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University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan the UNIVERSITY OE OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE This dissertation hos been I microfilmed exactly as received 66-14,216 I INGLER, James Boyd, 1929- f WOMAN AS MYTH IN THE WORKS OF GERARD f DE NERVAL. t . I The University of Oklahoma, Ph.D., 1966 I Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan THE UNIVERSITY OE OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE WOMAN AS MYTH IN THE WORKS OE Gi^RARD DE NERVAL ' A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE EACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OE PHILOSOPHY BY JAMES BOYD INGLER Norman, Oklahoma 1966 WOra AS MYTH IN THE WORKS OE CdEAED EE HERVAI EOVEE BY ^ r\ £ BISvSERTATIOH COMMITTEE ACZNOWIEDGIENT The writer wishes to thanh hr. Besse A. Clement, Chairman of his Committee, for the generous assistance she has hrou^t to the preparation of the present work, and to acknowledge the enormous debt of her past kindness, extending over all the years of his graduate studies. Ill TABLE OP COITTEÏÏTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ................................ 1 II. THE ROAD TO AURELIA ................... 8 III. GENESIS OP THE MYTH ................... 48 IV. THE RUINED TOWER ..................... 63 V. THE VOYAGE TO CYTHERA ................. 94 VI. IN THE SHADOW OP VESUVIUS .............. 115 VII. THE BLACK SUN . '................... 141 VIII. THE GATES OP HORN AND IVORY ............ 174 IX. CONCLUSION............................ 185 BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................... 191 IV WOMAN AS MYTH IN THE WORKS OE GERARD DE NERVAL CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Today we are in the midst of a critical reappraisal of Gerard de Nerval. Year Ly year His star rises in the literary firmament, not unlike that star He saw from tHe Paris street, tHat seemed to grow as He watcHed it. THe past decade Has witnessed a score of Hooks on Him Hy tHe most discerning of ErencH critics, wHo Have laid aside tHeir studies of StendHal, Verlaine and Montaigne to investigate a man wHo was known to His contemporaries sligHtingly as "le pauvre Gerard" and sometimes indulgently as "le fol délicieux.” THose wHo are acquainted witH tHe work and life of Nerval cannot Help Hut rejoice at tHis assumption to Parnas­ sus, tardy as it is. Eor tHere was never a man wHo seemed less destined for tHe externals of fame, nor wHo, indeed, cared less for tHe externals of our mortal existence. Ill­ ness, poverty and an almost compulsive spirituality kept Nerval from ever fully appropriating tHe rôle of littera­ teur . He was ratHer a man of letters, in tHe singularly 1 2 Prench application of that term. For Nerval, writing was a means of livelihood, as it was for Sainte-Beuve and G-autier. He travelled— to Germany, Belgium, Egypt— partly from roman­ tic yearning, hut mostly because his travels provided mate­ rial for magazine articles and his pockets were always empty. He wrote many plays, always with the hope of the one hox- office success that would make his fortune. His plays ran a few weeks and closed. None of them is acted today. He founded a theatrical magazine that soon went bankrupt. He invented a printing system that no one was interested in. He fell in love with an actress who married somebody else, last of all, he went mad and killed himself. One finishes the great Aristide Marie biography with a feeling of pro­ found sadness. There are no doubt sadder lives in literary history, but few which evoke so poignantly the tragic soli­ tude of an individual— a cosmic solitude of which our own age has a particular knowledge and which, perhaps, more than anything else, renders Nerval understandable for us. Our age has seen a renaissance of interest in a group of writers who, though they may be of disparate temperaments and schools, nevertheless share a common misfortune : they were misunderstood or quite ignored by their own times. Such was the fate of Baudelaire, of William Blake, of Rim­ baud, to mention only a few. Their fate differs from the mere bourgeois contempt in which the artist has been held since the Industrial Revolution. The writers of whom we are speaking, thongh they may have heen read hy considerable numbers of people, were yet never understood. Their unique fate was to belong to a future of which they had only the dim hope of ever arriving— a future that for some, indeed, has not yet arrived. A quality shared by these writers— at least by Baude­ laire, Blake, Rimbaud and Nerval— was an inveterate inability to share the social and cultural vision of their contemporar­ ies, and a corresponding gift for creating personal visions of their own which, though unique to them in their times, have since become social and cultural realities. If these isolated artists were not quite the creators of this new reality, they were nevertheless instrumental in articulating the form and direction of that future that has arrived. But the signal characteristic of these writers is their concern with Man in isolation from his society, divest­ ed of his beliefs and orthodoxies, in that state in which he invests the world, not with borrowed meanings, but with mean­ ings that derive from an inner world of consciousness. It is this inner world of psychic reality which Gerard de Nerval asserts in his poetry and prose. It is the intri­ cate geography of this region which he attempted to chart by a unique faculty that he called ”1 ’epanchement du songe dans la vie reele." Through the medium of this subliminal faculty Nerval gained access to a new life— a life so remote from that of our quotidian perceptions that we are wont to label 4 the experience pure madness, and yet so familiar, so much our own, that we must perforce abandon, in Nerval's case, the criteria by which we define madness and sanity. Among Nerval's subliminal discoveries was a world of archetypal figures who coincide, in a quite unaccountable way, with the figures of mankind's historical myths. To the casual reader it may at first seem a critical pretension to bestow the term "myth" on the creations of a psychotic nine­ teenth century journalist. We tend to think of myths as quite grand, collective phenomena— the fruit of racial trag­ edy and endeavor. Yet it is one of the Nervalian paradoxes that as he defined these elusive figures, and particularly as he wrought them into artistic form, they came ever more closely to coincide with the figures of the Classical mythol­ ogies, in value and meaning and form. Nerval’s creations are neither fictional "characters" nor biographical prototypes, though it will be seen that they partake of both these iden­ tities. They are not, indeed, so much people, as something which people— as we sometimes come to realize in life— can be made to represent. They are human qualities, or the ide­ ational ciphers of whole families of human qualities— that is, they are archetypes. It should be pointed out that this has little to do with the more familiar Wordsworthian "per­ sonification" which is the translation of abstract qualities into human form. Nerval's creations are just the opposite: they are the translation of human qualities into idea. 5 It should he asserted, however, that Nerval was a poet and not a Platonic philosopher. The archetypes inter­ ested him, not as the ingredients of dead syllogisms, hut as artistic realities. Although Nerval's mythical creations are ideas, they held for him the power of living heings, and are the repositories of all the' emotional force he brought to their distant biographical prototypes. Aurelia spoke to him, and it is not for nothing that her mystic sym­ bol was the hollyhock, a flower of the kitchen-garden. In the present work we have attempted to define and categorize the mythologie content of Nerval's prose and poetry, with special emphasis on the figure of Woman as she is manifested in the numerous heroines and allusive figures of the Nervalian oeuvre. It is with some apology that we have imposed logical criteria on a work that is inherently illogical, poetic and multiform. Nevertheless, it will be seen that there are among Nerval's heroines certain traits to which the very logic of their author's mythical apprehen­ sion gave form and organization. We have departed from more familiar character studies in that Nerval's heroines have, one and all, a symbolic dimension which derives not only from their author's poetic vision, but also from the dic­ tates of his psychic needs. Por this reason, great atten­ tion has been paid to Nerval's personal life as well as to the literary influences that helped to form his private myths. Nerval is supremely subjective and self-obsessed. 6 but his work is not without debt to his contemporaries— es­ pecially to Nodier, Hoffmann and Goethe. Moreover— for all its richness of form, for all his claim as a psychological innovator— both the work and the man fall heavily beneath the shadow of Rousseau, like the hero of la Nouvelle Eelolse, Nerval believed that "hors I'Etre existant par lui-même, il n'y a rien de beau que ce qui n'est pas." Instead of through lyrical frenzy or romans larmoyants. Nerval was to render this "beauty which is not" into tangible concepts and through the immediacy of symbol and myth. The artistic achievement was also a psychic gain for Nerval, for by defining the un­ known in his own spirit, he partially delivered himself from the dictates of a tyrannical unconscious. The writer has attempted to heed Carl Jung's implicit advice for those who approach the symbol; Symbols are not signs or allegories for something known; they seek rather to express something that is little known or completely unknown.^ The "unknown" in this case is Nerval's soul, the terra in­ cognita of another's psychic existence.
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