July/1998
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BEDLAM: AN ANTHOLOGY OF SLEEPLESS NIGHTS
Selected and introduced by Jane Messer St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1996 296 pages, paperback, $14
Reviewed by Lynne Lamberg
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An insomniac herself, Jane Messer was writing a novel about
an insomniac bookseller who collected works about sleeplessness,
copying salient selections in a notebook. Bedlam is that
notebook.
"Sleeplessness is vague and troubled," Messer writes in her
introduction to more than 50 examples of literary insomnia.
"Insomniacs see transgressions," she says, "and go places and do
things without witnesses." Insomnia can be a private madness or
simple privacy, she notes, "a time to oneself to think and watch and
feel what may."
Bedlam opens with the introduction to the tales
Scheherazade told a sleepless king for 1,001 nights, saving her life
by leaving each one unfinished. In "Night without Sleep," Colette
delights in staying awake to gaze upon her lover. In "Mary Wants to
Sleep," Stephen Dixon shows how incompatible sleep habits may
shatter a couple's relationship.
Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel
Prize for literature, tells a dark tale of a brothel that provides
drugged young women to ease the nights of sleepless old men. In
this excerpt from House of the Sleeping Beauties, a girl dies in
the night, and is immediately replaced.
In "Night Walk," Isak Dinesen offers advice to an insomniac:
"Walk from the broadest streets of the town into a narrower one, and
from this narrow street into one still narrower, and go on like that. If
from your narrowest alley you can find your way into a tighter
passage, enter it, and follow it, and draw your breath lightly once or
twice. And at that you will have fallen asleep."
Marcel Proust describes what present-day sleep specialists
call alpha/delta sleep. Think of Swiss cheese, with the cheese
representing sleep, and the holes, wakefulness. "Sometimes, when I
had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that had not
even time to say to myself: 'I'm falling asleep.'" Proust wrote. "And
half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would
awake me. I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined
was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on
thinking, while I was asleep...."
In "Sleep," Haruki Murakami celebrates insomnia: "Now my
inability to sleep ceased to frighten me. What was there to be afraid
of? Think of the advantages!," says the story's narrator. "Now the
hours from ten at night to six in the morning belonged to me alone. I
could use this time in any way I liked. No one would get in my way.
No one would make demands on me...."
This is an ideal book to lose some sleep over.
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