SOURCE: Bouvier, Luke. “How Not to Speak of Incest: Atala and the Secrets of Speech.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, nos. 3-4 (spring-summer 2002): 228-42.

[In the following essay, Bouvier looks at Atala in relationship to René to examine the motif of incest in the former. Using a Derridean approach, Bouvier focuses on the structures of silence and secrecy, addressing the paradoxical nature of incest’s dual presence and absence in Chateaubriand's work.]

How not to speak of incest in Atala? The subject would seem to be unavoidable, for Chateaubriand's exotic tale of the doomed love of Chactas and Atala has frequently been read precisely through its evident thematic parallels in this regard with René: as the story of an incestuous passion between brother and sister, along with its inevitable prohibition. This “incestuous” influence of René on the critical reception of Atala has of course not been unwarranted, since the two texts share more than a passing resemblance. Both were originally written as episodes of Chateaubriand's grand Indian epic, Les Natchez, but were soon incorporated instead into Le Génie du christianisme (1802) as exemplary illustrations of the aesthetics of Christianity. Already in 1801, though, Atala had been published separately in order to stir interest in the coming Génie, a role in which it succeeded spectacularly, going through five editions in its first year. René made its debut the following year in joining Atala in Le Génie, and after several successful editions, the two episodes were extracted from Le Génie and published together in their definitive form in a separate volume (1805). Bound together by this publishing history, Chateaubriand's two texts are also linked, of course, by the characters of René and Chactas; in Atala, the elderly Chactas recounts for René his youthful adventure with Atala, while René narrates for Chactas (and le Père Souël) the story that bears his name. Given Amélie's confession of her “criminelle passion” (190) for her brother René, then, as well as her chaste, saint-like death in a monastery, it is difficult not to speak of an analogous structure of incest in the case of Atala and Chactas. Atala, too, dies the chaste death of a saint to avoid consummating her passion for Chactas—though the two are not literally brother and sister, Chactas's adoptive father, the Spaniard Lopez, significantly turns out to be Atala's biological father. On hearing this revelation, Chactas exclaims, “O ma sœur! ô fille de Lopez!” explaining that “C'en était trop pour nos cœurs que cette amitié fraternelle qui venait nous visiter, et joindre son amour à notre amour” (121). On the verge of succumbing to Chactas's advances, Atala's virtue is only saved from such an act of “symbolic incest” when le Père Aubry melodramatically intervenes a moment later to rescue them from the storm raging around them—and in effect to impose the prohibition on incest.¹

Reading Atala this way in the light of René surely illuminates crucial elements of the text, but such a simple parallel may also obscure much of the critical interest and specificity of Atala, in particular as concerns the very complexity of the problem of incest.² Indeed, a remarkable aspect of Chateaubriand's text would seem to be how Atala is less concerned with recounting the tale of incestuous desire that underlies Atala's struggle with her vow of chastity than with reflecting precisely on the problem of how not to speak of incest. This problem emerges quite explicitly, for example, toward the end of the text, when le Père Aubry attempts to console the dying Atala with a biblical allusion to the “founding” marriages of human society:

Je ne vous parlerai point 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. Toutes ces unions ont été troublées; la jalousie s'est glissée à l'autel de gazon où l'on immolait le chevreau, elle a régné sous la tente d'Abraham, et dans ces couches mêmes où les patriarches goûtaient tant de joie, qu'ils oubliaient la mort de leurs mères.

(144)

The context of this peculiar remark is le Père Aubry's exhortation to Atala to have no regrets about her unfulfilled passion for Chactas; as he tells her, “un jour, peut-être le dégoût fût venu avec la satiété” (144)—what hope is there in human passion if even Adam and Eve, who had the best chances for success, were unable to maintain lasting happiness? Not to mention those “mariages des premiers-nés des hommes,” which were all poisoned by jealousy—in the very unions where the patriarchs “goûtaient tant de joie,” their excessive pleasure or “satiété” perhaps turned into something like the “dégoût” that le Père Aubry foresses for Atala and Chactas.

There are a number of interesting aspects to this passage, but what interests us most is the “not-to-mention” remark that frames it, the “Je ne vous parlerai point” that introduces le Père Aubry's comments about “ces unions ineffables” between sister and brother. The name for such a rhetorical figure is “preterition,” literally the act of “passing over” or omitting, and classically it is used to emphasize or draw attention to something by claiming not to speak about it. In such a device, discourse seems to pause for a moment in order to comment on the limits of its own action, typically feigning to avoid a subject as too obvious or perhaps inappropriate for commentary, but the artifice of the figure, of course, is that one does indeed speak about it to a greater or lesser degree. It is a figure that appears quite frequently in Atala, such as in a second preteritive remark that occurs immediately after the passage above, as le Père Aubry continues to console Atala:

Je vous épargne les détails des soucis du ménage, les disputes, les reproches mutuels, les inquiétudes et toutes ces peines secrètes qui veillent sur l'oreiller du lit conjugal. La femme renouvelle ses douleurs chaque fois qu'elle est mère, et elle se marie en pleurant. Que de maux dans la seule perte d'un nouveau-né à qui l'on donnait le lait, et qui meurt sur votre sein!

(144)

We will return to certain details in these two passages, but for now we can note the general importance of such preteritive gestures in Atala, which seem to be symptoms of a larger paradox posed by Chateaubriand's writing: how to speak of the unspeakable, how to speak of that which must necessarily be kept silent or which cannot be spoken of, or conversely, how to avoid speaking of that which one cannot help but speak of? At issue here is certainly not a moral problem, but rather a conceptual one, which moreover seems to inhere in the very problematic nature of incest itself. As Jacques Derrida suggests in his well-known commentary in Of Grammatology on the prohibition of incest in Rousseau's work, incest itself remains strangely resistant to conceptualization because it only emerges as a concept at the very point of its prohibition or disappearance.³ Writing with respect to Rousseau's notion of the fête, or “festival,” marking the passage from nature to culture, Derrida points out that “Before the festival, there was no incest because there was no prohibition of incest and no society. After the festival there is no more incest because it is forbidden” (263). For Derrida, the advent of the prohibition of incest in the wake of Rousseau's fête assumes particular importance because it coincides with the opening of “the age of supplement, of articulation, of signs, of representatives” (263), which he traces in Rousseau's thinking. In this context, then, any notion of the “presence of incest itself” proves to be a particularly elusive entity:

The festival itself would be incest itself if some such thing—itself—could take place; if, by taking place, incest were not to confirm the prohibition: before the prohibition, it is not incest; forbidden, it cannot become incest except through the recognition of the prohibition. We are always short of or beyond the limit of the festival, of the origin of society, of that present within which simultaneously the interdict is (would be) given with the transgression: that which passes (comes to pass) always and (yet) never properly takes place. It is always as if I had committed incest.

(emphasis in original; 267)

As Derrida concludes, “incest itself” in the context of the presence of Rousseau's “festival,” like the “birth of society” (267) that it accompanies, is not a “passage” from nature to culture, but rather “a point, a pure, fictive and unstable, ungraspable limit” (267). Although Chateaubriand's Christian frame work of course does not exactly match Rousseau's notion of the fête and its role in the origins of society, his preteritive gestures would ultimately seem to be engaging a similar problematic: how to speak of those original “unions ineffables” between brother and sister when speech itself betrays or defeats such an attempt? How to conceive of an unthinkable “originary incest” in “post-catastrophic” terms, after the “fall” into the age of supplementarity (and the prohibition of incest)? Hence the double meaning of our opening question, “how not to speak of incest”: how to respect the imperative not to speak of incest, since it is in this sense unspeakable, but also how can one do anything but speak of incest with respect to such unions in the age of signs and representation?

Such a manner of posing the problem deliberately echoes the title of another work of Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” Although Derrida does not discuss incest in this work, he elaborates this double bind of speaking and not speaking with respect to the notion of the secret in a way that is particularly pertinent to Atala, where secrets and secrecy play such a pronounced role in the unfolding of the problematic of incest. “How not to divulge a secret?” (25), Derrida asks, as he suggests that the “endless oscillation” of such a question between “contradictory and unstable meanings” (how to take care not to divulge a secret? How to do anything but divulge a secret?) produces the movements of what he calls dénégation, or “denial” (25). Since a secret always “presupposes the possibility of speaking” (17), of revealing that which has been kept silent in the form of an already articulated representation, “the secret as such, as secret, separates and already institutes a negativity” (25). Like incest, in a sense, the secret as such proves to be essentially self-negating, for a secret “cannot even appear to one alone except in starting to be lost, to divulge itself, hence to dissimulate itself, as secret, in showing itself” (25). In other words, at the very moment when the secret emerges as concept, it unavoidably denies its very essence as dissimulation precisely by manifesting itself in the order of language, signs and substitution, a paradox that Derrida labels “the secret shared within itself, its partition ‘proper,’ which divides [its] essence” (emphasis in original; 25).

At the moment one asks, then, “how not to divulge a secret?” (or simply, “how to avoid speaking?”), Derrida insists that “it is already, so to speak, too late” (27, emphasis in original). Such questions already presuppose “the space of a promised speech” (18), what Derrida calls “a promise [that] has committed me even before I begin the briefest speech” (14)—not any promise in particular, but “that which, as necessary as it is impossible, inscribes us by its trace in language—before language” (14). It is “the arch-originary promise which establishes us a priori as people who are responsible for speech” (16), that which “preserves a trace of the other” (28) in speech, the call or rather “recall” (rappel) of the other, “having always already preceded the speech to which it has never been present a first time” (28). In subsequent works, Derrida situates this problematic of speaking and secrets with respect to his elaboration of the “gift of death,” or don de la mort—that imponderable “originary self-mourning” that lies at the basis of the “gathering” of the self in its “irreplaceable singularity,” a movement that Derrida casts as a kind of “founding” response of the self to an always-prior call to responsibility before the other.⁴ As Derrida suggests, such a configuration of absolute responsibility and singularity is necessarily sworn to silence and secrecy, for it must resist all manifestation—all substitution, signs and representation—and to respect its own logic must indeed remain “inconceivable” (GD 61). Such absolute responsibility inevitably falls prey to the same aporetic dilemma as the secret itself, though, for responsibility implies the necessity of a public accounting, marking out another “space of a promised speech,” and negating itself like the secret at the very moment of its conception: “one always risks not managing to accede to the concept of responsibility in the process of forming it” (GD 61). Like “incest as such,” then, secrets and responsibility in this sense are always fundamentally inaccessible, for they are already “betrayed” from the moment they are conceived, just as incest has always already given way to its prohibition. Now it is precisely around this inaccessible limit and the founding enigma of the “gift of death” that Chateaubriand's writing incessantly turns, continually drawn to reflect on the unfathomable proximity of death to the scene of birth or origins.⁵ And in Atala, as we have begun to see, this reflection takes place precisely through these problematic, interrelated structures of incest, secrets and the contradictory “preteritive” movements of speaking and not-speaking.

The narrative of Atala itself is organized around a three-fold structure of secrecy, which gradually comes to light. Chactas, a young warrior from the Natchez tribe, is captured by the Muscogulges and sentenced to death, but before the sentence can be carried out, he and Atala, the Christianized daughter of the Muscogulge chief Simaghan, fall in love. Atala facilitates their escape together, and wandering alone in the forest, caught in a violent storm, Chactas urges Atala to reveal the source of her melancholy, which he suspects is the loss of her “patrie” (120). Atala responds by divulging the first element of her secret, that her patrie is not what it appears to be, since her father is in fact not Simaghan, but a Spaniard from Saint Augustine named Lopez—a revelation that triggers the crisis of “symbolic incest” mentioned earlier:

Atala n'offrait plus qu'une faible résistance; je touchais au moment du bonheur, quand tout à coup un impétueux éclair, suivi d'un éclat de la foudre, sillonne l'épaisseur des ombres, remplit la forêt de soufre et de lumière, et brise un arbre à nos pieds. Nous fuyons. O surprise! … dans le silence qui succède, nous entendons le son d'une cloche! Tous deux interdits, nous prêtons l'oreille à ce bruit si étrange dans un désert.

(122)

The sound of the bell of course heralds the arrival of the missionary Père Aubry, as well as the Christian civilization he is attempting to establish in the wilderness. In this regard, Chateaubriand's exotic staging of Indian passion clearly evokes a phantasmic scene of the origins of society, the moment of primordial passage from nature to (Christian) culture. The scene significantly takes place on the cusp between the chapters entitled “Les Chasseurs” (centered on the Muscogulges and Chactas's captivity) and “Les Laboureurs,” an idyllic description of Aubry's Christianized Indian community, “une culture naissante” (131) complete with surveyors marking out “les premières prop-riétés” (132). What would seem to be at stake here between Chactas and Atala, then, is something that unmistakably resembles those “mariages des premiers-nés des hommes,” for a moment earlier Chactas describes the scene as “notre hymen” (121). And indeed, as Derrida's analysis of incest would suggest, such an “ineffable union” between brother and sister takes shape here as an elusive, inscrutable limit, one in which “incest as such” does not take place, but rather passes in the incalculable moment of “un impétueux éclair,” which is already on the far side of “enlightenment” and prohibition. In its wake, then, there emerges something of an originary “falling silent” toward such an impossible, “unspeakable” union, a gesture that would appear to coincide with the very imposition of the incest prohibition itself in the double meaning of the word “interdits” above, where Chactas and Atala are left speechless before the call to civilization and the disappearance of “incest as such,” which never appeared in the first place.

The intervention of le Père Aubry implicitly promises to lift the specter of incest from Chactas and Atala's passion, for he proposes to instruct Chactas in the Christian religion to make of him a “legitimate” husband for Atala, and then to integrate them into his Indian community. Atala and Chactas, however, will of course never take up the role marked out for them in Aubry's civilization, as Chactas and le Père Aubry return from their visit to the Indian village to find Atala dying. “Ma triste destinée a commencé presque avant que j'eusse vu la lumière” (136), she tells them, as she begins to reveal the second element of her secret in the hours before her death. Having nearly died at birth, Atala explains that her mother, a Christianized Indian, made a vow in order to save her life: “elle promit à la Reine des Anges que je lui consacrerais ma virginité, si j'échappais à la mort” (136). Later, before she died, Atala's mother had her reiterate this vow herself in the presence of a priest, urging her to respect the promise she made in her name in order to save her mother's soul—“Songe que je me suis engagée pour toi, afin de te sauver la vie, et que si tu ne tiens ma promesse, tu plongeras l'âme de ta mère dans des tourments éternels” (137)—and to save herself from her mother's curse: “Ma mère me menaça de sa malédiction, si jamais je rompais mes vœux, et après m'avoir recommandé un secret inviolable envers les païens, persécuteurs de ma religion, elle expira, en me tenant embrassée” (137). The sense of Atala's struggle between her passion for Chactas and her vow to her mother now becomes clear, and le Père Aubry assures her that he can write to the church authorities to have her relieved of such a vow so that she can marry Chactas. Too late, Atala tells them, in revealing the final element of her secret: feeling herself on the verge of succumbing to temptation with Chactas during the storm, Atala took a fatal poison to force herself to obey her mother, one that failed to work immediately but inexorably comes to produce its effects in the end.

There have recently been a number of compelling feminist readings of Atala's predicament, the most important of which is no doubt Naomi Schor's.⁶ Schor focuses on Chateaubriand's veritable consecration of Atala as an allegory of Virginity, reading the text's ideological strategy in this regard as “the putting into place of a cultural construction of femininity adequate to the reactionary sexual regime brought into being by the French Revolution” (144). After the unprecedented participation of women in the upheavals of the Revolution, the process of female allegorization would serve the repressive function of once again expelling women from the public sphere, a reactionary consolidation organized around “a spectacular binding or rebinding of female energy” (145). Chateaubriand's text fully participates in this strategy, Schor argues, making of Atala “the first of a long line of nineteenth-century French heroines denied jouissance” (146). There is certainly much to recommend this line of argument, but it is also true that Chateaubriand's text is significantly unsettled by the kinds of philosophical undercurrents that we have been discussing, suggesting a less-than-fully successful mobilization of Atala's dilemma toward the ideological ends that Schor delineates. Schor herself identifies what she calls one of the “ideological fissures” (149) in Atala, Chateaubriand's condemnation of the excesses of religious zeal that lead to Atala's needless suicide; for he has le Père Aubry criticize Atala's mother and “l'imprudent missionnaire qui la dirigeait” (143), commenting that “Vous offrez tout trois un terrible exemple des dangers de l'enthousiasme, et du défaut de lumières en matière de religion” (143).

In a larger sense, though, it is remarkable to what extent the structure of Atala's dilemma reflects the constellation of concerns related to the enigmatic “gift of death” that we have been addressing: the paradoxes of speaking and not-speaking, of incest and secrets, of responsibility, promises and “originary mourning.” A useful approach to this problem is to examine the central opposition in the text between incest and Atala's virginity, a structuring pair that culminates in the dramatic conflict of the “crisis of incest” detailed above. The relationship between these two elements is certainly not coincidental or unmotivated, for “incest” is derived from the Latin incestus, composed of the prefix in- and castus (pure, chaste), meaning “impure,” or “not chaste.” This would seem to suggest a rather straightforward opposition between purity and impurity in the structure of Chateaubriand's text, but once again the problematic nature of incest seems to resist such a simple conception. For incest indicates a relation to proximity or “sameness” (the same family, the same lineage, etc.) that paradoxically comes to appear as too close, too much the same, and therefore impure, tainted, alien, prohibited. In this sense, then, incest would be not so much the opposite of the chaste or the pure as their uncanny double: far from any notion of purity that only subsequently becomes impure through the addition of some “foreign” substance, incest institutes a kind of “originary taint” of sameness that subverts the very possibility of any original purity or chasteness. Following upon Derrida's analysis above, one could say that incest in this regard is ultimately another name for the general opening of self-relation or self-difference in the “age of supplementarity,” a way to speak of that “unspeakable” moment of eclipse of an original self-presence that could never take place.

Indeed, everything in Atala's experience speaks of such an “originary taint” and its unsettling effects—how else to conceive of a primordial vow of chastity that paradoxically comes to poison her existence, both literally and figuratively? Soon after fleeing the Muscogulges, Chactas praises Atala for tending to the wound in his arm: “« C'est un baume, lui dis-je, que tu répands sur ma plaie. » « Je crains plutôt que ce ne soit un poison », répondit-elle” (113). This equivocal structure of a seemingly pure substance dissimulating a poisonous “double” repeats itself with numerous variations throughout the text. As Atala subsequently reveals, for example, the scene of the “crisis of incest,” which we examined as a founding moment of sorts for Chateaubriand's notion of Christian civilization (and the prohibition of incest), also turns out to be the moment of an imperceptible “originary poisoning,” since it is precisely at that moment that Atala secretly poisons herself to safeguard her virginity. Such an inscrutable act of “giving death” of course harks back to Atala's brush with death at the moment of her birth—to the “secret promise” made in her name that both precedes her and marks out her existence, a promise that saves her life and thus comes to be the very precondition of her existence, but one that also casts a pall of death over her and seals her fate as certainly as poison: “Vœu fatal qui me précipite au tombeau!” (136). In this regard, Atala's name itself, expressing itself through a strange linguistic taint, would seem to speak in an oblique, half-hidden way of this originary scene, for it noticeably condenses two key terms in Chateaubriand's lexicon, “fatal” and “natal.” “Fatal,” in the sense of the “vœu fatal” (136) or “fatal secret” (101) that Atala conceals from Chactas, a secret that both fixes her destiny and marks her with the ruinous trace of death; “natal,” in the sense of the “pays natal” (117) whose loss Atala laments in her song, a figure for the inaccessible scene of inception where her deadly fate has already been decided in advance. The figure of Atala may have effectively served the cause of reactionary sexual ideology in the wake of the French Revolution as Schor argues, but ultimately she also clearly echoes the preoccupations that Chateaubriand will later explore at greater length with respect to his own identity in the Mémoires d'outre-tombe: the enigma of a primordial inscription of death at the basis of identity, the unrepresentable moment of loss in the emergence of the self, the imponderable cataclysmic instant of the “gift of death,” which casts its long, melancholic shadow over so much of Chateaubriand's writing.

In the case of Atala, there is no doubt that the primary figure associated with this enigmatic configuration is that of the mother—Atala's mother, of course, but also a whole series of mothers who are either dead themselves or the mothers of dead infants. In the two “preteritive” passages cited earlier, we have already seen examples of each of these variants: in those troubled “unions ineffables,” where the pleasure of the patriarchs seems strangely conditioned on a certain forgetting of maternal death, “où les patriarches goûtaient tant de joie, qu'ils oubliaient la mort de leurs mères” (144); and as an example of the “soucis de ménage” that Aubry claims not to talk about: “Que de maux dans la seule perte d'un nouveau-né à qui l'on donnait le lait, et qui meurt sur votre sein!” (144). Likewise, while wandering in the forest, Chactas and Atala come across the tomb of a “nouveau-né” (105), where the child's mother comes to sprinkle the ground with her milk and talk with her dead child, and where Indian women pass by to recover the soul of the lost infant: “On y voyait dans ce moment des épouses nouvelles qui, désirant les douceurs de la maternité, cherchaient, en entrouvrant leurs lèvres, à recueillir l'âme du petit enfant, qu'elles croyaient voir errer sur les fleurs” (104). An even more striking example occurs at the very end of the text, where the European “voyageur aux terres lointaines” (157) who serves as the frame narrator for the tale comes across a group of wandering Indian exiles in the forests near Niagara Falls in search of a new homeland. One young Indian mother, who turns out to be the granddaughter of René and his Indian wife Céluta, holds a dead infant in her arms and speaks with him as if he were alive, moistening his lips with her milk. The whites in Virginia recently forced them off their land, she explains, “Je suis accouchée pendant la marche; et comme mon lait était mauvais, à cause de la douleur, il a fait mourir mon enfant” (161).

What these passages suggest is that the moment of an “originary poisoning” and the “giving of death,” as well as the melancholy that ensues from them, are conceived in Chateaubriand's text through a phantasmic notion of “bad milk” and a primordial scene of loss related to the mother. In this regard, the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok on the problem of melancholy seems particularly pertinent, since they trace the “introjective” process through which the work of mourning takes place precisely back to a first inscription of lack related to the mother—to the way in which infants learn to mediate the loss of the maternal object in feeding through the use of the voice and speech, gradually bringing the loss to words or symbolic representation.⁷ For Abraham and Torok, “Le passage de la bouche pleine de sein à la bouche pleine de mots s'effectue au travers d'expériences de bouche vide. Apprendre à remplir de mots le vide de la bouche, voilà un premier paradigme de l'introjection” (262). What would seem to be at stake in Atala, though, is the disturbance of this process that the two analysts label “incorporation,” a phantasm that they situate at the basis of melancholy. Rather than filling the mouth with “introjective” words, one denies the lost other and refuses to accept the loss as part of oneself by ingesting an “imaginary object” in which the loss is encrypted. Now underlying Chateaubriand's preoccupation with “bad milk,” originary poisoning, and the proximity of birth and death is what appears to be a primary predisposition toward such a blocking of the process of mourning, a general refusal to accept or overcome loss that manifests itself through the continual revisitation of the enigmatic moment where the maternal object is constituted as already eclipsed, where milk is marked with the “originary taint” of loss, and where such loss is irremediably assumed by the child as something like a fundamental inscription of death at the basis of identity.

What interests us most, though, is the effect of this predisposition on Chateaubriand's language, the way that a signifier such as “Atala” at once both speaks and avoids speaking of such an enigmatic moment through the encrypted echoes of fatal and natal that we examined above. Indeed, Atala's relationship to the imperious demands of her present/absent dead mother is focused in particular on the voice and speaking; “Elle priait continuellement sa mère,” Chactas recalls, “dont elle avait l'air de vouloir apaiser l'ombre irritée. Quelquefois elle me demandait si je n'entendais pas une voix plaintive, si je ne voyais pas des flammes sortir de la terre” (118). Even on her deathbed, Atala continues to address her mother's reproaches and laments: “Mais ton ombre, ô ma mère, ton ombre était toujours là, me reprochant ses tourments! J'entendais tes plaintes, je voyais les flammes de l'enfer te consumer” (139). Atala's deadly obsession with her mother's voice evidently harks back to that fatal moment when her mother pronounced a vow of chastity in her daughter's name, as well as to her mother's exhortations to respect that original vow: “O ma mère! pourquoi parlâtes-vous ainsi! O Religion qui fais à la fois mes maux et ma félicité, qui me perds et qui me consoles!” (137). Of course, what is consuming Atala is not just the misfortunes, or “maux,” provoked by her religion, but the very mots pronounced by her mother in the name of that religion. Chateaubriand's text would seem to insist on this “echo of words” equivocally hovering over Atala's misfortunes, for maux is a word that in fact appears quite frequently in Atala, often lurking around the “unspeakable” configuration we have been examining; as Atala tells Chactas on her deathbed, “Il ne me reste plus qu'à vous demander pardon des maux que je vous ai causés” (147), a phrase that perhaps echoes le Père Aubry's lament, “Que de maux dans la seule perte d'un nouveau-né” (144), or his inability to find “quelque remède aux maux d'Atala” (142). In the phantom mots that momentarily resonate over Atala's maux, we can detect something like a “plague on speaking” that announces itself in this text, the staging of voices that are always strangely “poisoned”—not voices of presence, but ones that have already been tainted by the disruptive trace of death, by an unassimilated loss or primordial “wound” that unremittingly makes itself heard in cryptic fashion. They are voices, ultimately, that cannot help but speak of the unspeakable calamity that lies at their inaccessible origins, and they would seem to include the narrative voice of Chactas himself: a voice that only begins recounting the story of Atala—“il commence en ces mots” (93)—when on a hunting expedition the blind old Indian chief comes into proximity with the very site of loss, “les magnifiques déserts du Kentucky” (93) where Aubry's mission once stood.⁸ Only Aubry himself (and through his intervention, Atala) would perhaps seem to escape from this “contaminated” speech, through the “linguistic” salvation promised by Chateaubriand's Christian ideology:

Le prêtre ouvrit le calice; il prit entre ses deux doigts une hostie blanche comme le neige, et s'approcha d'Atala, en prononçant des mots mystérieux. Cette sainte avait les yeux levés au ciel, en extase. Toutes ses douleurs parurent suspendues, toute sa vie se rassembla sur sa bouche; ses lèvres s'entr'ouvrirent et vinrent avec respect chercher le Dieu caché sous le pain mystique.

(149)

Through his “mots mystérieux” le Père Aubry in the end does find a remedy of sorts for Atala's maux right before she dies, one that is indeed focused on the mouth (“toute sa vie se rassembla sur sa bouche”) and that promises to restore a certain transcendent purity there, through the medium of “une hostie blanche comme le neige.” Surely this is the lesson that Chateaubriand would like us to take away from Atala's misfortunes, the only possible solution to what his voyageur calls “la tristesse de [l']âme et l'éternelle mélancolie de [la] pensée” (164). Given this context, however, it is also a “solution” that strangely resembles the illness itself, what Abraham and Torok might view as the ingestion of the ultimate “imaginary object” in the service of denying loss. In any case, le Père Aubry himself will die the horrible death of an exemplary Christian martyr, tortured and burned at the stake by the Cherokee Indians who overrun his mission, and who finish him off in a way that suggests that even he will not escape the plague on speaking: “Les Indiens furieux lui plongèrent un fer rouge dans la gorge, pour l'empêcher de parler. Alors, ne pouvant plus consoler les hommes, il expira” (162).

Ultimately, what the plague on speaking in this text reveals through such echoes as Atala/fatal/natal or mots/maux is the obscure play of a strange “incest of words,” one that seems to give voice to the melancholy arising from the structure of originary “taint” or loss. It is a “linguistic incest” that plays on resemblances between paronyms and homophonic doubles that are in a sense “too close” or “too much the same,” and that as a result come to signify in an oblique manner, in a way that must be suppressed or “prohibited” so as not to disrupt the “normal” or “apparent” course of signification between words. Such a “poisonous” lining of oblique signification speaks of the impossibility of an illusory purity or originary “chasteness” of words, disclosing the “incestuous” secrets that words may always potentially harbor in their very materiality as signifiers. That this linguistic incest evokes the melancholy associated with the “gift of death” and the configuration of originary paradoxes involving speech, secrets and incest is ultimately suggested perhaps most insistently in the figure of Atala's father, the Spaniard Lopez, who also doubles as Chactas's adoptive father. Lopez is of course the link that brings Atala and Chactas together in a structure of symbolic incest, and in the brief period when Chactas lives with him in Saint Augustine, we also learn that he has “une sœur avec laquelle il vivait sans épouse” (96), hinting at those “ineffable unions” that Aubry will later (not) speak of. Most important in this regard, though, is his very name, “Lopez,” which conceals an uncanny “incestuous” double, l'eau pèse. Far from gratuitous, such an echo cryptically speaks of the enormous melancholic weight of water in this text, as well as throughout Chateaubriand's writing: the four great rivers described in the Prologue marking out the “vaste empire” (89) that France once possessed in North America, the river on which the old Chactas floats in his pirogue with René as he recounts his tale, the floods of tears that mark nearly every scene, the final encounter with the last of the Natchez Indians near Niagara Falls, the flooded landscape that Chactas finds when he later returns to Aubry's mission after hearing of his death, “Le lac s'était débordé, et la savane était changée en un marais …” (162).

As Chateaubriand's voyageur watches the last of the Natchez set off again in search of a new homeland, it is this weight of water that comes to predominate in the end:

Oh! que de larmes sont répandues, lorsqu'on abandonne ainsi la terre natale, lorsque du haut de la colline de l'exil, on découvre pour la dernière fois le toit où l'on fut nourri et le fleuve de la cabane, qui continue de couler tristement à travers les champs solitaires de la patrie!

(164)

It is a final scene that strangely resembles the phantasmatic “initial” scene around which the text of Atala circles incessantly: that cataclysmic moment of separation from the inaccessible scene of origins, from “la terre natale” and the originary paradoxes it harbors in its echoes of “Atala.” It is a final “catching-sight” (“on découvre pour la dernière fois”) that is also something of a primordial discovery and disclosure, the very double movement of a writing that is carried along on tears and “sadly” flowing rivers, continually moving away from an imponderable scene of originary loss. Such a writing cryptically puts into play Chactas's concluding thoughts on the “plaie cachée” (156) buried in every human heart: “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” (156, emphasis added). Surely Chactas's failure to detect this “plaie cachée” in the case of Atala is precisely what is figured by his blindness in old age—his inability to grasp the “incest of words” staged by Chateaubriand's writing, to discern the secrets of Atala, whom he calls “un être incompréhensible” (116).⁹ It is a kind of writing, ultimately, that speaks obliquely of the deceptive appearance of “linguistic purity” itself, of the treacherous dangers nurtured by even the “calmest” and “purest” of words, by the name that signifies the very epitome of purity and chasteness, “Atala.”

Notes

1. The ostensible drama surrounding this scene of course does not concern incest, but rather Atala's secret vow of chastity imposed on her by her mother, as well as her suicide to respect that vow and ensure her mother's eternal repose. The structure of symbolic incest lurking behind this drama might appear to be secondary or even unrelated to Atala's vow, but the two in fact prove to be closely intertwined. For Chateaubriand and his contemporaries, the problem of incest is quite far removed from modern psychoanalytic or anthropological theorization on the topic, which focuses on questions of sexuality, love, the formation of the subject and the law of exogamous marriage. Chateaubriand's treatment of the problem, in contrast, harks back to incest's etymological roots in the “impure” and the “unchaste,” situating it in its traditional, centuries-old context of philosophical and religious thought concerning the pure and the impure. In this respect, incest often figures as a phantasmatic “impurity” whose expulsion or prohibition lies at the mythical basis of the founding of civilization or the formation of the sacred, and in this capacity it is closely related to a whole series of similar religious and social prohibitions: the untouchable, the inedible, the unspeakable. … In this regard, Chateaubriand's thinking is clearly in the same mainstream of eighteenth-century philosophical thought as, for example, Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville or Rousseau's Essai sur l'origine des langues—two works that likewise raise the issue of incest with respect to the question of purity and the origins of human society, although in a more secular context. From this perspective, as we will see, it is certainly not difficult to perceive that the problem of incest is intimately related to Atala's vow of chastity and her paradoxical self-poisoning to protect that vow, as well as to the final religious sanctification of her virginity. We might also add that in such a context of myth and phantasm, it ultimately matters little that the incestuous undercurrents in Atala are “only symbolic,” rather than “literal” as in René.

2. Among the interesting recent attempts to read Atala on its own terms, independent of René, see for example Waller, Vallois and Schor, “Triste Amérique.” See also Glaudes, which shifts the focus from incest to problems of orality and castration anxiety in a generally conventional Freudian framework.

3. See in particular “That ‘Simple Movement of the Finger.’ Writing and the Prohibition of Incest,” Of Grammatology 255-68.

4. See in particular Aporias and The Gift of Death, henceforth cited as GD.

5. I have examined this problem at greater length elsewhere in the context of the Mémoires d'outre-tombe, including a more detailed discussion of Derrida's arguments concerning the “gift of death”; see my “Death and the Scene of Inception.” Among the recent efforts to reassess Chateaubriand's writing in a post-structuralist light, see in particular Bruno Chaouat's illuminating work on these issues, Je meurs par morceaux: Chateaubriand, as well as the issue of the Revue des Sciences Humaines edited by Chaouat and devoted to Chateaubriand (no. 247, July-September, 1997), which contains important contributions by Denis Hollier, Naomi Schor and Claude Reichler, among others.

6. See Schor, “Triste Amérique”; also Waller and Vallois.

7. See in particular “Deuil ou mélancolie. Introjecter—incorporer,” L'Écorce et le noyau 259-75.

8. See Berchet's note on this point, n. 56, 257.

9. As many critics have pointed out, Chactas's blindness of course also recalls the fate of Œdipus, which Chateaubriand indeed evokes in the Prologue: “[Chactas] était devenu aveugle. Une jeune fille l'accompagnait sur les coteaux du Méschacebé, comme Antigone guidait les pas d'Œdipe sur le Cythéron, ou comme Malvina conduisait Ossian sur les rochers de Morven” (92).

Works Cited

Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. L'Écorce et le noyau. Revised edition. Paris: Flammarion, 1987.

Bouvier, Luke. “Death and the Scene of Inception: Autobiographical Impropriety and the Birth of Romanticism in Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe.” French Forum 23.1 (Jan. 1998): 23-46.

Chaouat, Bruno. Je meurs par morceaux: Chateaubriand. Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1999.

Chateaubriand, François-René de. Atala, René, Les Aventures du dernier Abencérage. Ed. Jean-Claude Berchet. Paris: Flammarion, 1996.

Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.

———. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

———. “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” Trans. Ken Frieden. Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. Eds. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. 3-70.

———. Of Grammatology. Corrected Edition. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.

Glaudes, Pierre. Atala, le désir cannibale. Paris: PUF, 1994.

Hollier, Denis. “Incognito.” Revue des Sciences Humaines 247 (1997): 25-43.

Reichler, Claude. “Raison et déraison des commencements.” Revue des Sciences Humaines 247 (1997): 153-79.

Schor, Naomi. “Cent ans de mélancolie.” Revue des Sciences Humaines 247 (1997): 45-62.

———. “Triste Amérique: Atala and the Postrevolutionary Construction of Woman.” Rebel Daughters. Women and the French Revolution. Ed. Sara Melzer and Leslie Rabine. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 139-56.

Vallois, Marie-Claire. “Exotic Femininity and the Rights of Man: Paul et Virginie and Atala, or the Revolution in Stasis.” Rebel Daughters. 178-97.

Waller, Margaret. “Being René, Buying Atala: Alienated Subjects and Decorative Objects in Postrevolutionary France.” Rebel Daughters. 157-77.