The Other Night - by Herschel Farbman (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"I sleep, but my heart wakes," says the Song of Songs. "The other night" names the sleepless night we spend in dreams.

From The Interpretation of Dreams to Finnegans Wake, many of the great writing projects of the first half of the twentieth century articulate experiences of waking in the very depths of sleep, where no "I" can declare itself present though the heart still beats. After World War II, in the cold light of the closure of the age of dreambooks, Beckett and Blanchot discover with new clarity, and new fatigue, that what wakes when the "I" sleeps doesn't sleep when the "I" wakes.

Revisiting Freud's argument that the dream is a form of writing, The Other Night looks at how life becomes literature in this wakefulness. Though we seem to be seeing things in our dreams, we are actually confronted with a kind of writing. This writing is not in our power, and yet it is ours. We are responsible for it in the same strange way that we are responsible for our lives.

Review Quotes

. . .Generates some important insights on Joyce's last work.-- "--James Joyce Quarterly"

...undoubtedly a piece that turns the wheels of the thinking and dreaming mind by drawing lucid parallels between the dream, responsibility, ethics, ad language.-- "--LA Dream Interpretation Examiner"

Focusing on dreams and their impact in the many genres of fiction and non-fiction, Farbman offers insight into the real world as well as the literary one with his writing.-- "--The Literary Shelf"

The Other Night is as demanding as the literature it engages with, and is not for the faint-hearted. Farbman's strength lies in the rigorous and detailed linguistic analyses of these lengthy, complex texts, to which he brings both considerable and considerate knowledge.-- "--The Times Literary Supplement"

This book about restlessness generates a restlessness of its own, a ferment of ideas, hints, and possibilities.-- "--Postmodern Culture"

A beautifully written, often moving account of the status of the dream in twentieth-century writing.-----Pericles Lewis, Yale University

A far-reaching, far-seeing work based on varied and serious reading.-----Paul Fry, Yale University

Powerfully conceived and beautifully written . . . An important contribution to the theory of dreams and a new thinking of ethics.-----Eyal Peretz, Indiana University

The Other Night is a series of brilliant and lucid readings. But beyond that, Farbman brings his very broad knowledge of these demanding authors to bear such that he transforms commentary on individual key figures of twentieth-century European thought into a generalized commentary on that era. Farbman engages the questions of language, subjectivity, and the difficult link of these to the fundaments of an ethics. He foregrounds the issue of dream, which proves to be inextricable from a meditation on language and responsibility. How are we to begin to contemplate the urgency of responsibility in dreams of all places, and this in the writings of authors whose reflections never gain the status of certainty, he asks. This is an elegant piece of rigorous and original critical thinking.-----Carol Jacobs, Yale University

About the Author

HERSCHEL FARBMAN is a Lecturer in English and French at the University of California, Irvine.