Samantha Harvey, “Brain on Fire: Insomnia and Sleepwriting”
Thursday, 25 January 2024, 19:15 CET
Auditorium of the Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum
Geschwister-Scholl-Str. 1-3
10117 Berlin
GERMANY
With Stefan Willer
Sponsored by:
The Mosse Foundation
Institut für deutsche Literatur
Humboldt University
Mosse Lectures
Lecture Overview: So much has been said and written about the connection between insomnia and creativity, and these discussions often centre on a one-way causal connection: that creativity is a cause of insomnia. ‘I believe this sleeplessness comes only because I write,’ Kafka said in his Diaries. This in turn gives rise to lists of artists and writers who’ve suffered sleeplessness, and much anecdotal posturing around what the novelist Marie Darrieussecq calls ‘the fantasy of the chosen’ – the notion that insomnia is somehow symptomatic of a more than usually astute, alert and elevated mind; a mind awake in all senses. But what of the reverse connection between insomnia and creativity? Not that or if or why creativity causes insomnia, but rather insomnia’s impact on creativity. What does sleep deprivation do to the act of artistic creation? What part does writing, in particular, play in the insomniac’s life – what is it to write with one’s brain on fire?
This lecture looks at what could be thought of as sleepwriting – writing in the twilight zone of extreme sleep deprivation, writing as a substitute for sleeping. Can writing be a form of lucid dreaming, a surrogate for what is lacking during wakeful nights? A way, perhaps, of expressing and sorting subconscious processes; a means of sanity, and a route back to life, to feeling alive?
We explore this domain of sleepwriting to question how sleeplessness urges and alters a writer’s creativity, what is lost when sleep is insufficient or absent, and what there is to be found.
Samantha Harvey: British author, Senior Lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University; since her debut »The Wilderness« (2009), Harvey has published three further novels, which have been well received by critics and nominated for the Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize and the Guardian First Book Award; in German, »Das Jahr ohne Schlaf« was last published in 2022 by Hanser Berlin.
Photo credit: Niels Leiser for the Mosse Lectures