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Selected Writings
1. Introduction
2. Sylvie
3. Émilie
4. Aurélia, or Dream and Life
5. Poetry
6. Proust on Nerval
2. Sylvie
3. Émilie
4. Aurélia, or Dream and Life
5. Poetry
6. Proust on Nerval
271 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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987 people want to read
About the author
Gérard de Nerval
648 books243 followersGérard de Nerval was the nom-de-plume of the French poet, essayist and translator Gérard Labrunie, one of the most essentially Romantic French poets.
Gérard de Nerval, nom de plume de Gérard Labrunie, écrivain et poète français. Figure majeure du romantisme français, il est essentiellement connu pour ses poèmes et ses nouvelles.
Gérard de Nerval, nom de plume de Gérard Labrunie, écrivain et poète français. Figure majeure du romantisme français, il est essentiellement connu pour ses poèmes et ses nouvelles.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
May 14, 2016
The world literature landmark Faust was first translated into English from Goethe's German original in 1821. Illustrious Brit prodigies Coleridge and Shelley both made attempts with varying degrees of success. In 1828 it was translated into French, by Gérard de Nerval, who by all accounts, Goethe's included, nailed it. At the age of twenty.
When it came to his own work, Nerval had a wrenchingly different arc; early success with poetry and plays led to important associations, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas amongst them. Heady times in France, the newly emerging Romantic movement, crisis of The Faith, and the July Revolution of 1830 spun the young man in several directions. The King Of Bedlam, 1839, finds him steeped in the echoey dissonances of the times; what would be the indelible Nerval themes of doubles, impersonation and deception come to the surface, fully formed.
An inheritance (squandered), an investment in a literary magazine (bankrupt), and some luckless stabs at love (failed) were to lead Nerval off the Parisian reservation. An insatiable curiosity toward exotic cultures, whether the Balkans or the Near East, led him to the unfamiliar. But from what gets written, nothing about, say, Cairo or Constantinople seemed to soothe the broken heart, and his involvement with absinthe, ether, and hashish probably didn't constitute a cure, either. The first of several nervous breakdowns occurred, just as Nerval was finding his subject. The off-world beauty of The Tale Of Caliph Hakim was emblematic of the fascination he found in 'the orient', where he was drawn to the themes of heresy, apostasy and the shadowy atmosphere where the far-off is directly, unknowably at hand.*
So what we have is the French sensualist, libertine, voluptuary and poet-- but unlucky in love and carrying a sizeable chip on his shoulder. His writing now took up the inevitable near-misses Nerval had observed, in identity and romance, the hearth/home-terroir thing versus the longing for the exotic other, the hallucination of finding his own opposite, his unknown twin. In female form. Beguiling, complex stories dealing in this paradox were written, always about a woman and her--safer or more dangerous, depending-- other self, all complete torture to the man of relentless visions. 'Angelique', 'Sylvie', 'Octavia' and 'Pandora' all materialized to confront the writer. Enigmas with an echo, touched by unreliable memory and sentiment. This is capital-R Romantic Lit, if wildly off its head and a little dizzy.
Here he was completely and wholly his own man, waging an ardent struggle with both the goddesses of antiquity and the comely mademoiselle at close range-- which is to say, absolutely lost in the stratosphere of his own imagination. Women must have been completely bewildered by his approaches. Nerval's signature theme is the intentional indecipherability of enchantment-- how it manifests, and flits away, having left the initiate clenching a fistful of deceitful clues. (Yes, hello Mr Nabokov). And often enough those clues came in dreams.
Time, and the times he lived in, were not kind to Nerval; they were a whirling extravaganza of bohemian allure, pure catnip to any young dreamer with an established way with the pen. He immersed himself in the mystic, threading his writing with allusions to the hermetic, the alchemical, the arcane interests of his age. Oneiromancy, (what a word!) or the practice of letting dreams predict the world, became an obsession, his day job on any day preceded by a night, of dreaming (and perhaps hallucinogens).
Well you can tell where this is going. Borderlines between embracing the exotic and socially taboo behavior were being questioned, and Nerval and his set were at the forefront. But there were real breakdowns, and friends would have to resort to committing him to asylums to try to help him cope, sometimes at the insistence of the police. In the asylum, Nerval did the only thing he knew, wrote and wrote, much of it raving, attempts to connect Norse foundation myths with Islamic ones, for example, reams of barely connected allusion, and macro referencing of myth & literature. The riddle-filled Gramont manuscripts and Les Chimeres appear to be the skeleton key to his whole oeuvre, sonnets addressed to an array of Nerval's femmes and his mystical touchstones. He also composed his hermetic masterpiece, 'Aurelia', the autobiography of a man encountering, then submitting to madness. A descent into Hell, he confides honestly enough.
Nerval seems to have been able to contain himself long enough to gain release from the sanitarium, and having done so is a free man when he hangs himself in a narrow lane in Paris. He left a note to a relative, "do not wait up for me this evening, for the night will be black and white." The final pages of Aurelia were found on the body.
This was a difficult group of readings, and only really takes final shape once you've gotten thru 'the girls' sections, and realize that this singular madman really means it, really sees dreams as continuous with reality (and isn't so completely wrong, at that), really has miraculous vision. Proust himself commented that to read Sylvie for the first time was to experience 'a disorientation verging on mild panic'. Nerval's influence would ripple far and wide, though, in a certain sense-- Gautier, Heine, Dumas, Proust would all feel his example simmering through their own pages. The Symbolists would cite his influence as a prime mover. Andre Breton and the Surrealists of the next century would count him with Baudelaire and Mallarme as the oracle of their conception of the world. It is impossible to get to Joyce, or Beckett, or Borges-- without first confronting Nerval.
________________________
* this disconcerting combination, 'heresy, apostasy and the shadowy atmosphere where the far-off is directly, unknowably at hand' would be exactly what Surrealism would embrace, sixty years later.. Breton & Apollinaire both would hold Nerval to be a patron saint.
When it came to his own work, Nerval had a wrenchingly different arc; early success with poetry and plays led to important associations, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas amongst them. Heady times in France, the newly emerging Romantic movement, crisis of The Faith, and the July Revolution of 1830 spun the young man in several directions. The King Of Bedlam, 1839, finds him steeped in the echoey dissonances of the times; what would be the indelible Nerval themes of doubles, impersonation and deception come to the surface, fully formed.
An inheritance (squandered), an investment in a literary magazine (bankrupt), and some luckless stabs at love (failed) were to lead Nerval off the Parisian reservation. An insatiable curiosity toward exotic cultures, whether the Balkans or the Near East, led him to the unfamiliar. But from what gets written, nothing about, say, Cairo or Constantinople seemed to soothe the broken heart, and his involvement with absinthe, ether, and hashish probably didn't constitute a cure, either. The first of several nervous breakdowns occurred, just as Nerval was finding his subject. The off-world beauty of The Tale Of Caliph Hakim was emblematic of the fascination he found in 'the orient', where he was drawn to the themes of heresy, apostasy and the shadowy atmosphere where the far-off is directly, unknowably at hand.*
So what we have is the French sensualist, libertine, voluptuary and poet-- but unlucky in love and carrying a sizeable chip on his shoulder. His writing now took up the inevitable near-misses Nerval had observed, in identity and romance, the hearth/home-terroir thing versus the longing for the exotic other, the hallucination of finding his own opposite, his unknown twin. In female form. Beguiling, complex stories dealing in this paradox were written, always about a woman and her--safer or more dangerous, depending-- other self, all complete torture to the man of relentless visions. 'Angelique', 'Sylvie', 'Octavia' and 'Pandora' all materialized to confront the writer. Enigmas with an echo, touched by unreliable memory and sentiment. This is capital-R Romantic Lit, if wildly off its head and a little dizzy.
Here he was completely and wholly his own man, waging an ardent struggle with both the goddesses of antiquity and the comely mademoiselle at close range-- which is to say, absolutely lost in the stratosphere of his own imagination. Women must have been completely bewildered by his approaches. Nerval's signature theme is the intentional indecipherability of enchantment-- how it manifests, and flits away, having left the initiate clenching a fistful of deceitful clues. (Yes, hello Mr Nabokov). And often enough those clues came in dreams.
Time, and the times he lived in, were not kind to Nerval; they were a whirling extravaganza of bohemian allure, pure catnip to any young dreamer with an established way with the pen. He immersed himself in the mystic, threading his writing with allusions to the hermetic, the alchemical, the arcane interests of his age. Oneiromancy, (what a word!) or the practice of letting dreams predict the world, became an obsession, his day job on any day preceded by a night, of dreaming (and perhaps hallucinogens).
Well you can tell where this is going. Borderlines between embracing the exotic and socially taboo behavior were being questioned, and Nerval and his set were at the forefront. But there were real breakdowns, and friends would have to resort to committing him to asylums to try to help him cope, sometimes at the insistence of the police. In the asylum, Nerval did the only thing he knew, wrote and wrote, much of it raving, attempts to connect Norse foundation myths with Islamic ones, for example, reams of barely connected allusion, and macro referencing of myth & literature. The riddle-filled Gramont manuscripts and Les Chimeres appear to be the skeleton key to his whole oeuvre, sonnets addressed to an array of Nerval's femmes and his mystical touchstones. He also composed his hermetic masterpiece, 'Aurelia', the autobiography of a man encountering, then submitting to madness. A descent into Hell, he confides honestly enough.
Nerval seems to have been able to contain himself long enough to gain release from the sanitarium, and having done so is a free man when he hangs himself in a narrow lane in Paris. He left a note to a relative, "do not wait up for me this evening, for the night will be black and white." The final pages of Aurelia were found on the body.
This was a difficult group of readings, and only really takes final shape once you've gotten thru 'the girls' sections, and realize that this singular madman really means it, really sees dreams as continuous with reality (and isn't so completely wrong, at that), really has miraculous vision. Proust himself commented that to read Sylvie for the first time was to experience 'a disorientation verging on mild panic'. Nerval's influence would ripple far and wide, though, in a certain sense-- Gautier, Heine, Dumas, Proust would all feel his example simmering through their own pages. The Symbolists would cite his influence as a prime mover. Andre Breton and the Surrealists of the next century would count him with Baudelaire and Mallarme as the oracle of their conception of the world. It is impossible to get to Joyce, or Beckett, or Borges-- without first confronting Nerval.
________________________
* this disconcerting combination, 'heresy, apostasy and the shadowy atmosphere where the far-off is directly, unknowably at hand' would be exactly what Surrealism would embrace, sixty years later.. Breton & Apollinaire both would hold Nerval to be a patron saint.
August 15, 2007
My copy's titled Selected Writings, as pictured here, not Selected Prose, so Penguin may have excised the dense, enigmatic poems of "The Chimeras" for this new edition, in which de Nerval virtually invented literary modernism. Even without them, the book's a must-have. Aurelia is one of the most touching accounts of schizophrenia ever written, and Sylvie is a gorgeous proto-Proustian hymn to memory and loss. (I wish there were more of his travel writings among the Ottomans though.)
De Nerval's tragic disintegration, ending in suicide in 1855, seems to mark the point where Romanticism turned from fantasy and Nature to madness and derangement, a pattern that still plays out in our culture in a hundred different ways. This book, it's the Magna Carta of that.
De Nerval's tragic disintegration, ending in suicide in 1855, seems to mark the point where Romanticism turned from fantasy and Nature to madness and derangement, a pattern that still plays out in our culture in a hundred different ways. This book, it's the Magna Carta of that.
August 29, 2016
Don't be misled by the size of this volume (approx. 450 pages)...it contains multitudes. Like most people I came across Nerval through his impenetrable sonnets, being a big fan of 19th century French writing I was curious to see what his prose writings were like. After being spellbound the entire way through this treasure trove I find myself wondering why he is not better known. In fact in my humble estimation he should be considered one of the great writers of 19th century Europeans.
This volume ranges through short stories; an exquisitely mischievous "historical" novella; "travel" writings; Aurelia, an account of his descent into "madness"; letters and concludes with the famous sonnets. Notice the constant use of quotation marks, this is deliberate. Nothing Nerval does in any genre fits neatly into its generally accepted parameters. The degree to which he plays both with form and substance is astounding. The introduction posits he is a precursor of surrealism. I would describe some of his work as surrealism in full flight. At the same time there is a luminous rather delicate component to his writings which make them absolutely charming, there's something almost Chaplinesque about the atmosphere of some of them.
I really could not put this down. I was constantly returning to previous sections to re-read portions. It's a shame that in the States he is known only for the sonnets and walking around Paris with a leashed lobster. There is so much to this writer and if you are a fan of 19th century European literature you might want to give Nerval a go.
This volume ranges through short stories; an exquisitely mischievous "historical" novella; "travel" writings; Aurelia, an account of his descent into "madness"; letters and concludes with the famous sonnets. Notice the constant use of quotation marks, this is deliberate. Nothing Nerval does in any genre fits neatly into its generally accepted parameters. The degree to which he plays both with form and substance is astounding. The introduction posits he is a precursor of surrealism. I would describe some of his work as surrealism in full flight. At the same time there is a luminous rather delicate component to his writings which make them absolutely charming, there's something almost Chaplinesque about the atmosphere of some of them.
I really could not put this down. I was constantly returning to previous sections to re-read portions. It's a shame that in the States he is known only for the sonnets and walking around Paris with a leashed lobster. There is so much to this writer and if you are a fan of 19th century European literature you might want to give Nerval a go.
November 8, 2013
This review is only for one of the novelettes in this collection, entitled Sylvie by Gérard de Nerval.
The narrator is a feckless young man who falls in love easily but cannot ever "close the deal." In this story, he goes to the haunts of his youth in Valois, where he takes up with the beautiful Sylvie, who, alas, is pledged to another. Still, he returns to see her married to the local pastry cook, with small children running around. He muses, "This way lay happiness, perhaps, and yet...." Never have ellipsis marks been so sad.
The atmosphere of Sylvie is dreamlike. Nerval's writing is always beautiful in a hortatory way:
This is a beautiful little work. It encourages me to read more by Nerval.
The narrator is a feckless young man who falls in love easily but cannot ever "close the deal." In this story, he goes to the haunts of his youth in Valois, where he takes up with the beautiful Sylvie, who, alas, is pledged to another. Still, he returns to see her married to the local pastry cook, with small children running around. He muses, "This way lay happiness, perhaps, and yet...." Never have ellipsis marks been so sad.
The atmosphere of Sylvie is dreamlike. Nerval's writing is always beautiful in a hortatory way:
Such are the chimeras that beguile and misguide us in the morning of life. I have tried to set them down without much order, but many hearts will understand me. Illusions fall away one after another like the husks of a fruit, and that fruit is experience. It is bitter to the taste, but there is fortitude to be found in gall -- forgive me my old-fashioned turns of phrase. Rousseau said the spectacle of nature provides consolation for everything.Rousseau, who was originally buried at nearby Ermenonville (before his remains were spirited away to the Pantheon in Paris), acts as the local deity of the place, the scene of the narrator's attempts at love.
This is a beautiful little work. It encourages me to read more by Nerval.
January 14, 2016
I’m new to Gerard de Nerval, but in reading him it was almost immediately clear to me that he must have been a big influence on Flaubert (especially the Flaubert of Three Tales and The Temptation of St Anthony). It would also be interesting to compare de Nerval to Thomas De Quincey and Robert Louis Stevenson, among others.
This is a wonderful collection and it includes (from what I understand) all of de Nerval’s most well-known work. Silvie (which Proust admired) and Aurelia, a memoir of his very public mental breakdown, are the stand-outs.
The opening paragraph of the latter is really terrific:
“Dream is a second life. I have never been able to cross through those gates of ivory or horn which separate us from the invisible world without a sense of dread. The first few instants of sleep are the image of death; a drowsy numbness steals over our thoughts, and it becomes impossible to determine the precise point at which the self, in some other form, continues to carry on the work of existence. Little by little, the dim cavern is suffused with light and, emerging from its shadowy depths, the pale figures who dwell in limbo come into view, solemn and still. Then the tableau takes on shape, a new clarity illuminates these bizarre apparitions and sets them in motion – the spirit world opens for us.”
This is a wonderful collection and it includes (from what I understand) all of de Nerval’s most well-known work. Silvie (which Proust admired) and Aurelia, a memoir of his very public mental breakdown, are the stand-outs.
The opening paragraph of the latter is really terrific:
“Dream is a second life. I have never been able to cross through those gates of ivory or horn which separate us from the invisible world without a sense of dread. The first few instants of sleep are the image of death; a drowsy numbness steals over our thoughts, and it becomes impossible to determine the precise point at which the self, in some other form, continues to carry on the work of existence. Little by little, the dim cavern is suffused with light and, emerging from its shadowy depths, the pale figures who dwell in limbo come into view, solemn and still. Then the tableau takes on shape, a new clarity illuminates these bizarre apparitions and sets them in motion – the spirit world opens for us.”
December 21, 2007
The myth of Nerval: eccentric, careless, tortured. Reading the writing of this eccentric, you walk away dazed by the multi-dimensional, jeweled imagination he carried within himself. The themes of Nerval’s stories are typical: desired love, lost love, phantasmagoric worlds and exotic places. However, you sense one who has wandered so far away that there can be no return. Nerval pursues his dreamt muse who forever eludes capture into words.
January 20, 2025
Schopenhauer said one writer does it because he wants to write. The other writer does it because he has to. And I'll add this further, there are only two writers, one that writes to forget death, the other to forget life as Pessoa once said in his Disquiet; “literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life”
Nerval falls into the 2nd.
There's also two types of readers. One reads to forget his existence and that includes himself. And the other reads to not kill himself.
“A book is a suicide postponed.”
E.M. Corian
‘The trouble with being born’
-Pg 99
Nerval would walk in the streets of Paris with his pet lobster named “Thibault” since he thought it wouldn't be absurd as having a cat or dog as a companion.
He influenced many, one being Proust.
Proust, who ranked Nerval to be among the three or the four greatest writers of the 19th century, called Sylvie a masterpiece.
And he translated Faust at 19 to which caught Hugo's eye. Inviting him to his Cènacle Romantique.
I love reading, but if there's anything else that I hate as much as I love, it's reading waste. Some stories in here I couldn't engage with but by the time you reach Aurelia, a sudden change has occurred.
You have been led away from your world now.
You now get lost into his words. Sometimes you don't even feel like you're reading words, you happen to see what he's seeing. His writing drives my mind so quickly out of my head that I forget it's just ink on paper.
I was reading an article on the game Silent Hill 2 called “The basement's basement.”
“Cool escherian title” I thought, so I entered and found that the article talks about the interesting architecture of the game. How its illusory graphics make you think you're going infinitely downstairs of rooms on an endless journey like Dante's descent but what's actually happening is that you're just moving from room to room on the same level.
The article even uses “The Poetics of Space” to add color to this analysis.
“Verticality is ensured by the polarity of cellar and attic, the marks of which are so deep that, in a way, they open up two very different perspectives for a phenomenology of the imagination. Indeed, it is possible, almost without commentary, to oppose the rationality of the roof to the irrationality of the cellar.”
-The Poetics of Space
What this means is that the upper and downer areas of a house, has two realms of imagination, and symbolizes two things.
The upper being the realm of rationality and clarity, the downer being irrationally and subconscious.
Two symbols of the mind.
This creates a framework of understanding mental spaces as well. And this is mentioned to explain how the game takes place in the downer area, the basement's basement, like the subconscious. Which symbolizes the horror aspect of the game.
Yeah. This is a whole other basement we can fall into, but I'll read that book one day and we'll discuss that in the future.
I bring this up because it reminds me that Arulie has an interesting structure. And that is it's structureless, it's almost as if you're reading a stream of consciousness because Nerval just changes the direction of the story so changeably, you're going into an endless illusory direction, just like Silent Hill 2’s architecture.
Rather than a “ The basement's basement”
Aurelia would be more like a portals portal.
The barrier between the arithmetic and algebra of life. Or in more non-abstracted words, between vision and reality. Between splitting a second, one clock going linear, the other going backwards.
Carl Jung admired his work, in which he gave a lecture on Nerval’s splitting of the soul. Coincidentally Jung's shadow self aligns with the Silent Hill game, taken place in shadowy places.
The portals portal is a structureless design of the unseen that Nerval pours in Aurelia. It's in the upper regions of imagination and writings from him that reach pink-burning clouds of thought.
It makes sense why Breton said Nerval was a precursor of surrealism.
Just read this part of the story when he sees a phantom.
“I lost my way several times in the long corridors, and as I was crossing one of the central galleries, I was struck by a strangest scene. A creature of disproportionate size-man or woman, I do not know - was fluttering about with great difficulty overhead and seemed to be floundering in the thick clouds. In the end, out of breath and energy, it plummeted into the centre of the dark courtyard, snagging and bruising its wings on the roofs and balustrades as it fell. I was able to get a brief look at it. It was tinged with rosy hues and its wings shimmered with countless changing reflections. Draped in a long robe falling in classical folds, it resembled the Angel of Melancholy by Albrecht Dürer. I could not stifle my shrieks of terror, which woke me with a start.”
-pg 268
I wonder if Nerval's pet lobster might've subconsciously inspired Dali’s lobster. He did love Nerval's work.
There are, for some reason, parallels of Jung and Dante in Aurelia. Even Silent Hill 2 weirdly.
And Nerval writes Aurelia in a way how Dante writes about Beatrice.
“This Vita nuova was divided into two phases in my case.”-pg 265
To digress. I've realized some people share the same druggy experience to those who are non-users (roughly). Scheiszphonia, Dementia, there is even one called Cotard's syndrome. Where one thinks they're dead. (A character on the last page of Aurelia seems to have this illness when Nerval confronts him)
But they're closer to having a bad trip or paranormal experience like those who have had bad experiences with certain drugs, than good trips.
I bring this up because Nerval went crazy in his last years, and falls into this phenomenon. Ironically Nerval experienced bad trips but wrote good ones.
Those who are haunted by madness, see more beauty. And this madness costed him sadly, even left a sorrow on Corian.
“Nerval: ‘Having reached the Place de la Concorde, my thought was to kill myself.’ Nothing in all French literature has haunted me as much as that.”
-pg 177 of The Trouble with Being born.
I began to read Nerval because of Corian, this one aphorism, which intrigued me when I read it 2 years ago, has now been read. I've now come to understand what troubled Corian reading that line.
I think I've over-fashioned this review, but I couldn't help myself. This is writing that favoured the minds of Dali, Proust, Carl Jung, Corian and Antonin Artaud, who placed him in the same visionary cloud as Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Van Gogh.
Every page is a sculpture in the first part of Aurelia, and most sentences are costumes of imagery. Bouquets of thought. This is all only in Aurelia.
“Dream is a second life”
Nerval falls into the 2nd.
There's also two types of readers. One reads to forget his existence and that includes himself. And the other reads to not kill himself.
“A book is a suicide postponed.”
E.M. Corian
‘The trouble with being born’
-Pg 99
Nerval would walk in the streets of Paris with his pet lobster named “Thibault” since he thought it wouldn't be absurd as having a cat or dog as a companion.
He influenced many, one being Proust.
Proust, who ranked Nerval to be among the three or the four greatest writers of the 19th century, called Sylvie a masterpiece.
And he translated Faust at 19 to which caught Hugo's eye. Inviting him to his Cènacle Romantique.
I love reading, but if there's anything else that I hate as much as I love, it's reading waste. Some stories in here I couldn't engage with but by the time you reach Aurelia, a sudden change has occurred.
You have been led away from your world now.
You now get lost into his words. Sometimes you don't even feel like you're reading words, you happen to see what he's seeing. His writing drives my mind so quickly out of my head that I forget it's just ink on paper.
I was reading an article on the game Silent Hill 2 called “The basement's basement.”
“Cool escherian title” I thought, so I entered and found that the article talks about the interesting architecture of the game. How its illusory graphics make you think you're going infinitely downstairs of rooms on an endless journey like Dante's descent but what's actually happening is that you're just moving from room to room on the same level.
The article even uses “The Poetics of Space” to add color to this analysis.
“Verticality is ensured by the polarity of cellar and attic, the marks of which are so deep that, in a way, they open up two very different perspectives for a phenomenology of the imagination. Indeed, it is possible, almost without commentary, to oppose the rationality of the roof to the irrationality of the cellar.”
-The Poetics of Space
What this means is that the upper and downer areas of a house, has two realms of imagination, and symbolizes two things.
The upper being the realm of rationality and clarity, the downer being irrationally and subconscious.
Two symbols of the mind.
This creates a framework of understanding mental spaces as well. And this is mentioned to explain how the game takes place in the downer area, the basement's basement, like the subconscious. Which symbolizes the horror aspect of the game.
Yeah. This is a whole other basement we can fall into, but I'll read that book one day and we'll discuss that in the future.
I bring this up because it reminds me that Arulie has an interesting structure. And that is it's structureless, it's almost as if you're reading a stream of consciousness because Nerval just changes the direction of the story so changeably, you're going into an endless illusory direction, just like Silent Hill 2’s architecture.
Rather than a “ The basement's basement”
Aurelia would be more like a portals portal.
The barrier between the arithmetic and algebra of life. Or in more non-abstracted words, between vision and reality. Between splitting a second, one clock going linear, the other going backwards.
Carl Jung admired his work, in which he gave a lecture on Nerval’s splitting of the soul. Coincidentally Jung's shadow self aligns with the Silent Hill game, taken place in shadowy places.
The portals portal is a structureless design of the unseen that Nerval pours in Aurelia. It's in the upper regions of imagination and writings from him that reach pink-burning clouds of thought.
It makes sense why Breton said Nerval was a precursor of surrealism.
Just read this part of the story when he sees a phantom.
“I lost my way several times in the long corridors, and as I was crossing one of the central galleries, I was struck by a strangest scene. A creature of disproportionate size-man or woman, I do not know - was fluttering about with great difficulty overhead and seemed to be floundering in the thick clouds. In the end, out of breath and energy, it plummeted into the centre of the dark courtyard, snagging and bruising its wings on the roofs and balustrades as it fell. I was able to get a brief look at it. It was tinged with rosy hues and its wings shimmered with countless changing reflections. Draped in a long robe falling in classical folds, it resembled the Angel of Melancholy by Albrecht Dürer. I could not stifle my shrieks of terror, which woke me with a start.”
-pg 268
I wonder if Nerval's pet lobster might've subconsciously inspired Dali’s lobster. He did love Nerval's work.
There are, for some reason, parallels of Jung and Dante in Aurelia. Even Silent Hill 2 weirdly.
And Nerval writes Aurelia in a way how Dante writes about Beatrice.
“This Vita nuova was divided into two phases in my case.”-pg 265
To digress. I've realized some people share the same druggy experience to those who are non-users (roughly). Scheiszphonia, Dementia, there is even one called Cotard's syndrome. Where one thinks they're dead. (A character on the last page of Aurelia seems to have this illness when Nerval confronts him)
But they're closer to having a bad trip or paranormal experience like those who have had bad experiences with certain drugs, than good trips.
I bring this up because Nerval went crazy in his last years, and falls into this phenomenon. Ironically Nerval experienced bad trips but wrote good ones.
Those who are haunted by madness, see more beauty. And this madness costed him sadly, even left a sorrow on Corian.
“Nerval: ‘Having reached the Place de la Concorde, my thought was to kill myself.’ Nothing in all French literature has haunted me as much as that.”
-pg 177 of The Trouble with Being born.
I began to read Nerval because of Corian, this one aphorism, which intrigued me when I read it 2 years ago, has now been read. I've now come to understand what troubled Corian reading that line.
I think I've over-fashioned this review, but I couldn't help myself. This is writing that favoured the minds of Dali, Proust, Carl Jung, Corian and Antonin Artaud, who placed him in the same visionary cloud as Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Van Gogh.
Every page is a sculpture in the first part of Aurelia, and most sentences are costumes of imagery. Bouquets of thought. This is all only in Aurelia.
“Dream is a second life”
October 4, 2016
My reading of Proust goes on, but I’d just like to say a few things about Gerard de Nerval – I’ve read Sylvie, and Émilie, and a few of his poems – and am just starting Aurélia ou le rêve et la vie (Aurélia, or Dream and Life).
First, the relation to Proust is immediately apparent: the shifting time frames, with the age of narrator ambiguous, as to “who” is speaking (young man, or older man looking back). But then, in these stories he’s trying to express the something essential of memory, and dreams, and their relationship to the mundane now. How experiencing ourselves is less about a chronological order of events, but rather as the mind being some kind of psychic whole, with Time and Place being fluid. But poor Gerard suffers – its difficult to say whether this experience of himself has caused his “madness”, or vice versa…
And also, as with Proust, there is pursuit of love, his relationship to women (and their fluidity in his mind) - or should I say, the seeking, chasing after of an ideal woman, or reincarnating an ideal love that may or may not have been "real" (not to say of a vanished time). He realizes that he’s not actually falling in love with each new woman he desires, but he’s trying to recreate his love for a first, or imagined ultimate love, in each new woman he meets… falling in love with her again and again. it means he becomes somewhat voyeuristic about women – in the sense that any will do. This reminded me very much of Proust’s relationship with women in ROTP – so far Gilberte, Albertine – but also, I think, crystalizes some of my qualms about his relationship with the Frieze of Girls, in Balbec (a version of which, at times, I have played out in my life).
Golly, my heart goes out to Gerard; I feel so sad so much of the time when I read him, or read accounts of him, and discussions of his work. I welled up on reading the first few chapters of Aurélia. He can write very beautifully, in a strange ethereal dreamlike manner, as he looks for ‘spirit’ or meaning to dispel his alone-ness, in what he sees as an increasingly materialistic world. Its strange and startling reading something written in the first half of the nineteenth century, lamenting a anaemic material world, from the viewpoint of the 21st century. Maybe this is why his writing does resonate now, as he tries to place himself in life; to understand; and to seek comfort, believe there that there is something more there, that there is something eternal. Or, maybe its always been this way, this longing.
First, the relation to Proust is immediately apparent: the shifting time frames, with the age of narrator ambiguous, as to “who” is speaking (young man, or older man looking back). But then, in these stories he’s trying to express the something essential of memory, and dreams, and their relationship to the mundane now. How experiencing ourselves is less about a chronological order of events, but rather as the mind being some kind of psychic whole, with Time and Place being fluid. But poor Gerard suffers – its difficult to say whether this experience of himself has caused his “madness”, or vice versa…
And also, as with Proust, there is pursuit of love, his relationship to women (and their fluidity in his mind) - or should I say, the seeking, chasing after of an ideal woman, or reincarnating an ideal love that may or may not have been "real" (not to say of a vanished time). He realizes that he’s not actually falling in love with each new woman he desires, but he’s trying to recreate his love for a first, or imagined ultimate love, in each new woman he meets… falling in love with her again and again. it means he becomes somewhat voyeuristic about women – in the sense that any will do. This reminded me very much of Proust’s relationship with women in ROTP – so far Gilberte, Albertine – but also, I think, crystalizes some of my qualms about his relationship with the Frieze of Girls, in Balbec (a version of which, at times, I have played out in my life).
Golly, my heart goes out to Gerard; I feel so sad so much of the time when I read him, or read accounts of him, and discussions of his work. I welled up on reading the first few chapters of Aurélia. He can write very beautifully, in a strange ethereal dreamlike manner, as he looks for ‘spirit’ or meaning to dispel his alone-ness, in what he sees as an increasingly materialistic world. Its strange and startling reading something written in the first half of the nineteenth century, lamenting a anaemic material world, from the viewpoint of the 21st century. Maybe this is why his writing does resonate now, as he tries to place himself in life; to understand; and to seek comfort, believe there that there is something more there, that there is something eternal. Or, maybe its always been this way, this longing.
December 4, 2024
Aurelia is one of the most enchanting and beautiful works by any hand I have ever encountered. It transcends being a book, if even it ever is a book. I can't think of a work more utterly and literally super-real. It walks in a higher world, its feet extended outside of time.
This book is more important than any book of the occult. It has stolen dreams into this world where they should not be, rendered in the simplest and most precise language.
Those book critics who casually use words like "spell-binding" and "riveting" can relax because these descriptions for once are not egregious here. I found this book midway through college. It immediately delivered me to a place I recognized, that I had considered a secret. And it is. For weeks I felt stunned, or struck on the bell of my soul. I am convinced that Gerard de Nerval went into other worlds and times, and never, even after returning to this one, completely left them. This is not fantasy. This is at a minimum true visionary literature. He is describing what might be uncertain but cannot be mistaken. Reading this book you will have the experience of recognition in the same way lovers meeting for the first time describe feeling as if they remembered one another.
The framing of "Aurelia" as the writing of a mentally ill man attempts, whether deliberately or not, to reduce a work that cannot be reduced. It is too fluid to exist entirely in another world. It moves in and out and between because it is alive. This book is one of those that invent what a book could be. I see the figure of this book sleek and dark, creeping forward over stones that appear ancient centuries before their time, damp with fog.
Sure I sound purple talking about this work. It's so directly delivered that it delivers you. You feel like you have arrived when you speak of it later. Who were you before you read this book? What does this book tell you underneath its pure but mirror-mazed lines? Would it be possible to copy this book down word for word? No. I think this book is one of those that changes with each reading. Each time there are lines and paragraphs, passages I am certain were not there before. This is a book riddled with magic like beautiful wounds, bruises and gashes.
People throughout history have written and told of having visions. What are visions? You don't know (and perhaps this will be its definition) what a vision is until you have one. Gerard de Nerval has written a vision here that burns with the prism-hued chimeric fire.
This book is more important than any book of the occult. It has stolen dreams into this world where they should not be, rendered in the simplest and most precise language.
Those book critics who casually use words like "spell-binding" and "riveting" can relax because these descriptions for once are not egregious here. I found this book midway through college. It immediately delivered me to a place I recognized, that I had considered a secret. And it is. For weeks I felt stunned, or struck on the bell of my soul. I am convinced that Gerard de Nerval went into other worlds and times, and never, even after returning to this one, completely left them. This is not fantasy. This is at a minimum true visionary literature. He is describing what might be uncertain but cannot be mistaken. Reading this book you will have the experience of recognition in the same way lovers meeting for the first time describe feeling as if they remembered one another.
The framing of "Aurelia" as the writing of a mentally ill man attempts, whether deliberately or not, to reduce a work that cannot be reduced. It is too fluid to exist entirely in another world. It moves in and out and between because it is alive. This book is one of those that invent what a book could be. I see the figure of this book sleek and dark, creeping forward over stones that appear ancient centuries before their time, damp with fog.
Sure I sound purple talking about this work. It's so directly delivered that it delivers you. You feel like you have arrived when you speak of it later. Who were you before you read this book? What does this book tell you underneath its pure but mirror-mazed lines? Would it be possible to copy this book down word for word? No. I think this book is one of those that changes with each reading. Each time there are lines and paragraphs, passages I am certain were not there before. This is a book riddled with magic like beautiful wounds, bruises and gashes.
People throughout history have written and told of having visions. What are visions? You don't know (and perhaps this will be its definition) what a vision is until you have one. Gerard de Nerval has written a vision here that burns with the prism-hued chimeric fire.
March 8, 2007
He is brilliant and amazing but rarely read outside of France. I highly recommend checking this out. If you do end up reading any of his stuff, tell me! I need someone to talk to about this mind-bending writing.
July 2, 2010
I liked Sylvie, which is what got the 4 star rating. As to the others... I feel Aurealia was an undirected account, which while it wasn't as tiresome as it could have been, was not really .... my thing.
May 17, 2017
From the Pen of a Poetic Soul
Poor Gerard, his was an unfortunate fate. But the sad, mad man of letters and adventurer left behind some truly remarkable stories and verse. So in a strange way—though his life seems to be a study in sorrow—somehow, despite the tragedy of it all, artistically he triumphed in the end.
For the most part Gerard de Nerval: Selected Writings serves up a sumptuous literary banquet. Who could forget the haunting and tender “Sylvie”, Nerval’s masterpiece of melancholic reflection on lost love which apparently inspired Proust? Or the hallucinatory and hashish enshrouded “Tale of Caliph Hakim” influenced by his voyages through the Orient? As for Nerval’s poetry cycle, “The Chimeras”, they are a visionary revelation, and fittingly, they appear at the end of this volume—a proper dessert.
Of course, a few stories here and there may fail to capture your imagination, or perhaps they go on a bit too long. “Angélique” comes to mind, and “Aurélia”, despite its sublimity, can be a challenging read, having been written after one of Nerval’s serious mental breakdowns. In other words, among this collection, you’ll probably find your own favorites.
But one thing is certain: there is a poetry and sensitivity here that will bejewel your memory. Nerval seems to capture details of the past as though with a daguerreotype, allowing you to see what he saw. And he goes beyond this as well, inviting you to step into his own personal Diorama wherein everything unfolds: the sights, sounds, colors, and emotions. In this regard, pay special attention to the story “October Nights” which, when you read it, is like traveling back in time to the mid-1800s and journeying on a nocturnal Parisian perambulation with Gerard.
Richard Sieburth, the translator, provides insightful introductions to the writings and copious notes of interest. Depending on your own personal reading style, and if you value surprise and suspense above all else, you may want to read Nerval’s stories first and then the introductions afterwards.
To sum up, if you are looking to read a very interesting and oft-overlooked 19th century French writer, you should give this volume a look. I think you will be impressed with most of Nerval’s writing, as he was a gifted and poetic soul, whose work is infused with a heady combination of pathos, mysticism, and remembrance.
Poor Gerard, his was an unfortunate fate. But the sad, mad man of letters and adventurer left behind some truly remarkable stories and verse. So in a strange way—though his life seems to be a study in sorrow—somehow, despite the tragedy of it all, artistically he triumphed in the end.
For the most part Gerard de Nerval: Selected Writings serves up a sumptuous literary banquet. Who could forget the haunting and tender “Sylvie”, Nerval’s masterpiece of melancholic reflection on lost love which apparently inspired Proust? Or the hallucinatory and hashish enshrouded “Tale of Caliph Hakim” influenced by his voyages through the Orient? As for Nerval’s poetry cycle, “The Chimeras”, they are a visionary revelation, and fittingly, they appear at the end of this volume—a proper dessert.
Of course, a few stories here and there may fail to capture your imagination, or perhaps they go on a bit too long. “Angélique” comes to mind, and “Aurélia”, despite its sublimity, can be a challenging read, having been written after one of Nerval’s serious mental breakdowns. In other words, among this collection, you’ll probably find your own favorites.
But one thing is certain: there is a poetry and sensitivity here that will bejewel your memory. Nerval seems to capture details of the past as though with a daguerreotype, allowing you to see what he saw. And he goes beyond this as well, inviting you to step into his own personal Diorama wherein everything unfolds: the sights, sounds, colors, and emotions. In this regard, pay special attention to the story “October Nights” which, when you read it, is like traveling back in time to the mid-1800s and journeying on a nocturnal Parisian perambulation with Gerard.
Richard Sieburth, the translator, provides insightful introductions to the writings and copious notes of interest. Depending on your own personal reading style, and if you value surprise and suspense above all else, you may want to read Nerval’s stories first and then the introductions afterwards.
To sum up, if you are looking to read a very interesting and oft-overlooked 19th century French writer, you should give this volume a look. I think you will be impressed with most of Nerval’s writing, as he was a gifted and poetic soul, whose work is infused with a heady combination of pathos, mysticism, and remembrance.
March 17, 2023
A strongly affecting bibliographic journey, beginning lightheartedly and ending in tragedy, the last story “Aurelia” being a journey through Gerard’s madness in the months before his suicide. His personality is the most striking thing about these selections, piercing through the lines of surprisingly modern humor and “forever lucid” (as Baudelaire puts it) self-reflection in a way that recreates Gerard the man bit by bit. “Sylvie” alone makes this collection worth checking out, though it's by no means the only story here worth reading.
I do question the translator’s handling of the introductions, though. They tend towards being more flowery than informal, like he’s desperately trying to show off his prose skills. At one point he even describes the unfinished “Aurelia” as being left hanging “like Nerval’s corpse." In addition to being offensive, this sacrificial grasping for imagery shows Sieburth's commitment towards aesthetics over all else, in sections that warrant it least. A much better example of a Nerval introduction can be found in Craig E. Stephenson's intro for https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... . I can only hope that future reissues of Nerval's work are edited by someone like him.
I do question the translator’s handling of the introductions, though. They tend towards being more flowery than informal, like he’s desperately trying to show off his prose skills. At one point he even describes the unfinished “Aurelia” as being left hanging “like Nerval’s corpse." In addition to being offensive, this sacrificial grasping for imagery shows Sieburth's commitment towards aesthetics over all else, in sections that warrant it least. A much better example of a Nerval introduction can be found in Craig E. Stephenson's intro for https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... . I can only hope that future reissues of Nerval's work are edited by someone like him.
December 7, 2024
The author conjures phantasmagoric images delightfully, but there's minimal vivification within the actual stories and characters. Like a will-o'-the-wisp, they are an effulgent glow with airy substance and merely vaporize upon approach. (This style does work wonderfully for the few poems included in this volume.) Reading about the author's "madness" is interesting, though he sounds no crazier than the people who are conditioned to role-playing within a society. The difference is, the majority of people possess neither the intelligence nor self-awareness to realize that they too are loco; because their egocentric proclivities blindside them. Happy hunting, campers.
March 2, 2019
Some truly gorgeous musings and reflections about dreams, time, and the ineffable. Nerval's self-awareness about longing and ideals is resonant and tender, his use of women in his life as grand metaphors isn't as problematic as it sounds, but builds to a satisfying uncertainty and enigma about beauty, history, illusion, and life itself. Part flaneur, part troubled and in a fugue state, Nerval's prose is haunted and Proustian. The translations of the poems weren't as impressive as I assume they are in the original French.
January 17, 2022
He’s crazy. The first story in this collection (King of Bedlam) is good, and some of the last poems work. Sylvie might have a certain kind of appeal to it, and for those psychedelically inclined, Aurelia may be worthwhile, but for the most part, I would save your time and steer clear of Nerval.
May 16, 2022
Not my cup of tea. Too magic realism type. Liked his letters, which weren't many, Memories of Valois and Caliph Hakim
December 29, 2024
Lovely and strange. From the Patti Smith French romantics list of things to read...really enjoyed Angelique and the long-ish short stories. Totally transporting.
January 17, 2026
so beautiful
Desdichado
you will weep and you will be drinking with him in the sea caves where sirens swam
He is so underrated
What courage in that troubled gaze
Desdichado
you will weep and you will be drinking with him in the sea caves where sirens swam
He is so underrated
What courage in that troubled gaze
March 3, 2025
After reading Nietzsche and some Bataille, Nerval's game of mythological miscellania isn't that hard to grasp. I wonder if the french author, clearly aquainted with the most proeminent german romanticists, might have ever read the similarly stigmatized Holderlin.
I already read a recent translation of one of Nerval's most excentric friend, Pétrus Borel's Champavert. His historical fictions were on par with Schwob and Borges so I don't get it why he was even more ostracized than Gérard de Nerval since than and well-after the literary establishment from the times of Dumas and Eugene Sue.
I already read a recent translation of one of Nerval's most excentric friend, Pétrus Borel's Champavert. His historical fictions were on par with Schwob and Borges so I don't get it why he was even more ostracized than Gérard de Nerval since than and well-after the literary establishment from the times of Dumas and Eugene Sue.
June 2, 2013
I'm confused by this Goodreads entry. The copy I am reading is translated by Geoffrey Wagner, & was published by University of Michigan/Ann Arbor paperbacks in 1970. It is about 250 pages in length, contains three of Nerval's better-known prose pieces -- "Sylvie", "Emilie", & "Aurelia" -- & a selection of poems.
Linked to this is a book of the same name, but translated by one Richard Sieburth, & was published by Penguin in 1999. It is said to be over 400 pages in length, contains a number of his prose pieces, & according to an essay written by Sieburth is an improvement over Wagner's translation & is organized into four sections: "a first section, "Shadow Selves," devoted to his Doppelgänger tales ("The King of Bedlam" and the hashish-inspired "Tale of Caliph Hakim" from his Voyage to the Orient); a second section, "Memories of the Valois," including the Sternean experimental fiction "Angelique" and "Sylvie" (Nerval's "masterwork," according to Proust); a third section, "Unreal Cities", devoted to Nerval's phantasmagoric evocations of Cairo, Naples, Vienna, and Paris; a fourth section, "Dream/Life," featuring "Aurelia" (the autobiography of his madness) as well as cullings from his correspondence during his first mental breakdown in l841 and subsequent internments in l853-54. And finally, a section entitled "Sonnets," with the poems of the Grammont Manuscript. and The Chimeras."
I'm disappointed that there is no way for a reader who has found a mistake in a Goodreads entry to either fix it, or bring it to the attention of someone who can fix it.
Linked to this is a book of the same name, but translated by one Richard Sieburth, & was published by Penguin in 1999. It is said to be over 400 pages in length, contains a number of his prose pieces, & according to an essay written by Sieburth is an improvement over Wagner's translation & is organized into four sections: "a first section, "Shadow Selves," devoted to his Doppelgänger tales ("The King of Bedlam" and the hashish-inspired "Tale of Caliph Hakim" from his Voyage to the Orient); a second section, "Memories of the Valois," including the Sternean experimental fiction "Angelique" and "Sylvie" (Nerval's "masterwork," according to Proust); a third section, "Unreal Cities", devoted to Nerval's phantasmagoric evocations of Cairo, Naples, Vienna, and Paris; a fourth section, "Dream/Life," featuring "Aurelia" (the autobiography of his madness) as well as cullings from his correspondence during his first mental breakdown in l841 and subsequent internments in l853-54. And finally, a section entitled "Sonnets," with the poems of the Grammont Manuscript. and The Chimeras."
I'm disappointed that there is no way for a reader who has found a mistake in a Goodreads entry to either fix it, or bring it to the attention of someone who can fix it.
May 2, 2022
Aurelie-
This was a fever dream in all its description. It was an autobiographical account of a madman after all. But wow. I was astounded at how he drew connections from nothing and everything-- the detail of the star draining his life force, the throbbing molten metal veins of the Earth, familiar faces of dead relatives in a house, along with many other vivid descriptions of hallucinatory visions.
This is a good story to show how engrossed people are in delusions and how it makes total sense for them but not for us...
This was a fever dream in all its description. It was an autobiographical account of a madman after all. But wow. I was astounded at how he drew connections from nothing and everything-- the detail of the star draining his life force, the throbbing molten metal veins of the Earth, familiar faces of dead relatives in a house, along with many other vivid descriptions of hallucinatory visions.
This is a good story to show how engrossed people are in delusions and how it makes total sense for them but not for us...
August 30, 2007
I may never have read this book without also rereading Dante's "Vita Nuova," as I've done these past two days. I would much recommend either. I've two or three translations of "Sylvie" but no others with the daguerreotype cover. Nerval had a pet lobster he leashed during walks.
June 3, 2020
The highlights here are Aurelia and the poetry from Les Chimeres onwards. They are wacked out, and the ending of Aurelia is incredible.
Sylvie is subtly disquieting, probably completely unintentionally.
Sylvie is subtly disquieting, probably completely unintentionally.
February 11, 2008
I love the cover of the Exact Change AURELIA edition, but this is a remarkable book overflowing with page after page of amazing texts
March 11, 2008
worth a shot. everyone should know where decadence emerges...
December 18, 2009
Well-conceived collection of the various writings of one of Romanticism's most talented madmen.
February 13, 2010
Best Nerval in English! Sieburth is a translator of genius.
Read
July 28, 2011impossible de s'en lasser
April 10, 2013
dreamy, narcotic, mythopoetic.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews