Bureaucracy of Dreams: Surrealist Socialism and Surrealist Awakening in Ismail Kadare's The Palace of Dreams

Abstract

Ani Kokobobo addresses the novel The Palace of Dreams (1981) by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, with a particular focus on the larger significance of the novel's dream project. Through fictional processes of dream collection, selection, and interpretation, Kadare meditates on two twentieth-century movements that either overtly or covertly incorporated dreams in their ideological platforms: surrealism and socialism. Kokobobo posits that as a political and aesthetic category the dream serves Kadare as the ideal epistemological vessel for investigating the interrelatedness of socialism and surrealism. Throughout the novel, Kadare emphasizes socialism's Utopian inclinations, the dislocation of political decisions from political realities in this system, and the mutual disturbance of both reality and the imagination that such a dislocation produces. At the same time, the dream narrative helps him launch a surrealist poetics and metapoetically counter the damage dealt to the imagination by political realities.