Marcel Proust, «Gérard de Nerval,» in Against Sainte-Beuve, trans. John Sturrock (Harmondsworth: 1994), 24–33.
A piece of advice I must give to the reader is to read (or reread) the text of Sylvie before tackling this essay. Before moving on to critical reflection it is important to discover or rediscover the pleasure of an «innocent» reading. Moreover, seeing that I will often refer to the various chapters, and that we have just said, in Proust’s words, that «we are constantly compelled to go back to the preceding pages, to see where we are,» it is indispensable to experience personally this to-ing and fro-ing.
A similar table appeared in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, page 40. Table A and Table B are taken from the Einaudi translation of Sylvie, by kind permission of the publisher.
In a fit of obsessive precision I actually visited the places. Naturally the roads are no longer the same, but the forests and many pools are still there (those near Commelle are particularly evocative, with the swans and Queen Blanches castle). You can follow the Thève in its meandering route, the structure of Ermenonville is still more or less what it once was, with the road passing above La Launette and the four dovecotes, Châalis is still touchingly dilapidated, and at Loisy they show you what was presumably Sylvie’s house. The greatest danger for the sentimental Nervalian is to come across, somewhere between Orry and Mortefontaine, the Pare Asterix, and to find, in the desert, a reconstruction of the Wild West and the Sahara, with Indians and dromedaries (France’s Disneyland is not far off). Forget about the road to Flanders, because Gonesse is close to Charles de Gaulle airport, stuck between high-rise blocks and refineries. But after Louvres you can start to go back to your memories again, and the mists are still what they once were, even though the distant landscape has to be seen from a motorway.
Unhappy the languages that do not have the imperfect and try to render Nerval’s opening. A nineteenth-century English translation (Sylvie: A Recollection of Valois [New York: Routledge and Sons, 1887]) tried this: «I quitted a theater where I used to appear every night,» while a more recent one went for: «I came out of a theater where I used to spend money every evening,» and we have no idea where that mention of spending money comes from, but perhaps the translator wants us to realize that this was a habit, a vice, something that had been going on too long (Nerval, Selected Writings, trans. Geoffrey Wagner [New York: Grove Press, 1957]). What lengths people will go to make up for the absence of the imperfect! The most recent translation, by Richard Sieburth (Sylvie [New York: Penguin, 1995]) seems to me more faithful: «I was coming out of a theater where, night after night, I would appear in one of the stage boxes….» It is rather long, but it conveys the durative and iterative nature of the original imperfect.
«Journées de lecture,» in Pastiches et mélanges (Paris: Gallimard, 1919, ed. 1958), 239 n 1.
See my Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
Mirène Ghossein, in a term paper during my course at Columbia University in 1984, observed a continual dyscrasia between what is set up as a Platonic ideal, and what is revealed as a disappointing shadow in the cave. I do not know if Nerval was thinking of Plato, but certainly the mechanism is this: as something gradually comes within reach (real in the normal sense of the term), it becomes a shadow and cannot stand comparison with, is no longer equal to, the ideal image conjured up.
The «completing analepsis» is sometimes not a calculated technique but a stopgap, as in the case of many nineteenth-century writers of serial novels. By expanding to excess the dimensions of their novels in installments, they would find themselves obliged either to make amends for details they had forgotten or to justify, with a brusque retrospective explanation, events they were forced to make happen. For a discussion of this technique, see, for instance, my «Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris,» now in The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
There are many works that have helped me understand Nerval. I will cite only some of those from which I took various suggestions. In the special issue of VS, 31/32 (Sur «Sylvie») (1982), see Daniele Barbieri, «Etapes de topicalisation et effets de brouillard,» Beppe Cottafavi, «Micro-procès temporels dans le premier chapitre de Sylvie,» Isabella Pezzini, «Paradoxes du désir, logique du récit» (and see also the same author’s «Promenade a Ermenonville» in her Passioni e narrazione (Milan: Bompiani, 1996)), Maria Pia Pozzato, «Le brouillard et le reste,»
Patrizia Violi, «Du côté du lecteur.» Among French critics I should mention Albert Béguin,
Gérard de Nerval (Paris: Corti, 1945), Jacques Bony, Le récit nervalien (Paris: Corti, 1990),
Frank Paul Bowman, Gérard de Nerval. La conquête de soi par l’écri-ture (Orléans: Paradigme,
1997), Pierre-Georges Castex, introduction and commentary to Sylvie (Paris: SEDES, 1970), Léon Cellier, Gérard de Nerval (Paris: Hatier, 1956), Michel Collot, Gérard de Nerval ou la dévotion à l’imaginaire (Paris: PUF, 1992), Uri Eisenzweig, L’éspace imaginaire d’un récit: ‘Sylvie’ de Gérard de Nerval (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1976), Jacques Geninasca, «De la fête à l’anti-fête,» and «Le plein, le vide et le tout,» in La parole littéraire (Paris: PUF, 1997), Raymond Jean, Nerval par lui-même (Paris: Seuil, 1964), and his introduction and notes to Sylvie, Aurélie (Paris: Corti, 1964), Michel Jeanneret, La lettre perdue. Ecriture et folie dans l’oeuvre de Gérard de Nerval (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), Aristide Marie, Gérard de Nerval, le poète et l’homme (Paris: Hachette, 1914), Pierre Moreau, Sylvie et ses soeurs nervaliennes (Paris: SEDES, 1966),
Georges Poulet, «Nerval,» in Le metamorfosi del cerchio (Milan: Rizzoli, 1971), Dominique Tailleux, L’éspace nervalien (Paris: Nizet, 1975). I will mention also the introductions and notes by Henri Lemaître in the Gamier edition of the Oeuvres, the commentaries by Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois, and their collaborators, in the third volume of the Oeuvres complètes in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition, and Vincenzo Cerami, introduction to Le figlie delfuoco (Milan: Garzanti, 1983). I have taken many ideas from Gérard Genette, Figure ILI (Turin: Einaudi, 1976).
«Pitigrilli: l’uomo che fece arrossire la mamma,» in II superuomo di massa (2nd ed; Milan: Bompiani, 1978).
Karl Kraus, Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths, ed. and trans. Harry Zohn (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986).
This reverses the commonplace whereby one does wonderful things for noble reasons, butit too can be reversed: when a person does a particularly noble deed, it is always for the most stupid of motives.
This reverses a commonplace, but it continues with «But no one is readier than myself to recognize that it is better to be good than to be ugly,» and so resorts to a commonplace of the lowest order, of the kind made popular on Italian TV screens by talk-show hosts: «It is better to be beautiful, rich, and healthy than to be ugly, poor, and sick.»
See Diego Poli, «La metafora di Babele e le partitiones nella teoria grammaticale irlandese dell’ Auraicept na n-Éces,» in Episteme. Quaderni Linguistici e Filologici, 4 (1986–89), ed. Diego Poli (Macerata: Istituto di Glottologia e Linguistica Generale), 179–98.
The Books at the Wake (London: Faber, 1959).
The Book of Kells (Ms 58, Trinity College Library Dublin), commentary and ed. by Peter Fox. Fine Art Facsimile Publishers of Switzerland (Lucerne: Faksimile Verlag, 1990).
See The Hisperica Famina. I: The A-Text, ed. Michael Herren (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974), and The Hisperica Famina. II: Related Poems, ed. Michael Herren (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1987).
Liber Monstrorum de Diversis Generibus, ed. Corrado Bologna (Milan: Bompiani, 1977).
Virgilio Grammatico Marone, Epitomi ed Epistole, ed. G. Polara (Naples: Liguori, 1979).
For this, see the following essay on Borges and the anxiety of influence.
Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (London: Fontana, 1997).
See «Interpreting drama,» The Drama Review, 21.1 (March 1977), now in The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Carlo Ossola, «La rosa profunda. Metamorfosi e variazioni sul Nome della rosa,» Lettere italiane 36.4 (1984), subsequently in «Purpur Wort,» in his Figurato e rimosso. Icone di interni del testo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988).
Paul Morand, Tendres Stocks, preface by Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1921).
David Hume, «Of the Standard of Taste,» in Four Dissertations and Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul, ed. John Immerwahr, John Valdimir Price, and James Fieser (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1995), 216–17.
Now in Hermann Parret, «Nel nome dell’ipotiposi,» in J. Petitot and P. Fabbri, eds., Nel nome del senso (Milan: Sansoni, 2001).
See my «II tempo dell’arte,» in Sugli specchi (Milan: Bompiani, 1985), 115–24.
In George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson, Metaphors
