Aurélia Reading Order

Aurélia, ou le rêve et la vie (Aurélia, or Dream and Life, 1855, published posthumously) by Gérard de Nerval is the hallucinatory autobiography of his madness — the account of the two episodes of mental illness (1841 and 1853-54) that punctuated and ultimately ended his life, written during the second episode and published after his suicide in January 1855. The work is one of the most extraordinary documents of the inner life in the French tradition: Nerval describes his hallucinations (the visions of the doubled self, the descent into the underworld, the encounters with supernatural figures, the sense of the cosmic significance of apparently random events) with the same precision and detail that a naturalist would bring to descriptions of the external world, from a position of partial self-awareness that knows the experiences are hallucinations but also lives them as real. Aurélia is simultaneously a clinical document and a spiritual autobiography: the 'Aurélia' of the title is the ideal woman (based on the actress Jenny Colon, who died in 1842) whose loss precipitates the first episode of madness and who appears in various transformations throughout the hallucinations. The work had an enormous influence on the French tradition: Breton identified it as a founding document of Surrealism; Artaud's writings on madness are in direct dialogue with it; and Nerval's method of treating the hallucinatory as literal has remained a resource for writers from Rimbaud to Michaux.