Aurélia : un monde qui va de soi Le problème d’acausalité dans les visions

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Aurélia ou le rêve et la vie (1855) de Gérard de Nerval est sous l'enseigne d'un mécanisme intelligent. Celui-ci s'incarne à la fois dans la démarche immotivée des visions et le comportement passif du narrateur. Cette double gratuité dont la mise en forme s'attribue une bonne partie des ressources langagières de l'écriture d'Aurélia se remanie, au cours du récit, pour rendre compte des différentes nuances de l'idée nervalienne de « seconde vie ». Nous nous intéressons donc, dans cette étude, aux points du texte où le principe d'acausalité constitue un biais d'interprétation pour le rêve.

Extended abstract— Aurelia or Dream and Life (1855), by Gerard de Nerval, follows an intelligent mechanism. This mechanism is embodied both in the unmotivated approach of the visions and in the passive behavior of the narrator. This two-sided apathy, which demonstrates well the linguistic capacity of Aurelia's writing, is rearranged, during the story, to reveal various aspects of the author's idea of "secondary life". We are therefore focused, in this study, on parts of the text where the principle of "noncausality" constitutes an interpretation bias for the dream. Aurélia's narrator uses means as diverse as they are fascinating to discern with an authenticity and sincerity that the reader would find it hard to doubt what happens in him and for him. It is sincere, because through naive writing - that one does not read, in this expression, nothing shouting or pejorative - he is content to communicate to us what he is certain of. Even his gesture of believing, by which he gropes around the invisible world, strikes us as more certain and reliable than any real image that one would raise in front of us. Thus, the ingenious contrast in which his work is marked is that of expressing the supernatural as natural and convincing as possible. The reader adheres to this view of things very early on, because the author removes the task of following some mysterious thread that would link these together, giving him time to consider what he is offered. From shows playing out in front of his eyes, he only has the last acts. With Nerval, the origin, the cause and the author are worth less than the act and the effect themselves. We therefore start from the idea that the text of the story is likely to be approached from an actant present in any change of state which it nevertheless excludes from its space. In the pages to come, we propose to raise, through examples taken from Aurélia's text which, more than simple illustrations taken as witnesses, serve as a corpus for the in-depth studies that transcend our initial hypotheses, the elements of the text by virtue of which Nerval's dreamlike universe seems to us to be animated by itself, without any wanted explanation as to how it works. These elements could arise from linguistic, conceptual and theoretical considerations and express a certain distancing not only from the narrator with the objects and creatures that are revealed to him, which covers the aspect of a fascination, but also of the narrator and of himself that we often talk about, in terms of duplication and megalomania. We are therefore going to focus, in particular, on this unnecessity that strikes the dreamlike achievements in Aurélia and that we will approach from angles as diverse as automatism, acausality, synchronicity, passivity, autonomy, … But it should be noted, from now on, that the narrator, in his resigned attitude, is not a prey to visions and apparitions but lets it be his prey. More than submission, we are therefore dealing here with abandonment, an abandonment that pays more than any scheduled action and endeavor. Therefore, acausality, in the individual, can lead to enlightenment if it is understood as the gratuitous correspondence between the material world and the spiritual world. From the first dream, the dreamlike space presents itself as pre-existing, it is a déjà-fait where the narrator enters. This one has only to follow the course of events in a world which, even, is already making its place. The salient eclipse of which causality in Aurélia is victim can be understood by a series of scenes where the visions that are exposed to the narrator's sight turn out to be actions marked by automatism. The absence of attentional cost is perhaps one of the first features characterizing automatism and that Ravaisson had defined, long before, as the effacement of the consciousness of effort. The second trait that Perruchet considers to be part of the first is “parallelism”. The psychologist defines this property as follows: "Operationally, it corresponds to an absence of mutual interference between automated processing and other processing."3 The criterion of unconsciousness, as another characteristic of automatism, is defined "by the inability of subjects to verbalize, or more generally to intentionally testify through a symbolic response, to the nature of a process or an event".4 We also propose to refer to the notion of synchronicity which was invented by Jung in his Roots of Consciousness and where acausality is the principle to define the automatic (automated) act as an acausal act. The first definition of the word "synchronicity" is the one that best applies to the point of view that we develop through this work. Synchronicity will then be the correspondence between two events, one physical, the other psychic, which are located outside a causal relationship, are linked by a link of significance. Jung's theory of synchronicity in psychology and psychotherapy feeds, in many ways, on Chinese Tao philosophy founded by the sage, Lao Tseu. According to this philosophy in broad outline, the Tao which means "path" or "path" (to be taken) is the basis of life, the soul that turns it on. Each element or phenomenon has a double in nature, which far from rejecting it as an opposing force, completes it and lends it a reparative effect. The Taoist worldview admits of no causal argument, so any attempt to explain the world is looked down upon there. The question of the passive, for its part, is of particular interest for the study of language mechanisms reflecting self-management or, to put it better, the co-management of the visions depicted in Aurélia. Indeed, the passive here is of such frequency that the reader is led to make assumptions about its use. Not only the constitutive phenomena of the dream space interact in perfect agreement and without having to control each other, but also they integrate, in them, the one who comes to be placed there while making sense for him. It is often said that Aurelia is the relation of a succession of spiritual experiences. But a subject, who "experiences", more than it exerts an action on the element supposed to fulfill the function of object, receives the effect from it : it is therefore a patient and not a real agent. Different language means allow, in the text of the story that we have studied, to express this submission, moreover, so desired. But the narrator's submission is that of a body and a soul. Sometimes he sees his body duplicate, sometimes his soul joins that of his dead relatives who inform him of the immortality of humans. Likewise, in Nerval, any material whose dream images have a body of their own are likely to undergo transformations. We can therefore say that the Nervalian being is a passive being in the sense that he is at all times overwhelmed by his imagination and its world a harmonious but acausal arrangement insofar as it functions on the mode of metamorphosis. Enlightened or visionary, the narrator, although himself immersed in the strongest metamorphoses that touch on madness, is clearly aware of it and remains lucid 3PERRUCHET Pierre, « Une évaluation critique du concept d'automaticité (A critical assessment of the concept of automaticity »), Les automatismes cognitifs (1988), p. 28. 4 Ibid. p. 35 owards them. Passivity is therefore translated here by a constitutive perseverance of meaning when the truth comes to light in delirium and the metamorphosis ends in ecstasy. Thus, the Infinite whose idea runs through the texts of fantastic authors and whose research pushes them to the gates of the unreal, can be placed in an acausal aim. Its rejection of any delimitation exercise results in it being defined in its negation of our ways of understanding the world, including causal relationships.

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agentivité , Aurélia , causalité , linguistique , rêve

Recherches En Langue Et Littérature Françaises

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The Obvious World of Aurelia: The Issue of Lack of Causality in Dream Images

2022