This essay attempts to identify what attracts Stendhal’s writing. Disconnection, exaltation of freedom, detestation of all conformisms, left-wing aristocratism explain the “disheveled” aspect of his texts, as well as his dandyism.
Considering the relationship between literature and political expression, Stendhal is a special case. Also engaged that clearedas resolutely progressive as he is anti-modern, the author of Red and Black remains an ambiguous figure – at the antipodes of the image we keep of a Hugo, a Sand or a Zola. This ambiguity constitutes the beating heart of François Vanoosthuyse’s essay. It poses a delicate and fascinating problem, even reduced to its ideological dimensions.
To what historical and literary conditions can we attribute the strangeness of such a situation? distinctive ? How can we understand, in particular, that Stendhal has become a “heritage writer, but a chic heritage writer”, offered “to us, 230 years after his birth, in his armorial box and his almost intact legend, as a “promise of happiness”, of intelligence and of style” (p. 267)? The interest of the Stendhal Moment consists, by articulating these questions head-on, in killing two birds with one stone: on the scale of the monograph alone, it comes to revisiting the political history of the first XIXe century and to bring out the specificity – that is to say the plasticity – of the literary fact.
A tiling of presents
“A Stendhal,” say the textbooks; but why “Stendhaux” (p. 259)? A first answer is suggested to us by the plan adopted in the essay, which follows a chronological curve: the Napoleonic Empire, the Restoration and the July Monarchy would see the evolution of the person and the concerns of the novelist. And how could it be otherwise? History has its demands… However, it is not a development of the Stendhal Moment which does not complicate matters: each era thus distinguished, each writing context is returned to its complexity and its constitutive tiling.
The present of 1800, the present of 1815 and the present of 1830 are at the same time those of a restored France and a revolutionized France. The extreme sophistication of this essay does justice, in a sense, to the contradictions that animate any (so-called) present. But this fidelity could have a cost: freed from a linear conception of history, it almost naturally risks leading to a fragmentation of the subject. And requires, in any case, to determine what attracted and nourished Stendhal’s writing in such a persistent manner.
François Vanoosthuyse calls this fuel “paradox”. Basically, it is the same exaltation of freedom and the same detestation of feudalism of all kinds, old and new, “right-wing” and “left-wing”, which energize works as diverse as The Charterhouse of Parma, Of a new plot against industrialists And Lucien Leuwen. A curious combination, an “eccentric combination” (p. 311), that of the revolutionary ideal and a reactionary spirit, hostile to triumphant liberalism… The “Stendhal moment” undoubtedly has its coherence, one might say: that, always divisive, of a “left-wing aristocracy” (p. 167), tied together “with elegance (and) with charm” (p. 372).
This work suggests, however, that the acuity of a gaze and a discourse are due less to their possible coherence than to their necessary out-of-phase. Attacking the old world in the name of new aspirations, tearing apart the “mediocracy” of 1830 in the name of values inherited from the past, Stendhal is not of any school and remains at odds. Only this out-of-phase, only this fundamental anachronism brings the work into conflict with its present (which is not truly its time) and can explain its “capacity to last” (p. 360). Happy and strange fecundity… Following two other great critics of the century, Georges Blin and Philippe Berthier, the author of this essay-manifesto thus pleads the cause of the limping, the effects of smoky which result from it and from the supremely “disheveled” aspect of the Stendhalian text.
Election grounds
An explanatory factor is privileged here, ordering literature to life and to the “Stendhal person”: the completely singular elaboration of a posture of superior man, of “a ethos sufficiently witty not to be entirely soluble” (p. 280) in any school whatsoever. The originality of this Stendhalian dandyism makes the originality of the method adopted by François Vanoosthuyse, who roots the authorial strategies of distinction in the social situation itself of Henri Beyle (his provincial origin, his feeling of downgrading, his lack of diploma and heritage, etc.) – and who sees it at work as much in the creation of the pseudonym “Stendhal” (already well commented on by Jean Starobinski and Gérard Genette) as in the production of the theatrical sketches, travel stories, pamphlets that preceded the novelistic production.
An eminently devious fabrication, consequently: this subjectivity by which the Stendhalian text gives the impression of having “a face, eyes, a mouth” (p. 262), remains constantly distanced from itself, ironized and literarized. We can therefore understand that the community of readers ” happy few ” dreamed of by the writer is based on an intellectual and emotional connivance, much more than by virtue of an ideological adherence.
The manifestations and implications of Stendhalian heterodoxy are numerous; it is impossible to mention them all here. Let us simply indicate three of them. First field: Bonapartism. Stendhal was a “cadre” of the imperial regime, inseparably enthusiastic and critical. François Vanoosthuyse explores with great care the hypothesis of a republican Bonapartism And liberal, maintained after Waterloo for sentimental reasons, and operating in the private and complicit mode of the wink, in the Life of Napoleon (1818) as in The Red and the Black (1830).
Second field: the romantic battle. The same shift, the same “counterpoint” led the writer, under the Restoration, to attack the academicism inherited from the Ancien Régime in the name of naturalness and sincerity, while affirming a passionate loyalty to the classical values of clarity and restraint – on the model of Mme of La Fayette, Molière and Montesquieu. The understanding and articulation of these symmetrical forms of stripping, including theHistory of painting in Italy (1817) or Armance (1827) draw their irrelevance, demanded the formidable erudition deployed by François Vanoosthuyse.
Third favorite terrain, irrigated by Bonapartism and the romanticism of Stendhal: Italy. Also a seismic terrain: without real coherence, the possibility of an integral romanticism, placed under the sign of a feminine heroism, and “the retrospective dream of an Italy” are combined there French » (p. 103); so that in Rome, Naples and Florence (1826) and Walks in Rome (1829), fruits of a “thwarted patriotism” (p. 100), “the “mirror” which wanders on the roads of Italy (also becomes) the screen which allows Beyle not to see it” (p. 107).
This dense, sometimes Byzantine work is a hall of mirrors. The tremors of an era are reflected there (the first XIXe century), the divisions of a man (Beyle/Stendhal) and the sophistication of a critic (François Vanoosthuyse). We would like to believe that this alignment of the stars is the common lot of literary essays. We could hope that a discourse on method would come from it, applicable “outside the walls”. This would be without counting, unfortunately or fortunately, on “the incomparable class of Stendhal” (p. 269), on his refusal of all conformity and on an obvious fact. The “writer’s profession” was not his thing, he who published during his life only a quarter of his texts – in the blind spots of the literary field. And besides, what lesson can we expect from a novelist transforming “the truth, the harsh truth”, on the threshold of Red and Blackin quote… from a charlatan?