This text was part of an address delivered at the Creative Writing Program of the University of Philadelphia, September 2005.
Fiction and the Dream John Banville
A man wakes in the morning, feeling light-headed, even somewhat dazed. Standing in the curtained gloom in his pyjamas, blinking, he feels that somehow he is not his real, vital, fully conscious self. It is as if that other, alert version of him is still in bed, and that what has got up is a sort of shadow-self, tremulous, two-dimensional. What is the matter? Is he “coming down with something”? He does seem a little feverish. But no, he decides, what is afflicting him is no physical malady. There is, rather, something the matter with his mind. His brain feels heavy, and as if it were a size too large for his skull. Then, suddenly, in a rush, he remembers the dream.
It was one of those dreams that seem to take the entire night to be dreamt. All of him was involved in it, his unconscious, his subconscious, his memory, his imagination; even his physical self seemed thrown into the effort. The details of the dream flood back, uncanny, absurd, terrifying, and all freighted with a mysterious weight—such a weight, it seems, as is carried by only the most profound experiences of life, of waking life, that is. And indeed, all of his life, all of the essentials of his life, were somehow there, in the dream, folded tight, like the petals of a rosebud. Some great truth has been revealed to him, in a code he knows he will not be able to crack. But cracking the code is not important, is not necessary; in fact, as in a work of art, the code itself is the meaning.
He puts on his dressing gown and his slippers and goes downstairs. Everything around him looks strange. Has his wife’s eyes developed overnight that slight imbalance, the right one a fraction lower than the left, or is it something he has never noticed before? The cat in its corner watches him out of an eerie stillness. Sounds enter from the street, familiar and at the same time mysterious. The dream is infecting his waking world.
He begins to tell his wife about the dream, feeling a little bashful, for he knows how silly the dreamed events will sound. His wife listens, nodding distractedly. He tries to give his words something of the weight that there was in the dream. He is coming to the crux of the thing, the moment when his dreaming self woke in the midst of the dark wood, among the murmuring voices. Suddenly his wife opens her mouth wide—is she going to beg him to stop, is she going to cry out that she finds what he is telling her too terrifying?—is she going to scream? No: she yawns, mightily, with little inward gasps, the hinges of her jaws cracking, and finishes with a long, shivery sigh, and asks if he would like to finish what is left of the scrambled egg.
The dreamer droops, dejected. He has offered something precious and it has been spurned. How can she not feel the significance of the things he has been describing to her? How can she not see the bare trees and the darkened air, the memory of which is darkening the very air around them now—how can she not hear the murmurous voices, as he heard them? He trudges back upstairs to get himself ready for another, ordinary, day. The momentous revelations of the night begin to recede. It was just a dream, after all.
But what if, instead of accepting the simple fact that our most chaotic, our most exciting, our most significant dreams are nothing but boring to others, even our significant others—what if he said to his wife, All right, I’ll show you! I’ll sit down and write out the dream in such an intense and compelling formulation that when you read it you, too, will have the dream; you, too, will find yourself wandering in the wild wood at nightfall; you, too, will hear the dream voices telling you your own most secret secrets.
I can think of no better analogy than this for the process of writing a novel. The novelist’s aim is to make the reader have the dream—not just to read about it, but actually to experience it: to have the dream; to write the novel.
Now, these are dangerous assertions. In this post-religious age—and the fundamentalists, Christian, Muslim and other, only attest to the fact that ours is an age after religion—people are looking about in some desperation for a new priesthood. And there is something about the artist in general and the writer in particular which seems priest-like: the unceasing commitment to an etherial faith, the mixture of arrogance and humility, the daily devotions, the confessional readiness to attend the foibles and fears of the laity. The writer goes into a room, the inviolable domestic holy of holies—the study—and remains there alone for hour after hour in eerie silence. With what deities does he commune, in there, what rituals does he enact? Surely he knows something that others, the uninitiates, do not; surely he is privy to a wisdom far beyond theirs.
These are delusions, of course. The artist, the writer, knows no more about the great matters of life and the spirit than anyone else—indeed, he probably knows less. This is the paradox. As Henry James has it, we work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have, the rest is the madness of art. And Kafka, with a sad laugh, adds: The artist is the man who has nothing to say.
The writer is not a priest, not a shaman, not a holy dreamer. Yet his work is dragged up out of that darksome well where the essential self cowers, in fear of the light.
I have no grand psychological theory of creativity. I do not pretend to know how the mind, consciously or otherwise, processes the base metal of quotidian life into the gold of art. Even if I could find out, I would not want to. Certain things should not be investigated.
The dream world is a strange place. Everything there is at once real and unreal. The most trivial or ridiculous things can seem to carry a tremendous significance, a significance which—and here I agree with Freud—the waking mind would never dare to suggest or acknowledge. In dreams the mind speaks its truths through the medium of a fabulous nonsense. So, I think, does the novel.
The writing of fiction is far more than the telling of stories. It is an ancient, an elemental, urge which springs, like the dream, from a desperate imperative to encode and preserve things that are buried in us deep beyond words. This is its significance, its danger and its glory.
end
Fikcija i san
Čovjek se probudi ujutro, osjeća vrtoglavicu, čak blagu omamu. Dok stoji u zavjesama zastrtoj tami, u pidžami, žmirkajući, ima osjećaj da nekako nije onaj pravi, živahan, posve priseban on. Kao da je ona druga, budna verzija njega još u postelji, a onaj koji je ustao da je neka vrsta drhtave, dvodimenzionalne sjene njegovog ja. Što se dogodilo? „Hvata“ li ga kakva bolest? Doista, malko je grozničav, čini se. Ali ne, pomisli, nije to nikakva tjelesna boljka. Prije će biti da mu nešto nije u redu s pameću. Ima dojam da mu je mozak otežao, kao da je za broj veći za njegovu lubanju. Tad odjednom, u hipu, sjeti se sna.
Bio je to jedan od onih snova za koje kao da treba cijela noć. On je sve svoje bio unio u nj, svoju podsvijest, svoje pamćenje, svoju maštu; čak je, čini se, i njegovo tjelesno ja bilo ubačeno u akciju. Pojedinosti sna iznova ga preplave, sablasne, besmislene, zastrašujuće, sve natovarene nekim tajanstvenim teretom – onakvim, reklo bi se, što ga nose samo najintenzivnija životna iskustva, to jest iskustva u budnome stanju. I doista, sve iz njegova života, sve bitnosti njegova postojanja, nekako su bile u tom snu, smotane čvrsto poput latica u ružinu pupoljku. Otkrivena mu je velika istina, u kodu koji, zna, neće moći provaliti. Ali nije važno provaliti kod; riječ je o tome da je kod, kao u umjetničkom djelu, sam po sebi značenje.
On navuče šlafrok i papuče te siđe kat niže. Sve oko njega doima se čudno. Jesu li oči njegove žene obnoć malčice ispale iz ravnoteže pa je sad desno za dlaku niže od lijevoga, ili je riječ o nečemu što nikad prije nije zapazio? Mačak, iz svog ugla, motri ga iz neke sablasne tišine. S ulice dopiru zvukovi, poznati i tajanstveni u isti mah. San mu inficira javu.
On stane pričati ženi o snu, pomalo sramežljivo, jer zna kako smiješno će joj zvučati prosanjani događaji. Žena sluša, rastreseno kima glavom. On nastoji riječima pridati nešto od težine prisutne u snu. Stiže do same srži priče, do trenutka kada se njegovo usnulo ja probudilo usred mračne šume, među mrmljavim glasovima. Najednom, žena razjapi usta – zar ga kani zamoliti da prestane, viknuti da je ono o čemu joj priča odveć zastrašujuće? Zar će kriknuti? Ne: ona zijevne, snažno, uz kratke nutarnje dahtaje i škljocaj čeljusnih zglobova te na kraju ispusti dug drhtav uzdah i upita ga kani li pojesti ostatak kajgane.
Sanjar se zguri, potišten. Ponudio joj je nešto dragocjeno, a ona je to prezirno odbacila. Kako je moguće da ne osjeća važnost onoga što joj je opisivao? Kako je moguće da ne vidi ogoljela stabla i potamnjeli zrak, ta od sjećanja na nj već tamni i sam zrak oko njih – kako ne čuje mrmljave glasove kao što ih je on čuo? Teškim korakom odvuče se natrag na kat da se spremi za još jedan običan dan. Važna otkrivenja iz prethodne noći počinju se gubiti. To je, na kraju krajeva, bio samo san.
Ali što bi bilo da je – umjesto da prihvati jednostavnu činjenicu kako su naši najzbrkaniji, najuzbudljiviji, najznačajniji snovi dosadni drugima, čak i našim značajnim drugima – što bi bilo da je ženi rekao, Dobro, pokazat ću ti! Sjest ću i opisati taj san tako snažnim i uvjerljivim rečenicama da ćeš ga, kad ih pročitaš, i sama sanjati; vidjet ćeš sebe kako lutaš divljom šumom, u sumrak; i sama ćeš čuti glasove iz sna kako ti kazuju tvoje najtajnovitije tajne.
Ne mogu zamisliti srodniji prikaz od ovoga za proces pisanja romana. Romanopiščev je cilj navesti čitatelja da sanja san - ne samo da čita o njemu nego da ga doista doživi: da ga prosanja; da ispiše roman.
E, da, opasne su to tvrdnje za ovo poslije-religijsko doba – a fundamentalisti, kršćani, muslimani i drugi samo su svjedoci činjenice da je naše doba poslije-religijsko – ljudi pomalo očajnički traže novu vrstu svećenika. A umjetnik općenito i pisac posebice, imaju u sebi nešto svećeničko: beskrajnu predanost svojoj eteričnoj vjeri, mješavinu drskosti i poniznosti, cjelodnevnu posvećenost, ispovjedničku spremnost za skrb o manama i strahovima svjetovnjaka. Pisac pođe u sobu, u tu neprikosnovenu kućnu svetinju nad svetinjama – u radnu sobu - i ostaje u njoj sam, sat za satom, u sablasnoj tišini. S kojim božanstvima ondje komunicira, kakve obrede ozakonjuje? On sigurno zna nešto što drugi, ne-inicirani, ne znaju; sigurno je upućen u mudrost znatno veću od njihove.
To su zablude, dakako. Umjetnik, pisac, ne zna ništa više o velikim pitanjima života i duha nego drugi ljudi – zapravo, on vjerojatno zna manje. U tome je paradoks. Kao što reče Henry James, mi radimo u mraku, činimo što možemo, dajemo što imamo, sve ostalo je ludovanje umjetnosti. A Kafka, uz tužan osmijeh, dodaje: Umjetnik je čovjek koji nema što kazati.
Pisac nije svećenik, nije šaman, nije sveti sanjar. A ipak izvlači svoje djelo iz mračnoga zdenca u kojemu čuči esencijalno ja, strahujući od svjetlosti.
Nemam nikakvu velebnu psihološku teoriju kreativnosti. Ne pretvaram se da znam kako um, svjesno ili na kakav drugi način, prerađuje sirovi materijal svagdašnjeg života u zlato umjetnosti. Sve kad bih i mogao ustanoviti, ne bih to želio učiniti. Neke stvari ne bismo smjeli propitkivati.
Čudan je svijet snova. Sve u njemu u isti je mah stvarno i nestvarno. Može se činiti da najtričavije ili najsmješnije stvari nose golemo značenje, značenje na koje se – a u tome se slažem s Freudom – um u budnom stanju nikad ne bi usudio ukazati ili ih odobriti. U snovima, um izriče svoje istine kroz medij bajkovite besmislenosti. To, mislim, čini i roman.
Pisanje fikcionalne proze mnogo je više nego pričanje priča. Ono je drevna, elementarna potreba koja, kao i san, potječe iz očajničke nužde za dekodiranjem i očuvanjem onoga što je u nama zakopano duboko ispod riječi. U tome je značaj fikcije, opasnost od nje i njezina divota.
John Banville