The Somnambulist's Dreams by Lars Boye Jerlach
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Apocalyptic for the 21st Century

I spent several years of my young adult life serving on what were then called Ocean Stations in the mid-North Atlantic. Bouncing around on small ships which were meant to act as electronic beacons, floating lighthouses really, for overflying aircraft, we spent four or five weeks every two months at sea. The only way to stay sane, for many of us, was to bring a library of books and music along on each patrol. So Jerlach's setting in Somnabulist's Dreams of an isolated lighthouse and its keeper, with a fixed routine of watch-taking and daily living, feels very familiar.

The difference between Jerlach's lighthouse keeper and me is that his diversion in isolation comes not directly from literature and song but indirectly through the dream diary of one of his 19th century predecessors, one Enoch Soule. Enoch has recorded a series of remarkably precise prophetic, or more accurately apocalyptic, dreams involving figures as diverse as the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami and Jerlach's fellow Dane Karen Blixen (to name any more would spoil the fun of discovery).

I say apocalyptic rather than prophetic because the name of Jerlach's protagonist-once-removed, Enoch, is an explicit reference to the Judaic patriarch, author of the apocryphal (non-canonical) Book of Enoch. At one point a dream-Magritte addresses Enoch in the form of a raven as "the man who apparently didn't die," a reference to the legend that he was taken bodily to heaven by God.

An important section of the biblical Book of Enoch recounts a series of dreams involving the history of Israel. Most of these are not prophecies in the sense of foretelling future events, but rather reinterpretations of historical events in terms of the ultimate destiny of Israel. This is the characteristic of that particular genre called apocalyptic, an eschatological interpretation pointing to final triumph from the midst of apparent disaster.

Frequently Jerlach's lighthouse keeper reads that "nothing is what it seems" in the dream diaries. Animals speak, dreams overlap and interweave, their meanings are never quite clear. This is also the biblical Enoch's technique. For him animals represent people, people represent angels, and the interaction between the two is as enigmatic as in the most obscure of biblical writing. There is an intoxicating overload of possible intention and signification in both sets of dreams (not surprising then that Soule, Enoch's surname, is the first person singular of the French verb 'to induce drunkenness').

For the lighthouse keeper and Enoch Soule, Enoch's dreams are prophetic. They are about the future and people and events of which neither the keeper nor Soule have any knowledge or interest. For them therefore the dreams are confusing rather than revelatory. They are in no position to understand what the dreams or the found-text might mean.

But for us, the readers of Jerlach's book, the dreams are definitive interpretations of the literary and historical events described. They are events of the past that are familiar, at least to some degree, to the reader. Often they are literally terminal, that is, about approaching or recent death. They are always about that present moment and that precise place. There is no future, only 'now'; there is no place other than 'here'. Jerlach presents them as definitively revelatory. That is their meaning, their last meaning.

This brilliant apocalyptic play by Jerlach makes the reader part of the narrative, in fact, the ultimate narrator of the book. It is the reader who puts the final meaning on each event, a meaning which cannot be gainsaid. A remarkable use of the apocalyptic genre for the 21st century.

I feel somewhat nostalgic about my former life at sea, primarily because it did indeed allow the regular reading-leisure to consider many apocalyptic meanings, as well as the meaning of apocalyptic.

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