In Dreams Awake
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| 2001 Space Odyssey |
There is built in into the whole critical project as it existed from the middle of the 18th century on, certain notions of what literature is and does, which seems to me must be qualified if not abandoned at the present time.
As long as one thinks of literature as instructing and delighting—instructing delightfully, delighting instructively—then one tends to judge literature in two ways: for the quality of its ideas… or else, or together,… upon elegance of architectonics—form, structure, and texture, and so forth.
But there’s something else that books do that get’s through that sieve of instruct and/or delight. And I think when we begin to talk about popular literature, we’re driven to talk about the kind of books—there’s no name for this too—which produce ecstasis. This goes back to Longinus, that is to say, books which temporarily release you from the ordinary limits of consciousness. There’s a sentence in Thoreau, some place, in which he says, “the best of all states is to be in dreams awake.”
Great literature lets us have the experience that we have when we dream with a certain control which belongs to a waking state. And if you start doing that, then you talk about myths…
[For example,] why do you think Dracula survived [as a work of literature] though it does not come up to specifications in terms of the quality of its language, its form, and so forth. Then I will be forced to invent a new method of talking about books, and I would talk about something called myth, or archetypes… primordial images.
And I would say that certain books which may be low in instruction, and don’t even delight in the ordinary sense of the word… (Horror pornography or sexual pornography is not delight in the ordinary sense of the word.) Some of those books may do something else to you, that is to say, they may touch that essential archetypal, mythological material that is in all of our minds, and which is the one thing that keeps us together. This is a populist line I’m giving you.
What I mean is this: Sometimes it seems to me that almost everything that happens from here on up in our heads, all our conscious ideas, separates us. You and I, if we discussed many things about politics, we might find we disagree. But if we were to swap nightmare stories, I bet we would discover that there are places where we live in the same region. Or good dream stories for that matter.
And I think the emphasis should be put now, for correcting the situation that we have, on the dream material, on the archetypal material, on the primordial images.
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