Lydgate

Hi everybody. As I was reading through all your blogs this weekend, I noticed some common themes emerging, so I thought I'd collect them and link them to each other. So, I'm listing a series of topics and linking to blogs where these are discussed! My apologies if I've left some pertinent entries out. I'm sure I have! If you notice some, maybe you can post a comment to point it out.

Prophetic Dreams
Sonomas
Silent Partner
Lily Briscoe (okay, this one isn't quite about prophetic dreams, but it's related.)

The Science of Sleep
Sacrifice of a Song
Sonomas

Remembering Dreams
Annie Hall
Searching Buddha
I'll add William Sharp's Introduction to Dream Analysis site

Rose in "A Country Doctor"
vitaminc
Sacrifice of a Song
Lily Briscoe

Kafka's "The Judgment"
Scott Cheshire
Milquetoast
English Teacher
mr. mxylplyx
True Romance

I just dreamed that I was with eight or nine other men, and we had all just broken out of prison and were on the run. (Yes, we broke out of prison.) I knew some were guilty of the crimes they'd been convicted of and others not guilty. I wasn't sure if I was guilty or innocent.

I thought I'd give you some faces to match with the Victorian dream theorists we're reading for next week.

Robert Macnish (1802 -1837)

Macnish was a Scottish physician--as well as philosopher and poet. He published pretty widely in popular periodicals before his death at 35 (of typhus).

Henry Holland (1788 - 1873)

Sir Henry Holland was a physician, but he also wrote travel literature.

George Henry Lewes (1817 - 1878)

Lewes is well-known for having been the unmarried lover / partner of novelist George Eliot. He was also a philosopher in his own right (and something of a radicial). His two most influential publications were probably A Biographical History of Philosophy and Life of Goethe (a biogrpahy).

Lewes reviewed Jane Eyre, for Fraser's Magazine, in 1847, very positively. He wrote of Bronte, "Almost all that we require in a novelist, she ahs: perception of character, power of delineating it; picturesqueness; passion; and knowledge of life. The story is not only of singular interest, naturally evolved, unflagging to the last, but it fastens itself up on your attention, and will not leave you. The book is closed, the enchantment contintues." The review is included in the Norton edition we're using, if you want to read more.

Francis Power Cobbe (1822 - 1904)

Cobbe was a nineteenth-century feminist thinker who argued for both women's suffrage and women's economic independence. She also published widely on religion, morality, and a host of social issues.

James Sully (1842 - 1923)

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Sully was a psychologist, with a strong focus on evolutionary psychology. George Henry Lewes, George Eliot, and Robert Louis Stevenson were among his admirers. In fact, Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (purported to have originated in a dream!) was strongly influenced by some Sully's work on "double consciousness." (I couldn't find an image of Sully, so I'm including a link to his book Illusions instead.)

One last thing: Here's a link to a pretty good site on Victorian phrenology, published by the British library. Phrenology--a science rooted in the belief that the skull was an "index" of the brain (and ultimately psychology and character)--is fairly central to the plot of Jane Eyre.

The dream consisted of a single image, of four snow white puppies, nursing on their snow white mother. When I say "snow," I mean pure snow, bright white, untouched, gleaming in the sun. The pups looked just like little lambs, but whiter, and they just nursed and kneaded.

I dreamed I was in class, teaching Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, a novel I taught in English 150W last fall.

This isn't a painting of a dream per se, but Bosch's work in general has a dreamlike flavor. He tends, like many of his contemporaries, to paint religious themes, but he belongs to a tradition of artists before and after him who explore--almost obsessively--the overlapping territory of mystical visions and dreaming. I'm thinking of Pieter Breugel, James Ensor, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, and, more recently, Marcel Dzama, to name just a few. All of these artists works involve fantastical scenes that suggest snaphots of a larger narrative and they often involve hybrid creatures--which we might also think of as the "composite figures" of the dream world.

Bosch was Dutch and lived from 1480 to 1516. He ws from a family of painter, and though his work is eccentric, he was highly successful during his lifetime. His work was owned by royal families all over Europes.

This next image is a view of the triptych with its exterior shut. Notice the apparitional quality of the globe. (I'm also posting some details from the painting below, so you can get a closer look at some of its scences, figures, and fantastical machinery.)

Giotto (1266 - 1336) was an early Renaissance painter known for innovations in naturalism (or realism), particularly with regard to perspective. (Note the earlier dates for the Italian Reniassance; if this were England, we'd still call it the medieval period.)

This isn't a painting of a Biblical dream. It's a rendering of a dream of St. Francis (or San Francesco), who lived during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--not long before Giotto. (Although there is some dispute about the authorship of the frescoes of the Basilica di San Francesco in Italy, most historians seem to be convinced they are Giotto's work.)

The dream in the painting represents a moment of temptation in the life of St. Francis. According to the legend, soon after he joined a Knight's troop, he dreamed his father's house was transformed into a palace full of fine armor. The dream inspired him to set forth to claim glory as a knight, but he soon fell ill. During his illness, he heard a voice telling him to turn back, to serve God rather than pursuing human conflict and human glory. He did.

I would seem to me that St. Francis's dream is the man-made sort (unless it is a temptation fabricated by a nefarious demon or devil) and that the voice comes from a Divine source, but the mural depicts an angel standing over St. Francis's bed, suggesting something more. I'm not sure what to make of this. I suppose you could read the dream as a link in a chain of divine communication, in which case St. Francis's temptation is a necessary stage in his evolution. So, the dream and a "vision" seem at first to conflict and to be distinguished from each other, but the presence of the angel suggests they're conflated as they are, for example, in so many Victorian texts (and in A Midsummer Night's Dream). I'll be curious to hear what Steve Kruger might say about this, because I'm far from an expert on the literature or history of the period.

In addition to questions about the origins and various types of dreams and visions and the various types of dreams, Giotto's fresco suggests an interesting question about form. A fresco is a mural. This one is painted on a church--so it's a representation of a palace originating from a dream and then recreated on the wall of a very different kind of building. A dream image is, of course, ephemeral--it's an "airy nothing," to borrow language from Shakespeare's Theseus--but a wall couldn't be more solid, more "something." In addition, the palace represents temptation, the material world--a moment in the saint's life where he might have lost his way--and here it is transported to the walls of a church, which, though solid and worldly, is intended to be God's palace on earth, a material link to the spiritual realm.

I mention all this because it strikes me that these ironies--the serious (and perhaps disturbing) kind, not the glib or cynical irony that permeates so much contemporary culture--are part of the effect of the fresco. They call attention to the viewer's position. To see this art directly, you have to be in the church, the walls on which it's painted creating a sanctuary from the material world outside. The palace is a reminder that the viewer's current position is contemplative, removed. And this translation of a dream onto a solid wall is a reminder of the ephemerality of such moments--and of the tensions between the spiritual and the material.

I don't think I'm overreeading, but I am aware of another irony--this one perhaps the glib for cynical (or just resigned) kind--that if you're reading this you're seeing the image on your computer screen, very far from the cloistered walls of the Basilica di San Francesco.