The Global Novel: a literature podcast
The Global Novel is a podcast that surveys the narratology of world literature and history of translation from antiquity to modernity with a critical lens and aims to make academic education in literature accessible to the world.
The Global Novel: a literature podcast
Le Rouge et Le Noir (1830)
Known for his masterful blend of realism and romanticism, Stendhal is one of the greatest novelists of the 19th century, and his works offer profound psychological insights and sharp social critiques. His unforgettable characters, such as Julien Sorel in Le Rouge et Le Noir, navigate themes of love, ambition, and identity that remain timeless and relevant. Today on the Global Novel podcast, we will dive into Stendhal's world and discover his novelistic artistry that continues to influence literature today. With me is the distinguished American literary theorist Dr. Peter Brooks. Dr. Brooks is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University. His interdisciplinary research cuts across French and English literature, law, and psychoanalysis.
Recommended Reading:
Stendhal, Le Rouge et Le Noir (1830)
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (1984)
Peter Brooks, Seduced by the Story (2023)
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Stendhal's Masterful Blend of Realism and Romanticism. Known for his masterful blend of realism and romanticism, stendhal is one of the greatest novelists of the 19th century, and his works offer profound psychological insights and sharp social critiques. His unforgettable characters, such as Julien Sohel in Le Rouge, illinois, navigate themes of love, ambition and identify that remain timeless and relevant. Today, on the Global Novel Podcast, we will dive into Stendhal's world and discover his novelistic artistry that continues to influence literature today. Hello, I'm your host, claire Hennessey. With me is the distinguished American literary theorist, dr Peter Brooks. Dr Brooks is a starting professor emeritus of comparative literature at Yale University. As many of you may already know, his interdisciplinary research cuts across French and English literature, law and psychoanalysis. Welcome to the show, peter. Thank you very much, clara. I know you've recently published a sequel to reading for the plot. This time is titled seduced by a story which was a finalist for the 2023 national book critics circle award. In Congratulations, could you share with us the main takeaway from this new book?
Speaker 2:Well, it's a reflection on narrative, the analysis of narrative, looking back at my earlier work, but also a kind of cry of alarm about the way story is taken over in our culture and being used in kind of mindless ways.
Speaker 2:I talk about the storification of reality and how in politics, in public affairs, corporations, publicity, all turn to stories without thinking at all about their value or how to criticize them.
Speaker 2:I mean it's as if someone says to you let me tell you my story and you're supposed to accept that as something valuable and something that you have to agree to and think will somehow change your opinion of the speaker. Stories are not always beneficial and if you look at the American political climate at the moment, you can see that some stories, particularly ones based on a sense of resentment or exclusion, can lead to dire results. I mean stories can turn into myths that animate and mobilize large sectors of the population to take over what they see as a misshapen reality. So I think we need to approach stories with a great deal of critical caution. I mean, stories are important. I believe in them, I think they're part of our cognitive toolkit for dealing with reality. I think they're particularly important because they're about meanings that develop in time and humans are time-bounded. In a way they're not place-bounded, but they're not to be accepted uncritically.
Speaker 1:Well, you dedicated an important chapter on Stendhal in Reading for the Plot. To study the Stendhalian plot and narrative, perhaps we should begin with his approach to realism, right? Stendhal refers to a novel as a mirror being carried in a basket to describe the limitations of realistic novels. He emphasizes that a mirror cannot fully capture reality and that an artist must carefully select what to portray. How does this metaphor shape our understanding of Stendhal's approach to realism and his use of selection to achieve unity, coherence and typicality in his work?
Speaker 2:Well, as I remember that quotation, he says that a novel is like a mirror being carried along a road. And then he goes on to say uh, the mirror carried along the road is going to reflect mud as well as reflecting the sky and prettier things. And I think that's, uh, if you will, a justification, uh, for some of the unpleasant aspects of reality that he has to deal with, and he's always very conscious of that. There's also another famous metaphor of speaking politics in a novel is like a pistol shot in a concert. But then he goes on to say but here we are in modernity, in the 19th century, and my characters have to talk politics because that's what life has come to be about.
Speaker 2:And Stendhal, you know, born before the French Revolution, was very much conscious of how, post-revolution, no one is in agreement anymore. Right, no one is in agreement anymore. There are different parties, there are different opinions, and everyone has the right to speak his mind or her mind. And so there is no coherent audience, no unified audience, the way there was once under the old regime, where everyone shared the same value, essentially. So he's very much conscious that his realism is a matter of conflict and showing different points of view, in dialogue and in dissension with one another.
Speaker 1:Right? Well, it is said that Stendhal was a dandy and an obsessive womanizer. What does his love experience speak of his philosophy of love conveyed in many of his novels?
Speaker 2:Well, stendhal is a womanizer. It's an interesting topic. I mean, as he says himself, he was in love with many women, but not successful with most of them, and his greatest love, matilda Demboski, in Milan. He never became her lover after many, many attempts. So a great deal of Stendhal's womanizing is in his imagination. It's reveries about women and desires for them, and then creating ideal women in his novels. As for being a dandy, that strikes me as a slightly different issue. The dandy is someone who tries, through his own personal style, to abstract himself from the historical moment. Sandal is someone who feels, particularly after the fall of Napoleon, that he's living at the wrong moment of history. To become a Dandy is to create a personal style, which means you're immune to the historical contingencies. Of course you aren't really, but it's an illusion. It's something that Baudelaire also picks up later. If you're a dandy, you create your own rules and your own atmosphere around you.
Speaker 1:How do you think his analytical approach to love and the theme of triangular desire influenced the later realist? Because that someone is being desired by someone else.
Speaker 2:I think it's not so much a theme as a dynamic that you see playing out very often throughout the 19th century novel, but I think the nature of the desire is somewhat different. The nature of the desire is somewhat different. I mean, desire in Stendhal is very mobile and imaginative. Desire in someone like Balzac is almost like a primitive appetite. It's wanting to devour the world. And in Zola desire can be sort of like a house on fire, a conflagration burning up the world, whereas I think in Flaubert, who's the most complicated case, in a way, desire almost seems to be immobilizing. It doesn't get you anywhere, it becomes inward turning and inarticulate and doesn't project itself onto the world, whereas earlier in the century, in Stendhal and Balzac, desire is your meeting with the world, right, it's what connects you to the world and the objects you want to possess.
Speaker 1:I think exploring desire is such a fascinating and important aspect of reading the novel. So how do the plots of the 19th century novels reflect our reading desires? What are the defining characteristics of the modern novel, in other words, what drives the plot going?
Speaker 2:the defining characteristics of the modern novel, in other words, what drives the plot going? Well, I mean, I think plots are erotic. I mean I think they are about wanting and having, and I think that takes place on several levels. I mean, in one sense they're about wanting to understand and to command the reality that you're seeing in a fictional world, and so plots are always to some extent end-driven. It's a point I made in reading for the plot that you want to know where you're going to come out. It doesn't mean that you know what the end is or the end is already determined. It's that by the time you get to the end, it creates some retrospective illumination of what you've read up to that point. So it's a dynamic of wishing for the end and then the end showing you the meaning of the journey that you've been on. I think Right.
Speaker 1:Well, what about female plots, and how do these characteristics compare to those of earlier narratives?
Speaker 2:Female plots, you mean the plots concerning women in Stendhal in particular. I mean Stendhal created an extraordinary set of female characters, such as Mathilde Lamolle or Gina Sanseverina, who seemed to refuse to accept the limitations placed upon them by their sex and by the role they're supposed to play in society. And in Mathilde's case, it involves this reference to her 16th century ancestor and his heroism, and casting aside all the conventions which control her and therefore falling in love with a plebeian, inviting him up to her bedroom on a ladder and so on. Where, sanseverina, she just won't play by any of the rules of the court of Parma. She insists on making her own rules and she has everyone eating out of her hand.
Speaker 2:And if you get to the very end of Stendhal's writing career, you have this strange character named Lamiel in the novel he never finished, who really undertakes to behave completely contrary to the limits dictated on her sex. For instance, when she wants to find out about sexuality, she hires a young peasant man to have sex with her. Then afterwards she says sex is that all it is? There's this constant striving to get rid of the conventions that are supposed to govern proper young women in the 19th century, and Stendhal finds that a very seductive notion seductive notion Right.
Speaker 1:Well, to sum up, how does Le Houdi Le Noir typify the desires and themes dynamics?
Speaker 2:of the 19th century plots, oh, wow. Well, in a way, it's the first right. I mean, it is 1830. It really sets the tone for the century of, first of all, an ambitious young man who wants to rise above his condition and succeeds in doing so, but then encounters disaster, as many commentators have always said, disaster that he probably could have avoided, except that he doesn't want to. In a sense, the nature of his heroism is such that he breaks with all the conventions that he's mastered and, as a result, goes to the guillotine, and it's at his trial for shooting Madame de Renal.
Speaker 2:And let me just step back a bit. Why does he shoot Madame de Renal? Well, that's always been a mystery, because he's deeply in love with her, but she has presented an image of him, a negative image, a kind of monster image that he can't live with. And I think in shooting her he's trying to sort of shoot down that image. But then he goes to trial and he does the one thing that he must not do, this absolutely suicidal, which is referred to class warfare, right and says I am a peasant who has dared to rise in the world and join the bourgeoisie. And that's exactly what his jurors do not want to hear and the reason they condemn him to death.
Speaker 2:So at the very end, this notion of class warfare, which is going to be so important throughout the 19th century, comes up. And there's this how should I say this political side of Julien, which often seems to be about to be covered over, because he is very successful, he makes it in society, mathilde becomes pregnant and he gets engaged to her. He's given a new name, julien the Chevalier, julien Sorel Laverney. But then he throws it all up and the class identification as a peasant in revolt against the lowness of his condition comes back up again. So I think you've got enormously rich material here which is going to be exploited all the length of the 19th century.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, Stendhal admired Napoleon, and Le Rouge et le Noir is often seen as a kind of literary tribute to the emperor. How do you think Stendhal's admiration for Napoleon influenced the themes and characters in the novel?
Speaker 2:Well, I think Napoleon is an enormously important figure and image to Stendhal. He started to write two books about Napoleon and wrote many pages but never finished either. For him, napoleon splits in two. There's the heroic young general who inherits the ideas of the French Revolution and exports them throughout Europe, and he was actually part of that campaign. I mean, he actually was part of the disastrous Russian campaign once, so far as Moscow with Napoleon. But then there's the Napoleon who had himself crowned emperor and created a new court and new titles of nobility, who, to Stendhal, was a betrayal of the great Napoleon.
Speaker 2:So there's this double image of Napoleon, and Julien Sorel imitates Napoleon and he keeps a portrait of Napoleon hidden in his straw mattress.
Speaker 2:On the other hand, he says one day the memory of Napoleon is going to make young men like me perpetually unhappy in the 19th century because it's a model of a career that none of the rest of us can have. And you know, the Napoleonic ideal was that career would be open to your talents, no matter where you came from. And to some extent that was true, particularly in the army. I mean, the slaughter of Napoleonic officers was such that you could become a general or even a marshal of France. From you know, you could go from peasant to marshal of France in a matter of a few years, like Murat who then became king of Naples. So there was this sense of infinite possibility, and with the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy, that's been shut down, and so that's part of what Julien is talking about. So Napoleon is both an heroic image and a sense of lost possibility, I would say at the same time.
Speaker 1:Well, it is easy for most critics to observe Stendhal's non-retrospective use of narrative, which you mentioned in reading for the plot, and which very much aligns with the author's time, as you just talked about, when writers and thinkers resisted looking back at an old regime or ideology before the French Revolution. And it is in this context that here I quote you, the Stendhalian protagonist ever looks ahead, planning the next moment, projecting the self forward through ambition. Unquote. However, you also argue that such a non-retrospective use of narrative is essentially a retrospective mode and it tends toward an ending that offers retrospective illumination of the whole. Given the Stendhalian time, which is momentary, abruptive and discontinuous, how should we understand the dramatization of his future-orientated desire in relation to his political views?
Speaker 2:Ah well, you know, Stendhal famously said I buy a little lottery ticket to be run to be read 50 or 100 years from now, and that turned out to be pretty close to accurate. Uh, he was not a popular writer in his time and he sees himself as as writing to, to those who will understand it the happy few, as he calls them and creating this audience of very special, intelligent people he can talk to long. Usually he starts with some anecdote or some outline that he can work with. In the Red and the Black, Rouge et le Noir, it's this story of Antoine Bertet.
Speaker 1:If you have enjoyed this episode so far and want to complete the entire episode where Professor Peter Brooks discusses narrative agency and feminism in stand-all, be sure to subscribe at theglobalnovelcom slash subscribe. Thank you so much for listening.