At the Borders of Sleep: On Liminal Literature

Notes

145 notes preface 1. “Identity and Trembling,” 13; and again in The Fall of Sleep, 13: “There is no phenomenology of sleep.” But for one piece of a possible phenomenology, see Jan Linschoten, “On Falling Asleep.” And see the fine paper, as yet unpublished, by Robert Switzer (switzer@aucegypt.edu): “The Sleep of Reason: Phenomenology and Its Shadow.” 2. “How often has it happened to me that in the night I dreamt that I found myself in this particular place, that I was dressed and seated near the fire, whilst in reality I was lying undressed in bed! At this moment it does indeed seem to me that it is with eyes awake that I am looking at this paper; that this head which I move is not asleep, that it is deliberately and of set purpose that I extend my hand and perceive it; what happens in sleep does not appear so clear nor so distinct as does all this. But in thinking over this I remind myself that on many occasions I have in sleep been deceived by similar illusions, and in dwelling carefully on this reflection I see so manifestly that there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep that I am lost in astonishment. And my astonishment is such that it is almost capable of persuading me that I now dream” (13). Another version of the conundrum will be picked up in the last section of this book. 3. I have used Richard Sieburth’s translation of the preface to Michel Leiris’s Nights as Day, Days as Night. The essay is more readily available in Blanchot’s Friendship, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, but I have found that Sieburth’s translation brings out my point better. 1. toward sleep 1. I owe this reference as well as the opening quotation from MerleauPonty to Kevin Davis’s “Hypnogony.” 2. Reports from informants in Mavromatis’s Hypnagogia have provided the elements of this description. It can only be “fairly” representative because there are less common versions of hypnagogia that are verbal rather than imagistic (as reported by André Breton in the quotation given in note 4), or even olfactory and tactile. There is also the related phenomenon of hypnopompic imagery, which takes place at the other end of sleep: upon waking one continues to see, distinctly, images from a preceding dream. 3. On Hawthorne, see Susan Katherine Hopkins Kurijaka’s 1992 dissertation “‘Waking Dream’: Hawthorne’s Hypnagogic Image of the Imagination.” On Wolf, see Andrew Winnard, “‘These Drowsy Approaches of Sleep’: Christa Wolf and the Hypnagogic Dream.” See also my own study of Christa Wolf and hypnagogia in Fantasm and Fiction, 37–46. 4. “It was in 1919, in complete solitude and at the approach of sleep, that my attention was arrested by sentences, more or less complete, which became perceptible to my mind without my being able to discover (even by meticulous analysis) any possible previous volitional effort. One evening in particular, as I was about to fall asleep, I became aware of a sentence articulated clearly to a point excluding all possibility of alteration and stripped of all quality of vocal sound. . . . I am unable at this distance to remember the exact sentence, but it ran something like this: ‘A man is cut in half by the window.’ What made it clearer was the fact that it was accompanied by a feeble visual representation of a man in the process of walking, but cloven, at half his height, by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body. Definitely, there was the form, re-erected against space, of a man leaning out of a window. But, with the window following the man’s locomotion, I understood that I was dealing with an image of great rarity. Instantly the idea came to me to use it as material for poetic construction” (What Is Surrealism? 120). This account follows the general pattern of hypnagogic experiences, but it differs in that the visual representation is “feeble” in contrast to the focused and articulated nature of most hypnagogic imagery. The auditory component that begins the experience, too, is “stripped of all quality of vocal sound”—a phenomenon more characteristic of dream communications than of hypnagogic ones. 5. An exception is Christopher Baker, “Frost’s ‘After Apple-Picking’ as Hypnagogic Vision.” 146 . . . Notes to Chapter 1 6. In the original: “Dans le champ...