Realism in Dream Literature
PHELPS, ROBERT
Realism in Dream Literature The Visionary Novels of George Macdonald. Ed. by Anne Freemantle. Noonday. 434 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Robert Phelps Contributor to "New Republic,'' "Yale Review,"...
...I don't think any contemporary, not C. S. Lewis, not even Walter de la Mare, has written more persistently or with greater insight about this whole wing of writing than Auden...
...The result is diaries, letters, lyric poetry, and that messiest of literary packages, the novel, all of which concentrate on a very personal "I," private prejudices, self-conscious questions, and tend to smudge everything else...
...Both are about young men whom "the Pantocratic Riddle—Who are you and Why...
...Opposed to dream literature is everything that looks at human experience from approximately six feet above the ground...
...Very few can make their dreams, as we read them, as real as our own...
...and I can think of at least a dozen of his prose pieces, from his analysis of the detective story to his study of Don Quixote, which speculate on one or another of its aspects...
...Reviewed by Robert Phelps Contributor to "New Republic,'' "Yale Review," "Hudson Review'' and other magazines I read somewhere a couple of years ago that our master Auden was about to publish a book of miscellaneous musings called simply Thinks...
...It's a perfect title, and the book would certainly be a fascinating one, for it would probably draw upon that enormous reservoir of reviews, prefaces, essays, lectures and obiter scripta which his "thinking type" •genius, though sworn to Poesy, has been shedding these 25 years...
...One is called Lilith, the other Phantasies, and the dominant influences are Poe's nightmares and Novalis's conviction that "our life is no dream, but it ought to become one...
...Many writers can make up dreams...
...He may be the incarnation of an idea, but, like Hamlet, Mrs...
...has set off in search of greater realities, and both are, as Bunyan said, "delivered under the similitude of a dream...
...Fantasies, or plain tales, or even Auden's pet epithet, heroic quests, would have been less misleading...
...What makes them readable is Macdonald's exceptional gift for dream realism...
...Much of his own poetry, from The Orators to The Age of Anxiety, belongs to its ranks...
...Since any appreciation of Macdonald presupposes a taste for its virtues and limitations, I would like to draw one of Auden's overly neat lines down the middle of the blackboard and try to define them...
...But when he died in 1905 he had also written naturalistic novels, dramatic verse, and such stories as the two which Anne Freemantle now calls "visionary novels...
...As for dream literature in general, I have always suspected that a preference for it, especially one as ingeniously argued as Auden's, amounts to the sort of nostalgia to be simpler than we are which can at once flatter our complexity and relieve us of facing up to it...
...He is more generic than particular...
...The hero, as Auden points out, is distinguished by the fact that "his nature is independent of history...
...Dream literature includes everything which looks at human experience from the sky...
...It sees with the farsighted vision of the mythopoetic imagination, stylizing, diagraming, and generally tidying the scene in the same way the view from an air-plane does...
...The hero is distinguished by the fact that he is at stake every waking moment, and vulnerable to everything that happens to him...
...Dalloway, or the thoughtful first-person who writes the Bucolics in Auden's new book of poems, the idea is contained in him, and his human compound includes any number of others...
...I bring this up not only to remark from the floor that the book is long overdue, but because, in my imaginary version of its contents, a substantial section will deal with the sort of literature to which these "visionary novels" of George Macdonald belong, and which in his introduction Auden calls dream literature...
...How nice, how soothing, to identify with heroes as coherent as Sherlock Holmes and as single-minded as Prince Tamino, neither of whom ever looked into his shaving mirror to find several selves scowling back...
...I think "novels" is a misnomer...
...On the other hand, how pharasaic, how presumptuous, to raise the issue...
...The truth is, I simply prefer diaries to dreams, no matter whose...
...Like Don Giovanni, Li'l Abner, or Auden's own Airman and Tom Rakewell, he is the incarnation of an idea, which wholly contains him...
...George Macdonald is probably best known today as the author of At the Back of the North Wind and similar "children's books" which adults go on reading...
...The result is parables, allegories, fables, fairy tales, which concentrate on types, significant gestures, meaningful acts, and remove everything else...
...It sees with the nearsighted vision of the witness-bearing imagination, scrutinizing, detailing, and generally complicating the scene in the same way a close-up in a mirror does...
...No matter what happens to him, he remains the same...
Vol. 38 • March 1955 • No. 12
