Review: The Sleep of Reason, by Michael Swanwick

Review: The Sleep of Reason, by Michael Swanwick

by Rich Horton

Around the turn of the millennium, Michael Swanwick wrote a sequence of short-shorts based on Goya's satrical etchings Los Caprichos. He had done short-short sequences before, most notably Puck Aleshire's Abecedary, in The New York Review of Science Fiction in the late '90s, and The Periodic Table of the Elements, a story for each then-known element, that appeared in Ellen Datlow's seminal online 'zine Sci Fiction beginning around 2001. Those two series became chapbooks in 2000 and 2005 respectively. The stories based on Los Caprichos, collectively called The Sleep of Reason, appeared in Eileen Gunn's excellent online magazine Infinite Matrix in 2002-2003, but did not get book publication until PS Publishing produced this volume in 2024. I got my copy at World Fantasy in Niagara Falls last year, and Michael was kind enough to sign it.

(He has done numerous other pieces of flash fiction, I should note, many making up smaller sequences, often published as beautiful tiny books from his wife Marianne Porter's Dragonstairs Press. I've been fortunate enought to obtain a couple of these, but the print runs are very small. Michael's bibliographer will have an Herculean task assembling all the information on those books!)

The title of this collection comes from the 43rd etching in Los Caprichos, "El sueño de la razón produce monstruos" (normally translated "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" though Swanwick replaces "monsters" with "nighmares").) These etchings were made in 1797-1798, and published in 1799. This volume reproduces each of the 80 prints on one page, with Swanwick's accompanying story on the opposite page. (The original edition of Los Caprichos included some prose commentary, probably by Goya, but Swanwick states in the last entry in this book that he found the commentary unsatisfactory, even complacent, in contrast to the implications of the prints themselves. (It seems that Goya included these comments partly to help explain his intent, but also to avoid reprisal from the objects of the satire by (unconvincingly, it seems) disguising the true targets, which presumably would have included the Inquisition. In the end the first edition was mostly withdrawn by the publisher, and Goya ended up selling the unsold copies and the original plates to the King. Several further editions have been produced from those plates, most recently in 1970.)

Each individual story is a sardonic narrative based on a particular etching. The stories are not presented in the numerical order Goya gave in his edition. The prints depict some recurring characters, named by Swanwick Prick the Donkey, Elena, and Grace; as well as recurring themes: nightmares, witches, monsters human and otherwise. Swanwick's reordering allows him to develop some thematic threads, as well as a continuing narrative for each of Prick, Elena, and Grace. The pieces about Prick develop his career, involving corruption in business, war, and politics, including time spent as the US President. Elena is a clever woman who delights in using her sexual wiles (and her job as a whore) to make fools of men, while Grace is an innocent beauty who is forced by circumtances into prostitution, and is treated dreadfully throughout. The witches and nightmares and the various other monstorosities pretty sharply illustrate the dark side of humanity (and society.)

The result is bracing -- a very funny book in a very uneasy way; a fierce satire on the depredations of the powerful; a despairing look at the the way men treat women; a condemnation of politicians, the church, the rich, and people in general. All of this was present in Goya's original, aimed then primarily at Spain. It is present in Swanwick's 2002 text -- aimed both at people throughout time, and the specifics of our world, especially our country, at that time. And the message resonates as much or more today, even if the specific details were originally aimed at others.

It's a dark book, for sure, and sardonic. At times the tone is cynical, at times almost imploring, at times just angry. It's not necessarily a book to read in one go -- perhaps pacing it like the original pacing of the stories' publications would makes sense. I read it in tranches of 5 or 10 stories at a time over a few weeks. Recommended.