UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Enacting Sincerity: Nerval and the Cultural Politics of Imagination Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6xn1k3hj Author Talley, Catherine Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Enacting Sincerity: Nerval and the Cultural Politics of Imagination by Catherine Beryle Talley A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in French in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Suzanne Guerlac, Chair Professor Susan Maslan Professor Robert Kaufman Spring 2015 Copyright © 2015 Catherine Beryle Talley Abstract Enacting Sincerity: Nerval and the Cultural Politics of Imagination by Catherine Beryle Talley Doctor of Philosophy in French University of California, Berkeley Professor Suzanne Guerlac, Chair This dissertation proposes a new reading of the work of Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855), placing him alongside Walter Benjamin’s Baudelaire as an insightful critic of modern life. During the 1840s and 1850s, the literary field in France was increasingly shaped by bourgeois values like sincerity, originality, and authenticity, and by the individualism that they underpinned, restricting authorized forms of writing and of subjectivity. I argue that Nerval’s writing constitutes an astute opposition to this transformation of literary subjectivity and the limitations it placed on imaginative experience and practice. Rather than merely reflecting the author’s own psychological crises (as is usually claimed), Nerval’s writings strategically reinvent the literary text as a site of new forms of collective imaginative practice. By considering Nerval’s work as a journalist, playwright, critic, and travel writer, as well as a poet, I draw out Nerval’s engagements with specific institutions and discourses, from censorship and intellectual property law to the national philosophy curriculum and literary criticism journals. From these local engagements emerges a shrewd critical voice that speaks directly and explicitly to the influence of bourgeois culture on the literary field. I argue that, though he is traditionally read as a figure of Romantic isolation and eccentricity, Nerval should rather be understood in relation to figures like George Sand and Maurice Barrès, writers who advocated a renewal of communal ties (albeit from very different political perspectives). Unlike these contemporaries, however, Nerval approaches community as a formal challenge, as well as a theme. He explodes the framework of the individual writing subject through, for example, a pervasive intertertextuality that constantly relates his texts to other writing and reading experiences. My project thus rejoins the critical tradition that emphasizes the failure to coincide with oneself as the essential feature of Nerval’s writing practice. However, I give this “failure” a productive and strategic value rather than the tragic valence attributed to it by psychoanalytic readings, be they psycho-biographical or post-structuralist. The mobility and porousness of the Nervalian writing subject are a formal innovation that generates a literature of community rather than self-expression. 1 In Memory of Janette and Tyra Talley i Contents Acknowledgments iii Prologue: On Reading Nerval iv Introduction 1 Chapter One: Reimagining Empiricism (Les Nuits d’octobre) 16 Chapter Two: History Play (Sylvie) 42 Chapter Three: Fictional Crimes (Les Faux Saulniers) 69 Chapter Four: Performing Authorship (Les Illuminés and Les Chimères) 96 Bibliography 129 ii Acknowledgments I have been very fortunate to have many insightful and generous interlocutors and readers throughout this project. I would like in particular to thank Suzanne Guerlac for her support and guidance, and for her unflagging confidence in the project; Susan Maslan and Robert Kaufman for their encouragement and advice; Joshua Craze for his enthusiasm and curiosity, from beginning to end; Daniel Hoffmann, Jessie Hock, and Ketaki Pant for thoughtfully reading so many drafts, and for inspiring me with their own work; Alek Jeziorek, Alex Dubilet, Margot Szarke, Jessie Singer, Eric Trudel, Marina van Zuylen, and Odile Chilton for many thought-provoking conversations; and my family for their love, and their patience. iii Prologue On Reading Nerval Nerval’s most famous poem, “El Desdichado,” was first published in 1853, not by its author, but by his sometime friend and collaborator, Alexandre Dumas, père. Dumas included the cryptic sonnet in a column he devoted to Nerval in Le Mousquetaire, citing the poem as evidence for his depiction of the younger writer.1 The depiction was an ambivalent one at best, a sort of smiling jibe at Nerval’s eccentricity. The Nerval of Dumas’s “Causerie” is “le plus rêveur de tous les poètes” [“the dreamiest of all poets”], a man at the mercy of his wayward imagination (“cette folle du logis” [“that madwoman in the attic”]) who sometimes allows those around him a glimpse of the strange world in which he lives.2 “El Desdichado” functions in Dumas’s portrait as a kind of trace of what the normal observer can never really see, serving as a souvenir from the distant land of Nerval’s mind, that “pays des chimères et des hallucinations” [“land of chimeras and hallucinations”].3 Dumas’s “Causerie” emphasizes the indexical function of the sonnet-souvenir, framing the poem with a story in which it serves as another sort of trace: Jugez-en. Il y a quelques jours, il passe au bureau; nous n’y étions pas, chose rare. Il s’informe de nous, et en nous attendant il prend une plume, du paper, et nous laisse ces vers en manière de carte de visite. [Judge for yourselves. A few days ago, he comes by the office; we were, exceptionally, not in. He inquires about us, and while he waits for us he takes up a pen, some paper, and leaves us these verses as a calling card.]4 This image of the calling card is a telling one, encapsulating the complexities of Dumas’s depiction of Nerval. The poem is remarkable, on the one hand, for the carelessness of its casual composition; one can almost imagine Nerval perched on the edge of Dumas’s desk scrawling the fourteen lines without even properly seating himself. On the other hand, however, this merely dashed-off poem is intended—both in Dumas’s office and in his article—as a meaningful trace of its author. It functions less like a poem (signifying its author by embodying his expressive labor) than like the signature a homemade calling card might bear, emerging effortlessly from the signatory’s pen and yet standing in for him absolutely. 1 “Causerie avec mes lecteurs.” Translations are my own except where otherwise noted. I will return to Nerval’s response 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. iv As the paradigm of Nerval’s writing, the calling card-sonnet suggests a kind of artlessness that cannot but surprise readers of Nerval. So spontaneous a production appears as merely an emission of its author, a status that seems to belie the beauty and intensity of the writing. And yet that seems to be precisely the crux of matter for Dumas: whatever beauty and intensity, whatever poetry there might be in Nerval’s poem (as in his other writing), they are to be traced not to Nerval himself but to the imperious imagination that exceeds and subjugates him. Nerval is but a kind of medium for his own hallucinations. And so it is that Dumas cautions in his “Causerie” against mistaking Nerval for a member of the ranks of professional writers; write though he may, Nerval earns the status of writer here only through the condescension of those more worthy of the title. The cruelty of such a portrait among friends—exploiting as it did public knowledge of Nerval’s recent psychological crises—need hardly be pointed out. Yet the depiction of Nerval in the “Causerie” cannot easily be dismissed on such grounds, for the simple reason that it has been so vigorously echoed by critics in the century and a half since. Setting aside differences in tone, the image of the calling card provides an economical way of thinking the family resemblance among the vast majority of readings of Nerval. In the image of the calling card-sonnet, we can recognize common assumptions about the relationship of writer to writing and about the place of truth that determine the way Nerval has been read. We might say that the calling card does for Dumas what the symptom has done for so many other critics and scholars, locating the significance of Nerval’s writing in a psychic reality that precedes and dominates it, and reducing the practice of literary production to a largely instinctive and almost involuntary self-expression. Rather than formal choices to be understood as constituting a poetics, the complexities of the Nervalian text have been interpreted as traces of a deeper (most often tragic) psychological truth. Nerval’s imagination has been understood not as a creative faculty, but as an incurable (if compelling) illness. * In the readings that follow, I propose to replace Dumas’s emblem of the calling card with another that orients a very different approach to Nerval’s writing (figure below). Nerval left this other card in 1843 at the Cairo home of the great engineer Linant de Bellefonds—a visit dutifully made by many French travellers in Egypt, including Gustave Flaubert and Jean-Jacques Ampère, as well as by Nerval and his traveling companion, Egyptologist Joseph Fonfrède.5 This might seem to be a far more straightforward carte de visite than “El Desdichado,” bearing as it does only a pair of names and an address. I would like to suggest, however, that this improvised calling card has much to say about both the indexical status of the Nervalian text and the sort of subjectivity of which it might be the trace.