Guido vitiello, researcher and essayist
2 December 2019
Dear bibliopathologist,
when in a novel I find the story of a dream, I jump to even. What a bore those useless digressions that add nothing to the narrative! And when I find that I have devoted time to a dream, because the witty writer only reveals it at the end, I get angry
– Giulia
Dear Julia,
I’ve read the interpretation of Freud’s dreams, bypassing as much as possible the descriptions of patients' dreams. Reckless, right? The fact is, other people’s dreams are boring. But to understand what makes us allergic to the dreams told in the books, we start by asking ourselves why they are so frustrating in so-called real life, when it is a friend who tells them. In the morning it comes to us all radiant, eyes still lost in the hesitant light of the sleeper, as if he had just visited a wonderful country. This is, in fact: he experienced a place truer than the real one, which appeared to him in very vivid colours, and he quivers to put us apart. Yet the moment he begins to describe it is the crossroads from which two disappointments diverge: his, who cannot find the right words and who, in the effort to unravel it, almost loses the thread of the dream within himself; ours, that we expected a fairy tale and gradually we find ourselves faced with an uneven tangle of incongruous words, illogical connections, abstruse images.
What lies between his disappointment and ours? Literature, in fact. That is the art of making vivid for others a vision that has dominated our minds. This is why I am better disposed towards the dreams told in novels than towards the dream materials collected by psychoanalysts.
If life is a dream, we read on Strindberg Island of the Dead, then theatre is the dream of a dream. Literature is the same. But we do not ask writers to tell us the dreams so that they seem like dreams, pushing us even further into the grey skies of abstraction; rather, we expect them to tell us so that they seem true, that’s how that friend couldn’t do it. It will not be an accident if the only exciting dreams we encounter in novels are those who do nothing to resemble the miserable dreamlike debris that we get toghether at awakening, but rather sound like novels in the novel; those dreams, that is, where the literary artifice– the somnium fictum– multiplies the intensity instead of attenuating it. Try comparing the dream of Hans castorp in the Enchanted Mountain, with the hags tearing a child to shreds in a temple, to any exercise in surrealist dreamlike transcription, and you’ll see what I mean.
But here, of course, my tastes speak, indeed my taste. If you want to cultivate your own, and give a second chance to the literary dreams that are so steamy, I suggest you read them as autonomous stories, not as digressions in a larger story. The anthology of Borges Libro di sogni and the ninety-five examples collected by Marco hagge in the appendix to the essay Il sogno e la scrittura (sansoni, 1986) are to my knowledge the best pillows on which to recline the head. Dreams of the gold!
The bibliopathologist answers is a post on cultural perversions. If you want to submit your cases, write to g.vitiello@internazionale.it.
he writes in italian in:https://www.internazionale.it/bloc-notes/guido-vitiello/2019/12/02/sogni-nei-romanzi
