Abstract
This chapter examines a cluster of recent texts, including Jonathan Coe’s The House of Sleep (1997), William Boyd’s Armadillo (1998), Ralph Cohen’s Inspired Sleep (2002), David Foster Wallace’s ‘Oblivion’ (2004) and Alison MacLeod’s The Wave Theory of Angels (2005), that have taken inspiration—albeit often of a decidedly negative kind—from the discoveries, institutions, practices and discourses of contemporary sleep science. These texts are evidence of an emerging and indeed flourishing subgenre in contemporary fiction, one that we can call ‘sleep-science fiction’, a subgenre that despite its fascination with the hi-tech world of the sleep laboratory is conspicuously nostalgic for natural, pre-technological and ‘unplugged’ forms of human slumber.
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- 1.
Al Alvarez, ‘The Sleep Laboratory’, in Night: An Exploration of Night Life, Night Language, Sleep and Dreams (London: Cape, 1995), 61–86 (74).
- 2.
David Foster Wallace, ‘Oblivion’, in Oblivion: Stories (London: Abacus, 2004), 190–237 (219).
- 3.
De la Mare’s anthology Behold, This Dreamer! is probably the best one-volume ‘map’ of the tradition of literary somnolence; Schwenger’s At the Borders of Sleep is a valuable critical meditation on the inter-relations between sleep, liminality and writing in a range of modern writers.
- 4.
Williams, Sleep and Society, 101. Williams, it should be added, is careful to distance himself from some of the more alarmist proponents of the sleep-crisis hypothesis.
- 5.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, ‘The Nature of Sleep’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 53 (2011): 945–70 (947). Writing in a similar vein, Emily Martin contends, in her discussion of managerial and pharmaceutical attempts to commodify sleep in the modern world, that ‘“natural” sleep only exists as a category once it is distinguished from other types of sleep, primarily “medicated sleep”… Because it takes its meaning from its place in a system of cultural categories, “natural” sleep is anything but natural.’ ‘Sleepless in America’, in Pharmaceutical Self: The Global Shaping of Experience in an Age of Psychopharmacology, ed. Janis H. Jenkins (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2010), 187–207 (204). Despite its ‘constructivist’ model of slumber, Martin’s essay is, nevertheless, pervaded by a certain unexamined nostalgia for the supposed ‘naturalness’ of the practices of premodern sleep whose traces have been uncovered by contemporary historians such as Ekirch.
- 6.
Wolf-Meyer, The Slumbering Masses, 270 n.39.
- 7.
A. Roger Ekirch, ‘Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles’, The American Historical Review 106, no. 2 (2001): 343–86. See also ‘The Modernization of Western Sleep’, in which Ekirch argues that widespread popular and medical anxieties about insomnia in the nineteenth century may be attributable to the difficulties that modern industrial society encountered in negotiating the transition from ‘segmented’ to ‘seamless’ sleep.
- 8.
Kenton Kroker, The Sleep of Others and the Transformations of Sleep Research (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 169.
- 9.
Kroker, The Sleep of Others, 290.
- 10.
William C. Dement and Christopher Vaughan, The Promise of Sleep: A Pioneer in Sleep Medicine Explores the Vital Connection between Health, Happiness, and a Good Night’s Sleep (New York: Delacorte Press, 1999), 176.
- 11.
J. Allan Hobson, Sleep (New York: Scientific American Library, 1989), 1.
- 12.
Penelope A. Lewis and Ra Page, eds, Spindles: Stories from the Science of Sleep (Manchester: Comma Press, 2015), v.
- 13.
Scrivner, ‘That Sweet Secession’, 270–71.
- 14.
Ekirch, ‘The Modernization of Western Sleep’, 150–51. See also the theory of ‘social jet lag’—a distinctively modern form of sleep deprivation characterized by a mismatch between the individual’s body clock and the ‘official’ time of work and business—propounded by Till Roenneberg in Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
- 15.
Cited in Craig A. Lambert, ‘Deep into Sleep’, Harvard Magazine (July–August 2005), 25–33 (26).
- 16.
Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, 39.
- 17.
Reiss, ‘Sleep’s Hidden Histories’.
- 18.
Crary, 24/7, 8.
- 19.
Dement and Vaughan, The Promise of Sleep, 99.
- 20.
Scrivner, Becoming Insomniac, 176. For a fictional ‘cure’ to overstimulation, see Sara Maitland’s magic realist story ‘The Rip Van Winkle Project’, in Lewis and Page, eds, Spindles, 65–76, which imagines Hypnos (the Greek God of sleep), his son Morpheus (the God of dreams) and the nymph Circadia (Maitland’s own invention—the ‘guardian of the deep rhythms of the turning world’ [65]) hatching a plan to cure present-day teenagers of the ‘electricity plague’ (75) that blights the modern world.
- 21.
Thomas Edison, The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (New York: Greenwood Press, 1948), 178.
- 22.
See Oliver Simmons, ‘Edison and his Insomnia Squad’, Munsey’s Magazine (September 1916), 623–24 for a hagiographical portrait of Edison as a purveyor of ‘wide-awake inventions’ (623).
- 23.
Williams, Sleep and Society, 137.
- 24.
Jim Horne, Sleepfaring: A Journey through the Science of Sleep (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 188. Horne expands this critique in Sleeplessness: Assessing Sleep Need in Society Today (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), a book-length rejoinder to claims that contemporary society is plagued by ‘social jet lag’, racking up crippling levels of ‘sleep debt’ or in the grip of a self-inflicted epidemic of ‘societal insomnia’.
- 25.
J. G. Ballard, ‘Manhole 69’, in J. G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories (London: Harper, 2006), 1:66–89 (69). Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.
- 26.
Adam Roberts, ‘The Raveled Sleeve of Care’, in Lewis and Page, eds, Spindles, 233–60. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.
- 27.
Lisa Tuttle, ‘The Night Husband’, in Lewis and Page, eds, Spindles, 143–58 (147).
- 28.
Cited in D. T. Max, ‘The Secrets of Sleep’, National Geographic 217, no. 5 (May 2010), 74–93 (80).
- 29.
Scrivner, ‘That Sweet Secession’, 286.
- 30.
Selections from the hundreds of drawings and paintings in which Picasso depicts scenes of watched sleep appear as illustrations in Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep: Exploring the World of Sleep (New York: Norton, 1978), William C. Dement’s overview of developments in modern sleep medicine.
- 31.
Crary, 24/7, 25.
- 32.
Dement and Vaughan, The Promise of Sleep, 38.
- 33.
Ralph Cohen, Inspired Sleep: A Novel (New York: Vintage, 2001), 18.
- 34.
Alison MacLeod, The Wave Theory of Angels (London: Penguin, 2006), 29. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.
- 35.
Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep (London: Penguin, 1998), 18. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.
- 36.
Reiss, ‘Sleeping at Walden Pond’, 20.
- 37.
William Boyd, Armadillo: A Novel (London: Penguin, 1998), 8.
- 38.
Dominic Head, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 35.
- 39.
‘I don’t know if she needs less sleep’, said her Parliamentary Private Secretary Ian Gow in 1982. ‘She certainly gets less sleep. But I think it’s really a triumph of the spirit over the flesh.’ Cited in Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One: Not for Turning (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 730; italics in original.
- 40.
Elias, The Civilizing Process, 167–68.
- 41.
Kroker, The Sleep of Others, 290.
- 42.
Worthman and Melby, ‘Towards a Comparative Developmental Ecology of Human Sleep’, 105–106.
- 43.
As Williams has argued, to speak of the ‘“architecture” of sleep’ is to invoke ‘a double point of reference involving both the “discovery” of distinct sleep stages and their relation to dreams and dreaming, and the architecture of organisations such as the APSS [Associated Professional Sleep Societies] and the modern-day sleep laboratory which may be regarded as prime institutional expressions and loci of this knowledge’. The Politics of Sleep, 119.
- 44.
Alvarez, ‘The Sleep Laboratory’, 80.
- 45.
Martyn Bedford, ‘My Soul to Keep’, in Lewis and Page, eds, Spindles, 1–19.
- 46.
MacLeod, The Wave Theory of Angels, 35, 241.
- 47.
Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 63.
- 48.
Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 65.
- 49.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, ‘Sleep, Signification, and the Abstract Body of Allopathic Medicine’, Body & Society 14, no. 4 (2008): 93–114 (94).
- 50.
Lisa Carrie Goldberg, ‘Envisioning Sleep in Contemporary Sleep Science’, in Glaskin and Chenhall, eds, Sleep around the World, 79–96 (95).
- 51.
Though it doesn’t explicitly invoke the notion of posthumanism, Eric L. Hsu’s ‘The Sociological Significance of Non-human Sleep’, Sociology 51, no. 4 (2017): 865–79, which considers the sleep of animals and of technological objects, is a valuable path-breaking discussion of the interfaces between human and non-human sleep.
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Greaney, M. (2018). ‘Observed, Measured, Contained’: Contemporary Fiction and the Science of Sleep. In: Sleep and the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75253-2_6
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