"We are brought up from infancy," writes R.M. Vaughan, in a piece on Restless Leg Syndrome, "to appreciate our beds and bedrooms as spaces that provide quiet, rest, solace and pleasure." But the ordeal of uncontrollably restless legs -- a phenomenon poorly understood by doctors and all too easily mocked by those who've never experienced it -- makes the bedroom "a space one associates with a betrayal by one's own body."
1 Comment
In a new chapter on sleep and sleeplessness in Ford Madox Ford and Siegfried Sassoon, Sarah Kingston offers some extremely suggestive observations on sleep, war and the disciplined body: "[I]n wartime especially, sleep is not a matter of individual comfort, but of national import. As such, sleep becomes not only a behaviour essential to productivity, but also one that is subject to discipline, therefore within the realm of disciplinary mechanisms. In essence, control over sleep becomes a point of threshold between public and private behaviour, and, as [Parade's End and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer] show, a point of resistance to the subjection of the body for public interest." Entitled "The Work of Sleep: Insomnia and Discipline in Ford and Sassoon," Kingston's chapter is part of War and the Mind: Ford Madox Ford's "Parade's End", Modernism, and Psychology, eds Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes (Edinburgh University Press, 2015).
|
Archives
December 2017
Categories
All
|