Balzac, Honoré de | Maryann Weber (essay date November 1990)
Maryann Weber (essay date November 1990)
SOURCE: Weber, Maryann. “How to Do Things with Dreams: Dream Power in Balzac and Nerval.” Romance Quarterly 37, no. 4 (November 1990): 409-17.
[In the following essay, Weber examines the function of dreams in Balzac's “L'Auberge rouge” and “Sur Catherine de Médicis,” and Gérard de Nerval's Aurélia.]
Dreams escape the confines of reason and reality. Although Freudian psychologists find dreams to be deeply motivated and overdetermined, recounting a dream would appear to have no purpose except a therapeutic one or, in certain cultures, the foretelling of events to come. But dream discourse as a framed narrative within a literary text can have an intended perlocutionary effect in the social sphere and create a double hesitation—the hesitation between the real and the imaginary which characterizes the fantastic as a genre and a second hesitation between an iconic fixation at the level...
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