The Art of Dreams: Reflections and Representations 9783110437515, 9783110433852, 9783110433531

Citation preview

The Art of Dreams

Paradigms

Literature and the Human Sciences Edited by Rüdiger Campe ‧ Paul Fleming Editorial Board Eva Geulen ‧ Rüdiger Görner ‧ Barbara Hahn Daniel Heller-Roazen ‧ Helmut Müller-Sievers William Rasch ‧ Joseph Vogl ‧ Elisabeth Weber

Volume 4

The Art of Dreams

Reflections and Representations Edited by Barbara Hahn and Meike G. Werner

The editors thank Bea Brockman and Sarah Köllner for their careful and competent work on the book.

ISBN 978-3-11-043751-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-043385-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-043353-1 ISSN 2195–2205 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: “Echo”, a public sculpture by Jaume Plensa. Photo: Maria Carmen (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents Barbara Hahn The Art of Dreams  An Introduction 

 1

Gregg M. Horowitz The Authority of Dreams 

 5

Pascal Grosse Sensible Dreams Irrationality and the Philosophy of the Mind in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 

 25

Theresia Birkenhauer Representation of Dreams – Representation of Theater  Marianne Schuller The Logic of Writing, the Logic of Dreams Reading Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry 

 45

 61

Therese Ahern Augst “And I had to write it to you” Franziska zu Reventlow and Else Lasker-Schüler: Dreaming in Public   71 Barbara Hahn “Chaque époque rêve la suivante” Or: How to Read a “Bilderatlas” of the Twentieth Century?   85 Davide Stimilli Dream Bodies On the Iconography of the Dreamer 

 97

Lucia Ruprecht “Dance-Work” and the Art of Walking in Benjamin, Valéry, Rilke, Jensen, and Nijinsky  121

VI 

 Contents

Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca Dreaming of the Mother: Notes on Love and Photography Lutz Koepnick Dreamtime: The Specter of Cinema Contributors

 181

Name index

 185

 161

 137

Barbara Hahn

The Art of Dreams An Introduction We all dream; we all share these strange experiences that infuse our nights. Mani­ fold are the means of representing those nightly adventures: Songs and poems, paintings and films, dance and drama, novels and short stories. In all these differ­ ent kinds of art, “dream” seems to be a name for experiences that need to be con­ veyed to our fellow humans. In the long history of coming to terms with dreams two different ways of delineating our forays into this nocturnal world prevail. One way is the attempt to interpret, to unveil a hidden meaning within dreams. The other way is to use the extraordinarily productive force to experiment with and test all the various representational means for our oneiric experiences. Most of the essays collected in this book are of the latter sort. In the spring of 2006, scholars from a wide range of disciplines gathered at Vanderbilt Uni­ versity’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities in order to explore rep­ resentations of dreams in different arts. While most of the essays concentrate on the twentieth century, which could be called the century of dreams, we have also tried to assemble texts that reflect upon the question of how a history of the rep­ resentation of dreams might be conceived. It is surprising how little we know about this history, though dreams are so prominent in the realm of each and every art. It is difficult to find a great twentieth­century novel, one that will survive, in which dreams do not play a role; it is just as hard to find letters or diaries that do not include dreams. So many painters experimented with dreams; for some, like Joseph Cornell or Carl­ friedrich Claus, dwelling in this world determined their work.1 The same holds true for films. From the very beginning, directors tried to find means of repre­ senting dreams. Georg Wilhelm Pabst in his Geheimnisse einer Seele (Secrets of a Soul, 1926) was one of the first; Alfred Hitchcock asked Salvador Dalí to stage a dream for his film Spellbound (1945); Ingmar Bergman found frightening images to open his Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries, 1957), such as a clock without hands or an open coffin in which the dreamer sees himself; Akira Kuro­ sawa composed his Yume (Dreams, 1990) as a sequence of eight dreams. Feder­ ico Fellini probably was not the only director to keep a dream diary – most of the inspirations for his films seem to stem from dreams.2 1 See for example Diane Waldman, Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams (New York: Harry Adams, 2002). 2 Federico Fellini, Il libro dei sogni, ed. Tullio Kezich and Vittorio Boarini (Milano: Rizzoli, 2007).

2 

 Barbara Hahn

Surprising too, how little we know once we decide to leave one particular art behind and explore representations of dreams in a variety of arts. Very few books published over the last decades have tried to cross the boundaries between art and scholarship, between art and science. One that has, Dreams 1900–2000: Science, Art, and the Unconscious Mind, presents a stunning collection of visual rep­ resentations of dreams, framed by a couple of excellent essays. The book accom­ panied an exhibition, mounted in New York, Binghamton, Vienna, and Paris, “in commemoration of the centennial of the publication of Sigmund Freud’s Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) in 1900.” Freud’s magisterial study, so the thesis of the book, marks a threshold in our understanding of dreams. But how, so the question, are art and science related if we assume Freud’s theory of the unconscious? “Any reduction of psychology to physiology does not account for the life of the mind as experienced by human beings,”3 writes Lynn Gamwell, the editor of the book. This means that for Gamwell, neuroscience, which has so often lately been taken as the new royal road into the world of dreams, is not the only road into this world. Her essay sees in a neuroscientific perspective on the unconscious only the latest of four different stages of theoretical exploration of the concept. Three of these stages were developed by psychoanalysts, namely Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, and Jacques Lacan. The fourth stage seems to relo­ cate our knowledge of dreams in a different scientific paradigm, neuroscience. All these stages have influenced the visual artifacts presented in the book  – drawings, paintings, and photographs of installations, film stills. Yet for all its breadth, Gamwell’s construction remains somewhat questionable. If we accept this schema, then art never “knows” more than theoretical concepts have already discovered; artists seem to be influenced by theories. But certainly the inverse is just as plausible: art can be read as an archive of kinds of “knowledge” that the­ oretical thinking has not yet reached. So many of the artworks presented in this wonderful collection ask for closer readings than Gamwell’s orientation allows.4 The precarious relation between artistic representations of dreams and theo­ retical approaches points to a deeper problem. Dreams dwell in two realms: they are part of the world of language as well as of the world of images, of imagination. Michel Foucault, in his introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s Traum und Existenz 3 Lynn Gamwell, “The Muse is Within: The Psyche in the Century of Science,” in Dreams 1900– 2000: Science, Art, and the Unconscious Mind, ed. Lynn Gamwell (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 51. 4 More representations of dreams in visual art are to be found in The Interpretation of Dreams: The Illustrated Edition, ed. with an introduction and essays by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (New York: Sterling Publishing, 2000). A rather strange book: biographical chapters illustrated with photos of the Freud family written by the editor, where all the captions seems to be wrong. Freud never created such an edition; there are no illustrations accompanying the text.

The Art of Dreams 

 3

(Dream and Existence), argued that psychoanalysis grasps the linguistic aspect but neglects the imagistic by translating everything into language; it only notices what can be rendered in words. Phenomenology, born contemporaneously with psychoanalysis, registers the imagistic but leaves it mute.5 In Foucault’s essay, written in 1952, reading dreams is still a task for which we seem to lack the appro­ priate theoretical tools. Not much has changed since that essay was published. Most of the collec­ tive attempts at creating a history of dreaming concentrate on written testimo­ nies without paying much attention to the imaginary dimension of dreams. Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming (1999), for instance, claims to be a “cross­cultural history of dreams,” as the editors David Shulman and Guy Stroumsa say in their introduction. The volume offers a collec­ tion of essays that trace “cultural traditions and religious attitudes” as they tint and determine dreams.6 The collection is impressive, starting in ancient China and India, moving to native North America, then to early Jewish and Christian texts, until it ends with a reading of the dreams of Adam and Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost. The only essay to touch upon contemporary study considers Sigmund Freud’s Traumdeutung. In this collection only written traces are the subject of critical approaches, and dreaming is taken to be an activity with a long tradition but not many connections to contemporary cultures. Dreams and History (2004), a more recent essay collection, presents a history of interpretation of dreams “from ancient Greece to modern Psychoanalysis”7: “How far need we – can we – think our way back to other ways of being and think­ ing, other forms of consciousness about consciousness, other cultural accounts of the meaning of waking or sleeping, dreaming or not­dreaming? And anyway, is it helpful to view dream discourse in these ‘before’ and ‘after’ terms – the history of our most intimately private life periodized around the imaginary year zero around 1900?”,8 so Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper, the editors, in their introduc­ tion. These questions remain open; such established historical periods as Antiq­ uity, the Middle Ages, or Modernity seem to lose most of their relevance when it comes to constructing a history of dreaming.

5 Michel Foucault and Ludwig Binswanger, Dream and Existence, trans. Forrest Williams (Seat­ tle: Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, 1986). 6 Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming, ed. David Shulman and Guy Stroumsa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3. 7 Dreams and History: The Interpretation of Dreams from Ancient Greece to Modern Psychoanalysis, ed. Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper (London/New York: Routledge, 2004). 8 Dreams and History, 14.

4 

 Barbara Hahn

A last example. Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History, coauthored by Natalya Lusty and Helen Groth,9 opens with English literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century, moves on to psychology, Freud, surrealism, Walter Benja­ min’s Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project), and finally to an English archive of “mass observation.” The book concludes – as do most contemporary attempts to reflect on dreams – with references to studies of brain activity. Again, neuro­ science offers itself as a contemporary royal road to the interpretation of dreams. But even if we know how we dream, what we dream needs to be represented; it needs to be translated into one of the many arts human beings have created. For to dream, as Friedrich Nietzsche reminds us, is already to be engaged in artistic creativity. Dreams “paraphrase our experiences or expectations or circumstances with such poetic boldness and definiteness that in the morning we are always astonished at ourselves when we recall our dreams. In dreaming we use up too much of our artistic capacity — and therefore often have too little of it during the day.”10 As all of these collections with their strengths and limitations confirm, it is unlikely that any approach will prove to be a royal road to the unconscious, and awakened historical discourse must strive mightily to match the inventiveness and power of the oneiric awareness that punctuates traditions of representation. Hence our own collection of essays can only claim to make a modest contribu­ tion to the perennial challenge of understanding written, danced, sung, filmed, painted dreams.

9 Natalya Lusty and Helen Groth, Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History (New York: Rout­ ledge, 2013). 10 Aphorism 194 in Human, All too Human: “Der Traum. Unsere Träume sind, wenn sie einmal ausnahmsweise gelingen und vollkommen werden – für gewöhnlich ist der Traum eine Pfuscher­ Arbeit –, symbolische Scenen­ und Bilder­Ketten an Stelle einer erzählenden Dichter­Sprache, sie umschreiben unsere Erlebnisse oder Erwartungen oder Verhältnisse mit dichterischer Kühn­ heit und Bestimmtheit, dass wir dann morgens immer über uns erstaunt sind, wenn wir uns unserer Träume erinnern. Wir verbrauchen im Träumen zu viel Künstlerisches und sind desshalb am Tage oft zu arm daran.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Manzino Montinari (Munich: dtv, 1985–), vol. 2, 639

Gregg M. Horowitz

The Authority of Dreams 1 The Two Functions of Dreams Patients talk to their psychoanalysts about everything under the sun. But we also speak of things that have never before seen the light of the conscious day. Buried fears and inchoate anxieties, infantile lusts and banked frustrations, ancient wounds and archaic pleasures, all come out into the discursive open in psychoanalytic conversation. Among the inhabitants of the subterranean world, however, dreams seem to be primi inter pares. This, at least, is the conclusion we are compelled to draw from the fact that, of all Freud’s texts about the secretiveness of the human mind, only Interpretation of Dreams was regularly and massively revised to keep it current with the changing state of knowledge of its subject matter. In the thirty years after its publication, Freud issued new editions eight times, demonstrating with unstinting vigor and increasing combativeness the importance of keeping psychoanalytic attention fixed first and foremost on the shaded dream-world.1 There are, to be sure, other phenomena from the kingdom of mental marginalia that Freud also never stopped writing about, such as jokes and parapraxes, neurotic symptoms and works of art, and, of course, the sexual perversions and their related historical arcana. But in regard to these matters, Freud generally left his writings to stand finished as what he called historic documents. When he felt obliged to revise his views about these subjects, he did so by publishing new texts. Only with Interpretation of Dreams did Freud seek repeatedly to consolidate his thoughts into a cohesive, encompassing, and stable dream-book.2 But with its endless, intricate revisions, the dream-book also attests to the folly of trying to build a theoretic, single-author monument to the dream-world. By 1929, when its eighth edition was 1 James Strachey provides a brief overview of the publication history of The Interpretation of Dreams in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953), IV, xi– xxii. There is, surprisingly, only one in-depth study of the history of the text: Lydia Marinelli and Andreas Mayer, Dreaming by the Book: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2003). 2 In the prefaces to the fifth and eighth editions, Freud refers to The Interpretation of Dreams as a historic document. In both cases he justifies the usage in terms of his inclusion of new bibliographic or documentary data on dreams. Freud, Standard Edition, IV, xxix and xxxi.

6 

 Gregg M. Horowitz

published, the dream-book had become the work we now know or love or admire – or dread. It is a Frankenstein’s-monster of a text, stitched together out of bits of the living and the dead; it is scored by wounds, some of which are sewn closed with virtuosic skill while others continue to suppurate. Looking at a text like this, aren’t we inevitably reminded how much a book is like a living body? Isn’t a living body, too, an assemblage of parts which, however organically bound, nonetheless continue to express independent interests within, by means of, and sometimes against the collective? And, although the team of organs ordinarily pulls together in ways that enable us to forget that our bodies are complex, historical, and uncertain concatenations, don’t they also persistently pull apart, revealing that our joints and sutures are also sites of frailty and moral crisis? And so, too, with a single-author book: by 1899, when Interpretation of Dreams first saw the light of day, a bound and published set of leaves was the indisputable mark of authorial unity, the highest achievement of monographic integration, both suppressive and expressive, of the independent interests of its component parts. Freud’s dogged revision of his dream-book allows us to single it out as the unique embodiment of his troubled integrative work. Something there is in dreams, Freud’s text proposes, that needs but doesn’t love a book, as is vivid, indeed unmistakable, when the rigors of interpreting dreams distort the form of the book so ruthlessly. Since dreams send the frozen ground to swell under Freud’s book, it would be perfectly understandable were he to have given up his monographic ambitions altogether. In fact, the other early compendious texts of psychoanalysis, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, are more like anthologies than monographs. By contrast with his work on dreams, Freud tracks mistakes and wit with a much greater tolerance for their variety and diversity. But since in Interpretation of Dreams Freud strove for the formal authority of the monographic book, we need to ask: what is the special authority of dreams that compels Freud to try to keep up with them in theory? What force do they wield that demands representation in nothing less than the magisterial form of a book? If we assume that the form of the monographic book expresses a demand for synthesis that no shorter, more essayistic form can muster, then we can start to address these questions by thinking of a book as a symptom of a tension that has proven incapable of being resolved on more navigable terrain.3 And a repeatedly revised book, by extension, would then stand as a monument to a vital tension in 3 And we might adduce in this regard the fate of more popularizing dream books that do take essayistic form, for they have tended to serve the interests of knowingness alone, knowingness without the uncertainty that initiates interpretive conversation about the form of dreams. I ask for the reader’s patience here, for the point of this observation cannot be made intelligible at this point in my discussion.

The Authority of Dreams 

 7

the thought that it embodies. In the specific case of the dream book, the tension in question is between the points of view needed to bring into focus two very different functions that dreams serve in psychoanalysis. In other words, there are two sources of the authority of dreams in psychoanalysis, and Freud cannot craft a single and comprehensive perspective from which to clarify and explain both sources at one blow. Not some intrinsic enigmaticalness of dreams, as their esoteric nature might suggest, but the unresolvable tension between their functions as both objects of psychoanalytic knowledge and demands communicated to the psychoanalyst by the analysand (the analytic patient) to keep his secrets, is at work in Interpretation of Dreams. The effort neither to let this tension dissolve nor to let it disappear in some prematurely attained synthesis accounts for Freud’s persistent struggle to present the lessons of dream interpretation in the form of a monographic book. Let me unpack this thought about the two functions of dreams more deliberately. On the one hand, dreams provide the privileged lens through which we can interpretively perceive aspects of human mental functioning that are crucial for a comprehensive theory of human mindedness but which otherwise remain obscure to us. This is what Freud means when he claims that “the Interpretation of Dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”4 From this perspective, dreams help to satisfy a curiosity about human mindedness that is fundamental to general psychology and to psychoanalysis as the special science of what minded creatures keep hidden, even from themselves. As Freud put it, he revised Interpretation of Dreams over and over for thirty years because “it contains [. . .] the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime.”5 Freud’s protestation that he was but the lucky recipient of the knowledge presented in the dream-book, his huge pride theatrically canceled by putting on the mask of a humble scribe, alerts us that Interpretation of Dreams arises out of an abiding epistemic urge that is so deep in Freud that he can avow it only if he denies that its gratifications are under his conscious control. There is no will here, Freud implies, and so no affective attachment;6 the dream-book thereby takes on the aura of a book of science beholden solely to the data it collects and synthesizes. Freud reinforces this aura when, at each point where his exposition is pulled in the direction of that other commanding psychoanalytic topic, the neuroses, he cuts off the discussion for fear that the complexities of human 4 Freud, Standard Edition, V, 608. 5 Freud, Standard Edition, IV, xxxii. 6 Or no cathexis [Besetzung], as psychoanalysts call it. Paradoxically, this inference from lack of will to lack of attachment will become a primary target of Freud’s theory of the unconscious.

8 

 Gregg M. Horowitz

suffering will obscure the clarity and lucidity, the epistemic gratifications, of his exposition of the meaning of dreams. Interpreting dreams is the royal road into primary-process thinking, and no therapeutic interests, no empathy, will distract Freud from marching down it. It is no surprise, then, that Interpretation of Dreams has served as the model for so many forms of hermeneutical inquiry that aim to disclose buried strata of meaning in our mental and cultural lives without being dragged down into the mud. The second function that dreams serve in psychoanalysis is, however, in profound tension with their scientific function, for dreams are also the medium of communication between the analysand and the psychoanalyst (and, we might add, insofar as Interpretation of Dreams was written before there were trained psychoanalysts, of Freud’s communication with himself and other protoanalysts).7 When Freud thought, in the early stages of his career as a doctor, that bringing unconscious complexes into consciousness was the path to cure, he inferred that his task was to explain the meaning of the analysand’s own invisible past to her, to make knowledge of her past into shared public knowledge, at least in the space of the treatment. At this early moment, then, knowing and healing were two names for the same process. But as soon as he began to move away from techniques such as hypnosis and pressure that, like explanation, were invasive precursors to the talking cure, Freud noticed that analysands began to tell him their dreams. In fact, there is little in the prehistory of psychoanalysis that anticipates the intense analytic focus on dreams before Freud’s patients began to say, in effect, that they were themselves more interested in their dreams than in the unconscious reminiscences, the events stuck in the mud of the past, to which Freud originally wanted to attribute their suffering. The preference of analysands to communicate dreams must be understood, then, as their effort to talk with Freud here and now instead of, in place of, being understood by him. In other words, while Freud tried early on to feed his patients knowledge, they turned indifferently from the meal on offer in favor of something much more nourishing to them, their dreams. The ways in which dreams nourishingly impede the offer of analytic knowledge is connected directly to their authority, so much more on that soon, but it is fair to say at the start that, from the point of view of therapeutic practice, the dream-book was written and rewritten not simply because of the accumulation of more knowledge but because Freud’s patients insisted on coauthorship. This small piece of psychoanalytic history puts us in position to state openly the tension between the two functions of dreams in psychoanalysis: to the extent 7 On the communicative function of The Interpretation of Dreams, see Marinelli and Mayer, Dreaming by the Book, 9–49.

The Authority of Dreams 

 9

that dreams are media of communication, then they are not, in the instant of telling them to a psychoanalyst, appropriate objects of scientific inquiry by the psychoanalyst. When we are listening to a speaker, our relation to communicative artifacts (utterances, self-interruptions and silences, gestures and paralyses, dreams and the forgetting of dreams – it is a precondition of psychoanalytic conversation that we not have a settled theory of what counts as communication) is not of the same ethical or cognitive type as our relation to them as objects of mere knowledge, for when we listen to a communicative artifact we are attending in the moment to the communicator who creates them. Communication is a mode of human interaction – it is an activity we participate in – and not just the satisfaction of an epistemic drive. By no means do I mean to deny that the epistemic urge plays an essential role in conversational listening; curious interest is the agent of the erotic impulse that is required by all forms of attentive listening in which the auditor wants to close the gap between himself and the speaker by having the speaker make sense to him. My point rather is that when we listen to others talking to us, we are not listening solely as scientists but also as participants in a conversation. Perhaps the point can be put this way: whereas listening as a scientist is listening from a distance of impersonality across which we then try to approximate the meaning we are hearing produced, listening to someone we are talking with presumes a conjoining of perspectives that is inconsistent with the objective measurement of distance from the conversation. Scientific attention enables approximation; conversational attention presumes proximity. (This distinction can also be captured in a secondary meaning of “measure”: to take the measure of a person one uses judgment rather than a yardstick). The second function of dreams in psychoanalysis, as a medium of communication, depends then on a momentary suspension of mere curiosity, hence cuts against the first, more strictly scientific, function. To think of dreams as media of communication as well as objects of interpretation is, I believe, deeply unsettling to humanistic inquiry. We humanists are more readily translators who take our hermeneutical task to be to extract the kernels of meaning from interpretable artifacts and thereby to make such artifacts accessible to reflective intelligence. In that sense, while our assumption is that the artifacts we analyze are intrinsically meaningful ones, we nonetheless treat them as halting, stuttering, crippled vehicles of their own meaning. Our art of translation is like the art of the maker of prosthetic devices; we aim to make meanings capable of walking about on a terrain that is not naturally hospitable to them. The idea, then, that what we presume to be lamed forms of expression might be the right forms, and that our translational practices might need to be modeled not against them but on them, requires a sea-change in our orientation. But it is precisely the insistence that dreams are the right form of expression – right even

10 

 Gregg M. Horowitz

if lamed – that provides the second source of the authority of dreams in psychoanalysis, for, as I have suggested, it is the ways in which they impede immediate understanding that makes them the communicative artifacts they are. Their communicative authority rests, that is, on their arising in place of and against ready comprehension. This, of course, is also why they fire up curiosity, but mere curiosity is at best an incomplete response to the authority of the dream.8

2 Dora Says that She’d Prefer Not The analysand’s insistence on dream communication as both an alternative and an impediment to psychoanalytic knowing is nowhere more vivid than in a key transitional moment in Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, his case history of Dora. I will not push far into this famously conflicted text, but will focus exclusively on the moment when Freud introduces the first of Dora’s two dreams. Before taking even this small step, however, let me remind you of something that, if you have read this case history, you are in no danger of forgetting: Freud’s analysis of Dora was a catastrophe. He made almost every wrong move imaginable and, most crucially, failed abysmally to master his own feelings of frustration with his suffering patient. That Freud did not cure Dora is indisputable; what remains uncertain to us even now, after decades of post-mortem historical and biographical scholarship, is whether he deepened the damage her ruthless and crazy family had already inflicted on her.9 I recall these facts not for the sake of gossip, however, but so that we keep in mind that Freud is reporting an 8 Since the relation of dreams to the subject matter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious will not be addressed further in this essay, let me say briefly that, insofar as parapraxes and jokes are already public, it is not especially controversial to treat them as communicative. No force of theory, then, is required to transfigure them into objects of shared knowledge. Dreams, by contrast, are private, hence do require a theory to justify treating them as shared. But precisely because they are private, a theory that makes them objects of shared knowledge is also a danger to them. Dreams need to be recalled to conversation, but recollection is always a form of distortion. 9 In the somewhat belated wake of the psychoanalyst Felix Deutsch’s 1957 secondhand report of Dora’s apparently troubled later life, a vast scholarship emerged on Dora, whose real name was Ida Bauer. All historians agree that Freud’s treatment fails to cure Dora, but there is a wide range of disagreement whether Freud harmed her. See Felix Deutsch, “A Footnote to Freud’s ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,’” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 26 (1957), 159–167; reprinted in In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, 2nd edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 35–43. For an account that is more forgiving of Freud, see Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud’s Women: Family, Patients, Followers (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 146–167.

The Authority of Dreams 

 11

analytic error, which is to say an error in listening and hearing, when he relates how he indulged his curiosity at just the moment when Dora most openly worked to block his epistemic drive. The Freud on display in the Fragment is so avid to know that he misses how Dora’s communication of her dream is an expression of her need for refuge from what, for her, was already too much knowing. Dora is caught in a nest of three-dimensional love triangles with no way out. The triangle that concerns us comprises Herr K.’s love for her, which is, according to Freud, both reciprocated by Dora and repressed by her, and her love for Frau K., Herr K.’s wife (who is also Dora’s father’s mistress), which love is not, to all appearances, reciprocated by Frau K. and which, more to the point, has never been conscious for Dora at all. Thus, Freud writes of a particular train of Dora’s thought that it “was designed not only for the purpose of suppressing her love for Herr K., which had once been conscious, but also to conceal her love for Frau K., which was in a deeper sense unconscious.”10 The sense in which Dora’s love for Frau K. was more deeply unconscious is that she had never been conscious of it to begin with. It was a love that bloomed, so to speak, already under prohibition and therefore prior to any experience by Dora of a need to struggle against it. Still, however deep the stratum of her mind at which Dora stores her unconscious love for Frau K., it is not too deep for Freud to plumb. Like a master detective, he sees right through Dora to the secret she harbors. Dora, Freud writes, “concealed from herself [. . .] that she grudged her father Frau K.’s love, and had not forgiven the woman she loved [i.e., Frau K] for the disillusionment she [Dora] had been caused by her betrayal. The jealous emotions of a woman were linked in the unconscious with a jealousy such as might have been felt by a man.”11 We do not even need that last bit of insulting arrogation of gendered authority to see that all insight is on the side of the analyst here, none on the side of Dora. And thus Freud takes license to make inference to a psychoanalytic generalization, a “principle” of developmental science fully equipped with a freshly minted scientific concept. “These masculine or, more properly gynaecophilic currents of feeling are to be regarded as typical of the unconscious erotic life of hysterical girls.”12 Freud does not tell us if he spoke these exact words to Dora. Since, however, throughout the case history he reports carefully what Dora said and what he said to her, it’s safe to assume that he kept his mouth shut at this moment of epistemic gratification. But Dora heard it loud and clear nonetheless and, taking offense at being made the transparent object of analytic knowledge, immediately moved to block Freud’s view. Directly after his triumphant instant of generalization, 10 Freud, Standard Edition, VII, 62. 11 Freud, Standard Edition, VII, 62. 12 Freud, Standard Edition, VII, 62.

12 

 Gregg M. Horowitz

Freud writes that “just at a moment when there was a prospect that the material that was coming up for analysis would throw light on an obscure point in Dora’s childhood, she reported that a few nights earlier she had once again had a dream which she had already dreamt in exactly the same way on many previous occasions.”13 Freud writes as if Dora’s dream were simply next in sequence after the prospect that childhood material was about to come to the surface. But it was Freud himself who argued in Interpretation of Dreams – the first version of which was written at the same time as the Fragment although published five years earlier – that sequence is the form in which the unconscious represents causality, that, more precisely, sequence just is consequence in the unconscious mind. Dora’s dream, we therefore must read Freud as saying, is a rejoinder to his grab at the obscure point in her childhood. The conversational situation in effect, then, is this: Freud says to Dora, “Let me get at the memories of your childhood that you have no direct access to yourself,” to which Dora replies, “I’d prefer not. How about a dream instead?” The dream is Dora’s alternative to Freud’s insight, a way of cutting off Freud’s privileges as a scientific observer of and within her psychical life. Dreams, of course, do provide access to the storehouse of childhood experiences, but not in the form of memories, therefore not as directly as Freud might hope, which is to say, not without further conversation. To tell Freud her dream is thus for Dora to cut him off at the epistemic pass. But – and here is the tragic aspect of Freud’s failure of listening and hearing – it is also Dora’s way of choosing Freud as her analyst. But Freud’s curiosity is in full roar, and he will have none of it. He responds instead with a cognitively greedy jerk away from conversation. A periodically recurrent dream was by its very nature calculated to arouse my curiosity; and in any case it was justifiable in the interests of the treatment to consider the way in which the dream worked into the analysis as a whole. I therefore determined to make an especially careful investigation of it.14

Dora’s strategic counter-offer of a conversation falls on Freud’s ears as both an insult and an incitement. That the dream is an old one, one dreamt before he came into Dora’s life, is the pitiful excuse Freud offers himself for giving free rein to his overriding, uncontrolled – hence shameful – curiosity about why Dora is telling him the dream. He does not stop to consider, for instance, that Dora’s telling him that the dream antedates her consultation with him is a way of reminding him of the personal distance from her that he has yet to earn the right to cross. In this moment is encapsulated Freud’s failure to be a proper therapist for Dora, a failure which is expressed as his desire to know the meaning of Dora’s dream rather than 13 Freud, Standard Edition, VII, 64. 14 Freud, Standard Edition, VII, 64.

The Authority of Dreams 

 13

to respond to it as an opening in a conversation between them. Notice: Freud does not say that Dora’s dream merely aroused his curiosity, which would be a completely natural and altogether desirable expression of his therapeutic interest in her. Rather, he says that Dora’s dream was calculated to arouse his curiosity – structured, that is, with the aim of crafting a place for him as a knower. And perhaps it was a calculated move by Dora, but why to arouse only Freud’s curiosity? Given her recent history of mishandling by an adult world that was overeager to know her real intentions, Dora may well have been testing Freud’s capacity to restrain or redirect – to sublimate – his curiosity. It remains shocking to this day that Freud misses this possibility altogether, and instead characterizes Dora’s aims by using the language of a lover who, in order to disavow the depths of his own ardor, inflates the seductiveness of his beloved. Rather than lay claim to his own palpable erotic interest so thinly disguised as an urge to know, Freud offers a post hoc defense, especially unconvincing because entirely unsolicited, of his overweening curiosity as serving the interests of the treatment. In this passage, it is as if Freud’s conscience had launched such a powerful attack on his pretense to innocent curiosity that only his defense against conscience remains audible. But all of our skepticism about Freud’s motives notwithstanding, it still remains uncertain whether curiosity or healing is really behind his determination to make an especially careful investigation. However, the idea of setting out on a determined investigation against a foe equally determined to protect her secrets betrays incontrovertible curiosity. It will not serve us to follow out Freud’s brilliant interpretation of Dora’s dream in detail, for all we are interested in now is the way Freud’s curiosity causes him to miss how Dora’s dream functions within the analytic encounter to block his entry into dream-space as a knower and instead, by serving to keep something back for herself, invites him in as a partner to the conversation. Freud is thus in a sense seduced by Dora after all, but like so many others drawn in by the promise of dreams, he forgets that the authority of the dream is how it holds back and invites intimacy – and only with intimacy, perhaps knowledge, too – on a stage not yet unveiled. Dora’s modesty should have aroused Freud’s interest more than it did.

3 The Secret Life of Power That dreams hold out a promise of intelligibility makes them hermeneutic bait. Freud’s inability to resist the temptation to pluck out from Dora’s dream what it means ought not therefore entirely to surprise us. Still, that his motives are familiar does nothing to save Freud from the criticism that blasting through Dora’s dream to the meaning it mediates is a way of forgetting that its significance specifically

14 

 Gregg M. Horowitz

as a dream cannot be disentangled from its being bait. In his overly narrow textual focus on dream-meaning, Freud thus rejoins the lineage of dream-diviners whom he had criticized in Interpretation of Dreams by arguing that their authority to proffer prophetic knowledge rests on nothing but the manipulative power of suggestion. His achievement of theoretical distance from prophetic dreamdivination in Interpretation of Dreams notwithstanding, perhaps some unacknowledged ambition caused Freud to fall back on that same exercise of illicit power in his treatment of Dora? This, too, wouldn’t be surprising: it is, after all, a familiar charge against dream interpretation that there is something autocratic about the whole enterprise, something that makes any achievement of interpretive depth testimony not to the meaning of the dream but to the force and cleverness of the interpreter.15 In this perspective, the very idea of the intelligibility of the dream is nothing but a cover for the unwarranted power of the interpreter who offers himself up as the knower of what remains obscure to those in the grip of dream images, a power so effectively disabled by Dora. For reasons that are essential to how dreams communicate, this endless suspicion about exploitation and authority in dream-interpretation is incapable of being put to rest once and for all, however hard friends of psychoanalysis work to disarm it. It is undeniable that Freud found powerful personal gratification in having made dreaming intelligible, so much so that he fantasized to his friend Wilhelm Fliess that one day a plaque would be affixed to the house in Bellevue where he had the Irma specimen-dream that opens Interpretation of Dreams saying “In this house, on July 24, 1895, the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigmund Freud.”16 But it is equally undeniable that Freud knew – if “knowing” is the right way to name a relation to a principle of suspicion – that establishing the meaning of a dream in an analysis is never finished and that, more radically, the function of dreams within analysis is to unsettle normative understandings of the patent meaning of their signs and symbols.17 What makes dreams compelling, and what makes interpreting them a key component of psychoanalysis, is the way they hold meaning back even in the telling. Not what is meant in the dream but rather what is meant by 15 The classical formulation of this objection to psychoanalysis is in Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). A more bellicose recent version can be found in the writings of Frederick Crews, such as his essay collection, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Emeryville, CA: Avalon Publishing, 2006). 16 Sigmund Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst Freud (New York: Dover Publications, 1992), 240. 17 This claim combines Paul Ricoeur’s famous characterization of Freud as a practitioner of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” with my own insistence that Freud’s interpretive practice also retained at every moment a clinical or intersubjective dimension. See Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970).

The Authority of Dreams 

 15

dreaming it, which is to say something that subsists untold in the manifest dream-text while nonetheless remaining compellingly patent, opens a proto-semantic space for analyst and analysand and thereby solicits from them jointly a certain kind of conversation. At the same time, then, that Freud gives vent to his endlessly pressing epistemic urges, he finds a suitable match for those urges, a partner equal to their force, not in the ingenuity of dreams (as was Moriarty for Sherlock Holmes, ingenuity is the perfect justification of the epistemic urge, and so spurs narratives of investigation on to their appointed gratification) but rather in their incalculability. The dreamwork, Freud says in Interpretation of Dreams, “does not think.”18 I will be concluding this essay with an extended reflection on the significance of this claim, but for now let me say simply that, because dreams, despite being vehicles of thinking, are not thoughts – or, as Freud also expresses it, the dreamwork is not made with the intention of being understood19 – they are, far from being masters of deception, utterly guileless. It is this idea that moved Freud in his 1907 essay on creative writing and day-dreaming to appoint dreams the inheritors of children’s play which, he notes, children do not hide from the eyes of adults because while at play children are indifferent to the curiosity and judgment – the seriousness – of the adult world.20 What makes dreams matter (what makes them dreams) is not that they have hidden meanings (although that they certainly do), but that they have no shame. Dreams are all surface, and so they have no proper end of meaning. Or, as Freud also puts it, “There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable – a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown.”21 We should take this remarkable figure of speech literally: the navel is a visible feature on the surface of the body which hints at the connection to the mother’s body that has been physiologically broken and handed over for safe-keeping to the mind. It is the joint of memory and the living body inscribed on the living body itself. The authority of the dream, from this perspective, is its manifest withdrawal into itself, its moment of intrinsic inwardness which is shielded right there, in plain sight. En passant, this is why Freud’s characterization of Dora’s dreams as “calculated” to arouse his interest cannot be right. In this respect, the analysand’s dream is an opportunity for the analyst and analysand to explore together not the meaning behind the dream but the unsettling of normative meaning that is characteristic of dream-space. Sometimes, to be sure, the presentation of the dream serves as a solicitation addressed to the 18 Freud, Standard Edition, V, 507 19 Freud, Standard Edition, V, 341. 20 Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” Standard Edition, IX, 141–153. 21 Freud, Standard Edition, IV, 111.

16 

 Gregg M. Horowitz

analyst’s epistemic authority, to the analyst as what Jacques Lacan called the subject-supposed-to-know. But this kind of obsequious invitation, let us recall, is not unique to psychoanalytic conversation; flattering authority is a common means to escape its most overbearing demands. But in psychoanalysis, flattery of the analyst’s canniness by the analysand can be destructive of the entire enterprise; it can misdirect the analytic conversation by making some particular interpretation so irresistibly attractive to both analyst and analysand that they conspire together against recognizing what remains unspoken. Submission to the analyst’s expertise, in other words, can be an identification with the analyst’s authority not, despite appearances, for the sake of insight but, rather, for the sake of rebellion against it. In this light, we can understand how the unconscious phantasy that Freud has while interpreting Dora’s dream that he is observing the dreamwork from a position safely outside of it is brought wholesale inside the analysis – inside the space opened by Dora’s dream – as an enemy of further, deeper knowledge. It is as if Dora has said, “OK. You’re right. That must mean that there’s no more to talk about.” This moment can be treated as a textbook illustration of why analysts ought not to give proud credence to interpretations that win the analysand’s quick assent, for what is at stake in analysis is play around the navel, conversation around the site of resistance that quick assent forecloses. Where something remains vividly unknown in the dream, what the analysand cannot acknowledge is announcing its power. In this spirit, the authority of the dream in analysis resides not in its meaning but in the opening to additional and unpredictable meaning-making that the dream compels, an opening at the site of its opaque connection to its origin. Meaning unfolds forward, and the feeling that dreams have one deep, hidden meaning, in order not to become a conversation-stopper, thus must be regarded as nothing but the promise of meaning that lures us into psychoanalytic conversation. If the authority of the dream in psychoanalysis is in this manner understood to be tied to its indifference to knowledge, hence to what is, from the point of view of analytic knowledge, its antagonism to the epistemic urge to settle the matter of meaning, what changes must be made in our conception of interpretive authority? What role remains to be filled by a theory of dream interpretation if such a theory is obliged to accommodate itself to a conception of the authority of dreams as essentially antinomian? (When Freud argues that there is no negation in the unconscious, he is arguing that the unconscious doesn’t bow down before the law of non-contradiction; a world without contradiction, however, is a world entirely hostile to theoretical insight.)22 It must be acknowledged at the start that it is far from obvious that considering dreams to be complex structures 22 Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious,” Standard Edition, XIV, 186.

The Authority of Dreams 

 17

of reticence would require us to re-theorize their authority at all. It might lead us instead to dismiss the question of authority altogether. Dreams, we might say, are simply one of the many things analysands talk about with their analysts. Their felt intensity of meaning would then have no special significance in the play of psychoanalytic conversation. In this case, the path of least theoretical resistance would be to argue that the dream as experienced – the dream as dreamt – is unimportant to psychoanalysis and thus, as B. F. Skinner, for instance, urged (in the days when even behaviorists felt obliged to think about dreams!), to focus our attention instead exclusively on dream-reports, which are fully discursive tokens in common language.23 In this spirit, some analysts argue that psychoanalysis is uniquely free conversation in which, in virtue of its setting in the para-social space of the consulting room, everything is discursively up for grabs.24 But this complete emancipation of psychoanalytic conversation from the question of knowledge is also an error. For the analytic conversation, far from being uniquely free, is uniquely haunted. It is shadowed by what still cannot be said plainly and directly even when, in the consulting room, the norms and demands of everyday life have, to all appearances, been suspended. Freud wrote that the first rule of psychoanalysis is free association but, his early optimism about the technique notwithstanding,25 it turns out that striving to say whatever happens to be on one’s mind produces all sorts of creative defenses against speaking. In psychoanalysis, in other words, silence matters as much as speaking. Indeed, speaking can itself be a way of concealing silences. Dreams, with their trail of compelling but unthought meanings, have pride of place in psychoanalysis because they bring the silence harbored by speech into the analytic conversation as silences to be heard, acknowledged, understood. But why should the analysand need to hold anything back when in the presence of the stranger she has hired expressly to keep her confidences? Why, even in the consulting room, must she sometimes fall silent? Here we confront head-on 23 B. F. Skinner, “The Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms,” Psychological Review, 52 (1945), 270–276 and “Behaviorism at Fifty,” in Behaviorism and Phenomenology: Contrasting Bases for Modern Psychology, ed. T. W. Wann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 79–108. 24 Although he is not a psychoanalyst, Glenn Callaghan has defended this view in its most radical, Skinnerian form. See “The Clinical Utility of Dream Reports from a Radical Behavioral Perspective,” The Behavior Therapist, 19 (1996), 49–52. For a more moderate and specifically psychoanalytic form of this view, see H. F. Waldhorn, Indications for Psychoanalysis: The Place of the Dream in Psychoanalysis, Kris Study Group of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, Monograph 2 (New York: International Universities Press, 1967). 25 Early in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes: “[W]hat Schiller describes as a relaxation of the watch upon the gates of Reason, the adoption of uncritical self-observation, is by no means difficult. Most of my patients achieve it after their very first instructions.” Freud, Standard Edition, IV, 103.

18 

 Gregg M. Horowitz

the authority of the dream in the psychoanalytic conversation, for it is the significance of the dream to allow the question of authority in the last ditch, authority where it seems to have no interests to protect, to be posed in the form of a question: what dynamic force connects us to what remains unknown even in the freest of speech, to the secret life of authority that remains perforce unknown proximally to the analyst and distally to everyone in the world? In the shadow of this question, the openness of conversation that the dream compels is crucially not conversation free of authority, but rather conversation in the presence of the authority that flourishes at the heart of secret life, authority that is, in this sense, sustained by no one but the dreamer herself. It is conversation around what stays hidden even in the moment of its betrayal, not simply because some authority commandingly opposes it, but also for exactly the opposite reason: because to reveal it would be for the dreamer to give away her last scrap of power, which is harbored – lodged – in her power to dream anyway. The reticence of the dream, in short, is a counter-power to the power of the authority that sees all. It is the dynamic blind-spot in omniscience which, from the perspective of omniscience, can be nothing but the compelling unknown. The ethical and therapeutic question for the psychoanalyst, then, is this: with which power, knowledge or its blind spot, will you make your alliance? And this is the question that cannot be settled once and for all – which is to say, settled omnisciently, settled in theory – because of the way that dreams function inseparably both as objects of knowledge and media of communication.

4 The Form of the Dreamwork and the Hunger for Knowing Dreams are fortresses. And although it may sound strange to say in the face of the enormous mental energy dreamers expend in defending against whatever the dream allows to remain hidden, what is analytically interesting in the dream is not the hidden thought but the need to shore against it, the need to dream it instead of thinking it in a lucid and recognizable shape of thought. “Fortress” is my own way of getting at how the reticence of dreaming is dynamically tied to the hunger to know the meaning it contains. Freud’s way of getting at it in Interpretation of Dreams is, however, by means of the concept of “form.” In closing, I wish to interpret how Freud’s concept of form captures the tension between the two functions of dreams in psychoanalysis, but without resolving it. As a concept that coordinates the known and the not-yet-known in dreams but without ameliorating the conflict between them, “form” is, I want to say, in mimetic relation to dreams themselves. It is an analytic concept, in the sense that it helps to make mental life intelligible, but it nonetheless carries within itself the relation to the unknown that is the mark of the dynamic unconscious.

The Authority of Dreams 

 19

As he concludes the discussion of the dreamwork, in which he has analyzed the processes of condensation, displacement, considerations of representability and secondary revision, Freud takes up again a question that he had put on hold earlier. [Does the] mind employ the whole of its faculties in constructing dreams or only a functionally restricted fragment of them[?]. Our investigation led us to reject entirely the form in which the question was framed as being inadequate to the circumstances. If, however, we had to reply to the question on the basis of the terms in which it was stated, we should be obliged to reply in the affirmative to both the alternatives, mutually exclusive though they may be. Two separate functions must be distinguished in mental activity during the construction of a dream: the production of the dream-thoughts and their transformation into the content of the dream. The dream-thoughts are entirely rational [. . .] They have their place among thought-processes that have not become conscious – processes from which, after some modification, our conscious thoughts, too, arise. (GH: As we’ve seen by this point in Interpretation of Dreams, dream-thoughts are perfectly normal thoughts, such as “my colleague is in the way of my ambition,” “I love my mother’s new dress,” “I want some strawberries,” “My father is a tyrant,” “I wish I could go on sleeping,” and so on. They are perfectly rational perceptions and assessments of reality and, from the practical point of view, express perfectly humdrum aims. As such) [. . .] However many interesting and puzzling questions the dream-thoughts may involve, such questions have, after all, no special relation to dreams and do not call for treatment among the problem of dreams.26

What interests Freud here is not the unconscious thoughts themselves, even though there could be no dreaming without them. What he works to bring into focus instead is what it says about the dreamer’s relation to those thoughts that she has them only in the form of a dream, that is, that she must provide them a disguise in order to think them at all. What, Freud wants to know, do these ordinary thoughts carry in train that causes them to be barred from direct awareness? And so Freud goes on: This dream-work proper diverges further from our picture of waking thought than has been supposed even by the most determined depreciator of psychical functioning during the formation of dreams. The dream-work is not simply more careless, more irrational, more forgetful and more incomplete than waking thought; it is completely different from it qualitatively and for that reason not immediately comparable with it. It does not think, calculate, or judge in any way; it restricts itself to giving things a new form.27

Freud’s ambivalence in this passage about what counts as thinking, hence what he will tolerate counting as kin and competitor to his own analytic work, is 26 Freud, Standard Edition, V, 506. 27 Freud, Standard Edition, V, 507.

20 

 Gregg M. Horowitz

magnificent. The mind thinks when dreaming, but yet dreaming is not thinking. Since the dreaming mind is thinking but not casting its thoughts as thought, the thoughts remain concealed within the dreamwork. But the concealment is also expressive, and Freud can feel the thinking. But a feeling does not itself render a dream intelligible. The dream is thus a magnet for Freud’s translational urge to return the miscast, alienated thoughts to a properly cognitive métier. To interpret the dream as a way of getting hold of the thoughts is, from this angle, to understand its meaning. But is it also to understand the dreamer, to understand why she comes before the analyst as a dreaming self? What does dreaming add to, or do to, or subtract from, the unconscious thoughts it bears? From the point of view of knowledge, the answer, it appears, is nothing, for the dreamthoughts, recall, have nothing cognitively unusual about them. So is Interpretation of Dreams merely an idle game after all? And is the dream-form, into which the dreamer pours enormous psychical energy, after all a cognitive achievement of . . . nothing? These panicky questions are, of course, being rehearsed in the voice of the analyst committed to the view that dream-form must be the expression of recoverable meaning. It is this avid analyst whom Freud addresses, rather crossly, in a footnote added in 1925 to the seventh edition of Interpretation of Dreams. Now that analysts have become reconciled to replacing the manifest dream by the meaning revealed by its interpretation, many of them have become guilty of falling into another confusion, which they cling to with equal obstinacy. They seek to find the essence of dreams in their latent content and in so doing they overlook the distinction between the latent dreamthoughts and the dream-work. At bottom, dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work, which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming.28

While Freud is within his rights to insist that neglect of the distinction between the unconscious dream-thoughts and the dream work guarantees a misunderstanding of the nature of dreaming, he is surely wrong, wrong to his own ambivalent argumentation, to accuse analysts who remain attached to the latent thoughts of simple obstinacy. For this is the obstinacy Freud himself shares, the obstinacy that betrays the implacable impulsion at the core of the epistemic urge and that forces him, in the midst of reminding his readers that a dream is nothing but a “form,” helplessly to append “of thinking” to his correction. That the dreamwork merely creates forms is not true to the practice of Interpretation of Dreams, for it is as forms of thinking that remain untranslatable into thoughts – “not immediately comparable,” recall, is Freud’s way 28 Freud, Standard Edition, V, 506.

The Authority of Dreams 

 21

of describing it – that dreams are compelling. To treat dreams as meaningless would be as damaging as treating them as penetrable. There is thus no way out of the circle of knowing and not knowing, translating and failing to translate. As with works of art,29 the authority of dreams rests in the peculiar way they hold out the prospect of unending interpretation in virtue not of the randomness of meaning but rather because of an unthought link, a real but secret link, between mind and its vehicles. With this thought in mind, we are turned back again to the aims and norms of psychoanalytic conversation to make sense of why Freud argues in paragraphs only one page removed from one another both that all dreams can be multiply interpreted and that, for the same reason, some cannot be interpreted at all. “The analyst’s task is not at an end,” Freud writes, “when he has a complete interpretation in his hands – an interpretation which makes sense, is coherent and throws light upon every element of the dream’s content.”30 The cognitively and aesthetically gratifying correctness of an excellent interpretation, he warns, can be a tool of resistance to confronting and acknowledging additional strata of meaning. At the same time, however, “the question whether it is possible to interpret every dream must be answered in the negative. It must not be forgotten,” he writes in the chapter called “The Forgetting of Dreams,” “that in interpreting a dream we are opposed by the psychical forces which were responsible for its distortion.”31 The resistance to interpretation here reveals itself to be nothing but another name for the navel of the dream, the moment in the dream beyond which no one can go. The authority of the dream, then, is expressed in the way it makes interpreters uncertain about the sources of its meaning, hence inspires them to go on making more meaning. As opposition to interpretation, this moment resists knowledge, but understood as the navel of the dream, it keeps the thirst for knowledge alive. The resistance to knowing is the insistence on better understanding. Where does all of this leave us? Well, with a book and a practice. Interpretation of Dreams is fragmentary, even if, unlike the case history of Dora in which the fragmentariness is announced in the title, its fragments are gathered together in a book-form that has been shaped by its confrontation with, and slow, unwilling, submission to, the force of dreams. That this is a book of dreams, a book about dreams and made of dreams, is confessed in another passage in which the idea of the dream navel which, we now know, is the scar that attests both to the condition 29 I have argued elsewhere that works of literary and visual art served as Freud’s models for the dreamwork. See Sustaining Loss (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 91–132. 30 Freud, Standard Edition, V, 523. 31 Freud, Standard Edition, V, 524–525.

22 

 Gregg M. Horowitz

of the dream’s birth and to its intelligibility, appears. Since the figure of the navel is here being repeated, it must be treated as an effort to remember something. Needless to say, then, it makes its second appearance in the chapter of Interpretation of Dreams on the forgetting of dreams. There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite ending; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.32

If psychoanalysis were nothing but a way of knowing, the only response to this passage would be: thanks for nothing. However, as I have been arguing, the scientific function of dreams, while indispensable, is not the only function they serve in psychoanalysis. They are also the privileged forms of withdrawal from the world of common meaning precisely because they are the forms in which that withdrawal is communicated, first of all to the dreamer. In dreams the unknown makes contact with the known, makes a claim on conscious awareness, and so compels a way of listening and talking differently. This is the site and stake of the psychoanalytic conversation in which the tension between the already known, the long-since forgotten, and the yet-to-be-understood (or: the normative, the invaluable, and the promised) is most fully at play. So I will close with a moving passage by Freud about this play. It not infrequently happens to me that [. . .] having been woken up, as one might say, by a dream, I immediately afterwards, and in full possession of my intellectual powers, set about interpreting it (answering the call of the dream to be known). In such cases I have often refused to rest till I have arrived at a complete understanding of the dream; yet it has sometimes been my experience that after finally waking up in the morning I have entirely forgotten both my interpretation and the content of the dream, though knowing that I had a dream and interpreted it. It happens far more often that the dream draws the findings of my interpretive activity back with it into oblivion than that my intellectual activity succeeds in preserving the dream in my memory.33

In this report of his own dream-response to his powers of interpretation, Freud relates how his dream-life teaches him that knowing is not the opposite of secrecy 32 Freud, Standard Edition, V, 525. 33 Freud, Standard Edition, V, 520–521.

The Authority of Dreams 

 23

but also secrecy’s fodder. Here then, finally, we have the right response to Dora’s dream. For if we allow this thought that the domain of knowing also includes knowing how to keep a secret to expand to incorporate Dora, then it also offers us a picture of a psychoanalyst listening rightly to the dream of an analysand and submitting to the authority of the dream by letting it swallow up the knowing it remains hungry for, still.

Pascal Grosse

Sensible Dreams Irrationality and the Philosophy of the Mind in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 1 Introduction The overwhelming impact Freud’s approach to dreaming has had in the Western world since the beginning of the twentieth century until today pushed into oblivion previous intellectual models that tried to conceptualize dreaming. And perhaps, when it comes to dreaming and its relevance for the human condition, Freud has sometimes been taken too much for granted, particularly in the areas of today’s critical theory and cultural studies. Though his axioms have been further developed and modified, they have never been contested in essence. Outside of such scholarship, familiar neologisms such as “dream house,” “dream team,” or “dream couple” – like so many others in which “dream” is linked to a noun – reflect popularized versions of Freud’s basic concepts, which equate dreaming with unconscious or repressed wishes – an understanding with particular value in the economic and emotional market place. Yet, from the point of view of scientific discourse, what was fundamentally novel in Freud was the paradigmatic shift from a formal analysis of dreaming as a bodily act (which he discusses at length in the first chapter of Interpretations of Dreams) to the content-based dissection of dreams as a mental and emotional network in the subsequent chapters.1 Crucially, Freud undertook the fraught double task of attempting to keep dreaming anchored within the formalized framework of contemporary psychophysiology, neurology, and psychiatry (today’s neurosciences) while also focusing on dream content in an effort to scientifically “understand” dreams as an intelligible aspect of the subjective corporeal and mental experience. However, in parallel to the popularization of Freud’s concepts on dreaming and the advent of psychoanalysis in the psychiatric practice after World War II, most notably in the US,2 segments within the medical community voiced sharp opposition to Freud’s assumptions. In particular, some neuroscientists argued 1 For the development of scientific dream theories based on physiological premises leading up to Freud in the second half of the nineteenth century see Stefan Goldmann, Via Regia zum Unbewussten. Freud und die Traumforschung im 19. Jahrhundert (Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2003). 2 Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997), 170–180.

26 

 Pascal Grosse

that psychoanalysts represent an entirely distorted and unscientific interpretation of what dreaming constitutes by ignoring the physiological basis of dreams. With the identification of REM-sleep in 19533 and the subsequent observation that dreaming mostly occurs in REM-sleep4 many neuroscientists believed they had a tool in hand to objectively “measure” dreaming for the first time, an approach that has continued with ever more sophisticated tools.5 From this vantage point all previous dream theories, “including psychoanalysis, are essentially religions in that they are based on faith in an agency that gives hidden directives, which can be understood only through the intervention of someone who can interpret the ‘message.’”6 Such polemic against psychoanalysis (as well as religion-based concepts of dreaming) only seemed to reinstate the unbridgeable gap between neuroscientific approaches and the interpretation of dream content, despite recent efforts to overcome this seeming abyss through “neuropsychoanalysis.”7 Nevertheless, psychoanalysis and the “new neurosciences” since the 1950s have more in common than might seem at first glance. Both constitute the end point of the process to dismantle dreaming from its religious halo, an approach still very much prevalent in the nineteenth century.8 Religiously inspired interpretation of dreaming, which assumed that divine directions and prophecies are mediated to people through dreams, had been dominant for millennia and across many cultures. Though today dreaming has entirely lost its religious connotations in all scientific communities and is now viewed as the ultimate autonomous and 3 Eugene Aserinski/Nathaniel Kleitman, “Regular Occurring Periods of Eye Motility, and Concomitant Phenomena during Sleep,” Science, 118 (1953), 273–274. 4 William C. Dement/Nathaniel Kleitman, “Cyclic Variations in EEG During Sleep and Their Relation to Eye Movements, Body Motility and Dreaming”, EEG Clinical Neurophysiology, 9 (1957), 673–690. 5 For a recent short review on current dream theories see e.g. Alan S. Eiser, “Physiology and Psychology of Dreams,” Seminar Neurology, 25 (2005), 97–105. 6 Allen Hobson, Dreaming (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 16–17. 7 “Neuropsychoanalysis” tries to link psychoanalytical insights with current neuroscientific tools such as functional imaging; see e.g. Karen Kaplan-Solms/Mark Solms, Clinical Studies in Neuropsychoanalysis: Introduction to a Depth Neuropsychology (London: Karnac Books, 2000); against the claim that neurosciences provide any relevant insight for psychoanalysis see Rachel Blass/Zvi Carmeli, “The Case Against Neuropsychoanalysis: On Fallacies Underlying Psychoanalysis’ Latest Scientific Trend and its Negative Impact on Psychoanalytic Discourse,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 88 (2007), 19–40. 8 See, e.g., Franz Splittgerber, Schlaf und Tod nebst den damit zusammenhängenden Erscheinungen des Seelenlebens. Eine psychologisch-apologetische Erörterung des Schlaf- und Traumlebens, des Ahnungsvermögens und des höheren Aufleuchtens der Seele im Sterben (Halle: Julius Fricke, 1866); for an overview of dream theories across the centuries in the West see Dreams and History: The Interpretation of Dreams from Ancient Greece to Modern Psychoanalysis, ed. Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper (London/New York: Routledge, 2004).

Sensible Dreams 

 27

self-reflective experience, religious underpinnings still prevail in popular culture, politics, and economics, where such dreams are sometimes interpreted as a sign of God or some (divine) prophecy. For example: as much as Martin Luther King’s 1963 “dream speech” – perhaps the most multifaceted example in recent history of the political use of dreaming – can be read in psychoanalytical terms as wishful thinking by an individual, it can also be understood as a prophecy mediated to the public through the Reverend who only acts as the vessel of some supranatural power. It is up to the listeners and their cultural backgrounds as to how they interpret that speech. In other words, the presumed “secularization of dreaming” that has taken place in the scientific world, be it through psychoanalysis or the neurosciences, does not necessarily reflect or coincide with cultural practices. The intellectual scope of what can potentially be understood today as the secularization of dreaming was set up in the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury philosophy of the mind. Therefore expelling supranatural powers from the concept of dreaming must be understood as the result of a historical process that made dreams and their content an autonomous act of the individual. This new conceptualization formalized dreaming as a bodily act that takes place in individual bodies and brains.9 From this perspective all subsequent scientific concepts of dreaming can be derived. Psychoanalysis and today’s neurosciences have often obscured this long history of scientific endeavor concerned with dreaming, but these early efforts established the main frameworks by which dreaming – also indeed, all human mental processes – emerged as a psychophysiological process. At first glance, dreaming seems to have always been associated with the potential to possibly counteract, if not subvert, judgment based on reason. As such dreaming has been, and still is, associated with vivid and exuberant imagination, visionary thinking, distortion, confusion, disorientation, chaos, mental anarchy, and the like, in short, as closer to madness than to reason. The seeming paradox that the mental experience of dreaming can resemble experiences in wakefulness, sometimes in a distorted fashion while the individual is, nevertheless, fast asleep, raised fundamental questions about the nature and working of the human mind and the boundaries between (reasonable) thinking in wakefulness and in sleep. Moreover, because the human mind can produce images and ideas in sleep that indeed mimic “real” experiences, but have to be judged as “unreal,” because they are not shared by anybody, dreaming raised questions about the “truth” of an individual’s sensory experience. 9 Already Thomas Willis in his groundbreaking work in the study of human neuroanatomy entitled The Anatomy of the Brain and the Description and Use of the Nerves, trans. Samuel Pordage (London: Dring et al., 1681, Latin original published in 1664), 97, referred to the brain as the site where natural sleep is facilitated, echoing and refining Aristotelian theory.

28 

 Pascal Grosse

On the basis of this set of tensions inherent in early modern philosophy of the mind, I contend that the discourse on dreaming highlights some of the elementary foundations of biopolitical thinking raised by anthropocentric philosophy of that time and was an important element of the political philosophy of the period. Following this line of thought, the central question was to what extent humans are able to exert control over their mental processes and, by implication, control over others, since, presumably, self-control constitutes the basis for legitimately exercising power over others. In other words: how can a reasonable Self – as the potential human resource for civil society – be ascertained if this reasonable Self periodically spends time in mental confusion while asleep? Moreover, unlike madness, dreaming is a state that every human is assumed to potentially experience. Thus, if Foucault and his successors were right in their claim that abnormal behaviors such as madness entailed social exclusion in the project of bourgeois society,10 then strategies of exclusion could not work in the same way when it came to dreaming, if dreaming were to represent episodic madness. What agency, be it inside or outside the individual, could certify that this kind of madness would not extend into wakefulness at some point? Or, following the secretary of the Berlin Academy of Sciences Samuel Formey who allegorically asserted in 1746 that “imagination in wakefulness is a well organized republic, where the voice of authority keeps everything in order; imagination when we dream constitutes the same republic at times when there is no authority,”11 how could such disordered individuals then claim full citizenship, when such a disordered state as dreaming episodically occurs in every citizen?12 What most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalist and sensualist philosophies had in common is that they advocated that mental processes while dreaming somehow relate to previously made sensory experiences.13 As such no mental processes would be conveyed by supernatural authorities, such as, e.g., a God who uses humans as vessels for depositing thoughts and visions, including 10 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage Books, 1965); Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974– 1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni (New York: Picador, 2004). 11 Samuel J.H. Formey, “Versuch über die Träume,” Neues Hamburgisches Magazin, 18 (1777), 483–510 (488–489); first published as “Essai sur les songes,” in Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences et belles lettres, 1746; own translation. 12 For a more detailed discussion of citizenship as a bio-political category see Pascal Grosse, “Conceptualizing Citizenship as a Bio-Political Category, Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries,” in Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 181–197. 13 For an extensive discussion of the theoretical concept of sensualism/empiricism and its various outlooks see, e.g., Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

Sensible Dreams 

 29

dreams in a state of paralysis and defenselessness while asleep. To assume that all mental processes, including those in sleep, relate to the human experience would empower all individuals with the mastery of their individual minds – even in sleep. Therefore, to even discuss dreaming beyond the scope of a divine power intrinsically entailed an antireligious skepticism that contested any supranatural influence on the human mind. However, in such philosophies, dreaming presented a particularly pressing problem, since at least some dreams seem to lack a corollary within the world shared by everybody. If other humans cannot see or sense these images and sensation stemming from dreams, how are these images produced if not by some external agency? If humans dream of something that is potentially non-existent, how can the dreamer be sure he or she is not mad? Or, as Kant put the problem, what really makes the difference between the dreamer and the individual that hallucinates and sees ghosts while being awake.14 Along the fragile line of tension that defines the boundaries between reason and madness as well as between authority and disorder represented by the dichotomy between wakefulness and sleep, the discourse on dreaming evolved in Western philosophy from the seventeenth century onwards. Therefore, what constitutes mental sanity or insanity in dreaming became the relevant problem. However, rather than focus this investigation on the assumed proximity between dreaming and madness, I want to suggest that we look for those intellectual models through which dreaming could become integrated with the concept of the reasonable Self through sensory experience, in particular, the early modern Western philosophical discourse on dreaming that tried to overcome the close link between dreaming and divine powers. Rather than looking at dreaming as a topic that intrinsically contested the principle of reason upon which the “Enlightenment” was supposedly founded, as it has recently been claimed,15 some philosophers understood dreaming and waking to involve a variety of interrelated mental processes that all contribute to the reasonable mind. As such, dreaming could be included in intellectual models that instituted secular anthropocentrism, rather than contested it. Here, then, the notion of the “Enlightenment” is of little heuristic help; dreaming was neither excluded from consideration, nor did dreaming need to be brought out of the darkness to the light of reason by e.g., Freud. 14 Immanuel Kant, “Träume eines Geistersehers,” in Immanuel Kant, Werkausgabe, II, Vorkritische Schriften bis 1768 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), 954. 15 See, for instance, Peter-André Alt, Der Schlaf der Vernunft. Literatur und Traum in der Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2002), see esp. 127–189; arguing in a similar vein stressing the irrational aspect of dreams is Lucia Dacome: ‘“To what purpose does it think?’ Dreams, Sick Bodies, and Confused Minds in the Age of Reason,” History of Psychiatry, 15 (2004), 395–416.

30 

 Pascal Grosse

In this essay I would like to examine some of the key ideas of the discourse on dreaming within a historical framework that primarily addresses those concepts that refuted plain religious interpretations of dreaming and which tried to identify dreaming as an autonomous experience. In order to illustrate some of the cultural inflations within that non-religious framework I shall start with a case history of Blaise Pascal’s distorted visual perception which came close to a simultaneous dreaming-wake-state, and its various interpretations in subsequent centuries until today. Then I shall look into three different seventeenth-century concepts of dreaming as synthesized by Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke. Finally, turning to the eighteenth century, Diderot and Rousseau presented transitions and exchanges between waking and dreaming as alternative intellectual models in order to overcome the putative dichotomy between sleeping and waking and by doing so, also between the potential anarchy of dreams and reasonable thinking while being awake. What all these authors have in common is that they defy strict boundaries between mentation in dreaming and waking. On the contrary, they all try to establish links between these two states, which allowed them to argue within a framework that does not exclude dreaming from the realm of reason.

2 Fusing the Boundaries: Blaise Pascal’s Visions Following a head injury in 1654, Blaise Pascal occasionally experienced somewhat odd visions while awake. On the right side of his visual field, he had regular vision, while on the left side he occasionally saw a chasm, a void that made him feel he could be swallowed up. According to anecdotal evidence, for this reason he often built up a wall of chairs on his left side to protect himself from this sensation of falling into an abyss. The accident that had led to the head injury also made him turn to the sectarian Catholic movement of the Jansenists. He abandoned mathematics altogether in order to dedicate his life to the defense of the Catholic faith, a turn which materialized in his most famous book, his Pensées. This example, with all its allegorical subtext, provides an appropriate vantage point to capture some fundamental problems related to dreaming in the borderland between mental sanity and insanity as Pascal’s case demonstrates periodic split vision in an individual. He could see the world shared by everybody in parts of his visual field, but concomitantly also experienced images of a void associated with strong feelings of fear, a visual impression seemingly shared by no one else. It was as if Pascal was caught in what could be called an episodic waking dream, or a daydream in which he saw two different screens at the same time.

Sensible Dreams 

 31

Such a configuration of dual images also organized the way dreaming was discussed in many early modern philosophical texts. In the case of Pascal’s split vision, the decisive boundary was located between the left and right visual fields. In dreaming, however, the boundary is represented between the external, material world perceived and processed by the human eye, and an inner world evoking images without a material corollary. Thus, the core problem has always been whether humans’ visual experience, while being awake or asleep, is “real” or not. This uncertainty raises the highly contested question whether reality is what humans immediately experience through their senses or whether it is constructed by the human mind. Most notably, scientific and philosophical interpretations of how “truthful” visual experiences are and what they signify vary according to cultural interpretations. Consequently, Pascal’s perceptual problems have been understood in quite different ways across the centuries. The pivotal moment – his accident – led to both to his visual problem as well as his metamorphosis from an eminent mathematician to an ardent Catholic, thus linking vision with religion, and by doing so also dichotomizing science and religion. Pascal himself drew indirectly on the double nature of his own vision, between what is perceptible, and by implication physically limited on the one side (his right visual field) and infinite on the other (his left visual field). Similar to the concept of the infinite in mathematics as a surrogate for perfectibility, Pascal indirectly relates his own vision to the omnipresence of God. In the Pensées he wrote, in the section on “the disproportion of man,” in which he addresses, among other things, the nexus between the abyss, nothingness, and infinity, that “the whole visible world is only an imperceptible dot in nature’s ample bosom. No idea comes near it [. . .] Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. In short it is the greatest perceptible mark of God’s omnipotence that our imagination should lose itself in that thought.”16 Wrapped up in mathematical terms throughout this section – the infinite representing God whereas center and circumference allude to limited geometrical bodies such as the human body – visibility and invisibility are complementary analogies that fuse the immaterial, perfect, and incommensurable God with the imperfection of the material world. This key concept of fusion also prevails in Pascal’s reflections on waking and dreaming. For Pascal, there is little difference between them and, in essence, reasoning in waking does not entail greater truth than dreaming: “No person is certain, apart from faith, whether he is awake or sleeps, considering that during sleep we believe that we are awake as firmly as we do when we are awake; we believe that we see space, figure, and motion; [. . .] So that half of our life being passed in sleep, we have by 16 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995), 60.

32 

 Pascal Grosse

our own admission no idea of truth, whatever we may imagine.”17And so truth must rest in the infinite that is God. Whereas fusion was the structuring principle in Pascal’s view of his visual world, subsequently the doubling of his vision has been much more attractive. To Julien Offray de La Mettrie, the godfather of cerebral materialism, Pascal was a genius, but one with a split personality by virtue of a split brain represented by his doubled vision. In his most renowned pamphlet, the “Machine Man” published in 1747, La Mettrie argues on a strictly materialist basis that Pascal’s vision was the result of “an unusual circulation in one of the brain’s lobes! He was a great man on one side but he was half mad on the other. Madness and wisdom each had their department on their lobe.”18 Referring to Port Royal, the headquarters of the Jansenists, he questions provocatively: “From which side did his great attachment to Port-Royal come?”19 Clearly, La Mettrie’s own refutation of religion led him to assume that Pascal’s eager attachment to a Catholic sect could only be explained by madness. To La Mettrie, Pascal’s religious ardor was an expression of an insane brain, though its madness was compartmentalized. 20 In the nineteenth century, interpretations of Pascal’s story also revolved around the tension between genius and madness. In 1846, in his “Pascal’s Amulet, which serves as a history of hallucinations,” the illustrious French psychiatrist Louis-Francisque Lélut proposed Pascal’s vision to be the very intersection of genius and madness.21 This fitted with Lélut’s broader interest to understand consciousness and its workings through the study of differing perceptions in wakefulness and sleep. As was becoming fashionable at the time, his account of Pascal’s visions represents the classical retrospective 17 Pascal, Pensées, 128. 18 “He [Pascal] always needed a rampart of chairs or someone near him on his left to prevent him from seeing the terrifying depths into which he was sometimes afraid of falling, however much he knew it was a delusion. What a terrifying effect of the imagination or of an unusual circulation in one of the brain’s lobes! ” Julien Offray de La Mettrie, “Machine Man,” in Machine Man and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–39, here 21. 19 La Mettrie, “Machine Man,” 21. 20 Interestingly, Pascal’s relatives requested an autopsy of Pascal’s body, perhaps because of his prior severe illnesses. Though abnormalities in his brain such as blood were noted, most likely related to the accident of 1654, these observations did not serve as an explanation for his state of mind; see Michael Hagner, Geniale Gehirne. Zur Geschichte der Elitegehirnforschung (Wallstein: Göttingen, 2004), 41–42. 21 Louis-Francisque Lélut, L’amulette de Pascal pour servir à l’histoire des hallucinations (Paris: OJB Baillière, 1846).

Sensible Dreams 

 33

medical case study of assumed geniuses whose genius could only be explained on the ground of some mental illness. Such an approach only inflated the genius’s almost feverish geniality. Here, genius and madness are two sides of the same coin, rather than parallel opposites as understood by La Mettrie. “Nervousness” results in mental fatigue and hallucinations in exchange for being a genius. At the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Freud left Pascal’s assumed geniality and only referred to Pascal’s visions in the context of traumatic obsessions (Zwangsvorstellungen) and phobias, both being expressions of Pascal’s hysteria.22 Also Aldous Huxley showed interest in Pascal in a similar vein, but, despite his admiration for many of Pascal’s thoughts, he pathologized Pascal’s personality as a whole to characterize him as a hypocrite sociopath trying to compensate his personal shortcomings through religion.23 In the framework of today’s neurology Pascal’s ailment would entirely be interpreted as a cerebral problem. His distorted vision would be understood as the result of a circumscribed brain lesion. Since his symptoms were episodic, one would perhaps conclude they were related to epileptic seizures. This same or another brain lesion would also be assumed to have led to his religious enthusiasm, since certain areas of the brain have been associated with overtly strong religious beliefs. One example of this is Gastaut-Geschwindsyndrome,24 which combines hyperreligiosity, a low sexual drive, excessive writing, and seizures. No matter what the exact “diagnosis” would be, the theoretical underpinning of this neurological interpretation is that every human perception, emotion, belief, or behavior must somehow be anchored in the materiality of the brain. That this leaves little space for cultural interpretations is not considered to be a problem, because culture itself is considered to be nothing more than the product of the brain.25 22 Sigmund Freud, “Mechanismus der Zwangsvorstellungen und Phobien,” in Gesammelte Werke. Nachtragsband aus den Jahren 1885–1938 (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1987), 354. Original in French under the title “Obsessions et phobies: Leur méchanisme psychique et leur étiologie,” Revue neurologique, 3 (1895), 33–38. 23 “In spite of all his heroic efforts, Pascal never succeeded in entirely suppressing the life that was in him. It was not in his power to turn himself into a pious automaton [. . .] He became a monomaniac, a man with but one aim – to impose the death of Christian spirituality on himself and all his fellows.” Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, II, 1926–1929 ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 367–406, (403). 24 E.g., S.G. Waxman/N. Geschwind, “The Interictal Behavior of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: The Interictal Behavior Syndromes of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 32 (1975), 1580–1586. 25 Interestingly, already in Pascal’s times such a materialistic logic came to its first fruition as Pascal’s body was dissected right after his death in 1662 to find out about his ailments, but with no results.

34 

 Pascal Grosse

In these changing accounts we find almost the entire matrix of culturally inflated understandings linked to visual perceptions: from the visible and the imperceptible, to the putative opposition between imagination and reality, to psychopathological categories such as misperception, delusion, illusion, obsessions, and hallucination. Further, visual perception has been arranged between two opposite poles. It can be real or unreal, or it is imperfect and needs to be complemented by the idea of the infinite, or visual experiences are interpreted as an abnormality in an individual otherwise a genius. Finally, the discourse on the visual since the seventeenth century has explored the boundaries between the visible on the one side and some supernatural and immaterial sphere on the other. The supernatural element has been mainly understood either in terms of religion or of some psychiatric deviation, even to the point that religion and psychopathology become interchangeable. When it comes to understanding dreams, the polarity between natural and supernatural is particularly evident. This comes as no surprise since dreams are the most subjective of any human experiences, unable to be shared by anybody else – like every true hallucination. Pascal’s story and its subsequent interpretations highlight the many different ways that human visual experience, whether waking or sleeping, can been shaped historically. All these elements create the common intellectual matrix on which the scientific discourse on the formation of the human intellect revolved. In this sense, the scientific discourse on dreaming provides little new insight on the human condition. However, what is specific about dreaming is the question of whether dreaming is a different state of existence from waking reasoning, or simply a replica of the latter. In the seventeenth century, Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke suggested three main coordinates to answer this question, which all significantly departed from Pascal’s theism.

3 Three Seventeenth-Century Concepts: Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke Whereas Pascal tried to reconcile science with theology, his contemporary Descartes took a different route that led him to his dualistic concept, but in which there was, as for Pascal, still a place for a God when it came to the human mind. For Descartes, the human body with its sensory experiences has clear limitations and does not serve as the crucial gateway to thinking which in turn represents a separate sphere in its own right. Thinking is determined by ideas, which are innate. In Cartesian epistemology dreaming serves as an important argument to question the truth of sensory experiences such as seeing or hearing based on a bodily, and by implication material, experience. In other words, Descartes refutes

Sensible Dreams 

 35

the assumption that the material world might bear absolute truth. In his Discourse on Method of 1637, he uses dreams in several thought experiments to show that truth only rests in the immaterial mind. According to Descartes, thinking while asleep can be identical to thinking while awake. However, since dreaming is just an illusion of the mind, by analogy the waking human experience also might be an illusion.26 Rather it is the self-awareness that, while thinking that there is no truth in the material world, that truth immaterially discloses itself to him: [. . .] while I decided thus to think that everything was false, it followed necessarily that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and observing that this truth: I think, therefore I am, was so certain and so evident that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were not capable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.27

Descartes then continues with a dream-like sequence in which he assumes that any concept of the body in space is dissolved: “[. . .] I could pretend that I had no body and that there was no world nor place that I was in.” In this non-corporeal state, he encounters the ultimate essence of human existence as it corresponds to the “I”: I thereby concluded that I was a substance, of which the whole essence or nature consists in thinking, and which, in order to exist, needs no place and depends on no material thing; so that this “I,” that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body and even that if the body were not, it would not cease to be all that it is.28

Here dreaming is understood not as a specific state of mind, but as a structural template for the dissolved and therefore infinite body. Crucially, for Descartes dreaming as a visual experience is as much a bodily act as is any waking visual perception. Both bear no truth when compared to thinking which is why thinking is existence, “for the most ordinary error of our dreams, which consists in their representing to us various objects in the same way as our external senses, this is not prejudicial, since it leads us very properly to suspect the truth of the ideas of 26 “And finally, considering that all the same thoughts that we have when we are awake can also come to us when we are asleep, without any one of them then being true, I resolved to pretend that nothing which had ever entered my mind was any more true than the illusions of my dreams.” René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, in René Descartes, Method and the Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (London: Penguin, 1968), 25–91, (53). 27 Descartes, Discourse on Method, 53–54; since for Descartes such a self-awareness of thinking as it exists in waking is lost while dreaming, of course, dreams provide no truth, but as detailed further in the Méditations the thinking individual always has to prove that he or she is not dreaming. 28 Descartes, Discourse on Method, 54.

36 

 Pascal Grosse

sense.” In summary, what we think represents truth, but what we sense should be met with caution. Working at the same time as Descartes, Hobbes addressed questions of dreaming within a concept that synthesized body and mind to a single entity, and that did not distinguish between outside materiality and inner illusions. And certainly, Hobbes did not advocate an ulterior truth located beyond the body. Therefore, rather than being an illusion or an imagination born out of one’s mind, dreaming is a sensory act, because sensual experience in both wakefulness and sleep are principally identical. In fact, dreaming is a residue, or waste product of waking. Hobbes was a staunch empiricist, and his anthropology in the Leviathan of 1651 starts off with the fundamental role of sensory experiences in the formation of the mind. To him, when it comes to dreaming, visual experiences in wakefulness are retained at some stage during the act of processing in the body and are then activated in sleep: “The imaginations of them that sleep, are those we call Dreams. And these also (as all other Imaginations) have been before, either totally, or by parcells in the Sense.”29 Hobbes describes at length the physical mechanisms by which an impression made on the eye while awake can be conserved and, during sleep, can set in motion the distorted dream imagery in the brain. Despite equating the imagery in wakefulness and sleep there remains, nevertheless, a crucial difference between these two states: “I am well satisfied, that being awake, I know I dreame not; though when I dreame, I think my selfe awake.”30 In short, there is no self-awareness of the dreamer as a dreamer. In consequence, dreaming is a state of lesser insight than thinking in wakefulness. This argument adds to Hobbes’s principal intention in his analysis which is to disentangle dreaming from religion and superstitions, which he considered to be “apparitions or visions.” Dreaming is material reality with a self-awareness distinct from that when awake, while all other visions are the result of human imagination, most notably those with a religious connotation. To Hobbes, the materiality of the human senses and the human brain is in exchange with the material world. Subsequently, he sharply distinguishes between dreams on the one hand and other dream-like imagery on the other hand, which are not materially grounded: From this ignorance of how to distinguish Dreams, and other strong Fancies, from vision and Sense, did arise the greatest part of the Religion of the Gentiles [. . .] that worshipped Satyres, Fawnes, nymphs, and the like; and now adayes the opinion that rude people have of Fayries, Ghosts, and Goblins; and of the power of Witches.31 29 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (London: Penguin, 1985), 90. 30 Hobbes, Leviathan, 90. 31 Hobbes, Leviathan, 92.

Sensible Dreams 

 37

Some decades later, classical English psychophysiological empiricism as represented by Locke systematically turned Descartes’s dualism upside down and added sophistication to Hobbes’s monism, who had already vigorously defied the duality of body and mind. To Locke there are no innate ideas; the human mind can only reconstitute what it has experienced through its senses and retained as memory, because there is no immaterial mind providing some higher truth than that of sensual experience. The truth is represented only as reality through sensory perception. When it comes to dreaming one would expect that Locke must come close to the concept of innate ideas: since the mind shuts down when humans sleep, dreams can only be the product of one’s own imagination, disconnected from experience while awake. But interestingly, he takes a different turn: “You find the mind in sleep retired [. . .] But in this retirement of the mind from the senses, it often retains a yet more loose and incoherent manner of thinking, which we call dreaming. And, last of all, sound sleep closes the scene quite, and puts an end to all appearances.”32 To Locke, dreaming is just one of a number of intermediate stages, during which some sensory input still acts on the human mind. In fact, Locke argues that there are many gradations between a state of being fully awake and a state of sleep. After all, all mental processes, whether in wakefulness or in sleep, depend on the amount of sensory input. Thus, Locke emphasizes the transitions between states of mental processes rather than their extremes: That which I would further conclude from hence is, that since the mind can sensibly put on, at several times, several degrees of thinking, and be sometimes, even in a waking man, so remiss, as to have thoughts dim and obscure to that degree that they are very little removed from none at all; and at last, in the dark retirements of sound sleep, loses the sight perfectly of all ideas whatsoever: since, I say, this is evidently so in matter of fact and constant experience, I ask whether it be not probable, that thinking is the action and not the essence of the soul?33

Stressing the extremes would have required him to advocate a concept in which a common single body could exist with two sharply distinct minds, a waking mind and a sleeping mind. Locke’s focus on transitions allows him to avoid this result. Instead, to summarize, Locke’s understanding of dreaming explicitly and fundamentally departs from Descartes’s concept of the mind. Locke essentializes sensory experience as a precondition for the functioning of the mind – also when this mind is asleep.

32 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Roger Woolhouse (London: Penguin, 1997), II, xix, 4. 33 Locke, Essay, II, xix, 4.

38 

 Pascal Grosse

4 Transitions between Waking and Dreaming: Diderot and Rousseau Locke’s suggestion of the “several degrees of thinking” in the states of waking and sleeping seems to be an important crossroad in the study of dreaming as it has developed up to today. A logic of transitions implies that there might not be any meaningful difference between waking and sleeping mental processes. Unlike Locke’s ultimately reductionist argument that dreaming is a state of reduced intellectual powers compared to wakefulness, some eighteenth-century philosophical writings entirely blur the borders between mental activity in waking or sleeping. In this view, dreaming definitely does not necessarily entail reduced intellectual faculties; indeed, dreaming can even be understood as a state of increased insight, a concept currently equaled with “lucid dreaming.” In a more systematic way the concept was advanced in the early twentieth century.34 Whether such a state exists biologically at all is still debated among neuroscientists, because one precondition would be that the dreamer is aware of dreaming while being, nevertheless, asleep. Many filmmakers have played precisely with the polarities of this hybrid state between full wakefulness and dreaming. Diderot preceded them by centuries in his complex philosophical treatise of 1769, D’Alembert’s Dream, in which he presented the core of his philosophy.35 The counterpart to lucid dreaming as in Diderot is rêverie. Rêverie means to be in a dream-like state while being awake, a state that provides deeper intellectual insights than plain wakefulness. Of course rêverie comes close to the idea of meditation, most explicitly in Rousseau’s unfinished Reveries of a Solitary Walker written in the 1770s. Diderot’s and Rousseau’s use of interchanges between sleeping and waking had its corollary in another topic that became very popular at the time: sleep-talking and somnambulism.36 Sleep-talking as well as somnambulism refer to meaningful speech and movements that are theoretically not supposed to occur in sleep, but, nevertheless, happen. The fact that d’Alembert 34 A. van Eeden, “A Study of Dreams,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 26 (1913), 431–461. As understood today, “lucid dreaming” refers to a mental state in which the individual is aware she or he is dreaming and is able to control the course of the dream. The fundamental problem with the concept of lucid dreaming is that neurophysiologically an individual can either be awake or asleep, the latter including dreaming. Since both states inherently imply different awareness of oneself theoretically “lucid dreaming” cannot exist. 35 Denis Diderot, D’Alembert’s Dream, in Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works, trans. Jacques Barzon and Ralph H. Bowen (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 2001), 92–175. 36 See especially the most influential treatise by John Bell, An Essay on Somnambulism, or Sleep-walking, Produced by Animal Electricity and Magnetism, as well as by Sympathy (Dublin: Printed for, and to be had of the author, also of Mr. Butler, and other booksellers, 1788).

Sensible Dreams 

 39

speaks while dreaming and that Rousseau is a walking “daydreamer” define their hybrid state of existence. In D’Alembert’s Dream, the putative opposition between dreaming and waking structures the philosophical principles of continuity and transitions Diderot is advancing to explain the workings of the universe. Also in the text, he discusses dreaming explicitly as a state of mind in its own right. The story starts with a daytime conversation between Diderot himself and d’Alembert, in which both contest Descartes’s and Leibniz’s theories of the immaterial mind. As an alternative, they propose that the plurality of living and non-living forms should be explained through the principle of continuity and continuous transitions from one form of material existence to another – from the infinite of the universe to atoms. The time then shifts to night. The physician Bordeu comes to visit his friend d’Alembert, only to encounter d’Alembert’s mistress Mlle de l’Espinasse. She tells Bordeu that d’Alembert is ill and talking in a state of feverish sleep. Despite considering his utterances to be confused, she took notes of them. Bordeu and l’Espinasse then go through d’Alembert’s utterances, thought by thought, as Bordeu explains to her how the material world is organized. Bordeu and l’Espinasse next go to d’Alembert’s chamber to listen to the sleep-talking patient, while Bordeu translates the meaning of d’Alembert’s new utterances. Occasionally, d’Alembert wakes up and joins in the conversation, not always aware of the thoughts he expressed while asleep. The text closes with a reflection between Bordeu and l’Espinasse the next day on the topics raised during the previous night. In this piece, both waking and dreaming as well as day and night illustrate the ideas of continuity and hybridity that are central to Diderot’s philosophy. Whether awake or asleep, d’Alembert participates in the flow of conversation, so that any distinction between wakefulness and sleeping becomes entirely blurred. At the end, it does not matter whether d’Alembert is awake or asleep. In both states, d’Alembert’s thoughts are lucid. The “expert” Bordeu does explain the sleep-talking, but not because d’Alembert’s train of thought was confused. Rather, as a dramaturgical tool, l’Espinasse is unfamiliar with his unconventional ideas and needs explanation of his waking thoughts also. Thus, Diderot uses waking and dreaming as hybrid states of existence in which two opposed principles mix to advance his idea of continuity. His approach primarily serves to put forward one of Diderot’s most cherished figures of thought in his entire writing, that of monstrosity.37 In the medieval and 37 See, e.g., May Spangler, “L’hermaphroditisme monstrueux de Diderot,” Études Françaises, 39 (2003), 109–120 and Andrew Curren, Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001).

40 

 Pascal Grosse

early modern periods, the monster represented the mixture of two realms, usually the combination of a human and a beast such as a human with an animal head or an animal body with a human head.38 This principle of monstrosity became inflected in many different ways (e.g., mixtures among different animals or between the sexes as in hermaphroditism). Diderot uses the hybrid character between sleeping and waking in very much this same sense to show that human thinking can be ambiguous, ambivalent, and in fact monstrous, but it is this monstrosity which makes the material world develop from one form to another through intermediate stages. This intention becomes obvious when Diderot advances his theoretical thoughts on how dreaming works.39 Though sleeping might produce “a whole series of sensations that are often ill-assorted, incoherent, or confused,” a condition in which “the animal ceases to exist as a whole entity” and “cooperation and subordination among his various faculties are lacking,” sleeping can also produce “sensations [. . .] so unified, consistent, and well-ordered that the man in question would display no greater eloquence if he were wide-awake.”40 Taking Locke’s basic idea of the “several degrees of thinking,” Diderot plunges into a discussion on the broad variety of dreams.41 He explains they are caused because our nerves are “active and passive by turns and in a variety of ways – hence the sense of disorder” as if dreams were “a transitory form of illness.” But Diderot seems to aim at an even more subversive idea: he contests that the principle of will, as a philosophical category, can only be applied to the waking mind. Diderot sees no meaningful difference in the expression of will whether dreaming or awake. For him, dreaming provides at least the same if not even perhaps better a ground for the expression of one’s own will than does wakefulness. Echoing Hobbes’s radical notion of deliberation, Diderot reduces will to “the most recent impulse of desire or aversion” so that

38 Park and Daston have suggested a three-stage periodization in the attitudes towards monstrosity since the Middle Ages: monsters as divine prodigies, as natural wonders, and since the eighteenth century as medical examples for comparative anatomy and embryology; Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston, “Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England,” Past and Present, 92 (1981), 20–54, and Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone, 1998); for the medical perspective around Diderot’s time see Urs Zürcher, Monster oder Laune der Natur. Medizin und die Lehre von den Missbildungen 1780–1914 (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2004). 39 In a more systematic fashion Diderot examines sleeping and dreaming in his Éléments de Physiologie, in Œuvres, I, 1296ff. 40 Diderot, D’Alembert’s Dream, 158. 41 Here and in the following, Diderot, D’Alembert’s Dream, 157ff.

Sensible Dreams 

 41

[a] deliberate act of will always originates in some internal or external motive, from some present impression or from some memory of the past, from some passionate impulse, or some plan for the future. All that being so, I have only one thing to say about freedom of the will – a so-called voluntary act is nothing but the most recent of our actions and the necessary effect of one single cause: ourselves.42

And for this immediacy between egocentric appetites and the act, it does not matter whether one is awake or asleep. Reinforcing his privileging of the dream state, he identifies human actions while awake only rarely to be deliberate. Diderot plays with all these paradoxes in order to be subversive. In his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau does not play at all. Nevertheless, there are some correspondences between the Diderot and Rousseau. The somnambulistic Rousseau is ultimately egocentric in his solitude, forlorn, and far removed from every other human being, as is made clear in the opening of the text: “Thus I am now alone in this world.”43 Rousseau is engaged in a dream-like state, raising the idea that dreams might be unreal, because “without noticing, I must have plunged from waking to sleeping, if not from life to death.” At the same time, Rousseau evokes a dream image which corresponds to his dissolving inner order. He feels “carried away from a well-structured order – how, I do not know – I just see myself falling into chaos, in which I am not able to discern anything, and the more I reflect upon my current situation the less I understand, where I am right now.” He then delves into this dream-like state in the following ten reveries to provide deeper insights and, ultimately, truth. Thus the rêverie plays with polar opposites, with the idea that, without the distractions of the material world sensed when fully awake, the blunted senses of sleep allows the sleeper to essentialize the meaning of life. Remarkably, Rousseau’s Reveries, as well as his Confessions, have mostly been interpreted as the autobiographical work of an almost paranoid philosopher who had failed in life. I would argue that some aspects of rêverie are closer to his social philosophy than may appear at first glance. In his Discourses, which were the basis of his anthropology for the later Social Contract, he describes the natural state of human existence as being “solitary, idle, and never far from danger,” but happy compared to life in civilization.44 As such “the savage lives within himself; the social man, outside himself, lives only in the opinion of others, and it is, so to 42 Diderot, D’Alembert’s Dream, 160; for a detailed discussion of Hobbes’s concept of will and freedom see Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), 276–278. 43 Here and in the following Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (London: Penguin, 1979), 1ff. 44 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, trans. Franklin Philip, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 32.

42 

 Pascal Grosse

speak from their judgment alone that he gets the sense of his own existence.”45 In short, rêverie comes close to the state of nature as he proposed it: lonesome, no sense of time, uncorrupted by civilization, and most importantly: truthful.

5 Perspectives Despite their apparent differences, all the conceptualizations of dreaming examined here share a common commitment to removing dreams from the realm of the divine and to secularizing dreaming as a state of mind, although, with the exception of Diderot, their authors were far from being atheists. Of course, by implication this movement also secularizes the content of dreams, which is perhaps why all the authors avoid the temptation to interpret dream content. Indeed, Pascal’s reflection probably represents one of the last attempts to insert an explicitly theological interpretation into a scientific framework. What comes to the fore instead are analyses that focus on transitions and exchanges between mental processes in wakefulness and sleep, to the point that both states become interchangeable. This result can be seen when Descartes suggested that neither the waking nor the sleeping mind can provide truth, because they are bound to experiences made through the material world; or, conversely, when Diderot and Rousseau contended that dreaming and reasoning while awake can mix to produce truthful insights. Neither of these two extreme positions, nor those, like Hobbes and Locke, who stand somehow in between, claim that mental processes in sleep and waking are fundamentally opposed. Compared to waking images, dream imagery might be distorted, but the formation of dream imagery can be analyzed and explained. This conclusion comes as no real surprise, since all these authors, except for Descartes, rely on the assumption that sensory experience channels the formation of the mind. God was excluded from this arena of theorizing mind-formation. Thus, for reasons of logical consistency, and to expel God from the process of mind formation altogether, these philosophers could offer no other explanation except that dreams must be in some exchange with the sensory experiences made in wakefulness. In this way, the occurrence of dreams could be explained without making dreaming an unreasonable action of the human mind. Where these authors primarily differed concerns the question of whether there is a reality beyond that reality provided by the human senses. Apart from Descartes, these authors also paved the way to anchoring dreams, like all other mental activity, in some bodily materiality, be it the nerves or the brain. Here again, this move allows no place for a God, though no one else went as far as La 45 Rousseau, Discourse, 84.

Sensible Dreams 

 43

Mettrie, who pathologized any religion itself on the basis of a cerebral pathology. But materialism by itself could not, and still cannot, provide interpretation and meaning when it comes to dream content, nor to any other action of the mind; so far, that form of materialism can only interpret structural principles and physiological mechanisms, but not the content of human mentation. By implication, any attempt to address the question of dream content on an exclusively materialistic basis can only lead to the claim that the content of dreams is generated by chance and, consequently, bears no meaning at all. In fact, current theories in the neurosciences on dreaming are therefore much closer to Hobbes and Locke than, for instance, to Freud. The chief question that Freud was concerned with was the timing of specific dream contents at particular moments in an individual biography. Because the neurosciences, to date, have no tools to analyze content and meaning, such questions can only be dismissed in the neurosciences for methodological reasons. This is the circular nature of current dream theories in the neurosciences today.46 This methodological problem also perhaps explains the ambiguity contained in the philosophical writings I have analyzed, although this ambiguity is not explicitly addressed. Leaving aside some logical inconsistencies encountered in all the authors, there remains a key doubt: can the human mind produce images by itself at all if one has not experienced them previously? Such images would be true hallucinations as in madness. They could, in fact, as Formey put it in the eighteenth century, represent some kind of mental anarchy, whether divine or secular in origin, because there would be no way to control it – except to wake up. That, it seems, is the anarchy of the potentially irrational human mind that these authors are writing against.

46 Hobson, Dreaming; for more refined views in current neurosciences and to some extent echoing Locke’s concept of graded mentation in sleep see, e.g., T. A. Nielsen, “A Review of Mentation in REM and NREM sleep: ‘Covert’ REM Sleep as a Possible Reconciliation of Two Opposing Models,” Behavior and Brain Sciences, 23 (2000), 851–866 and 904–1121.

Theresia Birkenhauer

Representation of Dreams – Representation of Theater 1 Introduction The starting point of my reflections is the following observation: Nearly all studies on dreams work with the metaphor of the theater. Time and again, dreams are referred to as “theater of the soul;” we hear of “the stage of the imagination” or a “dramaturgy of the dream narrative.” But what is the point of using these metaphors? This question is rarely posed – presumably because of the seemingly obvious: Dreams, like theater, are expressed through images and scenic tableaux. Both are determined by the visual. The opposite is not necessarily true, however. In accounts of the history of dreams in art and literature, theater is certainly mentioned, but in a singularly reduced fashion. We read examinations of the dream motif in dramatic texts, the dramaturgical function of dreams and dream narrations, yet rarely does this inquiry take up the mode of theatrical presentation itself in relationship to the way dreams are articulated. This is where my question comes in. I am interested in looking into how theater as a medium relates to the form of the dream. In other words, my focus is the relationship between the modes of representation in theater versus those of dreams. As I can only present an initial outline of this question here, I have chosen to illustrate my point by using better-known plays as examples.

2 Calderon de la Barca: Life is a Dream (1625) In Calderon’s drama Life is a Dream, the analogy of theater and dream is grounded in the ontological positioning of theater itself. Theatrum mundi – the whole world is a stage and the theater is a monadic mirror of this world. If we only follow the dramatic plot, the relation to the dream appears didactic more than anything else. King Basilio locks his son, Segismundo, in a tower Note: Theresia Birkenhauer passed away on November 6, 2006. She was not able to finalize this text for publication. An earlier German version of this essay was published in Theresia Birkenhauer, Theater / Theorie. Zwischen Szene und Sprache, ed. Barbara Hahn and Barbara Wahlster (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2008), 190–205.

46 

 Theresia Birkenhauer

immediately after his birth because his pregnant wife dreamed that she would give birth to a “monster” that would kill her. When the son grows up, he is allowed out of the tower for 24 hours and exposed to real life, in order to determine whether he is capable of ruling. The experiment fails. The son who had been kept in isolation turns aggressive and is locked away once again. To comfort him, the prince is told that his experience outside of the tower was only a dream – an explanation he takes very seriously. What was supposedly a dream was genuine happiness for Segismundo. He concludes that life in general is a dream – a fleeting, ephemeral joy. For this very reason, one must honor God even in sleep and act justly in dreams. With this insight, the son becomes wiser than his father, who fears losing his authority. From this perspective, we can read the play as depicting a process of selfdisciplining and recognize Segismundo as the modern subject who complies with internalized rules of reason. Yet the key conclusion – life is a dream – becomes evident only through the scenic design of theatrical reality. The spectator can only perceive what is, on the level of plot, an abstract conclusion by means of what is being represented on stage. We see Segismundo, who is locked away in a cage and has become a barbarian. What is he? A king? An animal? A “monster”? The other figures cannot be understood without a certain ambiguity. Rosaura, the main female character, appears as a valiant stranger, a desired chambermaid, a committed liberator. She appears in different costumes, as a man, as a woman, and, finally, as a manly woman – and only in the end does she learn that she is also a daughter (of a mother, who, like herself, was also dishonored). The same holds true for Clotaldo, who is not only a true servant to the king and his son, but also an unfaithful lover and secret father. Which identities – gender, origin, social belonging – can be trusted? Which roles are chosen freely by the individual, which are imposed by others? Although the play takes place on just one level of reality (no dream is actually ever depicted), the temporal juxtaposition of heterogeneous realities, deceptive confusions, and illusory in decidability reveal the logic that life should be taken as a dream. The logic of dreams corresponds to the specifics of the theater as a medium.

3 William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1590) The first play that comes to mind in relation to theater and dreams, however, is not Calderon’s Life is a Dream, but Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Representation of Dreams – Representation of Theater 

 47

This is probably due to Max Reinhardt’s famous productions of 1905 and 1913, which utilized all potential theatrical means of representation to suggest the analogy to the fantastic quality of dreams. (The film version gives an impression of this.) Visual opulence, an abundance of playful fantasy, virtuoso acting – these attributes caused Hugo von Hofmannsthal to speak of the stage as a “dream image,”1 in reference to Max Reinhardt’s production. Shakespeare’s play also makes the relationship between dreams and theater tangible in other ways. The relation claimed in the title should not necessarily be taken literally – as if A Midsummer Night’s Dream were actually presented on stage. It can also be interpreted as a question addressed to the audience. At the very end, the play references its own title. Puck suggests that the audience regard everything they have just seen as a dream: “And this weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream.”2 But what has the audience just seen? Four different plots, intricately blending into each other. The preparations for Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding are interrupted by the amorous woes of four youths from Athens who flee to the forest. There is also a group of craftsmen who are rehearsing for a performance of the tragedy Pyramus and Thisbe at the wedding. Both groups are subject to a magic spell that the jealous Fairy King Oberon has his imp, Puck, put on them in order to disgrace Titania. This construction brings together several spatially and temporally separate elements: Greece, the Middle Ages, and Elizabethan England; upper and lower classes – nobility and craftspeople; the city as the place of social order and the forest as location for a precarious bewitchment. Every couple is mirrored by another: the ducal couple in Athens finds its double in the Fairy King Oberon and Queen Titania, the sorrow of the couples from Athens is reflected by the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, performed by the craftsmen. At the level of fable, the drama unfolds within the structure of a comedy. The disturbances of the wedding preparations are happily resolved by the events in the Athens forest. But the theatrical staging turns this formula upside down. Because Puck confuses the couples, Oberon’s magic elixir produces transformations that lead to the dissolution of the characters’ identities; it disfigures them. What they experience is much less magical than abysmal. Lovers turn into haters, unloved into beloved, fairy queens become fools: the characters recognize 1 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Die Bühne als Traumbild”, in Gesammelte Werke, Prosa II, ed. Herbert Steiner (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1959), 63–67, also in Das Theater, 1/1 (Oct. 1, 1903). 2 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare), ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1979), V, 413–414. All further references in the body of the text.

48 

 Theresia Birkenhauer

neither themselves nor one another, loving wishes result in brutality, no conventions protect desire, eroticism is bestial. In the end, everybody is lost and alone in a fog “black as Acheron” (III, 358). Is all of this just a rite of passage? Is the forest an image of the transformation of sexually confused youths? The fables could be read that way. But what is easily discernible at the level of the fable becomes more and more indiscernible for the spectator on stage: the framing story with the wedding preparations and the transformation due to a magic elixir; the spheres of court and forest, day and night. The reason for this confusion is the mode of theatrical representation itself. For to the spectator, both areas, the world of day and the sphere of nightly metamorphosis, are equally present in the reality of the performance. Because the nightly aberrations are just as present to the audience as the events at court, the distinction claimed on the level of dramatic fiction becomes blurred. This difficulty to differentiate increases exponentially, if we assume that the same two actors play both ruling couples. The orderly Theseus is also a despotic Oberon; the chaste Hippolyta is also donkey-loving Titania. The characters are themselves and others at the same time. They are over-determined fusions of opposed characters, “composite figures,”3 as Freud would call them. In the end, each of the characters describes the strange events in the forest as a dream, although nobody was dreaming4 and it was sorcery that caused the monstrous metamorphoses. It was all just a dream – Oberon explains, which makes the events bearable.5 Is this actually a relief or – on the contrary – cause for concern? The answer certainly depends on how one qualifies dreams. The ambivalence of this explanation becomes obvious in the discussion among the characters immediately after the night sequence. Hippolyta seems disturbed by the strange reality of the dream narratives: “’Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of” (V, 1), and does not want to perceive them as purely fictional: “But all the story of the night told over, / [.  .  .] More witnesseth than fancy’s images” (V, 23, 25). Theseus, however, qualifies the dream as an unreal chimera: “More strange than true. I never may believe / These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. / Lovers and madmen have such seething brains” (V, 2–4). The dispute about the status of dreams is not resolved within the play, but passed on to the audience at the end by means of a play-within-a-play construction. 3 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. and trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953), IV, 293 and 322. 4 With the exception of Hermia, but her dream is also caused by sorcery. 5 “When they next wake, all this derision / Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision” (370–371). This is also the case for the craftsmen. “May all to Athens back again repair, / And think no more of this night’s accidents / But as a fierce vacation of a dream” (IV, 64–66).

Representation of Dreams – Representation of Theater 

 49

The main plot is interrupted three times by the craftsmen’s play, emphasizing that the whole affair is, in fact, staged. This self-reflexive reference to the theater culminates in the fifth act, when the craftsmen finally get to perform their play, Pyramus and Thisbe – which fails, because it is incapable of creating a theatrical illusion for the spectator. The craftsmen’s play thus points out the condition for every theatrical performance. In the end, everything depends on the audience’s willingness to perceive an actor as the embodiment of a fictional character – be it of a wall, a moon, or a lion. Theseus puts it like this: “The best in this kind are but shadows; and the / worst are no worse, if imagination amend them” (V, 208–209). It is the spectator’s imagination that gives life to the performance – a reality that is at the same time a non-reality. This is also true for the play that has just been staged. Puck alludes to this when, at the end, he calls upon the audience to view the events as a dream. Puck: “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumber’d here / While these visions did appear. / And this weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream” (V, 409–414). If this play, in which neither a dreamer nor a dream situation is shown, is still called A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this is done so in view of an audience that is meant to recognize that which is presented on stage as precisely this, a dream vision. The spectators do not relate to the dramatic plot that attributes the characters’ aberrations to the effect of a magic elixir. Rather, they relate to the illusionary presence of the scene during which the action seems (to the spectators) like a dream sequence. The staged representation in its illusionary character corresponds to the spectators’ own experiences of dreaming. Shakespeare’s play does not address the dream on the level of plot, for instance by treating dreaming or dreaming persons as the subject. Instead, the focus is on the difference between the mode of dreaming and the representation of a dream. Demetrius wants to talk about what he experienced as a dream; Bottom wants to have a ballad written about his.6 But the spectator hears neither Demetrius remembering his dream nor the literary adaptation of Bottom’s dream experience. They have experienced, in the illusionary presence of the staged representation, what memory and literature subsequently address. It is this difference between realization on stage and simple dream narration that Shakespeare’s play is about – in analogy to the distinction between a successful and a failed theater performance. The question of the dream is connected 6 Demetrius: “Why, then, we are awake [. . .], / And by the way let us recount our dreams” (IV, 196–197). Bottom: “I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what / a dream it was [. . .] / I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this / dream: it shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’, because / it hath no bottom” (IV, 204–205, 212–215).

50 

 Theresia Birkenhauer

here with reflections on the scenic structure of the theater. This representational structure comes into focus as a double fictionality. On the one hand, it is the fiction of dramatic action; on the other hand, it is the illusion of an actual scene. If the performance is successful, the audience may well experience the sorcery of the Fairy King as something familiar, as a dream vision. Shakespeare is quite ahead of his time. A Midsummer Night’s Dream clearly illustrates that theater and dreams are not linked by any thematic connection, but by the theater’s representational structure – the double fictionality of dramatic plot and scenic presence. The theater allows the audience to watch themselves dream, whether dreams are the subject matter or not.

4 Karl Philipp Moritz: Blunt oder der Gast. Ein Fragment (1780) A leap in time brings us to the eighteenth century, to Karl Philipp Moritz (1757– 1793), best known for his work Anton Reiser: A Psychological Novel. However, Moritz also wrote a play – just one – Blunt, or The Guest: A Fragment (1780). The play remained unknown and was first performed in 1986, more than 200 years after it had been written. The work depicts the following scene: An elderly couple and their daughter sit around a table at midnight; Blunt, bitter because of his poverty, is plagued by murderous fantasies. The six-year-old daughter already has apparitions of her own. They all sleep on chairs because the bed has been rented to a stranger. The guest is in fact none other than their own son, whom the parents believe to have died in a shipwreck. The son wants to spend a night at his parents’ house before revealing himself to them. Driven by an inner compulsion, however, Blunt kills his son without recognizing him. In the morning, the son’s bride and her father arrive for a family reunion, revealing the son’s identity. The fiancée loses her mind. Next to the body of the murdered son, Blunt wishes: “Could I undo what I have done [. . .] Oh, would that everything were a dream! – that it were a dream.” 7 This is followed by a poem repeating the plea: “So call back to me the moment / ere the deed was done, / call it back to me” (45). Instantly, the scene where Blunt stands before his son “with a drawn knife” (45) repeats itself. Like a segment of film spliced into the story line, the action picks up again at that very spot. This time, the murder is not committed. When the bride and the father arrive in the morning, all the problems 7 Karl-Philipp Moritz, Blunt oder der Gast. Ein Fragment, in Werke in zwei Bänden, ed. Heide Hollmer and Albert Meier (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999), I, 25–82 (44). Translations are mine. All further references in my translation in the body of the text.

Representation of Dreams – Representation of Theater 

 51

are solved, and the wedding feast has already been prepared. Shock and shame remain for the father, who recognizes his son in the stranger he felt an urge to kill in his sleep. But the son implores him: “Please do not speak a word of this thing again” (50). A conventional, familiar pattern taken from fable might be traced here: the father’s moral transformation through insight into a devastating action, apostrophized as a dream. But this would ignore the dramaturgical peculiarities of the play. There is no instance of moral reflection in the play. Moritz does not use the dramaturgical function of the dream as it was commonly employed in the eighteenth century, as an instrument to illuminate the inner consciousness of the characters. Instead, the whole theatrical performance is represented as a dream. The play does not focus on the characters’ reflections, but on the vision on stage, directly addressed to the spectator’s perception of reality. We do not see a person on stage, who is supposed to be dreaming, but instead a staged representation consisting of two dream sequences and one interruption. Karl Philipp Moritz was the founder and editor of the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, a groundbreaking publication in the field of empirical psychology published in ten volumes between 1783 and 1793. It presented reports on psychological peculiarities and unusual phenomena, but also focused on the “seemingly small,”8 the unspectacular, the normality of human life – without the morally tinged concept of enlightenment common in the contemporary weeklies. Essays on dreams play an important part in the Magazin. The general topic of interest seems to be the individual, so-called natural dream. Dreams are collected and catalogued – and thus become an issue of theoretical and empirical curiosity. It is against this background that we should regard Moritz’s contribution to the theory of dreams. The play is actually an essay in the form of a dramatic vision, which – unlike attempts to rationalize – seeks to make the dream viewable as a specific mediality of consciousness, as a sort of “soul production.” Moritz’s Erfahrungsseelenkunde is especially interested in the reality effect of the dream. This reality effect was examined as a phenomenon of “deception,” of illusion. The paradigm of this mode of experience in the late eighteenth century, however, was the theater. That is the source of the unusual dramaturgy of Blunt. The play consists of short sequences that expose a motif rather than follow narrative logic. Without bothering with conventions of dialogue, the characters utter texts that express nothing but their own motivations – right at the beginning, the father mentions murderous thoughts: “I want no tears, I want blood! Blood!” (25); the mother calls her husband “proud and barbaric” (26); the daughter would like 8 Karl-Philipp Moritz, “Vorschlag zu einem Magazin einer Erfahrungs-Seelenkunde,” in Werke in zwei Bänden, I, 793–809 (801).

52 

 Theresia Birkenhauer

the “strange gentleman” (28) as a lover and brother; and the son wants to shock his parents with his sudden reappearance. Moritz’s play takes a special interest in what Freud would later describe as the “Teilung” or “Spaltung” (division) of a dream into pre-dream and post-dream, so that in both dreams “the same material were being represented [. . .] from different points of view.”9 This is how the poem comes into the play. The lyrical break in the dramatic form marks the moment of waking before the vision is picked up again, this time from another point of view. Without any framing, only the poem’s interruption, the play thus presents the dream events twice: the nightmare – a fantasy of murder – and the utopian dream – a fantasy of happiness. Moritz utilizes the theater to reflect upon dreams because of the special perception mode of the theater, the scenic illusion. His play puts this mode of perception into relation with the dream vision. Moritz uses the illusion effect of theater to make the experience of the dream visible.

5 Heinrich von Kleist: Prinz von Homburg (1809/1810) The many dreamers in Kleist’s plays have led to the term “theater of the subconscious” in connection with his oeuvre. This especially concerns characters whose dreams articulate a desire, hidden in speech that is alien to them. It is crucial that Kleist exposes the spectator to the very same doubts about the reality status of his / her perception that the protagonist experiences. This explains why Kleist uses the theatrical structure in such a complicated way. He interweaves the different levels of reality in a way that makes not only the characters but also the spectators doubt the reliability of their perception. But how reliable is perception in theater, in view of events whose unreality is stipulated at the level of the fictional plot? This issue is raised in the very first scene of Prince of Homburg. In the night before the decisive battle, the Prince of Homburg is sleepwalking through the castle grounds; his friend, Count Hohenzollern, shows the spectacle to the Elector and his entourage. The stage directions state: “A Garden in the Old French Style. In the background a castle, with a ramp leading down from it. It is night. Scene I. The Prince of Homburg, bare headed and with his shirt open at the throat, nodding half asleep, is seated underneath an oak tree twining a wreath.”10 9 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 314–315. 10 Heinrich von Kleist, Prince Frederick of Homburg: A Play, in Five Plays, trans. and introduced by Martin Greenberg (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1988), 269–350 (271). All further references in the body of the text.

Representation of Dreams – Representation of Theater 

 53

In the events on stage, the theater situation is in fact doubled. The Prince is exposed to the entourage who, so it says, are looking “down at him over the balustrade of the ramp” (271). Torches illuminate the dreaming sleepwalker. The Elector interferes with the dream scene, like a director, by staging the “scene” of a victory ceremony for the sleepwalker. The Princess is supposed to hand the crown and necklace to Homburg. The dreaming man addresses the Princess as his “bride,” the Elector and his wife as “father” and “mother” (274). As Homburg reaches for the trophy, everyone draws back from him, and all that remains of the dream is a glove (274). After awakening, Homburg recounts the events as a dream. In his tale, the dream scene becomes a magnificent fantasy of wishful thinking – until the moment when the glove disrupts the distinction between dream and reality. The dream narrative falters; the Prince has forgotten the woman’s name. The end of the play repeats the opening tableau. But now it is represented not as a somnambulant dream, but as a real part of the plot. The Prince is not asleep but awaiting his execution blindfolded. One moment he is expecting death and pondering the vision of his immortality, the next he is celebrated as a hero and the Princess hands him the laurel wreath. Homburg faints. Homburg asks, “No, it’s a dream! Do say – is it a dream?” to which Kottwitz replies, “A dream, what else?” and “all” chime in with the battle cry: “Down, enemies of Brandenburg, into the dust!” (350). Between the opening and closing scenes, an action marked by strange concatenations, slips, and misinformation unravels. Disturbed by the real object from the dream, the Princess’s glove, and dazed by the nighttime dream of the victory ceremony he interprets as a prophecy, Homburg fails to hear the Elector’s orders for battle – and because of this he wins the battle.11 The Elector dies in battle. Hastily, Homburg assumes the other’s position with Natalie and proposes to her. The next moment, the death announcement turns out to be a false report. A coincidence – the exchange of a horse – has saved the Elector’s life. The Elector learns of Homburg’s failure to obey and sentences him to death – which leads Homburg to the question: “Am I dreaming or awake? Can this be real? It must be I am raving!” (307). The Princess secures a pardon, which the Elector grants on condition that the Prince decides by his own sense of justice whether he should live or die. Homburg volunteers to die. At the same time, the officers demand that the verdict be reversed. The stage for execution is set, in order to perform the act of clemency as a victory ceremony.

11 Looking back on this scene Homburg says about the state of his mind: “Elsewhere, yes – on other things. I don’t know what was wrong” (291).

54 

 Theresia Birkenhauer

Random decisions, mistakes, and accidental slips determine the events between dream and war, dream and death. They undermine the logic of the plot as well as the reality criterion of perception. The fictional action begins with Homburg’s dream and it ends with the dream coming true. Homburg, however, experiences it in reverse. From his perspective, the first crowning was real, whereas the second feels like a dream to him. The others’ perspective is equally unclear. They see, above all else, Homburg’s mental state, as “nothing more than a fit of mere distractedness” (272) and explain his actions as somnambulism, illness, or narcissistic ambition, a triumphal precognition of victory. The same lack of clarity is true of the spectator’s point of view. This becomes evident in the final scene. Is the pardon a dream? Or is the reentry into the war a dream? Or does the Elector’s dream of reuniting his men in battle against the enemy come true? The inability to differentiate between dream and reality also arises on the level of character construction, on the level of reciprocal perception between the characters, and on the level of the play as a whole. Here, Kleist treats the topic of war experience. He combines these three levels by systematically playing with the impossibility of differentiating between the theatrical illusion that equally simulates both reality and imagination. He presents two dream scenes that are also staged as theater scenes. The spectators as well as the dramatis personae are left with open questions concerning where the dream ends and where the war and the theater start. The play begins with a doubled fiction. In theater, a dream scene coincides with the fictional reality of the play. This is transferred into a theater scene, a performance, with the Prince of Homburg as the exhibition object. Twice, the Elector plays the role of director. In the beginning, the “urge of curiosity” tempts him (“Follow me, my friends, we will study him a little closer” (272)) and he tries to expose the Prince’s secret wishes by taunting him with the “tableau” of the victory ceremony. In the end, the Elector makes the Prince experience the horror of death before arranging the pardon as a theater scene in which the Prince’s dream seems to come true. From the very beginning, this staging also makes it unclear how the spectator is to differentiate between dreamed and staged reality. Is the constant reevaluation and strange linkage of events an effect of the shifting of dream and reality in Homburg’s mind? Or is it the consequence of a military logic that stimulates the soldiers’ affective economy by alternately staging the immanent glory of victory and the threat of death? Does the spectator recognize the scene as a description of the protagonist’s inner reality, or does he perceive the whole scenic arrangement as a dream image of the objective reality of a society at war?

Representation of Dreams – Representation of Theater 

 55

Who is dreaming? Is it the Prince of Homburg? Or Heinrich von Kleist? A now-famous Peter Stein production (Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer Berlin, 1972) took up this structure by staging the play as Kleist’s Dream of the Prince of Homburg: “. . . no dramaturgy of the disfigured visions of the unconscious – but a clear, logical, hovering-stabilized dream construction [. . .]. That is where the immanent unreality of the characters in this play stems from; they are mounted from a ‘real’ picture corresponding to Kleist’s reality and an ‘ideal’ one (the dream part they are made of), and they represent both images at the same time,” 12 says Botho Strauss, dramatic adviser to the production. Half unreal, half real – that is what characterizes the status of these dramatic characters. Kleist operates with the theatrical scene’s indeterminate status of reality. It becomes the possibility of interpreting the reality of the dramatis personae as the dream of a character.

6 Franz Grillparzer: Der Traum ein Leben (1834) Dreams seem to distance themselves from the “general dream experience” in Kleist’s dramas. They resemble reality; they are not encoded. Unlike those Romantic writers who were interested in dreams as the dark side of the human soul, Kleist was curious about the barely noticeable line between imagined and real experience, dreamed and perceived reality. This dream theater was impossible to perform on the eighteenth-century stage. Kleist’s dramaturgy shook up the dramatic practice that had assigned scenic fiction exclusively to the illusion of real events. With the Romantics’ interest in the phantasmic and aesthetic potential of the dream, however, the medium by which dreams were represented changed. “Dreams are spontaneous poetry,”13 as Jean Paul puts it. Not the theater, but the novella and the novel become the privileged media for making linguistic shifts in the symbolic border connected to dreams. In this way, literary, “artificial dreams,”14 as Elisabeth Lenk calls them, are created. Grillparzer’s Der Traum ein Leben: Dramatisches Märchen in vier Aufzügen is also about this phantasmic potential. Here, the distance between dream and reality is constitutive. 12 Kleists Traum vom Prinzen von Homburg. Dir. by Peter Stein, 1972; videorecording: VHS tape 1 video cassette (137 min.) Berlin: SFB, et al. With Peter Lühr, Katharina Tüschen, et. al.. 13 Jean Paul, “Über das Träumen,” in Werke, ed. Norbert Miller (Munich: Hanser, 1962), IV, 971–982 (978). 14 Elisabeth Lenk, Die unbewußte Gesellschaft. Über die mimetische Grundstruktur in der Literatur und im Traum (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1983), esp. 201–250 (234).

56 

 Theresia Birkenhauer

Rustan, the protagonist, is to marry the daughter of a rich countryman, but he longs for adventures and fame. The night before he wants to head out, he dreams about such adventures, forestalling the life he so desires. Upon waking up, he will abjure this life. In Act IV, he is ready for marriage. At first glance, this seems like the simple scheme of a coming-of-age story, with a young man mending his ways. Converted by his dreams, Rustan recognizes the illusion of fame and grandeur and returns to his fiancée. But unlike many other dramas in which a bad dream is the reason for the return of the hero, this dream is not narrated, but instead placed in the center of the performance. Grillparzer also works with the difference between fictional action and what is represented on stage. The instrumentalization of dreams (for moral purposes) on the level of the plot enables a break with dramaturgic and moral norms of presentation in favor of an abysmal fantasy. The staged presentation creates an aesthetic attraction that undermines the moral purpose. The dramaturgic economy is in accordance with this, since the presentation of the dreams takes up almost the whole play. Rustan murders and lies, he desires the daughter of a strange king whom he kills, he usurps the king’s power and becomes a tyrannical dictator until he wakes up just as he is falling off a bridge. The dream leaps to and fro between times and places, it moves between lonely mountains and exotic landscapes with golden snakes, daggers, witches, and mysterious women. It wallows in adolescent fantasies of anarchy and violence. Grillparzer carefully distances the dream from the level of the fictional reality. The allegorical characters of sleep and dream stand next to the dreamer’s veiled bed. But does this localization create the space for a spectacle that undermines the aesthetic effect of moral intentions? Unlike Calderon’s Life is a Dream, the title here indicates the gap between dreams and reality, signaling a bias toward fantasy rather than life. This is perhaps the reason for the success of this dramaturgical scheme. Grillparzer’s play became a prototype for many dream plays constructed in similar ways: from Ernst Toller’s Die Wandlung and Karl Kraus’s Traumtheater to Bertolt Brecht’s Die Gesichte der Simone Machard.

7 August Strindberg: A Dream Play (1901) One play that announces the connection between dream and theater in its very title is Strindberg’s A Dream Play, which alludes to real dream experiences in a very different way. While the dream makes it possible in part to abandon realistic conventions of performance in Grillparzer’s play, it becomes a new mode of scenic presentation for Strindberg. Strindberg’s play marks a caesura in two

Representation of Dreams – Representation of Theater 

 57

ways: it corresponds to the new, modern concept of dreams as a representation of the unconscious, and to a new understanding of theater’s mediality. Even if Strindberg writes in a letter: “The Dream Play is a new form, which is my invention,”15 it is the medial changes in the theater around 1900 that are fundamental to this play. Modern stage technology and a new definition of directing had established the performance, the staging, as an independent form of artistic expression. The space, the voice, the sound, and décor were no longer predefined as having an illustrative function, but became autonomous in relation to the literary text. Strindberg implements this new mode of representation in two ways. The dramaturgy of A Dream Play focuses on the staging alone and not on the level of plot – “no intrigue; no strong curtains demanding applause”16 (as Strindberg writes in his preface). It depicts the scenario as a visual composition of a pictorial space, and thus breaks “with both the Aristotelian drama of strict causality [. . .] and the drama of character.”17 The play consists of 92 separate scenes of various lengths – from very short to minimal action sequences. Locations change even during a scene – without any logical reason in the story line. Time can stretch or compress (before the stage door, entire years pass in seconds) or take an opposite direction (an old officer is suddenly back at school). Material objects develop a life of their own; the line between animate and inanimate is annihilated (a castle grows like a plant; a ship becomes a skyscraper with trees). Instead of a protagonist, there are various changing characters that are not individualized: officer, lawyer, poet, concierge, glazier as well as innumerable minor characters perceived as polyphonic voices. “There are no solos with accompaniments, that is, no big parts, characters – or rather, no caricatures,” Strindberg writes in the preface of 1907.18 The characters do not determine the action. They are part of a visual scenario that unfolds a whole mesh of correspondences within the objects, silhouettes, colors, and light. The center of the play is the dream, not as a motif or a plot, but as a mode of representation. In the preface of 1907 Strindberg programmatically stated: “I have in this present dream play sought to imitate the incoherent but ostensibly

15 Strindberg to his German translator Emil Schering, May 13, 1902, cited in Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker, Strindberg and Modernist Theatre: Post-Inferno Drama on the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57. 16 Strindberg, “A Note from the Author,” in Selected Plays, trans. and introduced by Evert Sprinchorn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 647. 17 Marker and Marker, Strindberg and Modernist Theatre, 57. 18 Strindberg, “A Note from the Author,” 646–647 (647).

58 

 Theresia Birkenhauer

logical form of our dreams. Anything can happen; everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist.”19 Unlike in Grillparzer’s play, A Dream Play does not have the function of conjuring up a fantastic reality. Instead, it is everyday social reality seen in the mode of dream perception: school, marriage, university, backstage, divorce, poverty, unjustified punishment, and false rewards, in short, the monotony of everyday life. This reality is broken up into different perspectives, transformed, blown apart, decomposed, disfigured. It is taken apart and condensed into scenes. The stage becomes the pictorial space for a dreaming consciousness that is not personalized in any character: “a mixture of memories, experiences, spontaneous ideas, impossibilities, and improvisations,” as Strindberg puts it. He goes on to say: “The characters split, double, multiply, dissolve, condense, float apart, coalesce. But one mind stands over and above them all, the mind of the dreamer; and for him there are no secrets, no inconsistencies, no scruples, no laws. He does not condemn, does not acquit; he only narrates the story.”20 The title of Strindberg’s Dream Play connects back to Calderon’s Life is a Dream. The title is as much a name for a genre referring to the mode of representation as it is a statement about life: “Whoever during these brief hours follows the sleepwalking author on his wanderings may find a certain similarity between the apparent jumble of a dream and the disordered and mottled cloth of life, woven by the great World Weaver.”21 Unlike Kleist, Strindberg does not target the ontological status of the dramatic characters in the scenic presentation, their illusionary presence. He looks at the theater’s individual forms of expression; he is interested in their imaginative potential beyond the function of the illusion. The stage becomes a visual space that constantly changes into new, fictional settings that permeate one another. This space corresponds to a specific temporality that produces different intensities of duration; they can widen, fragment, and invert. The stage constitutes a shifting visuality in which objects and characters constantly change and transform, while voices and sounds become material for the composition of independent acoustic settings. Instead of dramatic progression, the play is governed by continual shifts of form, with sudden reversals, discontinuities, and repetitions. What does the spectator do in this theater? The convention that makes them the observers of events from the outside is negated. Strindberg’s Dream Play asks them to give up their sovereign position in favor of a shifting attention that is given over to the events on stage. 19 Strindberg, “A Note from the Author,” 646. 20 Strindberg, “A Note from the Author,” 646. 21 Strindberg, “A Note from the Author,” 646–647.

Representation of Dreams – Representation of Theater 

 59

Clearly this proved to be difficult. In order to make the performances easier, Strindberg wrote a prologue in 1907 that shows Agnes, daughter of gods, descending to the world to inform the audience about her motives. This framework introduces two levels – just like in Grillparzer – that provide the spectator’s perception with a clear orientation. The dream play, however, also proved very difficult to stage. The first few times the play was performed, the acting and the stage remained realistic. To this day, the play is a promise as well as a challenge. The list of famous productions reads like a Who’s Who of the theater: Max Reinhardt (Deutsches Theater Berlin, 1921), Antonin Artaud (Alfred-JarryTheater Paris, 1928), Ingmar Bergman (TV Sweden, 1963, Royal Dramatic Theater Stockholm, 1970, Residenztheater Munich, 1977, Royal Dramatic Theater Stockholm, 1986), Robert Lepage (Royal Dramatic Theater Stockholm, 1994), Robert Wilson (Theater of the City of Stockholm, 1998). The spectrum ranges from oneiric fantasy, biographical tableau, and melancholy revue to the dematerialized ghost show. Let me return to my original question of the relationship between theatrical modes of representation and those of dreams. The plays we have examined show the wide variety of ways that the forms of theater have been used in terms of staging dreams and dream experiences. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the dream vision becomes the standard for a scenic presentation that – in its illusionary visual presence – has the same envisioning power for the spectator that a dream sequence does. Blunt, or the Guest, Karl Philipp Moritz’s forgotten drama, sees the dream itself as the key to exploring the individual’s psychological reality. The eighteenth-century illusionary theater gives Moritz the opportunity to convey this experience in all its complexity by means of theatrical illusion. For Kleist, this psychic reality becomes the material for constructing characters, drawing on the possibility presented by the medium of theater of understanding these characters as figures in a dream. Kleist systematically plays with the impossibility of differentiating theatrical illusion in order to blend wish and reality in a way that shakes both the logic of the action depicted and the reality criterion of perception. Grillparzer with his clear distinction between dream and reality is an example of the Romantic understanding of dreams as an alien “dark side” of the soul. Here, the illusionary presence of the scene mainly depicts an unrestrained fantasy. Strindberg, finally, starts with this representational potential of the stage, but liberates it from its mimetic connection to reality. The space of the stage becomes a visual space in which the everyday social world is represented as a dreaming consciousness. It becomes a space of a consciousness for which, as Freud puts it, “the most general and the most striking” condition of dreams is true: “a thought, and as a rule a thought of something that is wished,

60 

 Theresia Birkenhauer

is objectified in the dream, is represented as a scene, or as it seems to us, is experienced.”22 The medial form of European theater consists of the relationship between subjective thoughts and the scenes in which these thoughts are presented as objective conditions in an external world.

22 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 534.

Marianne Schuller

The Logic of Writing, the Logic of Dreams Reading Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry Gottfried Keller’s novel, The Green Henry exists in two versions. The first was published in 1854/1855, the second in 1879/1880. One of the main differences between the two versions, which are separated by a quarter of a century, lies in the narrator. The later work is told only in the first person, while the 1854 edition makes use of an omniscient narrator as well as a first person narrator. The earlier firstperson narration contains an addition, which relates the story of the protagonist’s youth, told by him. This addition, under the title “A Story of a Youth,”1 however, becomes disproportionate by growing in length to over 500 pages, which is almost two-thirds of the whole novel. In the preface of the first edition, Gottfried Keller himself mentions this disproportion, speaking of a “certain unwieldiness,” which distracts from the enjoyment of a “pure and masterful piece of art.”2 In the following essay I will deal with the earlier version precisely because of this unwieldiness: in my opinion, it is not an aesthetic accident or mistake, but rather constitutes a special type of narration: subverting the teleological direction of the genre called “Entwicklungsroman” (development novel) or “Bildungsroman” (coming-of-age story), the novel Green Henry develops along a different scheme, which, as I want to show, follows the unpredictability of dreams. Green Henry’s real name is Henry Lee, which alludes to the “lee” side of a ship, (i.e., the sheltered side). He loses his father at an early age and is raised by his mother, who tries, but fails, to compensate for the loss. The novel often remarks on this failure: for example, the food she prepares tastes somehow indistinct; there is never too much and never too little salt in the soup. A deep sadness lies over this small, incomplete family and Henry tries to escape. He sets off to find a substitute for that which he is yearning for. He wants to become an artist, a painter. But he also fails in this endeavor, because – as it turns out – all his teachers are incompetent. His paintings, for all their pretentiousness, remain flat. He is not able to catch the light on the canvas. Henry leaves his hometown of Zurich and his mother in order to seek his fortune at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. But even here, far away from home, success eludes him. Artistically 1 Gottfried Keller, “Eine Jugendgeschichte,” in Der Grüne Heinrich (first version), ed. Thomas Böning and Gerhard Kaiser (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 57–544. 2 Keller, “Vorwort,” in Der Grüne Heinrich (first version), 9–10 (my translation, M. S.).

62 

 Marianne Schuller

and economically, he is a failure, and eventually he decides to return home to his mother. At the end of the first version, Henry, after having finally reached his mother’s funeral in time, dies. His death is thoroughly undramatic and anticlimactic; it is only said that “he was exhausted, his life and body broke and he died in a few days.”3 In the second version, he lives, resigned to his position as civil servant. Due to the autobiographical nature of the novel, Green Henry is often interpreted in a psychoanalytical manner as if there were, beyond the text, something, which could reveal the actual and true meaning of the novel. Just as often, the novel is categorized as a “Bildungsroman” insofar as the term presupposes a teleological direction of narration, which is prescribed by a well-defined goal. Viewing the novel under this aspect, it describes – as opposed to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister – nothing more than a sad and resigned failure. If, however, one views the novel not along the lines of teleological development, but instead starts to recognize the process of repetition, in which the attempt to bring back something lost, necessarily in vain, and therefore doomed to be repeated, then the novel takes on a different meaning: it articulates the language-based logic of desire and dream, and in doing so, constitutes the human subject as a wishing and desiring being. But how can the reading of such a long and complex novel be represented? I propose to start with single, highly condensed passages because the novel itself is punctuated with such condensation points, where the single threads making up the fabric of the text converge. In other words, the network-like structure of the text is constituted by unpredictable acts of repetition referring back to these condensed passages. Perhaps it is not too early to mention that this literary method corresponds to that which Sigmund Freud calls the “dream’s navel.”4 As I have already pointed out, Henry loses his father at the early age of five, as did Gottfried Keller. This loss is the starting point from which to project the father as a specimen of an ideal ego for the son. But more important for my reading is Henry’s account of a memory of his father, which is about engraving the structure of his wishes and desires. A man always sets a double value on what Fate has deprived him of, and so my mother’s long tales used to fill me more and more with longing for the father who died before I knew him. My clearest recollection of him goes back, curiously, a full year before his death, to a single lovely moment when he carried me on his arm, one Sunday evening in the fields, pulled a potato-plant out of the earth and showed me the little welling tubers, already 3 Keller, Der Grüne Heinrich (first version), 892. 4 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Second Part), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–1974), V, 525.

The Logic of Writing, the Logic of Dreams 

 63

trying to awaken in me the knowledge and love of the Creator. I still see the green coat and the bright metal buttons close to my cheek, and his shining eyes, which attracted my wondering gaze away from the green plant that he was holding aloft.5

It is Sunday evening in the field, four-year-old Henry is being carried in his father’s arms. The father stops to pull up a potato plant and starts to explain to his son the wonders of life and creation. This moment, however, in which his father raises his voice to tell him that he is a part of Creation and does not exist only by himself, fails to capture Henry’s attention. The father’s invocation to the son fails. The father’s voice, which sought to introduce the child into the symbolic order, echoes unheard. Instead of hearing the father’s voice, Henry sees. And in which direction does he look? He directs his gaze away from the green plant his father is holding up to show him.6 What happens in the process of looking away? He sees something different: he sees his father’s green coat and the shiny metal buttons quite near to his father’s sparkling eyes. Henry does not hear his father’s voice, his attention being captured by the man’s gaze represented by his sparkling eyes, which are, purely by chance, associated with the shiny metal buttons and the color green. The text speaks of a sparkling exquisite object, which is lost forever. Following the logic of the passage cited, it is all about contingent objects, which are lost and as lost objects, long to be found again. In Keller’s novel, these fantasies occur frequently, often in various and partly enigmatic images such as those found in dreams. They transport a gleam, a shine, which Henry fancies he can see on metal, water, rivers, lakes and on money, and by which he is fascinated because it echoes the earlier impression. The fact that Henry associates this fascinating gleam with money appears in another passage in the novel, which can also be considered as a key scene. Henry in the meantime is six years old and has been enrolled in school: “when at six years old I found myself, one fine morning, in a melancholy hall where some fifty or sixty small boys and girls were being taught” (GH, 21). The passage then continues: Standing with seven other children round a blackboard, on which was a fine show of big letters, I listened eagerly, silent and excited about what was coming next. Since we were all newcomers, the head teacher, an elderly man with a big, clumsy head, wished to give us our first instruction for one hour, and he asked us each in turn to give names to the strange signs on the blackboard. I had once, long ago, heard the word pumpernickel, and it had taken my 5 Gottfried Keller, Green Henry, trans. A. M. Holt (London, New York: Riverrun Press, 1985), 15. The translation refers to the second version of the novel; references to this second version are abbreviated as GH in the text. 6 See Norbert Haas, “Exposé zu Lacans Diskursmathemen, Teil II,” Der Wunderblock: Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 5/6 (1980), 9–34 (esp. 16–22).

64 

 Marianne Schuller

fancy uncommonly, but I could not attach any concrete form to it and nobody could help me to do so because the thing that bore this name had its home some hundreds of miles away. I was suddenly asked to give a name to the capital P, which letter in itself struck me as being extraordinarily queer and funny, and now I saw daylight and I said firmly: “This is Pumpernickel!” I entertained no doubts at all, neither of the world, nor of myself, nor of Pumpernickel, and my heart was glad, but in proportion to the gravity and self-satisfaction of my expression at that moment was my schoolmaster’s conviction that I was a sly, bold young rascal whose naughtiness must be dealt with at once, and he fell upon me, and pulled my hair and shook me so violently for a whole minute that hearing and sight left me. This attack, being something strange and new to me, was like a bad dream; for a moment I could make nothing of it, and could only stare at the man, silent and tearless, but oppressed with a secret anxiety. (GH, 22)

The schoolmaster assumes that Henry knows about the referential relation between the word and the thing, which means this black, sweet, hard and difficult-to-digest bread. From this assumption, Henry’s utterance is incorrect; it is wrong. As the schoolmaster considers Henry’s utterance as an intentional speech act, which he takes as a personal insult, he feels it must be punished. Punishment ensues immediately. For Henry, however, the word “pumpernickel” is nothing but a libidinous, gleaming, shining thing beyond the referential and symbolic function. To say it in Lacan’s words: it is nothing but an idiotic signifier.7 But nevertheless, something that is stuck to this signifier is neither known nor not known: “nickel.” In German as in English, “nickel” is a name for a coin of little value, which nevertheless shines like silver. In this sense, nickel appears to be an offspring of that gleam whose suppression, substitution, and bright appearance leave an indelible mark on Henry’s life. In this function as a substitute for another signifier, such as gleam, for example, the significant nickel initiates Henry’s misfortunes with money, which ruin him. In those coins he secretly took from a small purse and the money he stole from his mother – in every case there is a shining, a sparkling, a golden aura, which is connected to the symbolic green. To the extent that Henry does not understand and does not not understand, the nickel continues to pump idiotically and effectively throughout his life.8 As mentioned earlier, Henry becomes a landscape painter, but he is not successful in depicting light or points of light. While Henry as a painter cannot realize the gleam he longs for on canvas, it is realized enigmatically and perceptibly in the text. This gleam is the object of the text’s desire (so to speak). It produces different literary devices such 7 Jacques Lacan, “Was ist das, der Signifikant?” Der Wunderblock. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 5/6 (1980), 7. 8 In the dictionary of the Brothers Grimm the word “pumpern” is an emphatic word for pumping in the sense of hammering or pounding. See Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1899), XIII, col. 2231.

The Logic of Writing, the Logic of Dreams 

 65

as repetition, substitution, and postponement, which determine the random development of the novel in structural equivalence to dreams. As an example of this structure, I shall refer to the novella “Little Meret,” which Keller inserted into the “Story of a Youth.” The novella “Little Meret” can be characterized as an inverted martyr legend. While the martyr legend expresses the power of the church as opposed to paganism, in this legend the representatives of the church themselves initiate the martyrdom of “Little Meret.” Keller situates this legend around the beginning of the “Story of a Youth.”9 The connection between the legend and the novel is very loose. Like the novella of the “Wunderliche Nachbarskinder” in Goethe’s Wahlverwandschaften, which according to Walter Benjamin does not simply reflect the focus of the novel but remains inaccessibly closed,10 such is the case for the novella “Little Meret.” There is no commentary by the first-person narrator, just as there is no mention of the novella elsewhere in the novel. Furthermore, it is written in an old-fashioned German, which is unique in the entire works of Keller. Nevertheless, the novella has an important function for the progression of the novel. In certain details, images and aspects, one finds references to the novella, which occur so unexpectedly that they are assumed to have been placed there unintentionally by the author. In the novel, the story of the so-called “witch child” is passed down in legends, sagas, myths and in an old diary written by the pastor who tortured her. The story also refers to an old dark oil painting, the portrait of this remarkable child, which Henry describes as follows: It represented a girl of unusually delicate build, in a damask gown of pale green whose hem was spread stiffly around in a wide circle and concealed the little feet. Around the slender, delicate body was hung a gold chain, which reached down to the ground in front. On her head she wore a head-dress in the form of a coronet, made of sparkling gold and silver tinsel, and braided with silken threads and pearls. In her hands, the child was holding the skull of another child, and a white rose. Never in my life have I seen such a lovely, charming, intelligent child’s countenance as the pale face of this little girl; it was narrow rather than round, a deep sadness was in it, the shining dark eyes looked at the beholder, full of melancholy and as if imploring help, while around the closed lips hovered a faint indication of roguishness, or of a smiling bitterness. Heavy sorrow seemed to give the whole countenance something of precocity and womanliness, and aroused in the spectator an involuntary longing to see the living child and to be allowed to pet and fondle her. Unconsciously the villagers held her memory in love and esteem, and in the old tales about her one could detect as much involuntary sympathy as aversion. (GH, 29–30) 9 Keller, Der Grüne Heinrich (first version), 89–91. 10 Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” trans. Stanley Corngold, in Selected Writings, I, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996), 330–331, 333.

66 

 Marianne Schuller

Henry’s description of the portrait can be considered as a concentration of iconographic topoi. For example, the configuration of a woman holding a skull alludes to the tradition of depicting Vanitas as well as Mary Magdalene, combining the saint and the sinner. At this point, the iconographic tradition is not so much of interest. More important is the fact that in the description of the portrait, as well as in all the sagas, myths, and legends, usually mutually exclusive opposites converge. A convergence, which is typical for dreams, too. This is also true of the name “Little Meret,” or “Emerentia,” which has its roots in Latin and means “guilty” and “worthy.” These terms are the two poles that determine Green Henry’s fate.11 The novel as a whole draws on single elements from the legend. The very unpredictable recurrence of those elements, forgotten and left behind, create a logic not of narrative continuity, but of repetition and postponement, as is also the case in dreams. The following example concerns an important female figure in the novel named Anna. Anna, a childhood sweetheart of Henry, is, on the one hand, the perfect opposite of Little Meret. This is particularly true with respect to the realm of religion. While Little Meret absolutely resists attending church services or any religious rituals for that matter, Anna is characterized by stylized piety. On the other hand, there are certain similarities between these two characters: according to the description of the portrait, Meret is “a girl of unusually delicate build” and Henry speaks of her “slender, delicate body.” This description also fits Anna; her body is called “feather-light,”12 a “tender bud” (168), and Henry speaks of her delicate appearance and her slender, ethereal body. Just as Meret is compared to a “Kobold” (sprite) (98), so is Anna compared to a fairy-queen and an elf (264). She is also even called a witch (176) and is once surrounded by those animals associated with Little Meret and her powers of seduction: dove, snake, and trout (247). The clearest, and at the same time most enigmatic, similarity is brought forward in the so-called “Romance Among the Beans.” In the pastor’s diary, we read that Little Meret, who loved jumping and dancing and being naked, had made for herself a tiny parlor in the midst of the bean field. Here she had received visitors and was later found dead in a small hollow she had dug in the earth, as if she had wanted to creep inside the hollow (cf. GH, 32–35). One evening, after Anna, Henry and the maid, Catherine, piled up beans to be prepared for drying, Anna undergoes a metamorphosis. Different from her reserved and quiet daytime behavior, she begins to tease and seduce Henry:

11 See Winfried Menninghaus, Ästhetische Schrift. Studien zur Kompositionskunst Gottfried Kellers (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1982). 12 Here and the following references see Keller, Der Grüne Heinrich (first version), here 256.

The Logic of Writing, the Logic of Dreams 

 67

She was now lively and boisterous, and as nimble as quicksilver, seemingly quite a different person from what she was by day. Midnight had transfigured her, her little face was quite rosy and her eyes shone with pleasure. She danced round the helpless Catherine, teased her and was pursued by her, there began a chase round the room, in which I became involved too. [. . .] Anna grew wilder and wilder and more and more agile. [. . .] The next morning Anna was her usual self again, quiet and friendly. (GH, 177)

As the narrator hardly comments on this transfiguration, it is left as dreamlike and enigmatic ephemera. The recurrence of these elements from the legend of Little Meret generates the labyrinthine development of the novel. This process is active in even the smallest detail. While, according to the description of the portrait, Meret wears a “damask gown of pale green” (GH, 29), the costume Anna wears at the Wilhelm Tell festival is made of a “curtain of bright green damask” (GH, 264). While Meret wore “on her head a head-dress in the form of a coronet, made of sparkling gold and silver tinsel, and braided with silken threads and pearls” (GH, 29), and “around her delicate body was hung a gold chain” (GH, 29), Anna wears “a gold necklace” (GH, 264). The “silken threads and pearls” (GH, 29), which were braided into Meret’s hair, recur in a different passage when Henry puts the portrait he painted of Anna into a frame decorated with a string of pearls (GH, 239). It has been shown, taking the novella as an example, that the novel Green Henry is constituted by a process of branching out, caused by the unpredictable recurrence of elements left behind, of forgotten, repressed images and words. This structure, as I would now like to show, coincides with the structure of dreams. Keller’s novel Green Henry contains a number of dreams. The seventh chapter of the fourth book can be considered a dream chapter. As a young man, Keller had once kept a diary of dreams, but I am not so much interested in these documented dreams as I am in the question of whether the already indicated structure of repetition, postponement, condensation, and displacement is related to the structure of dreams and the articulation of a dream wish. These are exactly the processes which – according to Freud – determine the dreamwork. But to mention the term “wish-fulfilment,” which occurs to Freud as an unprecedented flash of insight, seems to support a teleological structure, which Keller’s novel precisely subverts in my reading. The content of the dream, as Freud unmistakably puts it, is “fulfilment of a wish, and its motive was a wish.”13 But the question I want to raise, or the question that must be raised, is: What

13 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–1974), IV, 119.

68 

 Marianne Schuller

does the seemingly so simple statement of wish-fulfillment mean in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams14 as well as in Keller’s novel Green Henry? Speaking of wish-fulfillment in the context of Freud’s initial dream, the so-called dream of Irma’s Injection, a joke pops into Freud’s mind. I noticed, it is true, that these explanations of Irma’s pains (which agreed in exculpating me) were not entirely consistent with one another, and indeed that they were mutually exclusive. The whole plea – for the dream was nothing else – reminded one vividly of the defence put forward by the man who was charged by one of his neighbours with having given him back a borrowed kettle in a damaged condition. The defendant asserted first, that he had given it back undamaged; secondly, that the kettle had a hole in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly, that he had never borrowed a kettle from the neighbour at all. So much the better: if only a single one of these three lines of defence were to be accepted as valid, the man would have to be acquitted.15

Unwittingly, the story of the borrowed kettle dramatizes the predicament of sexual difference, which the initial dream of Irma’s Injection questions and explores. The kettle, in its phallic and urethral connotations, could be viewed as recapitulating the oneiric image of the syringe and the question of the injection. The hole could evoke the vision of the female cavity and the oneiric question of damage. The question of the joke, in much the same way as the question of the dream, is how to account for difference? How to account for the hole, the loss of the bodily integrity, for the damage done? What is funny in the joke, however, is that it refuses to resolve the question of difference in terms of the logic of identity. It is impossible to account for the hole in terms of a whole, since the loss of wholeness affects the very meaning of the joke: the joke subverts the self-identity (the wholeness) of its own meaning. So does, in fact, Freud’s dream: “I will not pretend,” Freud writes, “that I have completely uncovered the meaning of this dream or that its interpretation is without a gap.”16 The very meaning of the dream – the stated wish fulfillment – itself is but a kind of borrowed kettle that can – similar to Kleist’s The Broken Jug – somehow never be returned to wholeness. In other words: the wish-fulfillment is a joke. And yet the joke is in reality a worry. The wish-fulfillment is, in effect, nothing other than a denial of the (sexual) anxiety of difference and self-difference, which the story of the borrowed kettle at once materializes and disavows.

14 Marianne Schuller, “Sigmund Freuds Schrift ‘Die Traumdeutung.’ Eine fortgesetzte Lektüre,” in Einführungen in die Psychoanalyse II, ed. Karl-Josef Pazzini and Susanne Gottlob (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2006), 35–48. 15 Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (First Part), 119–120. 16 Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (First Part), 120.

The Logic of Writing, the Logic of Dreams 

 69

If the dream, however, is perceived as a text full of crises, as full of gaps and self-contradictions, it can no longer be read as a representation of a presupposed wish. Consequently, the dream itself is not a simple statement of a wish-fulfillment but an ongoing, unfinished, and perhaps unending process. The dream, like Keller’s novel Green Henry, asks: Where is my real wish in all these complications? What do I really want? The founding and path-breaking psychoanalytic insight that “a dream is the fulfillment of a wish” means, precisely, that a wish, because of its unconscious nature, is, by definition, what needs interpretation: a wish is what cannot be known, directly felt, or simply stated.17 A further relationship between the text of the novel and a text of a dream can be shown as follows: Since Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, one can no longer claim that the dream with its unconscious processes of displacement and condensation is only a phenomenon of sleep, of night and darkness in opposition to the clear consciousness of the light of day. Rather, they are visibly, invisibly engraved as strange and unknown things in the formations of consciousness. “The Unconscious,” says Lacan, “is precisely the hypothesis that one does not dream only when one sleeps.”18 But, says Freud, if we do indeed have an unconscious, if we do not dream only when we are asleep, is it possible that the dream itself could have a waking function? Is it possible that sleep itself could wake us up from our daily dream of wakefulness? Is it possible, in other words, that a dream – in sleep – would sound the alarm of daytime false solutions?19

If, however, there is no categorical difference between dreaming and being awake, if, however, dreaming, be it fleeting and nearly unnoticeable, intervenes in waking life, then the conscious, even calculated literary composition can be related to the structure of dreams.20 In its disproportions, its unpredictable movements, its repetitions and postponements, with its gaps and holes, which appear as the direct and straight way blocked by censorship, the novel shows a relationship to the structure of dreams. The novel wakes us up from our daily gossamer of fantasies, which promises us a total wakefulness, vigilance without sleep and without drowsiness or sleepiness. Perhaps we can say that reading is a way of awakening: An awakening to the presence of another, of an unknown, of something lost, forgotten, and cast aside, that we feel is somehow part of ourselves. 17 Shoshana Felman, What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 98. 18 Jacques Lacan, “Une pratique de bavardage”, Ornicar, 19 (1979), 5, trans. and cited by Felman, What Does a Woman Want?, 91. 19 Felman, What Does a Woman Want?, 100. 20 See Walter Morgenthaler, Bedrängte Positivität: Zu Romanen von Immermann, Keller, Fontane (Bonn: Bouvier, 1979), esp. 149–192, 216–256.

70 

 Marianne Schuller

Once Henry speaks of a letter he received from a former art teacher he had insulted. He wants to get rid of this letter and he wants to forget about it. But it doesn’t work. The letter comes back. The way Henry talks about it can be considered as an allegory to the way the dream-like text is written. Henry writes: “I did not dare to burn the sinister letter and I was afraid to keep it; sometimes I buried it beneath a heap of rubbish far out of my way; sometimes I pulled it out and put it in with my most cherished papers, and even now, as often as I find it, I change its place and put it somewhere else, so that it is constantly on the move” (GH, 348).

Therese Ahern Augst

“And I had to write it to you” Franziska zu Reventlow and Else Lasker-Schüler: Dreaming in Public Unbelievers My people always want to see my face, hear my voice. Under the morning star that was named for me, I speak to my city and open my soul to its people like a palm grove that they may enter. Heaven is my mirror. My image is disseminated in Thebes.1

The “people” always want to see, always want to hear. Isn’t this the eternal dilemma of the public figure? When the soul opens, the people enter; meanwhile the image, disseminated, begins to lose its fine detail, is reduced to an outline that must claim to encompass the face, the voice, the soul. This process takes place, as Else Lasker-Schüler explains here in the voice of her alter ego, “under the morning star.” In the glaring light of day, to be sure, little remains unexposed, and the dark secrets of the soul risk becoming common knowledge. But what happens, by contrast, when the soul opens under the night sky? Who, if anyone, may enter the palm grove when dreams become the mirror in which the self is reflected to the people? It is a relevant question, given that Lasker-Schüler wrote these lines in 1911, when literary and scientific interest in dreams had intensified and expanded with the popularization of psychoanalytic discourse in the early years of the twentieth century. When Sigmund Freud recounted his own dreams and those of his mostly female patients in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the case study of Dora (1905), he maintained that dream accounts, more than other expressions within language, contain unconscious material that can be unpacked with the proper tools. This promise of unprecedented access to the most intimate secrets of the 1 “Ungläubige / Mein Volk will immer mein Gesicht sehen, meine Stimme hören. / Unter dem Frühstern, der nach mir benamet wurde, spreche ich zu meiner Stadt und öffne ihren Menschen meine Seele wie einen Palmenhain, den sie betreten dürfen. / Der Himmel ist mein Spiegel. / Mein Bildnis wird verteilt in Theben. / Jussuf-Prinz.” Else Lasker-Schüler, Mein Herz, in Gesammelte Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Friedhelm Kemp (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1996), II, 391. Hereafter cited with page number as MH. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated, T. A. A.

72 

 Therese Ahern Augst

self proved irresistible to a rising urban class newly interested in the wider possibilities of self-analysis.2 Incorporating dreams into that study of the self is only possible, however, when the dream is placed into the recognizable frame of language – Freud’s “talking cure” or, in many other contemporaneous examples, writing. Just as keeping a diary became increasingly popular with the masses toward the end of the nineteenth century, dream journals and anthologies proliferated and were widely published.3 There is an important difference, however, between dream description in writing and Freud’s oral model; the writing of dreams implies a degree of narrative organization and performance that complicates the freeassociative basis of psychoanalysis. Far more than the spontaneous recounting of a dream on the analyst’s couch, the process of writing – and in particular, writing for an audience – involves the consideration of form, the imposition of sense into the dream image. Dream writing is a work of authorship, an exercise, in this sense, of authority: a way of gathering fragmentary experience into a self-governed representation.4 This presents an interesting wrinkle in the public perception of what dreams may encompass. Clearly, the public discussion of dreams around 1900 creates an environment in which the representation of dreams becomes aligned with the idea of obtaining access to the ultimate interiority, at least in a 2 Peter Gay, Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle Class Culture 1815–1914 (New York: Norton, 2002), 260–267. Gay discusses the proliferation of diaries and other forms of self-study among the middle classes in his engaging account of late nineteenth century European culture. He relates diary keeping as a mass movement to a broader concern with matters of privacy and individualism among the urban bourgeoisie, such as the architecture of the apartment house, the popularization of secret ballot voting, and secure postal service. 3 Examples of published dream journals include Friedrich Huch’s three volumes, published 1904, 1917, and 1921 (Gesammelte Werke, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1910–1911), Olive Schreiner’s Dreams (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891), and Isolde Kurz’s dream accounts from Traumland (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1919). Ignaz Jezower’s Buch der Träume (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1928) is a collection of 777 dreams from various sources, including the Bible, ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as well as the writings of modern philosophers and poets. Katherine Taylor Craig’s The Fabric of Dreams: Dream Lore and Dream Interpretation, Ancient and Modern (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1918) is an extended study of dream lore and symbolism intended, as she writes in the preface, “for the perusal of the unprejudiced.” 4 With the Traumdeutung, as Ronald R. Thomas discusses in his book Dreams of Authority, Freud confronts the problem of the dream’s apparent lack of coherence by asserting the basic rationality of the dream thoughts and emphasizing the distorting and form-giving functions of the dreamwork. The chaos, the nonsense of dreams, often figured in the nineteenth century as the fragments of an “unfinished book,” become subject, in the process of telling the dream, to the “consideration of representability” (Thomas, Dreams of Authority, 21). In the same gesture, the subject gains the opportunity to rehabilitate the fragmentary experience of dreaming into a model of selfgovernance, the exercise of authority over the self. Ronald R. Thomas, Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1990).

“And I had to write it to you” 

 73

distorted form. To what extent, however, does the constructedness of the written dream also reflect the process by which interiority can be constituted in writing? Freud’s seminal idea that dreams represent the “royal road” to the unconscious might thus be countered with the notion that dreams can also be – in the act of “telling” them through writing – a means of positioning the self. That which we choose to dream “in public” (which is not exactly opposed to, but perhaps a variation on, that which we dream for our analysts) is an indication of how we wish to situate ourselves with respect to those who are listening. If a dream not yet translated into words is, as Barbara Hahn has shown, “like an unopened letter,” then the dream as letter – the dream reconstituted, in written form, for another – presupposes a reader willing to open it up, to venture into the palm grove where the soul awaits.5 Indeed, the dream representation even gains significance through the process of reading, comprehending, responding. When writers describe their dreams to others, as Hahn claims, those descriptions offer up something other than they would in a diary or dream journal – composed, as they would be there, in an effectively private space and stored, as it were, in a personal archive. Dreams that appear in texts intended for other eyes figure the desire for a response, for understanding, for love.6 “When I awoke I had the feeling that it was a very significant dream and that I had to write it to you.”7 – Franziska zu Reventlow’s footnote to a dream description in a 1901 letter to her close friend, the philosopher Ludwig Klages – thus describes the impulse to share with another the essentials of the self, the wish to communicate and obtain some insight into the self through a written exchange of ideas. At the same time, initiating this exchange by telling dreams to others also implies a ceding of ownership over the dream; when dreams are not just recorded in private journals or recounted on the analyst’s couch but circulated in some way, whether in the form of a personal letter or in published writing, they can be absorbed into a discourse that takes place outside of the dreamer’s sphere of influence and sometimes even in her absence. In this case the dream’s readers, those who take up and respond to that representation, share in a process of understanding that seeks to shed light not only on the dream but on the writer 5 Barbara Hahn, “‘Ein unverstandener Traum ist wie ein uneröffneter Brief:’ Übertragen und Dechiffrieren,” in Im Schlaf bin ich wacher: Die Träume der Rahel Levin Varnhagen, ed. Barbara Hahn (Frankfurt a. M: Sammlung Luchterhand, 1990), 59. 6 Hahn, “‘Ein unverstandener Traum ist wie ein uneröffneter Brief,’” 60. 7 “Das sonderbarste war, daß ich beim Aufwachen das Gefühl hatte, es wäre ein sehr bedeutungsvoller Traum gewesen und ich müßte ihn Ihnen schreiben.” Franziska zu Reventlow, Sämtliche Werke in fünf Bänden. ed. Michael Schardt (Oldenburg: Igel, 2004), III (Tagebücher) [Diaries], 330. Hereafter cited as FR with volume and page number. Most of the citations that follow will come from volume IV, which contains Reventlow’s letters, including her letters to Klages; her diaries (III) also contain many dream descriptions.

74 

 Therese Ahern Augst

herself. Dreaming in public, it would seem, can easily lead to the perception of a publicly held self. For Lasker-Schüler and Reventlow, two women writers who traffic in dream writing at approximately the same time as Freud, the mitigated authority that results from disseminating one’s dreams becomes all the more pointed insofar as it is interwoven into a larger narrative about the blurring of lines dividing private life and public persona. Both women were public figures, Bohemian eccentrics noted for their unconventional approaches to life and love; indeed, Reventlow in particular remains more famous today for her sometimes lurid biography than for her provocative writing.8 In their prose texts, both authors make ample reference to genres traditionally associated with women’s artistic production – letters, diaries, autobiography, and dream journals – and also draw extensively from personal experience. In this they are certainly not alone; the early twentieth century was a moment of astonishing productivity for women writers in Germany and Austria, and most of them likewise wrote from personal experience and in these “domestic” genres.9 What sets these two writers apart, however, is the attempt to reflect explicitly on the problem of engaging with and representing for an eager public what is essentially private. Ensconced within café society in Berlin and Schwabing, respectively, Lasker-Schüler and Reventlow depict the urban experience as one of agonizing intimacy rather than anonymity or alienation, where the public disclosure of secrets seems necessitated by urban life and amplified within the city’s microcosms by rumor and insularity. Within this context, writing from personal experience becomes a medium not only of self-reflection or self-realization but of hyperconscious critique of the self, its surroundings and its limitations. Reventlow’s approach to autobiography is distinct from her copious journal writing in this respect, in what Karin Tebben calls its “goal of sketching an image of one’s own personality, of revealing its becoming and its being, of asking for understanding and achieving justification”.10 Neither author produces a book or piece of writing directly 8 As a result there are considerably more biographies of Reventlow – some of them definitive and impressive – than there are close studies of her writing. See, for example, Brigitta Kubitschek, Franziska Gräfin zu Reventlow, Leben und Werk: Eine Biographie und Auswahl zentraler Texte (Munich: Profil, 1998), and Ulla Egbringhoff, Franziska zu Reventlow (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2000). 9 See Chris Weedon, “The struggle for emancipation: German women writers of the Jahrhundertwende,” in A History of Women’s Writing in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, ed. Jo Catling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 112. 10 “. . . mit dem Ziel, ein Bild von der eigenen Persönlichkeit zu zeichnen, ihr Werden und Sein zu offenbaren, für Verständnis zu werben und Rechtfertigung zu leisten.” Karin Tebben, “Die öffentliche Frau: Bekennen und Verschweigen in Ellen Olestjerne (1903) und Von Paul zu Pedro (1912),” in FR, I, 254.

“And I had to write it to you” 

 75

described as “autobiography”; instead, their autobiographically inspired works – Lasker-Schüler’s epistolary novel Mein Herz, Reventlow’s short fiction and novel Ellen Olestjerne – bear the markings of personal experience even as they often grant their narrators the safety of irony, of a jaded distance from the events they describe. Still, that distance proves difficult to maintain with respect to the reading public. Lasker-Schüler’s novel was first printed in 1911–1912 as Letters to Norway (Briefe nach Norwegen), a serialized correspondence with her husband Herwarth Walden and friend Kurt Neimann in Walden’s journal Der Sturm, and chronicles not only her encounters with an array of famous figures from the Berlin bohème but also the end of her marriage. Although the occasion for the letters was supposedly Walden and Neimann’s trip to Scandinavia in 1911, the letters themselves occupied a far more paradoxical position: they were never actually sent, only published, and they continued to appear in Der Sturm well after Walden had already returned to Berlin. The line between fiction and personal experience, then, is blurred from the outset. Still, her audience’s response to her ostensibly autobiographical text (ambiguously subtitled Ein Liebesroman mit Bildern und wirklich lebenden Menschen) is sometimes so laden with pathos that she has to remind readers explicitly of the poetic license she has secured for herself with that ironic stance. “Haven’t you noticed yet,” as the narrator – also called “Else Lasker-Schüler” – writes in addressing a concerned reader, “that my Norwegian correspondence is a mass farce – albeit with bursts of seriousness, that goes along with being in Der Sturm.”11 On the other hand, Reventlow struggles so intensely with the pain of revisiting her own past while writing her first novel, Ellen Olestjerne, that in her later writings she shifts the figure that most resembles her to a peripheral position, allowing other narrators to reflect upon that figure’s frustrating yet lovable shortcomings.12 While the tragicomic details of personal relationships, work habits, and urban tableaux are all laid mercilessly bare in these pseudo-autobiographical texts, however, dream accounts tend to occupy a separate space of reflection for both authors, providing a sounding board for the anxieties of producing inwardlyfocused fiction. To be sure, this seems counterintuitive, since dream description would at least appear to be the most intimate writing of all; dreams purport, after all, to reveal a part of the self so interior that even the subject herself may not recognize it. Sharing dreams with a reading public thus implies exposing the unguarded self to potential ridicule while awaiting a response that could 11 “Haben Sie denn nicht bemerkt, daß meine norwegische Briefschaft ein Massenlustspiel ist – allerdings mit ernsten Ergüssen, die bringt so der Sturm mit sich.” (MH 336) 12 In the epistolary novel Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen, for example, the figure most closely resembling Reventlow herself is Susanna, the first-person narrator’s housemate and confidante (FR II, 9–112).

76 

 Therese Ahern Augst

make sense of it all. But it is also the promise of exposure that makes dreams so tantalizing for the reader; in this way their description may also be a place for the writer to assert most conspicuously a degree of creative control over the constitution of the self through writing. And indeed, the dreams that these two authors make public prove to be largely preoccupied with just this possibility. While dreaming in public represents the opportunity to package interiority for mass consumption, the content of the published dream would do well to figure the boundaries between that interiority and its audience, the “people” that wish to lay claim to it. Both Lasker-Schüler and Reventlow remain defiant on that front, using dream images of captivity and exposure in order to impose distinct limits on the possibility of publicizing the private. In an extended account, for example, Lasker-Schüler frames the process as a struggle between night and day, the cover of darkness afforded by dreaming and the glare of disclosure that the public demands: Oh, I had such a strange dream last night! I was lying on a stretcher in the middle of a square. I lay covered by a large, still cloth, as if in a sea – and was dead. Sometimes you walked up to me, Herwarth, and lifted the sea from my face and pointed to my forehead. And it was scorned by as many people as the days I have lived. I already began to feel frustrated by your naiveté, for I have always hated the bold, inquisitive day. [.  .  .] I wept so wildly, I heard the sea rise up around me. And I feared that your finger would be seized, the one that extended over the square on which I was bedded, the clear guide that pointed at my forehead. Everyone was waiting for something – Zeuxis Kokoschka loitered behind the Dalai Lama; and Loos, the gorilla architect, carried my robe on his hands, which was, appropriately for me, made of white Lebanon cedar, simple but too fine for the frivolous taste of the people [. . .] And a struggle broke out over the house of my body, they placed plaster ornaments and panels around the façade of my temple. But I could not fight anymore, I had already turned away from all everyday things and was playing with the roundness of time. The Dalai Lama’s eyes, blue, mild myrrh anointed me, Zeuxis finally painted me in death. And you, Herwarth, kissed my forehead, an organ symphony rose up to me; I could never be measured alongside other people; I could only ever be as they gazed up at me, for my forehead was the night sky. You knew this.13 13 “Ach, ich habe diese Nacht so sonderbar geträumt! Ich lag auf einer Bahre mitten auf einem Platz. Ich lag gehüllt in einem weiten, stillen Tuch, wie in einem Meer – und war tot. Manchmal tratst du zu mir, Herwarth, und hobst das Meer von meinem Angesicht und wiesest auf meine Stirn. Und es verhöhnten sie so viele Menschen, wie ich Tage gelebt hatte. Ich begann mich schon wegen Deiner Arglosigkeit zu ärgern, denn ich habe immer den neugierigen, dreisten Tag gehaßt. [. . .] Ich weinte so wild, ich hörte das Meer um mich aufstehen. Und ich fürchtete, Dein Finger würde erfaßt werden, der über den Platz wuchs, auf dem ich gebettet lag, der klare Wegweiser, der auf meine Stirn wies. Es wurde immer auf etwas gewartet – Zeuxis Kokoschka schlenderte hinter dem Dalai-Lama; und Loos, der Gorillaarchitekt, trug auf seinen Händen mein Gewölbe, wie es sich für mich geziemt, aus weißem Libanonholz, schlicht, aber zu reich für den eitlen Geschmack der Leute. [. . .]

“And I had to write it to you” 

 77

“I have always hated the bold, inquisitive day”; the scorn of the public under the glare of daylight is met by and distinguished from the immeasurable depth of the night sky, der Nachthimmel, at which others can only ever gaze from a distance. While the dreamer Else’s forehead represents the center of attention, the focal point around which “everyone was waiting for something,” it is also that which no one else can touch. The struggle that ensues lets the others claim ownership “over the house of [her] body,” which is anointed and painted in death, but the dreamer, in death, has “already turned away from all everyday things.” The scorn of the people is irrelevant after that turn; the façade of the temple may be altered, but the night sky cannot be contained or measured. That Herwarth “knew all of this, as she states at the end, knew that she was as vast as the night sky, yet still lifted the cloth to expose her to public ridicule, proves his enhanced “knowledge” of her infinite depth but represents a quiet reproach as well, subtly directed at a husband and editor who would disseminate a private correspondence in serialized form. In presenting the struggle over the public self, which in this case ultimately belongs to its audience, the dream becomes for Lasker-Schüler aligned with the heart, her predominant metaphor for the interiority that is both immeasurable in its depth and limited in its representability. While the title given to the correspondence when it was published in book form, Mein Herz, hints at the intimate truths contained within, the dedication effectively deflates any hope that such intimacy might find expression: “Mein Herz – niemandem” [“My heart – to no one”]. At the same time, however, the book’s title indicates that the heart is also the novel itself – Mein Herz – a space in which, as Dörte Bischoff argues, the self is constantly in the process of being fixed in the public eye: “Yet instead of allowing itself to be unambiguously aligned with feminine intimacy, it [the heart] appears as a stage on which identities and gender relations are placed into question.”14  Und es brach ein Kampf um das Haus meines Leibes aus; Stuckvolants und Einsätze setzten sie an meines Tempels Fassade. Aber ich konnte nicht mehr streiten, ich hatte mich schon aller Täglichkeit abgewandt und spielte mit der runden Zeit. Des Dalai-Lamas Augen, blaue, milde Myrrhen balsamierten mich ein, Zeuxis malte mich endlich im Tode. Und Du, Herwarth, küßtest meine Stirn, eine Orgelsymphonie stieg zu mir empor; ich bin nie mit anderen Menschen zu messen gewesen; ich konnte nur immer so sein, wie man zu mir heraufblickte, denn meine Stirne war der Nachthimmel. Du wußtest es.” (MH 311–312) 14 “Anstatt sich jedoch als weiblich konnotierter Intimität vereindeutigen zu lassen, erscheint es als Bühnen-Raum, in dem Identitäten und Geschlechterverhältnisse aufs Spiel gesetzt werden.” Dörte Bischoff, “Herzensbühne und Schriftkörper: Transformationen des Briefromans in der Moderne am Beispiel von Else Lasker-Schülers Mein Herz,” in Mutual Exchanges: Sheffield-Münster Colloquium II, ed. Dirk Jürgens (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1999), 49. In this excellent article, Bischoff highlights the contrast between Lasker-Schüler’s novel and the tradition of the epistolary novel in the discourse of Empfindsamkeit, in which the image of the heart represents the outpouring of interiority, the essence of the entire person.

78 

 Therese Ahern Augst

Because the framework of the novel offers to the heart the possibility of being constituted (and reconstituted) in language, it hints at both its fragile stability and its potential limitlessness. As the narrator Else claims with respect to another frustrating romantic encounter, the heart extends far beyond the parameters of potential expression: Why don’t I tell you more about the bishop? I only ever talk about myself, he says. I think he is sick of it. And at that he only discovered a tiny village in me, he did not conquer even one of my cities. He was a hundred thousand miles away from Baghdad. But who knows my heart?15

The dream functions similarly for Lasker-Schüler in the novel: what the public possesses, both in the dream and of the dream, is but a fragment of what it contains. Like the image of the heart, dreams written, publicized and read still remain a hundred thousand miles away from the interiority they represent. While the written self inhabits a framework recognizable to others – the contours of the body, the temple’s edifice – the dreamscape of the night sky serves as a marker of the vast space that representation cannot capture. [F]or I have never been able to recognize myself, neither in sculpture, nor in painting, not even in a cast. I seek in my portrait the interplay of day and night, sleep and waking.16

The gesture of placing the self within the framework of representation – of opening one’s soul to the people like a palm grove – thus needs the counterpoint of the dream, it seems, as a holding place for its unstable, otherwise inexpressible remainder. As Lasker-Schüler implies, her portrait would be incomplete without that contrast of night to day. This same sentiment functions somewhat differently for Franziska zu Reventlow, who creates a separate space for dream representation while completing Ellen Olestjerne, published in 1903. Dreams are still a release from the pressures of putting a version of the self into a frame, but they do not enter at all into the text meant for public consumption, appearing instead in a series of letters to Klages that is simultaneous with the production of 15 “Warum ich Euch nichts mehr vom Bischof erzähle? Ich spräche nur immer von mir, sagt er. Ich glaub, er hat es über. Dabei entdeckte er nur in mir ein kleines Dorf, nicht einmal eine meiner Städte hat er erobert. Hunderttausend Meilen war er immer von Bagdad entfernt. Aber wer weiß von meinem Herzen?” (MH 318) 16 “[D]enn ich habe mich nie wiedererkannt, weder in Plastik, noch in der Malerei, selbst nicht im Abguß. Ich suche in meinem Porträt das wechselnde Spiel von Tag und Nacht, den Schlaf und das Wachen.” (MH 389–390)

“And I had to write it to you” 

 79

the novel.17 In this sense they represent, even more starkly than Lasker-Schüler’s dream accounts, the remainder that the “people” cannot touch. An eternally reluctant author (though a prolific translator, diarist, and joke writer), Reventlow lets her dream accounts make manifest her own insecurities about writing; as a result, her dream descriptions become highly concentrated just as she is working most feverishly to meet her publisher’s deadline. At such moments, dreams afford the dreamer an expressive flexibility that differs markedly from waking efforts to put pen to paper; as she writes to Klages in November 1901, “There is not a single night in which I do not dream incessantly about the novel, now here now there, and it is strange, for in my dreams I can write, the most wonderful words come to me.”18 The practice of writing down dreams is similarly unproblematic for Reventlow, as we see in a letter to Klages from June 1901; even those dreams that refer to her tumultuous family life are easier to put into words than the memories she must summon in order to write the novel. The aristocratic daughter’s tortured captivity within family and social strictures – the dominant theme of the novel – merges with the writer’s experience of captivity within the limits of representation, and the dream dangles in front of the dreamer the potential to be free of both. Just last night I had a mad dream. I was captive again, confined like I was at the time of my family’s troubles, and in fact I was locked up in a house in Munich. My brother and Adam [i.e. Albrecht Henschel, one of her former lovers] were guarding me. But they had gone out and at once I thought: now or never, and ran away. On the way, I met a friendly, blond woman who brought me into a house with three large and artistically appointed rooms on the ground floor. And you were standing there, looked healthier than I have ever seen you before, and much younger than now, and you greeted me with great joy. My luggage consisted of three guitars filled with cigarettes. We smoked together, and the friendly woman went away after she had said to me that she loved me more than all others. – Then an old woman came and wanted to bring me back. I got out a revolver and wanted to shoot her dead. Then all of a sudden she sat like the Turkish women do, with folded arms on a 17 Between 1900 and 1902 Reventlow writes to Klages with particular intensity, sometimes several times a month, as she struggles both to complete her novel and to define the contours of their friendship. The stream of letters ends abruptly in November 1902, when Reventlow turns her attention to the author Karl Wolfskehl, a friend of Klages and fellow member of the pseudomystical “Kosmiker-Kreis.” In 1904 she briefly reestablishes contact with her old friend to negotiate the return of her own letters and photographs, as she notes somewhat bitterly, “wenn es auch vielleicht für Sie nur Sentimentalität ist” (“even if for you it may be mere sentimentality”; FR IV, 441). 18 “Es gibt keine Nacht, wo ich nicht unaufhörlich vom Roman träume, bald hier bald da, und es ist seltsam, denn im Traum kann ich schaffen, da kommen mir die wundervollsten Worte.” (IV, 357)

80 

 Therese Ahern Augst

cushion and had nothing on at all, a beautiful body with a very old head. And you said that I couldn’t shoot her dead, that I was free now. The strangest thing was that when I awoke I had the feeling that it was a very significant dream and that I had to write it to you.19

The desire to write the dream to Klages emerges from Reventlow’s sense that it must be significant, though this feeling seems “strange” to her; by inference, dreams that feel less important remain unwritten or at least confined to the private space of her diary (where, incidentally, many more dreams are recorded). So what makes this dream so significant that she must not only put it into words but also share it with Klages? That she is, as she states at the outset, captive “again” suggests that its subject matter is not completely new. Indeed, dreams of her childhood sense of confinement at the Reventlow estate in Husum recur throughout her adult life and revisit some of her most excruciating memories. The significance of this dream, then – written down, as it is, just as the dreamer is unable to avoid those childhood memories in her waking life – must lie in its theme of escape; while her memories confine her, even in Munich, to a house guarded by figures of the past, she seizes the opportunity to run away and is even prepared to defend her freedom to the death. Given that the novel she is writing represents a powerful expression of the desire to break free of family and social limitations, the dream thus resembles the writing process itself: a painful revisitation and, at the same time, a release. Perhaps she has to tell the dream to Klages, then, because it so clearly expresses the tension between the need to re-inhabit the past in order to write it down and the need to write it down in order to leave it behind. By reflecting this struggle to another, the dream account also displaces it, puts it into circulation; however, this circulation takes place outside the public

19 “Grad heute nacht hatte ich einen ganz verrückten Traum. Ich war wieder gefangen, eingesperrt, wie zur Zeit meines Familienkrachs und zwar hatte man mich in einem Hause in München eingesperrt. Mein Bruder und Adam hüteten mich. Aber sie waren ausgegangen und auf einmal dachte ich: jetzt oder nie, und lief fort. Unterwegs traf ich eine blonde, freundliche Dame, die mich in ein Haus brachte mit 3 großen schönen und künstlerisch eingerichteten Zimmern zu ebener Erde. Und da standen Sie, sahen so gesund aus, wie ich Sie noch nie gesehen habe, und noch viel jünger wie jetzt, und begrüßten mich mit großer Freude. Mein Gepäck bestand in 3 Gitarren, die mit Cigaretten gefüllt waren. Wir rauchten zusammen, und die freundliche Dame ging fort, nachdem sie mir gesagt hatte, sie liebte mich mehr wie alle anderen Menschen. – Dann kam eine alte Frau und wollte mich zurückholen. Ich holte meinen Revolver und wollte sie totschießen. Da saß sie mit einmal wie die Türkinnen mit untergeschlagenen Armen auf einen Polster und hatte gar nichts mehr an, einen wunderschönen Körper mit einem ganz alten Kopf. Und Sie sagten, ich dürfte sie nicht totschießen, ich wäre jetzt frei. Das sonderbarste war, daß ich beim Aufwachen das Gefühl hatte, es wäre ein sehr bedeutungsvoller Traum gewesen und ich müßte ihn Ihnen schreiben.” (IV, 329)

“And I had to write it to you” 

 81

glare under which the novel itself would stand. The dream in letter form calls for a response without overexposing the secrets of the self.20 Reventlow’s self-reflection through dream description proves astute for her writing practice. The figures she encounters in the dream, including Klages, love her “more than all others,” as she writes, and they offer her sanctuary in artistically appointed rooms. In this sense, this dream that she “had to write” relates her desire to arouse devotion, not from within the confines of her own house, but rather from within that new refuge, art. The nakedness of autobiographical writing can be tempered by the introduction of artifice; meanwhile the author, though protecting herself from overexposure, is no less beloved. In later texts, such as the novel Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen, Reventlow will displace the autobiographical subject into a peripheral role, reflecting the lightness with which she subsequently approaches the fictional portrayal of her own circumstances. Lasker-Schüler, on the other hand, portrays the price of overexposure as heavy indeed, not just because the glaring light of publicity shortens the depth of the night sky but because it creates the impression that anyone can lay claim to a private life, once that life is made public. “My image is disseminated in Thebes,” Jussuf-Prinz suggests, and with its dissemination comes its dismemberment; a struggle breaks out over the temple of the body, and ownership is very much in dispute. In a dreamlike description of an encounter with a reader, Lasker-Schüler gives this problem a comically sinister cast: I don’t think I can write you any more letters. As I was sitting outside the café today, an utterly strange individual in a threatening overcoat accosted me, he came up very close to me, his momentum nearly knocked over the chairs at my table. I heard the man breathing like Karl Moor: he said that I was an unbounded swindler, that I report about myself in a historically false way, that I practice blasphemy with my heart – for amongst the many, many love letters in Der Sturm I only conceal the unwritten. I was too fair to send the man away from my table, I even offered him a lemonade and gave him a Schillerlocke from my platter. He calmed down, but I did not, you can believe it, you and Kurtchen, you two cool Skagerak characters.21 20 Notably, the recipient of these copious dream descriptions, Klages, did not remain a mere bystander in the debates surrounding the significance of dreams; several years later he published his own treatise on dream interpretation, which was highly critical of the psychoanalytic model and drew the attention of Walter Benjamin. Although there is no direct evidence to support a connection between his interest in dreams and Reventlow’s letters, it is certainly tempting to speculate that such a connection may have existed. See Klages, “Vom Traumbewusstsein,” Zeitschrift für Pathopsychologie III / 1 and 4 (1914–1919), 1–38, 373–429. 21 “Ich glaube, daß ich Dir keinen Brief mehr schreiben kann. Als ich heute draußen vor dem Café saß, überfiel mich ein wildfremdes Individuum im drohenden Mantel, ganz dicht kam es an mich heran, beinah rannte es die Stühle um an meinem Tisch vor Schwung. Ich hörte den Mann atmen wie Karl von Moor: ich sei eine bodenlose Schwindlerin, ich berichte über mich historisch

82 

 Therese Ahern Augst

Else’s unrest here is directed less at the mysterious stranger than at Herwarth himself who, in the end, can never be anything more than an imperfect stand-in for the reading public; the connection between letter-writer and addressee, Else and Herwarth, is a strategic framework in which the heart promises to reveal itself but never really does. The absurdity of the stranger’s accusation – that the author conceals the unwritten, as if the unwritten were something that could be unconcealed – is overshadowed for Else when she is made to recognize the “falsehood” of that promise to write the self. I suddenly hate you, dear, good Herwarth, and you too, Kurtchen, and all the people in the café and the many lovable and hatable people in the world! Don’t you all stand like a living wall between him and me. And I hated the strange man too, the one to whom I dictated my “unwritten” love letter until it was singed under his trembling hand.22

The unwritten love letter is like the unexpressed dream; until it is put into words, its promise never has the chance of being delivered. And yet precisely in the act of putting it into words, in the attempt to fulfill that promise, its substance incinerates, and only a scorched impression remains. This is true, not only of the single unwritten love letter, but of the novel – the “heart” fixed within language – as a whole; the entire collection of letters in effect represents a singed impression of the unwritten, marking the relationship between two people whose end corresponds with the end of the novel. What remains, then, is a public version of the private self, which no longer belongs to the self at all. When you two get back to Berlin, I will most likely be in Thebes for the dedication of my relief in the wall. But I am not eager to see myself, because I have never recognized myself, neither in a sculpture nor in a painting, not even in a casting. I seek in my portrait the interplay between day and night, between sleep and waking. Does my mouth not utter the battle cry over my portrait?! An Egyptian arabesque, my nose a king’s hieroglyph, my hair shoots like arrows, and powerfully my neck carries its head. In this form I give myself to the people of my city.23 falsch, ich treibe Blasphemie mit meinem Herzen – denn unter den vielen, vielen Liebesbriefen im Sturm verbärge ich nur den Ungeschriebenen. Ich war zu gerecht, den Mann von meinem Tisch zu weisen, ich ließ ihm sogar eine Zitronenlimonade kommen und legte ihm sogar von der Platte eine Schillerlocke auf den Teller. Er beruhigte sich, aber ich mich nicht, das kannst Du mir glauben, Du und Kurtchen, Ihr beiden kühlen Skageraktencharaktere.” (MH 337) 22 “Ich hasse Dich plötzlich, lieber, guter Herwarth, und Dich, Kurtchen, auch und die vielen Leute im Café und die vielen lieb- und hassenswerten Menschen in der Welt! Steht Ihr nicht alle wie eine lebende Mauer zwischen ihm und mir. Und den wildfremden Räuber haßte ich auch, dem ich meinen ʻungeschriebenenʼ Liebesbrief diktierte, bis es unter seiner bebenden Hand versengte. ” (MH 337) 23 “Wenn Ihr wieder in Berlin seid, bin ich voraussichtlich in Theben zur Einweihung meines Reliefs in der Mauer. Aber ich bin nicht gespannt darauf, mich zu sehen, denn ich habe mich

“And I had to write it to you” 

 83

When Else announces in her last letter that she intends to withdraw into what she calls “the thicket,” the “deepest forest,” this withdrawal from public scrutiny is also a retreat from the conflict over the “house” of her body: “I have never regarded the ‘human being’ as anything other than a frame in which I placed myself; sometimes, to be honest, I lost myself in it . . . I have always hated the house, even the palace . . .”24 The “human being” created within the framework of the novel – the figure that emerges out of the dream accounts, the relationships, the experiences recorded in the course of this fictional correspondence – may be left behind in the possession of its readership. But the heart, like the night sky, remains a hundred thousand miles away. “Now I have no secrets anymore, my heart cannot keep one secure, it stands in service to the world. Oceans come and spill its secrecies on land, it awakens with the dawn and dies at sunset. But always, my heart is of silk, I can close it up, like an etui.”25 While love letters made public are but the residual ashes of a private encounter – something that the narrator Else, in fact, can finally surrender to her readership – dream accounts, by asking readers to tolerate a certain degree of nonsense, are able to bear a greater remainder. For this reason, they hint at an interiority not left behind in textual form. Yet dreaming “in public” also affords a protection against such porous boundaries, by reinforcing a fixed image that the dreamer wants the reader to retain. Reventlow, whose dream of being loved “more than all others” pointed to the role of artifice in inspiring devotion, provides an amusing example in a diary entry from February 1906. While she occasionally insists that her large circle of acquaintances in Schwabing hardly knows her (claiming that everyone misses the internal unrest beneath the “always smiling and cheerful surface”), here she uses the native absurdity of the dream to propagate the carefully cultivated image of a blithe and clever spirit: “During my afternoon nap a verse that I remembered very precisely: ‘Recken und blecken ist starr und stamm. Ich bin der König von Carlikam.’ – All of Schwabing had to laugh uproariously.”26] nie wiedererkannt, weder in Plastik, noch in der Malerei, selbst nicht im Abguß. Ich suche in meinem Porträt das wechselnde Spiel von Tag und Nacht, den Schlaf und das Wachen. Stößt nicht mein Mund auf meinem Selbstbilde den Schlachtruf aus?! Eine ägyptische Arabeske, eine Königshieroglyph meine Nase, wie Pfeile schnellen meine Haare und wuchtig trägt mein Hals seinen Kopf. So schenk ich mich den Leuten meiner Stadt.” (MH 389–390, my emphasis, T. A. A.) 24 “[I]ch hab den Menschen nie anders empfunden wie einen Rahmen, in den ich mich stellte; manchmal, ehrlich gesagt, verlor ich mich in ihm... [I]ch habe immer das Haus gehaßt, selbst den Palast . . .” (MH 387–388) 25 “Ich habe nun kein Geheimnis mehr, mein Herz kann keins verwahren, es steht im Amt der Welt. Meere kommen und spülen seine Heimlichkeiten ans Land, es erwacht mit dem Morgengrauen und stirbt am Sonnenuntergang. Aber immer ist mein Herz von Seide, ich kann es zuschließen, wie ein Etui.” (MH 348) 26 “Beim Nachmittagsschlaf einen Vers, den ich ganz genau behalten: ‘Recken und blecken ist starr und stamm. Ich bin der König von Carlikam.’ – Ganz Schwabing mußte furchtbar lachen.” (III, 377)

84 

 Therese Ahern Augst

The genial nonsense of the rhyme, which she relates to “all of Schwabing,” elicits the response she wants from her public – laughter. The release of laughter – which can be, just like the response to a letter, a sign of love – offers for Reventlow an antidote to the strain of autobiographical writing under the burden of authenticity. As she discovers, the public version of the private self can also be this: a parody of the self, a reframing of personal experience as a comedy of errors. Lasker-Schüler is aware of this strategy as well: “Yes, you have to become a clown in order to make yourself understood by the audience, and – to get to them.”27 The Letters to Norway, she writes, are a “mass farce” that she wrote with her “big toe” (370). The heart, she implies here, was not really involved. Or at least, as with Reventlow’s nonsense dream, the heart is a tactician, exposing its dream images in the interest of a particular response, for the sake of a particularly constructed public self, that can, in the end, belong to its devoted readership. To every other overture it remains closed, like an etui – or dark, like the night sky itself. Sometimes I have the strange feeling that in fact no one in the whole wide world really knows me. Above all they can never decipher me where I definitely do not want to be deciphered. No one can decipher my “darkest places.”28

27 “Ja, ja, man muß Clown werden, um sich mit dem Publikum zu verständigen, und – damit man dran kommt.” (MH 314–315) 28 “Manchmal ist es mir ein komisches Gefühl, dass doch eigentlich kein Mensch auf der weiten Welt mich wirklich kennt. Vor allem erraten sie mich nie, wo ich durchaus nicht erraten sein will. Meine ‘dunkelsten Punkte’ errät niemand.” (FR III, 349)

Barbara Hahn

“Chaque époque rêve la suivante” Or: How to Read a “Bilderatlas” of the Twentieth Century? It had to be a significant number. When Sigmund Freud published his Traumdeutung in the last year of the nineteenth century, he decided to predate the book; this seminal study started its journey through the world in the year 1900. The Traumdeutung was supposed to stand at the threshold of a new time. Looking back, the twentieth century – whenever it ended – proved to be a century of dreams. But not in the way Freud had imagined. To be sure, the Traumdeutung turned out to be much more than the “royal path” to interpreting the unconscious. Psychoanalysis, built on the founding block of this book, is the name of one of the theoretical revolutions in the last century without which we would be poorer. In 1929, on the brink of a new wave of destruction that would shake Europe, Freud received a letter written by Maxime Leroy. A letter containing an invita­ tion: would Freud be willing to provide Leroy, who was working on a book on Descartes, with an interpretation of some of the philosopher’s famous dreams? Freud declined: On considering your letter asking me to examine some dreams of Descartes’s, my first feeling was an impression of dismay, since working on dreams without being able to obtain from the dreamer himself any indications on the relations which might link them to one another or attach them to the external world – and this is clearly the case when it is a question of the dreams of a historical figure – gives, as a general rule, only meager results [. . .] Our phi­ losopher’s dreams are what are known as “dreams from above” [“Träume von oben”]) [. . .] In the most favorable cases we explain this unconscious [part] with the help of ideas which the dreamer has added to it.1

In 1937, André Breton, who was at work on his Trajectoire de rêve, received an even more explicit response: “A collection of dreams without the connected asso­ ciations, without knowledge of the circumstances in which it has been dreamt, does not mean anything to me, and I can barely imagine what it would mean to others.” As it turns out, dreams without interpretation pepper letters and diaries, memoirs and novels. They prove to be archives of the most frightening events 1 Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), XXI, 203.

86 

 Barbara Hahn

people had to experience during the past and so extremely violent century. It turns out that collections of dreams without any interpretation were the literary genre most significant for the twentieth century. We find these dream books, as I would like to call the new genre, written in German and Arabic, in English and French. When Walter Benjamin wrote that “the history of dreams remains to be written,” that “dreams have their share in history,”2 he probably had these dreams in mind. In a letter, written on March 3, 1934, in his Parisian exile, deep at night, in a “Nachtstunde,” he wrote to Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem: At this time, in which at daytime my imagination is bothered by the most degrading prob­ lems, at night, I more and more encounter their emancipation in dreams that almost always are politically charged. I wish I would once have the opportunity to tell you these dreams. They represent an atlas of images of the secret history of national socialism.3

Reading dozens and dozens of dreams that came down to us could assemble this atlas of images. When Benjamin tried to draft this “secret history” his reflections circled around the category of “collective unconsciousness.” From his letters to Theodor Adorno we know that the idea of a “Traumkollektiv” or a “kollektives Unbewußtes” met more than disagreement. Adorno vetoed all attempts to rethink these categories. From his point of view, Benjamin was maneuvering far too close to Carl Gustav Jung’s theoretical framework. Benjamin, as we know, gave in: “I had intended to write a critique of Jung’s psychology in which I wanted to show it’s fascist register. I had to postpone it.”4 It might be about time to reconsider Benjamin’s attempts. In retrospect is seems as if the history of this extremely violent century might well be written as the story of a “Traumkollektiv.” Not – as Carl Gustav Jung would have it – as embarking on a search of archetypes, recurrent in dreams of the people who had to live through the worst years of the twentieth century; but rather as an attempt to read their written dreams as “Bilder,” images, and concepts for unprecedented 2 “Die Geschichte des Traumes bleibt noch zu schreiben [. . .] Das Träumen hat an der Geschichte teil.” Walter Benjamin, “Traumkitsch. Glosse zum Surrealismus,” in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), II, 620. 3 “In dieser Zeit, die tagsüber meine Phantasie mit den entwürdigendsten Problemen be­ schäftigt, erlebe ich nachts, öfter und öfter, ihre Emanzipation in Träumen, die fast immer einen politischen Gegenstand haben. Ich wünschte sehr, einmal in die Lage zu kommen, sie Dir zu erzählen. Sie stellen einen Bilderatlas zur geheimen Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus dar.” Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998), IV, 357 and 359. 4 Letter to Fritz Lieb, July 9, 1937. Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, V, 550

“Chaque époque rêve la suivante” 

 87

experiences. Or to put it even more strongly: as one of the very few possibilities of fathoming and withstanding the unprecedented. There seem to be many, many pages of this imaginary “Bilderatlas.”5 The first pages are to be found in Isolde Kurz’s Traumland (Dreamland) published in 1920. This book stages a historical rupture: dreams become archives of frightening encounters with modernity’s dark sides. Quite literally. Experiences in the “real world,” in the battlefields where millions were killed, or “at home” in the starving cities, exceeded the worst nightmares. Dreams, so Isolde Kurz writes, have a history. In her case, dreaming in Italy where she had lived for many years differs from dreaming in Germany. In the middle of the book, the very idea of “history” changes. During the last years of the war, Kurz notices that she is having the same horrifying dream again and again. New series of dreams accompany the revolution. One of these dreams, dreamt on 29 December 1918, – it is the only dream in book dated so precisely – is espe­ cially upsetting. The dreamer walks the shores of a stream wide as the Isar, Munich’s river, when she suddenly notices that people are being swept along in it. They cannot be saved. “At the time I related what I saw to a sudden death which occurred at the very moment of my dream [. . .] Only later did I realize that the dream had a different meaning: it was related to the bloody massacres following the ‘Räterepublik.’”6 With Isolde Kurz’s Traumland dreams have moved into a new realm. Writing down dreams now helps to encounter the unimaginable. In May 1920, Wieland Herzfelde published his collection of dreams, Tragigrotesken der Nacht. Träume (Grotesques of the Night: Dreams). A book composed of eighteen dreams, with illustrations by George Grosz, dreams displaying an unreal reality, sharp images of a destroyed world. After the war, after a failed revolution. One dream, dated July 1919, bears the title “Die Sowjetwolke” (“The Soviet cloud”). In the middle of this rather powerful piece there is a scene at Unter den Linden in Berlin, its protagonist a hungry, lonely stroller: 5 Benjamin is referring to Aby Warburg’s term. 6 The dream reads as follows: Ich “finde mich plötzlich vor einem gewaltigen Strom, breit wie die Isar und tiefgrün, mit jagenden Wellen, worauf Leiche an Leiche vorbeitreibt. Zuerst auf der Mitte des Stromes ein Arbeitsmann, seitwärtsliegend, hemdärmelig, mit graugewürfelter Hose, die wie mit Kalk oder dergleichen beschmiert ist, dann näher vom Ufer ein junger Mann mit einem Ge­ lehrtengesicht, spitzer Nase, blondem Haar und gut gekleidet; dieser bewegt noch schwach den linken Arm, wie um das Ufer zu gewinnen, wird aber gleichfalls hilflos vorbeigerissen [. . .] Ich bezog damals das Geschaute auf einen zur gleichen Stunde eingetreteten plötzlichen Todesfall [. . .]. Als aber die Räterepublik mit dem schrecklichen nachfolgenden Blutbad kam, da verstand ich erst den wahren Sinn des Traumes.” Isolde Kurz, Traumland (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags­ Anstalt, 1920), 102–103. Kurz (1853–1944) published short stories, poems, and novels.

88 

 Barbara Hahn

In the window of a store I see the most delicious goods and fruits: eel, salmon, large walnuts, lobster, grapes, bananas, geese and turkeys, pates and sausages – whatever one might be able to imagine. I am staying there for a long while enjoying with my eyes; espe­ cially the summit of a mountain built of coconuts and pineapples: a dish, garnished with lemon and dark green parsley, a larded saddle. It’s not a roast of hare or rabbit! It is a child without skin, easily to be recognized because of its skull covered with dark hair, laid on its stomach, the little legs straddled and amputated at the knee for better display, red larded flesh, appetizing. “Who, in former times would have thought that something like this is possible,” I thought, “and today no one even takes notice.”7

The thought of the dreaming “I” is staging a historical rupture. In former times, “people” wouldn’t have thought possible what now turns out to be “real.” So “real” that nobody pays it any attention. People stay “cold,” as the sentence says. It takes the “I” a while before he notices that something has changed. The moment of recognition does not jump out of a passage in which all the verbs emphasize slow movements. The “I” “schlendert” – strolls – one of Berlin’s boulevards. He takes his time and studies all the goods on display in the window even though a ravenous appetite drives him. The window’s centerpiece, arranged on the top of a mountain built of fruits, does not initially draw his attention. We rather follow a wandering gaze. There are fruits – but how do they look? If we were to build a mountain of coconuts and pineapples we would probably not cut them up. Instead of the shiny white and the glossy yellow of these tropical fruits there would rather be blunt brown. And then, at the very end, an image appears, as clear as a still life. A dish carrying roasted meat that is neither hare nor rabbit nor pork nor anything else that human beings usually eat. It is a human corpse, as the verb in the sentence clearly points out. We cut the animal carcass at the joint; we do not amputate it at the knee. With the corpse on that dish, colors appear. Yellow lemon, dark green parsley, red flesh. A nature morte. A recognizable image. But the very moment in which something familiar is recognized is also the moment in 7 “Da sehe ich hinter einem Schaufenster die herrlichsten Delikatessen und Früchte gebrei­ tet: Aal, Lachs, Riesenwalnüsse, Hummer, Trauben, Bananen, Gänse und Puten, Pasteten und Würste – was man sich denken kann. Lange stehe ich davor, mit den Augen genießend; vor allem den Gipfel eines Berges aus Kokosnüssen und Ananasfrüchten: eine Platte, auf der, garniert mit Zitronenscheiben und dunkelgrüner, krauser Petersilie, ein gespickter Rücken liegt. Kein Hasen­ oder Kaninchenbraten! Ein Kind mit abgezogener Haut, am dunkelbehaarten Schädel deutlich erkennbar, auf den Bauch gelegt, einladend zum Kauf mit gespreizten, an den Knien amputi­ erten Schenkelchen und appetitlich mit rotem gespickten Fleisch.  ‘Wer hätte früher sowas für möglich gehalten’ – denke ich bei mir – ‘heute läßt das alle Leute kalt.’” Wieland Herzfelde, Tragigrotesken der Nacht: Träume (Berlin: Der Malik­Verlag, 1920), 66–67.

“Chaque époque rêve la suivante” 

 89

which the dreaming “I” realizes that the familiar is nothing but the empty shell of something absolutely new. In a book published in 1938 we find a dream that echoes the one written by Herzfelde. It is in the second version of Ernst Jünger’s Das abenteuerliche Herz (The Adventurous Heart). When the book first came out in 1930, this dream was not included. Purple Endives – Steglitz8 I entered a luxuriant delicatessen shop because in the window I had noticed a very special purple sort of endives. I was not taken by surprise when the sales clerk explained to me that there is only one dish that would go well with this vegetable – human flesh. I had a forebod­ ing of this answer. We engaged in a long conversation on how to prepare this dish and then we went down to the cold­storage room where I saw the humans hanging on the walls like rabbits hang outside a venison store. The sales clerk pointed out that what I would see here were only hunted pieces and not those fattened by the dozen on a farm. “They are leaner – I don’t say that in order to advertise them – but they taste much better.” The heads, hands and feet were displayed on special dishes provided with price tags. When we walked up the stairs I said to him: “I had not realized that in this town civilization had made so much progress.” The sales clerk hesitated for a moment but then he answered with a very obliging smile.9

A remarkable dream, structured through inversions. “Zuchtanstalten,” a word the sales clerk uses, could be rendered as “breeding farms”; and the context seems to support this interpretation. But “Zuchtanstalten” could also be read as deriving 8 Steglitz is a neighborhood in southwest Berlin. 9 “Violette Endivien Steglitz.  Ich trat in ein üppiges Schlemmergeschäft ein, weil eine im Schaufenster ausgestellte, ganz be­ sondere, violette Art von Endivien mir aufgefallen war. Es überraschte mich nicht, daß der Ver­ käufer mir erklärte, die einzige Sorte Fleisch, für die dieses Gericht als Zukost in Frage komme, sei Menschenfleisch – ich hatte das vielmehr schon dunkel vorausgeahnt.  Es entspann sich eine lange Unterhaltung über die Art der Zubereitung, dann stiegen wir in die Kühlräume hinab, in denen ich die Menschen, wie Hasen vor dem Laden eines Wildbrethändlers, an den Wänden hängen sah. Der Verkäufer hob besonders hervor, daß ich hier durchweg auf der Jagd erbeutete und nicht etwa in den Zuchtanstalten reihenweise gemästete Stücke betrachtete: ‘Magerer, aber – ich sage das nicht, um Reklame zu machen – weit aromatischer.’ Die Hände, Füße und Köpfe waren in besonderen Schüsseln ausgestellt und mit kleinen Preistäfelchen bes­ teckt.  Als wir die Treppe wieder hinaufstiegen, machte ich die Bemerkung: ‘Ich wußte nicht, daß die Zivilisation in dieser Stadt schon so weit fortgeschritten ist’ – worauf der Verkäufer einen Au­ genblick zu stutzen schien, um dann mit einem sehr verbindlichen Lächeln zu quittieren.” Ernst Jünger, Das abenteuerliche Herz. Zweite Fassung. Figuren und Capriccios, in Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1979), IX, 184.

90 

 Barbara Hahn

from “züchtigen” – to punish. In the Germany of 1938 “Zuchtanstalten” could serve as another word for concentration camps. In these camps, people were not fattened but starved to death. They were literately chased, hunted, and then brought to this “facility,” this “Anstalt.” Hunted like rabbits, hares. The image of people hanged on hooks like sections of butchered animals is an uncanny reminder of one of the Nazi’s preferred execution methods; those held responsi­ ble for the assassination plot of 20 July 1944, for instance, were hanged by piano wire from such hooks. As in the dream Herzfelde recorded, once again a color draws the dreamer’s attention: “violett” – purple. In the 1930s, purple was an unusual color for a veg­ etable. Red cabbage, served all over Germany in the winter, has a different color, while radicchio, French asparagus, or eggplant arrived on German tables only after the war. In prewar kitchens, the color purple did not suggest appetizing but rather rotten food. Frozen potatoes turn purple, as do the germs of this vegetable. Purple, one could say, was therefore a color that warned but did not attract. The purple endives in the window, read as a warning, find their echo when the dream­ ing “I” is not surprised to hear about the news of human flesh as a usual dish. His “dunkle Ahnung” [“obscure foreboding”] is met by the clerk’s affirmation that in the progress of civilization mankind has crossed a borderline. What the dreamer encounters is not a revival of cannibalism, for cannibalism always already was considered as a remnant of former uncivilized times in human history. In the world that the dreaming “I” is about to enter, the difference between flesh and flesh, mankind and animal has disappeared. The dream ends with consent – no room for disgust or revulsion; no room for disagreement. Consent – much like in the Herzfelde dream, where people stay cold and do not even notice that some­ thing has happened, that they encounter dramatic changes. Jünger’s dream was written – and published – in a Germany under Nazi dic­ tatorship. In a totalitarian state, dreams gain new importance. Charlotte Beradt, a journalist in Berlin when the Nazis destroyed the last remainders of democracy in Germany, seems to have noticed this change immediately. Her book, Das dritte Reich des Traums (The Third Reich of Dreams), published in 1965, opens a new chapter in the history of dreams.10 It is composed of carefully arranged dreams the author collected between 1933, when Hitler came to power, and 1939, when she fled to England. On the first page – two mottos. The first one is taken from the Book of Job: “In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth 10 Charlotte Beradt, Das dritte Reich des Traums (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1966). In 1968 an English translation was published: Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams, with an essay by Bruno Bettelheim, trans. Adriane Gottwald (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968). Beradt was born in 1901; she died in New York in 1986.

“Chaque époque rêve la suivante” 

 91

upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; Then he openeth the ears of men.” The second motto is by Robert Ley, a leading Nazi: “The only person in Germany who still leads a private life is the person who sleeps.” Ley’s statement does not prove true by the end of the book. Nothing about the realm of sleep is private. On the contrary. The book rather suggests that Nietzsche was right when he wrote that we learn for life in our dreams. The dreamers in Beradt’s book, none of whom was a member of the Nazi party, learned in their dreams how to live in a totalitarian state. They learned how to accept total control over their lives, minds, and souls. In the first dream, a man in his fifties, a member of the Social Democratic Party, dreams that Joseph Goebbels pays a visit to his factory. All employees must leave their workstations and line up like soldiers in the factory yard. The factory owner, standing in the middle of his workers, is forced to perform the “Hitler Gruss.” It takes him half an hour to move his right arm up into place. Millimeter by millimeter. As soon as his arm reaches the correct angle, Goebbels says: “I don’t want your salute” and leaves. The owner, standing there among his employees, is deeply ashamed. He looks for sympathy in the faces of “his” people, but he does not find the slightest hint of any emotion.11 In many, many dreams, the dreamers try to resist but – in the end – must give in. Only one dreamer murders Hitler in his dream. But he, like Charlotte Beradt, managed to escape to Prague where he could enjoy “Traumfreiheit,” the freedom of dream. The Third Reich of Dreams: a title to be read and reflected upon. It does not say: dreams in the Third Reich. “Dream” is the common denominator. And this “dream” has three empires. The first one came before Freud, when people had pro­ phetic or analytic dreams. They were written down in literary or theoretical texts. Then, in the year 1900, the century of the interpretation of dreams began with the publication of Freud’s Traumdeutung. Almost all of the dreamers in Beradt’s book seem to be psychoanalytically informed. They are able to reflect upon their dreams. But now, only thirty­three years later, Freud’s “century of dreams” seems to have reached its end, and the third “Reich” of dreams has begun. And in this “Reich” one does not require either effort or sophisticated skills of interpretation to understand dreams. Dreams now include their own interpretations. It could hardly be more disappointing: there is no private life in dreams. No resistance to overarching rules. In their dreams, people teach themselves how to live under totalitarian rule. Without this self­training of its subjects, the book seems to sug­ gests, totalitarianism would not be so effective. It seems to suggest that the world of dreams under these circumstances is even more “real” than the real world. 11 Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams, 5.

92 

 Barbara Hahn

In many, many dreams people anticipate restrictions, means of oppression that will only be enforced later. They dream of the impossible that is about to become possible. And they seem to prove that thinking, reflecting is much more difficult under totalitarian circumstances then acting. Beradt’s book presents dreams as means of representation with historical and theoretical relevance. The book is structured in a way that new experiences can be articulated – in a dialogue with a study that reconstructed and analyzed this devastating society: Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism.12 Arendt’s book sheds light on the dreams; the dreams shed light on Arendt’s analysis. Both types of knowledge are appropriate. None is superior to the other. While Charlotte Beradt collected dreams in Germany and composed a dream book in exile, the poet Paula Ludwig approached these nightly encounters in a different way. In 1935, she published her first collection of dreams called Traumlandschaft (Landscape of dreams). When the book came out, she had left Germany for good. Sites of her exile were Austria, Switzerland, Paris, the camp in Gurs, Marseille, then via Spain and Portugal to São Paolo. In 1953, she returned to Germany. Her book Träume (Dreams), published in 1962, is an expanded version of the first one with a second part containing dreams written down in exile. One dream is especially striking: The Sewer We traveled through Switzerland on a white and very clean train. The summits of the Alps were shining white and shimmered in their purity. We crossed a gorgeous bridge. Deep down there was a valley. When I looked down what I saw was horrible. A half circle formed by rocks, surrounding a sewer. Filled with dirty mud. In this dump people were crawling. They were in danger of drowning. A giant negro stepped out of a cave, rearing up, throwing up his arms. In the foreground, corpses rot. They had grown into tremendous dimensions and had turned into an ugly blue­green color. Some people tried to find shelter close to the rocks. But more and more rinse­water poured down. They could not be saved.13 12 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1951). 13 “Die Kloake  In einem weißen, blitzsauberen Luxuszug fuhren wir durch die Schweiz. Die Alpenspitzen schimmerten auch weiß und leuchteten in ihrer Reinheit. Wir kamen über eine grandiose Brücke.  Tief unten lag das Tal. Als ich hinunterblickte, eröffnete sich mir ein Anblick des Grauens: halbkreisförmig, von Felswänden eingeschlossen, war eine Art Kloake. Schmutzige Schlamm­ Massen häuften sich darin. In diesem Sumpf schleppten sich menschliche Gestalten. Sie waren

“Chaque époque rêve la suivante” 

 93

Nature does not produce sewers. They are manmade – as is “Spülwasser” – water for rinsing dishes or cloths. “Sewers” and “rinse­water” both hint at human activities. The people down below are caught between the rocks, but what will kill them is not melting snow or rain or flooding; other people are killing them. People absent from the scene. In the very moment in which the dreamer sees what is going to happen down there, the train as well as the other people on the train seem to have disappeared. “We” were traveling through Switzerland, so the beginning of the story reads. But then there is only “I” left, a lonely dreamer up there, far away from bridges, trains, mountains. As a closer look reveals, the “I” sees what a single “I” would not be able to see. She has a panoramic view of the valley down there; at the same time she perceives precise details that only someone would remark who is very close to the bottom of the valley. Like Herz­ felde’s dreamer who suddenly perceives something resembling a still life, the dreamer here sees something resembling a painting: in sharp contrast to the snow and the train, the color black emerges. As if the painting were black and white. Like national­socialist racism? But then, in the foreground, we see the ugly green­ ish or bluish color of the rotting corpses. An image so horrible that the dreamer’s attention slips to the next image: the dying people. To see them requires one more change of perspective. Is a group dreaming here? The “Traumkollektiv”? Pretty much at the end of her collection, Paula Ludwig included a dream enti­ tled “Buchstabe D” (letter D). The dreaming “I” was just about to write the word “Deus,” God, so the story begins, when the “D” jumped out of the word and dis­ appeared. Without this letter, the writer immediately recognizes, it is impossible to write the word “Du,” “you.” So she runs out the door; a woman with a broom – a witch? – tells her that she has just kicked the “D” into the “Abwasser” [“drain­ age ditch”]. Down the stairs the dreamer runs, and suddenly she finds herself diving into the dirty, muddy water of a channel – without even considering the fact that she is unable to swim. And there, floating on the stinking mass that is neither fluid nor solid she sees the “D,” shining like silver. She catches it, takes it home, and finishes writing the word “Deus.” “Deus” and “Du” [“you”]. The one not without the other. In the dreams we have considered, there is no God, there is no “you.” There is an “I” exposed to in Gefahr zu ertrinken. Aus einer Höhle trat ein riesenhafter Neger und bäumte seinen Leib. Er warf die Arme empor.  Im Vordergrund verwesten Kadaver. Sie hatten ungeheure Dimensionen angenommen und waren ganz aufgeschwollen und von scheußlich blaugrüner Farbe.  Viele Menschen versuchten, an den Mauern Schutz vor der trüben Flut zu finden. Doch es kam immer mehr Spülwasser. Sie waren verloren.” Paula Ludwig, Träume. Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren zwischen 1920 und 1960 (Ebenhausen: Langewiesche­Brandt Verlag, 1962), 107. The first collection, Traumlandschaft, was published in 1935 by Hoffmann in Berlin.

94 

 Barbara Hahn

a world in which all the fundamental differences tend to disappear. Other than the first dream with its shining white, the black down there in the valley, the blu­ ish­greenish shade of the rotting corpses, the second dream seems to be staged in a world without colors. Images as if painted in the style of a grisaille with a hint of silver, images like black and white photography. Color, so it seems, signals a moment of exposure to a rupture in history, a moment of recognition, exactly as in the dreams written by Wieland Herzfelde and Ernst Jünger. The absence of color, on the other hand, seems to signal that the dream stages a thought experiment. Colored images and grisailles – in two of his dreams, published 1928 as a sequence, Walter Benjamin plays with this difference; neither of the dreams were included in his Einbahnstraße (One Way Street); they are to be found in a compi­ lation, or rather a montage, of dreams, Ignaz Jezower’s Das Buch der Träume (The book of dreams).14 In the first dream, the dreamer, surrounded by people he is not able to recognize, sees a road in the darkest twilight. The sun is covered by fog and “without the power of shining.” He runs down the road toward the light. But the sun disappears as if someone had taken it away. As the dreaming “I” contin­ ues to run, a powerful rain floods the road until, suddenly, the road disappears in the ocean. The “I” turns around, runs back, “beseeligt” – delighted – because he has discovered the danger they all might have encountered and would warn them. But there is no return. The dream ends with the running dreamer – no one is there who could be warned. The dreamer seems to run in a world before the Creation. All the differences – between light and darkness, earth and water, earth and heaven – have disappeared. No differences. Mud and twilight. An impossible world. The second dream dives back into history. Here, the dreamer finds himself in a Roman arena. A chariot race is about to begin. A “dark consciousness” tells him that this race is about Christ. Suddenly, he finds himself at the bottom of the hill on which the arena is located. An electric streetcar races by. Sitting in it, an acquaintance of his wears the red garment of the damned. Her friend, with Satan’s features on his beautiful face, breaks a stick above his head and says to the dreamer: “I know that you are Daniel, the prophet.” In this moment, the dreaming “I” goes blind. Together with the man bearing the satanic features, he

14 Ignaz Jezower, born 1878 in Rzeszow, Poland, studied in Vienna and Berlin, where he lived until 1943, when the SS deported him to Riga and murdered him together with his wife. Jezower’s years in Berlin were very productive: he collaborated with Franz Hessel in translating Giacomo Casanova’s memoirs, and together with George Grosz he produced illustrated anthologies. As the dedication of the Book of Dreams demonstrates, Jezower was also acquainted with the master of literary montage: “Dieses Werk ist Alfred Döblin in freundschaftlicher Gesinnung gewidmet” – “This work is dedicated to Alfred Döblin, in friendship.”

“Chaque époque rêve la suivante” 

 95

walks the streets of a city, a ghost accompanying them. When they reach a gate, a gate not mentioned previously, the narrator wakes up. A dream charged with history. A dream structured by color. The woman on the streetcar wears a red garment. Like Tiresias, the prophet in Greek mythology who was blinded by Athena because he had seen her naked. In the dream, the red garment is not ascribed to this wise man but rather to the dammed in Christian mythology who will be burned at the stake. The “I” does not refuse to be identified with “Daniel the prophet,” a Christian interpretation of the story in the Hebrew Bible. Daniel, in the rabbinic tradition, is not a prophet. Together with three other young men, he was exiled in Babylon when Nebuchadnezzar was king; he came down as the one who had the gift of interpretation of dreams. And he was the one who was able to decipher the writing on the wall. According to this tradition, he was not blind. In Benjamin’s dream, this multilayered Daniel could be read as a character staging all the elements of “our” culture: Greek, Hebrew, Christian. The beginning of the dream – in a Roman arena – points to the fact that one of these elements proved to be dominant. It was in the time of the Roman Empire that Christianity started to conquer the world. “Chaque époque rêve la suivante” – “Every epoch dreams its successor.” This sentence, written in the middle of the nineteenth century by the French histo­ rian Jules Michelet, plays an important role in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Benjamin did not occupy himself with dreams when he worked on this project; for him, the dreams of the previous century were to be found in architecture, furniture, and many other objects. The twentieth century bestowed on us heavy burdens, among them nightmares. No answer to the question of how to wake up from these bad dreams that came down to us. Revolutions seem to have lost their function as wake­up calls. The previous century might have ended with an empire collapsing – without war or revolution. Dreaming, sleeping, being awake. Obviously, all these three modes of being need to be reconsidered. Not only as theoretical, but also as political questions.

Davide Stimilli

Dream Bodies On the Iconography of the Dreamer 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. Elizabeth Bishop, “Sleeping Standing Up”

The avowed intention of Aby Warburg’s famous last project, his atlas Mnemosyne, was to offer “a psychological history in images of the interval between impulse and action.”1 This essay is meant as a contribution to such a history, as I focus on the interval between the impulse to fall asleep and the action of waking up that we call sleep and that is, also, the stage of the dream. One may call, borrowing Wallace Stevens’s expression, what takes place in that interval a “motionless gesture:”2 namely, a gesture through which imperceptible change becomes manifest, such as the posture of the reclining body,3 or the appearance of shame, be it through blushing, the lowering of the eyes, or any of the other physical symptoms that accompany it.4 But let me first make clear what my title does not mean. I am not concerned with the bodies that we dream for ourselves, our ideal bodies, as opposed to the real bodies that we happen to be endowed 1 Aby Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000), II.1: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. Martin Warnke (2000), 3. 2 Wallace Stevens, “So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch,” l.8. David Rosand borrows the title of Stevens’s poem for his essay “So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch,” in Titian 500, ed. Joseph Manca (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1993), 101–115, which revisits the results of his earlier, wide-ranging discussion of pastoral imagery in Venetian art: “Giorgione, Venice, and the Pastoral Vision,” in Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape, ed. Robert C. Cafritz, Lawrence Gowing, and David Rosand (Washington: Phillips Collection and National Gallery of Art, 1988), 20–81. 3 Cf. Massimo Scalabrini and Davide Stimilli, “Pastoral Postures: Some Renaissance Versions of Pastoral,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 71 (2009), 35–60, to which the final part of this essay is substantially indebted. 4 Cf. Davide Stimilli, “Über Schamhaftigkeit: Ein Beitrag zur historischen Semantik einiger physiognomischer Begriffe,” in Geschichten der Physiognomik, ed. Rüdiger Campe and Manfred Schneider (Freiburg: Rombach, 1995), 99–123.

98 

 Davide Stimilli

with, nor with the bodies that we dream of as objects of erotic desire, nor, at least directly, with the bodies that we literally dream of in our sleep. I am concerned instead with the bodies as they dream, and more specifically with the posture of the body that dreams, hence of the body asleep. Marginally, I will also explore the relationship between the posture of the dreaming body and the dream itself, or those bodies that we create in dreams as a result of the actual posture of our body while sleeping, which occupied Coleridge so feverishly: “A really important Hint,” he wrote in May 1804, “suggested itself to me,” not by chance as he was falling into his “first Sleep:” [. . .] the effect of the posture of the body, open mouth for instance, on first Dreams – & perhaps on all. [. . .] My Mind is not vigorous enough to pursue it – but I see, that it leads to a development of the effects of continued Indistinctness of Impressions on the Imagination according to laws of Likeness & what ever that may solve itself into.5

I will not dare to claim for myself a more vigorous mind than Coleridge’s, but I will try to further pursue his hint by shifting attention, from the effects of the body posture on the dream, back onto the posture itself. My attention will be focused, in other words, not on the physical causation of the dream, but rather on the conditions for its representation, and specifically its representability in art: in Freudian terms, on the “considerations of representability” (Strachey’s translation for Freud’s “Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit”), not only of the dream content, as in Freud’s theory, but also of the dreamers themselves. Even if we consider only a couple of well-known Renaissance examples, such as Vittore Carpaccio’s Dream of St. Ursula (Fig. 1)6 and Raphael’s Knight’s Dream (Fig. 2),7 the limits of such representability in painting become immediately visible: the dreamers are shown asleep and surrounded by the figures inhabiting their dreams – the latter being 5 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 5 vols. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1957–), II (1961), entry 2064. For a discussion of this and similar passages investigating the question, cf. Jennifer Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6 Vittore Carpaccio (1455?–1525?), Legend of St. Ursula: Dream of St. Ursula, oil on canvas, ca. 1495, Venice, Accademia. 7 Raphael (1483–1520), Knight’s Dream, wood, 1502–1503, London, National Gallery. Cf. Johannes Röll, “‘Do We Affect Fashion in the Grave?’ Italian and Spanish Tomb Sculptures and the Pose of the Dreamer,” in The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance, ed. Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson (London: British Museum Press, 1998), 54–164 (158) and Erwin Panofsky, Herkules am Scheidewege und andere antike Bildstoffe in der neueren Kunst (Leipzig: Teubner, 1930), who suggested revising the title to The Choice of Scipio Africanus Major (now usually abbreviated as The Dream of Scipio: cf. Dieter Wuttke, “Erwin Panofskys Herculesbuch nach siebenundsechzig Jahren,” Afterword to the 1997 reprint [Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1997], 12).

Dream Bodies 

 99

Fig. 1: Vittore Carpaccio (1455–1525), Saint Ursula’s Dream. Legend of Saint Ursula, 1495, 274 x 267 cm, Accademia, Venice, Italy (Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

represented no less substantially than the former. As one interpreter puts it in reference to Raphael’s panel, the two allegorical figures, Virtue and Pleasure, “flank a sleeping knight like the content of his dream;”8 but more than just a simile, as the figure of speech implies, they are the very content of his dream. With the additional complication that it is hardly possible to establish, whenever one or more 8 Joseph Leo Korner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 392. Cf. also Sixten Ringbom, “Action and Report: The Problem of Indirect Narration in the Academic Theory of Painting,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 52 (1989), 36.

100 

 Davide Stimilli

Fig. 2: Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) (1483–1520), The Knight’s Dream, National Gallery, London, Great Britain (Photo Credit: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY)

sleeping figures are depicted, whether the figures surrounding them are actually mere shadows, figments of their imagination, or rather substantial bodies, as in the case of Filippino Lippi’s9 (Fig. 3) and Raphael’s10 frescoes (Fig. 4) depicting St. Peter’s liberation. Like the guards in the fresco, as it were, the dreamers are forced to inhabit their very dreams, they are imprisoned in them and by them, forced 9 Filippino Lippi (d. 1504), St. Peter Freed from Prison, fresco, ca.1427, Florence, Santa Maria del Carmine, Cappella Brancacci. 10 Raphael, Liberation of St. Peter, fresco, ca.1512–1513, Rome (Vatican), Stanza d’Eliodoro.

Dream Bodies 

 101

Fig. 3: Filippino Lippi (1457–1504), Saint Peter led from prison by an angel, 1481–1483, Brancacci Chapel, S. Maria del Carmine, Florence, Italy (Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

“within the limits of a representation,” as Anne Duden insightfully observes, that “both includes and excludes” them.11 A particularly challenging problem confronting Renaissance theorists of art, and as challenging as that posed by the representation of a living body, was that of the representation of a dead one – a problem most difficult to solve (“quod quidem difficillimum est”), according to Leon Battista Alberti, because of the impossibility of representing absolute absence of motion.12 The same difficulty, 11 Anne Duden, “Ausgehend von Liegenden,” in Vorträge des Warburg-Hauses, 4 (2000), 37–64 (53). 12 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua, ed. and introd. by Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), 76.

102 

 Davide Stimilli

Fig. 4: Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) (1483–1520), The Liberation of Saint Peter, detail of center, Stanze di Raffaello, Vatican Palace, Vatican State (Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

of course, extends to the sleeping body, whose representation is therefore, not by chance, one of the pièces de résistance of Renaissance art, as it measured itself against the great models of antiquity, which had already faced the “uncertainty as to how to show a figure who is recumbent but not dead;”13 it may be enough here to recall Giorgione’s Dresden Venus14 (Fig. 5) and one of its ancient sculptural precursors, the Vatican Ariadne (on which more later) (Fig. 6). As an interpreter 13 Sheila McNally, “Ariadne and Others: Images of Sleep in Greek and Early Roman Art,” Classical Antiquity, 4 (1985), 152–192 (156). 14 Giorgione (1478?–1510), Venus Asleep, ca. 1510, oil on canvas, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.

Dream Bodies 

 103

Fig. 5: Giorgione (da Castelfranco) (1477– after 1510), Sleeping Venus, Gemaeldegalerie, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Germany (Photo Credit: Art Resource, NY)

puts it, “the formula of the raised arm” that we see so elegantly applied in the Vatican statue and replicated by Giorgione “surely had – and continued to have – a raison d’être of demonstrating that a given figure in an inert pose was not to be misunderstood as a corpse, but was to be understood as alive, and only in a deep sleep.”15 But how do we tell the dreaming from the merely sleeping body? For the dreaming body appears, too, immobile to our eyes, even if it continues to be active, and even if it is, paradoxically, “more finely attuned than the waker” to its “innermost vitality,” as Jacqueline Rose argues in an essay suggestively titled “On Not Being Able To Sleep.”16 In support of her thesis, she quotes Freud’s 15 Harry Murutes, “Personifications of Laughter and Drunken Sleep in Titian’s ‘Andrians,’” Burlington Magazine, 115 (1973), 518–525 (522). Cf. also Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, “A Story of Five Amazons,” in American Journal of Archaeology, 78 (1974), 1–17, who sees the gesture as originating in representations of death, illustrating the Homeric formula of the “loosening of limbs,” and then being transposed “from the relaxation of death to the relaxation of slumber,” and, even beyond, “from resting while asleep to resting while awake” (10–11). 16 Jacqueline Rose, “‘On Not Being Able To Sleep’: Rereading The Interpretation of Dreams,” in On Not Being Able To Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 105–124 (117). It is interesting to consider that Erasmus Darwin explained the nightmare as due to a sleep so deep that the body would lose track of such innermost activity (cf. Ernst Jones, On the Nightmare [New York: Liveright, 1951], 23.)

104 

 Davide Stimilli

Fig. 6: Ariadne, Late Hadrianic/Early Antonine copy after a Pergamene original, Vatican Museums, Vatican State (Photo Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY)

remark that “in dreams, all the current bodily sensations assume gigantic proportions,” along with Proust’s, that the activity of our “agile vegetative powers [. . .] is doubled while we sleep.”17 To which one may add William Blake’s lines from his Milton: “When a man dreams, he reflects not that his body sleeps, / Else he would wake,” but still he has “perceptions of his Sleeping Body.”18 It is such an apparent paradox, pertaining to that which Thomas De Quincey, another sufferer, like Proust and Coleridge, of the “pains of sleep,”19 called “physical economy,”20 that 17 Rose, “‘On Not Being Able To Sleep,’” 117. 18 William Blake, Milton: A Poem, [Pl. 14], ll. 1–2, 4, in The Illuminated Books, 6 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), V, 140. 19 In The Pains of Sleep Coleridge describes his ritual before falling asleep as a set of prescriptions, meant to compose the body in order to gain composure over the soul: “Ere on my bed my limbs I lay, / It hath not been my use to pray / With moving lips or bended knees; / But silently, by slow degrees, / My spirit I to love compose, / In humble trust mine eye-lids close, / With reverential resignation, / No wish conceived, no thought exprest / Only a sense of supplication” (11. 1–9). 20 The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop, 7 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000) 2: “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” 66 (from the section titled, with an allusion to Coleridge’s poem, “The Pains of Opium”).

Dream Bodies 

 105

I am going to investigate next, before returning to the question of the representation of the dreaming body. The physiological theory of the dream, at which both Rose and her authorities are hinting, goes back ultimately to Aristotle, who defined the dream as “an appearance [phantasma] that arises from the movement of the sense-impressions, while one is in the sleeping state.”21 A motion is thus taking place, in spite of the apparent immobility of the body, but what is in motion is the soul, the animating principle within the body. This shift from the visible to the invisible becomes clearer if we consider Cicero’s account of dreams in his treatise On Divination, which makes direct reference to the Greek philosopher. Against the view of the dream as an instrument for divination, Cicero embraces Aristotle’s endogenous theory of the dream, as due to a sort of ebb and tide of the imagination, while he dismisses the exogenous theory of the dream, as a vision originating from without, that would prevail in late antiquity and up to the early modern era: By nature I mean that essential activity of the soul owing to which it never stands still, and is never free from some agitation or motion or other. When in consequence of the languor of the body (cum languore corporis) it is able to use neither the limbs nor the senses, it falls into varied and uncertain visions that arise, as Aristotle says, from the clinging remnants of the things the soul did and thought while awake.22

There is, hence, a continuity between waking and dreaming that runs against the assumption of an external origin of the dream. At the same time, a clear dichotomy is asserted between the languor of the body and the activity of the soul, which will be rejected by those early modern natural historians and philosophers, who, while certainly sympathizing with the Aristotelian primacy of sense impressions, will aim at developing a new monistic model for the explanation of both natural and historical change. Within such a model, change is accounted for as a continuum of unremarkable transitions with no design but its perpetuation. I know of no better, though quaint-sounding, way of expressing their common concern than the title of Robert Boyle’s Essay of the Great Effects of Even Languid and Unheeded Motion.23 Nature as a whole, and not just the spiritual principle, the soul, is a perpetuum mobile, for there is no such state of things as “absolute 21 De insomniis 462a 29–31, in Aristotle on Sleep and Dreams, ed. and trans. David Gallop (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1990), 101. Cf. Patricia Cox Miller, Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 42–51. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations and translations of classical texts are from the most recent Loeb editions. 22 Cicero, De Divinatione 2.128, ed. Arthur S. Pease, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1920–1923), II, 554–55; trans. Miller, 44. 23 London 1685.

106 

 Davide Stimilli

Rest,” as the subtitle of another of Boyle’s treatises suggests;24 in metaphysical terms, one cannot conceive of a substance “sans action,”25 as Leibniz supplements Boyle’s experimental findings. In natural and political philosophy as well, a hermeneutics of change may thus be seen to emerge in the early modern period that shifts attention onto what Leibniz calls “tò mikròn, les progrès insensibles.”26 One may trace the shaping of such a model to the seminal work of Francis Bacon and follow its development in the works of Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, and Boyle himself. Hobbes’s concept of endeavor as a “small beginning of Motion,”27 Locke’s notion of velleity as “the lowest degree of desire,”28 and Leibniz’s notion of inquiétude as a series of “petites sollicitations imperceptibles,”29 are all arguably dependent on Bacon’s redefinition of alteratio (the Aristotelian alloiôsis) in his Novum Organum as a “latio per minima,”30 a motion through minimal intervals. Bacon argued in favor of “the restless nature of things in themselves” but still explained it in psychological terms, as the effect of their “desire to change,”31 an Aristotelian natural appetite, though not meant to reenact the original and lost state of quiet, but rather to reproduce change. In such a context, he had spoken of an intrinsic “emptiness” or “insatisfaction” of the bodies, which results in an “appetite to take in others.”32 Thus, Bacon was also able to provide a new explanation for the particular type of action at a distance that is perception: having defined it as nothing else but “a kind of election to embrace that which is agreeable, and to exclude or expel that which is ingrate,” he could conclude that “all bodies whatsoever, though they have no sense, yet they have perception.”33 One can then indicate in Bacon’s “subtile perception” the epistemological organon to detect change, the sensorium of change in the new pattern of discovery: “for that which in these perceptions appeareth early, in the great effects cometh 24 An Essay of the Intestine Motions of the Particles of Quiescent Solids; Where the Absolute Rest of Bodies Is called in Question (London 1669). 25 Gottfried W. Leibniz, “Préface,” in Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, ed. André Robinet and Heinrich Schepers, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1962) VI.6, 53. 26 Leibniz, “Préface,” 57. 27 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), I.vi, 38. 28 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 230. 29 Leibniz, Nouveaux essais, 166. 30 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum I.50, in Works, ed. James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, and Douglas D. Heath, 15 vols. (London: Longmans, 1857–1874), I, 258. 31 Bacon, Sylva sylvarum, or a Natural History, in Works, V, 61. 32 Bacon, Sylva sylvarum, in Works, V, 61. 33 Bacon, Sylva sylvarum, in Works, V, 63.

Dream Bodies 

 107

long after.”34 What Leibniz calls the “immense subtilité des choses”35 demands an equally nuanced subtlety of perceptions. In order to appreciate the thrust of Bacon’s approach, one ought to keep in mind the crucial debate on the concept of subtilitas that involved Girolamo Cardano and Giulio Cesare Scaligero in the middle of the sixteenth century, and determined the subsequent European reception of the term.36 Boyle himself hints at the relationship of his project with the Renaissance concern for occult qualities when he says that his notes were written “to facilitate the explanation of occult qualities.”37 Such an explanation, and the ensuing “incorporation”38 of the latter into experimental philosophy, which has been recognized in recent years as a salient feature of the scientific revolution, is gained by shifting the accent from the hiddenness of the quality to its imperceptibility for the observer: the distinction between occult and manifest qualities is thus no longer tenable, and can be overcome thanks to the assumption of what Bacon called “the latent process [Latens Processus],” a kind of transformation that is “perfectly continuous,” though “for the most part escapes the sense.”39 A perfect illustration of how the Aristotelian theory of dreams is rephrased in the new vocabulary is offered by Hobbes’s account of dreams in the Leviathan. There he writes: [T]he imaginations of them that sleep, are those we call Dreams. And these also (as all other Imaginations) have been before, either totally, or by parcells in the Sense. And because in sense, the Brain, and Nerves, which are the necessary Organs of sense, are so benummed in sleep, as not easily to be moved by the action of Externall Objects, there can happen in sleep, no Imagination; and therefore no Dreame, but what proceeds from the agitation of the inward parts of mans body; which inward parts, for the connexion they have with the Brayn, and other Organs, when they be distempered, do keep the same in motion; [. . .] the Organs of Sense being now benummed, so as there is no new object, which can master and obscure them with a more vigorous impression, a Dreame must needs be more cleare, in this silence of sense, than are our waking thoughts. [. . .] In summe, our Dreams are the reverse of our waking Imaginations; The motion when we are awake, beginning at one end; and when we Dream, at another.40 34 Bacon, Sylva sylvarum, in Works, V, 64. 35 Leibniz, “Préface,” 57. 36 Girolamo Cardano, De Subtilitate (Basel, 1547); Giulio C. Scaligero, Exotericarum Exercitationum Liber XV: De Subtilitate, Ad Hieronymum Cardanum (Paris, 1557). Both works were repeatedly reprinted throughout the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth century. 37 Boyle, Essay of the Great Effects, in Works, ed. Thomas Birch, 6 vols. (London 1772), V, 2. 38 Ron Millen, “The manifestation of occult qualities in the scientific revolution,” in Religion, Science, and Worldview, ed. Margaret J. Osler and Paul L. Farber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 190. 39 “plane [. . .] continuatum, qui maxima ex parte sensum fugit,” Bacon, Novum Organum II.6, Works 1, 348. 40 Hobbes, Leviathan I.2, 17–18.

108 

 Davide Stimilli

If we grant that similar concerns were not limited to philosophers and natural historians, but inspired the work of visual artists as well, then we may gain a different perspective on some of the most enigmatic and intriguing images produced by the European Renaissance: the reclining, sleeping bodies that are so pervasive in both the profane and sacred imagery. It may be enough here to recall the prototypes of both categories, as identified by Millard Meiss in his influential essay “Sleep in Venice: Ancient Myths and Renaissance Proclivities;” Giorgione’s Venus (Fig. 5) and Giovanni Bellini’s Drunkenness of Noah41 (Fig. 7). As Meiss points out, the reclining, sleeping figure “became so common in later Western painting that we are inclined to overlook how novel it was around 1500 when first it began to appear.”42 Looking at nature from the vantage point of art, I would argue, the artist subtly anticipates the perception of the philosopher. The languid body that artists cast in the reclining pose of the sleeper is the perfect stage of Bacon’s latent process. Like the face, which a seventeenth-century English writer on physiognomy defines as “the dial-plate to that stupenduous piece of clock-work,”43 the façade of the reclining body displays, as much as it hides, the uneasy balance of the underlying mechanism (in German, as Leibniz remarks, the balance-wheel of a clock is designated by the word Unruhe, meaning inquietude).44 For the reclining, sleeping body is as much an image of transition (or the “transitory,” to use Lessing’s term),45 as it is an image of transience: it is a prelude to the erect posture 41 Giovanni Bellini (d. 1516), Drunkenness of Noah, ca. 1515, oil on canvas, Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts. 42 Millard Meiss, “Sleep in Venice: Ancient Myths and Renaissance Proclivities,” first published in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 10 (1966), 348–382, reprinted in The Painter’s Choice: Problems in the Interpretation of Renaissance Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 212–239 (212). Meiss’s assessment still holds true for the type of the reclining figure, in spite of Jayne Anderson’s retrieval of classical literary sources for the reclining Venus in the Latin epithalamion tradition (“Giorgione, Titian, and the Sleeping Venus,” in Tiziano e Venezia [Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1980], 337–342). 43 Dr. Gwither in his “Discourse of Physiognomy,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 18 (1694), 638–639 (638). 44 Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais II.xx.6, 166. The most recent translators of Leibniz’s Essais propose “disquiet” for inquiétude, although this term was chosen by Coste, the French translator Leibniz followed, as a rendition of Locke’s “uneasiness”: New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. and ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 164. 45 Warburg’s contribution to the congress of the German association for aesthetics, to be held in Hamburg in 1930 (as announced in the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 24 [1930], 96; Warburg could not attend, as he died on October 26, 1929) was to be devoted precisely to “The Transitory” [Das Transitorische], and one of the possible subtitles of his atlas, formulated in conjunction with the preparation for that congress and meant as “a supplement to Lessing,” was “The Transitory under the Influence of Classical Antiquity from the Renaissance Onward” [Das Transitorische unter dem Einfluß der Antike seit der Renaissance] (Warburg,

Dream Bodies 

 109

Fig. 7: Giovanni Bellini (1430–1516), The Drunkenness of Noah, oil on canvas, 103 x 157 cm, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Besancon, France (Photo: Hervé Lewandowski, Photo Credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY)

of the standing, awakened body, but it also prefigures the rising of the resurrected body, as in a wonderful drawing by Mantegna that best captures the “quiet uneasiness [stille Unruhe]”46 of such a moment (Fig. 8). Puzzlingly, the reverse phenomenon takes place at roughly the same time in tomb sculpture, where the recumbent – be it sleeping or dead – body that was Gesammelte Schriften, VII: Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg, ed. Karen Michels and Charlotte Schoell-Glass (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2001), 162). His famous pathos formulas are usually thought of as expressing emotional upheaval, uncontrolled energy, but Warburg became more and more interested, in his later years, in “the interval between the impulse and the action,” as I previously pointed out. The brooding Medea, in a truly Lessingian vein, henceforth replaced the ecstatic maenad as the epitome of his concerns: Rembrandt’s etching, created “for the 1648 edition of the tragedy written by his patron Jan Six” (E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 2nd. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 235), is one of three works around which Warburg centered his 1926 lecture “Italian Antiquity in the Age of Rembrandt” (cf. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 229–238). 46 Duden’s happy formulation in “Ausgehend von Liegenden,” 54. On Mantegna’s drawing (ca. 1480), cf. Ronald Lightblown, Mantegna: With a Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings and Prints (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 483, cat. no. 185: A man lying on a slab of stone, London, British Museum.

110 

 Davide Stimilli

Fig. 8: Andrea Mantegna (1446–1506), A man lying on a slab of stone, pen and brown ink, 20.3 x 13.9 cm, British Museum, London, Great Britain (Photo Credit: @The Trustees of the British Museum)

Dream Bodies 

 111

prevalent in earlier centuries gives way to a reclining, activated body, or the representacion au vif replaces the representacion de la mort, to use Erwin Panofsky’s convenient distinction:47 “the recumbent figure became a reclining living person, [. . .] no longer one of the blessed in repose, or a body laid out to death.”48 The epochal change is datable more exactly, at least in Italy, to the creation in S. Maria del Popolo in Rome of the twin tombs of the Cardinals Ascanio Sforza and Girolamo Basso della Rovere (Fig. 9), which were executed by Andrea Sansovino and his workshop in the first decade of the sixteenth century: “in both monuments the figure of the cardinal is shown asleep, lying on his side and supporting his head with one arm.”49 The apparent contradiction between the “activation of the effigy”50 in sculpture and its “deactivation” in painting may be explained by assuming that, in both cases, what is at stake is the representation of the invisible activity of the body, its “quiet uneasiness”; when not vouched for by the objective presence of the dream,51 it must now be detected and supplemented by the subtle perception of the viewer. For the novelty that both Meiss and Panofsky recognized in the new type of image, I would argue, is mainly due to the fact that the dreaming body, which was not at all unknown to previous centuries, but had been cast in a familiar and recognizable pose,52 is now no longer set against the backdrop of the dream. In other words, once isolated and cut off from the dream, the dreamer is no longer immediately identifiable as such: without the dream, the dreamer is nothing but a sleeping body.53 Thus the question that both Renaissance sculptors and painters are striving to answer is, how to represent the dreamer without the dream; or, to paraphrase Yeats, how can we know the dreamer from the dream? I turn to one final example to further illustrate my 47 Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1964), 56. 48 Philippe Ariès, Images of Man and Death, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 56–58. 49 Röll, “‘Do We Affect Fashion in the Grave?’,” 155. An analogous transformation took place in Spain a few decades earlier, but seems not to have directly influenced Sansovino’s work (cf. Röll, “‘Do We Affect Fashion in the Grave?’,” 155–157). 50 Cf. Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture, 76–87. 51 Cf. Eric Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press 1951), 104. 52 One has only to peruse the rich iconographic material gathered in the volume Träume im Mittelalter, ed. Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Giorgio Stabile (Stuttgart: Belser, 1989) to realize how widespread and successful the depiction of the dreamer was in the visual arts during the Middle Ages. 53 Röll’s argument that the sleeping cardinals in S. Maria del Popolo must be dreaming the monument of which they are part (“the imagery of the tomb and its surroundings,” 158) seems to me prisoner of a logic that artists such as Sansovino were clearly trying to undermine.

112 

 Davide Stimilli

Fig. 9: Andrea Sansovino (c. 1460–1529), Tomb of Cardinal Girolamo Basso della Rovere, ca. 1507, S. Maria del Popolo, Rome, Italy (Photo Credit: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY)

Dream Bodies 

 113

point, the extraordinary series of spring nymphs painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder between 1515 and 1550.54 The humanist habit of placing a fountain in a literary garden, which also spread at the beginning of the sixteenth century,55 was meant to transform a natural topos in a cultural tropos, so to speak, in the vein of the ancients’ transformation of “the pêgê, or spring, in its natural state,” into “a krênê, a ‘fountain’ with a basin or cistern.”56 Most often these fountains were watched over by a reclining female figure, who was, however, mostly asleep, hence could not keep guard, but was rather a bystander, or just another element in the landscape: as has been proven, the insertion of this element in the Renaissance garden is the result of a misconstruction, the copy of a prototype that was believed to represent the dying Cleopatra, until she was identified as the abandoned Ariadne in the early nineteenth century (Fig. 6).57 What is most relevant to my argument is the pseudoclassical inscription that was used to justify the juxtaposition of statue and fountain, and that presented the nymph as asleep: “Nymph of this place, custodian of the sacred fountain, / I sleep while I hear the murmuring of the smooth-sounding water. / Spare me, whoever touches upon this / marble cave, do not interrupt my sleep. / Whether you drink or wash, be silent.”58 The conceit of the sleeping 54 Cf. the catalogue by Dieter Koepplin and Tilman Falk, Lukas Cranach: Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Druckgraphik, 2 vols. (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1974–1976), II, 631–641. 55 Cf. the volume Fons Sapientiae: Renaissance Garden Fountains, ed. Elisabeth B. MacDougall (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture, 1978). 56 Jennifer Larson, Greek Nymphs: Myth, Cult, Lore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 10. Cf. R. E. Wycherley, “Pêgê and Krênê,” Classical Review, 51 (1937), 2–3, and G. W. Elderkin, “The Natural and the Artificial Grotto,” Hesperia, 10 (1941), 127–137. 57 On the history of the recovery and arrangement of ancient statues in the Renaissance “museum garden,” the indispensable frame of reference is offered by Otto Kurz, “Huius Nympha Loci: A Pseudo-Classical Inscription and a Drawing by Dürer,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 16 (1953), 171–177; Hans Henrik Brummer, The Statue Court in the Vatican Belvedere (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1970), 154–184; Elisabeth B. MacDougall, “The Sleeping Nymph: Origins of a Humanist Fountain Type,” in Art Bulletin, 57 (1975), 357–365; Phyllis Pray Bober, “The Coryciana and the Nymph Corycia,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 40 (1977), 223–239; Iosephus Ijsewijn, “De Huius Nympha Loci (CIL VI/5, 3*e) eiusque fortuna poetica syntagmation,” Arctos Supplementum II, Studia in honorem Jiro Kajanto (1985), 61–67. 58 huius nympha loci sacri custodia fontis / dormio dum blandae sentio murmur aquae / parce meum quisquis tangis caua marmora somnum / rumpere siue bibas siue lauere tace (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum VI/5, 3*e, trans. Leonard Barkan, in Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999],  242). The epigram has been attributed either to Michele Ferrarini or to Giovanni Campani (cf. MacDougall, 358), until Ágnes Ritoók-Szalay, “Nympha super ripam Danubii,” Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények, 87 (1983), 67–74, suggested that the epigram was actually transcribed in Hungary by the Veronese antiquarian Felice Feliciani. Franz Matsche (“Nympha super

114 

 Davide Stimilli

nymph addressing the passerby already exposes the inscription as epigonal, if not a straightforward forgery: for the nymphs are “sleepless” [akoimêtoi], as Theocritus unequivocally states (XIII.44)59 – their sleeplessness a natural reflection of the spring water’s inexhaustible gushing forth.60 The nymph could become a figure among others in the pastoral landscape, and hence be subject to sleep like her human counterparts, only once she ceased to be identified with the spring that she was, and not merely represented. One may argue that the inscription, if taken at face value, begs forgiveness for what is a dereliction of duty, as it were, on the part of the nymph. The first line of the inscription, in other words, should be read as a concessive clause: “Even if I am the custodian of the place, I sleep, rather than keeping wake, as I should.” The nymph is first surprised by sleep and then, as a consequence, in her sleep by an assailant, who forces himself upon her, or by a spectator, who witnesses her awakening.61 A number of interpreters, most recently Jayne Anderson62 and Carlo Ginzburg,63 have seen the origin of the Renaissance type in an actual voyeuristic scene, be it the profane one of Boccaccio’s Cimone and Ephigenia (Decameron V.1), or the sacred one of Noah and his sons, whose representations become allegories, as it were, of “the transformation of aggression into awe”64 that leads to aesthetic contemplation (a process that is also traceable in the earliest depictions of satyrs

ripam Danubii – Cranachs Quellnymphen und ihr Vorbild,” in Lucas Cranach 1553/2003: Wittenberger Tagungsbeiträge anlässlich des 450. Todesjahres Lucas Cranachs des Älteren, ed. Andreas Tacke with Stefan Rhein and Michael Wiemers [Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2007], 182–183) goes even further and identifies the model of Cranach’s nymphs with a no longer extant relief that the artist could have seen in Buda. 59 Theocritus, ed. and trans. A. S. F. Gow, 2 vols. (2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 98–99. Her identification as a “sleeping nymph,” which Winckelmann had authoritatively endorsed, could be dismissed already on this ground, rather than on those given by Ennio Quirino Visconti in 1819 when he first labeled her as Ariadne (the name by which the Vatican statue is still known): namely, that she is too fully clothed and her expression is too melancholy (the paraphrasis is Barkan’s, 388). 60 Cf. Servius’s gloss to Virgil’s flumine vivo, which he identifies as “augurale verbum” (Ad Aen. 2.719): semper fluenti, id est naturali (quoted in Louise Adams Holland, “Janus and the Bridge,” Papers and Monographs of the American Academy in Rome, 21 [1961], 6). Cf. also Holland’s enlightening comment that “from the religious point of view the volume of a stream is without interest: the basis of its potency rests solely upon its being in the augural sense ‘living water.’” 61 Cf. Barkan’s sustained remarks on the role of the beholder vis-à-vis the reclining female (but also male) figure (233–247). 62 Giorgione: The Painter of “Poetic Brevity” (New York: Flammarion, 1997), 217. 63 “Die Venus von Giorgione: Ikonographische Innovationen und ihre Folgen,” Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus 2 (1998), 1–38. 64 McNally, “Ariadne and Others,” 164.

Dream Bodies 

 115

Fig. 10: Sandro Botticelli (1444–1510), Venus and Mars, National Gallery, London, Great Britain (Photo Credit: Art Resource, NY)

pursuing maenads in Greek vase painting).65 These interpretations remain fundamentally indebted to Fritz Saxl’s intuition66 that Giorgione was able to create “a new subject all’antica” with his reclining Venus precisely “by eliminating the onlooker in the picture and making the spectator play his part.” But the safety of such a vantage point is only apparent: “in eternal reprise the ravished” may become “ravishers,” as Phyllis Pray Bober eloquently cautioned,67 in recalling the “tales of young shepherds like Hylas, Daphnis and Astakides,” who were lured and “carried off to deathless existence in underground caverns” by the nymphs. The “one notable Renaissance predecessor”68 of Giorgione’s Venus, Botticelli’s Mars and Venus already problematizes the conventional gender roles, as the reclining Venus turns to contemplate a slumbering Mars (Fig. 10); but the possibility – not to be dismissed on a formal basis for the reasons discussed at the beginning of this essay – that the painting69 be the representation of an instance of “nympholeptic possession”70 and that Venus be actually a “nympholectic phantasm”71 haunting Mars’s imagination, rather than a body of flesh and bones, sends further ripples across the apparently serene surface of the painting. 65 McNally, “Ariadne and Others,” 155–165. Cf. also Cornelia Isler-Kerényi, Civilizing Violence: Satyrs on 6th-Century Greek Vases (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). 66 In the 1935 lecture “Titian and Aretino,” Lectures, 2 vols. (London: Warburg Institute, 1957), I, 161–173 (163). 67 Bober, “The Coryciana and the Nymph Corycia,” 232. 68 Meiss, “Sleep in Venice,” 213. 69 As persuasively suggested by Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 107–146. Sandro Botticelli, (ca. 1445–1510), Venus and Mars, ca. 1485, egg tempera and oil on poplar, London, National Gallery. 70 Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, 141. 71 Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, 145.

116 

 Davide Stimilli

Whatever the outcome, it is the pregnant moment before the nymph is discovered that Cranach has illustrated in his full-length portrayals of reclining Quellennymphen, while uniformly adopting a shorter version of the inscription: “I am the nymph of the sacred spring. Do not disturb my peace for I am at rest” [“fontis nympha sacri somnum ne rumpe quiesco”].72 It is surprising that virtually no attention has been paid, so far as I can see, to a detail of such figures that is at least as telling as the crossing of their legs or the position of their elbows: namely, the unmistakable and consistent opening of their eyes (Figs. 11–12).73 A recent interpreter74 takes this detail as further proof that Cranach’s nymphs cannot be based on an ancient model, “since they do not sleep,” whereas, precisely for this reason, they seem to me closer than any other Renaissance depiction to a truly ancient understanding of the nymph. Cranach’s nymphs are certainly not meant to portray full sleep, but rather the “motionless gesture” of falling asleep or waking up, the imperceptible crossing of the threshold between conscience and dream.75 In the tale of Rhea Silvia from Ovid’s Fasti, which in all likelihood inspired the epigram,76 the epithet “languida” applies to both the hand supporting the chin that lets her head slip before falling asleep [cadit a mento languida facta manus], and to the vestal herself: languid she rises up after her awakening [languida consurgit nec scit, cur languida surgat] because she is already heavy [gravis] with the burden that she unknowingly carries, Rome’s founder.77 It is the languor before or after sleep, gravid with dangers and possibilities, which Cranach’s nymphs are meant to portray, the twilight between wakefulness and sleep: while verging on 72 Cf. M. Liebman, “On the Iconography of the Nymph of the Fountains by Lucas Cranach the Elder,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 31 (1968), 434–437. The line was dictated by Matthias Corvinus himself, according to the 1585 Historia inclyti Matthiae Hunyadis regis Hungariae by Thomasus Jordanus (cf. Ritoók-Szalay, 67). There are at least fourteen extant versions of the spring nymph produced by Cranach and his workshop (Matsche, “Nympha super ripam Danubii,” 160). 73 Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), Spring Nymph, ca. 1530–35, Lugano, ThyssenBornemisza Collection. Liebman (435) notices that the eyes are indeed open, but fails to draw any consequence from the insight. 74 Matsche, “Nympha super ripam Danubii,” 198–199. 75 Theodor Birt argued in 1895, though there seems to have been no one since, that even the Vatican Ariadne’s eyes are not entirely closed, though her eyelids have fallen (“Die vaticanische Ariadne und die dritte Elegie des Properz,” in Rheinisches Museum, 50 [1895], 31–65, 161–190 [43]). 76 For other mythological examples of this pattern, perhaps most influentially represented in an engraving from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, cf. Giovanni Pozzi-Lucia A. Ciapponi, “La cultura figurativa di Francesco Colonna e l’arte veneta,” Lettere italiane, 14 (1962), 160–161. 77 Ovid, Fasti III.11–25. As MacDougall pointed out (358), the Huius nympha loci epigram is indebted to Ovid’s lines. Cf. also the description of Ariadne’s awakening in the Heroides (X.9–10): “Half waking only and languid from sleep, I turned upon my side and put forth hands to clasp my Theseus” – “incertum vigilans ac somno languida movi / Thesea prensuras semisupina manus.”

Dream Bodies 

 117

Fig. 11: Lucas Cranach, the Elder (1472–1553), Reclining Water-Nymph, 1518, oil on panel, 59 x 92 cm, Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig (Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

the threshold of dream, human imagination may fall prey to the folly induced by the nymphs, who frequently succumb to divine violence, but like, in turn, to take hold of the human mind, as is briefly the case with Socrates on the banks of the Ilyssus (Phaedr. 238C–D),78 the “charming resting place” that is the setting of his conversation with Phaedrus and that Socrates takes to be “a sacred place of some nymphs and of Achelous, judging by the figurines and statues” (Phaedr. 230C). That the divinity of the place be vouched for by the presence of these idols is not without Socratic irony; on the other hand, one feels compelled to take literally the prayer he addresses to them at the end of the dialogue (279B–C), as Socrates’s rapture has inspired his speech to reach true poetic heights.79 Michelangelo’s Adam (Fig. 13), whose posture has been aptly described as “languid and yet instinct with an incipient autonomy,”80 is the most likely source for John Keats’s famous description of “poesy” in “Sleep & Poetry” as “might half

78 On nympholepsy, cf. Roger Caillois, Les démons de midi ([Saint-Clément-la-Rivière]: Fata Morgana 1991), 60–69. 79 A touch of irony is still to be perceived in his usage of the term “dythirambics” (238D). 80 Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 154.

118 

 Davide Stimilli

Fig. 12: Cranach, Reclining Water-Nymph, detail of Fig. 11

Fig. 13: Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), The creation of Adam, ceiling fresco after restoration, Sistine Chapel, Vatican Palace, Vatican State (Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

Dream Bodies 

 119

slumb’ring on its own right arm” (l. 237).81 There is undoubtedly a close “relationship between iconography and the dream,” as dreams are not unaffected by artistic images,82 and this, of course, is true of literature, as well: when the narrator in Proust’s Recherche contemplates Albertine asleep, he cannot but cast her body in the attitudes devised by both sculpture and painting:83 [H]er sheets, wrapped round her body like a shroud, had assumed, with their elegant folds, the rigidity of stone. It was as though, reminiscent of certain medieval Last Judgements, the head alone was emerging from the tomb, awaiting in its sleep the Archangel’s trumpet.84

In front of her “expressionless body, [. . .] beside that twisted body, that allegorical figure,” he asks himself what she is allegorizing: “My death? My love?”85 Like Cranach’s mute nymphs, Albertine is perhaps none other than an allegory of Dream itself, of its sleeplessness that does not countenance “the uncertainty of awakening”: [W]hen, from the underworld of sleep, she climbed the last steps of the staircase of dreams, [. . . t]he uncertainty of awakening, revealed by her silence, was not at all revealed in her eyes.86

81 Cf. Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 135. 82 Guido Guidorizzi, “Ikonographische und literarische Modelle der Traumdarstellung in der Spätantike,” in Träume im Mittelalter, 241–249 (243). 83 Even if, at first, when he contemplates Albertine “stretched out at full length” on his bed, her body appears to him “in an attitude so natural that no art could have devised it” (Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright, 6 vols. (London: Vintage, 1996), V: The Captive, 71. 84 Proust, In Search of Lost Time V, 411. 85 Proust, In Search of Lost Time V, 411–412. 86 Proust, In Search of Lost Time V, 77.

Lucia Ruprecht

“Dance-Work” and the Art of Walking in Benjamin, Valéry, Rilke, Jensen, and Nijinsky Sur le pont qui relie le rêve à la réalité, “retroussant légèrement sa robe de la main gauche”: GRADIVA (André Breton, Gradiva)

When Paul Valéry’s Phaedrus, swept off his feet by the charms of a dance performance, compares this spectacle to a dream, a cool-headed Socrates answers: “But this is the exact contrary of a dream, dear Phaedrus.”1 We are a few pages into Valéry’s 1921 dialogue Dance and the Soul, which is more precisely the transcript of a fictional performance as captured by the immediate impressions of three men: enthusiast, philosopher, and doctor of medicine. Socrates justifies his claim by “the absence of everything accidental” in the physical composition; yet he cannot avoid coming back, once again, to the metaphor of dreaming in the medium of dance: But what is the contrary of a dream, Phaedrus, if not some other dream? . . . A dream of vigilance and tension which Reason herself would dream! And what would Reason dream? If some Reason were to dream, standing solid, straight, her eye armed, her mouth shut, mistress of her lips, – would not her dream be what we are now looking at? – this world of measured forces and of studied illusions? – A dream, a dream, but all charged with symmetries, all order, all acts and sequences!2

This definition of a dream dreamt by open-eyed reason is decidedly distinct from approaches that focus on the less rational qualities of the phenomenon. In his theoretical investigation of the dream-like function of film, Christian Metz for instance speaks of the “true absurdity” of our dreams, of the 1 “Mais ceci est précisément le contraire d’un rêve, cher Phèdre”; Paul Valéry, Dance and the Soul, French/English, trans. Dorothy Bussy (London: Lehmann, 1951), 24–25. I have modified the translation in a few instances. 2 “Mais le contraire d’un rêve, qu’est-ce, Phèdre, sinon quelque autre rêve? [.  .  .] Un rêve de vigilance et de tension que ferait la Raison elle-même! – Et que rêverait une Raison? – Que si une Raison rêvait, dure, debout, l’œil armé, et la bouche fermée, comme maîtresse de ses lèvres, – le songe qu’elle ferait, ne serait-ce point ce que nous voyons maintenant, – ce monde de forces exactes et d’illusions étudiées? – Rêve, rêve, mais rêve tout pénétré de symétries, tout ordre, tout actes et séquences!” Valéry, Dance, 26–27.

122 

 Lucia Ruprecht

[.  .  .] internal obscurity of the elements and the confusion of their assemblage, the enigmatic brilliance of the zones that the wish dazzles and the dark, swarming shipwreck of the almost forgotten segments, the sensation of tension and relaxation, the suspected outcropping of a buried order and the evidence of an authentic incoherence, an incoherence which [. . .] is not a laboured addition but the very core of the text.3

Sigmund Freud, as is well known, tried to find meaning in the choreography of unconscious associations and distortions; but he also acknowledged that which Metz calls “authentic incoherence”: “the dream’s navel [. . .] reaches down into the unknown.”4 Yet the absence of the accidental, or, in turn, the presence of a thinking agency behind the enigma, is not only part of the process of dreaming in Valéry, but also in Freud; it even constitutes the latter’s notion of dreamwork: [D]reams are nothing other than a peculiar form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming – the explanation of its peculiar nature.5

Freud formulates this statement in a footnote added to The Interpretation of Dreams in 1925, to prevent analysts from focusing too exclusively on latent contents in order to find definite truth in dreams. He argues that the type of thinking achieved by dreamwork should be considered on its own terms. Echoing this approach, the task of interpretation is of marginal importance in the following. Instead, my contribution takes its cues from dreamwork as a model case of creativity in which the close interaction of imagination, analysis, and skill is particularly evident, before the retrospective or external analytic gaze. That is, I am unhinging Freud’s analysis of the working of dreams from the unconscious context of sleep to transpose it onto a conscious process of distortion, embodied in an operation that I would like to term “dance-work”: the distortion through choreography of raw material such as everyday movement to produce the manifest dance performance.6 3 Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier (London: Macmillan, 1982), 120. 4 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991), 671. “ [. . .] der Nabel des Traums, die Stelle, an der er dem Unbekannten aufsitzt”; Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, in Freud, Studienausgabe, II, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1972), 503. 5 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 650, fn. 2; “Der Traum ist im Grunde nichts anderes als eine besondere Form unseres Denkens, die durch die Bedingungen des Schlafzustandes ermöglicht wird. Die Traumarbeit ist es, die diese Form herstellt, und sie allein ist das Wesentliche am Traum, die Erklärung seiner Besonderheit.” Freud, Traumdeutung, 486, fn. 1. 6 Raw material is meant in a decidedly physical sense, not with regard to psychological contents embodied in expressive gesture.

“Dance-Work” and the Art of Walking 

 123

The difference which must remain is the chasm between dancing and dreaming as two phenomena of incompatible quality, the one exceedingly material, performed by bodies in space, “the same one as that occupied by the public during the performance”;7 the other one extremely immaterial, individual and closed to the public, placed on the stage of the unconscious, detached from a body paralyzed in sleep. Suffused with physical desires and anxieties, dream material is disembodied nonetheless; it is of the mind. Indeed, one of the oldest treatises on dreams, Aristotle’s De somno et vigilia, defines the specific power of dreams as resting in the separation between body and soul, with the latter set free from physical bonds to become uniquely receptive to cosmic, meta-physical messages.8 The very materiality of dance is thus often glossed over when invested with a dreamlike quality. Representative of this is Jean Cocteau’s claim that ballet – admittedly among the most illusory, incorporeal forms of dance – makes us “rediscover the flight of dreams, the strange lightness that is given to us in sleep.”9 The fulfillment of the wish of lightness marks a movement away from the body; it is the opposite of that which will be explored here under the heading of dance’s dreamwork, which is a movement toward the body, toward the most minute manipulations and distortions of its choreographies. More generally, dance and dream will be aligned on the basis of a premise that defined their position and constituted their popularity around 1900. Both entered center stage in theoretical and literary discourses that sought access to forms of hidden knowledge, unconscious or physical, which formulated itself in the iridescent realm between waking and sleeping, body and mind, image, language and movement. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, offering nothing less than the via regia, “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind”10 is complemented here by a plethora of theoretical, literary, and critical approaches to dance that try to decipher the hieroglyphs of the silent art as a source of wisdom withheld in verbal forms of representation.11 What 7 Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, 43. 8 See Hartmut Böhme, “Vergangenheit und Zukunft im Traum: Zur Traumhermeneutik bei Artemidor von Daldis und Ludwig Binswanger,” in Zeitschrift für Germanistik, 1 (2008), 1–29 (18). 9 Cocteau quoted in Monna Dithmer, “Of Another World: Introduction,” in Of Another World: Dancing between Dream and Reality, ed. Monna Dithmer (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002), 9–19 (9). 10 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 769; “Die Traumdeutung aber ist die Via regia zur Kenntnis des Unbewußten im Seelenleben”, Traumdeutung, 577. 11 For the discourse on dance around 1900, see Gabriele Brandstetter, Poetics of Dance: Body, Image and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Françoise Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), and Gregor Gumpert, Die Rede vom Tanz (Munich: Fink, 1994).

124 

 Lucia Ruprecht

can be observed with regard to these discourses on both dance and dream is the double-bind that affects the hermeneutic desire to impose narrative structures on that which is initially non-narrative: the successful act of reading enables insight, yet always to some extent at the cost of celebrated non-verbal otherness.12 If this background is multifaceted and far-reaching, my focus in this article will narrow it down to one particular instance of human motor activity, walking, the most everyday form of locomotion and at the same time the core-element of dance. The first part is a detour to aspects of this practice in Walter Benjamin, Paul Valéry, and Rainer Maria Rilke. The second part will trace the precise moment in which one prepares for the next step, pushing oneself off the ground with the foot that was, in the previous moment, the supporting foot and is soon to become the one that is free. My concentration on the position of this foot emulates the pivotal fixation of the protagonist of Wilhelm Jensen’s novella Gradiva (1903). It can be seen as a step toward filling the gap left by the relative absence of such a fixation in the most prominent reading of this text, Freud’s Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva (1907); and it completes its trajectory with some thoughts on the feet of the most famous dancer of the Ballets Russes, Vaslav Nijinsky, as they perform his signature piece L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912).

1 Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking, if only in general terms, we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a person steps out,

Benjamin writes in A Small History of Photography.13 In this text, and in Benjamin’s Work of Art essay, photography and film become the de-constructing – slowing down, interrupting, enlarging – devices that uncover those visual impressions and instances of physical comportment which constitute that which 12 André Lepecki’s Derridean model of dance writing aims at overcoming this double-bind, see his “Inscribing Dance” in Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory, ed. A. Lepecki (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 124–139. 13 Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” in Benjamin, One-Way Street (London: New Left Books, 1979), 240–257 (243); “Ist es schon üblich, daß einer vom Gang der Leute, sei es auch nur im Groben, sich Rechenschaft ablegt, so weiß er bestimmt nichts von ihrer Haltung im Sekundenbruchteil des Ausschreitens,” “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, II/1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), 368–385 (371).

“Dance-Work” and the Art of Walking 

 125

Benjamin terms the “optical unconscious”: such as, to come back to my example, that fraction of a second when a person steps out, a moment which normally does not occur in isolation, but only as part of a sequence, carried out automatically, generally without conscious mental effort or even awareness. The capacity of the apparatus to cast light on effaced structures by breaking down reality into spatiotemporal fragments, and so to prepare the ground for new or unusual associations, is seen as a model instance of the proximity of analysis and composition in dream and dance.14 What if the body, echoing the recording techniques of camera (and dream), was itself a medium equipped for such an endeavor, performing, through choreography, its own optical, more precisely kinesthetic unconscious? From a scientific point of view, it was certainly not the body on its own which possessed the ability to monitor and transform its movement. This was the domain of the recording practices of photo- and cinematographs, which were used, beyond and behind their successes in the entertainment industry, to fragment, register, measure, and eventually optimize human motor activity with the aim of reaching the highest possible rates of productivity. One was able to record the pathological, notice the dispensable, and devise the efficient. The audiovisual archives of medicine and work science were well stocked in the first decades of the twentieth century. The imperative of economy formulated actual and target values, established norms and flagged transgressions. In 1911, Frederick Taylor, founder of work science, published his manifesto Principles of Scientific Management, proclaiming a worker to be as predictable, regulated, and effective as the machine itself. His ideas and methods entered the workplace, establishing efficiency as the art of performing tasks by covering the shortest distance between given points in time or space. Two features of these general developments are worth retaining in our context: with the ability of the technical apparatus not only to record that which was there, but to make visible that which could not be discerned with the naked eye, the beginnings of a performative theory of media (as formulated by Benjamin) imposed themselves. Film and photography did not only record and transmit data, they also pronounced them into being. More functionally, with regard to the sciences of the body, these technically produced data were exploited to scientifically explore and re-align bodies in order to enhance their operations, for medical, cosmetic, or economic reasons.15 14 For deconstruction and distortion as avant-garde practices, see Andrew Webber, The European Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 12. 15 See Stefan Rieger, “Die Manierismen menschlicher Motorik: Pathologische Bewegungsformen und ‘natürliches’ Ausdrucksverhalten,” in Manier – Manieren – Manierismen, ed. Erika Greber and Bettine Menke (Tübingen: Narr, 2003), 233–258.

126 

 Lucia Ruprecht

Among the variously shaped turns toward abstraction at the beginning of the twentieth century, the straight line of efficiency can be taken as the emblem in the realm of art of the abovementioned exploits. Ornament, in this context, becomes a dangerously subversive supplement, celebrating digression, if not dysfunction and waste.16 The castigation of ornamental mannerisms in work science and aesthetics after 1900 is part of the more general preoccupation with the economy of psychophysical energy or capital that also informed Freud’s project; indeed, if hermeneutics is one methodological mainstay of Freudian psychoanalysis, economy is certainly another one. The economical aspect also found repercussions in Valéry’s theory of dance. Implicitly present in Dance and the Soul, this theory is articulated mainly in Degas, Dance, Drawing, where dance is defined in opposition to the functionality of goal-oriented activity as a form of decorative expenditure ending in ecstasy and exhaustion.17 Before the dreamlike performance in Valéry’s dialogue reaches that stage, however, the initial moments of dancing are observed, precisely those moments in which the fine line between the functional and its surplus is crossed. Mere walking is turned into an art by the principal dancer, Athikté: [C]onsider Athikte’s perfect progress on a faultless floor, free, clear and barely elastic. On this mirror of her energies she symmetrically places the alternating steps; her heel first sends her body flowing towards the tip of her toe, the other foot then passes in front, receives the weight of the body, sending it onwards again in another forward flow; and so on and so on; while the lovely crown of her head traces in the eternal present the crest of an undulating wave.18

Expenditure, here, is the virtuoso spending of controlled energy where the dancer “seems to be numbering and counting in coins of pure gold what we

16 A prime example here is Adolf Loos’s manifesto “Ornament und Verbrechen” (1908) [English trans.: Ornament and Crime], which pathologizes the ornament; compare, in turn, Walter Benjamin’s analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s observations of the pathologies of the perfectly adjusted “human motor,” where individual irregularities that have been cast out return in the dysfunctions of hyper-mechanical behavior; Benjamin, “Der Flaneur,” in Gesammelte Schriften, I/2, 537–569 (554–556).). 17 See Brandstetter, Poetics of Dance, 238–247, and more generally Felicia McCarren, Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 18 “[C]onsidère cette parfaite procession de l’Athikté, sur le sol sans défaut, libre, net, et à peine élastique. Elle place avec symétrie sur ce miroir de ses forces, ses appuis alternés; le talon versant le corps vers la pointe, l’autre pied passant et recevant ce corps, et le reversant à l’avance; et ainsi, et ainsi; cependant que la cime adorable de sa tête trace dans l’éternel présent, le front d’une vague ondulée.” Valéry, Dance, 36–37.

“Dance-Work” and the Art of Walking 

 127

squander carelessly in the vulgar change of steps when we walk about our common occasions.”19 In a cycle of texts by Rilke entitled Intérieurs, written in 1898, we find an equally subtle initiation into dancerly – and at the same time dreamy – expenditure in the shape of the ornamental digressions of poetic walkers. The target value of the straight line is worked into a street marked with trails, but these trails are overwritten and adorned by the steps of young girls: Follow them. Your gaze drops without thinking; their luminous clothes make it difficult to see. Your eye descends on half-scorched wings to the street, which lies like a broad book and open. On its leaves, past cars have left behind their marks. That is as it should be. The girls’ steps cannot write in a straight line. Different writings lead along the furrows. Up and down. As if somebody had written at night, or like a blind man’s letters. And yet with a little effort and practice you can see that they are all long poems, improvisations, where a strange rhythm runs, waxing and waning. The same rhymes keep returning. Like petitioners. The same ones can be found at every door. Stirring, simple words, lutes with only one string. A silver one – you think – and you allow the tone to accompany you into your dreams.20

This is clearly another study of oneiric movement, written at night, pacing out a stage at once poetic, choreographic, and acoustic. A slow dynamic of metamorphosis is steering the passage forward, enabling the trajectory of the winged, half-blinded gaze following trails, lines, steps, letters, to the rhythmical, rhymed, and repetitive improvisations of poetry, striking the one silver chord whose sound leads the flâneur, watching, walking, to the other scene of dreaming. Guided by the metonymical logic of dreams, prose is poetry here, walking is dancing, and life always already art. Darkness or blindness turn writing and reading into a physical activity, into a movement performed and followed, a choreography that plays with, distorts, and radicalizes the relationship between writer and muse. 19 “[. . .] semble énumérer et compter en pièces d’or pur, ce que nous dépensons distraitement en vulgaire monnaie de pas, quand nous marchons à toute fin,” Valéry, Dance, 34–35. 20 “Geh hinter ihnen einmal. Unwillkürlich senkt sich dein Blick; denn ihre lichten Kleider blenden. Dein Auge fällt mit halbversengten Flügeln auf den Fahrdamm, der wie ein breites Buch und aufgeschlagen ist. In seine Blätter haben vergangene Wagen Linien gelegt. Und das ist gut. Denn die Schritte der Mädchen können nicht grade schreiben. Viele Schriften führen die Furchen entlang. Auf und ab. Als ob jemand bei Nacht geschrieben hätte oder wie Briefe von Blinden. Und doch merkt man bei einiger Mühe und Übung, daß das lauter lange Gedichte sind, Improvisationen, durch die wachsend und wechselnd ein seltsamer Rhythmus rinnt. Die gleichen Reimworte kehren immer wieder. Wie Flehende. Du findest dieselben an allen Türen warten. Rührende, schlichte Worte sind es, Lauten, welche nur eine einzige Saite haben. Eine silberne, – denkst du; und du lässest dich von ihrem Ton begleiten bis in den Traum.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Intérieurs, in Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, V, ed. Rilke-Archiv, Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Ernst Zinn (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1965), 399–412 (411). Translation into English by Chantal Wright.

128 

 Lucia Ruprecht

The artist merely observes – more precisely imitates – by tracing the footsteps of the muses who are replacing him by carrying out the writing themselves. If Rilke’s flâneur states that these step-by-step street poems are produced by a single string, Valéry’s philosopher detects a form of universal regularity in the walking of his dancer, an “equality of [. . .] measures” by which “she gives [. . .] the sensation of immobility.”21 An impression of immobility, I would suggest, that is produced by the constant, masterfully controlled flow of movement, which is based on the analytical quality of this way of walking, appreciating every single element of its sequence. And if we feel reminded of Benjamin’s photographic still-image here, this impression is confirmed in a letter of August 1930 by Valéry to Louis Séchan, where the former mentions the two books that have served as inspiration for his dialogue – a study by Maurice Emmanuel on Greek dance and, more to the point in our context, “le livre de Marey” which he left open on his desk when writing the dialogue.22 It is most likely that Valéry refers to Étienne-Jules Marey’s 1894 Movement, a French classic on chronophotography and time motion studies, which includes successive shots of the act of walking, and of Greek-style dancing. Valéry transcribes Marey’s photographs, meant to discover “among the phenomena of life something that has hitherto escaped the most attentive observation,” as the translator’s preface to the 1895 English edition states.23 We are returning to those new forms of knowledge of the human body made possible through the impact of media; only that the medium’s task is taken over by the dancer’s skillful body itself: She is teaching us to understand what we do, showing our souls clearly what our bodies accomplish obscurely. By the light of her legs our immediate movements appear to us as miracles. They astonish us at last as they should do. [. . .] So that [. . .] this dancer has something Socratic in her, teaching us, as far as walking goes, to know ourselves a little better.24

Valéry invests the dancing body with the capacity for demonstrating knowledge that is first of all of a kinetic nature, providing the more poetic, and less welldefinable insights that are branching out into the elusive regions of dance with 21 “égalité de ces mesures,” “donne le sentiment de l’immobile,” Valéry, Dance, 36–37. 22 Paul Valéry, Œuvres, II, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Pléiade, 1960), 1407. 23 Étienne-Jules Marey, Movement, trans. Eric Pritchard (New York: Appleton and Company, 1895), reprinted by Arno Press 1972, viii. 24 “Elle nous apprend ce que nous faisons, montrant clairement à nos âmes, ce que nos corps obscurément accomplissent. A la lumière de ses jambes, nos mouvements immédiats nous apparaissent des miracles. Ils nous étonnent enfin autant qu’il le faut. [. . .] En quoi cette danseuse aurait [. . .] quelque chose de socratique, nous enseignant, quant à la marche, à nous connaître un peu mieux nous-mêmes.” Valéry, Dance, 34–35.

“Dance-Work” and the Art of Walking 

 129

clearly circumscribed rooting. Yet against the backdrop of work science, knowledge, precision, and control gain a subversive potential as they resist exploitation to celebrate nonproductive expenditure. Walking loses its function by no longer performing the intention of bridging the distance between two points in order to fulfill a specific task. Instead, teleological or narrative contexts are subordinated to the spectacle of beautifully enacted self-referential movement. If dance here is a walk made strange, undergoing a dreamlike distortion by being put on stage,25 this making strange is, in the first instance, nothing more than a making visible.

2 Jacques Rivière describes similar impressions when witnessing the first performances of the Ballets Russes in Paris: They brought clarity back to the dance. I well remember those first nights. For me, it was the revelation of a new world. It was possible, then, to come out of the shadows, to let every gesture be seen, to spell out everything in full without any mystery, [. . .] holding the spectators’ attention as by the most intricate and enigmatic tricks. I made a discovery in art similar to that of geometry in the sciences, and the joy that I felt was similar to the satisfaction one experiences when watching a perfect scientific demonstration.26

Rivière’s vocabulary detects a form of intellectual satisfaction in theatrical display and aligns it with the twin pleasures of exhibitionism and voyeurism, casting light on the libidinal logic of the spectator’s fascination with the exposure of minute physical skill. Nowhere in literature around 1900 is this fetishistic potential of the revelation of detail closer linked to the act of walking than in Wilhelm Jensen’s novella Gradiva, and nowhere is it more central to the construal of the plot than in this text, most famous not for itself but for its afterlife, starting with Freud’s influential reading Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva.

25 Freud’s analysis of the term “Entstellung” is useful here: “Man möchte dem Worte ‘Entstellung’ den Doppelsinn verleihen, auf den es Anspruch hat, obwohl es heute keinen Gebrauch davon macht. Es sollte nicht nur bedeuten: in seiner Erscheinung verändern, sondern auch: an eine andere Stelle bringen, anderswohin verschieben.” Freud, Fragen der Gesellschaft: Ursprünge der Religion, in Studienausgabe, IX, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1982), 493. 26 Jacques Rivière, “From ‘Le Sacre du Printemps,’ November 1913,” trans. Miriam Lassman, in Lincoln Kirstein, Nijinsky Dancing (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 164–168 (164).

130 

 Lucia Ruprecht

Fig. 1: “Gradiva”, Photo Vatican Museums.

Gradiva tells a story of disavowal: archaeologist Norbert Hanold is smitten with a bas-relief showing a supposedly Pompeian woman and travels to its location to uncover the traces of the original hidden behind the work of art. Ironically, this is exactly what happens; the reader realizes that the bas-relief acts as a screen that disguises a real woman named Zoë Bertgang, whom Hanold has known and loved since childhood, and who finally gives interpretation to his deflected sexual stirrings. It is the unusually graceful walk of his Pompeian idol that draws the scientist’s eye to the relief: With her head bent forward a little, she held slightly raised in her left hand, so that her sandaled feet became visible, her garment, which fell in exceedingly voluminous folds from her throat to her ankles. The left foot had advanced, and the right, about to follow, touched the ground only lightly with the tips of the toes while the sole and heel were raised almost vertically. This movement produced a double impression of exceptional agility and of confident composure, and the flight-like poise, combined with a firm step, lent her the peculiar grace.27 27 Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva and Sigmund Freud, Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1993), 4–5; “Nur ganz leicht vorgeneigten Kopfes, hielt sie mit der linken Hand ihr außerordentlich reichfaltiges, vom Nacken bis zu den Knöcheln niederfließendes Gewand ein wenig aufgerafft, so daß die Füße in den Sandalen sichtbar wurden. Der linke hatte sich vorgesetzt, und der rechte, im Begriff, nachzufolgen, berührte nur lose mit den Zehenspitzen den Boden, während die Sohle und die Ferse sich fast senkrecht emporhoben. Diese Bewegung rief ein Doppelgefühl überaus leichter Behendigkeit der Ausschreitenden wach und zugleich

“Dance-Work” and the Art of Walking 

 131

The idiosyncratic walk inspires Norbert to call her Gradiva, “the one who moves forward,” and eventually unites him with the real object of his desire who happens to show the same distinguishing mannerism which triggered his fascination with the stone image in the first place. Freud’s study of this novella to a large extent showcases his interpretation of the dreams that are scattered across the literary text. This is underpinned by a strategic summary of Jensen’s writing that replaces the original with a highly selective account. I would like to concentrate on one single instance of Freud’s reading, his conspicuous refusal to engage in any sustained way with the novella’s central obsession.28 Delusions and Dreams refuses “to put a fetishistic interpretation on Norbert’s behaviour,” as Sarah Kofman argues, and I would like to add that it does so not without reason.29 Under Freud’s expert hands, the novella turns into a closed case. It documents a cure mainly enacted, feminist readers are pleased to note, by the lucid mind and under the competent direction of Zoë Bertgang, another muse full of agency, managing to drag the archaeologist’s interest away from the ghost and making it turn toward her own flesh-and-blood body instead. Or so it seems. For Norbert’s fetishism, if indeed we take fetishism to be at play here, continues to lock Zoë in the position of both enthralling and threatening object, restricting her to fulfilling Gradiva’s legacy as the one who by moving forward exposes her almost perpendicularly rising, phallic foot.30 Eric Downing thus points out an intriguing intertextual network of Jensen’s Gradiva and texts like “Poe’s ‘Ligeia’, Storm’s Viola tricolor, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, all of which [. . .] add to the protagonist’s aestheticization of the living beloved his attempt to have her somehow become, or be replaced by, a previous, dead beloved woman.”31 And even though Jensen’s protagonist may be one of the tamer examples of this network, he is not cured of his obsession. The metonymic fascination with the gait that reveals the fetish stands at the opening and at the closing of the novella, with the above-quoted passage on the second eines sicheren Ruhens auf sich. Das verlieh ihr, ein flugartiges Schweben mit festem Auftreten verbindend, die eigenartige Anmut.” Freud, Der Wahn und die Träume in Jensens “Gradiva” mit dem Text der Erzählung von Wilhelm Jensen (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1989), 23–24. 28 For a more comprehensive reading of Freud’s engagement with Jensen, see Andrew J. Webber, “The Case Study,” in A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture, ed. Laura Marcus and Ankhi Mukherjee (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 34–48. 29 Sarah Kofman, “Summarize, Interpret (Gradiva),” in Kofman, Freud and Fiction, trans. Sarah Wykes (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 85–117 (106–07). 30 For an approach to Gradiva’s peculiar walk in the context of the history of science, see Andreas Mayer, “Gradiva’s Gait: Tracing the Figure of a Walking Woman,” Critical Inquiry 38/3 (2012), 554–578. 31 Eric Downing, After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and the Tradition of Bildung (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 113.

132 

 Lucia Ruprecht

page, and on the last one Norbert’s wish, uttered “with a peculiar tone,” that Zoë perform her trick again, “viewed by him with dreamily observing eyes.”32 The text leaves open whether this last instance of Norbert’s obsession is freely-chosen replay, or compulsive repetition; what it most unequivocally states is Zoë’s new complicity in the game. If Freud’s reading is geared toward waking up, the literary text suggests the continuation of at least one of Norbert’s dreams; and it alarmingly implies an uncontrollable feature of dreaming that may reach over into waking life: the fact that dreams paralyze gaze and body in a way that forecloses the freedom to choose not to watch, entailing a compulsion to freeze and stare, the same compulsion that Norbert experiences whenever he sees Zoë/Gradiva, rooted to the spot by the sight of the vertical angle of her foot.33 The persistence of Norbert’s fetishism even after he is allegedly cured and thus able to recognize and desire Zoë as the living being – and metaphor for life – that she is, casts doubt on the nature of this desire, and imprints the harmless ending with the uncanny mark of obsession; a bequest most obvious in Surrealism’s iconic appropriation of Gradiva as ultimate lover, mother, and muse. Paris, 29 May 1912, Théâtre du Châtelet: Vaslav Nijinsky’s twelve-minute piece L’Après-midi d’un faune is performed for the first time in front of a shocked audience. Set to Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune of 1894, a score inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem of 1876, the dance piece shows Nijinsky as the eponymous creature who surprises a group of nymphs about to take a bath in the midday heat. As they disappear he is left with a veil that has been dropped by one of them, which he carries back to a rock for an orgasmic final moment of pleasure. More revolutionary than the illicit display of lust on stage, however, was the choreography. Radicalizing the Ballet Russes’s first choreographer’s Michail Fokine’s innovations, L’Après-midi d’un faune introduced modernism to the institution of classical dance. Modernist dance has of course many faces; and so does L’Après-midi d’un faune. It is fitting in our context that it is based on a poem telling of the daydreams of a mythological being, all the more apposite as these daydreams include an openly fetishistic act. Yet that which is of greater interest here is the less obvious fetishism, the dance-work of distortion, the breaking down of balletic movement to the minimum gesture, and above all, the ensuing extraordinary de- and reconstruction of walking that forms the backbone of the choreography. Nijinsky strips movement of every sign of classical 32 Jensen, Gradiva, 117–118; “mit einem eigentümlichen Klang der Stimme”; “mit traumhaft dreinblickenden Augen,” Freud, Der Wahn und die Träume in Jensens “Gradiva” mit dem Text der Erzählung von Wilhelm Jensen, 86. 33 See Kofman, “Summarize, Interpret (Gradiva),” 106–107.

“Dance-Work” and the Art of Walking 

Fig. 2: Vaslav Nijinsky in “L‘Après-midi d‘un faune,” Studio Walery, Album Kochno. Copyright Bibliothèque nationale de France

 133

134 

 Lucia Ruprecht

bravura dancing;34 he who was famous for his seemingly weightless jumping choreographs one single small leap for himself within a score that evidently wants to go back to the “most etymological expressions of the body.”35 This return to the sources of movement included the rejection of “outmoded representational forms and conventions” like ballet mime, and is paralleled by the mise-en-scène of the piece, shaped by both Egyptian and Greek influences to give the impression of a frieze coming to life.36 Here, the dreamlike stare that we encountered in Rilke and Jensen returns. The plot of both Mallarmé’s poem and Nijinsky’s dance piece is triggered by a moment of scopophilic fixation of the female body. Yet as faun and nymphs start to move, it is more adequate to speak of an imitation of the female body by the male observer, or of a multiplication of the male body into its feminine others, similar to the process witnessed in Rilke. The technique which Nijinsky chose to convey this scenario, however, betrays yet another visual obsession transposed onto the stage, a more Hanoldian archaeological desire to go back to the origin, to the most archaic movement patterns, and to the beginning of dance in walking.37 Nijinsky’s choreography is a practice that makes use of some of the oldest visual archives of movement, articulating a drive similar to the one that Derrida, in Archive Fever, attributes to Freud and Hanold. Derrida addresses the fascination with the authenticity and immediacy of “the instant where the imprint is yet to be left, abandoned by the pressure of its impression,” giving rise to an “archive without archive, where, suddenly indiscernible from the impression of its imprint, Gradiva’s footstep speaks by itself.”38 Nijinsky’s dream-like dance may have been such an “archive without archive,” enactment rather than documentation, reaching into the past as much as into the future by launching a new, highly calculated aesthetic. Rivière writes: 34 For a discussion of Nijinsky’s modification of bravura dancing, see Lucia Ruprecht, “Der Virtuose geht. Waslaw Nijinskys L’Après-midi d’un faune,” arcadia 43/2 (2008), 237–256. 35 Rivière, “From ‘Le Sacre du Printemps,’ November 1913,” 165. 36 Ramsay Burt, The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1995), 90. Although Faune was part of what was nominally considered “Greek” in dance around 1900, the piece displayed a hybrid vision of classical antiquity. Especially the profiling technique was related to influences from Egyptian art. See Lincoln Kirstein, “L’Après-Midi d’un Faune, London 1912,” in Kirstein, Nijinsky Dancing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 125–126. See also Gabriele Brandstetter “Die Inszenierung der Fläche: Ornament und Relief im Theaterkonzept der Ballets Russes,” in Spiegelungen: Die Ballets Russes und die Künste, ed. Claudia Jeschke, Ursel Berger, and Birgit Zeidler (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 1997), 147–163. 37 This movement toward the primitive, archaic or “Greek” is not unique in Nijinsky, but one of the founding myths of origin in modernist dance, see Brandstetter, Poetics of Dance. 38 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 98.

“Dance-Work” and the Art of Walking 

 135

Thus Faune was also a demonstration of forgotten functions of the dance. [. . .] built from a simple walk, it was concerned not only with theatre-dance, but also with an extension of psychodrama, with the promise of limitless discovery beyond manneristic or decorative recovery, with exploration of private and individual sensibility past rhetoric or gentility.39

The overall impression of flatness produced by the dancers moving in clear linear propulsion either stage left or stage right was the result of a twist in the torso, so that the chest faces the audience, while hips and feet remain in profile. This modeling of the body on stage enabled the continuous view onto what Lincoln Kirstein calls “Faune’s [. . .] language of ambulation.”40 The documentation of the restored original choreography lists no less than fifteen different styles of walking for the faun and the nymphs, with the general effect of smooth yet exceedingly articulated locomotion, occasionally interrupted by moments of freezing. “Positions with weight on both feet rarely occur; usually weight is on one foot, the other merely touching the floor,” the choreographic annotations tell us.41 Not only are we reminded of the type of movement analysis in and through dance discussed above: “Such a lean and artificial grammar could have come only from sophisticated analysis,” Kirstein says;42 the fetishization of the minutely exposed angular foot is equally present. Similar to the workings of the libidinal economy in Gradiva, making visible that which normally remains unseen or unnoticed in walking gains both an obscene and an intellectual appeal. “Fokine,” as Lynn Garafola writes about the choreographer who created many of Nijinsky’s early roles, “had uncased the foot. It was Nijinsky, however, who put that liberated foot to work, pinioning it to the floor and weighting it, and using its component parts – heel, ball, arch – to reflexive purpose.”43 Through its hyper-articulation of the act of walking, L’Après-midi d’un faune gave rise to a performance of the phallic foot in which a male performer at once evoked and spectacularly disavowed assumptions of lack.44 The complicity of the protagonists – the fictional one, Zoë, and the real one, Nijinsky – in their fetishization thus leads us back to forms of aesthetic expenditure where the accent shifts from the presumed deficiency to the plenitude of fetishistic performance. This fetishistic performance, in Faune, was based on Nijinsky’s dance-work, 39 Kirstein, “L’Après-Midi d’un Faune,” 126. 40 Kirstein, “L’Après-Midi d’un Faune,” 125. 41 Ann Hutchinson Guest, Nijinsky’s Faune Restored (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1991), 158. 42 Kirstein, “L’Après-Midi d’un Faune,” 125. 43 Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 57. 44 For more detailed gendered readings of Nijinsky, see Burt, The Male Dancer, 74–100; Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 156–176; Gerald Siegmund, Abwesenheit: Eine performative Ästhetik des Tanzes (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006), 91–96.

136 

 Lucia Ruprecht

on his minute, distorting engagement with everyday physical material. It is the surplus of perception, born out of choreographic fine-tuning, that makes our watching of a dance piece like Afternoon of a Faune comparable to a dreamlike experience, having us freeze and stare in turn – just as Valéry’s three partners in conversation, Benjamin’s and Rilke’s observers, and Jensen’s archeologist. Not only, perhaps, enthralled by our scrutiny of fetishistic detail, but also experiencing embodied forms of knowledge and insight gained through the skillful operations of dance-work, as the dancers teach us, “as far as walking goes, to know ourselves a little better.”45

45 Valéry, Dance, 35.

Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca1

Dreaming of the Mother: Notes on Love and Photography When my gaze meets yours, I see both your gaze and your eyes, love in fascination – and your eyes are not only seeing but also visible. And since they are visible (things or objects in the world) as much as seeing (at the origin of the world), I could precisely touch them, with my finger, lips or even eyes, lashes and lids, by approaching you – if I dared come near to you in this way, if I one day dared. Jacques Derrida, On Touching I desire you. I desire only you. [. . .] Where are you? I am playing hide and seek with ghosts. But I know I will end up finding you, and the whole world will be newly lit because we love each other, because a chain of illuminations passes through us. André Breton, Mad Love To be on an island inhabited by artificial phantasms was the most insupportable of nightmares; to be in love with one of these images was worse than being in love with a phantasm (perhaps we always have wanted the person we love to have a phantasmatic existence). Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel

Is Roland Barthes dreaming when he writes Camera Lucida? Does he think of his mother every day, or of the mother of whom he dreams every day (he tells us at one point that he only dreams of his mother), or of the mother that he both knew and did not know, saw and did not see, or of the mother that was never herself? Is he haunted by the ruin of all the memories of her that he would have wished to capture, and in the writing of this book, for every day and always? Or else by what happens, one day, between photographic technology and the light that helps bring to life a photograph of his mother when she was five years old – a photograph in which he claims to find the truth of the face he loved, and from which he seeks to “derive” all photography? Or else by what happens, all at once, within the movement of his thoughts and writing, and in relation to his body, among photography, the work of his unconscious, the ghostly experience of music, the traumatic experiences of death and mourning, and the pangs of love? Barthes dreams (and writes) his vision (offering us something like photography 1 We would like to thank Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloch for their encouragement and support, and Roger Bellin for his diligent research assistance. A longer version of this essay appeared in Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, ed. Geoffrey Batchen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 105–140.

138 

 Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca

itself: what he calls “a new form of hallucination”), the fire of a declaration of love that, as he says, burns and consumes him, a “floating flash” that, blinding him, disorienting him, enables him to experience and touch his finitude, and, if we listen to the muteness of his mournful song, to the cry of his writing, we perhaps can hear him say: “I approach myself as I wait for you, today, my love, and for all time, but I know that, with your death, but also in your life, the self I approach is lost and cannot be found. In the midst of this loss, I experience the madness of a single desire: to affect time with time, secretly, in the night, and with the hope that, like the click of a camera, I may yet live to archive the music of my love for you. I love you, I desire you, I want to see and touch your body, I cannot live without you, and, with your death, I am no longer myself, even though I know that, even before your death, and because of my love for you, I already was not myself. If I have been wounded by your death – if it has pierced me and struck me – it is because this wound already was ‘mine,’ already was the signature of my love. Like the punctum about which I soon will tell you, your death has been added to my life, even if, from the very beginning, it already was there. No longer simply alive, but not yet dead, at the threshold of life and death, I offer you this book in the hope that it can suspend and derange time, and that, confessing my enduring love, my enduring wound, it can transform ‘the corpus I need’ into ‘the body I see,’ the body I touch.”

1 Photography is mad, and, in the world of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, its delirium and danger are related to the experience of love, and, more particularly, to what he calls the “pangs of love,” “extreme love.”2 But what is love, and in what way does it pain us, pierce us, strike us, and offer us a glimpse of our mortality? What is its relation to death, mourning, music, photography, and dreams? What does love have to do with the ruin, loss, and dissolution of the self? What does it mean to love a photograph, and in what way does love mean nothing else than loving a photograph (is it even possible to love something other than a photograph)? What is the relation, within the space of photography, between 2 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981), 116, 12. All references to the English translation of this text are to this edition and will be inserted parenthetically within our essay as CL and page number. Since, on occasion, we have modified this translation, we also include references to the original French edition. In this instance, then, the two citations can be found in La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard Editions du Seuil, 1980), 179, 28. All references to the French edition will follow the English citation and will be inserted as CC and page number.

Dreaming of the Mother: Notes on Love and Photography 

 139

the “observed subject” and the “subject observing” and how does this relation, at least according to Barthes, require a reconceptualization of both photography and love? These are the questions raised by Barthes’s strange, but moving meditation on photography and the death of his beloved mother. Barthes’s text carries the signature of a vigil that is more than simply an experience of mourning, more than simply a surviving testimony or a meditation on photography, since, as is legible in nearly every one of its sentences, it remains amorously related to a mother who has died, perhaps even more than once, but is still living, and not only in his memory. Indeed, we could even say that, within the logic of the book, it is his mother’s survival, her living on, even after her death, that indicates that things pass, that they change and transform, and, minimally, because this survival asks us to think not the impossibility of a return to life but the impossibility of dying, not life or death, but life and death, or perhaps, even more precisely, simply “life death.” If the landscape of Camera Lucida is a dream landscape, it is because, after Freud, we know that dreaming is the element most receptive to mourning, to haunting, to the spectrality of all spirits, and the return of ghosts. It is this ghostly survival – as a metonym for all such survivals – that defines the madness of the photograph, since it is there, within the medium of photography, that we simultaneously experience the absence of the “observed subject” and the fact of its “having-been-there,” the relation between life and death, between testimony and its impossibility, between the self and an other, and among the past, the present, and the future. Within the delirious space of photography, all these apparent oppositions are suspended and ruined in order to be rethought in relation to the madness of love “itself,” since the experience of love also breaks down and shatters these same oppositions, along with many others (including the relation between interiority and exteriority, presence and absence, singularity and repetition, lucidity and blindness, and necessity and chance). This means, among other things, that this little book on photography is also, and perhaps most essentially and significantly, a text on love and eroticism. It is perhaps Barthes’s true “lover’s discourse,” and this because, as he suggests, to speak of photography is always to speak of love. Barthes reinforces this point when, in the first few pages of his book, he confesses that when he looks at a photograph he sees “only the referent, the desired object, the beloved body” (7/19). It is precisely “love,” he explains, “extreme love,” that enables him to “erase the weight of the image” (12/27), to make the photograph “invisible” (6/18), and thereby to clear a path for him to see not the photograph, but the object of his desire, his beloved’s body. If, at first glance, it would seem that the force of love, and particularly of “extreme love,” enables him to pass through the photographic surface to reach the referent, to exceed the limits of the photographic medium in order to see his beloved, Barthes soon

140 

 Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca

makes it clear that there can be no love without photography and no photography without love. But to state this chiasmic axiom is merely to articulate the beginning of a mystery, since what is really at stake in this context is the possibility of understanding what “love” and “photography” mean here, especially since, like all the other terms he mobilizes within his text – including “studium,” “punctum,” “music,” “death,” “mourning,” “identity,” and even “mother” – these two words or concepts can never be understood outside of their relation to other words and concepts. Like the lover who wishes to address the singularity of his beloved without recourse to the lover’s discourse he inherits, Barthes seeks to invent a language that would be more faithful to what he “perceives” to be the singular, paradoxical, and contradictory character of photography.3 He suggests that, in order to submit to the photographic adventure, to surrender to the unprecedented experience of photography, we must invent a language with which we can approach it, even if we know we may never seize or capture it. Like all lovers, the Barthesian lover therefore seeks to name a world that has never yet existed before his eyes, as if his language might, in calling it forth, touch it for the first time. Indeed, as we know from his earlier analysis of the lover’s discourse, language desires nothing more and nothing else than to touch the beloved’s body – and the world in which it exists. In the same way that the lover’s language wishes to approach and touch his beloved, Barthes desires to approach and touch photography: to touch its essence, to touch on what differentiates it from other modes of representation. In the opening paragraph of his text, he confesses, in a wonderfully ambiguous formulation that signals both photography’s singularity and its intimate relation with cinema: “I decided I liked Photography in opposition to the Cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to separate it. This question grew insistent. I was overcome by an ‘ontological’ desire: I wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was ‘in itself,’ by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images” (CL 3/CC 13–14). Overwhelmed by desire, the writer seeks to discover the “ontology” of photography, but, rather than looking for concepts that might distinguish and define the fundamental elements with which 3 Barthes not only invents a set of Latinate neologisms but he also ceaselessly marks and remarks even familiar terms in such a way that, in each instance, they break away from what generally has been conceived or meant by them. He chooses Latin to be the “mother tongue” of photography – an archaic language to describe a modern technology, a dead language to evoke a technology organized around death – because modernity can only be understood in relation to the past from which it emerges. For an excellent discussion of this point, see Elissa Marder’s essay, “Nothing to Say: Fragments on the Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” L’Esprit Créateur, XL/1 (Spring 2000), esp. 28–30.

Dreaming of the Mother: Notes on Love and Photography 

 141

we might determine photography’s singularity, he suggests that there can be no reflection on photography that does not begin with the revision of the words or concepts with which we speak and think about images, and through which we look at them. If Barthes creates a text whose movement and circulation, whose words and names, embody and enact its semantic drift, in this instance, it is because he wants to suggest that what makes love and photography love and photography is that neither they nor their amorous or photographic subjects ever remain the same. As Barthes explains, [O]nce I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image (10/25), [. . .] in front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares) (13/29–30).

Photography – and the portrait as its genre par excellence – constitutes a radical and absolute destabilization of the Cartesian subject, “comparable to certain nightmares,” and not unlike the one advanced by psychoanalysis, in which “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.”4 Like psychoanalysis, photography shatters the subject of reason: it tells me that I do not exist before my image – that I exist only as an image, or, more precisely, only as a series of images, none of which are ever one. “I only resemble,” Barthes notes, “other photographs of myself, and this to infinity: no one is ever anything but the copy of a copy, real or mental” (102/159). This is why, far from reinforcing the assumption of an ontological difference between the subjectivity – the “humanity” – of the observer and the materiality of the chemical paper or metal plate that forms a photograph, Camera Lucida works to destabilize this frontier: the image becomes a subject and the subject becomes an image. They are bound together in a relation that, acquiring a certain privacy or intimacy, reveals itself to be an amorous one: the encounter between the subject and the photograph he holds in his hands produces the spark that subjectivizes the image (that “animates” it) and that simultaneously illuminates his own photographic being.5 4 Jacques Lacan, “Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 166. 5 Within this amorous relation, what evokes and attracts the gaze is called “adventure” (CL 19/CC 38). Like any adventure, the photographic adventure is linked to particularity – “contingency, singularity, adventure” (20/40) form a series in Camera Lucida – and to the adventurer’s

142 

 Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca

To look at a photograph is to recognize the photographic dimension of my “self,” to identify a particularity that seizes my gaze, to register or acknowledge that I already am, and in advance, a kind of photograph.6 Like the dream, photography names (without naming) the process whereby something stops being what it “is” in order to transform itself into “something else.” It “represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter” (14/30). Between life and death, subject and object, subject and image, in a kind of parenthesis, the specter I am becoming declares that the only image or subject that could really be an image or subject would be the one that shows its impossibility, its disappearance and destruction, its ruin. As Barthes explains, “I am the reference of every photograph, and this is what generates my astonishment in addressing myself to the fundamental question: why is it that I am alive here and now?” (CL 84/CC 131). In other words, why am I not there – in the fragment of paper that I hold in my hand or in the place in which confrontation with the other. Like all adventure, the photographic adventure implies the risk of an “internal agitation, an excitement, a certain labor, too, the pressure of the unspeakable which wants to be spoken” (19/37). Like music, the photograph breaks into the subject and produces a kind of agitation and interruption that – and here is the effect of the risk (and of all risk) – transforms the subject and thereby prevents him from remaining “himself.” This is why, when Barthes suggests that, “In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it” (20/39), he implies that the adventurer’s risk is never that of dying of thirst in the desert, of losing his life, but of passing through an experience that, at the edge of death, “animates” him, gives him the life he did not have, an other life. But this risk is also, at the same time, and like the adventure of love, very trivial. This is why what makes a photographic experience an adventure is precisely the enactment of an incredible feat that works to transform this triviality into a field in which the power of adventure can unfold in unexpected and transformative ways. To say that there can be no photography without adventure, then, means, among other things, that there can be no adventure without a force of animation and transformation. This is why, we might say, love (as another name for the photographic adventure) means: adventure, animation, and a transformation that displaces the lover onto a new terrain, one in which neither he nor his beloved (neither the observed subject nor the subject observing) can remain who they were “before” their encounter. 6 This is why the very possibility of love depends on our being able to love a photograph. For Barthes, to love a photograph is to experience “an internal agitation, an excitement” (CL 19/CC 37), to experience the adventure of what cannot be spoken or known, and to take “into my arms what is dead, what is going to die” (117/179). To love a photograph, then, is to embrace the mortality of the other, to experience a kind of madness, and to find and lose oneself in relation to the beloved, and inside the beloved, since, as we know, the beloved has, like the viewer of a photograph, internalized a trace of the lover, the lover’s “prick,” the lover’s punctum. To love an other, then, to love an other living person, means to love a photograph – to love what, wounding us, piercing us, and entering us, can no longer be thought or experienced as entirely other than us.

Dreaming of the Mother: Notes on Love and Photography 

 143

the photograph was taken? Why am I not there then, in the moment in which the click of the shutter was heard, in the precise instant in which what the image shows me was transformed into this image? If photography is “the cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity” (12/28), it is not only because photography signals a crisis in the identity of the subject but also because it introduces a mediation and break into the very interior of the concept of identity. Within the dreamlike photographic space, I “discover” that I am never self-identical to myself, and that there is no object, no act, no instant that ever coincides with “itself.” Photography prevents us from ever recognizing this or that identity – ours, but also that of someone or something else – because “photography” is the name of the destruction of any consciousness of identity. This law of both love and photography – a law that interrupts identity by marking it with the sign of difference and transformation – belongs to what makes Barthes’s meditation on love and photography so radically provocative: against a sense that photography’s signature lies in its capacity to fix and preserve – to arrest – what is before the camera, he mobilizes a network of associations that, practically and textually, seek to disorganize and destabilize the opposition or difference between opposing terms, such as stasis and movement, preservation and destruction, survival and death, and memory and mourning. That this work of disorganization and destabilization is shown to be at the heart of the experience of love – as Barthes would have it, love is, like the dream, nothing else than a process of disorganization and destabilization – is what we are meant to trace, as if we were tracing and listening to a kind of secret, and as we follow the Ariadne’s thread that, like the Winter Garden Photograph of his mother as a child, brings together photography, love, and death.

2 When Barthes first confronts the Winter Garden Photograph, he admits: “I gave myself up to the Image, to the Image-Repertoire. Thus I could understand my generality; but having understood it, invincibly I escaped from it. In the Mother, there was a radiant, irreducible core: my mother” (75/117). Registering that his engagement with this photograph of his mother (before she was his mother) is informed and shaped by the Image-Repertoire (perhaps another name for what he calls the studium), he nonetheless suggests that what distinguishes his suffering from the suffering of another person in similar circumstances, what even increases it, is the fact that he has spent his whole life with her and that his suffering “proceeds from who she was” (75/117). Precisely in order to articulate and maintain the particularity of his mourning, Barthes confesses that, “like the Proustian Narrator at

144 

 Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca

his grand-mother’s death: ‘I did not insist only upon suffering, but upon respecting the originality of my suffering’; for this originality was the reflection of what was absolutely irreducible in her, and thereby lost forever” (75/117–118). But how is it possible to believe in the originality of Barthes’s suffering if he himself tells us that it is “like” the suffering of Proust after the death of his grandmother? How can we believe in the originality of someone who is not an unprecedented figure in his life but a person who is repeated in the life of others, a figure almost as archetypal as the mother? In signaling originality through the words of another, Barthes stages the paradoxical character of mourning. Effectively, he suggests, the pain or grief that we experience before a loss is always contradictory: each time that we lose someone we go through, at least structurally (even if not in every detail), exactly the same series of experiences as someone who has suffered a similar loss: we surrender to the same rituals, we reproduce the same set of sentences and formulas. At the same time, and like everyone else, we think that our suffering is entirely unique. And we are not wrong here, because, paradoxically, what is repeated each time that we fall in love or that we lose someone is precisely the radical originality of love or loss. Photography, like love or death, is the experience of the singularity that is repeated or of the repetition that appears as something singular.7 This is why the punctum, in all its singularity, in its absolute irreducibility, can be shown to encrypt an entire network of substitutions that, composing and de-composing it at the same time, prevent it from ever being what it is, from ever being self-identical to itself. What makes this series of substitutions possible, however – and Barthes is entirely rigorous here – is time “itself,” and it is no accident that the term he associates most closely with accident and contingency – the punctum – is another word for time. Indeed, as he tells us, “there exists another punctum (another ‘stigmatum’) than the ‘detail.’ This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that-has-been’), its pure representation” (96/148). If time lacerates the surface of the photograph, this wounded photograph also interrupts the movement of time, in a manner that has, not the form of time, but rather the form of time’s interruption, the form of an “intense immobility” (49/81), of an explosion. It wounds the form of time, intensely and irrecuperably. This disorder is introduced by the photograph from the very beginning, however, since every photograph is marked 7 As a means of visualizing this paradox, the front cover of the Spanish edition of Camera Lucida presents an image of an antique camera – one of those machines that are at the other extreme of the Polaroid and that remind us of the daguerreotype or of a certain auratic moment – in the process of copying or taking a photograph. The camera is there, in the center of the cover, between two large quotation marks that, like citation, like love, mourning, or photography, infinitely reproduce its originality.

Dreaming of the Mother: Notes on Love and Photography 

 145

by the singular moment in which it was taken, a moment that, because it cannot be reproduced or repeated, because it is not redeemable in the present, inhabits the present like a kind of ghost. This is why every photograph signals “the return of the dead” (9/23), a return in which the photographed becomes a “Total-Image, which is to say, Death in person” (14/31). In this way, every photograph does not only show what it exhibits – does not only show a relation between an observed subject and a subject observing captured on a piece of photographic paper – but rather says, exhibits, or performs what photography is. Photography is an amorous experience, magical and paradoxical: an objective chance, a necessary gratuitousness, “the tireless repetition of contingency” (5/17). As an index, every image is an emanation of a body from the past that, disappearing, and no longer here, nevertheless has left behind a fragment of itself. When we contemplate this remnant, that is, this photograph, we look at it quickly in order to arrest the gaze in a new fragment, in a detail. As a fragment, a photograph offers itself to be read as what remains, as a kind of remnant or corpse; it is what remains of a totality that now is absent. But, as a new totality, it signals the violence enacted in every photographic act, and in photographic language itself. After all, a photograph is a cut that the eye or the camera realizes in the world, even if only in this fragmentary way. The fragment we call a photograph, and the fragment that illuminates it, have the power to tear both time and our gaze: “it is phantasmatic, deriving from a kind of second sight which seems to bear me forward to a utopian time, or to carry me back to somewhere in myself” (40/68). Photography is the amorous fetish par excellence, a fragment of the present that, like the relation between two lovers, links and realizes both the past and the future and, in doing so, deranges time altogether.

3 In his discussion of the question of resemblance, Barthes claims that, when he gets close to a photograph, when he feels he almost can touch his “desired object, his beloved’s body,” he finds himself “burning” (100/157), as if consumed by a kind of fire. This experience of burning registers not only the extremity of his desire and love but also, at the very edge of this extremity, the conflagration of his identity. Indeed, the entire discussion of resemblance belongs to Barthes’s polemic against identity in general. If a photograph implies a resemblance to an identity, he suggests, this identity is always “imprecise” and “even imaginary”; it is only an “absurd, purely legal, even penal affair” (100–101/157, 160). This is why a photographic portrait always “looks like anyone except the person it represents,” and why he can find the “splendor” of his mother’s truth in the Winter

146 

 Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca

Garden Photograph (102–103/160). In this “lost, remote photograph” – in which the little girl he never knew, the little girl who neither resembles nor looks “like” his mother, nevertheless evokes the “lineaments” of his mother’s truth – Barthes encounters a photographic principle. “In front of the photograph of my mother as a child,” he writes, “I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe” (96/150). If the photograph of his mother as a child already bears the trace of her future death, it is certainly because, at the moment in which Barthes finds it and views it, she is dead (the catastrophe “has already occurred,” and he only can view the photograph through the lens of this death), but it also is because the photograph, at the very moment it was taken, already had mortified and immobilized its subject (the catastrophe “had already occurred,” and not only before he views the photograph but also before his birth or his mother’s death). Whether or not the mother “is already dead,” then, literally dead, she already will have experienced (a kind of) death. Looking at a series of photographs of his mother, Barthes confesses that he sometimes “recognized a region of her face, a certain relation of nose and forehead, the moment of her arms, her hands.” “I never recognized her except in fragments,” he goes on to say, “which is to say that I missed her being, that therefore I missed her altogether” (66/103). These photographic fragments enable him to “dream about her,” but not to “dream her” (66/104). Or rather, if they “dream her,” they can only dream her as fragmented, as shattered, as only present in the absence that Barthes insistently and persistently wishes to overcome. The result of this fragmented dream is the object we can call image, a fragment that appears before our eyes only as a “counter-memory” (91/142). The photograph always brings death to the photographed, because death is the photograph’s “eidos” (15/32).8 What survives in a photograph, what returns in it, is therefore always also the survival of the dead, the appearance of a ghost or phantom. This is why, within the space of the photograph, the dead always are alive, and the alive always are dead without being dead. This axiom enables Barthes to generalize his experience of the Winter Garden Photograph into a claim about the photograph in general, but it also leads him to read his own death not only in relation to that of his mother’s, but in relation to the death that 8 The mother’s death is also legible, proleptically, and as a kind of analogue, in the mortality of the Winter Garden Photograph’s material support. “The photograph was very old,” Barthes writes, “[t]he corners were blunted from having been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded” (CL 67/CC 106), and, like all photographs, it shares the common “fate of paper (perishable)” and, “even if it is attached to more lasting supports, it is still mortal: like a living organism, it is born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages [. . .] Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes” (93/145–146).

Dreaming of the Mother: Notes on Love and Photography 

 147

is announced by every photograph: as he puts it, every photograph “always contains this imperious sign of my future death” (97/151). Observing a photograph, the viewer spectralizes himself in relation to a death that, through an uncertain and phantasmatic process of identification, now haunts him, now touches and inhabits his life, now comes to be seen as “his,” a death that is the life of his life, and in which he exists and lives, not as dead, but as dying. He exists, like the first actors who “separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead,” in “a body simultaneously living and dead” (31/56). That this experience of living at the threshold of death and life is another name for the experience of love – for what takes place in our relation to the one we love – is confirmed when, in A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes confesses: “I have projected myself into the other with such power that when I am without the other I cannot recover myself, regain myself: I am lost, forever.”9 While he suggests that this loss of self occurs especially in relation to the absent other, he also implies that it happens even when the other is presumably “present,” since the very relation between a self and an other means that, because each already inhabits the other, neither the self nor the other can return to himself (or, in the case of his mother, to “herself”): the self and the other deconstitute one another precisely in their relation. If neither Barthes nor his mother can remain simply themselves, it is because, bearing the trace of the other, each can become identified with the other. The possibility of this transformation of the one into the other is confirmed in an extraordinary moment in which Barthes claims, in an extreme temporal reversal, to have given birth to his mother, and therefore to have become a mother himself. After recalling that the Greeks “entered into Death backward,” Barthes claims, on discovering the Winter Garden Photograph of his “mother as a child,” to have “worked back” in relation to this photograph “through a life, not my own, but the life of someone I love.” He goes on to suggest that, while taking care of his ailing mother “at the end of her life,” he is able to experience the backward “movement of the Photograph” – its capacity to take him back to the childhood of his mother – in “reality” (CL 71/CC 111–112). “During her illness,” he explains, I nursed her, held the bowl of tea she liked because it was easier to drink from than from a cup; she had become my little girl, uniting for me with that essential child she was in her first photograph [. . .]. Ultimately I experienced her, strong as she had been, my inner law, as my feminine child. Which was my way of resolving Death [. . .] if after having been reproduced as other than himself, the individual dies, having thereby denied and transcended himself, I who had not procreated, I had, in her very illness, engendered my mother (72/112–113). 9 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978), 49. Future references to this text are to this edition and will be inserted into the essay as LD and page number.

148 

 Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca

Acknowledging that his mother always had been his “inner law,” Barthes suggests that, in relation to himself, she already was in him before him, she already was stronger or more forceful than him: from the very beginning, she already had left an imprint on him and therefore given birth to him, reproduced him, “as other than himself.” A mechanism for reproduction, the mother reproduces – like a kind of camera – not the same thing, but something else: she therefore kills (Barthes says he “dies”) at the same time that she engenders, produces, gives birth, brings to the light of day, and gives something to be seen. He confirms this death – this death that attends birth – when, as happens in this passage, he encounters himself in the figure of the mother. In experiencing the mother’s alterity, in experiencing alterity in the mother, he experiences the alteration that, “in him,” infinitely displaces and delimits his singularity. This is why, from the moment of his birth, Barthes already experiences a kind of death in relation to the maternal body – a body whose material residue lives on in his body and therefore retrospectively confirms not only his body’s passage through this body but also his capacity to retain a relation to the mother’s body, even after her death. Embodying both the past and the present, death and life, Barthes’s body bears the traces of the place where he once lived, and lived in order to begin dying: his mother’s dark womb (or, as we might put it, his mother’s “darkroom”). As he notes, “Freud says of the maternal body that ‘there is no other place of which one can say with so much certainty that one has already been there’” (40/68). The condition of possibility for a process of reproduction that gives something to be seen, the mother’s body is at once a kind of camera, developer, and photographic darkroom. Giving birth to the emergence of an image, the mother is another name for photography. This bond between photography and the mother is legible throughout Barthes’s text and it is not restricted to those moments in which he refers to the mother explicitly: he structures his entire text around a photograph of his dead mother that he does not reproduce, but from which he wishes to derive all photography, and he conceives of photography in maternal terms, as a process of reproduction that, like the mother, gives birth to a series of images – through chemical means – which create, preserve, and destroy their subjects, and which are joined to the observing subject by a kind of umbilical cord. Within the world of Camera Lucida, the mother is a dreamscape, an incunabula of images. If Barthes’s mother remains “in him,” then, even after her death, even after she has disappeared and passed away, this is because, beyond the material traces, the material imprint her body has left on his, she remains in him in a series of memories and scenes that are nothing else than images: she

Dreaming of the Mother: Notes on Love and Photography 

 149

leaves “in him” only images.10 Recalling his mother (but what else, other than the mother, can we remember?), Barthes associates her with a series of different, but related images – first the image of her during her illness, then the image she becomes when she is his “feminine child” or “little girl,” and then the image of the one whom he “engenders.” It is not an accident, however, that he identifies with the mother, with the maternal function, at the very moment when his “mother,” not yet a mother, before existing as a mother, is the “essential child” in her “first photograph,” and not a mother. Like the mother who reproduces the self as an other, Barthes reproduces his mother as an other (as a series of others). Incorporating his dead mother into his own spectral identity, he enables a kind of “resurrection” (82/129), another “birth,” and thereby counters her death with an element of life (perhaps his “own”), but a life that already was there in the mother’s living death. If the photograph bespeaks a certain horror, Barthes notes, it is because “it certifies that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing” (78–79/123); it is because, in other words, within the photograph, the dead and the living become undead.11 10 On this point, see Derrida’s essay, “By Force of Mourning,” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), 159. 11 If Barthes desires to resurrect his mother, if he wishes to recover and revivify her body, we should not be surprised to register his effort to reverse the trajectory of her life, to bring her back to life, and perhaps beginning from her death. This effort is legible, in perhaps its most secret and hidden form, in the very structure of Camera Lucida, at least insofar as we can claim – and we believe we can – that the structure and writing of the text embodies his desire. We can begin to read this effort by first noting that the text is composed of two parts, with each part consisting of twenty-four chapters, for a total of forty-eight chapters. It was written between 15 April and 3 June 1979, which means that it was written in forty-eight days. There are twenty-five photographs reproduced within the book, but, since the first one, Daniel Boudinet’s 1979 color photograph, Polaroid, is, strictly speaking, outside of the text, there are twenty-four photographs within the text proper. The number twenty-four seems particularly significant within the context of the book, since it evokes the number of still frames – the number of photograms – that pass through a film projector every second as well as the number of hours in a day, that is, the number of hours that constitute the cycle between day and night, and light and darkness. The number forty-eight perhaps becomes more significant, however, if we recall that Barthes’s mother died at the age of eighty-four, which, read backwards, is forty-eight. This reversed identification would seem to be only coincidental, and perhaps only a game of numbers and chance, but it becomes less so when we remember that Barthes claims to have discovered the Winter Garden Photograph, the photograph he associates most closely with the “essence” of his mother, “by moving back through Time.” Moreover, he seems to reinforce this gesture of reversal by noting that “[t]he Greeks entered into Death

150 

 Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca

The general relay between photography and the mother suggests that the photograph – and, in this instance, the photograph we know as the son who becomes the mother – is endowed with a magical and uncanny power to procreate and this is confirmed in one of the most remarkable passages in Camera Lucida, a passage that brings together light, the body, the gaze, the self, the referent, and the maternal body. Barthes writes: The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being touches me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed (80–81/126–127).12

Evoking Democritus and his theory of eidolas – in which bodies give off emanations, material vestiges of the subject, that travel through the medium of light to the eyes of a spectator13 – Barthes suggests that the photograph brings together a distant past and a present moment in the same way that the “delayed rays of a star” join what is most distant with what is closest at hand, and that it also is backward: what they had before them was their past. In the same way I worked back through a life, not my own, but the life of someone I love” (CL 71/CC 111). While there would be much to say about these correspondences, the least we can say is that, in a very real sense, what Barthes seems to want – because of his love for his mother, because of his desire to have her alive and beside him – is to have his text embody the trajectory of his mother’s lifespan, but in reverse, as if, in doing so, it might, by reversing the movement of her life from life to death and thereby transforming it into one from death to life, magically restore her to him. In the same way that he claims to have started with his mother’s “latest image, taken the summer before her death” and then to have “arrived, traversing three-quarters of a century, at the image of a child” (71/111), he states that, in taking care of his mother when she was ill, in taking care of her as if she had become his child, he experienced this backward movement in reality. It is this experience of the displacement and reversal of time that encourages him to seek to conjure his mother through an act of writing that is as much an act of desire and love as it is an act of counting. 12 This play between light and skin, between the photograph and emanations, can be registered in the French word for “film”: pellicule. From pellis, the skin, pellicule and film originally have the same meaning: a small or thin skin, a kind of membrane. Although, in this passage, Barthes uses the word “peau” and not pellicule, he demonstrates his awareness of this etymological connection between film and skin – a connection that suggests the relation between this “carnal medium” and the photogram – in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. See Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 54. 13 For a discussion of Democritus’s theory of eidolas in relation to photography in general, see Branka Arsic’s essay, “The Home of Shame,” in Cities Without Citizens, ed. Eduardo Cadava and Aaron Levy (Philadelphia: Slought Books and the Rosenbach Museum and Library, 2003), 36.

Dreaming of the Mother: Notes on Love and Photography 

 151

bound to the spectator’s gaze by a kind of umbilical cord composed of light. As Elissa Marder suggests in her reading of this passage: [P]hotography, whose etymology means “light writing,” alchemically transforms light into flesh. In this transformation, photography becomes a maternal medium that magically reconnects the body of the viewing subject to the body of the referent by an umbilical cord. This umbilical cord, in turn, creates a new corpus that envelops both the viewing subject and the photographed object under a common skin. In the act of transforming light into skin, photography transubstantiates the body of the referent and transports it through time and space.14

If the photograph transforms the living and the dead into the living dead – if it binds the living to the dead in a kind of “amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world,” if life and death are “glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures” (6/17) – it also is because, like the mother, the photograph kills at the same time that it gives birth. As Barthes puts it, “once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes [. . .] I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice” (10–11/25). Like the mother, the photograph exists between life and death, the past and the present, interiority and exteriority, body and image, and subject and image. It opens onto a future whose lineaments are not yet known, even if what can be known enables us to delineate the contours of the horizon and limit of death. This is why the mother – Barthes’s mother, but also all mothers – is nothing more nor less than a figure for the birth and death of photography. This is also why to gaze upon the mother is to dream of looking at the impossible. Like the Walter Benjamin of whom Adorno once wrote that he “overcame the dream without betraying it,” Barthes dreams of recovering the body of his dead mother within the uncanny vigilance and lucidity of a waking dream.

4 If the Winter Garden Photograph is indeed the “invisible punctum” of Barthes’s elegiac book15 – even though it does not belong to the series of photographs he exhibits and analyzes, it nevertheless haunts the entire book; we could even say that, as the wound that “signs” the book, there is no sentence in the book that is 14 Marder, “Nothing to Say: Fragments on the Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 32. 15 The phrase is from Derrida’s essay, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), 159.

152 

 Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca

not touched by it – he soon suggests that, in thinking of the photograph, we must think of something other than simply light or photography: we must think of what he calls the “last music,” the song of his mother and of his grief at her death, and, in general, a kind of accord or correspondence. As he notes: “The Winter Garden Photograph was for me like the last music Schumann wrote before collapsing, that first Gesang der Frühe that accords with both my mother’s being and my grief at her death: I could not express this accord except by an infinite series of adjectives” (70/110).16 While he already had stressed the relation between photography and music in his discussion of the studium and punctum – “Having thus distinguished two themes in Photography,” he writes, “(for in general the photographs I liked were constructed in the manner of a classical sonata), I could occupy myself with one after the other” (27/49) – his reference to Schumann’s last music is particularly resonant here, since, among other things, it evokes his 1979 essay, “Loving Schumann,” and an earlier essay from 1976 on Schumann and Schubert entitled “The Romantic Song.” In the latter essay, he explains that, listening to the Schumannian lied, he addresses himself, within himself, to “an Image: the image of the beloved in which I lose myself and from which my own image, abandoned, comes back to me.” “I struggle with an image,” he goes on to say, anticipating his later understanding of his relation to the Winter Garden Photograph, “which is both the image of the desired, lost other, and my own image, desiring and abandoned.”17 After his mother’s death, however, the figure of the “desired, 16 That Barthes can only “express” this accord by “an infinite series of adjectives” is critical here, and especially in relation to what he understands as the photographic character of the adjective in general. He draws this “correspondence” between adjectives and photography in the series of lectures he delivered in 1978 at the Collège de France on “The Neutral,” not long after the death of his mother (a death that leaves its traces throughout the lectures) and just two years before his death. As a counter to the petrifying, death-bringing effects of the adjective, Barthes explains that, in the discourse of the lover, the lover’s tendency to cover his beloved with adjectives eventually leads the lover to experience the wounding lack “from which predication suffers” and he comes “to seek a linguistic way of addressing this: that the totality of imaginable predicates will never reach or exhaust the absolute specificity of the object of his desire.” When he claims that he cannot express the accord between Schumann’s “last music,” his mother’s being, and his grief at her death, “except by an infinite series of adjectives,” he implies that all efforts to fix or arrest this accord inevitably will fail, which is why this effort has to begin again, an infinite number of times. That his discussion of the adjective is particularly resonant with his concerns in Camera Lucida is reinforced when he claims, in a way that evokes his mother and her death, that, “in linguistic culture,” the “two objects” that are understood to be “beyond predication either in horror or in desire” are “the corpse and the desired body.” See The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–1978), trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 52, 58. 17 “The Romantic Song,” in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 290.

Dreaming of the Mother: Notes on Love and Photography 

 153

lost other” evoked by Schumann’s music becomes associated specifically with his mother and her death, and with the loss of self to which this relation and death give birth. He makes this explicit in “Loving Schumann,” when he claims that Schumann is the musician of “solitary intimacy, of the amorous and imprisoned soul that speaks to itself [. . .] in short, of the child who has no other link than to the Mother,” and when he states that Schumann’s music is “at once dispersed and unary, continually taking refuge in the luminous shadow of the Mother (the lied, copious in Schumann’s work, is [. . .] the expression of this maternal unity).”18 Suggesting that we have a relation to the Mother even when we are alone and speaking only to ourselves (and this because we internalize her trace just as we internalize the trace of the music we hear), like photography, Schumann’s music joins love to a force of arrest, and the “Mother” to photography. Associated with the light and darkness within which photography emerges, the Mother also turns out to be linked to the rhythms and scansions of music “itself.” What is perhaps most remarkable about this series of associations, however – among music, love, death, mourning, and the mother – is that it transcribes music onto a shadowy representation of mortality and finitude. This relation between music and death is evoked in André Malraux’s 1933 account of the early days of the Chinese Revolution, The Human Condition. There, he notes that “music only can speak of death.”19 If, on the one hand, he suggests that, of all the arts, only music can speak of death, on the other hand, he tells us that music can only speak of death, can speak of nothing else but death. What makes music music, in other words, is that, in our experience of it, we encounter what is always about to vanish. This is why, for Barthes, music is linked to mourning, and, in particular, within 18 Roland Barthes, “Loving Schumann,” in The Responsibility of Forms, 293–294 (hereafter referred to as LS). 19 André Malraux, La condition humaine (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1946), 334. Although Barthes rarely evokes China and its revolutionary history, he addresses both of these in a brief but rich text from 1975 entitled Alors la Chine? In a two-page coda – written in response to the negative reactions his text elicited – he suggests that, “hallucinating” China as an object, he would like to read it as the “feminine (maternal?) infinite of the object itself.” This hallucination is not “gratuitous,” he explains, and it is meant to go against the popular Western hallucination of China’s “directly political” and dogmatic discourse. At this moment, he makes a remarkable statement that, like Malraux, links the thought of China to music. Claiming that the intellectual or writer always moves by indirection, he notes that the aim of his little text was to offer a discourse that would be just (and “musically” so) in relation to the indirectness of Chinese politics. Claiming that only a certain musicality can be “just” to the indecipherability of Chinese politics, he concludes that “it is necessary to love music,” and “the Chinese also.” In this instance, then – and in keeping with what he suggests in Camera Lucida – music and love are on the side of indirection, on the side of what escapes our comprehension, and perhaps even on the side of what he dares to evoke, even if in the mode of a question, as the “maternal.” See Alors la Chine? (Paris: Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 1975), 8, 13–14.

154 

 Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca

this book, to the relation between love and mourning. Indeed, it is precisely this latter relation that is evoked by the Winter Garden Photograph, and that draws him toward Photography, since it is in relation to this particular photograph that he claims to understand that he must “interrogate the evidence of Photography [. . .] in relation to what we romantically call love and death” (CL 73/CC 115). Like love and death, music begins in its fugitive, transitory character, in the impossibility of our ever comprehending it. This is why music often has been understood as “an art beyond signification.”20 In the experience of music, we always encounter an aleatory (but sonorous, audible, evocative) oversignification. We might even say that music is, as it were, the least incorporated matter. Like the other who always remains beyond our comprehension – as we know, this incomprehension is, for Barthes, a condition of love and its many enigmas – music still remains, even after we hear it, even after we incorporate its trace, somewhere beyond us, resonating at a distance, in an exteriority that extends in every direction and that we experience as the opening of the world. Music has no hidden surface, even when it remains unseen; like Barthes’s mother, it appears “without either showing or hiding” itself (69/107). It is fugitive and evanescent. Like love and death, it has the capacity to dispossess its subjects, and, since it determines us by displacing us, by disappropriating us, by making us inaccessible to ourselves, we could even say that it means the vanishing of the subject. To say that music “only speaks of death,” then, is to say that, like photography and love, music always signals our departure from ourselves, our imminent death. It is also to say that music always has been a means of experiencing traces, a form of inscription or writing. Like photography, it has the power to leave an imprint or trace – and it has this power because, among other things, it is rhythm itself. When Mallarmé says in Music and Letters that “every soul is a rhythmic knot,”21 he recalls the archaic sense of the word “music”: rhythm, which meant “type,” “letter,” “character,” and even “scheme.” This is why music always implies the violent imposition of a certain form; it is the impression that, in some malleable matter or other (wax or vinyl, for example) – and, again, not unlike photography – produces an effigy. To designate an operation of this kind, the Greeks used the verb tupein, from tupos: the mark, the imprint, engraved characters. Émile Benveniste (of whom Barthes often confessed his admiration and love)22 confirms 20 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe makes this point in his reading of Adorno’s writings on music. See Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner), trans. Felicia McCarren (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 144. 21 Stéphane Mallarmé, La musique et les lettres, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 644. 22 See, for example, his 1974 essay, “Why I Love Benveniste” (in which he explicitly situates Benveniste within the context of a discussion of the relation between love and music), in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 167.

Dreaming of the Mother: Notes on Love and Photography 

 155

this point in his 1966 essay, “The Notion of ‘Rhythm’ in its Linguistic Expression,” noting that rhuthmos means originally skhema: form, figure, schema, and that it also characterizes (and belongs to) a generalized process of differentiation and distinction that often is exemplified by the letters of the alphabet.23 This relation between rhythm and inscription, between rhythm and letters, evokes the question of writing in general, a question on the basis of which it seems possible, passing through the works of Barthes, to think about the subject’s pre-inscription within writing. But, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe notes in his analysis of Benveniste’s essay, we should not move too quickly through the steps of Benveniste’‘s argument.24 Benveniste in fact insists that skhema is only an approximation of rhuthmos. If skhema designates “a fixed, realized form posited as an object,” rhuthmos is “the form at the moment it is taken by what is in movement, mobile, fluid, the form that has no organic consistency.” It is, he adds, “improvised, momentaneous, modifiable” form.25 This means, among other things, that the form of rhythm is traversed by time, or, to put it differently, time is its condition of possibility. Following Lacoue-Labarthe, we can say that the word “rhythm” already implies, then – at the very edge of the subject’s capacity to figure or represent itself – the mark, the stamp, the imprint that, inscribing us within its movement, prevents us from ever returning to ourselves, sends us back to the night and chaos that, never ordered by us, enables us to appear as what we are, as what we are not – ourselves.26 This process of inscription and impression also characterizes the photographic space, a space in which, as Barthes suggests, we always experience the “advent” of ourselves as an other. In this sense, perhaps, “every soul is a rhythmic knot,” a bringing together of stasis and movement, of stability and instability, of singularity and repetition. We are rhythmed, therefore27 – which is to say, among other things, that we become an 23 See Émile Benveniste, “La notion de ‘rhythme’ dans son expression linguistique,” in Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 330. 24 See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s “The Echo of the Subject,” trans. Barbara Harlow, in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 196–203. In many respects, our reading of Benveniste’s essay – and of the notion of “rhythm” in general – is a miniaturized photograph of Lacoue-Labarthe’s argument, an argument he repeats somewhat telegraphically in Musica Ficta, especially on pages 77–83. We would suggest here that, although Barthes refers to Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay, “Caesura of the Speculative,” in Camera Lucida (see CC 141), it is perhaps this essay, “Echo of the Subject,” that has the most resonance with his book. A reading of Theodor Reik’s The Haunting Melody, the latter essay is, among other things, a meditation on the relations among music, mourning, and autobiography. 25 Benveniste, “La notion de ‘rhythme’ dans son expression linguistique,” 333. 26 See Lacoue-Labarthe, “Echo of the Subject,” 202. 27 Lacoue-Labarthe makes this identical point in “Echo of the Subject,” 202.

156 

 Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca

impression and, in particular, a photographic impression. Barthes confirms this transformation (and in the context of his relation to the beloved’s voice and body) in The Lover’s Discourse when he writes that, [I]n the fascinating image, what impresses me (like a sensitized paper) is not the accumulation of its details but this or that inflection. What suddenly manages to touch me (ravish me) in the other is the voice, the line of the shoulders, the slenderness of the silhouette, the warmth of the hand, the curve of a smile, and so forth. (LD 191)

Like the detail or punctum that pierces him, that wounds him, the details of his beloved’s body enter him and transform him into the register, the imprint, of a series of impressions that, like the “sensitized paper” that records the other’s trace, confirm his photographic character, his inscription within a photographic process. The body he loves is not unlike the music he loves, then, since both enter his own body and, in entering it, prevent it from remaining just “his,” even if, as he suggests, “he” and his body become a kind of musical organ that “plays” this music from somewhere else as if it were emerging from “him” (like the punctum, the music is added to his body, even as it is already there). “Schumann’s music goes much farther than the ear,” he explains, “it goes into the body, into the muscles by the beats of its rhythm, and somehow into the viscera by the voluptuous pleasure of its melos; as if on each occasion the piece was written only for one person, the one who plays it.” “The true Schumannian pianist,” he adds, is him: “c’est moi” (LS 295). Entering him and piercing him like the punctum of a photograph, music transforms and animates him and, in the rhythm of this process, he becomes the only one who can experience and interpret the music in a particular way, in a way that remains faithful to the madness of its movement. “Rhythmed” in this way, he is jostled back and forth until he appears to become a kind of light that, rebounding off the several surfaces it encounters, ensures that his “identity” remains nothing more than what he elsewhere calls a “fleeting index” (248).28 As he puts it in his analysis of the lover’s discourse, displacing his interest from a musical interest to a photographic one, “in the amorous encounter, I keep rebounding – I am light” (LD 199). As he suggests in an unpublished lecture from 1977 entitled “Music, Voice, and Language,” music – in the composer’s imaginary, more often associated with night than with light – in fact “derives” from the discourse of love. “Every ‘successful’ relation,” he writes, “successful in that it manages to say the implicit without articulating it, to pass over articulation without falling into the censorship of desire or the sublimation of the unspeakable – such a relation can rightly 28 Roland Barthes, “Listening,” in The Responsibility of Forms, 248.

Dreaming of the Mother: Notes on Love and Photography 

 157

be called musical.”29 The music of love therefore belongs to a space of relation and silence – a space without articulation – but one whose silence is linked to the “affect of the lost, abandoned subject.” Barthes reinforces this claim in Camera Lucida in an exquisite passage on the relations among music, silence, blindness, the night, and, again, a certain accord. Immediately after noting that the punctum, like the dream, can “accommodate a certain latency,” that it can appear when he is not looking at a photograph, he writes: Ultimately – or at the limit – in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. “The necessary condition for an image is sight,” Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: “We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.” The photograph must be silent [. . .] this is not a question of discretion, but of music. Absolute subjectivity is achieved in a state, an effort, of silence (shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence). (CL 53, 55/CC 88–89)

Encountering a photograph – like encountering music or having a dream, Barthes suggests – requires a certain silence and blindness, and, together, this silence and blindness suggest a kind of withdrawal from more conventional (or less surprising) understandings of photography. If he likens the silence of the photograph to the experience of shutting his eyes to what we do not wish to see or wish to name, and to music itself (we should remember that this silence, as he says, nevertheless still speaks), it is because music never gives anything to sight: it says nothing, it cannot be immobilized, it is, in Marie-Louise Mallet’s words, a “‘rebel’ object,” and this because, before everything else, it can never become an object.30 Like love, death, and photography, it escapes the theoretical regard; it remains in the dark. This is why Nietzsche calls music the “art of the night,” and why he associates it with the “night” of philosophy itself.31 In Barthes’s terms, while music may be of the order of an “event,” much like the photographic subject or object it appears only to disappear, and this is why it requires, at every moment, a work of mourning. This is simply to say that music names, if it names anything at all, a loss without return; it recalls death to us, and, since the night always suggests death, we could even say that, in Barthesian terms, there is no music without the night or death. As he states in relation to his love of Schumann, “Loving Schumann [. . .] is in a way [. . .] to adopt a Nietzschean word, Untimeliness, or again, to risk this time the most Schumannian word there is: Night” (LS 298). This means, among other things, that to focus on the relation between music and the night, 29 “Music, Voice, and Language,” in The Responsibility of Forms, 284. 30 Marie-Louise Mallet, La musique en respect (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2002), 11. 31 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 143.

158 

 Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca

between music and death, between music and the somnambulism of dreams, is already to suggest something “untimely,” since this focus menaces the projects of philosophy, knowledge, and truth. Like the Barthes who claims that he can respond to photographs only by dismissing “all knowledge, all culture,” and by refusing “to inherit anything from another eye than [his] own” (CL 51/CC 82), the Barthes who loves Schumann does so “against the age,” which, as he suggests, is the only responsible way of loving. Love means: going against the age, since “it inevitably leads the subject who does so and says so to posit himself in his time according to the injunctions of his desire and not according to those of his sociality” (LS 298), and this is, he suggests, the only way to have even the slightest chance of addressing the beloved’s singularity, the beloved’s cherished body. What happens, however, when, as Barthes asks, our eyes meet what they cannot see, or when they encounter what cannot be encountered – whether it be music, love, death, photography, or even the beloved’s singularity? What might this experience of blindness and shadows have to do with what makes photography photography? In what way is sight essentially linked to an experience of mourning, an experience of mourning that mourns not only experience but sight itself? Why is it that only the most profound mourning can become music? Why is it that music is perhaps most expressive only in the silence of the night? As Barthes would have it: as soon as a technology of the image exists, sight has always and already been touched by the night. It is inscribed in a body whose secrets belong to the night. It radiates a light of the night. It tells us that the night falls on us. “But even if it were not to fall on us, we already are in the night,” as Derrida explains, as soon as we are captured by optical instruments that have no need for the light of day. We are already ghosts [. . .]. In the nocturnal space in which this image of us, this picture we are in the process of having “taken,” is described, it is already night. Moreover, because we know that, once taken, once captured, such an image can be reproduced in our absence, because we know this already, we already know that we are haunted by a future that bears our death. Our disappearance is already there.32

Camera Lucida begins in the shadowy night of this relation to death, in this rhythmic play between life and death, presence and absence, and light and darkness. As Barthes works to demonstrate – but in accordance with the madness of what he calls a “stupid” metaphysics (CL 85/CC 133) – the entire logic of our relation to the world can be read here, and it can be read as the logic of the photograph. Like the world, the photograph allows itself to be experienced only as a fragment, only 32 Jacques Derrida, Échographies de la television. Entretiens filmés (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1996), 131.

Dreaming of the Mother: Notes on Love and Photography 

 159

as a remnant, of what withdraws from experience. Its experience – and if it were different it would not be an experience at all – is an experience of the impossibility of experience. This is why, after the death of his mother, after the death of himself in relation to his mother (a death that, as he tells us, did not have to wait until his mother’s death, or even his), Barthes suggests that we remain entirely unprovided for in a world in which we must survive the impossibility of experience, in which the photograph – the photograph as we generally understand it, but also the photograph that we now can call “Barthes” – tells us, if it tells us anything at all, that it is with loss and death that we have to live, to love, and to experience what cannot be experienced – this music of love and death (and there can be no other), this music that we call, for lack of a better name, “photography,” this music that we might even call, at least within this context, the dream of the “Muttersprache,” the dream of the mother tongue.

Lutz Koepnick

Dreamtime: The Specter of Cinema 1 Haunted by excruciating nightmares and insomnia, Sydney lawyer David Burton, the protagonist of Peter Weir’s 1977 The Last Wave, at one point in the film proclaims: “We’ve lost our dreams. Then they come back and we don’t know what they mean.” Desperately, he turns to one of his clients, the Aborigine Chris Lee, in order to sort out his predicament, but Chris’s response only intensifies the lawyer’s existential crisis. “A dream,” Chris ponders while the camera first captures his inscrutable gaze and then closes in on his thumb as it pinches his arm, “like [. . .] seeing [. . .] hearing [. . .] talking. The way of knowing things [. . .] [I]f my family is in trouble, in dream, they send me a message. [. . .] And through my body. Part of my body will move [. . .] if my brother calls me [. . .]. Dream is a shadow of something real.” For Chris, dreams do not operate as Freudian mechanisms of displaced wish fulfillment, nor do they merely regurgitate daytime events or provide imaginary solutions to pressing problems. On the contrary, true to the beliefs of Australian Aborigines, Chris understands dreams as media of sensory experience and transport. They link dreaming subjects to the ancestral past, bond them to other clan members who are scattered across geographical divides, and offer premonitory signs. To dream, for Chris, is to expand the real, to perceive it as being structured by the long, slow-moving, and often secret duration of clan history and mythology. Dreams here work like magical and somatic switchboards. They connect the near and far, past and present. They mediate mythical laws through historical subjects and warn about possible transgressions of shared rules and legislations. As a shadow of something real, the dream gives contour to reality, renders it legible and hence meaningful. As important, it enlarges the individual’s perception and knowledge in bodily form. Far from merely offering a cerebral imaginary, dreams transport and imprint physical impulses across space and time. Their language is haptic and tactile, enabling the dreamer to receive signals directly with his senses and to open up his sensory organs to other times and places. Weir’s The Last Wave tells the story of a white taxation lawyer drawn into a puzzling case of tribal murder. Though Aborigine tribes are said to be no longer in existence in Sydney, David Burton (Richard Chamberlain) reveals the covert work of tribal justice behind the killing in an effort to protect the accused from the ordinary legal system. Contrary to the prosecution’s line of reasoning, Burton

162 

 Lutz Koepnick

insists that the victim’s death did not result from an act of intoxicated murder, but constituted a punishment for the violation of tribal law, namely the theft of a number of ritual objects from a sacred cave way below the city’s topography. More important than the film’s nod to the courtroom and thriller genre, however, is its exploration of Burton’s troubled self, his interaction with the clan members, and his fateful descent into a world in which dreams provide visions of a catastrophic future while stable lines between the oneiric and the real can no longer be drawn. The film starts out with images of a freak hailstorm in the outback and then moves on to show us Sydney being inundated by unusual rainfalls and massive floods. Though the narrative introduces Burton as a well-to-do head of an orderly middle-class family, the routines of his day life and the world of his dreams will soon to be affected by the violent frenzy of nature. The more water floods his suburban house, the more Burton feels estranged from his family and delves into the mysterious temporality of Aborigine thought such that at the end of the film we not only witness Burton entering the forbidden cave and murdering one of the clan’s spiritual elders but also foretelling the arrival of a giant wave that, in the film’s last images, seems to consume the entire city of Sydney. Already troubled by premonitory visions as a child, Burton’s principal dilemma is that he, like his Aborigine clients, comes to experience dreams as a shadow of the real, yet he lacks the cultural resources to make sense of what he sees, hears, and senses. Unable to heed what, for the Aborigine Chris, are clear signs of warning, Burton’s curiosity drives the lawyer to behold that which Aboriginal law defines as secret and off-limits; he desires to enter the fabric of Aborigine life without realizing that, in doing so, he cannot but violate the very system of meaning he tries to attain. Weir makes use of a number of aesthetic strategies in order to imprint Burton’s confusion onto the film’s viewer as well. Repeatedly, it is only in retrospect that we come to realize that certain scenes captured the interiority of dream visions rather than Burton’s everyday surroundings. Moments of terrified awakening puncture the flow of the narrative, as much as images that seem to duplicate what we have seen before. However, what is perhaps most striking about Weir’s cinematography and mise-en-scène in The Last Wave is the extent to which the film associates the world of Burton’s dreams with the help of numerous internal framing devices such as windowpanes and doorframes. Chris, for instance, appears to Burton for the first time in the form of a disturbing dream image, framed initially by the pane of his home’s window and then by the verticality of the doorposts of his study. A later daydream of Sydney street life as a creepy underwater scenario is introduced to the viewer through the windshield of Burton’s Volvo, its windshield wipers haplessly trying to hold the flood at bay. While in both scenes Weir’s cinematography situates Burton like a movie spectator in front of projected images, rumbling noises on the sound track

Dreamtime: The Specter of Cinema 

 163

mark these scenes as at once terrifying and uncanny. The act of dreaming here literally pushes against the frames of the real. It displaces or engulfs the everyday with an immersive and sensually effective, albeit highly disturbing, theater of the mind. It is tempting to read Weir’s framing strategies in The Last Wave as testimony to the much-theorized affinity of cinema and dreamwork, i.e., the role of narrative film as a seductive dream screen and imaginary.1 Whether one resorted to the terminology of Freudian dream interpretation, the vocabulary of 1970s apparatus theory, or the language of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Weir’s staging of the oneiric could be understood as a deliberate exposure of how cinema replays Oedipal or pre-Oedipal scenarios so as to entertain the viewer with regressive fantasies of wholeness: with the pleasure of returning to the warmth of the mother’s breast; the lure of recovering the self-enclosed protection of the womb; the desire to disavow the fractures of subjectivity in face of the plenitude presented on screen. It is the task of this essay, not to reject the possibility of such readings altogether, but to understand Weir’s The Last Wave as an open invitation to elaborate yet another account of the link between cinema and dream activity, one that steers clear of psychoanalytic or psychological terminology and instead explores the Aboriginal notion of dreamtime – its mysterious blending of the spiritual and the sensory, the supernatural and the material, of past, present, and future – as a valuable allegory for the work of cinema. Rather than merely to discuss how films such as The Last Wave screen the power of dreams, this essay follows Weir’s suggestion and explores certain affinities between the medium of film and the medial character of Aboriginal thought. Its focus is on how both consider dreams as mechanisms creating life and leaving traces; as recording technologies mixing the mortal and the immortal; as relay stations emplacing audiences in multiple temporalities and asking them to experience the phenomenal world as a secret text in which even seemingly trite objects may have alternate meanings, multiple existences, and extended durations. Dreamtime mythology, as I will argue in the pages to follow, simultaneously envisions and embodies cinema before film – a cinema of phenomenological attraction in which vision exceeds the optical and viewers are not subjected to the linear drive of narrative progress. What I will subsequently call Dreamtime cinema seeks to translate the cinematic elements of Aboriginal religion – Chris’s understanding of dreams as sensory relay stations – into viable aesthetic forms 1 For a comprehensive overview, see Robert T. Eberwein, Film and the Dream Screen: A Sleep and a Forgetting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). This essay is an earlier shorter version of the chapter “Dream|Time Cinema” published in Lutz Koepnick, On Slowness (New York: Columbia Press, 2014). The editors thank Columbia University Press for the copyright permission.

164 

 Lutz Koepnick

and strategies. Far from inundating the viewer with primitivist fantasy, this mode of filmmaking actualizes what is medial and mediated about dreamtime mythology itself. Dreamtime cinema is dedicated to expanding our perception, our corporeal knowing of things. It helps stretch bodies and minds across temporal and spatial divides and thus invites viewers to encounter their present, not as a rapid succession of highly fragmented images, but as a meeting ground for openended narratives and extended durations. Like slow motion photography, Dreamtime cinema resists linear stories and trajectories so as to depict the present as a simultaneity of different temporal and spatial vectors, of sensory connections and embodied meanings. While it recalibrates some of the oldest creation myths of humankind, what I call here Dreamtime cinema might be seen as one subcategory of what we commonly understand as avant-garde or experimental filmmaking. Similar to the avant-garde, dreamtime filmmakers such as Weir challenge dominant codes of narrative integration while exploring the very materiality of the medium, the time-based nature of cinematic recording, projection, and spectatorship.2 Unlike the Brechtian branch of the avant-garde, however, Dreamtime cinema does not necessarily seek to situate the viewer as self-critical, cerebral, active, and distantiated. What it does instead is first and foremost to rework our bodily relation to the cinematic image and its inherent temporality. Like dreamtime mythology itself, Dreamtime cinema explodes the conventional frame of cinematic representation in the hope of rerouting our phenomenological construction of the world. It slows down our perceptual processes in an effort to open our senses to experiences of flux, multiplicity, alterity, and indetermination.

2 The English term dreamtime, when used by Australian Aborigines, denotes an indefinitely remote past, which is being understood as the ground and source of all things. Many creation myths tell stories about past beings that during their sleep imagine and in so doing call forth plants, animals, landscapes, rivers, and human creatures. Yet while the use of the English word dreamtime is an attempt, through metaphor and analogy, to convey a sense for the mystical bonds between past and present, there is no real equivalent in the many Aboriginal languages that have survived to the day. According to W. E. H. Stanner a “brilliant economy of phrase,”3 the notion of the dreamtime offers an ingenious translation of what 2 A. L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video (London: BFI, 1999). 3 W. E. H. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1964), 26.

Dreamtime: The Specter of Cinema 

 165

different Aboriginal tribes and languages call “ngakumal,” “kadurer,” or “altjiranga ngambakla,” – terms which describe a sacred period of creation that reaches into the present of social and historical time with the help of an intricate array of totemistic objects and sites, a texture of material references that Aborigines call dreamings. The function of the concept of dreamtime is thus to describe the principal duality of reality, it being at once visible and invisible, tangible and metaphysical, social and religious. As important, it is to render transparent that – like the cosmos of our dreams – the extrahistorical period of creation isn’t understood as a former golden age, a time of unhampered plenitude, harmony, and authenticity. On the contrary, Aborigine legends often recall the heroic creators of life and landscape as highly ambivalent figures whose all-too-human errors and desires by no means provide splendid models of moral integrity. Within the thought systems of most Aboriginal tribes, the aim of interconnecting the principal duality of life through certain ritualistic practices, and in this way of accessing the timeless domain of the dreamtime, is neither utopian nor nostalgic or entelechial in nature. Whether it depicts certain animals, artifacts, or geographical features as interfaces to the sacred time of creation, Aborigine thought urges clan members to reconnect to their mythic past, not in order to flee their present altogether, but to ascertain a compass able to map their positions in historical time. The opening credit sequence of Weir’s The Last Wave starts with the image of a man sitting in a cavelike opening while painting enigmatic figures and ornaments  – a spiraling circle, a shape possibly representing an animal – on the surface of the rock above his head. In the film’s very first frame, the cave’s opening and our painter are shown in profile from a medium distance, the rock shrouding more than half the screen in darkness, the painter’s arm stretched out in such a way that his body connects the cave’s bottom and ceiling. In this first shot, body and rock, in fact, seem to exist in a symbiotic relationship, one extending the other, one needing the other in order to achieve compositional completion. No matter whether we consider the painter’s presence as a force at once humanizing and buttressing the architecture of rock or the rock’s daunting overhang as a power simultaneously petrifying and incorporating the human body: Weir’s first shot defines the living and the nonliving as elements of one and the same semiotic order, a structure in which different temporalities – the rock’s apparent timelessness, the painter’s deliberate movements, the lyricism of the dawning or setting sun in the background – coexist in dynamic interaction. Inanimate objects, covered with painted emblems and hence human marks, play an essential role in The Last Wave to communicate the tribe’s secret knowledge and propel the film hero’s increasing disorientation. We’d be mistaken, however, to consider these objects and their emblematic surfaces as part of a primitive aesthetic. Rather than capture realistic views of nature, painted objects

166 

 Lutz Koepnick

in The Last Wave – as much of Aboriginal art in general – instead provide enigmatic representations of former instances of dreaming. Their task is to offer conceptual maps of at once spiritual and material landscapes, of geographies that are experienced as maps – as sites of past inscription, marking, and signification – in the first place. However, what concerns us most about the opening shot of Weir’s film is not the painter’s act of cognitive mapping itself, but the way in which the contact between the corporeal and the inanimate here seems to form a second screen within the screen, a jagged window onto a distant landscape that defies the symmetry of the ordinary cinematic frame. The intricate composition of this first shot is as allegorical as the subject matter of most Aborigine art production itself. It defines dreamtime art and mythology as protocinematic so as to evoke the possibility of an alternate order of cinematic representation, framing the real, and understanding the screen as a map of our dreaming. Far from fueling Luddite fantasies, this first shot reveals the medial and technological character of dreamtime myth as much as it envisions forms of cinematic representation in which the perceptual structures of Aborigine dreamtime help counteract the dominant codes of narrative cinema and their manipulation of the viewer’s conscious and subconscious.

3 It is worthwhile to recall, at this point, that one of the most influential Western conceptions of perception, truth, and the duality of body and mind, namely Plato’s allegory of the cave, not only shares its location with the opening of The Last Wave, but has inspired generations of film theorists to conceptualize cinema as a powerful machine of fantasy production. For Plato, the world was separated into the realm of ephemeral appearances and sensual perceptions, on the one hand, and, on the other, the timeless sphere of abstract ideas, whereby the first merely provided an alluring, albeit quite inferior, representation – a flickering image, a feeble projection – of the second. Chained and immobilized, the inhabitants of Plato’s cave were constrained in their perception to the play of mere shadows cast on a wall in front of them. Privy to the power of illusion, they were unable to grasp the true nature of things and hence enter the realm of eternal forms and unchangeable ideas. In the work of apparatus theorists of the 1970s such as Jean-Louis Baudry, Plato’s cave foreshadowed the perceptual conditions of cinematic experience: the way in which both the womblike darkness of the auditorium and the work of cinematic projection immobilize spectators so as to entertain them with captivating illusion – the way in which the dream screen of filmic representation, rather than merely helping to disseminate

Dreamtime: The Specter of Cinema 

 167

certain ideological perspectives, is ideological in its very institutional nature as it simultaneously exploits and reinscribes the Western duality of mind and body, the phenomenal and the physical, the real and the imaginary. At first, traditional Aborigine mythology and religion might seem to echo some of the basic tenets of Platonic thought.4 Just as Plato’s cave serves the purpose of separating the realm of timeless forms from the transience of sensual perception, so does the concept of dreamtime distinguish between the spiritual and the material, the supernatural and the natural, the eternal and the historical. And yet, what makes the Aborigine concept of dreamtime so puzzling is the fact that its stress on topography and site specificity revokes the very dichotomy it seems to set up in the first place. Many Aboriginal myths tell tales of travel in which ancestors move across expansive territories to relive the founding dramas of their tribes. Ongoing physical mobility here provides the base for reconnecting with the past, for both revealing and actualizing the power of ancestral dreaming. In these stories the features of the physical world figure as something neither to be subjected to human activity nor to be denied and overcome by inert spirituality. Instead of offering frozen images of the past, the physical landscape describes a crossroads for overlapping narratives and ongoing existential trajectories. It offers “concentration points for intense religious, political, familial and personal emotions”5 and must be read with the body’s entire sensory system. Contrary to Platonic thought, then, traditional Aborigine myths do not consider the body of the perceiving subject as being chained, immobilized, and fooled by transient illusions. They instead press the subject to open its senses to the indexical, albeit riddle-like, inscriptions – the dreams – of the foundational past and thus to 4 Robert Craan has suggested a similar juxtaposition. Though inspired by his argument, I however do not follow the Jungian trajectory of his examination. See Robert Craan, Geheimnisvolle Kultur der Traumzeit: Die Welt der Aborigines (Munich: Knaur, 2004), 63–65. 5 Peter Sutton (ed.), Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia (New York: George Braziller, 1988), 17. This essay’s discussion of different Aboriginal notions of “space” and “time” is very much indebted to the groundbreaking work of cultural geographer Doreen Massey. In For Space (London: Sage, 2005), Massey argues for a reconceptualization of both the temporal and the spatial so as to overcome a dominant trend in recent thought to see both as more or less independent, as categorical opposites. Space, for Massey, is an event, something structured by multiplicity, simultaneity, heterogeneity, flux, and temporal openness; we cannot reduce it to a mere static slice through time. Time, on the other hand, is considered as something we encounter in various forms of spatialization, a trajectory that cannot do without spatial inscriptions and topographical crystallizations. Taking the cue from Massey’s inspiring discussion, this essay is part of a larger study of contemporary media cultures which defines slowness, not as a desire to halt time and privilege the spatial over the temporal, but as an intensification of our temporal and spatial experience, a special receptiveness to perceive our present as one structured by multiple durations, rhythms, and trajectories.

168 

 Lutz Koepnick

establish reciprocal relationships to the physical world. It is through one’s corporeal engagement with the materiality of certain topographical features alone that one can partake of the timeless forms and sacred meaning of the dreamtime. It is only by means of various strategies of mobility that one can literally get in touch with the unconscious other of historical time, the long duration of that which transcends one’s own horizon. Whoever wants to connect to the timeless and dreamlike must sharpen, not shut down, his eyes and sensory perception. Whoever wants to tap into the spiritual world of the dreamtime needs to step into, not outside of, time.

4 Which returns us to the opening shot of Weir’s The Last Wave. In depicting not only an Aboriginal artist whose hands simultaneously map and mark the physical landscape, but one whose body comes to embody the perimeter of an asymmetrical screen within the screen, Weir’s film urges us to rethink the much theorized role of film as a Platonic mechanism, as a technology of fantasy production immobilizing the spectator with mind-numbing daydreams. Alluding to the curious mingling of the real and the imaginary in the Aborigine conception of the dreamtime, Weir’s shot envisions forms of cinematic representation able to situate film and audience in reciprocal sensory relationships. The materiality of the cinematic image, according to this conception, has the power to absorb the viewer into the world it presents as much as the viewer is enabled to immerse the film into his own body and sensuality. The border between frame and image here is as permeable as the one between the act of viewing and the act of representation, of image production. One simultaneously needs and produces the other. One relies on the other’s very materiality and presence, not merely in order to engineer acts of psychic identification, but to establish stunningly physical and physiological bonds between screen and spectator. Weir’s first shot, by defining dreamtime mythology as cinema before film, envisions modes of viewership that define vision as eminently haptic and tactile. It invokes structures of viewing in which the cinematic image, instead of simply suturing the viewer’s mind and desire into seamless narrative constructs, operates as the viewer’s second skin, a prosthetic limb allowing us to expand our spatial and temporal reach and to touch upon landscapes, objects, and histories not of our own making. Weir’s cinema, as envisioned in this first shot, is a cinema of embodiment, a cinema offering sensory maps of the world, the concept of map here being understood, not as a static and self-contained slice through time, but a presentational dynamic able to depict the heterogeneous simultaneity of various

Dreamtime: The Specter of Cinema 

 169

open-ended stories, of loose ends and possible connections that still need to be made. To capture and behold an image, in this conception of the cinematic process, is to sharpen our attention for the multiplicities of temporal trajectories that cut through the space of our present. Like the perceptual system of Aborigine dreamtime, cinema is to intensify our temporal experience and spatial stretch, to connect our senses – mystically, as it were – to different times and places, to the unseen and unheard. Instead of lulling the viewer’s mind with self-contained narratives and imaginaries, the ambition of this first shot is to redefine cinema as a technology able to reveal what is dreamed and dream-like about reality itself: the way in which invisible stories and seemingly forgotten times secretly structure our present in each of its moments, begging to be seen and deciphered, yet at the same time defining the viewer’s perceptual position as one that does not and can never enjoy full sovereignty over the visible world. Images here aren’t just something putting a stable frame around our vision and thus converting the world into a surface of visibility. At once map and body, Weir’s dreamtime screen instead wants to serve as a concentration point of various intensities and temporalities, an enchanting interface fusing the visual and the haptic so as to resurrect our desire to be and become other and to literally touch upon and be transformed by a dramatically expanded reality. At once myth and media, Dreamtime cinema in Weir’s sense, then, thoroughly breaks with the dominant conventions of both rectangular enframing and narrative development. First, it situates the viewer’s body as something that creates the image within itself. Dreamtime cinema seeks to enable a return of conventional cinema’s repressed: a meeting of different rhythms and intensities in whose context psychic activity isn’t purchased through physical immobilization and sensory anesthetization, but goes hand in hand with forms of embodiment. In contrast to dominant forms of spectatorship, Weir’s dreamtime screen addresses the eye, not as a transparent window to the soul and the viewer’s desire, but as a physical organ, as part of a body for which experiences of touch and physical motion are integral to the efficacy of seeing. Images here aren’t external to the body; instead, the body itself functions as a screen absorbing the world into its sensory operations. Secondly, rather than to draw the viewer’s psychic systems into the streamlined, restless, and linear time of narrative progression, Weir’s screen wants to open our senses to the irresolvable overlay of different times and spaces that make up the present. Rather than shove the viewer forward along a narrative’s teleological chain of events, Dreamtime cinema functions as a bodily relay station shaping our awareness for the incommensurable and inexpressible, the unframed and open-ended, the multiple and uncontained, the slow and durational, the strange and other in ourselves as much as in the world around us.

170 

 Lutz Koepnick

5 In various scenes of The Last Wave Weir makes repeated use of one of his early signature techniques – the deliberate manipulation and alteration of filming speed – in order to capture a sense for this incorporation of the real and the dreamlike. As described in Weir’s own words: “[W]ithin a dialogue scene I would shoot the character talking in the normal 24 frames a second, then I would shoot the character listening in 48 frames, or 32 frames. I would ask the character listening not to blink or make any extreme movement so that you didn’t pick up the slow motion, then I’d intercut those reactions and you would get a stillness in the face of the listener. These things were not discernible to the eye, but you would get this feeling, as you sat in your theatre seat, that you were watching something very different.”6 Weir’s tinkering with film speed – the uncanny intermingling of acted slowness and actual slow motion photography – unlocks from within the timebased medium an unexpected sense of suspension, pause, and wonder powerful enough to supersede the rule of causal, goal-oriented, and problem-solving storytelling. By accelerating the frames’ speed during the recording process, Weir not simply projects images that encourage spectators to slow down their perceptual processes and narrative desires, but that suddenly displace them into a different order of time and a different regime of framing altogether. Dreamtime cinema, Weir style, allows the viewer to climb on the ladder of ordinary time beyond it; to discover the dreamlike, hallucinatory, and unaccountable, not on the night-side, but in the very heart of the real. Often considered the first theorist of the medium film, Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg compared the cinematic experience to the dream experience because both allow the subject to be, uncannily as it were, “at the same time in two or three places,”7 and because in both perceptions of depth and movement rest on certain mental mechanisms, on our mind’s ability to create illusions of space and continuity even if these aren’t in the images we see framed on screen themselves.8 Münsterberg’s comments are useful in order better to understand the specificity of what I call here Dreamtime cinema, but also why the protagonist of Weir’s The Last Wave cannot but fail in his effort to partake of Aborigine law and dreaming. Like film and dream in general, Dreamtime cinema too functions as a mechanism of transport, substitution, and dislocation, empowering the viewing 6 Sue Mathews, 35 mm Dreams: Conversations with Five Directors About the Australian Film Revival (Melbourne: Penguin, 1984), 95. 7 Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York: Routledge, 2002), 60. 8 Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 78.

Dreamtime: The Specter of Cinema 

 171

subject to traverse different times and be at various places at once; to watch a film here is – similar to Münsterberg’s act of dreaming – to enter an uncanny world of specters and ontological conundrums. But Dreamtime cinema, as suggested here, doesn’t simply describe a mechanism of mental transport and activity, nor can it evolve within the mode of classical framing and perspectival illusion. As a dynamic that lodges images as physical realities inside the body of the viewer and thus redefines vision as a medium for sensory connections, Dreamtime cinema in Weir’s sense explodes the very frame of classical filmmaking and for that matter transcends the operations of a willful, active, and synthetic mind. No matter how well-meaning his intentions, the protagonist of Weir’s The Last Wave fails in his quest because he gets stuck in between two different and ultimately incompatible notions of what to consider as image. Unlike traditional Aborigine art, which shuns the use of symmetrical pictorial frames and instead uses irregularly shaped materials such as bark and rock for the act of image production, Burton’s approach to Aborigine dreaming remains caught within the limits of a conventional aesthetic of pictorial framing and narrative containment. Weir’s repeated use of diegetic framing devices signifies the extent to which Burton’s desire to go native hangs on to some of the most cherished aspects of Western identity and spectatorship, namely their stress on individual agency, willfulness, control, distance, and sovereignty. Burton’s paradox is to intend the unintentional, to frame the unframed, to conceptualize the inexpressible, to merely imagine what it might mean to get in touch with different sensory realities. Though eager to reach out to Aborigine dreaming, Burton’s rationalism keeps him from relinquishing esteemed notions of the subject as being in full control over perceptual processes and the world around him. Dreamtime cinema, on the other hand, impresses on the viewer that we have no absolute authority over our own bodies, their senses, their temporal and spatial extensions, the images we receive and produce alike – nor that we can employ these bodies and their images to claim authority over the perceptual field, over inner and outer nature. The body of Dreamtime cinema is intractable. In contrast to Burton’s hope, this body is something we can never entirely master and dominate, something of which we will always remain mere custodians. Dreamtime cinema situates viewers as strangers to themselves; it encourages viewers to slow down their trajectory through time and learn how to live with our own non-being, with the fact that – in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s words – “I borrow myself from others.”9 9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 159; also quoted in Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 212, to whose critical phenomenology of death, failure, and non-being and critique of fundamentalist subjectivity I am greatly indebted here.

172 

 Lutz Koepnick

6 We may find ourselves kicking and screaming when waking up after a terrifying nightmare, but most of our nighttime dreams seem to evolve without any sounds whatsoever. Classical Hollywood cinema may have embraced diegetic dream sequences as opportunities to experiment with jarring melodic progressions and modernist dissonance – think of the musical soundtrack during famous dream sequences in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Vertigo (1958) – yet most of the critical and analytical writing on our dreaming rightly considers it as an exclusively visual event, a silent film of the mind. It is one of the remarkable features of dreamtime legends that acoustical experiences and expressions play a role of nearly equal importance to that of seeing and the visual. Sound, in fact, in many myths of the Australian Aborigines has agentive and creative powers. Rather than merely representing a by-product of the emergence of living things, it energizes their very coming into being, their quasi-mythical transformation from the inanimate to the animate. Consider the legend of the birth of the Green Frog, an animal destined to become a master showman during the earliest days of creation. The tale takes place in the western slopes of the Blue Mountain, near the source of what today is a tributary to the Murray River. One section of the stream is populated by water spirits who dwell in the form of tiny bubbles, cling together tightly, and make themselves known to the world beyond the stream through a gurgling and murmuring song. One day, one of these bubbles, after admiring the little fish and other creatures swimming in and skimming over the water, thinks how good it would be to gain some material form and shape itself and assume a useful function in the life of other creatures, i.e., to become embodied and establish sensory contacts to the environment. The spirit, we are told, Began to think how pleasant it would be to leap forth and feel refreshed by the coolness of the stream; to touch the tender leaves of the water-lily; or to ride upon the swaying stem of the reed as it was rocked by the gentle east wind or touched by the warm breath of the sun god; to become enthralled with the song of the little water-bird; and sit in wonderment at the merry laughter of the laughing jack, while the forms of these birds were reflected in the clear water as they sat upon the overhanging branch of a large gum-tree. Oh, what a wonderful transformation it would be to become part of the material world!10

Not before long, the bubble’s wish is granted and soon our bubble turns into a green frog, eager to explore the pleasures of embodiment, but even more so to 10 W. Ramsay Smith, Myths and Legends of the Australian Aborigines (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2003), 112.

Dreamtime: The Specter of Cinema 

 173

enchant other animals with his special gift, the power of song. The first thing, in fact, our frog tries to do once he achieves material form is to mimic the various sounds he had listened to when still residing in the land of spirits. He learns from the lyre-bird how to sing like a lyre-bird, so genuinely that his teacher himself mistakes the frog for one of his own species. Soon, many other animals – the swift and the falcon, the kangaroo and the snake – come to visit the frog so as to be entranced by how he can sing their song and mimic any gesture of their particular tribe. The frog’s moment of greatest fame, however, arrives when he manages to produce the sounds of roaring thunder, of hammering hail and rain, and of potent wind while his audience seeks to take shelter in fear of being inundated by the storm – an experience so wondrous that all the animals present will afterward speak for many days to each other about what “they had seen and heard.”11 In some versions of this tale, the Green Frog will then develop the ability to sense the coming of the rains and, whenever necessary, will leave his hibernation to sing rainfall in. Other versions of the tale simply end with the account of how the Green Frog, trying to impress his new wife and – yes – being driven by all too human impulses, sang with ever greater pride and force, eventually transcended his powers, strained his voice, and was henceforth solely able to produce a rather bland croak. Legends such as that of the Green Frog indicate the importance of the acoustical in dreamtime mythology as a medium calling the world into being. In many Aboriginal creation myths, we encounter various totemistic beings wandering over the surface of the earth and singing animals, plants, geographical features, rocks, and humans literally into existence. Similar to the tale of the Green Frog, sound here has the power to build a bridge from the spiritual to the material, the timeless and shapeless to the sensory. It creates temporal forms and bodies, brings to light and life what had been slumbering beneath the earth’s crust, and thus sets up topographies of meaning and human interaction. By singing the world into existence, as Bruce Chatwin has reminded us, ancestral beings assumed the role of poets in the original Greek sense of the word poiesis: they engaged in the business of creation.12 The country and all its various elements – animate and inanimate – did not exist before these dreamtime heroes began to sing it; sound and song ushered things from the unconscious, imperceptible, and dreamlike, to the surface of the real, the phenomenal, such that later generations could consider entire landscapes or small and seemingly unremarkable stretches thereof as musical footprints, as song turned into spatial form, as a dynamic embodiment of voice, melody, and rhythm. 11 Smith, Myth and Legends, 118. 12 Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (New York: Penguin, 1987), 14.

174 

 Lutz Koepnick

Yet sound and song, in dreamtime mythology, not only have the ability to call forth the living and perceptible, they also enable the individual to reconnect to his or her ancestral past and thus to touch upon the mythical period of the dreamtime. Known as the practice of walkabout (and most memorably screened in Nicolas Roeg’s eponymous film of 1971), tribal Aborigines up until today suddenly begin to wander across vast spatial expanses in an effort to map through song and movement the secret meaning – the dreaming, the sacred map – of their territories. What to the unknowing eye may appear like a chaotic zigzagging across hostile and often completely nondescript geographies, in actual fact turns out to be a very deliberate tracing of the so-called songlines and dreaming tracks: an attempt to immerse the body in an intricate system of paths that is made up of songs telling the creation of the land. Songlines can thread their way through various language barriers and territorial divides. To follow their tracks is not only to follow a trail of materialized music, a spatialization of a musical score. It is to tap through one’s own song, listening, and motion into a network of connections and interactions whose complexity is no less wondrous than the Byzantine structure of the World Wide Web. Like the myriad channels of today’s telecommunication, the pathways of the Aboriginal songlines too defy any attempt at comprehensive representation. Their grids can be understood as images that exist only in and through the movements of a perceiving body, but we cannot but fail to capture these grids with the help of an ordinary frame and pictorial surface, with two-dimensional maps displaying seemingly frozen slices through time. Music and matrix alike, the idea of the Aboriginal dreamtrack brings into play a tactile production of spatial and temporal relations through physical motion and mobilized perception. These paths cut across and interlink expanded physical landscapes; as importantly, they also cut through any linear, progressive, or teleological conception of time. Songlines incorporate present, past, and future in such a way that any screen of conventional time-based art appears ineffective to render visible their mystical complexity. And yet, in spite of all its supernatural overtones, the experience of space as envisioned by the Aboriginal notion of the dreamtrack is to be understood as embodied, grounded, and relational. Place and space, the concrete and the abstract, the territorial and the conceptual are interrelated here, one embedded within and energizing the other. To walk along the pathways of ancestral history is not only to honor the creative songs of the past, but through physical motion and sound practice to reactualize the past’s dreamings and thus produce present space as a network of multifarious territorial and temporal connections, of meaningful proximities and distances. In this sense, the Aboriginal notion of the songline suggests a concept of embodied and relational responsibility for the past that Australian legal and political thought, by considering Aboriginal territories

Dreamtime: The Specter of Cinema 

 175

as terra nullius prior to British colonization, sorely missed until the early 1990s. Up to the so-called Mabo case in 1992, Australian jurisdiction rested on the fiction of Australia as a blank slate because it considered the Aborigines’ refusal to cultivate the land as a sign of the fundamental absence of any social, moral, political, or legal fabric. As a result, the Australian legal system had no instrument at hand to account for what had been done to indigenous people and territories due to the influx of white settlers. The Aboriginal concept of the dreamtrack, in its curious emphasis on motion, song, and embodiment, on the other hand, seems to offer precisely such a tool. It advocates a politics of connectivity, a caring for the past, that is based on the understanding of space, not as a terra nullius, but as a sphere of multiplicity, as something in which the local isn’t understood as a site of bounded authenticity and land development, but as being constituted in relation to wider temporal axes and spatial obligations. To walk along a songline is to experience one’s present location in space and time like a musical note in a larger piece of music: we do hear it in the here and now, and yet its meaning and beauty is dependent on a matrix of previous (and future) sounds that will never form a coherent experiential totality for us. To follow the invisible lines of the dreamtracks is to become responsible for the past, not in order to halt historical time, but to experience the present as a crossroads of open-ended connections and stories. In Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd’s words, “In understanding how our past continues in our present we understand also the demands of responsibility for the past we carry with us, the past in which our identities are formed. We are responsible for the past not because of what we as individuals have done, but because of what we are.”13

7 It should come as no real surprise that most filmmakers have stayed away from picturing the metaphysical idea and ethics of the songlines and instead deliver images and tales of obstructed or misconceived Aboriginal dreaming, of blocked or unsettled connectivity. Consider Werner Herzog’s 1984 Where the Green Ants Dream, where white landowners and mining company officials, by turning a seemingly dreary countryside into a site of exploration and exploitation, end up blocking, destroying, and rendering silent existing Aborigine dreamtracks. In one of the film’s most stunning scenes, we witness a group of Aborigines protesting against this destruction of their territories. Energized by the sounds of a 13 Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 1999), 81.

176 

 Lutz Koepnick

didgeridoo player, they perform a ritual dance in front of a mighty bulldozer, not simply in order to halt the machine’s destructive path, but to embody relations to the land that are in stark contrast to the mining company’s instrumental reason. Consider Nick Parsons’s 1996 Dead Heart, in which we, among other things, meet the figure of a well-meaning anthropologist, Charlie (John Jarrat), trying to record Aboriginal music and map out their dreamtracks. After the death of one of the members of the local tribe, we see our anthropologist lying on the ground amidst the chanting mourners. Tape recorder in hand, he is clearly out of place here, marked as both a violent and ridiculous intruder whose work is driven by a hubristic desire to capture the un-representable. When the village’s relationships between white and black populations take a turn for the worse, Charlie will rip his map of Aboriginal songlines from the wall of his house, only to then allow it to be blown away by the wind into the desert – as if to acknowledge the inevitable failure of any effort to cast the metaphysics of Aboriginal dreamtracks into a stable, two-dimensional, abstract representation. Instead of simply picturing the destruction or conceited framing of Aboriginal dreamtracks through white Australia, Weir’s The Last Wave goes a long way to encode the frame-breaking power of dreamtime song within the frame of his film itself. Heir to the Green Frog and its sampling of different voices, sounds, and melodies, Weir’s sound track layers barely perceptible and at times even imperceptible acoustic elements on top of each other in an effort to mediate the acoustics of dreaming without inviting the viewer to primitivist identifications. Employed already in his breakthrough success Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), these acoustic strategies are described by Weir himself as follows: “With the soundtrack I used white noise, or sounds that were inaudible to the human ear, but were constantly there on the track. I’ve used earthquakes a lot, for example, slowed down or sometimes mixed with something else. I’ve had comments from people on both Picnic and Last Wave saying that these were odd moments during the film when they felt a strange disassociation from time and place. Those technical tricks contributed to that.”14 In mainstream cinema, slow motion photography mostly serves expressive purposes. Its point is to intensify our perception; to stress the extraordinary nature of certain actions and gestures; to denote the dreamlike character of particular events; and to isolate certain moments from the drive of narrative progression and – like the long take – capitalize on what Siegfried Kracauer would call cinema’s redemption of physical reality.15 Yet while the special effect of slow-motion 14 Mathews, 35 mm Dreams, 95. 15 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, with an introduction by Miriam Bratu Hansen (1960; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Dreamtime: The Specter of Cinema 

 177

photography has become a major staple of contemporary filmmaking, few filmmakers today really explore the potentialities of decelerated sound recording. We are perfectly used to seeing violent action on a screen shown in extreme slow motion while a film’s sound track inundates us at the same time with the fast and relentless beats of techno music.16 Weir’s use of white noise and slowed-down sound occupies this lacuna so as to unsettle our relation to what we see on screen. Rather than bond the viewer’s emotions to what is spectacular or redemptive about the cinematic image, the layering of decelerated sounds in Weir’s work produces strange experiences of dislocation. It yanks viewers out of their habitual viewing position, not simply because we can’t figure out what we are hearing, but because it redefines what sound and hearing might mean and do in the first place. By sampling, stretching, and superimposing different acoustic properties, Weir’s sound track has the ability to open up the cinematic frame and – due to the enigmas thus produced – lodge itself in the interiority of the viewer’s sensory perception. To listen, here, doesn’t simply mean to become enveloped by prepackaged sonic stimulation and thus be sutured into a film’s spatial and temporal order. It instead means to experience the corporeality of one’s own listening as an instrument of framing and reframing the physical world, of actively producing temporal and spatial relationships in the first place. Puzzled by Weir’s assemblage of different sounds, we cannot but question the integrity of the film’s frame of representation and consequently feel urged to rebuild the world – similar to the Green Frog, similar to the wanderer along the Aboriginal songlines – through and within our mimetic faculty. In Weir’s The Last Wave, slow sound serves the purpose, not of redeeming physical reality as a self-contained image, but of marking the extent to which we cannot think of this reality as being independent of our own acts of perception: the extent to which our sensory organs create the perceptual field as a field to begin with and hence the extent to which we – in Henri Bergson’s famous words – must consider our own bodies as one of the images in whose affective presences we find ourselves all the time.17 Cinema, then, actualizes the metaphysics of the songline, it becomes Dreamtime cinema in Weir’s sense, whenever it explores its means of visual and acoustical representations, not as technologies firmly framing the real and hence enabling sovereign perspectives on the world, but as something that resembles 16 For more on this, see Lutz Koepnick, “Tonspur und Gewalt: Zur Akustik des zeitgenössischen Actionkinos,” in Hörstürze: Akustik und Gewalt im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Nicola Gess, Florian Schreiner, and Manuela Schulz (Würzburg: Könighausen und Neumann, 2005), 131–146. 17 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 17.

178 

 Lutz Koepnick

the efforts of a ventriloquist. Similar to the Green Frog of the Aboriginal legend, Dreamtime cinema aims to situate the viewer’s body as a mechanism actively generating audiovisual experience within its own physiological and affective indeterminacy. It enables viewers to establish sensory connections to images and sounds whose origins lie less in the framed space of the screen than in the viewers’ bodily innervations, their ability to assimilate to, incorporate, build, and rebuild the world within one’s own senses, and to thus establish affective relationships to an expanded sense of reality. Neither sound nor image, in the mode I here call Dreamtime cinema, merely serves the purpose of representing the world, i.e., to contain it within the bounds of a reliable frame. On the contrary, Dreamtime cinema encourages reciprocal relationships between percept and perceiving body, a non-instrumental coexistence of non-identical particulars, a mimetic approach to the phenomenal world based, not on desires to control, contain, frame, and dominate, but on our yearning to learn how to listen and let go, to open ourselves up to what is contingent and beyond our control, to assimilate what is incommensurable and strange into our own perception without denying its otherness and unassimilability. Like the Green Frog whose greatest pleasure seemed to consist in embodying the voices of other birds and thus sing a new world into existence, Dreamtime cinema emancipates us from the teleological time and causal orders of conventional narrative cinema; it makes us care for the past’s place in a passing present and urges us to develop an ethics and politics of connectivity. Rather than rush viewers forward or make them cling to myths of the Golden Age, this cinema enables them to explore the untidy richness of temporal and spatial experience, the ongoing layering of different temporal and spatial realities in what we call the present. Instead of trying to force its relentless narrative and perceptual trajectories onto the viewer, Dreamtime cinema allows the viewer to let go and slow down, the art of slowness here being understood as our ability to find respite from linear temporal and spatial orders and – like a dreamer – experience the world of our perception as something beautifully ambivalent, enigmatic, in flux, unassimilable, and unpredictable.

8 There are certainly good reasons to assume that neither cinema in general, nor Weir’s particular strategies of de-framing and reembodying the filmic image, can ever entirely live up to what, in extrapolating the formal organization of Weir’s The Last Wave, I here call Dreamtime cinema. In his study New Philosophy for New Media, Mark Hansen provides compelling arguments that the advent of digital culture supplies technological setups far more superior to that of cinema

Dreamtime: The Specter of Cinema 

 179

in order to rearticulate dominant relationships between a user’s body and the image and hence to turn our dreaming into action.18 But even if filmmakers may never be able to consummate the idea of Dreamtime cinema in its entirety, it can serve as a critical backdrop to identify and challenge what is wanting about mainstream practices. Nowhere does this perhaps become clearer than in Peter Weir’s own work, once this advocate of the Australian New Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s moved his trade to Southern California. Weir’s most notable American feature, The Truman Show (1998), tells the story of a man unaware of the fact that his entire life and world have been set up for the sake of entertaining global television audiences with daily reality material. When Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), the film’s protagonist, finally starts to realize that he is being duped, he makes a desperate attempt to flee the gigantic stage he has called home throughout his entire existence. In the film’s final scene, Truman rides his sailboat through a violent storm called forth with all kinds of technological devices by the show’s god-like director, Christof (Ed Harris). Eventually, however, the boat bumps into the stage’s outer perimeter, a wall demarcating the limits of Christof’s control over nature as much as of a global audience’s perverse pleasure to consume other people’s lives. At once puzzled and relieved, Truman walks up a staircase mounted against the wall, opens a hidden door amid the painted horizon, and disappears through its frame into what we must assume to be a more authentic, a less engineered life. Truman’s vanishing not only marks the end of a show, it passes judgment on an entertainment industry so desperate to accommodate and capitalize on its viewers’ desires that it feels driven to remake the world from scratch. Truman’s departure is part of a quest for images that transcend the framing power of contemporary distraction factories, the instrumental reason and demiurgic excess of Christof and his likes. As he slips through the door frame, Truman forces his audience to recognize that it has nothing left to dream anymore; that mediated images have come to deplete their imagination to such an extent that they no longer experience their dreams and bodies as media of unhampered sensory connection, of slowness. The Truman Show’s stage is as far away as you can get from the cave shown at the beginning of The Last Wave. Truman’s exit is a powerful reminder that we cannot do without opening our senses to the incommensurable rhythms, uncontained stories, and multiple durations that structure our present in each and every of its moments.

18 Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

Contributors Therese Ahern Augst is Associate Professor of German Studies at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Her research has long been concerned with collaborations, intersections, and cross-fertilizations across both language and medium. She is the author of Tragic Effects: Ethics and Tragedy in the Age of Translation (Ohio State University Press, 2012), which examines the German fascination with Greek tragedy as it intersects with theoretical questions of translation and cultural transmission. Her most recent work is concerned with collaborations and conversations among artists and thinkers working across various media, including poetry, painting, photography, and craft. Theresia Birkenhauer taught theory and history of the theater at the Berlin University of the Arts and with a focus on theater in the German Department at University of Hamburg. She is the author of Schauplatz der Sprache – Das Theater als Ort der Literatur (2005), and Zeitlichkeiten – Zur Realität der Künste, ed. with Annette Storr (1998), and Legende und Dichtung: Der Tod des Philosophen und Hölderlins Empedokles (1996). Her essays were published in Theater: Theorie, ed. Barbara Hahn and Barbara Wahlster (2008). Eduardo Cadava is Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Emerson and the Climates of History, and, with Fazal Sheikh, of Fazal Sheikh: Portraits. He also has coedited Who Comes After the Subject? Cities Without Citizens, and The Itinerant Languages of Photography. His co-translation of Nadar’s memoirs, Quand j’étais photographe, appeared with MIT Press in 2015 and his book Paper Graveyards: Essays on Art and Photography is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Paola Cortés-Rocca is a cultural and visual critic. She has published essays on literature and photography, citizenship and monstrosity, ghosts and political imagination, zombies and racial conflicts. Her work appeared in academic journals (October, Mosaic, and Iberoamericana among others) as well as on electronic and mass media publications. She is the coauthor of a book on the visual and literary representation of Eva Perón titled Imágenes de vida, relatos de muerte and the coeditor of Políticas del sentimiento, a collection of essays on Personismo. She is also the author of El tiempo de la máquina. Retratos, paisajes y otras imágenes de la nación. She has taught at the University of Buenos Aires, University of Southern California, and San Francisco State University. She currently holds a research position at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Téncicas (CONICET) and teaches at NYU-Buenos Aires. Pascal Grosse teaches at Charité Medical School in Berlin, where he leads the Neurological Sleep Medicine group. A neurologist and historian, he previously taught at the University of Michigan in the Department of History as well as at the Free University and the Humboldt University in Berlin. He is the author of Kolonialismus, Eugenik und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland

182 

 Contributors

1850–1918 (2000) and many articles related to European and German colonialism as well as to the neurophysiology of sleep. Barbara Hahn is Distinguished Professor of German at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her interests focus on late eighteenth-century to early twenty-first-century German literature, culture, and philosophy. Her books include “Antworten Sie mir.” Rahel Levin Varnhagens Briefwechsel (1990); Unter falschem Namen. Von der schwierigen Autorschaft der Frauen (1991); Die Jüdin Pallas Athene. Auch eine Theorie der Moderne (2002; engl.: 2005); Hannah Arendt – Leidenschaften, Menschen und Bücher (2005). In 2011, she published Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde (6 vols.). With Ursula Isselstein she is publishing Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s letters and notebooks, and together with Ingeborg Nordmann and Thomas Wild she is the editor of a critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s works and papers. Gregg M. Horowitz is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. He writes on aesthetics and the philosophy of art, psychoanalysis, and political theory. His publications include the books Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford, 2001) and The Wake of Art: Philosophy, Criticism and the Ends of Taste (Routledge, 1998, with Arthur C. Danto and Tom Huhn) and articles on “Tradition” (Art Bulletin, 2013), “A Made-to-Order Witness: Women’s Knowledge in Vertigo” in Katalin Makkai (ed.), Vertigo: Philosophers on Film (Routledge, January 2013), “The Homeopathic Image, or, Trauma, Intimacy and Poetry,” (Critical Horizons, 2010), and “A Late Adventure of the Feelings: Loss, Trauma and the Limits of Psychoanalysis” (in The Trauma Controversy: Philosophical and Interdisciplinary Dialogues, SUNY Press, 2009). Lutz Koepnick is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of German, Cinema and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He has published widely on film, media theory, visual culture, new media aesthetic, and intellectual history from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. He is the author of On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (2014), Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture (2007), and The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood (2002). Coauthored books include volumes on sound in modern German culture and on the role of German aesthetic theories in an age of new media. Lucia Ruprecht is an affiliated Lecturer at the Department of German and Dutch at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. She is researching and teaching across literature, dance, and film studies. Her Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine (2006) was awarded the Special Citation of the de la Torre Bueno Prize; her most recent book is New German Dance Studies (edited together with Susan Manning, 2012). From 2013 to 2015, she was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Institute of Theater Studies at the Free University Berlin.

Contributors 

 183

Marianne Schuller is Professor emerita of German at the University of Hamburg. She lectured and taught at New York University, Yale, Vanderbilt University, Indiana State University, Bloomington and University of Virginia, Charlotteville. She worked as dramatic advisor at Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Theater Bremen, and Freie Volksbühne in Berlin. Her books include Moderne. Verluste. Literarischer Prozeß und Wissen (1997), Im Unterschied. Lesen. Korrespondieren. Adressieren (1990), Romanschlüsse in der Romantik. Zum frühromantischen Problem von Universalität und Fragment (1985), and is coauthor with Gunnar Schmidt of Mikrologien, Philosophische und literarische Figuren des Kleinen (2013). Davide Stimilli teaches German, comparative literature, and Jewish studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of The Face of Immortality: Physiognomy and Criticism (2005) and Fisionomia di Kafka (2001), the editor of Aby Warburg’s clinical history Die unendliche Heilung: Aby Warburgs Krankengeschichte (2007), and of a selection of Warburg’s unpublished writings: “Per Monstra ad Sphaeram”: Sternglaube und Bilddeutung. Vortrag in Gedenken an Franz Boll und andere Schriften 1923 bis 1925 (2008). Currently, he is completing a book on Franz Kafka and Orson Welles. Meike G. Werner is Chair of the Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German literature, culture and intellectual history. She is the author of Moderne in der Provinz. Kulturelle Experimente im Fin de Siècle Jena (2003), editor of Eduard Berend und Heinrich Meyer. Briefwechsel, 1938–1972 (2013), coeditor of German Literature, Jewish Critics: The Brandeis Symposium (2002), Karl Korsch, Briefe 1908–1939 (2001), and Romantik, Revolution & Reform. Der Eugen Diederichs Verlag im Epochenkontext 1900–1949 (1999).

Name index Adorno, Theodor W. 86, 151 Anderson, Jayne 114 Arendt, Hannah 92 Aristotle 105, 123 Artaud, Antonin 59

Derrida, Jacques 134, 137, 158 Descartes, René 30, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 42, 85 Diderot, Denis 30, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42 Downing, Eric 131 Duden, Anne 101

Bacon, Francis 106, 107, 108 Barthes, Roland 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159 Basso della Rovere, Girolamo 111 Baudry, Jean-Louis 166 Benjamin, Walter 65, 86, 94, 95, 124, 125, 128, 136, 151 Benveniste, Émile 154, 155 Beradt, Charlotte 90, 91, 92 Bergman, Ingmar 1, 59 Bergson, Henri 177 Binswanger, Ludwig 2 Bischoff, Dörte 77 Blake, William 104 Bober, Phyllis Pray 115 Boccaccio, Giovanni 114 Bordeu, Théophile de 39 Botticelli, Sandro 115 Boyle, Robert 105, 106, 107 Brecht, Bertolt 56 Breton, André 85, 121, 137

Emmanuel, Maurice 128

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro 45, 46, 56, 58 Cardano, Girolamo 107 Carpaccio, Vittore 98 Carrey, Jim 179 Chamberlain, Richard 161 Chatwin, Bruce 173 Cicero 105 Claus, Carlfriedrich 1 Cocteau, Jean 123 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 98, 104 Cornell, Joseph 1 Cranach the Elder, Lucas 113, 116, 119 D’Alembert Jean-Baptiste le Rond 38, 39 De Quincey, Thomas 104 Democritus 150

Fellini, Federico 1 Fliess, Wilhelm 14 Fokine, Michail 132, 135 Formey, Samuel 28, 43 Foucault, Michel 2, 3, 28 Freud, Sigmund 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 29, 33, 43, 48, 52, 59, 62, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 85, 91, 98, 103, 122, 123, 124, 126, 129, 131, 132, 134, 139, 148, 161, 163 Gamwell, Lynn 2 Garafola, Lynn 135 Gatens, Moira 175 Ginzburg, Carlo 114 Giorgione 102, 103, 108, 115 Goebbels, Joseph 91 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 62, 65 Grillparzer, Franz 55, 56, 58, 59 Grosz, George 87 Groth, Helen 4 Hahn, Barbara 73 Hansen, Mark 178 Harris, Ed 179 Herzfelde, Wieland 87, 89, 90, 93, 94 Herzog, Werner 175 Hitchcock, Alfred 1, 131, 172 Hitler, Adolf 90, 91 Hobbes, Thomas 30, 34, 36, 37, 40, 42, 43, 106, 107 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 47 Huxley, Aldous 33 Jarrat, John 176 Jensen, Wilhelm 124, 129, 131, 134, 136

186 

  Name index

Jezower, Ignaz 94 Jung, Carl Gustav 2, 86 Jünger, Ernst 89, 90, 94 Keats, John 117 Keller, Gottfried 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 69 King, Martin Luther 27 Kirstein, Lincoln 135 Klages, Ludwig 73, 78, 79, 80, 81 Kleist, Heinrich von 52, 54, 55, 58, 59, 68 Kofman, Sarah 131 Kracauer, Siegfried 176 Kraus, Karl 56 Kurosawa, Akira 1 Kurz, Isolde 87 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de 32, 33, 43 Lacan, Jacques 2, 16, 64, 69, 163 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 155 Lasker-Schüler, Else 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 84 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 39, 106, 107, 108 Lélut, Louis-Francisque 32 Lenk, Elisabeth 55 Lepage, Robert 59 Leroy, Maxime 85 Lespinasse, Jeanne Julie Éléonore de 39 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 108 Ley, Robert 91 Lippi, Filippino 100 Lloyd, Genevieve 175 Locke, John 30, 34, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 106 Ludwig, Paula 92, 93 Lusty, Natalya 4 Mallarmé, Stéphane 132, 134, 154 Mallet, Marie-Louis 157 Malraux, André 153 Mantegna, Andrea 109 Marder, Elissa 151 Marey, Étienne-Jules 128 Meiss, Millard 108, 111 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 171 Metz, Christian 121, 122 Michelangelo 117 Michelet, Jules 95 Milton, John 3

Moritz, Karl Philipp 50, 51, 52, 59 Münsterberg, Hugo 170, 171 Neimann, Kurt 75 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 91, 157 Nijinsky, Vaslav 124, 132, 134, 135 Pabst, Georg Wilhelm 1 Panofsky, Erwin 111 Parsons, Nick 176 Pascal, Blaise 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 42 Paul, Jean 55 Pick, Daniel 3 Plato 166, 167, 168 Proust, Marcel 104, 119, 143, 144 Raphael 98, 99, 100 Reinhardt, Max 47, 59 Reventlow, Franziska zu 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84 Rilke, Rainer Maria 124, 127, 128, 134, 136 Rivière, Jacques 129, 134 Roeg, Nicolas 174 Roper, Lyndal 3 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 30, 38, 39, 41, 42 Saxl, Fritz 115 Scaligero, Giulio Cesare 107 Scholem, Gershom 86 Schubert, Franz 152 Schumann, Robert 152, 153, 156, 157, 158 Séchan, Louis 128 Sforza, Ascanio 111 Shakespeare, William 46, 47, 49, 50, 59 Shulman, David 3 Skinner, Burrhus Frederic 17 Stanner, W. E. H. 164 Stein, Peter 55 Stevens, Wallace 97 Strachey, James 98 Strauss, Botho 55 Strindberg, August 56, 57, 58, 59 Stroumsa, Guy 3 Taylor, Frederick 125 Tebben, Karin 74 Toller, Ernst 56

Name index  Valéry, Paul 121, 122, 124, 126, 128, 136 Walden, Herwarth 75, 77, 82 Warburg, Aby 97

 187

Weir, Peter 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 176, 177, 178, 179 Wilson, Robert 59 Winnicott, Donald 146