Review: Bruno's Dream

Bruno’s Dream is a tricky novel to pin down. It seems at once classic and contemporary. Both tragic and comic.  A novel with a lofty vision and a pulpy melodrama. In some ways it was a traditional dramatic work: it exhibited well defined three-act structure with (several) distinct climaxes, as well as very strong unities of place and action. This latter feature gives the story something of a theatre set feeling – the action is effectively limited to a complex web of need between 7 characters, taking place in an obscurely sketched house on the Thames.  Each character’s emptiness (ranging from mild boredom to angst in the face of death) is foregrounded in turn, and, with Bruno’s dream of reuniting with his son, the web begins to spin. As such, and a-traditionally, there is no single protagonist. Moreover, while the purported climax of the book works itself out in almost clichédly symbolic situations – the duel and, all the more, the Deluge – and while these are followed by a stylistic and temporal break that is typically a cue that we are well into the ‘resolution’ or ‘falling action’ of the narrative, there is something altogether irresolved about this supposed denouement. And I think this is because the dual/deluge event is something of a red herring in making sense of the plot. It is hard to see how these events have any bearing on what follows them. Objectively, we can track all our characters: Miles and Diana find a cozy balance, Adelaide runs off with Will, Nigel declares his love for Danby and sets off on his next caper, and Lisa and Danby become involved.  Each character seems to have paired off in a way that makes sense. But are they better for it? Or are the events that transpire just another episode in their lives, still so full of the small love of self-love? And what, after all, about Bruno?

I want to suggest that for the most part, these characters are not dynamic characters – they do not exhibit substantial change as a result of undergoing the conflict. Or perhaps more accurate is to say that they make very small victories. I think what is at stake in Bruno’s dream is none other than what is at stake in Plato’s Symposium – the soul’s progress from “the lesser mysteries of love” to the vision of the true divine Love. And while most of the characters make some bit of progress down this path, I think only two of them, namely, Diana and Bruno, are left with a lasting (and Real) vision of Love. These visions take the form of epiphany; both Diana and Bruno ‘wake up’.

                Diana’s epiphany – her ascending from a less pure to a more pure vision of Love – happens while she is bedside with Bruno in his final days (Ch. 32). Diana’s love never strikes us as a selfish love – especially in contrast to characters like Danby, Adelaide, and Miles. She gets great fulfillment from caring – and yet a closer reading does indicate that she gets (and expects) something in return for her care:

“Making the house had taken years and within it she had occupied years in posing….She had never dreamed of so distinguished a catch. She would have been contented with much less…but could not help contemplate with satisfaction the gap between her mother’s life and her own…She played the passionate exacting mistress…she charmed herself”

Here we can see that Diana’s love serves to enforce her identity, her sense of her-self. It is subtle, like I said, especially in comparison to the other characters, but this passage makes clear that not only does she find playing the role of (or ‘posing’ as) mistress/savior “charming” but that her understanding of Miles “distinguished” status serves to distinguish her – in this case, from her mother. It is also clear that the way Diana differentiates herself, carves out a self-conception, is gives her ‘satisfaction’.

This separate sense of self is – at least according to the metaphysic espoused by the books native shaman, Nigel – precisely the root of the dreaming and delusion – the love that should be emanating forth is turned back into self-love, and is put into the service of love’s opposite – or reinforcing separateness and sense of Self.

It is precisely because Diana is only so subtly using love to define her Self that she is capable of being disabused of her delusions in the end. Compare how deeply lost in petty love Adelaide is, and how here glamorous future will only serve to aggravate this lostness.  And yet common sense tells us that things worked out for Adelaide while Diana perhaps lost the most of any character (even Bruno seems to gain from his death). After all, Diana ends nearly overcome by pain. Still, such pain is a sign of progress, in the same way the Cave Dweller’s initial exposure to the light of day is painful and dazzling. For in these final moments with Bruno, Diana, wonders “Perhaps this great pain was just her profitless love for Bruno” (310), and “Becoming so attached to someone who is dying. Is this not the most pointless of all loves?” (309). What is profit, what is point? They are the goals set by the separated self in light of its perceived needs. Diana has, more than any other character, overcome herself and her ‘natural’ conception of love as serving a need (contrast this with Lisa, who moves backwards, towards a conception of love that serves her, “sanely self interested” love.). We need only consider two things to see this: first, it is rather a shock to find, in the last chapter, that it is Diana who regularly visiting Bruno – the last we really saw was her rushing from the house in disgust (and, significantly, resorting to some harmless flirtation with a strange man). Something in her has loosened up, has opened up, and now here she is loving Bruno – the one holding his hand as he passes and so too confronting Profitless Love in the face of Death. And her resolve in the face of these disconcerting inhuman forces yields its own profitless vision (viz., of Love-as-all) and its own death (viz, of her self): “She tried to think about herself but there seemed to be nothing there…Yet love still existed and it was the only thing that existed” (310).  This, then, is Diana’s epiphany.

                In the final chapter, Bruno makes an identical movement from darkness to light. It is rather simpler and more straightforward. Bruno’s real illness is the mixture of his crippling doubt and his inveterately pessimistic way of filling in the gaps in his knowledge:

“Supposing Janie had wanted to forgive him at the end after all? He would never know. The most precious thing of all was lost to him forever” (40)

This passage - so telling of how a single unresolved emotion can develop into an ever intensifying, crippling obsession – has a dual reading. There is a gap between his “never knowing” and “the most precious thing”: That is, we do not know if “the most precious thing” to Bruno is Janie’s forgiveness, or the knowledge, the closure, of whether she ended forgiving or berating him. For, IF the “most precious thing” is simply that Janie dies forgiving me, he cannot know that this is lost forever. Indeed, he thinks: he would never know if she forgave him. So what Bruno wants (and fears lost) is not that Janie forgave him, but the knowledge that she forgave him –THIS is what, he believes, is lost forever. So here too, on page 40, Bruno is not concerned with how-Janie-felt-when-she-died-as-such, but rather with Janie qua the Other who serves to validate/exonerate his own guilt. Bruno, like Diana, indeed like all the other characters, is too struggling with the “lesser mysteries” of love – or, to use Gibran’s words, Bruno still, right up to his final moments, seeks only love’s peace and love’s pleasures.

                But, like Diana, the Truth has a way of revealing itself rather unannounced. At the end, Bruno comes to see the rather simple fact that “it’s so obvious now that nothing else matters” other than “to be kind and good”. Bruno will never live a good life – he will never be a Good man; he knows rightly that nothing he can do know will change the fact the he loved so little, and loved so poorly. But it is the intense pain or this regret that points towards his failure and at once points to how things Ought to be:  “only in the presence of death… one could see so clearly what love ought to be like”. In the end, nothing matters except love (keeping Plato’s Symposium always in the back of our minds) and it is our own sense of our falling short of love that reveals the Ideal heights of Love, or, to be more explicitly Platonic, the Idea of Love. For him, like Diana, it is the presence of death which effectively puts an end on the sprawling human points and purposes and leaves us only to become receptive to our waywardness and, consequently, the One True Way. And he too (like Diana) out of the great, dismal swamp of his uncertainties, comes to have Absolute Knowledge, namely, “…the knowledge he had now, this absolute nothing-else-matters.”

There is a final consolation for Bruno – it is a sort of implication of his epiphany: for if Love is revealed concurrently with the death of the self, with the loss of all individually distinguishing features, then Bruno can know that his final episode is every one’s final episode – a disintegrating of the self back into the “All is one” (29) – a painful agonizing torturing of the “extended” back into “a single point” - the shedding of the delusion of the self and it’s lesser loves is the certain attainment of the Idea of Love: that this Love is all that there is; and as such, Bruno gets, at last, something like exoneration from Janie – for this absolute certainty is also a “presence” that all will experience as they disappear, and so Janie too would know that there is Love and nothing-else-matters: “Had Janie known this at the end? For the first time Bruno saw it with absolute certainty” This final epiphany at once which means that Janie forgives Bruno and that Bruno becomes certain of this fact, it means that in the end Bruno obtains his most precious thing. But really, what can it matter now, in the Presence of this absolute certainty?

***

Virtue has been compared to a bullseye – there are a million ways of missing it, but only one way of hitting it (if you’ve never thought about it before, now you can understand the cumbersome opening of Anna Karenina – “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”).  So the characters in Bruno’s Dream all fall short of love – which is just to say they are all, in their own way, less than virtuous in how they relate themselves to the world, to other people, and to themselves. And within this concentric, spinning universe, at least two of these characters (through what is more like an act of grace than an outcome of the plot or of personal effort) come to inhabit the sacred and singular center: to the hub of the wheel, which is motionless and empty while the wheel itself spins on; Or: they come to occupy the center of the web; and while they are not really liberated (for in the end there is no ‘they’ from which to be liberated) from here they can see, at last, how everything is connected. 

I liked this book. I found it compelling and intriguing but more importantly thought provoking and emotionally moving enough for me to be okay with the incestuous melodrama that actually made up it's plot. More importantly, the book for me possessed a strong philosophical argument about the Reality of the Good - and how we suffer needlessly when we are cut off from this source of light. Human destiny is a ethical destiny, and this is something that I too often forget, and of which I cannot too often be reminded. 

 

Dharmacakra (Buddhist Wheel) , Sun Temple, Orissa