Musset structures his series of lyrical poems as a dialogue between the Muse and the Poet and, in one instance, between the implied poet and his alter ego, “qui me ressemblait comme un frère.”¹ The two voices or roles in the poems are linked with Musset's “duality of temperament.”² In the Nuits, personality and biography lend themselves to his romantic technique of dédoublement, the projected splitting of self and the feeling that one contains dual and usually opposed identities.³ Polarity in the Nuits (1835-37) arises from the emotional aftermath of Musset's two-year love affair with George Sand that ended in March 1835. Through the self-therapy of poetry, he attempts to come to terms with his conflicting feelings.⁴

My interpretation focuses on the internal dynamics of Musset's Nuits in order to shed light on the creative process. I see the Poet and the Muse not only as projections of Musset, but more specifically, from the standpoint of Jungian psychology, as his dramatized ego and anima. They evolve in a dynamic relationship away from “sickness,” defined as reversed polarity, toward a “cure” or stabilized self, reflected in a realignment of the polarized interlocutors. The theme of “guérison,” constituting a psychological as well as a structural criterion of success in the Nuits, also benefits from Musset's insight into dramatization. Just as Jungian psychology opens up the dynamic mechanism of dialogue in the poems to reveal characterization, phenomenological analysis shows how their setting evolves in relation to the poet's state of mind.

The dramatized selves of Musset act out his conflicts within the dimensions of space, time, and materiality of opposing world views. Introduced in the opening stanzas of “La Nuit de mai” (15 June 1835) the two selves confront one another on an unequal footing. That of the Muse is verbalized first and is associated with the spatial qualities of expansion, exteriorization, and verticality. She announces the rebirth of spring with its burgeoning wild roses, greening bushes, and flowering trees. All of nature opens, and the Muse's insistent entreaties are garbed in the barely disguised language of seduction as seen in her repeated imperative: “Poète, prends ton luth et me donne un baiser” and in the urgent imagery of a rustic setting transformed into a perfumed boudoir: “Comme le lit joyeux de deux jeunes époux” (23). Indeed, the Muse's blatant imagery can be justified by its elevated intention of externalizing the Poet's need to create, to be artistically productive. Moreover, the visualization of fecundity, passion, and joyful love does not restrict the Muse to terrestrial values. As the source of her being, she identifies with the elements of fire, air, and sky and, in so doing, lays claim to mythical elements associated with the masculine.⁵ Born on the warm winds of spring sweeping down from above, she threatens to return: “Mon aile me soulève au souffle du printemps / Le vent va m'emporter; je vais quitter la terre” (125-26).

The second, opposing world is experienced by the Poet who has retreated into himself. Characterized by contraction, interiorization, and horizontality, his existence lacks light, perspective, and openness. Preoccupation with his inner space distances him from personal contact, and he is slow in responding to the Muse. Indeed, overshadowed by her verbal energy and passionate vitality, he feels threatened by her insistent invitation to life and to the stirrings within himself: “Qu'ai-je donc en moi qui s'agite, / Dont je me sens épouvanté?” (25-26). In contrast to nature's fecundity, the Poet laments his separation from life through loneliness and sterility: “Je suis seul; c'est l'heure qui sonne; / 0 solitude! 0 Pauvreté!” (32-33). He is chided by the Muse for his laziness and, indirectly, for his “impuissance” (121). Little wonder that he rebels in the concluding stanza: “O Muse! spectre insatiable, / Ne m'en demande pas si long” (192-93). Limited to the terrestrial, horizontal plane of existence, he is unsure of his feelings and is cut off from the outside world by his lack of confidence.

The opposing worlds of the Poet and the Muse can be explained by the concept of polarity that has considerable standing in literary criticism, science, myth, and in Jungian psychology. The concept of dédoublement has been referred to, and this romantic theme enjoys an intuitive insight into human nature. The brain is divided into two hemispheres, unequal but complementary, which work side by side and have some bearing as to gender.⁶ Myth also sees polarity as being of central importance to life and speculates that the sacred, when entering the field of time, provides transcendent energy by breaking “into pairs of opposites.”⁷ Between experimental science and mysticism stands Jungian psychology. It maintains that all energy and life are born of the tensions of opposites such as good and evil, day and night, life and death. etc., and that balance is made possible by the self-regulating system of the psyche.⁸ In the attempt to understand the function of polarities in the unconscious mind, the seat of creativity, Jung has set forth theoretical models based on contrasexual factors. Each gender incorporates, in addition to an ego and its shadow, tendencies of its opposite. The anima represents the woman within man and the animus, the man within woman. Each contrasexual factor has a positive and a negative potential. Development requires the integration of opposites in the process of individuation.⁹

In the Nuits, polarity is reversed in the sense that Musset's projected anima in the Muse overwhelms the Poet through her power of movement across time, space, and matter. For his part, the Poet appears to be mired in a present not of his choice, unable to reflect upon the past or project himself into the future. To be sure, some unconscious “bad faith” may be involved, for the shadow aspect of Musset's dramatized ego projects upon the Muse an aura of possessive and emasculating, if not devouring, maternalized figure of beloved.¹⁰ Indeed, both the Poet and the Muse show evidence of ambivalence between negative and positive aspects of personality, as in a dramatic character. In other words, the conflicts of Musset are acted out through opposing forces on complex levels of meaning radiating from his self.¹¹

The major symptom of reversed polarity in the Nuits, passivity, is featured in the first half of the next poem, “La Nuit de décembre” (1 December 1835). Lacking an assertive ego, the Poet undergoes the stages of life—schoolboy, lover, libertine, exile—as if he were a neutral observer of life without the personal responsibility to shape his world through values and actions. Indeed, a latent guilt surfaces periodically. This contradiction between his illusion of innocence and identity as a libertine literally explodes in the confrontation of his internal and external realities: “Et mon verre, en touchant le sien, / Se brisa dans ma main débile” (47-48).

The Poet's passivity seems to be fueled by guilt which culminates at the deathbed of his father where time is reversed to reveal the stranger as “un orphelin vêtu de noir” (53). The inability to cope with the loss of his father as an adult reflects the extent to which his ego has receded. Hence, without a counterbalancing force, the Poet's feelings race out of control: “Partout où le long des chemins, / J'ai posé mon front dans mes mains / Et sangloté comme une femme” (97-99). Frustrated by his passivity, he feels violated by life: “Partout où j'ai comme un mouton / Qui laisse sa laine au buisson, / Senti se dénuer mon âme.”

As the passive partner of the implied dialogue in “La Nuit de décembre,” the Poet is tempted to transfer responsibility for failure onto his absent counterpart, the Muse (poetic surrogate, woman or beloved, as well as his projected anima): “Et je songeais comme la femme oublie, / Et je sentais un lambeau de ma vie / Qui se déchirait lentement” (133-35). Temporally, he is torn between the past with its “eternal” promises of love and an empty present. His fear is reflected in the maternal element of water which threatens the loss of self by dissolution in the other: “Comme un plongeur dans une mer profonde, / Je me perdais dans tant d'oubli” (150-51).¹² However, fear of the other is overcome by anger's purging images of “faible femme, orgueilleuse insensée” (158) and “ce coeur de glace” (167). The ego of the Poet becomes unblocked but remains in a regressed state of resentment against dependency.

With a realignment of ego and anima, an integration of the Poet's self and a more balanced view of the world become possible. The first indication of victory over psychic imbalance can be seen in the Poet's distinction between the beloved or la femme and nature: “Partez, partez! la nature immortelle / N'a pas tout voulu vous donner” (172-73). Musset's persona starts reconciling itself to the necessary presence of the feminine principle without fear of absorption into it. Hence, he avoids the misogyny of Vigny's “La Colère de Samson” where woman, portrayed as leopard and viper, is associated with the weakness of man—affective and carnal—that originates in nature but is ministered to by woman. Moreover, Musset's distinction makes possible the painful process of emotional separation from the “other” who not only bears resemblance to the maternal Muse but to the divinity as well: “Eternal Dieu! toi que j'ai tant aimée / Si tu pars, pourquoi m'aimes-tu?”

Frustration ventilated in the absence of the Muse's overbearing presence reflects the assertion of his ego. The activation of this principle in the Poet's world is prepared by the scene with his father, “mon père” (51), and it is confirmed by an elevated reappearance in the concluding “vision”: “—Ami, notre père est le tien” (199). With a semblance of balance between his anima and ego, the Poet feels less urgency for completion in the “other” and shows less fear of separation from the beloved and its resulting loneliness. His double reveals his mission of guardianship in a message of hope: “Viens à moi sans inquiétude, / … Ami, je suis la Solitude.” Another reason for progress in the poem goes to the core of Musset's personality. A profound love of life moves his being, and it (together with a continuing realignment of his projected anima and ego) comes to the forefront in the next poem, “La Nuit d'août.”

With the self-nurturing insight of “La Vision,” that loneliness is not a condemnation, “un mauvais destin,” but a necessary part of the human condition, images of fear and despair—drowning and suicide—give way to expanded being through a normalization of existential polarities. Although the Muse opens “La Nuit d'août” (15 August 1836), she does so with quiet discretion: “J'attends en silence.” With ideas of the past and image of the Poet as child, she is greeted by a vigorous interlocutor come of age who vies with her to gain control of their dialogue. His strategy puts distance between them. By hailing her as “ma mère et ma nourrice,” the Poet de-eroticizes and objectifies their relationship. For her part, the Muse seems to resent the loss of her title as object of passion, “ma maîtresse,” and she stoops to control through manipulation: “Il ne te restera de tes plaisirs du monde / Qu'un impuissant mépris pour notre honnête amour” (25-26). The attempt to control through an appeal to fear and guilt continues in her assertions about his inconstancy, loss of vocation, and waste of self in loving: “Hélas! mon bien-aimé, vous n'êtes plus poète. / Rien ne réveille plus votre lyre muette” (57-58).

Closure is now represented by the Muse whose animus degenerates into the possessive love of a dethroned matriarch. Opening to life experience becomes, then, the posture of the Poet who announces the rebirth of nature and the continuity of life. At the same time, he sees death in the valley. This opposition of horizontality and verticality, nature and the Creator (“Dieu là haut, l'espoir ici-bas”) reflects an incipient balance between his own anima and ego that permits the harmonious view of existence in the conclusion.

In a final distancing from the Muse (who threatens the forfeiture of his genius by the gods) the Poet takes control of “La Nuit d'août” and the series of poems. In turning his back on the “heavens” of the Muse to focus on the earth, the Poet makes life rather than art the generating center of his existence. However, horizontality does not end in the cult of pleasure for its own sake. Love is located on the plane of continuity that opens out to infinity. Closure falls before the necessity of repeated exposure to experience. Suffering and love combine as human functions of immeasurable capacity to participate in the immortality of continuing creation: “Aime, et tu renaîtras.”

The exaltation of his ego released in a credo of love and its expanded being within the inexhaustible continuum of life make possible new gains in self-confidence and creative thinking. However, one is justified in wondering how much of this psychological progress is retained. Musset's internal drama—as played out in the next poem, “La Nuit d'octobre” (15 October 1837)—stabilizes the realignment of his projected selves and furthers his self-integration on a deeper level of consciousness. For the first time in a poem based on an explicit dialogue, the Poet begins. A scanning of the stanzas reveals an approximate equality in the length of roles. For her part, the Muse's own ego gains equal footing with her previously dominant animus. She recognizes the Poet not as an appendage of herself but as a separate being, a “friend” rather than a dependent child. They engage in a balanced dialogue with sufficient distance and mutual respect: “Muse, sois donc sans crainte; au souffle qui t'inspire / Nous pouvons sans péril tous deux nous confier” (45-46).

Only by working together in harmony can the Muse and the Poet, projections of Musset's anima and ego, cure his broken heart and heal his fragmented self. The theme of “cure” dominates “La Nuit d'octobre” and constitutes a criterion of success by which the whole series of poems can be interpreted. At first, the Poet claims to be cured in answer to the Muse's concerned query: “O poète? en es-tu guéri? … Je suis bien guéri de cette maladie” (34, 41). His return to work (“Jours de travail! seuls jours où j'ai vécu”) sounds promising but, paradoxically, psychological progress compounds his suffering. With emotional distance, he realizes the extent of his previous enslavement: “C'est une femme à qui je fus soumis” (73). Regrets as to time lost lead him to relive his former madness, jealousy, against which he struggles: “Va-t'en, retire-toi, spectre de ma maîtresse” (148). Peace of mind lies not in trying to forget her (as proposed by the Muse) but in admitting “une blessure / Qui jamais ne guérira” (191-93). The cure must be found, he intuits, in the faculty that made the experience possible, his heart.

Regression into offended sensibilities (“Ton souvenir abhorré”) is checked by the firm but caring counsel of the Muse who reasserts the Poet's own credo of suffering as the necessary condition to moral expansion: “Les moissons pour mûrir ont besoin de rosée; / Pour vivre et pour sentir l'homme a besoin des pleurs” (222-23). Through the willingness to reexperience his pain, the Poet is helped by the Muse to attain a broader view of his former beloved. She becomes a fellow being created as his equal, the companion who opened life to him, a concerned friend who saw his “wound” but was unable to “close” it (260-67).

Sensitive enough to feel deeply and strong enough to confront his feelings, the Poet commits himself to the reconstruction of his world. His commitment takes the form of an oath to ban hate, to free himself from the past, and to reaffirm life. Its condition of fulfillment rests upon forgiveness of himself and the beloved: “L'instant suprême où je t'oublie / Doit être celui du pardon. / Pardonnons-nous—je romps le charme / Qui nous unissait devant Dieu” (296-99). Images of rebirth, exalted in the ending to “La Nuit d'août,” conclude this series of poems on a sounder foundation. There is a more equal balance between his anima and ego in a stabilized self and a hopeful view of the world: “Viens voir la nature immortelle / Sortir des voiles du sommeil; / Nous allons renaître avec elle / Au premier rayon du soleil!”.

Polarized dialogue in the Nuits, now defused and regularized, extends as a meditation in “Souvenir” (15 February 1841). Although this major poem is presented traditionally as Musset's answer to Lamartine's Le Lac (1817) and Hugo's Tristesse d'Olympio (1837), it functions internally as a sequel to the Nuits.¹³ A basic change in form tends to confirm resolution of psychological conflict. Dialogue structure and the technique of dédoublement in fictionalized personae yield to a first person speaker. Hence, “Souvenir” offers a vantage point from which to appraise the outcome of Musset's self-healing through the therapy of poetry.

Progress made in the Nuits is retained and solidified in “Souvenir.” For example, the implied poet continues to reject the illusion of an absolute cure by admitting “un coeur encore blessé,” and he upholds the humanizing value of its pain, “sa cicatrice … si douce à sentir” (22, 51-52). Similarly, he preserves the affective distinction between his beloved and the setting of their love in nature: “Je ne viens point jeter un regret inutile / Dans l'écho de ces bois témoins de mon bonheur” (25-26). More important than the dimension of space, he separates the past self of his beloved from her present self. The moral victory on this level of temporality allows the Poet to transcend anger and to visualize objectively the “death” of his relationship, the transformation of a beloved mistress into “une femme inconnue” while preserving the wonder and value of his feelings.

The Poet's conversion to a religion of love in “La Nuit d'août” and his discipleship in “La Nuit d'octobre” develop into love's apostleship in “Souvenir.” He charges Dante and unidentified poets (presumably romantics) with shortsighted vanity and “blasphemy” in decrying love's “misery” (66). In his conclusion, the object of love is transcended by an integrated view of the world that reconciles horizontality and verticality in the dimensions of earth and heaven, and temporality in the present and past. The essence of life, pure love, is preserved in a private world beyond contamination of anger, time, and space:

Je me dis seulement: A cette heure, en ce lieu,
Un jour, je fus aimé, j'aimais, elle était belle.
J'en fouis ce trésor dans mon âme immortelle,
                                                            Et je l'emporte à Dieu!

Despite progression in the Nuits that leads to the seemingly solid integration of self in “Souvenir,” a cloud hangs over the outcome of Musset's therapy through poetry. In the sonnet, “Tristesse” (14 June 1840), which predates “Souvenir” by eight months, a behavioral problem is expressed that puts into doubt the possibility of a lasting “cure” to his broken heart and a viable readjustment to life. In this highly confessional sonnet heavy with guilt, the faculties of reason and feeling are brought into harmony to know a higher “truth” (“Quand je l'ai comprise et sentie”), but the habits of a disorderly life nullify the poet's freedom to undertake a personal reform (“J'en étais déjà dégoûté”).

Musset's acute awareness of his failure to harmonize reason and sentiment, action and feeling, situates his personal struggle in the broader context of generation. Disappointment in love reflects the search for meaning in life typical of French romantics living in the aftermath of the Enlightenment's aborted revolutionary idealism and the fall of imperial grandeur. Musset's mourning for the lost love of his life figures in “le mal du siècle” and its sense of anguished disillusionment. Loss of love and a fragmented self are part of a collective loss of destiny and betrayal of youthful revolutionary ideals. This confluence of personal time and history receives eloquent form in the opening to La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (1836) where a young generation born in war and for war, “des neiges de Moscou et du soleil des Pyramides,” is faced with absorption into bourgeois materialism or desperate dissipation.¹⁴ For Musset and his projected personae in the Nuits, war is internalized in an impossible love where the self is set against itself leading to a fragmentation of being. His polarized projections strain toward the “cure” of harmony through integration, but he never succeeds through the therapy of poetry to resolve a historical dislocation.¹⁵

Notes

1. See Musset's “La Nuit de décembre,” Premières Poésies, Poésies nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) 249. All quotations are to this edition. Numbers in parentheses refer to verses in the poem under consideration.

2. See Gérard Milhaud, “Psychopathologie de Musset,” Europe (nov.-déc. 1977): 5-16, whose thesis of duality in Musset's life and works derives from Alfred's “double tempérament.”

3. See James Smith, “The ‘homo duplex’ in Nineteenth-Century French Literature,” Studies in Honor of A. G. Engstrom, ed. Robert T. Cargo and Emmanuel Mickel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972) 127-38.

4. Some progress in this direction is usually acknowledged by critics. See Pierre Odoul, Le Drame intime d'Alfred de Musset (Paris: La Pensée universelle, 1976) 19 who contends: “Ainsi Musset, longtemps avant Freud, avait pressenti le rôle essentiel de la psychanalyse et tenté, par elle, de se guérir.”

5. See Georges Bachelard, La Psychanalyse du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1938) 100-101.

6. See Linda Garmon's summary of Norman Geschwind's theory of brain development, “Of Hemispheres, Handedness and More,” Psychology Today (November 1985): 40-48.

7. See Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988) 28.

8. See Carl G. Jung, “On the Psychology of the Unconscious: The Problem of the Attitude-Type,” Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1956; rept. Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Co., 1965) 64.

9. See M.-L. von Franz, “The Process of Individuation,” Man and his Symbols, ed. Carl G. Jung (New York: Dell, 1964) 186-207.

10. See Graham Padgett, “Bad Faith in Alfred de Musset: A Problem of Interpretation,” Dalhousie French Studies, 3(1981): 65-82, who applies Sartre's ideological definition of commitment and whose conclusion remains external to Musset's world in its reductionist thrust. For the negative anima figures, see L. Franz, Man and his Symbols 187.

11. See Georges Poulet, Les Métamorphoses du cercle (Paris: Plon, 1961) 136.

12. For the psychology of water symbolism, see Georges Bachelard, Water and Dreams, trans. from 1942 ed. by Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1983) 15.

13. See Lloyd Bishop, “Musset's Souvenir and the Greater Romantic Lyric,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 12.4-13.1 (Summer-Fall 1984): 119-30.

14. See Alfred de Musset, La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (Paris: Garnier, 1968) 4.

15. For a study on the psychology of “le mal du siècle,” see James F. Hamilton, “The Anxious Hero in Chateaubriand's René, Romance Quarterly 34 (November 1987): 415-24.