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the complete review - dreams

Nights as Day,
Days as Night

by
Michel Leiris

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : appealing collection; interesting piece of Leiris' larger life-capturing project

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Leiris hebt damit den Traum aus der einseitigen Betrachtungsweise der Psychoanalyse und behandelt ihn als Material einer vielfältigen Bearbeitung, als Zentrum einer umfassenden geistigen Tätigkeit. Er läßt so eine Traumgeographie des Ichs entstehen, ein lyrisches Traumgewebe, ein dichterisches Wechselspiel mit Bildern, Phantasmen und Wörtern: ein Buch voll dichter Poesie." - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "Above all, Nights as Day, Days as Night stands as a companion piece to Leiris' great work, his memoirs (L'age d'Homme). The existence of both books establishes a stunning assertion, that the dream life of a person is as valid and telling as the more usual memoirs. In fact, Leiris seems to be suggesting that only when the unconscious mind and the conscious mind are seen together, and the network of connections between politics, sexuality, fear, the exotic and the mundane, is reconstructed in all of its mystery, can the person begin to be known." - Lawrence R. Smith, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "(E)ach brief prose episode simultaneously displays his poetic lyricism and his scientific detachment. The incidents and images are largely uninterpreted, although some readers will find the pensive essay, here published as a foreword, in which Maurice Blanchot reflects on Mr. Leiris's text to be the gem of this volume. Many of the pieces themselves are pedestrian, and the author is uncomfortably faithful to the solemnity and self-dramatization that often color dream experience. But arresting images do emerge." - Amy Edith Johnson, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Other people's dreams are a bore, but these are prose poems of gossamer spun in such a way that they become part of the collective awareness." - David Coward, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Nights as Day, Days as Night is essentially a dream-diary, collecting, chronologically, generally very brief descriptions of some of author Michel Leiris' dreams (and a few 'real-life' experiences) from between 1923 (or before: the first dream is presented merely as a: 'Very Old Dream') and 1960. It is by no means exhaustive -- and, fortunately, at less than two hundred pages, far from exhausting. Dream-collections can quickly become tiresome, but this one remains surprisingly fresh pretty much throughout.
       Leiris' first entry -- that 'Very Old Dream' -- is the perfect introductory one:

In front of a crowd of gawking spectators -- of whom I am one -- a series of executions is being carried out, and this rivets my attention. Up until the moment when the executioner and his attendants direct themselves toward me because it is my turn now. Which comes as a complete and terrifying surprise.

I observe the following bit of dialogue between André Breton and Robert Desnos, or I read it as if it were a fragment of a play with stage directions:
       A.B. (to Robert Desnos). The seismoteric tradition ...
       R.D. (turns into a stack of plates).

Sidled up to a woman named Nadia -- to whom I am drawn by very tender feelings -- I am at the edge of the sea, a shore on the order of Palm Beach, a Hollywood beach. Playfully, just to scare me and to ascertain how hard I would take her death, Nadia, an excellent swimmer, pretends she is drowning. In fact, she does drown, and her lifeless body is brought to me. I begin to weep until the wordplay "Nadia, drowned naiad" [Nadia, naïade noyée] -- which comes to me just as I am waking -- appears to be both an explanation and a consolation.

I walk along a beach and risk being engulfed by the waves. I am wearing a top hat crowned by flames that seems to be a Pentecostal fire. And I have long hair.

But perhaps this kind of analysis offers the means, as it were, to solidify the dream by providing it a certain logic and by erasing the gap between life and dream through the discovery of their common roots

On a tomb (mine ?) someone has affixed a sign providing an epitaph that condensed the life of the deceased into a few lines. The sign is entitled "ARGUMENT."

- M.A.Orthofer, 29 March 2017

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Links:

• Spurl Editions publicity page
• Gallimard publicity page
• Sexto Piso publicity page
• Excerpts
• Excerpts

• Diabolique
• { feuilleton }
• The Los Angeles Times
• minor literature[s]
• Publishers Weekly

• Manhood

• Georges Perec's dream diary, La Boutique Obscure
• See Index of French literature
• See Index of Biographical works under review

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About the Author:

       French author and anthropologist Michel Leiris lived 1901 to 1990.

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© 2017 the complete review

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