Exotic Subversions in Nineteenth-century French Fiction

Jennifer Yee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351567459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In the course of the nineteenth century France built up a colonial empire second only to Britain's. The literary tradition in which it dealt with its colonial 'Other' is frequently understood in terms of Edward Said's description of Orientalism as both a Western projection and a 'will to govern' over the Orient. There is, however, a body of works that eludes such a simple categorisation, offering glimpses of colonial resistance, of a critique of imperialist hegemony, or of a blurring of the boundaries between the Self and the Other. Some of the ways in which the imperialist enterprise is subverted in the metropolitan literature of this period are examined in this volume through detailed case studies of key works by Chateaubriand, Hugo, Flaubert and Segalen.

Chapter 1
Shifting Ideologies in Chateaubriand’s Epic Les Natchez

François-René de Chateaubriand, that monumental figure dominating the landscape of early nineteenth-century French literature, is famously (though somewhat simplistically) associated with conservative, legitimist politics. He is also — since Said's Orientalism — associated with a construction of the Orient as 'a likely place for the realization of French colonial ambition'.¹ Indeed, he is, with Lamartine, one of only two French writers in whose work 'one hears the rhetoric of imperial grandeur' sound as loudly as it does in English culture.² It is thus at the heart of the conservative canon that we are going to begin our study searching for openings which allow the expression of subversive voices within the dominant discourse of nineteenth-century imperialism.

The view of Chateaubriand as a pillar of imperialist Orientalism is based on readings of the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811), an early and very influential instance of that classic nineteenth-century genre, the voyage en Orient. Yet alongside this vision of the Orient as an object to be known, studied, and dominated politically, we can set writings by another Chateaubriand, two decades younger and whose gaze was turned not to the East but to the West. While Atala and René, published in 1801 and 1802 respectively, knew quite extraordinary fame during their author's lifetime, the much longer work of which they are extracts (no doubt rewritten) is a much more neglected part of Chateaubriand's corpus. Les Natchez is the work of a young writer still finding his voice: the product of different periods of rewriting, it is long, rambling and desperately uneven. Yet there are particular reasons for us to turn back to Les Natchez now in order to undertake a rereading of Chateaubriand's American fiction.³

In the crucial Revolutionary years at the very beginning of the 'long' nineteenth century, Les Natchez opens up areas of indeterminacy that suggest a significant crack in the smooth discursive surface of cultural dominance. Complex, and often ambivalent, Chateaubriand's American epic is the site of cultural, generic and ideological disturbance.⁴ In short, Les Natchez is a troubled zone in which appear disruptions of the hegemonic system that will later be brushed over by the conservative politics of their author's maturity. Bakhtin speaks of internal polemic as a conscious strategy adopted by prose writing, and although some of the disparate elements of Les Natchez do clearly adopt a deliberately provocative stance, for this ill-mastered, discordant text it would on the whole be more accurate to speak of involuntary internal polemic. In either case, it is certainly far from the homogeneous discourse of pre- or proto-imperialism that is sometimes associated with nineteenth-century prose. Clearly a Romantic text, Les Natchez is also, in many ways, a product of the eighteenth century: we begin our look at the exotic literature of the nineteenth century as one of continuity, not rupture, with the previous century.

In René the eponymous narrator tells an Indian⁵ sage and a French missionary the story of how he was adopted by the Natchez tribe and lived among them but failed to liberate himself from his European melancholy. This melancholy is, we learn, partly guilt at having inspired an incestuous love in his sister, but more importantly an inherent part of the European condition that was to find fame under the name 'le mal du siècle'. Atala, its companion tale, is told to René by Chactas, the same wise Indian who is his audience in René, and in it he recounts his own unhappy love for Atala, the daughter of a Spaniard and an Indian woman converted to Catholicism, who kills herself because she mistakenly thinks a religious vow forbids her from marrying him. Both tales were originally conceived as parts of a greater whole, framed within an epic known as Les Natchez. In Les Natchez the attention is focussed on René's life within the Indian tribe, and there are three main thematic strands. Firstly, the Natchez tribe debates resistance, and undertakes active revolt, against early French imperialism. Secondly, this conflict is given a supernatural dimension in Chateaubriand's later rewriting, with God, the Saints and Satan playing their parts rather indirectly in the events that unfold — belated additions that are unnecessary to the development of plot and character. And finally, René's own inability to become fully Indian and lose his European melancholy and guilt is made clear (or, rather, it is made fully apparent in all its obscurity). Despite his rejection of the idea of returning to France, his marriage to an Indian woman (Céluta), his close friendship with members of the tribe (Chactas; Céluta's brother, Outougamiz; their young friend Mila) and the birth of his child, René's failure to fulfil the promise of his name and renaître in America reflects his inability to belong entirely to one identity or the other. This brings great unhappiness not only to himself but to the Indian characters who love him and who are drawn into his tragedy despite themselves.

Although Atala and René were first published in 1801 and 1802, they, like Les Natchez itself, originate in an earlier period in Chateaubriand's life, around the time of his voyage to America in 1791. The exact dating of Chateaubriand's American writings has inspired lengthy critical debates that are highly relevant to the ideological shifts inscribed within the texts themselves. The writing process began before the young Chateaubriand's travels in America, when he put together notes with the intention of writing 'l'épopée de l'homme de la nature',⁶ apparently in or before 1789, and composed Chactas's tale of his experience in France.⁷ During the voyage itself (July—December 1791) he then took notes; though most were lost, he was able to consult some later. It is now often argued that Chateaubriand's voyage as recounted in the Voyage en Amérique (1827) is a fiction considerably removed from his real travels;⁸ Les Natchez, of course, situates itself unhesitatingly on the side of fiction. After his return to France and a near-fatal campaign with l'Armée des Princes, Chateaubriand fled to England, where, during his long years of exile as a penniless émigré, he reworked his text, incorporating the accounts of other travellers that he had not been able to consult before his voyage. The rewriting in exile can be roughly divided into two periods: the first corresponds to the writing of the Essai sur les Révolutions (1793—96); and the second follows the famous return to religion when Chateaubriand claims to have 'wept and believed'⁹ after the deaths of his mother and sister. After this conversion, which was to play a key part in the personal mythology he was constructing around himself, Chateaubriand began to rewrite the American texts, working them towards a specifically Christian purpose. This process was never complete, and the full manuscript of Les Natchez was not published at this time; instead, extracts were published as Atala (1801) and René, the latter integrated with fragments of the American writings into Le Génie du christianisme in 1802. Chateaubriand was to undertake further revisions much later, before publishing fragments in the Voyage en Amérique and Les Natchez itself as part of his CEuvres complètes (1826), where it was presented as a work dating from his misguided youth.¹⁰

It is difficult to ascertain exactly which parts of the American writings were written before the crucial conversion and which were seriously reworked after it, but Les Natchez does appear to have been written in the main by the beginning of 1799.¹¹ That an ideological conflict subsists within Les Natchez is, in any case, apparent even to a non-genetic reading. As Gilbert Chinard's 1918 study put it: 'Ce poème indien commencé par un disciple fervent de Jean-Jacques, détaché d'un poème destiné primitivement à célébrer les vertus de l'homme de la nature, a été publié par l'apologiste de la religion chrétienne, et contient dans sa préface un renoncement formel aux théories de Rousseau'.¹² Despite its original Rousseauist inspiration, the preface to Atala in 1801 indeed saw Chateaubriand disavowing this youthful enthusiasm: 'je ne suis point comme M. Rousseau, un enthousiaste des Sauvages' (p. 19). This preface also implies Chateaubriand's hopes that France might one day 'redemander le Canada à 1'Angleterre' (p. 22), an aspiration that lies somewhat uneasily with the overtly anticolonial sentiments expressed in passages of the epic itself. Not simply northern America, but also France's southern American lands, were in the political balance at the time Les Natchez was being rewritten: lost to Spain in 1763, Louisiana was returned to France in 1800 only to be sold to the United States by Napoleon in 1803.¹³ The undoubted tension between patriotic-colonialist and anti-nationalist, anticolonialist sentiments has however attracted less critical attention than the religious vacillations of the text. In 1938, Jean Pommier followed Chinard in reading Les Natchez as the site of an internal struggle between a Christian epic and a subversive one.¹⁴ Pierre Barbéris, in 1976, also called for an active reading of Les Natchez in order to 'dechristianize' it.¹⁵ Perhaps the most developed, radical rereading of this internal polemic was however offered by Michel Butor in 1963.¹⁶ Butor's reading sees Chateaubriand's 'christianization' of the text as a falsification of the deeper significance of the primitive text: Ainsi Chateaubriand s'efforçait-il de "dénaturer", de rendre patriotique et catholique un livre qui était à l'origine un cri d'indignation contre sa patrie et sa religion'. He reads Les Natchez as revealing two conflicting men within Chateaubriand: 'Monsieur l'ambassadeur' and 'le démon' that he tried to repress and that is the reason we still read him today. The great works of Chateaubriand are 'des compromis entre ce démon si prodigieusement fécond et inspiré, d'où vient la matière, et l'ambassadeur qui va ensuite s'efforcer de maquiller, de baptiser cette progéniture demi-sauvage.' And this demon is to be found at work in the most pure and generous way in Les Natchez.¹⁷ Les Natchez is thus the site of an involuntary internal polemic, reflecting the ideological upheavals of the era. Its rereading has been proposed by twentieth-century French critics in terms congruent with the very French issues surrounding 'la laïcité', but the traces of contestation in Les Natchez, and its preoccupation with the representation of the language and voice of the other, lend themselves equally to a rereading from the point of view of postcolonialism.

Enlightenment Critique and Romantic Revolt

Les Natchez is situated at the intersection of various contrasted genres, and as a result the generic possibilities open to it are sometimes contradictory. The earliest-written part of the existing text, which recounts Chactas's time in France, belongs to the Enlightenment tradition of the philosophical tale. Yet Chateaubriand's original intention was to write an epic, the famous 'épopée de l'homme de la nature'; this early Rousseauist epic coexists with elements of a (later) 'Christian' epic. Les Natchez also contains, implicit within its unwieldy, imperfect frame, the ghost of a novel: a much more personal, subjective work that could be seen as fantasized autofiction —in a word, a more Romantic work. And finally, in a way that was to be typical of Romantic prose, Les Natchez includes elements of other genres, including verse and prose poetry — what Bakhtin calls 'incorporated genres'.¹⁸ This generic instability, and indeed the double nature of the epic tradition itself, allowed a certain liberty that was to disappear later in the century as a result of the stricter rules defining the realist novel, and which coincide, of course, with the rise of France's second imperial expansion.

As we have said, the tale of Chactas's travels in France is composed very much in the tradition of the Enlightenment philosophical tale, with Voltaire's L'lngenu as its direct model, and with echoes, more distantly, of Montesquieu's Lettres persanes. Chateaubriand adopts the technique of defamiliarization through the incomprehension of Europe by a non-Eu ropean character, a device well established in the eighteenth century that portrayed Trench social structure from the point of view of a foreigner who does not understand it',¹⁹ creating situations of comic misunderstanding and, crucially, using them to observe current European institutions from outside.²⁰

Chactas's distress faced with the follies of the corrupt, material world of despotism e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Shifting Ideologies in Chateaubriand's Epic Les Natchez
• 2 Victor Hugo and the Other as Divided Self in Bug-Jargal
• 3 Flaubert's Salammbô and the Subversion of Meaning
• 4 Exotic Polyphony: Victor Segalen and Les Immémoriaux
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index