L'Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem de Chateaubriand: L'invention du voyage romantique (review)

In L'Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem de Chateaubriand: L'invention du voyage romantique, Alain Guyot and Roland Le Huenen offer a thorough and detailed examination of Chateaubriand's eponymous work from 1811. Meant to coincide with the two hundred year anniversary of L'Itinéraire's publication, this work seeks to consolidate the critical and literary importance of Chateaubriand's text, which depicts his yearlong journey to Greece and the Holy Land in 1805. Guyot and Le Huenen offer an exhaustive account of Itinéraire's themes, innovations, and literary strategies, and argue that Chateaubriand's work ushers the genre of romantic travel writing and therefore deserves some long overdue attention. From examining Chateaubriand's appropriation of the concept of "ruines," defined by the Encyclopédie as the ruins of palaces and note-worthy buildings, to his strategic use of the present tense and of the "passé composé" in order to create identification on the part of the reader, the authors set out to decode Chateaubriand's "projet stylistique."

Guyot and Le Huenen argue that what characterizes L'Itinéraire is the fact that it's a trip undertaken in order to write – to find images for the Martyrs (1809), a work Chateaubriand interrupts to go on his journey. The process of writing is thus the motor for the movement across space and time. In this context, they suggest that through stylistic innovation, Chateaubriand seeks to break with a

tradition qui visait à la récriture de modèles à vocation esthétique: il s'agit désormais de rendre une réalité nettement définie à travers un regard nettement individualisé. La simplicité et la spontanéité du récit de ce voyage sont donc bien affaire d'artifice, au meilleur sens du terme, puisque le sens de la mise en scène rhétorique, l'élaboration des images ou de la stratégie autobiographique, le souci profond de l'unité de l'ouvrage contribuent à faire entrer le genre viatique en littérature.

(Guyot and Le Huenen 157)

This break with the early genre relies, first and foremost, on the author's awareness and literary manipulation of his subjectivity. The romantic economy of travel literature ushered by Chateaubriand consists in the supplanting of the description of the material object by subject-centered narratives. Furthermore, Guyot and Le Huenen claim that "cette dimension subjective Chateaubriand la poussera jusqu'à ses limites, c'est-à-dire jusqu'à la confondre avec l'enjeu de l'autobiographie qu'il sera le premier à associer à l'écriture du voyage" (227).

While the first part focuses on the textual analysis that seeks to position the work as a stylistic pioneer of the romantic voyage, the second part addresses the place of history, ideology, and the canon in this new genre of writing. Guyot and Le Huenen argue that Chateaubriand understands the position of the traveler in L'Itinéraire as an interlocutor of early historians and travelers, from Herodotus to Tavernier and Chardin. They frame Chateaubriand's double position (traveler-historian) through the political context of the French Revolution, and show how for Chateaubriand – a pilgrim to the Holy Land – only Christianity can interrupt the process of cultural decadence of which the Revolution is but a symptom. In this context, they argue that his aversion to oriental despotism, pervasive in L'Itinéraire, serves as a critique of the imperial regime in France. This critique, they suggest, marks the transformation of the travel writing genre and the ushering of a new kind of literary subjectivity.

Guyot and Le Huenen claim that in L'Itinéraire Chateaubriand acts as the erudite historian who determines the traveler's perception of reality and guides his reader through physical terrains and historical context. A similar process takes place in the critical work itself, wherein L'Itinéraire's contemporary critics lead readers through the various...