Rerun: Gerard de Nerval Day (orig. 04/13/09)

Gérard de Nerval lived from 1808 to 1855, dying one year after Arthur Rimbaud was born. He was an acquaintance of Baudelaire, his junior by thirteen years. Nerval's Journey To The Orient is said to have inspired Baudelaire's poem A Voyage To Cythera and his interest in the orient. Gerard's real last name was Labrunie. Nerval was a pseudonym based on his belief that he was a descendent of the Roman emperor Nerva.

Nerval was widely regarded as being a distracted soul, a dreamer perpetually lost in a state of supernatural reverie. He studied the Occult and was fascinated by antiquity and dead religions for which he always felt a spiritual affinity. Nerval's taste in literature tended towards the macabre or mystical which in his day and age meant Edgar Allen Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Swedenborg, and Goethe's Faust. He was particularly influenced by Faust and gained literary renown as one of the foremost French translators of the German play.

Nerval eventually lost the ability to distinguish dream from reality and his bizarre behavior resulted in numerous anecdotes. He was seen walking a pet lobster on a leash in the gardens of the Palais Royal. He came to believe that he was the son of Napoleon's brother. Nerval was committed to an insane asylum, described as being more of a literary rest home than a true institution, where he believed he was being put through an initiation ritual. Nerval came to a tragic end, hanging himself from a bar in a sewer grate.

There are many inaccurate accounts of exactly where he hanged himself. The back cover of Journey To The Orient claims "He died in 1855, hanging himself from a lamp-post in the snowy streets of Paris with an old apron string that he believed to be the Queen of Sheba's garter." The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry's brief introduction to Nerval tells a different story, "...hanged his humble and gentle self in a cellar in the rue de la Vieille-Lanterne on a freezing January morning". However, Solomon Rhodes' biography of Nerval provides the most detailed account of Nerval's suicide so it is probably the most reliable. He describes the spot as where "...the street sank down and was connected with the lower level by a stairway...at the foot of it, level with a man's head...there was a vent-hole with an iron-grating and cross bars".

Nerval is a significant literary figure because he was unusually absorbed in his inner life. He spent so much time lost in reverie that his surprisingly considerate friends remarked, "Sometimes one would catch sight of him at a street corner, hat in hand, in a sort of ecstasy, obviously far withdrawn from his immediate surroundings. . . . When we found him absorbed in this way, we were careful not to accost him bluntly for fear of causing him to fall from the height of his dream like a somnambulist suddenly awakened with a start while walking with eyes closed in deep sleep along the edge of a roof." Nerval has become closely identified with the power of dreams to lure us away from the world and for this he is worthy of close study.

—“Nonetheless,” I told myself, “it is certain that these sciences are interspersed with human error. The magic alphabet, the mysterious hieroglyphs arrive to us incomplete and partially distorted by time as well as by the efforts of those who have an interest in perpetuating our ignorance; were we to find the lost letter or an erased sign, reassembling the dissonant whole, we would gain force in the spirit-world.”

It is in this way that I thought to perceive the connections between the real world and the spirit world: The earth along with its inhabitants and their history are a theater where physical actions take place in preparation for the existence and determine the situation of immortal beings tied to its destiny. Without addressing the impenetrable mystery of the eternity of the universe, my thoughts went back to the period when the sun, like the planet which shares its name-sake, which while inclining it head follows the revolution of its astronomical path, sowed on earth the fertile seeds of plants and animals. This was none other than fire itself, which, being compounded of souls, formulated instinctively their communal dwelling. The spirit of the God-Being, reproduced and, as it were, reflected upon the earth, became the prototype of human souls, each of whom, was by turns both man and God. Such beings were the Elohim.

In 1851, Nerval's first prose book Le Voyage en Orient, resulted from his extended hashish-filled trip of 1842 to Cairo and Beirut. It puzzled readers of conventional travel books by retelling Oriental tales like Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in terms of the artist and the act of creation. appeared. Under the guise of a travelog, it concerns itself with the pilgrimage of a soul, being more revealing of the inner geography of Nerval than of Egypt, Lebanon, or Turkey.

'When both of them were deeply intoxicated by the hashish something strange occurred: the two friends entered into a certain communion of ideas and impressions. Yousouf imagined that his companion, kicking the earth which wasn’t worthy of his glory, soared up towards the heavens and, taking him by the hand, carried him off into space amidst the whirling stars and glittering marvels of the Milky Way. Pale but crowned by a luminous ring, Saturn increased in size as it approached them, followed by seven moons borne along in the wake of its rapid advance. Then... but who could relate what happened when they had reached this divine home of their dreams? Human language can only reveal experiences conforming to our nature, and we must bear in mind that the two friends conversed together in this celestial dream even the names by which they addressed each other were no longer names which are known on earth.'

Read 'Makbenash', Chapter 12 of Journey to the Orient