Dream on

‘Tell a dream and lose a reader’ was one of Henry James’s most immediately practical if obvious pieces of advice to fellow authors. Dying in 1916, he didn’t have much chance to experience surrealism in its numerous manifestations, and one can’t imagine his responding positively if he had. For the abandonment of memory, of motive, of logic, of any of the categories by which we make sense of experience is gleefully embraced by surrealists — and by no one more thoroughly than Georges Neveux, in his play Juliette, or the key of dreams. It concerns Michel, a man who is so haunted by a song he heard a girl singing through an open window that he returns to the coastal town where he had that experience, only to find that no one there has a memory, that there is a fortune-teller who predicts the past, and more alarmingly that he is elected mayor of the town, only for everyone to forget that he has been. And so on.

To dignify this kind of thing with the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ is completely to misunderstand that novelist’s achievement, which is to deduce conclusions rigorously from absurd premises. Where there is no memory or motive there can be no people, so nothing to be interested in. The most one can hope for is a series of sensational and almost wholly unrelated incidents that are fun or alarming in themselves.

That is not what Neveux, or Bohuslav Martinu, who unwisely turned the play into an opera, managed to do or even showed any interest in doing. Sometimes, attempting to follow the appalling intricacies of a baroque opera’s plot, I have wished that it had been dispensed with and that the librettist and composer had settled for a series of more or less unrelated arias and ensembles.