Nerval, Watteau et le Pèlerinage à L’Île de Cythère

The literature of travel is considered as an art form by many nations. During the 18th and 19th centuries there were an abundance of visits to the Middle East by Western travelers, some of whom were famous and influential. These visits engendered a variety of published documentation in Oriental literary and cultural values. The West had become interested in the Eastern World, specifically the Middle East, following the French Revolution and subsequent to the translation of the Holy Quran and of classical Arabic texts in literature, science, and philosophy such as 1001 nights and Calileh va Demneh. Napoléon Bonaparte's 1798 invasion of Egypt had hugely increased interaction on numerous levels between the two civilizations. A number of travelers have significantly contributed to the image of the Orient in general and of Arabs in particular, some of which are inaccurate, stereotypical or exaggerated. Edward Saeed considered these trips and their reporting as constituting "an authoritarian discourse." Such journeys to the Orient and their reporting have increased in number and frequency and have increasingly acquired political, social, military, ideological, scientific, and even imaginative aspects and impact. Gerard de Nerval's novel, "A Trip to the Orient" was a summary of his travel to Egypt. The author recorded each detailed event that occurred in what he perceived to be this exotic world. It was a wonderful example of implicit eloquence mixed with legendary imagination.

Gérard De Nerval: Christ at Gethsemane (from The Chimeras) Get access Literary Imagination, Volume 8, Issue 2, Spring 2006, Pages 229–231, https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/8.2.229 Published: 01 March 2006

(1991). Gerard de Nerval and Women's Autobiography: The Collective Mystical Self. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 6, Autobiography and Mysticism, pp. 211-225.

The proposed article is the first attempt in Ukrainian literary criticism to analyze the mini-cycle “Other Chimeras” by Gerard de Nerval, the French artist of the XIX century. These poems were not published during his lifetime. They have, to a large extent, a draft, which, among other things, further complicates their interpretation and understanding. The proposed article consists of two parts. In the first, the authors try to prove that the sonnets of mini-cycle “Other Chimeras” are a kind of quintessence of Nerval’s hermeticism. Accordingly, any interpretation depends significantly on the creative imagination of the interpreter. The authors of the article show that “Other Chimeras” is a compressed catalog of historical events and people, their actions and words. Also, this cycle is filled with some characters of the religious and mythological heritage of mankind. In the second part of the article, the authors proposed (for the first time in domestic literary studies) their own translation of “Other Chimeras” into Ukrainian. In order for the reader to better understand the specifics of Nerval’s mature work, this translation of the sonnets is literal. In this way, we managed to reproduce as much as possible and not damage the semantic and informational level of the original, without missing a single “tangle” of reminiscences, allusions, metaphors and hints, which are so rich in these five sonnets. Thanks to this form of translation, the reader will be able to imagine the complexity and, to some extent, the inexpediency of literary translation of Nerval’s poems. Finally, the authors of the article show that the mature work and in particular mini-cycle “Other Chimeras” of the named French writer can be perceived as the starting point of literature in its modern form. Which, on the one hand, gives Nerval’s texts even greater cultural and historical significance, and on the other hand, opens up virtually limitless possibilities for its interpretation by future researchers.

O artigo busca refletir sobre as relações entre leitura e criação na obra de Gérard de Nerval a partir da recente reedição de uma antologia dos poetas do Século XVI realizada pelo autor em 1830 (Choix des poésies de Ronsard, Du Bellay, Baïf, Belleau, Du Bartas, Chassignet, Desportes, Régnier). Pelo projeto da antologia o poeta se engaja na batalha pelo Romantismo na França. A consideração de seu trabalho como compilador abre espaço para uma série de reflexões a respeito da porosidade de fronteiras no domínio literário (entre os gêneros, entre criação e crítica, memória e invenção literárias...). O modo como, na antologia de Nerval, essas fronteiras são transgredidas, permite-nos ainda colocar sua obra em diálogo com algumas formulações do pensamento romântico alemão.

The black sun is one of most striking images in Mandelstam's poetry. It is identified as an symbol by Kiril Taranovsky, but only casually, in a chapter entitled Bees and Wasps: Mandel'stam and Vjaceslav Ivanov (87), with reference to a poem by Ivanov1 and no mention of black sun image in Mandelstam.2 Iu. P. Ivask, in an introductory essay to third volume of Mandelstam's Collected Works3 mentions that black sun image is found in Gerard de Nerval's sonnet El Desdichado, and observes that this is hardly a coincidence, as the entire poetics of Mandelstam is akin to Nerval, though it has not been proven that former had read latter (3: xi). Gerard de Nerval is French poet who was closest to German Romanticism and its Naturphilosophie.4 But neither Ivask nor lengthy essay on black sun image (Chernoe solntse, SS 3:404-411) explicitly identifies this image as orphic. A definition of is in order. The myth of Orpheus has him, a Thracian prince and son of Muse Calliope, attain a power of song that would charm even wild beasts. When his wife Euridice died, Orpheus descended to Hades and charmed guardians of nether world into allowing Euridice to return to world of living, under condition that he would not cast a glance at her before leaving confines of Hades. Orpheus forgot this stipulation and lost Euridice forever. The myth of Orpheus and Euridice has found an echo in many works of world literature, including Russian.5 It also appears in Mandelstam, but it is not per se source of orphic imagery, such as that of a black sun.6 Rather, orphic imagery is derived from religious cults founded by Orpheus. The evidence on these cults from classical antiquity is sparse and contradictory. In particular, Orpheus's relation to Dionysus is problematic. Legend has it that Orpheus was torn to pieces by Maenads for favoring Apollo over Dionysus, but then, too, he is often identified with Dionysus, the suffering god. The pursuit of moral and physical purity is orphic, but so are Dionysian revels. The orphic tendency to a dualist worldview

One of the first victims of, and rebels against, modernity, Gerard de Nerval attempted to redefine the boundaries of his own subjectivity through a remapping and enveloping of both internal and external, remembered and perceived space. The folding of space frees the subject from logical constraints and allows for nearly limitless recreations of the self. Nerval's use of the fold coincides with the definition provided by Gilles Deleuze in Le Pli. According to Deleuze, the fold is the philosophical and aesthetic figure that structures the work of Leibniz and the Baroque. Deleuze's reading of the Baroque proposes that, le propre du Baroque est non pas de tomber dans l'illusion ni d'en sortir, c'est de realiser quelque chose dans l'illusion meme, ou de lui communiquer une presence spirituelle qui redonne a ses pieces et morceaux une unite collective. (2) In this sense, we could call the folds of Nerval's texts baroque; the and Sylvie realize through folds in the text the illusion of the unity of the subject, a unity based on the inextricability of folds in matter to the folds of the perceiving or hallucinating subject. Inside and outside, memory and reality are confused and hallucinated in the fold, which is the site of a perpetually shifting subject. Through a crossed reading of Nerval's obscure and one of his most illustrious works, Sylvie, this essay explores the liberating possibilities as well as the eventual dangers of a spatial conceptualization of the subject. The juxtaposition of the and Sylvie uncovers the centrality of the fold to Nerval's spatial and textual imagination. In these two texts, he abandons the logical, modernist Cartesian grid in favor of the ambiguous, curved fold, as the distinction between inside and outside disappears in the pleats of his convoluted narrative. Nerval's folds manipulate space itself to envelop the subject in the world. Nerval's quixotic quest is to unify his visions, to create his illusions at will, to make the world conform to his desire. I. Il n'y a pas de Nuits des temps The document commonly referred to as Nerval's Genealogie fantastique (3) presents an extraordinary enfolding of social and psychic space through the condensation of hundreds of genealogical annotations onto a single manuscript page. Probably composed at the end of March 1841 during Nerval's first internment in the clinic of Dr. Esprit Blanche, (4) the predates the Voyage en Orient and anticipates the obsessions of Les Filles du feu (1854) and Aurelia (1855). According to Jean Richer, the first version of Aurelia (also from 1841) presents remarkable similarities to the Genealogie, which suggests that 1841 may indeed be the defining moment of Nerval's imagination. (5) Richer and Jean-Pierre Richard have done considerable work to situate the within Nerval's opus and to interpret the development of the inner logic of the manuscript. (6) However, the form of the Genealogie, its quality as image, has literally been overlooked, despite the fact that the tension between the visible and readable is key to the interpretation of this labyrinthine text. The is devoted to three uneven parts of Nerval's inner world: his father's family (Labrunie), his mother's family (Laurent), and his literary pseudonym (Nerval). As many critics have remarked, Nerval is the anagram of his mother's maiden name (LAVRENt), a partial anagram of his father's name (LAbRVNiE), and the name of his maternal uncle's property, the clos de Nerval. Nerval claims that the property near Senlis was an ancient Roman camp and traces the name back to the twelfth Roman emperor, Nerva. The literary/textual name Nerval links the two families Labrunie and Laurent and situates them in space and epic time. The sets out to create the matrix from which Gerard Labrunie de Nerval emerges. The goal of the drawing and the lineage is to make sense (both as meaning and as direction) of the disparate origins of the self. …

Using Jungian research into the similarities between dream material and the symbolism of medieval alchemy as a departure point, the author analyses the last work of Gerard de Nerval, Aurelia, from the angle of alchemical symbolism. The latter is integrated into the literary work, going beyond the allegorical interpretation of alchemy.

Gerard de Nerval: The Poet as Social Visionary

What is Tradition? We usually (and wrongly) think it coincides with History. It would be better to think of Traditions , that is various experiences that co-exist in history and can be picked up to build on one’s system of values to be passed on to future generations. Our knowledge is actually based on traditions, and literature makes no exception. In this paper the author shows how one tradition, i.e. the comic-humoristic one, has marked European culture and literature. Its extraordinary genealogy has been written down by Gerard de Nerval: from Apuleius through Petronius, Swift, Diderot, Voltaire, up to Lawrence Sterne. Nevertheless, in the course of time, the comic-humoristic tradition has been able to attract many other novelists, poets and artists who have brilliantly enriched our cultural experience. It is possible to go back to the nineteenth century and track down many lines of the comic-humoristic tradition acting in European cultures, in order to show their dynamics, their interactions and their influence even at the outset of children’s literature.

A woman I had loved for a long time, and a woman I shall call Aurelia, was lost to me. (Gerard de Nerval) Being no longer controlled by the powerful impulses of ‘common sense’ and the ‘normal’, the...

Chateaubriand gives French romanticism its first impetus withLe Genie du christianisme, a work that proclaims, in aesthetic and literary matters, the superiority of the Christian religion over the polytheism of the classics. It has long been believed that the romantic period coincided in France with a notable decrease of the fortune and the influence of the Greco-Roman world. This is far from certain: In 1852, Baudelaire attacks the representatives of what he calls “L'Ecole paienne” (“The Pagan School”). Gerard de Nerval, Theophile Gautier and Heinrich Heine are the authors Baudelaire is mainly aiming at. What is, in the French romantic accord, the importance of that “Ecole paienne”? What part does Greco-Roman polytheism play in Nerval's work, especially in theVoyage en Orient and inLes Chimeres? This revival of ancient paganism constituted a weapon for scepticism against the Christian religion and the Catholic church.

This chapter suggests that the drastic description of history as a series of revolutionary departures found a counterpart in autobiographical endeavors that were more and more choreographed across threshholds. It introduces three written-down autobiographies, but related house stories to explore fully the labor of archiving the private and historical conditions that enabled such activity. The first house story comes from the French writer Chateaubriand. In his novel Rene , Chateaubriand reenacts the homecomings of the French emigres, after a decade of exile. The second house story indicates the way household inventory was made available to write about loss and authenticity. In an 1853 short story, Gerard de Nerval sends his hero to the countryside to reclaim a lost lover whom he had abandoned for the city life of Paris. Final house story comes from Godey's Lady Book , the most widely circulated American magazine in the first half of the nineteenth century. Keywords: autobiography; Chateaubriand; drastic history; French emigres; Gerard de Nerval; Godey's Lady Book ; Rene ; short stories

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Gérard de Nerval. The Poet as Social Visionary. By KARI LOKKE. (French Forum Monographs,66). Lexington, Kentucky: FrenchForum. 1987. 166 pp. NORMA RINSLER NORMA RINSLER LONDON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XLII, Issue 3, July 1988, Pages 353–354, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XLII.3.353 Published: 01 July 1988

Gerard de Nerval was a French writer, poet and essayist, precursor of surrealism that used for the first time this word in literature and influenced many modern writers. Since the age of 32, Nerval had recurrent psychotic episodes mixed with a severe depression, leading to many hospitalizations, and finally to his death. This mental disease clearly influenced his works and provided originality to his prose and poetry. However no clear explanation has ever been given to his mental disorder. We analyzed the clinical data available from his own works and the opinion of his close friends and postulate the hypothesis that Nerval had a mood disorder.