Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

B-but listening to someone recount a dream for more than a minute or two can be excruciating. And in fiction and especially drama, I think of the whole thing as a dream state, so a dream within the dream can break the spell rather than enhance it. (Saying all of that having rewatched Eyes Wide Shut this week, which is all about whether a dream of infidelity is the same as a confession of infidelity or an act of it.)

Anyway, and off topic from HJ, but the line resonated with me more than where I read it.

I mostly adopted it because it's pithy and fun to burst out when someone's doing a bad dream scene, but yeah I think there's obv differences between having someone tell you their dream and having a talented writer make one up!

Someone telling you their life story in the manner of a typical novel would also be considerably excruciating.

I have problems with FW, as I'm sure does Amis (I suspect that unlike me, he hasn't read it, but I'm not sure of that now) -- but the argument that "FW is (or depicts) a dream" is contestable, according to good Wake scholars.

Which might be a pity, as "FW is a dream" probably makes more sense of FW than one might otherwise.

I think it's plain that there can be good dreams in fiction. One: at the start of an episode in THE LINE OF BEAUTY, where it doesn't seem like a dream, is taken as real ... but strange ... then gets stranger ... then he wakes up. Lasts probably less than a page.

A book that is much more dreamlike than FW is Ishiguro's THE UNCONSOLED, though it's not presented as a dream. The dream quality of the whole is implicit.

Dreams are boring to talk about, because people who talk about their dreams tend to focus on the surreal details of the dreams rather than the raw emotional insights they provide, which makes for very one-dimensional conversation.

But we're also bad listeners, and listening to someone else's narcissistic fantasies is hard work, which is why it's probably more productive to talk to your therapist about a dream than your partner.

Martin Amis is a grandiloquent twerp who speaks like he writes and hates being interrupted, so it makes sense that he'd confuse speaking with writing.

There’s a whole list of these things that boring cw maintains should/can never be represented in prose: dreams, music, sex, insanity… even without all the counterexamples that leap to mind it always just sounds to me like repping ur own lack of imagination

A notable example is Lydia Davis who has written fiction that not only represents dreams but is in fact based on specific real dreams she has had!

the phrase "finnegans wake is not a dream" seems to lead to some interesting discussions i don't have time right now to explore

however all of them immediately also concede that it is dreamlike or brings to bear the technics of dreamwork or whatever: even the guy who says we should pay more attenton to the psychotic episodes of his beloved daughter and the way schizophrenics use language also immediately compares this use to dreams

iirc correctly Colm Tóibín's iffy novel about Henry James, The Master, begins with HJ awakening from a bad dream

Finnegans Wake is not a dream in the same way as Ceci n'est pas une pipe? (onethread)

in a sense there is nothing that is not a pi(p)e

A book that is much more dreamlike than FW is Ishiguro's THE UNCONSOLED, though it's not presented as a dream. The dream quality of the whole is implicit.

amis is on thin ice (or as he might write it "exceedingly low temperature h20 arrayed in the manner that one spreads marmite on a morning slice of toasted comestible") talking about stodge and thin gruel tbh

some good dreams in bolaño

"It's not so easy writin' about nothin'." The ole cowpoke settin' at Patti Smith's kitchen table and talkin' while he's writin' (and, come to think of it, sounding and looking like Seinfeld meets one of Smith's ol' buddy Sam Shepherd's plays)(She does mention watching TV, though so far all detective shows) is ignoring her, and she doesn't like that, so she wakes up and goes to the Cafe 'Ito (black coffee, toast, olive oil, table, chair, notebook, pen: all she needs for quite a while) and writes about him, briefly, then goes on to next item. She gives the occasional arresting image its due, but then back to what the hell, dreams? They're not allowed to crowd her waking life, the things that happen as she keeps writing. (The ol' cowpoke does poke his oblivious head back in occasionally.

Sorry, that's Station M, my current bedtime buzz.

Dreamlike Vs a depiction of a dream seems to be the error here.

(M Train, that is) she's good at both, more into the former, and only as these things come by the intent, fairly careful traveler.

In Homeland Elegies, Ayad Ahktar's somewhat autobiographical novel, the Pakistani-American narrator has himself set (with pen tied to hand, I think) to record dreams as soon as he wakes, for a while. Mainly, he manages to write down a sequence about going up into the hills in the old country, near the town where he still has a lot of relatives, a place he used to visit occasionally. Now he's reminded of things he saw and how they and the new-seeming dream images relate to thoughts about his family and their situations that had faded into the background, as given, at best, as he'd become more self-absorbed.
It's not that long a passage, but all the parts about his family, in Pakistan and America, give the book most of its strength (and taking dream lessons, then reverse-engineering the results, is completely in character).

I liked that book

The Housing Lark, Sam Selvon - More straightahead comedic than I remember The Lonely Londoners being. A great Dudes Rock novel (and thus unsurprisingly not great on gender), love the poetry of the language and the liveliness of a London long gone. Selvon should have much higher standing in popular British literature imo.

ah wrong thread