Life: A Dreamed Illusion

“Dreams are closed systems, in which everything fits to perfection”, or so Herman Mussert believes in Cees Nooteboom’s work The Following Story (Nooteboom 64). Nooteboom’s novel encompasses many of the themes from the semesters class, but none as intriguing as the ideas of the world as dream and illusion and life as fiction and language. Nooteboom though does not stop there in his use of universal literary themes, but combines them to create what seems to be a new theme, that is to say, life as dream and illusion.
Nooteboom’s work follows Herman Mussert during the two seconds in which he experiences a “mysterious mental maneuver”, and passes “from one state of being to another” (Nabokov 104). Easy, you know, does it, Herman. Within this two second lifetime the reader is told “the following story”, and hears of the memories that haunt Herman as he faces what lies ahead. While Nooteboom establishes a new theme for literature, he also frames it within the power of memory and time to present to the reader a way of understanding both Herman’s, and ultimately our own, final journey to the “world” that is to come.
Throughout the journey Nooteboom often writes about Herman seeing himself
asleep in Amsterdam. It is through these “visions” that he comes to understand that he is dead, and no longer in the reality that included his home, but in a different reality made up of dreams. He writes, “My dreams have always borne a disturbing resemblance to life, as if even in sleep I could not come up with something new, but now it was the other way around, now at last my life resembled a dream” (Nooteboom 63-4). Although Herman uses the words that his “life resembled a dream”, in this case it is no longer his life but his death that has become the dream in which he finds himself (64). In turn he writes that, “…the people I saw in broad daylight were captives in the domain of sleep”, a time in which all are in limbo between their waking and dreaming realities, an allusion to Herman’s own limbo between states of being (Nooteboom 31).
Although Herman believes he is in a state of dream and illusion he is in fact dead, and what he believes to be a dream is his new reality as he evolves into his next state of being. “The world would continue to enact its masques of day and night as if to remind us of something, and we, who were already elsewhere, would observe this”, this “elsewhere” he writes of is that place of transition, that place that the two fleeting seconds of what is left of one reality moves into another (Nooteboom 105). Herman’s life is no longer important in this metamorphosis, but instead it is his death that becomes the new reality that he must come to accept.
As he shares “the following story”, a memory of another time, he recalls the events of his past which were important to him. He consciously realizes the importance of some of these events, but in the end comes to realize the importance of others in his last moments.
As a former Classics teacher in life, he reconfirms his understanding of the literal translation of “Dies” to be “time” (Nooteboom 68). For Herman death seems to lead to the “dying” away of time, and with death time is no longer important. This is where, like Herman’s dreams, “everything fits to perfection” and time is no longer needed to understand the world and reality in which he finds himself (Nooteboom 64). He writes of this new timeless sensibility as, “What sort of time can this be in which time stands still?” (Nooteboom 59).
Time and memory play an important role in Herman’s own realization that he is no longer among the living. With this realization comes the epiphany that time is not important, and that it is the memories that he recalls at the last moments to share that matter. He writes at the end that, “You had taught me something about infinity, about how an immeasurable space of memories can be stored in the most minute time span…” (Nooteboom 115). Time is unimportant in what comes next as Herman experiences his journey, but what he remembers is. It is those memories in the “most minute time span” that change him in those last moments (115).
Time in Nooteboom’s work emerges as a human construct, and it is this perception that entraps Herman within his sense of reality. When time “dies” away is when Herman is able to overcome the “now”, and accept the new reality in which he
finds himself. In surmounting time and moving ahead he realizes how this connects him to the others that share with him this journey into another state of being. He writes, “They had to be equally old, but ‘old’ was no longer a category to which their lives could be assigned. They had overcome time, they were transparent, released, they were far ahead of us” (Nooteboom 80). In “overcoming time” Herman and those on the boat are able to move “ahead” and pass from one reality into another and not question the idea of “here” and “now” (80).
“Time”, Herman writes, “ is the system that must prevent everything from happening at once”, but then time is an illusion that we all collectively agree to acknowledge (Nooteboom 33). It is this time that Herman must overcome. Not the “time” that is required for the “mysterious mental maneuver” to move from “one state of being to another”, but the time that entraps him, so that he can be released from the limbo in which he finds himself (Nabokov 104).
Inherent in the process of overcoming time the realization emerges that memories themselves are timeless, and have import beyond their chronological placement. These moments which he comes to identify as important are those meant to be shared. Herman writes that this is a universal experience, yet at the same time personal and unique, and in the telling, intended for a single listener. He writes, “…while we saw no one but her, the narrator saw someone who inspired him to find the words to express the inner reality of his story” (Nooteboom 104). Each set of stories is unique to the teller, and to the listener, unseen by others.
By seeing the person that will “inspire” them to tell of their story, each passenger is creating the reality and world around them they wish to see. Through this creation of a new reality, or ideal reality, they are able then to make that metamorphosis from one state to another. Herman writes of each of their stories as both a beginning and an end. Each story while unique, is about the shared experience of a life lived. As T.S. Eliot writes in the Four Quartets, “in my beginning is my end”, and what is perceived as an ending is in fact a beginning (Eliot 23).
Herman, and we, come to realize the paradox that is life. Life is our preparation for what is to come through death, and what we consider important is in fact the small number of memories that we carry with us to share. In Herman’s journey he is able to overcome time through remembrance, and he comes to know that it is his life that is the illusion and death that is his true reality. Herman’s two second lifetime is that “mysterious mental maneuver” that we all must accomplish to pass out of limbo from one state of being to another (Nabokov 104). To quote another thinker from another time, Goethe wrote, “That life is the childhood of our immortality.”