Book: The Other Night: Dreaming, Writing, And Restlessness In Twentieth-century Literature

"I sleep, but my heart wakes," says the Song of Songs. "The other night" names the sleepless night we spend in dreams.From The Interpretation of Dreams to Finnegans Wake, many of the great writing projects of the first half of the twentieth century tell tales of this sleepless night. In the post-war waning of the dreamier modernist projects, writers such as Beckett and Blanchot work through the residual fatigue. The Other Night looks anew into the causes of this fatigue, measuring the weight of dreams. Its measurements differ sharply from those of the booming contemporary science of sleep, which, despite spectacular advances in imaging technology, cannot see the dreams of its subjects. No one but the dreamer sees his or her dream. According to the argument at the center of The Other Night, this entirely solitary vision is, paradoxically, an experience of a connection between the dreamer and absolutely everyone else-a connection woven in writing. Beginning by establishing a link between Freud's claim that the dream is a kind of pictographic writing and his "metapsychological" claim that the dream represents the impossibility of complete sleep, The Other Night recalls, in readings of Joyce, Beckett, and Blanchot, the unrest, at once literary and political, in which this habitually forgotten vision comes to each of us.