Cecily's Reviews > Dream Story

“A game of gallantry, seduction, resistance and fulfilment” with “a whiff of freedom, danger, and adventure”.
That’s the intention, anyway.

Many editions have one of Klimt’s golden paintings on the cover: a mystical, sexual enticement that seems to fit the dreamy, steamy story. At first. But recreate those pictures with real people, as above, and they become disturbing in a way that is far more appropriate to the full dark arc of the story.

This novella takes place over barely 48 hours. It opens with an idyllic family scene and fond reference to the frisson of flirting at a masked ball the night before. But masks rarely symbolise anything benign, especially not black masks...

Fidelity, Temptation, and Truth

If we promise and expect fidelity, we’re usually thinking of sexual exclusivity, but the word also means truth, in the sense of a full and accurate recreation or reportage.

• Where does honest confession of sexual infidelity - real or imagined - fit?

• Is relishing the fantasy of betrayal as bad as committing it in the flesh, as the Bible says?

• Is seeking temptation, but not submitting to it, dishonourable, dangerous, or brave?

• Is true love unconditional, or is that an impossibility?
Love of one’s child would probably survive their deliberate harm of one’s partner, but would the converse be true?

• What if both partners get a thrill from an admission of infidelity?

• What if that flower of arousal then ripens into the toxic fruit of jealousy?

Truth… and Dare?

“Neither the reality of a single night nor even of a person’s entire life can be equated with the full truth about his innermost being.”

Deep, honest, and frequent communication is oft cited as the key to a happy long-term relationship, including sharing (though not necessarily carrying out) fantasies.

“With self-tormenting anxiety and sordid curiosity, each sought to coax admissions from the other.”

Such truths can be exciting and arousing, but are risky too. As Algy says in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (see my review HERE),
“The truth is rarely pure, and never simple”.

Fridolin is unexpectedly disoriented by Albertine’s fairly innocuous fantasy, despite his encouraging her to share it. He embarks on a night of costumes, passwords, clandestine encounters, secret societies, rituals, dire warnings, confusion, revenge, and redemption. When he returns, he finds Albertine laughing in a dream, and when she awakes, he implores her to describe the dream. Just a dream. But such a dream. It changes everything, and what has been said cannot be unsaid.

Fridolin is unmoored and rudderless, as he sets sail on unfamiliar, choppy waters, for another voyage of strange encounters and enquiries, destination unknown.

Dreams may not be “real”, but their effects can be.

The Reality of Dreams

“No dream… is altogether a dream.”

The pages are suffused with the vocabulary of doubt about reality and free will: melancholy enchantment; secrets; magically infused illusions; masks; dreams; brooding menace; intoxication; mysterious people, events, and places; soporific atmospheres; being enveloped by a sultry fragrance, and surrendering to a swelling melody, as if under compulsion. The dark, disorienting, surreal, sexualised mood reminded me of scenes from Kafka.

“Everything was becoming increasingly unreal… His very identity”.

This confusion is not so strange. Boundaries between dreams and reality can be uncomfortably hard to discern. When my mother-in-law recently came round from a week of heavy post-op sedation, she recounted bizarre events as real. A fortnight later, she began to realise they were drug-induced dreams, even though they still felt too real to be dismissed as such. And when reading this, I had a couple of nights of vivid and memorable dreams – to the extent that during one dream, I remembered the dream from the previous night, and wondered if I was dreaming that imagined world again.

The veil is thin; we are easily confused. How much licence does that give us to explore and experiment, in mind - and maybe body?

Fridolin’s adventures appear to be real, in vengeful response to Albertine’s imagined and dreamed exploits. But readers cannot be certain, and I’m not sure the protagonists are either. (Fridolin, a doctor, questions whether he is hallucinating, and later plans to recount what he thinks are real events as if they were dreams, but neither point is definitive.)

That is the intoxicating essence of the story.

Quotes

• Real people “had all withdrawn into the realm of ghosts”.

• “Those trivial encounters became magically and painfully interfused with the treacherous illusion of missed opportunities.”

• “In every woman with whom I thought I was in love, it was always you that I was searching for.”

• “He quickened his pace, as if to escape all forms of responsibility and temptation.”

• “Her blood-red mouth glistened beneath her black lace mask.”

• “The torment of unsatisfied longing for the mysterious woman’s body, whose fragrance still caressed him.”

• “Fridolin’s eyes roved hungrily from sensuous to slender figures, from budding figures to figures in glorious full bloom; and the fact that each of these naked beauties still remained a mystery… transformed his indescribably strong urge to watch into an almost intolerable torment of desire.”

• “Fridolin was intoxicated, and not merely by her presence, her fragrant body and burning red lips, nor by the atmosphere of the room and the aura of lascivious secrets that surrounded him; he was at once thirsty and delirious.”

• “The breeze… even warmer and more springlike, seemed to bring with it a mild fragrance from the distant wakening woods.”

• “The treacherous warm air, pregnant with dangers.”

• “A triumphant sunbeam coming in between the curtains”. The culmination of many allusions to thawing, spring, and liberation.

Notes

• This story was filmed by Stanley Kubrik as Eyes Wide Shut, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. I’ve reviewed and compared the film, via the screenplay HERE, but in summary, the plot is very similar, but the atmosphere is very different.

• A year before Eyes Wide Shut was released, Kidman starred in the premiere of David Hare’s play, The Blue Room, which is based on Schnitzler’s La Ronde. Daily Telegraph theatre critic, Charles Spencer, coined the phrase “theatrical Viagra” for the production.

• It seems appropriate that I reread this around the time Oxford Dictionaries announced “post-truth” as their Word of the Year 2016, albeit from its use in global-political, rather than inter-personal contexts.

• I read this in 2008 and in November 2016. This review replaces my two-sentence one from 2008.

• The image at the top is Inge Prader’s recreation of Klimt’s The Beethoven Frieze. See:
http://flavorwire.com/543239/gustav-k...