Every now and then, when bills are paid, deferred duties and commitments no longer cast their shadow over life, and a rare calm has settled over life, it is nice to crawl into bed. Before sleep sets in, the pleasant feeling sets in as I look forward with anticipation to my dreams, whether they are nightmares or fantastic adventures. It is like listening to 29th Century Fox's fanfare as it accompanies its sweeping spotlights, or listening to the roar of MGM's lion - "Now it begins!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rspzzsMRl-E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHU53NedhkQ&ab_channel=AhmedHassn
It is the dreams that come and whether they are nightmares or exciting stories, I appreciate them. Because they are stories. A sequence of images, ideas, feelings and sensations, complete with colour and sound. Just as during our waking conscious life, dreams occupy a large part of our time on earth and they have fascinated all of humanity since time immemorial – we find the Alcheringa of the Australian Aborigines, actually “the eternal, the uncreated”, translated by anthropologists as Dreamtime, the stargazers of the Sumerians and the Jungians of today.
The occasional wise guy has dismissed dreams as illogical and therefore unimportant – a kind of non-binding cleaning process of all possible, unnecessary debris that has cluttered our brain space during the day. An irrelevant hodgepodge. But to me they are highly interesting ideas and when I find myself inside the dream world it appears perfectly logical and completely correct, apart from the fact that places, objects and people can continuously merge into each other, becoming images and experiences that reflect everyday life and memories. Sometimes the dreams can take bizarre, exaggerated forms and take me into grotesque, complex worlds. But, just as often they take me to familiar places, to roads and paths I have followed before, to schools and other buildings I have stayed in, fields and forests, people I have met, some forgotten, others dead, although many are very present – siblings, my nearest and dearest, colleagues and childhood friends. I hear their voices, see their faces; we speak to each other, dead and alive and act together in these changing, unreal dream worlds.
Despite their nocturnal tangibility, dreams are fleeting. They can indeed be repeated and remain in the memory. I sometimes end up in them in places I have previously visited and stayed in. Visits to certain places are constantly repeated and when I remember them in a waking state I sometimes wonder – Why those places in particular? They were never particularly significant, were they?
I have dreams that seem to be common to the ones of other dreamers; to appear naked or inappropriately dressed in various contexts, or the more pleasant feeling of being able to fly. The latter dream means that I, as the only person, have discovered that by carefully jumping into the air and then standing upright, I can soar higher and higher, always standing upright. It is a difficult manoeuvre that requires a certain effort, but it is a nice feeling to be able to lift higher and higher and view the landscape of my childhood, or my present, from a high altitude. My ability to fly sometimes arouses surprise and admiration, but just as often complete indifference. Another recurring dream is that I end up in a large, complicated workplace; my contract has expired, my services are no longer needed and have not been appreciated, but I still have a desk and am given completely unnecessary tasks, while I no longer belong there and do not receive any salary. I can also end up in large, labyrinthine schools. I do not know what my schedule looks like, what lessons I have and no one helps me find my way. I do not know the names of my students; I am always late and cannot find the classrooms. Sometimes I am the student myself, significantly older than everyone else in the class. My classmates think it is strange that I have ended up there, but the teachers accept my presence: "Jan himself asked to be here". In other dreams I am late for flights, trains and boats, which often take off with my luggage and leave me alone. I lose myself in the intricate labyrinths of subways, or get lost in underground passages, which sometimes narrow into claustrophobic tunnels.
Dream research is a vast field that is now being explored using brain scans, computers and AI, but since dreams are highly personal and narrative-based, they are also being studied through the testimony of dreamers, who are awakened when there are indications that they are dreaming and who are then asked to state what their dreams were about.
For example, between 1940 and 1985, the Freud-inspired American psychologist Calvin S. Hall and his colleagues collected more than 50,000 dream reports from different corners of the world. Their results seemed to show that dreams from widely different environments and different cultural contexts had largely the same, or rather similar, content. According to the studies, anxiety was the most common dream emotion. Other emotions included abandonment, anger, fear, joy and happiness. Negative emotions were much more common than positive ones. Contrary to popular belief, sexual dreams made up less than ten percent of dreams and were roughly equally common in both men and women.
That sex does not have such an overwhelming presence in our dreams would perhaps surprise Sigmund Freud, who had a tendency to regard sexualized energy as the primary driving force in our mental processes and structures. Something that led him to interpret most sensory impulses as connected to eroticism, experienced or repressed. As far as I understand, such thoughts were the basis for his Interpretation of Dreams, which is characterized by Freud's view of dreams as created from "subconscious" thoughts, governed by a "pleasure principle" which meant that they reflected wishful thinking about sexual satisfaction. A phenomenon that, according to Freud, had been formed from repressed sexual scenarios of childhood. According to him, dreams had thus been endowed with a symbolic censorship function that created distortions, displacements and strange summaries of repressed thoughts in sleep.
I am not convinced. Freud's writings are certainly stimulating reading, but I think he often misses the mark. I am convinced that if we look, we can find patterns and explanations everywhere in the universe we live in. We look at the night sky and find connections between stars and galaxies, and many of us believe that their changing constellations influence, or reflect, our personal lives. Similarly, many may believe that our body constitution, posture and bodily fluids predestine our existence, just as our adult life has been irrevocably marked by our childhood, especially if it was unhappy. Even chaos and chance are believed by many of us to be rule-governed and predetermined. Not to mention our dreams, which are considered to be significant warnings, warnings and life-determining indications. In every Italian tobacconist's shop, there are thick books that convert dreams into numbers that can be used in lotteries, football tips and horse races.
In my opinion, dream interpretation is highly personal. What does not happen during a long life, during which our opinions and fantasies have come to be characterized by our own personality? Something that, by the way, has made me suspicious of the theories of Freud, Jung, Adler and other psychoanalysts. Many years ago, I knew a Jungian therapist and we often discussed my dreams. I have never dreamed so much as during that time and she always managed to interpret my dreams a very interesting, Jungian manner. Something that I found very amusing, but I did not tell her that despite my interest, I was far from a believing Jungian.
I assume that Freud's patients dreamed like Freud – in n a sexual-neurotic direction, like Jung – in archetypes, or like Adler – longing for belonging. And if they didn't, these psychoanalytic geniuses could certainly manage to make the dreams fit within the patterns they had established, not least by transforming them into metaphors and symbols.
I remember an amusing episode in the TV series The Young Indiana Jones where the main character meets Freud, Jung and Adler. All played by Swedish actors – Freud by Max von Sydow, Jung by Ernst-Hugo Järegård and Adler by Björn Granath.
I find it sad that I remember so few of my dreams. My eldest daughter is capable of giving long and often fascinating accounts of her dreams, and sometimes my wife can do the same. I myself vaguely remember my fantastic dream adventures, and it annoys me that I cannot narrate them more clearly and better. One of my best friends kept books of his dreams for several years, and perhaps he still does. He had taped a thin flashlight to a pen, which he had resting in a notebook on his bedside table. If he woke up after a dream, he would quickly turn on the flashlight and write down a few supporting words before falling back asleep. The next morning, with the help of the supporting words, he could write down his dream. Often, he had forgotten that he had woken up during the night and written down the words.
There are plenty of fascinating dream books. Swedish geniuses like Emanuel Swedenborg and August Strindberg wrote such books.
Visually obsessed and brilliant film directors such as Fellini and Kurosawa have managed to portray their dreams in their films, and they have used their dream books to help them. They were both keen cartoonists and often illustrated their dream books.
The author and literary critic Olof Lagercrantz has written somewhere that dream descriptions rarely make good literature. He is shooting himself in the foot there. He has written a book and researched Dante's Divina Commedia, one of the most magnificent dream descriptions in existence. Dante's visual richness and distinctive language have inspired writers, artists and filmmakers throughout the centuries. Fellini stated in an interview:
I could never make a film based on The Divine Comedy, for the simple reason that Dante has already created that film: there is in him, in his poetry, a vision so precisely expressed that I am unable to understand what I could ever add. Perhaps some Dantean special effects? I can finally say that all my films have been inspired by the great poet: what are they? If not a disciple's interpretations of Hell, with a few flashes of Purgatory and Paradise.
Master writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka were certainly convinced of the great importance of dreams and used them in their incomparable short stories and novels. Stories that have not lost their relevance and continue to captivate generation after generation. In A Ridiculous Man's Dream, Dostoevsky writes:
Dreams, as we all know, are very curious things: certain incidents in them are presented with quite uncanny vividness, each detail executed with the finishing touch of a jeweller, while others you leap across as though entirely unaware of, for instance, space and time. Dreams seem to be induced not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what clever tricks my reason has sometimes played on me in dreams!
Franz Kafka is well known for being inspired by dreams, and his stories and three novels are undeniably endowed with a dreamlike atmosphere, not least through their wealth of detail and coldly calculated absurdism. Like Dostoevsky, Kafka often spices his descriptions with fleeting details, noticed by an extremely alert mind. It is the detailed presence in these stories that makes them surreal – “more than real”.
In Prague, not far from the old ghetto, there is a statue illustrating the super-real reality that is almost always present in Kafka's storytelling. Kafka's alter ego sits crouched on the shoulders of an upright giant, consisting only of empty clothes. It is a vision taken from one of Kafka's early prose pieces – Description of a Struggle. Often dismissed as one of Kafka's worse works. Nonsense - I wonder if those who have called the novella an immature youth piece has really been to Prague and walked alone through its nocturnal streets, as they rest abandoned by the hordes of tourists that have cluttered the city during the day. Then you are surrounded by the Prague of Kafka, Seifert, Rilke and Meyrink; its mysterious, slightly sinister presence, alive in Kafka's Description of a Struggle. A dream indeed, but a reality dreamed. As true as Marquez's Maconde, or Monty Python's England. More real than reality. Kafka rides the empty suit. He has stepped onto his “acquaintance’s” shoulders and spurs him like a horse, while he imagines the surrounding landscape responding to his every whim.
The dreamer Kafka is in complete control of his art, his language. As in almost everything he writes. Think of his Castle, how dreamily detailed it is described, as is its surrounding village. Duke Westwest's threatening building complex. with its two floors, surrounding closed buildings and its single tower, overgrown with ivy. An extremely inhospitable building, equipped with a few window openings, almost impenetrable with its angular parapets, which rise against an even gray sky, as if they were clumsily drawn by an unfocused child. The castle looms frighteningly over a gloomy village, located on the banks of a sluggish river. Winter and cold prevail here, if it is not damp and rainy. The silent inhabitants of the village seem to have become one with the gloomy landscape. Their physical, with foreheads that seem to have been flattened by hard blows, testify to the suffocating presence of the despotically invisible lord of the castle.
Kafka moves freely in the landscape of dreams. It could be the barren desert landscape with the dilapidated buildings of his penal colony and the detailed description of the mechanism of its gruesome torture device.
Or a USA that the not particularly well-travelled Kafka never visited, where the Statue of Liberty has a sword instead of a torch and there is a bridge between New York and Boston. But still, as in a dream, Kafka's depiction of New York does not ring false. I find it less absurd than Céline's strangely nightmarish depiction of the city in Journey to the End of the Night, in which the main character, like Kafka's Karl Rossman, is a confused stranger. And Céline had actually been there
The Amerika: Or Missing Man’s meticulous description of a world of feelings that actually only exists in Kafka's imagination makes everything he writes tangible and experienced firsthand, perhaps not in reality, but in the dream. It seems as if he opens the door to his dreams and we step into them in amazement. To read Kafka, something that should probably be done with great attention, is to become a participant in a dream, usually a nightmare. As when a dream is viewed from the outside – beyond the fixed rules of the dream, the whole thing becomes strange and distorted, despite the strict presentation.
The dreamlike character of the story is recalled in every moment of The Missing Man (the actual title that Kafka gave his manuscript) as in Kafka's other novels and short stories – how Karl Rossman is taken in by his uncle, the nightmarish stay in Pollunder's enormous, half-finished house, the nasty hotel doorman, etc. As in a dream, figures appear and disappear, impossible coincidences take place within a limited, closed world, in which the dreamer remains a stranger, a confirmation of Joseph Conrad's statement "we live as we dream - alone".
In The Vanished we find the superb depiction of the Oklahoma Theatre in Clayton, a piece of absurd realism; a rather shabby spectacle that in its grand staging with false playing of doomsday trumpets provides a self-perceived authenticity that makes me think of the Mormons' huge festival at the Hill Cumorah, which, however, did not begin until 1920 (Kafka died in 1924) and ended in connection with the COVID 19 outbreak.
In its enormity, that Mormon spectacle seems to be a very American undertaking. And Kafka's The Disappeared makes me remember my own years in New York, when I was often seized by a strange feeling of alienation, as if I were in an unknown and familiar context. A world I knew from film and TV, music and other entertainment. Similar and yet different. Kafka gives me the impression of being well-read and familiar with the depictions of America that were common even in his time.
On one occasion when I was in New York, the fiftieth anniversary of the first King Kong film was being celebrated. A giant, inflatable rubber King Kong was attached to the Empire State Building. For some reason, the strange object did not hold the air for very long and when I stood down on the street and saw how high up there a shapeless King Kong fluttered in the wind (he was so high up that it was difficult to see him from the street below). A friendly Japanese tourist lent me his camera with a telephoto lens and commented in English on the strange spectacle: “It’s so American. It’s so huge. It’s so crazy and… it doesn’t work.”
If a dream is to be portrayed, it often takes the form of Tanguy's abstract surrealist landscapes, or through Dali's sharply defined nightmares.
It is also possible to choose Chagall's warmer, more cheerfully human art. This is despite the fact that Chagall himself claimed that he never dreamed. He stated that his art was rooted in reality to the extent that it lived through memories and a special view of life. If it seems as if his paintings were inspired by dreams, it was because they were created from his belief in the divine.
What I am searching for: work as meaning of life. Not a dream; but life. I do not have dreams. Art, in general, is an act of faith. But sacred is art the art created above interests, such as glory, fame, or any other material consideration. Painting appeared to me like a window through which I could fly away to another world. Before every landscape, I am moved; but I am also similarly moved before man and before certain events in life.
I assume I can understand him. For Chagall, despite the great suffering of his people, life was a heavenly hymn and his art a hymn of praise to the reality that surrounded him. Obviously, the Vitebsk of his childhood was a rather dreary and dreary place. Although in his early art he celebrates Jewish life, its traditions and family life, it is generally done in a brown and greyish colour scale. It was only after Chagall came to Paris that his palette began to vibrate with light and colour. In Paris he met the Orphists; Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Gleizes, La Fresnay and Lhote. Chagall also knew Picasso, whom he never really liked. The Orphists tried to give life to Cubism through colour and joy of life. Among the poets and artists of Paris, Chagall's Russian memories flared up with full force. What may seem spontaneous in him is nevertheless often coloured by profound reflections. Chagall was willingly inspired by the naive publican Rousseau, but also by more systematizing artists such as Robert Delaunay.
However, Chagall was and remained unique, admired early on by insightful poets such as Cendrars and Apollinaire. Consider, for example, his I and the Village. Chagall's memory of a Russian village, symbolized by an animal (donkey, horse, goat?) They look each other straight in the eye, a thin thread runs, almost invisible, between their gazes. The community is also symbolized by the fact that they both wear a necklace with a cross; faith, suffering? Chagall and the animal are painted different colours, green and blue; reality, dream? In the background, a floating woman can be seen; life, dream, fertility? She flies towards a farmer with a scythe over her shoulder; Death? At the top we see the village, or Vitebsk which (which was actually a city with 80,000 inhabitants) now, unlike before, shines in the light of memory, and so it would remain in the paintings that Chagall made of his beloved hometown from then on. The artist holds a flowering tree in his hand. The tree of life? As in several of the Orphists' cubic-inspired paintings, the canvas is divided into geometric fields, rendered in glowing colours.
Chagall would insist that a painting like Me and the Village had nothing to do with dreams at all, it depicted real life. Not long ago, I met a young music student from Vitebsk in Rome. He told me that his childhood city was now a dreary place, rebuilt after the destruction of World War II. Not much remains of Chagall's vision of Vitebsk. Between July 1941 and June 1944, Vitebsk was occupied by the German Wehrmacht. The city became known for its fierce resistance to the German occupation. After the German defeat, the city was a ruin and only 118 of its original inhabitants remained. The Jews, who had numbered 43,616 in 1910, were wiped out. During the summer and autumn of 1941, 18,000 Jews were taken to the Tulov ravine outside the city, killed and buried in mass graves.
The city is now rebuilt with the usual Stalinist skyscrapers, a restored cathedral with surrounding similarly restored buildings, and a recently inaugurated, pyramid-shaped shopping mall.
So, if Chagall claims that his paintings are not dream depictions, then perhaps the illustrations that often accompany fantasy stories can be considered as such?
Although for me, perhaps it is Delvaux's and Magritte's images that best correspond to how I perceive my dreams:
In my waking state, images bring me into the world of dreams. As a little boy, I often dreamed of acquiring magnificent books. In my hometown, Hässleholm, there was Hånell's bookstore. For me, it was a dream palace. In its basement there were toys, but above all large picture books that also had a strangely enticing smell. Among other things, I used to swear by a book called Animals on Earth. I don't think that, like many of my peers, I received any weekly allowance at that time. If I remember correctly, I collected money I received from relatives, or that was given to me when I ran some errands. In any case, after several months of browsing and fragrant Animals on Earth, I bought it and it became the first book I bought with my own money.
I still have it and as I leaf through it now, I am immediately transported back into the world of my childhood and realize why its images held such a great allure for me and influenced so many of my daydreams and drawings.
Another book that I didn't own, but constantly borrowed from the library and which was the main source for a feature film I was working on and called The History of the World. The "movie" consisted of rolls of paper that my father had given me, probably the kind used in calculating machines at the time. I divided them into frames and taped them together. There must have been hundreds of small coloured pictures that illustrated the history of the world. The book that inspired me (although I used a lot of other models) was large and magnificent and was called A Golden Book of the Fates and Adventures of Peoples (title had a different formulation in English).
The illustrations were extremely detailed and drawn in a style that imitated that which was common during the time period they depicted. I never tired of studying those pictures and I can still dream about them.
The books I have read about dreams often take the form of wanderings through strange regions, such as Alice in Wonderland, The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Divine Comedy. One such wandering that I have previously have written about is Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (in my blog Descending into Dreams: Rome and Our Inner Self). The complicated title, which is almost Greek, can be translated as Poliphilo's love struggle in a dream. Despite its allegorical complexity, I read with great interest this dream description about how the lovesick Poliphilo searches for his beloved Polia, a lady who in reality does not seem to be particularly interested in the protagonist's expressions of affection. In his search for Polia, Poliphilo wanders not only through different landscapes, but also from dream to dream. Not only are the landscapes, the images and encounters with mythical beings strangely elusive, so is the language. The famous author freely mixes Italian, Greek, Latin, and even Arabic and Hebrew words. In the translation I own (a beautiful edition, intact with the exquisite illustrations), Joscelyn Godwin has, thankfully, modernized the language.
I have previously given a fairly detailed description of the Hypnerotomachia's action, but I will repeat it in broad outline. Poliphilo wakes up after an apparently restless waking and falling asleep while dream after dream followed one another. It soon turns out, however, that Poliphilo has not woken up at all but is wandering in his dream through a wild forest through which he is chased by dragons and wolves, gets lost, meets beautiful maidens and ends up in ancient ruined cities. He believes he has come out of the forest, but in fact finds himself in another dream where he is cared for by beautiful nymphs. They take him to their queen who asks him to declare and pay tribute to his love for Polia. When Poliphili successfully succeeds in this, he is taken to three gates where it turns out that he has made the right choice, since behind the gate that opens for him is Polia.
The couple is now taken in a triumphal procession to a temple where they are betrothed and then they sail to the island of love, Cythera, with Cupid as helmsman. But here the story is suddenly interrupted by Polia's voice, expressing surprise at Polihilo's intentions. She rejects him, but after various nasty adventures, Cupid takes her back to Polihilo who, in despair over Polia's escape, has fainted. Culido makes Polia kiss the fainted one and when Poliphilo wakes up from his fainting fit through the kiss, he believes he can be reunited with Polia, but when he takes her in his arms she disappears and... Poliphilo wakes up, probably to everyday reality.
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is just one of the many dream descriptions in world literature. In my opinion, the most fascinating and comprehensive guide to different dream worlds is Alberto Manguel’s and Gianni Guadalupi's The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. A comprehensive work that, on 750 pages, with double-lined text, reproduces a multitude of imaginary places, taken from the works of hundreds of authors.
Despite the impressive scope and thematic scope, Manuel and Guadalupi do not address places that are set in the future, or out in space, nor heavens and hells, which means that works such as Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost fall outside its scope. For example, we are not allowed to become acquainted with the diabolical metropolis that was built under Satan's leadership by Mulciber, who had previously been the architect of Paradise, and which, on the recommendation of Mammon, became the home of the demons in Hell – Pandemonium, i.e. "All demons".
What is also missing from The Dictionary of Imaginary Places are megacities in outer space, such as those that have been relocated to the Moon and Mars over the centuries, not to mention the megacities that lie further out in the universe, such as Imperalia, the capital of the Galactic Empire on the planet Coruscant in Star Wars, or the city of Arrakeen in Frank Herbert's Dune series of novels.
We also miss future cities like Fritz Lang's groundbreaking 1927 film Metropolis, based on his wife's novel of the same name. Unlike her husband, Thea von Harbou was an enthusiastic Nazi and, after her divorce and her husband's flight, joined the National Socialist Party, first in Paris and then in the United States, where she held several influential positions. Thea was also inspired by H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, a writer who was also a skilled creator of future cities.
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Metropolis became the model for a number of future cities, especially in the world of film. Among them we find, for example, the American Just Imagine from 1930. It takes place in 1980 and is therefore, like Orwell's 1984, no longer set in any future. Just Imagine is a rather silly musical that, among other things, plays on one of the "vaudeville characters" of the time, namely the lost Swedish immigrant. A kind-hearted, but ridiculous figure with a strange accent and not particularly intelligent. The film's comic character is called Petterson and was struck by lightning in 1930. After being revived by researchers in 1980, Petterson wanders around in unfamiliar surroundings in which he unfortunately becomes highly intoxicated by taking "highball pills".
Together with the two main characters, Petterson makes it to Mars. After some tumultuous adventures on the human-inhabited planet, the trio manages to get back to Earth, where Petterson, now called Single O, meets his son who is now considerably older than his father.
As I said, the film is a bit cheesy and suffers from poor acting. Elmer Goodfellow "El" Brendel in the role of Petterson is particularly embarrassing. Brendel's overacting is hardly funny, almost embarrassingly bad. Despite this, Brendel was apparently a very popular artist in his time. He had behind hima long career as a vaudeville actor when had then developed a comic character with a German accent. When Germans after World War Iwere no longer considered to be particularly funny , Brendel developed a new comic personage – a good-natured, awkward and confused Swedish immigrant he called Oley, or Ole. For the rest of his career, El Brendel would portray this ridiculous character on stage and in several films.
Lang's Metropolis can probably be considered the prototype for several of its successors within a thoroughly urbanized, rather nightmarish film world, with aesthetically interesting cityscapes like those we encounter in Brazil, Bladerunner or The Fifth Element.
Metropolis was in turn inspired by the architectural dreams born of the Italian futurists and which soon afterwards inspired the Soviet artists who, like the Italian cultural radicals, wanted to create a completely new world. In Italy, architects such as the late Antonio Sant'Elia created highly mechanized, ultra-modern cities that never left the drawing board.
And the same fate befell the Russian futurists' dreams of fantastic, Soviet cities.
The fact that these grandiose projects were not completed, however, did not prevent them from falling into good stead. Totalitarian social systems seem to be particularly fascinated by grandiose, urban transformation projects. During the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union, the Suprematists' dreams were further developed in a considerably more tasteless, but nonetheless grandiose style.
In Nazi Germany, ruled by a narcissistic, megalomaniacal amateur artist who fancied himself an expert in architecture, his friend and favourite architect Albert Speer devised a grandiose project to transform Berlin into the Welthauptstadt Germania. Der Führer found joy and solace, as German cities were being razed to the ground by British and American bombers, in spending hours contemplating the vast and detailed model of a future Berlin that Speer had created for him.
Completely transforming his capital was also something that loomed over the mind of the master architect Le Corbusier, who through his Plan Voisin, developed between 1922 and 1925, dreamed of transforming Paris into a green city with enormous skyscrapers.
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It's not just Heaven and Hell, future worlds and extraterrestrial places that The Dictionary of Imaginary Places doesn't cover. The authors also deliberately overlooked fantasy worlds from the comic book meaning that we in their book neither find Duckburg, nor Bedrock or Gotham City.
But what is contained within The Dictionary of Imaginary Places is or sure interesting and imaginative, not least through the many maps and illustrations offered by the authors. The reading pleasure is enhanced by the fact that the imaginary lands that are described, from ancient times to the present day, are presented in a way that is as if they were guidebooks for potential visitors.
Among its more than a thousand articles, the extensive imagination of some eminent authors is more common than others. Of course, this applies to the well-travelled travellers of Rabelais, Ariosto and Swift.
However, authors such as Lovecraft, Baum and Tolkien are also generously represented with a variety of imaginative landscapes and cities.
Manguel’s and Gianni Guadalupi's guide to fantasy worlds and cities is richly illustrated. Here we find Dracula's castle, Baskervilles' mansion, the capital of Ruritania and even the castle of Otranto, the birthplace of Romantic Gothic novels by authors such as Lewis, Radcliffe, Maturin and Potocki. There are also pictures of a number of places described by almost forgotten authors from past centuries, such as the Fortunate Island, where the ships were equipped with sails made out of enormous butterfly wings.
We are invited to observe the strange architecture and/or interior design in a number of unexpected places. 
We meet the strange animals populating several of these fantasy lands.
As well as items such as wooden figurines, pumpkin vessels and live animals living in glass containers.
Like other comprehensive guidebooks, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places contains plenty of maps of countries and cities. For example, we find maps of Alice's Wonderland and King Kong's Skull Island.
Of course, there is also the famous map of Tolkien's Middle Earth. Tolkien was one of those authors who liked to draw his own illustrations for his fairy tales and also produced maps to support his fantasy journeys through the worlds he created. Together with his son Christopher, he made a detailed map of Middle Earth in 1953, which he gave to Pauline Bayne in 1970, the only illustrator who Tolkien considered worthy of illustrating his remarkable book series during his lifetime. Bayne created a number of personal impressions of the different landscapes that appear in the novel series, all in the absence of the people and various creatures that appeared in them.
In 1970, Pauline Bayne drew the map that was included in a new edition of The Lord of the Rings and which became the definitive map version of this fairy-tale world. Ten years ago, among Bayne's papers, the map made by J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien was found, complete with Tolkien's detailed comments on how he wanted Bayne's map to look.
A trained artist who made several beautiful and imaginative maps for her fairy tale worlds was Tove Jansson. The best of them depicts the winter landscape of Moomin Valley. Winter in Moomin Valley is my favourite among Tove's books, which I never tire of and often return to.
A successful fantasy author who did not want any maps to be included in his novels is George R.R. Martin, even though he makes it perfectly clear in them what his various cities and landscapes look like and how they relate geographically to each other. Martin believes that maps would destroy the reader's sense of participation in the journeys and adventures he talks about. However, that did not prevent the extremely successful film series based on his novel series A Song of Ice and Fire – Game of Thrones, in which every episode begins with a sequence that meticulously brings to life a map of Martin's fairy tale world, and several detailed maps have since that been made of that world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7L2PVdrb_8
I have now reached the part where I tell you that made me write about how different dream- and fairy-tale worlds have been portrayed, namely an article in FMR, Mensile di Franco Maria Ricci which told me about the to me previously unknown Lequeu. Well, he was not completely unknown. I had in several of my art books come across a mysterious picture of him, but without any further comment other than that Lequeu was one of the so-called visionary architects of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and that he lived between 1757 and 1826. On closer reflection, I came to wonder what the strangely elegant and meticulously executed, but at the same time erotically challenging female nude was doing in a niche within a classically designed piece of architecture. What was she doing? Was she releasing, or was she trying to catch, a lyrebird, which had only a couple of years earlier reached Paris from Australia? Without a doubt, the picture was dreamily strange and at the same time strangely “modern” and suggestive. When I now got to read about Lequeu, I found that in him, like in Poliphilo in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, there was a connection between eroticism and architecture, dream and madness. Lequeu too had succeeded in creating a dreamscape, as sharply portrayed and alienating as the one we encounter in Kafka and which appears in the multitude of the worlds described in Manguel’s and Guadalupi's The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.
Polihilo's wanderings through his dreamscape might be linked to the figurative ideology of the Italian Renaissance, its cult of sensual beauty and how this could be portrayed in harmony with a nostalgia for the Antiquity, a that artists and philosophers perceived as dominated by strength, simplicity and harmony. One means of achieving this dram was architecture and urban planning, something that several of the universal geniuses of the Renaissance devoted themselves to, not least Leonardo da Vinci. They believed that a well-planned, beautiful and harmonious environment would have a positive effect on people's peace of mind and intellectual life. The cities they dreamed up were beautiful and geometrically well-thought-out, based on ancient ideals and what they perceived as a divinely inspired, natural order.
There was a desire to change society through architecture, something that we later find in the Italian Futurists, Soviet Suprematists and their totalitarian heirs. A line of development that leads us to innovative architects such as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, and why not the more contemporary Hadid, Calatrava, Renzo Piano and Gehry. The latter have had several of their imaginative projects realized, but this was hardly the case for the Futurist and Suprematist architects, not to mention the visionary architects of the eighteenth century, whose main representatives were Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. They did indeed have some of their more modest building plans realized, but what else was in their hands were their grandiose, enormous projects.
In principle, it was not aesthetic principles that hindered their execution, like their predecessors during the Renaissance, they were firmly rooted in an ancient tradition. It was certainly the impossibility of realizing such enormous projects that hindered their realisation in real life. In Buollée's drawings of dream projects, people appear as ants.
Even Ledoux, although more successful than Buollée, could in his urban planning appear as a dreamer. Like Buollée, Ledoux was also seized by the revolutionary spirit of his time, albeit in a totalitarian direction. An example of this is his planned ideal city in Caux, where every single building, whether residential, industrial or public, would correspond to every conceivable human need. An example of this was how Ledoux was inspired by Réstif de la Bretonne's Le Pornographe from 1769, in which the "perverted peasant" advocated state-regulated brothels. Ledoux meticulously planned an "institution for public love." In the first volume of his Architecture Considered as Art, Morality and Legislation, Ledoux presented his idea for a kind of ideal convent for prostituted women, entirely in accordance with Réstif's detailed plans for such an institution "dedicated to pleasure and virtue," which he called Parthénia.
It is in this spirit of the time that we find Jean-Jaques Lequeu, also a visionary architect, but even considerably less successful than his contemporaries Boullée and Ledoux and not as grandiose as them. It was not until 1933 that the Austrian art historian Emil Kaufmann drew attention to the almost completely forgotten Lequeu. A year before his death, Lequeu had donated 823 drawings to the Royal Library in Paris, some carefully framed, and a multitude of newspaper clippings, letters, autobiographical writings and manuscripts for plays and novels. This had since lain forgotten somewhere in the library's secret places. Lequeu died impoverished and without heirs in his miserable two-room apartment somewhere in Paris. Before he donated his papers to the library, he had unsuccessfully tried to sell 90 drawings. He had been “chief draftsman of the Commission of Public Works” between 1797 and 1815, where he was responsible for drawing the official maps requested by the Government. In 1815 he retired with an annual pension of 668 francs. There are no surviving maps that can be identified with certainty as being made by Lequeu, but his estate includes a couple of maps he made of invented landscapes. Perhaps he occasionally daydreamed away in the drawing office and indulged in his own fantasies. Perhaps Lequeu was far too eccentric, possibly a little crazy, to succeed in this world. He was undeniably a dreamer.
Lequeu's surviving masterpiece is his Architecture Civile, which he intended to publish and in which he reproduced 107 drawings through which he intended to offer methods for depicting three-dimensional architecture, inspired by "various peoples scattered throughout the world", as well as his own "inventions and constructions. Lequeu emphasized that his intention was to pay special attention to how "shadows and their various effects are projected on flat surfaces, heights and other topography, as well as how they are created by sunlight or burning bodies". What may seem to be a strictly scientific account of architectural and drawing-related principles actually became in many ways a work that reflected Lequeu's strange imagination. A depiction of a dream world set on an unknown island where styles from all over the world - Egypt, India, China, Turkey, Persia - are mixed together in a completely unique Lequeusian vision of exoticism, eroticism and personal religion.
The viewer is invited to wander, like Poliphilo, through an exotic landscape of fantastic buildings. It is a largely deserted world in which the landscape seems to await its visitors. If any living figures appear, it is perhaps to populate a theatre stage.
or to operate any of Lequeus' many mechanical devices.
Much in Lequeu's dreamscape may bring to mind Diderot and D'Alembert's La Encylopédie (1751-1772).
Lequeu features enormous balloons, energy-generating windmills and sophisticated pumping stations, often accompanied by his own handwritten descriptions, as in the drawing below, where the ever-pragmatic Lequeu describes an extensive drainage system and a mechanism for distributing water within a Moorish pleasure palace. Inside the tower, the wind would whip a stretched canvas, moving a vertical chain carrying a bucket of water from the moat to a channel, which would then distribute the water throughout the structure. On the right, Lequeu added a newly invented lightning rod to protect the building.
In most of his structures, however, Lequeus' wild imagination takes over. For example, he has a stable take the shape of a huge cow. He imagined it to be draped in "gold and silver-studded, Indian cloth."
A residential building becomes an elephant, with a built-in garden equipped with full-grown trees.
Perhaps Lequeu was inspired by the giant elephant sculpture that was to be erected on the Place de La Bastille in Paris. Napoleon had the idea in 1808 and it was to be a 24-meter-high sculpture, cast in bronze. In anticipation of this, a life-size plaster model was erected, the increasingly miserable copy was demolished in 1846.
It was not only the form of his architectural creations that interested Lequeu. They were to be erected by special teams and the building materials were to vary from monument to monument, from building to building. He developed what has been described as a “strange culinary materialism”. For example, Lequeu explained that a funerary monument for famous personalities would be erected by “strong and robust men” and encased in a mail-maille (chain mail?) made of “slaked lime mixed with wine, pork fat and figs”. I don’t understand what it could be. Perhaps something that would be burned, like Lequeu’s vision of Trajan’s funeral pyre? Lequeu was interested in the interaction between fire and water.
However, Lequeu intended to use his “culinary cement” for many other purposes. For example, for the construction of a gate to a hunting lodge. It was to be decorated with boar heads, dog heads and antlered deer and was to be built of “pork stone”, a mixture of limestone with sulphur that Leqeau said would give off a smell of cat urine and rotten eggs. I wonder who would want such a gate on their property, or maybe it was a strange joke.
Several of the buildings in Lequeu's dreamscape have an organic character, for example a "dairy" made entirely of leaves and branches.
Lequeu was fascinated by plants and insects and in several of his buildings he produced detailed friezes of plants and animals. Below is his proposal for a pastoral temple dedicated to Ceres, the Roman divinity of agriculture and abundant harvests. The structure would combine stone and plants and Lequeu writes that the sanctuary would be approached across meadows and through wheat fields. On the temple stones various words of wisdom would be carved, such as “true happiness is found in the countryside” and Voltaire’s dictum “work is the father of pleasure”.
It seems as if Lequeu's Architecture Civile is in fact a kind of picture story. It takes place in an unknown fantasy world, similar to those described in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Lequeu moves like a visitor through deserted places, through caves and deep forests, while here and there he is surprised, like Poliphilo, by strange buildings and mysterious temples. Deep in a forest, for example, lies the Temple of Divination. There is no living being nearby, but the smoke from a recent sacrifice is rising.
There are several other mystical sanctuaries on the island of Lequeu, for I suppose that like so many other places in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places it is an island. There is a temple to the divinities of the Zodiac, a temple to Heaven and Earth, and a temple to Equality.
Underneath the buildings are often secret cellars and entrances to places for rituals that can only be visited by specially initiated people. Lequeu was a Freemason and this is also noticeable in his anthropomorphic architecture, which at times seems to have been constructed exclusively for Masonic rites. In keeping with the spirit of the times, many of these secret chambers are designed in an ancient Egyptian style.
The Freemasons considered their rites a revival, or rather a direct descendant, of the Biblical Moses and Joseph, who had spent a long time in Egypt and had passed on their knowledge to the master builder Hiram Abiff, whose death and resurrection were linked by several Freemasons to the myth of Isis and Osiris. Such Egyptological speculations also had a great impact on art, especially after the publication of Napoleonic Description de l'Égypte, which first lavishly illustrated volume was published in 1809.
The most famous Masonic opera, Mozart's The Magic Flute, premiered in 1791 and was already then filled with Egyptian allusions. For example, a choir of priests sings before Tamino is to undergo his trials and initiation:
Whoever makes his way through the obstacles of life
is purified by fire, water, air, and earth.
If he can overcome the horrors of death
he can soar from earth up to heaven.
Enlightened, he can then devote himself
entirely to the mysteries of the gods.
O Isis and Osiris! What a blessing!
The brilliant sun dispels the gloom of night.
The noble youth will soon feel his life renewed.
He will soon be eager to serve us wholeheartedly.
His spirit is bold, his heart is pure.
Soon, very soon, he will be entirely worthy of us.
The libretto writer Emanuel Schikaneder, who like Mozart was a Freemason, had certainly drawn much of his inspiration from Jean Terrason's popular novel The Life of Seth, taken from the private memoirs of an ancient Egyptian. Karl Friedrich Schinkel would in 1816 achieve great success with his Egyptian-inspired scenery for The Magic Flute when it was performed at the Royal Opera in Berlin.
Schinkel's sharp contour drawings seem to be related to Leqeus's linework, perhaps a result of their architectural training where rulers came in handy when lines and contours needed to be made sharp and easy to understand.
Lequeu placed behind a temple dedicated to the Roman goddess of wisdom Minerva, a complex of corridors and cavities that would be used in connection with the initiation of members of a “society of wise and unusually brave men”. According to Lequeu’s notes, the ritual was arranged in such a way that anyone who wished to become a member of the society had to overcome their fear of death by being subjected to trials that included terrifying sounds, darkness, heat and cold, and then be led up to light and open space. In other words, something we remember from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Each room would be equipped with adjacent, complicated mechanisms generating sound, heat and/or cold.
Lequeu designed an Island of Love and Fisherman's Rest, placing it between a military area of a royal city and a fortified camp for elite troops. The island was to be a peaceful place for rest, quiet pleasures and contemplation. A series of monumental terraces rise from the water and house a menagerie of wild animals and birds in cages, or in the surrounding forests. Lequeu carefully lists the many. Among the mammals we find lions, tigers, leopards, bears, lynxes, foxes, otters, hedgehogs, sables, marmosets, elephants, rhinoceroses, zebras, deer with thirty-pronged crowns and even dragons and unicorns. Beautiful fish populate crystalline ponds and are so tame that they come to the surface when called. The island is crowned by a temple pavilion of dazzling white marble, with elements of jasper, thus emitting a pink glow in daylight, an effect that Lequeu claims to have found in a description of a castle in Ankara.
Detailed descriptions of, often, paradisiacal islands constituted an entire genre in European literature at the time. In 1767, Louis-Antoine, Count of Bougainville reached Tahiti during a circumnavigation of the world. Five years later, he described the Tahitian society he encountered. The book became an immediate sensation by describing what Bouganville considered to be an earthly paradise where men and women lived in blissful innocence, far from the corruption of civilization. Bougainville's descriptions gave rise to the concept of the "Noble Savage" and thus came to influence the utopian thoughts of philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Even more influential than Bouganville's book was Denis Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, in which an anonymous reader Bougainville's book to a circle of friends recounts the story of Bougainville's landing in Tahiti. Diderot used his fictional approach, including a description of the Tahitians as noble savages, to criticize Western ways of life and thought.
What was picked up by the Libertines of the time was Bougainville’s depiction of the “savages”’ lack of sexual bigotry. They lived without the shadow of a vengeful, inhibiting Christian God, in innocent harmony with nature and regarded sex as a completely natural part of human existence.
Someone who pushed this to its extreme was the unsavoury Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade. A writer and philosopher who placed the sexual drive at the centre of all human existence. A natural but completely blind drive that, according to him, controlled all human behaviour. For de Sade, God was truly dead and when revolution overthrew the monarchy and its myth that earthly rulers ruled the world by divine right, this meant that a system of law and morality sanctioned by a sovereign God could be abandoned. If the satisfaction of erotic passion was to include torture and murder, so be it – it was in accordance with the laws of nature. A criminal was born the way he was and nothing could change something that had been predestined by nature.
The only thing that could limit a complete, uncontrolled release of all desires was that the struggle for absolute freedom also mean striving for dominance over others. Such a struggle for power could only be won by a strong, autocratic and limited elite, who had not come to power through birth and privilege, but through unlimited ruthlessness. That is precisely why the path to power should be open to everyone; man or woman, slave or aristocrat. This also meant that education should be guaranteed to everyone.
To me it is completely wrong to consider de Sade as some kind of anarchist or socialist. He demanded the enslavement of the majority of the people, a totalitarianism in the name of freedom. I agree with Albert Camus in his rejection of de Sade and his ideas, which he presented in a well-written manner in his book The Rebel. I also read Maurice Lever's book about de Sade. Lever downplays de Sade as the incarnation of evil, places him in his time and talks about this basically rather unsuccessful, pathetic and destructive individual for his immediate surroundings, who was extremely self-centered, constantly in debt, spent most of his time in prisons and asylums, while he endlessly and extensively wrote down his extremely distasteful sexual fantasies.
I have found it utterly impossible to get through any of de Sade's unusually disgusting pornographic writings, if these scenes, filled as they are with rape and wanton sexual abuse, can really be called pornography. If anyone is aroused by such things, I cannot help but consider such a reader to be more than legitimately perverted. I cannot possibly understand how an otherwise admired writer like Angela Carter could seriously claim that de Sade put pornography at the service of women by asserting their right to free sexuality. She claims that de Sade portrayed women as if they were in some kind of position of power. Parenthetically, Carter's extensive descriptions of de Sade's sadism are the closest I have come to this otherwise unbearable rubbish. I don't understand how Carter, like many others who have praised "The Divine Marquis", has failed to realize that his "female libertines" "affirm" their sexual urges only by submitting to men's violence against them and innocent victims.
Like many of his contemporaries, de Sade had a knack for transferring his reveries to unknown places, preferably islands. While imprisoned in La Bastille, he wrote his novel Aline et Valcour; ou, Le Roman philosophique in which he contrasted Batua, a kingdom in the interior of Africa, with the South Sea Island of Tamoe, ruled by the philosopher king Zamé. In the brutally ruled Butua, its ruler receives a tribute of five thousand women from all corners of his kingdom every month, who are then subjected to all kinds of sexual abuse by him and his servants. The whole of Batua is otherwise characterized by unbridled lust, meanness, cruelty and superstition. After revelling in descriptions of this misery, de Sade takes us to Tamoe where everything is constructed in accordance with perfect European plans. The state takes care of children and the elderly, who live separately from the rest of society. People marry, but they divorce just as easily, everyone is vegetarian and there are no penalties whatsoever. Even though people are free to live out their passions, there are still no abuses, since general prosperity prevents such. However, all this is just a game for the galleries. Let us not draw any wrong conclusions from de Sade's intentions. His dream of a liberal utopia is hardly praiseworthy or created for the good of humanity. It is actually something completely opposite. It is based on hatred and self-assertion. In fact, de Sade hates all of humanity. The "equality" he writes about is only a mathematical concept. What drives him, a life prisoner imprisoned by the State, is the desire for revenge and the longing for total domination over his surroundings. That is his utopian dream. For him, "justice" is synonymous with the fulfilment of this highly personal dream and that is what constitutes the utopia in his endless and annoyingly disgusting descriptions of atrocities committed against his fellow human beings.
In his The 120 Days of Sodom de Sade lets the mask fall, there are completely different conditions than the dreamt-of island paradise. At Silling Castle, hidden away somewhere in the deep forests of the German Black Forest, four wealthy gentlemen have retreated to enjoy grotesque sexual abuse committed against 42 carefully selected young people for a year, together with their wives, who are all tortured and murdered. Pasolini's film Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, follows de Sade's misery quite closely and that film is also a painful experience that made me wonder what made Pasolini wanting to make such a film.
As we have seen above, the visionary architect Ledoux was inspired by the writings of Réstif de la Bretonne, one of Sade's contemporaries, who detested the rival pornographer and attacked him in the errors of his writings. In many ways, Réstif was a strange figure, a night owl who moved among the brothels and back alleys of Paris and who wrote more than 300 volumes on all conceivable subjects. Réstif often suffered from poverty and wrote for a living. He based his books on episodes from his own life, which despite their flimsy sentiment, contain truthful pictures of French society on the eve of the revolution.
This “Rousseau of the Gutter” was not a revolutionary but feared and despised the “masses”. He built a strict utopian system where girls and boys were separated from their parents at the expense of the state and raised together until they reached puberty, when they were separated. The young men immersed themselves in various sciences, while the girls were raised in virtue and household chores, constantly subject to the rule of men – Réstif was a bigoted misogynist. All this was not at all to promote any Christian morality – on the contrary, Réstif believed that if young men and women were raised separately, their sexual drive in adulthood would be all the more intense and pleasurable. Réstif’s ideal society was a gerontocracy where young men and women were exploited and controlled by older men. If de Sade was driven to write, it was probably primarily by his own pent-up, perverted sexual drive, while Réstif possibly did it to earn a living. However, even Réstif had a strong libido that constantly drove him into what he considered deplorable fornication.
Réstif's writing was probably mainly guided by what would sell best – morality or depravity, exotic adventure stories or local conditions. He oscillated between moral sermons and pornography. Of course, Réstif also wrote about ideal island worlds and their opposites. In the novel La Découverte australe par un homme volant, the main characters live on a South Sea island, from where they fly to one island after another in the extensive archipelago that surrounds them.
On the unexplored islands, they encounter fantastic hybrid creatures – elephant people, lion people, bird people, etc., even oyster people. The most developed is La Mégapatagonie, which is located on the other side of the globe, opposite Paris, and everything is upside down there. The capital is called Sirap, Paris backwards and forwards, and people wear their shoes on their heads and hats as shoes. But the philosophy of life of the Mégapatagonians are more tolerant and more developed than that is found in Paris.
The ideology of the Megapatagonians is based on the principle of a living nature and a cosmos that constantly renews itself. According to them, the human species is a continuous, never-completed creation, it has no origin and changes in a circular manner. The Megapatagonians condemn the arrogance of the peoples of the northern hemisphere. However, they are convinced that young people are less equal than older people and, according to them, women can never achieve a male intellectual status. All land is owned in common; divorces are free and take place without any major problems, children grow up on their own through the care of the state. Both de Sade and Réstif seem to believe that children are nothing more than a nuisance. On La Mégapatagonie one finds the beginnings of the totalitarian society that has come into full bloom on The Island of Andrographia, according to Réstif the most perfect utopian island, which with its oppression of women and suffocating gynocracy with harsh punishments on offer, can almost be considered a totalitarian nightmare.
In parallel with the planned and extensive book Architecture Civile that Lequeu put so much effort into, he worked on a textbook on how to depict the human body, and the drawings that would fill this work are just as remarkably detailed those ins his Architecture Civile. They mainly depict different parts of the face, but he clearly intended to depict the entire human body, male and female, piece by piece.
Lequeu had also initially concentrated on female and male genitalia, in addition to the face, with an obsession and detail that may seem shocking and approaches the erotic obsession of de Sade and Réstif.
As part of his artistic studies, Lequeu worked with different facial expressions, some of the grimaces he creates are quite extreme and, like most things that concern Lequeu, skilfully executed, detailed and quite strange.
In this respect, he is reminiscent of the eccentric Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736 –1783) who created a large number of "character heads” in various materials. An activity he continued even after he was dismissed as a leading professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts due to "confusion in the head".
The society portraitist and Baron Joseph Ducreux (1735 – 1802) also devoted himself to portraying himself grimacing in various ways.
A character study by Lequeu that is almost shocking in its peculiar “modernity” depicts a screaming or yawning (or screaming?) man with a bandanna around his forehead, and crowned with a bowler hat.
The bandanna and the detailed presentation bring to mind the strange Dutch artist and fascist Pyke Koch (1901 – 1991), who, like Lequeu, was no stranger to detailed, erotically explicit female bodies depicted in extreme positions.
And the bowler hat? Did they already exist in the eighteenth century? On the Internet I find that it was invented in 1849 in London by hatmakers Thomas and William Bowler, hence its English name. This hat several associations, it was worn, for example, by the greatest comedians of the twentieth century, Chaplin and Laurel. Fats Waller was also a comic genius equipped with a bowler hat and he was furthermore a brilliant musician and composer.
Chaplin and Laurel portrayed popular outsiders, on the verge of laughter and tears. Chaplin's tramp never cried, but he could arouse sentimental feelings, Stan Laurel's character often cried. They were unfailing outsiders.
Kafka and Anton Räderscheidt were also portrayed in bowler hats. In any case, they are also in their art they often portrayed their characters as outside observers. Below is Räderscheidt's Tennis Player.
A bowler-hatted observer of a naked woman also appears in the work of the Italian Felice Casorati, in his Platonic Dialogue.
However, the most famous bowler hat in art was worn by René Magritte and his iconic characters.
Incidentally, Magritte's peculiar dream world was not free from erotic, sometimes almost perverse overtones.
Another bowler-hatted artist, who was also a writer approaching perverted themes was Roland Topor (1938 –1997), among other achievements the author of the excellently nightmarish novel The Tenant, which Roman Polanski used as the basis for an equally excellent film.
Topor, like Lequeu, seems to have been fascinated by both male and female genitalia, which he often depicted within a dreamlike context.
Topor even made a, not particularly successful, film that largely deals with how de Sade (equipped with a dog's head) spends his time in the Bastille dungeon by conversing with his sexual organ.
Something that brings to mind two much more interesting novels, namely Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and the in my opinion even better The Two of Us by Aberto Moravia, which in the publisher's advertisement for its English translation was described as "picking up where Portnoy's Complaint left off". Both novels deal with what is stated at the beginning of Portnoy's Complaint:
Portnoy's Complaint: A disorder in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses perpetually are warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.
Both Portnoy and "I" in Moravia's book struggle against a life of drive that distorts their existence and it is not without bringing to mind the fundamentally sad figures of de Sade and Réstif, perhaps even Lequeu, although we don't know much about him. Both novels are actually unusually well-written and at times really funny, but as Moravia said about his novel:
The problem I tried to treat in Io e Lui is terribly serious, even if it is also tragicomic. On the one hand, sexuality, personified in Him, is a physiological-mental driving force and on the other hand, a striving towards artistic, intellectual, social and civil goals. My Federico Rico is an intellectual man with directorial ambitions, a screenwriter who wants to take the step up to higher quality in his writing and also realize it in the form of a film. Unfortunately, his personality is so strongly divided that it becomes paralyzing. The artistically ambitious Federico is forced to watch how He helplessly acts on the orders of the subconscious. The sexual drive becomes a voice that commands and compels. The result is an undulating, comic progression, filled with unexpected complications. In my crazy story about a failed director, locked in a constant dialogue with his dominant genital and a culturally conditioned anxiety, a neurosis is evoked that I have interpreted and described in a tragicomic tone, very close to absurdism.
It is quite possible that Lequeu was also driven by a similar sexual obsession, but we know too little about him to know how it was. His obsession with genitals may have been a manifestation of such a disorder. His explicit drawings are of such a nature that after his assets had been transferred to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, some of them were labelled “pornography” and ended up in the closed library section popularly known as L’Enfer, Hell. Between 1909 and 1913, Guillaume Apollinaire and Fernand Perceau studied L’Enfer’s writings and visual material and compiled, without the library management’s knowledge, a catalogue listing 854 titles and described the contents of the books. Nowadays, “Hell” has been divided into a variety of departments and its books have been registered under fiction, sociology, medicine, history of ideas, etc., although pornographic magazines still have a separate classification.
Not all of Lequeu's nude studies are tainted with a naturalism that might appear as rough and even repulsive. Several have a softer appearance that can might be considered as reminiscent of the classicist art of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 –1867).
As was the case with the dream island worlds of de Sade, Réstif and other pornographers, Lequeu had also provided his island with tempting places of pleasure. There was, for example, a guinguette, a tavern dedicated to enjoying food, fine wines and cabaret performances. According to Lequeu, the place was equipped with Venetian crystal glasses, exquisite porcelain services, enormous “cheese wheels” and columns shaped like wine barrels.
In the tavernsr's exquisite garden, we find a hammock where, according to Lequeu, a loving couple enjoys “the sweet convulsions of Venus” in a padded "love hammock" made of soft "honey cotton". The hammock is suspended between two lush trees and shaded by a canopy, crowned by two turtledoves. The device is set in leisurely motion by a hidden mechanism and a gentle breeze brings with it exquisite scents which sweetness is spread from small plants, flowers and aromatically scented bushes that form a bed "saturated with voluptuousness and heavenly fragrance" under the hammock, plants that during calm and warm nights over the entire area spread a scent of Paradise.
The love hammock is just one of several beds that Lequeu has provided in his dream world, several of them equally lovingly described.
I assume that the skilled draftsman, dreamer and fantasist Lequeu was probably a rather aloof and perhaps even crazy, perhaps even a rather crazy person who was difficult to get along with. Why else are there no personal testimonies about him? Only one or two the occasional official note. The works he donated to the Royal Library are almost the only traces we have of him. Someone from the Library staff must have appreciated their undeniable quality, otherwise the gift would not have been accepted, it was after all very extensive.
Jean-Jaques Lequeu died poor, alone and unnoticed, possibly his physical remains can be found somewhere in Paris, perhaps in its extensive catacombs where so many unknown cadavers had been moved. However, in his writings he left behind a memorial to himself and his grave is also drawn there. In a representation of an underground cave system with a rushing river and an ancient sculpture we also find Lequeu's tomb. The cave is perhaps a symbol of Lequeu's hidden, inner life where he was master of a fantastic world in which he could realize all his dreams, while he sat drawing maps in a drab office or in his cramped two-room apartment somewhere in the innner bowls of Paris.
At the top right of the picture, Lequeu has inserted a picture of his tomb monument, as usual carefully crafted. He writes that it is “the tomb of the artist, brother of Jesus, who carried his cross throughout his life. In the tomb: his corpse embalmed in batumen [asphalt]”. The tomb is said to include Lequeu’s “professional instruments; square, rulers and a porte-crayon [pencil at the tip of which there was a steel device into which a drawing pin was inserted]”.
I will now leave this overly extensive essay. It is late and I will go to sleep – a dreamscape is awaiting my arrival
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