Chateaubriand and René

Use in the book

The early rereading is an experiment in the power of literature. Choosing a day of extreme disenchantment and inward dryness, Guérin tests whether René can still act upon him. Its effect resembles storm rain soaking the soul. The opening assertion that some books must no longer be read therefore cannot be reduced to an adverse critical judgement: the book is powerful precisely where it may also be dangerous or overwhelming. The next paragraph places the experience among returns to the passionate reading of his sixteenth to nineteenth years, where tears can still be drawn from almost exhausted sources. At Saint-Malo, René returns in another form. Alongside God, the Flood, Columbus, shipwrecks, and Byron, the fictional departure rises within Guérin’s first perception of the sea. He recalls the traveller’s gaze toward the religious woman’s lit window. Literature does not replace the actual shore; it enters the bewildering first impression and makes that shore already inhabited by memory. The two occurrences join reading, emotional vulnerability, and the cultural preparation of perception.

Places to read

1. 30 July 1832 · ¶1The deliberately chosen rereading breaks inward dryness with the force of storm rain.
2. 30 July 1832 · ¶2Returning to early books is described as drawing tears from youth’s nearly dried springs.
3. 15 April 1833 · ¶1René’s fictional embarkation enters the associations released by Guérin’s first view of the Ocean.

Translation in this edition

Translator note 3 identifies the title but deliberately leaves intact the tension between the prohibition on rereading and the admitted power of the book.