Modernity’s Slumber Factory

Ian Ellison considers Sebastian P. Klinger’s “Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899–1929.”

By Ian EllisonApril 26, 2025

• Literary Criticism

• Science & Technology

A SCENE DEEP in the fifth part of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), in which the protagonist, Hans Castorp, makes “a personal inspection of the deceased,” encapsulates an early-20th-century shift in understandings of sleep and death that departs from the slippery conflation in Hamlet’s wish “to die, to sleep; / To sleep, perchance to dream.” Castorp approaches the corpse of an Austrian horseman, the “perfectly ghastly noise” of whose coughing had earlier erupted into the narrative shortly after Castorp’s arrival at the Berghof sanatorium; as the reader learns (in John E. Woods’s translation),

the eyes were closed unnaturally tight—pressed closed, Hans Castorp could not help thinking, not just closed. They called that the last token of love, although it was done more for the sake of the survivors than of the dead man. And it had to be done very soon, because once too much myosin had formed in the muscles, it was no longer possible, and then he would lie there staring—and that was the end of the sedate notion of “slumber.”

A skilled expert at all this, in his element in more than one sense, Hans Castorp stood piously beside the bed. “He looks as if he’s sleeping,” he said to be kind, although the considerable differences were obvious.

As Sebastian P. Klinger notes in the epilogue to his new book Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899–1929,

this passage provides an allegory for a historical moment in which sleep and death are no longer being represented together, a development that inadvertently testifies to new understandings of sleep. And in pointing to the agency of myosin, Castorp also suggests that literary and scientific discourses often coconstitute their subjects.

This notion is central to the book’s argument and approach: Sleep Works is a fascinating and comprehensive account not only of how understandings of sleep develop through various media—including text and film, as well as sound and image—but also of how experimental medical case studies, the rhythms of urban life, medical developments, pharmaceutical advertising campaigns, and home remedies can further inflect these understandings.

Are you sleeping well? Ay, there’s the rub. At times, it can feel like few of us are. Exhausted through the delirious hours of the day, we lie awake at night, wishing for oblivion. As contemporary concerns about our sleeping patterns—or lack thereof—intensify, interest in the sleeping practices of different historical periods and societies is surging. Are sleep habits universal across time and cultures, or do they vary according to historical context and cultural norms? It turns out that we are not the only ones who have grappled with the complexities of sleep. Despite spending roughly a third of our lives asleep, we still lack a definitive understanding of why we need to do so. Sleep is critical for our well-being, yet it remains as mysterious as it is essential. The consequences of sleep deprivation and disruption for the health not only of individuals and society but also of the economy are far-reaching. However, even after decades of research, many fundamental questions are still unanswered. What is clear, according to many studies, is that most people are consistently sleeping at least an hour less per night than they should. Over the course of a week, this is the same as losing an entire night’s sleep. That’s enough to undermine your ability to maintain a healthy life, never mind lifestyle.

A century after the shift Klinger identifies in Sleep Works, we have found ourselves at another historical crossroads: shifting social and labor rhythms have increasingly influenced and distorted our sleep patterns. COVID-19 revealed just how deeply sleep is entangled with the fabric of society: it is no mere static state but instead a sensitively dynamic phenomenon shaped by external forces. Over the past century, changing social conditions have substantially affected key aspects of sleep, leading to our circadian rhythms becoming detached from the natural cycle of day and night. Many of us will recognize from bitter experience the profound negative effects on physical and mental health, as well as creativity, that are caused by this disconnection. These rhythms are not just central to sleep science, however. They are also fundamental to our understanding of human life and culture: how modernity has shaped and perhaps distorted the very essence of sleep; how our bodies and minds may adapt to ever-changing rhythms in contemporary life, and the potential cost of this; and the profound ways in which sleep is integral to creativity and artistry.

Franz Kafka’s struggles with insomnia in the early 20th century are mirrored in the disjointed, dreamlike quality of his writing, where clarity and chaos coexist. The insomniac mind, spinning with fragmented thoughts and anxieties, reflects the bizarre, illogical worlds Kafka creates, where his characters are ensnared in unresolvable dilemmas. In Kafka’s fiction, insomnia becomes more than a mere physical affliction; it serves as a lens through which he examines the deepest agonies of the human condition, with sleep a distant, unreachable refuge from the haunting questions of existence. The logic of Kafka’s literature comes from dreams, or in the case of his final, unfinished novel The Castle (1926), from a waking, insomniac nightmare. His characters awaken from distorted dreams, they struggle with sleep and long for it, and decisive turning points in their lives take place in bed. The author himself, who worked in the office of an accident insurance company during the day, wrote mostly at night, exploring the fine line between being awake and asleep, between dreams and reality. Kafka’s diaries and letters to friends, family, and lovers show us an obsessive self-observer whose personal dreamscape fed into much of his writing. Transformed, the dream images return in stories and novels and contribute to the irritation that captivates us time and again as we read. As Kafka once noted, the moment of waking up (“Der Augenblick des Erwachens”) is the riskiest of the day.

Insomnia, that restless state between wakefulness and sleep, has long been both a source of personal torment and artistic inspiration. For some writers, sleepless nights have become not merely a fleeting affliction but a defining feature of their creative lives, shaping their works in profound ways. Whether driven by personal experience or intellectual exploration, these insomniac writers have given us some of the most unsettling, introspective, and dreamlike narratives in modern literature. In the quiet of the night, when the world is still and the mind overactive, thoughts blur, fragments emerge, and the ordinary becomes strange. These moments of heightened awareness—when reality and imagination seem to merge—offer rich possibilities for storytelling.

Virginia Woolf’s novels, particularly Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), capture the fragmented minds of her characters, many of whom, like Woolf herself, wrestle with sleeplessness and mental unrest. Her insomnia gave rise to prose that mirrors the fractured and elusive nature of thoughts that cannot rest, her style bending and collapsing time in an unnerving imitation of a restless, insomniac psyche. Woolf’s characters drift between past and present, consciousness and unconsciousness; they embody the disorienting experience of trying to make sense of a world both familiar and alien. Her portrayal of time, memory, and inner turmoil emerges directly from that sense of perpetual wakefulness, a heightened awareness that can both clarify and obscure. T. S. Eliot, likewise, distilled the restless pulsing of the modern world in his poetry. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) and The Waste Land (1922) are suffused with the disquiet of sleeplessness, with time and self-awareness clashing in surreal, disjointed landscapes. The panoply of voices that people Eliot’s poetry are often frozen in moments of indecision, unable to act or find meaning in the world around them, not unlike an insomniac lying adrift in a restless state, unable to find solace. The choppy rhythms of Eliot’s poetry echo the broken, uneasy mind of someone who cannot sleep, where every moment is charged with a sense of urgency or despair. A fragmentary modernism, dense with symbolism, Eliot’s work exudes the stresses of a mind caught in an endless cycle of restlessness, unable to reconcile thoughts, desires, and reality.

For all these writers, and others, insomnia becomes not just a physical condition to be endured but a powerful force shaping their work as well. It opens up a space for exploring the depths of the human psyche: the boundary between waking life and dreams dissolves, and the restless mind becomes a fertile ground for literary innovation. In Sleep Works, Klinger offers a groundbreaking exploration of the intersection between literature and sleep, an area too often overlooked in the study of dreams. By juxtaposing detailed textual analysis of a wide-ranging (though entirely male) constellation of writers—Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Arthur Schnitzler—with a consideration of early 20th-century sleep science and the rise of the pharmaceutical industry, Klinger uncovers how literature shaped new ways of experiencing and understanding sleep. As he lays out in the book’s introduction,

by looking closely at the historical entanglements and interactions of these fields, we can gain an understanding into modernist culture that the familiar study of dreams does not supply. Literature (and literary studies) offer insights into sleep that are not available in the sciences. When it comes to the terra incognita within us, experiments with writing are as powerful as electrodes.

Klinger’s book challenges traditional boundaries between science and culture, arguing that sleep was neither lost nor discovered but co-produced in an era of experimentation and self-fashioning. He reimagines the relationship among language, form, and rest, showing how literary works did more than just reflect sleep: they actively explored and interrogated it. With striking clarity, Klinger illuminates how these authors engaged with sleep to probe the self, while also highlighting the profound influence of modern drugs and psychological theory. Sleep Works is a pioneering contribution to both literary studies and the history of science, offering fresh insights into the poetics of rest, slumber, and the elusive boundary between wakefulness and sleep.

At the dawn of the 20th century, sleep began to be regarded not as a mere passive state but as an active, dynamic process essential to our understanding of consciousness and identity. In Sleep Works, Klinger probes the fascinating intersections between scientific inquiry and literary expression during a time when sleep was both a scientific enigma and a cultural obsession. Researchers, physicians, and pharmaceutical companies led the charge in this burgeoning fascination with sleep. Some researchers made distinctions between sleep and other states like fatigue and hypnosis, while others focused on sleep disorders, developing treatments for insomnia. Meanwhile, literary giants struggling with their own sleep disturbances infused their works with their personal experiences. Klinger examines how these discoveries shed light on the broader implications of sleep, revealing its intricate relationship with selfhood and agency.

Sleep Works traces the rise of interdisciplinary sleep science and explores how sleep was culturally produced through literature. Blending literary analysis, historical contextualization, and archival research, Klinger offers a compelling narrative of how sleep has been understood, represented, and experienced in the modern age. Rather than existing in isolation, literary and scientific ways of knowing are deeply interconnected. Each chapter of Sleep Works examines and refines the intersection between the aesthetic and scientific portrayals of sleep, offering a distinct lens on the subject with each new perspective and allowing literary and scientific depictions of sleep to inform and influence each other. Sleep Works thereby demonstrates that sleep is not simply a biological process but also a construct shaped by various interwoven representational systems that exert as much influence on this construction as literary techniques like interior monologues and automatic writing.

The creation of sleep becomes, for Klinger, an object of scientific, aesthetic, philosophical, and political inquiry, each layer revealing deeper implications for understanding the self. Any exploration of sleep’s cultural production, he shows, is necessarily anchored in the history of science. Sleep Works centers on a detailed investigation of the scientific, medical, and pharmaceutical histories of sleep around the turn of the 20th century. Klinger traces how a distinct science of sleep emerged, differentiating it from related states such as fatigue, hypnosis, coma, narcosis, and dreams. Unlike the psychoanalytic focus on “dream work,” which emerged in the wake of Freud, early sleep scientists directed their attention to what could be termed “sleep work.” They challenged the view of sleep as merely a passive state, a dormant backdrop to restoration and dreaming, instead endowing it with its own vitality and agency, prompting the question: is the subject sleeping, or is sleep happening to them?

This shift in perspective is most evident in the rise of the pharmaceutical industry’s sleep business. One company, known for producing soporifics, even earned the nickname “slumber factory.” The burgeoning sleep industry capitalized on the anxieties and pressures of urban modernity, particularly the widespread issue of insomnia. By marketing sleep-inducing drugs as solutions to the stress and fatigue of modern life, the industry redefined sleep as something that could be controlled, commodified, and restored through pharmaceuticals, thus safeguarding labor power and personal agency. Sleep Works tracks the evolution of this narrative through the story of Veronal, one of the earliest and most renowned sleeping pills. This substance transitioned from medical texts to the laboratories of pharmaceutical companies, before infiltrating public discourse and literature.

When it turns to literary representations of slumber, Sleep Works offers fresh insights into the works of iconic modernist authors and their engagement with sleep as a literary theme. Arthur Schnitzler, a writer and physician, intervened in public health debates about Veronal through his 1924 novella Fräulein Else, testing how to depict sleep induced by Veronal and other somnolent states through interior monologue. Similarly, Proust’s literary exploration of sleep was informed by both sleep science and his personal experimentation with sleep-inducing drugs. Much like his pharmaceutical regimen, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) is an experimental framework that transforms familiar experiences by introducing variation, unveiling new layers of meaning, as Klinger explores: “While the Recherche flaunts an almost lascivious awareness of its artistic devices, this awareness ultimately serves to examine sleep as a ‘metamorphosis’ of the self.” In Proust’s depiction of waking, he grapples with the formation of the subject, while Rilke’s poetry raises the provocative question of whether sleep can exist without a sleeper: “sleep appears much less deathlike than death appears sleeplike, creating an elusive and ambiguous state of the in-between.”

Here we find ourselves again at that tricky moment of waking up. Yet, as Klinger points out, even that notion of “finding oneself” is as crucial as the slippery transition between slumber and wakefulness. When, in the first volume of the Recherche, Proust’s narrator uses the phrase “I found myself” in relation to waking up, it marks a condition of radical uncertainty and ambivalence. For Klinger, this recalls the opening of Kafka’s longest completed story, The Metamorphosis (1915), in which Gregor Samsa has woken up and “found himself in his bed transformed into” a creature best left untranslated. In perhaps the most celebrated scene from Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp loses his bearings in a blizzard and gives in to a desire to lie down and sleep. He later awakens only to have “found himself lying in the snow”—although this proves to be “not a genuine awakening; he simply lay there blinking, […] and he went on dreaming, as it were—no longer in visions, but in thoughts hardly less perilous and tangled.” These awakenings, like many others in Klinger’s book, must remain incomplete, refusing any straightforward recovery of the self or understanding, like the dissipating details of a dream.