El Desdichado

Je suis le ténébreux, – le veuf, – l'inconsolé,
Le prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie:
Ma seule étoile est morte, – et mon luth constellé
Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.

Dans la nuit du tombeau, toi qui m'as consolé,
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d'Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon coeur désolé,
Et la treille où le pampre à la rose s'allie.

Suis-je Amour ou Phébus? . . . Lusignan ou Biron?
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine;
J'ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la syrène . . .

Et j'ai deux fois vainquer traversé l'Achéron:
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d'Orphée
Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fée.

—Gérard de Nerval (1854)

El Desdichado

I'm the dark one, – the widower, – the inconsolate,
The prince of Aquitaine at the abolished tower:
My only star is dead, – and my constellated lute
Carries the black Sun of Melancholy.

In the night of the tomb, you who consoled me,
Give me back Posillipo and the sea of Italy,
The flower that pleased so my desolated heart,
And the trellis where the vine and the rose marry.

Am I Cupid or Phoebus? . . . Lusignan or Biron?
My forehead's still red from the kiss of the queen;
I've dreamt in the grotto where the siren swims . . .

And I've twice victorious crossed the Acheron:
Modulating in turn on the lyre of Orpheus
The sighs of the saint and the cries of the fay.

—Translated by Divya Menon

The sun is setting in a mythical landscape that seems beyond time. Bats come flying out carrying the banner of melancholy, who is sitting still, chin in hand, as sand sifts down an hourglass. Melancholy has massive wings, but can you see them flapping? A caliper idles in the winged angel’s hand. A polyhedron balances oddly in the middle-ground. The dog-cow curled up on the floor and the apocalyptic flood outside reveal a kind of imaginative excess. Only the baby seems focused, working with a tool resembling a burin (the carving tool Dürer used to make engravings). And in his self-portraits, Dürer looks a little like the angel staring at something beyond. [1]

Melancholia appears to Dürer less as a mood or affliction or even a disposition than as a moment in an artistic process. The oldest meaning of the word in ancient Greek (µέλαινα χολή) was an illness caused by an excess of black bile. But as early as the 4th century BCE, the author of Problem XXX, I (likely a student of Aristotle's) arrived at a sense of melancholia as a creative, philosophical, or otherwise exemplary temperament. This idea of the melancholy genius remained largely forgotten until the Renaissance. It was popularized in the fifteenth century by the priest, doctor, and philosopher, Marsilio Ficino. Dürer’s print reimagines Ficino's melancholy genius. Ficino apprehends the individual or type as exceptional, thereby reflecting a humanist conception emerging through a rebirth of the disposition closest to divinity from the Problemata. But the individual only arises at a moment in the development of society, and Melencolia I tries to envision the artist's role in society.

The angel of melancholy is a genius at geometry who resembles the artist in the studio. The double allegory makes a statement that elevates art and brings it closer to philosophy. Panofsky discovers the missing link in the chain from Ficino to Dürer in Agrippa of Nettesheim, who grants imaginative activity the strange gift of melancholy. Ficino lived in the Florence of the Medici and still denied art access to melancholy, which was reserved for contemplation. [2] Agrippa of Nettesheim, in his Occulta philosophia (the first draft of which might have ended up in Dürer’s hands sometime after 1510), laid out three forms of melancholia corresponding to the imagination, practical knowledge, and spiritual knowledge. Dürer engraves the first of these: imaginative melancholy.

The artist in this print cannot communicate their ideas to the world. But the baby sits there, scribbling. No one knows what. Perhaps no one need know what. Neither a genius of geometry nor prone to fits of melancholy, the baby is able to work. The contradiction that activates this product of Dürer’s imagination is that the mature artist who has mastered the principles of their craft cannot put them into practice while the scribbler blithely makes stuff. The task of the artist becomes to transcend this condition. Dürer was a master draughtsman (who went on to publish volumes on the subject) who managed to etch this problem, and the print survives as a testament to his ability to communicate the idea that art, while aspiring to truth, must also semble.

Semblance becomes the main aspiration of Nerval’s oeuvre. This sounds like a generalization, if not plain wrong, not least because one is tempted to associate Nerval with some kind of antiquated French pastoral charm. [3] But even when the narrator describes the texture of the Valois countryside in a story like Sylvie, he indulges its appearance. Nerval published “El Desdichado” in a series of twelve sonnets – Les Chimères – included almost as an appendix to a collection of short stories called Les Filles du Feu (1854). The name of the sonnet samples Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. It’s the name taken on by a knight in disguise. The character in Scott is something of a chimera, compounded by the fact that “desdichado” doesn’t quite mean what Scott and Nerval want it to. It simply means unhappy, not necessarily disinherited. Whatever he is, the poet introduces himself as the dark one, recalling the angel with the saturnine face, and, more generally, the darkness associated with creative labor.

The epithet the poet singles out for himself with em dashes is widower, which announces another by way of their lack. Julia Kristeva calls this other the pre-object of loss in Soleil noir. Whether as wife, mother, goddess, or star, however one imagines the lost object, the lute or lyric carries it. Melancholia spreads from the poet to the sun Dürer etched black. From a moment overcome in a process of making, it seems to continue beyond the poem. Kristeva reads the poetic effort as a kind of sublimation through language. In this view, melancholia sublimates mourning for that from which the poet finds himself disinherited. But what if it sublimates a fear of mourning? Then it would protect against the possibility of loss. Then one could read the turn inward and into the poem as rooted in experience and still read it as an aesthetic gesture, as Romantic. “El Desdichado” doesn’t quite work through melancholy but gives form and refuge to it.

Nerval’s strange symbols are made stranger by the poem’s formal unoriginality. This is a typical sonnet in fourteen alexandrines divided into two quatrains and two tercets in a predictable rhyming scheme. Its very lyricism transports a crisis of meaning. It deranges – constellates – reason with a confounding form of reasoning. But like Dürer’s assemblage of esoterica, Nerval’s poem can be read consciously naïvely as making poiesis palpable. 

Sonnets are comfortable dealing with absence. Petrarch writes to Laura and Ronsard to Hélène, but Nerval’s dead star does not go by any name. It could be his dead girlfriend, Jenny, or his dead mother, Marie; it could be a literary character like Beatrice in Dante, Isis in Apuleius, or even a primordial feminine principle. [4] Whatever has died, the black sun occupies the locus of loss. Melancholy rides the poet’s lute. 

Maybe the second stanza refers to the poem itself in the second person. The lute becomes a “you” who consoles the poet by bringing back memories of Naples: a place that fascinated Nerval as well as other nineteenth-century Parisian wanderers like Théophile Gautier, who was a friend of the poet’s and granddaddy of “l’art pour l’art.” The ruins of Pompeii fascinate Gautier as much as the frescoes at Herculaneum haunt Nerval. These sites are near-far-aways that attest to the potential ruination of everything more acutely for having been buried in their prime. The quatrain ends on a nearer-far-away: the French countryside, which, for Nerval, usually meant the Valois region of Île-de-France. Intertwining roses and vines return the poet to childhood haunts Nerval exhausted himself revisiting in the summer of 1853, the summer before he published the first version of this poem in Alexandre Dumas’s Le Mousquetaire. 

If you didn't know who “you” was in the previous stanza, the poet no longer knows who he is in the first tercet. Cupid? Apollo? Lusignan? Biron? Names bequeath images and perhaps Nerval wishes for his poet to remain unrecognizable. If one were to psychoanalyze him, then perhaps these lines suggest a return to a pre-Oedipal, dyadic struggle. [5] The kiss on the forehead mimics a maternal memory. The queen mother must have worn red lipstick. What does this have to do with dreaming in aquatic grottos with sirens? On the one hand, the two lines jostle each other paratactically. On the other, they mean something in Nerval’s mythic lexicon. The mother, the siren, and, in the last stanza, Eurydice, lure the poet beyond experience.

Nerval dreams of Dürer’s angel in the self-consciously autobiographical Aurélia, the first volume of which was published in the Revue de Paris on 1 January 1855. In this dream, he finds himself roaming through a museum or university building with several lecture halls and corridors. He finds the angel – he cannot say if it’s a man or woman – in one of the central galleries, struggling to fly amid thick clouds. Exhausted, bruising its wings against the balustrades, Melencolia finally falls to the ground and the narrator wakes up screaming. Why are the clouds inside the building? Flight seems impossible. The imagination seems stuck like a bird in a conservatory.

What makes the first Chimère melancholy is not that it copes with loss (which would be somewhat sanguine in spirit) but that it deals with the possibility of loss by wishing to escape experience. The image of Orpheus descending into the underworld need not refer to prior mental breakdowns overcome by the poet. [6] It is a wish that reveals the melancholy of experience itself. This wish is born of the conviction that the work is indeed the only place where darkness might continue to be laced with the possibility of light. Despite being a pleasing arrangement of syllables, Nerval’s poem is deeply unsatisfying, for it presents neither a legible puzzle nor its potential solving. Dürer’s print pictures a moment to be overcome by the melancholy artist, mathematician, or philosopher. Which implies that there is something to live for and make work for. By etching its contours, Dürer sought to bring the world into light. “El Desdichado” wallows in darkness.

NOTES

[1] Erwin Panofsky, Raymond Klibansky, and Fritz Saxl study the figure of the seated angel in relation not only to prior pictorial representations of acedia – marked by the saturnine face, the contemplative pose, the keys dangling from the belt, the shackle on the floor, etc. – but also the genealogy of melancholia through treatises on natural science, philosophy, and theology, in the Warburgian masterpiece, Saturn and Melancholy. In Melancholia’s face, Panofsky recognizes that it may be "Saturn's face which regards us; but in it we may recognize also the features of Dürer." See Panofsky, Klibansky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1964), 365.

[2]  This was a man who woke up every day and performed all kinds of rituals, like combing his hair from front to back 36 times, taking all kinds of potions and tinctures, emptying his bowels, and then thinking, until the sun was in a certain position in the sky.

[3]  Proust straightens this misconception in Contre Sainte-Beuve (c. 1900), arguing instead that Nerval's romanticization of the countryside reflects his cosmopolitan consciousness. See Marcel Proust, "Gérard de Nerval," Contre Sainte-Beuve (Éditions Gallimard: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1978). 

[4]  Kristeva reflects on the polyvalence of Nerval's symbols, tracing the multiple meanings of each sign, including the lost love object: "The untiring quest for mistresses or, on the religious level, the accumulation of feminine divinities or mother goddesses that Eastern and particularly Egyptian religions lavish on the "subject," points to the elusive nature of that Thing – necessarily lost so that this "subject," separated from the "object," might become a speaking being. See Kristeva, Black Sun, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 145.

[5]  Evelyne Ender recognizes in Nerval's Sylvie an impulse to return to the mother-child dyad: "in its most radical form, reminiscence drives us toward a preoedipal universe, to the dream of a dyadic bond that holds mother and child together." See Ender, Architexts of Memory (2005), 177.

[6]  The "twice victorious" of the last stanza of the poem has been interpreted to refer to Nerval's two major mental breakdowns: the first occurring around 1841, which was also when he wrote some of the sonnets he publishes over a decade later as the Chimères, while in the throes of a second bout of illness.