Œuvres complètes, xiii : Aurélia, ou, Le Rêve et la vie by Gérard de Nerval (review)

This is the second volume of an ambitious, projected multi-volume edition of Gérard de Nerval’s Œuvres complètes, to appear under the general editorship of Jean-Nicolas Illouz (for volume I (2011) see French Studies, 67 (2013), 108–09). While it is undoubtedly useful to have a new, clearly printed, and minutely annotated edition (with footnotes on each page) of this major classic of nineteenth-century French literature, Illouz does not make clear in his preliminary discussion or in his commentaries why a new edition is now needed. Nor does he state in what way his edition supersedes Jean Guillaume’s critical edition in the third volume of Guillaume and Claude Pichois’s three-volume Œuvres complètes in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Gallimard, 1984–91). The volume opens with an interesting introduction, ‘“Un mille-pattes romantique”: Aurélia de Gérard de Nerval ou le livre et la vie’, in which Illouz retraces the influence of Apuleius, Dante, and Swedenborg on Nerval’s project, and situates the narrative in the context of contes initiatiques and visionary works of the Romantic period. This is followed by a ‘Note sur l’histoire et l’établissement du texte’, in which Illouz stresses the uncertainty (‘cette précarité’) of the status of the text, which stems from the fact that Nerval had revised and corrected Part I of Aurélia after its first publication, but had not authorized or, quite possibly, even finalized the text of Part II, which was published in the Revue de Paris mere days after the author’s death. In an appendix entitled ‘Fragments manuscrits’, Illouz also includes seven colour plates reproducing reduced facsimiles of several pages of those ‘fragments’, or drafts, of the second part of Aurélia, which are now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Also reproduced here, with an introduction but without a transcription, is the facsimile of the two-page ‘Généalogie fantastique’, a complex and almost impenetrable manuscript consisting of Nerval’s rambling notes and elaborate musings on his name, ancestry, and family history. There is also a detailed bibliography and an index of names. All in all, this is a rather confusing publication: Guillaume’s new Pléiade edition remains authoritative. Illouz does not make clear which of the manuscript fragments that he has included have previously been published, or which ones he is publishing here for the first time. He provides no detailed or comprehensive listing of all the extant manuscripts of Aurélia, many of which have been published before. One is left asking why these few manuscript fragments have been selected for inclusion and photographic reproduction in this edition, which could have attempted to include them all.