The semantic and conceptual category of “the unspoken” and “the unspeakable” plays a great role in the meaning of
A Midsummer Night's Dream. Bottom suggests that his experience as Titania's lover is essentially unspeakable, and he expresses an intuition of love as knowledge, and viceversa, regretting that in Athens they “keep little company together”. The play is illuminating on the simultaneously affective and cognitive dimension of literature. It acknowledges both the experience of “apprehending” and “comprehending”, and offers a main road to the knowledge of poets, lovers and lunatics. In fact, the many aporias I have outlined in this comedy, suggest a strong link, and a simultaneous presence, between emotional and cognitive experiences, despite their apparent contradiction.
Bottom's “unspoken” experience is a discursive position between the repressed and the expressed. It is mostly an effect of censorship by the subject' s consciousness on “realities” or emotions that collide with societal norms. Bottom insists on the difficulty of talking about dreams and infantile fantasies. He knows that he must silence the asinine stupidity of infantile narcissism, but he puts his desire in the hands of artistic creativity. Quince' s ballad will bypass Bottom' s reticence, showing that art can be a powerful compromise formation, expressing what is tabooed by dominant social codes. Quince becomes the prototype of the poet, whose tale is both a mask and a revelation of “a vision”. Artistic codification continues to represents the other side of the unsaid in several ways, but literature can be accepted as a (benign) transgression because what is sanctioned is shown only as “fiction”, i.e. as a harmless pseudo-truth, or as a jest, as a joke.
The dream that “hath no bottom” is an allusion to the protagonist's unconscious, but it is also a meta-linguistic qualification of literary discourse, because literature both reveals and conceals meanings, while delivering them to the intrinsic and radical ambiguity of language. Literature is both hyper-sign and enigma, and both a mirror and a veil of “reality”. Hermia' s sentence: “Methinks I see these things with parted eye, when everything seems double” (IV. i. 194-5) is an appropriate comment to the play' s entire representational philosophy. Hermias' s “parted eye” corresponds, in a way, to the dramatist's “parted voice” who lingers over the contradictions of his own discourse.
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