SOURCE: Weber, Maryann. “How to Do Things with Dreams: Dream Power in Balzac and Nerval.” Romance Quarterly 37, no. 4 (November 1990): 409-17.

In the following essay, Weber examines the function of dreams in Balzac's “L'Auberge rouge” and “Sur Catherine de Médicis,” and Gérard de Nerval's Aurélia.

Dreams escape the confines of reason and reality. Although Freudian psychologists find dreams to be deeply motivated and overdetermined, recounting a dream would appear to have no purpose except a therapeutic one or, in certain cultures, the foretelling of events to come. But dream discourse as a framed narrative within a literary text can have an intended perlocutionary effect in the social sphere and create a double hesitation—the hesitation between the real and the imaginary which characterizes the fantastic as a genre and a second hesitation between an iconic fixation at the level of the dream tableaux and a goal-oriented...