This text was part of an address delivered at the Creative Writing Program of the University of Philadelphia, September 2005.
Fiction and the Dream John Banville
A man wakes in the morning, feeling light-headed, even somewhat dazed. Standing in the curtained gloom in his pyjamas, blinking, he feels that somehow he is not his real, vital, fully conscious self. It is as if that other, alert version of him is still in bed, and that what has got up is a sort of shadow-self, tremulous, two-dimensional. What is the matter? Is he “coming down with something”? He does seem a little feverish. But no, he decides, what is afflicting him is no physical malady. There is, rather, something the matter with his mind. His brain feels heavy, and as if it were a size too large for his skull. Then, suddenly, in a rush, he remembers the dream.
It was one of those dreams that seem to take the entire night to be dreamt. All of him was involved in it, his unconscious, his subconscious, his memory, his imagination; even his physical self seemed thrown into the effort. The details of the dream flood back, uncanny, absurd, terrifying, and all freighted with a mysterious weight—such a weight, it seems, as is carried by only the most profound experiences of life, of waking life, that is. And indeed, all of his life, all of the essentials of his life, were somehow there, in the dream, folded tight, like the petals of a rosebud. Some great truth has been revealed to him, in a code he knows he will not be able to crack. But cracking the code is not important, is not necessary; in fact, as in a work of art, the code itself is the meaning.
He puts on his dressing gown and his slippers and goes downstairs. Everything around him looks strange. Has his wife’s eyes developed overnight that slight imbalance, the right one a fraction lower than the left, or is it something he has never noticed before? The cat in its corner watches him out of an eerie stillness. Sounds enter from the street, familiar and at the same time mysterious. The dream is infecting his waking world.
He begins to tell his wife about the dream, feeling a little bashful, for he knows how silly the dreamed events will sound. His wife listens, nodding distractedly. He tries to give his words something of the weight that there was in the dream. He is coming to the crux of the thing, the moment when his dreaming self woke in the midst of the dark wood, among the murmuring voices. Suddenly his wife opens her mouth wide—is she going to beg him to stop, is she going to cry out that she finds what he is telling her too terrifying?—is she going to scream? No: she yawns, mightily, with little inward gasps, the hinges of her jaws cracking, and finishes with a long, shivery sigh, and asks if he would like to finish what is left of the scrambled egg.
The dreamer droops, dejected. He has offered something precious and it has been spurned. How can she not feel the significance of the things he has been describing to her? How can she not see the bare trees and the darkened air, the memory of which is darkening the very air around them now—how can she not hear the murmurous voices, as he heard them? He trudges back upstairs to get himself ready for another, ordinary, day. The momentous revelations of the night begin to recede. It was just a dream, after all.
But what if, instead of accepting the simple fact that our most chaotic, our most exciting, our most significant dreams are nothing but boring to others, even our significant others—what if he said to his wife, All right, I’ll show you! I’ll sit down and write out the dream in such an intense and compelling formulation that when you read it you, too, will have the dream; you, too, will find yourself wandering in the wild wood at nightfall; you, too, will hear the dream voices telling you your own most secret secrets.
I can think of no better analogy than this for the process of writing a novel. The novelist’s aim is to make the reader have the dream—not just to read about it, but actually to experience it: to have the dream; to write the novel.
Now, these are dangerous assertions. In this post-religious age—and the fundamentalists, Christian, Muslim and other, only attest to the fact that ours is an age after religion—people are looking about in some desperation for a new priesthood. And there is something about the artist in general and the writer in particular which seems priest-like: the unceasing commitment to an etherial faith, the mixture of arrogance and humility, the daily devotions, the confessional readiness to attend the foibles and fears of the laity. The writer goes into a room, the inviolable domestic holy of holies—the study—and remains there alone for hour after hour in eerie silence. With what deities does he commune, in there, what rituals does he enact? Surely he knows something that others, the uninitiates, do not; surely he is privy to a wisdom far beyond theirs.
These are delusions, of course. The artist, the writer, knows no more about the great matters of life and the spirit than anyone else—indeed, he probably knows less. This is the paradox. As Henry James has it, we work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have, the rest is the madness of art. And Kafka, with a sad laugh, adds: The artist is the man who has nothing to say.
The writer is not a priest, not a shaman, not a holy dreamer. Yet his work is dragged up out of that darksome well where the essential self cowers, in fear of the light.
I have no grand psychological theory of creativity. I do not pretend to know how the mind, consciously or otherwise, processes the base metal of quotidian life into the gold of art. Even if I could find out, I would not want to. Certain things should not be investigated.
The dream world is a strange place. Everything there is at once real and unreal. The most trivial or ridiculous things can seem to carry a tremendous significance, a significance which—and here I agree with Freud—the waking mind would never dare to suggest or acknowledge. In dreams the mind speaks its truths through the medium of a fabulous nonsense. So, I think, does the novel.
The writing of fiction is far more than the telling of stories. It is an ancient, an elemental, urge which springs, like the dream, from a desperate imperative to encode and preserve things that are buried in us deep beyond words. This is its significance, its danger and its glory.
end
Ficţiunea şi visul
Când se trezeşte de dimineaţă omul îşi simte capul golit, e oarecum năucit. Stă în picioare în lumina mohorâtă din spatele draperiei şi clipeşte, simte cumva că nu e el însuşi, cel adevărat, plin de viaţă şi pe deplin conştient. E ca şi cum cealaltă variantă a lui, care e pe fază, ar fi încă în pat, şi de trezit s-a trezit doar umbra sinelui său, tremurător şi bidimensional. Ce s-a întâmplat? Îl „paşte ceva”? Chiar parcă are un pic de febră. Dar nu, hotărăşte, nu o boală trupească îl supără. Mai degrabă ceva nu e în regulă cu mintea lui. Îşi simte creierul greu, ca şi cum ar fi cu o mărime mai mare decât cutia craniană. Apoi, brusc, dintr-o dată, îşi aminteşte visul.
Era unul din visurile acelea care par să dureze toată noaptea. Era implicat total, inconştientul, subconştientul, memoria, imaginaţia; chiar şi sinele trupului părea că se străduie. Detaliile visului se revarsă înapoi, nefireşti, absurde, înfricoşătoare şi pătrunse toate de o povară misterioasă – o povară cum duc numai cele mai profunde experienţe de viaţă, şi anume cele de viaţă în stare de veghe. Şi într-adevăr, toată viaţa, toate părţile esenţiale ale vieţii, erau cumva acolo, în vis, înfăşurate strâns, ca petalele unui boboc de trandafir. I s-a dezvăluit un adevăr măreţ, într-un cod despre care ştie că nu îl va putea sparge. Dar nu spargerea codului contează, nici nu e nevoie de asta; de fapt, ca într-o operă de artă, codul este însuşi sensul.
Îşi ia halatul şi papucii şi coboară la parter. În jurul lui toate i se par ciudate. A apărut oare peste noapte acea uşoară asimetrie între ochii nevesti-sii, dreptul o fracţiune mai jos decât stângul, sau e vorba de ceva ce n-a mai observat până acum? Pisica a încremenit în colţul ei de unde îl urmăreşte ca o nălucă. Din stradă pătrund sunete familiare şi în acelaşi timp misterioase. Visul îi atacă lumea veghei.
Începe să îi povestească soţiei visul, cu o uşoară sfială, întrucât ştie cât de caraghios vor suna întâmplările visate. Soţia îl ascultă, dând absentă din cap. Încearcă să dea cuvintelor ceva din greutatea din vis. Ajunge la punctul crucial, momentul în care sinele visător s-a trezit în mijlocul pădurii întunecate, în murmurul vocilor. Dintr-o dată soţia deschide gura larg – vrea să îl roage să se oprească, vrea să strige că ce spune el i se pare prea înfricoşător? – vrea să ţipe? Nu: cască, cât poate, inspirând scurt şi repetat, încheieturile maxilarelor îi pocnesc, terminând cu un suspin lung ce o scutură, şi îl întreabă dacă doreşte să termine el restul de omletă.
Visătorul se dezumflă, e abătut. El a oferit ceva preţios, dar a fost primit cu nepăsare. Cum e posibil ca ea să nu simtă semnificaţia lucrurilor pe care i le-a descris? Cum e posibil ca ea să nu vadă copacii golaşi şi aerul întunecat, a cărui amintire întunecă până şi aerul din jurul lor în momentul acesta – cum e posibil ca ea să nu audă murmurul vocilor, aşa cum l-a auzit el? Îşi târşâie picioarele înapoi în sus, ca să se pregătească de încă o zi obişnuită. Dezvăluirile epocale din timpul nopţii încep să se retragă. La urma urmelor, nu a fost decât un vis.
Dar ce-ar fi dacă, în loc să accepte simplul fapt că visurile noastre cele mai haotice, mai agitate, mai semnificative nu sunt decât o plictiseală pentru alţii, chiar şi pentru cei mai apropiaţi nouă – ce-ar fi dacă i-ar spune soţiei, Stai să-ţi arăt! Am să mă aşez şi am să aştern visul într-o alcătuire atât de intensă şi de convingătoare, încât atunci când îl vei citi vei avea şi tu visul; te vei afla şi tu rătăcind prin pădurea sălbatică la căderea nopţii; vei auzi şi tu vocile din vis povestindu-ţi propriile tale secrete cele mai secrete.
Nu mă pot gândi la o analogie mai bună decât aceasta pentru procesul de scriere a unui roman. Scopul romancierului este să îl facă pe cititor să aibă visul. – nu doar să citească despre el, ci să îl trăiască: să aibă visul; să scrie romanul.
Ei, bine, acestea sunt afirmaţii periculoase. În această epocă post-religioasă – iar fundamentaliştii, creştini, musulmani sau altminteri, nu fac decât să confirme că epoca noastră vine după religie – oamenii caută în jurul lor cu disperare un nou sacerdoţiu. Iar artistul în general şi scriitorul în particular au ceva ce pare sacerdotal: angajarea neîntreruptă faţă de o credinţă eterică, amestecul de aroganţă şi smerenie, râvna religioasă de zi cu zi, dispoziţia de a-i spovedi pe laicii plini de slăbiciuni şi temeri. Scriitorul pătrunde într-o încăpere, sfânta-sfintelor, casnică şi de neprihănit – odaia de lucru – şi rămâne acolo singur ore întregi într-o tăcere de nălucă. Cu ce zeităţi intră în comuniune, ce ritualuri desfăşoară? Cu siguranţă ştie ceva ce alţii, cei neiniţiaţi, nu şiu; cu siguranţă are acces la o înţelepciune mult peste a lor.
Acestea sunt bine înţeles fantasme. Artistul, scriitorul, nu ştie mai mult despre marile probleme ale vieţii şi ale spiritului decât oricine altcineva – de fapt probabil că ştie mai puţin. Acesta este paradoxul. După cum se exprimă Henry James, lucrăm în întuneric, facem ce putem, dăm ce avem, restul e nebunia artei. Iar Kafka adaugă cu un râs trist: Artistul e omul care nu are nimic de spus.
Artistul nu e preot, nu e şaman, nu e un sfânt visător. Şi totuşi lucrarea sa e trasă la suprafaţă din puţul acela de întunecime în care stă pitit sinele esenţial, în teama sa de lumină.
Nu am o teorie psihologică măreaţă a creativităţii. Nu pretind să ştiu cum transformă mintea, conştient sau altminteri, metalul inferior al vieţii cotidiene în aurul artei. Chiar dacă aş putea, n-aş vrea să aflu. Anumite lucruri nu trebuie cercetate.
Lumea visului e un loc ciudat. Acolo totul este real şi în acelaşi timp ireal. Lucrurile cele mai triviale sau mai ridicole pot părea că poartă o semnificaţie colosală, o semnificaţie pe care – şi aici sunt de acord cu Freud – mintea trează nu ar îndrăzni niciodată să o sugereze sau să o recunoască. În visuri mintea îşi spune adevărurile prin mijlocirea unui nonsens fabulos. La fel, cred, face şi romanul.
A scrie ficţiune este mult mai mult decât a spune poveşti. Este un impuls elementar străvechi ce izvorăşte, precum visul, dintr-un imperativ disperat de a codifica şi de a păstra lucruri îngropate adânc în interiorul nostru, dincolo de cuvinte. Aceasta îi este semnificaţia, primejdia şi măreţia.
sfârşit
The Continuous Dream
Corin Braga
Certain dreams of my nights spread out a hypnotic glow. For a long time after I awaken they stay on my retina like a neon drawing in the dark. The more I focus on the bustle of silhouettes chasing one another behind my eyes, the livelier they become. The easiest means of keeping my dreams is to awaken suddenly in the morning and pin them down, in writing, one by one, like insects caught in amber. Sometimes I get to write them down almost with my eyes closed, letting my hand transcribe mechanically what my inward glance keeps watching rapturously on the still visible paths of sleep. The more I zero in on a scene that I want to describe in its finest details, the more the other scenes sink into an impenetrable haze. That is why, as soon as my head has surfaced from the liquid of the night, I ought to proceed to a short rehearsal of everything I have dreamed, that might imprint the crucial moments on the soft wax of memory. There are much more complicated oneiric practices - they do not belong to literature, but to mysticism. Such as, for instance, intending to see my hand in a dream. I have never succeeded in this shamanic exercise, I did not know how to remember in my sleep what I wanted to do, or I did not have enough power of concentration for the purpose.
Dreams are the everyday world seen inside out. Whenever my access to the inside of this texture was denied I felt threatened. The weight of my dream images reconstructs my feeling of internal fulness. They make me more fragile and at the same time stronger. When a dream weighs down on me, on such days I become vulnerable, because I miss that bladelike glitter of intelligence that allows me to surpass reality in its speed and master it. I set off on my way into the world carrying the bastard baby of the dream I do not want to lose, swaddled in my fear or guilt. In order to avoid this state of uncertainty and dissociation I tend to move to a different spiritual level. This is the level of reality. It’s also the level of the infernal race of time. The reason is that if I tear myself away from the vital shimmering of the nocturnal spring for a longer time, I can see the ever more staggering spinning of the days. I grow slippery and I have no more point of support to stop old age. As long as I was in contact with the realm of dreams I had no fear of death. Dreams have a vibration that keeps me in a continuous present; on the other hand I felt myself getting old whenever I let myself be drawn too much to the wakened life. Intellectual activity and the exploration of dreams are the head and tail of the same life, so that I get split up when I roam along just one of the two ways. Without my nocturnal half I would amputate my soul.
*
Schopenhauer compares the real world to a book whose pages one turns, one by one, from first to last, and the dream world to a book that you skip through. The feeling of reality is given by the continuity of the reading, while the hallucinating impression would be due to discontinuous reading. By adding up the sequence of the dream pages, one should come up with a hallucinating representation of the world, complementary to the diurnal perception. It is as if I put on the black lenses of delirium, that make silhouettes shapeless and unsettling, turn objects soft and elongated, and make outlines wobble. It would be the world seen in its negative, under the nightmarish light of a black underground sun. But also a fairy world, for having the warm, genuine vibration of the springs of one’s soul. The spyglass of the dream is an exploration instrument of everything that disappears in the light of day. Death, for instance.
My novels (Claustrophobus, Hydra, Louise Textoris, The Ventriloquist) are an attempt to link together the oneiric images that have haunted me, in order to make up a continuous moving picture. Down this thread one could walk down into the realm of the world beyond. My dream diaries (Oneiria, Acedia), on the other hand, leave the dream pages in the untidiness in which they appeared; it may be that isolated fulgurations also have the power to light up the depths. Is it possible for me to dream a continuous dream in which reality flows from nightmare into a fairy scene, and the other way round? A diary of dreams is a permanently renewed attempt to take off from the everyday world to the world beyond, that is why its pages are bathed either in the ashen light of the quotidian , or in the splendid colours of noctambulation.
Translated into English by Liliana Pop
John Banville