I now consider whether dream texts can properly be called narratives. Perhaps no discussion of narrative can proceed without being prefaced by Roland Barthes’ well-known statement:
Numberless are the world’s narratives. First of all in a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed among different substances, as if any material were appropriate for man to entrust his stories to it: narrative can be supported by articulated speech, oral or written, by image, fixed or moving, by gesture, and by the organized mixture of all these substances; it is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, tragedy, comedy, epic, history, pantomime, painting..., stained-glass window, cinema, comic book, news item, conversation. (Barthes 1994:95)
And let dream-text be added to this list.
Various scholars of narratology have contributed what amounts to a definition of narrative. I cite only several, selected on the basis of their potential relevance to the structure of dreams. Toolan (1988:7), for example offers what he terms a “first attempt at a minimalist definition of narrative” as “a perceived sequence of non-randomly connected events”.
Sarbin (1986:9) defines narrative as “a way of organizing episodes, actions, and accounts of actions; it is an achievement that brings together mundane facts and fantastic creations; time and place are incorporated.” For Prince (1982:1), narrative “may be defined as the representation of real or fictive events and situations in a time sequence.” And among the best-known minimalist statements on narrative is surely that of Todorov, who defined narrative as “the shift from one equilibrium to another . . ., separated by a period of imbalance” (1986:328). This statement merits attention, having been a source of disagreement with respect to dreams in States (1988:152):
Dreams do not proceed on such a structure, partly because they do not (at least narratively) begin and end. A dream seems to be a steady disequilibrium, with no functional or thematic interest in solving or rounding out a problem. The narrative of the dream is concerned with ramifications of a tension, ... not with getting me into trouble (or pleasure) and out of it, but with extending the trouble (or pleasure) to the boundaries of the feeling that produced the dream.
While this statement may be characterize certain dreams, it relies on a narrow concept of narrative appropriate to the study of literary texts.3 It also conflicts with Jung’s formulation of the structure of the average dream (for which, see below). But as with the term text, once again it is a broad conception of narrative which permits us to include dreams reports as a type of narrative, for as I will illustrate, dream reports do represent events and situations in a sequence, bringing together both mundane facts and fantastic creations into a perceived sequence of non-randomly connected events, which are characterizable as the shift from one equilibrium to another. It is also worth noting that Barthes (1994:147) saw the dream in contrast to the classical narrative because it is “removed from the logico-temporal order,” while the classical narrative is readable because it contains a sequence of events narrated in an irreversible (logico-temporal) order; yet through the ages the narrative “subverts itself (modernizes itself) by intensifying in its general structure the work of reversibility.”
Before turning to the basic elements of narrative, mention may be made here of the problem of reliance on dream reports in connection with Freud’s secondary revision. Although Freud was concerned not with the gap between the remembered dream and the report of that dream but rather with the “manifest” dream and the supposed latent thoughts that lay concealed behind it, his notion of secondary revision is nevertheless relevant to the question of the dream’s relation to the dream report. Freud wrote that
...we should disregard the apparent coherence between a dream’s constituents as an unessential illusion, and ... trace back the origin of each of its elements on its own account.... a psychical force is at work in dreams which creates this apparent connectedness, which ... submits the material produced by the dream-work to a ‘secondary revision.’ (1900:486)
Freud further explained this process as “the psychical activity which, though it does not appear to accompany the construction of dreams invariably, yet, whenever it does so, is concerned to fuse together elements in a dream which are of a disparate origin into a whole which shall make sense and be without contradiction.” (Freud 1900:496). He identified secondary revision with waking thought, because according to him it behaves in the same way, establishing order in perceptual material, setting up relations in it, and making it “conform to our expectations of an intelligible whole” (Freud 1900:537).
In short, Freud seemed to recognize that the same text-making, narratizing capacity that helps us make sense of waking experience is operative in the dream, and that the dream only achieves an impression of coherence thanks to this capacity. He also assumed that secondary revision operates simultaneously with the other aspects of dream formation (condensation, representability, censorship), and not subsequent to them (Freud 1900:537), which lends support to my claim that text-making, narratizing processes are at work as the dream is created; they are not simply imposed by the linguistic constraints of the dream report.
This view would seem to contradict Hartmann’s (1996:12) statement that in a dream “what is experienced generally is images...”, which leads in turn to the caution that “though we are often forced to work with verbal dream reports we need to keep in mind that these are only attempts to render the dream experience in a preservable and reproducible form.” This warning notwithstanding, I am proceeding under the assumption that there is a narratizing principle at work in the dream formation process which helps to organize perceptual material into a coherent text. I suggest that, while it may be true that “the potential to narratize dreams is as surely wired into the human brain as is the potential to speak language” (Foulkes 1982:276), narratizing is integral to the formation of many dreams, and narrative form is further enhanced and intensified when the dream text is rendered as a verbal report.
Narrative elements
Many dream texts would seem to lend themselves to analysis along the lines developed by narratologists for other sorts of texts. The basic elements of narrative have been put forward by, for example, Chatman (1978), in reference to Todorov’s formulation of the structuralist view of narrative in the 1960s (cf. Barthes 1994:102). Chatman divides narratives into two basic parts, story and discourse.
A story (histoire) [is] the content or chain of events (actions, happenings), plus what may be called the existents (characters, items of setting); and a discourse (discours) ... [is] the expression, the means by which the content is communicated. In simple terms, the story is the what in a narrative that is depicted, discourse is the how. (Chatman 1978:19)
Narrative discourse, in turn, consists of the narrative form (narrative voice, point of view, etc.) and the manifestation of the narrative in a specific medium (Chatman 1978:22).
I will keep to Chatman’s basic formulation of story and discourse, incorporating into it Bal’s (1985) usage of the terms event, actors and to act: “An event is the transition from one state to another state. Actors are agents that perform actions. They are not necessarily human. To act is defined ... as to cause or to experience an event.” (Bal 1985: 5)
Half a century ago, Jung provided a succinct formulation of the structure of the average dream, borrowing from the classification of the elements of dramatic plot found in Aristotle’sPoetics. My focus here will be on the story component of narrative rather than the discourse, and what I will explore will be a blend of ideas gleaned from Jung, Chatman and Bal. Jung identified an opening Exposition phase, consisting of a statement of place, and a statement about the protagonists, and less frequently a statement of time; this phase also often indicates the dreamer’s initial situation. This first phase is followed by the Development of the plot, in which tension develops and the situation in the dream becomes complicated. In the third phase there is a Culmination (peripeteia), in which something decisive occurs or changes completely. The final phase is the Solution or Result (lysis), which shows the final situation; this phase is sometimes lacking (Jung 1974:80-1).
The adequacy of Jung’s formulation for dream reports and its relation to the elements of narrative just mentioned will be taken up in the following section. Here it may be said that Jung’s Exposition phase corresponds roughly to a presentation of the existents of narrative structure (setting, actors) and Jung’s remaining phases, Development, Culmination, and Result, are all aspects of the content of narrative (events acted by actors). In addition to the term actor for agents that perform actions in dreams, I will use the term character to encompass, additionally, animate beings who appear as presences in dreams without acting.
No comments:
Post a Comment