Suchergebnisse

`Flowers of the sea' is an attempt to respond to the question of dream writing with a different type of gesture. It was written in 2004, coming out of work done in what you might call the field of creative-critical writing, and is part of a series of what I call `legends'. Three of these legends have been published elsewhere, in the Oxford Literary Review, Succour and The Blue Guitar (Tiplady, 2002, 2005, 2007b). The title came from a conversation overheard in Cardiff, Wales, between Hélène Cixous and Sarah Wood. I thought they were talking about the flowers of the sea; they were in fact talking about the flowers of Derrida's Glas. One thing this legend concerns itself with is the links between TV and writing. How do these two connect up, and what does this have to do with the possibility of dream writing? One could write an anthology of televisions in literature. Derrida once commented, for example, that a hotel room without television is worse than a hotel room without water. And Barry MacSweeney also loved television, writing in Letters to Dewey, `And television is eternal, just like books and people and kindness' (MacSweeney, 1999: 40). My legend asks whether televisions really might have this quasi-eternal or even sublime quality to them, whether there is in television a possibility not yet properly taken account of (that we are not aware of when we watch, which makes us watch, which is not to say we should watch more or less). In `Flowers of the sea' the telly is something you can do things with, a bit like the airport chair-telly Alice puts money in at New York airport in Alice in the Cities (1973). The narrator speaks of writing notes on it, praying to it, as if it could not only be turned on and controlled, but somehow played. Long before the internet phenomenon of YouTube, I would contend we were dreaming of playing with TV ourselves, of actually playing television. I play TV, you play TV, we play TV. Playing with television is always playing with vision at a distance (`tele' from the Greek meaning `far off' or `at a distance'). It's a dream of a vision, us dreaming of actually seeing ourselves then doing so, and wanting to repeat that (video more and more quick). Television, in this sense, would be the dream of vision itself, and writing could be imagined as another means of this type of vision. We write, in other words, to see ourselves. Tvgraphy, architelewriting, or dream writing is the only possible writing. If anything can explain the immense popularity of television and its internet myrmidons (YouTube delivering approximately 100 million videos a day), perhaps it is this. (The legend is dedicated, by the way, to someone I can't name, but the whole dream is fully theirs.)

What's in a name? Do names dream? Freud's `science of dreams' and its exploration of dreams in terms of a syntax of rebuses rather than as images implies that dreaming and writing must, at some point, cross paths. Some dreams, however, precipitate insistent and resistant patterns of writing which, like Freud's dream of Irma's injection, leave writing at a loss — lost for words in the face of aporetic moments such as Freud's (much-gazed at) `navel' of dreams. This study proposes to navigate through the navel of dream writing, by reconnecting Freud's work to Fliess, his former friend and colleague, and to the resistant poetics of `fleecing' — a non-orthogonal, anti-textual approach to writing. The science of dreams becomes, from this angle, an uncanny space where science and chance interact and exchange positions.

This article investigates the nature of the difference between the conscious acts of a rational subject and the enigmatic worlds of dream. In particular I am concerned with situations where the dream world is represented as effectively contaminating, surprising or, in more or less severe ways, influencing the world of consciously intended objects. Beginning with Wilfred Bion's explanation of how psychotic patients project parts of their ruined emotional life into their environment through the media of sense and sensation, the article aims to raise a question about these media and their connection to dream art.

This article characterizes diaspora writing as a kind of dream writing, through the reading of two autobiographical works by Mary Antin (1881—1949), a Russian-Jewish immigrant to America. It dreams of the possibility of a `dream shibboleth', a password through which to bypass the law of the tribal shibboleths which condemn migrants to the border and the never-ending process of self-translation. It is the immigrants' wish to survive and make a home wherever they happen to land that makes their nightly adventure a scene of dream writing, in which the scars of border-crossing magically turn themselves into rich and nutritious seeds which aid their journey.

This paper will suggest that du Chaillu's Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa can be read as a book which presents to the reader a series of dream scenes that centre on the figures of gorillas, cannibals and negroes. I will argue that, by thus positioning himself as a subject who experiences West Africa as if it were a dream, du Chaillu brings back from his interior explorations not only scientific knowledge, but also dream knowledge, and that these two ways of knowing Africa are inseparably interwoven.