Sweet Dreams Are Made of This: Speculation

THE aim of this paper is to bring together literary narration and philosophical speculation in an attempt to show how these seemingly divergent fields in fact mutually inform one another[1]. In order to do so, I will use Ana Castillo’s 1986 novel The Mixquiahuala Letters as my tutor text [2].The Mixquiahuala Letters recounts its protagonists Teresa and Alicia’s travels to and adventures in Mexico and is usually read in terms of a quest for Chicana identity and independence [3]. Against this estab-lished consensus view I hold that identity is merely the starting point of the narrative which in fact embarks on a journey of disintegration, differentiation and dissolution both in terms of content and form. This disintegration and dissolution constitutes the novel’s speculative explo-ration of its very own constitution as narrative. This exploration is most prominently expressed in the novel’s monologic epistolarity (it consists of 40 letters), its hypertextual form (it presents three distinct possibilities of actualisation of its story matter) and in the structural and thematic importance of sleeping and dreaming. For the present essay, I will confine myself to this third characteristic and show how the novel casts dreams as acts of speculation while simultaneously presenting itself precisely as such an act of speculative dreaming [4]. Since it does this by means of narrative this leads me to postulate the correla-tion of speculation and narration.