| Even the most cursory glance at Chateaubriand's literary production reveals a puzzling anomaly: between the first and final works exists an enormous aesthetic rift. Not only has his type of subject changed (from the youthful and imaginary Rene, avid with curiosity in an ever-expanding world, to the aged self-effacing Rance, silent abbot of the enclosing Trappist monastery, symbolic rejection of the world), but so has his "style." Chateaubriand himself uncovers the difference: from "imagination" he has been "reduced to tracing." From the early fictional works to historical biography, from works of the "imagination" to one of non-fiction: is this the meaning of Chateaubriand's career? And Chateaubriand's autobiography which bridges the fifty-year distance between the two extremes: how can it be assessed in light of these two disparate modes of writing?;The following pages are an attempt to re-evaluate Chateaubriand's text through the difference between these two modes, between the youthful texts and his last, the Vie de Rance. The aesthetics of the two texts are revelatory of the Memoires as well. Evidence of both "imagination" and "tracing" can be discerned in them. In fact, more than discerned. This difference reveals the essential structural mechanism of Chateaubriand's autobiography. The origin for a reading of the Memoires takes place here, between the "imagined" works of his youth and the "realistic" biography sketched in his old age. Again, Chateaubriand has himself provided the tools for this insight: "La plupart de mes sentiments sont demeures au fond de mon ame, ou ne se sont montres dans mes ouvrages que comme appliques a des etres imaginaires." The autobiography is not only the temporal bridge between the Genie and Rance: it is also the aesthetic product of their union. Imagination and biography should, in their common alloy, produce autobiography. The analysis of their individual poetic "techniques" will furnish us the key for examining the Memoires.;From this, the structure of my text becomes clearer. I will first analyze in some detail the aesthetics Chateaubriand proposes in the Genie du christianisme; then a span of "three times fifteen years," as Chateaubriand writes, will bring us to the Vie de Rance and an examination of the aesthetics of tracing he exposes there. From these two vantage points. I will come back to 4 October 1811, to the birth of the Memoires. It is from the viewpoint of this inception, and illuminated by the aesthetics of the Genie and Rance, that the panorama of autobiography can be most clearly perceived. |
