제라르 드 네르발과 '부재의 원본'

Abstract

This study addresses Nerval’s obsession with resemblance, which continuously haunted hid mind. Many critics have revealed the importance of Nerval’s mental illness in his creative life. Through his writing, Nerval wanted to place a certain distance from his own self, abolish time, and distinguish between appearance and essence; he attempted to access the spiritual universe through reverie and “l’épanchement du songe dans la vie réelle (the outpouring of dreams in real life).” By doing so, he tried to cross the “portes d’ivoire (ivory doors)” and consciously externalize the hallucinatory delirium that overtook him during periods of manic excitement, as he did not believe in his insanity. The obsession with the image of a mother who disappeared precociously takes on considerable importance in Nerval’s life. The attempt to resuscitate this love déjà perdu (already lost) through figures, both imaginary and real, bears witness to the solitude of his narcissistic world; the Nervalian object of desire is reduced to an ideal, life-saving image. Nerval’s various feminine figures are inseparable and repeat a supreme mode, ‘l’Unique (the one and only)’. The quest for l’Unique comes from the feeling of abandonment connected to the premature disappearance of his mother as well as the unfortunate love Nerval carried for the singer Jenny Colon, whom he excessively idealized. Nerval never stops looking for this mother, who was never present except in these substitutive representations, the resemblances of resemblances of appearances. The Nervalian desire is linked in essence to an image, not to the real object of his love. The more the image of the female is reduced to a sublime idea, and the more its absence is represented, the better it coincides with “l’amour des formes vagues, (...) des fantômes métaphysiques (the love of vagus forms, (...) metaphysical phantoms) so dear to Nerval. Nerval attempts to assemble all his feminine figures in the hope of finding ‘l’Unique’: his work is a true syncretism studded with the diverse incarnations of ‘l’Unique’. He creates a real woman in the form of a mythological and deified figure; Adrienne crowned with laurels comparable to Dante’s Beatrice “qui sourit au poète errant sur la lisière des saintes demeures (who smiles at the poet wandering on the border of holy dwellings),” makes her appearance again in an allegorical representation of the Abbey of Châalis. Adriennce bathed in angelic light is a spiritualized image and a mediator. With the death of Adriennce at the end, “l’original éblouissant (the splendid original)” becomes nothing more than a copy of copies: love for his, thus, is always “déjà perdu”. He glides from one image to another in his successive metamorphoses to find l’Unique, but each image, always on the run, is only a copy of “l’original de l’absence(the original of the absence)”, of his entirely sacred mother; the repetition does nothing but emphasize “la non-existence(the non-existence)”. The feminine phantoms torment Nerval as much as they appeal to him; “C’est la mort-ou la Morte,,, O délice! o tourment! (It is death-or the dead... Oh delight! Oh torment!)”