The Faculty of Dreams
Page 1
Sara Stridsberg
The Faculty of Dreams:
Amendment to the
Theory of Sexuality
OR
Valerie
Translated from the Swedish by
Deborah Bragan-Turner
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Also by Sara Stridsberg
BAMBILAND
New York Magazine, April 25, 1991
Bristol Hotel, April 25, 1988, the Day of Your Death
Bristol Hotel, April 7, 1988, a Few Weeks Before the End
Manhattan Criminal Court, June 3, 1968
Ventor, Summer 1945
Manhattan Criminal Court, June 3, 1968
Ventor, Summer 1945
Bristol Hotel, April 9, 1988, Your Birthday
Ventor, June 1946
Bristol Hotel, April 10, 1988
The Narrators
Ventor, Summer 1948
Bristol Hotel, April 11, 1988
THE OCEANS
Bristol Hotel, April 12, 1988
Ventor, February 1951
Alligator Reef, March 1951
State Supreme Court, June 13, 1968
Alligator Reef, April 1951
Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital, July 2, 1968
Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital, July 13, 1968
Bristol Hotel, April 13, 1988
Ventor, June 1951
America, Road Movie, May 1951 – October 1952
The Architects
Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital, July 29, 1968
Bristol Hotel, April 14, 1988
Alligator Reef, December 1953
Alligator Reef, 1953–1954
Alligator Reef, Winter 1955
Bristol Hotel, April 15, 1988
Alligator Reef, Summer 1955
Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital, August 10, 1968
LABORATORY PARK
Bristol Hotel, April 16, 1988
Alligator Reef, Autumn 1956
Jacksonville College, Early Summer 1958
Jacksonville College, Late Summer 1958
Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital, September 8, 1968
University of Maryland, August 1958
Bristol Hotel, April 17, 1988
University of Maryland, October 1958
University of Maryland, February 1959
Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital, December 24, 1968
Christmas Eve, Conversation Two
Christmas Eve, Conversation Three
University of Maryland, Autumn 1959
The Psychoanalysts
Bristol Hotel, April 18, 1988
University of Maryland, August 1962
The Tenderloin, Winter 1987, One Year Before Your Death
University of Maryland, 1963
Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital, April 1969
Swanning Around in the Sciences I
Swanning Around in the Sciences II
New York, Summer 1966
Bristol Hotel, April 19, 1988
THE FACTORY
Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital, May 14, 1969
New York, October 1967
“Great Art”
Elizabeth Duncan and Death, September 1967
Notice to Unknown Writers
Chelsea Hotel, November 1967
Your Long Silences with Cosmo
Bristol Hotel, April 20, 1988
The Factory, December 1967
Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital, June 1969
Chelsea Hotel, February 1968
Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital, June 1969
Bristol Hotel, April 21, 1988
New York – College Park, March 1968
Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital, July 1969
Cosmogirl My Love
Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital, July 15, 1969
The Factory, Later in March 1968
Movie Star 1968
The Parasites
LOVE VALERIE
New York, May 1968
Chelsea Hotel, May 1968
Mission District, San Francisco, May 1968
New York, May 1968
Chelsea Hotel, Still May 1968
Bristol Hotel, April 23, 1988
Max’s Kansas City, New York, May 1968
The Presidents
33 Union Square, Morning of June 3, 1968, Like Being in a Dream
Film Sequence, the Last One from the Factory
Andy and Death
Arithmetic and Surfing I
Arithmetic and Surfing II
Arithmetic and Surfing III
New York State Prison for Women, 1969–1971
Bristol Hotel, April 25, 1988, the Last Day
America, Life Is a Court Case
On the Other Side of the Alphabet
Bristol Hotel, April 25, 1988, During the Night
One Last Lit Up Room, One Exploding Lily in the Darkness
Afterword
The MacLehose Press Editions
First published as Drömfakulteten – tillägg till sexualteorin
by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, in 2006
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by
MacLehose Press
An imprint of Quercus Publishing Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © 2006 Sara Stridsberg
English translation copyright © 2019 by Deborah Bragan-Turner
The moral right of Sara Stridsberg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Deborah Bragan-Turner asserts her moral right to be identified as the translator of the work.
Translation sponsored by
Claudia Rankine, excerpt from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, pp. 21–23. Copyright © 2004 by Claudia Rankine. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
EBOOK ISBN 978 0 85705 473 9
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
www.maclehosepress.com
Also by Sara Stridsberg in English translation
The Gravity of Love (2016)
The Faculty of Dreams is not a biography, it is a literary fantasy derived from the life and work of Valerie Solanas, American, now deceased. Few facts are known about Valerie Solanas and even to those this novel is not faithful. All characters in the novel should therefore be regarded as fictional, including Valerie Solanas herself.
*
This also applies to the map of America, there being no deserts in Georgia.
Hope was never a thing with feathers.
CLAUDIA RANKINE
A hotel room in the Tenderloin, San Francisco’s red-light district. It is April 1988 and Valerie Solanas is lying on a filthy mattress and urine-soaked sheets, dying of pneumonia. Outside the window, pink neon lights flash and porn music plays day and night.
*
On April 30 her body is found by hotel staff. The police report states that she is found kneeling by the side of the bed. (Has she tried to get up? Has she been crying?)
It states that the room is in perfect order, papers neatly piled on the desk, clothes folded on a wooden chair by the window. The police report also states that her body is covered with maggots and her death probably occurred around April 25.
*
Some weeks earlier, the report goes on to say, someone on the hotel staff had seen her sitting by the window, writing. I imagine piles of paper on the desk, her silver coat on a hanger by the window, and the smell of salt from the Pacific. I imagine Valerie in bed with a fever, attempting to smoke and make notes. I picture drafts and manuscripts all over the room . . . sun, perhaps . . . white clouds . . . the desert’s solitude . . .
*
I imagine myself there with Valerie.
Bambiland
NARRATOR: What sort of material do we have?
VALERIE: Snow and black despair.
NARRATOR: Where?
VALERIE: The crap hotel. Last stop for dying whores and junkies. The last epic humiliation.
NARRATOR: Who’s in despair?
VALERIE: I am. Valerie. I always wore rose-pink lipstick.
NARRATOR: Rose-pink?
VALERIE: Rosa Luxemburg. The Pink Panther. Her favorite roses were pink. Someone bikes away and burns down a rose garden.
NARRATOR: Anything else?
VALERIE: People lying dead in the wilderness and I don’t know who’s going to bury all those people.
NARRATOR: The President, maybe?
VALERIE: Death is seldom in the same place as the President. All activity has ceased in the White House.
NARRATOR: Where will you go now?
VALERIE: Nowhere. Just sleep, I suppose.
NARRATOR: What are you thinking about?
VALERIE: The girls from the underworld. Dorothy. Cosmogirl. Silk Boy.
NARRATOR: Anything else?
VALERIE: Prostitute stuff. Shark stuff. Me reeling at the prospect of all this eternity.
New York Magazine, April 25, 1991
The day Dorothy is interviewed by New York magazine over a bad telephone line the sky above Ventor is the same pink as a sleeping tablet or old vomit. No-one ever comes to fix the lines in Ventor anymore; desert birds have eaten the withered black wires, distorting conversations and laughing at Dorothy and the way she persists in her role as the victim of unfortunate circumstances. Her words flutter like wrapping paper in the wind.
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Dorothy Moran?
DOROTHY: Yes.
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: We’d like to talk to you about Valerie.
DOROTHY: Yes.
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: It’s three years today since she died.
DOROTHY: I know.
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Tell us about Valerie.
DOROTHY: Valerie . . .?
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Your daughter. Valerie Solanas.
DOROTHY: Thank you, I know who Valerie is.
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Tell us something . . .
DOROTHY: Valerie . . .
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Why did she shoot Andy Warhol? Was she a prostitute all her life? Did she always hate men? Do you hate men? Are you a prostitute? Tell us how she died. Tell us about her childhood.
DOROTHY: I don’t know . . . We lived here in Ventor. I don’t know . . . the desert. I don’t know . . . I burned all her things after she died . . . papers, notebooks . . .
(Silence.)
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Anything else?
(Silence.)
DOROTHY: Valerie . . . used to write . . . fancied herself as a writer . . . I think she had t-t-talent . . . she had talent . . . She had a fantastic sense of humor . . . (laughs). Everybody loved her . . . (laughs again). I loved her . . . She died in 1988 . . . April 25 . . . She was happy, I think . . . That’s all I have to say about Valerie . . . She was dedicated, reaching for the sky, the way I see it . . . I guess that’s how it was . . .
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Was she mentally ill? People say she was in and out of mental hospitals throughout the ’70s.
DOROTHY: Valerie was not mentally ill. She even lived with a man for a few years. In Florida. On the beach. Alligator Reef. In the ’50s.
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: There is evidence she was in Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital. We know she was in Bellevue. We have reports she spent time in South Florida State Hospital.
DOROTHY: That’s not right. Valerie was never mentally ill. Valerie was a genius. She was an angry little girl. My angry little girl. Never mentally ill. She had some strange experiences with strange men in strange cars. And once she pissed in a nasty boy’s juice. She was a writer. You can write that down . . . I’m hanging up now . . .
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: It’s alleged that she was subjected to sexual assault by her father. Did you know about that?
DOROTHY: I’m hanging up now . . . Put down that she was a writer . . . Put that she was a research psychologist . . . Put that love is eternal, not death . . .
(Call ended ———)
Bristol Hotel, 56 Mason Street, the Tenderloin, San Francisco, April 25, 1988, the Day of Your Death
The blood flows so slowly through your body. You claw at your breasts, weep and cry out, fumble with the bedding. The hotel sheets are dirty, gray with age, and foul-smelling, urine and vomit and vaginal blood and tears, a golden cloud of pain floating through your mind and gut. Blinding streaks of light in the room, explosions of agony in your skin and lungs, pitching, plunging, blazing. Heat in your arms, fever, abandonment, the stench of dying. Slivers and shards of light still flickering; your hands searching for Dorothy. I hate myself but I do not want to die. I do not want to disappear. I want to go back. I long for someone’s hands, my mother’s hands, a girl’s arms. Or a voice of any kind. Anything but this eclipse of the sun.
Dorothy?
Dorothy?
The desperate screeching of desert animals. The sun burning over Georgia. The desert house with no pictures, books, money, or plans for the future. The swollen pink Ventor sky pressing against the window and everything again blanketed in a coat of merriment, warm, moist. Dorothy has found some singed old dresses in a suitcase and you are probably on your way to the ocean again, to Alligator Reef and endless skies, just the two of you. She twirls in front of the mirror with cigarettes left burning all over the room. In plant pots, on the bedside table, in her powder compact.
VALERIE (chuckles affectionately): You little pyromaniac.
DOROTHY: All these dresses have black marks on the cuffs. Look at this snowy white one. It looks as though it’s been through a nuclear war.
VALERIE: You always were kind of like a nuclear war.
DOROTHY: It’s strange how you can forget one of your favorite dresses. I can’t remember where it came from. I just remember how everything around me was made completely white and scrubbed clean when I was wearing it. The sky, my breath, my teeth . . . Do you remember when I forgot all the candles in the bar and the curtains caught fire?
VALERIE: I remember you setting fire to that old guy’s beard when you were lighting his pipe.
DOROTHY: Do you remember when I set fire to my hair?
VALERIE: You were always doing it and I was always running for water to save you. I remember forever saving you.
DOROTHY: You did.
The glint of skyscrapers and tarmac in the darkness as the airplane continues its circling over Kennedy Airport; factories working, surfers gliding along beaches, fields of cotton, deserts, towns, New York traffic edging slowly forward. Splinters of light and memories glimmering faintly in your consciousness. The dark red-light district outside, neon lights, girls chasing the wind through the streets, skin and sparks of life, seductive smiles and puked-up dreams.
*
And if you did not have to die, you would be Valerie again in your silver coat and Valerie again with your handbag full of manuscripts and your building blocks of theory. And if you did not have to die now, your doctorate would shimmer on the horizon. And it would be that time again, the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, Ventor, Maryland, New York, and that belief in yourself: the writer, th
e scientist, me. The great hunger and swirling vortex in your heart, the conviction. Slogans echoing between the buildings on Fifth Avenue and the President crouching behind his desk in Washington. There are only happy endings.
A girl can do anything she wants
You know I love you
The shouts die down and the heat evaporates, the smell of New York full-blown and burning. Fifth Avenue is sucked into a blackness, a narrow, foul-smelling underground tunnel, only the sour taste of deadly disease and never-ending porn music. And there is daylight in the Tenderloin with vomit-colored curtains at a smeared window, piles of notes and your bloodied underpants over the back of a chair, and on the bedside table a bottle of rum you will never manage to drink. The itching has taken over your body. It is worse than the pain in your chest and the difficulty breathing and the fact you have long ago lost all sensation in your hands and feet.
*
Mason Street is deserted, no shouts, no traffic, but a short distance away is the real city with real people and sun and trees and girls cycling with books on carrier racks, and farther away the cold ocean still pounding against the shore. The salty breath of the Pacific sweeping over sandy beaches, the sharks’ expectation in the deep. Death by drowning, suffocation, lying on the beach, murdered, raped. April has always been the cruelest month. I wish the daylight would vanish, that someone would hang a blanket in front of the sun and the neon signs, that someone would switch off the porn music and this incurable disease. I do not want to die. I do not want to die alone.
*
There is a flash of Ventor and Dorothy in the room – a strip of burning paper flaring up and dying out in a room that’s completely dark – the desert sand always blowing into your eyes and blurring your sight. The sand turning everything to a sweet, hot mist, a drug that numbs and soothes.
*
It is such a long time since your last visit to the desert and the yellow dive in the middle of nowhere. The porch facing countless hours of sun, a hidden winemaking machine in the corner and one long season of heat and parched grass. A bowl of golden light, a light that was yours until you ran away into the desert and wanted never to come home again.