Aurelia, precede des Illumines et de Pandora, and: Les Filles du Feu, Les Chimeres et autres texts (review)

Brix, Michel, and Claude Pichois, eds. Nerval Aurélia, précédé des Illuminés et de Pandora. Introduction, notes et dossier par Michel Brix. Livre de Poche classique, 10. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1999. Pp. 512. ISBN 2-253-09631-8

Brix, Michel, ed. Nerval Les Filles du Feu, Les Chimères et autres textes. Livre de Poche classique, 9. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1999. Pp. 476. ISBN 2-253-93287-6

After the brilliant collaboration of Michel Brix and Claude Pichois on their magis-terial biography of Nerval, high praise from Pichois for his colleague's work on the second Pléiade edition of Nerval's Œuvres complètes, and the originality of Brix's more recent Les déesses absentes: vérité et simulacre dans l'œuvre de Gérard de Nerval and Le romantisme français: esthétique platonicienne et modernité littéraire, we have come to expect meticulous scholarship of great substance from Michel Brix. These splendidly edited volumes, with introduction and history of the texts involved, chronology, and select bibliography, as well as a very useful lexicology for the collections of sonnets that comprise "Mysticisme" and "Les Chimères," easily confirm Brix as one of the foremost Nervalian critics of our time.

The fact that most of Nerval's work first appeared in periodicals, frequently more than once, inevitably led to capricious editings in turn copied by other editors, com-pounded by the fact that, at the time of his suicide on 26 January 1855, Nerval had neither prepared a definitive version of his work nor completed all of it. In his introduction to volume 9, Brix observes that "le plus grand désordre a régné dans la documentation jusqu'au seuil du dernier tiers du XX^e siècle" (9) - a fact at the basis of the second Pléiade edition. He offers the analogy that the editors of the Revue de Paris, dealing in 1855 with fragments and versions of Aurélia whose order had not been established by the author, faced a situation reminiscent of the one that confronted those attempting to put order in the scraps of paper which ultimately became Pascal's Pensées. Renewed interest in Nervalian studies is characterized by a return to original texts - of which Brix is a champion. Philological studies by his colleague Jean Guillaume at Namur have focused on the various types of ink used by Nerval, e.g., the red ink that he used in autumn 1853, which has permitted the definitive structuring of Aurélia.

Volume 9 contains an outstanding introduction of forty-four pages in which Brix reminds us that the great Nervalien texts were all composed after 1841, date of the first crise de folie, thus were written by an author believed to be crazy by his con-temporaries, that Nerval was after this date the only person to believe in himself, and that at the time of his death in 1855 he was far from famous. While the madness of others forms Les Illuminés, Nerval's own bouts with madness are at the basis of Pandora and Aurélia.

"La bibliothèque de mon oncle," the Avant-propos to Les Illuminés, begins with the portentous claim, "Il n'est pas donné à tout le monde d'écrire l'Éloge de la Folie." The six protagonists of Les Illuminés, inspired by Nerval's painful confinement while under treatment for his crises de folie, were often considered irrational by their contemporaries and blur the demarcation between madness and sanity: "Les Illuminés proposent un constant jeu de balancier: l'auteur ne cache rien des tares de ses héros, mais souligne, en contrepoint, tout ce qui fait l'intérêt...