[In the following essay, Bailey concentrates on the image of the crocodile in Atala. Using a psychoanalytic perspective, Bailey claims Chateaubriand's work depicts tensions between nature and civilization and between sexuality and Christianity, especially in its representations of desire.]

Je n'ai point encore rencontré d'homme qui n'eût été trompé dans ses rêves de félicité, point de cœur qui n'entretînt une plaie cachée. Le cœur le plus serein en apparence, ressemble au puits naturel de la savane Alachua; la surface en paraît calme et pure, mais quand vous regardez au fond du bassin, vous apercevez un large crocodile, que le puits nourrit dans ses eaux.¹

These words are addressed by Chactas, Chateaubriand's Indian narrator of the récit of Atala, to his young European interlocutor, René.² Proffered as the old man's conclusions on the vanity of the aspiration to happiness in general, they have been specifically motivated by the picture he has just presented of his youthful self grieving over the tomb of his beloved Atala. Chateaubriand uses the same words however in his own name in his Lettre à M. de Fontanes of 1800, in which he remonstrates with Mme de Staël over her belief in human perfectibility, as proclaimed in her De la Littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales. In this letter, in order ostensibly to lighten the tone when writing on ‘l'article du bonheur’, he adopts ‘cette langue des forêts, qui m'est permise en ma qualité de Sauvage’.³ The image of the crocodile in the depths, an image which surfaces disturbingly in Atala, would seem to have been close to its European/Indian, real author/fictional narrator's heart.

A less exotic variant appears in Chateaubriand's Pensées, réflexions et maximes: ‘L'âme de l'homme est transparente comme l'eau de la fontaine, tant que les chagrins au fond n'ont pas été remués.’⁴ The mutation here of the all too fleshly crocodile into the discreetly abstract concept of grief invites the psychoanalytic reading of Atala which follows and in which my purpose is to expose the buried sorrows, hidden wounds, and lurking monsters which this supposedly unoffending text has smuggled undetected through nearly two centuries of polite acclaim.⁵ Starting from the smooth screen of the issues blandly presented for an untroubled reading of a ‘period’ piece (for both contemporary and later readerships), such as the conflict of nature and culture, the revival of Christianity, exoticism, and passionate and doomed love, I will show the tensions and contradictions apparent in their articulation and attempt to construct a Freudian sub-text from disconnected and fragmentary textual material which, like the recurring image of the crocodile in the pool, urges our attention without ever elaborating meaning.

Atala has traditionally figured within the canon as a transparent text, paired with but separable from and certainly lesser than its companion piece René. Fixed by layers of commentary by Chateaubriand himself and his critics into a mere elaboration of some major topoi of early Romanticism, its surface seemed to offer little critical hold.⁶ A major change in its status was proposed by Naomi Schor in 1985 when she wrote that, in a literary canon reshaped by feminism, ‘Chateaubriand's Atala would displace his René as the founding text of nineteenth-century French literature’.⁷ Since then, Atala has begun to be reclaimed for historical, psychoanalytical and feminist analysis and its transparency has been irreversibly clouded in the process.⁸ I hope further to muddy its once clear waters by teasing into action the monsters lying submerged in its depths.

After informal readings of the text and throughout the first years of the many early editions, Chateaubriand progressively wrapped Atala up in layers of protective explanation, which Pierre Barbéris has suggestively called its ‘cordon sanitaire’ (p. 181). Chateaubriand thus seems to have been aware of a gap between his proclaimed intentions for the work and how it could be read. In the first preface he points to a major change in his beliefs between the conception and the publication of Atala, which could account for any discrepancies. Reconverted to Catholicism during his years of emigration, he wished a text written as a celebration of the virtues of ‘natural man’ to serve as a demonstration of the need to subject nature to the Christian order. The religious sceptic had become a Christian apologist, just as the émigré aristocrat now sought to rally to the cause of Napoleon. Atala's increasingly voluminous packaging may therefore be seen as an effort to paper over its ideological cracks, thus frustrating readings for which the Chateaubriand of 1801, attempting reintegration after political and religious exile, did not wish to be held accountable. ‘Dire ce que j'ai tenté, n'est pas dire ce que j'ai fait’ he wrote disarmingly in the preface to the first edition in relation to his striving for simplicity (p. 6). I shall however (mis)interpret this remark, treating it as an invitation to ignore authorial attempts at textual closure by virtue of narrative tradition and theological correctness,⁹ and try to expose the strategies by which this text both expresses and represses inadmissible meanings.

The central issue of this text is an eighteenth-century commonplace. What, Chactas asks René, are the relative advantages and disadvantages of ‘natural’ as against ‘civilized’ life (p. 43)? At the turn of the century, Chateaubriand is a late entrant to this debate, about which I shall make only three points. First, that the terms Nature and Civilization are elastic, permitting use for very different ends. Second, that Nature tends to be identified with the feminine principle and Civilization with the masculine. And third, that whatever advantages Nature seemed to offer to a decadent and self-doubting European civilization, there remained considerable uncertainty in men's minds (I use the gendered term advisedly) as to the extent to which the ‘natural’ could safely be incorporated into a ‘civilized’ society.

Chateaubriand's own ambivalence on this last issue is apparent in his first preface. Locating the genesis of Atala in his youthful desire to write an ‘épopée de l'homme de la nature’ (the novel, Les Natchez, of which Atala was to be an episode), he subsequently, but without any explanation of his change of position other than the implication that he is now older and wiser, explicitly distances himself from the Rousseauistic evaluation of nature which the initial intention for the work would suggest: ‘Au reste, je ne suis point comme M. Rousseau, un enthousiaste des Sauvages; […] je ne crois point que la pure nature soit la plus belle chose du monde. Je l'ai toujours trouvée fort laide […]. Avec ce mot de nature, on a tout perdu. […] Peignons la nature, mais la belle nature: l'art ne doit pas s'occuper de l'imitation des monstres.’¹⁰ To be noted here is the association of the ‘purely’ natural with the monstrous.¹¹

In the body of the text of Atala, the Nature versus Civilization issue is foregrounded in the Indian Chactas's preamble to his tale of doomed love, which he is about to recount to the European René: ‘Je vois en toi l'homme civilisé qui s'est fait sauvage; tu vois en moi l'homme sauvage, que le Grand Esprit […] a voulu civiliser. […] Qui, de toi ou de moi, a le plus gagné et le plus perdu à ce changement de position?’ (p. 43). This question is however never answered, nor indeed explicitly returned to. The reader left dangling at this ‘point d'interrogation’ must seek an answer from the text which follows.

Nature in all its forms looms large in Atala. Set in the untamed forests of Louisiana, where flora and fauna abound, amongst primitive peoples who are strong and beautiful, whose customs and rituals are closely intertwined with their natural environment, and centring on a drama of unconsummated love, it brings into play three perspectives on nature. External nature, ‘natural’ forms of social organization, and the ‘natural’ within the human psyche (instincts and desires).

External nature is treated unproblematically, except at one significant moment. It is aestheticized, presented as beautiful, awe-inspiring and nurturing (‘Peignons la nature, mais la belle nature’). Only before and during the storm, when Chactas and Atala, stirred by their newly discovered quasi-fraternal relationship, are on the point of succumbing to their passions, does the characterization of nature change: ferocious wild animals prowl and roar, snakes hiss and rattle, the earth becomes a quagmire, flames engulf the forest and a smell of sulphur pervades the air (p. 89). At this point Chactas apostrophizes Nature as ‘affreuse et sublime’ (p. 93), thus articulating an ambivalence towards Nature which has hitherto been absent.

On the second level on which nature is presented, that of social organization, the debate is very formally conducted. The progression from Part I of Chactas's récit, ‘Les Chasseurs’, which features the nomadic Indian tribes in their natural state, to Part II, ‘Les Laboureurs’, which presents the Indian community created and governed by Père Aubry, clearly mimics the standard view of progress towards civilization via hunting to farming. Chateaubriand is reluctant however to abandon entirely ‘la vie sauvage’ for ‘la vie sociale’: Père Aubry advocates and incarnates a charitable, non-doctrinaire Christianity, which allows the Indians to maintain many of their customs, as long as they love each other, pray to God and hope for a better life in the hereafter (p. 112). Chateaubriand also tries to match the Christian sacraments surrounding birth, marriage, and death with the equivalent Indian rituals and selects from the Indian myths of the origins of creation that which most closely corresponds to Genesis. The only renunciation which is required here is that of the Indian practice of torture and mutilation. ‘Les Laboureurs’ as a whole accords with the title of the section of Le Génie du christianisme in which Atala itself eventually appeared: ‘Les Harmonies de la religion avec les scènes de la nature et les passions du cœur humain’. It is clearly utopian and designed to resolve, at least on one level, the problem of the traditional opposition of nature and civilization (or Christianity) which is central to the text.

However, the essential site of tension between the natural and the civilized is to be the human heart. The drama takes the form of the combat between desire and its renunciation and its arena is to be the heart of Atala, whose half-European/Christian, half-Indian/pagan constitution might seem to fit her, rather than Chactas, or even René, both also placed at some indeterminate point between the civilized and the natural, for the role of protagonist. However, the ‘collapsing of the savage upon the feminine’¹² neatly side-steps the problem of male desire which is elsewhere signalled as the true locus of the drama. The displacement of the conflict from the masculine to the feminine sphere is a subterfuge, projecting the anxieties of infantile and oedipal desire entirely into the maternal/feminine.¹³ The death of Atala may serve as a conventional sign of narrative closure, but it in no way concludes the male narrative in which Atala's death is but a stage.

Before discussing the drama of Atala I would like to touch on two related matters. First there is the place of eroticism in the Nature versus Civilization debate. A significant part of the fascination which distant lands and ‘primitive’ peoples held for eighteenth-century European writers was the assumed freedom of their sexual behaviour.¹⁴ Examples would be Diderot's Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, a serious exploration of this issue, and works cited by Donald Charlton, who, in the introduction to his analysis of European writing about exotic cultures at that time, emphasizes the tendency to link a striking natural landscape with an appropriately inserted ‘natural’ figure; thus linked are ‘the bountiful Pacific islands with their no less bountiful and sexually “natural” young women’.¹⁵ Chateaubriand himself writes regretfully of Tahiti: ‘Otaïti a perdu […] ses mœurs voluptueuses. Les belles habitantes de la nouvelle Cythère, trop vantées peut-être par Bougainville, […] sont aujourd'hui […] des puritaines qui vont au prêche […]. On imprime à Otaïti des Bibles et des ouvrages ascétiques.’¹⁶ In Atala, ‘la nouvelle Cythère’ could well replace ‘le nouvel Eden’ (p. 30) which the text proposes as the context of the drama, to highlight the (male) eroticism with which the text is saturated.¹⁷ If the exoticism of Atala's Éden has indeed been mapped over the eroticism of Venus' Cythera, we may glimpse in the interstices the desire for a pre-lapsarian innocence in matters relating to human sexuality.

Also relevant to the conflict within Atala, or Atala, is the relation between eroticism and Christianity in Chateaubriand's own thought. In the letter to Fontanes, Chateaubriand writes of Christianity as ‘une religion dont la qualité essentielle [est] de poser une barrière aux passions de l'homme,’ whose God is ‘un Dieu jaloux qui veut être aimé de préférence [et qui] punit jusqu'à l'ombre d'une pensée, jusqu'au songe qui s'adresse à d'autres qu'à lui’.¹⁸ This would seem to imply that the primary function of the Christian God, like the Freudian Father, is to repress and punish the first hint of erotic desire. Chateaubriand's reversion to his ‘qualité de Sauvage’ at the end of this letter to reiterate, almost verbatim, Chactas's bitter reflexions on the ‘plaie cachée’ in every man's heart, might however suggest that, for him, the Natural does not yield to Christianity entirely without protest. The narrating Chactas, fifty years after the death of Atala, has still not converted to Christianity.

I now return to the conflict within Atala between sexuality and Christianity, between desire and renunciation. The text of the central récit is less than clear on the outcome of this struggle. Atala's final words are a guilty recognition that her last thoughts are for her lover and hence ‘stolen’ from her (jealous) God (p. 138). It takes a final narrator, invented for the added epilogue, to render explicit the message that Christianity did indeed triumph over love and the fear of death in Atala's heart (p. 151). In the terms of the narrative, this fictional narrator has learned of Chactas's story in a privileged way, from the mouths of René's descendants, whereas the reader has it only from the récit. There the line between a false, fanatical Christianity, which has condemned Atala to eternal chastity and hence led to her suicide, and a true Christianity which, as Père Aubry compassionately asserts, offers the comfortable compromise of marriage as an alternative to hell, is not clearly drawn.¹⁹ This latter option would have indeed have been the ideal outcome if Atala were to have fulfilled its supposed function of demonstrating the desirability of Christianity. But I would suggest that Atala's subtextual logic does not permit the gratification of desire. There is a total prohibition on erotic satisfaction which takes priority over professed authorial intention and the surface logic of fictional events, a prohibition which the text intimates at an early stage by the intervention of two ‘miracles’ and the exaggerated menace of the storm to prevent the consummation of Atala's and Chactas's love.

Readings of the text at various levels can suggest different reasons for this interdiction. A traditional literary-historical approach identifies Atala as a typical Romantic text, of which the failure of passionate love is simply a convention for the production of pathos. Reading Atala as a text of the exotic, one in which the customs of the Indians are presented in great detail, the reader may be struck by the uninhibited eroticism of the rituals surrounding love. Love here, spoken in Chateaubriand's version of the language of the ‘primitive’ Indian, is definitely of the flesh; the courtship song of the young warrior addresses every part of his beloved's body and looks forward to conception, birth and breast-feeding (pp. 60-61). The directly erotic is thus given a voice, but this voice is distanced by speaking in a language foreign to its European author and audience. In the preface to the first edition, Chateaubriand explains the technique he adopted for his narrative: Chactas was to speak as an Indian in the depiction of Indian customs, and as a European for the drama and the narration. He adds that if he had employed ‘le style indien’ throughout, ‘Atala eût été de l'hébreu pour le lecteur’ (p. 9). The erotic is thus presented as spoken in an incomprehensible language.

A reading of Atala contaminated by that of René suggests a more powerful taboo. The relationship of Chactas and Atala is given an unmistakable aura of fraternal incest which has attracted little critical discussion, no doubt because it appears gratuitous. It has of course frequently been noted, but usually as merely another example of Chateaubriand's preoccupation with brother-sister incest. It is only in René that fraternal incest is invoked explicitly as the cause of necessary separation. The lovers in Atala have no blood relationship. Yet, curiously, they are made to act as if they had: Atala, for example, speaks to Chactas of Lopez, her own biological and Chactas's adoptive father, as ‘ton père et le mien’ (pp. 137-38). What is more, the discovery of their mutual link through Lopez, instead of reinforcing any existing reasons for inhibiting sexual union, fuels the flame of their passion. The idea of incest clearly intensifies desire: ‘C'en était trop pour nos cœurs que cette amitié fraternelle qui venait nous visiter, et joindre son amour à notre amour’ (p. 92). References to ‘frère’ and ‘sœur’ proliferate as the climax of the drama approaches. An excess of prohibition has already been noted. Is it to save her from the sin of sibling incest that Atala must be separated from her lover by death?

Unlike Père Souël in René, Père Aubry, the porte-parole of Chateaubriand's vision of an ideal Christianity, does not however raise the spectre of brother-sister incest as the ultimate crime. On the contrary, he speaks approvingly of ‘des mariages des premiers-nés des hommes, de ces unions ineffables, alors que la sœur était l'épouse du frère, que l'amour et l'amitié fraternelle se confondaient dans le même cœur, et que la pureté de l'une augmentait les délices de l'autre’ (p. 131). What may be concluded from this? It is incontrovertible that sibling incest is insistently present here as it is elsewhere in Chateaubriand's writing. But, for Chateaubriand, as Pierre Barbéris writes: ‘Un temps a existé où nature et amour n'étaient pas contradictoires. […] Le couple frère/sœur, est l'image d'avant l'expulsion dans la vie, dans l'Histoire. L'amour frère/sœur réunit à la fois le maximum d'érotisme […] et le maximum d'innocence.’²⁰ In Atala, the incestuous desire of ‘brother and sister’ is both insisted upon and at the same time indemnified, rendered innocent, indeed idealized. It cannot therefore be the reason for the interdiction on sexual union and the motivation for Atala's death.

The raising and subsequent dismissal or deculpabilization of fraternal incest does not however entirely clear the air. Alerted to the issue of incest, the reader should not miss the textual indicators of primary incest as manifested in the male oedipus complex.²¹ The first portrait of the aged and blind Chactas in the prologue shows him led by a young girl ‘comme Antigone guidait les pas d'Œdipe’ (p. 38), an Oedipus already self-mutilated, having involuntarily satisfied his desire and thus fulfilled his destiny. Many expressions of Chactas's love for Atala suggests the infantile desire for reunion with the mother: when Atala first unties the rope which holds him captive, he replaces it in her hands ‘en forcant ses beaux doigts à se fermer sur ma chaîne’ (p. 53). Thus united, they make their first amorous excursion (pp. 56-57). This image can be read as operating on more than one level. A first reading would stress the refusal to accept separation from and a chosen dependence upon the mother in the retying of the umbilical cord. A second might suggest a mature eroticism, in which the cord becomes a phallic symbol.²² Chactas's love makes him regress to an infantile state: ‘Sans force pour m'élever à la raison de l'homme, j'étais retombé tout à coup dans une espèce d'enfance; […] j'aurais eu presque besoin qu'on s'occupât de mon sommeil et de ma nourriture’ (p. 57). And the simile which seemed so obscure to the pedantic Abbé Morellet, ‘Atala était dans mon cœur comme le souvenir de la couche de mes pères’, is transparent to the post-Freudian eye (pp. 51-52).

Descending thus through different layers of the text leaves us faced with the ultimate taboo—that against primary incest. The increasing intensity of forbidden desire, from the simply erotic to incestuous fixation, has required decreasing explicitness, and ever more complex textual strategies have been put to work to screen out the unacceptable meanings which the text's unconscious insists on emitting.²³ One further such strategy will be that which involves the bizarre image of the crocodile in the depths.

Christian Bazin, in his Chateaubriand en Amérique, comments on ‘cette passion étrange pour le crocodile chez un homme qui exaltait la beauté et haïssait la laideur’.²⁴ To elaborate on this strange passion I shall draw on Chateaubriand's description of the crocodile, its habitat and its behaviour in Le Génie du christianisme, in which the crocodile is presented as seen through the eyes of a traveller or naturalist, hence in a more objective mode, and I shall then identify some features which have a bearing on my analysis of Atala.

On trouve au pied des monts Appalaches, dans les Florides, des fontaines qu'on appelle puits naturels. […] Les arbres, en s'inclinant sur la fontaine, rendent sa surface toute noire au-dessous: mais à l'endroit où le courant d'eau s'échappe de la base du cône, un rayon du jour, pénétrant par le lit du canal, tombe sur un seul point du miroir de la fontaine, qui imite l'effet de la glace dans la chambre obscure du peintre. Cette charmante retraite est ordinairement habitée par un énorme crocodile qui se tient immobile au milieu du bassin […].

Les crocodiles […] ne vivent pas toujours solitaires. Dans certains temps de l'année, ils s'assemblent en troupes et se mettent en embuscade, pour attaquer des voyageurs qui doivent arriver de l'Océan. […] Les monstres, poussant un cri, et faisant claquer leurs mâchoires, fondent sur les étrangers. Bondissant de toutes parts, les combattants se joignent, se saisissent, s'entrelacent. […] Le fleuve taché de sang se couvre de corps mutilés et d'entrailles fumantes […].

Considérés en eux-mêmes, quelle que soit la difformité de ces êtres que nous appelons des monstres, on peut encore reconnaître, sous leurs horribles traits, quelques marques de la bonté divine. Un crocodile, un serpent ne sont pas moins tendres pour leurs petits qu'un rossignol, une colombe. […] La femelle du crocodile montre […] pour sa famille la plus tendre sollicitude […]. Quand […] sa famille vient à éclore, elle la conduit au fleuve, la lave dans une eau pure, lui apprend à nager, pêche pour elle de petits poissons, et la protège contre les mâles qui veulent souvent la dévorer.

(pp. 582-84)

The points I would like to bring out relate to, first, the particular characteristics of the crocodile emphasized by Chateaubriand and, second, the symbolic potential of the pool it inhabits. Chateaubriand's initial characterization of the crocodile concerns its capacities for devouring, mutilation, and destruction. He concludes however by presenting the female crocodile as incarnating an ideal maternity in its instinct for the protection of its young, to the extent even of defending its offspring against predatory adult males. For the characterization of the pool, I am indebted to Naomi Segal for her assimilation of the pool of Narcissus to the ‘unheimlich’ place, the place of origins, the maternal genital. Chateaubriand's description of the ‘puits naturel’ is uncannily reminiscent of Ovid's description, in the Narcissus story, of a ‘clear pool with silvery bright water […]. Grass grew all around its edge fed by the water near, and a coppice that would never suffer the sun to warm the spot’.²⁵ Chateaubriand's version equally emphasizes the surrounding vegetation and the consequent shade, but revealingly adds the metaphor of mirror for the surface of the pool.

Returning to our fictional text, the image of the crocodile in the depths is forced to the reader's attention only towards the end of Atala, when Chactas uses it in his reflexions on the conclusions to be drawn from his doomed love for Atala. But it awakens echoes and invites the reader to go back and re-read.²⁶ It then becomes apparent that the crocodile's pool is consistently associated with erotic desire. Chactas is tied to a tree beside such a ‘puits’ when Atala first appears to him and he mistakes her for ‘la Vierge des dernières amours’.²⁷ Once alone with her, he is ‘interdit et confus’: he would prefer ‘d'être jeté aux crocodiles de la fontaine’ (p. 53). During their first ‘promenade de l'amour’, the atmosphere is enhanced by ‘la faible odeur d'ambre, qu'exhalaient les crocodiles couchés sous les tamarins des fleuves’ (p. 58). When Atala discovers that, despite her ‘fatal secret’ (her commitment to chastity), she has fallen in love, she cries: ‘Quel dommage que je ne puisse fuir avec toi! Malheureux a été le ventre de ta mère, ô Atala! Que ne te jettes-tu au crocodile de la fontaine!’ (p. 56) What is striking here is that the association of the crocodile with desire elicits responses which are markedly ambiguous. Throwing oneself to the crocodiles may be read as a conventional encoding of despair resulting from the impossibility of realizing love; or, since here, in the words of the characters, it is yoked with the passionate desire of the lovers to be united, it could signal that desire itself entails both attraction and terror. Satisfaction of desire and throwing oneself to the crocodiles may be one and the same thing.

Atala's reference to her mother's womb leads us into a further figurative complex. As Naomi Segal has pointed out, the entire text, including the prologue and epilogue, betrays ‘an obsession with the mother-child relationship’ and is pervaded with the myth of maternity (pp. 53, 56).²⁸ Fertilization, conception, the movement of the foetus in the womb, parturition, breast-feeding, appear repeatedly, both as narrative elements and as metaphors. However, the figure of maternity in Atala is by no means reassuring, because it is metonymically linked with infanticide. There are too many dead babies in Atala. Atala's own birth was nearly also her death, and, simply to preserve her child's life, her mother has vowed her to chastity and to sterility (pp. 116-17). The Indian mother who comes to visit the tomb of her infant placed by the wayside laments his death, but at the same time affirms that death in infancy is preferable to life: ‘Heureux ceux qui meurent au berceau, ils n'ont connu que des baisers et les sourires d'une mère!’; (p. 62). And René's grand-daughter, encountered by the narrator of the epilogue, admits to being the involuntary cause of her own child's death: ‘comme mon lait était mauvais […] il a fait mourir mon enfant’ (p. 159). May this not be read as the mother's unconscious wish that her offspring remain forever in the maternal domain?

The implicit culpabilization of the mother in these instances is only one form of a generalized problematizing of female sexuality which is apparent not only in Atala but elsewhere in Chateaubriand's writing. In the letter to Fontanes, for example, where the dramatic potential of the Christian God as a stern opponent of human passion is affirmed, the literary examples chosen for dramatizing ‘ces terribles combats de la chair et de l'esprit’ are Phèdre and Héloïse. In the case of Phèdre, the case for both the initiatory and the transgressive nature of the heroine's passion is well enough known to need no explicit comment. But Chateaubriand also, by implication, attributes to Héloïse alone the responsibility for the passion which led to her lover's castration: ‘Héloïse aime, Héloïse brûle’ (p. 1267). In René, it is Amélie who conceives and confesses to a ‘criminelle passion’ for her brother and who is made to die to the world by taking the veil (p. 233). Within Atala there is also a struggle, to a literal death, between her love for Chactas and some form of prohibition, never really sufficient to require her death, but variously motivated in terms of Christian virtue or her mother's vow. The sexuality of the male protagonist, however, remains unproblematized. René is merely the ‘cause involontaire’ of his sister's unfortunate passion for him.²⁹ Chactas relates his most amorous moments with Atala as if he were a mere onlooker. When Atala is on the point of succumbing to desire, he exclaims with concern: ‘Qui pouvait sauver Atala?’ (p. 63). From what, one might ask, but from his own assaults on her virtue? Male desire is not foregrounded, it is occluded, naturalized, taken for granted, a given, and thereby somehow rendered innocent. Atala, like Amélie, fully admits to the force of her passions and takes full responsibility for what is now presented, but without any previous textual motivation, as the transgressive nature of her desire. On her deathbed, she confesses to her ‘horribles transports’, describes her desires as ‘insensés’ and ‘coupables’, and admits that even in the face of a divine interdiction her passion would have triumphed over any obstacle: ‘j'aurais désiré que cette divinité se fût anéantie, pourvu que, serrée dans [les] bras [de Chactas], j'eusse roulé d'abîme en abîme avec les débris de Dieu et du monde!’ (p. 122). She, a desiring subject but also the object of male desire (for which responsibility is subsumed in her own desire), is made to recognize the conflict between ‘natural’ drives and ‘civilized’ values, and she opts consciously for the latter which lead to her own death. Nature in woman, it seems, far from being assimilable to civilization, would destroy it utterly, reducing God and the world to ruins. Better perhaps that it be destroyed itself (by one textual means or another) before the ultimate catastrophe.³⁰

It is by the pool of the crocodiles that Atala makes her first approach to the bound captive Chactas. It is on the way to the same pool that the Indian mother places her dead baby ‘afin que les jeunes femmes, an allant à la fontaine, pussent attirer dans leur sein l'âme de l'innocente créature, et la rendre à la patrie’ (p. 61). The spring may thus be seen as the site of both the erotic and the maternal (reproductive), or the maternal erotic: the female initiates relations, seeks actively to conceive, and produces the baby (if only to return it to the land/law of the father). It must however be kept in mind that the ‘calme et pure’ surface of the spring, which is the very image for Chactas of a man's ‘rêves de félicité’, masks the crocodile in its depths. Any male dream of happiness in this place is bound to end with a ‘plaie cachée’.

One aspect of narrative structure in texts such as Atala, as Naomi Segal has shown, has considerable import for the narrative itself.³¹ The récit is presented as a tale about a woman, now dead, related by one man to another. In Chactas's preamble however, rather than underlining the complicity between men which such a narrative situation implies, Chateaubriand proposes that the two interlocutors are radically different, as different as Nature (Chactas, the ‘Savage’) is from Civilization (René, the European): ‘Entrés l'un et l'autre dans […] la vie, par les deux bouts opposés, […] nous avons dû avoir des objets une vue totalement différente.’³² It is thus to René as presumed Other that he puts his question about the relative merits of ‘natural’ and ‘civilized’ existence.³³ Every aspect of the text has proclaimed the desire for assimilation with that which is ‘alien’ or Other. Can Chactas and Atala be united? Can ‘la vie sauvage’ be reconciled with ‘la vie sociale’? Can desire be reconciled with Christianity? René, however, cannot cast a new light on this old problem, for he and Chactas are just variants of the Same; male, with an equal mix of civilization and barbarism, though acquired in a different order. René can merely reflect back to Chactas a slightly distorted image of himself. Narcissus has rippled the surface but no more.

The real Other of this text is located in Woman, a woman, Atala, object of male desire and of the narrative itself. She is (Mother) Nature, in whom civilized man dreams of recreating himself and abolishing his enduring sense of exile through a fantasized (re)union. But in the (sexual)/textual exploration of the territory of the New World which seemed to hold so much promise an ever-deepening ambivalence has emerged. Nature is both ‘sublime’ and ‘affreuse’. The desired union carries with it the threat of loss of identity and of (pro)creative potential.

The calm surface of the spring, Narcissus' pool, invites embrace, immersion. But beyond the surface lies true Otherness, the Feminine, Lack (of the phallus). The plenitude that is desired, the return to the womb, would require the sacrifice of (masculine) identity. What more compelling/repelling image of the fear of castration consequent upon re-union with the mother than that of the crocodile in the depths, the vagina dentata ‘au fond du bassin’ from which no phallus could emerge intact?³⁴

The presentation of an active female sexuality and its culpabilization lends a special character to the version of the complex I am proposing as the governing myth of Atala. The longing for the return to the womb and the oedipal desire for the mother are both eventually frustrated by the fantasy of an intolerable separation, represented by the pains of birth, the severing of the umbilical cord and the loss of the penis.³⁵ In Atala, the instrument of castration (the crocodile in the spring) is the maternal body itself and not the jealous hand of outraged paternity. Paternal authority is in fact notably lacking in this text. Lopez does not forbid, indeed he encourages his adoptive son's return to Nature; more, were it not for his age, he would have accompanied him, in order both to return Chactas to the ‘bras de [sa] mère’ and to revive memories of his own earlier transgressive liaison—with Atala's mother (p. 46). Her eventual husband, the ‘magnanime Simaghem’, refuses to punish her for her premarital ‘offence’ by killing or mutilating her as anticipated: he rewards her instead for the respect she has shown for his paternal integrity in informing him that the child to be born will not be his, by assuring her that he will treat the child as his own (p. 91). ‘Père’ Aubry, who could well have been given the role of agent of Chateaubriand's ‘Dieux jaloux’, refuses to lay down the law for his Indian ‘enfants’: ‘Je ne leur ai donné aucune loi’ (p. 112). But this matriarchal paradise, this new Eden/Cythera in which desire and its satisfaction are innocent and there is no need for paternal chastisement, turns out to be seething with monstrously destructive forces. Chactas is introduced as blind; Aubry, who has suffered at the hands of his children, as an already mutilated being (p. 101); and he, like René, who chooses to remain in the New World, and Chactas who twice in the story returns to the forest (leaving Lopez, and Père Aubry), comes to an atrocious end.³⁶

Remaining in, or the fantasy of returning to, the textual New World (or the old world, that of biological origins, the pre-oedipal and oedipal world of Mother Nature), offers in this text certain doom. The oedipal stage must be left behind. The final narrator of Atala, the ‘voyageur’ of the epilogue,³⁷ experiences his own exile as more absolute than that of the wretched remnants of the Natchez tribe since he, unlike them, has not even ‘emporté les os de [ses] pères’ (p. 166). The paternal phallus is not part of his baggage. If, however, he alone has survived to tell the tale of Atala, it is perhaps because he has been able to recognize that the sense of exile is a transitional stage ‘entre la patrie perdue et la patrie à venir’. The grief of renunciation of the ‘motherland’ is intense: ‘Oh! que de larmes sont répandues, lorsqu'on abandonne ainsi la terre natale, lorsqu'on […] découvre pour la dernière fois le toit où l'on fut nourri’,³⁸ but this ‘chagrin’ is an expression of mourning, which is the first and necessary stage in the acceptance of loss.

In the letter to Fontanes, the voice borrowed by Chateaubriand to articulate the crocodile maxim is that of ‘une femme des monts Apalaches’ (p. 1279). But she does not have the last word. She is advised to consult a ‘jongleur’/wise-man who caps her image of the human psyche with another: ‘Si notre cœur est comme le puits du crocodile, il est aussi comme ces arbres qui ne donnent leur baume pour les blessures des hommes que lorsque le fer les a blessés eux-mêmes’ (p. 1280). This variant on the maxim has already made an inconspicuous appearance in Atala, in advance of and in no way linked to the crocodile image. It is put in the mouth of Atala who, dying, attempts to console Chactas for the loss he is to suffer through her death. She tells him, in Sartrean terms, that ‘la vie commence de l'autre côté du désespoir.’ ‘Tu ne seras pas toujours malheureux’ she says, ‘si le Ciel t'éprouve aujourd'hui, c'est seulement pour te rendre plus compatissant aux maux des autres’ (p. 135). In this context, the utility of the maxim is self-evident. Chactas may be ‘wounded’ by her death but he will emerge a better man, or even a Christian, from the experience. More interesting however is the direct linking of the two images in the letter to Fontanes with the tree image emerging as the preferred version.

The idea of wounding or mutilation by a knife is here explicit, and it is practised on a tree, an obvious phallic symbol. An example of this in the text of Atala has occurred at the moment when the amorous Chactas ‘touchai(t) au moment du bonheur’ and a mighty tree is felled at the lovers' feet by a stroke of lightning to herald the arrival of the good Père Aubry (p. 93). A significant difference between the two images, those of the crocodile and the tree, is that while the mutilating and annihilating implications of the first are left unspoken, as perhaps unspeakable, the second makes manifest both the wound and the beneficial consequences which ensue. I propose the following reading. The maternal domain of the New World, of primitive Nature, in which the pre-oedipal/oedipal mother-son dyad thrives, carries the threat of destruction/castration by the maternal agency, the crocodile (female genital/vagina dentata). The threat remains unarticulated since neither the desire for the maternal body, nor the terror which accompanies this desire is admissible. In the second image, the wound is explicitly presented as a rite of passage within a patriarchal order: consolation for the wound can only come from those who have themselves endured it. The sequence of the two images reflects a progression from the distinctly pre-oedipal—with an oedipal overlay—to the exclusively oedipal. In both cases however, the renunciation of desire for union with the mother is the painful precondition for entry into social life.

Chactas, Aubry, René, Lopez, those who cannot relinquish their preference for Nature over Civilization, for the New World over the Old, or who attempt to marry the two principles, are shown to exist in a fools' paradise. There is no re-entry into Eden, for the Law of the Father is as alive and well in Louisiana as it is in Europe. The crocodile's jaws or the blade come in the end to the same thing. The interdiction on the Natural thus remains absolute. The argument for Civilization seems irrefutable when conducted in these subliminal terms.

Exile, with its melancholy and solitary pleasures, did not, however, prove as unproductive for Chateaubriand as for his fictional characters, for during it he had authored a text, his good daughter Atala, who, he asserted, had literally saved his life.³⁹ He returned to his ‘patrie’ in 1800, attracted some attention for his Lettre à M. de Fontanes at the end of that year, and in March 1801 advertised in the Journal des Débats his forthcoming great work on the beauties of Christianity, of which Atala was to be a foretaste. The approval of the First Consul, who was about to sign a concordat with the Pope, was necessary for his name to be removed from the list of banned émigrés, remaining on which would have condemned him to indefinite exile. Atala, with its Christian gloss and its display of detailed knowledge of the New World (which formed part of Chateaubriand's justification for absence from France during the 1790s), was to help him effect his delayed entry into civil society.

I have attempted to show how this text, for long considered an inoffensive and decorative drawing-room piece, continues to haunt and disturb without ever rendering explicit the barely speakable raw materials from which it is ultimately wrought. Atala was presented by Chateaubriand as a simple tale, drawing on the aesthetics of the exotic (an Indian heroine in her natural setting) to exemplify the benefits of Christianity. To reinforce such a restricted reading Chateaubriand put to work within the text devices such as the insertion of internal commentators (Aubry and the final narrator) to underline the moral message, the adoption of an alien dialect to articulate the erotic, the projection of the spotlight on to the heroine to blind the reader to the problematic source of the narrative, and the emphasizing of secondary to screen out primary incest. I suggest however that Atala may be read as an artfully duplicitous, multi-layered narrative, which explores the foundations of the masculine erotic and portrays its repression by Christianity as a monstrous (if eventually inescapable) mutilation. Such a reading is invited by certain narrative fissures, such as the overdetermined ban on sexual gratification and the underdetermined culpabilization and death of the heroine, through which emerges a sub-text composed of disconnected textual fragments.

In this sub-text, I see the crocodile in the depths as a key image: in the world of natural desire, it evokes the fear of destruction and castration which satisfaction of both infantile and oedipal impulses towards the mother would entail. While the protagonists of the story of Chactas and Atala remain and die in the land of crocodiles, the final unidentified narrator remains in a state of exile, having renounced the imaginary satisfactions (and dangers) of the maternal territory, but as yet unable to progress to the fatherland, the symbolic, the order of language. Wielding his symbolic text, their creator however smugly announces his own return to civilization, proclaiming his allegiance to the fathers of the state and the church.

Seen as a text constructed on the working through of traumas relating to birth and the renunciation of oedipal desire, Atala may perhaps once more be read as an exemplary tale. For do not Christianity and Freud's Oedipus theory concur on the need to renounce hope of satisfaction in this world for the promise of reward in the next?

Notes

1. Chateaubriand, Atala, René, Les Aventures du dernier Abencérage, ed. by Fernand Letessier (Paris, Garnier, 1962), p. 149. All references to Atala and René in this article are to this edition and will subsequently be indicated by page numbers in the text of the article.

2. Terms such as nature, civilization, Indian, savage, primitive, barbarian belong to the particular discourse which is itself in question here and should be read with circumspection.

3. Chateaubriand, Essai sur les révolutions, Génie du christianisme, ed. by Maurice Regard, Pléiade (Paris, Gallimard, 1978), p. 1279. The italics are mine. Further references to this work will be indicated by page numbers in the text.

4. ‘Pensées, maximes, réflexions’ in Œuvres complètes (Paris, Furne, 1866), p. 553.

5. The suggestive potential of the crocodile is evident in its deification in Egyptian mythology. All-seeing but unseen, hidden in the primeval mud, waiting to snap and devour, it elicits both terror and respect. As a potent image of evil, of the primitive power to destroy, it belongs to the same category as serpents, sharks and the Biblical Leviathan, all of which have their own extensive mythology.

6. Pierre Barbéris, however, explicitly called into question this academic tradition in his A la recherche d'une écriture, Chateaubriand (Paris, Mame, 1974), drawing attention to the ‘lourd appareil présentatif’ (p. 196) which blocks the reader's access to the text itself. He proposes a historico-psychoanalytic reading which both highlights the brother/sister incest theme and links the writing of Atala to Chateaubriand's desire for social and political re-integration. Further references to this work are given as page numbers in the text.

7. ‘Unwriting Lamiel’ in Breaking the Chain (New York, Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 145. The point made briefly here by Schor is that there is an absolute interdiction on female jouissance in this text. The idea is fully developed later in ‘Triste Amérique: Atala, or the Postrevolutionary Construction of Woman’ in Rebel Daughters, ed. by Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (New York-Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992). It is to this article that I refer later.

8. In my reading of Atala the works which I have found most illuminating have been: Pierre Barbéris, op. cit., Michel Butor, ‘Chateaubriand et l'ancienne Amérique’ in Répertoire II (Paris, Minuit, 1964); Naomi Schor, op. cit., Margaret Waller, ‘Being René, Buying Atala: Alienated Subjects and Decorative Objects’ and Marie-Claire Vallois, ‘Exotic Femininity and the Rights of Man: Paul et Virginie and Atala, or the Revolution in Stasis’ in Rebel Daughters (see n. 7); Mary A. O'Neil, ‘Chateaubriand's Atala: A Study of the French Revolution’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 22. 1-2 (1993-94). I am grateful to Malcolm Bowie, John Rose, Diana Knight, and most particularly Christine Crow for their helpful responses in the germinating stages of this article.

9. Chateaubriand, without undue modesty, cites Homer and the Bible as his influences (p. 6).

10. p. 8. Chateaubriand's italics.

11. The distinction here between ‘pure nature’ as monstrous and a version of nature tamed and embellished by art is interestingly reflected in a reference for which I am indebted to Naomi Schor (op. cit., p. 143). She first quotes Chateaubriand's own comments on the reception of Atala in France: ‘On ne savait si l'on devait la classer parmi les monstruosités ou parmi les beautés; était-elle Gorgone ou Vénus? Les académiciens assemblés dissertèrent doctement sur son sexe et sa nature […]’ (Mémoires d'outre-tombe, ed. by Maurice Levaillant and Georges Moulinier, Pléiade (Paris, Gallimard, 1951), 1, 445). She then argues that the potential monstrosity of Atala lay in its ‘sexual indeterminacy’; in a still patriarchal age traumatized by regicide and the shock of democratization, Chateaubriand's response was to attempt to redefine femininity as inherently inferior. See n. 14 for an interpretation of the archetypal female monster, the Gorgon/Medusa.

12. Marie-Claire Vallois, op. cit., p. 182.

13. Mary Jacobus suggests that psychoanalysis itself exploits this highly functional type of projection, using the concept of penis envy to disguise its own lack of theoretical completeness: ‘An “idée fixe”, designed to stabilize an original undecidability, the story of penis envy—by projecting the boy's threatened loss or “cut” on to the girl's scarred psyche—plays the same role as the Medusa's head which at once represents castration and provides a reassurance against it. As penis envy insures the boy against lack (he has what she wants), it allows Freudian theory to become complete by projecting its own incompleteness onto woman, thus solving “the enigma of woman” […] at her expense’ (‘The Phallic Woman’, in Reading Woman (London, Methuen, 1986), p. 114). Chateaubriand's projection of the drama of forbidden love on to the heroine can thus be seen as a strategy for screening out the suspicion or fear of incompleteness within the male narrator who keeps control of the story.

14. ‘Le rêve de devenir Sauvage, c'est tout d'abord l'espoir d'une libération érotique […]’ (Michel Butor, op. cit., p. 171).

15. D. G. Charlton, New Images of the Natural in France, 1750-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 9.

16. Chateaubriand, 1827 preface to Voyage en Amérique in Œuvres romanesques et voyages, ed. by Maurice Regard, Pléiade (Paris, Gallimard, 1969), 1, 647-48.

17. The complex Nature/exotic/erotic/maternal/feminine is brilliantly unravelled in Vallois's psychoanalytic reading of Atala, op. cit.

18. Chateaubriand, Essai sur les révolutions, Génie du christianisme, ed. by Regard, pp. 1266, 1268. The context of Chateaubriand's remarks here is literary. His argument is that Christianity creates a psychological atmosphere which is propitious to drama: ‘la religion chrétienne a cet avantage sur les cultes de l'antiquité: c'est un vent céleste qui enfle les voiles de la vertu, et multiplie les orages de la conscience autour du vice’ (p. 1266). The figure of conscience is of course the Christian God.

19. ‘La religion n'exige point de sacrifice plus qu'humain’ are Aubry's words (p. 123). His position here seems to recognize the primacy of sexual passion and the only manner in which Christianity can accommodate it. My own reference to hell (Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 7.9) is designed to provide the theological underpinning for the interdiction which, as in the storm, hovers over the drama of eroticism in this text.

20. Barbéris, op. cit., p. 193. Barbéris also points out the lack of symmetry between the two parties: ‘Il faut remarquer qu'il n'est pas question des délices de l'une non plus que de la pureté de l'autre.’

21. A similar narrative ploy is one identified by Michel Crouzet as at work in Stendhal's ‘autobiography’. He argues that Stendhal's unambiguous account of the Oedipal scenario in its positive version (desire for the parent of the opposite sex) is intended to screen out its negative version (desire for the parent of the same sex): ‘Tant de clarté et d'audace devraient donc le décharger de toute culpabilité, puisque lui-même se passe de tout refoulement […].’ But ‘le déplacement de l'aveu qu'il fait ne recouvre pas le vrai aveu’, for this Oedipal text is an ‘œdipepalimpseste, le “négatif” sous le “positif”, trop purement positif’ (La Vie de Henry Brulard ou l'Enfance de la révolte (Paris, José Corti, 1982), pp. 35, 36, 40).

22. Carol A. Mossman in her illuminating analysis of Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir: The Narrative Matrix (Lexington, French Forum, 1984) discusses the differences between Freud and Otto Rank over the primacy of desires and fears generated by birth and those relating to the Oedipal stage. Her conclusion (Rank's) is that ‘the son's literal desire to return to the womb can compatibly exist with Freud's Oedipal theory’ and ‘it is not necessary to establish which of the two hypotheses has primacy: both draw on and project themselves in identical fashions’ (pp. 124-25). In Chateaubriand's work, the obsession with the birth trauma is (textually) writ large: the Chateaubriand of the Mémoires, René, and Atala construct themselves on the founding fact of their difficult birth. For René, the forceps delivery is a psycho-physical assault effected by the same instrument, ‘le fer’, which can later be translated into the castrating blade (see infra p. 150). Mossman (citing Mircea Eliade's Initiation, Rites, Sociétés secrètes (Paris, Gallimard, 1959), pp. 116-17), also identifies the subsequent ambivalence towards the mother, constituted by images on the one hand of an encompassing and protective maternity and, on the other, by those of a lacerating ‘gueule du monstre […], la vagina dentata de la Terre Mère’ (p. 141). In Atala, the image of the ‘maternal’ crocodile in its pool most precisely fuses these opposing tendencies.

23. Strategies such as the underlining within the text by two authoritative voices, those of Père Aubry and the final narrator, that Atala's death is merely a tragic mistake, resulting from ignorance and fanaticism; the use of the ‘style indien’ to distance overt eroticism, and the masking of primary (mother/child) incest by a transparently guiltless secondary (brother/sister) incest.

24. Bazin, Chateaubriand en Amérique (Paris, Éditions de la Table Ronde, 1969), p. 168.

25. N. Segal, Narcissus and Echo (Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 2-3.

26. Diana Knight, in ‘The Readability of René's Secret’ identifies the same technique in René, where the trigger is Amélie's overheard confession of her ‘criminal passion’ for her brother (French Studies, xxxvii (1983), 35-43).

27. Chateaubriand, Atala, ed. by F. Letessier, p. 50, Chateaubriand's italics. Does the ‘style indien’ need the reinforcement of italics here to emphasize that this uncivilized practice belongs to an alien culture?

28. The special signification of maternity within the Christian order is expressed by Aubry: ‘la maternité [est] une espèce de sacerdoce’ (p. 113). Does maternity, like sexuality a natural function, require the constraints of a Christian sanction to limit its anarchic potential?

29. Chateaubriand, Atala, p. 234, my italics.

30. Or, as Naomi Schor puts it: ‘better dead than troubling the homosocial order’ (op. cit., p. 148). Alex Hughes, in ‘Murdering the Mother: Simone de Beauvoir's Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée’, explains the ‘necessity’ of ‘matricide’, drawing on Alice Jardine: ‘the breaking of the (incestuous, pre-oedipal) mother/child dyad which both sexes must effect in order to gain access to the Symbolic order (i.e. the order of language, culture and society) involves the repudiation of the mother that may be read as somehow “murderous”’ (French Studies, xlviii (1994), 182). Chateaubriand elsewhere invokes the necessity of religion, which Atala (mis)understands as requi ring her death, in order to preserve society: ‘Il faut une religion, ou la société périt: […] il semble que l'Europe touche au moment d'une révolution, ou plutôt d'une dissolution, dont celle de la France n'est que l'avant-coureur’ (Essai sur les Révolutions, p. 429); ‘Quelle sera la religion qui remplacera le christianisme?’ (ibid., p. 428). If Atala has to die, it is in the name of an order which would guarantee the integrity of a pre-revolutionary, absolutist, patriarchal structure.

31. N. Segal, The Unintended Reader (Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. xi-xii.

32. Chateaubriand, Atala, p. 43, my italics.

33. This relates to the projection on to Atala of the central drama. She, as real Other, becomes the passive object of narration, while René, as pseudo-Other, is invited to replace her.

34. ‘Bassin’: ‘1. récipient portatif creux […] 5. […] pelvis’ (Le Nouveau Petit Robert (Paris, Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1993)).

35. Progressive separation from the maternal by ejection, severance and the interdiction on reunion. The severity of the loss of the maternal as an internalized part of the self may be gauged by the plenitude attributed to the maternal function throughout the text.

36. ‘[…] malgré sa charge érotique, Atala est un texte de l'inaccomplissement et Chactas [described as a ‘mâle glorieux’ on p. 186] […] est un être castré’ (Barbéris, op. cit., p. 190).

37. The chronology of Atala places this narrator's presence in America as roughly approximate to the time of Chateaubriand's visit.

38. Chateaubriand, Atala, p. 165, my emphasis.

39. In his Mémoires Chateaubriand refers to the manuscript as a ‘fille dévouée’, who ‘se plaça entre son père et le plomb ennemi’ (op. cit., p. 333).