Œuvres complètes, I: Choix des poésies de Ronsard, Du Bellay, Baïf, Belleau, Du Bartas, Chassignet, Desportes, Régnier (review)

Gérard de Nerval retains his unique ability to infect every publication of his works with the virus of doubt about what constitutes authorship and what constitutes an author, questions that make him an inexhaustibly contemporary writer, but just as inexhaustibly fertile in possibilities for editors. This is the first ever critical edition of Nerval’s anthology of Renaissance poets (and as a critical edition it is certainly excellent, give or take a few rather bewildering misprints). The decision to publish this work, dating from 1830, as the first volume in the projected Classiques Garnier edition of Nerval’s complete works, is clearly intended to signal a new approach to those questions about authorship. It was by no means the first work that Nerval published, nor is it obviously attractive to the general or academic reader. The Pléiade Œuvres complètes, published under the direction of Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois between 1984 and 1993, did not include it, on the grounds that an anthology is not a work by the anthologizer. Precisely for that reason, this book gives Emmanuel Buron and Jean-Nicolas Illouz the perfect opportunity to set out their distinctive approach to editing Nerval’s works. ‘Il s’agissait pour nous de justifier la publication intégrale de ce Choix dans les Œuvres de Nerval en considérant que ce Choix lui-même participait pleinement de la création nervalienne’, they write (p. 64). This they accomplish, in the extensive prefatory material and notes, by showing how Nerval shaped his selection of poems in order to present his own picture of sixteenth-century poetry, so that it appears both as a forebear of the evolution of poetry in Nerval’s time, and as the cradle of Nerval’s own developing private imaginary and symbolic world. In pursuit of this aim, as the editors show, the selection of poems that suited his preferred themes was by no means Nerval’s only strategy. He recentred poems around those preferred themes, by the simple expedient of cutting sections that obscured them; he was not above rewriting the occasional line; and he showed himself already a master of the frame, of the contextualizing title (not infrequently apocryphal), and of the effect of juxtaposing poems that their author had originally published separately or in other contexts. By carefully documenting these strategies, by relating them to the state of French literature in 1830 as well as to the current and future development of Nerval’s own art, the editors succeed in presenting this book as one that any ‘nervalien’ (and, indeed, anyone interested in how the nineteenth century learned to see the poetry of the sixteenth) really ought to read. In the process, Buron and Illouz also succeed in justifying their own approach to defining and presenting his complete works. This new edition, therefore, has a legitimate place in every library with a Nerval section, and on the shelf of every ‘nervalien’. Let us hope that Garnier continues to support it through what is bound to be many years of painstaking editorial work.