Graduation Year

2022

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

English

Reader 1

Jordan Kirk

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2022 Layla Elqutami

Abstract

ENTERING THE DREAMER'S REALM — Since before the conception of this project—before even getting to the institutional level that would allow me to begin imagining the conception of this project—a particular line has been stuck ringing (singing!) in my head, has followed me around since the moment I read it, eight years ago: J'ai le cœur sur la main, et la main percée, et la main dans le sac, et le sac est fermé, et mon cœur est pris. My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught. My heart is taken, trapped, seized—caught.

The line is not from any text I am to examine, nor is it at all to do with any of the themes I am to examine, but it is important. Jean Genet wrote this line as an intermediary fragment within his prison novel—prison in the sense that it is a prisoner’s story, but also prison in the sense that he wrote the novel in a prison cell.[1] His captive, Divine, dreams the sentence up. And it struck me then and strikes me still with its impossibility; if one tries to envision the scenario step-by-step, it is more than easily possible for one to get stuck on a single layer of this multi-layered image, losing the dimensionality of the whole. The wounded hand/heart duo is present in the mind, but once one mentally places the hand in the bag, the heart disappears. This is the bag shutting; the first, initial image is lost, this core that is the cœur. I still wonder—how to return to the heart, how to trace back the whole to sit with an internal, hidden thing? How to have the heart back in the hand, unpierced?

This is, in essence, the same eternal problem of the dream (which has similarly long-perplexed me). By definition, the dream as an experience is ephemeral, both in its content and its form. Boundaries between one dream and another are blurred; objects disappear and appear without logic. Time, money, and actually most all oppressive pseudo-capitalist nightmare constraints that exist in our perceivable waking realities are made into mere jokes in the dream (the dream is not labor). What more, to attempt to transmit one’s own dream-experience to another is to fail already in translation. We lose something essential when we dream, lose even more when we circulate the dream (though this occurs on a different plane), but we remain ever aware of the layers that once held that essential something in place, even if it is only a fuzzy remembrance.

I mention all this because I think it is simple (and becoming simpler) to write off that which is confusing and nonsensical, to accept that what is hidden is hidden for a valid reason, like evolutionary preparation or housing the urges of the unconscious mind. Or, in literature: the less popular and far more dense texts from authors who go out of their way to specially build these hand/heart/bag scenarios, to put something not directly in the reader’s eyeline but hidden deep within, say, a timeline of three-hundred years, or a heartbroken dream of a dream, or a perverse Catholic prayer. The texts featured in this thesis are such texts: two poems of Geoffrey Chaucer’s, The House of Fame and The Book of the Duchess, as well as two novels, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. I did not come to these texts primed with Genet’s line expressly in mind, but I did arrive back at each of them, individually, when the urge to pick apart the dream arose in me.

It was in studying these texts that the dream’s definition unfurled itself into more than what a dream supposedly can be, and I realized that the multilayered structure—“structure”—(already it threatens to slip away)—of the dream is present in any realm of the imaginal. This is, of course, the realm of all literature. Literature becomes through dreaming, perhaps is dreaming; to dream something up is a creation not unlike writing a story or a poem. The thing about stories and poems is that they are also, like dreams, containers, which may possibly house other dreams, which house other dreams, et cetera. It is a practice of radical enacting. Anything can happen when boundaries are continuously lost and forgotten, and the text remains fascinating all the while, perhaps because these boundaries are eschewed. In this way, it is easy to celebrate confusions of copia, the ever abundance of possibility not allowed by steady consciousness—puppies can will themselves in and out of being, and a modern Parisian girl can become the Virgin Mary—this can is resounding, the adding and adding of layers atop the hand’s heart. The question will always remain, however—if the lost heart is again redeemable. If the dream has a reliable center. If the dream is so expansive that waking life takes on its qualities. If waking life can be manipulated like a dream. If the waking life is the waking life of a fiction’s non-presence.

The following chapters will not all feature dreams as one might typically know them, but they will all feature dreams in the sense that the veils of trance will be drawn back, not necessarily always in search of the metaphorical heart itself, but always in accounting for the impossible steps beyond the heart. I imagine turning the bag inside-out, the poems and the stories, too. What will tumble out are real-world things—alchemy, psychology, heartbreak, to name only a few—but I urge the reader to engage in an exercise of perception. Keep, while reading, the nature of the dream in mind, even when the fact of the dream appears elusive or irrelevant. Remember that you are bound, in a container, that is the dream, that is literature, that is all text, and the following texts, and the text you are reading right now. You are solitary, as a dreamer is, unable to share outside of yourself the complete experience you face. Remember the heart in your hand; remember each ensuing movement.

[1] Twice—a guard burned his first draft.

Download

This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

Share

COinS