SOURCE: Wang, Ban. “Writing Self, and the Other: Chateaubriand and His Atala.” French Forum 22, no. 2 (May 1997): 133-48.

[In the following essay, Wang claims Chateaubriand offered an Orientalist approach to foreign culture in Atala. Wang examines the work's aesthetics through the concept of chinoiserie—or the dual elements of grotesqueness and disorientation—to argue that Chateaubriand both exoticized and sexualized the New World.]

The notion of the grotesque often figures prominently in the way one culture thinks about its radical other. In his classic study of the grotesque the German literary theorist Wolfgang Kayser recalls an instance in eighteenth-century France. The meaning of the grotesque, he says, was extended to apply to some strange aspects of Chinese culture under the rubric of chinoiserie. The term designates “the fusion of spheres, the monstrous nature of ingredients, and the subversion of order and proportion which characterizes them.” Kayser cites a critic's bewildered remark on classical Chinese painting: “The Chinese go so far as to represent houses and landscapes hovering in the air or growing out of trees.” What a viewer accustomed to Chinese art and aesthetics would find wholly natural is regarded as grotesque.¹

Indeed, the disorienting grotesque attributed to Chinese culture bewilders no less a philosopher than Michel Foucault. Reading the description of a certain Chinese encyclopedia by Jorge Luis Borges, Foucault was struck by a system of classification that places animals in such curious categories as “appartenant à l'Empereur,” “embaumés,” “cochons de lait,” “chiens en liberté,” “qui viennent de casser la cruche,” and so on. Foucault, ever the sympathetic philosopher of madness and the Other, pronounced such an incongruous array of items as “fantastic” and “monstrous.” This anecdote has almost been worked to death, but we may still find a freshness in the self-reflection induced by cross-cultural encounter. After his initial cultural shock, Foucault engages in a sober self-reflection on the limits of Western culture and the epistemic network that structures the understanding of Western man. After Borges's passage which “secoue à sa lecture toutes les familiarités de la pensée—de la nôtre: de celle qui a notre âge et notre géographie,” Foucault sees in “le charme exotique d'une autre pensée” the limitation of Western thought and proceeds to examine it critically.²

Chinoiserie and Foucault's self-reflection mark two stances of Western thinkers toward a fundamentally different culture. Feeling the native sensibility ruffled by the strangeness of the alien, the first approach attempts to soften the incomprehensible by cloaking it in the neutralizing blankets of the grotesque, the fantastic, or the exotic. Though slightly out of proportion and even transgressive, artifacts of chinoiserie are after all quaint and charming. If otherness becomes threatening, it is banished and branded with labels such as mysterious, demonic, monstrous, evil, devilish, or sinister. The classical Western attitude either aestheticizes an alien culture as a romantic realm of fantasy and myth, or relegates it to a grotesque noche obscura. What distinguishes Foucault's approach is that he is ready to confront the apparent abyss of the Other. He turns his eyes to the heart of darkness that borders on the viewer's self and examines its historical context, thus discovering the limitations of Western culture and destabilizing its complacent subjectivity.

These two approaches to an unfamiliar culture may serve as an analytical frame to explore the works of Chateaubriand, a writer who also displays a strong fascination for the Other. Chateaubriand's novella Atala explicitly sets out to deal with the Other, in the forms of vast nature and the Indian in the New World. It is generally agreed that Atala stems from the literary exoticism prevalent in late eighteenth-century France. This tradition is marked by an urge to discover far-off places, a fascination for the unknown and the marvelous, and above all a desire to seek alien cultures and to explore their differences from the West. This desire was directed to the Middle East as well as the Far East, a geographical space traditionally designated as “the Orient.” Victor Hugo summed up this spirit of exoticism, which fueled the imagination of his fellow Romantics, when he remarked: “During the age of Louis XIV they were Hellenists: today we are Orientalists.”³ If we regard the Orient as a mode of feelings or a cluster of literary themes rather than a geographical entity,⁴ and if we follow the definition of exoticism by Gilbert Chinard as “l'ensemble des sentiments et des émotions que nous ressentons au contact des pays étrangers et des âmes étrangères,”⁵ Chateaubriand's Atala can be read as the work of an Orientalist, one who turned to North America before he embarked on his actual Oriental journey.

This essay will read Atala along two lines. First, the novella displays an aestheticizing tendency germane to chinoiserie. Instead of discovering something new in an alien culture, Chateaubriand rewrites savage nature in religious and literary terms drawn from Western culture. He projects his own literary imagination and fantasy on what he assumes to be the clean slate of the New World. My second reading shows that savage nature awakens the savage in Chactas and Atala, arouses their libidinal drives, and plunges them into sexual passion. This slide into the libidinal threatens the civilized or Christianized self-identity by which the author fashions the characters of Atala and Chactas. The plot enacts a conflict between sexual love and religious imperatives. To resolve the impasse, Chateaubriand effects a leap of faith over the libidinal abyss by a recourse to the transfigurative light of the miraculous. With a drastic narrative turn toward the sublime and the marvelous, he re-inscribes Christianity on the savage mind of Chactas and on the savage landscape.

WRITING NATURE

In the preface to the 1801 edition of Atala, Chateaubriand writes that Atala came from “l'idée de faire l'épopée de l'homme de la nature, ou de peindre les mœurs des Sauvages.” The writing of this “épopée,” he claims, was inspired by the news of the massacre of the Natchez tribe in Louisiana in 1727 by French colonists. He was drawn to the Indians' struggle to win freedom in their own land by rebelling against colonial oppression. This was one of the reasons that prompted the author to travel to North America to look into Indian life and, by studying it, “peindre les mœurs des Sauvages.”⁶

Whether Chateaubriand did travel to North America, however, remains an open question. The Indians in Atala are believed to spring from Chateaubriand's reading and imagination and not from any real prototypes he might have encountered in his travels. According to Jean-Claude Berchet, even the publication of Voyage en Amérique in 1827, a work “où se mêlaient un récit de voyage authentique et une enquête de seconde main,” does not dispel the fictional aura surrounding Chateaubriand's American experience, especially in the deep south where Atala is set.⁷ This is confirmed by Chinard's comment (246-48) that the flowers of North America in Atala are painted by someone who has never seen the real ones. Chinard's study on Chateaubriand's exoticism in America traces motifs, figures, images, flora and fauna, and even specific passages and sentences in Atala to the vast body of exotic literature in France. He suggests that Atala is a brilliant textual fabrication out of the pre-existing exotic literary discourse rather than a sympathetic attempt to come to terms with an unfamiliar culture.

Although less skeptical critics have traced and documented Chateaubriand's American journey and his contact with the Indians (Chinard 30-67), it remains unclear that the journey was as crucial to the writing of Atala as the author and critics have claimed. In the Preface to Atala, Chateaubriand writes that he had already written some fragments before the journey. “Je manquais des vraies couleurs,” and he needed to travel because “je m'aperçus bientôt que … si je voulais faire une image semblable il fallait, à l'exemple d'Homère, visiter les peuples que je voulais peindre” (258).

What Chateaubriand sought in the journey, then, were true colors and embellishments to give verisimilitude to a grain of idea already in his mind. Even though he repeatedly said that Atala was written “dans le désert, et sous les huttes des Sauvages” (259), one may doubt that he sincerely looked into Indian culture. The artistic principles that guided his hand in painting “les mœurs des Sauvages” come from the classical tradition of the West. “Depuis longtemps je ne lis plus qu'Homère et la Bible” (260), and there was no attempt to read the Indians beyond the surface features of the “image semblable.” Indeed, in writing Atala the author clung to no other literary model than those of the Bible and Homer. He would be happy “si l'on s'en aperçoit, et si j'ai fondu dans les teintes du désert, et dans les sentiments particuliers à mon cœur, les couleurs de ces deux grands et éternels modèles du beau et du vrai” (260). This fidelity to Western models extends to every detail of convention, including “prologue, récit, et épilogue,” and his goal is to invoke the taste of the ancients (260). Confronted with the vast space of the New World, with foreign people and unfamiliar customs, Chateaubriand seemed enclosed in the cherished forms of literary representation. He resolved to look to Western literary resources to make sense of what he saw.

Although it is hardly fair to blame a writer for drawing on his own tradition, it is disturbing that Chateaubriand's reliance on the classical resources is predicated on the assumption of other cultures as total absence. In Atala the New World is so new that it is destitute of meaning. It has to wait for the will and imagination of a writer to inscribe its empty space with words and meaning. It has to wait for a narrative voice to tell its own story and history. This voice speaks through Chactas. Both narrator and protagonist of the story, Chactas is an Indian, a “savage” who cannot assimilate the life-style of the civilized world. He returns to his homeland to give voice to the empty forests and the silent savages, but he does not do so without first being equipped with the language, culture, and taste of the Western world. Although not a Christian, he is characterized, in the capacity of a storyteller, as a product of Western culture. Brought up “avec beaucoup de soin” by Lopez, he was tutored by “toutes sortes de maîtres” (48). Chactas is no usual Indian sachem enmeshed in despotism or blessed with indigenous wisdom, but one who “avait conversé avec les grands hommes de ce siècle et assisté aux fêtes de Versailles, aux tragédies de Racine, aux oraisons funèbres de Boussuet, en un mot, le Sauvage avait contemplé la société à son plus haut point de splendeur” (43). Having thus attended the school of French culture and graduated with a certificate of Western languages, Chactas is stamped with authority and authenticity. He occupies a privileged position that qualifies him to write on the empty deserts and tell the story of the Indians. He is a writing subject masquerading as an Indian. Critics tend to overlook the Prologue and Epilogue of Atala and focus on the more dramatic middle part of the novel.⁸ But the Epilogue furnishes a significant frame that places Chactas's narrative under the aegis of Western culture.

The chapter “Les Laboureurs” offers a telling example, both literal and symbolic, of an inscriptive will asserting its power over the virgin forests and Indians. In a tumultuous storm Atala and Chactas meet Père Aubry, the priest who has built a mission in the forests. The following morning, Chactas, accompanied by Père Aubry, visits the mission. On the way, Chactas comes upon some inscriptions:

En descendant la montagne, j'apercus des chênes ou les Génies semblaient avoir dessiné des caratères étrangers. L'hermite me dit qu'il les avait tracés lui-même, que c'étaient des vers d'un ancien poëte appelé Homère, et quelques sentences d'un autre poëte plus ancien encore, nommé Salomon. Il y avait je ne sais quelle mystérieuse harmonie entre cette sagesse des temps, ces vers rongés de mousse, ce vieux Solitaire qui les avait gravés, et ces vieux chênes qui lui servaient de livres.

(90-91)

To hear, as if for the first time, the names of Homer and Solomon pronounced by the priest seems to be a minor error in the composition of the novel. But this trivial slip is what the narrative at this moment calls for. For the inscription to assert its power, it needs the “vieux chênes” to serve as a book or writing pad, and a blank mind ready to be impressed with the divine message intimated by the august names and words. Chactas acts as if he were an empty space ready for the inscription of Christian word and Western culture. Inscriptions like these show up virtually everywhere, even in such an unlikely place as a reed in the swamp:

Son nom, son âge, la date de sa mission, étaient aussi marqués sur un roseau de savane, au pied de ces arbres. Je m'étonnai de la fragilité du dernier monument: “Il durera encore plus que moi, me répondit le père, et aura toujours plus de valeur que le peu de bien que j'ai fait.”

(91)

The priest is proud of his work and confident that his evangelizing efforts will leave enduring marks and traces—monuments of Christianity—on the wild forests. It does not occur and does not matter at all to him, nor to the Indian Chactas, that in the wild forests marks have already been made by the Indians. Marks of culture have been made by a people who have lived there for countless generations and who have developed their own language, belief, art, and social structure. No matter. All he sees are swamps, trees, reeds, animals, Indians. Blank sheets all. A clean slate for the sovereign will to inscribe. Even the death of Indians cannot escape the inscription of the religious code. Although the priest permits the Indians to bury their dead in their traditional way, their death and tombs would remain meaningless and unredeemed unless inscribed: he must sanctify and hence endorse the burial ground “par une croix” (92). For the priest and Chactas, the Indians, their culture and homeland, are totally devoid of meaning.

Indeed, the tendency to write off the wilderness as void and the Indians as non-existent runs throughout Atala. The deserts, the forests, and the landscape are places of solitude, silence, nothingness, and tranquillity, unspoiled by man. They are a no man's land, even if one can see Indians moving around in this landscape. While Chactas and Atala are fleeing from the Muscogulge Indians, the narrator describes the village of the Indian tribe Stico, located in the valley of Keow. Chinard tried to establish the authenticity of the description of this village by tracing its textual precedents. He found that the details of Stico in Atala are borrowed from Travel through North America and South America, a travel book by William Bartram. Bartram describes the ruins of the Stico village and the magnificent mountains and valleys in the surrounding area. But this was not a place of ruins and ghost towns; not far away there were villages and human habitations. Chinard cites from Bartram that there are “de nombreux villages et … habitations semées à des hauteurs diverses sur le flanc des montagnes” (263). In rewriting this landscape for Atala, however, Chateaubriand changes a place of human habitation into “ces profondes solitudes qui n'étaient point troublées par la présence de l'homme” (75-76) and erases a place bustling with human activities. There is a scrap of humanity in this landscape, to be sure. In a scene not troubled by “la présence de l'homme,” “nous ne vîmes qu'un chasseur indien qui, appuyé sur son arc et immobile sur la pointe d'un rocher, ressemblait à une statue élevée dans la montagne au génie de ces déserts” (76). With one stroke, humanity congeals into stone. The Indian hunter might as well not exist, for he seems to merge into rock and mountain, faceless, motionless, inhuman.

Chateaubriand often treats the Other as absent. Virtually all North America and many places in the East are empty spaces waiting to be discovered, explored, conquered, named, and inscribed. Geographical discovery, as Chinard shows, was a passion that dominated Chateaubriand's life and remained inseparable from his literary ambition. “Une idée me dominait,” writes Chateaubriand in Mémoires d'outre-tombe, “l'idée de passer aux États-Unis: il fallait donner un but utile à mon voyage; je me proposais de découvrir … le passage au nordouest de l'Amérique. Ce projet n'était pas dégagé de ma nature poétique …” (V, 15, 330). Geographical discovery and poetic projects go hand in hand. For Chateaubriand, discovering unknown lands means putting his name somewhere or having a place designated by his name. Some 20 years after his American journey, Chateaubriand claimed that he had discovered the exact location of the ancient city of Carthage and published his findings. But no one seemed to pay any attention. Lamenting the lack of public interest, he let his imagination run to other places.

… peut-être reprendrais-je mon ancien projet de la découverte du passage au pôle nord; peut-être remonterais-je le Gange. Là je verrais la longue ligne noire et droite des bois qui défendent l'accès de l'Himalaya … lorsque je demanderais à mes guides, comme Heber, l'évêque anglican de Calcutta, le nom des autres montagnes de l'est, ils me répondraient qu'elles bornent l'Empire chinois.⁹

Here it is no longer the empty space of nature. The oldest civilizations in the world, the Ganges and Chinese culture, are presented as if they were places untroubled by “la présence de l'homme,” unnamed nowheres for him to discover and put his name on. The fact that these places already had their own names and their own language and culture did not in the least trouble Chateaubriand. They are just like the remote North Pole for men like him to discover and explore. What is the Other but an empty space for the writing subject to impose its own marks and images, a blank pad for the sovereign inscriptive will to scribble on, a desert where the West can expand its domain?

Nineteenth-century colonialists' attitude to the East and other places has been characterized as a “geographical appetite” and a “frank covetousness” in acquiring new territories (Said 216). Chateaubriand's interest in far-off foreign lands does not resemble the covetousness typical of commercial explorers and military conquerors but signifies a desire for the spiritual and cultural dominion of the West. This desire stems from the assumption that foreign lands are blank spaces. Marlow, the narrator in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, expresses this assumption well: “At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there.”¹⁰ Chateaubriand's approach to the Other is symbolic rather than materialistic. For him, the vast deserts, plains, landscapes, and even age-old cradles of foreign civilizations lacked meaning and humanity until he stamped them with the code of Western culture; until he, the sovereign scribe from France, inscribed them: “Je ne trouvais dignes de ces plaines magnifiques que les souvenirs de la gloire de ma patrie: je voyais les restes des monuments d'une civilisation nouvelle, apportée par le génie de la France sur les bords du Nil. …”¹¹ Unable to go near the Pyramids to pay homage to the ancient monuments, Chateaubriand could only look at the Pyramids from a distance. In the ancient monuments he saw nothing except the reflected glory of France. This glory must be crowned by a name—his name. So he sent someone to have his name inscribed on the stones of the Pyramids (Œuvres romanesques 1137). Turning his eyes toward the Other, he saw a mirror image of himself and an opportunity to assert his ego.

REWRITING THE MIND

The rewriting of the other is not easy. Otherness obtrudes itself. It is both harmonious and chaotic, fascinating and menacing, alluring and repulsive. The ambivalent other has a large role to play in the drama of love and religion that makes up the plot of Atala.

Nature and Indians in Atala are so closely associated that one term may be taken to be metaphorical of the other. In Chateaubriand's description, the Indians appear to be the very picture of natural simplicity: they “respire la gaieté, l'amour, le contentement” (50). Atala and Chactas, though depicted as savages, are not an intrinsic part of this natural simplicity. Chinard rightly observes that they are burdened with the mentality, perception, and value system that constitute the Western self (283). Atala says to Chactas: “Mon jeune ami, vous avez appris le langage des blancs” (55). How they react to Indian customs and wild nature is as paradoxical as it is revealing. To them, Indian customs and rituals as well as the grand scenes of the deserts and forests are a source of wonder and surprise. Both Atala and Chactas consider themselves homeless exiles in the vast home of the Indians. They are inwardly and symbolically constituted as Western subjects while outwardly clothed in Indian garb.

A conflict between love and religion plays itself out in Atala's psyche. Atala's trouble starts as soon as she falls in love with Chactas. Bound by a vow made by her mother at her birth, she is consecrated to the Virgin and must remain a virgin all her life. To love Chactas would betray the religious vow, but to adhere to the vow as a Christian would go against her desire. This conflict between love and religion, passion and virtue, body and soul, corruption and redemption seems to have exhausted the criticism of Atala. Yet we can inject new life into these worn dichotomies if the main tension is not seen between Christianity and savagery, but between the raw passions of the psyche and a defensive subjectivity buttressed by Christian discourse. In this light, the plot depicts a self on the rack between libidinal drives and the moral imperative of Christian religion.

To Atala and Chactas the raw nature of the New World appears both fascinating and menacing. Natural landscape is described in glowing color and fresh details. Idealized and romanticized, nature marks a sharp contrast between the New World and the Old. As Chactas says, “jamais les merveilles de l'ancien monde n'ont approché de ce monument du désert” (73). Evident in such a contrast is the familiar Romantic yearning to escape the rigid constraints of civilization and to breathe the air of freedom in nature.

This yearning also brings trouble. To tread on unknown ground by disregarding the familiar signposts, to merge with nature by turning away from memory and tradition, creates perils for the stability of the subject. The culturally fashioned self is made possible by structures of language, the matrix of images and systems of representation. These anchor the subject's psychic unity and furnish social identity. The subject must be maintained by repressing whatever is heterogeneous to its socially organized self-identity. Thus, the self is always provisional, precariously perched on a volcano of unconscious drives, libidinal pulsations, and bodily impulses—that undercurrent of the repressed and potentially disruptive other. To sustain its sovereignty, the subject has to keep a watchful eye on this other. It is in this sense that Julia Kristeva identifies paranoia as the necessary condition for the subject.¹²

In René, Chateaubriand offers a powerful image of this perilous situation of the Romantic subject. While sightseeing on the top of the Etna, René contemplates the vast and enchanting scene over the horizon. While this scene affords him a perceptual unity and psychic harmony, he finds beneath his feet the burning abyss of the volcano. This precarious situation symbolizes a Romantic young man like 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” (Atala 152).

This image allows us to read the conflict in Atala as aggravation and intensification of the perils of the subject confronted with the Other in nature, which triggers the irruption of libidinal impulses within the self. In the wilderness and amidst the Indians in a “natural state,” civilization seems to be on a slippery slope towards “primal nature.” The first time this “natural other” poses a threat in Atala is when the two lovers see a young Indian lover wandering in the dark forest, torch in hand, in search of his beloved, and then a young Indian mother mourning over the tomb of her dead child:

La lune brillait au milieu d'un azur sans tache, et sa lumière gris de perle descendait sur la cime indéterminée des forêts. Aucun bruit ne se faisait entendre, hors je ne sais quelle harmonie lointaine qui régnait dans la profondeur des bois: on eût dit que l'âme de la solitude soupirait dans toute l'étendue du désert.

(58)

In this shadowy setting, Atala and Chactas perceive touching scenes of love and maternity. They are immediately spellbound; the armory of religious virtue begins to melt, the prohibitions of the Christian self are giving way to surging desire. “Nous fûmes accablés par ces images d'amour et de maternité, qui semblaient nous poursuivre dans des solitudes enchantées” (60). The narrator indicates the power of the mystical spell that awakens the “torrent des passions” and lures Atala away from self-control. In this twilight zone, he says, everything is in favor of love, passion, and desire: “le secret des bois, et l'absence des hommes, et la fidélité des ombres” (61). Atala teeters on the brink of passionate outburst.

But Atala is held back by the thought of God and by the religious principles that fortify her ego against this menacing Other. Her relationship with Chactas, who in love is merely a savage consumed by erotic passion, is felt as a “combat.” She tries to fend off Chactas's passionate pursuit. As they plunge deeper and deeper into nature, the conflict intensifies. A constant state of melancholy reflects a split between her yearning for her home and mother, and her desire to yield to Chactas. The mother does not represent maternal love but Christianity: “Elle priait continuellement sa mère, dont elle avait l'air de vouloir apaiser l'ombre irritée” (77). Her melancholy song expresses her tension accurately: “Heureux ceux qui n'ont point vu la fumée des fêtes de l'étranger, et qui ne se sont assis qu'aux festins de leurs pères” (76)!¹³

Yet, cut loose from father, mother, home, and country, from culture and tradition, and thrown into an alien environment, Atala and Chactas find in nature a congenial ground for their passions and desires: “la solitude, la présence continuelle de l'objet aimé, nos malheurs même, redoublaient à chaque instant notre amour. Les forces d'Atala commençaient à l'abandonner, et les passions, en abattant son corps, allaient triompher de sa vertu” (77). Chactas the storyteller, however, cautions against nature, which he sees as a threat to one's self. As he looks back at his own youthful experience as a Christianized savage, Chactas warns his adopted son, René, against the danger in the darkness of the forests:

O René, si tu crains les troubles du cœur, défie-toi de la solitude: les grandes passions sont solitaires, et les transporter au désert, c'est les rendre à leur empire. Accablés de soucis et de craintes, exposés à tomber entre les mains des Indiens ennemis, à être engloutis dans les eaux, piqués des serpents, dévorés des bêtes, trouvant difficilement une chétive nourriture, et ne sachant plus de quel côté tourner nos pas, nos maux semblaient ne pouvoir plus s'accroître. …

(78)

“Les troubles du cœur” are pushed to the breaking point with the sudden outburst of a storm. It rages with a threatening and sublime power and can be read as the physical correlative of the lovers' stormy passion. Chactas asks Atala: “Orage du cœur … est-ce une goutte de votre pluie” (80)? In the storm, Atala reveals her identity as Lopez's daughter, the step-sister of Chactas. At this moment, it appears that no resistance of Atala is of any use; religion and virtue are about to collapse. Nature—the raging natural elements and the erotic passions—once again surges, holds its powerful sway over the lovers and drives them toward the abyss of passion and desire, toward dissolution of the self.

A psychoanalytical reading may reveal the connection between wild nature and the inner nature of unconscious drives. In his study, Jean-Marie Roulin has demonstrated this connection by discussing the themes of incest, maternal love, narcissism, and paternal authority. The recognition of themselves as brother and sister unleashes the characters' erotic desire: “C'en était trop pour nos cœurs que cette amitié fraternelle qui venait nous visiter, et joindre son amour à notre amour” (82). Roulin observes that in his physical intimacy with Atala, Chactas endows her with maternal attributes and lapses into the dependent role of an infant. The union with the mother, as we have learned from psychoanalysis, is a short step from narcissistic love in infancy. Roulin's comments on these regressive psychic features show the hidden depths of the psyche and suggest that the characters are slipping from a culturally fashioned self towards an unconscious, repressed other. The stormy erotic union marks the highest point of libidinal outburst.¹⁴

A bell rings and a light appears in the darkness. Père Aubry comes on the scene. Symbolically, he is a warning bell that summons the lovers from the edge of the abyss and a light that illuminates the darkness. The bell, the light, and an august figure described as Christ—all this heralds the restitution of the self as well as the victory of Christian religion over savage nature. Whether religion wins in the end of the story, especially in the two pivotal chapters “Les Laboureurs” and “Le Drame,” has remained a point of contention among critics. The first of the two chapters leaves little doubt as to the triumph of Christianity over savage nature and chaotic passion. After he hears the story of the lovers, Père Aubry surveys the scene in which the storm has just subsided and asks: “croyez-vous que celui qui peut calmer une pareille tempête, ne pourra pas apaiser les troubles du cœur de l'homme”? (87). As he guides Chactas around the mission the following morning, the young Indian goes on a field trip in Christianity and is all but converted by the miracles that he sees around him.

What creates difficulties is the chapter entitled “Le Drame,” which marks the climax of the novel. Pierre Barbéris and Charles Porter focus on this chapter when they emphasize the unresolved conflicts of the story and the openness of the text. While acknowledging that Chactas is finally baptized in the epilogue, Barbéris contends that “l'épilogue n'a nul pouvoir romanesque” (177) and concludes that Chactas remains an open and problematic character. Porter also argues that Atala and Chactas share a common trait that “contains irreconcilables.”¹⁵ It is true that Chactas's repeated protests against Christian religion make the victory dubious, and it is also true that Père Aubry's arguments to console the tormented souls of the young lovers sound hollow and lame. But even without referring to Chactas's baptism in the epilogue, one feels that the narrative moves forcefully toward a reconciliation of the apparent irreconcilables. At the end of the chapter, the narrative takes a drastic turn towards the marvelous and the supernatural. This is preceded by the argument between Chactas and the priest, whose reasoning about God and Christianity only makes both more and more problematical. Yet, what cannot be reasoned by the mind can be resolved by the senses. Religious faith can be salvaged through an aesthetic detour. Atala employs a narrative strategy that anticipates the famous solution to the crisis of religious faith outlined in Le Génie du christianisme.

Confronted with the fading and crumbling of Christian faith and widespread skepticism in the age of the Enlightenment, Chateaubriand contends in Le Génie du christianisme that conceptual reasoning and discursive argumentation, appropriate to the seventeenth century, no longer worked in an age of rampant skepticism. The solution is to attain faith by aesthetic experience and art: if you do not have faith in Christianity, “voulez-vous le suivre dans la poésie?” To restore faith in God, it is necessary to demonstrate that Christianity “se prête merveilleusement aux élans de l'âme, et peut enchanter l'esprit aussi divinement que les dieux de Virgile et d'Homère.”¹⁶ In the midst of the sensuous, the sublime, and the marvelous, one can be awed into belief in the miraculous omnipotence of God. So the route is to “passer de l'effet à la cause, ne pas prouver que le christianisme est excellent, parce qu'il vient de Dieu; mais qu'il vient de Dieu, parce qu'il est excellent” (Génie du christianisme 56). This solution—what Fredric Jameson calls the “ideologeme of aesthetic religion” or “religious aestheticism”—is an attempt to restore and instill a blind faith through sublime images, a strategy that eschews the conceptual in favor of the sensuous.¹⁷

In Atala, this aesthetic solution to the crisis of Christianity takes the form of a sudden narrative swerve from the quasi-realistic toward the marvelous and miraculous. In spite of her mental oscillations between love of Chactas and love of God, Atala, as she lies dying, is ready to offer herself up to God. She talks to Chactas like a priest: “Elle m'exhortait à la patience, à la vertu” (112). She requests that Chactas make himself a Christian. As if this were not enough to persuade Chactas, the narrative suddenly thrusts Christian religion beyond argument and apprehension. The miracle happens as Père Aubry is performing a ritual over the dying Atala:

A peine a-t-il-prononcé ces mots, qu'une force surnaturelle me contraint de tomber à genoux, et m'incline la tête au pied du lit d'Atala. Le prêtre ouvre un lieu secret où était renfermée une urne d'or, couverte d'un voile de soie; il se prosterne et adore profondément. 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.

(115-16)

Here, whatever skepticism Chactas may harbor breaks down before the sublime images, whatever arguments Chactas may have against religion are swept off by the transfigurative religious symbols, whatever mental anguish he may suffer is soothed by Grace. If, as Barbéris argues, the baptism of Chactas in the epilogue cannot reconcile the unresolved conflict dramatized and aggravated by the “pouvoir romanesque,” here it is precisely the pouvoir romanesque that makes a giant leap of faith, transcends the yawning abyss, redeems the tormented soul from that burning hell. Chactas's arguments and protests are swiftly overcome by a dazzling image, a symbol of the transcendent realm beyond human conception. However unanswerable his questions and however lame Père Aubry's responses, it does not matter. Chactas is compelled to succumb. He prostrates himself before the sublime and supernatural images of God and angels, transfixed and convinced. This, indeed, is the beauty of religion, a religion “qui a fait une vertu de l'espérance” (102).

My analysis reveals that Chateaubriand's attitude toward the Other shares some of the attributes of chinoiserie. He romanticizes and aestheticizes the Other by writing on its space, but his writing is predicated on the assumption that other cultures are destitute of meaning. The Other is simply an empty space for him to inscribe, to impose meanings of his own culture, and to play out his imagination and fantasy.

Yet, Chateaubriand's approach to the Other is not a straightforward rewriting of the Western code. Confronted with the vast spaces of nature and Indians and cut loose from tradition and culture, the subject—Atala and Chactas—discovers the heart of darkness in itself—an abyss seething with sexual desire and libidinal chaos. Wild nature awakens the Other dormant within the self and throws the subject into psychic disorder. Thus, in his encounter with the Other, Chateaubriand stumbled on the urgent problems of our time. Unlike Foucault, he does not pause before the ever widening abyss to question God and the Self, and he remains untouched by the self-critical attitude more familiar to the late twentieth century. Instead, through the magic narrative device and a Romantic redemptive language, he makes a powerful but desperate gesture toward restoring God and the Western code on the savage landscape and mindscape.¹⁸

Notes

1. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983) 29.

2. The curious classification of the Chinese encyclopedia is a fiction made up by Jorge Luis Borges and it is a myth of China as a site of irrationality in contrast with the traditional Western image of China as a well-ordered space. My point in using Borges's fiction is to show that even a different fiction of the Other can disrupt the entrenched myth. See Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) “Préface” 7-16. For an excellent discussion of Borges's fiction of China and Foucault's response, see Zhang Longxi, “The Myth of the Other: China in the Eyes of the West,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1988): 108-31.

3. Quoted in Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) 236.

4. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) 3.

5. Gilbert Chinard, L'Exotisme américain dans l'œuvre de Chateaubriand (Paris: Hachette, 1918) v.

6. Francois-René de Chateaubriand, Atala, René, Les Aventures du dernier Abencérage (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) 258.

7. See François de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'outre-tombe, ed. Jean-Claude Berchet (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1989) 1: xlvi.

8. Pierre Barbéris, for example, focuses on the dramatic conflict of Atala without giving the prologue and the epilogue serious consideration. See his A la recherche d'une écriture: Chateaubriand (Place: Maison Mame, 1974) 175-97.

9. Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'outre-tombe (Paris: Gallimard, 1946) 1: 620.

10. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (New York: Bantam Books, 1981) 11.

11. Chateaubriand, Œuvres romanesques et voyages (Paris: Gallimard, 1969) 2: 1137.

12. Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974) 123.

13. In his much quoted analysis of mourning and melancholia, Freud argues that the melancholy psychic state results from a reaction to a lost object of love. The libido, cut off from the previous love-object, is not displaced to a new one, but is “withdrawn into the ego.” The libido functions to establish an identification of the ego with the lost object. “Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego.” As a result, one part of the ego is split from itself and assumes a critical faculty, treating the ego as an object. This description of melancholia applies to Atala's situation. Atala's identification with the shadow of her mother, which functions as a critical superego, seems to be a source of her melancholy. See Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth P, 1957) 14: 249.

14. See Jean-Marie Roulin, Chateaubriand: l'exil et la gloire (Paris: Champion, 1994) 77-79.

15. Charles Porter, Chateaubriand: Composition, Imagination, and Poetry (Stanford, CA: ANMA Libri, 1978) 88.

16. Chateaubriand, Le Génie du christianisme (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966) 1: 58.

17. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981) 247.

18. This article has benefited from the advice and suggestions of my colleagues Sandy Petrey and Robert Harvey of SUNY, Stony Brook. I express my deep gratitude to them. My thanks also go to the two anonymous reviewers of my article, whose comments helped me revise and strengthen it.