MDMD: On dreams

[Paul Nightingale]

For Freud, dreams were wishfulfilment, the play of the unconscious. Sleep is
necessary to allow dreaming to take place; we dream while asleep, even when
we recall nothing upon waking. Freud claimed to be a scientist; in fact he
produced an allegory of imperialism (describing female sexuality, for
example, as a dark continent - a direct reference to Africa as the
unknowable obsession of European colonial powers, principally Britain and
Germany). The twins want to hear stories of America that reference both its
colonial past and also, for the contemporary reader, the unspeakable crime
of genocide: liberation and oppression are inseparable, ego invoking the
superego's caution. The world's first democracy takes its first tottering
steps down the road to state terrorism. Going back to the storytelling scene
I've just been paying closer attention. The "afternoon habit" is a control
mechanism; "Juvenile Rampage" must be confined. Within imperialist
discourse, the so-called undeveloped so-called third world is often
described as childlike. Moreover, Cherrycoke is instructed without his
brother-in-law "ever so
stipulating". This raises the possibility that Cherrycoke's storytelling is
a (white man's) burden, one he assumes willingly; it allows him to pretend,
having interpreted LeSpark's words in that way, that he is justified in
living off his family. Who 'exploits' whom? Cherrycoke is a man with no
means; lingering at Mason's grave is prevarication, the only alternative
being to go on. Cherrycoke haunts Mason, who haunts Cherrycoke with the
impossibility of going on. So he goes on by talking. Freud called
psychoanalysis (which included the interpretation of dreams - he was a
modernist scientist, his latter-day poststructuralist successors like Lacan
will have no truck with such nonsense) the talking cure. Go on long enough
and 'the truth' will out. So Cherrycoke prevaricates, as at Mason's grave,
by telling stories that are commissioned "for their moral usefulness".
Eventually, the fog begins to clear, or should.