Why Read the Classics? (19 page)

But fragmentariness concerns not only the past: even in the present something that is only glimpsed involuntarily can have an even more powerful effect, like the half-open door through which, in one page of his
Journal
, he spies a young woman undressing and hopes to catch a glimpse of a breast or a thigh. ‘A woman who, spread out on a bed, would have no effect on me, glimpsed secretly gives me the most enchanting sensations, for in this situation she is natural and I am not preoccupied with my own role and can abandon myself to the sensation.’

And it is often by starting from the most obscure and private moments that the epistemological process develops, rather than from the moment of full realisation. Here there is a link with the title chosen by Roland Barthes for his paper:
‘On échoue toujours à parler de ce qu’on aime’
(Any attempt to talk about the object of our love is always doomed to failure). The
Journal
ends on his moment of greatest happiness: his arrival in Milan in 1811. But Henry Brulard had begun by acknowledging his happiness on the Janiculine hill on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, and immediately felt the need to start narrating his unhappy childhood in Grenoble.

Now is the point when I wonder whether this type of knowledge also holds any relevance for the novels, that is to say I wonder how this squares with the canonical image of Stendhal as the novelist of vital energies, of the will to assert oneself. Another way of asking the same question: does the Stendhal who fascinated me in my youth still exist or was it an illusion? To this latter question I can reply immediately: yes, he exists, he is there just the same as always, Julien is still contemplating from his rock the sparrowhawk in the sky, identifying with its strength and isolation. I notice, however, that now this concentration of energy interests me less, and I am much more intrigued to discover what lies underneath it, all the rest of the picture, which I cannot call the hidden mass of the iceberg because it is not in fact hidden but it does somehow support and keep together everything else.

Of course the Stendhalian hero typically possesses a linearity of character, a continuity of will, and a compactness of ego as he lives through his internal conflicts. All of this seems to take us to the opposite extreme from a notion of existential reality which I have tried to define as punctiform, discontinuous and pulviscular. Julien is entirely defined by the conflict in
him between shyness and will which commands him, as though by some categoric imperative, to take Madame de Rênal’s hand in the darkness of the garden, in that extraordinary passage describing his internal struggle in which the reality of his passionate attraction finally triumphs over his presumed hardness and her presumed innocence. Fabrizio is so cheerily allergic to any form of anguish that even when imprisoned in the tower he is never once affected by the depression of incarceration, and his prison transforms itself into an incredibly versatile means of communication, and becomes almost the very condition under which his love will be fulfilled. Lucien is so caught up in his own self-esteem that his desire to recover from the mortification of falling from his horse or from the misunderstanding of a careless phrase by Madame de Chasteller, or from the
gaucherie
of having kissed her hand, conditions all his future actions. Naturally the course of Stendhal’s heroes is never a linear one: since the scene of their actions is so far from the Napoleonic battlefields that they dream about, in order to express their potential energies they have to don the mask that is at the opposite extreme from their inner image of themselves. Julien and Fabrizio don priestly vestments and undertake an ecclesiastical career whose credibility from the point of view of historical verisimilitude is at least debatable; Lucien simply buys a missal, but he has a double mask, that of an Orléanist officer and that of a nostalgic Bourbon sympathiser.

This bodily self-consciousness in living out their passions is even more marked in the female characters. Madame de Renal, Gina Sanseverina, Madame de Chasteller, are all above their young lovers either in age or in social standing, and more clear-minded, decisive and experienced than them, as well as being willing to tolerate them in their hesitations before becoming their victims. Perhaps they are projections of the image of the mother that the writer never had and that in
Henri Brulard
he immortalised in the snapshot of the resolute young woman who leaps over the baby’s bed; or perhaps projections of an archetype whose traces he constantly sought in the ancient chronicles he read as sources: like that young stepmother with whom a Farnese prince fell in love, the prince who is evoked as the first prisoner in the tower, almost as though Stendhal wanted to establish them emblematically as the mythical core behind the relationship between Sanseverina and Fabrizio.

In addition to this tussle between the wills of the female and male characters, there is also the will of the author and his plan for the work: but each will is autonomous and can only present opportunities which the
other wills can either exploit or reject. There is a marginal note in the manuscript of
Lucien Leuwen
which reads: ‘The best hunting dog can only get the quarry to pass within the range of the hunter’s rifle. If he does not fire, the dog can do nothing about it. The novelist is like the hero’s hunting dog.’

Amidst these trails followed by the dog and the hunters, we can see taking shape in Stendhal’s most mature work,
Lucien Leuwen
, a representation of love which is genuinely like a Milky Way, dense with emotions and sensations and situations which follow, supersede and cancel out one another, following the programme outlined in
On Love
. This happens particularly during the ball at which Lucien and Madame de Chasteller have the chance to talk for the first time and get to know each other. The ball, which begins in chapter 15 and ends in chapter 19, chronicles a succession of minimal incidents, bursts of unremarkable dialogue, gradations of shyness, hauteur, hesitation, love, suspicion, shame and contempt on the part both of the young officer and of the woman.

What strikes us in these pages is the profusion of psychological detail, the variety of fluctuating emotions and of
intermittences du coeur
— and the echo of Proust, who will be the inevitable destination along this road, only serves to emphasise how much is achieved here by an extremely economical use of description and a linearity of procedure which ensures that our attention is always concentrated on the knot of essential relationships in the plot.

Stendhal’s portrait of aristocratic society in the legitimist provinces during the July monarchy is like the objective observation of the zoologist, sensitive to the morphological specifics of the tiniest of fauna, as is openly declared in these very pages in a sentence attributed to Lucien: ‘I should study them as one studies natural history. Cuvier used to tell us, in the Jardin des Plantes, that a methodical study of worms, insects and the most repellent sea crabs, carefully noting their differences and similarities, is the best way to cure oneself of the disgust they inspire.’

In Stendhal’s novels the settings — or at least certain settings, such as receptions and salons — are used not just to establish atmosphere but to chart positions. Scenes are defined by the movements of characters, by their position at the moment when certain emotions or conflicts are aroused, and in turn each conflict is defined by its happening in that particular place and time. In the same way Stendhal the autobiographer feels the strange necessity to fix places not by describing them but by sketching rough maps of them, where as well as giving a summary account of
décor
he marks the
points where the various characters were, so that the pages of
La Vie de Henri Brulard
come before us as detailed as an atlas. What does this topographical obsession derive from? From that haste of his which makes him omit initial descriptions only to develop them subsequently on the basis of those notes which merely served to jog his memory? Not only from this, I think. Since it is the uniqueness of every event that interests him, the map serves to fix that point in space in which the event happens, just as the story helps to fix it in time.

The settings described in the novels are more often exterior than interior: the Alpine landscapes of Franche-Comté in
The Red and the Black
, or those of Brianza gazed upon by the abbé Blanès from the belltower in
The Charterhouse of Parma
, but the prize Stendhalian landscape for me would be the plain, unpoetic one of Nancy, as it appears in chapter 4 of
Lucien Leuwen
, in all its utilitarian squalor typical of the start of the industrial revolution. This is a landscape which betokens a conflict in the protagonist’s conscience, caught as he is between his prosaic bourgeois existence, and his aspirations towards an aristocracy that is now a mere ghost of itself. It represents an objectively negative element but one which is ready to crystallise for the young lancer into buds of beauty if only it can be invested with an existential and amorous ecstasy. The poetic power of Stendhal’s gaze lies not merely in its enthusiasm and euphoria, it lies also in the cold repulsion for a completely unattractive world which he feels himself forced to accept as the only reality possible, such as the outskirts of Nancy where Lucien is sent to quell one of the first workers’ uprisings, as the soldiers on horseback file past through those grim streets in the grey morning.

Stendhal registers these social transformations through the minute vibrations in the behaviour of individuals. Why does Italy occupy this unique place in his heart? We continually hear him repeat that Paris is the realm of vanity: in opposition to Italy, which is for him the country of sincere and objective passions. But we must not forget that in his spiritual geography there is another pole, England, a civilisation with which he is continually tempted to identify himself.

In his
Souvenirs d’égotisme (
Memoirs of an Egotist
)
there is a passage in which he makes a decisive choice for Italy over England, and precisely because of what we today would call its underdevelopment, whereas the English way of life which obliges its workers to labour for eighteen hours per day seems to him ‘ridiculous’:

Stendhal’s idea is a certain rhythm of life in which there should be room for many things, especially wasting a bit of time. His starting point is his rejection of provincial squalor, his anger against his father and Grenoble. He heads for the big city: Milan for him is a great city where both the discreet charms of the Ancien Régime and the passions of his own Napoleonic youth live on, even although many aspects of that country of religion and poverty are not to his liking.

London too is an ideal city, but there the aspects which satisfy his snobbish tastes have to be paid for with the harshness of advanced industrialism. In this internal geography of his, Paris is equidistant between London and Milan: both the priests and the law of profit rule there, hence Stendhal’s continual centrifugal urge. (His is a geography of escape, and I should also include Germany in it, since it was there that he found the name with which he signed his novels: this name was thus a more serious identity than so many other masks that he used. But I would have to say that for him Germany represents only his nostalgia for Napoleon’s epic struggle, a memory that tends to disappear in Stendhal.)

His
Souvenirs d’égotisme
, an autobiographical fragment about his time in Paris in between Milan and London, is the text which contains the essential map of Stendhal’s world. It could be defined as his best novel manqué: manqué perhaps because he lacked a literary model that could convince him that it could become a novel, but also because only in this manqué form could a story about absences and missed opportunities develop. In
Souvenirs d’égotisme
the dominant theme is his absence from Milan, which he abandons after the famous, disastrous love affair. In a Paris that is seen as a place of absence, every adventure turns into a fiasco: physiological fiascos in his affairs with prostitutes, mental fiascos in his relations with society and in intellectual exchanges (for instance, in his meetings with the philosopher he most admired, Destutt de Tracy). Then comes the journey to London, in which his chronicle of failure culminates in the extraordinary tale of the duel that never happens, his search for the arrogant English captain whom
he had failed to challenge at the right moment and for whom he continues to hunt in vain through the dockland taverns.

There is but one oasis of unexpected happiness in this tale of disasters: the house of three prostitutes in one of the poorest London suburbs, which instead of turning out to be a sinister trap as he had feared, is instead a space that is tiny but elegant like a doll’s house. The inhabitants are poor young girls who welcome the three noisy French tourists with grace and dignity and discretion. Here at last is an image of
bonheur
, a poor and fragile
bonheur
, as far as could be from the aspirations of our ‘egotist’!

Must we therefore conclude that the real Stendhal is Stendhal in negative, a writer who must be sought out only in his disappointments, adversities and defeats? No, the value championed by Stendhal is one of existential tension which stems from measuring one’s own specific nature (and limits) with the specific nature and limits of one’s environment. Precisely because existence is dominated by entropy, by the dissolution of everything into instants and impulses like corpuscles devoid of shape or connection, he wants the individual to fulfil himself according to a principle of energy conservation, or rather of constant reproduction of energy charges. This is an imperative that becomes so much more rigorous the closer he comes to realising that entropy will in any case triumph in the end, and that all that will remain of the universe with all its galaxies will be a vortex of atoms floating in the void.