Here’s a useful reminder for when you’re on the cusp of speaking over a morning coffee.

Mount Vesuvius, 2016

In Martin Amis’ novel Inside Story, we’re presented with a rule for fiction and dreams:

I’ve come to an awkward conclusion: there are certain things that fiction must broach with extreme caution, if at all, certain sizable and familiar zones of human existence that seem naturally immune to the novelist’s art…Dreams are all right as long as they exhaust themselves in about half a sentence; once they’re allowed to get going, and once the details start piling up, then dreams become recipes either for stooge or for very thin gruel. Why is that?

If you’re on the cusp of speaking over a morning coffee, it’s a useful reminder.

Dreams are too individualised. We all dream, but dreams are not part of our shared experience…dreams are plucked from the random world of the unconscious, the subterranean perverse, reducing the dreamer-author to an agglomeration of quirks…

Although the reasoning is sound, I don’t quite take the conclusion as decisive. In the right hands a dream can come alive on the page. Hearing about a dream, for me at least, is perfectly acceptable, though Amis’ rule about dreams came back to me this week when I reread Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl, where at least four dreams are inserted into the narrative.

One or two notable behaviors can pass without comment in a novel; a series of three has the author waving a flag; and any pattern of four comes close to hitting the reading over the head. Yet Murdoch does follow the general principle of Amis’ rule, as not one of these dreams lasts more than a few lines. Her characters are usually interrupted mid-snooze, with the narrative demanding that the sleepy character return to work, fulfilling their role in the plot.

Perhaps I was primed to notice this strange undercurrent of dreams because I had a lucid dream earlier in the week: I was aware of the dream and could manipulate the world around me at will. Upon waking, the more skeptical questions appeared. Was I really lucid dreaming? Or was I just dreaming that I was lucid dreaming? At least one sign of sanity during the dream, however, made the case, as I stopped myself from opening a window in the dreamworld. Although I wanted to jump from the window—to fly, of course—I started to wonder whether I might also be sleep walking outside my dream.

Our narrator in The Italian Girl, Edmund Narraway, startles more than one character awake from a dream-state. Edmund is a rather hapless narrator, a bit stuck in a story he’d rather skip. Family, finances, a death before page one—all tedious matters for a character who would much rather be in a different novel. And he also presents us with a pattern beyond that repetition of dreams, one that becomes apparent as the story moves along. Early in the novel, he chases his niece; later, he chases a worker’s sister; over the coming chapters, he finds himself in similar pursuit of the worker, his brother, the niece once again, and the worker again. Most of these are brief—a sentence, a paragraph—but they are breathless, futile pursuits. A character who is just beyond reach, a pattern that Edmund can’t quite break.

A subtler but more humorous pattern comes from his attempts at persuasion. Although nearly every chase listed above is fruitless, he does eventually reach his destinations, the routes simply more circuitous than he wants. But reaching these goals merely brings another obstacle, that familiar difficulty of getting what you supposedly want. Readers begin to wonder whether Edmund is one of the worst persuaders in 20th Century literature. Despite his best attempts to schmooze and maneuver and cajole, nearly every character rebuffs his smallest desires.

The Italian girl at the heart of The Italian Girl is actually a succession of young women; all of the Italian nannies who cared for the Narraway family over the decades. By the opening of the novel, the current Italian girl is an Italian woman named Maria Magistretti, who has been lurking in the background of the family for longer than anyone can really remember. She’s part of the atmosphere, a comfortable, perhaps even forgettable, presence.

Do keep up with all of Murdoch’s playful repetitions: the succession of dreams, all those futile chases, Edmund’s rather pathetic abilities of persuasion, and, at last, the legacy of Italian girls, so commonplace that the family can’t distinguish one from another. What’s the pattern within her patterns? We might find a clue within the first few paragraphs, as Edmund returns home late at night and is just outside the family home after the death of his mother:

I must have been standing there for some time in a sad reverie when I saw what for a weird second looked like a reflection of myself.

Edmund misperceives a figure in the distance. He shivers, is alarmed, then steps closer.

Although I am not especially a coward I have always been afraid of the dark and of things that happen in the dark: and this night illumination was worse than darkness.

It’s a simple passage and easy to forget. We’re hardly two pages into the novel. Murdoch wants to introduce her characters, so she’s beginning to describe the environment in which they’re confined—the prison where she’s sent them. But then she begins those patterns: the repetitions of foolishness and those all-too-human mistakes around family. Many readers are sure to nod along. To recognize their own blunders. Or to see similar patterns in their own missteps. Those failures that happen again and again. All those times when life wasn’t quite right, and when, of course, it would have been nice to wake from a dream.

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