Inheritance and innovation in Nerval’s references to the visual
arts
SARAH GUBBINS
Trinity College Dublin
Nerval’s prose writings involve tensions between the exploitation of an existing
literary and cultural heritage, and its transformation. This is evident in the poet’s
fusion and subversion of conventional genres,1 in the blurred lines between
plagiarism, recycling and the creative use of textual borrowings in his work (e.g.
Voyage en Orient 1851; Jemmy 1854; Le Roman tragique 1844) and, as I will argue in
this article, in his references to the visual arts. I will discuss the interplay between
inheritance and innovation involved in the weaving of references to the visual arts
into Nerval’s collection of nouvelles, or short stories, Les Filles du feu (1854), and
into some of his travel writing including Lorely (1852) and Voyage en Orient (1851).
During the mid-nineteenth century, when Nerval was writing, poetry in France
was undergoing a transformation from the discursive or dramatic poetic language of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into a condensed, metaphor-centred medium
opening up new possibilities of expression and demanding new strategies of reading.
It has been argued that many of the techniques used in the mid-century transformation
of French poetic language were pictorial or spatial in nature (Scott 1988 and 2009,
p.13). Poets were beginning to assimilate both images and forms from the visual arts
into their work. Rather than using the natural world as a direct source of inspiration,
they exploited images from the Salons and from L’Artiste, a journal which combined
poetry, art criticism and engravings (ibid.). Further, they explored the pictorial and
spatial potentialities of language through a new focus on metaphor and rhyme, the use
of the sonnet form, and experimentation with line length. These techniques created a
visual as well as an aural impact and many of them are exploited by Nerval in Les
Chimères (1854), a collection of twelve sonnets. However, the influence of the visual
arts is also discernible in his prose works. It is manifested in various ways, ranging
from harnessing an inherited artistic tradition to conjure up vivid images to exploiting
the ambiguities in the work of a painter such as Watteau in a way that challenges the
conventions of representation in literature.
1
Drawing on an existing visual culture
Unlike many nineteenth-century poets and writers (e.g. Gautier, Baudelaire,
Fromentin, Zola, Laforgue and Mallarmé), Nerval did not engage in art criticism.
However, through his involvement in the Impasse du Doyenné group, he had contact
with painters such as Célestin Nanteuil, Narcisse Diaz, Camille Corot and Prosper
Marilhat (Cassagne 1959, p.352). In an article on Nerval’s references to Italian art,
Jacques Bony (2006, p.201) claims that Nerval is more interested in the subjects of
paintings than in their form. Consonant with this claim is Hisashi Mizuno’s (2002)
argument that Nerval uses visual artworks as points of cultural reference. By referring
to them, he can immediately conjure up an atmosphere, character or scene and avoid
unnecessary description:
La traversée du lac avait été imaginée peut-être pour rappeler le Voyage à Cythère
de Watteau. (Sylvie, p.545)2
[The lake crossing had perhaps been conceived to call to mind Watteau’s Voyage à
Cythère.]3
Elle avait l’air de l’accordée de village de Greuze. (Sylvie, p.551)
[She had an air of Greuze’s village betrothal.]
Ne trouvez-vous pas qu’elle ressemble à la Judith de Caravaggio, qui est dans le
Musée royal ? (Corilla, p.426)
[Don’t you think that she resembles Caravaggio’s Judith, which is in the Royal
Museum?]
Je me refuse donc à toute description de la cathédrale : chacun en connaît les
gravures. (Lorely, p.16)
[I shall therefore avoid any description of the cathedral; everyone is familiar with
the engravings.]
Allusions to paintings and artists intensify the visual depiction of scenes and
act as clues in the interpretation of events. Such references draw on an inherited visual
culture that was assumed to be common to all educated readers. They occasionally
evoke associations that foreshadow future developments. For example, Nerval hints at
the dangerousness of the main female character in Corilla (p.426), by comparing her
to Caravaggio’s Judith4 (see Figure One below); this prima donna eventually deceives
both of her admirers: Fabbio – the leading male character – and his friend and rival,
Marcelli. Nerval’s reference to the painting connotes a biblical story as well as the
physical appearance of the woman in the painting. This reappropriation from the
2
visual arts of what was originally a textual subject was a common practice among
nineteenth-century writers (Scott 1988 and 2009, p.13).
Figure One: Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c.1652), Giuditta e Oloferne (1612-1613), Naples, Museo di
Capodimonte. This painting was attributed to Caravaggio until the start of the twentieth century.
Innovation: generical and narrative ambiguity
My discussion of innovation in Nerval’s references to the visual arts will focus on his
use of the paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). More than one hundred
years before Nerval’s literary career began, Watteau was questioning the boundaries
3
of traditional genres in painting. He is known as the pioneer of the fête galante, a kind
of painting in which a group of noble people indulge in flirtatious or amorous
behaviour in a rural or park-like setting. By combining elements of landscape and
history painting, Watteau was instrumental in the breaking down of the divisions
between genres which were prevalent in European art from the seventeenth to the
eighteenth century. His work is noted for its ambiguity. For instance, the identity of
Watteau’s ‘shepherds’ is problematic. Are they upper-class revellers in rustic
costumes? Peasants and members of the bourgeoisie invited to join in the festivities
(Plax 2000, p.127)? Or are they simply studio models? Are the Harlequins and
Pierrots who feature in Watteau’s paintings paid entertainers or nobles in disguise?
Moreover, it is often difficult to tell whether the scenery in the background is intended
to represent a real landscape or a painted back-drop (e.g. Les Charmes de la vie [The
Delights of Life], c.1718, and Les Plaisirs du bal [The Pleasures of the Ball], 171517).
In what follows, I will examine the ways in which Nerval exploits the
subversiveness and the ambiguity of Watteau’s work in his own writing. Although
Nerval refers to Watteau’s work in a general sense on several occasions, he only
specifically mentions one painting: Le Pèlerinage à l'île de Cythère (1717
[Pilgrimage on the Isle of Cythera], see Figure Two below). This painting is referred
to in Voyage en Orient, when the narrator visits the island of Cythera and is
disappointed to find it devoid of mythological festivities:
Je cherchais les bergers et les bergères de Watteau, leurs navires ornés de guirlandes
abordant des rives fleuries ; je rêvais ces folles bandes de pèlerins d’amour aux
manteaux de satin changeant… je n’ai aperçu qu’un gentleman qui tirait aux
bécasses et aux pigeons, et des soldats écossais blonds et rêveurs, cherchant peutêtre à l’horizon les brouillards de leur patrie. (Voyage en Orient, p.234)5
[I was looking for Watteau’s shepherds and shepherdesses, their ships, decorated
with garlands, reaching shores covered in flowers; I was dreaming of those mad
bands of love’s pilgrims in coats of shimmering satin... But all I saw was an English
gentleman shooting at the woodcocks and the pigeons, and some Scottish soldiers,
blond and dreamy, perhaps looking for the mists of their homeland on the horizon.]
4
Figure Two: Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). Le Pèlerinage à l'île de Cythère (1717), Paris,
Musée du Louvre.
This reference uses Watteau’s painting to emphasise the divergence between the
narrator’s romantic expectations of the mythological island of Venus and the actual
reality of the territory, which had recently passed from French to British control.
However, just as it appears that the banality of Cythera has put an end to the
sentimental musings provoked by Watteau’s painting, the sight of the Scottish soldiers
sets the narrator off on another nostalgic reverie, as he projects onto them a longing
for their home country. The failure of one mythological dimension does not deter him
from exploiting the expressive potential of contemporary romanticism. This is an
example of the seeming endlessness of association in Nerval’s writing.
Le Pèlerinage à l'île de Cythère is also central to chapter IV of Sylvie, one of
Nerval’s most celebrated nouvelles, which forms part of the collection entitled Les
Filles du feu [The Daughters of Fire]. Nerval describes a lake crossing, part of the fête
de l’arc, a local festival, which may have been based on Watteau’s painting: ‘La
traversée du lac avait été imaginée peut-être pour rappeler le Voyage à Cythère de
Watteau’ (Sylvie, p.545). [‘The lake crossing had perhaps been conceived to call to
mind Watteau’s Voyage à Cythère.’]
Watteau submitted Le Pèlerinage à l'île de Cythère as his reception piece to
the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture [Royal Academy of Painting and
Sculpture] in 1717. Its original title was later crossed out by the Academy’s secretary
and replaced with the words ‘une feste galante’. The implication of the original title is
5
that the painting’s subject is mythological. Its acceptance as such would have given
Watteau the rank of history painter. However, it is likely that objections were raised
concerning the fact that the painting has no source in ancient literature and that its
subject was not an established theme in the genre of history painting (Posner 1984,
p.192). It is also possible that the relatively small size of the painting disqualified it
from being considered as a history painting. If we were to draw a line down the centre
of the painting (just to the left of the dog on the hill) we would see that the right-hand
side of the painting could almost be considered to belong to a genre painting. On the
other hand, the presence of putti, a statue of Venus, and the classically nude rowers
imply that the painting is not a simple genre scene. In changing the title of the
painting, the academicians denied Watteau the privileges accorded to history painters,
but they also acknowledged that his painting belonged to a new, modern genre (the
fête galante).
Le Pèlerinage à l'île de Cythère epitomises the undecidability of Watteau’s
work. James Elkins (1993) categorises it, along with da Vinci’s Last Supper,
Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, Botticelli’s Primavera, and Giorgione’s Tempesta, as
a ‘monstrously ambiguous’ work. As is usual in Watteau’s fêtes galantes, the identity
of the characters in the painting is debatable, and it is almost impossible to pin down
with any certainty what is happening in the painting. Charles de Tolnay (1955)
interpreted it as representing the different stages of romantic love. Moving from the
statue of Venus towards the water, he argued that the couples embody persuasion,
consent and harmony. The implication is that they will enter the ‘ship of Love’ and
travel to Cythera, which symbolises fulfilment (Posner 1984, p.184). But, if the
couples are on their way to Cythera, why is there no distinct land visible in the
distance? Levey (1961) has argued that the figures in the painting are not leaving for
Cythera but are about to return home from their pilgrimage. Claiming that the fact that
the statue of Venus is covered with roses suggests a rite accomplished, he maintains
that this interpretation would explain why a tone of sadness has often been detected in
the painting. However, others have argued that while a journey to Cythera was a
familiar image in Watteau’s lifetime, a return from Cythera had no precedent in either
literature or art. They hold that if Watteau had wanted to drastically change the
meaning of this established image, he would have done so more clearly; an indication
6
of a town or village on the other side of the water would have been enough to make
the boat’s destination clear (Posner 1984, p.192).
It could be argued that all of these attempts to decipher the meaning of Le
Pèlerinage à l'île de Cythère ultimately fail because of the painting’s narrative
inconsistency; it does not bear analysis as a story but rather suggests a mood. To ask
why we cannot decipher the island of Cythera in the distance, why Watteau did not
paint a village on the other side of the water, or whether the work should be classified
as history or genre painting is, to a certain extent, to miss the point; these ambiguities
are central to the originality of the painting. The fact that Le Pèlerinage à l'île de
Cythère cannot be interpreted in a conventional manner makes it possible for the
viewer to focus on the suggestiveness of the image; we do not need to understand the
context of the scene to appreciate its dreamy atmosphere.
What is interesting about Nerval’s reference to Watteau’s painting is that the
generical ambiguity and narrative inconsistency of the painting are mirrored in
Nerval’s short story. Sylvie is categorised as a nouvelle, but it involves strongly
autobiographical elements; many of its features – the childhood spent in the Valois,
the unrequited loves – correspond to what we know about Nerval’s life. It also
contains eerie twists which are more often found in the conte (a folk or fairy tale):
« Ah ! la bonne tante, dit Sylvie, elle m’avait prêté sa robe pour aller danser au
carnaval à Dammartin, il y a de cela deux ans. L’année d’après, elle est morte ».
(Sylvie, pp.559-560)
[“Oh! My dear aunt...” said Sylvie, “She had lent me her dress to go dancing at the
carnival at Dammartin two years ago. The year after that, she died.”]
This description connotes a fairy-tale spell or curse. The banality of the events and the
strange association that Sylvie makes between them contribute to the uncanny
atmosphere evoked by this description. The mixing of genres, the association of
elements that were previously thought to be contradictory, is one of the key features
of modernity (e.g. Johnson 1979; Scott 2009). While the fusion of genres in Sylvie is
less radical than in Watteau’s paintings – which combine elements of the previously
separate categories of history, landscape, and genre painting – the inclusion of
elements of autobiography and the conte in this nouvelle may indicate that, for
Nerval, no one prose genre was sufficient for the full expression of experience.
7
Much of the undecidability of Sylvie results from the fluidity of Nerval’s
representation of the narrator’s three love interests: Aurélie, a Parisian actress;
Adrienne, a young girl from a noble Valois family with whom the narrator once
danced as a child, who eventually joins a convent and dies; and Sylvie, a village girl
with whom he was briefly romantically involved in his youth. The nouvelle traces the
narrator’s various reunions with Sylvie, but is interspersed with his memories of or
present-day encounters with all three women. Each woman seems to play different
roles in Nerval’s universe: Aurélie, as an actress, is a professional role-player –
changing parts every time she acts in a new play – and, according to the mores of the
nineteenth century, a sexually available woman. In contrast, Adrienne is an
aristocratic child and later a pure-spirited nun. The narrator equates them at one point:
‘Aimer une religieuse sous la forme d’une actrice !… et si c’était la même !’ (Sylvie,
p.543). [‘To love a nun in the guise of an actress!... And what if they were the same?’]
Although Aurélie and Adrienne have little in common in terms of social status, they
are equally interesting to the narrator precisely because both of their lives involve
transformation: ‘Cet esprit, c’était Adrienne transfigurée par son costume, comme elle
l’était déjà par sa vocation’ (Sylvie, p.553). [‘This spirit was Adrienne transformed by
her costume, as she already was by her vocation.’]
Sylvie’s transformations are described in greater detail than those of Aurélie
and Adrienne. Throughout the story, the narrator emphasises her modest origins: ‘Qui
l’aurait épousée ? elle est si pauvre !’ (Sylvie, p.543). [‘Who would have married her?
She is so poor!’] When she and the narrator dress up in old-fashioned wedding
clothes, he compares her to ‘l’accordée de village de Greuze’ [‘Greuze’s village
betrothal’] (Sylvie, p.551), which locates her squarely in a genre scene. However, as
the nouvelle progresses, Sylvie becomes more difficult to categorise. She attempts to
climb the social ladder, becoming a glove-maker (a promotion in terms of social
status from her previous occupation as a lace-maker), taking singing lessons (‘Elle
phrasait !’ [‘She used phrasing!’], Sylvie, p.560), and reading books recommended to
her by the narrator, including Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse. This intertextual
reference is appropriate since the narrator and Sylvie play roles similar to those of
Saint-Preux and Julie (who, as the title suggests, resemble Abelard and Héloïse).
However, it is also appropriate on a visual level, since it is the book’s illustrations by
Moreau le Jeune which cause Sylvie to make the comparison:
8
Les gravures du livre présentaient aussi les amoureux sous de vieux costumes du
temps passé, de sorte que pour moi vous étiez Saint-Preux, et je me retrouvais dans
Julie. (Sylvie, p.555)
[The book’s engravings also showed lovers in old-fashioned costumes so that, for
me, you were Saint-Preux, and Julie reminded me of myself.]
The fact that Sylvie does not grasp her similarity to Julie until it is presented in visual
form indicates that she is far from integrated into Julie’s upper-class world.
The most dramatic example of the plasticity of Nerval’s representation of
Sylvie is his description of the lake crossing and the celebration which follows it in
chapter IV. By comparing the event to Watteau’s Le Pèlerinage à l'île de Cythère,
Nerval introduces all the ambiguities of the painter’s work into the nouvelle. Just as
the fête galante contains elements of history and genre painting, the lake crossing
combines village participants with pursuits which were originally reserved for the
nobility. Sylvie is portrayed as belonging to both worlds. She mocks the narrator for
his Parisian ways: ‘Nous sommes des gens de village, et Paris est si au-dessus !’
(Sylvie, p.546) [‘We are village folk and Paris is so much more sophisticated.’]
However, she is perceived by the narrator, due to her association with this noble
celebration, as playing a more elevated social role than she did previously:
Ce n’était plus cette petite fille de village que j’avais dédaignée pour une plus
grande et plus faite aux grâces du monde. (Sylvie, p.546).
[She was no longer the little village girl whom I had scorned for one who was taller
and more socially adept.]
Her heterogeneous identity fits well with the hybrid genre of the fête galante.
Sylvie becomes more attractive to the narrator at this point because she has
taken on another role; the range of expressive possibilities associated with her has
increased. But the malleability of the identities of Sylvie and the other female
characters in the nouvelle poses problems for the reader. The narrator states at one
point:
Tour à tour bleue et rose comme l’astre trompeur d’Aldébaran, c’était Adrienne ou
Sylvie, – c’étaient les deux moitiés d’un seul amour. L’une était l’idéal sublime,
l’autre la douce réalité. (Sylvie, p.567)
[Now blue, now pink, like the deceptive star, Aldebaran, it was Adrienne or Sylvie,
– they were two halves of a single love. One was the sublime ideal, the other, sweet
reality.]
9
The fact that these characters can so easily be confused and merged sheds doubt on
their autonomy. Indeed, the reader may wonder whether the narrator’s romantic
interests are simply personifications of aspects of his fantasies. Like the viewer’s
attempts to decipher the true meaning of Le Pèlerinage à l'île de Cythère, the reader’s
efforts to understand the essence of the characters in Sylvie are never fully adequate.
Nerval’s reference to Watteau’s painting does not help to clarify Sylvie’s identity, but
rather emphasises the fact that it is ambiguous. Faced with these uncertainties, the
reader’s experience is transformed; the nouvelle’s generical and narrative
undecidability accentuates its aesthetic qualities and prompts the reader to question
the nature of representation in Nerval’s work.
To conclude, Nerval does use references to the visual arts as a means of
conjuring up an inherited culture, in order to intensify descriptions and as a point of
departure for reverie. This may be understood in the context of a renewed interest in
the use of the visual arts as a means of enriching literature in the nineteenth century
(Scott 1988 and 2009, p.13). However, through his references to Watteau, Nerval is
able to use the suggestive potential of Le Pèlerinage à l'île de Cythère while, at the
same time, exploiting its undecidability. In this way he combines inheritance and
innovation. Although his reference to the painting succeeds in intensifying his
description of the lake crossing by calling to mind an established image, the
ambiguity of the image emphasises the malleability of representation in Sylvie, and
confirms Nerval’s willingness to bend narrative conventions in order to achieve poetic
effects. Thus, Nerval exploits not only the subject of Watteau’s painting, but also the
formal aspects of its composition, using these to open up new possibilities of
expression in literature, and perhaps to problematise the fixed status of literary forms
and genres.
Bibliography
BONY, J., 2006. Nerval et la peinture italienne. In J. Bony, Aspects de Nerval. Paris:
Eurédit.
CASSAGNE, A., 1959. La Théorie de l’art pour l’art en France. Paris: Lucien
Dorbon.
ELKINS, J., 1993. On monstrously ambiguous paintings. History and Theory, Vol.32,
No.3, pp.227-247.
10
DE TOLNAY, C., 1955. L'Embarquement pour Cythère de Watteau au Louvre. In
Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Vol.4, pp.91-102.
JOHNSON, B., 1979. Défigurations du langage poétique : la seconde révolution
baudelairienne. Paris: Flammarion.
LEVEY, M., 1961. The real theme of Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera. The
Burlington Magazine, Vol.103, No.698, pp.180-185.
MIZUNO, H., 2002. Nerval, écrivain de la vie moderne, et la peinture flamande et
hollandaise. Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, Vol.102, pp.601-616.
NERVAL, G. de. Œuvres complètes. Volumes One, Two and Three. Jean Guillaume
and Claude Pichois (eds.). Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1984, 1989
and 1993.
PLAX, J., 2000. Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
POSNER, D., 1984. Antoine Watteau. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
SCOTT, D., 2009. Generical Intersections in Nineteenth-Century French
Painting and Literature: Manet’s La Musique aux Tuileries and Baudelaire’s Petits
Poèmes en prose, in R. Langford (ed.) Textual Intersections: Literature, History and
the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi.
SCOTT, D., 1988 and 2009. Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in
Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Notes:
1
For example, the boundaries between the nouvelle, the conte, theatre, travel writing,
biography and autobiography are blurred. The prose narrative is interspersed with
verse poems in La Bohême galante and in Petits châteaux de Bohême.
2
NERVAL, Gérard de. Œuvres complètes, volumes one, two and three. Jean
Guillaume and Claude Pichois (eds.). Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard,
1984, 1989 and 1993. All quotes to Sylvie, Corilla and Lorely are taken from volume
three.
3
All translations from the French are mine.
4
The painting referred to here, although attributed to Caravaggio at the time Nerval
was writing, is actually the work of Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c.1652). Nerval saw
the painting in what was then the Real Museo Borbonico in Naples in 1834, as he
indicates in a letter to Duseigneur, Gautier or Nanteuil (See Œuvres complètes, vol.1,
p.1296). Caravaggio is the author of a different painting on the same theme, Giuditta
che taglia la testa a Oloferne (1597-1600), which can be seen in the Galleria
Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini in Rome. However, since this painting
was assumed to have been lost until it was rediscovered in 1950, it is unlikely that
11
Nerval could have seen it during his time in Italy. See Bony (2006, pp.201-221) for a
more detailed discussion of this issue.
5
NERVAL, Gérard de. Œuvres complètes, op. cit. All quotes to Voyage en Orient are
taken from volume two.
12