Lire Nerval au 21e siècle (review)

This is an intriguing and occasionally puzzling collection of essays ostensibly aimed, as its subtitle Invitation au monde nervalien pour les jeunes lecteurs suggests, at attracting younger readers to the work of a currently under-researched author. Certainly, several of the authors are recognized as having already contributed to much serious Nerval scholarship, and yet Hisashi Mizuno's short introduction, addressing young readers of unspecified age, leaves it unclear how each chapter contributes to the volume's rather hazy objectives, and how their sometimes radically different tones may be reconciled. It is unfortunate that, from the outset, the gently encouraging tone is unintentionally condescending, as Mizuno asks, 'Aimez-vous la littérature? [. . .] Nous, nous aimons la littérature et nous sommes passionnés par Nerval, "notre" poète et écrivain, au point de l'appeler parfois Gérard comme un de nos amis' (p. 5). As such, whereas the recent proliferation of Cambridge Companions to French literature clearly targets a mature undergraduate readership, one is unsure precisely how young the intended reader is here. Jacques Bony's contribution, for example, takes the form of an imaginary dialogue with his three teenage grandchildren, in which, using his own paperback edition, he explains the narrative intricacies of Sylvie. As an epigraph, the reader is warned, 'Trop sérieux, s'abstenir!', but the constant opposition between the sketch of impatient, unsophisticated, popular culture-obsessed teenagers and the grandfather's laborious didacticism quickly grates —a shame, since the observations which emerge, on narrative complexity, voice, tense, the unstable nature of truth and autofiction, might be useful to a class of collégiens, but the laboured packaging suggests on the contrary an elaborate joke for initiés. Of the twelve contributions, a couple are rather insubstantial, but gradually the chatty, personal tone subsides in favour of some high-quality introductions to a wide variety of Nerval's output, in which 'El Desdichado', Sylvie, Aurélia and Voyage en Orient loom large, but which also includes examples of Nerval's journalism, with Michel Brix comparing internet hoaxes with similar phenomena in nineteenth-century print media. Some of the weightier contributions are excellent, unafraid of maintaining a scholarly tone; Guy Barthèlemy on the encounter with the Other in travel writing; Henri Bonnet on the symbolic opposition between darkness and light; and Françoise Sylvos on the centre-periphery dialectic and social structures from the fonctionnaire to the bohème. Christian Leroy offers sensitive reflections on madness and humorous self-irony, deftly separating autobiography and narrative, and the volume closes with two comparative studies, Fatiha Dahmani on time, memory and l'indicible in Sylvie, Proust and Luchino Visconti, and Bruno Trismans on suicide, belief, loss and the volcano's destructive force in Nerval and Emmanuel Roblès' Le Vésuve (1961). Overall, one feels that, despite this volume's reductive and caricatural opposition between literature and 'lesser' teenage distractions such as the internet, video games and mobile phones, its heart is in the right place; frequently bursting with evangelical zeal for both Nerval and literature itself, it ultimately offers inexperienced readers some useful tools with which to read sensitively, imaginatively and confidently, as well as some fresh insights into Nerval for more confirmed scholars.