The Politics of Dreaming – from Diderot to Keats and Shelley

ALAN RICHARDSON, Professor of English, Boston College Aarhus University Press, Romantik, 01, vol. 01, 2012, pages 9-26 9 R O M A N T IK · 0 1 of the specific dreams represented in two important Romantic poems, P. B. Shelley’s Alastor and John Keats’ ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’. In both parts of this essay, my reinterpretation of earlier discourses and texts has been partly inspired by my awareness of key developments in the cognitive neuroscience of dreaming. As such, the analyses that follow may be considered examples of what has been termed ‘cognitive historicism’ (Spolsky; Richardson, Neural Sublime 1-16). Developments in the experimental study of sleep and dreaming, for example, first prompted scholars to look with serious interest at Romantic-era understandings of dreaming that could be seen to ‘anticipate’ not Freud’s ‘dream work’ but a distinctively post-Freudian, neuroscientific account of dream formation (Lavie and Hobson). Moreover, the differences as well as the resonances between Romantic-era and neuroscientific understandings can prove instructive. For instance, the cognitive neuroscience of dreaming shows relatively little interest in what scientists now term the ‘parasomnias’, such as sleepwalking or talking during sleep; the preeminent dream researcher J. Allan Hobson devotes only three of the 153 pages of his highly useful Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction to the topic (82-84). For Hobson, as for most of his colleagues today, REM (rapid eye movement) dreaming garners most attention and serves as the paradigmatic example; parasomniac activities belong to non-REM (NREM) sleep, as do sleep onset dreams and the thought-like dreaming that occurs in ‘slow wave’ sleep (8). To the contrary, influential Romantic (and late Enlightenment) accounts of dreaming show a pronounced interest in somnambulism and similar behaviors, and view them as continuous with the vivid, hallucinatory dreaming now connected with REM sleep. Indeed, this connection helped give certain Romantic-era theories and representations of dreams their radical ideological valence. D r e a m i n g , S o m n a m b u l i s m a n d t h e C o r p o r e a l M i n d We might start with a glance at John William Polidori’s 1815 medical thesis on ‘Oneirodynia’, his term for somnambulism and other parasomnias, as presented in an important recent article by Anne Stiles, Stanley Finger and John Bulevich. Polidori’s thesis, composed in Latin, long remained nearly invisible to Romantic scholarship, although Polidori himself was well known: as Lord Byron’s friend and physician, as a participant in the famed ghost story contest that generated both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Byron’s fragmentary vampire tale, and as the author of The Vampyre (1819), the first widely popular vampire story in English. As Stiles and her co-authors explain, sleepwalking and other parasomnias suggested how the ‘human body and brain could function mechanically’, independent of a guiding soul or of conscious volition (790). If so, might the soul and will themselves prove epiphenomenal or altogether fictive? Small wonder that sleepwalking and related unconscious behaviors became closely associated with the vampire, that notoriously soulless and deeply unsettling figure. Simply noting how the mind remained active during sleep could prove ‘controversial’ during the Romantic era, implicitly challenging as it did both ratio10 JO U R N A L F O R T H E S T U D Y O F R O M A N T IC IS M S nalist and religious notions of a unitary subjectivity guided by conscious volition (790). But Polidori’s interest in ‘oneirodynia’ went much further. Not only did dreaming suggest a mind (or brain) that stayed active in the absence of consciousness, but this unconsciously active mind could also engage in a number of seemingly guided actions with no rational subject awake to guide them. Polidori’s broad definition of somnambulism includes ‘not only someone who walks while in a dream, but also someone who appears to wake up while still asleep, and who performs actions or speaks as if he were awake’ (Polidori 776). He describes sleepers who ‘respond to friends’ questions and discourse ably’, who dress themselves and ‘guzzle’ wine, who (endowed with ‘vivid imagination’) compose poems or essays or even edit them (776-777). We are not far here from ‘Kubla Khan’ and its famous headnote, which S. T. Coleridge would first publish the year after Polidori completed his medical thesis (Richardson, ‘Coleridge’). Polidori borrowed the anecdote of a priest correcting sermons in his sleep from the Encyclopédie, which included an article entitled ‘SOMNAMBULE, & SOMNAMBULISME’ by the French physician Jean-Joseph Ménuret de Chambaud. The Encyclopédie also proffers a generous definition of somnambulism, embracing the same range of activities covered by Polidori, who apparently modeled his definition on that of Ménuret de Chambaud. The latter places special emphasis on the seeming directedness and rationality that these unconscious behaviors can manifest, ‘quelquefois même avec plus d’intelligence & d’exactitude’ [‘at times with even more intelligence and precision’, my translation] than ordinarily (vol. 15: 340). Given the leading role in the Encyclopédie project taken by Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert, it comes as no surprise that Diderot’s great fictional account of an elaborate dream attributed to d’Alembert, Le Rêve de d’Alembert [D’Alembert’s Dream], should feature a comparably broad range of parasomniac activities, some of which exhibit an unexpectedly high degree of rational sense. Not that coherent, connected thought and the sort of non-sense we normally associate with dreaming can be differentiated too readily or too definitively in this series of dialogues. Initially Mlle. de L’Espinasse, d’Alembert’s housemate though not his bedmate, has called in Dr. Bordeu precisely because d’Alembert seems to be raving in his uncharacteristically troubled sleep: he thrashes about, throws off the covers, and talks like a ‘crazy person’ (113) [‘tout l’air du délire’ (359)]. Bordeu, however, who shares some of d’Alembert’s crazier ideas, can turn his ‘nonsense of vibrating strings and sensitive fibers’ (113) [‘galimatias de cordes vibrantes et de fibres sensibles’ (359)] into a penetrating and corrosive discourse on the mind’s instantiation in the body and its nervous system, the necessary illusion of the self, the secret workings of sensibility and more. Later in the dialogue, d’Alembert resumes talking, sometimes in his sleep and sometimes awake – the line between sleeping and waking, unconscious cognition and conscious thought, never entirely clear. In addition, during his earlier period of somniloquy (which Mlle. de L’Espinasse has providentially taken down), d’Alembert at times addresses his present friend and at times an absent and purely hallucinated interlocutor, the ‘Philosophe’, that is, Diderot himself, who features in a waking dia-