Exotic Nations by Renata R. Mautner Wasserman

Author:Renata R. Mautner Wasserman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

1 Edward Said, for instance, is very annoyed by Chateaubriand’s account of the “Orient” but acknowledges his importance in creating an image of the Near East for the European imagination. He also claims that Chateaubriand helped create the image of the romantic writer in particular, and of Middle Eastern civilization in general (Orientalism, pp. 172–75).

2 He is neither entirely ignored nor widely glossed. In the preface to Chateaubriand’s Vie de Rancé, Roland Barthes discusses only the aging genius, omitting any reference to the young literary revolutionary ("La voyageuse de nuit"). Pierre Barbéris applies the newer critical tools to readings of Rene, Atala, Les Natchez (René de Chateaubriand; A la recherche de l’écriture; and Chateaubriand). Chateaubriand, however, did not undergo the rescue operation performed, for instance, on Sade or Poe. A revision may now be under way, by an approach unlikely to have pleased him—feminist historicism, which sees his early works as part of a postrevolutionary construction (and repression) of femininity. See, for instance, Naomi Schor, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction, and the articles by Schor, Gutwirth, Vallois, and Waller in Rebel Daughters. Waller distinguishes between Atala, which she sees as a cautionary characterization of the feminine, objectifying and distancing, and Rene, seen as inviting identification with the male. All see these texts—and Paul et Virginie—only as they function in postrevolutionary French culture.

3 Richard Schwitzer, for instance, bemoans the “fate of Atala as a beginning French reading text” whose effects at that level can be “disastrous” (Chateaubriand, p. 90). Barbéris proposes that the “taming of the text” by “scholarization” and by cutting selected passages effectively counteracts the ideological danger of a “free and savage reading of the text” (René de Chateaubriand, pp. 15, 19–20); in this reading Chateaubriand is sufficiently subversive of the nineteenth century for acceptance in the canons of the late twentieth.

4 Margaret Waller finds that the prescriptions and implications of René, Atala, and the volume from which they were excerpted, he genie du christianisme, fit in precisely with Napoleon’s plans to turn back the French Revolution (p. 158–59); Naomi Schor says that "Atala helped pave the way for the Napoleonic Code, first promulgated in 1804” ("Triste amérrique,” p. 144); there is a precise fit between Chateaubriand and his time.

5 Chateaubriand’s energetic life and multiple loves have inspired many biographies and his voluminous autobiographical writings are another endless source of information (or disinformation) about his life. I refer most often to George D. Painter, Chateaubriand: A Biography, which covers the period up to the publication of Atala and seems accurate on the facts.

6 The introduction to one collection of excerpts from Chateaubriand’s works begins by stating flatly that “Chateaubriand is more or less unanimously considered the founder of French romantic literature,” as if it were merely repeating undisputed facts (Emile Faguet, Introduction to Chateaubriand, Atala, René, Le dernier Abencérage.) Intertextuality between Atala and Paul et Virginie is also taken for granted. See, for instance, the essays in Sara Melzer and Leslie Rabine’s collection Rebel Daughters.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.