I recently read a translation (from French) of The Palace of Dreams (Nëpunësi i pallatit të ëndrrave) by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare with my book group at the University of Leeds Library. Whether it's SF is up for debate, but the events of the novel are certainly dystopian and understood to be informed by Kadare's experiences living under state totalitarianism in Albania during the 1970s and 1980s.
In it, we are presented with the central character of Mark-Alem, a member of the powerful but inauspicious Quprili family. This ancient Albanian dynasty have a long and fractious history within the Bulkan empire, sporadically falling out of favour with the ruling Sultans. Nevertheless, soon after the story begins Mark-Alem is selected to work in the prestigious Tabir Sarrail (The Palace of Dreams). Widely known as the state’s most secretive organisation, the workers select and interpret the dreams of the country’s citizens, which are gathered on horseback from all corners of the empire. Each week a Master Dream is selected and presented to the Sultan, as a means of anticipating plots to overthrow the authorities.
Mark-Alem quickly and inexplicably rises through the ranks of the Palace but is often disorientated navigating his way through the labyrinthine corridors of the Tabir Sarrail, and constantly baffled as to why he is distinguished from his peers. Part of the clue lies in a quote that featured on the front cover of my edition of the book:
And so that the bridge might endure, a man was sacrificed in its building, walled up in its foundations. And although so much time had gone by since, the traces of his blood had come down to the present generation. So that the Quprilis might endure...
Mark-Alem quickly and inexplicably rises through the ranks of the Palace but is often disorientated navigating his way through the labyrinthine corridors of the Tabir Sarrail, and constantly baffled as to why he is distinguished from his peers. Part of the clue lies in a quote that featured on the front cover of my edition of the book:
And so that the bridge might endure, a man was sacrificed in its building, walled up in its foundations. And although so much time had gone by since, the traces of his blood had come down to the present generation. So that the Quprilis might endure...
The Quprili family name means 'bridge', so the suggestion is that Mark-Alem sacrifices himself in order to ensure the family's continued influence. By having an agent in one of the state's most powerful institutions, the Quprilis can ward off potential conspiracies against them. There is also a nod to one of Kadare's earlier stories in this reference to the bridge, The Three-Arched Bridge (Ura Me Tri Harqe).
What I find so interesting about the story is the idea of the Palace of Dreams itself. In this system, the consciousness of the people is at the mercy of its government and the motif of the dream, which can often be associated positively with the capacity to imagine (utopian) alternatives, is presented in a scenario that allows for no alternatives, and actively precludes them. Lenin's quote from Pisarev on the importance of dreams, that 'if there some connection between dreams and life then all is well', is turned on its head here. As Mark-Alem's uncle, the Vizier, tells him towards the end of the novel:
Some people [...] think it's the world of
anxieties and dreams - your world, in short - that governs this one. I
myself think it's from this world that everything is governed. I think it's
this world that selects what it wants from the abyss.
My reference to Fredric Jameson's study in the title captures the sense in which the so-called unconscious is deliberately put to work serving the political ends of a totalitarian regime. In Jameson, this relationship is figured differently; Ian Buchanan's commentary of Jameson's criticism and his uptake of utopia as a critical method offers an insightful summary:
Utopia is figured as the repressed; its conspicuous absence in most cultural texts is thus a symptom of a deep resistance. Of course the fact that texts are actually cast as symptomatic means this particular repressed is, thankfully, irrepressible, that is to say, insistently returning. The larger goal of Jameson’s criticism, then, is to diagnose the source of this censorship, and, in the same gesture, perform a kind of cultural “talking cure” by bringing into the open the repressed idea of Utopia as it exist in popular and other texts.
Utopia is figured as the repressed; its conspicuous absence in most cultural texts is thus a symptom of a deep resistance. Of course the fact that texts are actually cast as symptomatic means this particular repressed is, thankfully, irrepressible, that is to say, insistently returning. The larger goal of Jameson’s criticism, then, is to diagnose the source of this censorship, and, in the same gesture, perform a kind of cultural “talking cure” by bringing into the open the repressed idea of Utopia as it exist in popular and other texts.
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