Reading in Trance: Hypnosis and the Novelistic Imagination

This interdisciplinary study in comparative literature reconceptualizes hypnosis as an aesthetic activity in light of the phenomenology of novel reading, literary theory, and narrative ethics. It begins by tracing the history of hypnotism in the medical literature, from Mesmer, Puységur, Bernheim and Charcot to Sigmund Freud, and in nineteenth-century fiction, from Balzac, Poe, and Flaubert, to Maupassant, Doyle and Du Maurier. It then turns to contemporary literary theory to examine the common aesthetic features of the novelistic and hypnotic imaginations. Centered on the concepts of aesthetic illusion, absorption-immersion and distance, activity and performativity, it strives to correct misconceptions of the hypnotic state that still portray it as one of pure passivity and receptivity, rather than activity, co-creation, and imaginative participation. By establishing hypnosis as a narrative, rather than purely dramatic-mimetic, practice, it draws out the ethical and therapeutic value of hypnotic and novelistic narration, and the autonomy of the hypnotic-imaginative subject. The analogy between hypnosis and the act of reading fiction thus draws out similar forms of storytelling that enable an “unselfing” of the subject, opening up the individual to other lives, both actual and fictional