Critical Fictions

Nerval's "Les Illumines"

Meryl Tyers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781900755153
• eBook ISBN: 9781351198899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Nerval's ""Les Illumines"" (1852) has often been seen as a problem text, and as a strange supplement to his masterpieces ""Les Chimeres"", ""Les Filles du feu"", and ""Aurelia"". In this first book-length study, in English or French, of ""Les Illumines"", Meryl Tyers argues that it is a complex work of art in its own right and that its originality has been obscured by the tangled publishing history of its individual narratives. Tyers re-examines that history and provides a complete documentary basis for critical discussion of the work. She also traces the critical response from the earliest reviews through to the scholarly editions and studies of the present day. Tyers's own critical reading pays particular attention to 'La Bibliotheque de mon oncle', Nerval's intriguing preface. By investigating in detail those fragmentary structures and varying themes that may at first make the unity of ""Les Illumines"" seem elusive, she is able to show that subtle integrative mechanisms are at work in a volume that deserves to be placed among the highest achievements of this incomparable poet."

Chapter 1
Texts and Contexts

Introduction

The title Les Illuminés is allusive—but hardly enlightening. Initially, it may suggest an eighteenth-century sect, special personalities, and a mysterious symbolism connected with light. Somewhere, nevertheless, between the restrictive dictionary definitions of Illuminati and the abstract concept of illumination, one can locate a matrix of factual information, fictional construction and meaningful indeterminacy, in the shape of this series of biographies which constantly defy both categorization and synthesis. In the French language, it is not Gérard de Nerval but Rimbaud who is credited with having revived the use, current in English but obscure in the French of his contemporaries, of illumination to mean a colourful coverage of margins using illustration; in the French lexicon, this semantic gap had for centuries been filled by the word enluminure, and since the sixteenth century illumination had not been used. In Littré’s definition of illuminer, under ‘Historique du mot’, the following sixteenth-century example is given from La Boétie: ‘Les petits enfans qui, pour voir les luisans images de livres illuminez, apprennent à lire’.¹ Yet, in defiance of linguistic diachrony (Rimbaud was three months old when Nerval died), Les Illuminés are indeed metaphorically illuminations—they use the medium of narrative in an illustrative treatment of marginal figures.

The attitude taken in many critiques of Les Illuminés, overtly or not, is that this work represents a series of marginalia in comparison with Nerval’s more characteristic and poetic work; the individual pieces are picturesque illuminations which are held to refer us inexorably to some more significant part of the Nervalian page. For readers familiar with the other mature Nervalian texts—the multi-layered temporal structures of Sylvie and the other Filles du Feu, the hermetic symbolism of Les Chimères or the tantalizing visions of Aurélia—Les Illuminés may perhaps seem peripheral. Its style is heterogeneous, its themes eclectic, and one has to work to recognize the luminous and characteristic brilliance which draws Nerval’s work into the sights of so much scholarly enquiry. More problematically still, it is questionable whether Les Illuminés offers a prototype for that elusive definitive text and heroic enterprise, the Nervalian autobiography.² But I would argue that, far from being the end of the story, these features are just the beginning of an interpretative quest. What we have here is not an arbitrary agglomeration, but a text which, as well as a collection of individual prose pieces, can be read as a singular, intra-textually patterned entity.

There is a need to redress the balance in favour of a text which repays closer attention, especially when read as a nexus of individual prose pieces whose whole is more than the simple sum of its parts. Its parts vary in style and focus, but those who know the complex relationships into which one must delve to make sense of Nerval’s work and its textual histories will be familiar with the sense of a cluster or network of writings constantly rearranged in the imagination and on the page, whose every published form, such as the one with which we shall be dealing here, could be considered a snapshot, one frame in the flow of a reel of film.

In the light of the need for a reassessment of extant material, along with the possibility of a justifiably different reading of Les Illuminés, my aims here are broadly twofold. The first is to discern and delineate the significance of Les Illuminés in the range of Nerval’s total output. This significance is partly defined by the perspectives of Nerval and of his time. The development of French literature over a twelve-year period can be traced in the lineaments of Les Illuminés: its first study, ‘Le Roi de Bicêtre’, dates from 1839, just past the height of the Romantic movement in France, and the last from 1852, in the period of artistic disillusionment and intellectual alienation following the coup d’état and the renewal of strict censorship. Its significance can also be defined by the horizons of current scholarly attitudes to Les Illuminés, at the point to which these attitudes have evolved over the course of the twentieth century—a century whose radical reinterpretation of

Nerval’s importance began with the enlightened intervention of Proust. The assessment of perspectives ‘external’ to the work is grounded, of course, in the conventions of fact and of history. But comparing the history Les Illuminés overtly traces with its blurring of many of the factual markers of that same history is only one critical option. My second aim is to foster a critical reading of this text as something other than a flawed collection of unreliable biographical documents. An adequate reading of the poetically significant content, as opposed to merely the factual documentation and inexactitude, of the whole work is necessary to our understanding of this transition phase in the author’s career.

In examining Les Illuminés as a text with polyvalent interpretative possibilities, I do not attempt exhaustive comparisons with Nerval’s sources, or diverge at length into discussion of much-investigated mystical and Masonic themes which have already received critical attention, although I briefly cover the historical basis of Illuminism, which is important to understanding Nerval’s very individual inflection of the subject in Les Illuminés. There is no lack of learned comment on the occult and the esoterically symbolic in Nerval’s writing, nor on the ‘portes d’ivoire ou de corne’ which separate Nerval’s consciousness of time and of history from more conventional ones. Les Illuminés can always be made to fit with ease into thematic studies on these areas of interest because of its subject. The work of Jean Richer, of course, epitomizes the extensive exploration of critical avenues linked to Freemasonry and mysticism: he underlines the significance of Les Illuminés (‘La lecture des Illuminés demeure, croyons-nous, indispensable à qui veut prendre une vue complète de la biographie intellectuelle de l’écrivain,’ API 2, xii), but for reasons which differ substantially from those proposed here: ‘Elle [la lecture du texte] ne peut que faciliter la pénétration du reste de son œuvre et, singulièrement, des Chimères. Et, en elle-même, la biographie de Jacques Cazotte mérite de prendre place parmi les meilleurs récits de Gérard’. This is a combination of reference outward to a text seen as more central and a personal opinion which is by no means a majority’ view of ‘Jacques Cazotte’. But research into mysticism and (often contentious) Masonic linkages in no way exhausts the possibilities opened up by the thematics of this text.

The assertion that Les Illuminés has been wrongly viewed as a marginal text or a series of ‘unusable’ fragments might be countered by the comment that it has not often been the object of exclusive critical attention because of the transparent importance of its themes to central Nervalian preoccupations, so that it calls up immediate and unavoidable references to its Nervalian intertexts, as it does for Richer, in my previous example. However, even a quite simple test, quantifying the frequency with which articles referring principally to Les Illuminés occur, soon reveals the lesser degree of attention accorded to it, compared, for example, with Les Filles du Feu or Le Voyage en Orient, two other major texts which take the form of compilations. A search, using the entire run of the Cahiers Gérard de Nerval and based both on titles of articles and on titles occurring in the ‘Bibliographie’ and ‘Livres reçus’ sections (excluding translations), yields the following proportions of items on the most well-known texts:

Les Filles du Feu or its elements (of which items on Sylvie	58 33)
Amélia	56
Le Voyage en Orient	34
Les Chimères	34
Les Illuminés (of which items on one piece in isolation	16 10)

The Cahiers do not provide an exhaustive record by any means, but this dedicated journal was one of only two such, representing a major strand of opinion in Nerval studies at their time of publication, and the amounts of attention accorded to the respective texts are a fair guide to the proportions found elsewhere.³

Three different strategies are brought into play in this study: textual history, critical discourse (contemporary and modern) and finally a move towards new readings. This first chapter looks at the relevant conditions in which Nerval decided to publish his book, what it represented in his writing career and what it meant or did not mean in relation to his political stance at the time, particularly in the context of one of its two subtitles. Each narrative that makes up Les Illuminés is briefly commented upon. Reassessing some of the letters written just after the recently revised publication date of this text has led me to reviews of it not indicated in the Nouvelle Pléiade edition. Nerval’s attempts to obtain reviews of his new book, reflected in letters, are an indication of his attitude towards his writing at this time, as is the fact of combining previously published pieces such as these in one volume. Contemporary reviews are discussed: they shed light on literary preoccupations of the time as well as providing an understanding of the implications the book would be deemed to have by a contemporary readership. Chapter 2 surveys the editions of Les Illuminés and critical commentaries focusing on the whole text. Studies of individual sections of the work cannot be overlooked, although they fragment what I read as a single work; yet, as an assemblage of disparate information their insights remain valuable especially where they unintentionally illuminate an aspect which runs through the collection. My survey of related scholarship thus relies on the distinction already drawn between two opposing ways of looking at Les Illuminés: studies which comment on a single constituent part, and which can often make this depend entirely for its significance on associations with Nerval’s other work or with his own biography, are treated after those, less numerous, which treat the book as a whole. The possibilities for linking Les Illuminés with other pieces of writing are endless: they are and have been regularly exploited. Such links as have been made must of course be taken into account, but there is an equal need to draw out and discuss its many intra-textual resonances. I argue that the text should be treated both as singular (it is a collection whose publication the author supervised and for which he wrote a prefatory statement) and as plural (these texts are heterogeneous narratives first published at different times and in diverse journals).

Factual contextualization and thematic interpretation eventually converge. Nerval’s interest in the (paradoxically) mystical rationalism of the eighteenth century is considered, and what may be meant or implied by his own use of the semantic field of Illuminism. The use of the word illuminés is informed by the small number of unequivocal definitions which can be found of the historical term, but Nerval’s implied and actual use of the term nevertheless personalizes these definitions, while his use of the related semantic field of illumination has affected its subsequent definitions as much as Rimbaud’s use of the same term. Attention shifts towards the meaning of illumination in its general senses, against a background of the imaginary library, and the whole becomes fundamental to the architectonics of the text’s cohesiveness. Some of the more prominent pre-texts and intertexts that can be identified are discussed. The final two chapters use images of private libraries and clandestine reading(s), as suggested by the themes of ‘La Bibliothèque de mon oncle’. By the end, therefore, the imaginatively involved reader or readers in the focus are present-day, rather than nineteenth-century, ones. The concluding emphasis is on finding a new response suited to modern readers of the Nervalian text, set against responses to other writings. Les Illuminés could be argued to be as innovative and suggestive as Nerval’s later prose, yet even if we remain sceptical on this point, it is traversed by passages of the prose style that is to come, and it certainly marks a crossroads in the development of later Nervalian writing.

Les Illuminés is diverse, diffuse but nevertheless cohesive, with aid from its ambiguous preface. To the extent that it is possible to speak of (or imply) ‘self-coherence’ in any Nervalian text, it is possible to say it of Les Illuminés. One way of identifying the ‘self-cohesive’ approach might be to call it structuralist-inspired. If so, then since it is possible to speak of an Analyse structurale des ‘Chimères’, as Jacques Geninasca does, despite their many outwardly referring elements, it should be possible to do so for Les Illuminés.⁴ However, there is no deliberate intent to follow a structuralist analysis here, or any prescription other than that of identifying the need for new readings, and suggesting ways in which these could usefully be approached.

Interpreting a text as perceptibly unified and self-indic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Conventions
• 1 Texts and Contexts
• 2 The Text and its Readers
• 3 Reading Nerval’s Library: Les Illuminés and the Literature of Eccentricity
• 4 The Library Catches Fire: Reading Proliferation
• Appendices
• Select Bibliography
• Index