On Literature

by Umberto Eco

  4. This is simply an old genteel festival

  2. Jerard is the only boy at the dance

  4. Each boy has a girl partner

  3. Broken clock: promise of time to be recovered

  12. Broken clock: memory of lost time

  5 Solitary, enchanted walk

  9. Solitary, depressed walk

  6. Uplifting walk and visit to her aunt

  10. The aunt is dead, embarrassed departure for Châalis

  7. Apparition of Adrienne singing

  11. Vague recollection of Adrienne; Sylvie sings

  In fact, the disturbing Châalis chapter breaks the symmetry and separates the first six chapters from the remaining seven. On the one hand we have in this seventh chapter a reversal of the ball in chapter 4: this is an aristocratic celebration as opposed to the people's festival on the island (there are no young people except on the stage: Jerard and Sylvie's brother creep in only as intruders), it is set in a closed space as opposed to the open space of Cythera, Adrienne's apocalyptic song contrasts with the sweet song she sang while still an adolescent, and finally, this is a funereal celebration as opposed to a Pervigilium Veneris, the return of his obsession with Adrienne as opposed to the reconciliation and conquest of Sylvie...

  The chapter contains themes from the other chapters as well, but they are dreamily unresolved and neutralized. It cites without any obvious reason the archery contest, the clock, a kind of dance-spectacle, a crown that is a halo of gilt cardboard, and above all a swan. Many critics imply that the swan is not just an emblem, a coat of arms engraved or sculpted (as the heraldic term "éployé" would suggest), but a real swan crucified on the door. This seems excessive, even though in a dream everything is possible, but whatever it is, this swan is halfway between the living, triumphant swan of chapter 4, and the one that is now absent in chapter 14.

  There has been talk of "degradation rituals," but one does not need to uncover all the symmetries in order to detect them. The correspondences work almost unbeknownst to the reader; each return of a motif that has already been sounded causes a sense of déjà vu, but we notice only that something that we thought we had been given has been taken from us.

  Going Round and Round

  Mist-effects, labyrinth-effects: Poulet has spoken of "metamorphoses of the circle." Perhaps critics have seen more circles than there really are in Sylvie, like the magic circle of the stage, the concentric circles of the dance on the lawn (the dance on the "pelouse" framed by the trees, the one that involved the circle of young girls and finally, in the whirlwind of the dance, as though in a close-up, the long gold circles of the girl's hair), and in the second festival at Loisy the three circles of the pool, the island, and the temple. But sometimes I feel as if they have underestimated the circles.

  For instance, in chapter 9, during the visit to his dead uncle's house, the word "jardin" is repeated three times in the same paragraph. This is not stylistic slackness: there are three gardens, belonging to three different epochs, but arranged concentrically, if not in terms of spatial perspective at least in a temporal one. It is as if Jerard's eye saw first his uncle's garden, in the distance the circle of his childhood, and farther away again the circle of History (the garden as the eternal place of archaeological finds). In a sense this triple garden becomes as it were the miniature model of the whole story, but seen from its final point. From a place revisited in a state of disillusionment (by now the garden is just a mass of weeds), there emerges in the mists of memory first the trace, still well-defined though partially canceled out, of the child's enchanted universe; and then in the distance, when the garden is the object no longer of Jerard's eye but of his memory, amid the fragments lined up in his study, one hears the echo of those Roman and Druidic times that had already been summoned up at the beginning of the story.

  Finally, it is a circular movement that Jerard carries out in each of his visits to Loisy: first of all leaving from Paris, only to return in the space of a day, then leaving from the village, only to return after crossing pools, woods, and moors.

  This circling-round is worthy of an effort that almost amounts to a land survey, but I believe it is worth doing. I decided to draw a map of the places (Table B), more to help myself when translating Sylvie. Even though I kept my eye on several maps of the Valois,* I did not go in for the excessive nuances of meridians and parallels, and I tried to give an approximate visualization of the mutual relationships between villages and forests. However that may be, it should be borne in mind that from Luzarches to Ermenonville is about twenty kilometers as the crow flies, from Ermenonville to Loisy three kilometers, and two from Loisy to Mortefontaine. We are told in chapter 13 that the dance in front of the castle with Adrienne took place near Orry. But I have identified the place of the first and second dance at Loisy as the pools immediately north of Mortefontaine, where the Thève now rises (but at that time apparently it rose between Loisy and Othys).

  If you read while also looking at the map, the space comes to look like a bit of chewing gum, changing shape every time you chew it over. It seems impossible that the post carriage takes the route it does to drop Jerard near Loisy, but who knows what the roads were like then? The route chosen by Sylvie's brother on the night at Châalis totally throws commentators with a passion for checking topography, and they solve the problems by noting that the boy was tipsy. Did one really have to go through Orry and run parallel to Halatte Forest to get from Loisy to Châalis? Or were the two youths not coming from Loisy? Sometimes it seems that Nerval is reconstructing his own Valois but that he cannot avoid interference from Labrunie's. The text says that Jerard's uncle stayed at Montagny, while we know that Labrunie's uncle stayed at Mortefontaine. Now if we reread carefully, following the table, we see that—if Jerard's uncle stayed at Montagny—this does not work out, and we are forced to conclude that he stayed at Mortefontaine, or, rather, that—in the Valois of the story—Montagny occupies the exact spot where Mortefontaine is.

  Jerard, in chapter 5, says that after the dance he goes with Sylvie and her brother to Loisy, and then "returns" to Montagny. It is obvious that he can return only to Mortefontaine, all the more so since he goes up through a little wood between Loisy and Saint-S*** (which in reality is Saint-Sulpice, a stone's throw from Loisy), goes along the edge of Ermenonville forest, clearly to the southwest, and after sleeping sees nearby the walls of the convent of Saint-S***, and in the distance La Butte aux Gens d'Armes, the ruins of the abbey of Thiers, the castle of Pontarmè,

  all of which are places to the northwest of Loisy, where he returns to. He cannot have taken the road for Montagny, which is too far to the east.

  At the beginning of chapter 9 Jerard goes from the spot where the dance had taken place to Montagny, then goes back on the road to Loisy, finds everyone asleep, heads toward Ermenonville, leaves the "Desert" on the left, reaches Rousseau's tomb, and then goes back to Loisy. If he really went to Montagny he would be taking a very long route by crossing the Ermenonville area, and it would be crazy to return to Loisy—crossing back through the Ermenonville area—only then to decide to go up once more toward Ermenonville, and finally return again to Loisy.

  In biographical terms this might mean that Nerval had decided to move his uncle's house to Montagny, and then was not able to maintain the fiction, and kept on thinking (along with Labrunie) of Mortefontaine. But this question must be of only minimal importance to us, unless we are seized by the desire go and take the walk again. The text is there only to make us travel in a Valois where memory is confused with dreams, and its function is to make us lose our bearings.

  If that is the case, why make such efforts to reconstruct the map? I think most readers give up, as I did for many years, because it is enough for them to be seized by the fascination of the names. Proust already pointed out how much power names have in this story, and concluded that whoever has read Sylvie cannot fail to feel a thrill when they happen to read the name of Pontarmè on a train schedule. However, he also pointed ou
t that other place-names, equally famous in the history of literature, do not cause the same turmoil in us. Why do the toponyms that appear in this tale become embedded in our mind (or heart) like a musical sequence, a Proustian "petite phrase"?

  The answer seems obvious to me: because they keep returning. Readers rarely draw maps for themselves, but they sense (in their ears) that with every "return" to the Valois, Jerard goes back to the same places, almost in the same order, as if the same motif started up after every stanza. In music this form is called a rondo, and the term " rondeau"comes from "ronde, "which means a round dance. So readers perceive aurally a circular structure, and in some sense they see it, yet they see it only in a confused way, as if it were a spiral movement, or a successive shifting of circumferences.

  For this reason it is worth reconstructing the map, to understand visually what the text makes us feel aurally. You will see on my little table, starting from Loisy, three nonconcentric, differently shaded circles. They trace the three main walks—not the real journey, but the presumed area of the trip. The lightest circle refers to Jerard's nocturnal walk in chapter 5 (from Loisy to Montagny—or, rather, Mortefontaine—but changing direction to skirt the Ermenonville forest, going past Saint-S***, and returning at last to Loisy, while Pontarmè, Thiers, or La Butte can be seen in the distance); the slightly shaded circle represents Jerard's walk in chapter 9 (from the dance area to his uncles house—which must be at Mortefontaine—then to Loisy and finally to Ermenonville as far as Rousseau's tomb, and returning once more to Loisy); the darkest circle follows Jerard's and Sylvie's walk to Châalis in chapters 10 and 11 (from Loisy, through the forest of Ermenonville as far as Châalis, then back to Loisy via Charlepont). The journey to Othys is a round trip to the eighteenth century and back.

  Finally, the biggest circle, which covers the entire area in Table B, corresponds to the wanderings with Aurélie in chapter 13. Jerard tries desperately to find everything and loses the central core of his first wanderings. He will never find it again. In the end, since Sylvie by now lives in Dammartin, the returns mentioned in chapter 14 never go beyond the margins of this circumference. Jerard, Sylvie, everyone, they are all now excluded from the magic circle at the start, which Jerard can see only at a great distance, from a hotel window.

  In any case, what strikes us visually (as we previously had been struck aurally, albeit in the guise of echoes answering each other from a distance) is that in every journey Jerard simply goes around in a circle (not as in the perfect circle of the first dance with Adrienne, but like a crazed moth fluttering inside a lampshade on a chandelier) and never rediscovers what he had left there on the previous occasion. So much so that one has to agree with Poulet, who saw in this circular structure a temporal metaphor: it is not so much Jerard who goes around in circles in space; it is time, his own past dancing in a circle around him.

  The imperfect

  Let us go back to the first sentence in the story: "Je sortais d'un théâtre." We have considered the implications of that "Je" and of that "théâtre," now let us consider the "sortais." The verb is in the imperfect.

  The imperfect is a tense of duration and is often iterative. It always expresses an action not fully completed, and all we need is a tiny contextual hint to establish whether the action is also iterative, that is to say, is carried out several times. The fact is that Jerard came out of that theater every evening, and had been doing so for a year.*

  I apologize for the apparent tautology, but the imperfect is so called because it is in fact im-perfect: it moves us to a time before the present in which we are speaking, but it does not tell us exactly when or how long it went on for. Hence its fascination. Proust said (speaking of Flaubert): "I confess that certain uses of the imperfect indicative—of this cruel tense which presents life to us as something ephemeral and at the same time passive, which at the very moment it summons up our actions stamps them with illusion, and obliterates them in the past without leaving us, like the simple past does, the consolation of activity—have remained for me an inexhaustible source of mysterious sadness." *

  All the more reason why in Sylvie the imperfect is the tense that forces us to lose our sense of the confines of time. It is used with apparent generosity, and yet with mathematical caution, so much so that in the changes from the first to the second version of Sylvie Nerval adds one imperfect but eliminates another. In the first chapter, when he discovers that he is rich, Jerard writes, in 1853, "Que dirait maintenant, pensai-je, le jeune homme de tout à l'heure" (What would the young man of a few moments ago say now, I thought) and then "Je frémis de cette pensée" (I trembled at that thought). In 1854 he corrects this to "pensais-je"(I was thinking). In fact this is correct, since the imperfect appears in those lines to present us with the narrator's thoughts, a stream of thoughts that lasts in time: Jerard dreams for a certain number of seconds (or minutes) of the idea of a possible conquest of the actress, without making up his mind. Then, suddenly, and only then, with the return to the simple past ( "Je frémis"), he definitively rejects that fantasy.

  On the other hand, at the end of chapter 2, in 1853 Adrienne "repartait" (was leaving again), whereas in 1854 Adrienne "repartit"(left again). Rereading the passage one sees that up until that point everything has taken place in the imperfect, almost as if to make the whole scene more nebulous, and only at that point something definitely happens that belongs not to the dreamworld but to reality. The next day Adrienne disappears. Her departure is abrupt and definitive. In fact, aside from the ambiguous oneiric episode in chapter 7, this is the last time Jerard sees her—or at least has the good fortune to be near her.

  In any case, the reader is well warned right from the first chapter, where in the space of the first five paragraphs there are no fewer than fifty-three imperfects out of a total of sixty or so verb forms. In those first five paragraphs everything that is described happened habitually, for some time, every evening. Then in the sixth paragraph someone "said" something, or, rather, someone asks Jerard "who it is" that he goes to the theater to see. And Jerard "said" her name. The nebulous temporality becomes more concrete, becomes solid at a precise moment: the story starts at that point, or, rather, that point signals Time1, from which Jerard (who is recalling this in TimeN) makes the story of his journey start.

  The extent to which the imperfect nebulizes time can be seen in the Châalis chapter. The person who intervenes twice in the present indicative (the first time to describe the abbey, the second to tell us that in summoning up those details the speaker wonders whether they are real or not) is Nerval—or Jerard in TimeN. Everything else is in the imperfect—except where syntax will not permit it. The analysis of the verb tenses in this chapter would require too many grammatical subtleties. But all we need to do is reread the chapter several times, listening attentively to the music of those tenses, and we realize why not only we but also Nerval himself hesitates to say whether this is a nightmare or a memory.

  The use of the imperfect takes us back to the distinction between story, plot, and discourse. The choice of a verb tense takes place on the level of discourse, but the vagueness thus established at the discursive level impinges on our capacity to reconstruct the story by way of the plot. This is why critics are unable to agree on the sequence of events, at least so far as the first seven chapters are concerned. In order to extricate ourselves from the tangle of tenses, let us label as "the first dance" the one that takes place in front of the castle with Adrienne (perhaps at Orry), as "the second dance" the one at the festival with the swan (the first trip to Loisy), and as "the third dance" the one Jerard gets to just as it ends, after his journey in the carriage.

  When does the episode of the night at Châalis happen? Before or after the first visit to Loisy? Again, remember that we are not dealing with a forensic problem here. It is the unconscious reply to this question that the reader is seeking, the one that plays the greatest role in creating the mist-effect.

  One critic (and this shows just how powerful the mis
t-effect is) has even advanced the hypothesis that Châalis comes before the first dance on the lawn—on the grounds that in chapter 2, paragraph 5, it is said that after the dance "we would never see her again." But this cannot be before the dance, and for three reasons: first, Jerard recognizes Adrienne at Châalis, whereas he sees her for the first time at the dance (and this is confirmed in the third chapter); second, the young girl is already "transfigured" by her monastic vocation that night, whereas in the second chapter we were told that she would devote herself to the religious life only after the dance; and third, the scene of the first dance is described at the beginning of the fourth chapter as a childhood memory, and one cannot see how, when they were even younger, Jerard and Sylvie's brother had gone on a cart through the woods at night to watch a sacred mystery play.

  In that case Châalis comes between the first and second dance. But this would presuppose that in the time between those two events Jerard had gone once more to Loisy. And in that case why is Sylvie sulky with him upon his arrival at the second dance, as though she still felt the humiliation she had suffered in Adrienne's presence? But this could be another mist-effect. The text does not in fact state that Sylvie is sulking with him because of that ancient betrayal—if anything it is Jerard who thinks this. Both she and her brother reproach him for not having been in touch "for so long." What is to say that this long time extends from the first dance? Jerard could have returned in the meantime, on any occasion, and enjoyed an evening with her brother. And yet this solution is not convincing because that evening Jerard gives the impression of seeing Sylvie for the first time since the first dance, finding her transformed and more fascinating than before.

  So Jerard could have gone to Châalis after the second dance (in Time1). But how could that be if, according to most critics, the second dance happens three years before the evening at the theater, and once more, on arriving, Jerard is rebuked for not having been in touch for so long? Here too, perhaps we are victims of a mist-effect. The text does not in fact say that the second dance (Time-1) happened three years before the evening at the theater. The text (chapter 3, third paragraph) says of Sylvie, "Why have I forgotten her for three years?" It says not that three years have gone by since the second dance, but (paragraph seven) that Jerard had been wasting the inheritance left him by his uncle for three years, and one can imagine that in those three years of high living he had forgotten about Sylvie. Between the second dance and the evening at the theater many more years could have passed.