Scanning the Hypnoglyph: Sleep in Modernist and Postmodern Representation by Nathaniel Wallace

Abstract

MLR, .,   den Nation strikes a delicate balance between breadth and depth of analysis in seven steps. An Introduction sets out theoretical contexts, for example in studies of Wales itself; travel writing and the tourist gaze, here related critically to minoritized cultures and languages; endotic travel; and perceptions of the Celtic and Celticism. e first chapter discusses Francophone writing –, and three successive focuses of interest: (Romantic) landscape, technical writing on world-leading industries , and religious revival. e second chapter focuses on the ‘Celtic’ in French texts (–), highlighting their complexity and ambiguity. Two chapters on German writing follow. Chapter  (–) observes, as foundations for travel itineraries and writing traditions are laid, tensions between appreciation of Romantic, sublime landscapes on one hand and social modernization, including tourism and industry, on the other. It registers, too, frequent critique of English hegemonic or colonial attitudes to Wales. e fourth chapter (–) examines interest in Welsh identity, language, and culture, which relates both to the contemporary importance of Celtic studies in the German-speaking lands, and to those lands’ own concerns with national identity and modernity. A comparative fih chapter surveys sparse inter-war and post-war writing, and the more productive period from the s onward. Paradoxically, even as Wales and writing about it become ever more accessible, most recent developments reflect fragmented views of the country and declining engagement with the Welsh language and cultures. e Conclusion draws attention, inter alia, to the importance for present and future research of ideas about micro-cosmopolitanism and relationships not only between cultural centres and peripheries, but between so-called peripheries, to better understand where Wales, and many other places, might be. is important book will be welcomed by and appeal to readers with interests in travel and technical writing, European, Breton, Welsh, Celtic, and archipelagic studies, as well as French, German, and comparative literature, minoritized cultures and languages, and critical debates about the supposed centres and margins of cultures. U C L M P D Scanning the Hypnoglyph: Sleep in Modernist and Postmodern Representation. By N W. Leiden: Brill Rodopi. . xxvi+ pp. €. ISBN ––––. In Scanning the Hypnoglyph Nathaniel Wallace sets out to demonstrate that the representation of human slumber in the visual and verbal arts ‘performs aesthetic functions, delineates the individual psyche, and reveals cultural values’ (p. xii). Wallace casts his net wide, providing detailed analysis of writers from North America (Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Anne Sexton), France (Marguerite Duras, Marcel Proust), and Japan (Yasunari Kawabata) and no less detailed scrutiny of the work of visual artists from North America (Vincent Desiderio , Fran Gardner, David Yaghjian, Paul Cadmus, Andy Warhol, Mark Tansey),  Reviews Germany (Anselm Kiefer), and France (Gustave Courbet). e book is handsomely illustrated and Wallace reads visual texts as patiently and astutely as he reads literary ones. Wallace conducts his quest for ‘hypnoglyphs’—‘sleep-centred work[s] of art’ (p. )—via chapters on the figure of the vertical sleeper; on the sense of vastness or illimitability in sleep; on representations of nude or semi-dressed female sleepers; and on affinities between sleep and queer or ‘non-standard’ sexualities. e story he tells is a broadly chronological one. Modernism, exemplified by the writings and career of Proust, has powerful affinities with slumber and indeed uses sleep as a ‘discursive ground’ and ‘existential baseline’ (p. xii). Postmodernist culture, tossing and turning in a chronically ‘overawakened’ (p. ) state, can only dream of such ‘equilibrium in dormancy’ (p. xii). But summarized in this way the modernisminto -postmodernism story does not convey the richness of Wallace’s discussion. To read Scanning the Hypnoglyph is repeatedly to experience a concertina effect as Wallace’s text, through its labyrinthine range of cross-reference and strenuously busy footnotes, reveals within itself a kind of submerged magnum opus on the cultural history of sleep from antiquity to the present, one in which the author’s generous and searching intellectual curiosity takes him off in all directions. e extended discussion of Richard Wilbur’s ‘Walking to Sleep’, which Wallace reads via Shelley, Poe, Neoplatonism, Galen, Molière, Hopkins, Baudelaire, Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot, and Coleridge, is just one instance of Wallace’s Argus-eyed vigilance as a critic. It...