Arthur Schnitzler’s novella DREAM STORY (TRAUMNOVELLE) may be the best known as the genesis of Stanley Kubrick’s last completed film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999) staring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Although Kubrick shifted the story from Imperial Vienna before World War I to 1990 New York City, he conveyed the business and unsettling nature of Schnitzler’s story effectively.
It’s difficult to say what is the connection between the novel and dreams. It’s about the remarkable and more or less erotic adventures of a young married doctor in Vienna. Not only are these adventures inexplicable, but they are meant to be, on the surface, quite pointless. Yet below the surface, they have the significance of adventure in dreams, in that they are symbolic and might hint at interpretation. The novel is rather exciting, the mystification is amusing, and the hints at a hidden meaning, intriguing.
Much of Schnitzler’s works read as if it was written as a text for Freudian scholars. Schnitzler does it superbly as a study of the subconscious desires and fears.
Doctor Fridolin, happily married, is vaguely haunted by a sense of neglected opportunities, outside his home. On a night when his 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 his wife, in her dreams, has fared forth into an erotic world even wilder than anything he has ever encountered. To be revenged, he decides to complete the unfinished episodes of the night before. In every case he fails because his subconscious inhibitions and fears are ever more stronger than his desires…
The wife’s dreams revealed, besides its romantic urge for the unattainable, a deep-lying feminine jealousy of her husband’ actual attainments while his adventures equally revealed his inability ever to realise 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 characters have dual personalities, they observe their own actions as those of an outsider and behind them sits Schnitzler, another observer, and behind that another Schnitzler, and so on. Thus in this short story we have a glimpse of infinity, an infinity of dissolving mirages.
DREAM STORY contains a revealing exploration of Schnitzler’s relationship to psychoanalysis, revealing himself as a pragmatic moralist. At the end of the novel, Fridolin and Albertine are left with the disturbing awareness of whole areas of their personalities which they can neither understand or control. And yet, for all their problems their dreams have posed, they have one certainty left: that of of the righteousness of their everyday lives, of the business of living together as man and wife and bringing up children.
Schnitzler’s story is impregnated with Jewishness. Fridoline is an outsider, like every middle-European Jew. DREAM STORY was first published in instalments in the magazine Die Dame, the number one issue in 1926.
A little erotica is good for the soul.
