Gérard de Nerval

The French poet and writer Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855) was an early romantic. His prose and poetry mark him as a precursor of the many movements, from symbolism to surrealism, that shaped modern French literature.

Gérard de Nerval was born Gérard Labrunie on May 22, 1808, in Paris. Because of his parents' immediate departure for Silesia, where his mother died, Nerval was taken to the home of maternal relatives in the Valois. This region played a prominent part in many of his works. The fact that his early years were bereft of parental care probably contributed to his subsequent lack of mental equilibrium.

Upon his father's return from the Napoleonic Wars in 1814, Nerval returned to Paris. As a day pupil at the Lycée Charlemagne, he distinguished himself by his precocious literary gifts and made the acquaintance of a lifelong friend, the poet Théophile Gautier.

Nerval's translation in 1827 of J. W. von Goethe's Faust (Part I) earned him the praise of Goethe and opened influential Parisian literary circles to him. His admiration for Victor Hugo converted him to the romantic movement. In the 1830s Nerval belonged to the petit cénacle, a group of minor artistic figures that gravitated around Gautier.

In 1834 Nerval received an inheritance from his maternal grandparents that enabled him to pursue exclusively the literary career of which his father disapproved. Nerval gave up his nominal study of medicine and made a brief trip to Italy, a tour that had a powerful and lasting effect on his imagination.

Meanwhile, Nerval fell in love with Jenny Colon, an actress, for whom he founded a theatrical review, Le Monde dramatique. It failed after 2 years. The brilliant and gay life that Nerval led during this brief period of prosperity was succeeded by a lifetime of financial difficulties and personal sadness. The poet lost both his small patrimony and Jenny Colon, who married another. During this period Nerval centered his main literary efforts on the theater, a genre basically uncongenial to his talents. In spite of an occasional success, such as Piquillo (1837), his efforts in the theater generally met with failure.

The years 1839-1841 were ones of growing eccentricities and depression for Nerval. His translation of Faust (Part II), which appeared in 1840, culminated in a mental breakdown that caused him to be hospitalized in 1841. His mental stability thus shattered, Nerval's life became more precarious and difficult because he depended upon his pen for his living. In order to mend his health, Nerval made a trip to the Orient in 1843. His health regained, he published articles dealing with his travels in serial form in various periodicals. During these years of remission from mental breakdown, he also published chronicles, essays, poems, and novellas in many magazines, all the time trying unsuccessfully to establish himself in the theater. He also traveled in foreign countries and in the Valois. Wandering had become a temperamental necessity, and it is an important theme in his major works.

In 1848 Nerval published his translation of Heinrich Heine's poetry. In 1851 Le Voyage en Orient appeared. Under the guise of a travelog, it concerned itself with the pilgrimage of a soul, being more revealing of the inner geography of Nerval than of Egypt, Lebanon, or Turkey.

Nerval's major works were all written in the last few years of his life under the threat of incurable insanity. A serious relapse in 1851 marked him irrevocably. In 1852 he published Les Illuminés, a series of biographical sketches of unorthodox and original figures. In 1853 Les Petits châteaux de Bohême appeared. It was a nostalgic recounting of his happy years. It also contained the Odelettes, early poems in the manner of Pierre de Ronsard. Nerval then published his best and most famous story, Sylvie, in the Revue des deux mondes. In this tale he explored the sources of memory and transfigured the Valois of his childhood. It was included in Les Filles du feu in 1854. That same year Les Chimères, a series of 12 hermetic sonnets, also appeared.

During this period Nerval was also writing an autobiographical work, Les Nuits d'Octobre, and Aurélia, his last and most occult work. In Aurélia Nerval described the experience of madness and his attempt to overcome it by means of the written word.

In January 1855, destitute and desperate, Nerval committed suicide by hanging himself in a Parisian alley.

Further Reading

Two full-length studies of Nerval are Solomon A. Rhodes, Gérard de Nerval, 1808-1855: Poet, Traveler, Dreamer (1951), and Alfred Dubruck, Gérard de Nerval and the German Heritage (1965).

Nerval, Gérard de (pseudonym of Gérard Labrunie, 1808–55), a French writer best known for his poetry and fantastic tales. Reared in the country, he felt that the ‘old French ballads’ of the provinces should be preserved, yet feared being labelled too ‘historic’ or ‘scientific’. None the less, his work between 1842 and 1854 included 26 folk songs and many legends: some were collected as Chansons et légendes du Valois (1842). The occult and delirium, which ultimately led to his suicide, also influenced his writing.

The German romantics inspired Nerval's early work. His translation of Faust at 19 was praised by Goethe, and he later penned Hoffmann‐inspired fantastic stories set in the Valois, such as ‘La Main enchantée’ (‘The Enchanted Hand’) and ‘Sylvie’ (in Les Filles du feu (Daughters of the Fire, 1854)). After collaborating with Dumas père and obsessing about an actress, Nerval led a bohemian existence throughout Germany and the Orient. He suffered his first breakdown in 1841, and recorded the resulting confusion between dream and reality, illusion and delusion in Aurélia (1855), his masterpiece. Religious syncretism of mythology, the Cabbala, and Swedenborgian theosophy, plus a metaphysical ‘descent’ into the psyche, gave Nerval's work an Orphic quality whose Illuminism prefigured symbolism. Les Illuminés (1852) and Les Chimères (1855) typify his esoteric poetry.

Bibliography

• Bénichou, Paul, Nerval et la chanson folklorique (1970).
• Knapp, Bettina, Gérard de Nerval: The Mystic's Dilemma (1980).
• Richer, Jean, Nerval: expérience vécue & création ésotérique (1987).
• Strauss, Walter A., Descent and Return: The Orphic Theme in Modern Literature (1971).

— Mary Louise Ennis

Nerval, Gérard de (pseud. of Gérard Labrunie) 1808-55. Poet, traveller, story-writer. His father was a military surgeon who joined Napoleon's armies shortly after the poet's birth; his mother died in Silesia in 1810 and his father, permanently wounded, only returned to France in 1814. Relations between father and son were often somewhat strained. Nerval spent his childhood in the Valois region, of which he always remained fond, then attended the Lycée Charlemagne, where he met his lifelong friend Théophile Gautier. He began publishing in 1826, and his translation of the first part of Goethe's Faust appeared in 1827. Nerval also translated other texts from the German, and republished the poems of Ronsard. A member of the Petit Cénacle with Célestin Nanteuil, Pétrus Borel, Alexandre Dumas, and Gautier, he contributed regularly to various periodicals (travel literature, drama criticism, essays). In 1834 he inherited a considerable sum from his maternal grandfather which he quickly lost in an unfortunate publishing venture, and much of the rest of his life was spent in financial straits. In that same year he made his first voyage to Italy, and thereafter was an inveterate traveller, indeed at times a vagabond. Partly because of his love for the actress Jenny Colon, partly in order to achieve fame and money, he wrote a number of plays, often in collaboration, none of which was a great success. He also practised the fantastic tale and wrote a historical novel about the Revolution, Le Marquis de Fayolle (1849).

In 1841 he underwent his first crisis of madness, and thereafter until his death was hospitalized intermittently for varying periods of time. Diagnosed as ‘theomanic’ at the time, he seems to have suffered from manic depression and schizophrenia. In 1843 he took an extended trip to Cairo and Beirut which led to his Voyage en Orient (1851); this breaks with the traditions of travel literature in that much of the text is devoted to rewriting, in a quite personal way, a series of tales, including that of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, where he expounds his theories about the artist and artistic creation. In 1850 he published Faux saulniers, a strangely complex work in both form and structure, playing with the Sterne- Diderot tradition of the digressive and self-conscious novel and with the problems of realism and historical veracity. In 1852 Les Illuminés, ou les Précurseurs du socialisme brought together a series of portraits of representatives of the tradition of Illuminism. Nuits d'octobre (1852) and Promenades et souvenirs (1854-6) belong to a different sort of travel literature, describing his peregrinations in and around Paris and in the Valois, but introducing anecdotes, reminiscences, and dreams. The Petits Châteaux de Bohème (1852) contain many of his poems framed with a commentary on life and literature. His most read work, Sylvie (1853), is a tale of his love for three women and their differences or resemblances, and of his return to the Valois, with reminiscences of his childhood. His intense and continuing interest in folk-songs and popular traditions, which he shared with George Sand, is manifest in this work.

That year and the following, when he was suffering more and more from psychological instability, he was none the less extremely productive. He completed the writing of Les Filles du feu et les Chimères, containing Sylvie and also a number of other tales, each about a woman figure, and a series of sonnets rich in mythological allusions and often ambivalent in tone and complex in nature, of which the most haunting and commented on is ‘El Desdichado’. He also wrote Aurélia and Pandora, a tale of his loves in Vienna, perhaps the most extreme of his works in its structural innovations, as it moves between lucidity and the oneiric or unconscious world. Because of what his doctor considered a premature intervention by his friends, he left the asylum and was found dead by hanging. Though in all probability the death was a suicide, thanks to his doctor's pleas he was given a Christian burial at Notre-Dame.

Nerval was not considered a major writer until the 20th c., when Barrès, then Proust and the Surrealists moved him into the literary canon; he has since been much commented on by various schools of criticism. For several reasons (the anonymous publication of some works, his tendency to publish texts in various forms and configurations), the task of editing Nerval is a complex one and readers are well advised to consult the new Pléiade edition (ed. Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois).

Nerval was representative of Romanticism in many ways—in his appreciation of the Renaissance, of the exotic and the fantastic, of the primitive and folklore, of irrationalism and the occultist tradition, of the oneiric—but often he both pursued these interests to the extreme and ironically questioned their validity. He had a rich sense of (as well as curiosity about) the numinous, but was also profoundly sceptical. Many of his (especially later) writings invite an autobiographical reading, but his quest for the self was clearly problematic and hence enriched by his investigations of reverie and dreams. Deeply indebted to a certain tradition of thought and of literature (from Neoplatonism, Apuleius, and Virgil to Restif de la Bretonne), his essential adventure was that of seeking a literary form adequate to the expression of his conceptions, whence his revolutionary contribution to such varied genres as travel literature, the sonnet, and the autobiographical novel.

[Frank Paul Bowman]

Bibliography

• L. Cellier, Gérard de Nerval (1963)
• M. Jeanneret, La Lettre perdue (1978)
• G. Malandain, L'Incendie au théâtre (1988)

1808 - 1855

A French romantic poet and novelist known for his writing about the Orient.

Gérard Nerval was born in Paris with the name Gérard Labrunie. His delicate, musical poetry (e.g., Les chimères, 1854) and prose (of which the short story "Sylvie" is the best known) earned him a respected place in French literature. His treatment of dreamlike topics and visions influenced the development of surrealism and his translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust (1828) was widely acclaimed. Like many of his contemporaries, he was swept by romantic depictions of the Orient. In 1842, he left for a trip to the Orient in search of the sources of religion and spirituality as well as the exotic horizons of the Arab and Muslim world. His travel account Voyage en Orient is considered among his finest works. His depiction of the Orient is more an occasion for introspective meditation on religious issues and criticism of his own culture and society than an objective social study. His friendly account, extolling the tolerance and openness of the cultures and religions he encountered, caused critics to accuse him of skepticism. The use of the Orient as a cover for self-criticism had been well established in literature, as seen in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and Voltaire's Zadig. Like others before and after him (Chateaubriand, Alphonse de Lamartine, Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, etc.), Nerval contributed to the movement of orientalism, which depicted the Orient in a romantic light, at times projecting onto it the negative characteristics and fears of Western culture. The distortion of reality in subjective arts was a normal cultural phenomenon; however, it contributed to the pseudoscientific discipline of orientalism, which was closely associated with colonialism and has in contemporary times been denounced for its lack of objectivity and its political motivations. Beset by mental illness, Nerval committed suicide in 1855.

Bibliography

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. 1978.

Sharafuddin, Mohammed. Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the Orient. New York and London: Tauris, 1994.

— MAYSAM J. AL FARUQI

Quotes:

"Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us from the invisible world."

"Every flower is a soul blossoming in Nature."

"The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life! And yet can we cast out of our spirits all the good or evil poured into them by so many learned generations? Ignorance cannot be learned."

"When the soul drifts uncertainly between life and the dream, between the mind's disorder and the return to cool reflection, it is in religious thought that we should seek consolation."

"The first moments of sleep are an image of death; a hazy torpor grips our thoughts and it becomes impossible for us to determine the exact instant when the I, under another form, continues the task of existence."

"It has been rightly said that nothing is unimportant, nothing powerless in the universe; a single atom can dissolve everything, and save everything! What terror! There lies the eternal distinction between good and evil."

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