Traumnovelle Reading Order

Traumnovelle (Dream Story, 1926) by Arthur Schnitzler is the novella Stanley Kubrick adapted into Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and it is as disturbing in its prose form as in its cinematic — a night of sexual wandering and danger through Vienna that may be dream or reality, narrated in a prose that refuses to clarify which. Fridolin, a Viennese doctor, is unsettled by his wife Albertine's confession of a desire she felt on vacation; he leaves their apartment and walks through a series of increasingly strange nocturnal encounters: a dying man's daughter who wants to sleep with him, a prostitute who turns out to have syphilis, and finally a secret masked ball in a grand villa where something horrible happens that is never clearly named. Schnitzler was the novelist of Viennese fin-de-siècle sexuality and the psyche — Freud read him and called him his 'double', the writer who had used literary intuition to arrive at the same psychological territory that Freud was mapping in the consulting room. Dream Story is the most concentrated of Schnitzler's works: thirteen thousand words that cover one night and one day, using the couple's competing fantasies of infidelity as a way of asking whether there is a secure boundary between the sexual dreams we have and the sexual reality we inhabit. Fridolin's night may be a series of narrow escapes, or it may be something more terrible than escape, and the novella refuses the consolation of resolution.