
In Pursuit of the “Real” Chateaubriand - apollinaire
https://publicdomainreview.org/2019/10/09/our-masterpiece-is-the-private-life-in-pursuit-of-the-real-chateaubriand/
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pmoriarty
A disappointing essay which barely mentions Chauteaubriand's writing and
dismisses it in a few words as "high-flown and formal". Yet his writing was
his greatest contribution and was exactly the reason that Chauteabriand held
such a great fascination for his contemporaries, for he founded a literary
movement which shook the world of his time and whose echoes reverberate down
to the present day: Romanticism.

The word "romantic" and "romanticism" has been trivialized today as synonymous
with the sentimentality of Hallmark cards, yet the literary movement to which
the term refers bears little resemblance to today's colloquial meaning.
Instead, it was a mystical, nature-worshiping reaction against mechanization
and the Enlightenment, which elevated the world of nature, the imagination,
genius, and the supernatural.

Out of the seeds that Chauteaubriand planted grew the Gothic novel, and from
there eventually the modern horror novel, to cite but one small influence.
From the pen of Alexandre Dumas, another Romantic, came books like the Count
of Monte Cristo, from which masked avengers like Batman and other superheroes
eventually grew. The Surrealists with their fascination with dream and the
irrational also had their root in the Romantics, and the Surrealists'
influence thoroughly pervades contemporary culture, from surreal
advertisements we see every single day to movies with dreamlike imagery to
books and films that question reality.

None of this or the many, many other influences of Romanticism or what
Romanticism even was is touched on by this essay, so in it Chateaubriand's
contribution remains opaque, as does the value of his books, which are well
worth reading for their awe-inspiring vistas of nature and their alienated
protagonists, which in some ways prefigured much later existentialist heroes.

Pick your favorite tragic, tortured, brooding, rebellious, misunderstood,
alienated anti-hero from contemporary fiction, film, anime, comic books, or
music, and then read Chateaubriand and the other Romantics to see where their
archetype, along with much else of contemporary culture, was forged.

------
ggambetta
I thought this would be about steak :(

