Chateaubriand face aux traditions by Marika Piva (review)

The origins of the four essays collected in this volume lie in various conference presentations, but the book still offers a coherent and often original reading of Chateaubriand’s dynamic interaction with literary traditions and illustrious predecessors. Marika Piva presents Chateaubriand’s relationship with Montaigne, his debt to sundry tourist literature, the medieval inspiration in his work, and the theme of exile in the Mémoires d’outre-tombe. Montaigne is well known for the abundant use of quotations from antiquity in his Essais; by reproducing an eclectic selection of these quotes (twenty-three in all in his memoirs), Chateaubriand creates a mise-en-abyme effect, which he then subverts in order to tackle more contemporary figures such as Rousseau and his idiosyncratic ideas about the innate goodness of savages or about the goals of autobiography. To enhance his description of foreign venues, Chateaubriand incorporates citations from travel literature, including the first tourist guides, borrowing from such writers as Piganiol de la Force and Antoine Claude Valery. Along with other Romantics (but before it became fashionable), Chateaubriand helped to revive the Middle Ages by drawing on medieval themes in his work, but also by living out his own dream of chivalry, through his faithful adherence to the legitimist branch of the Bourbons. Piva considers influences from Chrétien de Troyes and the reinvention of courtly romance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but focuses on Chateaubriand’s little-known romance in the mauresque and troubadour tradition, Les Aventures du dernier Abencérage, a love story between the noble Saracen Aben-Hamet and the daughter of the Spanish governor of Alhambra, Bianca. The theme of exile runs like a leitmotif through Chateaubriand’s memoirs and has been exhaustively studied. Piva does not add much but provides many shrewd and sensitive insights, comparing Chateaubriand to Dante and Tasso, as well as to Mme de Staël and Napoleon, helping us to understand better the psychology and style of a writer whose sobriquet was ‘l’enchanteur’ but who himself seemed enchanted by the likes of Napoleon. In his memoirs Chateaubriand appropriates the emperor’s tragic destiny in a series of literary manoeuvres whose aim is nothing less than self-vindication and self-glorification, a vainglorious attempt to construct a persona that will resist time from beyond the grave. Piva’s analysis of Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe (the felicitous acronym of which is MOT) is both impressionistic and erudite, serving up hitherto unknown variants of the text in a delightful collage that pays homage to Chateaubriand’s poetic style. However, her analysis does not always go beyond obvious comparisons and could be developed to interrogate the curious notion of a destiny ‘beyond the grave’. Chateaubriand’s memoirs tell the story of an aristocratic provincial, intellectual, Romantic, and statesman who was dispossessed from his heritage by history and by modernity. If his life had been a happy one, there would have been no need for words; any MOT would have been unnecessary. Autobiography is creative self-expression, and Chateaubriand’s answer to adversity in life, to exile, lies in his MOT, in a work in which he will find eternal life after death.