Stendhal the Sollersian: A Twenty-First-Century Autoportrait

Abstract

Under cover of a love story, Trésor d’amour is actually a highly personal essay about Stendhal, its plot merely a thin pretext to quote extensively from Stendhal’s writings and to discuss his life and his love affairs. Sollers’s autobiographical protagonist channels Stendhal throughout, expanding the horizon of Stendhal’s continuing presence and surreptitiously placing Stendhal before a twenty-first-century readership. Adding to his own multiple self-portrait, Sollers now gives us to understand a changed and richer Stendhal: Sollers shows us a Stendhal for our time that even Stendhal did not realize he could be, because Sollers sees himself in the nineteenth-century writer and takes the trouble to illustrate this resurrection in a long work. In his idiosyncratic manner, Sollers shows how Stendhal’s presence has never been more persuasive than it is today.

Keywords:

• Stendhal
• Philippe Sollers
• Trésor d’amour
• autoportrait
• love story
• De l’Amour
• autobiographical fiction

Notes

1 There are 282 instances of the name ‘Stendhal’ and 23 of ‘Beyle’ in Trésor d’amour in an edition of 213 pages.

2 Sollers invented the expression Multiple Related Identities or MRIs (Identités Rapprochées Multiples or IRM in the original) for the virtually autobiographical persona he portrays via the first-person narrator-protagonists in all his novels since Femmes (1983). See Mortimer (2002).

3 In Portraits de femmes, Sollers claims that the women protagonists of his novels are based on real women (as faithful readers of Sollers have always known), and that Minna is perhaps his favourite (2013: 74).

4 Mérimée bears witness to this tendency in Beyle: ‘La police de l’Empire pénétrait partout, à ce qu’on prétend; et Fouché savait tout ce qui se disait dans les salons de Paris. B[eyle] était persuadé que cet espionnage gigantesque avait conservé tout son pouvoir occulte. Aussi, il n’est sorte de précautions dont il ne s’entourât pour les actions les plus indifférentes’ (1965: 456).

5 In the Vie de Henry Brulard, when Stendhal speaks of future readers, he mentions 1880 several times. Victor Del Litto, in a note to Souvenirs d’égotisme, comments that it was published ‘douze ans après la date de 1880 qui, pour Stendhal, était celle où il devait commencer à être compris’ (Stendhal, 1981–82, ii: 1231). See also the Vie de Henry Brulard (Stendhal, 1981–82, ii: 745): ‘être lu en 1935’.

6 Saint-Gérand comments: ‘l’on sait tous les reproches qui ont été adressés à Stendhal pour les impropriétés, les lourdeurs, les incohérences, les cacophonies, les vulgarismes, les galimatias d’une écriture qu’il aurait voulu aussi naturelle, précise et univoque que celle du Code civil’ (2005: 15).

7 ‘Au milieu de tant d’ouvrages mis au jour par de braves gens qui auraient dû se taire’, writes Stendhal, he prefers ‘un livre écrit simplement’, such as a book he is reviewing by his cousin Romain Colomb (1933, iii: 383–84). As Patrick Bray observes: ‘The more ambiguous or even incoherent the representation, the more truthful the image of the subject, since, in Stendhal’s logic, a style that is too polished must be lying’ (2013: 40).