On Literature

THE MISTS OF THE VALOIS

I discovered Sylvie when I was twenty, almost by chance, and I read it knowing very little about Nerval. I read the story in a state of total innocence, and I was bowled over. Later I discovered that it had made the same impression on Proust as it did on me. I do not remember how I articulated this impression in the vocabulary I had then, especially as now I can only express it in Proust's words from the few pages he devotes to Nerval in Contre Sainte-Beuve (Against Sainte-Beuve).

Sylvie is certainly not, as Barrés (and a certain strand of "reactionary" criticism) insisted, a typically French, neoclassical idyll; it does not express a rootedness in the French soil (if anything, by the end the protagonist feels uprooted). Sylvie speaks to us of something that has unreal colors, the kind of thing we sometimes see when asleep and whose contours we would like to pin down, and which we inevitably lose when we awake. Sylvie is the dream of a dream, and its oneiric quality is such that "we are constantly compelled to go back to the preceding pages, to see where we are...." The colors in Sylvie are not those of a classic watercolor: Sylvie is of "a purple color, a pink-purple color like purple-violet satin, at the opposite pole from the watercolor tones of moderate France.'" It is a model not of "gracefulness full of restraint" but, rather, of a "morbid obsession." The atmosphere of Sylvie is "bluish and purple," although this atmosphere is found not in the words but in the spaces between one word and another: "like the mists in a morning at Chantilly."^*

Perhaps at twenty I could not have put it like this: but I emerged from the story as though my eyes were glazed, not quite as happens in dreams, but, rather, as though I were on that morning threshold when you slowly awaken from a dream, you confuse the first conscious reflections with the last glimmers of the dream, and you cannot make out (or have not yet crossed) the border between dream and reality. Without having read Proust at that time, I knew I had felt the mist-effect.

I have reread this story very many times in the course of the last forty-five years, and on each occasion I would try to explain to myself or to others why it had this effect on me. Each time I thought I had discovered the reason, and yet each time I started to reread it I would find myself as at the beginning, still a victim of the mist-effect.

In what follows I will try to explain why and how the text manages to produce its mist-effects. But whoever wants to follow me must not be afraid of losing the magic of Sylvie by knowing too much about it. On the contrary, the more the reader knows about it, the more able will's/he be to reread it with renewed astonishment.^†

Labrunie and Nerval

I must begin with a very important distinction. I want to eliminate from the outset an unwelcome character—namely, the empirical author. The empirical author of this story was called Gérard Labrunie, and he wrote under the nom de plume of Gérard de Nerval.

If we try to read Sylvie thinking about Labrunie, we are immediately on the wrong track. For instance, one then has to try, as many critics have done, to see how and to what extent the facts narrated in Sylvie refer to Labrunie's life. Thus it is that editions and translations of Sylvie are generally accompanied by biographical notes debating whether Aurélie was the actress Jenny Colon (incidentally, whoever looks at her portrait, reproduced in various editions, becomes seriously disillusioned), whether there really was an archery company at Loisy (or whether it was not rather at Creil), whether Labrunie really had received an inheritance from his uncle, or whether the character of Adrienne was based on Sophie Dawes, Baroness of Feuchères. Many solid academic reputations have been built on the basis of such meticulous research, all very useful for writing a biography of Gérard Labrunie but not for understanding Sylvie.

Gérard Labrunie committed suicide after passing through several psychiatric clinics, and we know from one of his letters that he had written Sylvie in a state of hyperexcitement, in pencil and on tiny sheets of paper. But if Labrunie was mad, Nerval was not; that is to say, there was no madness in that Model Author we manage to discern only through a reading of Sylvie. This text tells the story of a protagonist who borders on madness, but it is not the work of someone who is unwell: whoever wrote it (and this person is the one that I shall from now on call Nerval), it is constructed with astonishing care, with a play of internal textual symmetries, oppositions, and echoes.

If Nerval is not a character who is extraneous to the story, how does he appear in it? First and foremost as narrative strategy.

Story and Plot

In order to understand Nerval's narrative strategy and how he manages to create in the reader the mist-effects I spoke of, I refer you to Table A.^* Along the horizontal axis I have plotted the sequence of chapters in the tale, while on the left, vertical axis, I have reconstructed the temporal sequence of the events mentioned in the story. Thus, along the vertical axis I have plotted the fabula or story, and along the horizontal axis the development of the plot.

The plot is the way in which the story is constructed and gradually revealed to us: a young man comes out of a theater and decides to go to the ball at Loisy, during his journey there he recalls a previous journey, arrives at the ball, sees Sylvie again, spends a day with her, goes back to Paris, has an affair with the actress, and finally (Sylvie is by now married in Dammartin) decides to tell his own story. Seeing that the plot begins on the evening when the protagonist was coming out of a theater (conventionally represented as Time¹), the development is represented by the black line that proceeds from that evening, through successive moments in time (Time¹—Time¹⁴), to the end of the story.

But in the course of these events previous times are recalled, represented by the arrows pointing upward to times preceding Time¹. The unbroken vertical lines represent the protagonist's reconstructions, the dotted lines represent references to the past that occur, sometimes fleetingly, in the course of the dialogues

between the various characters. For instance, between 1 A.M. and 4 A.M. the protagonist recalls his previous journey to Loisy (in Time¹), which on the plot level takes up three chapters, whereas in chapters 9 and 10 there are fleeting evocations of episodes in Sylvie's life as a young girl and the "wyater" event, in Time^-3.

Thanks to these flashbacks one can reconstruct the story by fits and starts, or, rather, the temporal sequence of all the events the plot mentions: initially, when the protagonist was small, he loved Sylvie; then, when slightly older, he meets Adrienne at a ball; later he goes back to Loisy; finally, one evening, when the boy has become a man, he decides to go back there, and so on.

The plot is just that, we have it before our eyes as we read. The story, on the other hand, is not so obvious, and it is in the attempt to reconstruct the story that some mist-effects are created, since we never quite catch precisely what time the narrating voice is referring to. I do not claim to dissolve the mist-effects with my table, but rather to explain how they come about. And the story is reconstructed in a hypothetical way, in the sense that it is probable that the events evoked correspond to experiences lived through initially at age ten or eleven, then between fourteen and sixteen, and finally between sixteen and eighteen (but one could even count this differently: the protagonist might have been extremely precocious, or a very late bloomer).

The extent to which the reconstruction (and it is only a probable one) must be based on the text and not on elements of Labrunie's biography is confirmed by the experience of some commentators who try to place the evening at the theater in 1836, since the moral and political climate evoked seems to fit the one obtaining at that time, and the club mentioned is apparently the Café de Valois, which was subsequently closed at the end of 1836, along with other gaming houses. If we collapse the protagonist onto Labrunie, a rather grotesque series of problems ensues. How old was the young man, then, in 1836, and how old was he when he saw Adrienne at the ball? Since Labrunie (born in 1808) stopped living with his uncle at Mortefontaine in 1814 (at age six), when did he go to the ball? If he started at the Collège Charlemagne in 1820, at the age of twelve, is that when he goes back in the summer to Loisy and sees Adrienne? But in that case is he twenty-eight that evening at the theater? And if, as many accept, the visit to Sylvie's aunt at Othys happens three years before, is it not a rather big boy of twenty-five who plays with Sylvie, dressing up as gamekeepers, and is treated by her aunt as a nice little blond lad? A big boy who has received an inheritance of thirty thousand francs in the meantime (1834), and who has already traveled to Italy—a genuine initiation rite—and in 1827 has already translated Goethe's Faust? As you see, there is no solution here, and so one must reject such biographical calculations.

Jerard and Nerval

The story begins: "Je sortais d'un théâtre." We have here two entities (an "I" and a theater) and one verb in the imperfect.

Since it is not Labrunie (whom we have abandoned to his sad fate), who is the "Je" who is speaking? In a first-person narrative the person who says "I" is the protagonist of the story, and not necessarily the author. Therefore (having excluded Labrunie), Sylvie is written by Nerval, who brings onto the scene an "I" who tells us something. We thus have the narration of a narration. To eliminate any doubt, let us decide that the "I" who was coming out of a theater at the beginning is a character we will call "Je-rard."

But when does Jerard speak? He speaks in what we will call the Time of Narrative Enunciation (or Time^N); that is to say, at the point when he begins writing and recalling his past by telling us that one day (Time¹, the Beginning of the Plot) he was coming out of a theater. If you like, given that the story was published in 1853, we could think that Time^N is that year, but this would be pure convention, just to allow us to attempt a backward calculation. Since we do not know how many years pass between Time¹⁴ and Time^N (but it must be many, because at Time^N he already remembers that Sylvie has two children who are old enough to be archers), the evening at the theater could be placed either five or ten years previously; it does not matter, so long as one imagines that at Time^-3 Jerard and Sylvie were still children.

So the Jerard speaking at Time^N tells us about a self of many years previously, who in turn was recalling events concerning Jerard the child and adolescent. Nothing strange here: we too can say, "When I [I¹, who am speaking now] was eighteen [I^2, then], I could not get over the fact that I at sixteen [I³] had been involved in an unhappy love affair." But this does not mean that I¹ still feels the adolescent passion of I³, nor that he can explain the melancholy memories of I². At most he can recall them indulgently and tenderly, thus revealing himself to be different from who he had once been. In a certain sense this is what Jerard does, except that, realizing that he is so different each time, he can never tell us with which of his past Is he identifies, and he ends up so confused about his own identity that in the course of the story he never names himself once, except in the first paragraph of chapter 13, when he refers to himself as "an unknown admirer." Thus even that first-person pronoun, apparently so clearly defined, always denotes an Other.

Yet it is not only that there are so many Jerards, it is also the fact that sometimes the narrator is not Jerard but Nerval, who, as it were, creeps into the tale. Note that I said "into the tale," not into the story or plot. Story and plot coincide, but only because they are communicated to us through a discourse. To make the point more clearly, when I translated Sylvie I changed its original discourse in French into a discourse in Italian, while trying to keep the same story and plot. A film director could "translate" the plot of Sylvie into a film, allowing the spectator to reconstruct the story through a series of fade-outs and flashbacks (though I would not like to say with what degree of success), but he certainly could not translate the discourse like I did, since he would have to change words into images, and there is a difference between writing "as pale as the night" and showing the image of a pale woman.

Nerval never appears in story or plot, but he does in the discourse, and not only (as would happen with any author) as the mechanism that selects the words and articulates them in phrases and sentences. He comes in surreptitiously, as a "voice" speaking to us his model readers.

Who is it that says (in the second paragraph of Chapter 3), "Let us go back to reality"? Is it Jerard talking to himself after wondering whether Adrienne and Aurélie were the same person? Is it Nerval encouraging his character or us readers who have been caught up in that enchantment to go back to reality? Later on, between one and four in the morning, while Jerard is traveling toward Loisy, the text says: "While the carriage is climbing up the hills, let us piece together the memories of the time when I used to come here so often." Is this Jerard in Time³ talking, in a kind of interior monologue that is happening at the present time of the first verb? Or is it Jerard in Time^N, saying "while that character is climbing uphill in the carriage, let us abandon him for a moment and try to go back to a previous period"? And is that "let us piece together" an exhortation by Jerard to himself, or by Nerval to his readers, inviting us to participate in the course of his writing?

Who is it that says at the beginning of chapter 14, "Such are the chimeras which bewitch us and lead us astray at the dawn of our lives"? It could be Jerard in Time^N, participant in and victim of his own past illusions, but it will be noted that that observation justifies the order in which the events have been narrated, with a direct address to the readers ("but many hearts will understand me"). The person who is speaking—therefore—does not seem to be Jerard, but the author of the book we are reading.

Much has been written on this interplay of voices, but everything remains unresolved. It is Nerval himself who has decided to remain unresolved, and he tells us so not only to join us in our sense of bewilderment (and to understand it) but also to compound it. Over the course of fourteen chapters we never know whether the person who is speaking is saying things or is representing someone else who is saying things—nor is it ever entirely clear whether this someone is experiencing these things or simply recalling them.

Leaving the Theater?

Right from the first sentence of the story, the theme of the theater literally takes center stage, and it will be present until the end of the tale. Nerval was a man of the theater, Labrunie had really fallen in love with an actress, Jerard loves a woman he has seen on the stage, and he haunts various stages until near the end of the story. But the theater reappears in Sylvie at every moment: the dance on the lawn with Adrienne is a theatrical event, as are the flower festival at Loisy (and the basket from which the swan rises is a theatrical machine), the mise-en-scene that Jerard and Sylvie devise at her aunt's house, and the sacred drama at Châalis.

In addition, many have noted that Nerval uses a kind of theatrical lighting for the most crucial scenes. The actress appears at first illuminated by the footlights on the stage, then by the light of the auditorium chandelier, but theatrical lighting techniques are also put into play at the first dance on the lawn, where the sun's last rays arrive through the foliage of the trees, which act as a curtain; and while Adrienne sings, she is picked out as it were by the light of the moon (and she emerges from what today we would call a spotlight with a graceful bow, worthy of an actress saying farewell to her audience). At the beginning of chapter 4, in "The Journey to Cythera" (which above all is a verbal representation of a visual one, inspired as it is by one of Watteau's paintings), the scene is again illuminated from above by the vermilion rays of the evening. Finally, when Jerard enters the ball at Loisy in chapter 8, we witness a masterpiece of stage direction, which gradually leaves the bases of the lime trees in shade and tinges their summits in a bluish light until, in this struggle between artificial light and the dawning day, the stage is slowly pervaded by the pale light of day.

We must therefore not allow ourselves to be deceived by a "crude" reading of Sylvie and say that—as Jerard is torn between the dream of an illusion and the desire to find reality—the story plays on a clear and precise contrast between the theater and reality. First and foremost, every time Jerard leaves one theater he enters another. He begins, already in the second chapter, with a celebration of the sole truth of illusion, which intoxicates him. In chapter 3 he seems to begin a journey toward reality, since the Sylvie he wants to reach does "exist," but again he finds her to be no longer a creature of nature but one steeped in culture, who sings with musical "phrasing" (and who by now uses her aunt's wedding clothes to go to a masked ball, and is prepared, like a consummate actress, to imitate Adrienne and sing once more the song she sang at Châalis, with Jerard acting as director). And consequently Jerard himself behaves like a theatrical character (in chapter 11) when he makes the final attempt to conquer her, adopting a pose out of classical tragedy.

Thus the theater is sometimes the place of all-conquering and redeeming illusion, sometimes the place of disillusion and disappointment. What the story questions (creating in the process another mist-effect) is not the opposition between illusion and reality but the fracture that cuts through the two worlds and mixes them up.

Symmetries of Plot

If we go back to Table A, we see that the fourteen chapters into which the plot is organized can be divided into two halves, one largely nocturnal, the other prevalently diurnal. The nocturnal sequence concerns a world lovingly evoked in memory and in dreams: everything in it is experienced in a euphoric tone, in the enchantment of nature, and characters move slowly through space, which is described with a full range of cheerful details. In the diurnal sequence, on the other hand, Jerard finds a Valois that is mere artifice, made up of fake ruins, where the same stages of the preceding journey are revisited in a state of dysphoria, without dwelling on the landscape and focusing solely on epiphanies of disappointment.

From the fourth to the sixth chapter, after the festival, which had been an opportunity for fairy tale-like surprises such as the appearance of the swan, and the encounter with Sylvie, who by now seems to embody the gracefulness of the two exorcised ghosts, Jerard makes his way through the forest at night (with the help of a moon that is also theatrical as it lights up the sandstone rocks): in the distance pools dot the misty plain, the air is perfumed, and gradually elegant medieval ruins can be seen on the horizon. The village is jolly, Sylvie's bedroom is virginal as she works at her lace cushion, and the journey to her aunt's house is a feast of flowers, amid buttercups and great tits, periwinkles and foxgloves, and the hedges and streams that the two young people happily leap over. The river Thève gradually becomes smaller as they approach its source, and comes to rest in the fields, forming a little lake between irises and gladioli. There is little more to say about the eighteenth-century idyll at Othys, where the past smells so good.

In the second journey (chapters 8–11), Jerard arrives when the festival is over, the flowers in Sylvie's hair and on her bodice are fading, the Thève shows pools of stagnant water, and the perfume of the hayricks no longer inebriates the way it once did. If in the first journey to Othys the two youngsters leaped over hedges and streams, now they do not even think of crossing the fields.

Without describing the journey, Jerard goes to his uncle's house and finds it abandoned, the dog dead, and the garden overgrown with weeds. He takes the road for Ermenonville, but oddly the birds are silent and the place-names on the signposts have faded. What he does see are the artificial reconstructions of the Temple of Philosophy, but by now these too are in ruins; the laurels have disappeared, and on the (artificial) lake, beneath Gabrielle's tower, "the scum bubbles up and the insects drone." The air is mephitic, the sandstone is dusty, everything is sad and solitary. When Jerard arrives at Sylvie's bedroom, canaries have replaced the linnets, the furniture is modern and affected, Sylvie herself no longer makes her bobbins resound but works a "mechanism," and her aunt is dead. The walk to Châalis will be not a mad dash through the meadows but a slow journey with the help of a little donkey, in the course of which they will no longer gather flowers but instead will compete in terms of culture, in an atmosphere of mutual mistrust. Near Saint-S*** they have to watch where they put their feet because treacherous streams meander through the grass.

When finally, in chapter 14, Jerard returns to those very same places, he will no longer find the woods that once were there, Châalis is being restored, the pools that have been dug up show in vain the stagnant water "that the swans now shun," there is no longer a direct road to Ermenonville, and the space has become even more of a senseless labyrinth.

The search for inverted symmetries could be carried farther, and it has been by many, so much so that what emerges are relations of almost diametrical opposition between the various chapters (that is to say, between the first and the last chapter, the second and the thirteenth, etc., even though the correspondences do not follow this rule precisely). Here are the most glaring examples:

EUPHORIC

DYSPHORIC

1. Archery as mythical evocation

14. Archery as children's game

2. Adrienne's graceful farewell, as she heads for the monastic life

13. Aurélie's graceful farewell, woman of the world

2. The kiss as mystic experience

8. The kiss is merely affectionate

2. All thought they were in paradise

4. This is simply an old genteel festival

2. Jerard is the only boy at the dance

4. Each boy has a girl partner

3. Broken clock: promise of time to be recovered

12. Broken clock: memory of lost time

5 Solitary, enchanted walk

9. Solitary, depressed walk

6. Uplifting walk and visit to her aunt

10. The aunt is dead, embarrassed departure for Châalis

7. Apparition of Adrienne singing

11. Vague recollection of Adrienne; Sylvie sings

In fact, the disturbing Châalis chapter breaks the symmetry and separates the first six chapters from the remaining seven. On the one hand we have in this seventh chapter a reversal of the ball in chapter 4: this is an aristocratic celebration as opposed to the people's festival on the island (there are no young people except on the stage: Jerard and Sylvie's brother creep in only as intruders), it is set in a closed space as opposed to the open space of Cythera, Adrienne's apocalyptic song contrasts with the sweet song she sang while still an adolescent, and finally, this is a funereal celebration as opposed to a Pervigilium Veneris, the return of his obsession with Adrienne as opposed to the reconciliation and conquest of Sylvie...

The chapter contains themes from the other chapters as well, but they are dreamily unresolved and neutralized. It cites without any obvious reason the archery contest, the clock, a kind of dance-spectacle, a crown that is a halo of gilt cardboard, and above all a swan. Many critics imply that the swan is not just an emblem, a coat of arms engraved or sculpted (as the heraldic term "éployé" would suggest), but a real swan crucified on the door. This seems excessive, even though in a dream everything is possible, but whatever it is, this swan is halfway between the living, triumphant swan of chapter 4, and the one that is now absent in chapter 14.

There has been talk of "degradation rituals," but one does not need to uncover all the symmetries in order to detect them. The correspondences work almost unbeknownst to the reader; each return of a motif that has already been sounded causes a sense of déjà vu, but we notice only that something that we thought we had been given has been taken from us.

Going Round and Round

Mist-effects, labyrinth-effects: Poulet has spoken of "metamorphoses of the circle." Perhaps critics have seen more circles than there really are in Sylvie, like the magic circle of the stage, the concentric circles of the dance on the lawn (the dance on the "pelouse" framed by the trees, the one that involved the circle of young girls and finally, in the whirlwind of the dance, as though in a close-up, the long gold circles of the girl's hair), and in the second festival at Loisy the three circles of the pool, the island, and the temple. But sometimes I feel as if they have underestimated the circles.

For instance, in chapter 9, during the visit to his dead uncle's house, the word "jardin" is repeated three times in the same paragraph. This is not stylistic slackness: there are three gardens, belonging to three different epochs, but arranged concentrically, if not in terms of spatial perspective at least in a temporal one. It is as if Jerard's eye saw first his uncle's garden, in the distance the circle of his childhood, and farther away again the circle of History (the garden as the eternal place of archaeological finds). In a sense this triple garden becomes as it were the miniature model of the whole story, but seen from its final point. From a place revisited in a state of disillusionment (by now the garden is just a mass of weeds), there emerges in the mists of memory first the trace, still well-defined though partially canceled out, of the child's enchanted universe; and then in the distance, when the garden is the object no longer of Jerard's eye but of his memory, amid the fragments lined up in his study, one hears the echo of those Roman and Druidic times that had already been summoned up at the beginning of the story.

Finally, it is a circular movement that Jerard carries out in each of his visits to Loisy: first of all leaving from Paris, only to return in the space of a day, then leaving from the village, only to return after crossing pools, woods, and moors.

This circling-round is worthy of an effort that almost amounts to a land survey, but I believe it is worth doing. I decided to draw a map of the places (Table B), more to help myself when translating Sylvie. Even though I kept my eye on several maps of the Valois,^* I did not go in for the excessive nuances of meridians and parallels, and I tried to give an approximate visualization of the mutual relationships between villages and forests. However that may be, it should be borne in mind that from Luzarches to Ermenonville is about twenty kilometers as the crow flies, from Ermenonville to Loisy three kilometers, and two from Loisy to Mortefontaine. We are told in chapter 13 that the dance in front of the castle with Adrienne took place near Orry. But I have identified the place of the first and second dance at Loisy as the pools immediately north of Mortefontaine, where the Thève now rises (but at that time apparently it rose between Loisy and Othys).

If you read while also looking at the map, the space comes to look like a bit of chewing gum, changing shape every time you chew it over. It seems impossible that the post carriage takes the route it does to drop Jerard near Loisy, but who knows what the roads were like then? The route chosen by Sylvie's brother on the night at Châalis totally throws commentators with a passion for checking topography, and they solve the problems by noting that the boy was tipsy. Did one really have to go through Orry and run parallel to Halatte Forest to get from Loisy to Châalis? Or were the two youths not coming from Loisy? Sometimes it seems that Nerval is reconstructing his own Valois but that he cannot avoid interference from Labrunie's. The text says that Jerard's uncle stayed at Montagny, while we know that Labrunie's uncle stayed at Mortefontaine. Now if we reread carefully, following the table, we see that—if Jerard's uncle stayed at Montagny—this does not work out, and we are forced to conclude that he stayed at Mortefontaine, or, rather, that—in the Valois of the story—Montagny occupies the exact spot where Mortefontaine is.

Jerard, in chapter 5, says that after the dance he goes with Sylvie and her brother to Loisy, and then "returns" to Montagny. It is obvious that he can return only to Mortefontaine, all the more so since he goes up through a little wood between Loisy and Saint-S*** (which in reality is Saint-Sulpice, a stone's throw from Loisy), goes along the edge of Ermenonville forest, clearly to the southwest, and after sleeping sees nearby the walls of the convent of Saint-S***, and in the distance La Butte aux Gens d'Armes, the ruins of the abbey of Thiers, the castle of Pontarmè,

all of which are places to the northwest of Loisy, where he returns to. He cannot have taken the road for Montagny, which is too far to the east.

At the beginning of chapter 9 Jerard goes from the spot where the dance had taken place to Montagny, then goes back on the road to Loisy, finds everyone asleep, heads toward Ermenonville, leaves the "Desert" on the left, reaches Rousseau's tomb, and then goes back to Loisy. If he really went to Montagny he would be taking a very long route by crossing the Ermenonville area, and it would be crazy to return to Loisy—crossing back through the Ermenonville area—only then to decide to go up once more toward Ermenonville, and finally return again to Loisy.

In biographical terms this might mean that Nerval had decided to move his uncle's house to Montagny, and then was not able to maintain the fiction, and kept on thinking (along with Labrunie) of Mortefontaine. But this question must be of only minimal importance to us, unless we are seized by the desire go and take the walk again. The text is there only to make us travel in a Valois where memory is confused with dreams, and its function is to make us lose our bearings.

If that is the case, why make such efforts to reconstruct the map? I think most readers give up, as I did for many years, because it is enough for them to be seized by the fascination of the names. Proust already pointed out how much power names have in this story, and concluded that whoever has read Sylvie cannot fail to feel a thrill when they happen to read the name of Pontarmè on a train schedule. However, he also pointed out that other place-names, equally famous in the history of literature, do not cause the same turmoil in us. Why do the toponyms that appear in this tale become embedded in our mind (or heart) like a musical sequence, a Proustian "petite phrase"?

The answer seems obvious to me: because they keep returning. Readers rarely draw maps for themselves, but they sense (in their ears) that with every "return" to the Valois, Jerard goes back to the same places, almost in the same order, as if the same motif started up after every stanza. In music this form is called a rondo, and the term " rondeau"comes from "ronde, "which means a round dance. So readers perceive aurally a circular structure, and in some sense they see it, yet they see it only in a confused way, as if it were a spiral movement, or a successive shifting of circumferences.

For this reason it is worth reconstructing the map, to understand visually what the text makes us feel aurally. You will see on my little table, starting from Loisy, three nonconcentric, differently shaded circles. They trace the three main walks—not the real journey, but the presumed area of the trip. The lightest circle refers to Jerard's nocturnal walk in chapter 5 (from Loisy to Montagny—or, rather, Mortefontaine—but changing direction to skirt the Ermenonville forest, going past Saint-S***, and returning at last to Loisy, while Pontarmè, Thiers, or La Butte can be seen in the distance); the slightly shaded circle represents Jerard's walk in chapter 9 (from the dance area to his uncles house—which must be at Mortefontaine—then to Loisy and finally to Ermenonville as far as Rousseau's tomb, and returning once more to Loisy); the darkest circle follows Jerard's and Sylvie's walk to Châalis in chapters 10 and 11 (from Loisy, through the forest of Ermenonville as far as Châalis, then back to Loisy via Charlepont). The journey to Othys is a round trip to the eighteenth century and back.

Finally, the biggest circle, which covers the entire area in Table B, corresponds to the wanderings with Aurélie in chapter 13. Jerard tries desperately to find everything and loses the central core of his first wanderings. He will never find it again. In the end, since Sylvie by now lives in Dammartin, the returns mentioned in chapter 14 never go beyond the margins of this circumference. Jerard, Sylvie, everyone, they are all now excluded from the magic circle at the start, which Jerard can see only at a great distance, from a hotel window.

In any case, what strikes us visually (as we previously had been struck aurally, albeit in the guise of echoes answering each other from a distance) is that in every journey Jerard simply goes around in a circle (not as in the perfect circle of the first dance with Adrienne, but like a crazed moth fluttering inside a lampshade on a chandelier) and never rediscovers what he had left there on the previous occasion. So much so that one has to agree with Poulet, who saw in this circular structure a temporal metaphor: it is not so much Jerard who goes around in circles in space; it is time, his own past dancing in a circle around him.

The imperfect

Let us go back to the first sentence in the story: "Je sortais d'un théâtre." We have considered the implications of that "Je" and of that "théâtre," now let us consider the "sortais." The verb is in the imperfect.

The imperfect is a tense of duration and is often iterative. It always expresses an action not fully completed, and all we need is a tiny contextual hint to establish whether the action is also iterative, that is to say, is carried out several times. The fact is that Jerard came out of that theater every evening, and had been doing so for a year.^*

I apologize for the apparent tautology, but the imperfect is so called because it is in fact im-perfect: it moves us to a time before the present in which we are speaking, but it does not tell us exactly when or how long it went on for. Hence its fascination. Proust said (speaking of Flaubert): "I confess that certain uses of the imperfect indicative—of this cruel tense which presents life to us as something ephemeral and at the same time passive, which at the very moment it summons up our actions stamps them with illusion, and obliterates them in the past without leaving us, like the simple past does, the consolation of activity—have remained for me an inexhaustible source of mysterious sadness." ^*

All the more reason why in Sylvie the imperfect is the tense that forces us to lose our sense of the confines of time. It is used with apparent generosity, and yet with mathematical caution, so much so that in the changes from the first to the second version of Sylvie Nerval adds one imperfect but eliminates another. In the first chapter, when he discovers that he is rich, Jerard writes, in 1853, "Que dirait maintenant, pensai-je, le jeune homme de tout à l'heure" (What would the young man of a few moments ago say now, I thought) and then "Je frémis de cette pensée" (I trembled at that thought). In 1854 he corrects this to "pensais-je"(I was thinking). In fact this is correct, since the imperfect appears in those lines to present us with the narrator's thoughts, a stream of thoughts that lasts in time: Jerard dreams for a certain number of seconds (or minutes) of the idea of a possible conquest of the actress, without making up his mind. Then, suddenly, and only then, with the return to the simple past ( "Je frémis"), he definitively rejects that fantasy.

On the other hand, at the end of chapter 2, in 1853 Adrienne "repartait" (was leaving again), whereas in 1854 Adrienne "repartit"(left again). Rereading the passage one sees that up until that point everything has taken place in the imperfect, almost as if to make the whole scene more nebulous, and only at that point something definitely happens that belongs not to the dreamworld but to reality. The next day Adrienne disappears. Her departure is abrupt and definitive. In fact, aside from the ambiguous oneiric episode in chapter 7, this is the last time Jerard sees her—or at least has the good fortune to be near her.

In any case, the reader is well warned right from the first chapter, where in the space of the first five paragraphs there are no fewer than fifty-three imperfects out of a total of sixty or so verb forms. In those first five paragraphs everything that is described happened habitually, for some time, every evening. Then in the sixth paragraph someone "said" something, or, rather, someone asks Jerard "who it is" that he goes to the theater to see. And Jerard "said" her name. The nebulous temporality becomes more concrete, becomes solid at a precise moment: the story starts at that point, or, rather, that point signals Time¹, from which Jerard (who is recalling this in Time^N) makes the story of his journey start.

The extent to which the imperfect nebulizes time can be seen in the Châalis chapter. The person who intervenes twice in the present indicative (the first time to describe the abbey, the second to tell us that in summoning up those details the speaker wonders whether they are real or not) is Nerval—or Jerard in Time^N. Everything else is in the imperfect—except where syntax will not permit it. The analysis of the verb tenses in this chapter would require too many grammatical subtleties. But all we need to do is reread the chapter several times, listening attentively to the music of those tenses, and we realize why not only we but also Nerval himself hesitates to say whether this is a nightmare or a memory.

The use of the imperfect takes us back to the distinction between story, plot, and discourse. The choice of a verb tense takes place on the level of discourse, but the vagueness thus established at the discursive level impinges on our capacity to reconstruct the story by way of the plot. This is why critics are unable to agree on the sequence of events, at least so far as the first seven chapters are concerned. In order to extricate ourselves from the tangle of tenses, let us label as "the first dance" the one that takes place in front of the castle with Adrienne (perhaps at Orry), as "the second dance" the one at the festival with the swan (the first trip to Loisy), and as "the third dance" the one Jerard gets to just as it ends, after his journey in the carriage.

When does the episode of the night at Châalis happen? Before or after the first visit to Loisy? Again, remember that we are not dealing with a forensic problem here. It is the unconscious reply to this question that the reader is seeking, the one that plays the greatest role in creating the mist-effect.

One critic (and this shows just how powerful the mist-effect is) has even advanced the hypothesis that Châalis comes before the first dance on the lawn—on the grounds that in chapter 2, paragraph 5, it is said that after the dance "we would never see her again." But this cannot be before the dance, and for three reasons: first, Jerard recognizes Adrienne at Châalis, whereas he sees her for the first time at the dance (and this is confirmed in the third chapter); second, the young girl is already "transfigured" by her monastic vocation that night, whereas in the second chapter we were told that she would devote herself to the religious life only after the dance; and third, the scene of the first dance is described at the beginning of the fourth chapter as a childhood memory, and one cannot see how, when they were even younger, Jerard and Sylvie's brother had gone on a cart through the woods at night to watch a sacred mystery play.

In that case Châalis comes between the first and second dance. But this would presuppose that in the time between those two events Jerard had gone once more to Loisy. And in that case why is Sylvie sulky with him upon his arrival at the second dance, as though she still felt the humiliation she had suffered in Adrienne's presence? But this could be another mist-effect. The text does not in fact state that Sylvie is sulking with him because of that ancient betrayal—if anything it is Jerard who thinks this. Both she and her brother reproach him for not having been in touch "for so long." What is to say that this long time extends from the first dance? Jerard could have returned in the meantime, on any occasion, and enjoyed an evening with her brother. And yet this solution is not convincing because that evening Jerard gives the impression of seeing Sylvie for the first time since the first dance, finding her transformed and more fascinating than before.

So Jerard could have gone to Châalis after the second dance (in Time¹). But how could that be if, according to most critics, the second dance happens three years before the evening at the theater, and once more, on arriving, Jerard is rebuked for not having been in touch for so long? Here too, perhaps we are victims of a mist-effect. The text does not in fact say that the second dance (Time^-1) happened three years before the evening at the theater. The text (chapter 3, third paragraph) says of Sylvie, "Why have I forgotten her for three years?" It says not that three years have gone by since the second dance, but (paragraph seven) that Jerard had been wasting the inheritance left him by his uncle for three years, and one can imagine that in those three years of high living he had forgotten about Sylvie. Between the second dance and the evening at the theater many more years could have passed.

But whatever hypothesis is chosen, how does one place Châalis with respect to the year of 1832, when Adrienne dies? It certainly would be touching to think that Adrienne dies (is dying, is already dead) when Jerard sees (or dreams he sees) her at Châalis.

It is such calculations, apparently so persnickety, that explain why we readers (like Proust) feel obliged constantly to turn back to earlier pages of the story to understand "where we are." Of course, in this matter too, it could be Labrunie who is confused. But if his overeager biographers were not so obsessive in providing us with the unfortunate writer's clinical charts, we would simply say, when we read the text, that we do not know where we are because Nerval did not want us to know. Nerval does the opposite of the author of a detective novel, who plants clues in the text so that when we reread it we tell ourselves that we should have guessed the truth immediately. Nerval puts us off the scent, and wants us to lose "the sequence of events."

And that is why Jerard tells us (in the first chapter) that he could not keep track of the order of events and (at the beginning of chapter 14) that he tried to pin down his own chimeras "without paying attention to their order." In the universe of Sylvie, where someone said that time passes in fits and starts, "the clocks do not work."

Elsewhere, taking as an example the clock described in chapter 3, I said that a "symbolic mode" is inserted into a text when there is a description of something that does not have any relevance for the purposes of the plot.^* The case of the clock in the second chapter is a perfect illustration. Why stop to describe that antique when it cannot actually say what even the concierge's cuckoo clock knows? Because it is a condensed symbol of the whole story, and first of all for the Renaissance world it evokes, which is the world of the Valois, and secondly because it is there to tell us (to tell the reader more than Jerard, perhaps) that we will never recover the sequence of time. Through a symmetry that has already been mentioned, a broken clock returns in chapter 12. If it appeared only there, it would be simply an enjoyable childhood detail: but it is the return of a theme. Nerval is telling us that right from the beginning, for him, time was destined to become confused or, as Shakespeare would have said, the time is out of joint—for Jerard as much as for the reader.

Objects of Desire

Why is it that the order of events cannot be recovered? Because in the course of time Jerard shifts his desire onto three different women, though the sequence is not linear and heading in one direction, but goes in a spiral. Inside this spiral Jerard identifies, in sequence, one or other of the women as the object of his desire, but often he confuses them, and in any case, as each woman reappears in turn (rediscovered or remembered) she no longer possesses the properties she had previously.

Jerard has an object of desire, and he draws its outline for us right from the start of the tale. It is an ideal of femininity as either goddess or queen, so long as she is "inaccessible." However, in the following chapters he does still try to reach something. But as soon as his object of desire comes close to him, Jerard finds a reason for distancing himself from it. So the mist-effect concerns not just the time sequences, and space, but also desire.

In the first chapter it seems that Jerard desires dreams and finds reality repugnant, and that his ideal is incarnated by the actress:

DREAM

ACTRESS

REALITY

Uncertainty and indolence

What does it matter if it is him or someone else?

Heroic gallantry

Vague enthusiasms

She satisfied my every desire

Chasing after benefices

Religious aspirations

The divine Hours of Herculaneum

The lost hours of day

Drunk with poetry and love

She made people thrill with joy and love

Skepticism, bacchanalia

Metaphysical phantoms

Pale as the night

The real woman

Inaccessible goddess and queen

He did not care who she was

Vice

Up until this point the stage is certainly more real than the auditorium, and compared with the actress the spectators are nothing but "empty appearances." But in the second chapter Jerard seems to desire something more tangible, even if only by recalling the one moment when he came close to it. The person who has all the virtues of the actress, who had been seen all alone on the stage, is now Adrienne, glimpsed in the pale circle of the lawn by night.

AURÉLIE

(chapter 1)

ADRIENNE

(chapter 2)

Pale as the night

The brightness of the rising moon falls only on her

She lived only for me

I was the only boy in that dance

The warble of her voice

With a fresh, penetrating voice

Magic mirror

A will-o'-the-wisp escaping

An apparition

A phantom barely touching the green grass

Beautiful as the day

A mirage of glory and beauty

Like the Divine Hours

The blood of the Valois ran in her veins

Her smile fills him with bliss

They thought they were in paradise

This is why Jerard wonders (in the third chapter, second paragraph) whether he is not in love with a religious woman in the guise of an actress—and this question will haunt him till the end.

However, Adrienne possesses not only, let's say, ideal qualities but also physical properties, thanks to which, in the second chapter, she wins out over Sylvie, who bears the hallmarks of a rather slight rustic gracefulness. But in chapter 4, when some years later Jerard sees Sylvie again, now that she is no longer a child but a young girl in the bloom of adolescence, it is she who has acquired all the graces of Adrienne, who has now disappeared, and of Aurélie (albeit in a pale reflection of the latter), whose memory now fades.

ADRIENNE

SYLVIE

SYLVIE

(chapter 2)

(chapter 2)

(chapter 4)

"

Grande

"

"

Petite fille

"

"

Ce n'était plus cette petite fille

"

Beautiful

Lively and fresh

She had become so beautiful

Blonde

Tanned complexion

White arms

Tall and slim

Still a child

Her slender figure

Descendant of the Valois

From the nearby village

Worthy of ancient art

Mirage of glory and beauty

Regular profile

Athenian features

She remained alone and triumphant

(She did not deserve the crown)

Irresistible charm

Intangible, vague love

Tender frindship

Her divine smile

Not only does Jerard entertain suspicions, fears, desires, illusions right to the end, and in the face of considerable evidence that Aurélie and Adrienne are the same person, but at times he thinks that what he desired in the first two women can be given to him by Sylvie. For reasons never stated, after the second dance, when he has even celebrated a kind of symbolic marriage with her, he leaves her. When he comes to her at the third dance, to escape the impossible fascination of Aurélie, he finds her similar to the woman he is fleeing, and understands that either Sylvie is lost for him or he is lost to her. It could be said that at each fade-out, when one female figure dissolves and becomes another, what was unreal becomes real; but precisely because it is now within reach, it changes again into something else altogether.

Jerard's secret curse is that he always has to reject what he previously desired, and precisely because it becomes just what he wanted it to become. Look how in chapter 13 Aurélie becomes exactly what he had dreamed of unconsciously: she had belonged to another, and the other man disappears overseas; actresses did not have a heart, and now she shows herself ready to love.... But alas, what becomes approachable can no longer be loved. Precisely because she has a heart, Aurélie will go off with the person who really does love her. ^*

This agonizing wishing and then unwishing is given an almost neurotic manifestation in the interior monologue in chapter 11. Stung by the ambiguous allusion to Adrienne's fate, Jerard, who up until a moment before had desired Sylvie, discovers that it would be sacrilegious for him to seduce someone he regarded as a sister. Immediately (and with irritating fickleness) his thoughts and desire turn once more to Aurélie. Yet at the beginning of the next chapter he is once more ready to throw himself at Sylvie's feet and offer her his house and his uncertain fortune. With "three women around his heart, dancing around him," as Dante might have said, Jerard loses his sense of their identity and desires and loses all three.

1832

In any case, Nerval encourages us to forget. And to help us (or lose us), he puts onstage a forgetful Sylvie, who only at the end remembers that Adrienne died in 1832.

This is the element that most upsets the critics. Why give such a crucial piece of information only at the end, whereas, as a rather naive note in the Pleiade edition remarks, we would have expected it at the beginning? Here Nerval performs one of those "completing analepses" or "returns," as Genette calls them, where the narrator, pretending he has forgotten a detail, remembers it much later in the development of the action. ^* It is not the only one in the story; the other is the incidental remark about the actress's name, which appears only in chapter 11 : but there seems to be more of a reason for this latter return, because it is only then that Jerard, sensing that his idyll with Sylvie is about to end, begins to think of the Actress as a Woman whom he might perhaps approach. The completing analepsis regarding the date seems to be at the very least scandalous, all the more so since it is preceded by a delaying tactic, which is difficult to justify at first sight.

In chapter 11 we find one of the most ambiguous expressions of the whole story: "cela a mal tournée!" For whoever rereads the tale, that allusion by Sylvie in some way anticipates the final revelation, but for whoever reads it for the first time it delays it. Sylvie does not quite say that Adrienne ended up unhappily, but that her story ended unhappily. Consequently I cannot agree with those who translate it into Italian as "le è andata male" (she ended up unhappily), nor with the more cautious translators who say "è andata male" (ended up unhappily—not daring to interpret that very obvious "cela" leaves one with the suspicion that the subject is Adrienne). In fact, Sylvie says that "that story ended unhappily." Why do we have to respect that ambiguity (so much so that some people understand it to mean that, hearing this hint, Jerard convinces himself even more that it means Adrienne has become the actress)? Because it reinforces and justifies the delay, which means that it is only in the last line of the text that Sylvie definitively destroys all of Jerard's illusions.

The fact is that Sylvie is not reticent. For whom would this information be essential? For Jerard, who on the basis of his memory of Adrienne, and of her possible identity with Aurélie, has created an obsession. But would it be essential for Sylvie, to whom Jerard has not yet revealed his own obsessions (as he will with Aurélie), except through vague allusions? For Sylvie (an earthly creature), Adrienne is even less than a phantom (she is only one of the many women who had passed that way). Sylvie does not say that Jerard has been tempted to identify the religious woman with the actress, she does not even know for certain whether this actress exists, nor who she is. She is totally outside this metamorphic world in which one image fades into another and overlays it. So it is not that she delivers the final revelation in small doses, drop by drop. Nerval does this, not Sylvie.

Sylvie speaks in a vague way not out of guile but "absent-mindedly," because she finds the affair irrelevant. She participates in the destruction of Jerard's dream precisely because she "is unaware of it." Her relationship with time is serene, made up of some nostalgia to which she is now reconciled or some tender memories, neither of which threaten her tranquil present. For this reason, of the three women, she is the one who remains the most inaccessible at the end. Jerard has even had a magic moment with Adrienne, and from what one can understand has enjoyed amorous intimacy with Aurélie, but with Sylvie nothing, except an extremely chaste kiss—and at Othys the even chaster fictional nuptials. The minute Sylvie comes fully to embody the reality principle (and pronounces the only undoubtedly true, historical statement in the whole story: a date), she is lost forever. At least as a lover: for Jerard she is by now only a sister, and, what's more, married to his (foster-)brother.

So much so that one would be tempted to say that it is precisely for this reason that the story is entitled Sylvie and not—like a later, flamboyant work— Aurélie. Sylvie represents the real time that was lost and never found—precisely because she is the only one who stays.

But this would imply a thesis, an ambitious thesis, and one that acquires all its importance precisely from the comparison between Proust and Nerval. Nerval seems to go in search of lost time but is incapable of finding it, and he celebrates only that emptiness of his own illusion. The final date pronounced by Sylvie would seem to sound therefore like a funeral bell that closes the story.

This would help us understand the affectionate and almost filial interest shown by Proust for this literary father, who failed in a desperate enterprise (and perhaps this is why Labrunie killed himself). Proust then sets out to avenge this paternal defeat with his own victory over Time.

But when is it that Sylvie reveals to Jerard that Adrienne had died some time previously? In Time¹³ ("the following summer," when the theater company gives performances at Dammartin). However one works out the figures, she certainly does it long before Time^N, when Jerard begins his narration. Consequently, when Jerard starts to conjure up the night at the theater, only to go back to the time of the dance on the lawn, and to tell us of his trembling at the thought that Adrienne was the actress, and of the illusion of still being able to see her near the convent of Saint-S***—during this period of time (and narration), when he makes us share in his uncertainties, he already knew that Adrienne had definitely died in 1832.

So it is not that Jerard (or Nerval along with him) stops narrating when he realizes that everything is over: on the contrary, it is precisely when he has understood that all is over that he starts his narration (and it is a narration about a Jerard who did not know, nor could he have known, that everything was by now over).

Is the person who acts like this someone who has not succeeded in dealing with his past? Not a bit: this is someone who notices that one can start to revisit the past only when the present is by now canceled, and only memory (even though, or precisely because, it is not too ordered) can give us back something for which—if it is not worth living—it is at least worth dying.

But in that case Proust would not have seen Nerval as a weak, defenseless father, a forerunner to be rehabilitated, but, rather, as a strong, overstrong father, one to be outdone. And he would devote his life to this challenge.^*

A reworking of part of the afterword to my Italian translation of Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie (Turin: Einaudi, 1999). I have already discussed, in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), how I first wrote a short article on this novella ("II tempo di Sylvie' (Time in Sylvie), Poesia e critica, 2 [1962]), then conducted a series of seminars on it at the University of Bologna in the 1970s (from which stemmed three graduating theses), then took it up again for a course of lectures at Columbia University in 1984, and made it the subject of the Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1993, as well as of two other courses, at Bologna in 1995 and at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, in 1996. The most interesting outcome of these many papers of mine was the special issue of the journal VS, 31/32 (1982) (Sur "Sylvie').