English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
An approach rather than a method; the Dogon 0:00 I'm very glad to find the old-timers again and very glad to meet the new ones. The old-timers, well it's been 4 years now, thank you for your loyalty. And I'll hasten in a few moments to show that it wasn't out of some fit of temper that I suddenly moved on to a short story by Nerval, and then to choosing textual commentary rather than the essay, if we were to use metaphors from the field of exams and competitive entrance exams.
0:36 But I'm going to recall the questions we left off with last year, well at the end of the previous cycle, last June, and in particular the reflection on the notion of modernity. I'll come back to that, so I won't go into detail for now. So, thanks to the old-timers for still being here. Thanks to the newcomers for engaging, for taking the risk of coming to join our sessions.
1:10 And I come right away, since Thomas has announced it, to the notion — we said method to simplify, but I prefer to say approach. I'm not a structuralist, I don't have a superstition about signifiers, don't worry, I'll use whatever word you like. But I prefer "approach" because, with reference a little, you know, to the way Hegel was annoyed when people spoke of method — you know, from a dialectical point of view, method is not something external to content.
1:49 The best method is the progression of what he himself calls the thing itself, die Sache selbst. Not Ding, which gives "thing" in English, not the thing as object, but the thing in the sense of causa in Latin, right? The object of research and thought, the stakes, if you prefer. It is this that imposes its method on us. There you go, we don't have... But, since there are many very involved listeners, of very good will, who told me, "but really, you should tell us your method from time to time," well, that's what Thomas wanted to announce, I asked him to announce it — it's a method that's a bit by antiphrasis.
2:30 I call it the griot's method. I'll explain why. It's not a metaphor, it's serious. You know, I don't write. Griots — that's an oral tradition. That's where the connection lies. There's an ethnic group in Mali, this isn't a digression, I'm not starting my digressions, we're at the heart of the subject — there's an ethnic group, the Dogon, this has been much studied, there are ethnic groups like that who become the darlings of anthropologists. I have nothing against these ethnic groups. But they're generally the ones farthest from us, the most preserved from white people, because the white man's dream in Africa is to be the only white man wherever he is.
3:04 Well, all this has been studied in particular by François de Negroni, who's a specialist on the question, which he studied in a very amusing way in several books, one of which is called L'Afrique fantasme, if that interests you, and another called Les colonies de vacances, which is a triple pun on the Ministry of Cooperation. Yes, the white man's dream, myself first — if I take you picnicking in some remote spot deep in Mali or Ivory Coast, I'd be happy if suddenly a 4x4 doesn't show up with kids and all that, and the aid workers of course.
3:35 Well, we come to terms with it, it's like paid holidays, you know. It's annoying not to have the beach to yourself. Obviously, I too prefer that. I come to terms with it, feudalism is over. There are paid holidays, it's a pain, but that's how it is. So we organize, we put out trash cans, and it's clean, and there, it's fine. It's good for flirting because there's more... Well, let's not get sidetracked. There. The Dogon, they live clinging to a cliff, so the terrain allowed them to resist invasions by other ethnic groups.
4:11 So they've kept something. The indigeneity, pardon the barbarism, of Mali. And so they were approached by Marcel Griaule, the old-timers know, probably with famous titles like Dieu d'eau (Conversations with Ogotemmêli), things like that. Let's move on. I'll go straight to the point. They have something really specific, a ceremony where they all gather, more or less all the villages, all the valleys come together. And the period of this ceremony is every 60 years, which is exceptional as a length of time in countries of oral tradition where memory doesn't go back very far.
4:47 I'll make a parenthetical remark here, which is already very Nervalian, by the way, because Nerval worked a lot on popular songs, so on oral traditions. You see we're not so far from the subject. And surveys were done in Yugoslavia for example, in the former Yugoslavia, ethnomusicological surveys, musical anthropology, you know, as early as the late 19th century, where there were tales, stories, legends, and they asked the inhabitants, in your opinion, when does this take place?
5:17 They say, oh my, it goes back to the dawn of time. When you do research, it went back to the war of 1914. Oral memory doesn't go back very far when there's no written trace. It doesn't go back very far, it's rather recent. Here, though, that they gather every 60 years is exceptional. I had the chance to attend one of them, a biographical coincidence. What struck me — I'm getting there. There was the master of ceremonies, the griot. Well, for those who were kind enough — I got a little help — on the small talk I gave in Saint-Dizier, at the Saint-Dizier people's university, on the music of history.
The griot, orality, and the Mandingo epic 5:53 I'd been asked to give a history of music, I gave the music of history instead. I talked a bit about the figure of the griot, let me sum up. Many of you already know what that is, but the griot has multiple functions. He is at once the traditional musician, I'll start with the best known, the traditional poet. Is there any separation between poetry and music at that level? Absolutely not, no more than in Homer. You know that in Homer it was chanted, it was rhythmic, it was more like slam poetry than what I'm doing right now, isn't it, the way that...
6:26 ...rap, whatever you want to call it, the American invention. You know that what we call the songs of the Iliad, for example, the different parts of the Iliad, the songs, are in the original text "rhapsodies." And the poets of that era are called rhapsodes. Which doesn't mean, by the way, musicians — do you know what it means, rhapsodes? Maybe some of you know? Compilers. It means "stitchers." If you take the Greek term exactly, it comes from a term linked to sewing.
6:59 You take one song, you join it to another, you make a variation, each time the audience asked for a new variant on the same themes. The griot is a bit like that, it's an oral tradition. I'll remind you, all the same, that the literary genre par excellence, the most literary one, and even from a linguistic point of view, when you listen to the research of the Prague Circle, they talk about the poetic function in language, in everyday language, what linguists call natural language. Only neo-positivists — there are Wittgensteinians too, because he had pretty eyes, he has quite a few groupies — who really believe there's something else in language besides natural language.
7:36 There are discourses, afterward, formalized ones, but there's only one language, it's a natural language. Whether it's that of the market-woman or that of the philosopher, however abstruse he may be. And we must never forget that the literary genre par excellence, poetry — because prose can serve journalism, whatever you like, it was Mallarmé who spoke of literature being ill-served by universal reportage, already, yes. Well, this literary genre par excellence was oral for thousands of years, well before being written.
8:12 We always forget, it's so obvious that we forget. What a paradox! "Literature," that's littera, that's the letter, that's writing. And the essence of literature is a genre that was oral for thousands of years, well before being written. That must leave traces somewhere, auricular traces, auditory ones, I don't know. There. So, when I speak of the griot, I'm thinking of all that. And here this griot, master of ceremonies — yes, I told you — poet, musician, historian, since he bears on his shoulders the responsibility of being the collective memory.
8:51 Since there's no written history, right? It's the continent of orality south of the Sahara. I believe I'll quote — last year, during a workshop, for something else — the very beginning of what is the equivalent of the Iliad in the countries of the West African Sahel, that is, the Mandingo epic, the epic of the great Mandé, Malinke linguistic area, Malian — in Malinke, you find "Mali" written, if you look — a great empire from the 14th century on, the Mandingo epic recounting the exploits of the Achilles of the region, Sundiata Keita, he who subjugated all the peoples of the West.
9:36 The beginning of the Mandingo epic, which was transcribed by — I'm searching for his name — Djibril Tamsir Niane, a Guinean who lived most of his life in Senegal and whose admirable text you find at Présence Africaine, I recommend it, for those who have students coming from those cultures or those regions, it's rather nice to use this text for a change — the admirable text of the Mandingo epic. It begins like this: I am a griot. My name is Djeli Mamadou Kouyaté, son of Bintou Kouyaté and of Djeli Kouyaté, griot from father to son.
10:11 We are the sacks of speech. Without us, the names of kings would fall into oblivion. You see, the poet superior to the king — without us, the names of kings would fall into oblivion. That's the responsibility. Now, what was my master of ceremonies doing? That's why I'm lowering my voice, because I didn't want to be overheard. He was there, calling out all the tribes doing a thing you know, classic, from the Bible, which also goes back to an oral tradition before being written — the genealogies.
10:42 You know, Solomon, son of David, himself son of so-and-so, so-and-so, Suleymane, Ben Daoud, Ben This, Ben That, son of Daoud. That's what the griot did. And here: Traoré, son of Keita, son of Sidibé, son of Diara. And he goes on, and suddenly, that's where I'm getting to. He'll show you my method, what it drew on. Suddenly, he says, like a stuck record, and the millipede has too many legs, we can't count them.
11:15 He repeats it, it's not me — the millipede has too many legs, we can't count them. It means, listen guys, I've done my job, I remember up to this point, beyond that, it's too old for me. I'm reaching my limit — it was magnificent. Tragic, and magnificent. Suddenly you see the responsibility of the griot. That's my method. I try to give back to you what I received. I have no other.
A minor romantic; Les Faux Saulniers and the salt tax 11:47 So now, the context — thank you for announcing it, Thomas — the context of this text. To explain why this text in particular, because it's by Gérard de Nerval, don't think that he's been a well-established reference for a long time. When I was a teenager, he still wasn't — I wasn't born before the war of '14, mind you — but he was still an author who didn't have a chapter of his own in literature textbooks.
12:21 Like minor authors, he was classified into categories, as they say "the minor Romantics," you see how they dispatch him — afterward there's a chapter for Musset, a chapter for Vigny, a chapter for Hugo, those are the great Romantics. Then Nerval was among the "Bousingots." They were the eccentrics of the time, of whom Nerval was one. They drank from skulls picked up at the medical school, like that. They frightened the bourgeois, the "Jeune-France," you know, who distinguished themselves at the battle of Hernani, they had red waistcoats with fancy-worded, over-the-top fellows.
12:54 And at the battle of Hernani, Nerval is said to have swung from the theater's great chandelier, you see, like on a vine, you see. And so he was classified as a minor Romantic. And the work we're going to read together until next June, Angélique, a relatively short short story, well, a relatively short narrative, a bit long for a short story but very short for a novel, originally had the title Les Faux Saulniers.
13:27 So already, you see, there's an uncertainty right there, the title itself changed. Nerval had first written Les Faux Saulniers, S-A-U-L-N-I-E-R-S. Does anyone know what that means? Les Faux Saulniers. We're already in counterfeiting, if you look closely. Sorry? But really, there's nothing to teach you. Oh yes, I'll have to be on my toes. I'll have to be on my toes. Yes, thank you. The salt smugglers. This goes back to the Ancien Régime, when there was the famous tax, the gabelle.
13:58 You know, the tax on salt. The salt trade was a royal privilege. The gabelle, the taille, the corvée — those are the best-known taxes. And the gabelle was one of the most unpopular. You weren't allowed to take a bucket of seawater and bring it home. They'd check on you. Well, I mean, in principle, you weren't allowed to. It was severely punished. And those who smuggled salt were called... The gabelous. Because of the gabelle, the gabelous. There you go. And the faux-sauniers were those who...
14:31 It has a Robin Hood side to it. I don't mean to defend the mafias just because I'm Corsican. No, no, that's not it. But still, at the start, there's always something... there's always a social injustice. People try to regulate it. While I'm speaking, over there in the Red Sea, you see the Red Sea, it's frightening. There are deserts of salt. It's such poverty. It's... it's fine. Anyway. Whether Christian in Ethiopia or Muslim as in Eritrea, it doesn't change anything. It's among the poorest regions.
15:01 You've been alerted periodically — when I say "you," it depends on the generation — about famines in Ethiopia, in Somalia. And yet people scrape by. They scraped by until the World Bank arrived. We don't laugh about it anymore. The IMF that says you're living beyond your means. And then, it gets poorer. Would you be so kind as to eliminate all subsidies for food crops, privatize the public sector, and then maybe we'll lend you something. That's it. It's called structural adjustment plans. Yes, because if you say it the way I just did, it doesn't go down well.
15:32 But if you say "a structural adjustment plan," admit that this is the language of development aid, it goes down much better. There you go. And then come the hunger riots, the revolts, the civil wars, the SAPs, the adjustment programs. I'm not exaggerating anything. It's actually even worse than what I just said, believe me. I've seen it in Mali, I've seen it in Burkina, in the poorest countries. This speech I just gave, proclaimed by people who earn three grand a month and then go back to Washington at the World Bank, and behind their backs there are riots and coups.
16:04 As for them, the locals, those with a boat with a motor, they watch it go by — you see the Red Sea, you know your geography, the Suez Canal, the route to Asia — it's not the Silk Road, it's the route of flat-screen TVs, of cell phones. They watch all the world's wealth pass right under their noses, the starving. So they turn to piracy, of course, they're pirates. After that, they're thugs, I'm not defending it, but after that they're gangs, then they traffic people, the poor refugees crossing over.
16:38 But still, at the start, it's Robin Hood. Well, the gabelous, that's what they were, right? They distributed salt to the peasantry in the interior. It's interesting because salt isn't absolutely biologically necessary, it's only for — how do you say in French — the salt of life. It's interesting, they say, because cognitive science can't capture that. Cognitive science only knows biological needs.
17:09 Imagine, cerebral — the salt of life, you are the salt of the earth. It's interesting that people took enormous risks. And as Nerval notes, the faux-sauniers gathered forces that opposed the royal gendarmerie and laid siege to strongholds like Dijon. It was serious. The most famous of the faux-sauniers' leaders — does anyone know, perhaps? Mandrin. Bravo, Mandrin.
17:39 Thank you, Catherine. You've done the Ballad of Mandrin. "We were twenty or thirty brigands in a band." That's the Ballad of Mandrin, which sings a bit of his condemnation. So he's often made out to be a thug, a bandit. In fact, Mandrin was only the leader. That should be emphasized. There you go. That was the original title. This text has always had a strange fate.
History of the text and the difficulty of reading it 18:12 It was for a long time, as I told you earlier, Nerval already. Nerval's work in general was long dozing among the secondary Romantics. It's from the sixties onward. In terms of textbooks, it's the Lagarde et Michard collection. They were the first to give Nerval a chapter of his own. So noted. Early sixties. That's not so long ago historically speaking. But by contrast, the text I'm talking about, the one we're going to work on, in its original version, Les Faux Saulniers, has only been available to us in the Pléiade edition since 1984.
18:52 I tell you, it's really incredible. We're not talking about Hugo or Banville or people who've been documented for a long time with an abundance of theses. We owe this to the Namur school. I say this for those interested who want to go further. In Belgium, our Belgian friends at Namur have a team that received grants from several universities, even some from the United States, to do Nerval research. They managed pretty well to get them. In any case, that's their merit. And there we really have a critical edition.
19:23 with scientific methods. You know, now it's less a matter of whoever's in charge. Before, every great specialist had his own vision of Hugo, of Nerval, of Racine. Now they calculate for you the frequency of the letter L in a short story, you see, word by word. It's still more objective. Or the frequency of such-and-such theme, etc. Well, there you go. That's not enough. I'm not a neo-positivist. But still, I mean, at least we're sure we're talking about the same thing. About the same author.
19:53 So, we have the three-volume Pléiade edition in which, in volume 2, you find, for the first time since 1984, for the French reader, and indeed the reader worldwide, this text of Les Faux Saulniers. But Nerval will rename it Angélique as soon as Prince Louis-Napoléon, the future Napoleon III, takes power.
20:23 There are a few elements of — a "version," that's a big word, Nerval is very discreet — but of political criticism which he judged wiser to remove from the second version, the one you have, which is Angélique. Right? We'll see that it remains very political, but camouflaged, Nerval-style. Well. And we'll even see that the problem of censorship is one of the fundamental themes. Are there a few of you who've read it since we announced we'd be reading it?
20:54 Are there a few of you who... Does everyone have it, at least, today? Raise your hands, those who don't. Good. Some have read it. Have any of you read it all the way through? Well, bravo, honestly. Because it tends to... don't you find it's a bit hard-going for some people? I don't know, some have told me, "Oh dear, I tried, I struggled through it." Ricardo, I'd like you to tell us, a bit louder because you're tucked away in a corner, roughly what you thought of it.
21:29 for me, mostly because there are things that are essentially historical, of a historical nature, that escape me, not being French. Right. But if you had to say what's the main obstacle to reading it, what would you say? The first time, I was a bit lost. Ricardo is a native Spanish speaker, so credit to him. Sorry? The second time, I found my footing, I really stuck with it. Right, right. It's the first time that it puts up resistance. Very important, what we've just seen. That's why I allowed myself this little interrogation. Thank you, Ricardo.
21:59 It's a text you start to penetrate on a second reading. Second, third, fourth, it depends, I mean. The more you read it, the more suddenly you get hooked on it, I mean. It's a text that does everything to weed out, to skim off, I don't know, a portion of readers on the first reading. Those who say "I've had enough, they keep changing the subject." "I'm tired because we cover miles and miles with Nerval." We walk, we're going to see that together. It begins in Frankfurt, continues in Paris, and ends in the rivers of the Valois near Compiègne.
22:30 We're a bit worn out. That's it. And also, we never reach the goal. So it's a bit trying. And above all, the plot keeps changing all the time. So, before going into detail, we'll have plenty of time to see the work in detail. So let me recall that Nerval's place is quite singular. That's why I chose him. The very first words of the novella, it's in 1851, I was passing through Frankfurt. You see, it's half a line.
1851, middle of the century: the school of disenchantment 23:01 In 1851, I was passing through Frankfurt. We're not told what he's doing there. Because afterwards, he's going to be very, very precise in telling us why he does this, why he goes to Compiègne, why he goes back to Senlis. He's very precise. There, he doesn't say why he finds himself there, at that moment, in Frankfurt. But he is in Frankfurt. Now, two things, or rather one, a concept and two representations. A concept: it's the middle. In 1851, we are in the middle, the midpoint of the century. That's why I chose this novella precisely, within Nerval's work.
23:34 You'll say to me, so what? Is that arithmetic? Yes, the middle is even geometric. But there you go, look carefully at the date—for those who know literary history well, otherwise let's recall it—it's the moment when Romanticism is passing the torch and Baudelaire hasn't come yet. There's a void. It has been studied. There's Mr. Bénichou who wrote a famous book called The School of Disenchantment. It's right after 1848, there's a refusal.
24:04 After the failure of the revolutions of 1848, there's a refusal. The writers who during the Romantic era were all fire and flame for great ideals, for transforming the world, do what we do now. That's why I took this contemporary angle. There's a new right, you know, often very cultivated—I don't say that pejoratively. An old humanist right, counter-revolutionary, conservative, etc. Already better than the liberal libertarians running the world. Well. But anyway, there it is. People who somewhat say: politics, all that, it's disappointing, we must retreat into our ivory tower.
24:40 That's what the school of disenchantment is. Besides, you know this, for those who know a bit of literary history, even from school, it's the era when people talk about art for art's sake. Enough of art for politics, art for changing the world. Well, that's over, we've buried all that. We buried it, especially after taking blows on the barricades. There you go. It's a bit like after the Paris Commune too, a great ebb. So, after periods of literature of action, there are periods of literature of escape. These are patterns you see everywhere, not only in France at that time.
25:11 There's what's called escapism. The greatest champions of escapism were the German Romantics. But that's praise, mind you, I'm not handing out prizes here. The greatest singers of the fantastic, of dream, of madness, of the oneiric, a century before the Surrealists—and not in the form of student pranks like the Surrealists often were, who are likeable, but still—the German Romantics. Now Nerval is in this in-between.
25:42 Too early for the avant-gardes that Baudelaire was going to inaugurate—you know the famous declaration by Rimbaud, in that extraordinary letter where Rimbaud reverses the roles: he writes to his literature teacher and tells him, I'm going to give you a lesson in modern literature. There you go. This kid, he's 17 years old, imagine that. And on top of it, his lesson in literature is brilliant. There, in three pages, from the Greeks up to himself, he says they're all pretty much worthless except for those who were seers. That's a criterion, you know the famous letter of the seer. There you go. And then, well, Hugo saw clearly in his last volumes—ah yes, there's Les Misérables.
26:15 I have Les Misérables at hand, he says, a real poem. You see, there will be a tribute here. Because he lays into everyone in this letter, so that he can pay this kind of tribute, roses and misérables. I mention it in passing. There you go, he evaluates all the literature before him with this criterion. Was he a seer a little, a lot, madly? There you go. And then Baudelaire arrives. Baudelaire, I quote, is the first of the seers, king of poets, a true god. There you go, all of a sudden. It begins—it's become banal now—Baudelaire inaugurates the avant-gardes that come after: Rimbaud, Mallarmé, René Char, Michaux, right?
26:57 But he's harsh—one word, but, you know there's always a "but" in that sentence, it's very telling. But he lived in too artistic a milieu—not wrong, is it? And the form, so praised in him, is petty. At 17, that age is merciless. There you go. Nerval is between the two. Romanticism has gone out of fashion. In literary textbooks it's abstract—it's not that on December 31, 1853, at midnight, we left Romanticism to enter Realism, of course not.
27:29 But we do need reference points, and it's often said that it's the failure of Hugo's play titled "Les Burgraves" at the theater—which flopped, to put it plainly—that inaugurates the ebb of Romanticism, which is passing the torch, in prose, to Realism—the great novels, Balzac, then later Stendhal, Flaubert, of course—and in poetry, as I said earlier, to art for art's sake, to the Parnassians. It's no longer Hugo's Legend of the Ages, it's Enamels and Cameos, it's plastic art, it's Théophile Gautier, it's superb.
28:02 It's goldsmith's work, enamels, you know—enamel is hard, it's craftsman's work, it's jewelry-making. Enamels and Cameos is a bit cold—jewels are cold. The Parnassians have often been reproached for being a bit cold compared to Romanticism. And yes, the Romantics had careless form and generous content; the Parnassians will make Parnassian verse out of subjective content. There you go, I don't want to give a literary lecture. We'll come back to it whenever you like, but I mean, I don't want to develop this further: Nerval arrives too early to be part of modernity and too late to have a Romantic audience.
Frankfurt, the middle of Europe 28:44 And so it is that in this very novella—it doesn't begin in 1851, I was going to pass through Frankfurt. Well, I've spoken of the temporal middle, the middle of the century. I'll come back to it, we're not done with it. But Frankfurt is also the spatial middle. Frankfurt is the navel of the world. No, that's not me speaking, it's Hölderlin. You know him a bit, after all.
29:15 And also, you know that's where the European Central Bank is. Well yes, it's the navel of Europe. Where do they tell you that from? Some things never change, in Frankfurt. Frankfurt? No, seriously, it's a middle point of distance. It's a middle. Between what and what? Between us, the more civilized ones, the English, the French, the old nations. Germany—when Nerval is writing, Germany is not a nation, don't forget that. When we speak of Germany, at the time, it begins beyond the Rhine.
29:47 People said—the countries, yes, careful, Austria, that's called—Nerval speaks of Germany when he speaks of Austria. It's the country of Germanic language, of the German language. Don't forget that. At the time, at its peak, there were 490 states. It's the moment when Germany shone the most in letters, in the arts, in music. As soon as it's unified, it causes problems. Not only for Germany, but for Europe. And even for the world. The world wars.
30:17 That's how it's put in history. Not just European wars. As soon as it's Germany—I'm not bashing the Germans, you know I'm a Germanophile. But still. As Mauriac used to say, and he's not a man of my camp, he's a right-wing guy. But as he said in 1947, I love Germany so much that I prefer there to be two of them. I'm telling you between us, because if we say that out loud, we'll get lynched. No, it's true that Germany was never as culturally generous as when it was divided into a multitude of states.
30:48 The Germanies, the Bachs, the Beethovens, the Wagners, the Brahms, the Mozarts. There wasn't a Germany as one nation at that time. But the Germans of all these countries, the citizens of the German language, speaking of France, said "Die große Nation, the great nation." These are issues that are not entirely settled. So, Frankfurt—geographic middle, temporal middle, 1851, midpoint of the century. And geographic middle, between what and what?
31:18 I said one end, us, Westerners—at the time, Germany isn't yet included among the Westerners. A German quarrel, as people said contemptuously back in 1914. They were seen as bumpkins, you know. Countries where people eat rye bread, black bread, cabbage. Really, poor lands. Until the Industrial Revolution came, Germany was poor. Read Montesquieu's travel accounts. Nobody reads Montesquieu's travel accounts. He travels across Europe. It's very interesting. He grumbles like mad because he says that in that country—he means Germany—you can never find water to drink, plain water.
31:50 I laugh because, Jean, we traveled in Germany not so long ago, half a century ago. And even in East Germany, isn't that right? Try asking for water in Germany, in a restaurant, in a café. They bring you sparkling water. No, no, water, tap water. They look at you like that. Maybe that's also because water carried diseases. Who knows. Anyway.
32:23 Between the West and Mitteleuropa—I'm getting there. It's a geopolitical term. Everyone who studies at Sciences Po knows what's called Mitteleuropa. It starts at the Rhine. Do you know the expression? There you go. Because sometimes I wonder if I haven't aged. Besides, the expression itself—we say it in French, but it's in the German language. It's everything between us and the so-called Eastern countries, of the former Soviet bloc. Ah, but it's interesting, all this history.
32:55 Here, look. The first page of Angélique. In 1851, I was passing through Frankfurt. I'm illustrating the geographic middle. Forced to stay two days in this city which I already knew. He's a great wanderer. I had no other resource than to walk through the main streets, then crowded with traveling merchants. Even now, the Frankfurt fair is the most important in Europe. I'm turning this into an invariant. The Römer square, especially—it's the center—gleamed with an incredible luxury of display.
33:30 And nearby, the fur market—you can guess that at the other end are the Slavic steppes. The land of trappers, sable, mink, that's Poland, Russia. But yes, you see, yes. Beyond, the fur market displayed countless animal pelts, coming either from High Siberia or from the shores of the Caspian Sea. The polar bear, the blue fox, the ermine, were the least of the curiosities of this incomparable exhibition. Further on, Bohemian glassware, etc.
34:02 It's beautiful, you want to keep going. This is Nerval's prose. He's not talking about nothing. He sees the market stalls of the fair. And how the writing—it's something. It's not just objects. Do you realize? I'll finish the sentence. As for me, I'm hooked, I can't stop. So, further on, the Bohemian glassware, in its thousand dazzling colors, mounted, festooned, engraved, inlaid with gold, spread out on shelves of cedar wood like the cut flowers of an unknown paradise.
34:32 That didn't last long. He's soon going to adopt a journalistic tone, a bit impertinent, humorous. But you see, still, the writing is beautiful. So, I chose this text because it's by Nerval, because Nerval comes too early and too late, caught in an in-between, you know, he'll end up mad and having taken his own life. I insist on this too late, too early. At the same time, his companion in youth, from the days of the battle of Hernani, I'm thinking of Alfred de Musset, who was a Romantic—now he had much more glory at the time, all the adolescents, right up to my generation, used to recite Musset's Nights.
Musset and the opening of Sylvie: the generation of the ebb 35:10 Ah, strike your heart, that's where genius lies. Nothing makes us so great as a great sorrow. Can you imagine that we were made to recite that as adolescents. The most despairing songs are the most beautiful songs, and I know immortal ones that are pure sobs, when the pelican... Well, I'll stop there. The one Baudelaire called a languorous undertaker. You've gone out of fashion, Romanticism, with Baudelaire. But yes. Ah, they don't spare each other—so Musset wrote at the time "Confessions of a Child of the Century."
35:42 I'm not talking about literary value—Musset is a great poet—but it's an extraordinary document about what I called earlier, I don't know, it wasn't me who called it that, it's Bénichou, the school of disenchantment, this ebb tide that comes after '48, in which Nerval finds himself. He says clearly, it's the generation—our fathers, our parents—were in the Grande Armée. They were men of action who plowed through the world from Spain to Russia. And us, we're in the cafés. Musset, by the way, called himself the coffee prince.
36:13 He said he was nervous because of the coffee. But yes, men of action, and then afterward, dreamers, in the cafés. Well, you see, Nerval—the confession of a child of the century, that's a thick volume, which illustrates this whole historical period. Well, Nerval condenses this period, not in Angélique, but in Sylvie, the novella that follows, the most famous one he wrote—he condenses it in one page. That's his art.
36:43 In one page—I don't want to talk about two novellas at once, so I won't even tell you the context, but it begins with: We were living then in a strange era, like the one that usually follows revolutions or the decline of great reigns. You see, there's a fall from action. So we're in the cafés, like us, talking. I know you are workers and producers of value.
37:14 I'm not going to say what I didn't say. Well, anyway, we are intellectual workers and, as Rimbaud said, the spiritual struggle is as brutal as the battle of men, after all. It's not pejorative. We were living then in a strange era, like the one that usually follows revolutions or the decline of great reigns. It was no longer, a little history lesson, the heroic gallantry of the Fronde—three words, and everything is said, especially since an era, that's Louis XIII. Skepticism—sorry—elegant, adorned vice, as under the Regency of the early 18th century.
37:50 Skepticism and the mad orgies of the Directory. No, because there are some who still believe that it's today that people started to really let loose. During the Directory, the ladies had mirrors on their shoes, like this, so they could look at themselves while lowering their eyes. I'm going further back. I saw that in Saint Augustine's Confessions. Yes, I'm not going to go looking through salacious authors. Although... there are some, at the time. One must be decadent—in Latin, it's not dreary. But in Saint Augustine, he tells how he follows...
38:20 He follows... Confession. He follows a prostitute in Tunis. Well, it wasn't called Tunis, in Carthage. He follows a prostitute, and there, it wasn't in the sand—the ground was already starting to dry up. And on her footprints, there was engraved on the sole: follow me. You see? Follow me, handsome. No, really. You see? No, no. Because they'd have you believe that... Well, alright. So, skepticism and the mad orgies of the Directory... So we know what it wasn't, that period.
38:50 But we don't know what it was. But there, he says it. It was a mixture of activity, hesitation, and laziness. Rather current, all that. Do you remember when I told you that the illness of your generation, mine, is depression, the one before, is hysteria, Freud's? And yours, is it that? Because you're good, aren't you? You remember better than I do what I say, it's really extraordinary. Yes, procrastination, it seems to me, I'm no specialist. But just statistically, the number of students I see saying I can't manage to finish my thesis, my dissertation, it's fine.
39:21 I'll put it off till tomorrow. It was a mixture of activity, hesitation, and laziness, of brilliant utopia—there's never been so much of it, with the crisis—of philosophical or religious aspiration, of vague enthusiasm, mixed with certain instincts of renewal, of weariness with past discords, of uncertain hopes. There's a composite portrait of the period, something like the era of Peregrinus and Apuleius—Nerval adores decadent Alexandrian antiquity.
39:58 Material man aspired to the bouquet of roses that was to regenerate him through the hands of the beautiful Isis. He's alluding to Apuleius's Golden Ass—perhaps some of you have read this extraordinary text called The Golden Ass, written by a Greek, Apuleius, at the time of Roman decadence. Decadence—not at all pejorative in literary terms, far from it. It's an initiatory novel, despite the comic side, since the hero is a donkey, and it's a donkey who will regain human form at the end by grazing on Isis's roses. The rest hardly matters here.
40:28 So material man aspired to the bouquet of roses that was to regenerate him through the hands of the beautiful Isis, the eternally young and pure goddess, appeared to us in our nights and made us ashamed of our lost daytime hours. Ambition, however, was not suited to our age, and the eager scramble that was then happening for positions among—Macron. No, excuse me, that's not what's there. And honors kept us away from possible spheres of activity. We had, as our only refuge, that ivory tower of the poets where we climbed ever higher to isolate ourselves from the crowd.
40:59 You see, it's the generation of the ebb tide. From the crowd, to those high points where our masters guided us, we finally breathed the pure air of solitude, we drank oblivion from the golden cup of legends—escapism, oblivion, the cup, the booze too. The golden cup of legends, we were drunk with poetry and love. Love, alas, of vague forms, of pink and blue tints, of metaphysical phantoms. Seen up close, the real woman offended our ingenuousness. She had to be a queen or a goddess, and above all, not to be approached.
41:35 Well yes, that makes you laugh, and you're right. Well, we won't be laughing for long. Next line: Some of us, nevertheless—still speaking of this era—cared little for these Platonic paradoxes. And through our dreams renewed from Alexandria—that's already more risqué. Alexandria is the end of Antiquity, it's not dreary. You just have to read Aphrodite by Pierre Louÿs to see what was going on in Alexandria, as told by a Frenchman of the late 19th century. But well informed, well documented, at least. It's about a courtesan, Aphrodite. Well, so, and through our dreams renewed from Alexandria, sometimes stirred the torch of the underground gods.
42:11 You see, Nerval is allusive—the torch, the underworld. Afterward, on the surface, we're like this, idealistic, we see woman from afar. The torch of the underground gods, what is that? What's going on down there? So, in the subconscious, isn't it, stirred the torch of the underground gods, excuse me, there you go, which lights up the darkness for an instant with its trails of sparks. That's how, leaving the theater with the bitter sadness left by a vanished dream, etc.
42:41 In a page and a half, he summarized what Musset did in a whole volume, The Confession of a Child of the Century, this in-between period. There you go, I'll come back to the details, but I won't return to the general situation. Now, to remedy the aspect—you saw our little back-and-forth with Ricardo—the somewhat disjointed side of this air, which kept changing its pitch, as they say on TV, its plot, its purpose, in the proper sense of what one proposes for oneself, what one pursues, its intrigue—or, in literature departments, what's called the diegesis, isn't it?
The object of the book, Dr Blanche, Aurélia, and Les Chimères 43:34 Let me tell you right away, dogmatically, in advance, to make the reading easier for you, what are, as Thomas was announcing, what are the different goals that Nerval—those, and so we—proposes, proposes to the reader, when we will see that the originality of this text, also, among all of Nerval's other works. It's an incredibly modern relationship between the author and the reader. So, you can list them: it starts in Frankfurt, we saw that, at the fair in question, he arrives at the booksellers, the book displays, and he says, it reminded me of Paris, the quays, the Seine, etc., one cannot without emotion look.
44:19 And then, he was always fascinated by the world of books, Nerval—he even worked on the origins of printing, and the one time he almost succeeded in the theater, it was with a play called The Image-Maker of Haarlem, in Holland—Haarlem in Holland, not yet New Amsterdam, that is, New York—The Image-Maker of Haarlem, who would have invented printing before Gutenberg, while also being an alchemist. Nerval knows inside out, going back even to the Chinese, to Antiquity, the origins of movable type.
44:49 It fascinates, everything about the material world of the book, regardless of content. Bibliophilia is about someone who doesn't care about the content of the book, who doesn't like to lend it out much, because the book mustn't move around and circulate, these are rare things. The object of the book always fascinated Nerval, he even had missions, he was even a bit of a cop. That is to say, when he had these fits of madness, we'll come back to that, between two stays at Doctor Blanche's clinic, in Montmartre, and then later in Passy—there's still a rue du docteur Émile Blanche now, in the 16th—that's the man who treated Nerval.
45:25 My dear Émile, there are letters. And, a small parenthesis, homage to this doctor who was actually ahead of his time, because most were a bit like in Foucault—it's not the least accurate part of Foucault, what he says about the history of madness. At the time, if you weren't mad going in, you were sure to be mad coming out, of those asylums. I'm not even talking about electroshocks, boiling baths, all sorts of baths—I mean, psychiatric confinement is quite frightening. Above all, Foucault saw this very well: people weren't committed to be treated, but to be isolated as someone considered dangerous.
46:00 Either dangerous because he was violent, or dangerous because he risked capturing the inheritance. There you go. Now, the doctor who treated Nerval said to him, "What if you put your dreams into writing, that might help you?" You see, he really was ahead of his time. We owe Aurélia to him. Because me, I'm not giving you a major text of Nerval's, Angélique—I'll tell you straight—it's still considered, even now, a work that doesn't have the prestige of Sylvie, which is a pure masterpiece, the novella that immediately follows Angélique in Les filles du feu.
46:30 Aurélia, which is the clinical account, for the reasons I just told you, where there was a burning urgency, with visions, the whole history of the initiates since Antiquity of the daughters, which is also in prose. Then you have Les chimères, which are his masterpiece in poetry. Everyone knows "I am the shadowy one, the widower, the unconsoled, the prince of Aquitaine of the ruined tower," a poem that already had prestige at the end of the 19th century, when the Symbolist movement, inaugurated by Baudelaire, appeared.
47:01 Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud—none of them ever called themselves Symbolist. It's afterward, retrospectively, that we call it that. It's when the secondary Symbolists come along that suddenly the word appears. Well, anyway, within that movement, he was appreciated, because there were rehabilitations of Nerval that always failed because they were always based on a misunderstanding. The Symbolists rehabilitate him precisely because of the strangeness, the Chimères. You read it, it's enigmatic, it's magnificent. We read it because it's magnificent. "My brow is still red from the queen's kiss." You'd think it was a fairy tale.
47:33 "My brow is still red." Everything is in the "still." You'd think it had been 2000 years since he received the queen's kiss and he still has the redness. It's magnificent. Which queen? He never says. Everything is in the definite article like that. "Give me back," isn't that right, "give me back the flower." The flower, you see, it's not this or that flower. Well, so, all these poems, the Chimères, are major works. And that's why this volume is so precious. In the paperback edition, it's the same.
Poetry and madness; El Desdichado 48:03 You have the same arrangement, Les filles du feu, so the summit of Nerval's prose followed by the Chimères, which are the summit of his poetry. I'm telling you this dogmatically because I don't want to waste too much of your time, but I'll have the chance to demonstrate it afterward, because one shouldn't stay dogmatic for too long. Poetry, in Nerval, especially the Chimères, is the moment of madness. Which isn't pejorative on the creative level. There are sometimes real hallucinations. In fact, if you look at the end of the preface, the extraordinary preface he writes to Alexandre Dumas, with irony, at the end of his preface, Nerval says, and since you had the imprudence to quote one of the sonnets, he had written an article, composed in a state of supernaturalist reverie, as the Germans say, mind you—the word surrealist didn't exist.
48:56 That's well before. Nerval puts forward this expression, much more appropriate, in my opinion, in fact. "And since you had the imprudence to quote one of the sonnets, composed in a state of supernaturalist reverie, as the Germans say"—so he attaches himself, connects himself directly to what I called German Romanticism, which is a generation earlier than ours. Careful, German Romanticism is contemporary with the rise of the English Romantics, the Coleridges.
49:27 What's the name of the one who did the illustrations, Gregorio Toca, a specialist, the one who illustrated—engraved himself—to illustrate his own poems, The First Book of Urizen, The Book of Heaven and Hell. I know that you know. I too know that I know, but I don't know. Well. Anyway. There you go, that's this Romanticism, of course.
49:57 Say, I'm in the middle of saying "Israeli, German Romanticism." In 1851, I was passing through Frankfurt. This is several times now that I pass through Frankfurt again. Come on, I'll tell you, because I don't want there to be... We're not going to make a detective story of it, because it would take 10 years. It shouldn't take a whole cycle. You'd say, we're surely not going to spend a whole semester on one novella. We'll have read it quickly. No. If we read it properly, it takes 10 years. And even then. You have no idea how many glosses there have been on just a single line of the Chimères.
50:28 It's not... I don't want to digress too much, but let me take, in the Chimères, just... "I am the shadowy one." There, I'll stop there. So, just that, do you know what it means, Nerval, word for word? Come on, I'll guide you, for those who know a bit of Italian. You translate. The black valley. "I am the shadowy one." Already, Nerval, nero, that's black. The black valley.
50:58 That's... So, you say, there we have it, we've got the meaning. In fact, it means the black valley. Yes. But no, it's not reducible to just one thing, because then we'd know it. That's why, I mean, I'm warning you, you mustn't get lost in all this, but... It's just to show you how far you could lose your footing. But it's also El Desdichado, whose title is the name from Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott, which was very much in fashion at the time. A revival of the Middle Ages. The rehabilitation of the Middle Ages is one of the typical themes of Romanticism.
51:29 In Racine's time, they used to say "Gothic," meaning: this was made by barbarians, these churches are ugly, they're appalling. What's beautiful is what's Greek, what's classical. There you go. Actually, if you go see Saint-Eustache, near Les Halles, you'll find both there. You have a Gothic masterpiece, that thing—it's Nerval, in fact, who says in Les Nuits d'octobre, he spends the night at Les Halles, which was the part of Paris that never slept at night, who says it looks like the skeleton of a cetacean. Well observed, when you see Saint-Eustache like that, with its flying buttresses. It looks like the skeleton of a whale.
51:59 That's the Gothic part. But you go around the front, there, on the pediment, there's a Vignola-style portal, as they used to say. That's from the 17th century, it had to be done, under the influence of the Counter-Reformation, when the Catholics were fighting against the Protestants, and neoclassicism, the Greek model, was in fashion, so they put a colonnade in front of a Gothic cathedral. Well. No. Now, seriously, Walter Scott writes medieval novels, some of which have been made into films, Ivanhoe, with Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor, who has violet eyes.
52:37 We're keeping up with each other. Excuse me. Because afterward, they get a bit tangled. But honestly, Robert Taylor, yes, that's it, Robert Taylor, who was a vile collaborator during McCarthyism, unlike Mitchum—I won't wander off—and decent guys like Errol Flynn, who has quite the physique. So, he plays Ivanhoe very well, a lot of... We used to talk of a "Walter Scott landscape" when you saw a ruined abbey deep in a forest, where we're at.
The widower of his mother; the theater chronicler; madness 53:11 So, when he says Desdichado, that's the name... When Ivanhoe arrives in black armor. So, it's no longer the black valley now, it's Ivanhoe who has black armor. Isn't that right? The widower. The widower, you wear mourning, you're in black. I'm passing through Frankfurt again because of the widower. Nerval never saw his mother. Nerval is a widower of his mother from birth.
53:41 practically. Here's what happened. His father, as I told you, belonged to the generation that was in the Grande Armée. He was a doctor in the Grande Armée. So, the little one, barely born, and the father is somewhere between Berlin and Poland. But yes, poor fellow. And here's the thing—this doesn't happen every day, mind you—the mother is in love with her husband. That's not what I mean. I'm not saying it's rare for a mother to be in love with her husband. It's rare for her to be in love to the point of leaving the newborn behind and going off to follow her husband all the way to Russia, no less.
54:15 And she died from it while crossing a bridge loaded with corpses, we don't know exactly. Anyway, she caught the fevers. And still now, at this very moment as I speak to you, she's buried in Glogau, in present-day Poland, which at the time was Schlesien, Silesia, Germanic land, well, German-speaking at the time, but old Slavic land. So, there's a widowhood. What am I trying to tell you? That this is a work, this apparently disparate work, which keeps changing plots, that is an extraordinarily homogeneous work, taking place halfway—and here I arrive at my final determination of that middle ground—between two tombs, one of which is in the East, in Poland, the mother's tomb, symbolically.
54:55 We will always try to get closer to it without ever quite reaching it. You understand now why all these journeys go toward Germany, toward the East. He's discreet, he doesn't talk about it very directly. This is where Romanticism went out of fashion. Hugo said—we saw this last year, didn't we—to oppose Pascal, to classicism which had said the self is hateful, we don't talk about the self in classical art. Hugo said, when I speak to you of myself, I speak to you of yourselves. So I'll talk about myself as much as I like. Nerval, that's not it. He took a long time to talk about himself, and even then, only a little.
55:25 I haven't dwelt much on this, but he was famous fairly early, though in a secondary way. Famous, the way we'd say today a TV presenter. Why do I say that? Because his specialty was writing reviews of theater plays. Mostly, it was boulevard theater. You see, it's as if nowadays someone wrote reviews of TV series. But he did it better than the others, with style. Readers were very attached to it. A column by Nerval is always pleasant to read, even if the play is worthless. I say this to those interested, and to the film buffs among you, by the way, who've seen Les Enfants du Paradis 127 times, for instance.
56:04 That Nerval, in one of his reviews, wrote accounts of performances at the Théâtre des Funambules. That's worth reading. He's supposedly playing—dare I say—Jean-Louis Barrault, Baptiste. It's not quite the moonstruck Pierrot. But he also writes a review of... that's the mime Deburau, who really existed. Nerval corresponds with him. The great mime Deburau, the towering mime of the era. But also, the antithesis—the antithesis of moonstruck Pierrot is Harlequin, isn't it, who's as much a smooth talker as the other is mute.
56:41 Pierre Brasseur, in his role as Frédérick Lemaître, isn't that right, who was a prestigious actor of the time, who set the stage ablaze with his glib tongue. There you go. And I find him very good, of course, old Brasseur, who is the father of Claude Brasseur. Nerval meets both of them. You see, he did at least theater reviews. And he dreamed his whole life, like many of the greatest writers of the time, of succeeding in theater. Succeeding in theater is like succeeding, that's it, succeeding in Hollywood. Because theater has an audience, it's not intimate like poetry, it's not anonymous. You can be a genius painter and be completely unknown, with your masterpieces in your room, whereas in theater, you need money to be performed.
57:16 It's a bit like the architect. If there's no financial means, he'll never see what he made. You see, that's interesting. Do you realize Mozart never heard a single note of his most-played symphonies for two centuries now, the last three? Because you have to pay a philharmonic orchestra, it's not... He's buried in a common grave, in Vienna, Mozart, he didn't even have money for a decent tomb. I say this because some people make you believe that classical music is for the elite. Or think of Mussorgsky, who was picked up in the gutter, a drunkard.
57:48 Well. So, it's not only Charlie Parker and Monk who are the accursed ones. And so, he wanted to succeed in theater, he failed, we'll come back to that, he was always fascinated by the world of the stage. And so he had this somewhat dubious reputation, somewhat based on a misunderstanding—it's a charming pen. There you go. It was a charming pen that people liked reading on secondary subjects. He's not a great creator.
58:18 We had to wait, as I told you, for the Symbolists, then, I'll go a bit faster, the Surrealists, who found in him—it wasn't only the Chimères, it was above all automatic writing. But Aurélia, if you read Aurélia, the account of his madness, there is, what Nerval himself calls the outpouring of the dream into real life, that is to say, dreaming during the day, hallucination. There, I don't want to dwell too long in the clinical domain, but there, we're no longer in neurosis, we're in psychosis. We all get little yellow dots when we've tied our shoelaces for a while, bent down for a long time, and don't get back up right away, that's nothing.
58:54 These are distortions of the psychosensory sphere, as they say in psychology school. On the other hand, when it becomes thematized, when you see the faces of your long-dead grandparents wandering at the tips of tree branches, that's hallucination. And there, we move into psychosis—you see, Nerval had seen this moon strolling above the Concorde. One day, he gave a resounding slap to a postman on a bridge while crossing the Seine, because he had a little thing, the postman, on his chest, which he'd mistaken for a supporter of the Armagnacs against the Burgundians in the 12th century.
59:25 You see, that's a real psychotic. Today, we'd say, to be precise, that he was affected by bipolar disorder. I think that's how it's called. It's not my field, so I'm just trying to keep up. But a few years ago, they still said cyclothymics or manic-depressives, that is, alternating periods of lucidity and delirium. In delirium, that's the manic phase, euphoric. "I am Napoleon and you're all worthless." There are passages like that in the mix. And then the depressive phase.
59:55 "I am the shadowy one, the widower, the unconsoled." Yes, just on the word black, the widower, there's a whole world to say. So, I would advise you against thinking that to understand Nerval, you have to dive into the tarot, the history of the tarot, Freemasonry, Pythagoreanism. No—he knew all that inside out. I'm not telling you not to be interested in those things, but you have time. And it's not necessarily needed to understand Nerval. So I come to the end of this dedication of Les filles du feu, where he says to Dumas, and since you had—knowing that Dumas couldn't have understood much of this kind of literature—and since you had the imprudence to cite one of these sonnets composed in a state of supernaturalist reverie as the Germans say, you'll find them all at the end of the volume.
1:00:42 That's why, still today, we're in the habit of following Les filles du feu with Les Chimères. "You'll see, they're hardly more obscure, thank goodness, than the metaphysics of Hegel"—he's mocking us, he's mocking Dumas—"or the Memorabilia of Swedenborg"—a very interesting Swedish visionary mystic, by the way—"and the Memorabilia would lose their charm if explained, were that even possible. At least grant me the merit of the expression."
1:01:16 Listen, one couldn't be any clearer. Well before structuralism: "At least grant me the merit of the expression." That you don't understand it, but admit that it's beautiful. The only madness—the last sentence is superb, the most reasonable thing a madman has ever uttered: "The only madness that will probably remain mine will be to believe myself a poet. It is for criticism to cure me of it." Full stop. There's the madman. Checkmate.
The abbé de Bucquoy; Nerval's death and the memory of Adamov 1:01:48 That's not bad at all for a madman. So, that's why I chose this text. You understand more and more why it's a design. So I go back to my story of intrigues that follow one another. I'm in Frankfurt. I'm at the fair. I go to the book section. And what do I stumble upon? I continue now. Upon a work written in French and German, but of French origin. From the 18th century. Which tells the story—the title—Les aventures, let me sum up the title.
1:02:21 That was the title back then, roughly. The Adventures of the Abbé de Bucquoy. A character who really existed in the 18th century, and who recounts his memoirs. Nerval is interested in the content, in the era, in the fact that this rather strange abbot defrocked himself, threw off the cassock—that's the etymology, defrocked, isn't it—left the Catholic Church he came from while remaining a mystic. He became subversive, was imprisoned several times in the Bastille and in a number of other prisons, made multiple escapes.
1:02:52 Well, anyway. A book that generated a certain amount of interest. He wants to buy it, but he had already spent money on other books and had no more left to buy this one. I'll mention, in passing, there's always a strange relationship between Nerval and money when he's traveling. He has a lot of modesty about it. In fact, he's broke. Completely. All right, now I come to something serious—the night he kills himself. I'll tell you the way I told someone once. Ah, I can say it for once—that I saved someone from suicide that very night.
1:03:26 I'm thinking of Arthur Adamov. Someone here might remember that when we talk about the Theater of the Absurd, there were three great authors at one time. There was Ionesco, Beckett—those two remained—and then Adamov, who disappeared because he had the bad taste to join the Communist Party in 1956, when everyone else was fleeing it. I think some of you remember Arthur Adamov. Let me cite a few plays, like Ping-Pong, which is about the pinball machine. Or like La politique des restes, which is extraordinary, set in South Africa.
1:03:57 Paolo Paoli, etc. Sainte Europe, already a pamphlet on Europe, Sainte Europe. And who wrote an admirable journal, L'homme et l'enfant—that's a rather silly publisher's title, from Folio. And well, precisely, in his journal, he's kind enough to recall this anecdote—forgive me for quoting myself, well, quoting a passage where he talks about me. But I mean, he was doing very badly because he had just quit drinking, he was a tremendous alcoholic. And I was very young compared to him, I was a kind of groupie, and he was in a sordid hotel room, poor man, and he was suffering a great deal.
1:04:29 And to calm him down, I read to him—I had Les filles du feu on hand. And I remember, he'd say, it's beautiful, and he'd calm down. He had an appointment with his psychiatrist in Épinay, I remember. And he had an appointment with Marthe Robert—some of you might know a bit about her, she wrote Roman des origines et origines du roman, a great critic and translator of Kafka, Kleist, etc.—whom I met on that occasion, in fact. And I need to talk about Nerval and Adamov, not about myself here, wait, don't get me sidetracked, but it just came back to me all of a sudden.
1:05:04 And then the light was fading, so I kept going, I knew the text by heart. And he tells this and he'd say, "But you see, you see, Pagani, it's Nerval too, he killed himself, he cracked." I told him, "Yes, but you're exaggerating—since we're getting to what I'm about to tell you about the circumstances of Nerval's suicide. You're surrounded by friends, everyone's around you, it's true, Adamov, everyone loved you very much, etc. He was alone." So there, let me tell you now, the circumstances of his suicide: he was penniless, he had just spent a night at an aunt's, where he used to go from time to time when he had no home—homeless, as we'd say today.
1:05:38 The aunt wasn't home, it was bitterly cold, it was minus 15 in Paris, and he left a note, which is his final text, at his aunt's. I'll tell it to you because it's... What an author! "My dear aunt, tell your son that you are the best of mothers and aunts. When I am done with all my enemies, you will have your place in my Olympus, as I had my place in your house. Don't wait up for me tonight, for the night will be black and white."
1:06:09 Nerval. And there you go, I said to Adamov, come on, stop that nonsense, you're surrounded, you are, there you go. And he did kill himself, but much later, Adamov—I was in Africa at the time—from alcohol. You see, I'm being serious when I say that this is... someone who... When he makes these plots follow one another like that, and when I tell you about his drink, he would have...
1:06:43 Ah yes, he had knocked at a night shelter which refused to let him in, it was cold. Ultimately, mind you, one shouldn't exaggerate either... If they had opened the door for him, he'd... he would still be among us—I won't overstate it either. But I mean, there you go, I mean, sometimes it takes so little to tip into the act, you know, there it is. So, he's very discreet, I'll come back to this discretion, suicidal, literally. And he has the modesty to say, I didn't have a cent, in fact he had already spent too much on books.
The Riancey amendment: separating history from fiction 1:07:15 And then, he says to himself, this is, I continue, in two days I'll be in Paris, capital of the book, a French book, I'll find it more easily and it will be cheaper than here. That's how the book begins. And as soon as he gets back to Paris, on my return to Paris, I found literature in a state of inexpressible terror. You have to pay attention to words. Terror, that's a strong word. What has just happened? While he was traveling — but this is serious, it's in the official gazette of the time, for those who want to consult the archives — an amendment was passed in Parliament, this was during the Guizot ministry, just before Napoleon III's coup d'état.
1:07:54 An amendment, the Riancey amendment, as it's called, still today, after the name of the one who proposed it. And now, follow closely, because this is going to govern the whole story: it forbade authors from writing serialized novels. Either you write fiction, a novel, or you write history. But you don't do what Mr. Dumas, Eugène Sue, Nerval, etc. did, where you never know if the musketeer — if you're in the... in history, in romance, in the flashy stuff, in the courtly, in the learned — you never know.
1:08:34 You'll say to me, but what... Can censorship and politics get mixed up with literary genres? Because that's exactly it, you know I'm hooked on the problem of literary genres, but not randomly with this text. This text raises the question of where history ends and where fiction begins. Do you think that's a simple problem? What was I talking about earlier, the griot? That's it, the first historians — well, historians, goodbye — but the first historians in the strict sense, that is, history appears with writing, Pharaoh's scribes, do you think they were paid to tell the truth?
1:09:11 They were paid to say that Pharaoh is the most handsome, the best, and that he crushed the Hittites underfoot. That's what he had inscribed on the frescoes, roughly, with the beautiful metaphors the Orient has the secret of. There you go, the beautiful hyperboles — that's not made to state reality, history at the outset. So what does it mean to separate fiction from the real? That's all very nice, but it's programmatic. In reality it's not so simple. Nerval has the merit of raising the problem with a great deal of humor.
1:09:41 And since — I'm only telling you this now — this story actually appeared at the time as a serial in a newspaper, the text of Angélique, in a newspaper called Le National, which was somewhat left-wing, somewhat libertarian, as we'd say today. You see, a somewhat subversive era. Le National and Le Charivari, which was a bit like the Canard enchaîné of the time. Besides, there's a moment when Nerval finds himself in Vienna — you'll see, he tells it himself in the story, we'll get to that — he's in Vienna, on one of his trips, in previous years, and he finds himself penniless, once again.
1:10:17 I only dwell on things when they're thematic for him and keep recurring. These aren't digressions, it's staying within the body of the text. And to earn a living, he wrote theater reviews, which he did in Paris, and he does the same in Vienna. That's what he does. It was the era of the political crackdown, the Congress of Vienna, that was the NATO of the time, the union against the French Revolution, against everything that remained of revolutionary miasma — that was Metternich, the master of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was the politics and the police, and the money was London — well, that hasn't changed much.
1:10:54 Germany and Central Europe serve as cannon fodder and the Anglo-Saxons finance it. Since Waterloo, that hasn't changed. And so he's waiting for the censorship visa and he's broke while waiting; timidly, he goes to the censorship offices to say couldn't you go a bit faster. And there he's received by the head of censorship in Vienna, who had read it, and what does the head of censorship say to him?
1:11:27 He owns all the works that are censored at the time and he offers to read them. Exactly, it's extraordinary, thank you, I can't remember your first name, sorry. Samy. Samy, thank you Samy, there you go, his name is Pila, like Pontius Pilate, but without the E. Besides, Nerval says, unlike his near-namesake, he didn't want to wash his hands of it, but he told him straight out: you are here, in the freest place in the Empire, colon, the censorship offices. That means you're in the eye of the storm, here you have every freedom, and you come — I'll continue now — you can come every day to read Le National and Le Charivari.
1:12:03 So Parisians, in Paris, don't have the right to read it. It's all purged and everything. In Vienna, no one has a copy of Le National or Le Charivari, but here, I, the head of censorship, I read everything. And it's the same for the somewhat racy stuff, isn't it? Louis XIV could divorce at a time when divorce was forbidden. Power is always above the power it exercises. So, he comes back to Paris, there's this amendment, and where it gets serious is economically — it was their livelihood, the serial novel.
An anti-novel: the nowhere-to-be-found book 1:12:37 The Eugène Sues, the Nervals, the... right? And he absolutely has to find the book to prove that yes, the character existed, that it's history, because if it's discovered that it's a novel, a fine of a million, one centime per copy sold, and it bankrupts the newspaper he works for — that's what's at stake. Well then, there's no plot — actually there is one. Yes, well, it's the first, but it won't stop until the end. Throughout this story, we're going to spend our time looking for this book. I'm telling you now, because I don't want to create a detective story, a fake suspense.
1:13:09 I'm telling you right away that until the last page, we won't find the book. We'll find it later, in another text, he'll tell the story of Bucquoy's life, but in this story he deliberately made it what today we'd call, in terms of modern literature and even avant-garde before its time, an anti-novel. That is, since I can't tell the planned story, I don't have the book, I have to talk about other things while I wait. And so I create, you see, I invent other stories, I find material to talk about anything and everything. So there you go, Pagani can only digress, he only deals with one text, but I, Nerval, can digress as much as I want, because I don't have the book.
1:13:45 Do you understand why I chose this text? It's to keep digressing, but it's not me, it's him. In short, I'm caught by the symptom that Nerval describes over pages in the famous preface that some of you have read, where he says, Alexandre Dumas, you understand what you call my madness, it's that I can't help identifying with the characters I talk about. I talk to you about a hero, I automatically identify with him. There you go. The digression. First thing, find the book.
1:14:16 You can guess he's going to find all sorts of pretexts so the book stays unfindable. In Paris — or else in Paris we'd find it right away. The library is on vacation, or else it's closed, or else it's under repair, or else there are rodents. Ah, rodents, they attack manuscripts. They eat the traces. No but I'm serious, there's a passage called The Russian Rat, the Cossack Rat and the Mouse of Athens. Rodents imported in crates of foreign books. Did you read that? It's extraordinary!
1:14:47 I remind you that Marx, in The German Ideology, which is his work, the protocol of the break with his Feuerbachian period — young, anarchist, etc., and libertarian, which one must always go through, there's no serious revolution if one hasn't been a rebel, there's no serious revolution if one stays in mere revolt. As Merleau-Ponty magnificently puts it, if the philosopher were a rebel, he'd shock less. For after all, everyone notices that the world is not as it should be, only to forget it once they come to power.
1:15:17 With Socrates, it's more serious. There you go. So, Marx says in The German Ideology, 'We abandoned our early works to the gnawing criticism of the mice.' You see, mice in libraries, all the same. These are images that endure. There you go. There are all sorts of reasons why the book can't be found, and we'll see the details. For now I'm being programmatic. We'll see that the further we go into the story, the more he mocks us, the more implausible the pretexts become. The rodent story is already quite something.
1:15:51 And now I'll send you to letter 4, for those — because it's divided not into chapters but into letters. These are the letters he sends to the newspaper director. First letter, second letter, third letter, so that it can appear as a serial. Starting from the fourth letter, that's page 74, I think, wait, not quite. There he is. I'm speaking like in Abidjan, I said 'there he is.' So wait, speaking of a letter.
1:16:23 It's page 64 in the Folio edition. Starting from the fourth letter, there's a shift in space. That's why I want to list in advance the different spaces we're going to move through, because as I told you, we move around a lot. We started on the banks of the Main. Frankfurt am Main and not am Rhein. Frankfurt on the Main. We started on the banks of the Main. We continue on the banks of the Seine in Paris, in a maze — we'll see this — a stifling maze of libraries, of corridors where we search for unfindable books between the mice of Athens and the rats of Russia, amid manuscripts where we don't know if it's 'de Bucquoy' or 'du Bucquoy' because names were uncertain at a certain period.
1:17:08 If it's 'du Bucquoy,' we have to start all over again under the letter D and not under the letter B. There's all that. There's a fantastical side that recalls, for those familiar with South American literature, Borges. In Borges there's a theme of the library of Babel, of the labyrinth. Did you think of that while reading, perhaps? Because Ricardo comes to us from South America and I was sure he'd make the connection — which doesn't stop him from teaching our language.
Longueval, the Valois, and Mortefontaine 1:17:43 So, fourth letter, we change setting. I'll read you the passage where he justifies it, and I ask you — if I may give you this as homework, it's amusing — to look at every moment where he changes plot, the reasons he gives, and the moments where he changes place. You follow the local movement. Why do we go left rather than right? Why do we suddenly head toward Compiègne instead of staying in Paris? What reasons does he invoke?
1:18:14 I'll give you the page numbers for this. So, as I told you, at letter 4, page 64, the first time we leave Paris. We already saw that we left Frankfurt. And he says this: I had the idea of going to the Archives de France. That's in the Marais, isn't it? Now they're in the suburbs, the bulk of it, but the head office is still in the Marais, rue des Archives, you know it, past the Hôtel de Ville. I had the idea of going to the Archives de France where they gave me the authentic genealogy of the Bucquoys. He's still doing research, mind you, while waiting to find the book, he's inquiring about the family, the genealogy.
1:18:47 Their family name is Longueval. Gifts. What does Longueval make you think of? It's so simple you don't think of it. Yes, thank you, Nerval. Same suffix, yes or no? Same suffix, which is the root of a region of France where Nerval spent his childhood, and which is the Valois. With a proper name, with a surname, we soon get place names.
1:19:17 For if you go there, and I recommend it, because it's among the most beautiful spots in the world — he'll say so, Nerval. But even without Nerval saying so, take the little illustrated Larousse. Look up the entry for Mortefontaine. Nerval spent his childhood there, his mother's village. Commune of the Oise, X inhabitants, etc., colon, the most beautiful English garden in Europe. All the same! Right? And yet the English garden, in England there are beautiful ones, they're the ones who created it.
1:19:48 It's magnificent, it's a region of ponds, woods, it's a region where the soil is poor, that's why it's beautiful. Where it's rich, that's where Roissy-en-France is. There it's the land, the big fields, the sugar beets, stuff all the way to the horizon, it's not beautiful. It's rich, it's not beautiful. Then after that it's the sand, where there's sand, there are forests. If there are still forests today, the ancestors weren't stupid. If they didn't cut down the trees there, it's because it wasn't worth it. Besides, where they cut too much, that's what gave, 3 km from Ermenonville, the sea of sand. Because a lot was cut to build the French navy and vice versa.
1:20:31 And on sand, it doesn't grow back like that. So even now you have this attraction called the sea of sand, where they take children on camel rides. As Nerval says, there are enough deserts that from the center you can't see the other edges, but not enough that you arrive in two minutes at the most charming place in the world. So, a region of woods and ponds, and even, I've told you, it's a magical place-name, Mortefontaine. Magical, but maleficent. There are curses and blessings among fairies, you know, there are good fairies and bad fairies.
1:21:01 And Mortefontaine is the mother's village. How could it not be? The fountain is what nourishes, what waters, what is maternal. Dead fountain [Mortefontaine]. At the source, there is death. The dead woman. Turn to Les Chimères, as you'll have time to do this evening. And you'll see there's a sonnet called Artémis. Everything is coded in Les Chimères. The goddess, the Greek name for Diana. I'm telling you, the first quatrain, the thirteenth returns, it's still the first. And it's always the only moment or the one or the only one.
1:21:34 'For art thou queen, O first or last, / Art thou king, thou the only or the last lover, / Love him who loved thee from cradle to bier, / She whom I alone loved still loves me tenderly, / She is death or the dead one, O delight, O torment, / The rose she holds is the hollyhock.' You see, it seems obscure. It's already clearer. I have to make a parenthesis about the philosophical use that interests me in this text. It's not literary, even though there's much to say.
From repetition to liberation: Rousseau's empty tomb 1:22:06 I'm not doing psychoanalysis. So, I give you every appearance of it. I'm not saying Nerval's problem is his mother. It's an issue, in his work, that plays a considerable role. But yes, thank you, that's kind. If I chose this text, it's precisely because it's the only one where Nerval goes all the way, and we'll see. Thomas outlined the different plot lines for you, and we saw that the final one isn't to arrive at the mother's tomb, it's to arrive at Rousseau's tomb. It's the only text where Nerval overcomes the individual novel, the personal novel, the deathly cycle we saw all last year of the repetition of Ulysses, where the carnage repeats itself, where there's death at the beginning and death at the arrival.
1:22:51 Do you remember that? That was the structure of Ulysses and the Odyssey. This is the only one where he goes beyond it, to take us not to Mortefontaine — we never go there, in Angélique, even though it's right there, right at hand — but to take us to the tomb of the one who wrote The Social Contract. I've told you the outline of what awaits us this year. For the first time, there's an opening from repetition toward liberation. There, I'll finish with Rousseau's tomb since that will be the endpoint of our walk.
1:23:25 We're going to walk from Senlis, about ten kilometers, to Ermenonville, through the woods, breathing in with joy the autumn mist, as he says. Arriving — some of you may already know the park — arriving at Ermenonville, Rousseau's tomb is on the so-called Island of Poplars, a little islet in a pond with a cenotaph, a monument sculpted at the time by a disciple of Houdon, and the Island of Poplars because it's surrounded by a ring of poplars.
1:23:55 It's the least deathly, least morbid tomb there could be. First because it's disappointing for the fetishists — Rousseau's ashes aren't there. And Nerval keeps saying: Rousseau's tomb, emptied of its ashes, for one fine night at the time of the Revolution, the men of the Convention came with torchlight to fetch the philosopher's remains to bring them to the Panthéon. They're still there. So it's a pure sign, it's rare, a tomb like that. It's an old pun of Plato's.
1:24:25 Soma, sema. Sema the sign, soma the tomb. A pure sign, that tomb. So no need to look underneath, there's nothing, there are no ashes. Instead, you raise your eyes and you see. How does Rimbaud put it? At the end of A Season in Hell, sometimes I see in the sky white nations rejoicing, the song of the heavens, the march of peoples — peupliers, popolo, slaves — let us not curse life. There, I'll end this introduction to the text of Angélique with these words of Rimbaud.
Audience question: the two tombs and the maternal uncle 1:24:59 What I'd like — Thomas, we decided that for the questions, we note them, how does that work? No, are there questions, so that you could reassure me and you have questions? So, if you have questions, I'll have until next month to concoct an answer. Yes? Élise? Between two tombs, is it between the mother's tomb, which is in Germany.
1:25:30 Ah yes, thank you, yes, I interrupted myself. The other one is Rousseau's tomb. Ah yes, right. There's the queen's tomb, to speak in Nervalian terms, 'my brow is still red from the queen's kiss.' You know all children's tales begin with once upon a time there was a king, a queen — and it's not daddy, mommy. Now we're in psychoanalysis. Now we're in the personal world. Then afterward there's always the stepmother who is the bad mother. Anyway, the Oedipal triangle begins. Yes, that's it. There is, somewhere in Poland, he tried to approach — it's at Glogau, Gross Glogau, currently.
1:26:07 What am I saying? That's the German name, Glogau, Wrocław now, in Poland, it's a big city. Sorry? A positive tomb and a negative tomb. There you go, there's the mother's tomb, but what is this quest that would only lead to a corpse? A quest bound to be disappointing, leading to madness and suicide. You'll say to me, well that's what happened to him, yes, but that's because there's no one at Rousseau's tomb. In this text, he tells us, we ought to be at Rousseau's tomb. So, I'll answer your question with an intertextual reference, borrowing a passage from Sylvie, the story that comes right after, which has nothing to do with it, it's a much more classic story, apparently autobiographical — there you go, I was in love with an actress, etc.
1:26:49 'Although my uncle' — this is Nerval speaking — his maternal uncle, you know, in anthropology, including among the Bororo whom Lévi-Strauss studied deep in the Amazon, and in Africa too, and in our regions, the maternal uncle always has a positive role in tales and in the imaginary. The mother's brother, very interesting. You know there are wife-receiving kin groups and wife-giving kin groups. When you say 'my brother-in-law,' you never know if it's the one who received a wife or the one who gave her.
1:27:21 Very interesting. Because there's a matter of debt — well, I won't go into it further — but the one who gives a wife is a creditor. He must receive in exchange three loincloths, two oxen and four sheep. Well, I saw that in Niger, for example. And yes, Lévi-Strauss gives this Indian proverb: an in-law is an elephant's thigh. It's a cute proverb, isn't it? There's enough to eat for a long time. An in-law is an elephant's thigh. Well yes, these things are serious. We — I say 'you,' but me too, I'm spoiled like you by modernity — we're for marrying for love.
1:27:56 That's just indulgence, that. Well, you'd say, when what was at stake was old man Martin's vineyard along with so-and-so's cows, it's not love that's going to ruin all that. It's serious. There you go, we're in the substantial, as Hegel would say, in objective morality, where many peoples still are, right, because of... the level of development of their productive forces. So, you're quite right to bring that up, it's in your question. Yes, it goes from the mother's tomb, personal novel, to Rousseau's tomb, collective emancipation. Because, by a quirk of his biography, Rousseau's tomb is located in the region where he spent his childhood.
Sylvie at Ermenonville: the temple of philosophy 1:28:34 The place that's familiar to him. But there's no one there. So, in Sylvie — I don't know it yet — in Sylvie, another story, we're in Paris, the theater, and suddenly, you'll see, you'll read it, it's admirable. For Proust, it was the example to follow, the whole of the Search — he dreamed of writing like a single sentence of Sylvie. He's led to go to the Valois, as in Angélique, we start in Paris, then it's in the Valois.
1:29:06 And he arrives at Sylvie's place in the middle of the night, he takes a stagecoach at 4 in the morning, it's a kind of madness. And he arrives, he allows himself to arrive very late, because he remembers it's the feast of Saint Bartholomew, the regional festival, well the village festival, where no one sleeps all night, where they dance all night. So he knows Sylvie is awake. She's a little girl from his childhood, a childhood sweetheart he had, a little peasant girl. Sylvie, an emanation of the forest, Sylva. And we'll see that in Angélique, he walks through the forests with Sylvain, with Gérard de Nerval.
1:29:40 Forget naive realism, well, realism — the first names, you can change them whenever you like, we're in the symbolic field. As soon as we're in the forest, he's with Sylvain. As soon as we get to the fields, Sylvain disappears, he goes back to his village. Well, here it's Sylvie, a little brunette, a little peasant girl with a slightly tanned complexion, as he says, etc. And when he arrives, she has grown into an adult, she didn't wait for him. He was very nice, the little Parisian who came to the village on vacation and was her crush, but since then she's engaged to the man who's opening a bakery in the village.
1:30:19 So you see, well yes, what do you want, my friend, one has to come to terms with it, as she says. All of a sudden, we move on to Flaubert, there. Well yes, we realize, well yes, it's terrible, the end of Sylvie. In short. And when he arrives there, since she's been dancing all night, she's happy to see him again, the reunion is a bit melancholic, he notices that the fiancé is his former foster brother, he says, that was just my luck to have a foster brother in the country where Rousseau died, Rousseau who wanted to abolish wet nurses.
1:30:50 With a lot of humor and bitterness. Well, I'm not going to retell the whole of Sylvie, so while she's sleeping to recover a bit, he has some empty time, he goes to Ermenonville, to Rousseau's tomb. In Sylvie, which is a novella, a sentimental one, not at all a travel narrative like Angélique. And there, he answers your question. When he arrives, when I saw the lake waters shining through the branches of the willows and the hazel trees, I recognized — and this is in broad daylight, in full sun, in the middle of the afternoon — I recognized entirely a place my uncle had taken me to many times, or quite often, on his walks.
1:31:28 It's the Temple of Philosophy, which its founder did not have the happiness to finish. And yes, the one who invited Rousseau to come die, so to speak. He invited Rousseau to come to his estate, the Marquis de Girardin, who owned the Ermenonville estate, interested, like many, in Rousseau's ideas on education. It seems, moreover, that this aristocrat forced his children — he applied Émile to the letter — to earn their breakfast by climbing a greasy pole. You see, the poor things, they had to climb up and catch it.
1:31:59 Yes, really. Well. No, no, it's serious, he built the old people's bench. You see, he tried, applying Rousseau, to build things of collective interest. A fountain with water for the herds, an archery range because it's the traditional sport of the region. You see, still, a kind of political lost paradise, in this political Arcadia that is Girardin's Ermenonville. So, when I saw — and yes, in this estate, it's ecology in reverse.
1:32:30 He builds an estate where he imitates nature. It's simply the English garden, as it was called at the time. You know that the first time the word 'romantic' appears in our literature, the first occurrence, is in the Fifth Walk of Rousseau's Reveries, so in the 1760s. That's the first occurrence, very precisely, at that time — it's not at all the very complex meaning it has today, it's the English manner of making gardens as opposed to the French, geometric and classical manner. The shores of Lake Bienne are wilder and more romantic than those of Lake Geneva. If one sees fewer crops and vineyards there, one sees more forests and shade.
1:33:02 There you go. That's geometric romanticism. So you can go there, it's magnificent. It's now called the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Park because, well, entry is paid, there are gaps, a fence. I shouldn't say it because the people who maintain it are very good people. There you go. And now there are events, because now, you know, they tell every association 'self-finance, self-finance, there's no money left.' That's a moment we're in now.
1:33:33 With Macron it's getting worse, but it didn't start with him. So, self-finance. So one day, if you have to look at the stars at night, another time, it's an operation around scents, herbs, etc. Another time, it's literary, it's the Nerval trail, Rousseau, it's magnificent. So there's a temple which is the Temple of Philosophy. You know, this is what's called at the time the poetics of ruins. They deliberately built an unfinished building, as if it were a ruin, as if it were some Greek remnant, in the mists of the Île-de-France. And on each of the columns there's the name of a philosopher, it's a tribute to the Age of Enlightenment.
1:34:06 The first column is Descartes, then Newton, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and it ends with Rousseau, of course. Well, actually it un-ends with Rousseau, the temple, columns are missing, deliberately. When I saw the lake waters shining through the branches of the willows and the hazel trees, I recognized entirely a place my uncle had taken me to many times, it's the Temple of Philosophy which its founder did not have the happiness to finish. It has the shape of the Temple of the Tiburtine Sibyl, a memory of Naples, from Les Filles du feu, Naples, Vesuvius, but that's another novella called Octavie.
1:34:44 And in Les Chimères, a poem is called Myrto: give me back Posillipo and the sea of Italy. It has the shape of the Temple of the Tiburtine Sibyl, still standing under the shelter of a cluster of pines. I recall that pines are dedicated to Dionysus in antiquity, all of that matters, I'm telling you quickly, ivy and pine, everything that's always green, you know, because Dionysus, it seems tough, it's the libido, it never dies.
1:35:14 There you go, it doesn't fade. And still standing under the shelter of a cluster of pines, it shelters all these great names starting with Montaigne and Descartes and ending with Rousseau. Up to this point, it's almost elegies, we come back to revisit the past. This unfinished building is already no more than a ruin. The ivy festoons it gracefully, the bramble invades the disjointed steps. Well now! It's not man destroying nature, it's nature threatening the temple.
1:35:45 The ivy festoons it gracefully, the bramble invades the disjointed steps. There, as a child, I saw festivals where young girls dressed in white came to receive prizes for learning and wisdom. Where are the rose bushes that surrounded the hill? And there you have the great elegiac tone, in the imperfect tense, the tone of long duration, of lost happiness, the Proustian note, the only true paradises are those we have lost. Where are the rose bushes that surrounded the hill? The wild rose, the raspberry bush, now hide the last remaining plants that are going back to a wild state, and the laurels.
1:36:19 Do you know the song? Come on, come on, you know the song. The nursery rhyme with the laurels, which one is it? Ah, that's nice. Yes indeed, Nerval is a specialist of the nursery rhyme, the counting rhyme. The most beautiful fusion, for him, of language and music, of word and ear, of the auricular, is not only Wagnerian drama — which he was actually the first to point out, before Baudelaire, but that's another story — it's not opera and rap trying to achieve this fusion too, I mean this seriously, it's at work, it's at work in every era.
1:36:55 It's not opera, it's the folk song of our regions. And the laurels, have they been cut down, as the song says, of the young girls who no longer want to go to the woods? No, these shrubs of sweet Italy have perished under our misty sky. You see, it's the elegy. Fortunately, Virgil's privet — what a classical reference, the laurels — fortunately, Virgil's privet still blooms, as if to support the master's words inscribed above the door. Listen, on Sunday, for that, I'm a well brought up... we can still see inscribed above the door, engraved, look, you have to clear away the moss a bit because sometimes it fades.
1:37:31 And here, we're no longer in elegy and nostalgia. To know the reason of things, the Enlightenment. And Nerval's conclusion is not at all naturalist. Yes, this temple falls like so many others. Men, forgotten or weary, will turn away from its surroundings. Nature will reclaim the ground that art disputed with it. But the thirst for knowledge will remain eternal, the driving force of all strength and all activity.
1:38:02 Here are the poplars, and the island, and Rousseau's tomb, empty of his ashes. He continues. O sage — this is the last sentence, I reassure you — you had given us the milk of the strong, and there I answer your question, and we were too weak for it to benefit us. Well now, we're barely one generation from the Revolution here. That means already, Rousseau buried, the Restoration did everything to forget him. You know, like after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Well yes. No but I'm not re-loading my guns under Stalin. Let's not mix everything up.
1:38:32 But yes, still. It notes that one must indeed fight to the fullest against every trace of Marxism and communism. Well yes. As being totalitarianism and the gulag. But yes. One can bloody the whole earth without ever being troubled, as at the time of Suez when the Soviets made us clear out. This story of Nerval's Angélique is serious. We have forgotten your lessons that our fathers knew. He's talking about Rousseau. We had already forgotten. And we have lost the sense of your word.
1:39:04 Last echo of ancient wisdoms. And there, I told you I was doing the philosophical exploitation of this text. Nerval draws a masterly link between the Social Contract and... yes? No, no, no, no. The Republic. Good, bravo. Last echo of ancient wisdoms. That means that since Plato and the total leveling that is the Republic, where one has to make an immense detour, my friend, if we want to solve our problems, we have to change politics. Plato, 2400 years ago.
Audience question: the engineer, from Adoniram to Prometheus 1:39:36 Rousseau renews this gesture. And we have completely forgotten it. There, that's where the delightfully mad Nerval, the dreamer, the wandering minstrel, takes us. There. That's to answer your question, I don't want to monopolize things because there are other questions, but they'll come around, no doubt. Yes? Romain? So the question — last year you spoke about repetition with Ulysses, and you contrasted the figure of Daedalus who frees himself, who literally flies away. You said he was a kind of engineer, a figure of the engineer freeing himself too thanks to technology.
1:40:12 And I wanted to know if that theme was present in this novella, since I have the impression you haven't spoken of it yet, but in the meantime, indeed, between the Republic and the Social Contract there was quite a... I appreciate all the more questions where you make an effort to speak. Yes. Bravo, that's nice. Very... Not only is it very interesting, Romain is an engineer. Can we say that? Yes, I take courage.
1:40:42 There you go. He's an engineer, and of course, Daedalus, Ulysses — it's the ingenious Ulysses in antiquity. Ulysses is ingenious, Daedalus is the engineer since it's he who devises the wings, the springs. You see? He's the one who frees us. It's praxis in Marxian or Clouscardian terms, isn't it? Which frees us from constraint. So, in Angélique, that doesn't seem so at first sight.
1:41:14 Because everything is wrapped up in this story of the quest for the book, the fight against censorship, and so everything is veiled because of censorship. He says everything. I'll make a small parenthesis a bit far from your question, but to come back to it. Racine is even more censored in his time, absolute monarchy, and Racine, who has nothing of a subversive about him, except that all the same, he is the poet of Eros. That's always subversive. Now, Racine says everything without saying anything.
1:41:44 That is, he uses a vocabulary that lets him make an X-rated film without showing anything. No, no, but I'm serious. How, for example, does he speak of the breasts of... what's her name? The other jealous one, Hermione. He's not going to say it outright, of course, he's not going to name things. Besides, he's a poet, and as Mallarmé said, to name an object is to remove three quarters of the pleasure it gives. So he has Hermione say — she's speaking to her suitor Orestes, who is her cousin, whom she's known since childhood, whom she watched grow up.
1:42:17 Yes, it is you whose budding love, along with my charms, first taught me the power of their weapons. Don't get it wrong. That is great art. That's how one transgresses censorship while remaining within the law. Legality is not legitimacy, as Kant taught us. On the other hand, in Aurélia, Nerval never stops — in fact in his work in general, in the poems — opposing, and you see it in his most famous poem, El Desdichado, which I partly quoted earlier at the end, 'and I, twice victorious, have crossed the Acheron' — an allusion to those fits of madness, there were two at the time, in his committals, 'modulating in turn on Orpheus' lyre' — Orpheus is the one who makes the descent into the underworld and comes back after all.
1:43:02 The sighs of the saint and the cries of the fairy. And I had told you, you see, I had used it last year to illustrate the opposition found throughout the West, between a pagan Hellenic heritage, a heritage of immanence where the divine is all around us, to the point that it's a perilous world, because one must never mix the human and the divine — that's hubris — and then tragedy strikes to purge that impurity, that transgression; as opposed to — not immanence, but the reverse, transcendence — the Jewish, Christian, Muslim religion, the religions of transcendence, of unrepresentability, forgive my barbarisms, there, and of the non-figurative — abstract painting cannot exist in a Christian civilization, and you know that in Muslim art it's always arabesque, that's where it comes from, it's abstract, but one never depicts a living being, because that would be capturing the soul, seriously.
1:44:00 So this opposition itself gives birth to a series of oppositions, fractal ones — from a fractal point of view, it's a metaphor I borrow from mathematics, of which I don't know much, but you'll quickly see the connection. For example, the Greece-Christianity opposition gives rise to the Renaissance-Middle-Ages opposition. The Renaissance rehabilitates the Greek world. We saw it in architecture earlier, but not only there. The statues, nudity, Titian's girls, Titian's women — that would have been scandalous in the Middle Ages — and then the settings, Poussin, nature, etc.; in the Middle Ages you see a golden background with God and the saints, there's no nature, it's a... pi...
1:44:41 These are the classic oppositions. Except that Nerval sides with the Renaissance. So it's subversive with regard to the Catholic world, etc., and the world of the Father, because it's the Father-God who depopulated the Pantheon. There's only one God left. All right? Now you'll say, we're still far from the engineers, no. Because that's where I answer your question, where the engineer is the hero of the work, is in the Voyage en Orient. Nerval takes a journey to the Orient.
1:45:12 It's his longest prose text at the time, and it's the text he's going to publish right after — it should be emphasized, precisely this one. Now, in the Voyage en Orient, he inserted within it, at the heart of the Voyage en Orient, a story that I recommend to you, magnificent, like a tale, inspired by the Bible and the stories of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba — it always comes back to that — called the Story of Adoniram, Prince of the Genies. The Story of Adoniram and King Solomon, prince of the genies. Excuse me, Suleiman Ben Daoud, Solomon, son of David.
1:45:46 It turns out that Solomon is, for Nerval, a way of continuing his subversion — your question is very interesting, because we're diving into Nervalian initiation. Solomon is the one who remained, for posterity, in glory, but the one who built the temple is the worker, the engineer, Adoniram. Hiram, depending a bit on the various oriental sources. Hiram, the one who comes from far off, from Lebanon, from where the cedars are, which allow for building the temple — timber passing, the beams — and who is, himself, in love with the Queen of Sheba and loved by the Queen of Sheba.
1:46:20 There's a kind of rivalry. We find the same triangle, do you remember my Rousseau triangle? I'll tell you, for those who don't know, we'll see it in this novella, in Angélique, at one point, Nerval arrives with Sylvain, his traveling companion, they come within sight of the ruins of the Abbey of Chaalis, near Ermenonville, the medieval ruins. And it was the gamekeeper's son who showed us the ruins, and he says, here is the tower of the beautiful Gabrielle, because there's a castle there where Henri IV sheltered his love affairs, forgive the tabloid-style detail, with Gabrielle d'Estrées, his favorite.
1:46:52 Here is the tower of the beautiful Gabrielle. Every evening, this is the peasant speaking, Rousseau used to come and play the guitar under her window. And the king, who was jealous, finally had him put to death. So of course, Nerval finds this amusing. In the peasant's ignorance, two centuries get mixed up, Henri IV and Rousseau. And then he puts a period, goes to a new line, and says: this legend is perhaps truer than one thinks. A rehabilitation of popular memory. Colon.
1:47:22 By refusing the hundred louis of Madame de Pompadour — Madame de Pompadour had wanted to reward Rousseau with a pension for the bling-bling success of Le Devin du village. He'd had a hit, we'd say today. All right? He could have kept going that way and made a lot of money. Like Wagner, in fact, when he wrote Rienzi, his wife told him: keep going like that! Well. And then, he refused, and afterward he had debts his whole life. So Rousseau, because Rousseau's motto was to make his life depend on the truth, and not on the money of nobles.
1:47:54 Rousseau, by refusing the hundred louis of Madame de Pompadour, ruined the edifice founded by Henri, the love of Gabrielle. Everything collapsed — this is Nerval speaking — his immortal image remains standing over the ruins. And there, the figure of Rousseau becomes almost titanic, almost phallic, above the ruins of the Ancien Régime. Everything collapsed, his immortal image remains. So you find the same triangle again, where you see that Eros itself is bound up with class struggle.
1:48:28 Very interesting, this question, all right. The engineer is the one who did the work, but whose role is afterward masked. I don't know if you remember Brecht's poem, which I like to quote, where Brecht mocks the way history is told, and says: they say the kings built seven-gated Thebes, did the kings haul the rocks? They say the pharaohs built the pyramids, did anyone see the pharaohs bending over the sand? And when the Great Wall of China was built, where did the masons go?
1:48:59 Magnificent poem. That answers your question. And there, he takes the side — and it's Adoniram, whom he identifies with — who is the subversive one. And here I'll finish the initiatory side, it's all, for him, a dotted line within the symbolic order that begins with the first one punished by the jealous god of monotheism, that is, Cain. The Cainite tradition, an underground one. When earlier I quoted that little passage, I told you, we lived in a strange age, he says, we have thrown down the torch of the underground gods — it's Cain who, according to some, still lives under the earth, as the one rejected by God, and who, among the Greeks, is Prometheus, because he is the engineer who brought light, fire, technè, not only the fire of intelligence, but also — not only — the fire that melts metals, that allows technology to be made, that allows weapons to be made by the Titans, etc., it's that one.
1:49:56 So your question is very interesting. Nerval always associates the two, and I recommend you read the Voyage en Orient, especially this inserted piece — it's long, the Voyage en Orient, the story of Solomon, Prince of the Genies, and Adoniram, and the Queen of Sheba, of course — and then also Aurélia, the account of his madness, where there's this opposition constantly, between technology... that technology is a bit like crossing a transgression. There you go. 9:01.
1:50:26 I'm sorry for going a minute over. But the questions, the questions were excellent. There you go. If there's a part to read, read up to and including letter 4. There are 12 letters. 13. There you go. Read up to and including the fourth letter. There you go. We'll fix it soon, because we always have to negotiate that with the venue each time. But it's roughly in a month, the next session.
1:50:57 The exact date will be posted. Right, I'll remind you, as Thomas said, that for those who can and wish to, and who have no obligations, we'll meet up at the restaurant Le Débonnaire. Tristan, were we able to make the reservations? Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.