SOURCE: "Hakem," in Nerval's Double: A Structural Study," Romance Monographs, 1979, pp. 46-58.

In the following essay, Gilbert analyzes the figure of the double in Nerval's story "L'Histoire du Calife Hakem."

Two Nervalian heroes, Hakem and Spifame, were confined to an asylum for insanity, apparently as victims of a type of schizophrenia. They both have autoscopic experiences, a hallucinatory perception of one's own body image projected into external space.¹ For both, there exist historical models which Nerval altered to fit his own experience. In providing the details of their speech and life, with obvious sympathy, Nerval invites his reader to examine these figures as projections of his own existential dilemma.

Hakem's story presents the most explicit treatment of the double, or autoscopic experience, in Nerval's writings; it forms the core model whose transformations can be traced in his other works. "L'Histoire du Calife Hakem," first published in 1847, appears in...