Gérard's sojourn in the asylum in the final episodes of Aurélia parallels George Trosse's experience in Glastonbury and Cowper's in St Albans. Each protagonist undergoes a spiritual resurrection in a place of healing. In Aurélia, however, the asylum, for all its historical specificity, remains a fictional construction. The tension between autobiographical history and autobiographical fiction reflects the tension which characterises the work as a whole: as an autobiographical discourse, it is bound up with the relevant historical and biographical contexts, but as a writing of subjectivity it is independent of them. The two levels of discourse subvert each other. Meanwhile, the relationship between the life and the work itself remains problematic: the narrative of Gérard's recovery is coherent, but in biographical terms that very coherence is fictional.

The ambivalence of Nerval's actual relationship with Dr Blanche and his establishment is not apparent in Aurélia, yet traces can be detected in a description of Gérard's private room at the asylum: 'On the whole I found nearly everything that I had possessed there.' The asylum, seemingly, provides Gérard with a space in which to realise a sense of identity. For Nerval, however, home was not a private interior: it was located by memories of his maternal uncle's house in Loisy, and comprised an entire locality. As Sylvie shows, this is not a space which Gérard can reinhabit, for it no longer exists in reality: the sites of childhood still exist, but their meaning derives from the lost plenitude of the childhood world.

A domestic retreat might conceivably have compensated Nerval for that alienating objectivisation of social reality which he saw occurring in contemporary life. In Sylvie both Gérard's 'old-fashioned apartment,' full of 'bric-abrac splendours,' and his celebrated proposal that 'the only refuge left to us was the poet's ivory tower' imply a domestic aesthetic of the type which assumed increasing importance as the century progressed—the private 'palace of art' into which sensitive souls such as Huysmans's des Esseintes could withdraw from the insufferable vulgarities of the era. For Nerval, however, the private interior was usually a point of departure, and he was rarely chez lui.

Dr Blanche attempted to persuade Nerval not merely to take up residence in his clinic, but to treat it as a home. In a period when a settled domicile acquires a psychological character, Blanche was evidently concerned about his patient's chronic vagabondage. In October 1853, he took delivery of Nerval's possessions and installed them in a private room at Passy, seeking, in effect, to anchor him to a stable environment. As reported in Aurélia, however, the personal possessions that surround Gérard obstinately refuse to coalesce into the domestic circumference of a centred self:

I found there the debris of my various fortunes, the confused remains of several sets of furniture scattered or resold over the past twenty years. It is a junk heap as bad as Doctor Faust's. A tripod table with eagles' heads, a console supported on a winged sphinx, a Seventeenth-Century commode, and Eighteenth-Century bookcase, a bed of the same period, with an oval-ceilinged baldequin covered with scarlet damask (...) , a rustic dresser laden with faïence and Sèvres porcelain, most of it somewhat damaged; a hookah brought back from Constantinople, a large alabaster cup, a crystal vase; some wood panelling from the destruction of an old house I had once lived in on the site of the Louvre.

The list of antiques, exotic curios and bric-à-brac, all of it lacking in use value, continues for half a page further. The disparate and heterogeneous nature of this collection, so far from placing Gérard, bears witness to his endemic displacement: 'For some days I amused myself by rearranging all these things, creating in this narrow attic a bizarre ensemble composed of palace and hovel, that aptly summarises my wandering existence.'

The age of the commodity had dawned with the Paris of the Second Empire and Gérard's room in the asylum is a fantastic version of the commodified private interior of the mid-nineteenth century. Like that interior, it perpetuates the connection which is traced between person, property and desire in the bourgeois era, but in the inverted forms of heterogeneity, eccentricity and lack of permanence. Under these conditions bourgeois reality becomes extravagant, fantastic and unstable. Later in the century, Maupassant's naturalist fiction took an increasingly fantastic turn as his mental condition deteriorated (he was to be another patient of Dr Blanche's at Passy). One of his later stories, 'Qui sait?' (1890) would have delighted Marx: it concerns a roomful of furniture which comes to life one night and makes its way out of the house. Some time later, the narrator inspects an antique shop full of bric-àbrac, where he discovers his furniture. By the end of the story he has taken refuge in a private mental clinic. Nerval's possessions, although not so fantastically animated, were scarcely more restful in their effect: 'Dr Blanche thought he had done well in re-establishing him in his past; that would help him, he hoped, to cope better with his solitude. On the contrary, the reappearance of his fondest memories provoked an acute crisis of exaltation; he wept day and night ( . . . ) . After several days, the doctor decided to suspend the experiment and moved him to another room' [Pierre Petitfils, Nerval, 1986].

In a psychoanalytic study of Sylvie [Nerval: le charme de la répétition: lecture de 'Sylvie,' 1979], Sarah Kofman has itemised 'narcissistic' female motifs in Nerval's oeuvre:

rhythmically repetitive rounds, accompanied by songs with set refrains, garlands, bowers [berceaux de fleurs]—these have a maternal, protective value; they are linked to the cycle of natural fecundity, to the cycle of the seasons, to that of woman; they are linked to the moon, to the cult of Artemis-Isis, to that of the Great Mother and her avatars. They refer to the need to be regenerated and reborn through maternal exhalation, to the desire to be enclosed in an enveloping uterine form.

In Nerval, such female-maternal circles are rarely if ever 'enveloping' in the claustrophobic sense of the reference to the uterus. None of the womb motifs noted by Kofman involve an interior space; all, on the contrary, are situated in the open, and associated with nature. From an historical point of view, this alfresco emphasis is untypical. In his paper, 'The Uncanny' ['Das Unheimliche,' 1955], Freud assimilates the female womb to a home: 'It often happens that neurotic men declare there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us has lived once upon a time and in the beginning.' According to Freud, this (repressed) association is primeval, but the literature he cites tells a rather different story. His final example, immediately prior to this identification of womb and home, is a story encountered in the Strand magazine which exemplifies the Victorian-Edwardian genre of the haunted house story, 'about a young married couple who move into a furnished house ( . . . ) . ' In Nerval, the noninteriority of the womb corresponds to the non-materiality (and non-sexuality) of the ideal female, which in turn derives from the absence of the mother. Conversely, if the domestic interior rarely constitutes for him a womb-like space of retreat from the reality of the world at large this is because he does not associate it with the image of the mother presiding over hearth and home. His lack of interest in the forms of bourgeois reality extends to the private sphere.

As well as seeking to surround Nerval with a homelike space, Blanche further sought to integrate him into a surrogate family. [According to Petitfils] 'Dr Blanche held it to be important that his establishment was above all a family dwelling: the boarders' meals were shared and presided over by the doctor's family (his mother and sister) and his assistants.' Blanche married in the summer of 1854 while Nerval was absent from the clinic on the illfated journey to Germany. When he returned to Blanche's care in August, the doctor sought to assert a paternal authority over his patient. Nerval resisted this: in a letter written on October 17, and left behind at Passy for Blanche to discover, he insisted on his seniority in years: 'You are young! in fact I forget what age separates us, because I still act as a young man, which stops me from perceiving that I am several years older than you.' As the letter continues, Nerval transfers his own sense of rivalry to his doctor:

I saw you at your father's so young that I took advantage of my presumed state of madness to inspire the friendship of a young lady (...) . Do you want me to think and let it be thought that, from that period, a dark jealousy has made you unjust towards me . . . Perhaps even this cruel sentiment will be newly manifested here. I fear to go too far, and in order to reassure you, I need to appeal to my entire life. Never having aspired to the wives or mistresses of my friends, I wish to always rank you among these (...) .

(Pléiade)

The letter continues with a bizarre paragraph which seems to provide evidence of derangement. It is not, however, incoherent: full of masonic references, it resumes the themes of seniority and rivalry in a pseudo-occult language:

I don't know whether you are three years old or five, but I am more than seven and I have metals hidden in Paris. If you have for yourself the Gr .. . B .. . I will tell you that I call myself the terrible brother I will even be the terrible sister if need be. Belonging in secret to the Order of the Nopses, which is German, my rank permits me to play my cards openly . . . Tell it to your superiors, for I don't suppose that great secrets have been confided to a simple [brother] who should find me very Respectable (X). But I am sure that you are more than that. If you have the right to pronounce the word [ . . . ] [hieroglyph inserted] (that is to say Mac-Benac and I write it in the Oriental way), if you say Jachin, I say Boaz, if you say Boaz I say Jehova, or even Machenac . . . But I know very well that we are only joking (Pléiade).

Ross Chambers [in Nerval et la poétique du voyage, 1969] argues that Blanche's marriage aligned him, for Nerval, with the double who, in Aurélia, is scheduled to marry the beloved. Bearing this perception in mind, the above paragraph can be linked to the climactic encounter with the double in the final dream of Part One of Aurélia (which Nerval had only recently completed): Gérard raises his arm 'to make a sign which appeared to me to have magical power.' This aggressive contest is converted into a reciprocal gesture of healing in the asylum at the end of Aurélia: 'the spirit figure [Saturninus] placed his hand upon my forehead, as I had done, the night before, when I had endeavoured to magnetize my companion.' But in the real as against the symbolic asylum, matters turned out differently. Nerval's stay at Passy in 1854 reverses the narrative sequence: the letter of October 17 shows his relations with Blanche in the light of the occult and latently sexual contest which ends Part One of Aurélia.

At a climactic point in the narrative of recovery, Nerval exploded any normative implications by inserting the radically heterogeneous lyricism of the 'Mémorables'. This rhapsodic prose sequence seeks to enact the immediacy of transcendental revelation: 'A star shone suddenly and revealed the secret of the world of worlds to me. Hosannah! Peace on earth and glory in heaven!.' The 'Mémorables' constitutes a maternally inspired writing of nonidentity: birth and creation are joyful and effortless because they do not involve the painful labour of producing a substantial entity: 'In the Himalayas a little flower is born. ( . . . ) A silver pearl shone in the sands; a golden pearl sparkled in the sky . . . The world was created.' The inspired writer is fecund rather than potent: 'the world was created. Chaste loves, divine sighs!'; 'the air quivers, and light harmoniously bursts the budding flowers [fleurs naissantes]. A sigh, a shiver of love comes from the swollen womb of the earth.' Breathing and sighing are intimately allied with fecundity. Inspired language, transcending the concerns of the ego, is selfless. The various equivocations, doubts and questionings of the confessional discourse of identity evanesce: the visionary prose consists of a flowing succession of declarative and lyrical statements, untroubled by either introspective self-examination or temporal succession (they fluctuate between present and past tenses). The writer is released from the labourpains of reproducing an identifiable self through his autobiographical discourse. Inspired language is diffuse and gentle, 'a soft foreign tongue,' different in kind from the self-analytical discourse of identity.

As the studies [in 'Illuminism, utopia, mythology,' The French romantics, 1984] of Frank Paul Bowman have shown, the imagery of the 'Mémorables' is embedded in the syncretistic, illuminist and Utopian thought of the period. The message of the Romantic visionaries, and of the 'Mémorable', concerns 'the Utopian and apocalyptic dream of justice and unity, the spiritualisation of matter and humanity, the disappearance of the ancient anathema' [Bowman, 'Une lecture politique de la folie réligieuse ou "théomanie",' Romantisme, 1979]. The resurrection of the son coincides with the Second Coming ('glad tidings') and announces an end of history: 'peace on earth and glory in heaven.' Celebrating a paradisal transformation of reality, the texture of the prose further enacts the positive overcoming of identity in language. A relay of song threads together time and space in an animate texture which is both turned inwards and returned outwards: 'the choir of stars unfolds itself in infinity; it turns away and returns upon itself, contracts and expands.' Revealed secrets, emergence from sheltered grottoes, music and song—these images subsist in a language which itself opens outwards in a responsive rhythm—the rhythm of an inspired language which aspires to the status of revelation.

However, the visionary momentum of the 'Mémorables' is not sustained: The visionary sequence is abruptly succeeded by dream narratives: "I found myself in spirit at Saardam, which I visited last year': Nerval had in fact visited Saardam in 1852. We find ourselves once more in the presence of an autobiographical narrator, relating his dreams to his lived experience. Bowman [in '"Mémorables" d'Aurélia, signification et situation générique,' French Forum, 1986] has argued that these dream narratives are continuous with the visionary sequence, and carry over its Utopian theme. Nevertheless it remains true that the immediacy and transparency of the visionary prose sequence is problematised by the return of a voice which no longer acts as a transparent medium of revelation and is identifiably that of an autobiographical and psychological subject. Loss of transparency is confirmed by the discourse which follows: "I resolved to fix my dream state and learn its secret.' This is a subject who is by no means certain of the meaning of his dreams and who now confronts sleep and dream as a threat to the integrity of the ego: 'Is it not possible to control this attractive and fearful chimera, to rule the spirits of the night which play with our reason?.' In seeking to unriddle the enigma of his dreams, Gérard engages in a discourse of psychological introspection. Seeking to come to terms with his own psychological identity, he is aware of being divided between two modes of being ('Sleep takes up a third of our lives'). From the side of the ego he must attempt to reestablish the link between the disjoined spheres: 'Who knows if there is not some link between those two existences and if it is not possible for the soul to re-tie it [de le nouer] now. From that moment on I devoted myself to trying to find the meaning of my dreams.'

In The interpretation of dreams [1976], Freud admitted the existence of dream-thoughts which defeat analysis: 'there is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable—a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown.' Subsequently, the psychoanalyst Guy Rosolato has proposed that this node or knot serves as the metaphor of a relationship with a maternal dimension which escapes knowing—a relation d'inconnu. Gérard's reference to the problematic link [lien] between the two existences of life and dream (a link which must be retied) can be interpreted in these terms [from Guy Rosolato's La relation d'inconnu, 1978]: 'The sleep into which the sleeper plunges can be assimilated to the maternal container for a primordial identification. The navel indicates (... ) that which is not recognised concerning the originally lived relationship between the child and its mother, but which is daily reproduced in sleep where the desire of the dream is condensed.'

For Rosolato, the hollow of the navel is superimposed on the female fissure [fente] which constitutes the dark abyss of the 'unknown' on which object-relations are founded. In this way (and bearing in mind Gérard's own quest for meaning) he provides us with a means of interpreting the second of the dream-narratives which succeed the visionary sequence:

in front of me there opened an abyss into which there rushed in tumult the frozen waves of the Baltic. It seemed that the whole ofthe Neva with its blue waters were to be swallowed up in this fissure in the globe. The ships of Cronstadt and Saint Petersburg bobbed at anchor, ready to break away and vanish in the abyss, when a divine radiance from above lighted the scene of this desolation. In the bright beam of light piercing the mist, I saw the rock on which stands the statue of Peter the Great. Above this solid pedestal clouds rose in groups, piling up to the zenith.

It is the rocklike image of the father-emperor who restores stability to a world threatened by a watery abyss. A similar contrast recurs in Gérard's subsequent consideration of the problem of dream-imagery: 'the strangeness of certain pictures, which are like the grimacing reflections of real objects on a surface of troubled water.' The masculine-paternal identity is re-established over against an unstable female dimension which is both fascinating and disturbing ('cette chimère attrayante et redoutable'), and which eludes male knowledge. In this view, it is the unknown fissure of female sexuality which haunts the psychological subject as that which is not known, but against which he will react as the assumptions of sanity require he must: '"Why should I not," I asked myself, "at last force those mystic gates, armed with all my will-power, and dominate my sensations instead of being subject to them?"' The image, not fortuitously, is one of rape and domination.

Michel Foucault [in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, 1980] has proposed that 'the society that emerged in the nineteenth century—bourgeois, capitalist or industrial society—call it what you will—did not confront sex with a refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it.' Dr Labrunie was, at an early date, an exponent of this development: 'On brumaire 9, XIV (1806), he submitted his thesis on "The Dangers of the Deprivation and Abuse of Venereal Pleasure in Women" (...). The chosen subject—a study of hysterical manifestations in women due to either a lack or an abuse of sexual relations—announces the direction in which he will later specialise—female illnesses and gynaecology' [Petitfils]. There is some evidence that Dr Labrunie's son found the prospect of physical sexuality a disturbing one: Sebillote [in Le secret de Gérard de Nerval, 1948] has underlined the significance of the statement in Sylvie, 'Seen at close quarters the real woman revolted our ingenuous souls.' Nerval's openly acknowledged tendency to idealise and spiritualise women can be understood as a reaction against his father's medical interests. However in proposing to force apart the gates of dream he is once more his father's son: it is the psychological subject who finds the female space of the unknown threatening rather than liberating, and who now undertakes a quest for knowledge as means of control in an act of historical reason. If Nerval is nowhere more radical than in the 'Mémorables', he is nowhere more normative than in the passages which follow the 'Mémorables* and which reflect on the problematic relationship between dream and reality. The therapeutic discourse of identity which results anticipates the project of Freud's Interpretation of dreams in proposing to investigate the meaning of dreams in the context of a self-analytical autobiography.

Rosolato proposes that the umbilical knot of the navel is the corporeal metaphor of a relationship with a female sexual orifice, and with the womb as interior container. This female 'unknown' poses a double threat to masculine definitions of reality: it is that fissure which, as absence of the phallus, undermines the solidity of the object-world; equally, it presents the seductive phantasy of a 'regressive' return to the uterus. In this way the doctor, typically, would project the onus of madness onto the female: Thus we see converging in an interiorisation which, singularly, makes the psychical apparatus a container, possessing therefore a feminine value, everything which escapes the signifying organisation and its totalisation—sexuality represented in femininity itself, madness and the real' [Rosolato]. The key term here is 'interiorisation.' In Aurélia, dream has represented a spiritual realm which may be 'psychical,' but which is not psychological. On the penultimate page of the text, however, this spiritual dimension is seemingly lost. As it becomes the object of introspection and self-analysis, dream acquires the meaning of an interiorised madness. On the final page of the text, Gérard returns his attention to the figure who, in the asylum, sums up the simultaneous representations of madness and intériorisation—the young madman. Turned in on himself and sustained by a life-support system, Gérard confronts in him an embodiment of self-withdrawal into the interiorised enclosure of the uterus.

Entry into sleep involves a descent into a 'vague underground cavern.' Going to sleep is an 'image of death,' but the cavern also suggests a uterus. The space of the tomb and that of the womb converge in this dangerous transitional moment.

In chapter VIII of Part One of Aurélia, Gérard, in the course of a sequence of dream-visions, witnesses the unfolding of an occult world history. Necromancers parthenogenetically reproduce themselves in uterine sepulchres:

These necromancers, exiled to the ends of the earth, had agreed to transmit their power to one another. Surrounded by women and slaves, each of their sovereigns was assured of being born again in the form of one of his children. Their life lasted a thousand years. When they were about to die, powerful cabalists shut them up in well-guarded tombs where they were fed elixirs and life-giving substances. They preserved the semblance of life for a long time. Then, as the chrysalis spins its cocoon, they fell asleep for forty days to be born again as a little child which was later called to the kingdom.

These male wombs are malignant parodies of the female womb: they do not produce new life but endlessly reproduce the Oedipal self. In the asylum, Gérard, remembering the necromancers, exclaims, 'Ah misery! ( . . . ) we live again in our sons as we have lived in our fathers.' The necromancers are bad versions of the father-doctor. In the narrative of recovery, the good father embodies an historically determined reality-principle, but this good father is inescapably accompanied by a negative double. The bad father asserts his presence in a fantasmatic perversion of history: the threat of a pathological loss of reality resides in his continuing influence.

In Aurélia, an open, undefined maternal 'womb' is readily translated into the material closure of the paternal tomb. In Part One, Gérard dreams of a woman whose form coalesces with the landscape of a garden, but this in turn is nightmarishly transformed into a graveyard:

gradually the whole garden blended with her own form (...) . I lost her as she became transfigured, for she seemed to vanish in her own immensity. 'Don't leave me!' I cried. Tor nature dies with you.' (... ) I threw myself on a fragment of ruined wall, at the foot of which lay the bust of a woman. I lifted it up and felt convinced it was of her .. . I recognized the beloved features and as I stared around me I saw that the garden had become a graveyard, and I heard voices crying: The universe is in darkness.'

Subsequently, (in an episode which corresponds to the relapse of 1851) Gérard, visiting a friend, admires the view from a terrace. While descending a stairway he falls, hurting his chest. He believes himself mortally wounded and rushes into the centre of a garden: "I felt happy to be dying this way, at this hour, surrounded by the trees, trellises, autumn flowers. It was, however, no more than a swoon.' Later, as fever takes hold, he 'remembers' that the view he had admired overlooked the cemetery where Aurélia is buried. Again, a garden or landscape is transformed into a cemetery; again a site saturated with maternal implications is juxtaposed with the graveyard of the dead beloved. Gérard rushes into the garden as into the maternal circle which will transform death into rebirth, but this transition is denied: the open, pastoral space congeals into the enclosure of the tomb, and Gérard is plunged once more into delirious dreams. In the climax of this sequence, the dead beloved, trapped in a material, reified form (represented in the dream as a sculpted bust) is claimed by the hostile double who rules in the underworld: "I imagined that the man they were waiting for was my double, and that he was going to marry Aurélia.'

In the asylum, the situation of the young madman resumes the episode of the necromancers. '[the necromancers] were fed elixirs and life-giving substances'; '[the young man] was made to swallow liquid and nutritious substances by means of a long rubber tube inserted into his stomach.' Nerval had originally written 'By means of a long tube of rubber inserted into a nostril he was made to swallow a fairly large quantity of semolina and chocolate.' The revision, while highlighting the womb-image, brings the madman's situation into closer rapport with that of the necromancers. Given this rapport, his delusive perception is symbolically accurate: "I was buried in a certain graveyard.' His trance equates dream and madness just as his state of suspended animation equates womb and tomb: in confronting this figure, Gérard confronts the embodiment of a nexus of concerns which bear directly on his own experiences of sleep, dream and madness. The madman's delusion that he inhabits a tomb expresses, for Gérard, the deadly interiorisation of madness itself as a psychopathological condition. In Aurélia, the 'uterine' womb, so far from being a maternal space, is both deathly and paternal. The meanings of the asylum are balanced between this negative condition of stasis and a positive release from enclosure, with the young madman positioned at the point of balance.

In seeking to heal him, Gérard magnetises him, then sings to him. In this way he re-establishes a connection with the maternal-transcendental realm celebrated in the 'Mémorables'. As in the 'Mémorables', song evokes an answering response: "I had the happiness of seeing that he heard them, and he repeated certain parts of the songs.' Reawakened from the deathly sleep of the paternal tomb, the young man is linked with the resurrected son of the 'Mémorables'.

This renewed maternal influence enables a positive revaluation of the paternal roles—soldier, doctor and gynaecologist—which are redistributed between Gérard and the madman. Gérard is thus able to care for the afflicted young man, where Nerval's father had failed to care for him in his crises. We should, then, conclude that a psychological recovery would reintegrate the spiritual values of the maternal sphere with the stabilising norms of the paternal sphere. Such a recovery would reconcile the spirit world with contemporary historical reality, notably the Crimean war, which is implicated in the imagery of the dreamnarratives. Recovered from the fatal divide which polarises the mother and the father, reality itself would then fulfil its Utopian potential. The possibility of such an outcome is intimated in the happy conclusion to the 'historical' dream-narrative: the solid statue of Peter the Great, having stabilised the threatening abyss and re-established the historical world, is surrounded by ethereal female forms who bring a message of harmony which is at once visionary and historical:

In the bright beam of light piercing the mist, I saw the rock on which stands the statue of Peter the Great. Above this solid pedestal clouds rose in groups, piling up to the zenith. They were laden with radiant, heavenly forms, among which could be distinguished the two Catherines and the empress Saint Helen accompanied by the loveliest Princesses of Muscovy and Poland. Their gentle expressions, directed towards France, lessened the distance by means of long crystal telescopes. By that I saw that our country had become the arbiter of the old quarrel of the East, and they were awaiting its solution. My dream ended in the sweet hope that peace would at last be granted us.

Nevertheless this cannot but seem a secondary, compromised version of the visionary radicality of the "Mémorables." As the maternal and paternal figures return to their ordained roles, and as the ecstatic dream-language returns to a discourse of identity, the celebration of holy madness is suspended. It recedes on an horizon of Utopian possibility, becoming a dream from which the sleeper must awaken. With that awakening, the Utopian priority cedes to a medical one, the healing of a damaged reality to the healing of a damaged self, represented in the figure of the young madman.