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La forza del sogno
Los seres humanos siempre se han sentido cautivados por los sueños y por el misterioso poder que transmiten sus imágenes. El antiguo Egipto nos ha legado insólitos sumarios de fragmen-tos oníricos, cada uno acompañado de su puntual interpretación, que se remontan al segundo milenio a.C. Dos son las grandes perplejidades que a lo largo de los siglos han fascinado a la ima-ginación humana: por una parte, el significado que tienen los sueños en relación con nuestra vida y personalidad; por otra, el grado de realidad que podemos atribuirles. Por ejemplo, algunos durmientes acceden a imágenes oníricas premonitorias que luego son constatadas con toda exactitud en el mundo de la vigilia. Este dilema plantea la duda ontológica de si un sueño es igual de real que los hechos que acontecen en nuestra vida. Todas estas cues-tiones gravitan sobre los textos literarios de la presente antología, que se inicia con un sugerente corpus inédito de antiguas narra-ciones chinas y prosigue con una notable nómina de autores occidentales tan heterogéneos como Apuleyo, Prosper Mérimée, Edgar Allan Poe, Théophile Gautier, Ambrose Bierce, Ksaver Šandor Gjalski, Jean Lorrain, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Oliver Onions, W. Somerset Maugham, Bruno Schulz, Vladimir Nabokov, Louis Golding, Henry Kuttner y C. L. Moore, Luisa Mercedes Levinson, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar y Bernard Groethuysen.
373 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1962
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September 22, 2021
I got this through through Inter-Library Loan to read one story, but then, while waiting on the library, I found the story online. Still, it arrived and, looking at the TOC, I realized that I needed to read one piece in it, and to re-read (to supply a Goodreads review) a number of others. So, here we are.
Needless to say, I didn't read the whole thing, which seems like a shame (but I'm adrift in the middle of Pseudopod submission season) because the introduction is excellent - Caillois' interrogation of the presentation of the dream in history and literature. From there, half the book is Chinese dialectics on dreams, and then selected fiction.
My Prosper Mérimée read was "The Vision of Charles XI" - technically, I did not read the translation included in this book, but a newer translation online. This is one of those "could be real, could be a fable" in which Charles the XI and his entourage witness a strange and bloody prophetic vision of the political future (I assume). Not my kind of thing.
More a mood piece than a story "proper" is "The Holes In The Mask" ("Les Trous du masque") by arch-Decadent Jean Lorrain. Here, Parisian bon-vivant De Jacquel promises to take our narrator to a singular masquerade - but when he re-appears, masked, and sweeps our narrator on a long carriage ride to the outskirts of the city, we share the worry that perhaps it is not De Jacquel at all. And the gathering proves to be a silent masque of hooded, robed figures who are gradually revealed to be empty ciphers and hollow men. And what of our narrator, as he examines himself in the large mirrors? "Proto-Thomas Ligotti type concepts arise during a Decadent's ether visions," might be the best summation. Not bad, the eerie carriage ride is nicely brought across and the lush descriptions lend a nightmare feel to the proceedings, where details stand out, but the whole is enigmatic.
I wasn't a fan of Vladimir Nabokov's "The Visit To The Museum" when I first read it decades okay, but times and people change. An educated man, tasked by an unreliably flighty friend with seeing if his grandfather's portrait still resides in a small Russian museum (and, if so, inquiring about purchasing it) doesn't intend to fulfill the request but finds circumstances lead him to the place anyway. Despite being unimpressed with the small museum, and finding the manager unwilling to admit that they even have the painting (until he's shown it hanging on the wall), our narrator wanders and begins to find the small museum expanding with ever larger exhibits, grander in detail and depth of life, even as it seems overrun with ignorant hooligans. Quite a nice metaphor for a rich and varied historical Russia, and how its past was erased in the transition to a totalitarian state. Not bad.
In Julio Cortázar's "The Distances," a young woman, Alina Reyes, records in her diary how she seems to be haunted by dreams of the experiences of another person's life far away, possibly in Budapest - a life of poverty and physical abuse, while she lives as a bourgeoisie in Buenos Aires, planning her marriage and playing piano accompaniment. She is both fascinated and annoyed by this other, older woman's life, teasing out possible details of her through memories and word games, and on her own marriage, has the opportunity to travel to Budapest... This was a difficult read for me - at times I felt the translation may have been off (or perhaps that was just the wordplay in the story). There are some interesting ideas of dream logic here - has Alina just projected this entire scenario from inside herself, giving form to unconscious conflicts in her life, or is there really a woman in Budapest? And I'm not sure if the ending is intended to be read as sinister or not (transference?). A strange one.
Much more straightforward is Louis Golding's "The Pale Blue Nightgown" - in which an insecure and constrained schoolmaster catches one of his students mocking him on the playground while telling a yarn to other students. But the boy eventually only confesses that he was relating a dream - the actual contents of which hold some surprises. This is a familiar, and yet odd, piece . Punchy, kinda strange.
"Phantas" by Oliver Onions opens with two sun-blackened sailors adrift on a slowly sinking sailing ship caught in a windless straight. The one, driven mad by thirst and the sun, does nothing but sing hymns, while the other - our captain and main character - drifts in and out of consciousness and contends with the strange vision which approaches their damaged craft. This, a solid example of the supernatural fantasy, does not succeed through invention () but through effective writing () and a nice little emotional fillip at the end (). Charming, Romantic, disposable but solid.
"Everything And Nothing" by Jorge Luis Borges is a short parable about a boy who is unsure of his identity in relation to the world, who grows into an actor (still taking on masks to cover his lack of - or feeling of a lack of - identity) and eventually, on his death, meets with God, who answers his questions and ours. Simple, poignant, effective.
Ksaver Šandor Gjalski, in "The Dream Of Doctor Mišić," relates us a tale of an intelligent man (with no time in his life for love), who moves into a purportedly haunted house (but he doesn't believe in such things) and who becomes distressed by repeated and unfolding visionary dreams of a beautiful young woman - dreams that are passionate, romantic, erotic but also, at times, frightening in their varied scenarios and imagery (cast adrift on a giant seashell with her in a vast ocean full of beautiful fish, sailing in a coffin that sinks, he acting as her coroner as he autopsies her, etc.) He discusses these dreams with other learned men who caution him about the symbolic import of dreams, but he chalks the dreams up to physical sources (nerves, diet). And then, he has a specifically detailed dream of violence at a tavern. And then, he is called to serve the law as a doctor in determining a cause of death... What starts very similarly to a classic ghost tale, in fact, is more about dreams and their weight in our lives. Yes, it has a fantastic bent (and a grim ending) but there's something interestingly philosophical about it, that is offset by some of the early Romantic detail, and the latter morbid specifics. Good.
Théophile Gautier's oft-reprinted "Clarimonde" (occasionally re-titled as "The Dead In Love", "The Loved Dead", "The Beautiful Vampire" or, here, as "The Dead Leman" - "Leman" being an old word for "lover") is an interesting story in which the female vampire occupies the classic role of femme fatale. A young initiate to the church is just about to take his vows (literally!) when he spies a beautiful women in the crowd who seems to strongly desire him and warns him against committing his life to God. He does anyway, but ends up being sent to officiate at her deathbed in his religious capacity and then finds himself visited by her at night in his dreams, dreams in which he flees with her to another country and takes a position as a rich, decadent Prince. Is he a priest dreaming he is a sinning Prince, or a sinning Prince dreaming he is a priest? He spends his "normal" days in rigorous mortification of all the sins he commits during his unearned worldliness at night, but the night is where he also loves his beautiful, cruel mistress with all his heart. How can he continue to live two sides of life? This is a fine story (as is true of almost any Gautier) and Clarimonde is an interesting vampire figure. She does seem to love Romuald (the priest/prince) - when events advance to the point that she feeds on his blood, she takes only a small amount, and surreptitiously at that. In fact, the strain between Romuald's religious duties/vows and the lustful joy he experiences with Clarimonde are not, necessarily, presented in a completely black/white - good/bad dichotomy and one can see a rather wry or ironic note behind the final knowledge which Romuald gains from the experience ("beware all women," essentially). There's also a nicely executed classic sequence of Romuald riding desperately through a dark, spooky forest on his way to his first actual meeting with Clarimonde on her deathbed. Very evocative, fairy-tale like writing.
"An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge" - During the Civil War, a Confederate citizen is to be hanged by the Union army for attempted sabotage. But, luckily for him, the rope breaks and... away he goes.... I didn't have an official Goodreads review for this Ambrose Bierce tale, despite having been familiar with it since my youth in the 1970s (including that great TWILIGHT ZONE short film/episode). And one might ask "what is there to be gained by rereading this? You know what the twist is..." But as I'm always tinkering with my model of how I approach criticism, and (given the recent, fundamental shift that my views have undergone in the last few years) one of my realizations is that with 7,000+ stories and countless novels read, "the story" (in the plot sense) is not that important to me anymore - yes, I value invention, creativity and novelty but now these are just aspects to be considered, not the prime reason for reading (or watching, or listening) - if there is even a "prime reason" and not just a variety of angles. And "HOW it is done" can sometimes be AS important (even, at times, MORE important) than "WHAT is done." And Bierce is a hell of a writer, regardless - in fact, I had recently been struck, reading another piece by him, how one of his fascinations seems to have been capturing in writing how one's personal perceptions can distort under extreme emotional duress, such as fear. Since noting that, it specifically has shown up in different forms in a number of his pieces I was reading/re-reading. Here, there is the pounding, incessant, mechanical sound that our doomed man hears as he awaits his fate (it is his watch) and, post his "escape", there is the moment where he surfaces from the river and perceives everything around and about him in minute detail (down to the veins in the leaves and the insects on the trees). Not to even open up an examination, on a larger scale, of Farquhar's escape and return home... A classic for a reason.
The title character of W. Somerset Maugham's "Lord Mountdrago" is a respectable, upstanding Government Minister - arrogant and snobbish due to his class position but honorable and without vice - who finds himself so plagued by a problem that he visits a psychotherapist. It seems he repeatedly dreams of engaging in illicit actions, always observed and mocked by a lower member of another party who he finds common and repugnant in real life - and this individual, in real life, seems to be aware of these dreams, as if he shares the dreams with Mountdrago. But while the psychological/supernatural cause of such a fixation is eventually made apparent (if not HOW it can actually be happening), its obvious solution is unthinkable to the prideful Montdrago - and so it all resolves in a more terminal way. This is quite good - Maugham's writing is clear, concisee, engaging and his understanding and portrayal of his character's underlying psychology is very deft. Solidly entertaining, and the final moments capture an even larger sense of unease and incertitude that extends beyond the plot itself.
H.G. Wells' "The Door In The Wall" is one of his atypical fantasy stories - gentle, humane and very British. Old lion Lionel Wallace, respected and revered politician on his way to a Ministership, confides to a friend of a singular event in his childhood when, at 5 years old, he happened upon an anomalous door on a street in his neighborhood that led to a marvelous garden filled with animals and gentle, welcoming children and people - but he had to leave, and was punished by his stern father for his flight of fancy about this impossible place. And then, throughout his life, he has glimpsed the door again, in different places, but despite nothing but warm recollections, he never had the time to stop and re-enter... This is an allegory (not too hard to guess at what) exceedingly well told. The end may seem a bit jarring, but even that I feel is calculated into the overall formula. Simply wonderful.
Needless to say, I didn't read the whole thing, which seems like a shame (but I'm adrift in the middle of Pseudopod submission season) because the introduction is excellent - Caillois' interrogation of the presentation of the dream in history and literature. From there, half the book is Chinese dialectics on dreams, and then selected fiction.
My Prosper Mérimée read was "The Vision of Charles XI" - technically, I did not read the translation included in this book, but a newer translation online. This is one of those "could be real, could be a fable" in which Charles the XI and his entourage witness a strange and bloody prophetic vision of the political future (I assume). Not my kind of thing.
More a mood piece than a story "proper" is "The Holes In The Mask" ("Les Trous du masque") by arch-Decadent Jean Lorrain. Here, Parisian bon-vivant De Jacquel promises to take our narrator to a singular masquerade - but when he re-appears, masked, and sweeps our narrator on a long carriage ride to the outskirts of the city, we share the worry that perhaps it is not De Jacquel at all. And the gathering proves to be a silent masque of hooded, robed figures who are gradually revealed to be empty ciphers and hollow men. And what of our narrator, as he examines himself in the large mirrors? "Proto-Thomas Ligotti type concepts arise during a Decadent's ether visions," might be the best summation. Not bad, the eerie carriage ride is nicely brought across and the lush descriptions lend a nightmare feel to the proceedings, where details stand out, but the whole is enigmatic.
I wasn't a fan of Vladimir Nabokov's "The Visit To The Museum" when I first read it decades okay, but times and people change. An educated man, tasked by an unreliably flighty friend with seeing if his grandfather's portrait still resides in a small Russian museum (and, if so, inquiring about purchasing it) doesn't intend to fulfill the request but finds circumstances lead him to the place anyway. Despite being unimpressed with the small museum, and finding the manager unwilling to admit that they even have the painting (until he's shown it hanging on the wall), our narrator wanders and begins to find the small museum expanding with ever larger exhibits, grander in detail and depth of life, even as it seems overrun with ignorant hooligans. Quite a nice metaphor for a rich and varied historical Russia, and how its past was erased in the transition to a totalitarian state. Not bad.
In Julio Cortázar's "The Distances," a young woman, Alina Reyes, records in her diary how she seems to be haunted by dreams of the experiences of another person's life far away, possibly in Budapest - a life of poverty and physical abuse, while she lives as a bourgeoisie in Buenos Aires, planning her marriage and playing piano accompaniment. She is both fascinated and annoyed by this other, older woman's life, teasing out possible details of her through memories and word games, and on her own marriage, has the opportunity to travel to Budapest... This was a difficult read for me - at times I felt the translation may have been off (or perhaps that was just the wordplay in the story). There are some interesting ideas of dream logic here - has Alina just projected this entire scenario from inside herself, giving form to unconscious conflicts in her life, or is there really a woman in Budapest? And I'm not sure if the ending is intended to be read as sinister or not (transference?). A strange one.
Much more straightforward is Louis Golding's "The Pale Blue Nightgown" - in which an insecure and constrained schoolmaster catches one of his students mocking him on the playground while telling a yarn to other students. But the boy eventually only confesses that he was relating a dream - the actual contents of which hold some surprises. This is a familiar, and yet odd, piece . Punchy, kinda strange.
"Phantas" by Oliver Onions opens with two sun-blackened sailors adrift on a slowly sinking sailing ship caught in a windless straight. The one, driven mad by thirst and the sun, does nothing but sing hymns, while the other - our captain and main character - drifts in and out of consciousness and contends with the strange vision which approaches their damaged craft. This, a solid example of the supernatural fantasy, does not succeed through invention () but through effective writing () and a nice little emotional fillip at the end (). Charming, Romantic, disposable but solid.
"Everything And Nothing" by Jorge Luis Borges is a short parable about a boy who is unsure of his identity in relation to the world, who grows into an actor (still taking on masks to cover his lack of - or feeling of a lack of - identity) and eventually, on his death, meets with God, who answers his questions and ours. Simple, poignant, effective.
Ksaver Šandor Gjalski, in "The Dream Of Doctor Mišić," relates us a tale of an intelligent man (with no time in his life for love), who moves into a purportedly haunted house (but he doesn't believe in such things) and who becomes distressed by repeated and unfolding visionary dreams of a beautiful young woman - dreams that are passionate, romantic, erotic but also, at times, frightening in their varied scenarios and imagery (cast adrift on a giant seashell with her in a vast ocean full of beautiful fish, sailing in a coffin that sinks, he acting as her coroner as he autopsies her, etc.) He discusses these dreams with other learned men who caution him about the symbolic import of dreams, but he chalks the dreams up to physical sources (nerves, diet). And then, he has a specifically detailed dream of violence at a tavern. And then, he is called to serve the law as a doctor in determining a cause of death... What starts very similarly to a classic ghost tale, in fact, is more about dreams and their weight in our lives. Yes, it has a fantastic bent (and a grim ending) but there's something interestingly philosophical about it, that is offset by some of the early Romantic detail, and the latter morbid specifics. Good.
Théophile Gautier's oft-reprinted "Clarimonde" (occasionally re-titled as "The Dead In Love", "The Loved Dead", "The Beautiful Vampire" or, here, as "The Dead Leman" - "Leman" being an old word for "lover") is an interesting story in which the female vampire occupies the classic role of femme fatale. A young initiate to the church is just about to take his vows (literally!) when he spies a beautiful women in the crowd who seems to strongly desire him and warns him against committing his life to God. He does anyway, but ends up being sent to officiate at her deathbed in his religious capacity and then finds himself visited by her at night in his dreams, dreams in which he flees with her to another country and takes a position as a rich, decadent Prince. Is he a priest dreaming he is a sinning Prince, or a sinning Prince dreaming he is a priest? He spends his "normal" days in rigorous mortification of all the sins he commits during his unearned worldliness at night, but the night is where he also loves his beautiful, cruel mistress with all his heart. How can he continue to live two sides of life? This is a fine story (as is true of almost any Gautier) and Clarimonde is an interesting vampire figure. She does seem to love Romuald (the priest/prince) - when events advance to the point that she feeds on his blood, she takes only a small amount, and surreptitiously at that. In fact, the strain between Romuald's religious duties/vows and the lustful joy he experiences with Clarimonde are not, necessarily, presented in a completely black/white - good/bad dichotomy and one can see a rather wry or ironic note behind the final knowledge which Romuald gains from the experience ("beware all women," essentially). There's also a nicely executed classic sequence of Romuald riding desperately through a dark, spooky forest on his way to his first actual meeting with Clarimonde on her deathbed. Very evocative, fairy-tale like writing.
"An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge" - During the Civil War, a Confederate citizen is to be hanged by the Union army for attempted sabotage. But, luckily for him, the rope breaks and... away he goes.... I didn't have an official Goodreads review for this Ambrose Bierce tale, despite having been familiar with it since my youth in the 1970s (including that great TWILIGHT ZONE short film/episode). And one might ask "what is there to be gained by rereading this? You know what the twist is..." But as I'm always tinkering with my model of how I approach criticism, and (given the recent, fundamental shift that my views have undergone in the last few years) one of my realizations is that with 7,000+ stories and countless novels read, "the story" (in the plot sense) is not that important to me anymore - yes, I value invention, creativity and novelty but now these are just aspects to be considered, not the prime reason for reading (or watching, or listening) - if there is even a "prime reason" and not just a variety of angles. And "HOW it is done" can sometimes be AS important (even, at times, MORE important) than "WHAT is done." And Bierce is a hell of a writer, regardless - in fact, I had recently been struck, reading another piece by him, how one of his fascinations seems to have been capturing in writing how one's personal perceptions can distort under extreme emotional duress, such as fear. Since noting that, it specifically has shown up in different forms in a number of his pieces I was reading/re-reading. Here, there is the pounding, incessant, mechanical sound that our doomed man hears as he awaits his fate (it is his watch) and, post his "escape", there is the moment where he surfaces from the river and perceives everything around and about him in minute detail (down to the veins in the leaves and the insects on the trees). Not to even open up an examination, on a larger scale, of Farquhar's escape and return home... A classic for a reason.
The title character of W. Somerset Maugham's "Lord Mountdrago" is a respectable, upstanding Government Minister - arrogant and snobbish due to his class position but honorable and without vice - who finds himself so plagued by a problem that he visits a psychotherapist. It seems he repeatedly dreams of engaging in illicit actions, always observed and mocked by a lower member of another party who he finds common and repugnant in real life - and this individual, in real life, seems to be aware of these dreams, as if he shares the dreams with Mountdrago. But while the psychological/supernatural cause of such a fixation is eventually made apparent (if not HOW it can actually be happening), its obvious solution is unthinkable to the prideful Montdrago - and so it all resolves in a more terminal way. This is quite good - Maugham's writing is clear, concisee, engaging and his understanding and portrayal of his character's underlying psychology is very deft. Solidly entertaining, and the final moments capture an even larger sense of unease and incertitude that extends beyond the plot itself.
H.G. Wells' "The Door In The Wall" is one of his atypical fantasy stories - gentle, humane and very British. Old lion Lionel Wallace, respected and revered politician on his way to a Ministership, confides to a friend of a singular event in his childhood when, at 5 years old, he happened upon an anomalous door on a street in his neighborhood that led to a marvelous garden filled with animals and gentle, welcoming children and people - but he had to leave, and was punished by his stern father for his flight of fancy about this impossible place. And then, throughout his life, he has glimpsed the door again, in different places, but despite nothing but warm recollections, he never had the time to stop and re-enter... This is an allegory (not too hard to guess at what) exceedingly well told. The end may seem a bit jarring, but even that I feel is calculated into the overall formula. Simply wonderful.
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March 11, 2021Como me suele ocurrir con las antologías, especialmente las que reúnen textos de épocas y autores muy diversos, «Poder del sueño. Relatos antiguos y modernos» me ha gustado más en algunos momentos que en otros, pero en conjunto ofrece un panorama muy rico e interesante sobre los sueños en la literatura.
En otra de sus exquisitas ediciones, Atalanta rescata este libro publicado por primera vez en 1962 por el Club Français du Livre. La selección de los relatos y el prólogo del volumen son obra de Roger Caillois (1913-1978), conocido sobre todo por sus ensayos y su célebre «Antología del cuento fantástico». En el sustancioso y cultísimo prólogo —que merece la pena releer una vez terminado el libro—, Caillois aborda las claves de nuestra fascinación por los sueños: qué significan y cuál es su relación con la realidad.
Además, recorre la forma en que la literatura ha explorado ese mundo turbador y misterioso desde la Antigüedad más remota, deteniéndose sobre todo en la cultura china —que ya desarrolló hace siglos múltiples variaciones del tema— y en las literaturas occidentales de los siglos XIX y XX, cuando el sueño no se emplea solo con fines moralizantes o filosóficos y alcanza categoría de resorte narrativo y estructural en autores como Poe, Nabokov o Borges.
Casi no queda fórmula sin explorar en la antología: sueños dentro de sueños, premoniciones, sueños paralelos o complementarios, identidades que intercambian sus vidas mientras duermen, estados de la conciencia que quizás no sean sueños pero comparten su atmósfera y los «equívocos insidiosos particulares de los sueños»… Mis relatos favoritos, por diferentes motivos: «Sueño infinito (cíclico) de Baoyu» de Cao Xueqin, «El sueño del doctor Mišić» de Ksaver Šandor —un autor que desconocía por completo—, «La puerta del muro» de H. G. Wells, «Las tiendas de color canela» de Bruno Schulz y «Un atónito estupor» de Henry Kuttner y C. L. Moore.
En otra de sus exquisitas ediciones, Atalanta rescata este libro publicado por primera vez en 1962 por el Club Français du Livre. La selección de los relatos y el prólogo del volumen son obra de Roger Caillois (1913-1978), conocido sobre todo por sus ensayos y su célebre «Antología del cuento fantástico». En el sustancioso y cultísimo prólogo —que merece la pena releer una vez terminado el libro—, Caillois aborda las claves de nuestra fascinación por los sueños: qué significan y cuál es su relación con la realidad.
Además, recorre la forma en que la literatura ha explorado ese mundo turbador y misterioso desde la Antigüedad más remota, deteniéndose sobre todo en la cultura china —que ya desarrolló hace siglos múltiples variaciones del tema— y en las literaturas occidentales de los siglos XIX y XX, cuando el sueño no se emplea solo con fines moralizantes o filosóficos y alcanza categoría de resorte narrativo y estructural en autores como Poe, Nabokov o Borges.
Casi no queda fórmula sin explorar en la antología: sueños dentro de sueños, premoniciones, sueños paralelos o complementarios, identidades que intercambian sus vidas mientras duermen, estados de la conciencia que quizás no sean sueños pero comparten su atmósfera y los «equívocos insidiosos particulares de los sueños»… Mis relatos favoritos, por diferentes motivos: «Sueño infinito (cíclico) de Baoyu» de Cao Xueqin, «El sueño del doctor Mišić» de Ksaver Šandor —un autor que desconocía por completo—, «La puerta del muro» de H. G. Wells, «Las tiendas de color canela» de Bruno Schulz y «Un atónito estupor» de Henry Kuttner y C. L. Moore.
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