The Dream of Writing (review)

 
A profoundly “other” concept of writing is unfolded in Herschel Farbman’s The Other Night–other than the commonly accepted notions of writing, and other than the subject from which writing is presumed to emerge. Rather, writing comes out of the night: not the night of rest that serves the needs of the day, but the “other night” described by Maurice Blanchot: a night that exists within the one that holds sleepers secure in their beds. Associated with dreaming, it delivers not rest but restlessness. Farbman argues that this restlessness is not only the subject of writing, as in Beckett’s trilogy and in Finnegans Wake, but that it is ultimately the very movement of writing itself.
 
Blanchot, who supplies the book’s title, is also at the heart of its thinking. The book’s second chapter, devoted to Blanchot, provides the terms for Farbman’s extended meditation on the relation between dreaming and writing. For Blanchot, the dream is a waking within sleep–indeed, as Farbman points out, it is this waking-within that prevents the sleeper from succumbing to an all too final rest. In this sense the restlessness of dream maintains a liaison with the waking world. At the same time the restlessness of dream moves, interminably, away from the presumptions that govern the state of waking: the subject’s coherence, the connectedness of thought, the stability of the world’s objects. In the dream, nothing is wholly itself; rather, in Blanchot’s words,
 

 

The dream touches the region where pure resemblance reigns. Everything there is similar; each figure is another one, is similar to another and to yet another and this last to still another. One seeks the original model, wanting to be referred to a point of departure, an initial revelation, but there is none. The dream is the likeness that refers eternally to likeness.
 

(Space 268)

 

This description of dream has a likeness, as well, to the movement of writing, whose point of departure can never be pinned down; it is always already in motion before pen is set to paper. That is to say, writing is never just words being set down on a page. It is not even the idea of the “work” that precedes the attempt to physically transcribe it. It is, rather, the mind’s restless movement between associations and possibilities. At the same time it is the continual ruin of any attempt to hold those connections steady; the restlessness of too many possibilities leads to the impossibility of the work fulfilling itself as an achievement of the day. This goes for both ends of the unstable middle that is writing. The readers of the finished work (of which the author has now become one) find in it not stability but restless movement. Farbman quotes Beckett:

 

Here everything moves, swims, flees, returns, undoes itself, remakes itself.
 
Everything ceases, without cease.
 
That’s what literature is.
 

(Le Monde 35)

 
On the other side of this unstable middle, the side that Blanchot calls (not without irony) “inspiration,” there is likewise no rest to be found. The work emerges from a restless welter of thoughts, to which it is fated to return, with or without the writer’s consent or complicity. “Thoughts,” in fact, is scarcely the right term for what one experiences in the other night, to the degree that it implies a conscious articulation, like that of words themselves. For Blanchot, though, not words but an interminable “murmuring” is to be found in that restless night. Out of that murmuring words may emerge, in somewhat the same way that symptoms may speak of an unconscious content. But no dream interpretation is wholly adequate to that content. Farbman quotes Freud’s famous admission that there is always a “navel” of the dream beyond which analysis cannot follow, a point where the dream joins with the wider world of the unconscious. He might have gone on to the metaphor with which Freud immediately follows this one, a more restless one to be sure, literally dissolving the navel’s implied promise of an origin: the mycelium, a tangled, rhizomic, jelly-like mass that is the (un)root of a mushroom.
 
While we should not flatly equate Blanchot’s “other night” with a reified Unconscious, Freud will naturally come up in any discussion of dreaming–and, it turns out, in Farbman’s discussion of writing. Going beyond what I just called a “likeness” between the movement of a dream and that of writing, Freud asserts in The Interpretation of Dreams that dreams are writing. For him, the images of our dreams are rebuses. They represent not the things of the waking world, but syllables, fragments of words or entire words; and this is a writing that can be read. A strange enough theory, according to Farbman, but one that impels us to reconsider what is meant by “writing”–for Freud, for us. “Without defining the word in a way that would account for all its different uses,” Farbman says, “we can say that the word ‘writing’ is the common name for that kind of image that serves primarily to represent words” (26). This common understanding is shared by Blanchot, that uncommon thinker. In literature, he says, “words … are not signs but images, images of words, and words where things turn into images” (Space 34). Blanchot’s formulation, though, begins to unravel the stability of Farbman’s provisional definition, and to throw us once again into the realm of restlessness. For here everything turns into everything else–words, images, things. If there is a priority here, it must be that of image, image as Blanchot characterizes it in “The Two Versions of the Imaginary”–”pure objectless resemblance,” as Farbman calls it (63). With this pure resemblance we are returned to the region of dream, a region without terminus, one of interminable movement, continually transforming its terms. We can compare Blanchot’s formulation with one of Freud’s. In the dream, Freud says,
 

Thoughts are transformed into images, mainly of a visual sort [what other sort might there be?]; that is to say, word-presentations are taken back to the thing-presentations which correspond to them.
 

(228)

 

This is a much clearer genealogy, but one of the things that Freud’s restatement makes clear is that he is here equating “thoughts” with “word-presentations.” Yet words are not to be equated with either thoughts or writing in the sense that Farbman is trying to convey, beyond that “common name” that is only a sort of way-station. Something more restless even than words is at stake here. At the end of his chapter on Freud, Farbman writes of the presence of the word within dreams as preceding the dreaming subject; he is not wrong. But his own thinking in the chapter, and in the thinkers he has used to think with, would indicate that the word is…well, not the last word. There is no last word, or even any word at all, at the edges of the dream–only interminable movement and inarticulate murmuring. And this too is writing.

 
Nor does this interminable writing cease with the day. As Farbman elegantly puts it, “What wakes when the ‘I’ sleeps doesn’t sleep when the ‘I’ wakes. Restless night stretches on after night” (5). There is no more powerful depiction of this than Beckett’s novel The Unnamable. A sort of extreme phenomenological reduction, it strips away nearly everything from the narrating consciousness except that consciousness. That is to say, there is almost nothing to be conscious of except the movement of the narrator’s mind. Fixed within an undefined gray milieu, seeing nothing but that grayness, unable to move his gaze to the left or right, the narrator can only look within to a realm of interminable movement. If there are no physical objects in this realm–there is even doubt about whether the narrator has a body or a head—there is still, somehow, a knowledge of objects, perhaps residual. These become counters in a game without definite rules or boundaries, a game that has been played by Beckett before this, the “insane game of literature,” as Mallarmé called it. Stories, and memories of stories, float half-formulated through the narrating consciousness, and their protagonists often have the names of Beckett’s own characters: Molloy, Watt, Malone. Yet these vague attempts at story continually dissolve back into the region from which they come, a region of voices and “murmuring.” This is not a dream, and the narrator is not a dreaming subject. Rather, he is a subject stripped down to a restless movement that flows through the night world and the day world alike–though it is obscured during the day by the perceptual impress of objects and by our conscious purposes. We read the world to serve those purposes, but much more is going on than we can be conscious of–as is the case with literal reading. The reading of a book, Valéry has said, is “nothing but a continuous commentary, a succession of notes escaping from the inner voice” (80-81). This “continuous commentary” is also an aspect of the restlessness that Farbman is dealing with here: “a more or less fantastic commentary,” as Nietzsche puts it, “on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text” (119-20). “What literature is” according to Beckett is also what we are.
 
But since literature is described by Beckett as an interminable restlessness, we must consider whether the subject has a place in all this movement. “Place,” Farbman reminds us, has been associated by both Levinas and Blanchot with the fixity that is the condition of sleep. The paradox is that within sleep’s fixity is its opposite, the restlessness of dream. It would seem, then, that within dreams the subject has no place. And if that is the case, it is only a short step to Blanchot’s assertion that in the dream “the subject becomes absence” (Writing 51). This somewhat theatrical statement lends itself all too readily to misunderstanding. For if the subject is only an absence, how can the experience of the dream take place at all? Doesn’t the subject need to have a place within dream if dreams are to be experienced? This is the argument of one philosopher, Norman Malcolm, for whom dreams are always a past-tense phenomenon, a matter of remembering and telling, and thus are never present except as hallucinations; nor is the dreamer present in the dream any more than what is dreamt is. Farbman resists this analysis through a comparison (Blanchot’s comparison) of dream to death. It is logically impossible for the dissolution of the self in death to be experienced by that self. Nevertheless this may take place, in Blanchot’s subtle sense of “experience,” and precisely because of an element of impossibility:
 

Impossibility is nothing other than the mark of what we so readily call experience, for there is experience in the strict sense only when something radically other is in play.
 

(Infinite 46)

 
Responding to Farbman’s implicit invitation to think with him on these matters, we might consider the differences between waking and dreaming states as centripetal and centrifugal. No matter how much one engages with an other in the waking state, that experience must always be pulled back to a putative core that is the subject. In the dreaming state, the experience may be made up of recognizable elements from one’s waking day or waking life, but we have an “unspooling”¹ that is not only centrifugal but interminable in Blanchot’s sense. This movement loosens the core that defines the waking subject, but it is still a subject that is loosened. At what point in this loosening can it be said, then, that the subject is truly absent? Jean-Luc Nancy comments on Hegel’s handling of sleep:
 

Sleepy, dreamy subjectivity remains at the stage of the abstract universality of representations, as a “tableau of mere images,” and does not grasp the “concrete totality of determinations.” Thus the subject itself can consist only in “the being-for-self of the waking soul.” [Before this] there was no subject but only the lethargic essence of subjectivity.
 

(14)

 

The distinction between the “subject” and the “essence of subjectivity” may not be so easily made; it may have more to do with the “lethargic” than with anything else. Dreamers are lethargic in a sense that Jacques Lacan gestures toward when he writes, “Our position in the dream is profoundly that of someone who does not see. The subject does not see where it is leading, he follows” (75). There is movement, a movement that is leading what Lacan here calls a subject; but since that subject grasps no “concrete totality” and has relinquished its “being-for-itself,” it is at the same time a non-subject, if not a completely absent one.

 
With terms such as these we attempt to grasp an ambiguous experience that is profoundly other than those of our waking hours, even though it undoubtedly underlies them. Farbman’s analysis applies in a particularly intense way to writing and to the nature of literature; but it might well apply to any experience that is stripped of readymade frameworks and assumptions to reveal a radical otherness. So radical is this otherness that it can only be described with words like “impossible” and interminable.” That is to say, Farbman’s book must necessarily fail–in a way that is worth any number of more easily attained successes. It stretches toward something that is in the end beyond words, something that words can only gesture toward. Literature can try to evoke it, and at times comes uncannily close to doing so–literature, and the kind of passionate theorizing that Farbman gives us here. This book about restlessness generates a restlessness of its own, a ferment of ideas, hints, and possibilities. Adventurous and subtle, The Other Night should be read by anyone who is interested in thinking otherwise.