Dreams in Fiction

I've been reading a fat biography of Carl Jung and coincidentally thinking about the unconscious, dreams, and fiction.

People have known about the unconscious—or subconscious—for hundreds of years. Shakespeare explored the role of the unconscious in many of his plays without naming it as such. It seems to me that Jung and Freud (and others) thought that they could understand the unconscious through dreams. But that understanding is based on a chain of assumptions:

1) That dreams are manifestations of, or reflections of the unconscious.

2) That the dreamer can report a dream accurately.

3) That with this report, it is possible to interpret what is going on in the unconscious.

I suspect these are all wrong. Based on what I've read recently, it seems that dreams are utterly random firings of neurons in the resting brain. It’s impossible to report a dream accurately, even an exceptionally vivid dream (you may think you're doing so, but you are probably kidding yourself). And because the dreams are random, there’s no sensible way to interpret what they might mean. 

Michael Chabon has an interesting brief essay on dreams in the current issue of The New York Review of Books: 

“I hate dreams...I hate them for their absurdities and deferrals, their endlessly broken promise to amount to something, by and by. I hate them for the way they ransack memory, jumbling treasure and trash. I hate them for their tedium, how they drag on, peter out, wander off...Dreams are effluvia, bodily information, to be shared only with intimates and doctors...Whatever stuff dreams are made on, it isn’t words. As soon as you begin to tell a dream, as Freud reminds us, you interpolate, falsify, distort; you lie...

“Worse still than real dreams, mine or yours—sandier mouthfuls, ranker lies—are the dreams of characters in books and movies. Nobody, not even Aunt Em, wants to hear about Dorothy’s dream when she wakes up at the end of The Wizard of Oz. As outright fantasy the journey to Oz is peerless, joyous, muscular with truth; to call it a dream (a low trick Baum never stooped to) is to demean it, to deny it, to lie; because nobody has dreams like that...If art is a mirror, dreams are the back of the head. A work of art derives its effects from light, sound, and movement, but dreams unfurl in darkness, silence, paralysis...."

Dreams in fiction (says someone who has included a dream in his novel) are a cheat. As Chabon says, "Dreams in art either make sense, or they make no sense at all, but they never manage to do both at the same time." I'll try not to do it any more.

Guardians of Literary Culture? Ha!

Makoto Rich began a recent article in The New York Times, "Book publishers have long seen themselves as the gatekeepers of literary culture."

Book publishers might have seen themselves as gatekeepers of literary culture when Maxwell Perkins was editing Thomas Wolfe, but that was a long time ago. They may still see themselves as such at certain self-congratulatory awards events, but who are they kidding?

Book publishers have always been profit-making enterprises. At one time, if you believe the industry's story, they made enough profit that they could take a chance on a talented unknown author, support him through several money-losing but increasingly assured books, and be rewarded either in profit or literary status or both. Today, I suspect, profit is all. Is there any publisher today who believes it is worth spending the company's money cultivating an author? Is there any editor who would go to his or her publishing committee and say that "this might not be a best seller, but it's a fine book by an author who shows a lot of talent and any house would be proud to publish it."

The irony it seems to me is that while publishers reportedly spend big bucks to buy best selling authors, no one knows what makes a best seller. (Okay, a brand name helps: John Grisham, Danielle Steele, Stephen King, Clive Cussler, James Patterson...but how do you become a brand name?) Publisher's Weekly has run year-end review stories about the books publishers flogged enthusiastically that the public just as enthusiastically ignored and the books that took off with virtually no publisher support. Rather than trying to hit a home run (read: publish a best seller) with every manuscript, a publisher would probably be better off trying to hit a lot of singles and doubles, knowing the odds favor an occasional home run.

None of this is to say that if a book is a best seller it cannot be "literary" whatever that means. Nor is it to say that if a book is literary it cannot be popular. It is to say that if a book does not fit into a well-defined niche—mystery, romance, thriller, science fiction, chick-lit, etc., etc.—most publishers don't know what to do with it, and rather than work to find out, it is easier, and certainly cheaper, to pass and literary culture be damned.

Philip Roth's "Indignation"

Spoiler alert:I am going to talk about Philip Roth's new novel, Indignation in some detail. If you have not read it, and if you have any interest in Roth and want to read it, you may want to skip this posting.

First, it's short; 233 pages that are only a little larger than the average paperback. The first 224 pages, titled "Under Morphine," are told in the first person by 19-year-old Marcus Messer who is either dead or on the verge of death. The next seven pages are an objective account of what happened to him—bayoneted and killed on a Korean hill late in the war—and the effect on his parents, and the irony of his being in Korea at all. The last two pages continue the history of Winesberg College, the small Ohio liberal arts school Marcus attended.

Marcus tell his own story: Growing up a good Jewish boy, son of a kosher butcher, in Newark, driven to leave his Newark college and home by his father's sudden and inexplicable terror that something will happen to his precious boy. Marcus is a straight-A student, is a non-practicing Jew (indeed, follows Bertrand Russell's atheism), is a virgin, and sees himself put-upon by his father, his roommate at Winesberg College, and by a well-meaning Dean of Students.

I found Marcus a young 19, stiff-necked, inflexible, self-justifying, with almost no insight into himself or other people. As a result I found myself regularly telling Marcus, "That's not a good idea...think of what you're doing...listen to what he/she is telling you." In fairness, Marcus himself realizes that there comes a point in his confrontations where he should shut his mouth—but he doesn't do it. He will not bend, and for his inflexibility, he ends up slaughtered pointlessly on a Korean hill.

But so what? I don't care. I suspect Marcus means a lot more to Philip Roth (who seems to share much of Marcus's early history) than to most readers, although you could probably say that about any writer's creations. The problem I find with the book is that, wonderfully well-written as it is (and it is), I am not moved in the least by Marcus and his struggle to find his way in the world.

Annie Proulx's dialogue

I've just finished That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx. The novel is set in the Texas/Oklahoma panhandles in present day, and Proulx does two things that I think are wonderful and one thing I find off-putting. Let me talk about one of the things I like in this post, and I'll discuss the others later.

Proulx is a marvel in her ability to write dialogue that sounds like dialect without resorting to phonetic spelling. Here, taken at random, is an example (actually it's taken from page 132):

"Jesus... That's a little harsh, weld a man's gates. Could be he don't have no money. I hear their place is for sale. Anyway, when I was out there it was hot enough to loosen the bristles on a wild hog and Mrs. Wilcox gave me a glass a cold buttermilk. Best thing I ever drank. So I don't want to give them trouble."

I take it back on the phonetic spelling. She does use "a" for "of" and "awl" for "oil" and "Amarilla" for "Amarillo," but she uses it so lightly it does not become a distraction--or did not for me. One more example, a woman talking about another character on page 179:

"He was. Vain as a peacock. Wrote poetry too. Horse poetry and stuff about sunsets. Made your skin crawl to listen to him recite. He had a voice like a woman. They say a horse kicked him the Adam's apple when he was a boy. Some say the kick was lower down."