La Chimere: Tombeau de Nerval (review)

Froment-Meurice, Marc. La Chimère: Tombeau de Nerval. Paris: Editions Befin, 2001. Pp. 201. ISBN 27011-2938-9

Marc Froment-Meurice's new book, La Chimère: Tombeau de Nerval, appears in Michel Deguy's collection, "L'Extrême Contemporain," published by Belin. Belin also published Marc Froment-Meurice's Tombeau de Trakl in 1992. The parallel title places Gérard de Nerval in the company of modernist poets whose works trans-formed the literature of modernity. The paradox of the title - the fantasmatic construction of the object of desire that returns as the writer's "tombeau" or eulogy, the symbolic life after death - hints at the challenge of reading Nerval's writing from beyond the threshold of beliefs in the occult, medical and moral diagnoses of madness, and other elements that may distract the reader from an encounter with the text as a work of verbal art. Marc Froment-Meurice's book rises to the occasion, and takes seriously the task of reading Nerval, at times against the grain of critical assessments of Nerval's life and work. The result is a book that opens Pandora's box to explore the role of subjectivity in the writing of modernity: Froment-Meurice guides the reader through some of the most difficult aspects of Nerval's œuvre.

In the course of this exploration, the author brings to life a range of questions that shape Nerval's writings as well as a century and a half of Nerval reception. With Aurélia as its centerpiece, the book takes up a wide range of texts and topics to examine Nerval's writing of occult spirituality and antiquity, birth and death, love and loss; Paris, the provinces, and the Orient; actresses, artists, and intellectuals in bohemian Paris; travel and the observation of otherness; and the encounters of philosophy, literature, and experience that are played out in language. The book focuses on Nerval's writing of dreams, fantasy, repetition, and consciousness, the key elements that distinguish poetic prose and poetry from the writing of his con-temporaries.

The chimaera and the literary tomb of the book's title - the idealized fantastic creation and the elegiac consecration of the artist - locate the process of reading Nerval's double life of dreams in and around the text of Aurélia. Reading Nerval challenges the reader across several disciplines and discourses: literary criticism and history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Marc Froment-Meurice discusses Nerval in the context of contemporary approaches to literature and philosophy, and in view of his own contributions to the study of modernity. The book explores the fictional constructions, repetitions, and points of no return. The approach to reading, the treatment of the text as a literary work, allows the author to reassess Nerval's writing outside the frame of psychology where even the Daughters of Fire, in spite of the text's status as one of the finest works of late romantic and early modernist French prose, have been imprisoned.

In the essay on Baudelaire that Marcel Proust wrote on his deathbed, a few sentences indicate Proust's admiration for Nerval as one of the greatest writers of early modern poetic prose. Marc Froment-Meurice's book will interest readers of trans-romantic modernity, and all those who wish to see Nerval's work reassessed in this light. Beyond the thirteenth hour, the death sentence that occurs under a black sun, the chimaera at the center of Nerval's work (and of La Chimère: Tombeau de Nerval) lives on as a fugitive presence, a figure for the specters that continue to haunt us as readers, writers, and subjects of time.