A Structural Study, University of Mississippi. Romance Monographs, 1979.

Glas, Norman, trans., Voyage to the Orient, Peter Owen, 1972.

Gordon, Rae Beth, Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire in Nineteenth-century French Literature, Princeton University Press, 1992.

Holmes, Richard, Footsteps. Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, Viking, 1985.

Jay, Peter, trans., The Chimeras, Anvil Press, 1993.

Jones, Robert Emmet, Gérard de Nerval, Twayne, 1974.

Knapp, Bettina, Gérard de Nerval. The Mystic’s Dilemma, University of Alabama Press, 1980.

Knight, Philip, Flower Poetics in Nineteenth-century France, Oxford University Press, 1986.

Lappin, Kendall, trans., Aurélia followed by Sylvie, Asylum Arts, 1993.

Lokke, Kari, Gérard de Nerval. The Poet as Social Visionary, French Forum, 1987.

Mahon, Derek, trans., The Chimeras, Gallery Books, 1982.

Miller, David, There and Here. A Meditation on Gérard de Nerval, Bran’s Head Books, 1982.

Newmark, Kevin, Beyond Symbolism. Textual History and the Future of Reading, Cornell University Press, 1991.

Poulet, Georges, Metamorphoses of the Circle, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.

Prendergast, Christopher, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert, Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Prendergast, Christopher, Paris and the Nineteenth Century, Blackwell, 1992.

Proust, Marcel, Against Sainte-Beuve, Penguin, 1988.

Rhodes, Solomon, Gérard de Nerval 1808–1855. Poet, Traveler, Dreamer, Philosophical Library, 1951.

Rinsler, Norma, Gérard de Nerval, Athlone Press, 1973.

Rinsler, Norma, ed., Les Chimères, Athlone Press, 1973.

Seigel, Jerrold, Bohemian Paris. Culture, Politics and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, Viking Penguin, 1986.

Sowerby, Ben, The Disinherited. The Life of Gérard de Nerval, Peter Owen, 1973.

Strauss, Walter, Descent and Return. The Orphic Themes in Modern Literature, Harvard University Press, 1971.

Symons, Arthur, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, W. Heinemann, 1899.

Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantasie, Cornell University Press, 1975.

Wagner, Geoffrey, Selected Writings of Gérard de Nerval, Grove Press, 1957.

The standard French text of Nerval’s Oeuvres complètes is the three-volume Pléiade edition published by Gallimard (1984–93), edited by Claude Pichois and Jean Guillaume. The most up-to-date biography in French is Claude Pichois’s and Michel Brix’s Gérard de Nerval (Fayard, 1995). I am indebted to these works throughout.

Shadow Selves

INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO
‘THE KING OF BEDLAM’ AND
‘THE TALE OF CALIPH HAKIM’

As befits a story dealing with multiple personalities, ‘The King of Bedlam’ was published on three separate occasions in identical versions – each of which, by a kind of Borgesian logic, turns out to be unalike. When it first appeared in 1839 (the same year as Poe’s ‘William Wilson’), the tale was presented as a historical reconstruction of ‘The Singular Biography of Raoul Spifame’ and attributed to the archival research of a certain ‘Aloysius’. Six years later, it was republished in a fiction magazine under Nerval’s own signature as a fable entitled ‘The Finest King of France’. In 1852, acquiring new political significance in the wake of the recent revolution and reverting back to non-fiction, it inaugurated his eccentric survey of ‘The Precursors of Socialism’, The Illuminati, with its protagonist now transformed into the enlightened monarch of the celebrated Parisian madhouse, Bicêtre (here translated into its generic English equivalent, Bedlam).

Given that the tale turns on the twin issues of political sovereignty and literary property – Raoul Spifame is under the delusion that Henri II has usurped his lawful place as king, while his fellow Bedlamite, the poet Claude Vignet, is convinced his verse is being plagiarized by rivals – it is somehow appropriate that Nerval’s actual authorship of this story should have been posthumously challenged by Auguste Maquet, who claimed to have dashed it off in 1839 to help his friend meet a pressing deadline. Maquet would later go on to minor notoriety as the uncredited co-author of Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers (1844) and Count of Monte Cristo (1845) – a thankless job in which he succeeded Nerval, Dumas’s previous literary understudy during the late thirties. Read as a bitter private allegory of the politics of literary fame and fortune during the July Monarchy, ‘The King of Bedlam’ casts Dumas père as the all-powerful sovereign, while his ghost-writer doubles are reduced to playing the hapless role of court fools.

Although the hasty hand of his collaborator may be detected in the rather artless prose of this early tale, the text is unmistakably Nerval’s: not only do Spifame’s delusions of grandeur uncannily foreshadow his own mental collapse two years later but the story includes passages that point forward almost verbatim to ‘Aurélia’. Yet despite all its intimations of madness, the overall thrust of ‘The King of Bedlam’ remains comic, and like all comedy it ends in marriage. Spifame is saved from his potentially parricidal rivalry with his royal alter ego by the arrival on the scene of Vignet, a far less threatening and far more fraternal Doppelgänger, who serves to safeguard his identity from dispersion and self-doubt. Transforming folly into a version of pastoral, the tale concludes with its bachelor duo idyllically housed in one of the king’s country estates, scribbling away, printing up poems and edicts – Bouvard and Pécuchet avant la lettre and, as Nerval ironically hints, unacknowledged legislators of the world.

‘The Tale of Caliph Hakim’, first published in 1847 (a year after Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Double’), is more darkly Hoffmannesque in its treatment of the replica theme; indeed, a number of its elements, notably the rivalry between the two doubles over their shared object of incestuous desire, derive directly from the German author’s Elixirs of the Devil (1815). In Nerval’s rewriting of Hoffmann, the diabolic philtre that drives the plot to its murderous conclusion is provided by hashish, the drug associated (as he had learned from his readings of the Orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy) with the fierce Lebanese sect of the Assassins. Jointly consumed by the caliph Hakim and his secret sharer, the commoner Yousouf, this ‘fantastic concoction’ leads the former to become convinced he is a god and the latter to dream that he is loved by a mysterious princess – none other than Setalmulc, the caliph’s sister.

Compared to Gautier’s ‘Club of the Hashishins’ (1846) or Baudelaire’s ‘Of Wine and of Hashish’ (1851), both of which grew out of their participation in the hashish ‘fantasias’ organized by the pioneering neuro-pharmacologist Moreau de Tours at the Hôtel Pimodan in Paris in the mid-forties (which Nerval may or may not have also attended), ‘The Tale of Caliph Hakim’ remains relatively sketchy as to the actual physical effects of the drug upon the sensorium. Far from experiencing hashish as an artificial paradise, Nerval’s Coleridgian caliph finds himself cast into an existential limbo whose most lucid moments, significantly enough, occur when he is least certain of his identity: ‘unsure that he was a god, unsure at times that he was even a caliph, he found it nearly impossible to reassemble the scattered fragments of his thoughts’. Riven by self-doubt, Hakim hopes that marriage with his sister might again make him whole – Osiris ingathered and redeemed by Isis. But the Doppelgänger plot of the tale demands that it be his spectral self, Yousouf, who acts out these unconscious desires in his stead and who, in a final suicidal twist, strikes him dead, thereby ensuring his immortality.

Formally and thematically ‘Caliph Hakim’ bears all the hallmarks of a classic conte fantastique. When the tale appeared in the complete Journey to the Orient of 1851, however, it acquired a far more documentary tenor as part of a larger mosaic of historical materials (again drawn from the Orientalist scholarship of Sacy) outlining the traditions and doctrines of the Druse religion of Lebanon – a syncretic faith, so Nerval believed, whose gnostic tenets and initiatory rituals, brought back to Europe by the Knights Templar after the Crusades, had inspired the Rosicrucians, Freemasons and Illuminati. According to the fiction sustained by his travelogue, it was primarily in order to delve into the secrets of the Druses that Nerval had made his pilgrim’s way from Egypt to Lebanon – where, as fate would have it, he falls in love with a young woman by the name of Salema. Intending to ask for her hand in marriage, he visits her father, an imprisoned Druse sheikh, and the latter in turn tells him ‘The Tale of Caliph Hakim’ (in Italian) in order to instruct his future son-in-law in the esoteric traditions of his people.