sleep (The Two Friends) 238–40, 244–53 Sleeping Spinner 83–85, 85n157 Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer) 126–27 Covin, Michel 6–7, 19, 155, 253n Crary, Jonathan 46n98, 139n112, 281n77, 310n10 Dante Alighieri 27, 29, 79, 183, 249, 260, 266n46 Darwin, Charles 60, 61n124, 79n152 Darwin, Erasmus 61 David, Jacques-Louis Oath of the Horatii 183n75, 184 death, sleep 10n18, 29, 33, 37, 54–55, 57n118, 61n124, 64–65, 67–69, 71, 151n19, 160, 170n57, 178, 179n71, 193–94, 196, 202, 204, 243, 264, 268, 280, 284n81, 304, 306 de Chirico, Giorgio Joys and Enigmas of a Strange Hour 36n80, 199n3, 201 decreation concept 153–54n22 work by Anne Carson 307 de Man, Paul 122, 129n89, 135, 137, 171n59, 230n56 Derrida, Jacques 12n25, 41n87, 158n31, 205n10 Descartes, René xiv, 6n11, 41, 50–55, 59, 64, 70, 83, 90, 155n23, 252 Desiderio, Vincent xxii, 175, 309, 311 Couple 300–03 The Interpretation of Color 131–38, 305, 307 The Sleeping Family 119–31, 306 diary xv, 11, 99–100, 104n27, 104n28, 105–06, 117n64, 226, 278–79 Dohrn-van Rossum, Gerhard 44n96 dream x, xii–xiv, xvi, xviii, 2, 3n6, 5n7, 7, 11, 14, 20n45, 28, 35–41, 47–48, 50–57, 59, 61, 64–65, 70n39, 71–72, 76–77, 88–91, 100–02, 103n24, 109n43, 111, 123, 142, 145, 151n19, 153, 155n23, 156, 161, 162n43, 163n46, 164–66, 171, 173, 175–76, 178, 186, 191, 193–94, 198, 204–06, 210–11, 215, 223–25, 229, 237, 244, 252–56, 275, 280n75, 282, 301–02, 305–06, 308–09

dreamless sleep xii, 2, 51, 55n115, 57, 65, 70, 77n150, 147, 155n23, 158, 160, 164, 252, 298 Dunkell, Samuel 92, 186n77 Duras, Marguerite Blue Eyes Black Hair (Les yeux bleus cheveux noirs) 220, 283–94 The Malady of Death (La maladie de la mort) xvii, 78, 206, 215–28 Early Modern, sleep xviii, 33, 41, 43, 44n96, 47–48, 50n108, 58, 60n123, 108, 124, 125n80, 129n89, 163n46, 181, 201–03, 207, 242–43, 263, 266, 268 Ekirch, A. Roger 8, 44n96, 62n126, 127n84 Eliot, T. S. 80, 117, 172n62, 255 Endymion 31, 32n75, 33–34, 65n129, 204–05, 277n70, 278, 302, 306 Euphronius Vase 179 Evans, Walker Subway Passengers 141–42, 310 extimacy 28n67, 216n31, 284n82 Ferenczi, Sandor 3, 76n148, 150, 151n19, 221n42 Fink, Bruce 39n85, 215n27, 220n40, 222n43, 247 Firestone, Evan 121, 131n95, 136–37 Flanagan, Owen 55n115 flatness 132–34 Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary 112–13 Fludd, Robert 181–83 Foley, John Miles 15n30 folklore, sleep xvii, 29, 235, 237 See also: Sleeping Beauty theme Forster, E. M. 260n36, 262–63, 266 Foster, Hal 3n6, 57n118, 68n135 Foucault, Michel 246n18, 255n34 Freccero, Carla 242n10 Freud, Anna 296 Freud, Sigmund 3, 4n7, 12n25, 13n26, 25, 35, 76n148, 103n24, 106, 109n43, 144, 149, 150n15, 151n19, 183, 193, 205n10, 210, 212–13, 220n40, 221n42, 222, 235, 246–47 Signorelli 268–72 Tansey 297–99 Fried, Michael 63, 73, 74n146, 82, 85n157, 127, 244–48

340 Frost, Robert 172n61 Fuseli, Henry 61–62 Gablik, Suzi 131n95 Galen 95–96 Gardner, Fran No Need for Wings 184–89 Orienting the Self 189–92 Gardner, Hunter H. 199n3 Gass, William H. 237–38 gay sexuality xvii, 110n48, 220, 238, 240, 257–58, 262–64, 265n45, 271n55, 275–76, 283, 285–86, 288, 290, 293–94 Genette, Gérard 230n56 genres, postmodern xii, xv, 9, 11n19, 16, 60, 75, 78, 99n13, 105, 135, 137, 215n28, 272, 307 Giotto di Bondone Envy 253–56 Giorgione Sleeping Venus 199–201, 203–04, 215, 223, 225 Giorno, John 273–77, 279–80, 282 Girodet, Anne-Louis Moonlight of the Sleep of Endymion  277n70, 278 globalization 5n8, 8, 42, 105, 130, 139n112, 145, 149, 152, 287, 295, 306 Goncharov, Ivan Oblomov 37–40 Green, André 193–94, 196 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste Sleeping Knitter 82–83, 85 Gross, Kenneth 297n94 Hammer, Barbara 240n5 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Heidegger, Martin xv, xvi, 10n18, 105, 106n34, 116, 214, 226n51 Heise, Ursula K. 9n17, 105n30 Heraclitus 10n18, 55, 273 hermaphrodite xviii, 110n48, 240–43, 244n13, 248, 253, 261, 263, 295–99 Hesiod 179n71 Hinduism xvi, 146–48, 156, 171n60, 173n63, 175, 176n66 Hippocrates 95 Hobson, J. Allan 35n79, 162n43, 252n30 Homer 15n30, 179n71, 304, 307–08

Index homophobia 245, 263n43, 276 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 172 Horace 170n58 horizon 4, 10n18, 18, 100, 166, 171, 277n70 Hughes, Langston “Sleep” 158 Hugo, Victor The Legend of the Ages 71, 77n150, 80–81, 85, 88–89 hypnagogia 40, 162n42, 186, 224, 254 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 50, 159n34 Hypnos 179, 277, 306, 308 hypogram 230n56 Icarus 31–34, 187, 306 iconicity 103n23, 119n68, 272 imaginary (Lacanian order) 39, 115, 129, 221–22, 247, 279n73, 288 insomnia x, xvi, xviii, 2n4, 6, 19n43, 67, 95, 107, 111n49, 115, 154, 157–58, 160, 165–66, 171–73, 208, 212 Jameson, Fredric 5n8, 100n17, 117, 133n97, 134n101, 135n102, 137, 192n83, 281n77, 305 Johnson, Mark 23, 24n59 Jung, Carl Gustav 6, 103n24, 149, 183, 188 Juvan, Marko 230n56 Kafka, Franz 20 The Castle 92, 98 Kant, Immanuel 62n126, 63n127, 160n35 Kasdorf, Julia 99n14 Kawabata, Yasunari “House of the Sleeping Beauties”  228–32 Keats, John 61 “Sonnet to Sleep 67n134, 69, 78n151 “To Autumn” 86n158 Kelen, Jacqueline 8n15, 20n45 Kenyon, Joan “Pharaoh” x, xi, 176n68 Kiefer, Anselm Brunnhilde Sleeps (Brünnhilde Schläft) 232–34 The Rose Gives Honey to the Bees (Dat Rosa Mel Apibus) 177–84, 306 Kierkegaard, Søren 2, 56 Kirstein, Lincoln 257–58, 260–61, 263, 267

341

Index Kokoschka, Oskar The Tempest 26–29, 34 Kozachek, Janet After Antonio Bolfo 311 Hypnos cover, front Kristeva, Julia 116, 130 Lacan, Jacques 28n67, 38, 39n85, 72n142, 129n88, 156, 214, 216n31, 220n40, 221n41, 222n43, 228n54, 246–47, 255n34, 283n80, 296n93, 297 Signorelli 268–72 lalangue / llangage 222n43 Larkin, Philip 304 late-capitalism 5n8, 50, 100, 131n95, 134, 141, 238, 280 Leadbeater, Charles 46n98 lesbian sexuality xvii, xviii, 109n46, 110n48, 114, 238, 240, 242, 244–53, 263, 271n55, 275 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 16–17, 90, 132 Levinas, Emmanuel 3, 56, 107, 108n40, 115, 152, 166, 287n85, 309 libidinal economy 299n95 Lisle, Leconte de 77n150, 78 Lowell, Robert xvi, 279, 308 “Man and Wife” 113–19 Lyotard, Jean-François 299n95 Mahler, Margaret 29–30, 31n74, 34, 210n19 Makron Satyrs and Maenad 199–200 Mallarmé, Stéphane 77n150, 78 Manet, Édouard 12, 79, 134–35 The Railway 305 Mann, Thomas “Sleep, Sweet Sleep” 145–50, 152 Mansfield, Katherine “The-Child-Who-Was-Tired” 112–13 Marin, Louis 6n11, 8n14, 267–68 Maritain, Jacques 52 Marolles, Michel de 144 Marr, Elspeth 158 Marrion, Eric Relaxing Nude 138–39, 198 McClatchy, J. D. “Lexington Avenue Subway, 1941, after Walker Evans” 141–42 McNally, Sheila 65n131, 126n82

memory xiii, 12n25, 19n43, 40, 53–54, 74n146, 90–91, 116, 160n35, 169, 206, 222–23, 225, 229, 269, 281, 289–90 Michelson, Bruce 155n24, 172n61, 175n65 Miller, J. Hillis 20 Miller, Paul Allen 255n34, 281n77 Millet, Jean-François 79 Noonday Rest 86–87 Miltown 113, 115, 117 Miner, Earl 17n35 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 60n123 Mitchell, W. J. T. 3n6, 16, 131n96, 134n100, 156, 305 Molière, Jean-Baptiste 166, 167n54, 170n58 Montaigne, Michel de 50n108, 54–55, 56n116, 57–58, 59n122, 65 Moon, Michael 275 Morgan Wortham, Simon 23n54, 108n40, 289n87 multiple orgasm 238–39, 240n5, 252 Muñoz, José Estaban 238 Murdoch, Iris 117n64 Muybridge, Edward 274 Nabokov, Vladimir 104 Nancy, Jean-Luc 8n14, 57n118, 151n19, 284n81, 289n87 narcissism negative 193–96 primary 25–26, 29, 106, 150, 151n19, 152, 183, 193–94, 282 Narcissus 144, 156 narrative / narrative resistance xi–xv, xvii, 9, 11–20 Nietzsche, Friedrich 57–59, 149, 199n3, 297–99 nude, sleeping xii, xvii–xviii, 73, 93, 138–39, 185, 189, 198, 200–01, 204, 210, 216, 225n49, 227, 229, 235, 238, 240, 255, 258, 272 Ovid 32, 34, 163–64, 199n3 Owens, Craig 121–22, 129, 135, 137 palimpsest 122n74, 216, 230n56 Pascal, Blaise 41, 54–59, 228n54 Paster, Gail Kern 97–98 Peirce, Charles Sanders 103n23

342 Perloff, Marjorie See genre, postmodern Perrault, Charles 202–03, 209n18, 235n63 Persons, Robert xiv, 1, 47–48, 50, 66 phallus 85n157, 214–15, 237, 251, 254, 267, 271, 283n80, 290, 293, 296n93, 297 photography 8, 93, 116, 141, 173, 180, 217, 231–33, 254, 274, 310 Plato xiv, 3n7, 14, 22–24, 43n93, 44, 50n108, 105, 108, 162n43, 163n46, 237, 304 Poe, Edgar Allan 158n30, 160–67, 170, 172, 176 Pop art 208, 275–76, 279–80 Poussin, Nicolas 6n11, 62, 73, 267, 278 Rinaldo and Armida 64, 65n129, 66 Proust, Marcel 19n43, 60, 89–91, 101–05, 110n48, 111n49, 116, 130, 149, 206, 218n34, 219, 223–26, 228, 235, 253–56, 280, 293, 304, 306–08 Rauschenberg, Robert Bed 118–19, 153, 167, 218n34 real (Lacanian order) 28, 39n85, 40, 57n118, 72n142, 228n54, 232, 283n80 Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum 44 regression, sleep and / as 3n7, 4, 37, 76n148, 103n24, 151n19, 176, 212 Reiss, Benjamin 7n12 Renard, Paul 19n43 Resurrection and Last Judgment xiv, 176n68, 224–25, 260, 263–68 Ricoeur, Paul 16–17, 25 Riffaterre, Michael 230n56 Riis, Jon Eric Icarus #3 31–34, 40, 306 Ringelbergius, Joachimus Fortius 46–47 Saslow, James 240–41 savasana 178, 180 Schopenhauer, Arthur 79n152, 148n11 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 110n48 separation / rapprochement 29–31, 34, 40, 72n142, 106, 115, 156, 168, 210n19, 306 Sexton, Anne “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)” 207–15 Shakespeare, William The Rape of Lucrece ix Shelley, Percy Bysshe Alastor 158–61, 164, 167, 176

Index Siegfried 232–34 Signorelli, Luca 264–66, 268–72 Sitwell, Edith The Sleeping Beauty 207 Sleeping Ariadne 205 Sleeping Beauty theme See the following entries: Basile Calvino Kawabata Perrault Sexton Sitwell Sleeping Hermaphrodite xviii, 110n48, 240–41, 248, 261, 263, 295–99 sommeil paradoxal 252n30 somnambulism 99n14, 130 Stafford, Barbara Maria 22n53 Starobinski, Jean 6n11, 57n118 States, Bert O. 36n80 Steinberg, Leo 3, 6, 119, 153, 218n34 Steiner, Wendy 17, 121n70 Suetonius 2n4 symbolic (Lacanian order) 39n85, 40, 54, 72n142, 129, 156, 169, 222n43 Tansey, Mark Utopic 295–99 tarot 186–89 Tasso, Torquato 64–65, 179n71 The Rule of Four: A Novel 159n34 Turner, Victor 209n17 Valázquez, Diego 135 The Ladies-in-Waiting 246n18 Valeriano, Pierio 33–34 van Gogh, Vincent Siesta at Noon 86–88 Vermeer, Jan Art of Painting 137n109 A Maid Asleep 81–82 vertical slumber xvi, 94–97, 99n14, 100–13, 115, 118, 123n77, 124, 131, 134, 138–39, 143, 154, 166, 169, 198, 307, 311 Vien, Joseph-Marie Sleeping Hermit 63–64, 66, 83, 88 Vietnam War 167–68, 176n66 Vishnu 145, 153, 156, 163n46, 171n60, 173–77

343

Index Wagner, Richard 80 Siegfried 232–34 Tristan and Isolde 28–29 Warhol, Andy 2n5, 167, 306, 309 Sleep 272–82 Weber, Max 42, 47 Weininger, Otto 271n55 Wellbery, David 16 Wilbur, Richard xvi, xxii “Marginalia” 165 “Walking to Sleep” 145, 153–76, 193, 212 Williams, Simon J. 8, 42, 48, 50, 102n20 Winnett, Susan 18n39 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 19

Wordsworth, William “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” 172n62 “To Sleep” 66n133 Wright, Lawrence 45n97 Yaghjian, David Sleep 192–96 Yeats, William Butler 255 “Lullaby” 75–76, 78, 158 Zeki, Semir 21–23 Zhang Longxi 171n59 Zimmer, Heinrich 171n60, 175n64 Zipes, Jack 202n6, 209n18, 235n63