Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899–1929

During the opening decades of the twentieth century, German- and French-speaking physicians, scientists and modernist writers alike contributed to a robust discourse about a primary human activity—sleep—that was being reshaped fundamentally by modern life. They were concerned with figuring out the nature of sleep, with the physiology that facilitates sleep, with managing sleep, and with the writing of sleep. Significant inquiries in sleep science occurred in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Habsburg Empire within a tightly delineated historical period. The latter had begun in 1899 with Sigmund Freud’s conceptual division of sleep and dreams, and concluded in 1929 with Hans Berger’s introduction of the electroencephalogram, or the EEG, which enabled the analysis of brain waves. Concurrently, and within the same geographic setting, pharmaceutical companies grew increasingly invested in the manufacture, marketing, and distribution of soporifics. In his compelling volume Sleep Works, Sebastian P. Klinger examines the evolution of scientific understanding of sleep, as well as of synthetic interventions in the sleep behavior of humans. He devotes himself furthermore to scrutinizing contemporary, literary portrayals of sleep. While his principal focus is on writers Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Arthur Schnitzler, and Rainer Maria Rilke, Klinger’s informative account also expands understanding of the scientific and cultural contexts of their contemporaries. It certainly will encourage readers of this journal to revisit Edith Wharton’s attention to physical distress, the individual’s search for respite through the loss of consciousness, and the use of pharmaceutical drugs in works like The House of Mirth (1905), The Fruit of the Tree (1907), and Twilight Sleep (1927). It also might inspire further appraisal of the sleeping behavior of Wharton’s characters and of her literary strategies when depicting different states of consciousness.The subtitle of Klinger’s volume yokes together the science and literature of sleep but also emphasizes the inherently experimental nature of the work connected to understanding and communicating sleep at this time. Chapter 1’s account of advances in sleep science that preceded the EEG’s incontrovertible proof of sleep as an active rather than passive human experience gestures toward this by recounting Angelo Mosso’s sound experiments. These were performed in the late 1800s on a consenting subject with a cracked skullcap and found that his brain registered responses to his name while asleep. The first chapter explains also how experimental psychologist Édouard Claparède distinguished between active and passive sleep, characterizing sleep as a form of labor to remain disinterested in the world for the duration of one’s rest. Claparède reinterpreted experiments with sleep deprivation conducted originally by one of the few female figures in Sleep Works, physiologist Marie de Manacéïne, to conclude that we sleep in order to shield ourselves against the dangers of exhaustion. (Unfortunately, Manacéïne’s example also stands out for demonstrating the cruelty on which our quest for scientific knowledge so often rests. All the puppies used during her project died, having been kept awake for a week, yet this did not stop psychologist Henri Piéron from replicating the study.) Finally, based on his diagnostic work during the worldwide epidemic of encephalitis lethargica or sleeping sickness (1915–1927), psychiatrist and neurologist Constantin von Economo was able to confirm sleep as active and to argue that it was a function of the brain.In contrast to the first chapter’s emphasis on experimentation as a formal component of scientific inquiry underpinned by protocols, close observation, and replication, chapter 2 draws attention to its unofficial and unsanctioned role within the pharmaceutical industry a century ago. It follows the production of soporifics, notably the barbiturate Veronal, by companies like Bayer and Merck. Veronal was aimed at a considerable market of prospective consumers who, in response to the circumstances of modern living, suffered increasingly from a range of sleep disorders, such as insomnia, and proved particularly receptive to the promise of controlling their own rest. Klinger traces Veronal’s rise and success via a varied and rich body of literature, including Bayer’s own archival records, pharmaceutical advertisements aimed at the public, and medical reviews of the drug, that rapidly developed around it. He emphasizes the pivotal role of the drug’s branding, which targeted women. As the first synthetic sleeping drug available in tablet form, marketed as free of side effects and sold over the counter in its early years, it not only spelled scientific progress harnessed to increase a person’s individual agency but also possessed a new, aesthetic appeal. Contemporary German newspaper reports and fictional work, however, told a story different from the pharmaceutical narrative—one that linked the use of Veronal to accidents and suicides that affected women disproportionately. Klinger’s examination of the gendered impact of Veronal use (like his consideration of Manacéïne’s work in chapter 1) helps to diversify the volume’s predominant focus on male scientists and writers. At first, women’s irresponsible use of the drug and/or suicidal inclinations were blamed, but in reality Veronal had been designed around the male body, was not properly tested or sufficiently regulated by the time that it was brought to market, and would prove highly addictive. Pharmaceutical companies effectively trialed the drug on a society that entered, unwittingly, into what Klinger calls “an open-ended self-experiment” (57).Next Sleep Works turns to the voices of literary writers that formed part of the contemporary conversation around sleep. Chapter 3’s focus on the physician-author Schnitzler—particularly his novella Fräulein Else (1924)—likely will be of special interest to readers and scholars of The House of Mirth. Wharton’s novel is mentioned briefly as a comparative example for its portrayal of Lily Bart’s chloral use and overdose. Klinger draws on Bayer’s archival records to establish the company’s familiarity with Fräulein Else’s plot, which reimagined an actual case reported in the Neue Freie Presse involving a young woman’s suicide by Veronal. He also outlines how Bayer sought to moderate the work’s effect on its future business. (Schnitzler appears not to have taken much notice of the company’s actions in this regard.) Klinger’s reading of the novella underlines its importance as a literary intervention—one that includes Schnitzler’s inventive use of the interior monologue to privilege Else’s perspective—by a medical expert within the period’s discourse surrounding Veronal and its role in a contemporary public health crisis.Close consideration of the relationships of Proust, Kafka, and Rilke with sleep, the stories they tell about sleep, and how they experiment with ways of telling them most effectively makes up the remainder of the volume. Proust’s use of sleep scenes as structural scaffolding for his À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927), intersecting with his attentiveness to various states of sleep—in Wharton’s view no other writer “carried as far the analysis of half-conscious states of mind” (Writing of Fiction 110) —seems in keeping with his own insomnia, reliance on sleeping drugs, and interest in sleep science. Chapter 4 positions the multivolume novel against the backdrop of evolving sleep science and pharmaceuticals, developments with which Proust was well acquainted. It also considers his responses to dealing with sleep’s inherent absences and to portraying the state of sleep from the perspective of the first person. Unlike Proust, Kafka rejected the promise of synthetic sleeping aids and insisted instead on nurturing his insomnia as a source of literary creativity—and indeed on writing itself as a form of sedation. This distinction represents Klinger’s springboard in chapter 5 for exploring Kafka’s interest in states that exist between wakefulness and sleep, and in writing scenes of waking up and falling asleep, through his diaries, the novel Das Schloss (1922), and the short story “Der Bau” (1923–1924). Ultimately, he finds that Kafka’s experiments with writing about sleep cast light on modern life in the absence of a synthetic avenue toward rest.It seems fitting that Klinger’s volume concludes with verse. Chapter 6 focuses on Rilke’s poetry about sleep, which echoed the inquiries of contemporary sleep science, and draws out his admiration for the work of Paul Valéry in particular. An insomniac like Proust and Kafka, Rilke—whom Wharton described as an “exquisite poet” (Backward Glance 333)—seems to grapple with sleeplessness both through his prose and through the poetry of his middle period. In his final years, though, Rilke’s engagement with Valéry’s poetry heralded a significant change in his literary approach to sleep. As demonstrated by his German translation of Valéry’s “La Dormeuse” (1922), he became interested, for instance, in the transitions from, or turning points between, states of sleep to wakefulness (and in the idea that regardless of said state, the corporeal form remains conscious). A similar turning point in Rilke’s “Idol” (1925), marked formally by the double reference to a gong—a distinctive instrument in sleep-scientific experimentation with thresholds of awakening—releases the subject of all agency, as it is overpowered by and drawn back into sleep. Klinger’s analyses of these poems, alongside further examples from Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus cycle (1922), offer stimulating readings that, like those of Proust’s and Kafka’s works, reflect Sleep Works’s overarching focus on the interrelationship between early twentieth-century scientific and literary engagements with sleep.Given the temporal and geographic focus of Sleep Works, the effects of the Great War on the individual’s relationship with sleep perhaps could have occupied a more prominent position in its discussions. Yet, the vigor of this multidisciplinary account—generously supported by footnotes, a substantial list of sources, and a helpful index—compensates for this perceived absence. Last but not least, Klinger’s attractive volume includes several intriguing figures, rounding out its discussions.