Chateaubriand

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani sees Chateaubriand as the heir to the poetic prose that Rousseau founded in the Reveries1, but above all as his opposite on one point: where Rousseau erases the visual, "the enchanter" gives a great deal to see. He compares him to a fixed camera facing a landscape where everything moves, with the colours, the birds and the named species of the Meschacebé in Atala2. He places him with Rousseau and Senancour among the pre-Romantics3 and links René to the mal du siècle, to the season of storms and to the modern cult of autumn4. He notes that René mocks himself for having believed the woods would be delightful to him, and finds him more lucid in this than the ecologists. In the Mémoires d'outre-tombe, he singles out the song of the thrush at Combourg, a "pre-Proustian" passage and the embryo of literary anamnesis, as well as the shepherd whose song leads to the conclusion that the song of man is sad everywhere5. He calls him an avowed reactionary who is forgiven because he writes so well, and often quotes his remark on Pascal, "that frightening genius".

1. 1#4.2 Angélique (de Nerval)12 Nov 2017 · 30:51
2. 2Chateaubriand26 Mar 2019 · 3:03
3. 3#3 • Les Attelé(e)s de la confinitude4 Apr 2020 · 36:02
4. 4Mann (Thomas)23 Oct 2019 · 43:38
5. 5Musicosophie 9. Ironie romantique et sonate de Vinteuil15 Jan 2021 · 5:02

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