Nerval’s Léo Burckart The Duplicity of Power and the Power of Duplicity
Nerval’s Léo Burckart The Duplicity of Power and the Power of Duplicity Ross Chambers I N 1835 STENDHAL abandoned Lucien Leuwen, discouraged by the illiberal atmosphere prevailing in Rome as in Paris, and more especially by the news of the réintroduction of censorship in France. A novel concerned wi...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
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| Published: |
Johns Hopkins University Press
1987
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| In: |
L' esprit créateur
Year: 1987, Volume: 27, Issue: 2, Pages: 56-73 |
| Further subjects: | B
Girard, René (1923-2015)
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Nerval’s Léo Burckart The Duplicity of Power and the Power of Duplicity Ross Chambers I N 1835 STENDHAL abandoned Lucien Leuwen, discouraged by the illiberal atmosphere prevailing in Rome as in Paris, and more especially by the news of the réintroduction of censorship in France. A novel concerned with the electoral practices of the July Monarchy had now little chance of achieving publication; and Stendhal turned to Henry Brulard and soon after to La Chartreuse de Parme, where the portrayal of political maneuvering takes cover under a representation of restora tion Italy. The frenzy in which La Chartreuse was written suggests some thing of the return of the repressed. The strategy of displacing the fictive reference to another place and/or period so as to permit indirect com mentary on the author’s own society is, of course, a classical one: it had been employed a little earlier (1834) by Lorenzaccio, a play which, how ever, was judged unperformable and did not see the planks until the end of the century. There is crying need for a critical monograph on the political fiction of the 1830’s, but I undertake here only to read another drama of the period which was in fact performed, in spite of its political thrust. After problems with the censorship apparatus which have been documented by Jean Richer in his edition of the play, Léo Burckart was staged in 1839 at the Porte Saint-Martin. The play is an excellent example, therefore, of what was possible in the way of public oppositional writing (and more specifically in the theatre, a traditional bête noire for censors) during the years of disenchantment that followed the July revolution. Taking up the socially sensitive question of political assassination in the wake of Loren zaccio, but also of Fieschi and his " machine infernale," Nerval’s play (the collaboration of Dumas is most evident in the firmly constructed plot) could not afford simply to dramatize, as it does, the phenomenon of political duplicity. It needed a duplicity of its own, a duplicity of writing, a simple manifestation of which is the adoption of the cover tac tic already referred to (the political realities of Louis-Philippe’s France being addressed via a representation of post-Napoleonic Germany in the year 1819). 56 Su m m e r 1987 C h a m b e r s But the duplicitousness of Léo Burckart goes considerably further, and I propose to treat it, first, as a text-book case of the mutual involve ment it permits us to discern between the duplicity of power and the oppositional duplicity of artistic production, and second as a startingpoint for an inquiry into the relationship (of difference and similarity) between oppositional writing in two periods of post-revolutionary dis enchantment that, at first sight, seem very similar: the early years of the July Monarchy and those of the Second Empire.1 It is symptomatic, for example, that when Nerval applied in 1838 for the censor’s permission to perform his play, this office was operating without legal status. The law voted in 1835 was of two years’ duration only, and was never renewed, so that the defacto censorship that existed throughout Louis-Philippe’s reign had lost its de jure legitimacy as early as 1837. This is a fine example of the trickiness of power and the in authenticity in which it is exercised, the very phenomenon about which Musset, Stendhal and Nerval wrote and which Nerval attempted to oppose more directly by a court challenge. Quite possibly the sense of its own illegitimacy is what led the censor’s office, in 1838, to pay particular attention to the climactic scenes of Act IV (or the VeJournée in the 1839 text which Nerval reprinted in Lorely and which will be my reference here).2 Amid masks, disguises, betrayals and counter-betrayals galore, we witness a gathering of secret societies, explicitly described as a replica of the diplomatic congresses of the era, in which a minister passes him self off as a student, students impersonate the Prince’s soldiery, and two complementary characters function, one (Paulus) as a double agent... |
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| Item Description: | BN: 27, HN: 2 |
| ISSN: | 1931-0234 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: L' esprit créateur
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1353/esp.1987.0017 |