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
L’écriture et le rêve
Un homme se réveille le matin, pris de vertige, étourdi. En pyjama, debout dans l’obscurité d’une chambre aux rideaux tirés, il cligne des yeux, il a l’impression en quelque sorte qu’il n’est pas là en personne, ni bien réel ni pleinement conscient. C’est comme si cette autre version de lui-même, bien alerte celle-là, était restée au lit, et que cette chose debout n’était que son ombre, frêle, plate. Mais quel problème peut-il bien y avoir? Serait-il en train de « couver » quelque chose ? C’est vrai qu’il se sent un peu fébrile. Mais non, il décide que ce qui le tourmente n’est pas un mal physique. Son souci serait plutôt d’ordre mental. Son cerveau lui semble lourd, comme s’il était un peu trop grand pour sa boite crânienne. Et puis soudain, en un éclair, il se souvient du rêve.
C’est un de ces rêves qui semblent devoir durer toute la nuit. Ce rêve l’a absorbé tout entier, son inconscient, son subconscient, sa mémoire, son imagination, dans un effort qui a paru lui demander qu’il s’y jette à corps perdu. Les détails du rêve lui reviennent, ils affluent : étranges, absurdes, terrifiants, chargés d’un poids mystérieux –d’un poids, lui semble-t-il, que ne peuvent supporter que les plus profondes expériences de l’existence, enfin de l’existence éveillée. Et effectivement, toute sa vie, tous les éléments essentiels de sa vie se trouvent en quelque sorte contenus là, dans ce rêve, repliés sur eux-mêmes, bien serrés, comme les pétales d’un bouton de rose. Une vérité fondamentale s’est révélée à lui, dans un langage codé qu’il se sait incapable de déchiffrer. Mais ce déchiffrage n’importe guère, est inutile ; en fait, comme dans une œuvre d’art, ce langage codé constitue en lui-même tout le sens à trouver.
Il enfile sa robe de chambre, ses chaussons et descend. Tout autour de lui semble étrange. Cette légère dissymétrie dans le regard de sa femme, l’œil droit un rien plus bas que le gauche se serait-elle développée du jour au lendemain au cours de la nuit ? Ou bien est-ce seulement qu’il n’avait jamais remarqué ce détail auparavant ? Dans un coin, le chat le fixe d’un œil inquiétant. Des bruits lui parviennent de la rue, à la fois familiers et mystérieux. Le rêve semble contaminer son monde diurne.
Il commence à raconter son rêve à sa femme, un peu honteux, car il sait à quel point les évènements dont il a rêvé lui paraitront idiots. Sa femme l’écoute, hochant la tête de manière distraite. Il tente de conférer à ses mots autant de force qu’ils avaient dans son rêve. Il arrive au moment-clef, quand son être onirique se réveille au beau milieu d’une forêt obscure, parmi des voix qui murmurent. Soudain sa femme ouvre grand la bouche, va-t-elle le supplier d’arrêter, va-t-elle s’écrier qu’elle trouve tout ce qu’il lui raconte trop effrayant, va-t-elle pousser un cri ? Non : elle bâille, de toutes ses forces, en aspirant l’air par petites saccades, à s’en décrocher la mâchoire, pour finir dans un long soupir frissonnant. Elle lui demande s’il veut finir les restes d’œufs brouillés.
Soudain abattu, le rêveur baisse la tête. Il voulait faire un don précieux et on l’a méprisé. Comment sa femme peut-elle ne pas comprendre l’importance de ce qu’il est en train de lui raconter ? Comment peut-elle ne pas voir les arbres nus et ce décor plongé dans l’obscurité, dont le simple souvenir à présent est justement en train d’obscurcir l’air alentour –comment peut-elle ne pas entendre les voix qui murmurent, tout comme il les a entendues lui ? Il retourne à l’étage d’un pas lourd, se préparant à une autre journée ordinaire. Les grandes révélations de la nuit commencent à refluer. Ce n’était qu’un rêve après tout.
Mais que se passerait-il si, au lieu d’accepter le simple fait que nos rêves les plus chaotiques, les plus excitants ou les plus chargés de sens sont juste barbants pour les autres – même les êtres les plus chers à nos cœurs–, que se passerait-il donc s’il disait à sa femme : « Bon d’accord, je vais te montrer ! Je vais m’asseoir et expliquer par écrit ce rêve d’une manière si intense et convaincante que si tu lis le texte, toi aussi tu feras le même rêve, toi aussi, tu te retrouveras errant dans les bois sauvages à la tombée de la nuit, toi aussi tu entendras les voix en rêve te révélant tes secrets les plus intimes. »
Il ne me vient à l’esprit aucune meilleure analogie pour décrire le processus d’écriture d’un roman. Le but du romancier est de faire en sorte que le lecteur fasse le rêve– pas seulement dans le but d’en faire la lecture mais pour vraiment en faire l’expérience : pour rêver le rêve ; pour écrire le roman.
Cela dit, ces affirmations sont dangereuses. En cette époque post-religieuse –et les fondamentalistes de tous bords, chrétiens, musulmans ou autres, ne font qu’attester que nous vivons à une époque qui a dépassé le religieux– les gens sont désespérément en quête de nouveaux guides spirituels. Et il y a quelque chose autour de l’artiste en général et de l’écrivain en particulier qui rappelle le prêtre : l’adhésion sans cesse renouvelée à une foi éthérée, le mélange d’arrogance et d’humilité, la ferveur quotidienne, l’avidité confessionnelle à s’enquérir des travers et des peurs du commun des mortels. L’écrivain rentre dans une pièce, le saint des saints domestique, inviolable – son étude – et y reste seul, heure après heure dans un silence étrange. Avec quelles divinités communie-t-il, là-dedans, à quels rituels se livre-t-il ? Il sait sûrement quelque chose que les autres, les non-initiés, ne savent pas ; il doit certainement être le détenteur d’une sagesse qui n’est pas à la portée du premier venu.
Ces conceptions sont évidemment illusoires. L’artiste, l’écrivain, n’en sait pas plus sur les grands problèmes de l’existence ou de l’esprit que qui que ce soit –en vérité il en sait probablement moins. Et voilà tout le paradoxe. Comme Henry James l’a expliqué, nous travaillons dans l’obscurité, nous faisons ce que nous pouvons, nous donnons ce que nous avons, le reste n’est que la folie de l’art. Et Kafka d’ajouter d’un rire triste : « L’artiste c’est l’homme qui n’a rien à dire. »
L’écrivain n’est ni un prêtre, ni un shaman, ni un rêveur sacré. Pourtant il tire son œuvre du puits obscur où l’essence de l’être se tapit effrayée par la lumière.
Je n’ai aucune grande théorie psychologique sur la créativité. Je ne prétends pas savoir comment l’esprit, consciemment ou non, transmue le métal brut de la vie quotidienne en l’or de l’art. Et même si j’étais en mesure de le savoir, je ne le souhaiterais pas. Il vaut mieux s’abstenir d’explorer certains domaines.
Le monde des rêves est un drôle d’endroit. Tout y est à la fois réel et irréel. Les choses les plus triviales ou ridicules peuvent y sembler d’une importance démesurée, une importance que – et je serai d’accord avec Freud sur ce point -–- l’esprit éveillé n’oserait jamais suggérer ou reconnaître. Dans les rêves, l’esprit formule ses vérités par le truchement d’un non-sens fabuleux. A mon avis le roman fait de même.
Ecrire de la fiction c’est bien plus que raconter des histoires. C’est un désir ardent, ancien, et élémentaire qui provient, comme le rêve, d’un impératif désespéré de chiffrer et de préserver les choses enfouies en nous profondément, en deçà des mots. C’est là tout le sens, tout le danger et toute la gloire de l’écriture.
Fin.
Translating Banville,
–5 questions raised by the translation of “Fiction and the Dream” into French
1. The very word “fiction” in English is quite generic and comes in handy to refer to literature –all genres included– as well as the adjacent notions of writing, or poetic invention. This broad, ample meaning is quite remarkable in English for instance when one says or talks about “crime fiction” as a genre whereas French has to come up with a very specific label or literary denomination such as “polar”, “roman policier” which involve very precise components and codes. As a matter of fact, “le roman policier” involves a “policier” that is a policeman, an investigator figure whereas in English , the very hyperonymic phrase “crime fiction” may only revolve around a murder or simply a crime without imposing any particular dynamic element or literary ingredient so to speak. That very general meaning, I thought, could only be conveyed through the very activity of writing, not by the generic word in French which is the same as in English that is “fiction”. This is further justified by this extract from the text :
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.
Hence my choice of “écriture” instead of “fiction” in the French translation, which in French is always quite redolent of its root verb ‘feindre’ akin to the notion of dissembling, mimicking etc., as in the English polyptoton feign, “figment” or even “fake” which shares similar roots etc. This option proved all the trickier since the very word “fiction” appears as early as in the title. But eventually, you realize the whole text is more about the process of writing than about fiction proper. Banville acknowledges this when he hypothesizes : “The writing of fiction is far more than the telling of stories” –my emphasis.
2. A key characteristic and asset of Banville’s prose proves to be its capacity to generate fiction while constructing an artistic rendition of reality through various original tropes and mental images. His metaphors are always powerful, his similes baroque. In The Book of Evidence (1989), similes prove as original as evocative; Freddie Montgomery –the narrator– felt “like a a mouse being toyed with by a sleek bored old cat” (21), or “Even as a child [he] seemed to [himself] a traveler who had been delayed in the middle of an urgent journey” (56). There is a couple of metaphors to be found toward the excipit or explicit of the very same novel which are astounding. Here is the unreliable narrator’s final depiction of the human condition : “Time passes. I eat time. I imagine myself a kind of grub, calmly and methodically consuming the future.” (219) The discourses engendered by human agencies –justice, diverse administrations etc.– are called “official fictions” (220, final page). In “Fiction and the Dream”, the same sense of stylistic efficiency through similes and metaphors prevails and pervades the seemingly mundane scenes described by the writer on awakening from his night’s sleep. The problem with original tropes is that their translation may prove difficult or sound awkward precisely due to their unexpected unique quality in the original text. Hence the concise “curtained gloom” is not that easy to convey in French due to the absence of any past participle associated with the word “rideaux” (curtains). A sentence centered on a simile like “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” may also turn out to be bit more challenging to translate, than one may anticipate on the first reading of the text. When you translate a literary text from English to French, you may always profitably ponder over Samuel Beckett’s reflection on the differences and similarities between the two languages. In a 1937 letter to his friend Axel Kaun, Beckett explained:
“It is becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask…Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved?”[1]
Beckett frequently expressed a desire to rid himself of the burden and inherent hackneyed stereotypical associations of traditional English. He claimed he could only get closer to some approximation of the truth beneath the “mask” of English words by freeing himself from all the “irrelevancies” and conditioning of grammar and style, slowly acquired as early as his infancy in and through the medium of his mother tongue. Beckett rightfully believed such excessive profusion and irrelevance of language to be naturally ingrained in English. That is why he began experimenting with French, a language in which he explained, “It is easier to write without style…[because French] had the right weakening effect.” One may object though that the problem is not solely due to the essence of French but to the linguistic straightjacket constituted by the –more often than not frustrating –use of a foreign tongue by a writer. It is probably a fact though, that English is more prone to baroque combinations than French, whose structures and collocations are dictated by a more rigid sense of syntax. For those interested, Anthony Cronin’s pages on French in Beckett’s work are enlightening –see Samuel Beckett, The Last Modernist, London : Flamingo, 1997, pp. 359-361.
3. Sometimes it is the lexical variation typical of English which proves demanding. “Uncanny” or “eerie” may refer to what Freud called “Das Unheimliche”. Incidentally but revealingly, Freud is mentioned towards the end of the text.
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.
Even if French offers a wide variety of possibilities ranging from “étrange” to “bizarre”, without forgetting “déconcertant”, “insolite”, “biscornu”, “singulier” etc., “uncanny” proves near untranslatable as such in a single word. Usually the whole concept of uncanniness is described as “inquiétante étrangeté” or literally “disturbing/disquieting strangeness” in French. The fact that English may borrow from both Germanic and Latin or Greek lexicons to enrich its own vocabulary is to be taken into account to explain the difficulty one is faced with when having to translate a text written by Banville. Doubtless he is an author whose florid, incredibly rich vocabulary often tests the translator’s lexical limits. This text is no exception and lays bare the dual nature not to say schizophrenic nature of both Banville’s style and the English language as a whole complex linguistic system, borrowing from two complementary sources and idiomatic treasure troves : on the one hand “uncanny”, “eerie”, “darksome”… derive from a Saxon concise vocabulary, while “strange”, “mysterious”, “unreal” are more ornately latinate and derive from French. It is an understatement to assert that is an arduous task to convey that sense of verbal wealth and multiplicity. One last instance of this may be found in the simple word “crux” which refers to the most important or serious part of a matter, problem, or argument and comes from the Latin word “crux”, which literally means ‘cross’ or crossroads, implying various notions such as dilemma, ambivalence, decisive moment etc. More often than not, in French, this is rendered through a standard lexicalized metaphor like “le cœur du problème” or literally “the heart of the problem/matter”. But in this text, the idea is more chronological than conceptual or philosophical, hence the choice of “moment-clef” or “key-moment”, which is probably less connoted or figurative than the splendidly expressive “crux”, which happens here to be reminiscent of the whole concept of “kairos” , (Ancient Greek: καιρός), an Ancient Greek word which means the right, critical, or opportune moment. This Greek mythological subtext is not without reminding the reader of Banville’s strongly intertextual 2009 novel The Infinities.
4. More specifically now, detailed physical descriptions are often easier to achieve in English than in French, which is a more abstract and conceptual language than English is. That is why it may turn out to be ever so slightly more strenuous than expected to translate such short and seemingly easy passages as : “[S]he yawns, mightily, with little inward gasps, the hinges of her jaws cracking, and finishes with a long, shivery sigh […]” or “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?” As a conscientious French translator you have to isolate, deconstruct each action or notation carefully and sequentially, to end up finding the adequate idiomatic phrasing in French, where usually abstract generalities are easier to put into words than down-to-earth specificities relating to visual scenes, auditory depictions, simple smells, tastes, perceptions.
5. Now finally, to try and reach some very modest provisional conclusion on the matter of translation, one may remember Banville likes to beware of the whole academic endeavour to make sense of (his) literature. He often tends to regard Academic commentaries as much too sophisticated, while art to him–in a Kafkaesque manner– offers no clear absolute meaning. As he likes to remind us quoting from the novelist from Prague : “The artist is the man who has nothing to say.”
Pace Banville though, a postmodernist concept like “amphibology” is all the same bound to occur to the translator who may logically find it is one of the most striking subtleties lying at the heart of his work and hence one of the main difficulties to address. As the Merriam Webster’s Dictionary goes:
A venerable old word in English, amphibology is from Greek amphibolos (via Late Latin and Latin). Amphibolos, from amphi- ("both") and ballein ("to throw"), literally means "encompassing" or "hitting at both ends"; figuratively it means "ambiguous." Amphibology is an equivocator's friend.
Thus, Banville is a master at rendering artfully and conveying with cunning the ambiguities and contradictions of life through art. As he explains : “[O]ur most chaotic, our most exciting, our most significant dreams are nothing but boring to others, even our significant others […]. Other illustrations of this blatant contradiction or creative paradox range from “the mixture of arrogance and humility” of the writer. In literature, Banville argues : “Everything […] is at once real and unreal […]” where “The most trivial or ridiculous things can seem to carry a tremendous significance”. The faithful translator, who according to the famous Italian saying can but only turn into a traitor at some stage –traduttore traditore sempre–, will have to bear this crucial paradox in mind to try and reflect Banville’s writing philosophy, before contemplating –I was about to say “dreaming of”–embarking upon the perilous task of interpreting his art through another idiom.
Dr Thierry E. ROBIN, University of Western Brittany, France (EA 4249, HCTI)
[1] See Beckett, Samuel, Lois More Overbeck & Martha Dow Fehsenfeld (ed.)The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
John Banville