Dream and Dementia

"From that moment on I devoted myself to trying to find the meaning of my dreams, and this anxiety influenced my waking thoughts. I seemed to understand that there was a bond between the external and internal worlds: that only inattention of spiritual confusion distorted the outward affinities between them, - and this explained the strangeness of certain pictures, which are like grimacing reflections of real objects on a surface of troubled water." -Nerval, from "Aurélia"

In 1854 Gérard de Nerval, the French Romantic poet most famous for walking a lobster on a leash through the streets of Paris, was ordered by his doctor to record the series of fantastic visions and hallucinations he was having during a bout of mental insanity caused by his obsession with an actress he called Aurélia.



This document of dreams, dementia, and spiritual longing, subtitled "Life and the Dream," was considered foundational by such artists and writers as the Surrealists, Marcel Proust, and Joseph Cornell, and was hailed as a masterpiece of fantastic imagery. In his critique of the fantastic as a literary genre, Tzvetan Todorov continually turns to Nerval's "Aurelia" as exemplary of both syntactic and semantic techniques for articulating the essential ambiguity (near magic) of our perceptions of reality. Throughout this mostly autobiographical story, Nerval or the narrator finds himself and other people doubled, causality is called into a synchronistic question when putting on a ring begins a mass and throwing that same ring away stops a ferocious storm, and hosts of angels and gods recreate all of reality before the narrator's eyes. In order to stress the utter subjectivity and ambiguity of these scenes, Nerval uses a literary device that anyone who writes down their dreams may be familiar with: sentences are modified by phrases like "it seemed that," "I imagined myself," "I felt," "for some reason," each time putting into question the reality of what seems to be occurring for the narrator. This ambiguity is further intensified by the narrator's use of dream sequences, which he not only claims help explain the visions he just had, but further become seemingly real experiences in their own right. In particular the narrator dreams of an angel, first sculpted out of the actress he desires, who in turn gets projected onto every other woman he meets in the story, each of whom he thinks is that now dead actress.

While these scenes and devices certainly make for a magical read, and if they were actually dreamt by Nerval then a rather fantastic experience, but I'm not quite convinced that they add up to a full narrative, or that they produce the fantastic effect of a hesitation on the reader's part as to whether the events may actually be happening. Though the narrator seems slightly unsure that what he dreamt may be true, and despite the lucidity of the narration, he is much more likely to tell the reader that he is dreaming, that he is indeed going crazy. Several times throughout "Aurélia" the narrator is locked up in mental institutions, which frames the fantastic events in such a way that we are never led to believe that they are anything but the workings of a demented (although spiritually romantic) mind. These visions may spill out into the narrator's life and interactions with other characters, but never in such a way that these other characters are also led to believe the visions are true, which would make them much more believably ambiguous. Similarly, the narrative chooses to focus so much of its attention around the bizarre content of the visions that we loose what may have been the more important story behind them. We are told briefly about the narrator's obsession with Aurélia, but the rest of the manuscript is solely dreams and madness, through which the reader might look at their watch from time to time saying "well you're dreaming and mad, so what?" What might have been more interesting, and possibly more gripping, would have been to document that decline between sanity and insanity, how these visions played off against the normal content of a man's life. This draws on another important aspect of fantastic or magical literature, which is that they have to establish a stronger reality first before stepping out of that reality. Nerval however assumes that his readers know the world he lives in and the everyday content of his thoughts.

There is however a rather touching and realistic moment at the end of the story, which more then, or almost, makes up for the dérive of the narrator's visions. While locked in a hospital the narrator befriends a man in a torpor or coma who slowly awakens seemingly because of the narrator's attention. When asked why he won't eat, the man says that he is in hell, which causes the narrator to reflect on his own thought processes and outlandish beliefs throughout the rest of the story. Though the narrator ultimately refuses to give up his own convictions, this scene raises that subtle point that each of us can contain such bizarrely subjective worlds of dream and dementia, which we must articulate in whatever manner we can.