SOURCE: Fisher, Ben. “The Companion and the Dream: Delirium in Rachilde and Jarry.” Romance Studies, no. 18 (summer 1991): 33-41.

In the following essay, Fisher discusses the pre-Freudian significance of delirium in the novels of Jarry and of his close friend and biographer, the writer Rachilde.

It is inevitable that discussion of the dream in literature, and particularly over the last hundred years, tends to focus on Freud and the relevance of Freudian interpretation. The mark of Freud upon twentieth-century thought is in fact so great that other reflections on the dream are often forgotten. This article discusses two French novels of the 1890s, Rachilde's La Princesse des ténèbres¹ and Alfred Jarry's Les Jours et les nuits², which belong to the period leading up to the publication of Die Traumdeutung (1900) and illustrate an approach to the literary dream which is distinct from Freudian attitudes, and has identifiable links...