Only
an exalted could think he could choice a wind and sea-gulls roaring sea
girt rock as a grave for himself. Nobody but a genius could succeed in
transforming this exaltation in reality and turn himself, his own life
and his works into a stone monument, so bare but streaming such calls to
make inscriptions, phrases, at least a line.... only vain.
On
the Bè rock, facing the old town of Saint Malo, the exalted genius
of Chateaubriand is going on keeping his struggle against the oblivion.
Since he decides to make people know his live but only since the date when
he will die, and since the Mèmoires that contain his life are entitled
d'outretombe, it turns rather clear the challenge of eternity; it have
never been any author so belonging to his time, yet so inadequate, so irreparably
in advance and nevertheless always terribly late, revolutionary styled
but conservative in morals, reactionary tempered but progressive attitude
holder, politics impassioned but unable to service anywhat but he himself...
Witness of the end of a world, of an epochal change that is no less than
the beginning of modernity, Chateaubriand goes through the Ancien Regime,
the Revolution, the Restoration, pursuing a personal loyalty and the loyalty
toward a character which might avoid occurrences and might not be caught
by compromises.
Very
sensible indicator of the moods and passions surrounding him, he tries
to perform them and give them a meaning beyond the moment, arryments and
alliances.
 Megalomaniac
in times of giants, he does not give up mediocrity, either public or private,
which is taking their place, he believes only in individual and collective
greatness. Still today, 150 years since his death, his' is an unusual and
present lesson for whom wants to seal at sight, having not anymore an ideological
reference, among the wreckage of the old that is disappearing and the outlines
of the new that finds hard to come out, between what we used to be and
what we are going to be, saving what it can be saved, daring sometimes
what is undareable.
During
transitions, who does not adequate is seemingly who is defeated; but, as
Chateaubriand teaches, “the proud of victory is unbearable for me “. In
the castle of Combourg where he lives a troubled youth, the future writer
and traveller, the ambassador and the controversialist, the politic and
the seducer take shape and weight. “Men don't have only one and exactly
alike life.
They
have many lined up lives and that is just their misery.
Those
walls, internals, towers can give us still today the idea of his loneliness,
among a bigoted mother, an icy manner father, a mournful sister, the load
of a Spartanly cruel instruction ('Mister the chevalier, is he perhaps
afraid? was said to him smiling ironically when he was going to bed, in
the most insulated little tower, in a darkness never lighted up, along
more and more dark nights...) inside which ceremonials were severe, manifestations
of affection put aside, and conversation non-existent.
It
is on this circumstances that the mind runs hell for leather through fancied
worlds and forged beings, that sweeps into a morbid sensitiveness, standing
by which everything hurts you, everything hits you, all is felt as if the
only butt of unhappiness were you... Proud, wild, intolerant to obedience,
to the noblesse he belongs to, Chateaubriand get on time to acquire the
its behavioring style but he does not get the proper vices of decadency.
When
the revolution breaks out he is twenty, and he has already understood that
“aristocracy goes through three different ages: the superiority age, the
privileges one, the vanity one. Got out from the first one, it degenerates
into the second to die out then on the third phase.”
He
has sworn loyalty to the king and so it will be, but he understands too
well that absolutism is over and that the noblesse has at last killed itself;
turned to mere formality, his substance has gone searching other coats.
About the Vandean epos and how the èmigrès let it die out,
about the ingenuous trust of those fighters in the honour of a coward and
knavish crown, about the noblesse waiting a leading, waiting for someone
who leads the struggle, Chateaubriand says a fulminating phrase: “Giants
went to ask pygmies for a leader.” The epoch of travels precedes the exile
and travels alternate rises and falls of the politic epoch.
That's
the way, among others, to cultivate his own loneliness, the taste of independence,
the way not to give account to anybody and to his times.
Further,
travelling allows him to fly away from what he does not like. All Chateaubriand'
s life is a run into deception, a struggle for a missed cause, an opposition
to just won causes.
A
run where he feels “as a Huguelin, Time bowing over him gnawing at his
cranium”, a run where he does not belong anymore “to those mornings that
solace by themselves but to those nightfall hours that need solace “. A
run against time by an ahead being: “Why have I been realist against my
instinct in times when a miserable court race could neither hear me nor
understand me? Why have I been thrown into this troupe of mediocres among
whom I am deemed as a hare-brained when I spoke of courage; as a revolutionary
when I spoke of freedom?” Nevertheless he understands his times very well:
he understand that at the beginning of the new century it has been turned
the page, and that no restoration is possible, any absolutism is no more
proposable, that no revolutionary republic is any more desirable.
 Even
if Napoleon seems to stop, along a period of fifteen years, the match of
the old regime, that does not resign itself to disappear and the new world
that persists in reappearing, then it will not be possible anymore to turn
back; but going on means a whole of forces, ideals, wills, hopes, greatness
that his compatriots lack. Chateaubriand is haunted by greatness, he is
among those who have would 'die with Leonidas and live with Pericles”.
The
post-Napoleon phase, after struggling him (“Vainly Nerone flourishes, Tacitus
was already born in the Empire “ he will write a memorable article the
day after of the murder of the Duke of Enghien), not as emperor but as
a dictator, seems to him miserable.
And
he is right. It is little alike the Longanesi', Malaparte', Soffici' feelings
after the fall of fascism and Mussolini. Normality as mediocrity. Between
Saint Malo and Combourg, in Bretagne, where on this anniversary, exhibitions,
meetings, publications and commemorations are being performed, it is consumed
an unrepeatable experience, it comes to light an out of common life.
The
thousand pages of the Mèmoires d'outretombe (just translated and
edited by Einaudi), ever read by anybody during his life, are the most
uncommon funeral monument to literature, the highest tribute paid to writing,
to its rôle, its meaning. |
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Mensile di Economia, Attualita` e Cultura