I�ve thought about writing fiction for about as long as I can remember. But outside of school, I haven�t really done much. As a kid I always imagined my adult self, living in a squalid, one-room apartment in New York scribbling in the blue sketchbooks that were my favored journals at the time. But despite the ideas and copious amounts of ink spilled in those books, nothing much came of it.

Lately, inspired, I think, by those who are doing NaNoWriMo, I seem to be trying out picture frames around stories fleeting through my head, so see if they might work in novel form. One such story was inspired by my job research. In looking at the photos of the faculty in a university department, I was struck by the intense personality of each face. They look like a stereotypical cast of a comic novel about academia � perhaps Jane Smiley�s Moo. There is the gentleman in the polka-dotted bow tie with the most enormous pair of horn-rimmed glasses you�ve ever scene. There is the gentleman in the black turtleneck that matches his black goatee and his black combed-over hair. I bet there�s a pair of bongo drums in his office. There is the tweedy, salt-and-pepper-haired department chair, whose suede elbow patches are visibly worn, no doubt from many late nights at his desk propping up a book to keep himself awake. There is the soft-focus glamour shot of a woman with long, flowing locks, who is, in my minds eye, the fantasy object of the rest of the department. This includes the sharp-faced woman with cat-eye glasses who teaches gender studies. But this kind of story is one I�m not particularly interested in reading, let alone writing.

I have, though, I have been obsessing over one story, replaying it in my mind over and over, changing a few or a thousand small things with each iteration. I am not ready to write yet. I do not know how it ends. But I think I�m getting ready to write. Perhaps that will be my reward for when the dissertation is done. Or maybe I�ll sign up for next year�s NaNoWriMo. I have to say, I�m feeling rather jealous of all of you who�ve signed on. It sounds a lot more exciting than �according to Foucault,� or �Dear Professor So-and-so, Please hire me.�

I have been reading fiction, though � my guilty pleasure. After a conversation with a colleague about the use of cabarets and biergartens as liminal spaces in novels � spaces where identities can be shifted, where social borders can be crossed , I picked up a copy of Arthur Schnitzler�s Dream Story, the book on which Kubrick�s film Eyes Wide Shut was based. And because I�m a geek, I also picked up Peter Gay�s Schnitzler�s Century a history of the middle class from the mid-18th through early twentieth century told through Schnitzler�s life that looks like a fun read. But I will reserve my assessment of that book until a later date, as I haven�t read past the first few pages.

Dream Story, however, I have finished � a very fast read. It�s much more interesting than the film, which ended up being much more about Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise than anything else, especially in retrospect. While the film is actually quite faithful to the original story (my book contains copies of both the screenplay and the novel on which it was based), the nuance is lost. And while I find it intriguing and characteristic of Kubrick to want to put this kind of book on film, I think it is fundamentally misguided. The nuance is necessarily lost.

More than anything else, Dream Story reminded me of D. M. Thomas� The White Hotel, another book that merges dream and action in a seamless and complex way, and one of my most favorite books. The books are quite different in scope. The Schnitzler focuses almost obsessively on the relationship of a married couple and the way it is affected by realistic dreams and dream-like realities, about the pleasures and dangers of the libidinous mind. The marriage is messy and perhaps a little dangerous, held up in contrast to the couple�s innocent child, wearing purest white. The White Hotel is, however, a much larger, richer and more daring book. It is, in a sense, a history of the first half of the twentieth century in novel form. The White Hotel also written much later � 1981, I think. Dream Story dates from 1926. The connection between to two novels has more to do with materials. Both draw heavily on Freud and both have made me want to reread Freud�sOn the Interpretation of Dreams, even though I know the process will annoy me in the extreme. I seem to recall my old, used paperback copy of it having MISOGYNIST written across the cover in black magic marker. I didn�t put it there � I�m ridiculously squeamish about defacing books and will never use anything but pencil to take notes � but neither did I seek to purchase a clean copy. After all, the accusation is pretty hard to argue with. Actually, Freud is pretty hard to argue with, because everything becomes a circular argument and that is exactly what makes him so infuriating.

But I digress. In addition to the Freudian connection, Don Giovanni stands in the background of both works. In The White Hotel Don Giovanni is overtly mentioned � one of the characters is an opera singer and one of the chapters is taken from notes she has written in the spaces between the staves of the score of Mozart�s opera. In Dream Story, Don Giovanni is not directly invoked, but the themes of descending to the underworld, of guilt and redemption or punishment are similar. In Kubrick�s film version of the tale, Eyes Wide Shut, Don Giovanni is more directly invoked in the score and through the costumes of the masqueraders, which mimic costumes in the earlier film Amadeus.

Dream Story ends with a return to at least the appearance of normalcy � a husband and wife lying in bed on a sunny morning while listening to their daughter laughing in the next room, leaving open the question of which is more dangerous � infidelities of action or of the mind. The White Hotel ends with a woman and a boy climbing out of a pit of bodies at Baba Yar and escaping to �The Camp,� which may or may not be the afterlife. It is a remarkable book, although I find it very difficult to describe to those who have not read it. And while it can be brutal, it is not at all depressing. Just go get yourself a copy, put on a recording of Mozart�s Don Giovanni (I�m partial to the Bernard Haitnik and Neville Marriner versions)and take a quick trip to Hell and back. Just don�t go inviting any statues to dinner.

Don Giovanni is perhaps the ultimate figure of love and death and accountability

0 people said it like they meant it