Sylvia Plath and Electracy

Abstract

I. The Impossible ArchiveSylvia Plath's short story "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams," written in 1958, reads like an archival fantasy.Its narrator, a secretary in a mental hospital, spends each day "facing the door of the office and [typing] up other people's dreams" (17).In media-technology terms, this task already presents a problem, as dreams operate on the level of the Lacanian imaginary in addition to the symbolic register recorded by the typewriter.The talking (or typing) cure, which attempts to convert dreams into discourse, is, according the media theorist Friedrich Kittler in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, the final, ultimately futile "attempt to establish writing under media conditions" (90).Hence, the Bible of Dreams can only succeed to the extent that it does not limit itself to bibliographic methods.But then, what is a poet, the archivist who, Plath writes, "must forget the dreamer and remember the dream" (26), to do about this media gap?The simple answer is that the poet, often figured as a "secretary of dreams" in cultures where writing and print have been the primary mediums of communication, can do nothing about this gap.Rather, I hope to argue that Plath's poetic project, envisioned in "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" and most fully realized in the Ariel poems (including those poems written at the time of the Ariel compositions but not collected in the volume), involves not, as Kittler argues about Freud, establishing writing under media conditions, but instead bringing writing into media conditions.Whereas secretarial dream poets have either relied on transcendent

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