TWO LITERARY DREAMS:
Some reflections on pre- and post-Freudian literature
The Freudian theory, and particularly Freud’s conception of dreams and
their function, has affected (not to say infected) practically every aspect of our
society, and literature is no exception.
Indeed, dreams and their possible
meaning(s) have fascinated humanity since ancient times, each era or
civilization elaborating in turn its own system of interpretations: messages from
the gods or from the dead, warnings about the future and premonitions were
among the main beliefs concerning dreams in pagan times, which were then
replaced with messages from God or (more frequently) temptations by the Devil
or evil spirits when Christianity took over. Few were the sceptics like Luther,
who once bluntly said that dreams meant nothing: sh – ing (sic) in one’s bed,
that was reality. So that the Freudian “revolution” was but just another attempt
at tackling those nightly manifestations of the mind, albeit one allegedly
“scientific”: according to Freud, as is well known, dreams exclusively relate to
the subject’s own history, particularly infancy and childhood, and mainly
express either repressed traumas or desires and frustrations (of a sexual nature
mostly) under a symbolic form that has to be interpreted (or deciphered) by the
analyst (let us forget about Lacan’s delirious elucubrations – one quack is quite
enough). Such a theory could not but slip into literature as another “tool” or
device for the writer devoted to track down every facet of human nature, so that
it may be said that there exists nowadays, up to a certain point, a boundary
between pre- and post-Freudian literature.
Certainly there are elements of the Freudian theory to be found in preFreudian works – and indeed Freud himself acknowledged his debt to literature
in establishing or confirming his theory. But with a difference: pre-Freudian
writers did not deliberately resort to such a system (since it did not yet exist as
such), whereas practically no post-Freudian author can claim to do so otherwise
than deliberately. I have chosen to illustrate this point with two literary dreams,
from two well-known works, respectively pre- and post-Freudian: the first is
Calphurnia’s dream in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599), the other Jocelin’s
dream in William Golding’s The Spire (1964).
Judging from the treatment of Calphurnia’s dream, it might be suggested
that it was not Freud, but Shakespeare who discovered (or invented)
psychoanalysis. This is hardly an exaggeration: indeed Freud himself, in a rare
fit of modesty, admitted that he had merely theorized pre-existing notions
(actually, he did not even coin the term “the unconscious”, which had already
been used for some time by another psychologist). For in the play we have two
successive (and apparently drastically opposed) interpretations of the dream: the
first, literal, by Calphurnia herself, the second, symbolic, by sly Decius (one of
the conspirators) – who will convince Caesar through his flattering reinterpretation to discard Calphurnia’s (very legitimate) fears about his life. For
the dream is about Ceasar’s death, as recounted by himself:
She dreamt tonight she saw my statue,
Which, like a fountain with a hundred spouts,
Did run pure blood; and many lusty Romans
Came smiling, and did bathe their hands in it. (II.2.76-79)1
This is a literary dream, and doubly so. First, Shakespeare did not make it
up: he found it in Plutarch, his main source for Julius Caesar. But, on the other
hand, he rewrote it very carefully, and specifically according to the general
thematic economy of his play: Plutarch very briefly reports of Calphurnia that
“she dreamed that Caesar was slain, and that she had him in her arms.” 2 – and he
immediately adds that others, Titus Livius among them, gainsaid this anecdote
as mere legend invented after the facts. It could be said too that Shakespeare
1
SHAKESPEARE, William, Julius Caesar, ARDEN, Routledge, London and New York,
1965, p 55.
2
Ibid., p142.
himself practically “re-invented” the dream, what with all the details he added to
a very curt report. All these details are, of course, highly significant.
First, this bloody dream is not about Caesar himself, but his statue:
indeed, it could be said that Shakespeare’s Caesar spends his time trying to turn
himself into his own icon, his own glorious and godly statue proudly erected in
the face of posterity. Moreover, there is later the allusion, made by Antony to
the mob, that during the murder the statue of Pompey (Caesar’s rival, then
enemy and victim) bled profusely in the presence of such a foul crime. Then the
statue becomes a fountain, which strongly connotes a source of life, of
prosperity, of wealth (anyway, usually something highly positive), spouting not
just blood, but pure blood – why such a precision, if not to suggest Caesar’s
superior status and even essence?
At this point, it may be noted that
Shakespeare already introduces a symbolic dimension totally lacking in
Plutarch.
The rest of the dream is more ambiguous: lusty and smiling Romans bathe
their hands in the satue’s pure blood. Of course this already announces Brutus’s
sudden decision, right after the assassination, that the murderers should bathe
their arms (and not just their hands) in dead Caesar’s blood – thus brutally
turning the whole thing into revolting butchery. Also, that the killers are “lusty”
is an understatement to say the least – but the term itself is carefully chosen for
its very ambiguity. The same remark can be made about “smiling”: it is exactly
the same ambiguous understatement concerning the murderers.
The Shakespearian treatment of Calphurnia’s dream is instructive in
several ways. First and foremost, it is (as in Plutarch) of the premonitory kind –
which means, resolutely pre-Freudian. But Shakespeare drastically alters the
perspective: while in Plutarch the dream was about the husband, i.e. the private
man, with Shakespeare it concerns the public man, the historical figure. Also,
the calculated ambiguity of the second part of the dream has a double function.
In the short term, as it were, it is meant to anticipate Decius’s own flattering
interpretation, which will radically turn the tables (from negative to positive,
evacuating the assassination threat in the process). In a wider perspective, it
points to the many ironies in the play as a whole, which shall soon be discussed
in more detail.
But, most important of all, it contains a lesson that the Freudian theory
very carefully and conveniently did occult right from the start: namely, that
there is no analysis of dreams as such – but the interpretation of dreams
recounted. Which is quite different, for the medium of language (not to mention
the vagaries of memory) may well influence the content of the pristine “object”
in question. Asked about the relevance of the nouvelle critique during a filmed
interview, Roland Barthes thoughtfully replied that it had crucially established
(actually re-established, for the Renaissance had been there before) that
language does exist in its own right, or dimension: meaning that it is neither
transparent nor innocent – the which was soon after to be vindicated by Jacques
Derrida’s déconstructionnisme. In this respect, it may well be that the only
dreams really interpreted in the whole history of psychoanalysis were Freud’s
own (indeed he tested his theory on himself, fastidiously consigning his dreams
to paper at night and subsequently analysing them over a long period): but,
typically, he kept the whole undertaking and its results to himself. After all, you
don’t psychoanalyse God: He may choose to do so, but mere mortals have no
right to any insight of His very secret and divine psyche – otherwise He would
at once cease to be God. In such matters, mystery and mum are the words.
But, as has been said, Shakespeare in his play goes further: not only does
he provide the dream, but its symbolic interpretation as well (and this is, as
noted earlier, entirely his own creation, being absent from Plutarch) through
Decius. The latter at once sets out to dispel the “warnings and portents / And
evils imminent” (II.2.80-81) inferred by Calphurnia:
It was a vision fair and fortunate:
Your statue spouting blood in many pipes,
In which so many Romans bathed
Signifies that from you great Rome shall suck
Reviving blood, and that great men shall press
For tinctures, stains, relics, and cognizance. (II.2.84-89)3
This again calls for a few remarks. First, Decius slightly alters the original
report: the Romans no longer smile, but bathe whole (instead of just their hands)
in Caesar’s blood, thus suggesting no longer a fountain, but a stream. Also,
Caesar’s “pure blood” becomes “reviving blood” which “great Rome shall
suck”. Finally, he introduces “great men”, and from “tinctures, stains” (indeed
pertaining to blood) switches to “relics, and cognizance”.
In other words, Decius very cunningly plays on Caesar’s megalomania
and obsession with immortality: he implicitly compares him first with the
Roman she-wolf which suckled Romulus (founder of Rome) and his brother
Remus, then with a stream of life, and finally with a saint / prince (Christian
perspective) or even a god (pagan perspective). What Decius simply suggests is
that mighty Caesar, in his lifetime, shall be a second founder of great Rome, and
after his death be turned into a saint / god by the latter – an interpretation which
Caesar, naturally, is only too eager to seize upon in order to reassert his own
aloofness and will (which may just be wilfulness, if not obduracy and blindness,
all for the sake of his self-image, meaning: his absurd, pathetic egotism and
vanity). Yet there is a grim irony, first in the she-wolf comparison (for Romulus
murdered Remus – an allusion to the civil strife that will shake Rome after
Caesar’s death?), then in the last line (a saint may also, very often, be a martyr –
as Samuel Johnson had already noted about this passage).
However, the greatest irony of all, carefully worked out by Shakespeare of
course, is that both interpretations, literal and symbolic, will prove true: Caesar
will be assassinated and his jubilating murderers will bathe their hands (and
arms to boot) in his blood, but he will also, having first been a martyr, be turned
3
Ibid, p 55.
into the god of a new religion (Caesarism, as it were), and indeed “revive” great
Rome, since he will become the founder and tutelar divinity of the Roman
Empire, even giving his emblematic name to all future emperors. So that, far
from being opposed, the two interpretations are in fact complementary. But, at
this juncture, Calphurnia’s dream has come a long way off from Plutarch indeed.
Jocelin’s dream in The Spire occurs at the very end of chapter 3, that is,
relatively early in the novel, as well as in that nightmarish odyssey represented
by the erection of the eponymous spire. This being the Middle Ages, the
perspective is now Christian: the dream is seen by Jocelin as torment inflicted
on him by Satan. The dream, though considered “meaningless” by him, is quite
explicit to the modern reader:
It seemed to Jocelin that he lay on his back in his bed; and then he was
lying on his back in the marshes, crucified, and his arms were the
transepts (...). People came to jeer and torment him (...), and they knew
the church had no spire nor could have any. Only Satan himself, rising
out of the west, clad in nothing but blazing hair stood over his nave and
worked at the building, tormenting him so that he writhed on the marsh in
the warm water, and cried out aloud.4
This is very clearly what today would be called an erotic, or more vulgarly
a“wet” dream. The whole Freudian arsenal is there, making the interpretation
quite easy, if not obvious, to the reader: Jocelin becomes the cathedral, or even a
Christic, martyred figure (spiritual dimension at first), and the missing spire
symbolizes his erected penis, which Satan (wearing Goody Pangall’s red hair)
“works at”, that is, masturbates – no need to insist on the nature of the “warm
water”. The spiritual has swiftly given way to the sexual, that is, the base and
sinful in Jocelin’s maedieval view (he is a priest, moreover obsessed with God
and purity, not to say sainthood). In other (Freudian) terms, here are the themes
4
GOLDING, William, The Spire, Faber, London, 1972, pp 64-65.
of libido, repressed desire (for Goody Pangall), castration (the spireless church):
a perfect example of post-Freudian writing.
Incidentally, after the tremendous success of his first novel, Lord of the
Flies, which is fraught with Freudian overtones, Golding insisted that he knew
nothing about Freud’s theory when he wrote the book.
This was a bit
disingenuous, to say the least: how could an educated person, a literature teacher
moreover, living in England in the second part of the twentieth century, be
utterly ignorant of Freud’s works?
All the same: obviously the author
subsequently decided to remedy this astonishing lack of general knowledge.
However, there is still more to Jocelin’s dream. For Golding proceeds in
a way opposite to that of Shakespeare: Calphurnia’s dream was first given a
literal interpretation, and then twisted around into a symbolic one. Golding does
the reverse: the symbolic (Freudian) dimension comes first but, later in the book,
the reader is made to understand that this dream also has a more literal, physical
root – Jocelin is slowly being eaten up by a spinal disease whose side effect is to
exacerbate the sexuality of the sufferer – which is indeed, as in Shakespeare, in
keeping with the general thematic economy of the book: deviousness of
motivations, in other words self-deception (Jocelin’s “Folly”, the undertaking of
building the spire, is also a substitute for his unconscious and hopeless desire for
Goody – Freudian “sublimation” therefore), the interplay between the physical
and spiritual spheres, and the impenetrable mysteries of this world (the spire in
the novel, like that of Salisbury cathedral on which it is indeed explicitly based,
is erected on a lack of foundations, but still stands, albeit slightly out of the
true).
The two dreams analysed here share one common basic feature: both are
literary dreams, that is, they pertain to hermeneutics rather than to the real
nature, texture and phenomenology of real dreams. For my own experience of
dreams (which must not be very different from that of other people) has taught
me a few things. First, there are different “qualities” in dreams, of intensity, or
degrees of “reality”: some of them may feel so real that you wonder how you
came to find yourself in such or such situation, while in others you are more
passive, as if watching a film unfolding around you. In other instances, you may
even realize that you are dreaming – indeed, some people claim that they can
control their dreams. Which leads, in passing, to a last question regarding
Jocelin’s dream: when it is (even before the description of the dream itself)
qualified as “meaningless and hopeless”5, in a novel told from the main
protagonist’s point of view (a landmark in most of Golding’s fiction), is this
supposed to occur within the dream, or subsequently? Is it to be ascribed to the
dreamer, or to the awakened man? The text provides no answer.
Another notable discrepancy between literary and actual dreams is their
coherence, or lack of it: everybody knows that dreams very often are rather
desultory, switching from one “sequence” to another, without any apparent
transition or logic. While literary dreams are, perforce, well constructed and
structured within the general economy of the text in which they appear: thus
with the two examples studied here. Finally, there is another questionable
aspect about real dreams: their rememberance. From personal experience, I
could not help marvel at Freud’s patients’ amazing memory in recounting their
dreams, sometimes several days after they had taken place: generally, my
memories of my own dreams are hazy and rather incomplete, even just after
waking up (but then I might be subnormal, after all). One valid objection might
be that nightmares leave a stronger imprint on the mind: which is precisely the
case with Calphurnia’s and Jocelin’s dreams. But still, their structure (one
sequence) and coherence, then again, point to their literary essence and origin.
From the reflections above, several things might be inferred. First, that
dreams in literature are epistemologically marked: Calphurnia’s dream in Julius
5
Ibid., p 64.
Caesar (following Plutarch) is basically of the premonitory kind, whereas
Jocelin’s in The Spire is resolutely sexual – meaning, Freudian in essence. For
who nowadays would still believe in premonitory dreams? On the other hand,
who nowadays has not been infected by the sexual terrorism, as it were, brought
about and institutionalized by the Freudian theory? There is a general (and
uneasy) agreement that Western societies are literally saturated with sex, almost
enough to turn anybody off the act and make them embrace chastity: if
“neuroses” in that field were private and repressed (a “taboo”) in Freud’s
puritanical time, they are nowadays displayed on the maket place, and even
pushed right under your nose, as it were, whether you are interested or not.
“Sexual liberation”, indeed?
Another characteristic of literary dreams is that they are also infused with
a precise thematic dimension, involving oppositions: violent death and
immortality in Caesar’s case, God and Satan (sainthood and sin), but physical
disease as well, in Jocelin’s. With one meaningful implication: literary dreams
are ready-made, according to certain, precise themes and parameters of a
rhetorical nature. So that it could be said that they short circuit, as it were, the
Freudian method: for their interpretation is already explicit in the dream (in
other words, the surface and latent meanings of the dream are given at once,
together (true, this aspect is slightly more sophisticated with Shakespeare than
with Golding, since the play offers two successive interpretations: but it has
been noted that both are valid and, then again, Calphurnia’s dream is preFreudian). Which is already quite enough to disqualify them as “real” dreams:
comparatively, Plutarch’s version was much more convincing.
But there may be yet another, further implication, this time regarding the
Freudian theory and method of interpreting dreams. It has already been pointed
out that what is analysed and interpreted by the Freudian method is actually a
reconstructed dream, through the medium of language: which ultimately
suggests that those “dreams” themselves are literary too, up to a certain point.
Then they are filtered again through certain specific modes of “reading” by
Freud (or his stooges), predominantly based on sexual desires and frustrations
(libido, primal scene, Oedipus’ complex, castration fears, sublimation and so on
and so forth): in other words, they are thus “formated” through another
epistemological prism, so that one discourse is replaced with another – supposed
to unveil the ultimate “truth” about the subject (a modern obsession rightly
denounced by Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality). But once again, it
brings us back to literature – not to say fiction (as was blatantly shown by Marie
Bonaparte’s outrageous excesses regarding Edgar Allan Poe’s life and works,
reluctantly and cautiously prefaced by Freud, not to mention Lacan’s famous
Séminaire sur “La lettre volée”, which was sardonically demolished by Derrida
in a subsequent essay, Le facteur de la vérité, 1980). More generally speaking,
anyway, Freud’s theory as a critical tool has not been much of a success in its
pretentions to track down the writer’s unconscious (see for instance the
historical background to his own essay “The Gradiva”). Could it be then that
Freud’s works too belong more to literature than to science in the first place?
This indeed seems to be a growing opinion among researchers, one century later.
This might contribute to explain why such a theory was so easily seized
upon and used by fiction writers – but not without certain ironic consequences.
For it ceased to be a critical, or analytical tool to become a mere “rhetorical”
device– the process of “recycling” it was self-defeating, as it were: then again,
fiction cannot claim the status of science. But, above all, it entailed what might
be termed a certain “loss of innocence”.
For, with pre-Freudian writers,
Freudian overtones could claim to be intuitive and therefore genuine insights
into the human psyche. With post-Freudian ones, it is inevitably reduced to just
another narrative convention or code (or device – or even artifice) shared by
both writer and reader as common “knowledge”: it becomes ready made, prefabricated, so to speak, a kind of quick recipe among many others.
The
unconscious therefore is no longer a mystery, but a mere hermeutical adjunct:
Jocelin’s dream is a perfect illustration of this. On the other hand, a good
example of a “postmodern” approach to psychoanalysis in literature can be
found in Beckett’s novel Molloy, which explicitly refers to Freudian concepts –
but in order to subvert and even debunk them: Beckett had started an analysis
when living in London, and then given it up as useless, dismissing the whole
thing (which he knew very well indeed) as mere claptrap. After all, a man who
considers Freud as a quack cannot be entirely bad. Besides, Woody Allen is
probably the only “patient” who ever made a profit out of his analysis. Freud
himself, with his famous early, idealistic motto (he became much more
circumspect and even cynical with experience),“Wo es war, soll ich werden” –
“Where it was, I must emerge” –, meant to bring the dark abyss of the
unconscious to light, and make it part and parcel of consciousness: this is
precisely what happened, up to a certain point – yet he would be surprised and
probably displeased, could he see the results – or would he?
Denis GAUER, MCF,
Université
de
la
Réunion
(November 2002)