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a few seconds of Andy Warhol’s home movie Sleep (1963), which comprises some five hours of black-and-white
footage of Warhol’s boyfriend John Giorno sleeping in a New York apartment, will know this only too well.
The beds that have stirred the literary imagination are altogether less comfortable than the one in which John
Giorno slept. Probably no beds in world literature are more horrifically uncomfortable than those belonging to
Procrustes, one of the most memorable psychopaths of Greek mythology. Procrustes was always happy to offer
travellers a bed for the night, and was abnormally eager that the sleeping bodies of his house guests should
precisely match the dimensions of the beds to which they were assigned. Like a deranged DIY expert who
believed in adjustable people rather than adjustable furniture, Procrustes -- whose name literally translates as
‘the stretcher’ -- customized his guests to fit their beds: short sleepers were stretched and flattened out with a
hammer, whilst tall ones had their extra inches lopped off. The story of Procrustes, in which the bed is imagined
as a lethally dangerous place of enclosure and entrapment, ripples with the sense of fear and paranoia that is so
often evoked by beds in literary narrative.
But has the literary imagination ever found anything to say about comfortable beds? A celebrated line from
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is instructive in this regard. When eyebrows are raised at his prolonged
absence from Rome, Antony famously remarks that ‘“The beds i’the east are soft.”’ One way of reading these
words is as a veiled confession that Antony has ‘gone soft’ -- that the disciplined soldier has become a tender
lover in the arms of Cleopatra. If ‘the bed is the man,’ as Maupassant puts it, then the soft beds of the east tell us
all we need to know about the potential ‘softness’ of Antony in this play. It is of course a curious paradox that
the eastern beds that confirm Antony’s virile heterosexuality are the very same beds that call into question his
heroic manliness. Nor are the messages emitted by these beds exclusively concerned with gender. As Garrett A.
Sullivan Jr. has remarked, there is a whole ‘geography of sleep’ implied in Antony’s words, one that revolves
around an opposition between the tough martial culture of Rome and the sumptuous beds of Alexandria, the
scene of sexual languor and decadent inaction. In what we can now recognize as a classic ‘Orientalist’ gesture,
the east is envisioned as a soft and yielding bed whose embrace dangerously emasculates Shakespeare’s Roman
hero. Luxuriously comfortable as they may seem, the eastern beds of Antony and Cleopatra are every bit as
dangerous in their own way as the beds in the Procrustean torture chamber.
The bed, as it has been imagined by writers, is always a double bed, a twofold entity. It is an object that answers
to our desire for periodic withdrawal from the demands and obligations of social space; but it also embodies
our fear that the non-social or anti-social space of sleep might turn out to be a death-trap rather than an escape
hatch or a bower of bliss. And the contradictory fears and desires that beds excite in us are not likely to be
resolved anytime soon. Beds function as a permanent reminder of our fallen or falling nature, our inescapable
nightly reorientation from vertical self-consciousness to horizontal oblivion. To consider the story of the bed is
to confront the extraordinary fact that in the oblivion of sleep we are periodically absent from the story of our
own lives. How we do we deal with that absence? What stories and props do we use to plug the gaps in our
discontinuous life experience? The bed is one such prop, and its stories, as we shall discover in the articles that
follow, are never less than richly unsettling.
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