SOURCE: "Comedy, Tragedy, and Madness in Nerval's Roman Tragique" Modern Language Notes, Vol. 89, No. 4, May, 1974, pp. 600-13.

In the following essay, Zuckerman analyzes Nerval's difficulty with presenting a tragic vision in his novel Roman Tragique.

Nerval presents the Roman tragique within the introduction to Les Filles du Feu as an illustration of his inability to write a novel from a comic perspective. The unfinished state of the Roman tragique, however, indicates that for Nerval writing a novel from a tragic perspective is equally problematic. In fact, the tragic novel continually puts its own structure into question, suggesting that for Nerval the language of the novel and a tragic vision of the world are in some sense incompatible.

The narrator of the Roman tragique begins his story by showing ways in which he is different from Destin, a character in Scarron's Roman comique; he concludes by showing ways in...