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Aurelia is French poet and novelist Gérard de Nerval's account of his descent into madness--a condition provoked in part by his unrequited passion for an actress named Jenny Colon. One of the original self-styled "bohemians," Nerval was best known in his own day for parading a lobster on a pale blue ribbon through the gardens of the Palais-Royal, and was posthumously notorious for his suicide in 1855, hanging from an apron string he called the garter of the Queen of Sheba. This hallucinatory document of dreams, obsession and insanity has fascinated artists such as Joseph Cornell, who cited passages from it to explain his own work; Antonin Artaud, who saw his own madness mirrored by Nerval's; and André Breton, who placed Nerval in the highest echelon of Surrealist heroes. Geoffrey Wagner's translation of Aurélia was first published by Grove Press in 1959, but has remained out of print for nearly 20 years. Also included in this volume are previously untranslated stories by Marc Lowenthal, and poet Robert Duncan's version of the sonnet cycle Chimeras, making this the most complete collection of Nerval's influential oeuvre ever published in English.
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Benjamin Kuffour
reviewed Aurelia & Other Writings on May 14, 2008 Aurelia & Other Writings
Aurelia is a non-fictional account of Nerval's "descent into hell", perhaps precipitated by the death of an actress he was obsessed/in love with. During this descent he is beseiged with visions, both waking and sleeping, of universal love and unity and universal desolation. He is also beseiged by his own Catholic guilt for seriously dabbling in the occult for the purposes of figuring out these very visions. These conflicts entangled him in a significant psychic bind and landed him in an asylum, from which this document seems to've been written.
It begins with the famous dictum - "Our dreams are a second life," and continues from there to elaborate in great detail the substance of this second life, giving much greater credence to this second life than waking life. Through his trials and his meetings and "conversations" (more like direct mind-to-mind transmissions) with deceased friends and relatives and purely spiritual beings Nerval is convinced of the immortality of the soul, and this assurance of immortality is what saves him from total despairing madness. And so Aurelia ends on a positive note, though Nerval was not to survive long after the writing of it, hanging himself from a window grating in 1855. Poor Nerval, what a troubled and beautiful soul. Thank you for descending to Hell for all of us!
There are other stories, poems, and documents in this fantastic collection that I'm not reviewing, all of which are great or at least well worth reading (esp. the short sonnet sequence, The Chimeras, translated by Robert Duncan), but none have the raw immediacy (yet still classical French structure and control) of Aurelia
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