Sleep and the Novel

Fictions of Somnolence from Jane Austen to the Present

Michael Greaney

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319752525
• eBook ISBN: 9783319752532
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Sleep and the Novel is a study of representations of the sleeping body in fiction from 1800 to the present day which traces the ways in which novelists have engaged with this universal, indispensable -- but seemingly nondescript -- region of human experience. Covering the narrativization of sleep in Austen, the politicization of sleep in Dickens, the queering of sleep in Goncharov, the aestheticization of sleep in Proust, and the medicalization of sleep in contemporary fiction, it examines the ways in which novelists envision the figure of the sleeper, the meanings they discover in human sleep, and the values they attach to it. It argues that literary fiction harbours, on its margins, a "sleeping partner", one that we can nickname the Schlafroman or "sleep-novel", whose quiet absorption in the wordlessness and passivity of human slumber subtly complicates the imperatives of self-awareness and purposive action that traditionally govern the novel.

© The Author(s) 2018

Michael GreaneySleep and the Novelhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75253-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Michael Greaney¹

(1)

Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

End Abstract

If sleep had never existed, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to us to invent it. A state in which we don’t speak and have no sense of the passing of time; in which we can’t absorb information, perform even simple tasks or interact purposefully with the people around us; in which we are physically unprotected and prone to intermittent (and sometimes frightening) hallucinations; in which we have no sense of me in the here and now—it is difficult to imagine that the attractions of such a state would be immediately obvious to lifelong non-sleepers. Those who had never slept would probably not find much to disagree with in Aristotle ’s definition of sleep as a ‘privation of wakefulness’¹—a negative state of passivity and oblivion, that is, rather than one with positively desirable qualities of its own.

But what if our non-sleepers decided, collectively, that they would, after all, like to make sleep part of their lives? It would be hard to over-state the magnitude of such a transformation in their creaturely existence. The invention of sleep would create a strange new on-off life-rhythm, a constant oscillation between alertness, tiredness and oblivion whose peaks and troughs our novice sleepers would need to synchronize with the waking world’s demands on their attention and active involvement. Sleep’s invention would also confront societies and governments with the most formidable logistical challenge in human history. How to cater for the fact that, at any given moment, something in the region of two billion people worldwide will be unconscious? How to safeguard the privacy and well-being of sleepers whilst ensuring that social systems continue to function normally in their absence? How to ensure that human habitations—rooms , homes, towns, cities—are designed to accommodate sleepers in safety and comfort? How to ensure that there is a fair division of labour between sleepers and wakers at any given time? How to minimize any negative impact of sleep on the safe and efficient running of the waking world? How to guarantee that everyone has access to sleep and wakefulness in fair and appropriate quantities? It seems reasonable to assume that many countries would need to set up something like an interim Ministry of Sleep to guide policy and allocate resources during the months/years of the transition, though the private sector would doubtless see all sorts of lucrative opportunities in the new dispensation. New industries would spring up to meet the need for sleep-related products (beds and bedding, sleep-wear, curtains, alarms ), whilst pharmaceutical aids for the regulation and enhancement of slumber and/or wakefulness would reach a huge market. New sleep-related, night-time jobs and tasks would also emerge—night-manager, night-nurse, night-porter, night-watchman—whose purpose would be to maintain social systems in a state of minimal operational ‘wakefulness’ while the majority sleep.

The point of conjuring up this scenario is, of course, to indicate that the almighty logistical challenges that would be posed if sleep were invented ‘overnight’, as it were, have already been addressed, in incremental and piecemeal fashion, through the course of human history. Over thousands of years, human societies have developed a multitude of informal systems that cater for the periodic suspension, by sleep, of our ongoing participation in the shared lifeworld of everyday experience. We have clothes to wear , rooms to retire to and furniture to occupy when we sleep—and a set of low-key rituals to mark our transitions between wakefulness and slumber. All societies have unwritten rules about when sleep happens, where it happens, when it counts as healthy or natural and when it counts as irresponsible or self-indulgent; when it can be interrupted and when it must be respected; whose sleep is valuable and whose is not. But to say that the challenges posed by sleep have been addressed is, of course, a long way from saying that they have been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Sleep is a non-negotiable biological inevitability , but the parameters of sleep—when? where? with whom? for how long?—are all open to negotiation. Different versions of sleep can be performed, narrated and invented both by individuals and by entire cultures. Sleep has always been with us, but we invent it, and reinvent it, every day and night of our lives. One way in which we invent sleep, I want to argue in this book, is by writing about it.

What is/was Sleep?

Sleep and the Novel examines the representation of sleep and sleep-related experiences in literary fiction from the early nineteenth century to the present day. It is a study of how novelists narrate human somnolence, how they envision the sleeping body, what narrative problems and possibilities they encounter when they engage with such a seemingly nondescript and uneventful region of human experience, what meanings they discover in sleep and what values they attach to it. And although sleep has always been a complex and protean region of human experience, it was in the period covered by the present study that a genuinely unprecedented series of transformations took place . The historical backdrop to this study is one in which sleep has been consolidated into seven- or eight-hour blocks and hived off into private bedrooms ; in which it has become the measurable and recordable object of ever more finely calibrated scientific analysis ; in which the standards of comfort and hygiene enjoyed by many sleepers have improved considerably, even if, according to some commentators, natural slumber has been irreparably damaged by modern technologies from the electric light bulb to the online virtual worlds of the internet . I should emphasize, even as I offer this thumbnail sketch of the modern history of sleep, that I do not propose to treat fictional depictions of somnolence as anything like empirical ‘evidence’ in a history of human slumber, still less to weigh in on debates around what has been referred to as an unprecedented ‘crisis’ in modern sleep; rather, I want to argue that any account of the human significance of sleep must attend to its representational history , and that the modern novel offers a remarkably rich and largely untapped archive of the ways in which the practices of modern sleep have been imagined, fantasized and reinvented.

Before I begin to explore any of these issues in more detail, however, we must return to a more fundamental question: What is sleep? In a sense, everyone knows the answer to this question. Sleep is not a jargon word or an abstract concept but a plain and uncontroversial part of everyday creaturely existence whose significance—and inescapability—we all grasp as a fact of lived experience from an early age. But a shared body of commonsensical knowledge does not necessarily translate into precise consensus about the nature—still less the function, purpose or value—of sleep. Part of the problem is that ‘sleep’ is meaningful only in relation to non-sleep states. ‘Tell me what the role of wakefulness is’, the distinguished sleep scientist Nathaniel Kleitman is reported to have said, ‘and I shall explain the role of sleep’.² Kleitman ’s words raise existential questions to do with the final cause(s) of human subjectivity that lie well beyond the jurisdiction of sleep science , and he does not pursue them.³ Leaving aside these philosophical enigmas for a moment, we can say that sleep is a reversible state of diminished awareness and bodily passivity into which human beings (and indeed all mammals) periodically fall, one that is usually marked by low responsiveness, recumbent posture, closed eyes and deep, heavy, regular breathing. Since the mid-twentieth century we have known that human slumber is characterized by a recognizable pattern of electrical activity in the brain as it cycles through different stages from shallow sleep to deep sleep to ‘paradoxical’ or Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep and back again.⁴ But why do we sleep? It is a commonplace to say that ‘no one knows’ exactly why we sleep but it might be truer to say that there are all too many plausible scientific answers to this question—sleep is an indispensable period of physical rest and recuperation; it conserves energy and makes us inconspicuous and therefore safe from predators; it boosts immune function; it is associated with the consolidation of short-term into long-term memory ; it clears away molecular detritus in the brain—no single one of which has yet definitively superseded the others.⁵ Nevertheless, even if what Steven W. Lockley and Russell G. Foster call the ‘holy grail of sleep biology’⁶ remains elusive, a broad consensus has formed in recent years that sleep is an active and dynamic state, one that is of particular significance to the brain.⁷ Ostensibly synonymous with passivity and uneventfulness, sleep is increasingly understood by modern science as a busy state, even a surreptitious mode of wakefulness, an indispensable multi-tasker that goes to work in our absence, rather than a condition of passive downtime in human consciousness . (The problems and paradoxes associated with this ‘activist’ model of slumber will come into focus more than once in the pages that follow.)

The question of sleep’s function(s) is complicated further when we factor in the possibility of analysing human slumber diachronically as well as synchronically. In recent years, as sleep has been increasingly understood as a historically variable dimension of human experience, we have begun to learn that the question ‘what is sleep?’ need not always be posed in the present tense. And once we find ourselves asking ‘what was sleep?’ then the prospects of our discovering, one fine day, the core or ‘essence’ of sleep may begin ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. ‘The Yawns of Lady Bertram’: Sleep, Subjectivity and Sociability in Jane Austen
• 3. ‘Snoring for the Million’: Dickens the Sleep-watcher
• 4. From Bildungsroman to Schlafroman: Goncharov’s Oblomov
• 5. Proust and the Sleep of Others
• 6. ‘Observed, Measured, Contained’: Contemporary Fiction and the Science of Sleep
• 7. Conclusion: ‘A World without a Lullaby’?
• Back Matter