“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” was originally published in the December 1937 issue of The Partisan Review. It was collected in In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938). It is currently most readily available in In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories (New Directions).
We all dream our parents’ courtship, if they had one; we all fantasize their first fateful encounters, tender or passionate or violent. The family drama begins without us, and rankled by exclusion, undaunted by chronology, we invent the means to witness the intimate exchange from which we are forever barred. Some of us write down these fantasies of origin, and a few are masterpieces: Delmore Schwartz's story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” is one such treasure.
From what might have been a hackneyed device—a young man dreams he is watching a silent movie in which his father and mother court—and a melodramatic premise—the young man wishes he could thwart the marriage which will yield “only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous”—Schwartz creates an ingenious and haunting narrative which stays with us the way a significant dream does. Resonant, ambiguous, transparent, and mysterious, this story rewards our scrupulous attention, each reading and re-reading revelatory and disturbing.
Schwartz's narrator begins his tale in uncertainty—“I think it is the year 1909”—and it is not just factual confusion he is announcing, it is not just dream-terrain he is signaling. In his scholarly way, Freud postulated what shamans and seers from other cultures have always known: the dream is a coded description of the dreamer's soul, and the soul of Delmore Schwartz's narrator is a tormented mix of self-loathing, sentiment, rage, and compassion.
From the first paragraph of this classic story, those disparate elements project themselves onto the screen that is the teller's mind: “This is a silent picture, as if an old Biograph one,” the word “biography” there in the detail of cinema history, alerting us to the doubleness of every image in this dream scape— theater, film cast, usher, and audience are all rendered in vivid detail by a witness observing his own psyche's show.
