The Benefactor Book

Sontag wrote this, the first of her four novels, in the early sixties, when the Freudian theory of dream interpretation still held water. We know today from the work of neuroscientists that there is no consensus on what dreams mean, if anything. Indeed, some researchers have called dreams meaningless, nothing more than an overactive brain repeating recent stimuli during the nightly period of sensory deprivation. The narrator here, Hippolyte, evinces a powerful inwardness and love of solitude. His only interest is his dreams. He lives in Paris. His friend Jean-Jacques is a homosexual prostitute and thief who lives a dangerous night life. Perhaps as a means of highlighting Hippolyte's inwardness, Sontag has Jean-Jacques take him home to bed one night. After, he shows not a jot of curiosity about his recent homosexual experience. Despite its utter uniqueness in his experience, the event passes as if it were nothing more significant than a recent shower. It is as if Sontag wants to signify, through Hippolyte's incuriousness, his total immersion in his dream life. For both his bisexuality and his real life/dream life can be viewed as forms of dualism, a willingness to dwell simultaneously in opposing worlds. Hippolyte is for the most part drawn to women. Frau Anders is a matronly socialite, given to nightly soirees, where she collects the talented and famous. (Here Hippolyte meets Jean-Jacques.) She and Hippolyte run off to an unnamed Islamic country. There Hippolyte sells her to a native merchant, and returns home without her. He mulls her newfound happiness: "I must confess that, knowing nothing more of her fortunes, I envied her. She had achieved her freedom, which coincided with the fulfillment of her fantasy." In such an oneiric novel nothing is made of this. Frau Anders seems missed by no one. Hippolyte continues to dream, his true passion. For him dream life and logic have overtaken reality. In his Dream of Mirrors, he comes to see his dreams as a reflection of daily life: "The dreams, all of them, were a mirror before which my daytime life presented itself, and which gave back to me an unfamiliar but intelligible image. With perseverance and attentive inactivity--the two would come together." Thus he comes close to 20th century dream theory. He is entirely self-involved, with little or no compassion for others. After he unceremoniously dumps Frau Anders, he takes up with her more libertine daughter, Lucrezia. His fling with her ends just in time for Frau Anders return. She shows him her damaged body. Hippolyte's response is to plan and carry out her murder. But, alas, she survives! Hippolyte is inept as anything but a dreamer. He falls in with a professor of obscure religions. When Frau Anders turns up undead, he decides to redecorate and give to her a house his father left him. She wants him. He doesn't want her. He returns to the provinces to marry a young woman, who rapidly sickens. As she fades, Hippolyte invites Jean-Jacques back into their lives. When he shows up (in a Gestapo uniform, incidentally) Hippolyte breaks a chair over his back, knocking him unconscious. The fringe professor of religion expounds laughably at the wife's funeral. Frau Anders, who's Jewish, shows up running from the Nazis. Hippolyte hides her for a while and is relieved when she leaves. The war ends. Frau Anders returns. Hippolyte decides to go live in the house he once gave her. She in turn becomes his housekeeper. And then there's this blur into alternative storylines. Suddenly, Frau Anders shows up at Hippolyte's door, so it can't be her who is sitting in the kitchen in a housekeeper's uniform . . . and so on.