“Nerval is remembered as a minor literary figure, an eccentric who walked his pet lobster on a ribbon in the Palais Royal, gabbled his poetry in doorways, read at night with a candlestick on his head, and slept in coaches with his head in a noose, habits that endeared him to aesthetes and literary anecdotalists.”
” ‘Do not wait up for me tonight, for the night will be black and white’ were the last words he wrote. He was found hanged from a grille with an apron string that he, in his madness, thought was the Queen of Sheba’s girdle. A protean figure, Nerval’s artistic worth is still in dispute 150 years after that fateful, freezing night in Paris.”
Ahmad Saidullah reviews The Salt Smugglers, by Gerard de Nerval, in the current issue of the Quarterly Conversation.
In the wake of the failed 1848 revolution, “laws were enacted to curb populist fiction in newspapers, such as Dumas’ ephemera and Eugene Sue’s serial novels, that the authorities believed had stoked the masses into action.” This book was Nerval’s immediate reaction to the politics of the day, and he called it “not a novel,” but “a history,” in the form of letters addressed to the editor of the newspaper that published it.
The book, Saidullah writes, “embodies Bakhtin’s idea of the polyphonic or dialogic novel where narrative authority is undermined. In this playful, pre-postmodern work, the frame dominates the story.”
