Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 2 Number 2, August 2007
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From “Ethno-Dream” to Hollywood: Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle,
Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and the Problem of “Deterritorialisation”
By
Zhejiang University
I dreamt that I am awake, I dreamt that my
eyes are wide open.
From an inner monologue of Schnitzler’s Der Sekundant
1. Towards a Minor Literature
Deleuze and Guattari refer, in order to establish a linguistic canon for minor literature, to a linguistic model developed by Henri Gobard who distinguishes between four kinds of language: the vernacular (here); the vehicular (everywhere); the referential (over there); the mythical (beyond) (Deleuze & Guattari, p. 43).
Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (2001) is an adoption of Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle (“Dreamnovella,” 1926)#1. Differences appear not so much with regard to the plot but with regard to aesthetic elaborations. As a dream discourse reaching beyond itself, the Traumnovlle is not simply vernacular. At the same time it is not a mythical fairy-tale either (like, say, Hoffmansthal's contemporary Zauberflöte in which all concrete social questions are presented in a stylized and symbolic form that Schnitzler refused). Rejecting all aesthetic idealization and employing even Jewish-Viennese dialect, the Traumnovelle becomes the paradoxical model of a vernacular-mythical ethno-dream. The ethnic world is present almost everywhere but is constantly devalorized because the story takes place in a “fluctuating intermediary land between the conscious and the unconscious.”#2
Kubrick does certainly not simply shift the story from the vernacular Austrian sphere to the vehicular US-American one. The dramatic cinematic language (just like the English language in general) is more than the vehicular English that is so common in the international world today. Cinema-English is a language that draws from a long Hollywood history and must therefore be considered as vehicular-mythical.
2. Dream and Reality
As the title of the novella shows, Schnitzler intended to let the entire narrative appear as a dream. Kubrick and his co-writer Frederic Raphael do not continue this project: the title of their film includes no allusion to “dream” but evokes, in a more indirect way, a psychic state of “auto inspection,” that is of taking, “eyes wide shut,” a thorough look at one’s interior psychic life. On the DVD flap one acknowledges the script’s inspiration to Schnitzler’s “Traumnovelle,” a title which is, curiously, written in German and thus unable to give non-German speakers a clue that here we have to do with a dream in its entirety.
Schnitzler employs complex strategies to show that dream and reality can never be clearly distinguished. The structural model valid for many of his works is that of estrangement, of the shifting of the familiar to the uncanny, and of the replacement of certitude by possibility. In the Traumnovelle, various structural and stylistic devices attempt to blur the dividing line between reality and dream: the frequency of expressions like “lost in dream,” “like in a dream,” “he heard himself in a way one hears oneself in a dream,” “as if everything had been a dream” leaves no doubt that Fridolin’s entire experience, even if it is not a dream in itself, has to be understood as a genuine dream experience. Fridolin and his wife are “traumlos” (dreamless) only during those two morning hours that Schnitzler compresses into a few lines at the very end of the book: when all confessions are made and they are waiting for the next day to come. Their psychic state of dreamless awareness of the world is cancelled at the moment the maid knocks at the door in order to introduce them to a new series of lived dream/reality.
Kubrick/Raphael’s film does not appear as a dream in its totality but rather like a “real” story in which dream sequences have been inserted. For this reason it comes along like a cinematic illustration of a message handed over by the enlightened Dr Freud: If we only manage to carefully inspect our dreams from time to time, the affairs of our waking life will become much more manageable. Mathew Sharpe (a disciple of Dr Lacan) finds that Eyes Wide Shut “casts into relief the malaises haunting our own specifically later capitalist ‘permissive’ mode of organizing sexuality and sexual difference.”#3 Such a criticism is not contained in Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle. Like in all his works, instead of accusing he simply narrates the fleeting impressions yielded by a dissolving world and points out the misunderstandings that such a decline produces.
True, most generally speaking, both Schnitzler and Kubrick criticize a kind of modern enlightened false consciousness, but the way each of them does it is different and this is essential. Schnitzler sees typical fin de siècle bourgeois values like rationality, individuality, progress, self-determination, and integrity in decline in Viennese society. He formulates his criticism by depicting the existential crisis Fridolin undergoes when he is invaded by a sort of reality that overlaps with a dream. However, it would be wrong to conclude that Schnitzler speaks here as the medical doctor that he actually was, and that he is trying to heal Fridolin from his strange syndrome. Unlike Freud, Schnitzler “refused to get to the bottom of dreammatters” and is not eager to produce new scientific insights with the help of literature. In that sense, Schnitzler’s social criticism comes closer to that of the philosophical and pessimistic Freud who remained convinced that a certain feeling of discontent cannot be eliminated within human civilization. #4
Kubrick, on the other hand, seems to be convinced that truth overlaps with scientific reality. Once Bill Harford (played by Tom Cruise) has solved the riddle and revealed the undoing of a late capitalist upper class, the “dreams” he went through are of no further interest: what matters is only their interpretation. Also Fridolin recognizes that the bourgeois order and the certitude of his existence are not more than appearances and lies; but he also recognizes that there is no position outside the dream that would permit him to experience his life in an entirely “real” way. In other words, Fridolin does not discover a reality behind the falseness of dreams. For a moment he might believe to have looked through the deceitful tender atmosphere of their bedroom because, by telling him her dream, Albertine has revealed her “real” nature. He recognizes that she is “faithless, cruel, and treacherous.” But is this “reality?” Certainly not, since the space within which Fridolin believes to discover “the truth about Albertine” is itself no more than the space of another dream.#5
Contrary to Kubrick, who composes a drama with the help of symbolizing characters that act out in a metaphorical way the combat between (false) dreams and (true) reality, Schnitzler wants to see everything as reality, even the dreams. “Modern psychology pays too much attention to metaphors than to psychic realities. The establishment of the I, the super-ego and the id is intelligent but artificial” says Schnitzler.#6 Reality is no certitude but it could be a dream. While we are free to suppose that there is a reality behind every dream we still have to admit that there is no certitude about this either.#7 On the contrary, knowledge is most likely to come to us when we manage to see reality as a dream, that is, when we know, during a flash of a moment, that it is a dream (and perhaps even stay aware of that fact), but still continue dreaming because no doctor can cure us from this disease.
Apart from that, for Schnitzler this is no disease but a benediction. As says Max in Promenade (Spaziergang): “If we want moods to arise it is necessary that senses and thoughts be somehow tired. Should we really be awake all the time, or should we even attain the ideal state of waking in which all senses are able to perceive everything, the waving veil that is put over the distinctness of things and thus produces the tones of our moods, would disappear.”#8
3. From Dream-Time to Drama-Time
While the chronological order of the storyline remains intact in the film, it is obvious that Kubrick/Raphael have changed the rhythm of the temporal narrative structure. Kubrick transforms Schnitzler’s even and indifferently advancing time flow of dream in which many sequences appear as self-contained, into a pulsating (though slow) time flow of a drama.
Schnitzler does not use such a dramatic dialectics. (He might have considered using one but abandoned it at a very early stage. In a 1907 version of the story, Fridolin, after having been thrown out of the manor house, is not sent on a walk through the Viennese suburbs, but dies in a duel.#9) Since his novella Lieutenant Gustl, Schnitzler is the master of “inner monologue” which is almost always linked to an expression of dream. Very often in monologues a dreamlike atmosphere is produced not through the introduction of strange events but through the style of language (Der grüne Kakadu, Zum großen Wurstel, Paracelsus). In the Traumnovelle, the synthetically summarizing style of the narrator’s voice is “heavy,” overly meaningful, solemn and abstract, and evokes powerful omniscience. During the whole first part of the novella, the narrator’s voice remains linked to the style of the sort of 1001 Night fairytale that Fridolin and Albertine read to her daughter right at the beginning of the story.
The Traumnovelle’s “inner monologues” are not really monologues, but third person accounts of complex interior considerations delivered by a paternalist narrator: “Harmless though permanently lurking questions were exchanged against sly and ambiguous answers. None of them could ignore the fact that each was lacking sincerity, which made each of them feel moderately vengeful” (p. 8). The intimate account of the conversation is continued in this style though it gets, towards the end, more and more interspersed with direct speech. A dramatic conflict arises almost when Albertine says: “if you only knew.” For once she speaks with “strange harshness” though the discussion is soon guided by the formal voice of the narrator who quickly prevents the situation from turning into a real conflict.
Kubrick decides to have this drama of existential conflict acted out. In the book Fridolin’s and Albertine’s dialogues remain half-narrated. In the film, Alice’s (played by Nicole Kidman) performance gets immensely “real”: “Millions of years of evolution? Right? Men have to stick it in everyplace they can. But for women, women! It’s just about security, and commitment, and huh, whatever the fuck else! If you men only knew!”
Steven Spielberg affirms in the “Special Features” interview recorded on the DVD that Kubrick liked to “tell stories differently.” What happens when the master-storyteller meets the master of inner monologue? One could expect that the dramatic tension contained in the inner monologue will simply be heightened. The problem with Eyes Wide Shut is that here we have to do not with a simple story but with a dream.
When Georg Wilhelm Pabst approached Schnitzler with a concrete project to adopt the Traumnovelle as a film, Schnitzler suggested to use sound but no language.#10 Kubrick’s decision to render Fridolin’s monologues not in “voice over” but to reproduce them through the visual presence of the Bill Harford can appear as a solution that is in keeping with Schnitzler’s idea. The problem is that Bill Harford, as he is played by Tom Cruise, is widely unable to render Fridolin’s complex inner monologues. True, like Bill Harford, Schnitzler’s Fridolin is only superficially in harmony with the values of his society. However, Fridolin’s self-doubts and inferiority complexes (he feels inferior to Dr. Roediger [Carl in the film]) let him appear much more like a humiliated and ruminating rebel who sublimates his sense of revolution into cynical, mystifying language that suggests (though never reveals) hidden animosities. Bill Harford, on the other hand, is the impeccable good guy who does not seem to hide his real self behind an empty and superficial rhetoric but simply is empty and superficial.#11 Only when he gets angry he is ready to fight in a straightforward manner.
At first sight, both the book and the film open with a description of happy bourgeois family life. However, there is an important difference. In Schnitzler’s work, the parents read a fairytale to her six year old daughter whose text is quoted at the very beginning of the novella without any introduction. Kubrick decides to omit this; instead he lets play a Vienna-style waltz by Shostakovich which, as we surprisingly notice some seconds later, comes from the Harford’s stereo.#12
Then the story starts. Fridolin and Albertine (Bill and Alice in the film) are invited to a ball (a masked ball in the book though not in the film). At the ball, both are brought to the brink of unfaithfulness though in the end nobody transgresses the limits. In the film, these events are shown at length while in the book they are only mentioned in a cryptic and fleeting fashion, not occupying more than fifteen lines. Schnitzler’s distanced and condensed style reinforces here the authority of the meta-narrator.
Kubrick lets not only act out Schnitzler’s allusive remarks but introduces a new series of events together with a new character. Ziegler’s addition is essential: only through Ziegler does it become possible to transform Schnitzler’s vague storyline composed of self-contained and elliptic events into a more cause-effect oriented dialectics able to produce a dramatic constellation.
In the book, Fridolin never sees the girl that is called Mandy in the film. In the film Bill sees her right at the beginning when he is called to assist her medically. When Bill sees her again in the morgue, there is no doubt either about her identity or about his love for her. These things remain formally ambiguous in the book. A further check with Ziegler confirms that the woman is also the one who “sacrificed” herself at the party (though it remains unclear if she really died in that context or if she committed suicide later). In Schnitzler’s novella the girl remains the great unknown factor until the end because Fridolin never saw her without mask. His inquiries do not provide any insight into reality but yet into another mystery that is the product of his dream work: he recognizes that he had always imagined the girl’s face with that of Albertine.
Such vague constellations were unacceptable for the dramatists Kubrick and Raphael: through the addition of the mafia-like Ziegler and his involvement with a girl that the right-minded Bill has to search for and finally finds, the Traumnovelle becomes a detective story with an incorporated romance.
A day after the ball, Fridolin/Bill and Albertine/Alice discuss the events of the preceding night. Suddenly their conversation turns serious: both mention temptations of adultery to which they were submitted during their vacation. These temptations are presented in the form of fleeting attractions and sexual fantasies that do not allow to decide what had really happened but is scheduled as a dream: Albertine starts her “confession” by saying that the whole day she had been laying at the beach “lost in dreams.” Expressions like “experiences delivered to the deceiving semblance of lost opportunities” and the allusion to “dream” that could transfer their lives one day to an unknown destiny, blur the limit between what is real and unreal. The dream effect dedramatises the narrative. When Albertine mentions, just after having made the “confessions,” his former girlfriend in a way “as if it would come out of a dream,” Fridolin feels “threatened.” (“doch wie ein Vorwurf, ja wie eine leise Drohung klang er ihm entgegen” p. 13). It remains unclear why he actually feels threatened.
These are only some examples of how carefully Schnitzler attempts to transform the narrative into a dream narrative by avoiding dramatic conflicts. Instead of hiding Freudian symbols in the discourse he employs sophisticated dreamlike devices. In the book Fridolin tells also his almost-adventure with a fifteen year old girl on the beach in Denmark which gives the dialogue an almost ritual-like symmetry. Kubrick leaves this confession out which lets Alice emerge as the quasi-guilty wife and Bill as rightfully angry husband. In the book, Albertine immediately aims at reconciliation; as a result Fridolin is not really angry but merely “disdainful” at her clumsy attempt at reconciliation (“er verzog spöttisch den Mund,” p. 14).
By suppressing Bill’s confession, Kubrick/Raphael willfully renounces to a further dream effect: later, in the costume rental store, a similar girl appears which produces in Schnitzler’s book a Bergman-like hallucinatory dream effect. (Kubrick does not seem to be fond of such oniric rhyme effects. In the book, the password that Fridolin obtains from Nightingale is ‘Denmark,’ a typically Freudian uncanny allusion to the confessions that he had just heard some hours ago from his wife. Kubrick changes it to ‘Fidelio,’ a lame allusion to the theme of fidelity.)
In the middle of the conversation Fridolin/Bill is called to see a patient. In the film, a confused and troubled Bill rides on a taxi and imagines, in a sort of pictorial inner monologue, pictures of his wife making love to the Danish officer. The images deprive here the story of its dreamlike nature. Alice’s confession gains an ontological expressiveness that annuls Schnitzler’s intended ambiguity (Kubrick seems to have attempted to reduce this very expressiveness by turning these pictures in black and white). In the book there is a long and complex inner monologue that combines elements from all domains of life and reduces the thoughts about the Dane to something subordinate.
From there on Bill/Fridolin undergoes a series of extremely uncanny experiences: the daughter of a patient who has just died surprisingly confesses her love for him while she is standing at her father’s deathbed. Soon afterwards Fridolin/Bill is approached by a prostitute whom he pays without having had sex with her. In Schnitzler’s novella, these events are dreamlike to the extent that they just “happen” and fade out: insufficiently prepared by preceding “real” actions they do not leave palpable traces in the real world either. Like the “confessions” about imaginary sexual adventures in Denmark, they remain in the ambiguous conjunctive sphere of the potential. In the film, there is a real reason why Bill leaves the prostitute: his wife calls him on his mobile phone which makes him kind of wake up from the dream he is in and forces him to face reality. In the book, Fridolin’s decision to leave seems to flow out of the dream itself as it remains largely unexplained from a logical point of view. These, like many other actions in Schnitzler’s book appear like automatic actions. As a consequence, in the film it is “unclear” why Bill goes back to the prostitute on the next day while in the book no real motive is needed: it is just like in a dream.
Continuing his walk through the city, Fridolin/Bill meets his former fellow student Nightingale. Nightingale is about to leave for an obscure party which usually resembles, as he says, a wild orgy. Intrigued, Fridolin/Bill asks for the password which he obtains. In a nearby shop he rents an appropriate costume. He gets entrance to the obscure party and observes ritual-like obscene dances. It is important to point out that in the book these events lack many elements of erotic experience: at Schnitzler’s party, the male dreams of desire cannot be lived out:#13 The gentlemen “seem to practice a purely masochistic ritual in a way that, standing fully dressed in front of the naked women, they push their voyeurism to the limits” (Sebald).#14 Schnitzler’s orgy is an aesthetic dream whereas Kubrick’s is the depiction of a Freudian Wunschtraum (dream of desire).
Fridolin/Bill’s appearance at the party has raised suspicion and he is asked for the second password which he does not know. His life is threatened and he manages to escape only because a woman offers to sacrifice herself in his place. On his return home he wakens Albertine/Alice who tells him a dream that strangely echoes the events that Fridolin/Bill has just been through.
On the next day Fridolin/Bill decides to inquire about what had happened the night before but is not successful. The mystery that troubles him most is the identity of the woman who sacrificed herself for him. When he reads in a newspaper about a certain woman who committed suicide that night, he considers – without having any particular reason to do so – that she could be the woman he is looking for. Fridolin goes to the morgue and is allowed to examine the body but cannot identify her. For Bill things are different: through Ziegler he is finally able to identify the girl.
4. From Ethno-Space to Hollywood
Schnitzler’s story is transferred from fin de siècle Vienna to contemporary Manhattan. Before examining the problems that arise here for literary or cinematic space as such, I would like to reflect upon the consequences that this shift brings about for the Traumnovelle’s cinematic adoption as a genre. No doubt, Schnitzler is linked to Austrian culture like few other authors of his generation. However, in spite of the ethno-components it contains, Schnitzler’s novella is in no way a piece of folk art. In theory, a literary work like the Traumnovelle can be transplanted anywhere; still it seems that a transfer from Vienna to Manhattan has a general consequence for this piece of European culture.
Had the film been made in Vienna as an Austrian film by an Austrian director using the German language, this would have affected not only the cinematic space within the film but also the space in which the film itself is inscribed. As an Austrian or German film launched on the international market, Eyes Wide Shut would occupy exactly that space that Deleuze and Guattari attribute to Minor Literature, that is, to a literature that has to find, far away from the mainstream, “its own point of underdevelopment, its own dialect, its own third-world, its own desert.”#15
Deleuze and Guattari use the concept of “minor literature” in the context of Kafka studies and the literature produced by the German speaking community in Prague. In minor literature, they find, individual affairs are immediately linked to larger, collective and political affairs, constantly producing active solidarity between members of the community (p. 30ff).
There are serious reasons to ask if today’s non-English speaking cinema, as it faces the immense machinery of American cinema, cannot be granted the status of “minor cinema” that the Jews of Prague liked to defend.
Kubrick/Raphael saw no problem in transferring Schnitzler’s socialpathological picture of Vienna to New York.#16 Finally, had not Schnitzler himself insisted that all he depicts is “love and death” which exist in any time and in any space?#17 Schnitzler, as the Austrian antipode of the Czech Kafka, might not have been aware of everything that such thoughts imply. True, love and death exist everywhere, but they exist in another way in minor literature than in major literature. As a proponent of major literature, Schnitzler could not suspect that his novella would one day be transformed into a major film.
Kafka thinks that a minor literature is more apt to elaborate “matter” (Diary 25. Dec. 1911). He could as well have written that it is more apt to elaborate space. I am not talking about idyllic, folk-like and “rustic” space that Kubrick should have produced of Viennese culture. I am rather talking about a particular spatial quality that lets Viennese culture appear as a dream culture; and my point is that this quality can be obtained much better through minor than through major approaches. The reason is that minor literature is dream literature by nature. In minor literature, as Deleuze/Guattari confirm, “the individual affair becomes (…) more necessary, indispensable, blown up like with the microscope to the point that a completely other story acts within it” (p. 30). Is this not also an exact description of the construction of dreams? The space of minor literature is so small that everything becomes important: every matter, as banal as it might look, is able to produce a large story; and when this happens, the story develops in a dreamlike manner: constantly evolving within a space in which everything is not only what it appears to be but connected to the infinite sphere of the unconscious.
Major literature, with its large but more neutral space on the other hand, uses an entirely different spatial aesthetics because here space serves merely as a background for dramatically constructed stories. Of course, also these stories can be dreamlike but they will never employ space itself as a means to produce dreamlike expressions.
Had the Traumnovelle been adapted in the form of minor cinema, Vienna would represent, as it does in the novel, the Abgrund-like space of dream-reality with its own strange logic, laws and associations that are determined by its culture.
Several instances of how space is “told” in the Traumnovelle and in Eyes Wide Shut confirm my hypothesis. As mentioned, the Traumnovelle is not a piece of folk art. True, there is a strong local coloring in the novella, almost like in Lieutenant Gustl, but in the Traumnovelle the ethno-components are constantly mixed with those spheres to which normally only dream has access: to an unconscious reality that remains closed to clichés and prejudices.
Since the Traumnovelle is set in a no-man’s-land just before the breakup of the monarchy and in the postwar years of the republic, any exposition of the local culture of the belle époque is necessarily dreamlike because it belongs almost to the past.#18 Above that, Fridolin’s odyssey takes place within the space of a dream that get subsequently deterritorialized through its inscription in other dreams. The story starts with or as a fairytale, incorporates several accounts of dreams in itself without clearly showing the limits between the first “dream reality” and the subsequent ones (Eric Santner speaks of various Buñuel-like levels surreality).#19 The reader gets sucked into a dream and before he is able to find a way out of it, he gets sucked into another dream. In this sense, the space of the novella becomes a real chôra to the extent that we are confronted with a “dream within a dream.” Reality is seen through dream and dream is seen through reality. However, this constellation, which would normally result in a purely fantastic and abstract experience of space, remains consistently glued to the concrete: to the labyrinthic ethno-space of a decadent Vienna.
Schnitzler’s story begins in an utmost “spaceless” fashion. The fairytale offers no space and the self-sufficient style in which the narrator tells the events that Kubrick/Raphael act out in “real space” (the ball), take place “nowhere.” What follows are memories from the past. Here we are brought to an exotic place that is culturally very different from Vienna: Denmark. A sunny Nordic beach serves as a theatre of both Alberine’s and Fridolin’s adventures and forms a contrast with the dreamlike labyrinthic nightly Vienna. Everything that happens in Denmark counts among those few things in the book that are likely to really have happened. Kubrick does not bother to reproduce this mnemonic space of the real (though it could have created an interesting contrast, in the way in which Tarkovsky inserts the “earth sequences” in the flow of fantastic space scenes of Solaris). Instead Kubrick prefers to instrumentalize the Danish experience to make it a starting point for the film’s dramatic action.
The concrete space of Vienna becomes a point of reference able to pin the chôraic space of this interlocked series of dreams to something concrete and “real” (though the real becomes subsequently dreamlike itself). Two examples: After having said that for Fridolin, “as he was mechanically walking the nightly streets, everything became unreal, even his home, his wife, his child, his profession,” Schnitzler adds: “The town hall clock stroke half past seven” (p. 73). Or: “The people (…) appeared to him as ghostly-unreal. He felt like a runaway; run away not so much from an event as from a melancholic enchantment that he would not allow to get power over him,” immediately followed by: “The snow on the street had melted away, to the left and to the right were piled up little white mounds, the gas flames in the lanterns flickered and from the nearby church it stroke eleven. He decided to pass half an hour in a quit café close to his home and crossed the Town Hall Park” (p. 21).
Concrete geographical indications of Vienna are abundant in the novella (Town Hall Square, University, Josefstadt, several street names) and descriptions of the city are often combined with empathically written meteorological indications. After having left the obscure party in the manor house, Fridolin walks home through the countryside surrounding Vienna. Schnitzler provides a two and a half pages long atmospheric description of the Viennese suburbs through which Fridolin approaches the city in the early morning hours. (In these suburban landscapes Schnitzler had also set some of his most obscure characters: here the Jewish hypnotizer Marco Polo in Die Weissagung created his illusions and Paracelsus made people dream strange things.)
In the film, the switch from one dream sphere to another one is organized in a totally spaceless manner. Bill does not take a walk after having left the party. What matters for Kubrick is not the artistic elaboration of space but the dynamic of a rhythmic scheme able to work in the service of a dramatic dialectics.
Finally it seems that Schnitzler himself has been aware of the spatial tension between major and minor experiences and incorporated them even in the Traumnovelle. When Fridolin scans the headlines of a journal while sitting in a café he suddenly reads: “In some bohemian city German-speaking plates had been torn down. In Constantinople there was a conference on railway constructions in Minor Asia in which participated also Lord Cranford” (p. 27). Through a strange juxtaposition of minor and major affairs Schnitzler creates a spatial dream effect.
Through the subordination of space to drama, Eyes Wide Shut becomes a typical example of major cinema. Had Kubrick followed Schnitzler’s paradoxical juxtaposition of abstract, dreamlike “no-space” and concrete ethno-space, his film would have been an ideal example of minor cinema. Instead Kubrick deterritorialises the Traumnovelle not in order to make of it a piece of dreamlike minor cinema that remains indebted to the “vernacular and beyond.” He transforms it into a piece of major cinema that is the vehicular myth of everybody. Schnitzler’s ethno-dream goes Hollywood.
Notes
1. Arthur Schnitzler: Traumnovelle (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2003).
2. Arthur Schnitzler: Aphorismen und Betrachtungen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1967), p. 455.
3. Mathew Sharpe: “Contemporary Sexuality and its Discontents: On Kubrik’s [sic] Eyes Wide Shut” in Symptoms: Online Journal for Lacan 4 Spring 2003. No page numbers.
4. In spite of their “friendship” which they developed only at a very late stage of their lives Schnitzler remained skeptical of Freud’s intentions (see Ulrich Weinzierl, 82). At the time Schnitzler writes the Traumnovelle, Freud composes The Ego and the Id.
5. This is in keeping with the most important motivations of Schnitzler’s writings in general. In his memories (Jugend in Wien) Schnitzler notes that already as a child he did not consider “the world of the stage as a world of deception and deceit, whose corruption by an unexpected intrusion from the sphere of reality I would have to feel like an insult or as if having been waken from a dream. I rather found that what had opened up here to me was a world of inspirations, disguises, with funny and sad jokes. In a word – I, and certainly no reasonable being even when deeply moved by art, would fail to see the unreal nature of even the highest artistic achievement. This small experience might have contributed, as petty as it was, to the development of my fundamental motive that is the confluence of seriousness and play, life and comedy, truth and lie…” Arthur Schnitzler: Jugend in Wien. Eine Autobiographie (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1981), p. 27. Equally important for Schnitzler are the thoughts of the literary aesthetician Hermann Bahr (See Gotthart Wunberg: “Fin de siècle Wien. Zum bewusstseinsgeschichtlichen Horizont von Schnitzlers Zeitgenossenschaft” in Text und Kritik 4, 138/139, 1998, p. 14ff.). In 1894 Bahr attacked Naturalism and its conception of art as “reality.” At the same time he remained opposed to a decadent art that created nothing but dreams: “Und wieder wurde die Kunst, die eine Weile die Markthalle der Wirklichkeit gewesen, der ‘Tempel des Traumes’. Die Ästhetik drehte sich um” (p. 86).
6. Heinrich Schnitzler, Christian Brandstätter, Reinhard Urbach (eds): Arthur Schnitzler: Sein Leben, sein Werk, seine Zeit (Frankfurt: Fischer 1981), p. 343.
7. “Aphorismen” in Arthur Schnitzler: Sein Leben, sein Werk, seine Zeit, Aphorismus 25 (p. 279): “Ist es dir noch nie begegnet, dass plötzlich in einer grossen Gesellschaft, nachdem du dich eben noch ganz wohl gefühlt und vergnügt befunden, alle Anwesenden dir wie Gespenster und du selbst dir als der einzig Wirkliche unter ihnen allen erschienest? Oder wurdest du noch nie mitten in einem höchst anregenden Gespräch mit einem Freund der völligen Unsinnigkeit all Eurer Worte und der Hoffnungslosigkeit bewusst, einander jemals zu verstehen? Oder ruhtest du noch nie selig in den Armen deiner Geliebten und spürtest mit einem Male untrüglich, dass hinter ihrer Stirne Gedankten spielen, von denen du nichts ahnst? All dies ist schlimmere Einsamkeit als das, was wir gewöhnlich so zu nennen pflegen. Das Alleinsein mit uns selbst.”
8. Schnitzler: “Spaziergang” in Komödiantinnen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1996), p. 69: “Zum Entstehen der Stimmungen ist eine gewisse Müdigkeit der Sinne und der Gedanken notwendig. Wenn wir stets völlig wach wären, oder wenn wir ns gar zu jener idealen Wachheit vorringen könnten, in welcher alle Sinne vollkommen aufnahmefähig wären, so gäbe es jenen wallenden Schleier nicht, welcher sich vor die Deutlichkeit der Dinge legen und uns die Töne unserer Stimmungen bringen.”
9. Dorrit Cohn: “A Triad of Dream-Narratives: Der Tod Georgs, Das Märchen der 672. Nacht, Traumnovelle” in Erke Nielsen (ed.): Vienna 1900: Change and Continuity in Literature, Music, Art and Intellectual History (München: Fink, 1982), note 39.
10. Letter from 20.12.1930 to Heinrich Schnitzler.
11. Certainly Kubrick ironizes here American masculinity (in a way he had done with Ryan O’Neal in Barry Lyndon) by famous American actors in untypical roles.
12. See on this sound effect Michel Chion’s analysis in his book Eyes Wide Shut (London: British Film Institute, 2003).
13. Eric L. Santner: “Of Masters and Slaves, and Other Seducers: Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle” in Modern Austrian Literature 1986 19, 3/4, p. 40.
14. W.G. Sebald: “Das Schrecknis der Liebe. Zu Schnitzlers ‘Traumnovelle’ in Merkur: Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken 1985, 2: 39, p. 128.
15. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari: Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975), p. 33.
16. As a matter of fact, Kubrick’s New York has been filmed in a studio in London and some might argue that he deterritorializes New York by replicating it in London, providing us thus with a dreamlike vision of Manhattan (the same US Post Office Mailbox appears in about five shots during the film). I do not think that this is the point of the film and even if it were, it would not affect my argument concerning the deterritorilization effect leading from Vienna to new York. [My thanks go to an anonymous reviewer of this article who pointed out this problem to me].
17. H.-J. Schrimpf: “Arthur Schnitzlers Traumnovelle” in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philologie 82, 1963, p. 173.
18. Michaela Perlmann: Arthur Schnitzler (Wien: Metzler, 1987), p. 157.
19. Cf. Santner: “As in a Buñuel movie there is no frontier between dream and reality – just different levels of surreality (op. cit. 33).”