L'Ecriture nervalienne du temps: L'Expérience de la temporalité dans l'oeuvre de Gérard de Nerval (review)

In Philippe Destruel's monumental study, L'Ecriture nervalienne du temps: l'expérience de la temporalité dans l'œuvre de Gérard de Nerval, the conceptual focus is Nerval's poetics of Time, allegorized with a capital letter. Time operates on and through Nerval's writings: a diachronic reading distinguishes the critic's approach from a thematic treatment of temporality. In this study of Nerval's major writings, the author emphasizes the importance of a diachronic reading, exemplified by Frank Paul Bowman's Gérard de Nerval: la conquête de soi par l'écriture. Nerval's protagonists and narrators struggle with the constraints of time – including the difficulty of apprehending the present moment, and the temptations of imagination and illusion. Nerval's thematic emphasis on flight is emblematic of the fictionalized struggle with time; the process of writing, however, uses ressouvenirs, retrospective acts of memory, to refine the portraits, fables, and autofictions of the provinces, Italy, and the Orient into the written works of the future.

Many studies of Nerval's poetics are anchored in the notion of space, but the layers of time, for Philippe Destruel, encompass Nerval's representations of space within a larger framework. The category of Time is dominant in the world according to Nerval; it is historical, cultural, subjective, and engaged in the process of creation. From within, notions of past, present, and future inform the writing of experience. This perspective, according to the author, allows for the possibility of coherent and precise readings of Nerval's richly varied and poetically accomplished oeuvre.

In Nerval's difficult lifetime and beyond it, through most of the twentieth century, the writer's battles with mental illness somewhat compromised his literary reputation. Destruel points toward the lack of critical rigor frequently attributed to Nerval's works, and the prevalence of dreaminess, space, and thematic approaches to isolated texts. (These critical positions might be the effects of Nerval's style, especially the widespread notion of Nerval's narrative "quest," fictionalized through a series of intimate voices in the first person singular.) In contrast to most of the major authors of nineteenth-century French literature, Nerval's work was not published in a chronological edition until 1983. With a focus on time as a vector into the oeuvre, Destruel retraces Nerval's strategies in writing and in rewriting, one text at a time. He focuses on the period between 1850 and 1854, when Nerval published new and final versions of many of his major works.

The author raises questions of historical and biographical relevance at appropriate moments in his analysis; the emphasis on Nerval's orientation toward the future – within the texts, but also in light of Nerval's considerable literary ambitions – challenges the enduring clichés of the mad romantic poet and the suicidal melancholic that were set in motion in Nerval's lifetime by some of his literary friends, especially Jules Janin and Alexandre Dumas. Destruel explores Nerval's Voyage en Orient with its traveller trying to escape the rigors of Paris, Nerval's impact as a playwright and translator at home and abroad, the wandering figures of the actor Brisacier, the courageous Angélique, young men looking for love, and others in flight from "destiny."

The impulse toward flight is a constant in Nerval's writings, and is in part related to his lifelong battles for recognition after Janin and Dumas spread the word of his premature disappearance into madness. Perhaps in response to the negative critical impact of the psychotic episodes that haunted Nerval's adult life and led to his tragic death, Destruel emphasizes the evolution of his texts, the orientation toward the future, and the literary ambitions that motivated Nerval. The author takes a radical position that is ultimately fruitful because it allows Nerval's works, rigorously constructed from one revision to the...