The Work of Unreason

For many readers, Sylvie may first be encountered through its influence on Proust. But the deeper resonance emerges in the enigmatic Les Chimères, opaque poems with an undertow of sorrow and nothingness. Sieburth provides a prose translation in this edition, but Will Stone’s version (Menard Press, 1999) renders the poems with greater intensity. These verses offer a glimpse into Nerval’s use of writing to transform his experience of madness: “Someday I will write the story of this descent to the underworld, and you will see that it was not entirely deprived of reasoning even though it always lacked reason.”

Dante’s journey in the Commedia is not far removed from Nerval’s in Aurelia. As Foucault observed, “Madness begins where the relation of man to truth is disturbed and darkened.” Nineteenth-century Paris, though no longer requiring asylum inmates to sleep on straw, still confined those judged to have lost reason. Nerval’s experience, shaped by clinical treatment, differs from that of Nietzsche or Hölderlin, whose social positions and contexts granted them other forms of solitude.

Sylvie stands partly as a lyrical recreation of Nerval’s Valois roots. Though dream life is touched upon, it lacks the centrality it would later assume. Instead, emphasis falls on rural memory and adolescent infatuation. The symbolism here is deeply embedded in the language itself. Each reading offers new reflectiveness, though even as a tale of the loss of illusion it remains resonant: “Illusions fall, like the husks of a fruit, one after another, and what is left is experience. It has a bitter taste, but there is something tonic in its sharpness.”

Following Nerval’s second confinement, Alexandre Dumas described him as “a charming mind . . . in which, from time to time, a certain phenomenon occurs . . . imagination, that resident lunatic, momentarily evicts reason . . . and impels him toward impossible theories and unwritable books.” To which Nerval replied: “Several days ago everyone thought I was mad, and you devoted some of your most charming lines to the epitaph of my mind . . . Now that I have recovered what is vulgarly called reason, let us reason together.”

Aurelia is that reasoning: a disavowal, not a denial, of madness, and an argument that unreason should not annul the work. It is the conversion of delirium into prose that remains so striking. It may be, as Dumas remarked, unwritable, but it is far from unreadable:

“Dream is a second life. I have never been able to cross through those gates of ivory and 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 moment 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.”

In Sieburth’s translation, the prose is crystalline. It compels attention toward the condition of human fallenness. Nerval, who translated Faust, does not enact a Faustian bargain for literature’s sake. What emerges is not the romanticisation of psychosis, but a work of desperate sadness and undeniable beauty. Though composed in the register of unreason, Aurelia remains a joyous explosion of strangeness, and resonates with a truth that cannot be dismissed.