Problems with Dream Logic

These are notes on "The Book of Communities" (1974), first of the trilogy translated in this book.

1. The layout of the pages

Llansol (pronounced, roughly, Yensol) has been compared to Clarice Lispector and, more distantly, to Pessoa and, still more distantly, to Dickinson (whom Llansol translated). One striking similarity with Dickinson is the odd gaps in Llansol's paragraphs, which are like Dickinson's increasingly wayward dashes:

...they laughed, they listened to the voice that slowly read what
they had written and, in the end, even imitated their laughter you
must know that a soul laughter must generally pass first
through two nights that the mystics call purgations laughter or

...

never again bring me a message that doesn't know how to tell me
what I want. The door closed with a soft
disturbance of air
which agitated the scarf
which wrote to look for the book; a short phrase, once found, was lost
again... [18-19]

(In these excerpts, you have to imagine the words "what," "you," "first," "or," "me," and "lost" are right-justified.) The text in general is right-justified, but with gaps, and at times it breaks into shorter left-justified lines, mimicking blank verse. As in Dickinson's dashes, some of these gaps make sense ("laughter" does), and others are difficult to interpret. The effect isn't so much prose alternating with poetry as prose broken by thoughts that have not been written. (I wonder if any of Dickinson's dashes can be read that way.)

2. Dramatis personae

In the book, Ana wanders around her house, and through landscapes, in the intermittent company of a half-dozen other people: St. John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz); the early 16th c. German reformer Thomas Müntzer; Henry Suso, the 14th c. German mystic; Meister Eckhart, the early 14th c. German mystic; and Nietzsche. Sometimes these characters are people, and other times they are animals, and a loosely dream-like logic is maintained throughout. The main character, Ana de Mercado y Peñalosa, funded the tomb of St. John of the Cross in Segovia, and may have been the woman he said he loved in the poem "Llama de amor viva."

The presence in the book of an unknown person (Ana) together with well-known people (St. John of the Cross, Eckhart, Suso, Nietzsche) and several perhaps less-known people (Müntzer) makes for a dream-like atmosphere. At one point Ana shaves Nietzsche's moustache (she describes one of the photographs taken lae in his life) and his head, and he falls asleep on top of her. Other characters are more ethereal or surreal. Müntzer was beheaded, and his head falls into various scenes.

The entire book is about writing, and in a sense all the characters are writing, or thinking of writing. Writing takes places in memories, on paper, as metaphors of light and water. And as Benjamin Moser notes in the Afterword, there is a remendous loneliness in the book: it was written in exile, in Brussels, and its author had little hope anyone would ever read it.

All this is makes for a memorable combination: disparate historical characters, most of them mystics or theologians, and a waking dream of solitude disarticulated by unexplained gaps.

3. Issues with the dream logic

The problem, for me, happens whenever any of the characters is named, which happens several times on some pages. With a few exceptions, Llansol does not have her historical characters quote their own writing, and none behave in ways that can be connected to what they wrote. All of them drift in and out of the narrator's imagination with equal freedom. This wouldn't be an issue if I hadn't read all of them (except Müntzer), so their proper names conjure many specific ideas, images, tones, voices, problems, and cadences, none of which are used by Llansol. She seems to have read only "Zarathustra" among Nietzsche's books, and I can't be sure what she has read of St. John, Eckhart, or Suso.

In an abstract sense this shouldn't matter, because what counts is what they say and do in the novel: but it does matter, because readers will bring their own knowledge with them, and that will be continuously unaccountably distracting. On the other hand, if Llansol had used only Ana's name, or perhaps only Müntzer's (who has read him, or even read about him? Scholars of the Reformation?), then the oddity of the book would be reduced, and it would be less memorable.

A solution might have been to quote just selected words from each writer: that would have signaled to readers that those writers were included for particular lines or images. Alternatively, the writers might have behaved more differently from one another, signaling the author's interests in their imagined presences. As it is, they are mainly walking proper name tags. That logic works in dreams, where a Meister Eckhart might make an appearance without needing to explain himself, but not in novels, where an actual public, no matter how distant from the author's life, is waiting to know whether they are included in the author's dream, or merely ignored.… (mehr)