Jan-Maat's Reviews > Dream Story

The big shock and surprise for me about this story was that it written in 1926, it feels like something that belongs to an era twenty or thirty years earlier, perhaps that is part of the point.

In a cafe by chance the main character Doctor Fridolin, meets his old friend Nightingale, Nightingale has a wife and four children back in Lemburg who he supports by playing the piano badly in various shady establishments. The thing is that in 1926 Lemburg wasn't Lemburg, it was Lwow and had been for a few years - this type of thing can happen to you if you are a city, you sit around minding your own business then suddenly somebody imposes a change of identity on you - or maybe they reveal your true identity, or allow the potential for a new identity to emerge. Something that seems at first very absolute and stable - literally a fact on the ground, turns out to be insubstantial and provisional and indeed a little while down the road the city would be L'vov, and then L'viv. Is one name, one identity more real, more correct, or did they all co-exist in reality, just that mostly only one is on display at anyone time? Yet the city is a fact. It does exist, it did exist, it will exist, just what it is called changes and each name implies a radically different reality without the reorientation of a single street or even the remodelling of a modest house. To me, that is what the story is about, hello city, are you Lemburg, or Lwow or really L'viv? Or do I perceive a certain L'vovness about your cafes and restaurants? Are all these names just masks? Does the mask hide, does it protect or project?

This is a geographical story, with clearly marked zones and spaces. The Fridolin at the beginning of the story has a safe space, within this space are himself, his wife and their daughter, however nothing happens and as a result of that his space is revealed in fact to be polluted. In the cafe, hard-working Fridolin flicks through the newspapers, he is reassured and settled by what he reads - people are dying horribly in foreign places which he didn't even know existed. He talks to Nightingale. Weird, potentially depraved things happen he asserts, in Romanian castles (view spoiler)[ well obviously, Dracula, electoral fraud, financial insider dealing, Vlad the innumerate bookkeeper - take your pick (hide spoiler)] (out there, a definite place but beyond Fridolin's territory) . In Lemburg there is the wife and child zone, Vienna is the work zone and in the wallet is some money that belongs correctly to Fridolin, a debt is repaid, however Nightingale asserts that Vienna is not what Fridolin is familiar with, no, weird things happen, secret societies, masked faces, naked bodies - everything smells of sex. Fridolin decides he wants in to transition from safe space to a danger zone.

Later Fridolin visits the mortuary, the mortuary we can read as the underworld, traditionally there the hero is given certain and precise guidance. This mortuary is presided over by Doctor Eagle, Fridolin is neither an eagle nor a nightingale, but each attracts him (non-sexually) as representing a certain attitude towards life, science versus sensuality. In a modern world we can read the mortuary as a place of science, definite, precise, analytic. Fridolin looks at a woman. Is she a woman who may have protected him, or not? All he can see is that this woman is dead, the woman he knew was alive, he moves through a space of secret knowledge but within himself finds only doubt and uncertainty.

Fridolin and his wife exchange almost erotic memories, once, says Fridolin, I saw a naked teenaged girl walking down a gangplank early one morning, just as the sun was rising by the seaside. But we look at this and how difficult it is for Fridolin - is she a girl or a woman? Is this virginal innocence or a sexual display that is, frankly whorish? Is this a family holiday and therefore a safe zone, or is it out there in dangerous Denmark?

The answer I feel is, Hello Dr. Freud, also geographic, specifically in that particular zone between the ears, above the tongue and below the scalp. Is there something weird happening out there on the mean streets of Vienna, ought he be frightened that his daughter's bedtime story spills over into his wife's erotic dream, should he fear the removal of the mask? He is bumped against by a member of a student fraternity - harmless accident or evidence of hostility on the street, he turn he suspects both. Can he cope with himself without the constant projection of his own lust on to others? In the end maybe a naked juvenile of the female variety enjoying the privacy of the early morning by the seaside is just that, as a Doctor we might think his duty was to warn her of the dangers of sunburn as a man we know he is doing a not so good a job of repressing his sexuality because it pops up everywhere and troubles him.

It is though a very cold story, oddly enough for a exploration of a man in a certain psychological state - wanting to have sex with all the women but when specific opportunities come his way he turns away, believing with some fierceness that everybody around him is busily having sex almost whereever he goes - and to me it felt like a Freudian word association game- hearse? Death. Death? Sex. Sex? Danger. Danger? Exposure.

Blargh what a lot I've written about a story that didn't even impress me so much, I might eventually learn to be concise. I think Jewishness and Vienna are essential here, Vienna was both a relatively safe space for Jews in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but also a city in which anti-Semitism had become fused into main-stream politics. You might want to pass unnoticed, being exposed, unmasked, might be dangerous. Also, hello Dr. Freud, come in, sit down - I would offer you a cigar but I see you already have one, this the city of the discovery of the unconscious, most of us are too unlike turn of the century Viennese to find Freud congenial any more I guess, but we are considering a culture both interested in atypical human psychological states and in the realisation that what we see isn't what we get, we see the mask that is presented to the world, but beneath the L'viv, is the L'vov, and under that the Lwow, which covers the Lemberg, the mask projects - I am a German city, I am a Polish city, I am a Soviet city, I am a Ukrainian city, but also hides, and hides we might feel, quite reasonably, to protect itself - help, I am confused, I'm not sure who I am, or if I like who I am, or if any of this is real, yet I seem to be substantial - I have streets and schools and public transport.

Whose dream is this story? Fridolin's, his wife's? Vienna's? Ours?