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.

Bankei’s Zen Made Easy

  

Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in Peter Haskel’s Bankei Zen: Translations from the Record of Bankei; those in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     The prize of enlightenment is so precious, one might naturally think it must be very difficult to attain.  The history of Zen certainly includes some heroic strivers, among them the Second Patriarch Huìkě who cut off his own hand to offer Bodhidharma as evidence of his earnestness.  The very last advice the Buddha gave his followers was to strive hard [1], and monks of the sangha have virtually always been given a rigorous and demanding regimen of meditation and sutra chanting. 

     Yet Zen, particularly the Rinzai (Linji) tradition that arose from the Southern School has always recognized the possibility of sudden enlightenment.  Their founder Huìnéng, after all, experienced what the Japanese came to call satori when he overheard a passage of the Diamond Sutra.  Though monasteries of all sects continued the demanding spiritual practices they had inherited, none considered diligent effort sufficient to guarantee enlightenment, and many thought spiritual liberation might suddenly arrive at any moment. 

     The seventeenth century Japanese monk Bankei served as abbot of several important monasteries (including that at Ryoanji in Kyoto where the celebrated “dry garden” of raked sand and rocks is found).  He was as well a genuinely popular teacher whose public sessions attracted tens of thousands of listeners.  His approach to Zen, though singular in its simplicity and surprising to many, was approved by such masters as he could locate and his work became sufficiently influential that he is today regarded as one of the greatest exponents of Japanese Buddhism [2].

     Bankei’s central teaching is his exhortation to dwell in the Unborn Buddha Mind, a concept derived from the concept called in Sanskrit anutpāda, which is to say unconceived, or unborn [3].  His sermons hammer away at this one simple counsel to the point of becoming tiresome.  “Straightway abiding in the Unborn Buddha Mind just as it is , and you’re a living  tathagata from  today forever after” (4).  “Everything is perfectly managed with the Unborn” (13).  ”You’re always a living buddha, and there’s no time when you don’t remain a buddha” (22).  One need do nothing to achieve this status; it is in fact always already present {4].

     Bankei repeatedly recounts his own history of pursuing enlightenment by practicing zazen, reciting sutras, and studying Chinese to read the accounts of earlier masters, only to assure his followers that they need do none of these, though, if they wish, they may (49).  Bankei does not shout or strike meditators, seeking to shock them into enlightenment.  He tells them that, rather than anticipating years of rigorous and perhaps fruitless effort and self-denial, they are fortunate to hear his advice which has the potential to bring them enlightenment the very same day they hear his message.  The question is problematized by Bankei’s claim that “there’s no such thing as enlightenment” (83) and that “talking about wanting to achieve ‘enlightenment’ is certainly useless.” (84). But the aspirant need not worry about his meaning.  Everything, Bankei says, is already perfect.  There are no rules: “Do whatever you like” (58, 155), he says.  A student need do nothing but recognize the fact of a liberation fully present in every moment [5].

     Thus he insists that moral laws and miracles are irrelevant (7), there is no need even to speak of Buddhism or Zen (8), koans are nothing but “old wastepaper” (23) and icons useless (25).  All methods are merely expedients (103) and, if study has any role at all, it would be only to confirm one’s satori (114). 

     One must, however, contend with an adversary perhaps more subtle than memorizing characters on a sparse diet with a harsh teacher: the old bugbear of self-consciousness.  Bankei notes that his listeners are paying attention to his sermon with their conscious minds, yet they are simultaneously aware of other extraneous sounds such as sparrow, crows, or human voices which they hear without intention or effort, thus with the Buddha Mind [5].  While one may intentionally concentrate on a lecture or on achieving a goal, one must sneak up on oneself unawares to avoid paying attention or striving.  Surely this is the reason that most of Bankei’s listeners did not find their lives transformed after once hearing him speak.  Will is powerless, one must fall without thought into the Unborn Mind . 

     By his account Bankei’s own enlightenment came after prolonged arduous effort, when he was ill and had not eaten for a week, “on the verge of death.”  He spit against the wall and, when he “noticed that the sputum had congealed into a jet-black lump like a soapberry,” he suddenly realized “Everything is perfectly managed with the Unborn . . .I’ve just been uselessly knocking myself out!” Presumably his overstressed physical state had taken him out of himself and brought him momentary thoughtlessness which was sufficient to alter his consciousness, leaving his spirit “clear and buoyant” (13).  Yet he insists that his listeners need not follow his path.

     Bankei does not shrink from self-contradiction; indeed, he embraces paradox.  In spite of criticizing the traditional means for pursuing enlightenment, since one need do nothing whatever to find the Unborn Buddha Mind, he also declares that “to practice is hard” (67) and advises students “don ‘t fritter away your time” (89).  In spite of considering koan study “of no particular usefulness,” (23) he uses koans to bring his followers to understand his position. 

     The very koan that elicits Bankei’s dismissal of the device in fact enriches the subtlety of his vision.  An old man asks Hyakujō Oshō whether an enlightened person remains subject to causation.  He says he had told a follower of his own that such a one would no longer be subject to birth and death whereupon the student was condemned to five hundred lives as a fox.  When he was told that an enlightened state “does not ignore causation,” the student was freed from his fate and died in the form of a fully enlightened fox [6].  His error had presumably been to provide too definite an answer.  Bankei thus reminds his listeners of the value of such old stories for some and warns against accepting duality.  Bankei's use of the story, reminds his followers of the teaching while holding it at arm’s length, using it while explicitly rejecting its value. 

     Another central koan for Bankei’s Unborn Buddha Mind is that in which a monk who pursues the Sixth Patriarch, expecting to challenge his succession is startled into a higher consciousness by being told  “Think neither good nor evil. At this very moment, what is the original self of the monk Myo?” [7]  This “original self,” identical with the Unborn, though always and inevitably present, is obscured by delusion and accumulated habitual ignorance.   Hui-neng assures his questioner who inquires whether this is the most profound mystery that “what I have told you is no secret at all.  When you look into your own true self, whatever is deeper is found right there.”  He sounds here very much like Bankei.

     We twenty-first century Americans may feel that our era, even more than seventeenth century Japan is a “degenerate age of Buddhism” (6), sorely in need of a kickstart of insight.  Bankei reminds us that the Unborn Buddha Mind is always present, always perfect, for those who can recover a spontaneous unselfconscious grasp of it.

 

 

 

1.  "Behold now, bhikkhus, I exhort you: All compounded things are subject to vanish. Strive with earnestness!" Maha-parinibbana Sutta: Last Days of the Buddha translated from the Pali by Sister Vajira & Francis Story.

2.  In the century following Bankei, Hakuin rose to prominence.  He was an advocate of very rigorous and unremitting practice and very critical of what to him was “do-nothing” Zen, including that practiced by Bankei’s followers.  Most modern Japanese Zen has roots in Hakuin.

3.  The term is often encountered in the Prajñāpāramitā Sutras and in the Lankavatara Sutra as well as in  Nagarjuna.

4.  Readers may be reminded of the use of the expression “always already” (immer schon) in Heidegger, Althusser, Derrida, and others.

5.  This point appears on pages 5, 27, 28, and 33.  The reader may be reminded on Cage’s celebrated piece 4’33” (1952).  In another image, Bankei notes that one withdraws the hand from hot fire without thought, prior to conscious perception.

6.  Case 2 Mumonkan.  The phrases here quoted are from Two Zen Classics: The Gateless Gate and the Blue Cliff Records, translated with commentaries by Katsuki Sekida and edited and introduced by A. V. Grimstone, p. 31. 

7.  This is quoted from the above edition of the Mumonkan, Case 23, p. 81. This story appears as well in the Sung version (the Hui-sin edition) of the Platform Sutra.  The questioner’s Chinese name is Hui-ming.

The Rather Abstract Charm of Diderot’s La Réligieuse

 

     Diderot’s La Réligieuse is scarcely a novel at all.  Apart from the apparent accident of its composition and an elaborate metafictional apparatus, the book focuses less on action and events or on constructing credible characters than on the insistent repetition of the central figure’s suffering.  The image of Suzanne as a “damsel in distress” [1] is, in fact, the center of the story’s content.  Virtually every page is filled with her helpless laments and the whole work is presented as her appeal for a rescuer. 

     In this use of the image of a helpless woman, in need of a man’s intervention, Diderot was highly conventional, though he was innovative, even radical, in other ways.  The spectacle of a defenseless woman, threatened, often sexually, by a villain occurs universally.  The motif, one of the most widespread in world culture, appears in myths like those of Andromeda and Sita and in many heroines of the Yuan drama, through Scheherazade and European fairy tales such as “Snow White” and “Rapunzel,” to nineteenth century American melodrama, modern Bollywood movies, and bdsm pornography.

     In the last paragraph of her story, Suzanne summarizes her entire manuscript saying “je m'étais montrée à chaque ligne aussi malheureuse à la vérité que je l'étais (“I had shown myself in every line as unhappy as I was”).  Given such a simple and unchanging protagonist, Diderot might have concentrated on description (of which there is very little) or style (generally straightforward) or on theme.

     Diderot’s view of the Roman Catholic Church and, indeed, of Christianity might suggest that last alternative.  The fact is that prior to fictional treatments of the topic of convent life often had very little to do with the spiritual growth for which religious houses were created.  A good deal of the genre is rather overheated.  Often the nunnery was represented as an impediment to lovers, as in the Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, or the Lettres portugaises of the Vicomte de Guilleragues.  Risqué tales also proliferated concerning this female world forbidden to men’s eyes, including Vénus dans le cloître, attributed to Jean Barrin and Le Portier des Chartreux attributed to Gervais de La Touche. 

     In La Réligieuse Diderot does not attack the church as a whole despite his hostility to Roman Catholicism.  Suzanne is a devoted believer who has no specific objection to the prayers and rituals she is expected to perform.  Her only protest, and presumably her author’s, is against the forced imposition of religious vows.  The depictions of one viciously sadistic Mother Superior and another, consumed by predatory homosexual desire (and unstable to boot) are balanced by the first, a generous-hearted mystic who seems really to belong in a convent.    

     Forced vocations were a reality; indeed, Diderot’s sister had died at twenty-eight in an Ursuline convent in which she had been placed due to her mental health, and the author had himself been confined in a Carmelite monastery at the age of thirty at the orders of his own father who wished to prevent his son’s marriage to Anne-Antoinette Champion.  The cloister walls held him scarcely a month, but the experience may well have provided him with memories that sharpen his account of Suzanne’s suffering. 

     However, neither that slender theme and nor the generous helpings of pathos, highly seasoned as it is with sex and violence, provides the book’s principal interest.  In recent years the text has gained increasing recognition for its conceptual and metafictional elements, what might be called a sort of proto-postmodernism (if the term is not too barbarous). [2]

     Even a simplified outline of the levels of fabulation in La Réligieuse can be dizzying.  The events of the plot are discernible only through multiple layers of refraction, distortion, irony, and deceit.  The text is presented, as were many early novels, as factual, a genuine series of letters, documents of lived experience, though from the start the fact of their publication throws that appearance in doubt.  Still, the narrator is, as she often reminds the reader, a perfect ingenue who says she writes “sans talent et sans art, avec la naïveté d'un enfant de mon âge et la franchise de mon caractère” (“without talent and without art, with the naivety of a girl of my age and with the frankness of my character”).  Her unworldliness is only perhaps too perfect, as she strains credulity when she cannot recognize lesbian love-making though it seems that both she and the Mother Superior reach orgasm.  

     Furthermore, this modesty topos is a highly conventional formula, recognized for millennia by rhetoricians.  Since Suzanne’s pleas are meant to be persuasive, to move the heart of her correspondent, and win his aid, they are appropriately rhetorical, though the use of such familiar devices may cast a wash of uncertainty over the story’s veracity. 

     The tension between reality and representation that inevitably accompanies fiction is, in the case of La Réligieuse, dramatically heightened by the peculiar circumstances of the book’s creation.  Suzanne’s heart-felt appeals are directed to the Marquis de Croisemare, a real person and a friend of Diderot’s.  Thus the “novel” breaks out of the page and into lived experience.  The letters were originally composed as part of an elaborate hoax to bring the Marquis to Paris, since he had several years before sought to intervene in the case of a certain Marguerite Delamarre who had been involuntarily confined in a convent.  The plan failed -- though the Marquis was taken in and responded with sympathy and offers of help, he asked his correspondent to his estate instead of coming to Paris. 

     Diderot continued to work on the letters over the next ten years.  In 1770 Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, included the book in his handwritten journal Correspondance littéraire, a periodical of tiny but influential circulation, along with the Marquis’ actual replies.  Diderot continued to work on the manuscript, modifying it as well as adding a “Préface-annexe” explaining the circumstances of its composition and altering some passages by Grimm and the Marquis.  (This “preface” was printed at the end of the text, a detail that puts the reader just a bit more off balance.)

     Finally, in 1796 the book was published in a generally available edition which proved so popular that it ran through fourteen printings by the turn of the nineteenth century.  By this time the Revolution had first outlawed lifelong religious vows and then attempted to suppress the church altogether.  La Réligieuse was associated in this revolutionary period not only with unorthodox religious views, but also with pioneering avant-garde artistic technique.  Diderot’s interest in interrogating the ideal of mimesis is evident in the very title of his story “Ceci n’est pas un conte” (“This is not a Story”).

     The book’s most radical characteristics points toward such new directions as performance art, metafiction, and collaborative composition.  The circumstances of its creation and its resulting form question the very bases of mimetic fiction, rendering the subject unstable and ambiguous and in that way La Réligieuse anticipates late twentieth-century trends at a time when much of European culture had not even yet engaged with realism. 

 

 

 

1.  The phrase is in fact used by Richardson in The History of Sir Charles Grandison but such threatened and oppressed women regularly appear in his other novels as well, as well as in the Gothic novels of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

2.  Consideration of Diderot, often centering on Jacques le fataliste et son maître or on “Ceci n’est pas un conte” occurs regularly in discussions of metafiction.  See, for example, Gamal Abdel-Fattah, Postmodern Literature and its Background, Marie-Laure Ryan, “Postmodernism and the Doctrine of Panfictionality,” Narrative, Vol. 5, No. 2 (May, 1997), Malin Strømberg, What Makes Fiction “Meta”? A comparative study of literary self-reflexivity from Sterne to Winterson, and Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox.  Diderot’s metafictional role is also reflected in his appearance in Malcolm Bradbury’s To the Hermitage. 

An Explication of Stevens’ “A Primitive like an Orb”

     Wallace Stevens’ late poem “A Primitive like an Orb,” like Beethoven’s late string quartets, is elegantly wrought and profoundly spiritual, though both the poet and the composer puzzled or put off a portion of their initial audiences. [1] The early work that established Stevens’ reputation was replete with lapidary images, at times tumbling one after another with such speed as to dizzy the reader, but generally sharply defined, solid, and earth-bound. “A Primitive like an Orb,” published when the author was sixty-eight years old, is far more abstract and assertively thematic, even tendentious. The poem, more explicitly than anything in Harmonium, more clearly even than his “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” proffers a spiritual, indeed a mystical, potential in art alone stripped of religion’s conventional clothing in mythology and supernaturalism. In Stevens’ terms god is a “supreme fiction,” known to be illusory but efficacious nonetheless when willfully believed. [2]
     Stevens is hardly alone in defining a non-supernatural route to illumination. In their various ways, Jains, some Stoics and Skeptics, pantheists, most Buddhists and some Hindus have done the same, but Stevens presents a modern sophisticated attempt to recover religion from the ruins left by the “death of God” in the nineteenth century.
     In “A Primitive like an Orb,” Stevens outlines what is at once his aesthetic and spiritual philosophy, with a majestic Olympian confidence beyond that of his often highly qualified and oblique prose musings. Using metaphors of surprising and illuminating originality (called “opulent” in stanza 4) and French-style syllabic alexandrines (for the most part) of such music that their authority is difficult to question, the poet soars above the decorative and ameliorative, seeing the eternal in the ephemeral, the pattern underlying each perception, the macrocosm in every microcosm, with a grand mystery parallel to that promised by mystics and occult savants.
     A linear paraphrase of this ambitious notion as it unfolds through the poem’s ninety-six lines may be useful though the idea is present from the start. I take the word “primitive” in the title in the sense of originary, though it bears traces as well of association with the religious paintings of the “Italian primitives.” The “orb” is the Platonic sphere of which, in the Timaeus, the philosopher says “the shape of a sphere, equidistant in all directions from the center to the extremities, which of all shapes is the most perfect” [4] The “perfect” shape is later the basis for the concept of the divine as “an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere” [5]
     To seek what is promised in the initial phrase “the essential poem at the centre of things” the poet first notes the necessity of recognizing that every significant perception entails an “apperception.” What one sees is not the discrete object outside but a connection, a relationship, a dyad of viewer and viewed. In this way the “cast-iron of our lives” is “gorged” with “good.” The process is aided by beauty, always a subjective, mind-created quality, in the poem signified by “nymphs” and “genii,” the graces that signify art. (stanza I)
     The possibility of a “supreme fiction” is suggested by the ambiguous veridical status of art. “It Is and is not and, therefore, is.” [3] The beauty of art, “its huge, high harmony,” affirms a validity and a reality distinct from that by which other discourses are tested (“a separate sense”). Once accepted, once it “captives the being,” the truth of art seems to inhere in the nature of things, to have always been there. (stanza II)
     The “captiving” of the senses that occurs with the apprehension of aesthetic vision brings immense and intimate pleasure (“what milk,” “what wheaten bread and oaten cake,” “green guests and table in the woods and songs”) at the same time as it remains powerful, divine, and mysterious. The “secluded thunder” of such revelation allows access to what was otherwise “too heavy for the sense to seize,” a truth manifest yet obscure. (stanza III)
     The rewards for the poem’s reader are not limited to delight, but rather extend without limit, until “last terms, the largest, bulging still with more.” Steven’s emphasis is on apperception. [6] It is neither the vision itself nor the subjective mind that can produce “the fulfillment of fulfillments” but only the connection, the link, the integration of the consciousness with the world. “One poem proves another and the whole.” [7] Only by infusing reality with passion may “the lover, the believer, and the poet” whose “words are chosen out of their desire” shape language to a reflection of themselves. In this way they “celebrate the central poem.” Is this not similar to the Chandogya Uphanishad’s assertion that the individual atman is identical to the cosmic Atman, though with aesthetic language substituted for the mythological? (stanza IV)
     Insistently repeating his theme, Stevens declares that through this process in which the mind and the world inform each other “by sharp informations” (precise imagery) until “the central poem became the world.” (stanza V) with a sensuality recalling erotic love. [8] We make love to creation through language ”each one the mate of the other.” The poet is “the mate of summer,” the refracted image of self “a self of her that speaks, denouncing separate selves” and exploding dualities. The process, like human love, is productive as “the essential poem begets the others.” (stanza VI) In the end “the central poem is the poem of the whole,” in which the cosmos as a whole has a coherence and a meaning like that of a well-crafted work of art. (stanza VII)
     This whole, this cosmos or Atman or god may also be called a vis, a strength or power. It is the broadest generalization of all things, “a principle or, it may be, the meditation of a principle, an “inherent order.” It is positive in influence, “a nature to its natives all beneficence, a repose,” allowing the mind to relax, having purchase at once on itself and on all else. This may be imagined as well as “muscles of a magnet” (invisible order perceived),and the mention of muscles suggests then the figure of “a giant, on the horizon, [i.e. barely visible] glistening [yet grand].” This giant becomes the dominant image of the poem’s conclusion. (stanza VIII)
     This vision is a surpassingly beautiful one “in bright excellence adorned,” “crested with . . . fire,” with “scintillant sizzlings,” “serious folds of majesty,” “trumpeting seraphs,” altogether “a source of pleasant outbursts in the ear.” (stanza IX) In spite of the fact that the mind cannot grasp his totality in any single vision, the “giant” of reality “imposes power by the power of his form.” The grand whole, the vision of the total whole lurks behind imperfect incarnations in the world and people and art though it always appears in truncated forms. (stanza X) Though barely glimpsed, this giant, “an abstraction given head” is divine, the “centre on the horizon,” god as the infinite sphere. (stanza XI)
     What more can be said? By imbuing nature with passion, the individual renders it holy and redemptive, though in the end it be “nothingness,” which is to say nirvana.


That’s it.” The lover writes, the believer hears,
The poet mumbles and the painter sees,
Each one, his fated eccentricity,
As a part, but part, but tenacious particle,
Of the skeleton of the ether, the total,
Of letters, prophecies , perceptions, clods,
Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one
And the giant ever-changing, living in change. (stanza 12)


     Various traditions have suggested that the glint of the divine might be discerned in any object at all: Among the more dramatic insights are the Zen assertion that “the Buddha is dried dung” [9] and the gnostic claim that Christ may be found in a split stick or under every rock. [10] Blake saw “a world in a grain of sand” and Huxley under mescaline in a vase of flowers. [11] However, none of these foci of meditation is an intentional work of art. Stevens does not say that any sight at all can lead toward the mystical giant, but rather that illumination may come through a profound gaze not on some appearance in the world but on the artist’s reception of an object. For him the connection between perceiver and perceived defines the link between microcosm and macrocosm the clear view of which has the potential for enlightenment. Stevens is developing to its furthest the late nineteenth century spiritual valorization of art and the Symbolist exploitation of underdetermined images.
     The spiritual validity of Steven’s “supreme fiction” accessible through meditation on poems can only be measured by practitioners. It is certainly true that devotion has many modes to suit the sensibilities of various human consciousnesses: some advance through charity, some must be ravished by devotional rapture, others climb to the sublime on intellectual concepts, while the rituals and formulae of established religions serve the needs of most. Stevens’ poem is elegantly crafted and subtly argued: surely his method deserves a place among the rest.




1. The poem first appeared as one of John Bernard Myers’ Banyan Press series, the Prospero Pamphlets in 1948 with two drawings by Kurt Seligmann. It was republished in Steven’s 1950 volume The Auroras of Autumn. The pamphlet’s notice in the New York Times for June 27, 1948 observes that “the poem, at times, eludes understanding." and makes no mention whatever of the artist or the images.

2. See Gregory Brazeal , “The Supreme Fiction: Fiction or Fact?” for a critic’s view that Stevens failed in his quest to define such a possibility and, indeed, that the very notion arose from a misreading of William James. (Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Fall, 2007), pp. 80-100). One might wonder in what sense a fiction can be fictional.

3. Descending from Hesiod and Aristotle all the way to Derridean deconstruction.

4. Timaeus 33b.

5. In the “Dialogue on Infinity” attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, but identical or very similar formulae appear in Empedocles, Augustine, the Liber XXIV Philosophorum, Alain of Lille, Nicholas of Cusa, Pascal, and Voltaire among others.

6. Cf. Steven’s claim may derive from, though it goes beyond Kant’s notion of transcendental apperception.

7. Cf. Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

8. There is, of course, a vast mystical literature in which divine and human love are conflated: Krishna and the gopis, Mechthild von Magdeburg, Rumi, and John of the Cross, and a great many others.

9. In another passage, the Buddha is three pounds of flax. See The Gateless Gate, Cases 21 and 18,

10. Gospel of Thomas 77.

11. Doors of Perception.