Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
“Beyond the Wall of Sleep” is a story about Slater, a “white trash vagrant” who falls into a psychotic rage and murders his neighbour. When the narrator meets him in an asylum, Slater keeps having these bizarre visions of these amazing things with green lights, oceans of space, beautiful music, mountains and valleys, and also of this blazing entity that has it in for him… Every time the story takes fire and leaps at you it’s because of these descriptions of this extraordinary place.
Your first book?
I’ll start with Lovecraft, who thinks reality itself is completely nuts, and that anyone who thinks there is a single absolute or straightforward interpretation of our reality is obviously barking mad. “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” is a story about Slater, a “white trash vagrant” who falls into this psychotic rage and murders his neighbour. When the narrator meets him in an asylum, Slater keeps having these bizarre visions of amazing things with green lights, and oceans of space and beautiful music, and mountains and valleys, and also of this blazing entity that has it in for him. Obviously the narrator thinks: how can this illiterate idiot have these extraordinary visions, where did they come from? The narrator attaches a telepathic device to Slater so that he can experience it as well, whereupon conveniently Slater dies, and this voice starts communicating to the narrator and says: I come from this world that you enter in your freedom of sleep – once you enter your dreams you lose all the trappings of your tedious reality and enter this wonderland. He says in sleep we all roam through many ages and lose all the limits of time and space.
The narrator has to be regarded as having had a nervous breakdown, and Lovecraft is using dreams as a way in, to justify it all, but really every time the story takes fire and leaps at you it’s because of these descriptions of this extraordinary place.
The Lovecraft stories that I really love are these ones that some people call the Dreamland Cycle (this story is often classified as one of them) about worlds that you enter through dreams. But even within these worlds, people say: don’t push too much against the boundaries of what you’re permitted to see, so there’s still that sense of prohibition. You have to be absolutely certain you can cope; so it’s always about how much disillusion of your sense of reality can you deal with in these worlds? How far can you go before you say: actually I’d quite like things to be normal? In the end we don’t like to lose our entire identity and humanity.
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Joanna Kavenna is a novelist, travel writer, and reviewer. She has held writing fellowships at St Antony’s College, Oxford and St John’s College, Cambridge. Her first book, The Ice Museum, was about travelling in the North in search of the mythical land of Ultima Thule. Her first novel, Inglorious, won the Orange Broadband New Writers Award. Here she tells The Browser that the concept of parallel worlds is no more dubious than that of a single reality, and that this is something that writers have known for centuries.
