If Nerval is not a character who is extraneous to the story, how does he appear in it? First and foremost as narrative strategy.
Story and Plot
In order to understand Nerval’s narrative strategy and how he manages to create in the reader the mist-effects I spoke of, I refer you to Table A.* Along the horizontal axis I have plotted the sequence of chapters in the tale, while on the left, vertical axis, I have reconstructed the temporal sequence of the events mentioned in the story. Thus, along the vertical axis I have plotted the fabula or story, and along the horizontal axis the development of the plot.
The plot is the way in which the story is constructed and gradually revealed to us: a young man comes out of a theater and decides to go to the ball at Loisy, during his journey there he recalls a previous journey, arrives at the ball, sees Sylvie again, spends a day with her, goes back to Paris, has an affair with the actress, and finally (Sylvie is by now married in Dammartin) decides to tell his own story. Seeing that the plot begins on the evening when the protagonist was coming out of a theater (conventionally represented as Time1), the development is represented by the black line that proceeds from that evening, through successive moments in time (Time1— Time14), to the end of the story.
But in the course of these events previous times are recalled, represented by the arrows pointing upward to times preceding Time1. The unbroken vertical lines represent the protagonist’s reconstructions, the dotted lines represent references to the past that occur, sometimes fleetingly, in the course of the dialogues between the various characters. For instance, between 1 A.M. and 4 A.M. the protagonist recalls his previous journey to Loisy (in Time1), which on the plot level takes up three chapters, whereas in chapters 9 and 10 there are fleeting evocations of episodes in Sylvie’s life as a young girl and the “wyater” event, in Time-3.
Thanks to these flashbacks one can reconstruct the story by fits and starts, or, rather, the temporal sequence of all the events the plot mentions: initially, when the protagonist was small, he loved Sylvie; then, when slightly older, he meets Adrienne at a ball; later he goes back to Loisy; finally, one evening, when the boy has become a man, he decides to go back there, and so on.
The plot is just that, we have it before our eyes as we read. The story, on the other hand, is not so obvious, and it is in the attempt to reconstruct the story that some mist-effects are created, since we never quite catch precisely what time the narrating voice is referring to. I do not claim to dissolve the mist-effects with my table, but rather to explain how they come about. And the story is reconstructed in a hypothetical way, in the sense that it is probable that the events evoked correspond to experiences lived through initially at age ten or eleven, then between fourteen and sixteen, and finally between sixteen and eighteen (but one could even count this differently: the protagonist might have been extremely precocious, or a very late bloomer).
The extent to which the reconstruction (and it is only a probable one) must be based on the text and not on elements of Labrunie’s biography is confirmed by the experience of some commentators who try to place the evening at the theater in 1836, since the moral and political climate evoked seems to fit the one obtaining at that time, and the club mentioned is apparently the Café de Valois, which was subsequently closed at the end of 1836, along with other gaming houses. If we collapse the protagonist onto Labrunie, a rather grotesque series of problems ensues. How old was the young man, then, in 1836, and how old was he when he saw Adrienne at the ball? Since Labrunie (born in 1808) stopped living with his uncle at Mortefontaine in 1814 (at age six), when did he go to the ball? If he started at the Collège Charlemagne in 1820, at the age of twelve, is that when he goes back in the summer to Loisy and sees Adrienne? But in that case is he twenty-eight that evening at the theater? And if, as many accept, the visit to Sylvie’s aunt at Othys happens three years before, is it not a rather big boy of twenty-five who plays with Sylvie, dressing up as gamekeepers, and is treated by her aunt as a nice little blond lad? A big boy who has received an inheritance of thirty thousand francs in the meantime (1834), and who has already traveled to Italy—a genuine initiation rite—and in 1827 has already translated Goethe’s Faust? As you see, there is no solution here, and so one must reject such biographical calculations.
Jerard and Nerval
The story begins: “Je sortais d’un théâtre.” We have here two entities (an “I” and a theater) and one verb in the imperfect.
Since it is not Labrunie (whom we have abandoned to his sad fate), who is the “Je” who is speaking? In a first-person narrative the person who says “I” is the protagonist of the story, and not necessarily the author. Therefore (having excluded Labrunie), Sylvie is written by Nerval, who brings onto the scene an “I” who tells us something. We thus have the narration of a narration. To eliminate any doubt, let us decide that the “I” who was coming out of a theater at the beginning is a character we will call “Je-rard.”
But when does Jerard speak? He speaks in what we will call the Time of Narrative Enunciation (or TimeN); that is to say, at the point when he begins writing and recalling his past by telling us that one day (Time1, the Beginning of the Plot) he was coming out of a theater. If you like, given that the story was published in 1853, we could think that TimeN is that year, but this would be pure convention, just to allow us to attempt a backward calculation. Since we do not know how many years pass between Time14 and TimeN (but it must be many, because at TimeN he already remembers that Sylvie has two children who are old enough to be archers), the evening at the theater could be placed either five or ten years previously; it does not matter, so long as one imagines that at Time-3 Jerard and Sylvie were still children.
So the Jerard speaking at TimeN tells us about a self of many years previously, who in turn was recalling events concerning Jerard the child and adolescent. Nothing strange here: we too can say, “When I [I1, who am speaking now] was eighteen [I2, then], I could not get over the fact that I at sixteen [I3] had been involved in an unhappy love affair.” But this does not mean that I1 still feels the adolescent passion of I3, nor that he can explain the melancholy memories of I2. At most he can recall them indulgently and tenderly, thus revealing himself to be different from who he had once been. In a certain sense this is what Jerard does, except that, realizing that he is so different each time, he can never tell us with which of his past Is he identifies, and he ends up so confused about his own identity that in the course of the story he never names himself once, except in the first paragraph of chapter 13, when he refers to himself as “an unknown admirer.” Thus even that first-person pronoun, apparently so clearly defined, always denotes an Other.
Yet it is not only that there are so many Jerards, it is also the fact that sometimes the narrator is not Jerard but Nerval, who, as it were, creeps into the tale. Note that I said “into the tale,” not into the story or plot. Story and plot coincide, but only because they are communicated to us through a discourse. To make the point more clearly, when I translated Sylvie I changed its original discourse in French into a discourse in Italian, while trying to keep the same story and plot. A film director could “translate” the plot of Sylvie into a film, allowing the spectator to reconstruct the story through a series of fade-outs and flashbacks (though I would not like to say with what degree of success), but he certainly could not translate the discourse like I did, since he would have to change words into images, and there is a difference between writing “as pale as the night” and showing the image of a pale woman.
Nerval never appears in story or plot, but he does in the discourse, and not only (as would happen with any author) as the mechanism that selects the words and articulates them in phrases and sentences. He comes in surreptitiously, as a “voice” speaking to us his model readers.
Who is it that says (in the second paragraph of
