TRAUMNOVELLE (RHAPSODY, A DREAM NOVEL) - ARTHUR SCHNITZLER trans. OTTO P. SCHINNERER

Another short little novel, to go along with THE BLUE FOX and NAZI LITERATURE IN THE AMERICAS, it’s been a while since I’ve read a long novel, I’ll have to get to that soon, but, in the meantime, I’ve been enjoying knocking these small little numbers out. This is, in fact, the novel that EYES WIDE SHUT is based on, and that is the reason I’m read it. I’m quite an EWS fan and thought it would be fun to explore the greater EWS universe. This novel, which you can read in a day easily, is recreated pretty exactly in the movie. It is about a doctor, here in Vienna, who lives a comfortable bourgeois life which is upended when he discusses his dreams and desire with his wife and, crucially, listens to her dreams and desires. It’s interesting that we are told that he, “for years…had not exchanged confidences with anyone except his wife” yet it seems like this book chronicles the only time in their marriage where he’s really thought about her inner life and desires and thoughts and it drives him insane. He hears a revelation that she, at some point in the past, found another man attractive and fantasized about leaving him for this mystery Danish man. He hears her recount a dream where she doesn’t save him from crucifixion, and this idea, that she wouldn’t be faithful to him in her dreams and fantasies, drives him insane. He deals with this by wondering the streets and witnessing all sorts of weird psycho-sexual scenes. This, famously if you’ve seen EWS, ends with him at a masked orgy of rich people, which like the movie, takes place in the middle of the book. He is found out and has to flee and thus spends the rest of the book trying to figure out what went on with that orgy and if he can be with his wife, despite her being a separate person from him. The novel certainly implies that he girls at the orgy might be prostitutes or they might be the children of the rich, which is an intriguing twist. However, the book also makes it more ambiguous than the movie w/r/t whether or not the orgy stuff even happened or if this was his version of his wife’s dream. He also mentions several time that, in his capacity as a doctor he had recently been coughed on by an infectious person so he’s somewhat worried he might develop a deadly disease, so there’s some job-related trauma playing into this as well. Definitely an interesting take on desire, especially male desire, and the perversity of heterosexuality. Kubrick has such a good spin on it that I do find this to be one of the few examples of “movie is better than the book.” 1880 masked orgies.