On Literature

by Umberto Eco

  Gérard Labrunie committed suicide after passing through several psychiatric clinics, and we know from one of his letters that he had written Sylvie in a state of hyperexcitement, in pencil and on tiny sheets of paper. But if Labrunie was mad, Nerval was not; that is to say, there was no madness in that Model Author we manage to discern only through a reading of Sylvie. This text tells the story of a protagonist who borders on madness, but it is not the work of someone who is unwell: whoever wrote it (and this person is the one that I shall from now on call Nerval), it is constructed with astonishing care, with a play of internal textual symmetries, oppositions, and echoes.

  If Nerval is not a character who is extraneous to the story, how does he appear in it? First and foremost as narrative strategy.

  Story and Plot

  In order to understand Nerval's narrative strategy and how he manages to create in the reader the mist-effects I spoke of, I refer you to Table A.* Along the horizontal axis I have plotted the sequence of chapters in the tale, while on the left, vertical axis, I have reconstructed the temporal sequence of the events mentioned in the story. Thus, along the vertical axis I have plotted the fabula or story, and along the horizontal axis the development of the plot.

  The plot is the way in which the story is constructed and gradually revealed to us: a young man comes out of a theater and decides to go to the ball at Loisy, during his journey there he recalls a previous journey, arrives at the ball, sees Sylvie again, spends a day with her, goes back to Paris, has an affair with the actress, and finally (Sylvie is by now married in Dammartin) decides to tell his own story. Seeing that the plot begins on the evening when the protagonist was coming out of a theater (conventionally represented as Time1), the development is represented by the black line that proceeds from that evening, through successive moments in time (Time1—Time14), to the end of the story.

  But in the course of these events previous times are recalled, represented by the arrows pointing upward to times preceding Time1. The unbroken vertical lines represent the protagonist's reconstructions, the dotted lines represent references to the past that occur, sometimes fleetingly, in the course of the dialogues

  between the various characters. For instance, between 1 A.M. and 4 A.M. the protagonist recalls his previous journey to Loisy (in Time1), which on the plot level takes up three chapters, whereas in chapters 9 and 10 there are fleeting evocations of episodes in Sylvie's life as a young girl and the "wyater" event, in Time-3.

  Thanks to these flashbacks one can reconstruct the story by fits and starts, or, rather, the temporal sequence of all the events the plot mentions: initially, when the protagonist was small, he loved Sylvie; then, when slightly older, he meets Adrienne at a ball; later he goes back to Loisy; finally, one evening, when the boy has become a man, he decides to go back there, and so on.

  The plot is just that, we have it before our eyes as we read. The story, on the other hand, is not so obvious, and it is in the attempt to reconstruct the story that some mist-effects are created, since we never quite catch precisely what time the narrating voice is referring to. I do not claim to dissolve the mist-effects with my table, but rather to explain how they come about. And the story is reconstructed in a hypothetical way, in the sense that it is probable that the events evoked correspond to experiences lived through initially at age ten or eleven, then between fourteen and sixteen, and finally between sixteen and eighteen (but one could even count this differently: the protagonist might have been extremely precocious, or a very late bloomer).

  The extent to which the reconstruction (and it is only a probable one) must be based on the text and not on elements of Labrunie's biography is confirmed by the experience of some commentators who try to place the evening at the theater in 1836, since the moral and political climate evoked seems to fit the one obtaining at that time, and the club mentioned is apparently the Café de Valois, which was subsequently closed at the end of 1836, along with other gaming houses. If we collapse the protagonist onto Labrunie, a rather grotesque series of problems ensues. How old was the young man, then, in 1836, and how old was he when he saw Adrienne at the ball? Since Labrunie (born in 1808) stopped living with his uncle at Mortefontaine in 1814 (at age six), when did he go to the ball? If he started at the Collège Charlemagne in 1820, at the age of twelve, is that when he goes back in the summer to Loisy and sees Adrienne? But in that case is he twenty-eight that evening at the theater? And if, as many accept, the visit to Sylvie's aunt at Othys happens three years before, is it not a rather big boy of twenty-five who plays with Sylvie, dressing up as gamekeepers, and is treated by her aunt as a nice little blond lad? A big boy who has received an inheritance of thirty thousand francs in the meantime (1834), and who has already traveled to Italy—a genuine initiation rite—and in 1827 has already translated Goethe's Faust? As you see, there is no solution here, and so one must reject such biographical calculations.

  Jerard and Nerval

  The story begins: "Je sortais d'un théâtre." We have here two entities (an "I" and a theater) and one verb in the imperfect.

  Since it is not Labrunie (whom we have abandoned to his sad fate), who is the "Je" who is speaking? In a first-person narrative the person who says "I" is the protagonist of the story, and not necessarily the author. Therefore (having excluded Labrunie), Sylvie is written by Nerval, who brings onto the scene an "I" who tells us something. We thus have the narration of a narration. To eliminate any doubt, let us decide that the "I" who was coming out of a theater at the beginning is a character we will call "Je-rard."

  But when does Jerard speak? He speaks in what we will call the Time of Narrative Enunciation (or TimeN); that is to say, at the point when he begins writing and recalling his past by telling us that one day (Time1, the Beginning of the Plot) he was coming out of a theater. If you like, given that the story was published in 1853, we could think that TimeN is that year, but this would be pure convention, just to allow us to attempt a backward calculation. Since we do not know how many years pass between Time14 and TimeN (but it must be many, because at TimeN he already remembers that Sylvie has two children who are old enough to be archers), the evening at the theater could be placed either five or ten years previously; it does not matter, so long as one imagines that at Time-3 Jerard and Sylvie were still children.

  So the Jerard speaking at TimeN tells us about a self of many years previously, who in turn was recalling events concerning Jerard the child and adolescent. Nothing strange here: we too can say, "When I [I1, who am speaking now] was eighteen [I2, then], I could not get over the fact that I at sixteen [I3] had been involved in an unhappy love affair." But this does not mean that I1 still feels the adolescent passion of I3, nor that he can explain the melancholy memories of I2. At most he can recall them indulgently and tenderly, thus revealing himself to be different from who he had once been. In a certain sense this is what Jerard does, except that, realizing that he is so different each time, he can never tell us with which of his past Is he identifies, and he ends up so confused about his own identity that in the course of the story he never names himself once, except in the first paragraph of chapter 13, when he refers to himself as "an unknown admirer." Thus even that first-person pronoun, apparently so clearly defined, always denotes an Other.

  Yet it is not only that there are so many Jerards, it is also the fact that sometimes the narrator is not Jerard but Nerval, who, as it were, creeps into the tale. Note that I said "into the tale," not into the story or plot. Story and plot coincide, but only because they are communicated to us through a discourse. To make the point more clearly, when I translated Sylvie I changed its original discourse in French into a discourse in Italian, while trying to keep the same story and plot. A film director could "translate" the plot of Sylvie into a film, allowing the spectator to reconstruct the story through a series of fade-outs and flashbacks (though I would not like to say with what degree of success), but he certainly could not translate the discourse like I did, since he would have to change
words into images, and there is a difference between writing "as pale as the night" and showing the image of a pale woman.

  Nerval never appears in story or plot, but he does in the discourse, and not only (as would happen with any author) as the mechanism that selects the words and articulates them in phrases and sentences. He comes in surreptitiously, as a "voice" speaking to us his model readers.

  Who is it that says (in the second paragraph of Chapter 3), "Let us go back to reality"? Is it Jerard talking to himself after wondering whether Adrienne and Aurélie were the same person? Is it Nerval encouraging his character or us readers who have been caught up in that enchantment to go back to reality? Later on, between one and four in the morning, while Jerard is traveling toward Loisy, the text says: "While the carriage is climbing up the hills, let us piece together the memories of the time when I used to come here so often." Is this Jerard in Time3 talking, in a kind of interior monologue that is happening at the present time of the first verb? Or is it Jerard in TimeN, saying "while that character is climbing uphill in the carriage, let us abandon him for a moment and try to go back to a previous period"? And is that "let us piece together" an exhortation by Jerard to himself, or by Nerval to his readers, inviting us to participate in the course of his writing?

  Who is it that says at the beginning of chapter 14, "Such are the chimeras which bewitch us and lead us astray at the dawn of our lives"? It could be Jerard in TimeN, participant in and victim of his own past illusions, but it will be noted that that observation justifies the order in which the events have been narrated, with a direct address to the readers ("but many hearts will understand me"). The person who is speaking—therefore—does not seem to be Jerard, but the author of the book we are reading.

  Much has been written on this interplay of voices, but everything remains unresolved. It is Nerval himself who has decided to remain unresolved, and he tells us so not only to join us in our sense of bewilderment (and to understand it) but also to compound it. Over the course of fourteen chapters we never know whether the person who is speaking is saying things or is representing someone else who is saying things—nor is it ever entirely clear whether this someone is experiencing these things or simply recalling them.

  Leaving the Theater?

  Right from the first sentence of the story, the theme of the theater literally takes center stage, and it will be present until the end of the tale. Nerval was a man of the theater, Labrunie had really fallen in love with an actress, Jerard loves a woman he has seen on the stage, and he haunts various stages until near the end of the story. But the theater reappears in Sylvie at every moment: the dance on the lawn with Adrienne is a theatrical event, as are the flower festival at Loisy (and the basket from which the swan rises is a theatrical machine), the mise-en-scene that Jerard and Sylvie devise at her aunt's house, and the sacred drama at Châalis.

  In addition, many have noted that Nerval uses a kind of theatrical lighting for the most crucial scenes. The actress appears at first illuminated by the footlights on the stage, then by the light of the auditorium chandelier, but theatrical lighting techniques are also put into play at the first dance on the lawn, where the sun's last rays arrive through the foliage of the trees, which act as a curtain; and while Adrienne sings, she is picked out as it were by the light of the moon (and she emerges from what today we would call a spotlight with a graceful bow, worthy of an actress saying farewell to her audience). At the beginning of chapter 4, in "The Journey to Cythera" (which above all is a verbal representation of a visual one, inspired as it is by one of Watteau's paintings), the scene is again illuminated from above by the vermilion rays of the evening. Finally, when Jerard enters the ball at Loisy in chapter 8, we witness a masterpiece of stage direction, which gradually leaves the bases of the lime trees in shade and tinges their summits in a bluish light until, in this struggle between artificial light and the dawning day, the stage is slowly pervaded by the pale light of day.

  We must therefore not allow ourselves to be deceived by a "crude" reading of Sylvie and say that—as Jerard is torn between the dream of an illusion and the desire to find reality—the story plays on a clear and precise contrast between the theater and reality. First and foremost, every time Jerard leaves one theater he enters another. He begins, already in the second chapter, with a celebration of the sole truth of illusion, which intoxicates him. In chapter 3 he seems to begin a journey toward reality, since the Sylvie he wants to reach does "exist," but again he finds her to be no longer a creature of nature but one steeped in culture, who sings with musical "phrasing" (and who by now uses her aunt's wedding clothes to go to a masked ball, and is prepared, like a consummate actress, to imitate Adrienne and sing once more the song she sang at Châalis, with Jerard acting as director). And consequently Jerard himself behaves like a theatrical character (in chapter 11) when he makes the final attempt to conquer her, adopting a pose out of classical tragedy.

  Thus the theater is sometimes the place of all-conquering and redeeming illusion, sometimes the place of disillusion and disappointment. What the story questions (creating in the process another mist-effect) is not the opposition between illusion and reality but the fracture that cuts through the two worlds and mixes them up.

  Symmetries of Plot

  If we go back to Table A, we see that the fourteen chapters into which the plot is organized can be divided into two halves, one largely nocturnal, the other prevalently diurnal. The nocturnal sequence concerns a world lovingly evoked in memory and in dreams: everything in it is experienced in a euphoric tone, in the enchantment of nature, and characters move slowly through space, which is described with a full range of cheerful details. In the diurnal sequence, on the other hand, Jerard finds a Valois that is mere artifice, made up of fake ruins, where the same stages of the preceding journey are revisited in a state of dysphoria, without dwelling on the landscape and focusing solely on epiphanies of disappointment.

  From the fourth to the sixth chapter, after the festival, which had been an opportunity for fairy tale-like surprises such as the appearance of the swan, and the encounter with Sylvie, who by now seems to embody the gracefulness of the two exorcised ghosts, Jerard makes his way through the forest at night (with the help of a moon that is also theatrical as it lights up the sandstone rocks): in the distance pools dot the misty plain, the air is perfumed, and gradually elegant medieval ruins can be seen on the horizon. The village is jolly, Sylvie's bedroom is virginal as she works at her lace cushion, and the journey to her aunt's house is a feast of flowers, amid buttercups and great tits, periwinkles and foxgloves, and the hedges and streams that the two young people happily leap over. The river Thève gradually becomes smaller as they approach its source, and comes to rest in the fields, forming a little lake between irises and gladioli. There is little more to say about the eighteenth-century idyll at Othys, where the past smells so good.

  In the second journey (chapters 8–11), Jerard arrives when the festival is over, the flowers in Sylvie's hair and on her bodice are fading, the Thève shows pools of stagnant water, and the perfume of the hayricks no longer inebriates the way it once did. If in the first journey to Othys the two youngsters leaped over hedges and streams, now they do not even think of crossing the fields.

  Without describing the journey, Jerard goes to his uncle's house and finds it abandoned, the dog dead, and the garden overgrown with weeds. He takes the road for Ermenonville, but oddly the birds are silent and the place-names on the signposts have faded. What he does see are the artificial reconstructions of the Temple of Philosophy, but by now these too are in ruins; the laurels have disappeared, and on the (artificial) lake, beneath Gabrielle's tower, "the scum bubbles up and the insects drone." The air is mephitic, the sandstone is dusty, everything is sad and solitary. When Jerard arrives at Sylvie's bedroom, canaries have replaced the linnets, the furniture is modern and affected, Sylvie herself no longer makes her bobbins resound but works a "mechanism," and her aunt is dead. The walk to Châalis will
be not a mad dash through the meadows but a slow journey with the help of a little donkey, in the course of which they will no longer gather flowers but instead will compete in terms of culture, in an atmosphere of mutual mistrust. Near Saint-S*** they have to watch where they put their feet because treacherous streams meander through the grass.

  When finally, in chapter 14, Jerard returns to those very same places, he will no longer find the woods that once were there, Châalis is being restored, the pools that have been dug up show in vain the stagnant water "that the swans now shun," there is no longer a direct road to Ermenonville, and the space has become even more of a senseless labyrinth.

  The search for inverted symmetries could be carried farther, and it has been by many, so much so that what emerges are relations of almost diametrical opposition between the various chapters (that is to say, between the first and the last chapter, the second and the thirteenth, etc., even though the correspondences do not follow this rule precisely). Here are the most glaring examples:

  EUPHORIC

  DYSPHORIC

  1. Archery as mythical evocation

  14. Archery as children's game

  2. Adrienne's graceful farewell, as she heads for the monastic life

  13. Aurélie's graceful farewell, woman of the world

  2. The kiss as mystic experience

  8. The kiss is merely affectionate

  2. All thought they were in paradise