The Other Night: Dreaming, Writing, and Restlessness in Twentieth-Century Literature (review)

Estragon:

I had a dream.

Vladimir:

Don't tell me!

Estragon:

I dreamt that—

Vladimir:

DON'T TELL ME!

Hershel Farbman, in his provocative discussion of dreaming (the "other night" of the title, as found in certain works of Freud, Blanchot, Beckett, and Joyce), never quotes this interchange from the early moments of Waiting for Godot.¹ But Farbman's readers may be reminded of it. (If he had quoted it, he might have thought he was defeating his purpose in writing. The fact is that his monograph may be considered a parallel commentary on the play.) He does set up an expectation in readers that they will confront something concrete, some kind of contextualization. After all, present-day readers bring to bear on the topic the real-life, common-sense objections of anesthesia, hypnosis, and, above all, sleep deprivation as torture, not to mention their own dream repertories. This selection of linked essays (118 pages of text) does not make that claim. It is modest, discussing sleep, dreaming, and insomnia in the formulations, sometimes distilled, sometimes repetitive, of high literature.

(Farbman's 221-item bibliography attests that this is a revisiting of figures important in the comparative literature pedagogical canon over the past quarter century. Only eight entries date from 2000 or later, and these include a new edition of Eliot's Middlemarch and a new translation of Blanchot's essay on Lautréamont and Sade. Although Farbman relies on translation, he shows that he has a sound knowledge of the language of the original source and notes whenever he must change the available translation to make his point. Thus, for example, when he later speaks of Blanchot's expérience of reading, we can be sure that Farbman knows expérience is also "experiment," although he does not call attention to this polysemy.)

Farbman, who has followed empirical sleep imaging just in case it might provide a key to the mystery of dreaming, states quite emphatically that everyone dreams, that dreams are reduced in the telling, and that third parties (like Freud and psychoanalysts) can interpret only what they are told. This interpreting assumes that the dreamers do not omit or forget what was most significant. Yet, as Farbman points out, the dreamer, paradoxical as it may sound, is hardly the subject in his or her dreaming but at best a spectator, when not an object. Farbman also insists that even though sleep can mimic death, death is not a life experience. (The person who dies cannot report on the experience. Farbman does not mention Poe's premature burial obsession.) The reader may infer that for Farbman dreaming as a Freudian pictoscript can become an accessible form of writing through the minds of poets like Blanchot, Beckett, and Joyce. In this way, the dream lives on as an opening in life, although that it is a more simplified way of putting what Farbman intimates (16).

He proceeds then to look for life signs in the dream life delineated by these authors. Fairly comprehensive in his reading of Freud and Blanchot, Farbman limits his reading of Beckett to the novel trilogy and of Joyce to Finnegans Wake. In the introduction there is a remarkable excursion into the Cave of Montesino in Don Quixote and a virtuoso transition with Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." Farbman shows throughout his comfortable relationship with classics in the Western tradition, starting with the Song of Songs. In his conclusion he presents a perceptive epilogue on the death of Socrates in Phaedo. Working with the "dreamwork" of dreaming, with dream telling, and dream interpreting in his authors, Farbman links their changing and subtle arguments, revealing continuity without, however, harmonizing them. He moves from Freud to Blanchot, then from Beckett to Joyce. The movement is presented as natural but not necessarily logical. He leaves his readers free to insert other examples (Why not Proust...