The
Unanswerable Question
Alberto
Manguel
Edward Gorey
Charitable Trust
One day in
1842, the thirty-eight-year old Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his
notebook: “To
write a dream, which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with
all its
inconsistency, its eccentricities and aimlessness—with nevertheless a
leading
idea running through the whole. Up to this old age of the world, no
such thing
has ever been written.” Indeed. From the first dream of Gilgamesh four
thousand
years ago on to our time, Hawthorne’s observation proves to be right.
Something
in the retelling of a dream, however haunting and however true, lacks
the
peculiar verisimilitude of dreams, their unique vocabulary and texture,
their
singular identity.
Alice, whose
experience of dreams is one of the deepest and most convincing in all
literature, is quite ready to admit that words cannot be used to name
the
endless plurality of the world. When Humpty Dumpty tells her that he
uses the
word “glory” to mean “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you,”
Alice
objects that “glory” does not mean “a nice knock-down argument.” “When
I use a
word,” says Humpty Dumpty in a rather scornful tone, “it means just
what I
choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” Alice
objects,
“whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The
question is,”
Humpty Dumpty answers, “which is to be master—that’s all!” No doubt,
the
writer’s task is to embrace Humpty Dumpty’s faith in the powers of
language,
and be the master, while at the same time convincing Alice that he
submits to
the rules of a shared understanding, rules over which the words
themselves hold
dominion. Of course, both Humpty Dumpty and Alice, both writer and
reader know,
more or less consciously, that this is just a pretense to which we must
resign
ourselves if literature is to exist at all.
Jorge Luis
Borges, the master dreamer, keenly analyzed this paradox in a short
text he
called “Dreamtigers.” After confessing to a passion for tigers, which
he has
loved since his childhood, he tells the reader that while he sleeps and
dreams,
he suddenly realizes that he is dreaming. “This is a dream,” he says to
himself, “a pure entertainment of my will, and, since here I have
unlimited
power, I will bring a tiger into being.” But Borges then concludes:
Oh, my
incompetence! My dreams never know how to give birth to the longed-for
beast.
The tiger appears, oh yes, but withered or feeble, or with impure
variations of
form, or of an inadmissible size, or all too fleeting, or looking more
like a
dog or a bird.
In the same
way that we cannot deliberately, faithfully construct a dream while
asleep,
awake we are unable to put into words the complexity of the universe.
To avoid
or bypass this incompetence, a literary dream, the story of a dream,
must be
organized differently, made to assume other objectives, appear less
keen in
reproducing a real dream than in fitting something called “a dream”
into the
logic and tone of the narrative. Perhaps the only success to which the
writer
can aspire in dream-telling is to make the reader believe that the
characters
themselves believe the dream to be a dream. It doesn’t matter if we as
readers
know (to use three Biblical examples) that the dreams that Joseph tells
his
brothers are prophetic, or that the dreams that Nebuchadnezzar tells
Daniel are
allegorical, or that Joseph’s dream about Mary’s pregnancy is
explanatory: each
of these discussions of dreams works within the narrative that contains
it, is
justified by it, and illuminates it.
Edward Gorey
Charitable Trust
Sometimes
the story only pretends to be a dream. We accept, but are not really
convinced,
that Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is the story of a dream, or that
Dorothy’s
adventures in Oz are a dream. This method of framing the narrative in a
dream
is a sort of excuse for the writer who can then argue that, since this
is a
dream, everything that takes place in it is possible. However, rather
than add
verisimilitude to the story, such devices make the reader conscious of
how
dreams must answer to strict laws of fictional logic. Things may happen
that in
a realistic story would perhaps be impossible, but even the impossible
must
follow rules of cause and consequence. After running away from home,
Pilgrim
can arrive in any country, and after being whisked away by the tornado,
Dorothy
can land anywhere in the world, but in both cases it must be somewhere,
and
that somewhere must be mapped for the reader’s guidance. The
surrealists, as we
know, attempted a few deliberately incoherent dream narratives, but we
read
them less as examples of real dreams than as displays of verbal
dexterity.
Sometimes
the story tells a dream only better to question the nature of what we
call
reality, as in the famous case of Chuang Tzu and the butterfly: “Chuang
Tzu
dreamed that he was a butterfly and when he woke he didn’t know if he
was a man
who dreamed he was a butterfly or was a butterfly now dreaming it was a
man.”
Earlier, Socrates had asked the same question to one of his bewildered
disciples: “How can you determine whether at this moment we are
sleeping, and
all our thoughts are a dream, or whether we are awake, and talking to
one
another?” Alice faces an even more terrifying conundrum in Tweedledee
and
Tweedledum’s wood, where the Red King is lying asleep at the foot of a
tree and
(according to Tweedledee) dreaming of her. “If that there King” says
Tweedledum, “was to wake, you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”
Borges, in a
story called “The Circular Ruins,” and Giovanni Papini, in “The Sick
Gentleman’s Last Visit,” borrow and explore the same conceit.
Segismundo, in
Calderón’s Life Is a Dream, does not know how to distinguish between
waking
life and dream life, though his audience does, and Segismundo must wait
for
hard reality to teach him the difference. Hamlet’s doubts are the same
as
Segismundo’s, but expressed in reverse: it is bad dreams that let
Hamlet know
that he is not bounded in a nut shell, counting himself a king of
infinite
space.
The apparent
confusion between the reality of dreams and the reality of waking life
(like
the confusion between madness and dreams which Socrates noted in the
same
dialogue) allows writers to use dreams to question reality without
having to
attempt an impossible imitation of a dreamlike state. In one of his
unpublished
notebooks, Coleridge famously wrote:
If a man
could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to
him as a
pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower
in his
hand when he awake—Aye! and what then?
So
unanswerable is the question, so neatly does it blend the reality of
dreams and
the reality of waking life, that H. G. Wells, in order to lend
verisimilitude
to the nightmarish fantasy of The Time Machine, borrowed Coleridge’s
unsettling
supposition and concluded his story with just such a flower.
Edward Gorey
Charitable Trust
In
literature, dreams often serve to bring the impossible into the fabric
of
everyday life, like mist through a crack in the wall. Unfortunately, it
often
happens that dreams are brought in as an alibi for the unbelievable
plot, and
the device fails through the writer’s ineptitude. A number of
supernatural
stories conclude with this cop-out: “It was all a dream!” In the best
cases,
the reader is simply not convinced; in the worst, the conclusion
dilutes
whatever power the story might have held in its own right. Robert Louis
Stevenson, whose Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde began in a real nightmare (he
confessed
that he had dreamed of a horrible shade of brown), fortunately did not
end his
story by having his tortured hero wake up and deny that anything
atrocious had
really happened. Kafka reversed the procedure to great effect: it is
not a
dream but real life that proves to be Gregor’s nightmare, when he wakes
up one
morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. Dostoevsky
used a
different method: to lend his story a feeling of anguish and unease, he
had one
of the characters in The Possessed tell his beloved: “Last night I
dreamed that
you led me into a place inhabited by a spider the size of a man, and
that we
spent the rest of our lives watching it in terror.”
A few days
after having written in his notebook about the impossibility of
narrating
dreams, Hawthorne made another entry: “A dream, the other night, that
the world
had become dissatisfied with the inaccurate manner in which facts are
reported,
and had employed me, with a salary of a thousand dollars, to relate
things of
public importance exactly as they happen.” Surely Hawthorne was aware
of the
wonderful paradox of having a dream, a state which he earlier described
as
impossible to relate precisely, engaging him to report events “exactly
as they
happen”—and at a salary of a thousand dollars too, a vast sum in the
mid-nineteenth century. Perhaps this was Hawthorne’s way (or the way of
Hawthorne’s dreams) of admitting the truth about the writer’s so-called
craft:
that it consists of a morbid compulsion to make up stories in order to
acknowledge our human condition, in spite of knowing that his
instrument is
unreliable, his perception of things blurred, his understanding of the
world
muddled, and his reliance on the reader’s good will often unjustified.
In the
nineteenth book of the Odyssey, which Virgil of course knew well,
Penelope
speaks of dreams and says that they come forth through two gates: one
made of
burnished ivory, for the dreams that deceive us, and one of glistening
horn,
for the dreams that tell us the truth. Perhaps writers must content
themselves
with using only the ivory gate for their dreams, knowing that their
craft
consists in telling lies. Except that the lies told by writers are not
untruths; they are merely unreal. Errori non falsi, Dante, who knew
what he was
doing, called them, “Lies that are not false.” The distinction is
important.
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Part of a
continuing NYRblog series about dreams. Images from Edward Gorey’s “The
Prune
People,” collected in Amphigorey Also, are used by arrangement with the
Edward
Gorey Charitable Trust. Further information can be found at
edwardgoreyhouse.org
and goreystore.com.
May 23,
2013, 1:03 p.m.