Aurélie will go off with the person who really does love her. *
This agonizing wishing and then unwishing is given an almost neurotic manifestation in the interior monologue in chapter 11. Stung by the ambiguous allusion to Adrienne’s fate, Jerard, who up until a moment before had desired Sylvie, discovers that it would be sacrilegious for him to seduce someone he regarded as a sister. Immediately (and with irritating fickleness) his thoughts and desire turn once more to Aurélie. Yet at the beginning of the next chapter he is once more ready to throw himself at Sylvie’s feet and offer her his house and his uncertain fortune. With “three women around his heart, dancing around him,” as Dante might have said, Jerard loses his sense of their identity and desires and loses all three.
1832
In any case, Nerval encourages us to forget. And to help us (or lose us), he puts onstage a forgetful Sylvie, who only at the end remembers that Adrienne died in 1832.
This is the element that most upsets the critics. Why give such a crucial piece of information only at the end, whereas, as a rather naive note in the Pleiade edition remarks, we would have expected it at the beginning? Here Nerval performs one of those “completing analepses” or “returns,” as Genette calls them, where the narrator, pretending he has forgotten a detail, remembers it much later in the development of the action. * It is not the only one in the story; the other is the incidental remark about the actress’s name, which appears only in chapter 11 : but there seems to be more of a reason for this latter return, because it is only then that Jerard, sensing that his idyll with Sylvie is about to end, begins to think of the Actress as a Woman whom he might perhaps approach. The completing analepsis regarding the date seems to be at the very least scandalous, all the more so since it is preceded by a delaying tactic, which is difficult to justify at first sight.
In chapter 11 we find one of the most ambiguous expressions of the whole story: “cela a mal tournée!” For whoever rereads the tale, that allusion by Sylvie in some way anticipates the final revelation, but for whoever reads it for the first time it delays it. Sylvie does not quite say that Adrienne ended up unhappily, but that her story ended unhappily. Consequently I cannot agree with those who translate it into Italian as “le è andata male” (she ended up unhappily), nor with the more cautious translators who say “è andata male” (ended up unhappily—not daring to interpret that very obvious “cela” leaves one with the suspicion that the subject is Adrienne). In fact, Sylvie says that “that story ended unhappily.” Why do we have to respect that ambiguity (so much so that some people understand it to mean that, hearing this hint, Jerard convinces himself even more that it means Adrienne has become the actress)? Because it reinforces and justifies the delay, which means that it is only in the last line of the text that Sylvie definitively destroys all of Jerard’s illusions.
The fact is that Sylvie is not reticent. For whom would this information be essential? For Jerard, who on the basis of his memory of Adrienne, and of her possible identity with Aurélie, has created an obsession. But would it be essential for Sylvie, to whom Jerard has not yet revealed his own obsessions (as he will with Aurélie), except through vague allusions? For Sylvie (an earthly creature), Adrienne is even less than a phantom (she is only one of the many women who had passed that way). Sylvie does not say that Jerard has been tempted to identify the religious woman with the actress, she does not even know for certain whether this actress exists, nor who she is. She is totally outside this metamorphic world in which one image fades into another and overlays it. So it is not that she delivers the final revelation in small doses, drop by drop. Nerval does this, not Sylvie.
Sylvie speaks in a vague way not out of guile but “absent-mindedly,” because she finds the affair irrelevant. She participates in the destruction of Jerard’s dream precisely because she “is unaware of it.” Her relationship with time is serene, made up of some nostalgia to which she is now reconciled or some tender memories, neither of which threaten her tranquil present. For this reason, of the three women, she is the one who remains the most inaccessible at the end. Jerard has even had a magic moment with Adrienne, and from what one can understand has enjoyed amorous intimacy with Aurélie, but with Sylvie nothing, except an extremely chaste kiss—and at Othys the even chaster fictional nuptials. The minute Sylvie comes fully to embody the reality principle (and pronounces the only undoubtedly true, historical statement in the whole story: a date), she is lost forever. At least as a lover: for Jerard she is by now only a sister, and, what’s more, married to his (foster-)brother.
So much so that one would be tempted to say that it is precisely for this reason that the story is entitled Sylvie and not—like a later, flamboyant work— Aurélie. Sylvie represents the real time that was lost and never found—precisely because she is the only one who stays.
But this would imply a thesis, an ambitious thesis, and one that acquires all its importance precisely from the comparison between Proust and Nerval. Nerval seems to go in search of lost time but is incapable of finding it, and he celebrates only that emptiness of his own illusion. The final date pronounced by Sylvie would seem to sound therefore like a funeral bell that closes the story.
This would help us understand the affectionate and almost filial interest shown by Proust for this literary father, who failed in a desperate enterprise (and perhaps this is why Labrunie killed himself). Proust then sets out to avenge this paternal defeat with his own victory over Time.
But when is it that Sylvie reveals to Jerard that Adrienne had died some time previously? In Time13 (“the following summer,” when the theater company gives performances at Dammartin). However one works out the figures, she certainly does it long before TimeN, when Jerard begins his narration. Consequently, when Jerard starts to conjure up the night at the theater, only to go back to the time of the dance on the lawn, and to tell us of his trembling at the thought that Adrienne was the actress, and of the illusion of still being able to see her near the convent of Saint-S—during this period of time (and narration), when he makes us share in his uncertainties, he already knew that Adrienne had definitely died in 1832.
So it is not that Jerard (or Nerval along with him) stops narrating when he realizes that everything is over: on the contrary, it is precisely when he has understood that all is over that he starts his narration (and it is a narration about a Jerard who did not know, nor could he have known, that everything was by now over).
Is the person who acts like this someone who has not succeeded in dealing with his past? Not a bit: this is someone who notices that one can start to revisit the past only when the present is by now canceled, and only memory (even though, or precisely because, it is not too ordered) can give us back something for which—if it is not worth living—it is at least worth dying. But in that case Proust would not have seen Nerval as a weak, defenseless father, a forerunner to be rehabilitated, but, rather, as a strong, overstrong father, one to be outdone. And he would devote his life to this challenge.*
A reworking of part of the afterword to my Italian translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie
(Turin: Einaudi, 1999). I have already discussed, in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
(Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), how I first wrote a short article on this novella (“II tempo di Sylvie’ (Time in Sylvie), Poesia e critica, 2 [1962]), then conducted a series of seminars on it at the University of Bologna in the 1970s (from which stemmed three graduating theses), then took it up again for a course of lectures at Columbia University in 1984, and made it the subject of the Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1993, as well as of two other courses, at Bologna in 1995 and at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, in 1996. The most interesting outcome of these many papers of mine was the special issue of the journal VS, 31/32 (1982) (Sur “Sylvie’).
WILDE: PARADOX AND APHORISM
There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism. This Greek term, originally meaning “something put aside as an offering,” “an oblation,” comes to mean in the course of time “a definition, saying, or concise proverbial statement.” An aphorism is thus, according to the Italian Zingarelli dictionary, a “brief maxim expressing a norm of existence or a philosophical conclusion.”
What distinguishes an aphorism from a maxim? Nothing, except its brevity.
It takes little to console us since it takes little to afflict us.
(Pascal, Pensées, Brunschwicg ed., 136) If we did not have
