Stendhal is exhausting and bracing because his energy is relentless and directed relentlessly to one end: the refusal of “style.” It is sometimes said that was painfully aware that he was incapable of style; I think it likely he realized it to be an achievement. To say Stendhal has no style might seem to echo Arnold’s remark about Wordsworth. It is vastly different in … Continue reading 247. (Stendhal)
Stendhal’s romanticism has been described by Erich Auerbach in terms of “atmosphere,” a unifying relation of place, person, and time that we find in the works of Walter Scott and the medievalism of Coleridge and Keats; it is in fact a new conception of history, a sense that different peoples breath different atmospheres and are formed by the air that they breathe. Describing Balzac, with … Continue reading 245. (Stendhal)
Stendhal’s narration is a perpetual mystery of European literature; it goes hand in hand with his characterization (as narration usually does). How might the mystery be approached? Here, as a touchstone, is an example, from the end of Chapter 15, “The Cockrow,” immediately after Julien has first seduced Madame de Renal: Some hours later, when Julien emerged from Madame de Renal’s room, one might … Continue reading 244. (Stendhal)
Minor characters blaze into majority; major events are subordinated to asides; the tempo feels all wrong, the climax abrupt, the plot strands remain untied, are dropped, cut; love expends stretches of the narrative in perplexed clashes of feelings, owned, disowned, cauterized, and occasionally revealed to be false, but then true pages later. He saw that art is sometimes at odds with life, that to get … Continue reading 33. (Stendhal)
