The Christian Romanticism of Chateaubriand’s Atala and René

 

 

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.