SOURCE: “Michel de Ghelderode: The Theatre of the Swerving Dream,” in University of Windsor Review, Vol. 13, No. 2, Spring 1978, pp. 5-23.

In the following essay, Farish examines the states of dreaming and waking in Ghelderode's plays.

The search for truth among the rubble of reality and the debris of dreams is not new to the theatre nor is the effort to reconstruct the past and forecast the future from totems that have survived intact among such ruins. The fascinating aspect of this search is that no matter how the artist conceives the rubble, debris and totems, the truths which emerge are original in that they are discovered again and again. Thus, although the truths that Michel de Ghelderode uncovers in his theatre are not necessarily new, the conditions of his discoveries are startling, harrowing even, and render the terms of his drama newly convincing.

As his search for the...