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.