On Literature
Page 6
But whatever hypothesis is chosen, how does one place Châalis with respect to the year of 1832, when Adrienne dies? It certainly would be touching to think that Adrienne dies (is dying, is already dead) when Jerard sees (or dreams he sees) her at Châalis.
It is such calculations, apparently so persnickety, that explain why we readers (like Proust) feel obliged constantly to turn back to earlier pages of the story to understand "where we are." Of course, in this matter too, it could be Labrunie who is confused. But if his overeager biographers were not so obsessive in providing us with the unfortunate writer's clinical charts, we would simply say, when we read the text, that we do not know where we are because Nerval did not want us to know. Nerval does the opposite of the author of a detective novel, who plants clues in the text so that when we reread it we tell ourselves that we should have guessed the truth immediately. Nerval puts us off the scent, and wants us to lose "the sequence of events."
And that is why Jerard tells us (in the first chapter) that he could not keep track of the order of events and (at the beginning of chapter 14) that he tried to pin down his own chimeras "without paying attention to their order." In the universe of Sylvie, where someone said that time passes in fits and starts, "the clocks do not work."
Elsewhere, taking as an example the clock described in chapter 3, I said that a "symbolic mode" is inserted into a text when there is a description of something that does not have any relevance for the purposes of the plot.* The case of the clock in the second chapter is a perfect illustration. Why stop to describe that antique when it cannot actually say what even the concierge's cuckoo clock knows? Because it is a condensed symbol of the whole story, and first of all for the Renaissance world it evokes, which is the world of the Valois, and secondly because it is there to tell us (to tell the reader more than Jerard, perhaps) that we will never recover the sequence of time. Through a symmetry that has already been mentioned, a broken clock returns in chapter 12. If it appeared only there, it would be simply an enjoyable childhood detail: but it is the return of a theme. Nerval is telling us that right from the beginning, for him, time was destined to become confused or, as Shakespeare would have said, the time is out of joint—for Jerard as much as for the reader.
Objects of Desire
Why is it that the order of events cannot be recovered? Because in the course of time Jerard shifts his desire onto three different women, though the sequence is not linear and heading in one direction, but goes in a spiral. Inside this spiral Jerard identifies, in sequence, one or other of the women as the object of his desire, but often he confuses them, and in any case, as each woman reappears in turn (rediscovered or remembered) she no longer possesses the properties she had previously.
Jerard has an object of desire, and he draws its outline for us right from the start of the tale. It is an ideal of femininity as either goddess or queen, so long as she is "inaccessible." However, in the following chapters he does still try to reach something. But as soon as his object of desire comes close to him, Jerard finds a reason for distancing himself from it. So the mist-effect concerns not just the time sequences, and space, but also desire.
In the first chapter it seems that Jerard desires dreams and finds reality repugnant, and that his ideal is incarnated by the actress:
DREAM
ACTRESS
REALITY
Uncertainty and indolence
What does it matter if it is him or someone else?
Heroic gallantry
Vague enthusiasms
She satisfied my every desire
Chasing after benefices
Religious aspirations
The divine Hours of Herculaneum
The lost hours of day
Drunk with poetry and love
She made people thrill with joy and love
Skepticism, bacchanalia
Metaphysical phantoms
Pale as the night
The real woman
Inaccessible goddess and queen
He did not care who she was
Vice
Up until this point the stage is certainly more real than the auditorium, and compared with the actress the spectators are nothing but "empty appearances." But in the second chapter Jerard seems to desire something more tangible, even if only by recalling the one moment when he came close to it. The person who has all the virtues of the actress, who had been seen all alone on the stage, is now Adrienne, glimpsed in the pale circle of the lawn by night.
AURÉLIE
(chapter 1)
ADRIENNE
(chapter 2)
Pale as the night
The brightness of the rising moon falls only on her
She lived only for me
I was the only boy in that dance
The warble of her voice
With a fresh, penetrating voice
Magic mirror
A will-o'-the-wisp escaping
An apparition
A phantom barely touching the green grass
Beautiful as the day
A mirage of glory and beauty
Like the Divine Hours
The blood of the Valois ran in her veins
Her smile fills him with bliss
They thought they were in paradise
This is why Jerard wonders (in the third chapter, second paragraph) whether he is not in love with a religious woman in the guise of an actress—and this question will haunt him till the end.
However, Adrienne possesses not only, let's say, ideal qualities but also physical properties, thanks to which, in the second chapter, she wins out over Sylvie, who bears the hallmarks of a rather slight rustic gracefulness. But in chapter 4, when some years later Jerard sees Sylvie again, now that she is no longer a child but a young girl in the bloom of adolescence, it is she who has acquired all the graces of Adrienne, who has now disappeared, and of Aurélie (albeit in a pale reflection of the latter), whose memory now fades.
ADRIENNE
SYLVIE
SYLVIE
(chapter 2)
(chapter 2)
(chapter 4)
"
Grande
"
"
Petite fille
"
"
Ce n'était plus cette petite fille
"
Beautiful
Lively and fresh
She had become so beautiful
Blonde
Tanned complexion
White arms
Tall and slim
Still a child
Her slender figure
Descendant of the Valois
From the nearby village
Worthy of ancient art
Mirage of glory and beauty
Regular profile
Athenian features
She remained alone and triumphant
(She did not deserve the crown)
Irresistible charm
Intangible, vague love
Tender frindship
Her divine smile
Not only does Jerard entertain suspicions, fears, desires, illusions right to the end, and in the face of considerable evidence that Aurélie and Adrienne are the same person, but at times he thinks that what he desired in the first two women can be given to him by Sylvie. For reasons never stated, after the second dance, when he has even celebrated a kind of symbolic marriage with her, he leaves her. When he comes to her at the third dance, to escape the impossible fascination of Aurélie, he finds her similar to the woman he is fleeing, and understands that either Sylvie is lost for him or he is lost to her. It could be said that at each fade-out, when one female figure dissolves and becomes another, what was unreal becomes real; but precisely because it is now within reach, it changes again into something else altogether.
Jerard's secret curse is that he always has to reject what he previously desired, and precisely because it becomes just what he wanted it to become. Look how in chapter 13 Aurélie becomes exactly what he had d
reamed of unconsciously: she had belonged to another, and the other man disappears overseas; actresses did not have a heart, and now she shows herself ready to love.... But alas, what becomes approachable can no longer be loved. Precisely because she has a heart, Aurélie will go off with the person who really does love her. *
This agonizing wishing and then unwishing is given an almost neurotic manifestation in the interior monologue in chapter 11. Stung by the ambiguous allusion to Adrienne's fate, Jerard, who up until a moment before had desired Sylvie, discovers that it would be sacrilegious for him to seduce someone he regarded as a sister. Immediately (and with irritating fickleness) his thoughts and desire turn once more to Aurélie. Yet at the beginning of the next chapter he is once more ready to throw himself at Sylvie's feet and offer her his house and his uncertain fortune. With "three women around his heart, dancing around him," as Dante might have said, Jerard loses his sense of their identity and desires and loses all three.
1832
In any case, Nerval encourages us to forget. And to help us (or lose us), he puts onstage a forgetful Sylvie, who only at the end remembers that Adrienne died in 1832.
This is the element that most upsets the critics. Why give such a crucial piece of information only at the end, whereas, as a rather naive note in the Pleiade edition remarks, we would have expected it at the beginning? Here Nerval performs one of those "completing analepses" or "returns," as Genette calls them, where the narrator, pretending he has forgotten a detail, remembers it much later in the development of the action. * It is not the only one in the story; the other is the incidental remark about the actress's name, which appears only in chapter 11 : but there seems to be more of a reason for this latter return, because it is only then that Jerard, sensing that his idyll with Sylvie is about to end, begins to think of the Actress as a Woman whom he might perhaps approach. The completing analepsis regarding the date seems to be at the very least scandalous, all the more so since it is preceded by a delaying tactic, which is difficult to justify at first sight.
In chapter 11 we find one of the most ambiguous expressions of the whole story: "cela a mal tournée!" For whoever rereads the tale, that allusion by Sylvie in some way anticipates the final revelation, but for whoever reads it for the first time it delays it. Sylvie does not quite say that Adrienne ended up unhappily, but that her story ended unhappily. Consequently I cannot agree with those who translate it into Italian as "le è andata male" (she ended up unhappily), nor with the more cautious translators who say "è andata male" (ended up unhappily—not daring to interpret that very obvious "cela" leaves one with the suspicion that the subject is Adrienne). In fact, Sylvie says that "that story ended unhappily." Why do we have to respect that ambiguity (so much so that some people understand it to mean that, hearing this hint, Jerard convinces himself even more that it means Adrienne has become the actress)? Because it reinforces and justifies the delay, which means that it is only in the last line of the text that Sylvie definitively destroys all of Jerard's illusions.
The fact is that Sylvie is not reticent. For whom would this information be essential? For Jerard, who on the basis of his memory of Adrienne, and of her possible identity with Aurélie, has created an obsession. But would it be essential for Sylvie, to whom Jerard has not yet revealed his own obsessions (as he will with Aurélie), except through vague allusions? For Sylvie (an earthly creature), Adrienne is even less than a phantom (she is only one of the many women who had passed that way). Sylvie does not say that Jerard has been tempted to identify the religious woman with the actress, she does not even know for certain whether this actress exists, nor who she is. She is totally outside this metamorphic world in which one image fades into another and overlays it. So it is not that she delivers the final revelation in small doses, drop by drop. Nerval does this, not Sylvie.
Sylvie speaks in a vague way not out of guile but "absent-mindedly," because she finds the affair irrelevant. She participates in the destruction of Jerard's dream precisely because she "is unaware of it." Her relationship with time is serene, made up of some nostalgia to which she is now reconciled or some tender memories, neither of which threaten her tranquil present. For this reason, of the three women, she is the one who remains the most inaccessible at the end. Jerard has even had a magic moment with Adrienne, and from what one can understand has enjoyed amorous intimacy with Aurélie, but with Sylvie nothing, except an extremely chaste kiss—and at Othys the even chaster fictional nuptials. The minute Sylvie comes fully to embody the reality principle (and pronounces the only undoubtedly true, historical statement in the whole story: a date), she is lost forever. At least as a lover: for Jerard she is by now only a sister, and, what's more, married to his (foster-)brother.
So much so that one would be tempted to say that it is precisely for this reason that the story is entitled Sylvie and not—like a later, flamboyant work— Aurélie. Sylvie represents the real time that was lost and never found—precisely because she is the only one who stays.
But this would imply a thesis, an ambitious thesis, and one that acquires all its importance precisely from the comparison between Proust and Nerval. Nerval seems to go in search of lost time but is incapable of finding it, and he celebrates only that emptiness of his own illusion. The final date pronounced by Sylvie would seem to sound therefore like a funeral bell that closes the story.
This would help us understand the affectionate and almost filial interest shown by Proust for this literary father, who failed in a desperate enterprise (and perhaps this is why Labrunie killed himself). Proust then sets out to avenge this paternal defeat with his own victory over Time.
But when is it that Sylvie reveals to Jerard that Adrienne had died some time previously? In Time13 ("the following summer," when the theater company gives performances at Dammartin). However one works out the figures, she certainly does it long before TimeN, when Jerard begins his narration. Consequently, when Jerard starts to conjure up the night at the theater, only to go back to the time of the dance on the lawn, and to tell us of his trembling at the thought that Adrienne was the actress, and of the illusion of still being able to see her near the convent of Saint-S***—during this period of time (and narration), when he makes us share in his uncertainties, he already knew that Adrienne had definitely died in 1832.
So it is not that Jerard (or Nerval along with him) stops narrating when he realizes that everything is over: on the contrary, it is precisely when he has understood that all is over that he starts his narration (and it is a narration about a Jerard who did not know, nor could he have known, that everything was by now over).
Is the person who acts like this someone who has not succeeded in dealing with his past? Not a bit: this is someone who notices that one can start to revisit the past only when the present is by now canceled, and only memory (even though, or precisely because, it is not too ordered) can give us back something for which—if it is not worth living—it is at least worth dying.
But in that case Proust would not have seen Nerval as a weak, defenseless father, a forerunner to be rehabilitated, but, rather, as a strong, overstrong father, one to be outdone. And he would devote his life to this challenge.*
A reworking of part of the afterword to my Italian translation of Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie (Turin: Einaudi, 1999). I have already discussed, in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), how I first wrote a short article on this novella ("II tempo di Sylvie' (Time in Sylvie), Poesia e critica, 2 [1962]), then conducted a series of seminars on it at the University of Bologna in the 1970s (from which stemmed three graduating theses), then took it up again for a course of lectures at Columbia University in 1984, and made it the subject of the Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1993, as well as of two other courses, at Bologna in 1995 and at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, in 1996. The most interesting outcome of these many papers of mine was the special issue of the journal VS, 31/32 (1982) (Sur "Sylvie').
WILDE: PARADOX AND APHORISM
There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism. This Greek term, originally meaning "something put aside as an offering," "an oblation," comes to mean in the course of time "a definition, saying, or concise proverbial statement." An aphorism is thus, according to the Italian Zingarelli dictionary, a "brief maxim expressing a norm of existence or a philosophical conclusion."
What distinguishes an aphorism from a maxim? Nothing, except its brevity.
It takes little to console us since it takes little to afflict us.
(Pascal, Pensées, Brunschwicg ed., 136)
If we did not have defects ourselves we would not take such delight in noting those of others.
(La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 31)
Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.
(Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest)
Several thoughts that I have and that I could not sum up in words were actually derived from language.
(Kraus, Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths)
These maxims are also aphorisms, while those that follow are too long to be aphorisms: