[In the following essay, Gans argues that Chateaubriand attemped to integrate classical, Hellenic aesthetics with Christian morality in René. Gans claims the character of René—as both a literary hero and a behavioral model—operates as the central and self-centered character whose behavior is not motivated by desire. In this way, the work positions aesthetic questions rather than moral ones at its center.]

Few men have been as aware as Chateaubriand that modern western culture is a combination of Hellenic esthetics and Hebraic (or “Judeo-Christian”) morality. His attempts at realizing new forms of this combination have had varying long-term success. His novel Les Martyrs, for example, is less than convincing as a tableau of the Christian sublimation of classical virtues. It is rather in the two novelettes, Atala and René, included as “illustrations” in the Génie du Christianisme (1802), but also published separately (Atala a year previously, in 1801; René in 1805), that art and religion, ethics and esthetics achieve their romantic fusion. And, despite—or perhaps because of—Atala's more overt religio-esthetic exemplarity, particularly in the latter. Not the condemnations of the hero's vague des passions in preface and epilogue, but his story itself is the locus of this synthesis, in which Rousseau's personal system was converted, via a fictional narrative, into an existential model accessible to any young man with free time.

Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, first published in 1774, and thus antedating the Rêveries—but not La Nouvelle Héloïse!—had had a considerable enough impact upon Chateaubriand's generation to be cited in his 1805 preface, along with Rousseau, as a source of the “travers particulier des jeunes gens du siècle, le travers qui mène directement au suicide” (peculiar failing of the young men of our time, the failing that leads directly to suicide).¹René was written as a fictional counterattack on both. If Rousseau is the founding model of romanticism just as Jesus is that of Christianity, then the most obvious difference to note is that his most influential French disciple was an opponent, both political and moral, rather than a follower. It is easy enough to call Chateaubriand a hypocrite in his condemnation of René, a reactionary in his condemnation of Rousseau. But the strength of romantic culture (and politics) lay precisely in its reliance on an esthetic basis that made it invulnerable to ethical accusations.

It would have been a simple matter for Chateaubriand to portray René as a misguided reader of Rousseau and Goethe—and a victim of the French Revolution—rather than a man of the Regency. René was intended as an all but dehistoricized model of an attitude toward life that Chateaubriand's reader could nevertheless not help but understand as resulting from the recent crises in political and cultural history. Because René's fate was meant to serve as a deterrent to imitators, his relation to the world was presented, in accordance with the classical tradition, as independent of historical contingency. René is given to us as the product of a purely familial specificity. As with Rousseau (but not Chateaubriand), his mother dies at his birth. His father is austere and his older sister alone offers him companionship. These family details prepare the quasi-incestuous relationship with Amélie that is to follow, but they are far from explaining René's strange disinterest in the world. The self-contradiction of the model is apparent; René is presented in the Preface as typical of the modern era, but in the specific historical context of the Regency he would have been pathological, if not downright inconceivable. Yet the romantic strategy he incarnated would never again be so rigorously represented—and this made him a more powerful model for romantic youth even than Werther, although his international currency was far smaller.

Comparatists belittle French romanticism as an abstract shadow of the richer English and German variants, but this very abstractness is a source of greater rigor. French romanticism is “late,” but this lateness does not reduce it to a tardy imitation. Rousseau's literary centralization of the self became in France, as it could not become either in England or in the Germanic countries, a response not merely to “revolutionary” economic and social forces, but to a real political revolution that created at one stroke the radically post-traditional society that was the fundamental condition for the universalization of the romantic self. The post-revolutionary René, in comparison with the pre-revolutionary Werther, is the exemplary model of romantic “lateness,” and his paradoxical ahistoricity only adds to rather than detracts from his vigor. The condemnations pronounced both in the Preface and the text are fully consonant with this ahistoricity; they follow traditional morality and allow for no sociological alibis. René's sins are placed squarely on his own head. Because René is not “misguided” by Rousseau et al, he is alone to blame for his unhappiness; but it is precisely this autonomy that made him so attractive a model for romantic youth. Chateaubriand's crime was not in hypocritically pretending to disapprove René's sins, but simply in presenting them as full-fledged sins at all. For the romantics, if not for Chateaubriand, damnation was the most certain sign of (esthetic) centrality.

René was surely a sinner; yet his refusal of worldly desire-objects illustrates a mechanism of self-centralization that is basic to Christianity. The Christian can only recenter the world about himself by refusing to desire worldly mastery in any form. But this is a “Christianity” that is closer to the system of Rousseau's Rêveries than to the Gospels. René's refusal of desire does not make him the center of a new system of spiritual redistribution; instead of loving his fellow man, he can only find imaginary solace in “une Eve tirée de moi-même” (an Eve drawn from myself). Separation from the world maintains René at the center of his own imaginary universe, but the only recentering that takes place is of the esthetic variety. As a fictional hero rather than an autobiographical self-image, René cannot and need not make any claim to central status in the real world. Whereas Rousseau's task in the Rêveries was to demonstrate how happy he was in spite of his persecutors, Chateaubriand's is to present René's sufferings. Rousseau had to “die' (in the Second Promenade) and be reborn to write the Rêveries. René's “rebirth” can only be the almost entirely formal one of assuming the place of the narrator to tell his story.

Rousseau, before his expulsion from the world, was, as the Confessions develop at length, a creature of desire. The Confessions, autobiographical as it is, is closer to fictional narrative in its favorite eighteenth-century mode than the “posthumous” Rêveries. The greater rigor and abstraction of René as compared to Werther corresponds roughly to the difference between the worldly Rousseau of the Confessions and the reborn exile of the Rêveries. The parallel with the latter work also explains why René cannot be a novel. Werther's desire is, unlike René's, “bourgeois” and aggressive. He desires Charlotte (whom he first sees at the center of the circle of her brothers and sisters, to whom she is “ritually” distributing bread); he desires as well to be accepted in aristocratic society (which rejects him). René desires nothing, not even his sister. The only thing worldly experience can teach him is the impossibility of continuing his regressive relationship with Amélie, and this is by no means enough to reshape his imaginary world in detail as the novel may be defined as doing. René has, in effect, imported into fictional narrative the utter absence of worldly desire that characterizes the Rêveries. But whereas in the latter work this absence was presented as the result of an ultimate renunciation in the face of unremitting persecution, in René it appears as a spontaneous refusal of worldly particularity that has nothing of the renunciation of old age.

For perhaps the first time, desire as a force or “drive,” not unlike Freud's libido, is altogether separated from any concrete object. The modernity of this conception should not be underestimated, even if it is more imaginary than real. From René who desires nothing to the modern consumer who desires everything, the distance is not indeed very great. René's relation to the world is founded on control over his imaginary scene of desire. He is the first literary figure to view the world radically as a set of virtually equivalent particularities. Aristocrat that he is, he can afford to reject them all; but his immense bourgeois following resulted from the fact that even the latter, in effect, “reject” their object before they accept it. Nothing is predestined: desire in the modern world implies decision, thematization, freedom in the Sartrean sense of a negative space between the desiring self and the scene of its desire.

René's attitude is thus both in itself the basic romantic strategy of desire and the first moment in modern man's relationship to the multiplicity of the market economy. But René is a fictional hero, not an existential model. Because he exists only in Chateaubriand's text, his exemplarity must be detached from his biography. The romantic does not imitate René in order to end up like him; he imitates certain moments of his story in order to guarantee his own self from the suspicion of marginality. If his imitation goes no farther, it remains a mere pose—but the existential value of poses is the foundation of the entire modern system of consumption. Yet the more interesting case is that of the “true” romantic who has pretensions of his own to esthetic creation. René (unlike Werther) is no artist, but he does tell his own story. Art and, particularly, literature as “self-expression” finds in this novelette a guarantee of its non-particularity. The professions René rejects are all peripheral roles in a market society for which all roles are peripheral; only the artist remains faithful to the centrality of the self within his own (empty) scene of desire. This romantic faith in art is the last great self-centralizing force of western culture, one whose momentum has carried it nearly to the end of the twentieth century.

For the Rousseau of the Rêveries, writing is not creation, but recollection. Representation preserves the privileged moments of self-communion by making them available as scenes. Rousseau's understanding of the supplementary character of representation is ambiguously lucid. Existentially secondary although esthetically primary, representation for Rousseau presupposes a “natural” scene that it reproduces, although this reproduction is acknowledged to provide existential benefits (“happiness”) at times greater than the original. Romanticism, beginning with Chateaubriand, will take advantage of this scenic naturalism, but without acknowledging the supplementary function of representation. The latter is no longer contained within the existential scene as such; in contrast, the activity of representation is readily acknowledged as the self's only true guarantee of worldly centrality. The opacity of the supplement is incarnated in the fictional person, for whom representational supplementarity would destroy his esthetic raison-d'être. The romantic hero has no possibility of finding compensatory satisfaction in representation; his negativity must produce suffering, not, as for Rousseau, the pleasure of self-contemplation.

René is a series of quickly-drawn tableaux, a series of slides rather than a moving picture. Change within a single tableau is impossible. The only progression takes place between them, as each is switched off for reasons independent of the tableaux themselves. There is no interaction with the objects of the scenes because each one is presented to the reader as a self-contained esthetic object. But this closure is not that of the existential experience described, which is, in every case, although in different ways, open to temporality and thus a memento mori. The scenes of the Rêveries are explicitly scenes of happiness, even if they can only be fully realized as such in their written form. Writing for Rousseau is the supplement that brings detemporalized perfection to scenes whose lived reality was only a forgetting of time in time. The supplementary status of these represented scenes makes them accessible in their perfection only esthetically—and thereby communicable to the reader, whether Rousseau himself or another—but this perfection has an existential basis. René's experiences are at best available to René himself as scenes, but they never describe moments of bliss. Their perfection is qua scenes; but each scene is that of a new sacrifice, real or symbolic. Esthetic closure—and this defines the particular pathos of Chateaubriand's famous style—is opposed to the impossibility of existential closure. Art is here no mere supplement; it is the sole source of order. Yet the existential impact of this order was great enough to make René a model for a generation of romantic youth.

René is never happy, but he is at the center of each scene. The desiring self is forever drawn to the periphery, but never privileges any element of this periphery enough to make it a new center. The old scene is merely abandoned for a new one, and the process begins anew. The perspective of René is thus quite accurately described as “self-centered.” The coherence of the scenes is dependent on the equilibrium of the sentences in which they are composed, but this equilibrium is not a merely ornamental one. Each external experience, from the sound of church-bells to the view from Mt. Etna, exteriorizes the central self just as do the waters of the lake in Rousseau's Fifth Promenade; but in the place of an externally recurring rhythm is a figure of temporality whose very stability represents the permanence of change. The church bells toll as predictably as the splash of the waves, but we know what their tolling signifies. This signification is no mere matter of convention. What is significant is what is eventful—one tolls a bell to commemorate an event, be it birth or death. The natural images produce similar effects. Chateaubriand's nature is never static and sublime, but filled with an irregular movement that, in René, is always at least potentially destructive. And if the choice of such scenes is arbitrary, it is made by René himself: “j'entrai avec ravissement dans les mois des tempêtes” (I entered into the stormy season with rapture). Nature is only significant to René insofar as it impinges upon him; it is never an object of esthetic contemplation from the sidelines.

The series of scenes forms a narrative because each one expresses only its existential inadequacy. As an atemporal moment for the reader, each is perfect in itself, and would be so for the hero, were he able to live it atemporally. René is no model for himself, but he is therefore all the more a model for others; the reader of these scenes is drawn to imitate them in life only because he has had, quite unlike their central figure, the opportunity of encountering them first in art. For the fictional hero, unlike Rousseau's autobiographical one, has no existence apart from the scenes in which he appears, and therefore presents himself as a model unencumbered by external existential claims.

The successive scenes create a temporal progression by exhausting successive layers of exteriority. From world traveler to promeneur to the inhabitant of an isolated chaumière, René is driven into himself to the point of intended suicide. But without its unique péripétie, René's story would be a prose poem rather than a narrative. It is his relationship to Amélie that not only prevents his suicide, but gives his tale its definitive meaning. The classical incest-motif proclaimed in the preface provides the key element in this romantic narrative. René's status as desiring but objectless model is finally dependent on a factor that is not only beyond his control, but all but inimitable by his followers: the incestuous passion of his sister.

The Rêveries opposes a single individual to the rest of humanity; there is no privileged Other. Perhaps the most striking difference between the romantic system and that of Rousseau is the insistent presence of this Other, who is most often an individual love-object, but who can appear, as in the works of the “social romanticism” of the 1830's, in the form of an underprivileged or victimized social group. René stands, with respect to the role of the Other, as a limiting case. René is incapable of Werther's passion for Charlotte, but the consistently self-centered strategy of his desire only makes the specific role of the romantic Other stand out more clearly. For the importance of the Other is not in her role as love-object, but the fact that her suffering is absorbed into that of the central self. The romantic hero is too free to be tragic, but his suffering becomes, so to speak, tragic in the second degree by encompassing—and differentiating itself from—the suffering of the Other. This structure is extremely frequent in French romantic literature: from Le Lac of Lamartine and La Maison du Berger of Vigny to Constant's Adolphe and Balzac's Le Père Goriot. No doubt it cannot be called universal. It is not indispensable; but it is distinctive: the romantic self is distinguished thereby from the less “advanced”—and consequently less individualized, less significant—self of the Other, who can only employ pre-romantic techniques of self-centralization—those of Christianity and neo-classicism.

Amélie is a case in point of the esthetic inferiority of the Christian technique with respect to the romantic. Chateaubriand's Martyrs made famous the opposition between the merveilleux païen and the merveilleux chrétien, but in René, both pale before the merveilleux romantique. Amélie's moral superiority is never in doubt. But significance is grounded on esthetic superiority, and although Amélie's symbolic death and resurrection is the most dramatic moment of the narrative, it remains included within her brother's autobiographical tale. Let us not be accused of cynicism in thus privileging the esthetic above the moral. That Chateaubriand's apologetic project in the Génie du christianisme was explicitly founded on the exposition of the beautés de la religion chrétienne was perfectly typical, not only of romantic priorities, but of the priorities of the modern world in general. The utopia of reciprocity proclaimed in the Gospels could only realize itself through the centralization of the self, however sincerely each Christian self may have believed in the utopia. The primacy of the esthetic over the moral in the modern world is based on the realization that moral reciprocity is an abstract ideal that can at best be realized as the mutual resentment of equally self-centered selves, each being a “spectacle” for the other. The romantic self is already modern, already intent on presenting itself to others as a spectacle. The romantics were the first to adopt a “life-style” for this purpose; the consumer society in which we live is an outgrowth of the response of the industrial production-system to the need for social posture that the romantics had expressed through artisanal means.

In a romantic work, whatever the professed emotions of the characters, all relationships may be understood from the standpoint of a struggle for esthetic centrality. The ethic of this struggle is virtually independent of morality, although in the more naive forms of romanticism it may appear to coincide with it (thus the philanthropic novelist turns his gaze upon the humble but virtuous peuple, and away from their normally more visible masters). The survival of the esthetically fittest—often, as here, figured in the work directly as the hero's survival after the death of the Other—is not, however, without broader ethical relevance. The modern self, historically the most radically self-centered, sets itself a more difficult goal than its predecessors. Because its centrality is a priori and therefore abstract, it has no originally given content and thus risks at every moment falling under the domination, or more precisely, the fascination of others. Literary models of the romantic hero played an important role in guaranteeing the self's autonomy in an age in which the industrial paraphernalia of the consumer's self-expression did not yet exist.

But does René really represent a “higher type” than Amélie? The sceptical reader may object that his central position in Chateaubriand's tale is a formal a priori, and that, even if René makes a more suitable literary protagonist than Amélie, this is no reflection on their value as models of worldly practice. But this objection misses the point: René's claim to being a better protagonist comes not from a more dramatic end, but from his very inability to attain such an end. Amélie's sacrifice is Christian, but it is at the same time a direct descendent of the “sacrifice” of the tragic hero. René's superiority is not that of drama but of “life-style.” Amélie's spectacle is more vivid, but its vividness is a function of its impermanence. The posture incarnated by René has no such temporal limitations. And this contrast explains the more advanced centrality of the romantic over either the Christian or the tragic model. This centrality involves no constraints on praxis. Like the Rousseau of the Rêveries, but without his historical guarantees, René remains at the center of the universe without either lifting a finger on his own behalf or suffering the agony of physical martyrdom. As a literary figure, René's only constraint is to realize his indifference to the particular in what we have elsewhere called the “null-praxis.”² But the imitators of the romantic model need not thus limit their worldly activity. Like the average Christian, the average romantic need not renounce his worldly ambitions. Indeed, the romantic is by far the less inconsistent of the two, for he need only affirm the primacy of his desiring self over its temporal modifications, whereas the Christian is bound to a moral doctrine that condemns desire.

It is Amélie's devotion to René that preserves him from suicide. She thus plays a role antithetical to that of Charlotte, who made Werther a pre-romantic hero by provoking him to despair. Yet Amélie's sisterly devotion is from the beginning—or more precisely, from the moment of departure from the toit paternel of childhood—tainted with incestuous passion.³ The point of this passion, whatever we may think of Chateaubriand's remarks in the 1805 preface about the “malheurs épouvantables” that are the punishment for René's “rêveries criminelles” (pp. 66-67), is to demonstrate the incompatibility of the intimate world of the family with adult existence. The incest motif serves, as in the Oedipus legend, to point up the paradoxality of the scene of desire, but the opposition between childhood and adulthood is presented in a diametrically opposite fashion. Oedipus incarnates the permanence of this scene: he lives in a world without displacement, in which the central place in the scene of desire can have only a single occupant. Thus his attempt to flee childhood toward adulthood cannot succeed. For René, the world of adulthood and praxis offers no attractions: his incest is not the result of his usurpation of worldly mastery, but of his renunciation of it. Oedipus thought the world would reduce desire to a form; René thinks that attachment to a specific content will protect him against the empty form of desire.

But whereas Oedipus' error leads to the act of incest, René's does not even lead him to desire it. Oedipus' crimes, like his reign that is inextricably connected with them, are essential to his centrality. René remains central by refusing desire; the “crime” is that of the other who, unlike him, cannot live within her childhood attachments without investing them with adult desire. In this, as we see, it is Amélie, not René, who is “tragic.” Yet her “tragedy,” as played out on the scene of the narrative, is transformed by its Christian context. Amélie's crime is wholly imaginary, or more precisely, it is, in René's narrative, a mere formality. Its only presence in the text is at the moment of symbolic death and rebirth, where René overhears Amélie's avowal because, in this religious ceremony, he stands in a legitimately familial relation to her. The apologetic function of this passage is clear; Amélie, who has been initiated into adult desire within her childhood context, can only find refuge in a religious community that recreates an intimate universe beyond worldly desire. Renunciation of the world thus becomes the occasion for devotion to others; Amélie regains her central position ethically, not (merely) esthetically.

But René is a step ahead of her. Not only do his actions at her initiation ceremony disturb the proceedings, but he mimics her ritual death in a fainting fit from which he, like his sister, desires not to recover. His suffering is immediately declared more unbearable than hers, although this very unbearability is not without “supplementary” compensations:

On peut trouver des forces dans son âme contre un malheur personnel; mais devenir la cause involontaire du malheur d'un autre, cela est tout à fait insupportable. Eclairé sur les maux de ma soeur, je me figurais ce qu'elle avait dû souffrir …

O mes amis, je sus donc ce que c'était que de verser des larmes, pour un mal qui n'était point imaginaire! Mes passions, si longtemps indéterminées, se précipitèrent sur cette première proie avec fureur. Je trouvais même une sorte de satisfaction inattendue dans la plénitude de mon chagrin, et je m'aperçus, avec un secret mouvement de joie, que la douleur n'est pas une affection qu'on épuise comme le plaisir.

(We can find strength in our souls to resist personal unhappiness; but to become the involuntary cause of the unhappiness of another, that is altogether unbearable. Enlightened as to the misery of my sister, I imagined what she must have suffered …

Oh my friends, I knew at that moment what it was to shed tears for a suffering that was not imaginary! My passions, so long undetermined, threw themselves furiously on this first prey. I even found a kind of unexpected satisfaction in the fullness of my unhappiness, and I observed, with a secret feeling of joy, that pain is not an emotion that one exhausts like pleasure).

(pp. 170-71)

What indeed is the nature of René's suffering? It is not a vicarious identification with his sister; as la Rochefoucauld put it, “on a toujours assez de force pour supporter les maux d'autrui” (we always have enough strength to bear others' misfortunes). Nor is it the pain of her absence. René suffers because he has been the cause of another's suffering. As he imagines (“je me figurais”) her torments, he suffers on a secondary, higher level. Yet this “suffering” is, in fact, rather pleasant. The notion of suffering has here been altogether transformed from its origin in the unambiguously painful role of the ritual victim. The tragic hero encounters suffering in his search for mastery; the Christian finds mastery through assuming the victimary position. The romantic, too, assumes this position voluntarily, but imaginarily, by converting general indifference into one form or other of persecution. René “suffers” the guilt for his sister's incestuous desires that place him in the center of an intimate universe. This mal is not imaginaire because its primary victim is someone else, a person sufficiently worldly to desire another. This is, indeed, the only conceivable punishment for one who has refused to desire; but it is obvious that such a punishment is not without compensation to the ego. Like Hamlet, René finds in another's crime the realization of his scene of desire, but in contemplating this scene he maintains himself in the center of the stage.

Oedipus commits incest; Hamlet and Phèdre are involved in quasi-incestuous relationships; Amélie has unrealized incestuous desires that she must expiate; René inspires incestuous desires the expiation of which by his sister serves as his “punishment.” The importance of this series is less in illustrating the varying roles of the incest-taboo in literature than in serving as a paradigm of the evolving relationship between the central literary hero and the scene of desire. René is “post-Christian” because he has committed no crime in the Christian moral system. It is in this sense that the Père Souël's condemnation of him as a “jeune homme entêté de chimères” (young man infatuated with his own fantasies) is truly a hors-d'oeuvre. To be sure, one can cite at least two of the seven deadly sins—pride and sloth (acedia)—as relevant to René's case, but this is special pleading. René desires no worldly object; thus far it is he, rather than his pious sister, who is the true Christian. Yet René's renunciation of the ambition for worldly mastery leads to a quite non-Christian result. He retains the centrality of his self, but only at the price of an isolation from the world that is the very contrary of that of the Christian eremites. Père Souël—“Des saints, me direz-vous, se sont ensevelis dans les déserts? Ils … employaient à éteindre leurs passions le temps que vous perdez peut-être à allumer les vôtres” (Saints, you will say, buried themselves in deserts? They employed in extinguishing their passions the time that you perhaps waste in setting fire to yours). Even here, however, the “peut-être” indicates the good father's discomfiture at René's behavior, which does not fit into the worldly/non-worldly opposition of Christianity. The desert saints were practicing a form of askesis, and their example was meant for the worldly, even if they themselves never reaped the fruits of their self-discipline. Sainthood is an object of worldly emulation, and, among roads to sainthood, eremitism, properly publicized, is a functional equivalent to martyrdom. René turns his back on the world altogether. Rather than distinguishing himself by fighting against the desires all men possess in common, he distinguishes himself by disdaining all common objects. René's difference is a priori, and cannot therefore be imitated, but its effects are, by the same token, an ideal object of imitation because they demonstrate—or appear to demonstrate—this a priori difference.

René, as a fictional character, can offer no existential guarantee of his possibility. The detractors of romanticism have therefore no difficulty in casting doubt on the verisimilitude of his indifference to the world, or in insinuating that it is merely a mask for his creator's resentment of the post-revolutionary social order. The “real” René, in a word, feigns indifference as a mask for his resentful envy. Well and good. The important factor is not René's “real” indifference, but his usefulness as a model. Rousseau was real enough, but his qualifications for imagining himself at the center of the universe were not shared by his readers. The only universe in which René could be the center was his own. But, for the young romantic, that was sufficient. And, as we have seen, René's indifference to worldly objects of desire not only provides an example for the romantic, but constitutes the first moment of modern man's relation to the world of potential desire-objects. That he prolongs this moment beyond its normal limits makes him no more a “false” character than Oedipus. But no one has tried to imitate Oedipus, whereas René's imitators are legion. It is their existence that casts doubts on our hero's authenticity.

René, whatever his biographical sources, was created in answer to Werther and the Rêveries. As a counter-example, to be sure, but also as a version perfected for general imitation. Rousseau, the source of Goethe's as well as Chateaubriand's basic model, was imitable only in literature. His version of universal victimage being inaccessible to his readers, they could only borrow his cult of “nature,” without, however, being able to inform it with an individual significance. Rousseau is the father of romanticism, but his message could only become an existential one through the intervention of secondary writers whose very secondariness as reflected in their necessary recourse to fiction and in the necessarily anonymous lives of their fictional heroes, created the necessary existential link with their audience.

Werther is, not unjustifiably, thought of as the first existential hero of the new era, the first literary figure to inspire, not merely external fashions (like the jardins à l'anglaise of La Nouvelle Héloïse), but total engagement. “Wertherian” suicides were surely more than a fashion for their perpetrators. But as a praxis, suicide has the disadvantage of eliminating its most convinced adherents. The Wertherian generation as a whole could hardly be expected to copy more than the hero's yellow trousers or his passion for Ossian. No doubt, the bourgeois Werther was a more “realistic” hero than the unattached aristocrat René. But his very realism assured the worldly failure of his self-centralization, demanded his suicide as his sole means of attaining the spectacular status of central victim. In this, Werther is not a romantic, but still a neoclassical hero. Condemned to the periphery, he must justify by his suffering unto death the interest we have bestowed upon him. By combining in a single tale his flirtation with Charlotte Buff-Kestner and the suicide of his acquaintance Jerusalem, Goethe found a way to magnify a lived incident into a literary work; but he demonstrated, in so doing, both his secondariness with respect to the autobiographer Rousseau, and the impossibility of bringing his discipleship to Rousseau to the radical conclusion suggested by the Rêveries. Werther's disappointments in aristocratic society reflect pre-revolutionary socio-political realities; Charlotte's unshakable centrality is merely a personal version of the stability of the traditional hierarchy. The “outsider” Werther is able to incarnate in a literary passion the bourgeois' exclusion from this hierarchy, but his imitators' social resentment could only be expressed through suicide or Schwärmerei, not through the sort of radical recentering of the romantic self that became possible after the Revolution.

Chateaubriand's more abstract hero accomplishes the recentering that was beyond the reach of Goethe's. René's mal du siècle is, unlike Werther's, perfectly imitable, because it depends only on the self. No act of faith is necessary. René's stance was thus of immense value to the adolescents of his era, whether aspiring artists or not. And this value was not only psychological but social. In a society organized more and more rigorously around the solicitation of material desires, the self's only defense is its transcendental indifference—its primordial negative freedom.

It is only upon receiving news of his sister's death that René can bring himself to tell his story to Chactas and le Pere Souël. The last vestige of his intimate childhood universe now destroyed, René's only human contact can take place through narration. Having gone through life at the center of his own imaginary stage, René now opens the curtain and reveals himself to an audience. In doing so, he willingly becomes the Subject of his own narrative, albeit one intended to remain hidden in the American “desert.” Yet we should recall that René has a literary existence outside his own narrative. The frame-story, taken from Chateaubriand's unfinished American epic Les Natchez, provides René with just enough independent reality so that his story may appear as a deliberate autobiography. The hero of ennui does not demean himself by this act of self-revelation; his occupation of the position of literary Subject only reproduces formally what has been the structure of his imagination throughout. The central storyteller, like the centralized hero, is dependent on the existence of a periphery. His hearers are not, like Amélie, part of his childhood universe, but neither are they susceptible to the attraction of worldly desire. Their sympathy, or at least that of Chactas, is that of the esthetic audience in general. René's rejection of the world is not contradicted by his act of narration, because this audience is not motivated by worldly desires. They alone can accept the centrality of the romantic hero on his own terms, because they experience it both as that of the (traditional) literary victim and as a model for themselves.

The use of the literary hero as a behavioral (or “postural”) model, which distinguishes romantic from classical narrative, implies a complicity on the part of the hearer that corresponds to the narrator's recentralization of the universe around himself. The esthetic scene corresponds, as always, to a subjective perspective on the world, in which the romantic even more than the classical hero fails to occupy an objectively central position. But the subjective perspective of the romantic subject-narrator is existential as well as esthetic. René's world may not be equivalent to an objective social universe, but it is centered on himself. Esthetic representation is thus naturalized; it is nothing but the expression of a subjective reality. Its supplementary function, so clearly present in Rousseau, here goes unmentioned; its motivation—the need to draw others into the periphery of the hero's personal universe—involves no contradiction, as it does for Rousseau, because René makes no claim to total self-sufficiency, only to self-centrality. The absolute freedom of the self is not compromised by its need for observation by others in its intimate context. The reader who accepts entrance into this context does so because he recognizes in this vulnerable centrality an image of his own.

Romanticism cannot maintain itself without contradictions. But it is facile to view these as signs of the “inauthenticity” of the romantic self and its representation. If Chateaubriand condemned René's self-centeredness while, in effect, presenting him as a model, this is better explained by the invulnerability of this model to traditional morality than by its creator's “hypocrisy.” René expresses a problem for Chateaubriand, one that he never solved existentially—or politically—and never again esthetically. Chateaubriand remained all his life a mythomane, nowhere more than in the Mémoires d'outre-tombe, but this trait, far from disqualifying him as an influence on the modern self, only made it easier for him to grasp the necessary mythomania of modern man, his necessary affirmation of a priori freedom, without which the spectacle he presents to the world must go unwatched.

René is not a work disfigured by internal contradictions. What made romanticism impossible to pursue as an esthetic mode was not its “inauthenticity,” but, on the contrary, its existential inevitability. The romantic hero could no longer serve as a model once his example had come to be followed by the general population. The real-world centralized self needed not the prior exemplum of romanticism but the posterior justification of realism. Thus the end of romanticism as a literary and artistic movement was due to its success rather than its failure. In its prolonged post-romantic agony, what remains of “high culture” continues to explore, to the point of exhaustion and beyond, the qualifications of the esthetic self for the exemplary role that Rousseau and his romantic disciples discovered for it.

Notes

1. Atala/René (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964), p. 66. Subsequent references will be to this edition.

2. The Discovery of Illusion: Flaubert's Early Works 1835-1837 (Berkeley: The U. of California Press, 1971).

3. Thus even on his departure for his initial European tour: “Je dis adieu à ma soeur; elle me serra dans ses bras avec un mouvement qui ressemblait à de la joie, comme si elle eût été heureuse de me quitter; je ne pus me défendre d'une réflexion amère sur l'inconséquence des amitiés humaines” (I said farewell to my sister; she pressed me in her arms with an emotion that resembled joy, as if she had been happy to leave me; I could not avoid a bitter reflection on the inconsistency of human friendship) (p. 152); emphasis mine.