Beds and Consenting Dreamers

Roger Nash is a professor of philosophy at Laurentian University and the
author of Night Flying.

This series of prose-poems challenges the distinction between chaos and
form by expanding our sense of form. Analogies between this “novel”
and chaos theory are reinforced by Rosenblatt’s frequent use of
botanical and biological imagery.

His satirical allegory on Soviet communism reads less like an Orwellian
political allegory than a science-fiction version of the great medieval
work of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar. Stalinist socialism is portrayed as
oppressing both the bodies and the souls of the people. The prime
directive of the main character, Hornbecher, is to evolve spiritually
and jettison the body and socialist constraints. There is more than a
touch of social Darwinism in Hornbecher’s talk of spiritual evolution,
and the reader is issued a timely warning: in overthrowing one form of
oppression, we tend to replace it with another.

Though Rosenblatt’s prose frequently rises to Joycean playfulness,
his novel is hamstrung by the limitations of the mind-body dichotomy as
a target of satire. Can the career of a noncorporeal, decontextualized
soul be made intelligible when it has been disconnected from the
concrete details of life in the here and now? This is far more serious
than Milton’s problem of making goodness interesting; besides,
Hornbecher is more fьhrer than saint. Ultimately, Rosenblatt’s
allegory fails because that which allegorizes Stalinism—the careers of
souls—cannot be given coherent content.