So I put it aside at the time, but earlier tonight, having decided against going out, I was lying around in my bedroom with Loveless playing softly in the background and feeling broody in an inchoate sort of way, when my eye fell on the book and I thought the time was ripe to return to it.
Our dreams are a second life. Not without a shudder do I pass through the gates of ivory or horn which separate us from the invisible world. The first moments of sleep are an image of death -- our thoughts are held in a cloudy swoon, and we cannot tell the exact instant when the "Ego" continues the labour of existence in another form. A vague underground chamber little by little grows lighter; the pale, gravely motionless shapes which inhabit the dwelling-place of shades emerge from the shadow and from night. The picture takes form, new light falls on these strange apparitions and gives them movement. The world of the Spirits opens before us.
The blurry boundary between dreams and waking life, and the commingling of the two, has preoccupied me in the past: in an abstract, vaguely philosophical sense (phenomenology again - for what is the world, and reality, if not simply that which is present to us through experience, and are dreams not experiences just as much as those we undergo in waking life?); in recollection (sometimes, I can't work out whether something which I recall experiencing occurred 'only' in a dream or 'actually', while I was awake); and even, on occasion, quite immediately (as in the strange befuddled in-between state where I'm unsure whether I'm dreaming or awake - an uncertainty which is never entirely resolved, for there's never a clear line to be crossed between the two). In Aurélia, this blurriness is evoked - and invoked - with a fervid immediacy and incontrovertability, in which everything is drenched with a sort of heaviness, a suffocating mustiness and lushness which is the particular province of dreams, and this is generated by the dense, luxuriant prose as much as by the intersheavings of dreams with waking experiences. (Reminded me a bit of the Gormenghast books, though it's considerably more deranged than those, where ritual and stasis are all.)
However this may be, I think that the human imagination has invented nothing which is not true, either in this world or others; and I could not doubt what I had seen so distinctly.
It's a book which, I think, requires its reader to submit to it, and I suppose that that's what I've done by spending the last few hours wrapped up in its embrace - an embrace which is somehow both languid-drowsy and violent-turbulent. The text is a maelstrom of competing visions and ideas, heavily infused with 19th C mysticism and fascination with the Orient, along with some distinctly mystical takes on Christianity, and centred around the narrator's (Nerval's?) obsessive love for the titular Aurélia and the many forms that this (and so she) takes...I've glossed over the importance of love here and would say more about it were my thoughts on this book not such a mess (which fits the book itself!). It's compelling in its ill-formedness, coming on like the ramblings of an unhinged mind - indeed, it's framed by authorial protestations regarding the 'illness' that gave rise to the experiences it recounts - and convincing, too, possessing a perverse internal logic of its own. Not the kind of book that I'd have been likely to stumble across on my own (I came to it because Sarah had named it as one of her canonical books) but it's definitely left an impression.
Actually, this particular volume (translated and, I think, selected by one Richard Aldington), contains a few other pieces (and extracts from larger pieces) by Nerval - I'll probably read them at some point, but I wanted to set down my initial impressions of Aurélia immediately...
