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Original article
The madness of Gerard de Nerval Allan Beveridge Correspondence to Dr Allan Beveridge, Queen Margaret Hospital, Whitefield Road, Dunfermline, Fife KY12 OSU, UK; [email protected] Accepted 5 November 2013 Published Online First 27 November 2013
ABSTRACT This paper examines the madness of Gerard de Nerval, the nineteenth-century French writer. It looks at his account of mental disturbance, how he responded to the psychiatric profession and how he reacted to being diagnosed as insane. It considers his autobiographical novella of madness, Aurelia, which he began at the suggestion of his alienist, Dr Emile Blanche, and while he was still an asylum inmate. Nerval’s story raises important questions about the nature of madness. Is it, as he contended, a mystical experience revealing truths about spiritual worlds inaccessible to the ‘sane’? Does psychiatry fail to understand it and inappropriately reduce it to the categories of scientific reason? Or are such notions of the spiritual value of madness guilty of the charge that they romanticise insanity? Do they make extravagant claims for an experience that is often disturbing and debilitating? What is the relationship between madness and recovery? Should an individual try to forget their experience of mental disturbance once they recover, or should they examine what the event reveals about themselves? Can the language of madness be decoded to unveil profound truths as Carl Jung and R.D. Laing have suggested, or is it, as the psychiatrist German Berrios maintains, merely a series of ‘empty speech acts’, signifying nothing? And finally, how does one avoid writing about madness, and instead write madness?
INTRODUCTION
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In Madness and Civilisation, Michel Foucault1 identifies Gerard de Nerval as a member of a select band of artists whose work contains the ‘incendiary’ qualities of ‘the life of unreason’. This select band of mad seers also includes Holderlin, Nietzsche and Artaud. As Ian Hacking2 has observed, Foucault, at least in earlier versions of his book, sees the mad in romantic terms. For him, Hacking writes, they have “the purity of the possessed” and “not only speak the truth in paradox, like the fools in Shakespeare”, but “are also themselves the truth”. Foucault maintained that “The language of psychiatry” was “a monologue by reason about madness”. In Madness and Civilisation, he set himself the task of writing on the subject of madness avoiding the language of reason. As the French literary critic Shoshana Felman3 has pointed out, a century before Foucault, Gerard de Nerval had attempted to do precisely this, in his novella, Aurelia, which was based on his own experience of madness. Who was Gerard de Nerval? Although not so well known in the English-speaking world, Nerval is a major figure in French literature. He was admired by Baudelaire. Proust considered him to be one of the three or four greatest French writers of the nineteenth century. Andre Breton claimed
that Nerval had anticipated Surrealism, while Artaud saw him as a visionary like Holderlin, Nietzsche and Van Gogh. Gerard de Nerval was a poet, novelist, travel writer, playwright and translator. He was also a mystic and regarded by his contemporaries as something of an eccentric: he famously took a lobster for a walk with a blue ribbon around the gardens of the Palais-Royale. He suffered recurrent bouts of madness, necessitating spells under psychiatric care, and eventually hanged himself at the age of 47. This paper will examine Gerard de Nerval’s history of mental disturbance: how he accounted for it, how he responded to the psychiatric profession and how he reacted to being diagnosed as insane. It will look at his autobiographical novella of madness, Aurelia, which he began at the suggestion of his alienist, Dr Emile Blanche, and while he was still an asylum inmate. Nerval’s story raises important questions about the nature of madness. Is it, as he contended, a mystical experience revealing truths about spiritual worlds inaccessible to the ‘sane’? Does psychiatry fail to understand it and inappropriately reduce it to the categories of scientific reason? Or are such notions of the spiritual value of madness guilty of the charge that they romanticise insanity? Do they make extravagant claims for an experience that is often disturbing and debilitating? What is the relationship between madness and recovery? Should an individual try to forget their experience of mental disturbance once they recover, or should they examine what the event reveals about themselves? Can the language of madness be decoded to unveil profound truths as Carl Jung and R.D. Laing have suggested, or is it, as the psychiatrist, German Berrios maintains, merely a series of ‘empty speech acts’, signifying nothing? And finally, how does one avoid writing about madness, and instead write madness? Does one need to develop a new language as James Joyce did when he came to write of sleep in Finnegan’s Wake? Or was Nerval, as he jested, trying to compose a book that was ‘impossible’ to write?
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY Nerval was born Gerard Labrunie in 1808 in Paris.4–6 His father was an army doctor and his mother died when he was two. His English translator, Richard Sieburth,7 has suggested that Gerard can be seen as a classic case of the Oedipal complex. He wanted to get rid of his father and invented a new one for himself, by claiming he was the bastard son of Joseph Bonaparte, who had known his mother. In later life, he adopted the nom de plume, Gerard de Nerval, taking the name from the Roman emperor Nerva. The name also
Beveridge A. Med Humanit 2014;40:38–43. doi:10.1136/medhum-2013-010445
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Original article reinforced his fantasy of reuniting with his lost mother: ‘Nerval’ echoed the name of lands owned by his mother’s relatives as well as being a near mirror image of her maiden name. His father’s doctoral thesis on the dangers of nymphomania may have contributed to his son’s lifelong aversion to sex, as it contained graphic descriptions of venereal disease. His father wanted him to be a doctor, and Gerard enrolled in college in 1822 but neglected his studies. A precocious poet in adolescence, Nerval achieved fame at the age of 19 with his translation of Goethe’s Faust. In 1841, he suffered his first mental breakdown and had recurrent bouts until his eventual suicide 14 years later. In hospital he wrote most of the series of visionary poems, known as The Chimeras. In 1851, he wrote Journey to the Orient, a semi-autobiographical account of his travels in the Middle East. In 1853, he published his masterpiece, the short story Sylvie, which Proust greatly admired. During his final years while an inpatient in Passy under Dr Emile Blanche, he began work on his autobiographical account of his experience of madness, Aurelia.
HISTORY OF THE MADNESS OF GERARD DE NERVAL In early 1841 after a series of violent episodes during mardi gras festivities in Paris, Nerval was arrested and hospitalised as insane. In exalted mood, he had walked and sang in the streets. He threw off his clothes and stood with arms outstretched, awaiting the moment when his soul should leave his body and be drawn up by magnetic attraction to a star. He was confined for 9 months, first in the care of Mme Sainte-Columbe and then under Dr Esprit Blanche in Montmartre. He was given a diagnosis of ‘acute mania’. Dr Blanche’s treatment regime comprised a kind of moral treatment in a supportive family environment, but he also made use of straitjackets and hydrotherapy. In public Nerval described Dr Blanche’s institution as “a kind of fashionable and aristocratic villa, filled with charming ladies and persons of the highest social standing” (ibid., p. xviii). While he was in care, the drama critic Jules Janin published a mock obituary of Nerval, in which he claimed that he had lost his reason as a result of his poetic imagination. Initially Nerval took this insensitive article in good part but was later upset about it. He wrote to Janin: “Excuse me for writing to you with some bitterness; but understand that it is now seven months that I have been taken for a madman, thanks to your obituary of March 1st” ( p. 327).8 After his release, Nerval9 wrote a revealing letter to Ida Ferrier on 9 November 1841. In it he gives his perspective on madness and psychiatry. He begins by denying he was ever insane and chooses to describe his experience as a ‘dream’, a metaphor he will use when he comes to write Aurelia. I met Dumas yesterday, who is writing to you today. He will tell you that I have recovered what is conventionally called one’s reason, but do not believe this for a moment. I am always and have always been the same, and I am merely surprised that people found me so changed over the course of several days last winter. Illusion, paradox, presumption are all things inimical to common sense—which I never lacked. Basically, I had a very amusing dream and I regret it. I even wonder if this dream was not more true than that which appears only explicable and natural to me today.
Nerval then complains that the authorities do not understand these experiences: But, seeing as how there are doctors and police inspectors here whose business is to keep the field of poetry from invading public thoroughfares, I was only allowed to be released and to Beveridge A. Med Humanit 2014;40:38–43. doi:10.1136/medhum-2013-010445
mingle amongst reasonable folk once I had formally admitted that I had been sick—which took quite a toll on my pride and even on my honesty. Confess! Confess! They shrieked at me, as they used to do to sorcerers and heretics, and to settle the matter, I allowed myself to be classified as afflicted with a malady defined by doctors and variously labelled Theomania or Demonomania in the medical dictionaries… science has the right to conjure away or reduce to silence all prophets and visionaries predicted by the Apocalypse, among whose company I flattered myself I belonged! But I resign myself to my fate, and if I do not fulfil my predestination, I will accuse Doctor [Esprit] Blanche of having spirited away the divine Spirit.
As his translator Richard Sieburth comments: “At stake was the perennial battle of the Imagination against all those discourses—medical, penal or theological—that sought to strip it of its rightful sovereignty” ( p. xix).10 Nerval outlines his dilemma of having to publicly renounce his belief that he was a visionary in order to be judged sane and win his freedom. The themes of this letter anticipate those that Nerval will elaborate in Aurelia. In another letter to his friend, the painter Victor Loubens, Nerval11 again offers an interpretation of his experience of ‘madness’, which opposes that of his doctors: … imagine my own surprise when I suddenly awoke from a dream of several weeks that was as bizarre as it was unexpected. I had been mad, that much is certain, that is, if one can apply the sorry term ‘madness’ to my condition, given the fact that my memory remained entirely intact and that not for a single moment did I lose my reasoning powers. … for me it was merely a kind of transfiguration of my habitual thoughts, a waking dream, a series of grotesque or sublime illusions which held so many charms… no one will be able to convince me that what happened to me was not an inspiration or an omen… what took place in my head was rather a carnival of all philosophies and all gods… I thought myself was god…
Nerval goes on to argue for the superior status of the mad: the thing that was the most astonishing and that sustained my illusions to such an extent was that the other lunatics seemed so perfectly rational to me, and that we were perfectly able to explain our actions to each other; whereas the doctors and our friends seemed to us utterly blind and unreasonable… If the mind has to become completely unhinged in order to place us in communication with another world, it is clear that the mad will never be able to prove to the sane how blind they are… when I regained my health, I was deprived of this temporary illumination which allowed me to understand my companions in misfortune…
After the first bout of madness, Nerval took a year-long tour abroad to the Orient. In April 1849, he had another mild attack and was under the care of Dr Ley and Dr Aussandon. This was followed by another brief attack in June 1850, when he was once again under the care of Dr Aussandon. Between February and March 1853, he developed ‘fevers’ and was in Maison Dubois, a general hospital. Later that year Nerval had his second and final mental breakdown. On 24 August 1853, while sitting in a café in Paris, he suddenly began to throw his money in the air, strode off to a market and struck a stranger in the face. He imagined he was surrounded by ghostly armies and violently attacked a porter. When it started raining heavily, he believed that it was a second universal deluge. He was initially admitted to the Charité Hospital. He thought he was imbued with god-like power and walked around the wards placing his hands upon the sick and 39
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Original article inveighing against the ignorance of the doctors who believed they could cure by science alone.5 Nerval was then transferred to the Passy Clinic under the care of Emile Blanche, the son of his previous alienist. Dr Blanche took a particular interest in artists and writers. Nerval was deferential to Blanche, who was 12 years his junior, but he disliked being imprisoned and disagreed with the label ‘madness’, preferring the terms ‘nervous exaltation’ or ‘agitation’. On 21st October he wrote to his father. He complained about being in the company of other patients and added: “I am like a child, I sing and laugh incessantly, which tends to astonish those who are unaware that it has always been my habit to do so.”12 He concluded: “Let’s hope that Asclepius will save us from Hippocrates.” Here Nerval is pitting the Greek god of healing, who cured the sick by appearing in their visions or dreams, against the founder of modern medicine. As Sieburth observes, Nerval was participating in “the great battle between Reason and Imagination, Poetry and Science” ( p. xxviii).7 On 3rd December, he wrote to Dr Blanche: “your establishment… is allowing me to rid my head of all those visions that had so long inhabited it. These sickly phantasmagorias will be succeeded by healthier notions, and I shall be able to make my reappearance in the world as living proof of your medical care and talents.”13 In May 1854, Nerval was released and allowed to travel to Germany but suffered alternating moods of manic elation and profound dejection. In August he was back in the Passy Clinic. However, Nerval asked fellow writers to petition for his release, and Dr Blanche was compelled to discharge him in September of that year. On 24th October, Nerval14 wrote to the poet and fellow sufferer, Antony Deschamps: “…I officially admit that I was sick. I cannot admit that I was mad or even hallucinated. If I am hereby insulting medicine, I will throw myself at its knees when it takes on the features of a goddess, otherwise I invoke Moliere and Rousseau…” Both Moliere and Rousseau had satirised modern medicine. Nerval spent his last months wandering around the streets of Paris. On 26 January 1855, he was found hanged in the Rue de la Vielle-Lanterne, reputedly with the manuscript of Aurelia in his pocket. His last note was to his aunt Jeanne Labrunie and read: “…Don’t wait up for me tonight, for the night will be black and white.”15
Aurelia Nerval began writing Aurelia when he was in the Passy Clinic. The project seems to have originated as a kind of therapeutic experiment in which Dr Blanche asked him to transcribe his dreams and to narrate the course of his illness. Nerval, like many asylum inmates, wanted to prove that he had recovered his reason and deserved to be released. On 2 December 1853, he wrote to his father: “I am engaged in writing down and recording all the impressions left by my illness. This will be a study not without utility for science and first-hand observation.”16 However, the original project was abandoned, perhaps because both Nerval and his doctor felt that concentrating on his illness was unhealthy. Nerval was to go on to write a more poetic and ambitious account of his breakdown. Aurelia unites two dominant themes of Nerval’s work: the Orphic descent and the pursuit of the Eternal Feminine, the latter of which he created from a composite of three dead women: his mother, Baroness Sophie Dawes and the actress, Jenny Colon. Nerval’s depiction of his madness can be seen as an attempt to transcend his temporal identity in order to join 40
the spirits of the beloved dead.17 At the start of the novella, Nerval specifically refers to three works that inform his own book: Swedenborg’s Memorabilia, Apulieus’ Golden Ass and Dante’s Divine Comedy. He describes two phases to his journey, which are based on his two major breakdowns, in 1841 and at the end of his life. Throughout the novella, Nerval remains evasive about his madness. At the start of Aurelia, he writes: “I shall attempt to transcribe the impressions of a lengthy illness that took place entirely within the mysteries of my own mind” (p. 265).18 This is immediately followed by a refutation: “I do not know why I use the term illness here, for, so far as I am concerned, I never felt more fit.” This double-bind runs through Aurelia. Nerval has to hold two mutually contradictory positions. He has to admit he has been insane and that his experiences were nothing more than delusions if he is to convince his doctor that he is now better and fit to be released. However, he still wishes to retain his deeply held view that he has been on a spiritual journey. Several critics have commented on Nerval’s employment of the double-narrator. For example, Sieburg observes: Nerval’s solution… is to devise a duplicitous narrative scheme… He will tacitly bow to the doctor’s medical discourse, but will subvert it from within, surreptitiously displacing its clinical vocabulary of ‘madness’ into the more poetic and esoteric language of ‘dream’, while at the same time translating the diagnosis of his malady into an initiatory quest romance whose archetypal plot, derived from Virgil, Apuleius and Dante, will discredit the truth claims of positivist science by appealing to the eternal verities of the world’s great religions ( p. 263–4).19
Felman3 considers there are two voices in Aurelia: the hero and the narrator. The hero is a madman, while the narrator is a man who has recovered his reason. She feels there is an unresolvable tension between these two discourses. Warren17 writes: “the narrator observes his own visionary labour as it proceeds through memories, dreams, and hallucinations. So Nerval appears as a ‘doubled’ figure in the very structure of his work.” When Nerval does begin to discuss his unusual experiences, he explicitly describes his double narration and use the metaphor of the ‘dream’ to account for what others might ascribe to madness: Here began for me what I shall call the overflow of dream into real life. From this point on, everything at times took on a double aspect—without, however, my reasoning powers thereby ever lacking in logic and without my memory losing the least detail of what was happening to me. It was simply that my actions, to all appearances insane, were subject to what human reason chooses to deem illusion… ( p. 269)18
In a passage that clearly draws on his first breakdown at the mardi gras festival, he describes following a star and chanting chants hymn. He continues: “I proceeded to shed my earthly garments and scatter them about” (ibid., p. 269). With his hands outstretched, he experiences his soul separating from his body and merging into the ray of the star. He is then surrounded by a night patrol, but is under the impression he is quite tall and flooded with electrical forces. He sees visions of his soul dividing into two and remembers the German folk belief that the double or doppelganger means one is near to death. He is taken to a psychiatric clinic. He continues to have visions. He is carried off to the banks of the Rhine and he sees his dead uncle, a Flemish painter. He converses with a talking bird and deducts that the soul of his ancestor is in this bird. Further, he asserts that our ancestors visit us on earth in the shape of animals. After describing his Beveridge A. Med Humanit 2014;40:38–43. doi:10.1136/medhum-2013-010445
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Original article experience of the ‘mystical homeland’ he had glimpsed, he remarks: Such was the vision… the cataleptic state into which I had lapsed for several days was explained to me scientifically and the accounts of those who had seen me in this condition caused me a certain irritation, when I realized that it was to mental aberration that they ascribed certain words and actions of mine which had coincided with the various phases of what were to me a series of logical events. (ibid., p. 227)
So Nerval identifies the conflict between his mystical explanation of his experience with that of science. He considers that his experience proves the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, whereas doctors think he is insane. But he does admit he remains rather confused about what has happened to him: I don’t quite know how to explain the fact that in my mind terrestrial events were liable to coincide with events in the supernatural world… But who exactly was the spirit who was myself and yet outside myself? Was he the double of legend or the mystical brother whom the Orientals call ferouer?... I believe that the human imagination has never invented anything that is not true, whether in this world or in other worlds… (ibid., p. 285)
He tries to reach a conclusion: “to my mind terrestrial events were bound up with those of the invisible world… I had disturbed the harmony of that magical universe from which my soul drew the certainty of immortal life” (ibid., p. 289). As a result of his transgression, he will be accursed. In the subsequent part of Aurelia, Nerval describes his second breakdown. Again he frames the narrative as a spiritual and mystical journey. At the outset, he describes his quest for the magic alphabet: The magic alphabet, the mysterious hieroglyphs have come down to us in garbled form, distorted either by time or by those who have something to gain by keeping us in the dark; let us recover the lost letter or the effaced sign, let us recompose the dissonant scale, and we shall acquire power in the spirit world. (ibid., p. 291)
Nerval describes his descent into madness: … I began suffering from persistent insomnia. I would spend the entire night wandering around Montmartre…One night I dropped in for a bite at a boulevard café and, just for the fun of it, started tossing around gold and silver coins. Then I went to the market and found myself in an argument with a complete stranger, whom I proceeded to slap in the face… my thoughts turned to the battles between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs, and I thought I saw the ghosts of these ancient warriors rising up around me. I picked a quarrel with a market auctioneer who was wearing a silver plaque on his chest and accused him of being Duke John of Burgundy. I tried to prevent him from entering a tavern. (ibid., p. 302)
Later he interprets the rain as the beginning of the Flood and thinks he has special powers to stop it. He has a vision in his sleep of a goddess who tells him, “I am none other than Mary, none other than your mother” (ibid., p. 303). He thinks he has the soul of Napoleon inside him, commanding him to do great things. Concerned about his worsening mental condition, Nerval’s friends take him to the Hospice de la Charité. Nerval relates: In the course of the night the delirium got worse, especially in the early hours when I realized I had been bound and tied. I managed to free myself from the straitjacket and wandered through the wards as dawn approached. Convinced I had become Beveridge A. Med Humanit 2014;40:38–43. doi:10.1136/medhum-2013-010445
like a god and possessed healing powers, I laid hands on several invalids… I strode around ranting about the ignorance of those who believed they could cure by science alone… (ibid., p. 304)
He is transferred to a clinic on the outskirts of Paris and briefly wonders if he has been mistaken in his thinking: “When I saw I was among the mad, I understood that everything up to this point had been mere illusion” (ibid., p. 305). However, he continues to see connections everywhere and thinks his fellow patients exercise some influence over the stars. He writes: “My role, it seemed to me, was to re-establish universal harmony by cabbalistic arts and to discover a solution by summoning up the occult powers of the various religions” (ibid., p. 305). His reverie continues: From the moment I became persuaded of the fact that I was undergoing the ordeals of a sacred initiation, a sense of invincibility took hold of my mind. I saw myself as a hero living under the gaze of gods; secret voices called out to me in warning and encouragement from plants, trees, animals and the tiniest insects. (ibid., p. 306)
Nerval gradually recovers and attributes this to the “kindly, compassionate face of my excellent doctor” who “brought me back to the world of the living” (ibid., p. 310). The doctor asks him to observe a fellow patient, a young man, who had been a soldier in Africa. He had been refusing to eat for 6 weeks. Nerval is moved by his plight and spends time with him. As a result the young man opens his eyes and Nerval fetches him a drink of water. He refuses to drink, giving his reason: “Because I’m dead… I’m in purgatory, doing atonement” (ibid., p. 316). The book ends with Nerval’s recovery and he muses: “All the same, I am happy with the convictions I have acquired, and I compare this series of ordeals I have undergone to what, in the eyes of the ancients, was represented by the idea of a descent into Hell” (ibid., p. 316). Nerval feels he has learnt from his experiences and that he has been granted insights into unseen worlds. He remains convinced that what he underwent was essentially spiritual in nature. Felman3 argues that Nerval’s quest for the magic language leads ultimately to his abandonment of human language. In order to communicate with the spirits, Nerval renounces the world of human beings. She writes: “Nerval’s tragedy is precisely this loss of the other: the vicious circle of the imaginary—a narcissistic entrapment—is what constitutes the core of his madness” ( p. 73). When Nerval meets the young patient, he is confronted with his double, who reveals to him his own impoverishment and estrangement from human society.
CONCLUSION Gerard de Nerval’s story raises questions about madness and psychiatry. Is madness, as he contended, a mystical experience revealing truths about spiritual worlds inaccessible to the ‘sane’? Nerval certainly thought so and he can be seen as part of a Romantic tradition that exalts insanity as a visionary state. In Symbols of Transformation, Jung20 drew a parallel between a psychotic episode and a mythological journey or a transformation of the soul. Jung called this experience ‘metanoia’. In Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, R.D. Laing21 also portrayed psychosis as a potentially enlightening process. However, it could be argued that the Romantic view of madness trivialise an experience that is often distressing and disorientating. As we have seen, Nerval was violent to others and he eventually killed himself. Rosanna Warren feels that the romanticising of Nerval’s plight has led to an undervaluing of his work. Interestingly, Foucault, in subsequent editions of 41
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Original article Madness and Civilisation, drew back from his initial romantic view of the mad. But, does psychiatry offer a more convincing picture of madness? Scientific psychiatry is criticised for ignoring the patient as a person. Its biological, reductionist perspective cannot account for such aspects as meaning, value or the human spirit. Nerval himself seems to have been ambivalent about the role of psychiatry. He praised his doctor and for the most part accepted treatment, but he also railed against medical science. What is the relationship between madness and recovery? Nerval drew on his experiences of madness to write Aurelia. At the end of the novel, he concluded that he valued his ordeal as it gave him insights into the mysteries of the world. Narrative psychiatry emphasises the importance of the patient’s individual take on their predicament. The patient needs to construct a satisfying narrative of their suffering. Nerval undoubtedly created a coherent and personally meaningful account of his encounter with insanity, and, at the same time, he produced an acclaimed work of literature. However, he did go on to kill himself shortly after writing Aurelia. Did the act of writing his own narrative have no lasting, therapeutic benefit for Nerval? Was the designation of insanity too much to bear? Did he come to the conclusion that he was, in fact, mad? Did he take his discharge from Dr Blanche’s clinic before he was fully recovered? We will never know the answers to these questions. We have no access to Nerval’s thoughts in his last hours, and we are left only with his brief and enigmatic note to his aunt, which was found on his body after death. Can the language of madness be decoded? In The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, Jung22 tried to make sense of psychosis using Freudian theory and word association tests. Likewise, R. D. Laing23 argued that madness was more comprehensible than many thought, and in The Divided Self he attempted to ‘make madness and the process of going mad’ understandable by drawing on existential philosophy. In the view of Berrios,24 such endeavours are misguided: an attempt to find meaning where none exists. Delusions are nothing but ‘empty speech acts’. But to dismiss the often rich and fantastical content of delusions as essentially meaningless seems unnecessarily parsimonious. Do the beliefs of the mad reveal nothing about themselves or their predicament? How does one avoid writing about madness, and instead write madness? Does one need to create a new language? Nerval did not attempt to do this. His writing does not break with convention and is readily understood. He does not use neologisms or disrupt the syntax of his prose. Others have attempted to use fractured and disintegrating texts to mirror the disturbed world of psychosis as Louis Sass25 has described in his Madness and Modernism. James Joyce developed a dream language to depict the unconscious in Finnegan’s Wake. Such attempts at creating new languages run the risk of not only being artificial constructs but also being incomprehensible. After all, how many people have actually read Finnegan’s Wake? This illustrates the core dilemma. How does one describe the indescribable? How does one convey to sane bystanders one’s voyage to the world of insanity? As Felman asks: “How can madness, in itself, survive the translation into language?” ( p. 66)3 Was Nerval, as he asked himself, trying to write an ‘impossible’ book? As we have seen, Nerval’s solution was not to invent a new language, but to employ the device of the double-narrator to enable him to cross back and forth between the lands of reason and unreason. The double narrative strategy allows two versions of events to be presented to the reader. Neither narrative is necessarily 42
privileged, and it is left to the reader to decide what weight to give to each of the competing accounts. A classic early example of this technique is James Hogg’s 1824 novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, in which the central character, Robert Wringhim, relates his story of being possessed by Devil, while in a separate narrative, the ‘Editor’, who apparently represents the voice of scientific reason, maintains that Wringhim is insane. Hogg, like Nerval, does not resolve the tension between the opposing narratives and refuses to identify which version is the ‘true’ one. This phenomenon of the double perspective has resonances in psychiatry. The philosopher-psychiatrist Karl Jaspers was acutely aware that there are two major ways of approaching mental illness. First, there is the approach of the natural sciences that emphasises ‘explanation’ and studies brain malfunction. Second, there is that of the human sciences that is concerned with ‘understanding’ and focuses on the subjective meanings that individual people give to their experiences. Instead of arguing for the superiority of either approach, Jaspers saw it as the task of psychiatry to reconcile the two. Gerard de Nerval has left a vivid record of his experiences that brings in the poetic and the mystical as well as the psychiatric theory of his day. It is left to the reader as how to interpret and even reconcile his many-stranded story. Competing interests None. Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
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Foucault M. Madness and civilisation. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (trans. by Howard R). London: Tavistock, 1965 (originally published in French in 1961). Hacking I. Foreword. In: History of Madness Foucault M (trans. by Murphy J, Khalfa J). London: Routledge, 2006:ix–xii. Felman S. Writing and madness. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 2003. Rinsler N. Gerard de Nerval. London: Athlone Press, 1973. Sowerby B. The disinherited. The Life of Gerard de Nerval. London: Peter Owen, 1973. Pichois C, Brix M. Gerard de Nerval. Paris: Fayard, 1995. Sieburth R. Introduction. In: Gerard de Nerval. Selected Writings. (Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Sieburth) London: Penguin, 1999: vii–xxxi. Nerval GD. Letter to Jules Janin, August 24, 1841. In: Gerard De Nerval. Selected Writings. (Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Sieburth) London: Penguin, 1999:327. Nerval GD. Letter to Ida Ferrier November 9, 1841. In: Gerard de Nerval. Selected Writings. (Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Sieburth) London: Penguin, 1999:330–1. Sieburth R. Introduction. In: Gerard de Nerval. Selected Writings. (Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Sieburth). London: Penguin, 1999: vii–xxxi. Nerval GD. Letter to Victor Loubens, late1841. In: Gerard de Nerval. Selected Writings. (Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Sieburth). London: Penguin, 1999:331–5. Nerval GD. Letter to his father, October 21, 1853. In: Gerard de Nerval. Selected Writings. (Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Sieburth) London: Penguin, 1999:335–6. Nerval GD. Letter to Dr Blanche December 3, 1853. In: Gerard de Nerval. Selected Writings. (Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Sieburth). London: Penguin, 1999:389–9. Nerval GD. Letter to Antony Deschamps October 24, 1854. In: Gerard de Nerval. Selected Writings. (Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Sieburth). London: Penguin, 1999:342–3. Nerval GD. Note to his aunt Jeanne Labrunie. In: Gerard de Nerval. Selected Writings. (Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Sieburth). London: Penguin, 1999:343. Nerval GD. Letter to his father December 2, 1853. In: Gerard de Nerval. Selected Writings. (Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Sieburth). London: Penguin, 1999:337–8. Warren R. The ‘Last Madness’ of Gerard de Nerval. Georgia Rev 1983;37:131–47.
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Nerval GD. Aurelia. In: Gerard de Nerval. Selected Writings. (Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Sieburth). London: Penguin, 1999:265–316. Sieburth R. Introductory note. In: Gerard de Nerval. Selected Writings. (Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Sieburth). London: Penguin, 1999:257–64. Jung CG. Symbols of transformation. An Analysis of a Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1956. Laing RD. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
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Jung CG. The Psychology of Dementia Praecox (trans. by Brill AA, 1936). USA: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company, 1906. Laing RD. The divided self. A Study of Sanity and Madness. London: Tavistock Publications, 1960. Berrios GE. Delusions as ‘wrong beliefs’. A conceptual history. Br J Psychiatry 1991;159:6–13. Sass LA. Madness and modernism. Insanity in the light of modern art, literature and thought. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
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The madness of Gerard de Nerval Allan Beveridge Med Humanities 2014 40: 38-43 originally published online November 27, 2013
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Original article
The madness of Gerard de Nerval Allan Beveridge Correspondence to Dr Allan Beveridge, Queen Margaret Hospital, Whitefield Road, Dunfermline, Fife KY12 OSU, UK; [email protected] Accepted 5 November 2013 Published Online First 27 November 2013
ABSTRACT This paper examines the madness of Gerard de Nerval, the nineteenth-century French writer. It looks at his account of mental disturbance, how he responded to the psychiatric profession and how he reacted to being diagnosed as insane. It considers his autobiographical novella of madness, Aurelia, which he began at the suggestion of his alienist, Dr Emile Blanche, and while he was still an asylum inmate. Nerval’s story raises important questions about the nature of madness. Is it, as he contended, a mystical experience revealing truths about spiritual worlds inaccessible to the ‘sane’? Does psychiatry fail to understand it and inappropriately reduce it to the categories of scientific reason? Or are such notions of the spiritual value of madness guilty of the charge that they romanticise insanity? Do they make extravagant claims for an experience that is often disturbing and debilitating? What is the relationship between madness and recovery? Should an individual try to forget their experience of mental disturbance once they recover, or should they examine what the event reveals about themselves? Can the language of madness be decoded to unveil profound truths as Carl Jung and R.D. Laing have suggested, or is it, as the psychiatrist German Berrios maintains, merely a series of ‘empty speech acts’, signifying nothing? And finally, how does one avoid writing about madness, and instead write madness?
INTRODUCTION
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In Madness and Civilisation, Michel Foucault1 identifies Gerard de Nerval as a member of a select band of artists whose work contains the ‘incendiary’ qualities of ‘the life of unreason’. This select band of mad seers also includes Holderlin, Nietzsche and Artaud. As Ian Hacking2 has observed, Foucault, at least in earlier versions of his book, sees the mad in romantic terms. For him, Hacking writes, they have “the purity of the possessed” and “not only speak the truth in paradox, like the fools in Shakespeare”, but “are also themselves the truth”. Foucault maintained that “The language of psychiatry” was “a monologue by reason about madness”. In Madness and Civilisation, he set himself the task of writing on the subject of madness avoiding the language of reason. As the French literary critic Shoshana Felman3 has pointed out, a century before Foucault, Gerard de Nerval had attempted to do precisely this, in his novella, Aurelia, which was based on his own experience of madness. Who was Gerard de Nerval? Although not so well known in the English-speaking world, Nerval is a major figure in French literature. He was admired by Baudelaire. Proust considered him to be one of the three or four greatest French writers of the nineteenth century. Andre Breton claimed
that Nerval had anticipated Surrealism, while Artaud saw him as a visionary like Holderlin, Nietzsche and Van Gogh. Gerard de Nerval was a poet, novelist, travel writer, playwright and translator. He was also a mystic and regarded by his contemporaries as something of an eccentric: he famously took a lobster for a walk with a blue ribbon around the gardens of the Palais-Royale. He suffered recurrent bouts of madness, necessitating spells under psychiatric care, and eventually hanged himself at the age of 47. This paper will examine Gerard de Nerval’s history of mental disturbance: how he accounted for it, how he responded to the psychiatric profession and how he reacted to being diagnosed as insane. It will look at his autobiographical novella of madness, Aurelia, which he began at the suggestion of his alienist, Dr Emile Blanche, and while he was still an asylum inmate. Nerval’s story raises important questions about the nature of madness. Is it, as he contended, a mystical experience revealing truths about spiritual worlds inaccessible to the ‘sane’? Does psychiatry fail to understand it and inappropriately reduce it to the categories of scientific reason? Or are such notions of the spiritual value of madness guilty of the charge that they romanticise insanity? Do they make extravagant claims for an experience that is often disturbing and debilitating? What is the relationship between madness and recovery? Should an individual try to forget their experience of mental disturbance once they recover, or should they examine what the event reveals about themselves? Can the language of madness be decoded to unveil profound truths as Carl Jung and R.D. Laing have suggested, or is it, as the psychiatrist, German Berrios maintains, merely a series of ‘empty speech acts’, signifying nothing? And finally, how does one avoid writing about madness, and instead write madness? Does one need to develop a new language as James Joyce did when he came to write of sleep in Finnegan’s Wake? Or was Nerval, as he jested, trying to compose a book that was ‘impossible’ to write?
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY Nerval was born Gerard Labrunie in 1808 in Paris.4–6 His father was an army doctor and his mother died when he was two. His English translator, Richard Sieburth,7 has suggested that Gerard can be seen as a classic case of the Oedipal complex. He wanted to get rid of his father and invented a new one for himself, by claiming he was the bastard son of Joseph Bonaparte, who had known his mother. In later life, he adopted the nom de plume, Gerard de Nerval, taking the name from the Roman emperor Nerva. The name also
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Original article reinforced his fantasy of reuniting with his lost mother: ‘Nerval’ echoed the name of lands owned by his mother’s relatives as well as being a near mirror image of her maiden name. His father’s doctoral thesis on the dangers of nymphomania may have contributed to his son’s lifelong aversion to sex, as it contained graphic descriptions of venereal disease. His father wanted him to be a doctor, and Gerard enrolled in college in 1822 but neglected his studies. A precocious poet in adolescence, Nerval achieved fame at the age of 19 with his translation of Goethe’s Faust. In 1841, he suffered his first mental breakdown and had recurrent bouts until his eventual suicide 14 years later. In hospital he wrote most of the series of visionary poems, known as The Chimeras. In 1851, he wrote Journey to the Orient, a semi-autobiographical account of his travels in the Middle East. In 1853, he published his masterpiece, the short story Sylvie, which Proust greatly admired. During his final years while an inpatient in Passy under Dr Emile Blanche, he began work on his autobiographical account of his experience of madness, Aurelia.
HISTORY OF THE MADNESS OF GERARD DE NERVAL In early 1841 after a series of violent episodes during mardi gras festivities in Paris, Nerval was arrested and hospitalised as insane. In exalted mood, he had walked and sang in the streets. He threw off his clothes and stood with arms outstretched, awaiting the moment when his soul should leave his body and be drawn up by magnetic attraction to a star. He was confined for 9 months, first in the care of Mme Sainte-Columbe and then under Dr Esprit Blanche in Montmartre. He was given a diagnosis of ‘acute mania’. Dr Blanche’s treatment regime comprised a kind of moral treatment in a supportive family environment, but he also made use of straitjackets and hydrotherapy. In public Nerval described Dr Blanche’s institution as “a kind of fashionable and aristocratic villa, filled with charming ladies and persons of the highest social standing” (ibid., p. xviii). While he was in care, the drama critic Jules Janin published a mock obituary of Nerval, in which he claimed that he had lost his reason as a result of his poetic imagination. Initially Nerval took this insensitive article in good part but was later upset about it. He wrote to Janin: “Excuse me for writing to you with some bitterness; but understand that it is now seven months that I have been taken for a madman, thanks to your obituary of March 1st” ( p. 327).8 After his release, Nerval9 wrote a revealing letter to Ida Ferrier on 9 November 1841. In it he gives his perspective on madness and psychiatry. He begins by denying he was ever insane and chooses to describe his experience as a ‘dream’, a metaphor he will use when he comes to write Aurelia. I met Dumas yesterday, who is writing to you today. He will tell you that I have recovered what is conventionally called one’s reason, but do not believe this for a moment. I am always and have always been the same, and I am merely surprised that people found me so changed over the course of several days last winter. Illusion, paradox, presumption are all things inimical to common sense—which I never lacked. Basically, I had a very amusing dream and I regret it. I even wonder if this dream was not more true than that which appears only explicable and natural to me today.
Nerval then complains that the authorities do not understand these experiences: But, seeing as how there are doctors and police inspectors here whose business is to keep the field of poetry from invading public thoroughfares, I was only allowed to be released and to Beveridge A. Med Humanit 2014;40:38–43. doi:10.1136/medhum-2013-010445
mingle amongst reasonable folk once I had formally admitted that I had been sick—which took quite a toll on my pride and even on my honesty. Confess! Confess! They shrieked at me, as they used to do to sorcerers and heretics, and to settle the matter, I allowed myself to be classified as afflicted with a malady defined by doctors and variously labelled Theomania or Demonomania in the medical dictionaries… science has the right to conjure away or reduce to silence all prophets and visionaries predicted by the Apocalypse, among whose company I flattered myself I belonged! But I resign myself to my fate, and if I do not fulfil my predestination, I will accuse Doctor [Esprit] Blanche of having spirited away the divine Spirit.
As his translator Richard Sieburth comments: “At stake was the perennial battle of the Imagination against all those discourses—medical, penal or theological—that sought to strip it of its rightful sovereignty” ( p. xix).10 Nerval outlines his dilemma of having to publicly renounce his belief that he was a visionary in order to be judged sane and win his freedom. The themes of this letter anticipate those that Nerval will elaborate in Aurelia. In another letter to his friend, the painter Victor Loubens, Nerval11 again offers an interpretation of his experience of ‘madness’, which opposes that of his doctors: … imagine my own surprise when I suddenly awoke from a dream of several weeks that was as bizarre as it was unexpected. I had been mad, that much is certain, that is, if one can apply the sorry term ‘madness’ to my condition, given the fact that my memory remained entirely intact and that not for a single moment did I lose my reasoning powers. … for me it was merely a kind of transfiguration of my habitual thoughts, a waking dream, a series of grotesque or sublime illusions which held so many charms… no one will be able to convince me that what happened to me was not an inspiration or an omen… what took place in my head was rather a carnival of all philosophies and all gods… I thought myself was god…
Nerval goes on to argue for the superior status of the mad: the thing that was the most astonishing and that sustained my illusions to such an extent was that the other lunatics seemed so perfectly rational to me, and that we were perfectly able to explain our actions to each other; whereas the doctors and our friends seemed to us utterly blind and unreasonable… If the mind has to become completely unhinged in order to place us in communication with another world, it is clear that the mad will never be able to prove to the sane how blind they are… when I regained my health, I was deprived of this temporary illumination which allowed me to understand my companions in misfortune…
After the first bout of madness, Nerval took a year-long tour abroad to the Orient. In April 1849, he had another mild attack and was under the care of Dr Ley and Dr Aussandon. This was followed by another brief attack in June 1850, when he was once again under the care of Dr Aussandon. Between February and March 1853, he developed ‘fevers’ and was in Maison Dubois, a general hospital. Later that year Nerval had his second and final mental breakdown. On 24 August 1853, while sitting in a café in Paris, he suddenly began to throw his money in the air, strode off to a market and struck a stranger in the face. He imagined he was surrounded by ghostly armies and violently attacked a porter. When it started raining heavily, he believed that it was a second universal deluge. He was initially admitted to the Charité Hospital. He thought he was imbued with god-like power and walked around the wards placing his hands upon the sick and 39
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Original article inveighing against the ignorance of the doctors who believed they could cure by science alone.5 Nerval was then transferred to the Passy Clinic under the care of Emile Blanche, the son of his previous alienist. Dr Blanche took a particular interest in artists and writers. Nerval was deferential to Blanche, who was 12 years his junior, but he disliked being imprisoned and disagreed with the label ‘madness’, preferring the terms ‘nervous exaltation’ or ‘agitation’. On 21st October he wrote to his father. He complained about being in the company of other patients and added: “I am like a child, I sing and laugh incessantly, which tends to astonish those who are unaware that it has always been my habit to do so.”12 He concluded: “Let’s hope that Asclepius will save us from Hippocrates.” Here Nerval is pitting the Greek god of healing, who cured the sick by appearing in their visions or dreams, against the founder of modern medicine. As Sieburth observes, Nerval was participating in “the great battle between Reason and Imagination, Poetry and Science” ( p. xxviii).7 On 3rd December, he wrote to Dr Blanche: “your establishment… is allowing me to rid my head of all those visions that had so long inhabited it. These sickly phantasmagorias will be succeeded by healthier notions, and I shall be able to make my reappearance in the world as living proof of your medical care and talents.”13 In May 1854, Nerval was released and allowed to travel to Germany but suffered alternating moods of manic elation and profound dejection. In August he was back in the Passy Clinic. However, Nerval asked fellow writers to petition for his release, and Dr Blanche was compelled to discharge him in September of that year. On 24th October, Nerval14 wrote to the poet and fellow sufferer, Antony Deschamps: “…I officially admit that I was sick. I cannot admit that I was mad or even hallucinated. If I am hereby insulting medicine, I will throw myself at its knees when it takes on the features of a goddess, otherwise I invoke Moliere and Rousseau…” Both Moliere and Rousseau had satirised modern medicine. Nerval spent his last months wandering around the streets of Paris. On 26 January 1855, he was found hanged in the Rue de la Vielle-Lanterne, reputedly with the manuscript of Aurelia in his pocket. His last note was to his aunt Jeanne Labrunie and read: “…Don’t wait up for me tonight, for the night will be black and white.”15
Aurelia Nerval began writing Aurelia when he was in the Passy Clinic. The project seems to have originated as a kind of therapeutic experiment in which Dr Blanche asked him to transcribe his dreams and to narrate the course of his illness. Nerval, like many asylum inmates, wanted to prove that he had recovered his reason and deserved to be released. On 2 December 1853, he wrote to his father: “I am engaged in writing down and recording all the impressions left by my illness. This will be a study not without utility for science and first-hand observation.”16 However, the original project was abandoned, perhaps because both Nerval and his doctor felt that concentrating on his illness was unhealthy. Nerval was to go on to write a more poetic and ambitious account of his breakdown. Aurelia unites two dominant themes of Nerval’s work: the Orphic descent and the pursuit of the Eternal Feminine, the latter of which he created from a composite of three dead women: his mother, Baroness Sophie Dawes and the actress, Jenny Colon. Nerval’s depiction of his madness can be seen as an attempt to transcend his temporal identity in order to join 40
the spirits of the beloved dead.17 At the start of the novella, Nerval specifically refers to three works that inform his own book: Swedenborg’s Memorabilia, Apulieus’ Golden Ass and Dante’s Divine Comedy. He describes two phases to his journey, which are based on his two major breakdowns, in 1841 and at the end of his life. Throughout the novella, Nerval remains evasive about his madness. At the start of Aurelia, he writes: “I shall attempt to transcribe the impressions of a lengthy illness that took place entirely within the mysteries of my own mind” (p. 265).18 This is immediately followed by a refutation: “I do not know why I use the term illness here, for, so far as I am concerned, I never felt more fit.” This double-bind runs through Aurelia. Nerval has to hold two mutually contradictory positions. He has to admit he has been insane and that his experiences were nothing more than delusions if he is to convince his doctor that he is now better and fit to be released. However, he still wishes to retain his deeply held view that he has been on a spiritual journey. Several critics have commented on Nerval’s employment of the double-narrator. For example, Sieburg observes: Nerval’s solution… is to devise a duplicitous narrative scheme… He will tacitly bow to the doctor’s medical discourse, but will subvert it from within, surreptitiously displacing its clinical vocabulary of ‘madness’ into the more poetic and esoteric language of ‘dream’, while at the same time translating the diagnosis of his malady into an initiatory quest romance whose archetypal plot, derived from Virgil, Apuleius and Dante, will discredit the truth claims of positivist science by appealing to the eternal verities of the world’s great religions ( p. 263–4).19
Felman3 considers there are two voices in Aurelia: the hero and the narrator. The hero is a madman, while the narrator is a man who has recovered his reason. She feels there is an unresolvable tension between these two discourses. Warren17 writes: “the narrator observes his own visionary labour as it proceeds through memories, dreams, and hallucinations. So Nerval appears as a ‘doubled’ figure in the very structure of his work.” When Nerval does begin to discuss his unusual experiences, he explicitly describes his double narration and use the metaphor of the ‘dream’ to account for what others might ascribe to madness: Here began for me what I shall call the overflow of dream into real life. From this point on, everything at times took on a double aspect—without, however, my reasoning powers thereby ever lacking in logic and without my memory losing the least detail of what was happening to me. It was simply that my actions, to all appearances insane, were subject to what human reason chooses to deem illusion… ( p. 269)18
In a passage that clearly draws on his first breakdown at the mardi gras festival, he describes following a star and chanting chants hymn. He continues: “I proceeded to shed my earthly garments and scatter them about” (ibid., p. 269). With his hands outstretched, he experiences his soul separating from his body and merging into the ray of the star. He is then surrounded by a night patrol, but is under the impression he is quite tall and flooded with electrical forces. He sees visions of his soul dividing into two and remembers the German folk belief that the double or doppelganger means one is near to death. He is taken to a psychiatric clinic. He continues to have visions. He is carried off to the banks of the Rhine and he sees his dead uncle, a Flemish painter. He converses with a talking bird and deducts that the soul of his ancestor is in this bird. Further, he asserts that our ancestors visit us on earth in the shape of animals. After describing his Beveridge A. Med Humanit 2014;40:38–43. doi:10.1136/medhum-2013-010445
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Original article experience of the ‘mystical homeland’ he had glimpsed, he remarks: Such was the vision… the cataleptic state into which I had lapsed for several days was explained to me scientifically and the accounts of those who had seen me in this condition caused me a certain irritation, when I realized that it was to mental aberration that they ascribed certain words and actions of mine which had coincided with the various phases of what were to me a series of logical events. (ibid., p. 227)
So Nerval identifies the conflict between his mystical explanation of his experience with that of science. He considers that his experience proves the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, whereas doctors think he is insane. But he does admit he remains rather confused about what has happened to him: I don’t quite know how to explain the fact that in my mind terrestrial events were liable to coincide with events in the supernatural world… But who exactly was the spirit who was myself and yet outside myself? Was he the double of legend or the mystical brother whom the Orientals call ferouer?... I believe that the human imagination has never invented anything that is not true, whether in this world or in other worlds… (ibid., p. 285)
He tries to reach a conclusion: “to my mind terrestrial events were bound up with those of the invisible world… I had disturbed the harmony of that magical universe from which my soul drew the certainty of immortal life” (ibid., p. 289). As a result of his transgression, he will be accursed. In the subsequent part of Aurelia, Nerval describes his second breakdown. Again he frames the narrative as a spiritual and mystical journey. At the outset, he describes his quest for the magic alphabet: The magic alphabet, the mysterious hieroglyphs have come down to us in garbled form, distorted either by time or by those who have something to gain by keeping us in the dark; let us recover the lost letter or the effaced sign, let us recompose the dissonant scale, and we shall acquire power in the spirit world. (ibid., p. 291)
Nerval describes his descent into madness: … I began suffering from persistent insomnia. I would spend the entire night wandering around Montmartre…One night I dropped in for a bite at a boulevard café and, just for the fun of it, started tossing around gold and silver coins. Then I went to the market and found myself in an argument with a complete stranger, whom I proceeded to slap in the face… my thoughts turned to the battles between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs, and I thought I saw the ghosts of these ancient warriors rising up around me. I picked a quarrel with a market auctioneer who was wearing a silver plaque on his chest and accused him of being Duke John of Burgundy. I tried to prevent him from entering a tavern. (ibid., p. 302)
Later he interprets the rain as the beginning of the Flood and thinks he has special powers to stop it. He has a vision in his sleep of a goddess who tells him, “I am none other than Mary, none other than your mother” (ibid., p. 303). He thinks he has the soul of Napoleon inside him, commanding him to do great things. Concerned about his worsening mental condition, Nerval’s friends take him to the Hospice de la Charité. Nerval relates: In the course of the night the delirium got worse, especially in the early hours when I realized I had been bound and tied. I managed to free myself from the straitjacket and wandered through the wards as dawn approached. Convinced I had become Beveridge A. Med Humanit 2014;40:38–43. doi:10.1136/medhum-2013-010445
like a god and possessed healing powers, I laid hands on several invalids… I strode around ranting about the ignorance of those who believed they could cure by science alone… (ibid., p. 304)
He is transferred to a clinic on the outskirts of Paris and briefly wonders if he has been mistaken in his thinking: “When I saw I was among the mad, I understood that everything up to this point had been mere illusion” (ibid., p. 305). However, he continues to see connections everywhere and thinks his fellow patients exercise some influence over the stars. He writes: “My role, it seemed to me, was to re-establish universal harmony by cabbalistic arts and to discover a solution by summoning up the occult powers of the various religions” (ibid., p. 305). His reverie continues: From the moment I became persuaded of the fact that I was undergoing the ordeals of a sacred initiation, a sense of invincibility took hold of my mind. I saw myself as a hero living under the gaze of gods; secret voices called out to me in warning and encouragement from plants, trees, animals and the tiniest insects. (ibid., p. 306)
Nerval gradually recovers and attributes this to the “kindly, compassionate face of my excellent doctor” who “brought me back to the world of the living” (ibid., p. 310). The doctor asks him to observe a fellow patient, a young man, who had been a soldier in Africa. He had been refusing to eat for 6 weeks. Nerval is moved by his plight and spends time with him. As a result the young man opens his eyes and Nerval fetches him a drink of water. He refuses to drink, giving his reason: “Because I’m dead… I’m in purgatory, doing atonement” (ibid., p. 316). The book ends with Nerval’s recovery and he muses: “All the same, I am happy with the convictions I have acquired, and I compare this series of ordeals I have undergone to what, in the eyes of the ancients, was represented by the idea of a descent into Hell” (ibid., p. 316). Nerval feels he has learnt from his experiences and that he has been granted insights into unseen worlds. He remains convinced that what he underwent was essentially spiritual in nature. Felman3 argues that Nerval’s quest for the magic language leads ultimately to his abandonment of human language. In order to communicate with the spirits, Nerval renounces the world of human beings. She writes: “Nerval’s tragedy is precisely this loss of the other: the vicious circle of the imaginary—a narcissistic entrapment—is what constitutes the core of his madness” ( p. 73). When Nerval meets the young patient, he is confronted with his double, who reveals to him his own impoverishment and estrangement from human society.
CONCLUSION Gerard de Nerval’s story raises questions about madness and psychiatry. Is madness, as he contended, a mystical experience revealing truths about spiritual worlds inaccessible to the ‘sane’? Nerval certainly thought so and he can be seen as part of a Romantic tradition that exalts insanity as a visionary state. In Symbols of Transformation, Jung20 drew a parallel between a psychotic episode and a mythological journey or a transformation of the soul. Jung called this experience ‘metanoia’. In Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, R.D. Laing21 also portrayed psychosis as a potentially enlightening process. However, it could be argued that the Romantic view of madness trivialise an experience that is often distressing and disorientating. As we have seen, Nerval was violent to others and he eventually killed himself. Rosanna Warren feels that the romanticising of Nerval’s plight has led to an undervaluing of his work. Interestingly, Foucault, in subsequent editions of 41
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Original article Madness and Civilisation, drew back from his initial romantic view of the mad. But, does psychiatry offer a more convincing picture of madness? Scientific psychiatry is criticised for ignoring the patient as a person. Its biological, reductionist perspective cannot account for such aspects as meaning, value or the human spirit. Nerval himself seems to have been ambivalent about the role of psychiatry. He praised his doctor and for the most part accepted treatment, but he also railed against medical science. What is the relationship between madness and recovery? Nerval drew on his experiences of madness to write Aurelia. At the end of the novel, he concluded that he valued his ordeal as it gave him insights into the mysteries of the world. Narrative psychiatry emphasises the importance of the patient’s individual take on their predicament. The patient needs to construct a satisfying narrative of their suffering. Nerval undoubtedly created a coherent and personally meaningful account of his encounter with insanity, and, at the same time, he produced an acclaimed work of literature. However, he did go on to kill himself shortly after writing Aurelia. Did the act of writing his own narrative have no lasting, therapeutic benefit for Nerval? Was the designation of insanity too much to bear? Did he come to the conclusion that he was, in fact, mad? Did he take his discharge from Dr Blanche’s clinic before he was fully recovered? We will never know the answers to these questions. We have no access to Nerval’s thoughts in his last hours, and we are left only with his brief and enigmatic note to his aunt, which was found on his body after death. Can the language of madness be decoded? In The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, Jung22 tried to make sense of psychosis using Freudian theory and word association tests. Likewise, R. D. Laing23 argued that madness was more comprehensible than many thought, and in The Divided Self he attempted to ‘make madness and the process of going mad’ understandable by drawing on existential philosophy. In the view of Berrios,24 such endeavours are misguided: an attempt to find meaning where none exists. Delusions are nothing but ‘empty speech acts’. But to dismiss the often rich and fantastical content of delusions as essentially meaningless seems unnecessarily parsimonious. Do the beliefs of the mad reveal nothing about themselves or their predicament? How does one avoid writing about madness, and instead write madness? Does one need to create a new language? Nerval did not attempt to do this. His writing does not break with convention and is readily understood. He does not use neologisms or disrupt the syntax of his prose. Others have attempted to use fractured and disintegrating texts to mirror the disturbed world of psychosis as Louis Sass25 has described in his Madness and Modernism. James Joyce developed a dream language to depict the unconscious in Finnegan’s Wake. Such attempts at creating new languages run the risk of not only being artificial constructs but also being incomprehensible. After all, how many people have actually read Finnegan’s Wake? This illustrates the core dilemma. How does one describe the indescribable? How does one convey to sane bystanders one’s voyage to the world of insanity? As Felman asks: “How can madness, in itself, survive the translation into language?” ( p. 66)3 Was Nerval, as he asked himself, trying to write an ‘impossible’ book? As we have seen, Nerval’s solution was not to invent a new language, but to employ the device of the double-narrator to enable him to cross back and forth between the lands of reason and unreason. The double narrative strategy allows two versions of events to be presented to the reader. Neither narrative is necessarily 42
privileged, and it is left to the reader to decide what weight to give to each of the competing accounts. A classic early example of this technique is James Hogg’s 1824 novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, in which the central character, Robert Wringhim, relates his story of being possessed by Devil, while in a separate narrative, the ‘Editor’, who apparently represents the voice of scientific reason, maintains that Wringhim is insane. Hogg, like Nerval, does not resolve the tension between the opposing narratives and refuses to identify which version is the ‘true’ one. This phenomenon of the double perspective has resonances in psychiatry. The philosopher-psychiatrist Karl Jaspers was acutely aware that there are two major ways of approaching mental illness. First, there is the approach of the natural sciences that emphasises ‘explanation’ and studies brain malfunction. Second, there is that of the human sciences that is concerned with ‘understanding’ and focuses on the subjective meanings that individual people give to their experiences. Instead of arguing for the superiority of either approach, Jaspers saw it as the task of psychiatry to reconcile the two. Gerard de Nerval has left a vivid record of his experiences that brings in the poetic and the mystical as well as the psychiatric theory of his day. It is left to the reader as how to interpret and even reconcile his many-stranded story. Competing interests None. Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
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The madness of Gerard de Nerval Allan Beveridge Med Humanities 2014 40: 38-43 originally published online November 27, 2013
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