Introduction: Stendhal in the 21st Century/Stendhal au XXI^e siècle

Stendhal speculated in 1804 that he might one day write a work that would please him alone and that would finally be appreciated only in 2000 (1981–82: 167). He could not have predicted the scale of this appreciation. Since the turn of the new century, countless new monographs, edited collections, study guides, new editions, and re-editions have been published, along with five new Stendhal concordances and two Stendhal dictionaries. The fictional writings of the author have been brought out in a new three-volume Pléiade edition for the twenty-first century. Two Stendhal journals, HB and L’Année stendhalienne, ensure regular crops of new articles on the author, often growing out of a recent conference or study day given over to his work. The digital archiving of Stendhal’s manuscripts at the Université Stendhal in Grenoble is already at an advanced stage, with a fully searchable database of almost 3000 pages to date. A new Musée Stendhal opened in 2012, again in Grenoble, his many criticisms of his hometown and its inhabitants seemingly long forgiven or forgotten. The Association des Amis de Stendhal meets every month in Paris and organizes annual Stendhal-themed excursions. In short, Stendhal’s presence would seem (at first glance, anyway) never to have been as pervasive as it is today, over 170 years after his death.

To put the situation in perspective by comparing Stendhal to the novelist with whom he is most often paired, in the year 2013 five newly published French-language book-length academic studies (including essay collections and journal special issues, but excluding biographies and new editions) were exclusively devoted to Balzac. By contrast, over the course of the same year, fourteen equivalent publications were devoted to Stendhal. It is true that 2013 was a particularly rich year for Stendhal studies, Le Rouge et le Noir having been placed on the Agrégation programme for 2013–14. However, in 2003, when Illusions perdues was on the programme, there was hardly less activity in Stendhal studies than in Balzac studies (nine French-language book-length academic publications were dedicated to Balzac and seven to Stendhal).¹ Certainly, Balzac studies are in rude health in France; but Stendhal, who, as we have seen, lends his name to two annual journals, would seem to have the edge over his more prolific peer, who has to make do with only one.

However, it is bound to come as something of a surprise to most Anglophone scholars working in the field to read that Stendhal studies have never been as healthy as they are today. Balzac is, after all, the Realist author privileged in Anglophone French studies. Entire sessions are regularly devoted to aspects of La Comédie humaine at the annual conferences of Nineteenth-Century French Studies (NCFS) in the USA and the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes (SDN) in the UK and Ireland. At the 2012 NCFS Conference, for example, there were thirteen papers featuring Balzac in their title, and none that gave Stendhal a headline mention.² The same year, there were seven papers explicitly focusing on Balzac at the SDN Conference, while none referenced Stendhal or his works in their titles. It would be wrong, though, to suggest that Anglophone Stendhal studies have flatlined. A superb study guide to the Vie de Henry Brulard, by Sheila Bell, was published in 2006, while each of the two editors of this special issue has published, in recent years, a monograph and a number of articles on Stendhal. Ann Jefferson and Roger Pearson, who both published outstanding monographs on the novelist in 1988, continue to be leading experts in the field, as is Christopher Thompson, who published an excellent French-language monograph on Lamiel in 1997. Lisa Algazi, Lucy Garnier, Moya Longstaffe, John West Sooby, and Elaine Williamson are all names that are closely associated with Stendhal in the English-speaking world, and have all published on Stendhal since 2000. The fact is, however, that Anglophone Stendhalians are thin on the ground, and are arguably (though possibly not literally) getting thinner.

One result — or, perhaps, cause — of the relative dearth of interest on the part of Anglophone researchers is the absence of Stendhal from many university programmes where, in the past, he was a staple presence. Compounding this trend is the tendency for lecturers to view Balzac as the more accessible representative of French nineteenth-century Realism. Le Rouge et le Noir is perceived by many as more difficult, and consequently as less teachable than, for example, Le Père Goriot; it might be more logical, however, to hold the view that Le Rouge et le Noir is more difficult and therefore more teachable than Le Père Goriot. Certainly, Le Rouge et le Noir continues to be a very rewarding novel to teach. It offers an analysis of post-Napoleonic French society that is at least as comprehensive and acerbic as any found in Balzac; it presents a universe in which individuals are ultimately free to act in accordance with their desires, something that cannot easily be said of the version of Realism found in Balzac’s world; and it gives us a female character more startlingly autonomous than any to be found in Balzac (or any other nineteenth-century male author for that matter). More generally, Stendhal is unique in that he was born six years before the end of the Ancien Régime, witnessed the Revolution, lived through the first Republic and Empire, participated in the retreat from Russia, and then went on to write about post-Napoleonic French society. He experienced these social and political upheavals from a perspective that was alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, that of insider and outsider: his wealthy, bourgeois family were pro-monarchist, while he sympathized, even as a child, with the Revolutionaries; he fought in Napoleon’s Army and was awarded senior posts within Bonaparte’s administration, but also resigned from the army and was critical of what he perceived as the dictatorial tendencies of the Emperor; he chose to live in Italy in the first years of the Restoration he abhorred, during which time he became associated with the Italian nationalist movement; and, despite later being appointed to a senior diplomatic position under Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy, he considered his posting to the Italian port town of Civitavecchia to have been a form of exile. The ringside seat he enjoyed during the interesting times he lived through, and the outsider status he nevertheless managed to maintain, gave him both the knowledge and the critical distance required to identify those aspects of post-Revolutionary French society that would perdure and define liberal-capitalist modernity. It is Stendhal rather than Balzac who best makes sense of the principal epistemic shift in modern French and European history.

It has never, in fact, been as easy to teach Stendhal as it is now. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of inexpensive editions of his works, often accompanied by useful pedagogical dossiers. The fact that Le Rouge et le Noir was on the Agrégation programme in 2013–14 means that, in addition to a great wealth of existing teaching resources such as the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Stendhal’s ‘The Red and the Black’ of 1999, there are now three new French-language essay collections (Reid, 2013; Bourdenet, 2013; Bourdenet et al., 2013) as well as a clefs-concours guide (Ansel and Kheyar Stibler, 2013) and, finally, a new edition complete with pedagogical dossier (Stendhal, 2013), all of which offer valuable insights into recent thinking about the novel. Among the works that have recently been published, and that are often carefully packaged for the classroom, are Stendhal’s shorter fictions. These texts lend themselves very well to being taught as part of a French literature module. Mina de Vanghel, for example, is a novella that prompts reflections on the tensions between Romanticism and Realism, on the differences between Balzacian Realism and Stendhalian Realism, on the problem of heroism in nineteenth-century France, and, as Lucy Garnier has shown (2006), on the particularly complex position of the autonomous heroine in nineteenth-century French Realism. Similar themes can be drawn from other shorter fictions such as Armance, Vanina Vanini, and L’Abbesse de Castro, as of course from La Chartreuse de Parme, or the unfinished novels Lamiel and Féder. As Yves Ansel points out in his contribution to this volume, Lucien Leuwen is one of the two great French political novels (alongside L’Éducation sentimentale) of the nineteenth century; and the Vie de Henry Brulard has emerged as probably the most important autobiographical text of the French nineteenth century, serving as a bridge between Rousseau’s Les Confessions and Gide’s Si le grain ne meurt.

One of the reasons for the divergent paths that Francophone and Anglophone Stendhal studies have taken over the past two to three decades is no doubt the far greater interest, in France, in genetic criticism, or the study of manuscripts. This situation may change, however, particularly in view of the increasingly easy availability of digitized versions of manuscripts. As already mentioned, a major digital archiving project has been underway in Grenoble, Stendhal’s hometown, since the turn of the new century, offering a fully searchable online archive of the author’s manuscripts (digital images accompanied by transcriptions). Stendhal’s manuscripts can now be exploited as an innovative teaching resource wherever in the world a class may be taking place.

Béatrice Didier, who is exceptionally well placed to enjoy a panoramic view, begins this volume by offering her sense of the effervescent state of Stendhal studies around the globe. Yves Ansel’s article presents a more sceptical reading of this enthusiasm on the part of academics, arguing that a fascination with marginalia and the minor texts of an author says more about the current state of academe than about how intrinsically interesting such apparently peripheral work might be. The same critic, who is one of the editors of the new Pléiade volumes of Stendhal’s works and the author of several influential books on the latter, suggests that in considering the novelist’s place in the twenty-first century we might be well advised to look beyond the academic study of his work. Nowhere is this more likely to be true than in the case of Stendhal, who was far more interested in writing books that would be enjoyed by select present and future readers than he was in building a reputation as a literary giant. Whoever ‘the Happy Few’ might be, they are probably not academics. It seems likely, in other words, that the novelist would have been far more delighted to learn that twenty-first-century novelists would seek inspiration in his work than to hear that he was going to be a hit in twenty-first-century universities. The contributions by Pauline Wahl Willis, Armine Kotin Mortimer, and Catherine Mariette would thus, presumably, have cheered him greatly. Pauline Wahl Willis discusses the work of three novelists — Stephen Vizinczey, Peter Abrahams, and Mark Frutkin — who have all, to greater or lesser degrees, drawn on Stendhalian plots and tropes in their fiction. Armine Kotin Mortimer takes as her focus Trésor d’amour, the 2011 novel by Philippe Sollers, in which Stendhal is reinvented as a virtual alter ego of the twenty-first-century novelist. Catherine Mariette’s contribution also discusses the work of Sollers, along with that of three other contemporary novelists: Frédéric Vitoux, Patrick Rambaud, and Gérard Guégan. Her article shows how Stendhal has become a fictional character in the writing of each of these authors. Interestingly, the contributions by Armine Kotin Mortimer and Catherine Mariette both place a certain emphasis on the phenomenon of identification: a number of the contemporary authors that they consider have a pronounced tendency to identify with the person they imagine Stendhal to have been. The role of identification in the reception of Stendhal’s fiction is, in fact, a theme of Maria Scott’s article, which proposes a contestatory feminist analysis of the critical reception, over time and into the present day, of one of the novelist’s most famous (and controversial) heroines: Mathilde de La Mole. Francesco Manzini’s contribution reads the character and actions of Julien Sorel through the lens of a peculiarly late eighteenth-, early nineteenth- and twenty-first-century preoccupation with fanaticism and terrorism. Finally, Claire Deslauriers analyses the strangely enduring appeal of Stendhal’s style, already seen as simultaneously dated and innovative in his own time: it is one of the means by which the novelist marked himself out as original, and it is one of the many reasons for which he continues to be of interest today.

Jean-Paul Bruyas argued in the 1960s that Stendhal wrote for and about adolescents. Stendhal himself argued that he wrote with an even more specific audience in mind:

Il me serait doux de plaire beaucoup à trente ou quarante personnes de Paris que je ne verrai jamais, mais que j’aime à la folie, sans les connaître. Par exemple, quelque jeune Mme Roland, lisant en cachette quelque volume qu’elle cache bien vite au moindre bruit, dans les tiroirs de l’établi de son père, lequel est graveur de boîtes de montre. (2014: 69)

From our perspective in the twenty-first century, we might say that the author wrote especially for the young, and perhaps especially for young women; that he valued all forms of freedom, perhaps especially intellectual freedom; and that he championed our right to make what we will of his work and of our own lives. Maybe Stendhal is not taught as much as he should be because he teaches students not to listen to their teachers.

Notes

1 These numbers are based on a consultation during June 2014 of the online catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France as well as of bibliographies listed on the websites <www.armance.com> and <www.balzac-etudes.org>.

2 The North American Stendhal scholar Lisa Algazi published an article in 2005 in which she asks why Stendhal has been so neglected, relative to Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and (to an extent) Sand by American nineteenth-century French studies. She speculates that the ambiguous status of Stendhal’s feminism may have something to do with this situation.