Portrait of Chateaubriand
by Anne-Louis
Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, 1809.
References in
parentheses to Atala refer to the 1905 edition with an introduction,
notes, and a vocabulary by Oscar Kuhns; those to René to Claude
Martin’s edition of 1984. Numbers in
brackets refer to endnotes. Translated
passages are my own hasty renderings; the original French is relegated to
endnotes.
Chateaubriand is universally considered the founding figure of French
Romanticism, and there can be no question about the label’s general
accuracy. His self-consciously emotional
analyses of nature and of love made him an icon in his day, much as Byron was
in England just a few decades later [1], Many readers have found René to have something
in common with Childe Harold as exemplars of the mal du siècle, and something
of their kinship as celebrities might be inferred from the tousled portraits of
the viscount by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson and of the baron by Thomas
Phillips.
Chateaubriand not only created a character who wandered the world trying
to free himself from alienation, he himself spent time in an America that was
still largely possessed by its natives.
The question has been debated by historically-minded critics how much of
America Chateaubriand actually saw. He
surely never visited the Mississippi River or Florida, and it is very unlikely
that did he ever wrote while squatting on the floors of Indian hits, as he
liked to claim. Indeed, it is not direct
observation but rather his tumultuous imagination that underlies his
descriptions of America,
Among the most rhetorically elaborate and mythic passages in Atala is
the opening description of the Mississippi River, so extravagant as to be altogether
unrealistic, so majestic it is worth quoting at length.
When
all these rivers are swollen with the torrents of winter, when the storms have
uprooted great swaths of forest, the felled trees fill their sources. Before long the mud has cemented them and
creepers joins them together and the plants, sending out roots in every
direction, consolidate the debris. Carried
off by the foaming waves, they descend in the Meschacebe which takes hold of
them, carrying them to the Gulf of Mexico only to run grounds on banks of sand,
multiplying thereby the river’s outlets.
Now and then the river raises its voice while passing these heaps and its overflowing waters spread among the
forests’ colonnades and the pyramidal Indian tombs. It is the Nile of the desert. But grace is always accompanied by grandeur
in scenes of nature. While the central
current pulls the corpses of pines and oaks toward the sea, one sees currents
on either side rising, along the shores, floating islands of water cabbage and water-lilies,
the yellow blossoms of which mount up like little pavilions. Green snakes, blue herons, pink flamingos,
and young crocodiles embark as passengers on these flowery vessels, and the
colony, unfurling its golden sails before the wind, lands asleep in some
secluded cove of the river.
(1-2) [2]
This grand vision of great island-like agglomerations of timber
cascading downstream, reshaping the topography moment by moment, in effect constantly
reshaping the continent, is enacted between the columns of the trees and near to native peoples’ funerary pyramids, suggesting Greek and Roman antiquity and
the even older Egyptian civilization. Not
only are the great floating islands of debris covered in flowers; they are also
rich to an unlikely degree in fauna, birds and reptiles, which sail like the
early explorers until they come to rest by chance and establish a terra nova.
The primary characteristics of Chateaubriand’s America are its
magnificent richness in animals and plants and the wildness of its formation
amid turbulent earth-shaping floods. The
new world is specifically associated with Eden, for instance in Genesis’ mention
of four rivers but the reference is rendered ambiguous by the counterbalance of Milton’s four
infernal streams [3].
The fecundity of nature recurs elsewhere, for instance, during the
escape of Atala and Chactas when the cedars and live oaks, covered with Spanish
moss, teem with wildlife: “butterflies, bright flies, hummingbirds, green
parakeets, and blue jays” (28) [4] in a veritable swarm of life. Likewise, the scene at Niagara Falls is awe-inspiring
not simply because of the cataract, but also because of the eagles who “ride on
currents of air” and the altogether unreal picture if “wolverines” who “hang by
their flexible tails at the end of a low branch, to seize from the abyss the
broken corpses of elks and bears” (77)[5].
Yet such fantasies were not the only indulgences Chateaubriand allowed
his imagination. Since his reconversion
to Roman Catholicism in 1798, he had abandoned the philosophes to become
a committed Christian, and both Atala and René were portions of
his Génie du christianisme, a work which as a whole sought to justify religion
on largely aesthetic rather than intellectual or spiritual grounds. Thus, while nature may be a staggering marvel,
human beings, infected by original sin, are unredeemed until accepting
Jesus. In order to advance, Atala must
“have recourse to the Christian God” and pray to Mary (18). The”savages” inflict dreadful tortures on
their captives (19), and in fact cruelly kill the benevolent Father Aubry (79). They are, at best, “child-like” (68), with
“sorrows” that “arise from ignorance” which can be remedied only by “necessary instruction”
(58) [7]. Chactas cannot be a lover of Atala
unless he “learn the lessons of the Christian faith” (64). Doubt is impossible as Chateaubriand describes
a veritable theophany.
The
grotto seemed suddenly lit up; one could hear in the air the words of angels
and the tremelos of heavenly harps; and when the recluse took the holy vessel
from his tabernacle, it seemed I saw God himself emerging from the side of the
mountain. (65) [8]
A powerful figure for René’s “faiblesse”
is his prospect from the top of Etna.
A
youth full of passion, sitting at the mouth of a volcano, weeping for the
mortals whose homes he sees below is doubtless, o old men, an object deserving
of your pity, but, whatever you might think of René the scene provides an image
of his nature, of his being. Thus during
my entire life I have had before my eyes the creation, at once huge and
imperceptible, and an abyss open at my side. (67) [9]
His is an existential anxiety, not a
Christian “dark night of the soul,” specifically because what he faces is not
the prospect of judgement and eventual apocalypse, but rather a drear emptiness. Though he placed the novella as part of his apologia
for Christianity, the hero lacks Christian hope.
A distinctly modern variant on the medieval sin of acedia
(sometimes spelled accidie) which Aquinas describes (in Summa Theologica
II) not as a symptom of sensitivity or a contemplative stage but rather as a
flight from the divine, amounting very nearly to unbelief. The closing words of the epilogue’s narrator
in Atala indicate a remoteness from Christian salvation: “man, you are
nothing but a passing illusion, a melancholy dream. You exist only for sadness; you are nothing
but the dolor of your soul and the unending misery of your soul.” (81) [10]
This is not the only contradiction which Chateaubriand ignored as a
consequence of his clinging to Christianity’s consolations. The glorification of nature itself evident in
the opening passage (and throughout) is sweeping and unqualified, familiar from
many other authors’ Romantic rhetoric, yet inconsistent with the Christian
notion of the natural world as fallen.
The most fundamental statement of this proposition is Genesis 3:17: “cursed is the ground
for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life,” but the
idea recurs, for instance in Romans 8:22: “For we know that the whole
creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”
America was an apposite scene for René’s ambivalence toward nature,
natives, and, indeed, the entire creation.
Since Europeans arrived on these shores, the country was often described
as an unspoiled paradise but equally often as hell. Thus to many early settlers Indians must be remnants of the ten lost
tribes of Israel whose conversion would lkead to the apocalypse. Thomas Morton who founded the colony at
Merrymount called New England Canaan in his 1637 book, and for John Winthrop the
Massachusetts Bay Colony was “a city on a hill,” [11] while William Bradford says the new
world was a “hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild
men" [12]. For William Crashaw the devil "visibly and palpably
reigns” in America and for John Smith “the chefe God they [the natives]
worship is the Devel.” [13]
Just as Chateaubriand’s lifelong royalist politics may seem to harmonize
poorly with his liberal sentiments on m any issues, his allegiance to orthodox
Christianity compromises his Romanticism.
His enthusiasm for nature is prototypically Romantic, but, to be
consistent, this would be accompanied by a view of the indigenous people as
Rousseauian “noble savages,” though for Chateaubriand their heathenism is a
fatal deficiency. Similarly, René’s despair is a godless one,
though he is nominally Christian. These
contradictions would scarcely have bothered the author, whose conclusions were
always more impressionistic than systematic.
Atala and René dramatic examples of the mythic use of the
American colonies by an author who broke considerable new ground while insisting on traditional religious faith.
1.
In his Mémoires d’outre-tombe (vi) Chateaubriand clearly regards
Byron as a rival, complaining of the British writer’s failing to name him as an
influence and disappointedly calling himself “one of those fathers who are
disowned when the son has come to power” in an trope invoking Oedipal anxiety
of influence.
2. Quand tous ces fleuves se sont gonflés, des
déluges de l’hiver, quand les tempêtes ont abattu des pans entiers de forêts,
les arbres déracinés s’assemblent sur les sources. Bientôt la vase les cimente,
les lianes les enchainent, et des plantes, y prenant racine de toutes parts,
achévent de consolider ces débris. Charriés par les vagues écumantes, ils
descendent au Meschacebé: le fleuve s'en empare, les pousse au golfe Mexicain,
les échoue sur des bancs de sable, et accroit ainsi le nombre de ses embouchures.
Par intervalles, il éléve sa voix en passant sur les monts, et répand ses eaux
débordées autour des colonnades des foréts et des pyramides des tombeaux
indiens; c'est le Nil des déserts. Mais la gráce est toujours unie à la
magnificence dans les scénes de la nature: tandis que le courant du milieu
entraîne vers la mer les cadavres des pins et des chénes, on voit sur les deux
courants latéraux remonter, le long des rivages, des iles flottantes de pistia
et de nénufar, dont les roses jaunes s'élévent comme de petits pavillons. Des
serpents verts, des hérons bleus, des flamants roses, de jeunes crocodiles,
s'embarquent passagers sur ces vaisseaux de fleurs, et la colonie, déployant au
vent ses voiles d’or, va aborder endormie dans quelque anse retirée du fleuve.
3. See Genesis 2:10 and Paradise Lost
II, 575.
4. Papillons, de mouches brillantes, de
colibris, de perruche vertes, de geais d’azur.
5. Des aigles, entraînés par le courant d'air,
descendent en tournoyant au fond du gouffre, et des carcajous se suspendent par
leurs queues flexibles au bout d'une branche abaissée, pour saisir dans l'abîme
les cadavres brisés des élans et des ours.
6. La fille de Simaghan ut recours au Dieu des
chrétiens.
7. Tous vos malheurs viennent de votre
«ignorance; c'est votre éducation sauvage et le manque «d'instruction
nécessaire qui vous ont perdue;
8. La grotte parut soudain illuminée; on
entendit dans les airs les paroles des anges et les frémissements des harpes
célestes; et lorsque le solitaire tira le vase sacré de son tabernacle, je crus
voir Dieu lui-même sortir du flanc de la montagne.
9. Un jeune homme plein de passions, assis sur
la bouche d'un volcan, et pleurant sur les mortels dont il voyait à ses pieds
les demeures, n'est, sans doute, ô vieillards, qu'un objet digne de votre
pitié; mais, quoi que vous puissiez penser de René, ce tableau vous offre
l'image de son caractère et de son existence: c'est ainsi que toute ma vie j'ai
eu devant les yeux une création à la fois immense et imperceptible, et un abîme
ouvert à mes côtés.
10. Homme tu n'es qu'un songe rapide, un rêve
douloureux ; tu n'existes que par le malheur ; tu n'es quelque chose que par la
tristesse de ton âme et I'éternelle mélancolie de ta pensée.
11.
In his 1630 sermon "A Model of Christian Charity."
12.
Bradford, Of Plymouth
Plantation (1952) p. 62.
y.
Wm. Crashaw, "The Epistle Dedicatory" to Alexander Whitaker's Good
News from Virginia (London, 1613), in Early Accounts of Life in Colonial
Virginia, 1609-1613. Ed. W. F.
Craven (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimile & Reprints 1976, n. p.
13.
John Smith A Map of Virginia with a description of the country
(1612), 29.
