جمالياب الحلم: "تداعيات" / The Aesthetics of Dreams: "Reflections"

Program

ALIF

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http://www.jstor.org/stable/521782

All Authors

عبد الكريم, عبد المقصود; Abdul Karim, Abdul Maqsud

Document Type

Research Article

Publication Title

Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics

Publication Date

1994

doi

https://www.doi.org/10.2307/521782

Abstract

[In this unconventional article, the author reflects on and associates various discourses that describe dreaming and the unconscious. They range from poetic and fictional representation of dreams in Chinese and Czech literature to Derrida's theories to neurophysiology and psychoanalysis. This divagation leads to the author's suggestion that the "unconscious" is a misnomer since it indicates an absence of the state of "consciousness;" that is, it negates what is considered focal. The term itself, asserts the author, marginalizes the state of the "unconscious" or the state of nocturnal consciousness since it can only be viewed in its lack and deviation from diurnal consciousness. By deconstructing the centrality of what is called consciousness, the author is able to describe the unconscious as an alternative consciousness that should be seen not as an incomplete, imitative and deformed copy of consciousness, but as a variation on the axis of consciousness. Medical facts and experiments are marshalled to support this view in combination with a linguistic critique of the concept. The author then proceeds to give examples of his own dreams to demonstrate that dreams not only make sense, but are also poetically constructed "texts." Thus, by rejecting the privileged position of diurnal consciousness, the author is able to show the discursive autonomy of dreams and the aesthetic coherence of other forms of consciousness that may defy that of the quotidian. The aim of the author is to achieve an integrative consciousness that does not see dreams, and by extension other forms of non-conventional consciousness, as simply the "negative" of consciousness, but as an autonomous mode of cognition. The author refers to the work of Jacques Lacan to show the poetic nature of (his own) dreams and how they are replete with poetic imagery, including conventional, accidental and universal symbols. He gives examples of displacement and overdetermination in one of his dreams in which his previous description of a poet-friend in a poem as "a noble from the ages of books" is transformed in a scene in the dream that takes place in the State publishing house and features the image of an Old Testament prophet. The analysis of the author's dreams in this article, unlike those of psychoanalysts, does not aim at translating the dream into everyday language, but attempts to uncover the poetics, aesthetics and symbolic economy of dreams.]

First Page

136

Last Page

161

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