In Progress

Limin: Literature between Waking and Dreaming

This project deals with liminal or threshold states between waking and sleeping. One such state is hypnagogia, whose name is derived from the Greek words meaning “leading towards sleep.” In this state vivid images arise before the closed eyes, even though one is conscious of being awake. Hypnagogia has been used as a source of creative ideas by people as different as Thomas Edison and the artist Joseph Cornell; it is also used by authors such as Christa Wolf. In this project, though, I am not so much concerned with the creative use of this liminal state as I am with literature that gives a liminal effect –that is, literature that portrays events in such a way that the reader cannot be sure whether these are dreams or waking reality. Franz Kafka is the most famous example of this. “I sleep alongside myself, so to speak,” he wrote in his diary. “I spend the whole night in that state in which a healthy person finds himself for a short while before really falling asleep.” This state is reflected in Kafka’s literary works. Also reflected in these is the influence of the Swiss writer Robert Walser. Walser’s best-known work, Jacob von Gunten, describes a peculiar “school for servants” in such a way that we are constantly hovering between the dynamics of reality and those of dream. Some of the other authors to be considered in this study are Gérard de Nerval, Djuna Barnes, Raymond Queneau, and Peter Handke.

Such liminal literature has important ramifications. First: by walking the line between two modes of human experience, it throws into question the common assumption that these are essentially different. Such thinkers as René Descartes, Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan have all questioned this assumption; their observations will inform this study of literature. Second: the undecidable nature of this kind of literature encourages us to consider the reader’s experience while reading it, and indeed while reading any literature. Continuing an argument begun in my 1999 book Fantasm and Fiction, I will maintain that the reading of fiction is itself a liminal experience, in ways that are parallel to the state between waking and dreaming.