Dream Story (Traumnovelle) by Arthur Schnitzler
First published in Berlin by S. Fischer Verlag, 1926. Several English translations exist, including by Otto P. Schinnerer, J.M.Q. Davies, and Josef Bochs. Alternate English titles include Rhapsody and Wicked Dreams.
Arthur Schnitzler’s novelle Dream Story may be best known today as the basis of Stanley Kubrick’s last completed film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and with a screenplay written by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael. Although Kubrick shifted the story from imperial Vienna before World War One to 1990s New York City, he conveyed the bizarre and unsettling nature of Schnitzler’s story effectively.
From reviews and commentaries:
• The Times (London), 23 November 1928
It is difficult to say precisely what is the connexion between Mr. Schnitzler’s novel and dreams. It can scarcely be intended that the whole novel should actually be a report of a dream, since not only is there another dream within the book, but it is in general too circumstantial and elaborate. It deals with the remarkable and more or less erotic adventures of a young married doctor in Vienna. Not only are these adventures inexplicable, but they are really meant to be, on the surface, quite pointless. Yet below the surface, they probably have the significance of adventures in dreams, in that they are symbolic and might admit of interpretation. Certain apparently symbolic coincidences in the book are in no other way explicable. But, of course, however skilful in psychoanalysis the reader may chance to be, it is unlikely that he could interpret the story, though he might interpret some of its details, since the symbols can only have reference to something outside the novel, just as dreams themselves have reference to something in the dreamer’s life. Nevertheless, even if the reader makes no attempt at interpretation, the novel is rather exciting, the mystification is amusing, and the hints at a hidden meaning intriguing. It is a not uninteresting literary experiment to exploit the way in which the unconscious mind is supposed to work, and one can only be surprised that it has not been tried before. In the third volume of his collected papers Professor Freud himself has mentioned the psychological penetration of Mr. Schnitzler’s work, so that one may take it that he is a most suitable writer to have made this experiment.
• Ernest Sutherland Bates, Saturday Review of Literature, 23 April 1927
Much of Schnitzler’s work reads as if it were written as a text for Freudian scholars. This is nothing against it. Rather the contrary. Everybody is doing it nowadays, but he does it supremely well. Traumnovelle is a study of the subconscious desires and fears. Doctor Fridolin, happily married, is vaguely haunted by a sense of neglected opportunities outside the home. On a night when this sense is particularly keen he is drawn by fate into a series of fantastic adventures, each of which remains disturbingly unfulfilled. On his return home he learns that his wife in her dreams has fared forth into an erotic world even wilder than anything he had encountered. To be revenged, he decides to complete the unfinished episodes of the night before. In every case he fails, because his sub-conscious inhibitions and fears are even stronger than his desires. He confesses to his wife as she had to him. Then he asks what they shall do now:
She smiled, and after a minute replied; ” I think we ought to be grateful that we have come unharmed out of all our adventures, whether they were real or only a dream.”
“Are you quite sure of that?” he asked.
One feels that Schnitzler, also, is far from sure that his patients are cured. The wife’s dream revealed, besides its romantic urge for the unattainable, a deep-lying feminine jealousy of her husband’s actual attainments, while his adventures equally revealed his inability ever to realize his personality without frustration. Thus the little story is a tragedy, if you will, but it is the blithe tragedy of a delightful puppet show. Dreams and reality mingle; the figures are as if on a tapestry which might any moment be withdrawn showing an entirely diflterent set of actors. Or rather, the whole thing is like a set of Chinese boxes. The characters have dual personalities, they observe their own actions as those of an outsider, and behind them sits Schnitzler, another observer, and behind that Schnitzler sits another Schnitzler, and so on. Thus in this short story we have a glimpse of infinity, an infinity of dissolving mirages.
• Martin Swales, Arthur Schnitzler: A Critical Study, Oxford: 1971
Traumnovelle contains perhaps the most revealing exploration of Schnitzler’s relationship to psycho-analysis, and in it he asserts that position which we see him adopt so often in the aphorisms—that of a pragmatic moralist. It is because of this latter perspective that Schnitzler writes a story which is much more than a case-history. We know that the mature Schnitzler expressed an aversion for those of his early stories where he was concerned with ‘cases’ rather than people…. At the end of Traumnovelle Fridolin and Albertine are left with the disturbing awareness of whole areas of their personality which they can neither understand nor control. And yet, for all the problems their dreams have posed, they have one certainty left: that of the rightness of their everyday lives, of the business of living together as man and wife and bringing up children…. This is, however reticent, Schnitzler’s answer to the moral dilemma with which he concerns himself. It is an answer, but not a resolution.
• Frederic Raphael, from Eyes Wide Open: Memoir of Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut, London: 1999.
In one of our long, long talks, I pointed out to Stanley how thoroughly Schnitzler’s story was impregnated with Jewishness. The students who bump into Fridolin as he walks the streets insult and alarm him (and are, in fact, based on anti-Semitic fraternities of the period). He both despises them and fears that he has funked their insolent challenge. Nachtigall is a ‘typical’ Jew, a wanderer available for hire, outrageous but willing to be blindfolded and made a servant. The episode at the orgy in which Fridolin is literally unmasked, and called on to say who he is, seems to emphasize his alienation from the ‘gentlemen’ who manhandle him. Fridolin is an outsider, like every middle-European Jew.
We will be talking about Dream Story on:
US: Monday, 26 August
8-9PM Eastern
7-8PM Central
6-7PM Mountain
5-6PM Pacific
Australia: Tuesday, 27 August
10-11AM Australian Eastern
9:30-10:30AM Australian Central
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