Le sublime dans le "Voyage en Orient" de Nerval

By setting out for the Orient, Gérard de Nerval yields to the mysterious song of the sirens that had already captivated more than one Romantic writer. He sets sail, travels onward, and multiplies the stages of a journey that can be understood as a series of emotions guided toward a shared horizon : the sublime. Journey to the Orient indeed displays the transport of the soul before “sublime rocks,” the supreme impression inspired by a “sublime verse,” and the terrifying ardor provoked by “sublime monstrosities.” Nerval thus draws from the polysemic legacy of a notion that he carefully reappropriates. Accordingly, this article aims to show how the author of Aurélia makes the sublime the culminating point of an epic in which dream borders on adoration, danger brushes against prayer, and silence merges with enthusiasm- terms that together ensure the movement through which it becomes possible, upon the ocean of ages, to soar toward the heavens.