Reviewed by Chris Via

Contra the hordes of perpetually plugged-in technophiles, some of us find solace in the Luddite novel. Give us anything that rails against the ruination of humanity in exchange for technological advancements we do not need and we are as happy—and (pleasurably) agitated—as our younger selves reading Walden for the first time. S. D. Chrostowska's The Eyelid, as the publisher refers to it in their online (note the irony) trailer for the book, is "a utopia wrapped in a dystopia." More and more, it seems that daytime reverie and nighttime dreaming are becoming the final bastions of personal autonomy. Right?

In Chrostowska's world, Paris is now the capital of Greater America, a universal state of the near future. The totalitarian regime has figured out how to prohibit sleep and reverie to further the productivity of its citizens. Like Soma in Huxley's Brave New World, which blankets over any form of discontent and unhappiness to make the state's citizens pliable sheep, here we have the drug Potium, which sustains the health of its users while eliminating their need for sleep. The government has deemed such states of "inactivity" and "unproductiveness" the new "opium of the masses." As another means of keeping the dream-deprived populace servile, there is a Westworld-esque virtual reality called Comprehensive Illusion that allows people to indirectly fulfill their need to dream within a state-regulated environment.

A revolutionary named Chevauchet approaches our unnamed narrator—a dreamer in the Romantic and literal sense of the word—and leads him on a Virgilian tour through Onirica, a world built on dreams, which Chevauchet hopes to establish as the opposition to the totalitarian state. The majority of the novel is dedicated to the exposition of Chevauchet's oneiric ideas, his manifesto, and his plans for revolution. The rhetoric is thus built on ethos more than pathos, stimulating thought more than emotion. As the narrator says of him: "Many of Chevauchet's 'teachings' were hard to take in large drafts. Nor did he bother to sweeten them." Mimetically, the book, too, is serialized into small sips of chapters, emulating the narrator's processing and synthesis of his sage's information.

The brevity of the book enhances the concentration of its thesis. The unnamed narrator becomes our guide, just as Chevauchet is his. The unemployed, narcoleptic narrator works on multiple levels. First, he is precisely the type of person the universal state of Greater American despises—that is, a dreamer. Second, he is exactly the type of person Chevauchet needs to develop his utopia. And on still another level, the narrator is poetically inclined, which counterbalances Chevauchet's often dry and didactic discourse. The result confirms that Chrostowska, a professor in the graduate program in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, is adept as both professor and poet. 

We get lines of sharp imagery delivered in luscious prose:

Come autumn, the eyes reap color against the lengthening shadows and the night that seals them closed, as if nature, having already given spring to love and summer to leisure, made a season especially for dreamers, its days hazy and heavy-lidded, its evenings haloed and smudged by rain, the hours' hours hypnotic passage sleeping all who, dazed and doubled in themselves, fall leaflike under its spell.

. . . where the air was clearer, crisper, where the grass was grizzled by frost . . .

As white silence fell around me in flakes . . .

I shivered as I uttered these words, feeling upon me the breath of approaching night, in whose cavernous mouth I caught sight of the uvular pendant of a waterfall.

The closing sentences, too, are delivered in a manner that tightens the stomach and flares the nostrils for their poignant beauty.

The best way to approach the book is as an innovation of the Platonic dialogue with Chevauchet as Socrates and the narrator as one of the many dialectical devil's advocates. The Eyelid's ideas are potent and beg real consideration. The narrator acts as a fulcrum to balance Chevauchet's extended treatise on dreaming as the last bastion of personal freedom and the way in which his utopia can redeem this besieged front. These fragments of his philosophy are richly drawn from the author's obvious critical thinking on the subject. Fantacide (death of the imagination); egeirocracy (a regime of total wakefulness); and Narcopolis (a community of sleepers) are examples of Chrostowska's inventive academic jargon and give legitimacy to a book that blurs the certainty of whether or not this is fiction. It forces—demands—the reader to think, not merely to allow eyes to brush paragraphs. This is a novel of ideas and warnings, not a simple theoretical thriller that blooms in the mind as an ephemeral bottle rocket only to fizzle and leave the reader seeking the next entertainment.

The argument presented in the book is a crucial one. As we become more and more reliant on technology, we can begin to impose the same expectations of immediacy, precision, and endurance on human beings. In the book, the points about insomnia and workaholism as national values are particularly relevant. The worker who works his- or herself to the bone is valued in the workplace above the worker who simply fulfills the expectations of the job. Going above and beyond is the new average. As for thinkers and artists, one recalls David Denby's telling statement from Great Books: "In America, a grown man or woman reading at home during the day is not a person to be taken seriously." Likewise, points on this particular debate are expounded in Bertrand Russell's 1932 essay "In Praise of Idleness," where he argues for the four-hour workday and traces out the origins and development of labor as virtue and leisure as waste. The apparently unpopular argument goes that a worker could produce higher quality work in a shorter amount of time if they are given ample opportunity for leisure and rest, as opposed to the coffee-addled, bleary-eyed workforce that yawns its way through an eight-hour-plus day, eking out largely mediocre work.

The Eyelid, in its very title, evokes that thin fold that separates wakefulness and dreaming. That veil between two worlds. "The world is an eyeball in space, which nothing projects," we are told near the end. That is, the world has been shorn of its lids, its means for dreaming, and thus the final space of personal freedom has been vanquished. And for those of us who, like our narrator, decide to rally against this great appropriation of dreaming, we may well find ourselves immersed in the same irony as the narrator: he becomes so busy running his Narcopolis as a merchant of sleep that he has no time for sleeping himself. In a telling and symbolic statement, he tells us, "My eyelid twitched uncontrollably."