SOURCE: "The Companion and the Dream: Delirium in Rachilde and Jarry," in Romance Studies, No. 18, Summer, 1991, pp. 33-41.

In the following essay, Fisher examines depictions of delirium in Rachilde's La princesse des ténèbres and Alfred Jarry's Les jours et les nuits, claiming that these works illustrate a view of dream-states differing from the theories advanced by Sigmund Freud in his Interpretation of Dreams.

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 ténèbres and Alfred Jarry's Les Jours et les nuits, which belong to the period leading up to the publication...