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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Scanning the Hypnoglyph: Sleep in Modernist and Postmodern Representation by Nathaniel Wallace Wenying Xu Nathaniel Wallace, Scanning the Hypnoglyph: Sleep in Modernist and Postmodern Representation Amsterdam: Brill Rodopi, 2016, xxvi + 343 pp. "Glyph" traces its etymology to the Greek γλυφή, glyphē (carving), but many of us associate "glyph" with the pictographic Egyptian alphabet or with ancient Chinese pictograms carved on turtle shells or animal bones. Wallace's choice of "hypnoglyph" in the title of his book is fitting in that Scanning the Hypnoglyph enters the dense jungle of signs/pictograms/symbols in the landscape of sleep and dreams and offers its reader multiple and intersectional pathways by rendering layered interpretations of sleep/dream motifs in the visual and literary arts of the Western world. Wallace's ample references to sleep/dream works, ranging from ancient Greece to modernist Europe to contemporary/postmodern U.S., display the kind of mind that gleans great enjoyment from intense curiosity and erudition. And the reader in turn experiences a fascinating journey into the world of sculptures, paintings, poems, fiction, mythologies, and film, all centering on sleep, dreams, bodies, and sexuality. In reading these various discursive forms, Wallace intends to "demonstrate and clarify … that the representation of sleep … performs aesthetic functions, delineates the individual psyche, and reveals cultural values" (xii). Utilizing tools that bridge Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Scanning the Hypnoglyph yields meanings through a variety of critical approaches including Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Queer Studies, and Postcolonialism. Sleep, traditionally treated as a state of dormancy, frustrates, if not nullifies, narrative/discursive attempts for temporal arrangement and logical signification, a phenomenon that Wallace describes as "narrative resistance" (11). It is this key notion of narrative resistance that serves as the raison d'être for Scanning the Hypnoglyph's copious narratives that link sleep with varied stories of the self. Inspired by Emmanuel Levinas' notion of "existential hypostasis," Wallace opens up the narrative-resistant site and endows it with abundant explication of individual subjectivity [End Page 381] in the condition of sleep (107). Contrary to one's quick presumption that sleep and dreams are among the few things that are strictly private and thus apolitical, Wallace identifies sleep as a form of resistance, evolving from an infant's resistance to psychic maturation to our resistance to capitalist management and heterosexual normalization. To illustrate the discipline of the body in the modernist and late-capitalist eras, Wallace explores a number of works that problematize sleep via the figure of "vertical slumber" (112). For instance, Anton Chekhov's short story, "Let Me Sleep" (1888), portrays a thirteen-year-old nurse maid who is so overcome by fatigue from her endless duties that she falls half-asleep while caring for her mistress's infant. The maid at the end of the story kills her charge so that she can at last sleep deeply. A much more recent work illustrating the problematics of sleep in the golden age of capitalism is Bed (1955), a Rauschenberg assemblage exploiting a bed complete with a pillow, a sheet, and a quilt in a frame. This vertical (or deconstructed) bed, hanging on a gallery wall, exposes the false separation between private and public, between sleep and wakefulness, between rest and work. Wallace's readings of these works pose ethical questions about the manipulations of human circadian rhythms in the interests of productivity and efficiency. Marxist critics argue that the rise of capitalism is inseparable from colonialism. Placing the sleep motif against the backdrop of European colonialism, Wallace examines several works in order to reveal "the size of the dormant ego" or the ego of "the one who slumbers" (145). It is not an exaggeration to say that the size of the European ego in nineteenth and early twentieth century visual and literary art could correspond to the size of the world. Having "discovered" and conquered numerous new lands, Europe's growing sense of power nurtured the ever-increasing size of its ego. Wallace offers insightful interpretations of "the dormant ego" represented in a range of works. Particularly impressive is his reading of Thomas Mann's short essay, "Sleep, Sweet Sleep," a text that lays bare the far-reaching ego of the slumbering Mann...