This is by Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931); it was published in 1926; and the German text is available here. The original title is Traumnovelle (Traum as in dream, and Novelle as in something-shorter-than-a-novel). English translations have sometimes gone for Dream Story, but the Otto P. Schinnerer translation from 1927 is entitled Rhapsody, and Josef Bochs's from 2023 is called Wicked Dreams.

As a young student of German, I really liked Schnitzler. I read four of the seven volumes of collected narratives published by S. Fischer Verlag, plus Youth in Vienna, an autobiographical work. All with much profit.

So I was slightly surprised not to immediately take to this one, which I was reading with Henry Eliot's book group.

We open with a quotation about slaves and galleys and a prince in a purple cloak (it's from 1001 Nights, but we don't know that). Then we find that the passage is being read by a small child who is on the brink of going to sleep. Once she has drifted off, her parents, Fridolin and Albertine, resume their discussion of the masked ball they attended the previous night, where they both had mysteriously piquant encounters that came to nothing, but obviously sent their thoughts off in sensual directions. Once started on this track, it's as though they try to outbid each other with revelations of erotically charged moments. Undercurrents of jealousy surface -- not to mention the obvious truth that men and women are very differently placed in this society. But they're interrupted by the maid, who's relaying a request for Fridolin (he's a doctor) to attend a patient.

That opening sets the tone: Exoticism, sleep, storytelling, sex.


A rather restrained cover, compared with some of its successors (many of them drawing heavily on Gustav Klimt, a contemporary of Schnitzler's)

After that introduction, we're off on parallel adventures. Fridolin, ostensibly out there in the world (although you never quite know in this book whether what you're reading is reality or dream) encounters Marianne, the lovelorn daughter of the now-dead patient; a sex worker, Mizzi; a mentally ill young woman, Pierrette, whose father seems horrified that she is being sexually abused by older men; and finally -- at an extremely dodgy and sinister masquerade at a clandestine venue on the outskirts of Vienna -- a strange and beautiful woman who sacrifices herself to rescue him when his fellow-attendees, having realized he's an interloper, threaten him with dire things.

When he finally reels home, in the small hours of the morning, his wife is asleep, and obviously dreaming. When she wakes up, she tells him (bad idea...) about her own in-sleep adventure. Her inner escapade has been even wilder than his. Interestingly, whereas he has been present in several erotically charged environments, and has definitely been tempted, nothing "happens" -- because each time there's an interruption. Albertine's sleep experience suffers no such interruption, and she describes a really trippy encounter involving multiple other couples, and an incomparable feeling "of release, of freedom, of happiness". And that's not all. In her dream, Fridolin is crucified for refusing to betray her by becoming the queen's lover -- at which display of loyalty Albertine laughs.

By comparison, Fridolin thinks, his own experiences seem "ridiculous and insignificant". All right, he resolves, so I'll revisit them all, and this time make SURE that something happens. That can be my revenge. Again, though, every encounter is stymied. Marianne's fiance has come along to claim her; Mizzi has been taken to hospital; Pierrette is in real trouble because her father has "come to another agreement" with her abusers; and it seems the beautiful woman who saved Fridolin yesterday has committed suicide...

He hurries home. Albertine is asleep again. And on his pillow she has placed the mask he had worn the night before, which he had obviously dropped somewhere. The action expresses, to him, "a gentle warning and her readiness to forgive". He's overcome. She wakes up. He tells her everything.


The first US edition (1927)

And then there's a curious little passage that leaves it all very open-ended (this is Schinnerer's translation):

"'What shall we do now, Albertina?'
"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.
"'Just as sure as I am that the reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime, is not the whole truth.'
"'And no dream,' he said with a slight sigh, 'is entirely a dream.'
"'She took his head and pillowed it on her breast. 'Now I suppose we are awake,' she said, 'for a long time to come.'
"He was on the point of saying, 'Forever,' but before he could speak, she laid her finger on his lips and whispered, as if to herself: 'Never inquire into the future.'"

There's a knock at the door; we hear the laughter of the child; a new day has begun.


Schnitzler, aged six (1868)

***

My initial reaction was slightly negative. I don't really like dream sequences in books (as a device, they seem unfair -- authors can do ANYTHING if it's all supposed to be a dream), so I guess that prejudice is already a bit of a disadvantage in a book called Dream Story...

And there's a big question mark hanging over this narrator. We see everything through his eyes, and we often wonder whether what he's telling us is what he WANTS to see rather than what is actually there. All these women who seem to throw themselves at him... Really? And that secret ball, that sounds like the ultimate male fantasy? Women in nuns' costumes who then disrobe, and stand around naked...? It's the kind of urban legend that pops up in lots of cultures.

The gender double standard is also irritating, but of course, that's how it was... Novelist Frederic Raphael (who wrote the Introduction to the Penguin edition, as well as the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's 1999 movie Eyes Wide Shut, which is based on Dream Story) reminds us that men were despised if they didn't take extramarital partners, while women were shamed if they did. Admittedly, Fridolin is at least aware of this disparity. Still, after his wild night, when he apparently runs all over the city in search of the dodgiest encounters, it's a bit much to be so vengeful when Albertine tells him about HER dream.

This dream seems to bring his latent misogynism even more powerfully to the surface. He comments that one of his patients is leading him on: "They are all alike, he thought bitterly, and Albertine is like the rest of them -- if not the worst. I won't live with her any longer. Things can never be the same again." But then, as Gerhard Neumann points out, the story actually subverts the classic maxim: Fridolin actually fails in all his attempted sexual encounters; Albertine, in her dream, experiences no such failure.

More generally, Fridolin is a bit tiresome. When he's not sizing up women, he's trying (ineffectually) to "save" them. He's not lacking in compassion, but he's too aloof, too fearful, too self-centred, to really alleviate anyone's suffering.

On top of all that, I initially felt the ending was a bit of a fizzer... I was wondering all the way through how on earth Schnitzler was going to bring this to a resolution. And then Albertine just forgives him...


Schnitzler, aged 32 (1894)

***

There's no denying, however, that it's a gripping read.

First, you're waiting to see how much trouble Fridolin can manage to get himself into on his hours-long tour of Vienna's night spots...

And there's Gothic aplenty. The costume shop that Pierrette's father owns is extraordinarily creepy (moving between the costumes hanging to left and right, Fridolin feels as though he's walking through a gallery of hanged people who are about to ask each other to dance...). The whole ball scene is weirdly fascinating, and the atmosphere of danger very powerful, especially when he's warned by the woman: "There's still a chance for you to get away. You don't belong here." When he's challenged by the men who have discovered he's an intruder, she saves him by offering some unspecified sacrifice: "I am ready to redeem him." It is all very shuddery.

Then there's the ride home in that mourning-coach; its closed, opaque windows and unopenable doors surely make it the best Gothic carriage ever... His frantic hunt for the woman takes us into the realms of the whodunnit: Is she the woman whose death is reported in the papers?

And almost in a nod to vampiredom, there's the visit to the morgue, in which Fridolin really does seem to fall into some kind of necrophiliac trance. (Schnitzler was himself a doctor, and must surely have also been familiar with Gottfried Benn's Morgue cycle.)


Palermo, 2024. Schnitzler was here in April 1926. And how do I know that? Because of this totally amazing resource, which has the most adorable name (Wienerschnitzler), and documents, on the basis of Schnitzler's diaries and correspondence, over 47,000 stays at almost 4,950 locations...

***

Once you've got as far as acknowledging you've enjoyed reading something, it's only one step further to start appreciating Schnitzler's artistry, and his ability to reflect the age he lived in.

Masterfully handled is the way the narrative constantly hovers between reality and unreality/surreality. Fridolin himself often wonders whether he's dreaming, or whether he's feverish -- after all that child with diphtheria did cough in his face... Ernest Sutherland Bates, in the 1927 critique quoted here, remarks: "Dreams and reality mingle; the figures are as if on a tapestry which might any moment be withdrawn showing an entirely different 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." Another contemporary reviewer also admires this quality: "The borderland between illusion and reality is wrapped in shadow so artistically that we never know exactly whether Dr. Fridolin actually experienced the fantastic happenings of that night, when his senses were still pulsing from the unaccustomed excitement of the carnival, or whether the visions he sees are merely the figments of his yearnings."

This blogger also notes that for a short book, it really packs in the salient themes: The effect of story-telling; the omnipresence of death; the reckless desire to wander; "the eternal feminine the hero searches for in every alluring female"; the world as a stage...



Frederic Raphael also points out in that Introduction that while Fridolin is not specifically identified as a Jew, some of the scenes "echo the uneasiness of Austrian Jews in the face of Gentile provocation". Bullying (by a loutish student) and exclusion (from the ball) may well reflect the experience of Jews in Vienna at the time. Raphael continues: "Schnitzler neither denied his Jewishness nor asserted it. Denial was demeaning; assertion led to self-deluding vanity... Schnitzler responded to the Jewish condition without affecting to provide a solution." I wouldn't play up that element, but it adds an interesting nuance to the scenario evoked in Dream Story.

Raphael is spot on when he argues: "The tone and attitudes to be found in Dream Story are certainly true to the spirit both of Schnitzler's personal life and of decadent Vienna."

Schnitzler, for example, was a known womanizer, "a keen, not to say addictive, pursuer of sexual quarry". And though this book was not published until 1926, the world it offers us is pre-WWI, and therefore imbued with the atmosphere Florian Illies conjures up for us in 1913.

As Illies told us, the capital of the modern age was Vienna: "Here the battles raged: about the unconscious, about dreams, the new music, the new way of seeing, the new architecture, the new logic, the new morality." The star players were, among others, Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, Wittgenstein, Schoenberg...

Freud's dream ideas were already well known in 1913, and "Dr Freud and Dr Schnitzler seemed like Siamese twins even to their contemporaries." Indeed, in the Vienna of the day, everyone was talking about dreams. Schnitzler records one on 9 April, in which someone is trying to shave his leg for him: "The Freud school of thought," he notes, "might interpret this as some kind of disguised suicide attempt."

The Schnitzlers were an unhappy couple (as were the Musils, and many others Illies describes). And there would have been plenty of local inspiration for the more outre scenes in Dream Story. Klimt, says Illies, painted while naked women auditioned around him: "When Klimt dies, fourteen former models will come forward with paternity suits." There are plenty more such stories.



***

And what about that ending?

I initially found it a bit pat, but then started to think it was an appropriately ambivalent close, and did a good job in buckling the loop that the story had created. It has certainly been interpreted in different ways:

That contemporary New York Times reviewer, for example, says: "[Fridolin] weeps beside the bed of his lovingly understanding wife until he regains the health of his active and chaste life. The author's message is: Dreams are not merely dreams, and reality never is entirely true. Not only as a poet, but as a psychologist as well, he knows the chasms that yawn before our level roads, where the unsuspecting pilgrim suddenly falls to destruction."

Yeah, I don't think so...

But Martin Swales feels approximately the same way: "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."



I'm much more leaning towards the conclusion of this blogger, who sees this as a satire of a bourgeois couple, with what happens on the surface coming across as hypocritically at odds with what's going on underneath: "Fridolin and Albertine become a parody of the eternal couple, of the androgyne, because they only seem to unify the other antinomies: day/night, dream/reality, truth/lie. In fact, the last dialogue suggests that the future will draw the couple even further apart, and they will be unable (and reluctant) to fight against it..."

As Neumann explains, love -- and its capacity to both form and destroy identity -- is not just about conscious choices but about everything that lies in the subconscious, never safely buried, but always on the brink of surfacing in the form of dreams.

A member of Henry Eliot's group helpfully made us aware that the original ending that Schnitzler drafted was much darker. In this version, Albertine throws her husband out... (Admittedly, the prototype also paints a much darker picture of Fridolin: He was much more than an observer at that orgiastic party, and he was arousing at a time when he believed his wife was on her deathbed...)

***

In all, this is another example of the need to keep thinking about a book that has not immediately hit the spot.

And, after reading 1913, Schnitzler and his coterie are definitely back in my sights.