‘새로운 오르페’, 제라르 드 네르발의 ‘지옥으로의 하강’

Abstract

The beginning was experience of loss or losing. As Nerval knew neither the warmth of family ties nor the support of God, he searched for invariable and unique truth sometimes in idealized women, sometimes in religion and philosophers before him. Nerval tried to reach the spiritual universe through reverie and “effusion of dream in real life”. Thus, he tried to break through “ivory or horn door,” to consciously exteriorize hallucinatory delirium that seized him, because he did not believe in his insanity. Nervalian reverie feeds on mysticism, sensualism, paganism, and Christianity, constituting scholarly syncretism. To Nerval, dream is a downfall to the hell of reason. Gérard Labrunie adopted ‘Nerval,’ an anagram of ‘l’averne,’ as his pseudonym. The onomastic destiny points to the fate of Orpheus who pursues impossible love and becomes a ‘widower’, who is ‘inconsolable’ from the loss of his beloved, Eurydice; the name serves a double purpose as a revealer and a trigger. Nerval searched for support from dreams to free himself from the constraints of time and to break through the entrance to another world, reclaiming the right to live in his dream, apart from “what people agreed to call reason.” Nerval identified himself with great heroes from various legends and myths. He especially identified himself with Orpheus who is generally considered as the ‘archetype of poets’. Nerval, who is chimerical, confirms mysteriously rejoining his lost love beyond obscure barriers of death, breaking through Acheron after the Orpheus model. The myth takes place outside of temporality, and allows our new Orpheus to escape from time and reach the mysteries of life. The myth of Orpheus is generally made of following five themes: ‘Orpheus-traveler,’ ‘Orpheus-lover,’ ‘Orpheus-poet,’ ‘Orpheus-initiated,’ and finally, ‘Orpheus-dying’. We meet ‘the new Orpheus’ who is separated from the love of his life; no woman can belong to the ‘morose’ and ‘inconsolable’ ‘widower’. The narrator of Aurélia compares his own ordeals to “a fall to hell”. Reincarnating Orpheus’s fate, he falls into his soul to conquer death; he is reunited with his ‘new Eurydice’ and finds celestial happiness. Nerval, our ‘new Orpheus,’ becomes the victorious, transgressing Hades’s law: “I crossed Acheron twice as a vanquisher."