Chateaubriand mosaiste, "Ulysse, Hermione, une Truie" (review)

In this concise and yet illuminating reading of "Journal de Paris à Prague" (Mémoires d'outre-tombe, iv - xxxvi), Jean Christophe Cavallin examines the dialectics of literary production at the intersection with social and political transformations. With exceptional literary erudition and focused critical engagement, he contextualizes the Journal within the larger framework of Chateaubriand's epic - Mémoires d'outre-tombe - and explores notions of death, exile, and rebirth. He deconstructs the autobiographical and intertextual layers of the work and describes the various processes of literary and political exhumation, produced in the movement across space, time, and texts.

He begins by examining the interruption of Chateaubriand's trip in 1833, as he travels anonymously to meet with the exiled French king, Charles x, in Prague. Then, through a genealogical critique he frames Chateaubriand's political mediation in a series of attempts to recreate the French nation in the experience of physical and intellectual travel. Cavallin reads the section's references to Odysseus as a trans-position of the Odyssey's circular return to the origin of political subjectivity. Chateaubriand reimagines the French monarchy through a return to Homer, the literary origin, and to Henri iv, the first of the Bourbon, the political origin. He describes the ways in which Chateaubriand mourns the loss of the French monarchy with the usurpation of Louis-Phillipe by reconfiguring it in a terra incognita ("de la faire sienne") through literary Cathacresis.

Addressing Chateaubriand's conscious and unconscious appropriations of such metaphors as Tacite's narration of Odysseus's wandering in Germany, the white sow in Virgil's Aeneid as omen for political resurrection, and Shakespeare's Hermione in Winter's Tale, Cavallin locates the transfiguration of the French nation in the book ("le livre"), the stage of both the writing and reading of history. The structure Cavallin identifies is that of posthumous rebirth of man in relation to God, of Homer, Virgil, Tacite, Shakespeare, and Fervacques in relation to Chateaubriand, and of the French monarchy in relation to France after the Revolution and the Charte of 1830. In this context, a series of physical and intertextual encounters trigger Chateaubriand's fantasmatic writing of himself as literary character in the works of these various authors. Cavallin argues that "les textes s'engendrent les uns des autres selon un principe dynastique de réécriture perpétuelle qui voit les œuvres fond-amentales enfanter un lignage d'œuvres qui n'en sont que les arborescences" (Cavallin, 104). From this space of literary outre-tombe, Chateaubriand mem-orializes the irretrievable loss of the French monarchy.

In the Appendix to his book, Cavallin undertakes a comparative study of Mémoires d'outre-tombe and Génie du Christianisme, taking to task the transformation of Chateaubriand's notion of "beau ideal physique" from the first to the second work. He argues that the author's transferential relation to history and the material world in Mémoires supplants his relation to the universal and the divine in Génie. He establishes the "Poétique du Palimpseste" as constitutive of "l'éthique d'identité morale des objets nouveaux ne s'obtient qu'au terme d'un processus d'identification à d'anciens objets perdus" (Cavallin, 140). Given this intellectual and literary shift from the representation of truth in a religious and universal context, to its reemergence as historical and personal, Cavallin suggests that Chateaubriand's "objets idéals" in the Génie are freed in Mémoires from the suppression of their materiality, thereby facilitating the work's intertextual play.

Critical readings of memorialization in Chateaubriand's œuvre often address the author's transferential relations to his ancestors, the crusaders, the Bourbon, and Napoleon. Many critics, including Jean-Claude Berchet, address these relations by characterizing Chateaubriand's writing as "écriture archéologique," wherein the author's various encounters trigger rituals of literary and political commemoration. In the context...