Rene and Atala REVIEW
How did I miss Chateaubriand when I was assembling sources for my course on Romanticism? He seems to be right up there with Rousseau and Goethe in his influence or intended influence. Like Goethe, he later was somewhat ashamed of his influence but nevertheless, one does not always get to unlight the forest fires that they set ablaze. Written in 1801 and 1802, the short novels Rene’ and Atala participated in Romanticism’s reaction to Enlightenment values by making the irrational and emotional heroic. “One inhabits, with a full heart, an empty world,” Chateaubriand wrote, coining that James Dean like character who suffers for being a great soul, outcast from normal life in a mediocre world.
The young man in his story, Rene, revolts against a world where the only great task a young man is offered is the task of stuffing their fiery ambitious soul into a puny life. Rene must deal with a world that does not ask enough of its young. Rene then has no choice but to flee civilization for the wilds of the American west where he winds up living with Indians. “Absolute solitude, the vision of nature, soon plunged me into a state well-nigh impossible to describe,” Rene tells us in the story.
“Without parents, without friends, alone on earth, so to speak, and not yet having loved, I was overwhelmed by the superabundance of life. I was subject to sudden blushes, and felt as if rivers of molten lava flowed through my heart; I would give out involuntary cries, and night was as troubled by my dreams as my waking. I needed something to fill the abyss of my existence: I descended valleys, climbed mountains, summoning with all the strength of my desire the ideal object of some future affection; I embraced it in the winds; I thought I heard it in the sighing of the waters: all things became that phantom of imagination, both the stars in the sky and the very principle of life in the universe.”
That is a romantic era hero if I have ever seen one.
In Atala, the character, Chactas, falls deeply in love with an Indian woman, Atala, and finds, in her, something in life worth being romantically devoted to. As with all romantic lives it seems, bliss is infected by reason or some form of religion or both. Chactas’ missionary priest tells him that his suffering is part of what it means to be human. “I have never yet met a man who has not been deceived in his dreams of happiness,” he consoles him,
“no heart that does not suffer some hidden wound. The heart that appears calmest resembles the natural wells of the Alachua savannah: the surface appears calm and clear, but when you look into the depths of the basin, you see some monstrous alligator that the well nourishes with its waters.”
Chateaubriand would later retract the philosophy of his youthful romanticism, explaining sardonically in his memoirs, that he would not have written such things if he could go back to his youth.
"If René did not exist, I would not write it again; if it were possible for me to destroy it, I would destroy it. It spawned a whole family of René poets and René prose-mongers; all we hear nowadays are pitiful and disjointed phrases; the only subject is gales and storms, and unknown ills moaned out to the clouds and to the night. There's not a fop who has just left college who hasn't dreamt he was the most unfortunate of men; there's not a milksop who hasn't exhausted all life has to offer by the age of sixteen; who hasn't believed himself tormented by his own genius; who, in the abyss of his thoughts, hasn't given himself over to the "wave of passions"; who hasn't struck his pale and dishevelled brow and astonished mankind with a sorrow whose name neither he, nor it, knows."
The Romantic era painter, Caspar David Frederick put the law of the romantic heart this way: “The artist’s feeling is his law. Genuine feeling can never be contrary to nature; it is always in harmony with her. But another person’s feelings should never be imposed on us as law.” The French painter Eugene Delecroix would have joined Frederick in scolding Chateaubriand for letting age dampen the fire of youthful passions. We are not tradesmen,” wrote Delecroix to a friend in 1820, “We shall not bury our youthful hearts, at twenty-five or thirty, in the depth of a safe.”
Question for Comment: When, if ever, is it appropriate to surrender living out an irrational approach to life to something more planned and predictable?
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