Paris, "enfer" or "paradis"? On Gérard de Nerval's "cercles inextricables"

Abstract

The city of Paris constituted the scenario in which Gérard de Nerval grew up both personally and artistically. He passed his life in the city and recounted his experience there, transfering to his books a true melange of the sensory and experiential. A fundamental characteristic of his writing, and, more generally, of his method of thinking about the work of writing,was that he did not write of himself or of conventional space and time, but rather he investigated a much more complex universe, composed of a spiritual and psychological space, often mysterious and subjective. The consequent reality is a constant metamorphasis that demonstrates the imprint of Nerval’s internal world, and the myths and archetypes that populate his dreams; his vision of an alternative reality. Paris changes because Nerval himself changes, both internally and along with the city: light and music in the happy years he passed in his apartment on Doyenne street in the company of his bohemian friends, and darkness and claustrophobia in the pages of Aurélia, when the city described by Gerard was full of insurmountable anxiety and muted solitude.