I’ll admit to a certain bias for this review. Arthur Schnitzler’s novella is the template for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, one of my favourite movies of all time. The parallels between the text and the film are apparent. Essentially, the film is a beat-for-beat reproduction of Schnitzler’s novel, with two exceptions: Kubrick extends the exposition to create an exhausted dream-like state, and his denouement really dives into the paranoia and suspicion that runs throughout the text.
While Dream Story and its film adaptation aren’t all that different, I still admire the novel’s hypnotic quality. Schnitzler does create an experience that feels like a dream—the central character moves through the world through a number of threads that are temporarily introduced and then dropped without resolution. It’s somewhat like the puzzlebox of Arthur Machen’s 1894 novella The Great God Pan, though Doctor Fridolin’s escapades are more spiralled—when he goes far enough, he does return to formerly dropped threads, almost in order to trace a perfect return.
Let me do a brief retracing of my own here. The novel begins with Fridolin and his wife returning from a masquerade. They then share stories to make one another jealous, implying attractions and could-have-been affairs. Fridolin then spends the night in various travels; he visits a woman whose father, a patient of Fridolin, has just died. He then encounters a sex worker and briefly entertains the idea of gratifying his base urges before leaving. He runs into an old medical school friend who now plays piano; Nachtigall alludes to performing at a secret party and Fridolin conspires to gain entry, goes to a costume shop, witnesses a peculiar orgy, has a woman sacrifice herself for his transgressions, and then retraces his steps to find that people whom he had encountered the previous night have been disappeared. Nachtigall left his hotel in the early hours of the morning alongside two ominous men. The sex worker is now ‘away’, likely also removed by shadowy figures.
The novel does not lead to an easy resolution. Who, for instance, was the masked woman who warned Fridolin and sacrificed herself for him? Was she the sex worker? Is it in any way determinate? Schnitzler’s approach is pretty clever, actually. The novel’s themes are really centred upon delayed or unfulfilled gratification: the possible affairs that pass unconsummated, the storylines that lead nowhere, Fridolin’s inability to find sexual gratification at the orgy, and so on. Schnitzler fully knows what he’s doing and his central character remains oblivious to the pitfalls of his mindset:
“Fridolin felt intoxicated, not only with her, her fragrant body and her red-glowing mouth—not only with the atmosphere of this room and the voluptuous mysteries that surrounded him—he was intoxicated, his thirst unsatisfied, with all the experiences of the night, none of which had come to a satisfactory conclusion. He was intoxicated with himself, with his boldness, the change he felt in himself, and he touched the veil which was wound around her head, as though he intended to remove it “ (32).
Fridolin recognizes a lack of a “satisfactory conclusion,” and that propels him into more and more danger. There’s a selfishness to his behaviour where Fridolin puts others at risk in the pursuit of a narratological orgasm of sorts. When the events he experiences lack conclusion, he sees the events as a test. For instance, when he’s at the party uninvited he thinks all of the threats and warnings are a test to measure his boldness. Even after the others disappear and he returns to the house, he is provided with a note that says it is his second warning to stop investigating. How does he interpret it? Well it doesn’t say last warning, so therefore it must not be that serious. Fridolin is so driven towards a certain end that he even says he would rather be stabbed to death by a tramp than leave the mystery unsolved. He needs release at any cost, even if solving the mystery will destroy him and his family.
There were a few other interesting choices that added to the dream-like quality of the novella. One was that everything seemed so automatic. Fridolin is drawn towards the interior of the mansion where the cult-like orgy takes place. Despite warnings, he moves forward and “the main door opened automatically, and as if driven by some invisible force, he hurried out” (36). There are at least a few instances where doors seem to open automatically and present choices to Fridolin that he follows automatically, as well. It actually reminds me a little of Freud’s discussion of automata and the dream logic that draws people forward via their unconscious.
The other component that evokes dreams to me is Freud’s claim that dreams serve as wish fulfilment. Everyone Fridolin encounters seems to be in love with him or at the very least attracted to him. From his dead patient’s daughter who allegedly loves him despite being engaged, to the costume maker’s child daughter, to the woman at the party—everyone seems obsessed with Fridolin for no apparent reason. There’s an underlying eros charging almost every moment of the text; it’s kind of like reading Murakami but here it mostly feels less icky (except the part with the child). That also carries over into Eyes Wide Shut.
It’s interesting to consider, actually, some of the things that carry over from the text to the film. One more subtle change is the password to enter the party. In the Kubrick film, the password is Fidelio, which is a more general reference to the idea of fidelity. In Dream Story, the password is “Denmark,” which is where Fridolin’s wife’s transgressive fantasies took place about a man they saw on the beach. In the case of the novella, the password does indeed seem like a more personalized nightmare, as if his wife were somehow wrapped up in Fridolin’s strange adventures.
Another wild connection is that Schnitzler’s work is continually referencing disembodied sound. Laughter often emerges from a sourceless nowhere. In one moment, Fridolin is watching his wife sleep and she begins to laugh “so shrilly that he became frightened” (39). Laughter is often disembodied and then here she’s not conscious and yet the laughter permeates the room. In turn, Fridolin “involuntarily” called her name. It’s yet one more layer that adds to the dreamlike component of the text. I’m almost positive Kubrick latched on to that motif for the film. In Eyes Wide Shut, the masked woman’s voice does not seem to match any of the other women we’ve seen on screen. It’s a clever way of retaining the ambiguity, but the disembodied voice matches the novella’s spirit. Incidentally, Eyes Wide Shut was released in 1999 and finally in 2019 it was revealed that the voice of the woman was Cate Blanchett, who does not appear in the film. The woman we see nude on screen is not Cate Blanchett, but Blanchett’s voice is dubbed in afterward without any other role in the film. There may be some other explanations (the woman that appears in the scene—Abigail Good—noted that she didn’t have an American accent and offers that as an explanation), but I’m convinced Kubrick is mimicking the surreal nature of the novel.
Anyway,I really liked this book. I love its ominous, surreal, inconclusive approach. The disappearances are more forgotten (like waking from a dream) rather than resolved, and there’s something compelling about that. Granted, I likely wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much had I not fallen in love with Eyes Wide Shut when I saw it years ago, but the novella on its own, while sparse, has some wonderfully mysterious qualities and is a tightly wrought story, despite its lack of resolutions. In the film, Kubrick seems to hint much more directly about how the conspiracy has played out off-screen. In the novella, the conclusion takes a different shape and now I feel like now I may need to rewatch the movie (Fridolin’s wife in the novel recounts a dream where her husband gets executed—does that happen in the movie? Why or why not?).
Both of these texts leave me riddled with doubt and uncertainty, no matter how often I engage with the “same” story. It’s that which will retain the longevity of these works. The mystery is always the most fun part, anyway.
Happy reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment