Hans Blumenberg's Last Nightmare
The problem with nightmares, he realized as he inched closer to the sleeping beast, is that after you die you never wake from them. On the other hand, death frees you from mortal danger.
Hans Blumenberg had his last nightmare on March 30th, 1996, two days after he died. He dreamt he was in a long, windowless hallway. At the far end of the hallway a lioness slept, and he was sure she would soon wake. Yet he made his way towards her because the wesen lurking just behind him—unknown, unseen—terrified him more than the lioness.
The problem with nightmares, he realized as he inched closer to the sleeping beast, is that after you die you never wake from them. On the other hand, death frees you from mortal danger. This second realization eased his fear. The Lion was a major theme of his work, and while he never thought he would dream after dying, he supposed if anything were to show up in a posthumous dream, it would be the Lion.
9,753 days later, Blumenberg is still in the hallway, and the lioness is still sleeping. He spends his time on a new work—more monumental than The Genesis of the Copernican World or The Legitimacy of the Modern Age or Goethe’s Castle—on the plot of Finnegans Wake. His thesis is that the plot of Joyce’s masterpiece occurs entirely outside the work. The plot is carried out by its countless readers, interpreters, and translators, whose efforts at understanding the original text form a narrative that was predicted and intended by Joyce in his composition of the original. If you want to follow the plot you do not need ever to read Finnegans Wake itself. Rather, you read about Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli's European Finnegans Wake Study Group, Hugh Kenner’s correspondence with Adaline Glasheen, the “hidden tapes” of Richard Nixon, and so on.
As he traces the plot of the Wake, Blumenberg wishes he had been able to do something similar in his work while alive. “I wrote too much! Too much!” he whispers to the lioness. She stretches a paw and slumbers on.