[In the following excerpt, Feder explicates Aurélia as a work depicting madness as a process of self-creation and discovery for Nerval]

The Aesthetics of Madness

The extremes of Gérard de Nerval's individual transformation of certain Romantic modes, like Nietzsche's, make his work, especially his prose, anomalous within its literary and historical period. Except for this characteristic, which seems a peculiar modernism, the two writers are utterly different, even in their visionary grandiosity. Despite the narcissistic isolation to which Nietzsche considers himself consigned as the last adherent of instinctual release in a repressive and decadent society, his concept of Dionysiac frenzy is a social one, a reformer's vision. But the madness that Nerval describes as his own experience has little to do with social or psychic reformation; it is an interpretation of the self within the cosmos through dreams and hallucinations. In Aurélia [citations from the Société D'Edition D'Enseignement Supérieor edition, 1971], the work in which his madness is his subject, he employs the primitivism, mysticism, and exoticism characteristic of much Romantic literature to develop a metamorphic style that recreates the processes of mental pathology, particularly schizophrenia. Through this fluidity of language, structure, and tone, Nerval depicts the ever-shifting moods, images, feelings, withdrawals, and remarkable sudden insights that constitute the self as he experiences it.

In the first two paragraphs of Aurélia (p. 23), Nerval presents his basic material: "dreams" and the "long sickness that took place entirely within the secrets of my soul." Explaining his view of dreams as "a second life," he says that the "first moments of sleep" are an "image of death." In the "hazy numbness" which "seizes our thought" at this time, "we cannot determine the precise moment when the I, under another form, continues the work of existence." The "œuvre" that "le moi" continues in its dream life in Aurélia is remarkably similar to what Freud was later to describe as "the dream work," the reversals and condensations of thoughts transformed into images, the distortion of "existence" into apparent absurdities that disclose something of the "mystères" the dreamer approaches.

The hallucinations Nerval recounts are similar in the fluidity of their form and sometimes in contents to his dreams. His symptoms of madness, like his dreams, provide him with the material for a study of the human soul. He does not know, he says, why he refers to his periods of insanity as a "maladie," since he was then physically well, at times even extraordinarily energetic. Furthermore, he seemed, during these periods, "to know everything, to comprehend everything; my imagination supplied me infinite delight," and he wonders whether, "in recovering what men call reason," he has not "to regret having lost" such satisfactions (p. 23). Nerval's account of his madness records his depression and terror as well as times of manic joy, but he makes no distinction between these moods as avenues of discovery, and they are often alternating responses to the continual metamorphoses of his symbolizations.

The soul that Nerval professes to study in Aurélia is, of course, his own, but he suggests that his is a paradigm of the self released in dreams and in the hallucinations that he describes as "the overflowing of dream into real life" (p. 28). These states constitute a "Vita nuova" (p. 24) and, like Dante, who is one of his models (p. 23), Nerval centers his quest upon an ideal woman who symbolizes the merging of sexual desire, religious purity, and mystical yearnings. But Dante's visions of Beatrice in the Vita nuova, his fantasies of his death and hers, his feelings of being confused and possessed by his imaginings, serve Nerval only as allusive extensions in time and space of his own emotional fixations. Actually, the differences between Nerval and this "model" are more important than the similarities. Most crucial is Nerval's almost total divergence from Dante's method of representation, which he explicates (Vita nuova xxv) in distinguishing between the nature of affective experience and its reification through the rhetorical devices of metaphor or simile. For Nerval the visions centered around his idealized love are substantial; his method of fusing probable events with fantastic ones, the ancient past with the present and the future, is designed to convey the reality of dreams and hallucinations as superseding the generally accepted limits of time and space.

The question of whether Nerval wrote from memory of his own hallucinatory experience, the accounts of others, his own imaginary reconstructions combined with literary associations, or, as is probable, all three, is actually irrelevant to his method of conveying his accommodation to a continually shifting conception of existence. This he does by depicting fragmentation as a process of self-creation and discovery, which are one in Aurélia. Nerval uses his panic, his projections of his desires on beneficent forces and his anger on hostile ones, his paranoia, the splitting of his ego, his grandiosity, and other schizophrenic symptoms as means of communicating his perception and assimilation of experience.

In one hallucination in which "everything changed its form around me," the spirit who had been instructing him is transformed into a youth whom he now teaches. Frightened by his assumption of a dominant role and by his own recurrent Faustian "obscure and dangerous" questioning, the narrator immediately transforms himself into a wanderer in a more placid environment, "a populous, unknown city," in which he discovers a primitive race from the primordial past continuing to maintain its integrity and influence under modern urban conditions. He participates in this merging of past and present by feeling his feet "sinking into successive layers of buildings of different epochs" and by first observing and then being welcomed by and responding affectionately to the "primitive, heavenly family" the archaic race has now become. But these forms soon melt away, leaving only grief and confusion. Having concluded his account of this "vision," Nerval comments, without transition, on the "cataleptic state in which [he] had been for several days" and disparages the "scientific" explanation for it that he was given (pp. 34-37). The sinking feet, the ideal harmonious family, the merging time and shifting forms, the melting faces, the tears shed at "the memory of a lost paradise" are all the "moi" who has withdrawn from a reality that cannot fulfill its cravings or assuage its guilt, an explanation more "logical" than the "scientific" one he rejects.

Another hallucination recreates the world from its beginnings, the narrator struggling with monsters in the "chaos of nature." Even his own body is "as strange as theirs." Within this monstrous combat with nature there appears "a singular harmony" that "reverberates through our solitude," and suddenly the "confused cries, the roaring and hissing" of the primitive creatures assumes "this divine melody." There follow "infinite variations" and "metamorphoses" in the cosmos and in the earth and its inhabitants as they respond to this celestial influence. The miracle, of course, has been performed by a "radiant goddess" (pp. 42-43), one of the many versions of the image of the all-loving mother, the goal in the fragmentation of madness and, paradoxically, the potential source of integration. This image incorporates all the metamorphoses of mood and tone, of scene and episode of which the dreams and hallucinations are composed. No sooner does it appear than its other aspect—the hostile and denying—emerges, producing blood and groaning, years of "captivity" (pp. 44-45), and infinite recurrences of the monstrous in varied metamorphoses of the self. But in the second part of Aurélia, this "goddess" appears to the narrator in a dream vision and explains her role: "I am the same as Mary, the same as your mother, the same one whom in every form you have loved. In each of your trials, I have laid aside one of the masks by which I hide my features and soon you will see me as I am" (p. 69).

This moment of illumination occurs in a paradisaical atmosphere, which denies the mundane reality of the insight, and the narrator emerges from the dream with the delusion that he is Napoleon, inspired to accomplish "great things." Incorporating the real world into his delusional system, he believes that everyone in the galleries of the Palais-Royal is staring at him. Although he makes no overt connection, this delusion seems related to those he next alludes to—his "persistent idea that there were no more dead" and that he "had committed a sin" to be discovered by "consulting his memory" which was "that of Napoleon." His delusions grow more grandiose as, installed in an asylum, he imagines that he has the power of a god (pp. 69-70).

From this point on, the narrator almost consciously decides to use his delusions to reestablish a more stable identity. In another asylum, observing the "insane," he understands that "everthing had been an illusion for [him] up to then." Nevertheless, he submits to a "series of trials" which he feels he owes to the goddess Isis (p. 70). These are delusions centered on his own "role" in reestablishing "universal harmony" by Cabbalistic arts and other occult powers (p. 72). The most dreaded of his projections, the "magnetic rays emanating from [himself] or others," can serve as means not only of domination but of communication with all of the created universe (p. 73). He emerges from a hallucination of decapitation and dismemberment—which he himself recognizes as symbols of fragmentation (p. 77)—to offer friendship to another patient with whom he feels "united" by "a certain magnetism" (p. 78).

Near the end of Aurélia, the narrator asks himself if it is possible to "dominate his sensations instead of submitting to them, . . . to master this fascinating and terrible chimera, to impose order on these spirits of the night which play with our reason." His answer lies in discovering the meaning of his dreams and in the "link between the external and the internal worlds." He is now convinced of his own immortality and of the "coexistence of all the people [he] has loved" (p. 84). Through Nerval's very method of narration, in which a few factual details serve to link dream, hallucination, and delusion, he creates "le moi" he seeks in every image, every idealized figure, every fantastic episode, and every metamorphosis that represents what Freud calls "unconscious mental acts." The timelessness of the unconscious becomes for the narrator of Aurélia evidence of his own immortality and the continuous existence of those he loves. Through condensation, displacement, and reversal, he fuses elements of his fragmented identity, investing conflicting feelings in symbols of eternal unification, a fragile defense against the "void," the image of "nothingness" (p. 74) that he fears may be the definition of his own soul.