Oberman Reading Order

Why is Oberman less well-known than René?

Oberman (1804) and René (1802) were published two years apart and both respond to the same phenomenon — the post-Revolutionary Romantic self that cannot find an adequate world — but René achieved immediate enormous popularity and Oberman was largely ignored until Sainte-Beuve began promoting it in the 1830s. The reasons for the difference are partly stylistic (Chateaubriand's prose is spectacular and varied; Sénancour's is precise and austere) and partly structural (René is a short, dramatically shaped narrative with an exotic American setting; Oberman is a long, discursive collection of letters from the Swiss Alps with no dramatic arc). But the deeper reason is that Oberman offers no consolation — it does not end in tragic death, exotic exile, or religious transcendence; the protagonist simply continues in his incapacity, which is philosophically more honest but aesthetically less satisfying. Matthew Arnold preferred Oberman precisely because of this honesty: 'His eyes be upon the spot where thou dwellest; he knows thee' he wrote of Oberman's author, meaning that Sénancour, unlike Chateaubriand, actually described the condition of modern spiritual desolation accurately rather than dramatizing it for effect. Oberman's influence is therefore on philosophically serious readers rather than on the general literary public — it was important for Arnold, for George Sand, for Sainte-Beuve, and for the French poets who inherited the Romantic crisis; but it never had the popular impact of René or Werther.